PDC = Pretty Dumbed-down Content?

irascian wrote:

Has he used Adobe or Macromedia products? Has he used Eclipse or IBM's WebSphere? Clearly not, and yet he seems qualified to state that Microsoft give us "the greatest tools".

As a matter of fact I did, well all of this except IBM WebSphere (I am about 70% MS, 30% UNIX guy). But that’s not important here, when I say MS empower you like non other vendor, then I mean, Visual Studio 2005 is an unmatched product, not to mention future technologies like XAML driven Avalon or SQL Server 2005 CLR integration… or what about Team Systems? There are some very good products on the market for UML based modeling, but none of them will make an impact like Team Systems would. Microsoft is a company which make either great products by self or which is even more important they make other vendors ideas really work, they bring it to the masses, for low price and excellent value. That’s unmatched. And about the PDC networking stuff, yes of course you can network a much cheaper way, but there won’t be anything even close to the energy level an event like PDC can give to it. And where can you find 7000 developers and MS developers who working on those new products in one place? OK< maybe I am wrong, but I think your (and not just your) expectations from PDC is a little out of focus. Anyway this is only my opinion.

The benefits of using flash memory as opposed to hard drives is the reduced latency in seeks. Although the flash memory has slower access times, it is randomly accessible, whereas a hard drive has to seek. (I think)

There's a really cool/nifty/gadget out called an i-ram that does something similar.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

eddwo wrote:

Using the flash drive as RAM is just wierd. How the hell does that work? Flash is not nearly as fast as DRAM and it loses data after multiple write cycles. Ordinary flash drives are even slower than the hard drives usually.
Or is it just a way to store Superfetch profiles, rather than actual data.
Could someone explain that to me?

JoshRountree wrote:

The benefits of using flash memory as opposed to hard drives is the reduced latency in seeks. Although the flash memory has slower access times, it is randomly accessible, whereas a hard drive has to seek. (I think)

There's a really cool/nifty/gadget out called an i-ram that does something similar.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

Yes, you're right. Rob Reinauer, a Software Architect in the Core OS Division posted the following as a comment on my PDC blog in response to a similar question:

While hard drives are faster than USB2 for sequential I/O, USB2 based flash is significantly faster for satisfying random reads, which we have found to be a prime factor in poor system responsiveness. External Memory Devices serve as an extension of the data caching capabilities of main memory. All writes are pushed through to disk, random reads are serviced where possible from the EMD and sequential reads are serviced from the hard drive.

Link

Thanks for that.
I understand it better now.

The JasJar offer was very poorly handled.  They should have reserved one for each attendee or done this on the website afterwards.  Not only were these sold out in minutes, but since it retailed for $900+, it took only minutes before listings appeared on eBay!  e.g. "I just got this at PDC, but I don't really need it.  The box is unopened."  So people who actually wanted the device to program it couldn't get one due to cheeseheads who just wanted to make a buck!

Looking back, they probably should have had a custom case that said "PDC 2005" and/or "not for resale."  That would have made a better tie-in and discouraged those who bought copies with no intention of using them.

Hopefully, MS learns from this what the rest of us were taught in kindergarten: "I hope you brought enough for everybody?"