daria42 writes “The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the ‘2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.’ Huh?”
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CWmike writes “Citing data from Devil Mountain Software’s community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company’s chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory ’saturation’ point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. ‘This is alarming,’ Barth said of Windows 7 machines’ resource consumption. ‘For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.’”
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CWmike writes “Tuesday’s security updates from Microsoft have crippled Windows XP PCs with the notorious Blue Screen of Death, users have reported on the company’s support forum. Complaints began early yesterday, and gained momentum throughout the day. ‘I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to,’ said a user identified as ‘tansenroy’ who kicked off a growing support thread: ‘From then on, Windows cannot restart again! It is stopping at the blue screen with the following message: ‘A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.’ Others joined in with similar reports. Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by ‘maxyimus’ was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens.”
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Theovon writes “We’ve seen a few stories recently about the new Western Digital Green drives. According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes. Linux users should not be complacent about this, because not all the Linux tools like fdisk have caught up. The result is a reduction in write throughput by a factor of 3.3 across the board (a 230% overhead) when 4096-byte clusters are misaligned to 4096-byte physical sectors by one or more 512-byte logical sectors. The author does some benchmarks to demonstrate this. Also, from the comments on the article, it appears that even parted is not ready, since by default it aligns to ‘cylinder’ boundaries, which are not physical cylinder boundaries and are multiples of 63.”
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It must suck to be a Windows developer. So you already have an entire legion of misguided folk hating your work for no reason (on top of the people hating your work for legitimate reasons), and then a company comes along spreading clear misinformation about Windows’ memory usage, based on that company’s performance monitoring software. To make matters worse, when said company is called out on its errors, it decides to publish the usage information of an Ars Technica editor’s computer. As such, it is advisable to uninstall the software in question.
Via newsycombinator comes a reaction at Ars Technica to the recently reported claims of excessive memory use on machines running Windows 7. From the article: “I installed the XPnet performance monitoring tool and waited for it to upload my data to see what it might be complaining about. The cause of the problem was immediately apparent. It’s no secret that Windows 7, just like Windows Vista before it, includes aggressive disk caching. The SuperFetch technology causes Windows to preload certain data if the OS detects that it is used regularly, even if there is no specific need for it at any given moment. Though SuperFetch is a little less aggressive in Windows 7, it will still use a substantial amount of memory—but with an important proviso. The OS will only use memory for cache when there is no other demand for that memory.”
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Microsoft Sysinternals: (sem tradução porque já é tarde e ‘tou cansado)
The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. If you have a question about a tool or how to use them, please visit the Sysinternals Forum for answers and help from other users and our moderators.
Por aqui: technet.microsoft.com/…
jjrff writes “Phoronix has a little piece about the future (or lack thereof) of OpenSolaris. It appears based on the current support lifecycle, OpenSolaris may be going away. There is a fun thread (read: mild flameage) on a ZFS list about it.”
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Linux 2.6.33 has been released. This version features Nouveau, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), TCP “cookie transactions”, a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), support for cache compression and other improvements. See the full changelog here.
“Back in November, we officially announced a new Windows product called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. Today we are launching Windows MultiPoint Server around the world. Windows MultiPoint Server is available for purchase through OEMs and Microsoft Academic Volume Licensing customers on March 1, for schools and educational institutions (mainly for use in classrooms, labs and libraries).”
