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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
Am I the only one who can't open the first link in a new tab in Firefox? It wants me to open it with "FirefoxHTML", which opens it in the current tab.
really, it is that bad.. take a look at some of these power consumption figures for intel's "dual module chip."
3 89
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.
It's like having a seperate harddrive for all your apps and essentials than all your media. That way the core you are really using can do 100% what you want (ie play games) I don't know enough about the technology to really say for sure, but this seems like it is just a more efficient division of labor, and you could get excellent performance out of it. An another note, though, I can't believe people have that much bloatware that they actually NEED an ENTIRE second core to run it all. I hate modern software. I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.
The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
But Windows really does have truly horrific levels of fug (in the Pratchettian sense of 'air so full of toxic waste you can cut it with a knife') in it.
What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.
lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources (AMD K6-2 @ 500 MHz) for more than 6 seconds... With nothing else running besides IceWM and Firefox. Granted it was flash, but hell, my browser had to load the required libraries to load his/her website, much like a WP loads libraries. Oh, and Open Office actually loads faster (~4 secs). So who is wasting resources?
bash: rtfm: command not found
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
My experience is that it's less to do with how computer literate you are and more to do with how tasteful you are. If you think McDonald's decor is fun then you'd probably like Flash. If you think Radio Shack is the bomb then you'd probably like a plain website with no images or CSS or anything.. just paragraph aftyer paragraph of raw unadorned text. The rest of us like a few functional images and some CSS on a website that is actually functional and easy to navigate. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
get perpendicular perhaps?h ead/pr/
c one/. Please try to bear in mind the audience it was intended for. this leans towards the idea that the web is leaning towards ending up to be a replacement for tv, or 'surfing from the couch' as I've recently heard it put.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
attacking flash for being useless is like attacking tv for being useless. 90%or so, of the time you are right, but to someone else it's quite important.
I think soap operas are not worth the tape they are recorded on, some people can't live without them. personally I feel most websites would benefit by having little to no advanced formatting, much less flash as, for the most part, I am looking for the information in the page rather than the joy of lookng at it. and I definitely agree that flash should not be used as a place where information should be searchable or bookmarkable.
That said, for those who wish to make pretty moving pictures for their website, flash makes it very easy to create. bearing in mind that the flash is there to attract a different sort of person than you. By all means, avoid that site, or advertiser. there is a flash ad on this site that has a couple of horn blasts, and If I ever meet the marketing manager who thought that was a good idea, I will blast an airhorn in their ear.)
dhtml and css, though possibly more proper, are not easy by comparison, if they were, something like google maps would have arrived sooner.
as for another counter example, I was recently introduced to someone from ben and jerry's, who created thishttp://www.benandjerrys.com/fun_stuff/cow_to_
we who tend to treat the web like an encyclopaedia will rue this, but we are a regrettably small minority. tv has annoying commercials, now movies do, and so will follow, or lead, the web.
one can only hope that there are more instances of things that are really good, (like school house rock) than really bad.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
The same number of miles as my your horse. Except your horse is wearing a dress, and a hat, and clogs. And sometimes you have to feed it more hay because the clogs are icky.
For all the claims of "Techno luddite" he isn't talking about that scale. If word processors want to add AI to do predictive work (markov chain type prediction ala itap) that is FINE with me, but enough with the translucent flyaways -- it isn't so terrible to have them, but allow us to disable them.
The problem is not when I fire up word/ooo/staroffice, the problem is when I fire them up when I have 123123 other things running -- if they ran like they were on a 300 mhz celeron [i.e. conservative with resources] the system wouldn't bog down when I'm trying to add a note to some documentation.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.
Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).
All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.
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