Visual Studio: Database Edition CTP Now Available
The first CTP drop of the new VS2005 geared for DBAs is now available for download.
Archive for 13th June 2006
Morgenstern on Vista Flash Technologies
eWeek’s David Morgenstern is skeptical of Microsoft’s ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive technologies. These are Vista capabilities that allow flash memory to increase apparent RAM and speed boot times respectively. As far as ReadyBoost goes, I agree: the idea of depending on a USB dongle to increase RAM seems very hinky to me. There’s an enormous step down in access speed from RAM to Flash and Flash memory can wear out (MS surely uses the algorithms that mitigate, but not solve, this issue).
ReadyDrive, on the other hand, I quite like. This is the idea that your hard-drive will have some integrated Flash in which it caches boot information. This time, there’s an enormous step up in speed from loading a driver from the hard drive to loading it from Flash (especially if instead of actually loading stuff, you’re just bltting the in-memory image from Flash to RAM). Morgenstern points out the orders-of-magnitude disparity in mean-time-to-failure between Flash and hard-drives, which may be valid, but I wonder if both don’t exceed the reasonable operational time of a drive.
Free Satellite TV
I was reading an article about Libya and it mentioned, as is common in stories from developing nations, the many satellite dishes you see. This is something I can personally vouch for, having seen many satellite dishes in places like Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. What I don’t get, though, is that they obviously aren’t paying DirecTV $50 a month for access. I kinda’ doubt they’re paying $10 a month. It seems like the world is awash in free satellite TV channels. How do I get me some of that?
Wes Moise on Text in GDI+
Wesner Moise rants about the problems in GDI+. It’s a good read and contains a link to a crucial KnowledgeBase article.You wouldn’t think that one would fall back to GDI as an example of a “good” text-layout API, but at least it’s lightweight. WPF has a vastly improved API for text-layout, but the first comment on the post sent a chill down my spine: “Wait until you try getting performance out of WPF Text.”
