As a first-step in our coverage of Windows 7, we’ve created the Windows 7 FactsCentral site, accessible either via our wiki or through the following direct link:
http://win7.neosmart.net/
The Windows 7 FactsCentral site is intended to be a one-stop information center, where info about available builds, verified facts regarding Windows 7, etc. are available in encyclopedia format (verses the chronological article-nature of posts here on The NeoSmart Files).
Press Notice: NeoSmart Technologies will by providing blow-by-blow reports regarding the next version of Windows, as the facts come in.
As always, NeoSmart Technologies remains committed to providing accurate and verifiable information from trustworthy sources. We’re also dedicated to providing reports/articles regarding content that our readers deem important and newsworthy; so you’ll always be able to find the latest accurate information regarding the Microsoft’s next OS at The NeoSmart Files.
Today is Pi-Day 2008. A day in honor of Pi, one of the oldest and most mysterious mathematical constants known to man. A day in celebration of the works of dozens of great mathematicians and scholars. A day to revel in the glory and power of Pi. For those of you that live in the USA and use the MM/DD date representation format, the reason should be clear enough: March 14th, 2008 == 3.14.
Pi isn’t just a number that you can use to calculate circle-related mathematics, it’s a symbol of something by far greater. Pi is one of many “magic” numbers that are found everywhere – if you know where to look. These magic numbers can’t be explained, they just are. And if you use them right, they make it a lot easier to do a lot of really complicated things… In a way, they’re a testimony to technology and computers (or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it).
Pi, i, e, and Phi are just some of the numbers that have an almost-magical role in furthering scientific and mathematical studies and observations in our daily lives. It doesn’t matter where they came from or what they actually mean; the one thing that truly counts is what you can make them do for you.
As promised in our last post, we have some screenshots of Windows Internet Explorer 8 for those of you anxious to see where the latest iteration of Microsoft’s browser. While there are a couple of changes that stand out, most of the visual improvements are subtle and take some keen observation to notice.
The screenshots: http://neosmart.net/gallery/album/view/apps/Internet+Explorer/IE8/
We’re still working on an in-depth review and analysis of what IE8 brings to the proverbial web browser table.
Microsoft has just made Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 available to the public. The official site is currently not fully completed, so here are the links for those of you interested (each is approximately 11 MiB in size):
We’re working on screenshots and an early review, but in the meantime: Happy bug hunting!
You can always trust The Register to do what it can to twist the facts into a nice, juicy headline. This time, it’s about Windows Vista SP1, and the very short list of software that’s adversely affected by its installation.
Don’t get this wrong: we’ve got our own reservations about SP1 (between performance and usability – or, more accurately, the lack thereof). But Microsoft is not to blame because certain system tools and utilities won’t run on Windows Vista SP1 when it’s released in March.
According to The Register, "Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps, utilities" and that it’s somehow Microsoft’s fault that antivirus/firewall software by BitDefender, Jiangmin, Trend Micro, and Zone Alarm no longer works on SP1 – but it seems they forgot to mention two facts:
Following the recent RTM of Microsoft’s long-awaited Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, Microsoft has created (for limited release) pre-slipstreamed installation media intended for the distribution of PCs with newly-installed copies of Windows Vista.
With Windows Vista, the process of slipstreaming a service pack is no longer as simple as it once was as a result of the new WinPE/WIM based installation procedure. Since the installation media is packaged as a filesystem image, it’s no longer as trivial of a matter to unpack, update, and repack the setup files and ensure they’d still work. With Windows Vista, the only way to create a slipstreamed installation DVD is to install Vista RTM, apply the service pack, then create an image from the newly-installed OS.
This new procedure has multiple drawbacks, including the fact that it can lead to huge installation media sizes, unnecessary bloat, and has been known to create compatibility issues – unless, of course, it’s Microsoft that’s making the image in the first place.
Following right on the heels of Windows Vista SP1 RTM, Apple has seemingly one-upped Microsoft by releasing OS X 10.5.2 – the biggest update to OS X ever – effective immediately and available to all.
The release documentation for the OS X 10.5.2 build can be found at the Apple site, and it contains all the gory details about this whopping update. It’s 343 MiB (for comparison, Vista SP1 x86/x64 RTM are 434/726 MiB, but they contain plenty more changes) and contains a number of important fixes.
At the moment, you can download the update via OS X’s “Software Update” feature or directly from Apple’s OS X downloads site here. Updates are also available for OS X Server, the direct download link can be found here (382 MiB).
10.5.2 ships with several important security updates that were not previously disclosed/patched as well – if you don’t intend on updating to 10.5.2 anytime soon, you should definitely grab the standalone security update found here.
The round-robin algorithm is often used as a simple-yet-effective method of distributing requests to a single-point-of-entry to multiple servers in the background. It’s used by DNS servers, peer-to-peer networks, and many other multiple-node clusters/networks.
In a nutshell, round-robin algorithms pair an incoming request to a specific machine by cycling (or, more specifically, circling) through a list of servers capable of handling the request. It’s a common solution to many network load balancing needs, even though it does not result in a perfectly-balanced load distribution, strictly speaking. In the non-ideal world we our servers live in, there are many reasons why the stock round-robin algorithm just isn’t good enough when it comes to properly balancing server loads.
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that not all servers are created equal. One should be able to take advantage of all available resources, and it’s impossible to guarantee that all the servers available to process incoming requests are capable of dealing with the same load quantities, take as long to carry out each command, and deal with larger/longer queues as elegantly. Nor can all requests be treated the same, either. Some take longer to process than others, involve more work, and are generally more-demanding than the rest – just as others are finished relatively fast and with far-fewer resources.
For the past several months, our support forums have been plagued on and off with a number of weird and inexplicable failed attempts at installing Ubuntu by many users. We’ve finally pinned down the cause of the problem, and it isn’t pretty. Ubuntu (ever since version 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog) will not install properly on a filesystem other than ext2fs or ext3fs.
Unfortunately if you attempt to install Ubuntu with the “/” partition formatted as ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or any other non-standard filesystem, Ubuntu installation will begin like normal and tick merrily along its way until it attempts to install GRUB. At that point, you’ll get a fairly inexplicable and non-verbose “fatal error” message about “grub-install()” failing.