[Luna] Vista requirements (beating a dead horse)

[Jeff Clark]

Landfill:
I think you are accelerating the rate at which most medium to large 
companies turn over PC's.  I recently had the opportunity to go back and 
visit a large company I did IT for 10 years ago.  They still have 
purposed Pentium 233 mmx's from when I was purchasing them.  Granted 
they're not used for much, but they are still used.  All I'm saying is 
that it might be longer than you think before those computers make it to 
the dump.
OT; I was also surprised to hear that p200 system I setup running redhat 
(2 or 3?) as a smb file server for the call center was only recently 
replaced.  It is/was the only Linux installation in the company (5000 
employees) and apparently after my replacement left it became a black 
box.  About a year ago someone came in from the head office who did not 
know what it was and decided it should be unplugged.  Long story short 
that was it's last clock cycle, and the call center went down until a 
Windows server was installed.  I wish knew the uptime, by my estimates 
it would have been roughly 9 years.  Not bad on regular PC hardware.

Vista comments:
I can't see any reasonably sized business going to Vista in the next 12 
to 24 months.

On slow hardware (1ghz Via w/256mb ram) Vista Basic runs very similar to 
XP SP2.  I have used this on my CarPC and noticed no significant 
differences.

As for Vista Ultimate; I was very intrigued by the new Media Center and 
HD tuner support because I have an xbox 360 which would serve as an 
extender.  My setup for testing was:
3.4ghz Intel P4 w/1gb ram, Nvidia 7800 GT, Hauppage PVR 500 MCE, Dvico 
FusionHDTV 5 Gold
  http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_7800.html
  http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr500mce.html
  http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/eng/Products/RTGold.aspx

Going back and forth between XP and Vista Ultimate on the exact same 
hardware running almost the exact same applications, the feeling meter 
says it's about like the jump was from 2000 to XP.

My typical tasking (all running at the same time), used for the feeling 
meter :)
 Watching an HD recorded show,
 World of Warcraft in a window,
 Thunderbird reading/responding to emails,
 playing music w/winamp or whatever,
 4 (at least) ssh sessions (putty),
 8+ Browser windows (usually firefox, but I don't know anymore... the 
ram usage is getting out of control)
 and last but not least OpenOffice with a spreadsheet or something from 
a partner or customer.

I think adding another gig of ram will solve most of the noticable 
slowdowns I observed.

Xen:
I have 4 production servers running Xen, and I can tell you it 
absolutely does not _require_ 1g of ram.  During testing I was able to 
comfortably run 4 virtual machines w/debian stable & 256 mb ram.  In the 
real world, my first machine was deployed for over a year with no 
problems; Dual 1.7 xeon, 1g ram, running 6 moderate to heavy use vm's.  
Keep in mind, these are servers (no gui), but even with a gui a 1g ram 
machine will easily get you 1 512mb gui and 2 ~256mb console vm's.

Code:
I agree with Ryan, but would also add that your typical software 
developer has no clue about code optimization, even if the environment 
was made available.

Ryan, is it just me or is www.aspentelco.com broken in Firefox?  
Nevermind, I see it was made with a MS product.

-Jeff

Ryan Carrico wrote:
> I disagree with the assessment of code optimization and developer 
> mentality.
>
> Architectural optimization does matter to the developers however there 
> are generally two major issues to contend with regarding the creation, 
> maintenance, and subsequent distribution of optimized code. The first 
> is 'the purse' business units generally do not want to invest in the 
> build out and support for a new compile cluster for audience groups 
> (architecture profiles or configuration subsets thereof)  B, C, D, 
> etc. when the binaries generated for audience A will suffice within 
> reasonable limits. You must also take into account additional hidden 
> costs for additional compile clusters and their subsequent output 
> which also include quality assurance testing, post compile management, 
> and post release patch management of the final product(s). This is an 
> issue of basic bottom line economics especially for a company which 
> has public stock. Essentially, these issues regarding quality will 
> persist as long as the consumer population is willing to endure 
> 'Memory is cheap' scenarios where companies adhere to a profit 
> maximization versus a customer quality doctrine.
>
> But what do I know.
>
> Ryan C.
>
> On Nov 14, 2006, at 11:13 AM, Patrick Fleming, EA wrote:
>
>>
>> Andrew Roazen wrote:
>>
>>> There's been a lot of FUD about Vista's requirements. AFAIK it will run
>>> in 512Mb RAM, albeit not optimally. As a guy with a 256Mb laptop 
>>> running
>>> Ubuntu/XP, 1Gb ought to be a base requirement for most new computers
>>> until such time as code optimization actually matters to runtime
>>> developers. Memory is cheap.
>>
>> I don't know about FUD. MS states that you can run Vista on 512mb RAM
>> with a 800mhz processor. But with that you have essentially "ugly XP"
>>
>> A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
>>
>>     * 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
>>     * 1 GB of system memory.
>>     * Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of
>> graphics memory (minimum)2, Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
>>     * 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
>>     * DVD-ROM Drive3.
>>     * Audio output capability.
>>     * Internet access capability.
>>
>> So to me that means you will have to have at least those minimums to run
>> it "properly". A new basic computer these days will almost support that
>> with the exception of the video card (from what I've seen).
>>
>>>
>>> More importantly, 1Gb is mandatory for frameworks like Xen, and if the
>>> hype's to be believed, Xen is going to be a pretty big deal in both the
>>> MS/GNU worlds over the next few years.
>>
>> If what you are talking about is http://www.xensource.com/ it looks to
>> me like a server product, although many a developer and everyday geek
>> will install it. And the minimums for Xen look to be 1.5Ghz cpu 1g RAM,
>> with 2g the recommendation.
>>
>> I would think that Scott's approach is to look to the needs of the
>> spreadsheet jockey/administrative assistant/office grunt to see that a
>> 1Ghz machine means lots of landfill. Especially when you consider that
>> many would have bought bottom end machines to run XP or even 2k on.
>> These machines are now obsolete for upgrade purposes but are perfect for
>> today's *nix installs, for dumb terminals or even to run as servers
>> depending upon load and applications.
>>
>>> The major issue down
>>> the road is how successfully MS will be able to get people to abandon
>>> Vista once its replacement is ready: their track record on this is
>>> pretty awful compared to personal/business *nix users (OS X included).
>>> In the case of Apple, this is helped strongly by the amount of software
>>> (commercial and FOSS) which doesn't support OSes more than one release
>>> behind current if even that.
>>>
>>
>>