Channel 9 - Discussions by cain

Coffeehouse - Windows Server 8 Beta

cain — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Finally found the third thing I was looking for tonight. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/v8-default.aspx

Now I can get some sleep while everything downloads.

Coffeehouse - Where is the VS11 download ??

cain — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:49:10 GMT

It's a bit slow, but it's still going for me. It's up to about 20%.

Coffeehouse - Where is the VS11 download ??

cain — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:22:32 GMT

Oh look, it's a little after 2pm GMT... http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28975

More details & downloads can also be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/apps/br229516.aspx

Coffeehouse - Unbundle Windows from PCs urges EU think tank

cain — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:47:01 GMT

What's a think tank?

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20070921

That's a think tank.

Tech Off - Upgrading to Windows Server 2008 Beta 3

cain — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:18:29 GMT

I'm trying to upgrade a Windows Server 2003 (Standard R2 SP2 x64) machine to Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, but I'm getting a compatability error that I can't work out, and I'd appreciate it if anyone can help me get around this problem. The message it's giving me is:

You must make the following changes before upgrading Windows

Uninstall the following Windows components and features:

Windows Internal Database - Please read Microsoft Knowledge Base article: 934345

I can't seem to find that knowledge base article, and when I followed the instructions I found in another knowledge base article about removing Windows Internal Database, a message popped up saying "This operation is only valid for products that are currently installed."

Coffeehouse - Why the foot-dragging with 64 bit?

cain — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:11:33 GMT

I'm running 64 bit Vista on my desktop computer and had no problems getting drivers for any of my hardware - you just have to make sure you buy the right brands.

Tech Off - Vista boot problems.

cain — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:21:38 GMT

After another one of my regular multi-boot experiments, Vista became unbootable. I started writing this post while I expected that I would eventually need to ask here for help so that any helpful 9ers would know what I had already tried, but I eventually managed to fix it myself (see the last two paragraphs for the actual solution to my problem). Since I'd already written most of this, I decided I may as well just post it anyway and maybe someday someone with a similar problem will come across it and it will help them out.

I tried booting from the Vista DVD and going into the repair options. There was no Vista installation listed on the first screen, so I just clicked next. I then tried running the startup repair tool. It told me that it was attempting to repair disk errors, but after a few minutes it said it could not repair this computer automatically.

I then tried running chkdsk /R at the recovery environment command prompt, and it completed succesfully telling me there were no problems (or it had fixed any that were there).

I then tried running the startup repair tool again, with the same results as before.

I then tried going back to the recovery environment command prompt and ran bootrec /fixboot and it told me "The volume does not contain a recognized file system." bootrec /scanos found Vista without problems, bootrec /rebuildbcd found Vista, and then gave the "The volume does not contain a recognized file system" error.

I then tried navigating around the C: drive on the command prompt and that worked fine.

I then tried using diskpart and found that the partition was not active, so I made it active and tried bootrec /fixboot again. This time it said it was successful, so I rebooted the computer but still couldn't boot Vista.

I went back to the recovery environment and this time it was able to find the Vista installation and before I could even try anything, it came up with a message saying that it had detected some startup problems and did I want it to automatically repair them and restart. I told it to go ahead and this time it was able to boot Vista fine.

Coffeehouse - Vista per app/device audio

cain — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:46:44 GMT

I was looking for this feature recently too when I had USB headphones plugged into my laptop but some applications were still playing audio through the speakers.

One of the pages linked to above says "a future version of Windows might enable the user to assign roles to individual devices". Here's hoping 'a future version of Windows' might mean Vista SP1.

Coffeehouse - Vista = ME II?

cain — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:30:48 GMT

littleguru wrote:

Got this after a 3 seconds of black screen:

Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
It's like the 20th time I get this... I don't understand why Microsoft gives nVidia the "Vista certified" logo. They sure aren't!

I got that once too and was actually quite happy to see it. Whenever my display drivers stopped responding under XP I was forced to reboot.

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 07:48:03 GMT

sushovande wrote:

cain wrote:Yes, the shield is there. Is there anyway to tell Vista that it's wrong?

I have not been able to find a way to tell Vista that, although I have looked for it. The same problem happened to me with WinRAR once, so I installed a new version at another location.

Thanks for the suggestion , that worked.

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 02:29:06 GMT

Yes, the shield is there. Is there anyway to tell Vista that it's wrong?

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:01:54 GMT

AndyC wrote:

Have you tried disabling automatic updating? The Firefox updater requires full Administrator rights.

Yep, I'd already tried that too.

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:33:30 GMT

I had already checked the compatability tab to ensure it wasn't set to run as admin there, but I rechecked it and it's definately not that.

I tried logging in as a different user and that didn't help either.

I tried the US English version (I don't see how it's 'default', when I go to firefox.com it points me to the British version) that didn't work either.

I also tried uninstalling firefox and then manually deleting every firefox folder I could find (bits left behind in Program Files (x86), AppData, etc.) and then reinstalling, but that didn't work either.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, but it looks like it might be time for me to go back to IE.

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:21:42 GMT

I'd rather switch to IE 7 than do that .

Coffeehouse - Firefox needs my permission to continue.

cain — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:15:53 GMT

Every time I try to run Firefox on one of my computers it brings up a UAC dialog and I can't work out why. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox (more than once) but that doesn't help, and even when I try to run Firefox in safe mode it still triggers UAC. Does anyone have any idea what's causing this and how I can stop it?

Thanks.

Windows Vista Utlimate 64bit
Firefox 2.0.0.3 English (British)

Coffeehouse - What are YOU listening to?

cain — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:43:25 GMT

blowdart wrote:

http://last.fm/user/blowdart

Geez, why list things by hand

Now that's a good idea. Why did I never follow any of the links I saw to last.fm before now?

Anyway, C9 group anyone?
http://www.last.fm/group/Niners

Coffeehouse - Anyone been to Barcelona?

cain — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:31:18 GMT

I went earlier this year, but I didn't stay long. I'd love to go back again just to walk up and down Las Ramblas a couple more times. It's kind of hard to explain but it's the most entertaining street I have ever seen. While you're there head up to the top of the Monument a Colon (I think that's what it's called), which is at the end of Las Ramblas, for a very nice view of the city.

Edit: Here are a couple of pictures I took while there (they're big so I'll just post links).

The Monument a Colon

Not very well stitched together 360 degree view from the top.

Coffeehouse - What team do you support?

cain — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:21:11 GMT

leeappdalecom wrote:

Doesn't matter what sport just post up the team you support?

ONLY ONE!

Sport: Football (proper football, you know the one where you use your foot)

Team: Millwall FC

Only one? That's way too hard to pick . Just including the teams that I actually go to games for:

Rugby: Reds, Wallabies
League: Broncos, Maroons
Cricket: Bulls
Soccer: Socceroos

And a few other teams I support just because I couldn't resist:

Soccer: Arsenal (long time supporter, not just now that they're "an easy team to support")
AFL: Lions
Basketball: Bullets

Coffeehouse - What are YOU listening to?

cain — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:08:43 GMT

I'm currently listening to an auto-playlist of all music on my computer (on shuffle). It contains: classical, jazz, rock, metal, rap, hip-hop, pop, dance, trance, soundtracks, etc.

Last few tracks:

Tool - Forty six and two
Four Seasons - Oh what a night
Ramstein - Engel
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the name of
Kill Bill Soundtrack - Battle without honour
Black Eyed Peas (feat Jack Johnson) - Gone Going
Redgum - I was only nineteen
Moby - Body rock
John Farnham - A touch of paradise
Paul Simon - Loves me like a rock
Green Day - Time of your life

And after seeing it mentioned in this thread I'm going to pause my autoplaylist once this song is finished and listen to Delerium - Silence since I haven't heard it in ages (it used to be one of my favourites).

Coffeehouse - Does ReadyBoost really boost performance?

cain — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 06:04:26 GMT

SecretSoftware, maybe you're thinking of the hybrid harddrives? ReadyBoost has no affect on when data is written to the hard drive.

The hybrid harddrives are intended to save power as well as improving performance, but ReadyBoost is purely about performance.

To answer the original question, I've had my USB key plugged in permanently (with 2.5GB for ReadyBoost) so I can't really judge how big a difference it makes, but what I do know is that my 2 year old laptop is running faster now than it ever did under XP.

Coffeehouse - Why do some people not like .Net framework.

cain — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:10:20 GMT

SecretSoftware wrote:

For those who want proof that .NET runs slow, Checkout Andres Heijlsberg's (sp?) video in C9. He himself admits to that.

Further Statistical Perfomance Analysis which Demonstrate my point. (its a PDF). Also, C# Versus C++, Performance

You can also read Scientific Journals if you have subscription to it.

.NET is Slower than unmanaged code. Because with managed code, you do 2 compilations to get to machine code, rather than 1 with unmanaged.

   1. Those 'two' benchmarks you linked to are the same thing.
   2. Four very simple tests isn't going to tell you much about the overall performance differences of two languages. I could write four tests like that myself that show C# as being faster than C++.
   3. Trying to benchmark a VM language against a non-VM language is very difficult and will usually result in you testing the wrong thing.
   4. It's usually a good idea to actually know what you're talking about before you try to start preaching to other people.

Coffeehouse - Why do some people not like .Net framework.

cain — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:26:32 GMT

Don't worry imekon, you're definately not the first person to make the mistake you're making, and you certainly will not be the last. The explanation below was written about Gnome, but it applies here too. What you need to understand is that most of the 20MB you're seeing belongs to the .NET Framework itself (not the application), which falls into the Share part (i.e. if you run a bunch of managed apps at the same time they can share that memory and it only counts once for the whole lot of them, not once each)

Understanding Memory usage in GNOME.

Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)

People usually look at the memory sizes for the processes and
misinterpret the information.  This is a common mistake.

When talking about memory usage and the reports you get from the
operating system, you need to keep in mind the following terms and
what they mean:

	SIZE	This is the address space seen by the process.  If the
	        process maps 65 megs of memory, the address space of
	        the process will be reported as 65 megs of memory. 

		Even if only 100k of memory are actually used.  
	
	 	This bit of information is not usually very useful and
	        this is what most people believe is the actual memory
	        usage of a program: it is not.

	RSS	This is the "Resident Set Size".  This is the amount
	        of memory actually resident on memory.  This is a
	        better computation of what is actually loaded in
	        memory.

	  	This does not include any piece of code that have been
	        "swapped out".

		So, for example, if you have a program that uses 100k
	        of memory and the operating system discards or swaps
	        40k of memory, the RSS will be 60k.

		The RSS includes both the memory which is unique to
	        this process and the memory shared with other
	        processes.  In most modern Unix systems, a large part
	        of this accounts for the memory used by shared
	        libraries.  So it usually includes the ammount of
	        memory that is used by other processes for the code
	        that is shared:  The libc is usually taken into
	        account.

		GNOME uses many shared libraries (this makes the
	        applications share more memory).

	SHARE   This is the amount of memory from the RSS that is
	        shared with other applications.

So, the actual memory used uniquely by an application is RSS - SHARE.

Coffeehouse - The reason I hate iTunes

cain — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 11:55:42 GMT

Would this have been better?

So since I got my new Powerbook, I wanted to try iTunes and decided "Hey mine as well on an Apple machine right"?

"The attempt to burn a disc failed. The device failed to respond properly, unable to recover or retry"

Good luck getting any support from them. Yep $1299 gone.... I hate Powerbooks.

Edit: I have no idea how much powerbooks cost in US$ by the way, but based on Australian prices I'd assume I'm more likely to have underestimated than overestimated.

Coffeehouse - Games for Macs

cain — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:26:29 GMT

Why'd you put minesweeper, solitaire and freecell next to the games for windows logo? That almost makes the Macs look good in comparison .

Coffeehouse - how does google advertise itself?

cain — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 11:22:20 GMT

My dad was telling me a week or two ago about a guy he works with asking people how to get "this gogle thing" to work. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

He was the first person I've heard about in quite a while who hasn't heard of Google though.

In my first phone interview with Google (a few weeks ago) the interviewer asked me, "so how did you hear about Google"? That question threw me more than any of the technical questions they asked. I honestly can not remember where I first heard about them.