AlexHopmann.com

You know, I thought I understood this stuff but I think I’ve maybe been making a mistake in my thinking about 32-bit vs. 64-bit.

With 32-bit Windows by default each application is limited to a 2gb user address space. The other 2gb is available to various kernel things. It is possible to adjust this ratio to give more address space to the application, but limiting the kernel can have some really bad effects.

So what happens when you have 4gb or 6gb of RAM in a 32-bit system? Can you use it? Granted, each application can only use 2gb (by default). But if your goal is not about some one monster app but rather to have a smoothly running multitasking system (IE- plenty of resources for those 4-cores you can buy now) can one app use 2gb, another app use 2gb and the rest split of the remaining 2gb (+ of course system caches)?

Part of my goal is to have a system that can run a few VMs smoothly. So far my experience isn’t great. The performance inside a VM is much better but running VMs (given that the things I run in VMs sometimes needs lots of memory) both leaves my base OS with very little memory, plus I tend to get lots of hanging in other applications. For a developer that wants to run Orcas betas in one VM, an IE6 image in another and linux in a 3rd, a fast quad-core system with 6gb of RAM seems pretty useful, as long as the OS can VM software can take advantage of it.

I’m also curious if this is one of the differences between the free and paid VMWare solutions / Microsoft Virtual PC / Parallels? I’d love to see some reviews that really compare how efficient and flexible they each are.

Brett posts a detailed recipe for Massaman Curry. I can’t wait to try it out.

Two other notes on my hardware plans. First of all, the ASUS board says that it will support the future 45nm processors, yet several of the roadmaps show new Intel chipsets coming out and one of their features being support for the 45nm parts. I’m curious what the real story is here?

The other is whether or not to try Vista 64-bit? On the one hand going 64-bit could make a future upgrade to 4gb of RAM more easy. And I’ve checked and in theory all the pieces I’m getting will have Vista 64-bit drivers. On the other hand its hard to imagine that the 64-bit drivers are as tested (not to mention Vista itself) plus I’ve heard that 64-bit Windows was used as an excuse to lock down various DRM things that seem very consumer un-friendly. I will be trying out Vista’s Media Center support- I’m not planning on upgrading my existing Media Center box, instead I’m building this new one and I’m going to make sure its stable before I trust it as my main TV.

This week the various hardware review sites are full of news of next Monday’s impending price cuts from Intel. On one level this is all great news since never before has this level of computing power been available at reasonable prices. At the same time there is additional news of future Intel processor roadmaps which all leaves me with a quandry about how long to wait to build my next computers. The 45nm “Penryn” desktop CPUs are supposed to ship before the end of the year, but the question is how far before the end of the year and how much better will they be than the existing 65nm CPUs that are shipping next week. Next week it will be possible to get a 3.0ghz Quad-Core 1333mhz front-side bus CPU, and sure its expensive, but will the 45nm version be any better?

AnandTech did a very useful article asking some of the key questions about the current processor lineup. For me the key questions were “does 1066mhz vs 1333mhz bus really matter for a quad-core CPU?” and “For $266, should you buy a quad-core Core 2 Quad Q6600 or a dual-core Core 2 Duo E6850?”. The former answer was “barely”. Comparing two almost identical quad-core CPUs with the different bus speeds the faster bus had less than a 1% difference overall. The biggest difference was for some of the encoding tasks, which are good benchmarks for my media-center machine, but those were still only in the 4% range.

On the second question, the quad-core chip spanked the faster clocked dual-core chip for many of the media encoding, etc, tasks. This leads me to an interesting plan- I think I’ll build a Media Center box using the Q6600 (2.4ghz quad-core) fairly soon. For this application I think it should be fine, I doubt that my earlier plan of using the 2.66ghz 1333mhz bus version will really make that much difference- at most about 10-12%, and for half the price (of the CPU).

The other dilemma is whether to both with DDR3 memory. The P35 motherboards come in either DDR2 or DDR3 versions (some have both). I was assuming that I’d want to switch to DDR3 as soon as possible (so I could buy consistent memory between machines) but a recent review shows almost no difference between the two. Fast DDR2 is better than slow DDR3, and today the only DDR3 available is slow and still costs 2-3x as much as the DDR2. Much as I’m tempted to get the ASUS P5KC that has 4 DDR2 and 2 DDR3 slots, the rest of the board doesn’t look nearly as nice as the normal P5K Deluxe so I’ll probably stick with that.

CPU: Intel Q6600- 4x 2.4ghz 1033mhz bus. $266
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 460W $99
Memory: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR2 800mhz PC6400 CAS4 ~$105
Video: Gigabyte GF 8600GTS Silentpipe3- $183
TV Tuner: AverMedia MTVPEMCER- $104
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $32

Total is about $1280 without hard-drives. One of the cool things about the Zalman case is it has 6 3.5″ drive bays. I’m tempted to go with 4×750GB drives which should cost an extra $800 or so. A pretty hefty addition to the price of the overall system, but 3TB is nothing to sneeze at. The newer 1TB drives are nice but way higher in cost per GB. A more reasonable option would be to go 4×500GB, which only drops me to 2TB storage (still not bad), but costs half as much and I’ve got the extra two drive bays for later.

Finally once I put the system together I might need to buy an extra case fan. I’m aiming for as silent as possible, but with no fan on the video card and all the drives its likely that the stock cooling won’t be able to handle it. I believe you can upgrade the HD-135 case with extra fans- hopefully it supports the 120mm ones, although it isn’t clear. Ideally it should be fine as is, but we will see.

As for the new workstation PC, I think I can hold off for now. I’m at least waiting for the X38 chipset to come out and ideally I’d like at least a 3.0ghz quad-core CPU and can wait for prices to come down a bit more on those (or the 3.2/3.4ghz ones to come out at the same price).

Very cool map. Bonus points for The Shins reference. Via A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way.

My friends over at Jackson Fish shipping their first web app- an online virtual flower shop. Its been especially interesting following the commentary about this. All in all the reviews have been glowing and I think its a great testament to Hillel, Walter and especially Jenny’s design skills that they get consistent praise for the look and feel of the site. The funny thing about design is that its very personal and driven by taste so its pretty rare and special to pull off something that gets such widespread appeal.

At the same time I think a number of people appear a bit confused by how this speaks to the future direction for the Jackson Fish bunch. In the technology circles we tend to either focus on things that are technically impressive, or at the same time we appreciate something that has a great obvious business model capturing millions of users in weeks. This is neither. The notion of building something as a long term company, not to get bought up is so rare lately. Not trying to hit a huge home run every swing but aiming for a bunch of great singles, doubles, and ultimately a bunch of runs.

I’m a bit disappointed with uncov, one of my favorite sites to read lately. They were way too nice in the write-up today. They didn’t even use any obscene-word + meat phrases in the write up??? Of course uncov does get big points for the reference to the underpants-gnomes business plan, one of my favorites.

I think I’m probably one of the few people who has enjoyed Windows Media Player for quite a few years. Overall its been solid, has a decent library and plays the formats that I care about, does a decent job ripping + its built into any copy of Windows. Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t make it better, just I haven’t seen anything better.

Version 11 is a major regression. For starters it hangs. Frequently. Hard. It will come back in 30 or 100 seconds or something. The music usually keeps playing but I can’t access the UI at all and skip/pause or anything. Very seriously annoying.

I also feel like the library usability has gone down. Its hard to just do some simple things like “play my whole library on shuffle” and it feels like their attempts at new visualizations are seriously slow. And its not like any of my hardware is low-end…

This is an important app as part of the Windows ecosystem and I hope there is some serious effort on fixing it. I fear that most of the effort is going into turning it into an online store for the Zune or something… Oh well, maybe its time to explore alternatives. But I want to find something that isn’t all about pimping their own music store…

SmallNetBuilder has a review of the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router which is one of the first of the draft 2.0 compatible “N” routers to hit the market. Don’t you love all how “Xtreme” it is?

Overall it looks really good and I’ve heard some good things about it from the folks at Pure. I’m going to wait for the DIR-855 Dual Band version which should be available “soon” according to the D-Link web site. This version supports the 5ghz band and given the various reports of problems with 2.4ghz N routers coexisting with existing B and G equipment on 2.4ghz, I’m hoping that 5ghz will be less congested. When I tried 5ghz in the past (using “A”) the experience was very poor- the range was much lower for the 5ghz products, but I’ve heard that has improved in the past 4 or so years.

In my earlier post on High Resolution LCDs I mentioned one of the problems is that with a true high-resolution display often applications don’t work right.

It turns out that Vista does have support for helping in this situation, but it only turns on if you say your display is 120dpi or greater. Kam has the step-by-step instructions for enabling high-DPI support on Vista on his blog as well as more details about what is going on.

We watched “The Smartest Guys In The Room” Enron movie tonight on the NetFlix on-demand service. First of all it was a bit ironic watching a movie that covered the BS Blockbuster movies-on-demand (via the Enron “bandwidth trading system”) on Netflix’s real version.

One thought occured to me- the type of schemes that Enron used to do fake accounting to pump up their profits remind me of the kind of schemes that the Hollywood studios use (in reverse) to make sure that films never have a profit and thus they don’t have to pay out percentages to various folks who have a stake in the film. For those that aren’t familiar with it, having a percentage of the profit in a typical film has become a real joke since even films that rake in $100s of millions of dollars world-wide somehow always end up not making a profit. Strange that the studios keep paying for them when they never make any money?

Anyway, post-Enron and in the Sarbanes Oxley accounting environment, I’m amazed that they still get away with this stuff? Most of the studios are big public companies. I thought with all the new rules you weren’t supposed to be able to pull anything like this off anymore? I wonder if the execs and directors of those media companies are personally liable to criminal charges if irregularities are found now and if so you would think they would start changing the system.