19 minutes ago, DCMonkey wrote

I'm pretty sure you're the only one in this thread that thought he meant they forge their own chips. 

When I was 15/16 and expressed desire of building my own desktop PC at home, my dad thought "building my own computer" meant doing it like this. I think he was a bit disappointed when he found out it just meant spending a grand on stuff from Amazon and putting it together in a matter of hours.

10 hours ago, Kryptos wrote

Does anyone know, have any links?

I can't speak for the Azure datacenters or the stuff that powers services like Skype or Xbox live, but in our labs and datacenters on campus all I see are racks of Dell PowerEdge boxes. It's weird - I'd have thought given we use HP for our workstations that there'd be at least some ProLiant boxes, but nope... at least not that I can see.

The guy in the office down the corridor to mine has three Dell R900 boxes sitting on a desk, doing nothing. That's $30,000 worth of hardware right there.

40 minutes ago, Charles wrote

SimEarth 2014!!!

It sucks that the demographics of the game-buying public have changed so much since then. Remember, this was when schools purchased games (Oregon Trail, SimCity, Treasure Mountain, etc) - now there's no such market. Sad.

Looking at the launch - Xbox now really looks like Media Center 2013 - they probably moved those Windows folks over because lots of the same functionality is now right there. In fact, this Xbox One does everything my parents HTPC does with the exception of Microsoft Office (my parents use it to Skype me, for example, but mostly for watching BBC iPlayer or DVDs).

Who saw that coming?

9 hours ago, Bas wrote

That tent looks super-ominous. It's probably the fact that it's a gigantic black pyramid.

That's just the angle I took it. It's just a regular marquee-style tent. 3 of the sides and the roof are white, but the side facing The Commons (and the media entrance) is black.

10 minutes to go folks!

I've heard rumors the name might be "Xbox 8":

• Microsoft recently trademarked the name.
• 8 on its side is Infinity
• It's twice 4, which is the new PlayStation. Is that our way of saying we're twice as good?
• It follows absolutely no pattern, just like the name 360

Let the anticipation begin.

My money is still on the new Xbox being named simply "Xbox".

4 hours ago, kettch wrote

I've never met one, but I'm wondering if there are people who jump carriers every two years just for phones? It seems absurd (says the guy who's bought phones from overseas to get around carrier exclusivity ).

That's more likely given how easy it is to port a number from one provider to another - even a few years ago this made it practically impossible to switch carriers.

Personally I'd have preferred it if Nokia had a nomenclature like "Lumia 920 CDMA" or "Lumia 820 for T-Mobile".

57 minutes ago, yuhong wrote

@evildictaitor: Vista was not released until 2007.

2006.

4 hours ago, Dirtbagg wrote

Don't you miss the old days of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 *sigh*

No, because 16-bit programming hurts my brain. I still don't understand how memory addressing worked with near and far pointers.

I think NT4 in 1996 was the best time to be a developer - the Win32 API was (at the time) well-designed and new, everything was 32-bit and simple, and it had cool boxart to boot.

4 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Lol. Yeah. Got confused because I installed Office 2013 recently

You're one of them now. The people who tell me they were running Windows '97 on their Microsoft laptop, or had Office Vista.

2 hours ago, cbae wrote

@Ray7: I find that iPhone commercial rather cringe-worthy because it's so obvious what they're trying to do, and it's for a feature that nearly every smartphone in existence has.

The iPhone has the best picture-taking experience of every phone I've used - though it's a combination of having a great lens, great sensor, great screen to display pictures on, and a great processor to reduce latency and startup times. All of the other phones tend to get something wrong. (Disclaimer: I still haven't used a Windows Phone handset yet).

I think a low-point for Microsoft.com was the website during Windows Vista's launch in late 2006 - there were things that were clickable or collapseable without any good reason, and it was also oh-so-ugly. But this? It's a homepage I'm proud of.

However, once my hardware starts failing then the cost of new hardware (possibly in the $10k-range) means I'll start looking at a VPS or "Cloud" VM service. I'm looking at Amazon and our own Azure as possibilities.

2 hours ago, kettch wrote

@PopeDai: IO is also a problem for me. I have a server that does heavy image processing, and I can see the CPU and memory well within my tolerance, but disk access is pegged. This also probably also has something to do with our crappy SAN.

I'll also note that the new Task Manager in Windows 8 only measures IO throughput when it calculates % utilization. I find that IO-operations-per-second pose a much bigger threat to system responsiveness than a long sequential write. Maybe I'll file a bug on this...

5 hours ago, kettch wrote

@eddwo: "If you build it, they will come"

Software is always pushing the boundaries of what the hardware is capable of. You don't always need the latest hardware, but sometimes it helps.

These days, I'd rather have more cores. At work, I have a Core i5 and 8GB of RAM. With two cores, I spend most of the day in a state of resource starvation. Yet, my machine at home has an old Core 2 quad. It still has 8GB of ram, but the extra cores make all the difference. I can have a couple of visual studio instances open, and other miscellaneous stuff, and decide I want to switch contexts for a little while by firing up a game. If I did that on my work computer, it would explode.

The same goes for servers, more most purposes I'd rather have parallelism than raw speed.

I find IO to be the biggest bottleneck right now. There's no point being able to crunch through 10GB of data on your CPU in under 500ms if it still takes 30 seconds to read it from disk.

I also want to know why 3D games from 12 years ago have more responsive hardware accelerated UIs than a WinForms WebBrowser control embedded within a WinForms UserControl embedded within a WPF control, contained within a WinForms form (this is some of the internal software we use). The window takes 3 seconds to handle a resize event.

• Xbox 720 - not particularly original. I didn't like the original "Xbox 360" name anyway.
• Nextbox - Internally at Microsoft we use "Next" as a placeholder name making this unlikely, plus it's going to get confusing when the 4th generation Xbox comes out.
• Xbox {meaninglessName} - Nintendo did this with the "Wii U", Sony did it with the "PSP Vita", and we did it ourselves with Windows Vista and Windows XP. Word inside the company is that we, as an organization, have abandoned silly marketing gimmicks and are being more straightforward... if simple.
• Xbox 3 - see above, it's simple and direct, however remember one reason we didn't name it the "Xbox 2" was in order to look better compared to the PlayStation 3 ("Xbox 2 or PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3").
• Xbox S - Something that Apple and Samsung are up to (and car manufacturers) - take a brand and add "S" to the end - for sport, speed, or some other connotation you fancy. However we can't use this because we just called the revised Xbox 360 the "Xbox 360S".
• Xbox - reboots are a thing nowadays - Batman, Superman, Wolfenstein, Tomb Raider - it stands to reason they'll just call it "Xbox" with no qualifier. If the rumors of total backwards-compatibility are true (because it's an x64 chip that'll be able to run the old Xbox's x86 code fine) then this works even better, because the new Xbox can play the old Xbox games without any issues, thus actually reducing customer confusion.
• Xenon - this is the name of the chipset. It's possible, but unlikely they would use it as the name of the console.

My money's on either just "Xbox", or "Xbox 3".

6 hours ago, eddwo wrote

A ~100,000 word dictionary shouldn't come in at much more than about 5MB even in an indexed database file

5MB over 100,000 words gives 52 bytes per word. Fine for a word-list, but a dictionary tends to carry the word, pronunciation key, definition, inflections, declensions, synonyms, and possibly an etymology - for that you're easily looking at at least a few hundred characters per entry.

The OED, for example, has 600,000 words. 

No.