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When Your Hardware Isn't Obsolete Soon Enough
GrandCow writes: "There's a really interesting article over at Sharky Extreme on why the computer industry is slowing down recently. He talks about looking for the killer application that will make him go out and spend the big money on a whole new system... and can't find it. It's a really good read. For lots of the people on /. (me included) getting the latest hardware piece is a given, but for many people there's just no real reason to." Strangely, the proposed solution seems to be for the hardware industry to write bloated code so people will have more incentive to replace their currently-OK PCs. (Huh?) All I want is a machine on which Broadcast 2000 works.
You can't spell yourself. Seeing typos reminds you of your illiteracy and general stupidity and makes you mad.
Feeling threatened by the idea of possibly having to interact with a representative a foreign culture and finding your own culture inadequate in some aspects.
So, get a life moron.
I never though I'd see the day when the workstation guys were flaming the PeeCee guys on pricepoints!
Mozilla is an opensource failure.
As an application, yes. As a project, no. Mozilla is a great source of components for Galeon and KMeleon.
It's all about economics. I can trade off developer effort for increased hardware requirements. Sometimes that makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.
...]
In a word processor it make sense because I can count on the average user having more hardware resources than I could possibly burn with a reasonable sized team. However, If I'm responsible for producing millions hardware units with my software on it, it make more sense to eat the non-reocurring engineering cost required to jam all the functionality I need into the cheapest hardware I can find. If I can put everything I need into a 4-bit microcontroller, all the better.
The trend in non-embedded software is to continually trade decreased the amount of development effort in favor of increased hardware requirments. Here's sort of a brief history:
1) Machine Langue (real toggle-switch type coding. You had to think about which addressing mode to use for each function but it produced small code.)
2) Assemblers. If there we multiple addressing modes available for an instruction the assemblergenerall chose which on the use. It got it right most of the time but not all.
3) Compilers. Didn't need to deal with assemble most of the time. Compilers produce great code in the hands of a great developer but most times companies can't spend the time except for a few critical areas.
4) OO. Yet higher level of abstraction and less control of the code generated. Faster to code slower.
[yeah the history is glossed over but
So there's an increasing trend in application development to spend customers money in order to make the software less expensive to produce.
I agree! Just look at realdoll's success. Who DOESN'T want some 3D, interactive, 1 GB of pure RAM-SUCKING, 1280*1024 PIXEL-PUMPING , 120 fps slurping hardcore PR0N!!! These sweet dual-processor 6 Ghz, virgin, tight, silicon sluts will do ANYTHING!!!! LIVE!! Japanese, too! I want to be able to boot my computer instantly, and in less than three seconds, go from Off to, "Hello Big Boy! Where do you want to come today?"
Pshew, telephone service was never mandated for anyone. There's probably many an old coot without phone service to this day.
What the New Deal rural moderanization programs did was force the telephone systems into "Universal Service", which means that rural customers essentially were subsidized by urban customers. In some areas, the feds also formed subsidized co-operative phone companies to accomplish the same thing.
Since the end of Universal Service in 1996, if you found yourself on a farm with no phone line, the phone company would want to charge you for all the poles, wire, and labor to get the line to your house. That could be pretty pricey if you were in the middle of Montana or something.
It works well enough that it can model anything from an X plane to a 747 to a Cessna 172 with enough plausibility that people gripe about small details of the flight handling, without even recognising the brilliance of the accomplishment- the program doesn't know it's trying to model a 172, it's just interacting with the flight surfaces as they are given to it. You can put together absolutely anything no matter how weird and it will model that with the same degree of pretty-much-accurate-mostly.
I play with this sim on a 300mhz G3, and get almost 20 fps out of it, so by itself it is not that killer app. But- the compelling quality about it is that capacity to model real aircraft behavior from a given design. Well- one word, turbulence. Spins, stalls, nonlinear airflow, interaction of control surfaces- it already models propwash, but the fact is, 100% true modelling of airflow is not possible. Turbulence is chaotic... and yet, the closer you get, the more compellingly interesting the problem becomes.
An unhappy side-note: I've had to drop out of the upgrade cycle for X-Plane, even though I've paid for 5.* series upgrades, because the most recent ones, with drool-inducing GFX improvements and flight model refinements, are coded to require MacOS 8.5 or 9. I'm sticking to 8.1 so far, because I can control it and have hardware that's known to work with it (and some, that's potentially troublesome under later versions- some, like my glass-lens ADB Color Quickcam, is already rendered incompatible with recent versions of Quicktime). So even though my hardware will mostly support the very latest newest X-Plane- my other software will not. And so it goes- I'll have to catch up with X-Plane when I'm good and ready to run a substantially more recent computer, one that's a better match with the newer software etc.
So it's not only the digital unwashed who don't upgrade- some people who are very informed on the details of the systems also will resist, _because_ they are capable of establishing 'snapshots' of their computer systems in which any faults are known and avoidable, and the behavior is predictable... and will sometimes pass up 'newer and better' because it is also 'newer and untested'...
timothy, what kind of PC do you have that doesn't work with bcast2000? It works on my p233/mmx! There was a version that had pentium pro instructions a while back, causing it to crash, but the latest one works fine..
F0 07 C7 C8
Well, we _are_ talking video conferencing here. It's not like you need a 50'x20' projection screen and 8.1 sound system.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
You speak of 'media' users (aka Napster) as if they're the power users. All you need is a Pentium class machine to play mp3s, and you can probably download at the same time too.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
As far as OOP code goes... in all but the most complex cases of straight C code, C++ requires an extra level of indirection. When you call a function in C, you just go to its address. When you call a member function in C++, you need to find the address first. This means an extra memory fetch. Now, it may not seem like much, but if you've followed some technical links from the recent P4 article you'd see that this can add up to quite a bit in terms of cache misses, main memory access, stalled pipelines and mispredictions.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I think this is a bit premature. There are still some 'killer' apps left: there is voice recognition, VR, and, way down the road, AI, that is, natural language recognition.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Ah, in terms of interfaces it's pretty much the same thing. You speak into your computer, like you would talk to a person, and it under stands what you said and carries out the task. And, since I'm looking so far into the future here, I don't just mean 'open browser' or 'click submit', I mean 'I'd like to look for work now' and it will fire up your resume, address book, memos (so self), and bring up a bunch of job hunting sites, without being explicitely programmed to do so. Come on, you're splitting hairs here... maybe I should have written AI/natlang. Is that better?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
But the point is that you _don't_ need that for music. "CD quality" really is the upper bound on what people need from audio for music. They just don't care about having more than 2 channels. (Remember quadrophonic audio?) The vast majority of people don't even care about better-than-stereo audio for movies.
I bought a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card almost 10 years ago. It was one of the first that was capable of CD quality output. (44KHz,16 Bit stereo). There is still no good reason for me to want to upgrade it today -- it is every bit as good as a Soundblaster Live for playing MP3 files, etc.
Compaq donated about half a million dollars in hardware to promote Broadcast 2000 at this year's National Association of Broadcasters convention so if that's the application which is to drive consumer sales, you're probably looking too high.
Really there is more effort being made to downsize all applications to handheld devices than there is for upsizing applications to supercomputers. Regardless of how smart the mainstream industry is being about this, one thing is for sure, consumers still prefer bigger SUV's over mopeds.
I don't know what's so complicated about doing that, either. But I don't think you'll be checking if your stove's off from abroad, more likely your security system will notice that you've left the house, check whether the stove is off, check the state of your bathroom, check the quality of the air (and air your rooms if necessary), check the contents of your fridge (and order supplies if necessary).
Probably the system will profile your habits a bit, get to know you, and don't rip the windows open while you're for a short chat over at the neighbor's, but while you're at the office.
The system might also get a notice from your car when you've left the office, if you're heading home or not and fire up heating, stove, water heater, aircon, etc. accordingly. Or it might notice you've booked a holiday trip and put aircon and heating in energy save mode when you've left the building.
What I'm saying here is: It's not about being able to do everything from abroad, it's about integration! All this stuff is probably bound to eat up quite some cpu cycles, as there are quite some problems to solve, like: "Is this guy supposed to be in here? Yup, he came in with the master, the master told him he could stay even when he's not in, so I'm not supposed to sound the alarm." Or: "What's that guy doing in here? I better get the boss and the police to look at him!"
I hope that's some food for thought...
Regards, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
After running Maya for Linux, my dual 500 celeron (366 oc'ed ;) ) was not enough. Now a 1ghz system...
and waiting for the geforce 3 to cheaper....
so, the software to "force" upgrades is just in the highend area.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Hmmm, I think you're right. So long ago that I'm forgetting. I certainly remember how pathetic IE 1.0 was, though....
Anyway, that's beside the point, which is that Microsoft sure took plenty of time to get IE to be a decent browser.
And even that is a side point: the main thing is that Mozilla really will kick ass at 1.0.
I can't decide if this is a troll or an attempt at humor. Either way....
Read the comment I was replying to. For the comparison I was making, it doesn't matter what microsoft does in q3 -- only what they had done in three years (or two and a half, really) after they started.
But, as an aside, I'm fully confident that mozilla in q3 will beat ie6. Current nightly builds are superior to ie5.5 in many (but of course not all) ways, even in their half-baked state.
IE 1.0 was released with Windows 95, in August of 1995. From all reasonable accounts, IE wasn't very good until version 5, which was released March 1999. That's three and a half years.
The Mozilla project started with Gecko in Oct 1998. Even if you start with the less-charitable date of April 1998 (when the Communicator source was opened -- and turned out to not actually be very useful), it's still only three years 'til right now. (And remember, IE didn't start from scratch -- they began with the Spyglass Mosaic codebase.)
If you look at the current Mozilla roadmap, even the "if we're unlucky" plan calls for 1.0 to be out by Q3 of this year -- plenty of time to beat IE 5.0 by your suggested metric.
OMS is a bit of a processor hog-- but that's mostly because it's difficult to get specifications on the Motion Comp and iDCT features from video card venders.
If you play at the highest resolutions and with the highest level of detail, some games are pretty demanding-- although performance is usually dependent on the make/model of video card.
At one site (Tom's Hardware, perhaps) benchmarks processors with a MPEG2 to MPEG4 conversion test.
Heh. I have a two year old PIII-550 which I run Windows 2000 on and really have no complaints.
In fact my Win2k server at home is a PPro 200, and it operates perfectly as a file/print server, has my scanner and CD-RW on it and I use it as a development web server.
So I just gotta ask. What Microsoft bloat? I'm running the latest greatest software on computers that are 2 and 4 years old respectively.
Heh... 700 Mhz computer to run Linux. *laugh*
DOS 5.0 has given new life to all of my old obsolete hardware.
I tried running Linux on my IBM PS/2 Model 70, and it was slow as a dog.
Even after upgrading it with a Cyrix 486 processor, 387 math coprocessor, boosting memory to 12 Megs and harddrive space to 200Megs.
It was still slow running Linux!
But now with DOS 5.0 I can run Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5 slick as a whistle I tell you!
But on the positive side, I now have a top of the line computer for 1991!
Speaking of which, a lot of people have observed that Quake 3 for Linux might have done a lot better if it had been anywhere near as available as Quake 3 for win32. Instead, people didn't necessarily even know it existed, and Id decided there was no Linux market for games. Will the same thing happen here?
I recently got a new machine. It might be better t say "new" machine, as it's not a Power Mac G4. But it still is under warranty, and had not been taken out of the shrinkwrap. My "new" machine was a Blue & White Power Mac G3 (Blue G3), and it has been perfect for me. It's got USB and ADB (Apple Desktop Bus, for keyboards, mice, etc.) ports, plus FireWire (no SCSI, alas), three PCI slots, a relatively fast processor (which I'll make faster once it's out of warranty), decent video card, etc.
The great thing about it for me is that it can use almost all of my existing peripherals (USB 3-btn mouse, ADB Kinesis keyboard) without requiring special PCI cards or funky adapters. It seems blazing fast to me (says the man who still loves the 200 MHz PowerPC) 604e that it does everything I need to do perfectly. SSH, web, e-mail, an occasional game. It's great! Server functions never slow it down. Honestly, I don't need a G4.
I am not the only person using "old" hardware. Look at the winning responses to our Mac OS X Celebration Essay Contest, and you will see people that could take LinuxPPC and install it on a Power Mac 7200 (75 MHz PowerPC 601), and turn it from something that took up closet space into an effective AppleShare (netatalk), Samba, web server, or firewall.
That said, a lot of people are installing it on their dual processor G4s and PowerBook G4s. A lot of people. The responses that mentioned these machines said "I want to unleash my machine, so I'm installing LinuxPPC." So, Linux actually has driven new hardware sales. It also helps old hardware that's in the closet at the moment, as it can run on machines that Mac OS X never will run on.
You can definitely say that it is a benefit to everyone, regardless of how new or how old their hardware is.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
What is the "suck" that Apple owns? What does it do? It sounds interesting.
I know I'm still using my 5 year old 486 as a firewall, mail server, ftp server, web server, samba server, dns server, nfs server, etc. All thanks to Linux.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Back in '95, I worked for a small software company that had some financial difficulties. We were approached by Intel with a generous suggestion to finance the development of some new software piece - for lots of money, plus promises that Intel will help distribute the product, etc. etc.
The catch: the software had to have a minimal hardware requirement that was the equivalent of today's Pentium 4 at 2GHz (i.e., hardware that was not even available at the time -- PII 500MHz if I recall correctly). In other words, they suggested to pay us so that we'll write bloated code.
People at Intel were loudly telling us that the Web freaks them out: if the Web becomes a killer application, and remains unchanged from its status back then, then nobody would need strong CPUs for home-computing (it was the time people began to talk about Web "terminals").
Eventually the company agreed to the deal, but I am proud to say that I was no longer working there by that time...
- Tal Cohen
Assuming that you really are ignorant here (not stupid, just not yet informed on the particular topic under discussion), or that other's reading this are, there's an old saying/proverb/parable/old wives tale/whatever about boiling frogs. If you stick one in a pan of boiling water he'll do his best to jump out, same as would you or I. If you stick one in a pan of room temperature water and slowly raise the heat under the pan, he'll sit there not realizing anything is wrong and eventually cook to death. Don't know if it's really true or not, but the concept of gradually imposing something undesirable so that you don't realise that it's being done until it's too late is very real and happens all the time.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Welcome to the world of "haves and have-nots." Sucks doesn't it.
It's not done yet... not even version 1. Compare it to IE 2.0 and then talk trash.
Win XP isn't out yet. Once it's out you'll
see a rebirth of the slowed down PC industry
as people will have to buy new computers more
often.
Win XP, the ideal bloated OS + forced obsolescence. Considering that most people
think that they get a free os with a computer,
when the video card or hard disk dies they'll
buy a new PC to get a new license of Win XP.
If you're referring to Netscape 6.0x you're 100% correct. :-) Netscape really sucks d***** b**** due to its slowness on anything less than a Pentium II 233 MHz machine and also has trouble rendering many web pages, too. :-(
I believe that Mozilla 0.8 is a bit better, though.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I think Black and White may work well even on a Celeron 466 MHz machine just as long as you have enough RAM (128 MB minimum!) and a decently fast AGP graphics card (e.g., Matrox G400 with 32 MB of video RAM).
It won't be extremely zipping along like it does on a 650 MHz or faster CPU but at least the program actually works at a reasonable speed.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Actually, it really depends on the vintage of the motherboard.
:-)
If you're using a motherboard that supports the earlier Pentium II's but is using the Intel 440LX chipset (which means it has AGP, ATA-33 IDE ports and 168-pin SDRAM DIMM support), the best solution is to get as much RAM and bigger hard drive you can afford. With the price of PC-133 SDRAM DIMM's going for US$40 per 128 MB and 40 GB hard drives selling just over US$100, there's totally NO excuse to upgrade to get what could be as much as 50-75% increase in performance without swapping out your motherboard.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
One of the reasons why I have invested time and money in Linux is because it has given new life to my old and obsolete hardware. In fact this is one of the selling points that Linux people often quote. Perhaps Linux is contributing to a lack of interest in new hardware?
Even in the Windows environment it's not really necessary to get the latest motherboard. A very easy way to promptly boost Windows performance is a combination of getting a system RAM upgrade and getting a 7200 RPM ATA-66/100 hard drive. With the price of SDRAM DIMM's going for US$40 per 128 MB and 40 GB ATA-66/100 hard drives going for under US$115, there's no excuse to upgrade, especially when you can get as much as 50% to 75% increase in performance.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
45 megaBYTES of real-world perfomance from common IDE drives? Hah! Maybe when reading from a particularly well thought out cache (or 45 megabits/sec), but I have a hard time believing that there's gonna be much more than 20MB/sec sustained over IDE (even super-turbo ata 5000), and you're using a pile of cpu time to do it anyway. They're good performers for the money, but not *that* good of performers... :)
Oh, I'm aware that the IDE and SCSI drives are frequently the same darned thing with a slightly different interface board, and are thus physically capable of sustaining comprable transfer rates. My claim is that in real-world use, where your CPU is doing stuff other than running hard drive benchmarking software, it's unlikely that a drive using the IDE interface is going to be able to sustain high throughput, 'cause the CPU is tied up. SCSI moves a signifigant portion of that "what's the drive doing" load off to an external controller, thus freeing your CPU up to keep the apps rolling along.
Then again, I'm also aware that most common real-world apps don't need sustained transters for any great peroiod of time, thus IDE's success. I wish that more effort would go into making SCSI more affordable, though, rather than adding some bus-mastering to the already crappy IDE. "Look, ma, I've almost got this turd polished!" :) 'Course, x86-based processors are still more popular than almost every better design, so turd-polishing isn't just a drive interface thing - but I'm gonna go off on a wild rant tangent here if I son't stop now...
BTW, of my personal machines, only one is SCSI, the rest use the "far more affordable and wholly adequate for my needs" IDE. So, maybe I'm a hypocrite anyway. :)
I run Mozilla on a P133 every day and it runs as well as anything else. People who think it's bloated obviously don't use it. At least Mozilla doesn't crash as often as Netscape. Thank gawd! :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I use consoles to play games myself but I can tell you I've been tempted to buy bigger PC's w/ my evil nemesis OS running just to play some groovy games. It is sometimes very tempting. If the game itself was free, cross-platform (Linux, Windows, etc), and awesome I'd probably drop the cash for a enw computer. I don't even consider myself a major gamer. I play a game maybe once a week.
Something like Everquest that was free to use would be a good way to lock people into an upgrade cycle to kepe playing their games.. and you could actually USE the extra power rather than go with BLOAT. Social games are highly addictive.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
My gawd.. as a web developer I hate IE 5. It's worse than IE 4 even in many ways. Even the newest versions w/ all fixes applied still are buggy as hell. I like to test in every browser I can find and IE is always the one that gives me the msot pain. It also crashes far more than anything except Netscape. Those two (the most popular) are the worst. If you only do minor web development you might not notice but I do full fledged programs and Intranet sites and IE5 is my worst nightmare everytime. It even acts quite a bit different between Windows and Mac versions.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Mozilla runs for me for days at a time under heavy abuse but then I hand pick the builds I use. As it's still in development some days builds are much much more stable than other days builds. Netscape is just screwy. I honestly hate Netscape almost as much as IE. It tends to work better than IE when it is working but it crashes often and I have to wrap it to keep it's memory leaks from messing with the rest of my system.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Is this surprising? I've been wondering why Dell or other slipping PC companies haven't done this. To keep the PC market hot they have to drive people to buy PC's faster.. most games I've seen work on less than 500Mhz machines so why buy a 1.5Ghz machine?
:)
If I was Dell or a similar company I'd fund a free game that could be awesome.. and given away for free.. that was designed to be played on 1Ghz+ machines. That'd be a lot of power a game could take advantage of and would be the perfect reason why games could work as opensource. The key is to make the game fantastic so people will really want it badly.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Really? I tried out Mozilla around a year ago...it rendered things nicely, and had sane font support (finally!), but it was unusable on a stock 350MHz, 32-meg machine. Maybe it was just that version?
As it is, I'm using Opera right now, and it's good and mostly stable.
I still have a Pentium 166 (overclocked from 150 - pushing the envelope here :) that still works perfectly well as a desktop. It runs W2K, Office 2000, and most everything else I throw at it, but alas, no modern games. It is 6 years old now I believe. Granted the original hard drive is too small to hold anything but the operating system and the orignal 16MB of memory was laughable, but I stuck a new 16 gig drive in a few years back, and I upgraded the RAM to 92MB when EDO was still cheap.
-josh
Wow. So linux can not only attempt to take credit for the cheapening of commercial software (free Solaris, free SCO, free Unixware, as well as all the opensource initiatives taken on by proprietary software and software companies - it can also claim to take some credit for the hardware slowdown as well?
Way to go... Linux - the destroyer of the computer sector as a means of generating revenues...
I know - troll/flaimbait - but it was just too easy to resist.
No it isn't, you are just being sensationalistic. I think 3D is just now starting to get to the point where its really good. The playstation's graphics sucked ass. N64 was bearable 3D, dreamcast and PS2 are practical, and I think that the xbox and gamecube are finally into the realm of good 3D.
Yes, that is a sensationalist opinion... Being that you can't currently render jurasica park quality animations in realtime on any computer that we know of, even at screen resolutions, and that movie's like 6 or 7 years old now, isn't it?
However, it's so easy to take exception to your statement about the quality of XBox and GameCube's graphics, being that all we've seen so far are screen snapshots and simulations of them. You've fallen for microsoft's FUD on the subject, obviously...
But the point is that you _don't_ need that for music. "CD quality" really is the upper bound on what people need from audio for music. They just don't care about having more than 2 channels. (Remember quadrophonic audio?) The vast majority of people don't even care about better-than-stereo audio for movies.
And the point is, there's a world market for maybe 5 computers. One day they'll weigh less than a ton. 640k ought to be enought for anybody. Etc, etc, etc.
MP3 is great for most consmers, except you need a computer to listen to them. CDs are great for the rest. But neither really qualifies in the professional spectrum, and like everything else, things trickle down from the highend to the consumer.
Just because somethings acceptable today, don't make any long term assumptions based on that, i guess that's my point.
Works great when you look at it from that perspective. Step back and note that when consumers get things free, corporate profits go down. When corporate profits go down, people get laid off. When people get laid off, they don't spend as much. When they don't spend as much, corporate profits go down. When corporate profits go down, people get laid off... Vicious circle that we've been living in the past year and a half... I'd kinda like to see it stop, i don't know about you...
What percentage of your programs' memory requirements consist of string storage? I don't think the extra memory needed by unicode is really going to be noticeable.
Yes, OOP creates overhead. It also can make programs run faster because the programmer can get more work done in less time, and therefore have more time to debug stuff. You quote a 30% overhead... and then go on to say that this is much reduced in a later version. C++ has very little overhead, and even better OO languages like Objective-C and SmallTalk spend little of their time in the message sending operation.
I don't know what word processor you're using, but mine can use about a megabyte of memory, although it'll get by with 512k. Maybe you should conisder switching if you don't like yours to take up so much memory?
I have to agree that the web browser is the most ugly, bloated, unreliable piece of crap software ever to see the face of the planet. I just really don't know what happened there.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
First of all good luck on getting a dual P4 up and running. If you had a harddrive with a higher spindle speed and lower seek time your programs will start up faster. Your application developers also need to work on toning down the file system access for their fucking programs to open. Look at ICQ, everything the program needs/uses is contained in their library files. There's dozens of the fucking things to open and thus maintain in the file system. Office2k is the same way as are so many other Windows apps.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What the fuck are you suggesting? Why would I want to write toolkit code (GTK, Qt, ect) in a language that has to be run in a virtual machine? The point of writing shit small and fast is so they don't overuse your system resources. Why should something relatively simple like animating a widget interaction take 80% of your processing power? I can't believe someone marked this drivel up to 3 as interesting.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You've got to be joking? Java and/or Objective C is going to run slower in the long run than the equivilent C++ program (don't say C/C++ when comparing it to an OO language like Java, its bad semantics). The language running inside the VM has more overhead for external operations. Ever use emacs? FUCKING SLUG! Its written in Lisp oddly enough. What exactly does Java do that you aren't going to be able to do in C++? Don't blame C++ for the memory footprint of Konqueror and KDE.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Steve Jobs boasted about how the latest G4 Macs can encode a DVD in "only" twice as long as it takes to play back. My response: "GACK!" I'm not willing to wait more than 20 seconds for a PC to do *anything*.
So hardware makers are safe at least until a typical PC can encode a 30-minute DVD in under 20 seconds, which is at least 4 months from now.
On the other hand, suppose we actually do get PCs so fast that nobody wants a faster one. Look on the bright side -- nobody will want to build a Beowulf cluster out of them!
Sure, I'd like to triple my clock speed, but I can't warrant the cost.
My PII400 is a gaming box.. running M$ Windows. I recently purchased Tribes2, and it runs moderately with my GeForce.... but I want to upgrade now.
My laptop is a PIII750.. I do video editing on that. Plenty fast enough.
The thing is, comparing speeds of my PII450 and a PIII733 I sometimes use.. both running KDE2, and both running it sort of slowly. I have yet to see a machine draw KDE fast enough. Soo.. a faster machine doesn't really help that.
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
...as I've had absolutely no problem with the "need" to keep up with the latest hardware. The author of the story went through and looked at a selection of games, a _very_ small selection of games, and found two with system requirements close to his system. Then apparently he didn't buy them because he mentioned that they would most likely run fine on his system. His error is in not trying.
The author himself mentioned that while he had a 486/66 system when he tried out Doom (a game that requires a 386, FAR inferior to that 486) he made the decision to go with a Pentium 90. Looking at system requirements won't do anything for you. Playing newer games that only require a 200-300mhz processor such as Alice, Serious Sam, No one Lives forever, or Mechwarrior 4 only requires a certain type/speed of a processor, but to make them run well (read high framerate), then you're going to need something quite a bit faster.
When you're using a Pentium II 350, a GeForce2 will be a nice boost (depending on the existing video processor you just replaced), but it won't give nearly the boost that it would if you had a faster processor...so just slapping in a video card really isn't the answer.
There are plenty of apps out there that will stress this guys system, but looking at system requirements ain't gonna show him jack. We all know that the new DOOM game is going to rock everyone's world and be that killer app, but until then, don't say there isn't anything comparable...because there's lots out there.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Oh, I dunno about that. There's a lot of things that would have been ridiculously impractical because they need gigamips, so people didn't put much work into researching how to do them. I think there's a few outrageous CPU-bound surprises lurking in the basements of Computer Science that might start going mainstream in the next few years.
For the current mainstream activities, though, you are certainly right. I'm typing this on a 50 MHz 68060-based machine, because powering up the Athlon would be overkill for web browsing.
Your customer satisfaction comment is interesting. That is currently human-bound (it takes a person's time to release bugfree software). But if someone can figure out a way to get computers to do QC... Hmm...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
AI is definately going to be a Big Thing at some point. Neural Networks for desicion making would be extremely cool. Tack one onto napster and let it download music it thinks you'd like, and get it right! Where are my translating telephones? Where's the web shopping bots? Let's get rolling on all this Kurzweilian stuff before Bill Joy breaks up the party. just a thought.
linkfilter - fresh links daily.
One big one is virtual realities.
Have you seen Black and White yet? Imagine that with the detail scaled up by another 1000 or 10,000, with 1000 players all playing together over the net, creating a world together for work or fun. Yes, you'd need big bandwidth, but the sheer number of variables to realistically simulate a useful world will take BIG GRUNTY HARDWARE.
We are nowhere near close enough yet.
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Compiling just the browser yields a 2.9M dist/bin directory.This was as of just before Northpoint croaked and I stopped doing nightly builds. >:-(
There already is an RPC mechanism which is fully suitable for cross-platform development: Corba. There is absolutely no reason to do RPC's in a human-readable format (which doesn't guarantee better interoperability btw), it is just a big waste of resources.
Doing RPC in a human-readable format makes writing interoperable RPC code in high-level scripting languages much easier. For example, someone wrote an VB script in Microsoft Word that allows him to communicate via SOAP to a web server.
cpeterso
I can definitely belive Cisco would be working on these bandwidth sucking apps, but I'm curious if you know of some companies that had been spun out of Cisco. Ironically, Cisco is known for buying tons of other companies, not spinning them out!
cpeterso
Good comment, but I will extend it a bit. The metaphore of computers (PCs) as today will probably be revided. We have come to the point that we don't need the fastest computers available. Nowadays (and in the future), the focus will be on other features than speed when buying a new computer.
Some of these features are smaller computers, energy-saving computers and silent computers.
People (especially whose who use computers in their profession) are tired of large computers which makes their office room hot and noisy. I'm one of them.
Yes, linux can bring new life into old hardware... I used a little P90 laptop with a text console for the longest time....
If you want to run netscape (or mozilla), play video/mp3, use all the gnome shit and whatnot, you need a decent machine, similar to what you run windows on. Sure you can cut corners here and there.. but you still need new hardware.
The real point of this is that hardware has currently surpassed software; people don't need Ghz machines at home; the apps they have run just fine on something half that speed. We're at a point where the cycles are just plain wasted.
OK, let's look at the typical user's attention span. My guess is that you're looking at the meat-space interval between 0.1 sec and 5 minutes (roughly time for a human to respond to an event and the time it takes to go for a coffe break). Outside this response range you're look at either either direct embedded computer connect or distributed systems. So the performance requirements is that in ther period of 0.1 - 300 sec, you got a certain CPU (say 1 GHz) for software to do its thing. Now the human bandwidth is typing, reading, manu-vector (mouse/joystick), psycho-visual processing, listening, voice, kinesthetics/ haptics ... if you look at the possiblie algorithms and the time-lines you note that it takes about 2 decades for CPU power to fully address each human IO mode. So 60-70s we had teletype + TERMCAP, 80-90s was pretty much the WIMP era, the next decades are probably going to be voice/sound combos (keep in mind the minimum 0.1 sec response requirement to signal feedback). I don't think we're going to see real VR in mainstream (ie the stage where your granny can use it) until maybe 2020+when the cost of development = the time for obsolescence (~ 5-6 years @ 2 CPU generations). Keep in mind the basic business model of the computer manufacturing buiness in that they need to recover plant costs before forcing an upgrade due to "lack" of parts. For the consumer to accept the disposable theory, it has to be within a certain price range ($1K-$5K / 5-6 years???). Now within this basic allocation, they need to divy up expenditure across hardware/software.
The point is that Moore's Law goes on quite happily but our human limitations (until someone hacks in a direct brain-connect) restricts the requirements cost-performance range of computer devices. The supply of software is limited by (IMHO) flawed IP laws fo it makes sense for a company to be vertically integrated and self-contain its sofware internally rather than specialising in specific functions. Hence the inability to scale software complexity since the average high-tech firm just has too many hungry mouths to feed (hey the MBA's need a salary to match their ego) for the market to sustain. Frankly given that the current usage of the information economy is entertainment, news sensationalism, peer communication, telepresence, and trailing far far behind education, it's hard to see killer CPU-intensive applications which absolutely requires denser forms of media.
The upside is that we're spared from 3D virtual spam for another 15 years.
LL
Thank God for Java IDEs! Between NetBeans, JBuilder, and the (still not as good as Win32) state of Linux JVMs, I'm ready to keep the hardware industry booming for a LOOONG time. ;)
Ooh, and add to that the speed with which gcc compiles C++ code. Ever try to compile KDE from scratch??? Once they finish with precompiled header support, though, it'll be bye-bye workstation industry...
--JRZ
If you are looking for that "killer-app" that will cause many people the need to upgrade their current equipment... look no further. I believe .NET will provide some real slow down as it becomes mainstream over the next couple of years.
If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
no usb in nt 4? funny, my usb mouse works fine...
hell, I am doing it on my PII 350!(w/vcr, for recording tv shows!)
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
I don't see what the fuss is ... sure I don't get 100 FPS on my PII-400 and TNT2, but come on, this isn't a twitch game. Pretty amazing graphics for the framerate actually. The last Ultima was much worse.
Nope. What your cycles/RAM will be occupied with in the future is running 12 different versions of MSVCRT.DLL (or glibc) and flashing 3D-rendered banner ads at you.
New software is like foam, it fills all available space. Even my tax program seems like it needs a 1 GHz machine to run properly. The problem is that most developers are divorced from thinking about performance problems because it's absolutely last on their list of TODOs ('cept for game programmers, obviously) and if their program swaps for a few seconds, who cares? Their users will just spend a little more time in the AOL chat room.
Bloated code is good for marketing! No one wants to spend $300 on a measly 1 MB
Yes, the "Hello World" of the future will barely fit on a DVD.
But: I went over to a buddy's house to help him hack together an FTP server on his 1 gig Thunderbird system, and all I can say is wow. I want. Okay, he's not doing anything I can't do, but everything happens virtually instantly. Need to install a program that would take my machine around 30 seconds to unpack? His is done in three. Three! Dialog boxes that I see for about ten seconds appeared on his screen so fast they couldn't be read all the way through before they were gone.
There's no software I want to use that requires this kind of speed, but I want it. I mean, they're not opening up any new highways in my area, and a Geo Metro will get me to all the same places as a Mustang, but I'd still rather have the Mustang.
-N
-Noodle
> in all but the most complex cases of straight C
> code, C++ requires an extra level of
> indirection.
There are two type of failures that people can get when they see OOP.
I see many tech guys that says OOP is not required in most case, so why bother learning it. Like you, they say that OOP is not required except the most complicated case. They don't realize that how much code have to be made simpler and cater for less cases, or made less reusable than required, so that simple function call is needed. They don't realize that few uses any function pointers in their programs even in places that it would help. Even fewer see the limitations of that little function pointers. They don't see that since so many programmers are trained to do C programming, even in places that is perfectly suitable for polymorphism, they use a simple function call instead, ending up in very ad-hoc code.
There are people doing just the reverse: they think that the world is a whole lot of objects, so model everything as objects. They think that OOP is the only right tool. Every function should be a method, every data should reside in some class. Everything is ugly unless it get a very clean interface. If it breaks abstractions, don't optimize things even if it is in the critical path. Even very simple things end up hidden in piles of abstractions.
Interestingly, the two groups reinforce each other: the first group keep on blaming the second for the lack of efficiency in their code, the second group keep on battering the first for writing ugly, ad-hoc, unreusable code that require rewrite forever.
When will people understand that every programming paradigm has its strength and its weakness, that they have to be selected on a case-by-case basis instead of by a single bold far-reaching statement?
apple is out of the hot water: OS X needs all the hardware you can throw at it, and more. 512M of RAM and a GHz G4 (not out yet) and the GeForce 3... and maybe, just maybe, it will be fast.
on the PC-front, i agree. my P2/266 with GeForce card is good enough for everything i need, from Word to IE to Win2k (even!) to Quake 3. only Doom3 will require an upgrade. for which, BTW, i will get a cheapo GHz Athlon for $800.
I have relatively shitty CPUs and disks in my system, feeding my shiny new 12x burner. But it is a Plextor burner with BURN-PROOF. When it gets a buffer underrun, it transparently pauses until the data is streaming again. End result, it burns no coasters at all. If my system is too overloaded it might take 10 minutes to burn, instead of 7.
- P166
:(
It is more fun to play with networking and secure communications than it is to play a game, at least for me. The last time I bought brand new non-ram hardware was about 10 months ago so that I could play Half-Life. That was worth it. Mostly though to run some flavor of Unix and pound out code the P166 works just as well as the others. It just doesn't compile as fast.P6 200 Supermicro Dual with only one Proc.
PII 266
loptop PII 300
and a Multia
Honestly, if I had all the money in the world I would purchase exotic older hardware anyway.
Bull. It ran fine on a 386-25 with 2 MB of RAM. You had to shrink the screen a little bit to get the framerate up, and it would definitely dog it when more than 5-6 monsters were being drawn at the same time (not that common in the original Doom), but it was completely runnable. And on a 486-66, it was perfect in full screen mode - not just "adequate."
Come to think of it, that 386 ran Prince of Persia, Civilization, and Wing Commander. Why did I need to upgrade again?
So who remembers what spispopd stood for? No google now - that's cheating...
I VC with my friends and family all the time... It takes me 3 rings at most to answer the call (it stops ringing after that anyhow and tells them I'm not around)... where did you get this 20 rings thing from?
A lot of young coots too. Even in relatively urbanized Oregon (more than Montana, anyway), I knew several kids in high school without phone service. Most of them lived out of town in distant valleys and whatnot, but even some people in town -- in apartments even -- went without, usually because they couldn't afford it. (I gathered that this was mostly a lack of self-control when it came to long-distance, though.) And thanks to cheap, available cellphone service, none of those people will probably see POTS again.
Just be patient... in a few years (somewhere between 1 and 100) AI and artificial neural networks will take off, needing dedicated HW.
a) the typical age at which you can get a part-time job in the U.S. is 14, at least it was when I got one at 14;)
... informal. When I had a minimum wage job, I sure hated to see the chunk that was stripped off "for my own good" by big brother and his pals FICA and the SSA.
b) there are lots of jobs available to kids below that age, depending on environment, especially in suburbia: Mowing lawns / other yard work, babysitting, pool work, pet sitting. The informal economy is also nicely
If I were a 12-year old so inclned right now, I'd look into networking the neighbors for a commission, reading letters to blind people, and dumpster diving for discarded computers;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I don't know what compiler your using but this is one of the big differences between a 'true' OO language like java and C++. In C++ all objects have a compile time defined type. This means that non virtual method calls in C++ are exactly The same as a C function call except that they have an extra parameter on the stack. This extra parameter isn't usually 'extra' because proper C code will be passing data specific structures as well. On the other hand C++ virtual methods will incur a memory reference to lookup the address of a method. This memory reference is going to be roughly equal to the memory reference generated by having function pointers in structures with C.
The moral of the story is that C programmers tend to avoid function pointers and C++ programmers don't because the language hides the implementation nastiness. On the other hand C programmers tend to end up with switch statements to decide which function needs to access the data. The performance equations tend to get nasty then depending on whether the address fetches end up in cache, or the branch prediction logic is failing to predict the correct path. Then there are the cases of old C programs ending up with really long switch statements causing serious performance impacts because the data can't just jump to the correct code path.
The real question is did the programmer care about performance and bloat when they were writing the code? I think this is the real question because in my experience straight C programmers are constantly worried about performance even in code that it doesn't really matter in, while C++ programmers are worried about development speed and maintainability.
'Photorealistic graphics with the G3'? Pah! What universe do you live in?
Actual photorealistic graphics take hours per frame to produce on a very high-end machine. The G3 may make pretty pictures, but don't fool yourself.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is +5?
An interesting point that starts a thread is fine at 2, but a cheesy one-liner is +5?
I give up...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Okay, Overrated, thank you.
No offense to the poster, but that was a bit much...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I dunno... the big reason I tossed another 64M of RAM in my box was to appease X 4's memory-hogging nature for a little bit longer. That, and editing four multi-layer print-size images in the Gimp while listening to XMMS and running FoldingAtHome...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wasn't there an article here a few days ago about how mind-bogglingly big the hardware requirements were for Black and White?
The article seemed quite nervous at the idea that most people would see awful performance on their current hardware... but given the astounding hype surrounding B&W, it could be that killer app... especially given the developers' histories of making groundbreaking games. If the legions of fans need a P4-1500 to properly experience it, a large contingent of them will spring for the hardware.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
OK, let's go through the numbers.
... maybe about 10 percent. And since I'm not that keen on video, effectively zilch.
I've got two dual-CPU Pentium II 450MHz with 80GB dual HDs and 128MB of RAM. And this clunker I'm typing on.
And it just doesn't matter.
Look, if I want supercool boxen all I need to do is drop a few bucks into more RAM. And maybe upgrade my Net access by shelling out for 1440K instead of 256K. But the true difference between my current system and some new Pentium 4 chips is
If I wanted a better system I'd get some good AMD chips, they actually have some guts, but my limiters are HD access, Net speed, and maybe RAM. The rest is all a bunch of hooey.
Will in Seattle
Well, the Space Needle uses a far slower system with a lot less RAM, but then it's an older Oracle system.
Now, the disk access and storage requirements are critical, however. That, plus the ability to withstand constant lightning strikes.
Will in Seattle
1. Internet Explorer
Open one IE window on a PII-233 with 64mb of RAM, and you're okay. Now try that with 20 windows. One of the great advantages of having >200mb RAM is that you can open every application on your computer 5 times and not thrash your hard drive into oblivion. Same thing with Word, Excel, Winamp, or any other program where you might have more than 3 windows open for no good reason. Speaking of hard drives...
2. CD burning + broadband
MP3 files aren't enough to demand special investments in hard drive technology. But once you get a CD burner, you now need a faster harddrive so you don't burn as many coasters. (I mean, you don't want one turtle C: drive for everything - moving the mouse will screw up the burn) Then you run out of things to throw on CD... but then you get a cable modem, and you're downloading VCDs and giant MP3 collections. And that's when you need BIGGER as well as faster. At that point, if you're serious, you're looking at IDE RAID or big honkin SCSI drives. (I went somewhere in the middle and got a medium sized, blazing fast SCSI and a large, fast IDE drive... but I still have space problems, hehehe)
3. Video capture
This is where things start to get out of hand. Everyone has looked at an ATI All-in-Wonder at some point and thought, "*Sigh* if only it were GREAT at 3D and didn't have crap drivers." Well, I went that route anyway (I didn't have a decent video card at the time), and I haven't played too many games in a year and a half as a result... but it was worth it. Now I can watch TV on the computer and watch the computer on the TV, record TV programs onto the hard drive, get some decent performance in 3D games, etc. Only problem is, it's not good enough... it does a lot of things well, but overall it's not that impressive as it is convenient. The newer Radeon AIW does make me salivate, though... but it's not a GeForce2 in 3D, it's not like TiVO for recording programs, and it's not like a professional video capture/compression setup for making movies and stuff. It's just decent, that's all. But once you lose sanity and go for the gold, you can REALLY rack up some big price tags. Once you have the taste in your mouth, it's hard not to be hungry. To have a GeForce3, a TiVO, a professional TV tuner/video capture card, a PentiumIII for the processing requirements (cause I like 720x540 realtime MPEG2 encoding), and a nice set of hard drives to hold all the movies (yet another reason to pick up an IDE RAID or SCSI hard drive habit)... well, that's a LOT of money. A lot more than the $100 I paid for the AIW on eBay. Granted, you may have no need for most of this... but the TiVO and the GeForce3 are expensive enough.
Maybe the next boundaries to push aren't in software functionality, but in software/hardware convenience. Running bloated code is one thing, running many bloated code programs at once and getting them to cooperate is another story. And I hate to say it, but right now we WASTE so many computer resources on absolutely nothing. I don't run SETI or RC5 cause I have no interest in it, so my processor sits idle and unentertaining. My DSL line also remains underused, even when Napster is going full throttle - there's plenty of low bandwidth applications that can work alongside a file download, yet I have no compelling reason to run any of them. Other than games and video compression, there is nothing that makes my computer work hard at all... but there's not much that I'm doing instead, either. Which is why it's about time that we started making lots of little flashy doo-dads and convenient background applications to use all that wasted processor time. For example, I've never seen a single good alarm-clock application for a PC. Also, why can't I have a simple yet powerful personal organizer program that looks like a Palm Pilot and that I can bring up by clicking on an icon in the taskbar? (in otherwords, a program that acts like a Palm Pilot but on the screen... maybe even an emulator, perhaps) What about a personal Internet radio station tracker? Or a TV program listings retriver and alert system? (instead of the TiVO recording it for you, you click on an icon in the taskbar and it tells you when your favorite programs are on that day - and alerts you, ICQ style, 5 minutes before any of them start) How about some SERIOUSLY snazzy looking Winamp plugins? Or flashy GUI stuff like active icons and mouse-over gradient animation highlighting? (or how about that Aqua stuff in the new OS X?) A lot of this stuff would really run well on Windows AND Linux... except you won't want to close everything just to run a game that needs your entire computer... so you just buy a faster computer to run the game AND all that stuff at the same time! Old idea, new implementation - how many of us bought a new computer because games didn't run fast unless you used a boot disk or something...
With a P200MMX with 96MB of ram, and a 6MB Hercules Stingray 128/3D PCI, running KDE on SuSE 6.3 ("upgraded" to 2.2.14 kernel).
Plenty fast for me - it does what I want, fast enough.
However, with prices dropping so much, I decided to upgrade - I have waiting in the wings a Celeron 366 with 256MB SDRAM and an AGP TNT card (haven't received it yet off an ebay guy, but will soon). Right now the test rig is sitting next to me on top of my scanner.
I don't know when I will get around to installing it and booting up - maybe when I get that video card. I am not sure if it is really going to matter to me. I am thinking about getting an even better CPU (I bought the celeron only for testing - the MB was given to me by my employer, and I didn't know if it worked right or not), probably another celeron (maybe a 600), or a PII.
At any rate, I haven't found anything that I use that taxes the system as it is (with the P200). If I played more games, I probably would, but I haven't bought a piece of software in ages.
Just my two cents, probably worth less...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Your analysis falls very short of the social reality behind the technology involved. There is nothing that kept those rural types from walking a mile to talk to their neighbor if they wanted to, and the telephone has never intruded into anyone's life; you can always unplug it/leave the ringer off/whatever. In fact, you don't give even one plausible reason why there was resistance or why there was adoption; the original poster did at least that.
Quite simply, there is an advantage in being able to communicate with someone almost instantly from almost any distance. The telegraph was the start of that and the telephone was a natural progression. The videophone, however, doesn't get you much beyond that. Seldom is "visual participation" necessary to communicate. Yes, it can add helpful cues, just like voice communication adds cues beyond written communication, but the actual amount of signal that is broadcast visually is a relatively minor portion of the bandwidth. It's much more likely that when someone says they want to "see you", they want to be with you, not looking at a screen with your image on it.
And people might think it's at least a killer app for the porn industry, but think about the likely hood of you actually talking to someone who's as good looking as the person in the ad. The price for porn will definitely go up if you need to find women who are both sexy looking and sexy sounding on this video phone. Not to mention having to pay her to watch some butt ugly guy jack off into his camera.
No, video phones have not been killer for the 50 years or so the technology has been around, and the Internet doesn't change that. The porn industry itself has not adopted live, interactive video to any great extent (or maybe they have and I'm just disconnected), and I have absolutely no reason to believe the common consumer will suddenly think it a killer app without some really good reason. You have not provided that reason.
Like any technology, we make use of it, become adaptive and then become dependant on it. (Gosh, this is starting to sound like Ted's Manifesto, ). This has been going on since the day of fire.
Yes and no. Not every technology since fire is useful or becomes a necessary dependency. I can't count the number of products that die in the marketplace because they didn't serve a useful purpose. And the ones that do serve a purpose seem to change based on the marketplace. VHS ate Beta and DVD is eating VHS in many ways. I was using IRC a decade ago, but suddenly people are treating "instant messaging" as though it is some innovation that requires a proprietary tool. Slashdot forums serve the role that Usenet news did (and still does, for many of us).
I still haven't been convinced that videophone technology fills any fundamental role for the masses. I don't often need to see (to some limited degree of resolution) how someone looks most of the time, and people really don't need to see how I look most of the time! Sure, a videophone might sound like a natural progression, but what is the real need that makes it killer?
Flip side of the coin, VideoConference is a tool that we hopefully will adapt and then become dependent as well. I know the deaf community is actively using (out of necessity).
What is wrong with deaf people that they can't just type away like the rest of us? Yes, perhaps signing is as natural to a deaf person as spoken conversation is to us, but you can't really say it's a necessity.
Took telephone nearly 120-odd years, let's hope Video takes a lot shorter. The backbones seems to have the bandwidth, it's just the big-fat-pipe at the last-mile is not widely available yet.
The thing about killer technology is that it's killer even if it's crap because it fills a role that nothing else can. Videophones have been around for nearly as long as TV. No, the resolution wasn't great and the price wasn't low, but it has not advanced one bit at the consumer level (that's the important bit) in the last 50 years, compared to things like the telephone and computers which do have killer roles. Videophone technology hasn't gone anywhere because nobody wants it, with the possible exception of porn (which has it's own issues that I noted).
But what do I know? Who am I to say what people like and don't like? If you are so strongly convinced that videophones are the next big revolution in communications, I encourage you to invest as much money as you can get your hands on into that industry. Then you'll not only be able to rub my nose in it when it takes off, you'll be stinking rich as well. Best of luck.
Yeah, moz, video conferencing are all well and good, but two things drive the demand for consumer (computing) electronics - games and pr0n. What will make people get the GF3's and the Athlon DDR 1.5Ghz systems will be hardcore, 3D, interactive, good AI, 1GB of RAM suckin, 1280x1024, 120fps hardcore Pr0n. If I had the time and resources (I did a lot of 3D development), I'd be working on this right now, believe you me. The capabilities of a top-end system in 3 months graphic-wise are going to be previously unimagined in the consumer world.
I'm not talking about Virtual-Valerie cheezy sleaze. I'm talking about a virtual chick you can interact with and, uh, experiment in lots of innovative (and probably criminal, heh) ways. People are animals, and they love their pr0n. This I've been waiting for for years, and I think the technology is there to make it happen :).
And hey, you got bucks, I got a sick mind and OpenGL sk1llz :)
..don't panic
Let's not forget Emacs (especially XEmacs-GTK)
I have the same configuration (IE5.5/W2K), but when it crashes it's only once or twice a month, and I use it 10 hours a day ! Compare that to Mozilla or Netscape 4.x on Linux that was crashing on me every 20 to 30 minutes (basically as soon as a java/javascript/flash code would appear)...
java : well plenty of sites use java for usefull apps (although I'm not fond of them), or it's used on banners. If the banner makes the browser crash, then bye bye slashdot and all the sites with java banners
javascript : quite usefull in forms
flash : same as java, often used for banners... and banners are everywhere
Wow, several hundred dollars?
When I was 15 there was nothing around me. Oh, wait, if I got on my bike and pedaled for an hour I could get to a bar. For some reason they weren't interested in hiring me.
Farm sounds nice, too bad I was in a neighborhood where there were no farms. Any work done at home was considered "free labor".
Oh wait, I remember a horse farm, they were willing to let you work there for....free. Always a bunch of people there working for free access to the horses. So big guy, don't assume that because YOU can make money by working that EVERYONE can. Sometimes there are no jobs.
I don't believe you're making me say this, I mean, I'm only 29, but "Sheesh! Kids today!"
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
This guy is making his judgements by looking at the back of the box and seeing what the apps minimum requirements are.
Now, if you haven't played a computer game in the last 5 years, let me tell you that requirements are a joke. Sure it will *execute*, the code will "run". Hell even the recommended system will be sluggish at times for alot of current games.
The motive for game publishers to push the specs as low as possible is simple: the higher the Mhz number on the box, the fewer people will buy it.
Now there may be a point to this article, I can't think of anything at the moment that requires a ghz chip, apart from my data analysis. Game developers are scared to target a Ghz platform because they know sales will be pitiful( and note that a game targetted at 1ghz will probably have a minimum speed of 500-600 on the box, so even then this fellow's "in depth" research would turn up nothing)
Well, this article is quite inconsistent. The author starts out saying that Doom recommended a 386, but ran like a dog. So he went out and bought a 486/66 which barely ran it. But then he applies minimum numbers for comparison on all the other titles against his P2-350.
I ran Q3 on a Celeron 450a (oc'ed 300a) with a TNT2. The game play is very good, but could be better.
What I want more processor speed for is multitasking. I like to re-encode mp3s, compile programs, download huge files, edit sound files, and surf the net without the system bogging down. So I can't say that I'm satisfied. Also, as several people mentioned encoding Divx stuff faster would welcome as well. At this point it takes about a day (P3-700). Bring on the power!
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Moderate this up.
Its annoying that the editors don't actually read the articles that are submitted before they post them and make comments.
Timothy writes:
Strangely, the proposed solution seems to be for the hardware industry to write bloated code...
The article contains this text:
This isn't a call for bloated crap...
Did Tim read the article before he posted?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Your PC may be fine, but you are probably going to spend the $2000 dollars every 3 three years nevertheless, only this time on other sorts of hardware:
.Net, Hailstorm, Windows CE, and why you see Microsoft is leaving Intel (e.g. no support for HomeRF, nor for USB in Windows XP). Microsoft now rather goes to bed with Sony, Philips, Panasonic, Nokia, etc.
- Wireless LAN basestations
- You'll swap your PC for a faster laptop
- Multitude of wireless devices (PDA's, WebPad's, internet enabled wristwatches, 3G/4G mobile phones, etc., etc.)
- Faster modems to connect to the internet (paid per month)
In essense, the killer app is not some software product, but it's the wireless internet.
Microsoft has long recognized this, that's why
yo
loz
When people ask me "Mike, what would you do with a billion ops per second?" my first answer is "Never write another piece of compiled code in my life. Run everything under an interpreter that gives me bounds checking, symbolic debugging, and all of that good stuff all of the time."
Many of you may not recall the old 1880s when the telephone was first invented.
Many rural settlers resented it since it obviates the need to walk a healthy mile to chat with your neighbor. Not to mention the intrusion it posed into their quiet agrarian lifestyle (Amish, anyone?)
It wasn't until 1920, when the various telephone oligopolies started lobbying our Washington Capitol Hill to push telephone deployment as part of the mandated rural modernization.
The world became a closer place to live together with the telephone. Just like VideoPhone will bring them MUCH closer together.
- Make faces, not war!
It is the GNU/Linux lean-ware that caused the CPU-speed demand to go down.
No matter how hard Microcrap inflate their bloatware, it will only drive more users to GNU/Linux.
This K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) exodus keeps the users' need for CPU-speed in check for the near forseeable future. Intel will fall. AMD will reign. VIA will dominate.
Mozilla 1.0 will be the starting point for CPU-speed rush (a year from now).
- Now sign the N.D.A. or else.
The analysis was meant as a superficial observation. But your input is well thought-out.
Brashly pointed out, there is little or no justification for telephone, even today. Yeah, no justification (IMO). But it is a valuable tool, nonetheless.
Like any technology, we make use of it, become adaptive and then become dependant on it. (Gosh, this is starting to sound like Ted's Manifesto, ). This has been going on since the day of fire.
Flip side of the coin, VideoConference is a tool that we hopefully will adapt and then become dependent as well. I know the deaf community is actively using (out of necessity).
Took telephone nearly 120-odd years, let's hope Video takes a lot shorter. The backbones seems to have the bandwidth, it's just the big-fat-pipe at the last-mile is not widely available yet.
P0rn or not, nuances and body language are essential visuals during conversation that I think people will want to monopolize on, just like voices from afar (you say, just not as much).
I'm sorry but only two points I have given are natural technological progression and visual-psychology.
Write really bloated code so you can do your part to keep people buying new computers so there is more money in the industry so hopefully you can get paid ever more to write ever more bloated code. ARGH. May be some truth to the theory that bad languages and poor IDEs and deranged wizards led to the need for ever faster machines for developers
But it is still sick and disgusting to force feed buying decisions by purposefully bad design and implementation practices. The idea is to gain ever more capable actual tools and augmentation of abilities, not to continuously buy fancier hardware in order to run more of the s.o.s.
burst rotation speed
What is burst rotation speed? Last time I checked, my HDD's platter rotational speed was regulated closely to 7,200rpm as long as I did'nt spin them down in some power saving quest.
IDE drives are fast, but not real smart. An IDE drive of the same rotational speed and bit density could theoretically pull data off it's platters for a single sequential request just as quickly as the SCSI equivalent drive, and the same goes for how quickly it could move it's heads.
The merits of SCSI over IDE come in to play in tasks that are mainly required from server type applications. Using multiple disks, sending many read and write requests to the same disk or volume, are scenarios where IDE would bog down and SCSI shine. Reason being that IDE can only work with one command at a time and thus could not automatically re-order requests to achieve higher throughput and also IDE switching from master to slave on the same channel is nowhere near as quick as SCSI being able to take advantage of it's proper drive id address scheme, with data flying on that SCSI bus reaching each drive simultaneously yet only being acted on by the correct drive.
When you look at the typical home environment, with a single user using a single app or switching between multiple apps much slower than the disks can handle, then you will see that the merits of SCSI are largely wasted on that user.
SCSI drives tend to be on a higher R&D rung, have higher rotational speeds and support these advanced features because they are actually required by business who are willing to pay up for the speed.
Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
Apparently, Sun knows what they're doing. I'll take 512Mb RAM and UDMA over 128Mb RAM and SCSI any day. Having said that, I have a SCSI adapter for my CDWR drive because every IDE burner I have experienced or heard experiences of, have been of coaster makers. My Yamaha CDWR has yet to make a coaster, after 50+ CDRs.
What really pisses me off, is seeing these cheap 1U servers with heaps of CPU power and RAM, and then some IDE drives. They could hold everything up if what is obviously going to some day be a server, is going to rely on a db that resides on an IDE disk or array, that is going to crawl thanks to a single command, slow switching, simple interface design.
I would like SCSI on my workstation, but not at the cost. SCSI has it's place, and with the added cost factored in, it is obviously not on the desktop for most desktop users.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I've seen UDMA drives that are sustaining 30+ MBytes/sec.
Often, just some proper setting up with hdparm to enable 32bit, multi-sector/interupt, UDMA transfers, etc, are all that is needed to get a drive going from 3-5 MBytes/sec to 20-30+.
My real World tests confirm these results also.
SCSI drives with platters that have the same bit density and rotational speed as an IDE equivalent drive, don't have some magic that gives far greater sequential transfer rates. The differences in protocol overheads are not that great for single sequential transfers. Sure, SCSI handles multiple transfers and multiple drives much faster, and they do tend to use less CPU cycles to get the job done, but a modern UDMA drive, set up properly with hdparm will do admirably in sequential transfers compared with the much more expensive SCSI drives.
Thats not to say that I would'nt like a bunch of 15k SCSI drives in my machine. ; )
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
hdparm reports Mega Bytes per second with -t (device) and -T (cache).
If you don't believe the figures, test how long something large takes to load for the first time. Communicator 4.75 is around 13Mb.
My Seagate UDMA Barracudas are giving around 18-22 sustained M Bytes per second, depending on which area of the disks are being read from.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
99% of the Worlds desktops are going to be blue screening a lot faster.
While, I, with Debian Linux and FreeBSD, will continue to enjoy my 4 years without ever seeing either of these free OS'es crashing in any way.
What's more, there is a killer app, a few in fact... VMWare, Win4Lin, Wine and the likes which enable me to have my cake and eat it too.
And what with CPU and RAM so cheap, I am grinning like the Cheshire Cat because I can watch a Windows session or Netscape crash and this will merely temporarily speed up my X compile before I restart those sessions.
But sadly for you Robert, you have to hit the reset button yet again and allow your laughable OS fuck up your laughable file system and registry, that little bit more, leading to more instability, even more registry rot and work your way towards critical file system corruption...
Enjoy!
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
... for me anyway. Notice that the price of anything high quality is still in the thousands of dollars, for cameras (not little webcams of course), laser printers, good displays... When that stuff becomes cheap, then I'll buy.
Another idea is to really get going with the home appliance concept, ie communicating with your stove to make sure it's off when your not there, checking your security system, etc. I don't know what's taking so long with these ideas, what's so complicated about tying an on/off switch into a computer?
I get sick at the though that future Internet apps might be based on XML-RPC.
Video is a market where you can throw endless computing time at it. Apple has been making big strides in this area (iMovie, Final Cut Pro, DVD Authoring Studio, iDVD). These applications are pretty worthless to run on a 400 MHz G3, and they can really utilize the latest and greatest G4 series processors. Apple, despite its small market share, still maintains a leading edge on the video front which the PC platform isn't able to compete with.
I know it's hardly mainstream users, but personally I can't find a computer fast enough to do everything I want with software based synths and effects for audio production. I know I could use up all the processing power a 3 GHz machine would give me, and then some... Software synths are getting better and better sounding, but more cpu hungry. And don't 32 bit reverbs sound delicous, but....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Intel has a department devoted to finding ways to use more CPU time.
Cisco does something similar. They have a team whose sole purpose is to create applications that use lots of bandwidth in order to increase demand for bandwidth. Any successful application created by this team is spun off as a separate company. I doubt that they set up their software to waste a lot bandwidth, although they might not spend as much time on optimization as other companies.
The shareholder is always right.
Mmmm, IMHO speech recognition is way overrated - consider how you got to this post, & try saying: /. in lynx, & note this is the *condensed* version).
"netscape - slashdot - pagedown - pagedown -downlink - downlink - open - open-new - pagedown - pagedown - pagedown - pagedown - pagedown - downlink - downlink - open-new (try opening
It might be a neat thing for certain disabilitys - but point-click is simply way easier.
How many people do you know that actually *use* the "decent speech-to-text software" we already have?
--
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
I hate that damned paperclip, too. I always change it to the cat. =)
Who was working at Bell labs as they were researching and developing video phones. The class was having a discussion on technologies that were more advanced, more useful, or just "better" than existing technologies but didn't take off.
He said that in the studies they conducted (usability studies), it took people an average of 20 rings to answer the video phone, as compared to the 2 rings to pick up a normal phone.
Moller
What would video conferencing replace? The telephone. Does the telephone need to be replaced? No.
Think about it, what percentage of the masses wants to have to look presentable when speaking on the telephone? A video phone completely destroys the anonymity of your appearance. The person you're talking to can see what you look like, what you're wearing, your facial expression, it adds a whole new dimension to communication that people don't want.
A study was done on how long it takes people to pick up the phone vs how long it takes them to pick up the video phone. The average number of rings before someone answered the phone was 2 rings. The average number of rings before someone answered the video phone was 20 rings. Think about it, 20 rings. Where do you think all that extra time comes from? The person running around, smoothing their hair, straightening their clothes, checking their make up in the mirror...
Video phones add unnecessary overhead to the communication process. There's simply no need for them.
Moller
...the software industry? They are the ones that write code, right?
Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
The irony is we have just seen the release of a mainstream app that will bring most cpu's to their knees. Tribes 2
T2 will be out next week for Linux and just came out for the windows world, so give it a shot.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I think one thing that is contributing to this "problem" (heh) is that of the content development. There isn't any point in making an engine that supports even -more- detail than you have now when creating the detail for the last 2 generations of engines was almost too much work for your 200 man content creation team. Every advancement in engine tech his historically created more work for the artists, and at this point the sheer amount of time it takes to make a decent single player game is getting ridiculous. I don't think the art department is ready for it yet.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Why would I want good AI? The whole point of porn is that it's for those who don't know how to deal with the real thing. What, now my porn is going to say "sorry, you're an arrogant jerk. I'm going home"?
I want that thing to come with a users' manual. I want it to behave predictably. When I complement her eyes, I want her stipping right on the spot, not realistically telling me that I'm a pathetic loser and she'd have to be a hell of a lot drunker than she is to get with me.
For a specific example, in Everquest (which isn't top of the line in terms of realism), all the trees are the same, or one of a fixed set. Why not fractally generate the trees as you go? Store height, breadth, orientation, style, and a seed to generate it from. Voila, your forest doesn't look fake anymore.
There's no reason any objects should actually be stored as 3d models in a game. Everything should be based off a model, but perturbed slightly, so that it looks more like the real world. Of course, if you have to store 300 models in memory to display 300 trees, rather than just one, it's going to eat a lot of memory.
The point is that new methods of creating the content are needed. It is no longer feasible for someone to draw every pixel of the texture for the wolf's coat. Just store it as "hair" and have it generated by your hair generation algorithm, and have your computer (either at "compile" time or at runtime) build a jpg from that.
Want a realistic city? Figure out a model of how cities grow, run that to get the locations of buildings, businesses, and so on, then have something else to build a building of the size indicated in one of the styles you have coded.
So tell me, why are the artists drawing the walls, rather than just taking a map and saying, "this passageway is covered with moss at the density indicated by this overlay"?
Speaking of KDE: It's a great environment, and in many ways it's faster than Windows. (In others it still lacks, but most of the criticism it receives is pure bullshit.) Anyway, if I remember correctly, I was using a much more powerful GUI in 1994, on a P60, with 16 MB RAM (instead of 192 now) which was just as smooth to use and fast like hell. (I'm talking about OS/2's workplace shell).
The question is: Where has all that performance gone? Why can't you comfortably use Windows ME, or 2000, or Linux with KDE 2.1 on a P60 with 16 MB RAM? What are CPU cycles doing nowadays that they didn't need to do five years ago, although most apps had almost the same features? That is, while you are not watching your daily DivX porn ;)
Some probable answers come to my mind.
Unicode. Double every string in length, double the memory requirements of application resources. This makes for great internationalization, but it requires memory.
OOP. I overheard in a PHP mailing list that when you develop PHP3 apps without objects, just flat procedures, you can gain up to 30% in raw performance. (This has greatly improved in PHP4, IIRC.) I don't know how representative this is but I suspect that in languages like C++ and Smalltalk (and Perl :-) some CPU cycles are needed to take care of all those relationships, overloaded items and whatnot.
Standards. The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them. I.e. nowadays a browser (prime example) needs not only to render a little plain text with different fonts and one or two images, but it needs to know XHTML, XML, Javascript, ECMAScript, Java, CSS, cope with thousands of objects and plug-ins that mess up the system, and so on. Sure, these are features - but are they innovations? I don't think so, and I don't think most other apps received as much "feature bloat" as browsers did in the last couple years.
What do you think? Why does a word processor need 128MB nowadays when it doesn't _really_ have more features than what was available in 1994?
(Having said that, I have a K6-2 350 for my primary machine and I don't plan on buying a new one this year. It does what I want, it does it fast enough, and if I need more CPU power I can always ssh to our university cluster. ;)
Home Page
Flight Simulations
A good flight sim takes all the cpu, memory, and video performance you can throw at it. The higher resolution you can get, the more detail you can get, the higher color depth, the better anti-aliasing, the more immersive and realistic the simulation will be. And it all has to run at or above around 20-30 frames per second, otherwise it's disorienting and the realism is ruined.
Flight sims will likely ALWAYS push the hardware envelope. The killer hardware for flightsims will be high-res 3D graphic capable VR goggles that can smoothly pan the view, but that is years away at the current pace of things.
In the meantime, try running the latest microsoft flight simulator with all the graphic details full up and at high resolution. Then get on the web and order up your next upgrade.
Make that: The efficiency and stablilty of software halves every 18 months, and the size doubles. That's about right (Office XP full install - 750Mb, WinXP full install 2Gb (that's more than doubled, surely!)).
Gates Law: the speed of software will halve every 18 months.
As a hard-core gamer of many years, I suggest other adrenaline gamers do not miss Serious Sam! It's like a cross between Doom and Robotron. Dozens of enemies attacking at once for only twenty bucks! (-:
With K7-850 ($100) and GeForce2MX ($100) it runs smooth and is full of gorgeous effects.
Hardware manufacturers writing bloated code so we buy their hardware? tcha... whatever! So I'm gonna go out and design the latest and greatest motherboard and make sure that the hardware operates inefficiently? Maybe firmware updates that would progressively slow down the system while adding imaginary bug fixes would help -- hmmm kinda like those M$ update pack. "We didn't actually fix any of the bugs, but this update pack will give those bugs the necessary support to evolve into standard features" ... Of course.. we're talking about hardware here, not software..... So is that M$ mouse of yours flash upgradeable?
Think about it.
The product also had mail-merge (from an ASCII list, or the wp's own built-in BTREE-based database), and quite a few other nice features. It just wasn't WYSIWYG.
Total RAM in the best model: 750K.
I've commented on this trend in my previous comments. YOU need to step back and realize that a corporation does not have a RIGHT to earn profit. So if we both step back, we might even realize there is a balance here. I dunno about you, but I can see it.
Btw, small depressions are good for an economy. While stale upward conjunctures are not.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
As for app's that need more power it's down to..
Games: B&W is a great example, also checkout Opt Flashpoint, it won't run faster then 20fps on my Athlon800 w/ GForce2MX
Video: Er.. actually we're getting pretty close to this one. TV quality video is pretty easy for a comp to handle now.
3D rendering: kina like the games catagory, and a niche market. But i can't imagine anyone will ever have a fast enough comp for this.
MacOX: thank god someone has the balls to make an OS that runs slow on the fastest hardware. Hopefully eye candly will push people to get new hardware. I can't wait to get something that looks that cool on a x86.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
Duel processor AMD 1.6+ghz
Duel chanel DDRSDRAM(or 300mhz DDR)
10,000rpm serial-ATA hard drives.
FireWire
USB 2.0
25" ro 40" wide screen bioluminesent flat panels.
Dolby digital 5.1 sound in audio/video codecs and games.
HDTV reciever cards.
DVD-RW in a standard format.
Fiber Highspeed Internet access.
We have been hearing about this stuff for years, but its not available(or not affordable). Hardware companies keep dragging their asses(DVD-RW) and then they wonder why we stopped buying their old shit.
We have the best government that money can buy.
AC writes,
...
> Bounds checking and GC are best done during the
> debug phase
Bounds checking, probably, but then you don't catch security holes. It's usually difficult or impossible to make a program do all the things it can ever do on any possible input in any order.
Anyway, my point is that if we have spare computing cycles, why not put them to this task? Most people (myself included) would take slower, more stable software over faster, buggier software.
We can use extra speed to bring value to people, rather than make software "bloated"?
One thing we might do is write software which has checking to make sure certain kinds of common errors can't happen, and the programs don't crash. Specifically, we could do bounds checking on arrays (getting rid of some high percentage of security holes, and potentially catching memory corruption heisenbugs earlier) and automatic memory management (getting rid of memory leaks).
I'm not saying that we necessarily need to pay the efficiency price to do this kind of thing, but if the speed is there, why not?
Until recently, I could never afford anything close to a recent machine. And when I replaced my computer's guys recently, I only sprung for the Athlon 750 to save a few hundred bucks.
I never got to play Doom, Quake, etc., because my computer was always far from state of the art. When the Pentiums started shipping, we finally got a 486 (had a 286 when the 386 launched, a 386 when the 486 launched, etc). As a result, I couldn't play the recent games and always craved new hardware.
Now, I could play most of my games on my K6-3 450 that I finally replaced and the main reason for the new system is Office 2000, and even that ran reasonably.
At my office, we have the iPaq computers from Compaq with Celeron 466 processors, and everyone is happy with them.
There isn't anything pulling us to faster machines. I don't mean bloated code, like the author, there is no exciting new applications. IE 5.5 will run on a 486 w/ Win95, it doesn't tax anything near current.
Part of this is Intel's fault. By making the PII/PIII simply rehashed Pentium Pros, we're still sitting on what, 6 year old technology (ignoring the P4-currently useless system). The difference in performance from a P3-1Ghz and a PPro-200 is less than the 5 fold the system would indicate, it's maybe 2.5-3 times faster. But with the fast video cards, we can push some envelopes.
However, I guess if the current tech is good enough, why risk lowered sales. Besides, there what the author forgets is some of the economics behind this.
When the games for the 386 were running great on 486s, developers were paying a BIG price premium for 486s to develop for the consumer 386. Now we all use the same system and there isn't a BIG premium on CPUs...
All these windows-shmindows are not eating your super-duper 1.7 P4 on constant basis, hell no. The thing is that you want this application to start faster, be more responsive on user input etc. This require a short period of super power, burst of some sort. Or smarter software. They can do it -- look on hibernation feature on Win2000 or WinME. They wanted windows start faster -- they did it.
:-)
Or Look on BeOS or good ol' OS/2 (*sigh*) -- their give you impression that you computer ROCKS, without changing anything in hardware. And yes, they both built on OO basis.
Moore law is not the thing that will stop or slow down constant revolution in hardware. Consumer's "laziness" will. I am skipping already one step, owning Dual Celeron -- PIII, will buy Dual P4 when it will be cheap. This is just way too expensive to upgrade with all these GeForce to GeForce3 etc. I can afford it (just because I love computers), but the price ? To be killed by wife's "What, another $XXXX ? It works ok, so why do you want this strange looking thing AGAIN? You just bought new one less then 2 years ago!"
So, when number of not-wanting to upgrade consumers will reach "critical mass", then software will rule. People will have to upgrade software to have work done faster.
A possible problem is that human nature will not be changed, and consumers will be lazy to upgrade software... God forbid to me, software engineer, live in these times
tandr
This may seem a rant, but it's just sad that I have to deal with some things as a student and as a worker because of upgrade sprees.
There's actually lots of new hardware, but it's based on the same old compatibility with our old ports. If you think about it, whenever you buy your hardware there are disks that promise to do the install. The windows OS, although it claims to recognize Plug-and-Play, needs those installation disks.
The problem comes when your new hardware would need new ports, not SCSI, not USB, not parallel or ADB. Say, a PC's handling of Firewire. Then you would need an OS to provide the new system calls and hardware address resolutions and all the BIOS related things that your new hardware's drivers would rather not deal with.
That would be a reason to upgrade.
The sad thing is that even though the harware market doesn't get something like Firewire out every 12 months, our Operating Systems makers *must* change it every 12 months. The OS should actually have the bugs for the current hardware and software hammered out until enough new hardware did come.
So I personally don't find the need for my college campus's helpdesk job to have to support 3 flavors of windows that came out with pretty much the same hardware realm in mind. Windows 98 should be fine, but I realize that after windows 98 came out, MS has got its act together: They ship a new version of Windows every year, and now we are struggling to keep up. We will have to support windows 2000, windows ME and *gasp* windows XP.
I should mention my campus is an oficially a Macintosh campus. So we will have to support OS 10 as well... And all its little problems to be bloated enough and yet fail to support any optical CD technology. Thanks for all the eye candy, Apple, thanks for the likely to be bloated eye candy, XP! All I need is DVD support and actually Firewire compatibility, which they won't provide (for now)
"Wireless : LAN
Have you ever looked at how much RAM you needed to run System 7? It was about 2MB. I remember a laptop made around '92 or '94 where a RAM disk could be made big enough to dump your system folder and word processor, so you could work on a document for 7 hours of diskswap-less glory. That feature of the MacOs, will be missed, though:
Then came OS 8, and the amounts of RAM have raised... 10 MB, 15MB, OS 9: 24MB... Just for the system! Try running something like Unreal Tournament on OS X, and you'll need nearly 256MB --128 for the OS and a little more for the game.
God, I don't know where the mainstream OS industry is heading. The article mentioned that Win2000 should run on nearly 200Mhz, but my college campus has it on DELLs with 500Mhz pentiums that are as irresponsive as a Nintendo 64 emulator running without a 3D card.
Somehow I refuse believe the recommended specs. Windows won't willingly say how much RAM programs take, -- START \ RUN \ mem always says all my RAM belongs to the system. Ok, I know sysmonitor may tell you about RAM, but I don't trust its figures either: Try and start windows 98, which should run fine on 16MBs of RAM, with virtual memory off. I've had to troubleshoot computers that won't load any DLLs because the kernel takes the whole RAM and as soon as the desktop starts, you get errors for every DLL and VXD possible because 32MB != enough once people turn off VM.
In fact, here's something to think about:
Since when have we been able to run a system WITHOUT disk swapping? I told a friend taking an OS class the other day that OSs are guilty for our wait problems because they have made Hard Drives a requirement for an ideally optional feature. Old literature for Dos used to say: "First, insert your system floppy into the drive bay. Now, push the ON button." There were no hard drives and therefore, no disk swapping. And now you have swapping, 100% necessary DLLs instead of the dos system EXEs, and god knows how many unnecessary things get loaded at every startup.
A friend of mine said: Well, "what if a computer scientist like you built a system based on AI [so that] programs were 10k? [of plain-text human speech] The system would be huge, right?"
(It would need billions of library commands and much "knowledge", and it would need to compile the 10k on demand.)
I think AI will be the next killer app. If it were only true that we are closer to figuring it out, though... At least Clippy will be an unsupported feature in the next version of Windows.
"Wireless : LAN
I don't believe that the average user is incapable of telling the speed difference between an IDE and SCSI disks. Unless the machine is dreadfully outdated, the user will not be able to tell the difference when he is typing in MS Word. He will, however, notice the difference when the Word is first loading, and this is when most users will experience frustration, BUT, as you said, once the application is loaded into memory, assuming that the machine has plenty of RAM, it won't start thrashing.
This again calls attention to the imbalance in most OEM PCs, which often include an 800MHz+ CPU and only 128MB RAM. Your average PC user would be much happier (although thanks to Intel's marketing, he doesn't know it) with half as many MHz and twice as much RAM. So I agree, RAM needs should be taken care of before looking at disk upgrades.
** Unfortunately, IDE is just so much cheaper that SCSI may be on the way out for high-end workstations. For instance, note how new Sun workstations have IDE drives, while in the past it was unheard of to have a UNIX workstation with IDE. (Hell, even the before-mentioned SPARCstation 5 has SCSI-2.) Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
--
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I like to watch.
MS Word is often used as an example of bloatware. Yes, it is a fairly large program, but I don't hold its size against it, because it allows the non-computer savvy to create nice looking documents very quickly, with very little work. But MS Word is not what is pushing sales of 1GHz Pentiums. The truth is that nothing is pushing the sale of 1GHz CPUs. Intel and AMD make them, and the big OEMs sell them without question. Ever ask yourself why you it's difficult to find new OEM 500MHz machines on the market today? It's because the big OEMs know that consumers expect to spend $1500-2000 on a new machine, and aren't going to dissuade them if possible.
I'm also going to note that this hardware manufacturer/vendor conspiracy seems limited only to CPUs. Look at what Dell and IBM are trying to sell consumers, and you'll notice how incredibly unbalanced these systems are. A 1GHz CPU with a fucking IDE disk? The disk was the bottleneck 700MHz ago, and it is now... just get yourself a 500MHz CPU for $80 and spend the money you saved on SCSI-3 hardware. But, as mentioned before, you can't buy a measly 500MHz CPU from the big OEMs anymore, so balanced PCs are now only available to relative "geeks".
My dad is VP of Engineering in a large company whose name (a household name, I might add) I won't mention, and he does all of his work, including use of MS Office 2000, on a 133MHz ThinkPad. Doesn't sound like MS Office is selling new systems to me.
The only software industry that sells new systems is the gaming industry. Even when the next generation of games doesn't require a new video card, many of us will go buy one just to make our old games even better. My primary workstation, which I upgrade about twice per year, currently has an 800MHz Thunderbird, 512MB of 133MHz Crucial SDRAM, and an ELSA GeForce 2 Ultra. In addition to gaming, I use this box for my development work, but you can bet your ass that I didn't buy a $400 video card for writing C++ (yes, Carmack might, but I don't develop games). I bought the card because, as a gamer, playing Tribes 2 (just picked it up yesterday, actually) smoothly at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color just r0X0rs.
Incidentally, my firewall is a 170MHz SPARCstation 5, but I'm not going to be playing TFC on that anytime soon.
I believe that the WWW is the real "killer app", and only revolutionary Internet client and server software will really push hardware sales noticably. (If IE5, Apache httpd, or Napster required a 1GHz CPU, hardware sales would be exponentially greater.)
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I like to watch.
We have the technology. We can maybe build it.
I am not a lawyer.
I dont understand this article at all. It starts off as an explanation of how computers are already pretty powerful for today's applications. Then he talks about how though Doom said it would run on a 386, he was forced to upgrade. Then, applying stellar logic, he proceeds to use the minimum system requirements listed on software boxes as a basis for his first point, simply bypassing his second assertion that there exists software that lists much lower requirements then it needs. He has two completely different, paradoxical arguments in his article.
.agrippa.
He also demonstrates an acute lack of knowledge about his subject. So the Unreal box says "200mhz". Has he ever tried it? Sure it runs. However it's like watching a slideshow. The same is true for a lot of the software he listed. Just because something runs doesn't mean it runs well. Of the things that ran well, like Diablo II and Baulders Gate II, those are based on the previous engines, which ran fine with his current setup, and hence are not a good basis for comparison.
Essentially, what he is trying to say is that what it generally considered now as an older computer (mhz at or under 350 pretty much) can still run current software with the same hardware. Fine. Thanks for validating that. But, taking from his own Doom-upgrade theory, the current software will not run all that well on older machines and demand an upgrade (perhaps not to the latest stuff, but still an upgrade). Therefore, by his own logic, he has no reason to upgrade yet he does.
Perhaps downloading all that porn caused the logic section of his brain to malfunction.
To Quote:
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
this guy obviously havent tryied playing divX movies on p2 350mhz....
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Mozilla is now 0.8.1
the 0.8.1 release not appear in slashdot.
:(
Related Mozilla bugs = http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73658
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
You call a G3 "old" hardware? ;-)
I'm running a PII/300!
(course, its beefed up with >60 Gigs of drive space, 256MB Ram, antequated V3 2000 video card, etc etc).
I totally agree that an average computer is already expected to do a variety of things, and as such, newer ones are well equipped to do so.
However, I can think of at least one more killer app that your garden-variety PC doesn't do yet...
Virtual Reality
Or even a cheap imitation thereof! I personally think it'd be pretty damned cool to run "Linux VR" on a day-to-day basis, quite literally surfing the net, exploring VR models of Ancient Greece and Rome, or maybe just places I've never been able to travel to. Aside from the requisite cybersex, I think VR has some really neat potential applications. Simple stuff even... Build and test products, stuff like that. God what I wouldn't give to actually build a railgun prototype in VR...
hmmm.. Railgun...
Can you say Quake VR?
That aughtta get the gamers the hard on for hardware that they seem to need.
If only the cost was somehow negligible... for some reason I bet a system that can accurately manifest VR objects with realtime physics would be a bit pricey... unless you've got millions of dollars lying around!
So thats the next killer app... VR for the masses
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
By the time I was 15 I was pulling in several hundred dollars a week, working my ass off!
;-)
I do believe the federal labor laws specify you can work a "normal" job at the age of 15.
Course, any 12 year old can get a job on a local farm and pull in some decent money, if ya don't mind the elbow grease and (insert domesticated animal here) shit.
There's no excuse for whining cuz mommy won't buy a new computer.
BTW, I am 19, not some crotchety 85 year old man who thinks he still works harder than everyone else
Did I mention that I've owned my fourth PC for a couple of years now? Just thought I'd throw that in for good measure
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
well IMHO, here my computer history, in the 80's (around 85) I had a IBM XT (boy it was loaded for it time 10MB hard drive and 448Kb ram) Then in 92 I got a 486sx 25 4Mb ram, then in 96 I got a P133 16Mb ram and then in Dec of 2000 I got this baby a P3 600 with 128Mb (which I took it to 192Mb of ram) I if I look at the last 3 systems I can say I should have this computer as my main one till 2004. An I have keeped the P133 (I have 96Mb in it now) and it servers as a file server print server and internet router. It does the job nicely.
This guy needs to buy MacOS X. It will require him to pick up at least an iMac, if not a nice G4, and stuff at least 256 megs of RAM in it to get good speed. Even if he has a Mac laying around which was made no more than 2 years ago, the odds are against it being able to run MacOS X, with or without 2 gigs of RAM, fast PCI graphics cards and a G3 processor upgrade card.
Repeat after Steve: Fruit-colored Macs only beyond this point -- no beige allowed.
Were Microsoft has failed, Apple ironically provides.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
id software is in charge of making killer apps that neccessitate hardware upgrades. They do more to push consumer hardware than anyone else.
Ryan Earl
Student of Computer Science
University of Texas
I have to agree with this. It's hard to imagine video adding much to ordinary conversation and easy to imagine it detracting. The best application for videoconferencing seems to be to provide visual aids to a discussion-eg graphs & pictures. I don't often need to plot anything when I'm talking to my folks, but it'd be nice with the broker. If it were more ubiquitous and higher quality, it might even save on business flights. (Still want direct human interaction for some things, but if many details could be dealt with by video, it'd save a lot of $1200 overnight trips)
Microsoft is working on the business end of the problem. They have to find ways to force businesses to upgrade to Windows 2000 and the new revenue model, and businesses are resisting strongly. Refusing to put USB into NT 4 is a key part of the strategy.
The .NET thing has potential as a time sink. Implementing RPC via XML will be hideously inefficient. And interpreters are involved, which typically means a 10x performance loss.
Not that Java is much better. Swing seems to need upwards of 1GHz just to display menus as fast as a 20MHz Mac of a decade ago.
So, clearly the industry is addressing the problem.
Sorry but standards compliant browsers won't cause flash to go away. DHTMl is significantly more complicated than flash, and there are a huge amount of things that flash can do that dhtml can't (and vice versa). For example, any morphing from one shape to the next, mp3 playback, 3d object rotation, the precision of the vector graphics system itself, et al.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
What version of Oracle? 8.1.x seems to be a bit hungrier than that (like 192 or higher just to run the damn java installer). Or else you've discovered a way to tame it, in which case I'd love to hear about it. :-)
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Actually I have three of them:
And all of these are not flashy, consumer, game-type 'ware, the usual suspects for driving hardware upgrades. My point being that even us CLI-only, minimalist sysadmin types are going to run into this phenomenon now and again. (Although in this realm I think the scaling axis is usually more ram / more processors as opposed to faster processors (and of course video cards aren't a factor at all), as an example see the configuration of the pretty-damn-busy-but-still-very-responsive ccwf, where my skool account is...).
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
CiscoWorks 2000. This is a very intesive program. Look into it. G_Man
You want a killer app too create boosted harware performance? Let's throw in a way to let 2-4 users uset he same P.C. at the same time. My parents just had to buy a new computer because Papers (my mom back in school) and Taxes (Dad's job) coincided at the same time. But guess what you don't need two PIII 800 processors to do taxes and word processing at the same time. We all know the hardware could handle it. Throw in an extra monitor some new software a little extra memory and my 4-person family can use the thing when they want. Send some wires through the walls (or maybe wireless) set up access points throughout the house and connect it to the net via broadband. Let me get easy access over the net to my e-mail, documents or even programs etc. Then make it simple and stable to run and make it run without choking. Well shit, I'll spend $4,000 for that. Of course we see a drop in the number of computers sold, but well that's not my problem :P
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I don't see how this is relevant seeing as CD audio is uncompressed and not what I was talking about.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Actually I think that a soundblaster live probably has much better Digital to Analog conersion, but yes you are probably right that people aren't going to want a new computer for more channels of audio.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
That's cool to know, I wasn't taking reduced framerates into consideration.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
And nobody will ever need over 640K of RAM or whatever the quote is.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
However, it's so easy to take exception to your statement about the quality of XBox and GameCube's graphics, being that all we've seen so far are screen snapshots and simulations of them. You've fallen for microsoft's FUD on the subject, obviously...
I haven't fallen for any FUD, or in this case, I think it would be hype. My focus is the gamecube, actually. I have seen video's of the actual realtime renderings being done with the actual hardware, not just simulations. There are a few of those videos out there. If nothing else I know that the thousand marios demo was done in realtime on real hardware, it is like 10 minutes long and the guy in the backround says so.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
My point was the processor speed can become the bottleneck with advanced video codecs like mpeg4 and that bandwidth stops being the issue.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
You are absolutly right, although I think what is holding people back is knowledge and running cable. That is why I mentioned wireless. Knowledge is the real obstacle though, so it would need to be the harware and software sellers that dumb things down for people.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
We already have photorealistic graphics via the Geforce 3.
No it isn't, you are just being sensationalistic. I think 3D is just now starting to get to the point where its really good. The playstation's graphics sucked ass. N64 was bearable 3D, dreamcast and PS2 are practical, and I think that the xbox and gamecube are finally into the realm of good 3D.
Music is about as good as it can get with MP3, Vorbis, WMA, whatever.
No it isn't, although I am not one of those people who says "mp3 sounds like crap, my ears are 31337!" (192 Kbs mp3 sounds great I think) there is still alot to be desired. What will happen when DVD audio comes out? You will need five channels and that means bigger files, but more importantly more redudancy between channels to be compressed which means more CPU cycles. Not to mention that audio codecs are still evolving.
Maybe I am getting trolled, but this is the most sensationalistic thing I have read in a long time, it is people like you who sit on their asses while other people forge ahead because they are not content with what they have.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I have thnking about this off and on for sometime now (mr. anderson). Before I say anything, a thunderbird athalon is much faster than my 300 Mhz PII for even simple stuff like obsessivly reloading slashdot. That said, there might be a few platues along the way where not many people feel the need to upgrade. If you think about the trends though you can see, that one computer for one person is not really the way things are going to go for the average home. Home networking is going to be very mainstream in 2 years + or - a year. Wireless and other things will make it easy. Falt panel monitors are poised to become practical in a year or two too. Families want everyone to have their own computer, but that's expensive. The computer they also just bought is faster than anything they need. How to solve this problem ? Servers and terminals of course. This is where .NET is heading and is where Linux and Microsoft will eventually be fighting I think. Instead of buying everyone a computer, dad goes out and buys a server to be placed in the basement, and everyone gets their own terminal. Anyone could see that this could lead to faster single computers and more expensive ones too ( good for the hardware insustry, higher margins). Obviously this won't happen for a while but home networking will hit soon enough.(I am proud to say my home was networked with I was in 7th grade and I am now 19).
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I have said this a few times before but I think that one killer app for the masses is video conferencing. I have video conferenced with my friends in LA and it is alot of fun. You might say "Video Conferencing just requires more bandwidth." Well of course that's true to an extent but the codecs used in voice and video are made so that a computer can compress them quickly. Mpeg4 is very slow to compress and is not near real time in even a top computer. Mp3 is starting to become easily compressed in realtime, although I don't know about the second generation of good lossy codecs like vorbis, wma (gasp!) and whatever fraunhoffer is planning to cram up America's ass when they get their shit together and release their new codec. Mpeg4 looks nice, and with something with low movement like video conferencing video and optimizations like silence cut-offs, video conferencing should be a given for people with high-end systems and high bandwidth, eighther at home of work. Maybe mpeg4 isn't the way to go immediatly, but you get the point. That and maybe Doom3 when it's released.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Shouldn't it be the software industry?
The point of the article is that it is in the interests of the hardware industry to fund the development of bloated software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know there is a compiler online for the nes and the snes
There are common assemblers for NES and SNES. NES's 2A03 is a 6502 (same arch as Apple II and C=64) with an on-die sound generator. SNES's 65816 is nearly the same as that of the Apple IIGS. Neither is C-friendly. The 32-bit 68000 in the Sega Genesis, on the other hand, has a version of GCC.
but their cart based so you couldn't just trade them
It's relatively easy to make an EEPROM cartridge for NES; start here. Edit, compile, emulate, edit, compile, emulate, ... burn on to EEPROM, test for bugs tripped up by emu inaccuracies. Just make sure you never use NESticle for testing.
It would be nice if they did opensource their development tools.
Standard "why don't they just free the software" response: For one thing, they might have licensed technology and not licensed the right to sub-license it to the community. (This may be much of why NVIDIA hasn't freed the drivers for its video cards.)
For another thing, game companies sell software. They don't want competition from software designed to run on their older consoles. This is why Nintendo is going after not only ROMs but also emulators, even when such emulators are used to develop free software for old consoles.
Also, there are trademarks and copyrights on the games' content itself. If you have a devkit, you can rip graphics from Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon and use them in your own games.
the great thing about consoles is that the programmers can't just throw in a little extra and say "Oh, they'll upgrade".
But that's exactly what Nintendo did for the Super NES. The programming model for the Super NES CPU and picture generator wasn't that much different from that of the NES. Even though the sound was radically different (NES had 20 registers in CPU address space; Super NES had a mini-DSP in the space of a separate processor with an extremely obscure instruction set), most game publishers just used Nintendo's sound driver from Super Mario World (it was provided with the dev kits). In fact, backwards compatibility with NES games was planned but later dropped.
NESdev, the center of the NES sceneWill I retire or break 10K?
Mpeg4 is very slow to compress and is not near real time in even a top computer.
I'm using DivX ;-) with my USB video capture box, and my P3-900 compresses real-time 320x240x15fps captured video just fine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Some audiophiles prefer DTS encoded surround to Dolby Digital because it isn't as compressed.
DTS is not as compressed bitstream-wise as Dolby Digital, but it is more compressed sound-wise. When you send your audio off to the DTS people, they compress (remove dynamics from) the heck out of it, removing the punch. They attempt to add it back by turning up the bass really loud (Joe Sixpack thinks loud bass == good sound).
Will I retire or break 10K?
It seems that everyone is ready to accuse software of becoming more and more bloated as time goes on, with no apparent gain in features. Even some software developers say this, even though they are some of the same people who call C "assembly-like" and prefer to do their programming in Perl or Java. (Mmm...Perl and Java...)
Really, the payoff in code "bloat" is in the area of development time. It may seem like this has no benefit on the user side, but the so-called bloat that the user complains about is the same stuff that helps the programmer get software to the user in a timely fashion, with fewer mistakes. Granted, this is not always the case, but the trend these days is to put run-time efficiency second in favor of programmer-efficiency. As a programmer, I like this. As a user, I don't like it as much.
...why they can't just make the best piece of hard-/software given their talents, release it, and then just better it a few months later. If they are "so good" that they can sell their products by intentionally implementing flaws to be fixed later, try to imagine how wonderful our lives would be if they would just give us the goods and trust that we'll buy them anyway. (Something tells me that we would.)
What every user wants is the ability to control the computer easily with voice only. Imagine yourself walking in the door clicking on you computer. While making your sandwich you tell the computer ,"Go to slashdot. Open the first story having to do with micro$oft and set moderation level at -1. Also in another window open my hotmail account." Now granted, we can do this today but not without a lot of pain. The first program that decreases the pain that will be the killer app. Think AOL for online access. Think Windows for OS. Amazon for online Shopping. This killer app will make interacting with the computer effortless and seamless. The Killer app is the computer that controls the ships on Star Trek. The question is will microsoft research group create it before the linix open source group. LA.
How about latency?
I find the latency quite annoying. Speed of light already sucks, it gets even worse when you throw in the buffering/correction required to deal with packet loss and decompression codecs.
Cheerio,
Link.
There is one application that needs quite a bit of power - real time encoding. My PII 400 works well for practically everything - a bit of games, financial applications, word processing, internet, etc... There is one thing where it doesn't work, and this is the field where the processor speed is needed. I have the ATI Radeon All-in-wonder, which has the ability to work like a Tivo. But unfortunately, my PII can't simultaneously encode and decode MPEG2 video in real time at a 640x480 resolution. It can barely do it at 320x240, and even then has problems some times. MPEG2 encoder cards are expensive, and since MPEG4 will soon replace MPEG2, we will need the 1.3 GHz machines. I can't even play an MPEG4 on a 600 Mhz machine at full 720x480 resolution with perfect quality.
That was probably WriteNow, which was an excellent wp package for the Mac. Fast lean and full-featured. Worked great on my Mac Classic!
Just goes to show, build it and they may not come...
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
bloated code = microsoft code they have been doing this for ages...
But in the end, it didn't gain much ground and ulitmately is disappeared from the market in a year or two. Word 5.0 held the Mac market. Clearly, what the market considered important wasn't low resource usage and good performance on older hardware.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The design in question is a custom DRAM controller, DMA controller, IDE interface, and MP3 serial bitstreaming output (DMA based), in my little homebrew mp3 player project.
Ok, not exactly a killer app, running FPGA placement and routing, but that 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 can't come soon enough! I can't imagine how anybody ever manages to design with those really large FPGA chips!!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
"I've got a Pentium 2 300 MHz, 96 MB RAM, a SB PCI64, and a 12mb Voodoo 2"
;)
Heh, looking around my room I realised that I have your whole system in spare parts
Don't get me wrong, though. My highest-end systems are only Celeron 450's, and I'm not planning on upgrading any time soon.
Personally, I think that there are very few people who really need fast machines. The rest of us could still be doing just fine with 200mhz machines.
What's 190k of disk space, when you got GBs of them? The space it takes in memory may mean something, the space it takes in cache means a lot.
Comparing executable size for "hello world" is NOT a meaningful benchmark. (And comparing code produced by an IDE to handcrafted assembly is rather low too).
What's wrong with having the coolest games on the planet run on computers that only cost $500-700? I honestly have *no* problem with that at all! It means that you don't have to be making $50K+ just to afford such a toy. Even more interesting is that the lack of demand for the higher end machines means that you can get a bitchin' top-of-the-line computer for only about $1700 (that's Canadian too...), as opposed to about $5000 a few years ago. Hell, lately I've been having a hard time finding a generic-brand computer that costs more than $2000.
Basically, what this means is that now we're giving processing power to the people! The lowliest gas jockey making minimum wage can play starcraft or use the web like the rest of us! Schools can actually buy *new* computers! A computer on every desk in every office and every home! This is good for all of us!
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"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I'm getting about 35 Mbit/s (according to hdparm - no idea how close to a real world situation this is) out of both of my IDE drives - now the kernel lets me use UDMA 5 on my VIA chipset. My ancient P133 with a new Promise Ultra is even getting about 18Mb/s out of each channel (Which is half its cache speed, unlike the onboard VIA which gets 200Mb/s cache which I guess is because the i/f to the cache is 32bits wide though that's only a wild stab in the dark)
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Well, sort of. A similar thing that might be just as important to the consumer is 2d stuff, like making nice pictures of the family and whatnot. This capability is serveral years more mature than video.
I bet you that 99% of the people out there don't take advantage of much of anything that they can do in 2d except for the occasional crop and compression for ebay. Most of us just aren't 'content people'. Most people aren't creative, and most people don't need a powerful computer.
love is just extroverted narcissism
You Chevy only goes 100.
Why is that?
A device only has to be powerful and fast enough to do the job you expect of it. Period. The 8080 is STILL a very fine chip for certain applications. Hell, I've got a drawer full of 555 chips that suffice for many computational purposes much BETTER than even an 8080 would.
As for the next "killer app" I've seen this one coming for a long time, and have even posted here a number of times. Just what else do you expect a computer to DO?
It's a TV, stereo, recording console, data center, video game platform, web server, radio, external hardware controler, clock, printing press, fabber, and even * a computational device.*
The time will come when all the "killer apps" have been thought of and implimented. That time appears to be pretty close to NOW.
Sure, better, faster, cheaper computers will make some of these apps bigger, better, faster and more, but the computer as she is today DOES things, and does them well.
SOFTWARE, on the other hand, has turned into badly written, buggy overpriced crap.
Perhaps the next "killer app" is customer satisfaction?
KFG
The disk was the bottleneck 700MHz ago, and it is now... just get yourself a 500MHz CPU for $80 and spend the money you saved on SCSI-3 hardware.
:)
I have to totally disagree with this (although I agree with everything else you said). Even the tasks performed by a typical "HARDCORE" user don't require SCSI... not would they even benefit from them considering how fast IDE drives are now. SCSI only helps when you have many users thrashing the disk at once, or if you absolutely need more throughput than the 45 MB/sec or so of real-world performance that modern IDE drives give you.
Essentially, unless you're running a server (many users) or doing work with digital video (needs extreme, interrupted bandwidth) SCSI is a very expensive and not-too-useful luxury. You'd be better off spending all the extra money on RAM.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
"not would they even benefit from them considering how fast IDE drives are now."
:)
Well... I should say, they wouldn't "benefit noticeably". I mean, yeah... sure, your favorite bloated office suite will load a teeny bit faster with SCSI. And your swap file will be faster, too. But if you spend the money on RAM instead, you'll hardly use the swap file anyway.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
He will, however, notice the difference when the Word is first loading, and this is when most users will experience frustration
:)
I don't even know about that... even the "evil and bloated" MS Word loads in less than a second on my 800mhz Athlon. I mean... winword.exe is an 8MB file. With around 40MB/sec of throughput on an IDE drive, that doesn't take very long to load, and I don't think SCSI would show much improvement.
OK, OK, before someone nitpicks, I'm sure that 8MB winword.exe loads plenty of other shared libraries, too... so total disk i/o is probably more than 8MB... but the whole thing still loads in less than a second.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
The big problem is that code always seems to be written for the latest and greatest hardware. MacOS X, for example. I don't mind Aqua. But I could live without translucent dragging and some of the dock's behavior -- why not an Aqua light that looks just as pretty but doesn't eat up as much processor power?
What annoys me more than anything else is that there is absolutely no need for an operating system distribution or a basic office application to soak up massive amounts of system resources. I should still be able to get a copy of MSOffice that will at least run on a first-generation PowerMac (no reason on earth they can't dig up an old copy of CodeWarrior and keep it running on a 68K, for that matter). A simple *text editor* should not need that much space (sorry, Emacs junkies, but I'm a pico man myself).
Now we have gHz+ processors on the market... well, I have a quarter-gigahertz Power Mac 6500. Boot ROM issues aside, is a 250mHz 603e all that wimpy a processor? Damn straight it isn't. 32MB of RAM is a nontrivial amount of memory as well, yet MacOS 9.1's performance can be charitably described as flaky on my hardware. There is no excuse for this, not when I can run a medium-sized production webserver on a Pentium 100 or less using a stripped-down Linux or BSD system.
Okay, I personally do not need a spel czecher. A lot of people do; that's arguably a necessary feature. Mail merge, pretty useful as well. HTML filter, helpful (though I handcraft my HTML so I only rarely need it). But why do I need a fruit salad interface? Why do I need a word processor with anything more complicated than a ruler and justification controls across the top of the window? What purpose does a spreadsheet with more than four dimensions serve?
I like GUIs. That's me; I guess I'm in a minority around here saying that, and that's fine. But I don't need the flash of rippling scroll bars; believe it or not, I find Athena widgets to be rather elegant sometimes (although the scroll bars leave a lot to be desired). Skinning is not a terribly useful thing, though it's nice to have the option; I was a serious Kaleidoscope junkie for a couple of years. But what excuse is there for Mozilla? Oh, we have bigger computers now...
I HAVE NEWS FOR ALL OF YOU WRITING THE SOFTWARE.
Some of us can't afford new hardware. I am unacceptably behind in both Mac and Linux expertise because I can't afford hardware newer than a couple of years old (and therefore can't afford a G3 or an Athlon). People are still using Pentiums. People are still using PPC601s. People are still using 486s, fer cryin out loud. Pretty soon the software march will have to slow down because people don't want to be bothered with keeping up with the Moores.
Okay, that's my rant. I feel better now.
Here are a whole bunch of things I need to upgrade my computer(s) to do so I will have a happier life:
- A decent realtime mpeg2 hardware encoder that I can record TV with.
- A secondary processor to view multiple tv feeds or chunk mpeg2 in software while I can still wordprocess without feeling like an idiot.
- A 0.5 terabyte raid array so I can store all the content I own on computer, from photos to dvds, to music, to records of my bills.
There are plenty things I want to do that require a better computer. And I believe that many other people will desire the same thing once they see how unbelievably neat it all is. So is someone developing a killer app around all these things? Hmmmmm....-------------
It is easy to control all that you see,
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I myself have a 3 year old Compaq Presario (PII400, 8.0 GB HD, 224 MB RAM, TNT 16 MB), which I have triple booting Linux, BeOS and Win98 and do not see any compelling reasons to upgrade -- this machine can compile the Linux kernel in 7 minutes.
The bottom line is that the chip makers and OEMs are really going to be hurting unless they can figure out how to come up with a way to burn cycles -- I guess that explains the prominence of multimedia devices at computer retail stores.
Let's run all this like the Reds would, it's obvious that there aren't enough PC buyers out there to supply bok choy to all the hungry PC workers of the world.
All right, first of all, all hardware will have a 2-year life. This will be enforced by built-in firmware disablers, and if necessary, small thermite rods to dispense the power of the People's Hammer on those ungrateful running dogs.
Second, no piece of software will be developed that does not run hash computations in the background to pull CPU utilization to full. If you aren't using those CPU cycles, you are stealing from the People!
Third, your chocolate ration will be increased this week, to 20 grams, from last week's 25.
Forward Revolution!
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The phrase "killer app" gets tossed around too lightly. Killer apps? Try spreadsheets. Try desktop publishing. Try e-mail. Those are revolutions.
The PC market will just have to get used to growth margins that are the same as every other business.
BOO HOO, my heart pumps purple piss for them.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
... and they're both from Apple.
... which means I'm buying a Macintosh.
:)
Final Cut Pro 2
DVD Studio Pro
Hey, I'm buying a new computer specifically to run them well
Maybe Windows lusers have no killer apps -- but that's because they have no lives to make a video out of
I am suprised that noone mentioned serious sam yet. Great Doom clone from a small programming team in Croatia. In the later levels with swarms of baddies after you I have seen this game bring 800 Mhz athalons to thier knees. This is a gme that is targeted for the hard-core FPS player. Also it only costs 10-15$. Also if you kick down the graphics it will run just fine on a p2 300. Too bad that it's just doom with better graphics.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Or at least quad 2 GHz G4 chips with OS X. Damn, my RC5 keyrate would jump from 2.75Mkeys/sec to 18Mkeys/sec.
Until then, I'm sticking with my T-Bird 800 with 256MB RAM, and a 45 Gig IBM Deskstar.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
It's availiable for Win32 and Linux.
You can find more information about Tribes 2 here, here, and more about Linux Tribes here.
-Gnight
Fact is, 500MHz Pentium III is still fast enough for most things, even folks like me who do real (i.e., programming) work on their computers and not just browsing the web for p0rn.
In fact, the only times I which I had a faster processor is when I'm encoding video from my cam-corder.
sounds like my computers i have for my Win 2K server class.. Pent Pro 200 w/ 256 ram with 4 GB hard drive.. 2 hours for the install. 3 minutes to boot... and then try to setup NAT, ICS on these things at it takes a little while for it to bring up the screens.. Now Linux runs pretty good on these babys.. not the best things but im sure if you upgraded the video card they would run just fine...
We needed a second one for my classes and to avoid interference with my wife's email and internet access. So, like any self-respecting geek, I figured out my budget and then bought the biggest, baddest computer I could get for my money. I don't have a 1GHz T-bird just for the gaming power (though UT does run REAL nice), I have it because that's what I could afford. Do I use this thing to its full potential? Hell no, but unless you're running RC5 or SETI 24/7 or attempting to run Win2k on a P90, who really is maxing out their proc on a regular basis in their home? At work is another story.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
As I mentioned, I'm aware of the difference between Flash and DHTML. However, the place I see Flash used most effectively in baseline web-design is as navigation widgets (such as flyout menus, mouse-overs, etc) which really should be done in DHTML if it were practical (meaning you wouldn't have to code it 2-3 times).
Obviously, if you are using Flash as a animation or movie player, there's no current alternative. In the future, there will be W3C standards which do vector and time-based rendering. But not yet.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Face it man, if you have to say "Don't do that", YHL. The entire point of Mozilla is to be a platform for the standards-based dynamic web of the future. There's absolutely no point in treating it like Netscape 3, because you can still download Netscape 3 and use it if you want to.
Tons of people here hate Flash. Well, the only reason Flash exists is because (ahem) Netscape refused to work with the W3C on standards-based DHTML. So people chose a proprietary solution because at least it works in every supported browser. (And I am 100% aware that Flash and DHTML are not the exact same thing.) If and when the browser features converge, Flash and most uses of Java as a doo-dad generator will go away.
And it's easy to point at lame sites with a Flash splashscreen that you can't get past without having the plug-in installed. That doesn't mean that Flash can't be used very effectively for blinkenlights or navigation on web-pages. Face it, the average American luser is on the WWW, and he wants the web to be as flashy as possible. Enjoy your HTML2 Linux HOWTO sites.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I've just ordered an Athlon 1.2GHz to replace my Duron 700 (not OCed, mobo doesn't support it and I hadn't closed bridge anyway). You want my reasons? Of course as a geek we probably doesn't count much when it comes to the big Market(tm) ;)
1. Video capture. My Asus Deluxe requires more CPU power to do full res, 30fps, and I want to use my harddisk as video recorder.
2. Unreal Tournament framerate. Amazingly enough this game is limited by CPU. Good that I'm addicted to this game then, and not one that'd need a $$$$$$$$ gf3.
3. DivX encoding. Ever tried MM4/VKI? slooooooow. Ok that it can run overnight, but when it uses days it's too long.
4. The feeling I can finally get a premium line product for extremely little cash (compared to the past, to me that probably includes this autumn when I got the Duron). It's one small notch down from the 1.3GHz and it's only 200MHz bus (to fit mobo), but still, it's only 2250 NOK which is pretty much 200$ US + VAT, and that is cheap.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Object oriented programming lends itself to bloated code. You take an object that has most of the functionality you need, declare a child and add the last of of the functionality you need. This methodology cuts developement time and helps inexperienced programmers to write application level programs. The result, horribly bloated code. A simple program that performed an important task I wrote in Borand C++ Builder created a 190K executable. Written in Borland Pascal 7 created a 30K executable. Written in Assembly Language (yes I still can) created a 800 byte executable. That is right 190K to .8K. Microsoft's compilers are worse. The functional overhead of loading and running these routines requires cpu cycles, lots of them. I remember when Wordstar ran just fine on a 2MHZ 8080 with 20K of memory and that included room for the program, CPM operating system, and Data.
Great article...but he stopped to soon. I think what he left out was this:
When 95% of what people are doing nowdays is cruising the web a 56K or less --- then what good does a souped up 1gz state of the art power demon equipped with a power house 56k modem do them??? I think you will see harware requirements shoot up when Joe Six Pack can stream good video from the web....(I have to laugh when I see Dell and Gateway ads saying that these faster computers will "Speed up your Internet Experience"....)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Exactly. All my friends talk about how great their new >1GHz computers are and I just shrug. My year old 700 works perfectly fine in Linux. I can play Quake3 at very close to the framerate I enjoy in Windows and every other time-wasting desktop thing runs perfect, if not better than in Windows. Why would I put up M$'s bloat if I can do better in Linux? My typical desktop session consists of a lot of Netscape windows, XMMS, Gabber, Gnapster, and some various other applications in X4 plus I run Apache, MySQL, and SSH in the background and my CPU monitor is telling me it's 97% idle.
The truth is that if you're not a hardcore gamer you don't need the latest-greatest-nifty processor simply because it's overkill Most users are content to have a web browser open and some MP3s playing, and you can do that with a computer that's much "worse" than the newer computers.
-antipop
"However, I don't want to get to the stage where I'll have to buy the Intel version of a chipset in order to play my favourite game." I guess you missed out on the 2-3 year span in which AMD went from sharing the loser-CPU playing field with Cyrix to the point where it matched (and slightly overtook) Intel at every turn. Those of us that owned AMD CPU's back then took nothing but years of crap from friends who were somehow brainwashed into believing that AMD was a shoddy piece of junk and not the quality COST-EFFECTIVE CPU that is really is...
Man, I used to hate those debates...
------
Let me give you the lowdown
as time goes on, that is what is going to happen, things will be "Good Enough" to do the job, and why convert over? Why spend the bucks? As noted in the article:
My trip to CompUSA makes me think that the people who screw the boxes together should be especially worried about the business customer. I for one spent most of the winter with a garage full of top-of -the-line computers from a failed dotcom I helped found last year. In fact, I think the dotcom bubble has given the entire PC industry a false sense of security over the past couple of years with a lot of fantasy money purchasing some not-so-fantasy hardware. The jig is definitely up and unless Microsoft comes out with a version of Word that can read your mind I don't see many companies going through the trauma of a hardware upgrade anytime soon.
The XP machines may want to cash in on this, to be the only computer that people will ever need, because things will be good enough, along with the .net thingy. But ultimately, that becomes another nail in the PC coffin. Which is probably why MS wants ultimately to get out of the PC oriented market.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Depends on how you define "free".
:(
It's been given the ad-banner treatment, even the linux version. Yuck!
If you check the original specs, DOOM only required a 386 processor to run (for those who don't remember, a 386 ran at about 25 MHz, weighed as much as a TV, and had fans that sounded like a jet engine when you turned them on).
Did he really use to own a 386 or is he just trying to sound old sk3wl? My 386 had no fan, it didn't need any (except the power supply fan which is exactly the same thing as my current power supply's fan)
"by all accounts" - ah, you've never used it. It comes iirc with the first release of windows 95 and you would seriously struggle to use it to browse. I may be wrong but I seem to remember it doesnt send a HTTP_HOST header which will mean you can't even view a lot of sites.
no sig.
Duh, sorry ignore me, looking at some of the later posts it cant have been IE3...
:-)
no sig.
Last week I and my client scetched the phase one server setup for their new service. Estimated price for the hardware alone is $200K in SUN and Nokia hardware.
This setup is going to run redundant Java application servers, databases and ssl+apache boxes.
Had this contract come in by 1996 we would probably have delivered a bloated GUI application instead, that could very well have lead to the customer upgrading their desktop machines. Now they just keep their Netscape or IE current.
Your hardware killer app. is Java application servers. Development boxes (usually PC's with Linux) have at least 384 MB of RAM and uses top of the line PIII or Athlon CPU's and they still are awfully slow.
For my latest project I got my team of five programmers a SUN server worth $20k to use as a shared development machine in order to get restart times of the application server down to only 40 seconds. For the next project I hope to get approval for another SUN box four times as quick.
A while ago I decided to give the 0.8.1 version a try and it worked. It was faster and stable. I mean it's not perfect but, unlike previously, you can use it now. Goodbye Netscape 4.7.
As far as the rendering anomalies go, as long as web pages are designed by Microsoft software for Microsoft browsers running under a Microsoft operating system, you are bound to get some problems with any non-IE browser.
The new doom if as good as the original will definitely make people go out and get new hardware. Carmack seems to think a GeForce 3 as the minimum specs will be just dandy.
...is that there really isn't much left. I know, I know. People have always said this, and it's always proven wrong. The problem lately, though, is that the real proformace drive has not been aps, per se, but games. Really, there isn't jack that pushes a home computer to its limit besides 3d game.
Now, though... Most of the 3d stuff is being offloaded to super-powerful GPU's instead of the CPU. I'm currently running a P3 733, with 384 megs of RAM and a 32 meg DDR GeForce 2 GTS. I have tested many of the killer games, and have found that my system *easily* handles them. I get around 82 FPS on Quake III Arena, and I'm running Win2K on top of it! (Not known for it's amazing game performace as it's a business OS.)
I've found that if I have a problem with my performance, I'm much better suited getting more/better ram, a more powerful graphics card, and a faster hard drive than upgrading my processor.
-JaydeWhat's a sig?
Linux users don't need to upgrade because they never right bloated.....ooo wait, Mozilla.
Check that thought.
And Linux users don't need Mozilla because they already have a decent brow... ooh, check that thought.
"And like that
Aren't people also saying Windows is bloated enough already?
I think as long as my PC can't measure up to my consoles graphically, code is already too bloated. I still haven't seen anything look as good as Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast or Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2. Why don't they port them over (no matter how slow they will be) and then run them on the PC? Users will always be willing to upgrade for the sake of a killer must-have game, and I can't think of anything more so than Metal Gear Solid 2. If gaming leads technology on the PC, they should be able to keep it going by bringing out games that actually take advantage of the hardware or push it past its limits.
As long as Quake 3 is the best looking thing we have to play on PCs, nobody's going to want to upgrade. Even then, it's just another FPS, and the genre has become an ocean.
--- Anthony
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Really. They've already convinced the world that you need a fast PC even for word processing. What is the slowest computer you can get these days at CompUSA? 500MHz? Good lord! I'd say they're already on a roll. Word Processing, AOL, Outlook. These apparently are killer CPU intensive apps.
The most promising video conferencing app I've seen is qVIX which is GPL'd and written by some guys at Cornell. It looks great and doesn't even require a ton of CPU.
i really like the picture of the burning computer :)
Platy
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
And why isn't there a save as vcd option.
Consider an office with 200 people all yakking at their computers. Talk about a noise hazard. Will never happen. Mouse/keyboard already damned efficient method to work a computer. Talking to it is probably the least efficient way to work one.
Then you would find me running through the halls yelling "Format C Colon Yes"... :)
intel must have really shrunk die sizes over the years if a 386/25 weighed as much as a TV.
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
Preach it Bro!
I have a p2 400mhz with Voodoo3, and get 60fps in Quake3 AT 1024x768!!
Now, maybe a game like Aquanox wouldn't be so hot,
But I'm probably not going to upgrade for about 1/2 a year.
I visited a friend of mine, who is a big DV enthusiast. He was working on a cheesy rap video to pass the time and was trying to make it appear as though his car had flown into its parking spot.
That one minute clip took about an hour of work, and we spent at least 15 minutes just waiting for Premiere to render the effects he was applying (basically, move and rotate a Photoshop image acress the screen). Mind you, this is a 1.33 GHz Athlon, fresh out of the local hardware agora, with half a GB of RAM.
If a "killer app" to justify further upgrades is needed, I'd have to say one of them digital video. Is it any coincidence that Apple and Microsoft are putting said functionality in their latest OSes?
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
<P>How many times have I pleaded to my mother that we need a better computer, a larger hd, more memory? And how many times have I won? Never. I am a teenager living in a standard family of average wealth and one family computer. We run doze simply because my mother doesn't trust me to wreck the computer installing linux as I've seriously broken it so many times. I've suffered for 3 years with a P2, 233mhz computer with a measely 2gb hd. I can't afford an upgrade for anything at all, and so it is down to me to convince my parents that we <i>need</i> to get more memory, a bigger hd, a faster processor, a better graphics card etc. And surprisingly I have failed in all my pleas as computers do the jobs they are designed to do perfectly well.
<P>My family as a whole is perfectly happy with the computer as they can use it for invoices, school work, formal letters and the occasional email and online shop. There is nothing more they need to do on it, and it performs those tasks quite sufficiently. It is only really the power users that require the latest hardware, and these users are in the minority. Ordinary hardware does the ordinary jobs more than happily and there is no real need to get any better.
<P>My tale does have a slightly better ending- we managed to fry everything in my computer so now (after pushing the limits all I could) I have an AMD k6 500mhz with 64mb memory. Unfortunately I'm still stuck on doze and the 2gb hard drive, and I am left to only dream of when I can get my own linux box.
that article was pathetic, i thought maybe slashextreme would end when sharky jumped ship, but it appears not. can /. support internet.com any more? why not just point the domain straight at them?
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
The game is really impressive graphically, and thus it _does_ require killer hardware. I'm sure you could play it fine on the K6 but that's not exactly how it was meant to feel.
Running the game on a 1Ghz athlon 256 ram geforce2 GTS, you still experience slight ocasional slowdowns.
my point is, yes it does require top hardware, but it's worth it to many people, because the game kicks ass.
Maybe I've been reading too much about The Semantic Web and some of the other things going on at M.I.T. with Berners-Lee and Dertouzos, but I believe this disparity between hardware capability and software capability will bring about the mythical "Next Big Thing".
Yes, I'm talking about Star Trek. Maybe not the inter-galactic brouhaha, but definitely the human-computer interaction. We already have decent speech-to-text software; now the folks at M.I.T. and Big Blue (and others) are making advances in speech recognition. It won't be too long before your computer can "understand" what you want it to do, act on it, and give you the results--all with a mere fraction of the effort today's "user-friendly" apps require of you.
I'm making the assumption that there will be enough capital to finance this intensive research. If that fails, then the hardware manufacturers can fall back on their current model, which consists of salespersons telling naive consumers that their pc will run MS Word 50% faster with the new Pentium XX chip...
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
What's this guy talking about? 350MHz and old? I'd say such a system is fresh out of the box. I wouldn't even consider my pentium pro (underclocked at 166MHz --- a few decibels less noise without the fan!) an old system and I know people with even older systems. The only things I have upgraded is added memory (helped a lot with the amount of small programs I run), bought a quieter hard disk and power supply. But then again, none of the new software, especially games, is usable on it --- no 3D card; I don't like plastic polygons. But I don't need those crappy, bloated pieces of software. Older, simpler software/games is/was better. (No, you do not want to try to run mozilla on this system: it sometimes renders faster than netscape 4.x (and 3.x on those few pages it is slow with), yes, but the interface is even sluggier than a 1200bps modem line. And it takes virtually years to start it.)
Yet another very informed article from Sharky. I think the point argued was indeed a good one. I for one know for a fact that the driving force behind all my PC upgrades has been for killer apps (ok games) and not penis envy.
When Quake 2 came out I upgraded my mobo to AGP so I could buy a RivaTNT. Likewise when Unreal Tournament/Quake 3 etc. surfaced I shelled out on a new chip, a GeForce 2 and some more RAM.
Also, the argument that big player hardware developers (Intel/IBM/AMD) should back leading edge software is an interesting one. However, I don't want to get to the stage where I'll have to buy the Intel version of a chipset in order to play my favourite game.
--
--
Democracy is the art of saying "nice doggy" while subtly reaching for a large stone.
I'm purchasing a new machine for tribes 2 as we speak. It makes my pathetic p3 / 550 cry like a little baby. Also, Black and White also runs like crap. Sure, it will run on less, but its not really all that fun...
Seriously, having a great coder community here, I ask: Do you write bloated code intentionally?
If so, my p!! 233 scorns you.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Last I checked, p3's and T-Birds use different sockets. Like 370 and A(420)
Just a freindly word of caution, my freind. Look into it.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
I think recent reaction of low resource applications is a reaction by the software community to the consumers disgust at having to upgrade thier pc everytime a new piece of software comes out.
Not to mention the fact that most software developers are using outdated pc's themselves. At my company we upgrade departments on a rotating schedule and while I'm due for an upgrade month now, I have been using a P2 266 for the last year.
Obviously if the development pc is slow and the market still demands nice easy to use, but very complicated software, the software needs to be streamed lined at every possible turn.
Eventually, A piece of software will come out that is both important/cool enough to need, and is bloated enough to need to upgrade for, but I'm glad it isn't happening constantly.
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
The next big thing is broadband. In the short term, broadband will allow for huge downloads, such as movies, that will justify bigger HDs. Freenet purportedly works best when you give it several gigs of HD space and a mega-fast internet connection. People have always wanted a better GUI. How about flat touchscreens and voice activation? Organic LEDs will allow for Star Trek-style touchpads with full PC functionality. And as voice recognition improves and is better integrated into the OS, microphone sales should improve. Streaming movies could make popular cheap PCs with fast internet connections, great monitors and sound systems. But as for the current uses of PCs, I think they've hit their limit. We already have photorealistic graphics via the Geforce 3. Music is about as good as it can get with MP3, Vorbis, WMA, whatever. I think the future lies with devices and servers. It is from them that we shall see the sort of growth that we enjoyed in the mid 90s.
I like this man!
I dont think so. I have a 766 mhz/128 megs of RAM system running wonderfully fast, but its not enough! I always wish I had more speed, I could really use alot more speed, thats why I want a dual processing Athlon system. I cant use less. Maybe he's right, maybe no ONE program can slow down his system and certainly not mine. At the lowest settings. OK, so Alice (which I really want to get) can run on his system fine, but what if yuo like higher resulutions? Faster framerates? The ability to run at all, isnt the ability to run well! And another thing is that many people are multitasking the hell out of their computers! I have at least 20 apps at start-up and I use them all too!
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Thats because of the damn GUI they have. I hate it. Its the only thing I dont like about Mozilla. Try K-Meleon.. its new and still in beta, but it uses NGLayout (mozilla's rendering software) with a normal GUI that doesnt take so much out of the system.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Ok, dont laugh people.. Im stuck on an Me system. It doesnt seem like they have IE integrated like that anymore. It's still used alot for many things, but its not so entangled. IE can crash and explorer is still fine.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
its been released for free now.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Simple - no game publisher seems to want to release stuff that really taxes the hardware. They are scared shitless by the prospect that 'mainstream market' (who generally have sub-par 'major PC manufacturer'-branded machines with underpowered 3D cards) will skip their latest game, so it must run on the 'massmarket' setup.
It's commonplace to still see games that claim they run on P2-233Mhz,32MB ram and 8MB 3D accelerator. Sure, they actually need something like 400Mhz, 64MB and 16MB 3D accelerator to run well, but thats still a setup you no longer can even buy. Every 3D card nowdays tends to have at least 32MB ram, main memory is usually nowdays 128MB, and 256MB setups are becoming common. On the CPU side, it's not cost-effective to buy anything below 600-700Mhz anymore. Yet I cannot find a game that really requires a 1GHz+ setup.
Tribes 2 (just released two weeks ago) is the only one that comes close, and even that can be 'downgraded' to run acceptably on low-end setups. Anyway, it's the first game that keeled over and died using maxed-out settings on my 850Mhz Classic Athlon, 256MB Ram and GeForce 2 GTS. Few others run bit slow, but this was the first one that required major downturning of 3D graphics settings.
So right now I have one game that asks me to go get that 1.33GHz Thunderbird and a new motherboard - and I consider myself to be a serious gamer.
No wonder mainstream users aren't upgrading!
He mentioned that the doom fails on 66mhz 486.
Well I had 33mhz 486DX and it flied, actually.
There was couple of reasons.
a) 256kb of L2 cache on mainboard=fast.
b) 8mb of FAST ram. [bit faster rated than average]
c) 1MB trident SVGA gfx card.
For dukenukem my machine was speedy enough after some tweaking in settings. And that had minimum speed rating of 66mhz486!!
The minimum ratings of ancient days was for assumption that the system had lousy gfx card, that slowed the system down, and slow memory, and little cache. The addition of L2 cache to mainboard, over doubled the performance, the good gfx cards too increased the performance a lot.
And games got 3D cards that took the last part of equation of requiring more performance. The thing that happened besides CPU:s getting faster was that other chips took more of the things it was required to do previously. Like drawing cursors, and all the gfx movement commands, and some sound processing is reduced by getting to PCI. Etc...
If there wouldn't been the 3D accelerators you would still need processor upgrades every now and then.
I'm sure the Gaming industry could easily use all the CPU power you can give it nicely. But issues are that they want as large market as possible, so they make it for large audience, that has lower end boxes too! I know that a GOOD AI could eat, all the cycles in your CPU. But the design requirements for it are larger, it takes more time, and lessens the audience, and it wouldn't sell as much as spending that time just for improving the LOOKS!!! [GF2 seller.]
And by good AI I don't mean few and smart like some games, did I mean MANY and SMART. And of course the AI for RTS, that don't cheat, could be nice. Especially, one that has smart soldiers on both sides, that don't just stand around when a soldier thats next to them gets shot. Or a RTS with EVERY soldier are smart.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
It compiles fast enough, frame rates in games are good enough. My Cable modem doesn't really care about the CPU. I'll probably upgrade to a TBird 1G this summer when I can get it for under $200, but I may not. There really IS NO reason to upgrade for >97% of the population
No thanks. Those guys blew it. They hadd their chance in the late 80's but nobody wanted their overpriced proprietary crap.
That's why you mod it down.
Rendering anomolies. Crashes. Memory hod. Mozilla is an opensource failure.
"their hardware doesn't break down after a few months and their software delivers"
... best games) Visual Sutdio 97 ( best IDE).
Can't remember when a piece of hardware just failed.
"their software delivers" Delivers what?
What software are you talking about. I think I'm pretty typical. I run IE5.5 (best browser out there) Office2k (best WP) (quake / Unreal
Sorry overpriced proprietary crap loses again.
IE for the Mac is quite good. And even if it was a single platform app, how does that explain the crappy rendering?
deal with it.
From the article "there are a still a few billion people on the planet who don't own a personal computer. Some of them can actually afford one. Find those people."
Of course, for that to work, the computer makers have to make two changes. They have to abandon their business model of keeping computers at a nearly constant price by continually increasing the power of even the lowest-end models. And they have to make them work for people that just want to use them as tools, not mess around with registry settings, etc. (In other words, software unreliability, consequent on the software bloat that has sold the monster systems in the past, is going to become their enemy once they really start mass-marketing.)
This is total nonsense. If you extend a class, your new class will definitely NOT copy the members in the base class. Non-object-oriented code will sooner lead to bloated code, since people will copy and paste functions instead of using reusable methods. Look at the size of java class files: they're VERY SMALL. A couple of KB at the most. Bloated code is created by bad programmers (especially when they forget to turn off debugging information).
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - ast
Last I checked, Linux had like 1% of the desktop market. If your computer was running fine before, you wont need linux, if some new application needs a faster computer than yours, you need the app, and chances are that it's not available on linux.
I'm running Whistler Advance Server on a P3 500 with 384MB, no problems whatsoever.
Another machine run whistler pro on Celeron 450 with 80MB, noticebly slower.
If you've enough memory (128MB, which is *cheap* today) the CPU doesn't really matter.
And 700Mhz isn't that old.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
As a note, IE crashing (quite rare, I might add) usually don't take down the shell. If they do, what happens is that you have to wait a second, and everything returns to normal, the only bad side affect is that usually, the icons in the notification area (near the watch) are gone.
What happens on linux when the WM crashes?
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
That is actually a really slow codec as MP3 encoders go. It's faster than the one from faunhofer, but all FhG's codecs are unnecessairly slow. Probably the best all around encoder these days is LAME. It is much faster than FhG, and in my opinion sounds better. It also has teh benefit of being both free and open source as well as having tons of options to play with. IF you're looking for the most out and out speed, that crow would go to Xing. On my PIII 700 it can easily encode at 12-14x realtime. The only problem is, it sounds like crap per bit. Generally I just stick with LAME since it gives me the best per bit sound of any MP3 enocoder I've yet tried, and teh speed is very usable (usually around 4-6x realtime depending on the settings).
I have a copy of AudioActive Production Studio (uses the Faunhofer pro codecs), of Xing MP3 encoder and of LAME and I find that for 99% of what I do, I end up using LAME. I only use Xing when I need to bash out a quick preview to send off to someone and I want it doe fast. About the only time I use AudioActive is for low bitrate (96k or less) stereo files that have to be CBR for whatever reason. I used to use AudioActive all the time, as it was really the only worthwhile codec, however starting with version 3.87 and now espically with the 3.88 version I find that LAME pulls ahead for 99% of what I encode, so AudioActive has taken a back seat.
"After an hour of reading small print I've found exactly two: Clive Barker's Undying and American McGee's Alice. Both require 400MHz and a 16 MB video card, and both, suspiciously, are made by the same company - EA Games." Most games need a system much more powerful then the listed specs. Both alice and undying can barely take running on my geforce 1, amd 700mhz with 256 ram. They purposely understate the specs to get people to buy it even if there machine cant really handle it.
I was joking sparky! I just said that because people are always complaining about Mozilla being bloated. And yes any browser that weighs in at over 3 megs is bloated. See Opera for and example of what a browser should be. If their linux version was even half as good as the Win32 version, I would buy one in an instance. I have nothing against Mozilla. I haven't really used it in months. It may be doing fine.
Bloat isn't necessarily bad. Netscape isn't as bad as you think. At least not the version I'm using. 4.76 on Mandrake 8.0 beta 2.
It was just a joke. Put down the pitchforks.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
Linux users don't need to upgrade because they never right bloated.....ooo wait, Mozilla.
Check that thought.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
Is that why Konqueror and KIO together take 47Mbytes on my machine to display six simple web pages and feel sluggish on a 300MHz PII? (And that's not even counting the X server.) Is that the kind of "small and fast" you are talking about?
The fact is that large software systems like Gnome and KDE need the features that languages like Java, Smalltalk, Objective-C, or Lisp provide. The only choice their authors have is whether they leave the implementation of those features to compiler writers, who know what they are doing, or whether they try to come up with substandard ad-hoc solutions themselves.
Think of it like cars. A Z3 is a very fast car to move a person around. But trying to use a fleet of Z3's to haul a few tons of dirt is much slower and much more costly than using a truck.
Why would I want to write toolkit code (GTK, Qt, ect) in a language that has to be run in a virtual machine?
You wouldn't. You would want to write it in a dynamic language that can be compiled into efficient native code. A language like Java, Objective-C, Lisp, or Smalltalk. Your code in those languages may run 2-5x slower than C/C++ on small benchmark snippets. But for large software systems, there is a good chance that it will end up being faster and use less memory than the C/C++ code. And it will definitely be easier to develop and maintain. For really compute-intensive inner loops, you can always drop back to raw C or C++ no matter what language you use.
Yet, at the same time, many GUI applications under Gnome, KDE, or Windows are huge, complex messes. Trying to modify their behavior is an exercise in patience and persistence, not just because of the mountains of code one has to wade through, but also just because of the lengthy edit/compile/run cycle. And the irony is that, while those systems start out really fast when they are small, taking full advantage of the "fast" languages they are built on, they actually get very slow when they grow, because their authors end up reinventing higher-level language constructs without being able to do a good job at the implementation ("GObject" in Gtk is a recent example).
Even trying to install a sound card for the Linux kernel can take hours in trying to track down the right version and getting bits arranged just right for the superfast but dumb kernel to have its driver nuggets in all the right places.
Let's use the spare cycles and memory to make our systems smarter and easier to deal with. That does not necessarily mean something as complex as "artificial intelligence". It may mean putting a scripting language into the kernel that lets people add simple kernel extensions simply. It may mean using a language like Objective-C to extend an existing C system. It may mean doing GUIs in Python or Smalltalk or even just Java.
There are lots of things wrong with software: it's hard to install, it's hard to manage, and it fails a lot. Yet, both Linux and Windows developers still have an unhealthy obsession with performance (and, often, they don't even achieve it). Simplify your projects and deliver a better product: put those 1GHz+ machines to work by writing in languages that don't force you to optimize every bit. And if you can't get over worrying about performance when you look at that pretty but sluggish scripting language code, close your eyes and think about the good of the US economy.
smaller code != better code . .
... Is Dance Dance Revolution for the dreamcast. But even though the dreamcast had both this and the maracas game as really cool, inventive games you could only get on dreamcast, it still went out of production.
And that was REAL killer apps. Consider how little effective bloatcode would be, if real killer apps didn't do the job.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
About the only reason most people/companies bought new computers was the Y2K scare. It may come as a shock to the disc/propellor/beenie heads but most people and companies are happy with there boxes as long as they work. I have been getting along just fine with my Cyrix 200 from 1995 it runs IE5.5 without a hitch and I am able to run most games on it. However I have not upgraded beyond '95B because I dont need all the Garbage newer OS's have on them to supposedly surf the Net. ...
Matt's addition to Occam's Razor:"The most simple answer is preferred by those that are simple."
More accurately It never did but then again I do a lot of Audio, but so do many other people. Similarly with Video...
well....
the Typical gamer/home user may be satisfied but I'm not...(and a faster hard drive doesn't mean you can make more calculations...)
spas--+--- ###*
He talks about looking for the killer application that will make him go out and spend the big money on a whole new system.
One of the reasons why I have invested time and money in Linux is because it has given new life to my old and obsolete hardware. In fact this is one of the selling points that Linux people often quote. Perhaps Linux is contributing to a lack of interest in new hardware?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
What happens when us tech-junkie Americans end up requiring a 10 GHz chip just to run the latest knock-off of WordPerfect, while the medium- to low-tech world (with coders using nothing but assembly to squeeze every last drop out of their lower-tech stuff) releases something that runs just fine on a 486? Who'll need a $2000 PC when you get better performance on a $200 PDA?
Heck, with computing becoming so important to, well, everything, letting this cycle perpetuate could open big holes to national security in the industrialized nations. Iraq buying up PlayStation 2's has gotten some attention, but what happens when even toasters end up having 600 MHz embedded processors?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we recently seen a lot of people here saying: "I think Mac OS X looks really cool, but I'm not gonna buy an entirely new computer just to use it, only if they port it to X86" So if people aren't gonna buy a new computer even to run an entirely new operating system, what application could possibly make them spend that money?
"The jig is definitely up and unless Microsoft comes out with a version of Word that can read your mind..."
in which case new hardware will be 'required' to 'activate' Windows XP+ so it only works by scanning your mind to verify you are a legally licensed renter. (and implanting a few 'brain banner' adds)
I think (please do correct me gently on this if I am wrong) that the Blade 100 can't run with just any random SCSI card plugged into it. Don't you have to buy a Sun SCSI card, which is kind of pricey?
One of the things that's turned me off to Solaris (I have quite an assortment of older Sparc hardware) is that you don't get an ANSI C compiler in the free deal. I could run Solaris and bring in GCC, but I'd rather just run NetBSD on the hardware instead (although I do hope for cgfourteen support in NetBSD before too much longer).
You spelt "rod" wrong.
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.
Mozilla isn't the only browser available for Linux: Konqueror and Opera are both extremely quick, and unlike IE, aren't running the whole time wasting resources and adding to system instability.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I work for a software company who were doing some work for a chip manufacturer (name begins with 'I' and ends in "el" :).
The product a coleague of mine was writing was supposed to showcase their upcomming new processor, but was deemed to be "too fast" on existing systems. He was told to make it slower, and less efficient - that way they would sell more of their new processors...
As far as I can tell, we aren't getting new products so much as overclocked products.
Lastly, instead of creating bloated products, look to game designers. If they incorporate more lights in their 3D games, we'll have to buy faster comps with better vid cards to play them. Is that good? Not necessarily. Would it be worthwhile to us? My money is on no. Games aren't important enough and no casual user is compiling massive projects at home. Only people like us.
bleh
My 386 had huge external fans, which took up most of the room, and spun up to a deafening, albeit awe-inspiring roar as the machine's tape wheels began rotating in an endless supply of 1's & 0's((c) microsoft). A comforting warm glow seaped through the racks of breadboards from the monolithic tubes silently providing the raw number crunching power which enabled the computer age. In the machines presence one felt as if he were the only person witnessing an ancient godess of spring rise from her slumber and shake away the decaying foliage. Her powerful breath defrosting the soul of the forest, bringing life, brillance and power to the world. Finally a pale grey and awkwardly square sun rose and if you looked closely, on the northwest tip you could see a filecabinet drawer. Dotting its surface were brilliant icons which shown with each of the 256 colors of the rainbow. This was an intel 386, and this... was MS Windows 3.1!