Have I missed the point?

I think I've missed your point. I'm a Windows developer with very little understanding of how various storage technologies work, but I do know a bit about how Windows works (that's not understatement: I really just mean "a bit").

Here's my understanding of how Windows works right now:

"Virtual" address space is backed by both RAM and "disk" files. In the case of "Memory" the disk file is the "page file", in the case of memory mapped files it is the file in question. The most recently used pages of address space are kept in RAM, until you run out. When you access a page of address space that isn't currently in RAM, then that page is loaded from "disk" (this is a "page fault"). When you run out of RAM, read-only pages (e.g. code) are just discarded from RAM. Executable files (i.e. exes and dlls) are used as memory mapped files.

So I *think* that means it works *almost* like you want already. When you load an exe, the exe file itself and all it's dll files are mapped into RAM as they are accessed. If your disk is fast, then this process will also be fast. Note that Windows also keeps a prefetch cache, which will make it page in the commonly accessed set of pages as soon as you start an app (instead of waiting for the page faults).

Now I agree that (most) apps still don't start up instantaneously, even from an SSD, so I do wonder where the time goes. Perhaps it is somewhat down to the apps actually doing *work* during startup. I'm thinking JITting (for .Net apps), dll rebasing (where thunks have to be added when dlls collide in address space) and actual application code. That could be got rid of by leaving your apps running and just hibernating the PC when you walk away from it.

So... I'm not really sure where you're saying the slow-down is. Is it the file-system code? SATA? Do you have empirical evidence? Note that I'm no expert on these things (let alone anything like Fusion-IO), I'd actually love to know.

Bad news, Good news

Mine didn't turn up on Friday (and I got the £50 voucher).

Last week I phoned them & told them that rather than delivering to my house (where there would likely be no-one in) they should deliver to my work. Said change to the shipping address was showing on the website.

This morning UPS tried to deliver to my house. No-one was in. Bad form, MS :-(

Just now, UPS *came back and tried again*. That was a surprise! Thumbs up for the UPS driver! :-)

Looking forward to getting home & trying it out, now. Hopefully there's lots of obvious & simple apps missing from the store. Then I can write them and sell them to all the waiting punters. Oh, wait... Erm. Sell them to the other 2 ppl at work that have ordered one! ;-)

Excellent unit conversion maths

"about 12,000,000 light years, or about 1.14×10^20 kilometers (7.05×10^13 miles)"

How do you drop 6 orders of magnitude when converting from km to miles? (I think that should be "7.05×10^19 miles".)

Shouldn't this be in meters only, anyway, as a result of the recent vote to use only SI units (1.14×10^23 m)? Or does it fall under the altitude exception, which means it should be 3.72×10^23 feet?

Touch Cover & Stylus included - I don't think so

"What's more, Surface will ship with a cover that includes a built-in keyboard and trackpad, plus a stylus for ink input, both of which will drive up manufacturing costs even further."

Errr... no

I quite fancy a Surface, actually, but AFAICT they've not announced how the Touch/Type Covers will be available (remember also that there are two versions of the cover, plus different colours) and the stylus digitizer was only mentioned when they were talking about the x86 Surface Pro (not the ARM Surface RT).

I'm going getting one but I'm undecided between RT & Pro at this point. Pricing wil probably clinch it, as it will be either a Surface RT slab & a new laptop, or just a Surface Pro fro me. Of course there's other OEM's tablets/convertible's to check out, too...

1MB/s?

"Vodafone recommends a minimum of 1MB/sec"

Really? 8Mb/s seems quite a high minimum recommendation for voice.

"Acupressure"? Really?

"The Lifemax Dreamate ... aims to help relaxation by gently massaging acupressure points."

So a "vibrating watch" that does ABSOLUTELY NOTING AT ALL for £60. Shame on you, El Reg!

They do provide a consumer version

Here: http://www.vreveal.com/

It works quite well, especially for removing canera shake. It's just a shame they removed the "Super Resolution" feature that vReveal 2 used to have. It actually did a half-decent job of increasing the resolution of the old 320x200 videos I got off my old phone (by doing sub-pixel interpolation of data from multiple frames, I believe).

Call that outrage?

What about the outrage TiVo users are expressing due to the fact that Virgin Media is about to disable all "unofficial" TiVo control apps (except the really simple ones), including the workarounds to use the US TiVo app?

These two threads have > 140 posts, rather than the paltry 21 posts on the thread referenced in the article!

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/TiVo/New-FW-update-broken-Tivo-Commander-etc/td-p/979929

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/TiVo/New-Update-coming-31st-Jan-9th-Feb/td-p/990593

Padding handling not as good as Sky+

I've had one for 3 weeks now, after having Sky+ for years, and generally I think it's very good. My biggest issue is that the way it handles padding isn't as intelligent as Sky+.

The first issue is that if you are recording, say, 2 shows that are on at 8-9pm and 2 more at 9-10pm, and you'd like a couple of minutes padding at beginning and end then you're going to get one of them clipped (according to the priorities you've got set-up). That's because it doesn't see padding as any different to the rest of the recording, so it just sees a 4-way clash between 8:58 and 9:02, and with "only" 3 tuners it will have to clip something. Probable outcome is that both the earlier programs will record from 7:58 to 9:02, one of the later programs will record from 8:58 to 10:02 and the other one will only record from 9:02 to 10:02. Note that the clipping eats into the actual showing time of the later program! The Sky+ would just drop the padding from one of the earlier shows (or actually both, as it only has 2 tuners).

What makes it worse it that it can't do the trick the Sky+ does, where it can make two recordings from the same channel using only one tuner. In the above example, if the earlier and later shows were on the same channels (e.g. 2 on BBC1 and 2 on Sky1), then all the padding would be recorded OK, even with just 2 tuners.

Together, that can make a series link for "Peppa Pig" with padding use up 2 of the tuners for large chunks of time. I discovered when there was a "Peppa Pig Weekend" on Nick Jr the first w/e we had the Tivo. If I'd not been paying attention it might have lost me my Doctor Who recording. Once I'd put Peppa Pig at the bottom of the priority list we were OK, though.

Just skimmed the report...

Some details...

They *only* tested at 1m separation, but the required power to cause the same interference should change with 20log(d), where d is the separation in metres (that's just the definition of dB, right?). No idea what that means in practical terms.

When they are analysing the STB and CM design (page 45), they say that when they talk about "slots" and "apertures" they mean rectangular openings (maybe containing plastic connectors), NOT "grids of small cooling holes". It seems that the main problem is holes for connectors where the connector itself isn't surrounded by shielding.

They refer to the different boxes by codes throughout. They don't (AFAICT) say which box is which in any identifiable way. They do describe the internal design in reasonable detail in Appendix C, though. I guess someone dedicated enough could work it out.

Overreaction

It was funny to see all the Silverlight devs go mental about the fact that MS was mostly silent about Silverlight at PDC, whilst talking a lot about all their "HTML5" stuff. This is just a repeat the last couple of years, except then it was WPF getting "killed" in favour of Silverlight.

In actuality, of course, both WPF and Silverlight are doing fine. It's just that development and announcements scale back as the platform reaches maturity. Yes, Silverlight has a couple of features that I *really* wish were in WPF (as a full-time WPF developer), but in general it's a fantastic platform. If you look in the right places you can see that they *are* still adding features, they're just not great features to show off in a keynote (cross-thread collection binding! woo hoo!).

I'll be interested in hearing today's announcements, though. (And I do wish the WPF team wasn't *quite* as "dark" ATM).

Great, I think

I still don't know if I'll get one, but this removes one of the few reasons I wasn't going to get a Kindle. I usually ask for books for Xmas, etc (as I'm pretty unimaginative and I never seem to get time to watch DVDs or listen to music). Before this, I was wondering what on earth I'd ask for once I'd got a Kindle.

Still not sure about the "experience" of getting an e-book for Xmas, though. I do like giving/getting actual physical things.

Concern about fragmentation?

"But it would appear that devs are still concerned about Android fragmentation. Seventy-four per cent described Apple's iOS as the "least fragmented," with only 11 per cent saying the same about Android."

That doesn't say anything about how concerned devs are. It just says thatWHEN ASKED A DIRECT QUESTION, devs think that android is most fragmented and iOS the least. That sounds to me just like sensible interpretation of the facts ("iron-fist control" == least fragmented, "open-source. do what you like. many, many differing devices with differing levels of OS support" == most fragmented).

Trolls, check your facts!

I've just headed over to the "Mono Tools for Visual Studio" purchase page to see what they're charging for. The $2500 enables you to redistribute Mono *without* having to comply with its usual LGPL license. That's basically for if you want to embed it as a scripting engine inside your own application (e.g I think various games already do this).

As for "Why exactly do I need tools...": The tools enable you to remote debug under Mono on other architectures (Linux, Mac, etc) from within VS on Windows, if that's how you you prefer to operate. If you want to develop directly on those platforms, then you can use MonoDevelop for free.

Dell is a bank

I once read an article that explained that Dell doesn't make money from selling people computers, it makes money from acting like a bank.

Ah, here it (or something like it) is: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/berlind/the-problem-at-dell-wasnt-the-ceo-its-the-commodity-r-d/329

The longer Dell keeps its customers' money before having to pay its own suppliers, the more money they make (in interest). They are obviously feeling the pinch at the moment, so they've (unilaterally) decided to keep it a bit longer and make a bit more. Put another way: Dell's suppliers pay *their* banks interest on loans (so they can afford to make the kit they've sent to Dell), whilst Dell sell the kit to their customers (I heard that it usually only takes them a day or so), and then earn that same money *back* from the bank as interest. And keep it.

Ouch.

"available through PC Studio 7"

God I hope that's a new version of PC Studio (I haven't got my original s/w to hand). The existing version of PC Studio doesn't work at all for me (Win 7 32 bit). I get an error during installation, and it won't recognise the phone when I plug it in.

Glad to here that the upgrade is due, though. It will be very welcome.

@Gianni Straniero

Indeed: Very nearly the speed of light, although E=mc^2 is more to do with general relativity than special relativity (which is what you need to work this out).

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Composition_of_velocities

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special_Relativity/Simultaneity,_time_dilation_and_length_contraction#Addition_of_velocities

Quote:

"Notice that for an observer in another reference frame the sum of two velocities (u and v) can never exceed the speed of light. This means that the speed of light is the maximum velocity in any frame of reference."