Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
MS decides to not make the Zune compatible with the other MP3 players and music websites. It came out this week. Zzzzzz
PS3 comes out at the end of this week. Blue-ray, blue-tooth, blue-balls. It’s all blue. As “Gears of War” comes out for the 360 this week, Sony says they might not be able to deliver the measly 400k units for the U.S. So the retailers are scrambling telling their pre-order game fanatics they may not get their PS3, but they get a free DVD. Huh? Why does Sony even bother to have billboards and TV commercials for the PS3 when it’s already sold out of units!
Nintendo’s Wii also comes out this month. It actually will have some “real” games on day one, unlike the PS3. I guess Nintendo knows games.
MS dropped the part in Vista that was going to change the entire file system to be a relational database to make searches faster. To see how this makes a difference, I’ll give you a perfect real life example.
I needed to look for a specific file that I knew the name of on my WinXP based system. I used XP’s explorer to do a search for the file on my drive “C”. No wildcards. A specific filename. Chunk, chunk, chunk. Anytime this decade would be nice.
After about 5 minutes of waiting, I got bored and opened up a browser window and googled my own address for fun. In 0.41 seconds, I got a list of websites that had my address in it. One was an article written by somebody at the same address about some weird scientific stuff. Another one was a website that had a game that was a copy of an old game I wrote in the 90’s. Some other weird ones that looked at too.
In the mean time, my search for the file continued. After doing some other work, I noticed the hard drive went quiet so I looked and sure enough, after about 20-30 minutes, XP finally found my 1 file.
There you have it. The difference between XP’s (and presumably Vista’s) file structure for searching vs. Google. Is this a fair comparison? Not really. XP only went through about 5k of directories, maybe 50k-100k of files in 30 minutes. Google found my results from several million websites on the Internet in 0.41 seconds. Hmmm.
In XP’s defense, their system does not take up any space on the hard drive, whereas google’s method would probably take up about 1G of hard drive space. Will I give up 1G to save 30 minutes? With the way prices are with hard drives, the answer is now yes. 10 years ago, no.
So I look forward to Vista’s release in 2007. It will be slow and beautiful.
Oh, sorry. Have to go do another search.
