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PC with 512Mb of RAM? Install Vista Home Basic

Ed Bott, from ZDNet in the US recently tested Windows Vista Home Basic on a 2002-vintage PC with 512Mb of RAM – and found the operating system responsive and usable.

Surprisingly, even the visuals on this system were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this system was capable of running Vista’s Aero graphics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Standard display. It lacks the transparent window borders and whizzy live previews on taskbar buttons, but otherwise the look is indistinguishable from a system running Windows Vista Ultimate.

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MMOIE is the new Desktop

3D worlds such as Garry’s Mod and SecondLife have taken some the Hodge bandwidth and electrons over the last 6 weeks or so.  The recent posting from Yoick with their call-out to the general community has lead me to thinking…

The desktop is a metaphor for babyboomers. Going to work, sitting at a desk. Moving files and folders around in a desktoppy sort of way. Manila folders, filing cabinets, printers. How 1950’s is this vision?

I’ve always been pro-desktop as the metaphor for comptuers, and always looked for cool tools that extended the desktop rather than looking at the browser as interface end in and of itself. Dragging from a desktop icon to another to get cool things done (like a file onto the icon of a printer, or file onto a business card) made me giggle with glee.

So, in a rush of caffeine to the brain today, I realised that the MMOIE (massively multi-user online immersive experiences. meh) are may be the replacement for the desktop metaphor. Or maybe the real-world writ large is the new metaphor, expressed in 3D worlds.

Here, I am thinking Snow Crash / True Names / Neuromancer style interfaces not wired into your cells – more what the average consumer sees online

In your 3D world, your flickrs, twitters, blogs, emails, voicemails will appear in a different fashion on semi-transparent screens. With Dashboard,  Sidebar widgets, pop-ups, RSS feeds and the like cramming into my 1280×1024 is starting to overlap too much.

Tech Trader daily talks about the future of Enterprise looking like consumer sites such as MySpace. Maybe in the future our “virtual environment” will be 3D so we can manage the volume of information and interactions we have with customers?

Microsoft has another SecondLife thing going: a blimp!

Ryan Stewart recently blogged about Adobe’s Flex in a 3D world. It’s more than just seeing a 3D graph and rotating it. You really need to have an immersive world. Walk through your data, have information pop up in perspective to the attention it requires. 

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48 hours in Melbourne: AURemix07

Crown Promenade

The Crown Promenade is a good hotel. Above is a view of my hotel room late last week. You are a walk away from losing your cash playing poker in the casino; a little further away from Southbank eateries.  Oh, and Melbourne does the best coffee outside Venice, in my book.

Now imagine never seeing outside, and joining the glitterati of the Australian Web Design community at Australia’s first ReMIX. User Experience, Expression, Silverlight and keynotes from US personages.

To keep up with the fun and frolic, you can also join the Twitter: http://twitter.com/auremix07

Come join us!

John Lam and Jim Hugunin: DLR Presentation

Microsoft’s John Lam and Jim Hugunin go large with the DLR at MIX07. Here are my notes whilst listening and watching the presentation:

What to expect: a Mac, TextMate, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Safari and Silverlight.  TextMate equals text editing. Silverlight is not binary, its just XML and text. You can break it apart and look at the gooeyness inside. And some friendly Microsoft people bantering about Ruby vs Python.

And DLR is going Open Source, like IronPython.

What strikes me the most is that the language that people are comfortable with: Javascript, Python, Ruby, C# – you can code your client side in the same language as server side.

Also, having Ruby instantiate Javascript and call functions. Wow. With a C# object doing UI. Technorati via XML through Yahoo!Pipes to JSON to Silverlight on a Mac. Retrieving from the JSON object deserialised and queried via LINQ.

Let alone doing Basic, with REM and all.

In their only Powerpoint slide, Jim details the performance gains of IronPython on the CLR engine. I wonder if the perf gains are going to match to Ruby, too? Is the DLR/CLR going to be the saviour of the scaling bumps of Ruby?

Parts of the DLR (from Jim Hugunin at end of video):

  1. Dynamic type system, shared object system
  2. Shared hosting API; host one, get all of ’em. ruby bits are coming together now.
  3. Bunch of helpers for compiler writers, so dynamic language runs fast

Question: can use DLR inside console, ASP.NET?

Answer: yes, you can use DLR anywhere you are using .NET. More constrained in Silverlight, due to the sandbox.

Question: is it compiling an assembly, or executing script

Answer: Dynamic methods in .NET 2.0, for code generation lazily; and is a dynamic method. Only held whilst there is a live reference. ASP.NET scenarios with stress test not held onto. Not using method rental; System.Reflection.EmitDynamicMethod

Question: JScript.NET vs. new Dynamic Language Jscript?

Answer: Developer want language purity, not tight integration and following .NET. So follow the ECMA 3.0 spec. That’s Javascript. vs. Ruby “freelove” specification of Ruby is its implementation, not a specification document.

Microsoft has changed, big time. My head is spinning.

Australian Government Do-not-Call List

In light of the recent shenanigans of AMEX, its time to list my numbers in the “Do-not-Call List”

URL to register: http://www.donotcall.gov.au/

As per the Government’s web site:

Will it stop all telemarketing calls?

Registering your telephone number on the Do Not Call Register will not stop all telemarketing calls to your number. There are some exemptions which enable certain public interest organisations to make telemarketing calls. Exempt organisations include charities, religious organisations and registered political parties. You can also still receive calls from market researchers.

Hmm. I’ll still get push-polling recorded calls from politicians, and people asking for “market research”. All I want is no fricken’ calls from people I don’t know, fullstop.

Now, the site is broken and melting down. Ooops, Coldfusion just went hot. Dear webmasters: always overestimate the stresses on your sites. (Fixed at around midday.)

More DLR

John Lam, why Dynamic Languages from John Udell podcast:

expressing my intent in the code.

Interesting interview between Tim Heuer and John Lam on Ruby as a part of the announcements yesterday.

The Ruby support from Microsoft is more than just Silverlight; it also crosses into the server and the client, outside the browser.

21st Century SmallTalk: IronPython 2.0 in a browser, performance and dynamic fun.