Vista still sucks.

I know, it's almost the running theme of everything I've posted here... and that's not the intention. It's just that as of late it's the most common thing that this computer reminds me of, unless you count my Father's birthday.



As is par for the course, Windows Vista sucks. I'm still constantly having the issue where all computers on the network that are routing through the Vista box can access the internet via the crappy dial-up connection, but the Vista box itself is confused and can not see a damn thing. Very frustrating to have to reboot... or worse yet wait till the shows you are trying to record to finish airing so you can reboot, especially if you've got 3 hours of HD content you want to capture durring Prime-Time.



I have several ripped movies I keep on the hard disk for mobile boredom prevention. They're all movies I ripped and own, honest. They're mostly divx, some xvid. For the most part, everything works fine. If you browse to the folder in explorer or some such the thumbnails get decoded and rendered just fine. If you click on them they fire up in Windows Media Player just fine. Now, if you so much as browse to my collection of videos in Windows Media Center's "Video Library" section it (WMC) falls to it's knees weeping and then restarts itself. It's just sad. The codec is clearly installed properly... could be a problem with the codec. I've tried experiments with both a single xvid and a single divx movie and WMC still comes with the crying, so it's probably not both codecs. If it is it's because MS did something non-standard with the way codecs are implemented in WMC.



The most recent update to my nVidia drivers has resulted in a 10-15% net increase in memory usage for all beefy video applications. Previously, WMC only took 56-60% of my 1G but now it takes 80-85%. Fun. I mean Vista itself with almost nothing running (Virus and FW protection, obviously,) takes 46% with the translucent bells and whistles off... so it wasn't so bad before. C&C Generals: Zero Hour has the same increase. If I had more graphic intensive stuff going on I'm sure I'd notice it with those too.



All in all, I've given vista a fair try. It sucks, and it sucks much. Three months and only 1 slight improvement in video performance from an update... and that was the removal of a symptom they created, and it cost me 10-15% memory usage on affected applications. Bah.

TG Daily interview with AMD's CTO

I was reading this interview with AMD's CTO Phil Hester at TG Daily. I really liked how Mr. Hester pointed out that the convergence of GPU and CPU functions into a more tightly integrated platform would enable a lot of applications on a single stand alone machine that previously were limited to systems where multiple machines were handling the workload. He brought up facial recognition, physical interaction, physics modeling among others.

The TG Daily interviewer made the assertion that, "at least in the client space, 64-bit adoption has been almost non-existent and multi-core is also slow to make it's way into the general software space.", and that it would take a considerable length of time before people would actually utilize the technology to bring these tools to the single machine markets.

While this is true for Microsoft platforms there are a lot of users opting for Open Source solutions to bring the exact kind of applications he's talking about to the desktop. Once the Linux and BSD boxes get it, any apple user can use it... and if apple users use it enough then Microsoft has to play catch up.

That's the main reason I went with the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64. Fast as hell, and once I'm done, I'll be able to squeeze every single bit out of the 64-bit multi-core options. Linux lets me. Easily. Gentoo lets me make sure every application that can benefit from the progress of AMD's R&D department gets the opportunity to. Not to mention encoding my movies for mobile viewing gets to go as fast as possible. :)

I hate windows.

Well, Microsoft has pushed out another update to media center. They've solved the issue where On-Screen Display items screw up the display of the actual content... but now the damn thing crashes every single time I try to burn a DVD. It used to just fail to burn... now it crashes media center entirely. So much for QFE quality. Every single update has caused more trouble
than it's solved.

Maybe having a separate, lesser skilled, development team working on the QFE's isn't the way to go. Maybe the Windows Core development team could keep working on the product... so that quality doesn't have to start going downhill once the product's released to the public and the maintenance portion of the software development life-cycle kicks in. I just know the Windows Sustained Engineering team sure isn't doing their job.