Back on a university co-op term, I was working tech-support for a stock market trading floor in downtown Toronto.
So one of the traders calls me over in a panic (to these guys, every minute of downtime could be costing them thousands). His monitor is blank. I nudge the mouse. It was his fucking screen saver. *sigh*.
Is that some sort of attempt at a pr0n joke?;P By "intensive usage" I mean having a dozen or so tabs open all day at work developing various websites and having stuff like phpMyAdmin, and Java/PHP docs open (and the occasional/. story;). On a 3Ghz windows machine with a GB of RAM. Bread and butter stuff.
By "ridiculously slow" I mean it gets to the point where when you click on a tab, there is a 2 or 3 second delay before it switches. And something is not releasing resources because I can close the program and the process is invariably still running with 140MB+ until I End Task it.
I notice this behaviour on my home computer too, so I'm confident it's the browser and not the machine.
Yup.. no argument on that point. They do indeed LOOK like they belong to the story above, which is dumb.
I note they've changed them now to be rectangular instead of with rounded corners to differentiate them from the main stories. I guess that helps somewhat.
Use uTorrent. You can elect not to download individual files. In fact in the latest version, it gives you a checklist of files right in the initial download dialog to select or deselect files, even before you start the torrent.
And it does it with a ~100KB executable with no bigass Java VM in the background. uTorrent is simply as feature rich as Azureus, but way smaller, lighter, and faster. I used Azureus for a long time, but once I tried uTorrent once I never looked back.
"Well, if you stick some headlines in a little grey box attached to a "main" story, wouldn't you assume they are related to the main story?"
Maybe at first glance, but if every single one does NOT actually relate to the story above, I would realize that assumption was wrong...
Re:Browser stagnation?
on
IE7 Leaked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
For Firefox, I want it to stop becoming ridiculously slow after intensive usage, and continue to use 140MB in the background after I close all of its windows...
Um, it's obviously spaghetti sauce bestowed upon us by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, spread into a fine paste by the vastness of space, and given motion by His Noodly Appendage.
I don't know what encoding settings you're using, but high-res (640x480) hour-long TV shows are regularly released in the "scene" at half-CD size, or 350MB. Heck, full movies are aimed at CD size. Drop 3 x 650MB DivX's on a 2GB card and you've got 6 hours of video ready to go.
As fasr as resizing goes, I've shrunken widescreen movies down to 320x172, with a one-pass quality-based XVid encoding with a quality of 3 (1 being highest, 32 lowest), with decent 160kbit sound, and can easily get a full 2 hour movie to about 300-350MB which plays perfect on the GP2X.
At that rate, you could fit something like 12 hours of excellent quality (for a 320x240 screen that is) video on a 2GB card. I want to try fitting the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy on one someday. Nudge the quality down a bit more (quality 4, 128kbit sound?) and I think an entire season (say 24 episodes at 45 minutes each) of TV is completely achievable in 2GB.
But hey, you are right, if you are looking for a video jukebox, a hard-disk based unit will definitely be more cost/capacity efficient than this. I'll keep my GP2X myself though... it is literally a solid state, general purpose palmtop computer.
Just so you know, there is a dedicated group of devs working on what they call "HH" or "Hardcore Homebrew" for the GP2X, basically a micro OS that will skip Linux entirely and run directly on the bare hardware.
That would be pretty nice if it gains some traction, lose Linux's overhead, and the 20-second boot time as well.
Look for a thread on the GP32x.com gp2X dev forums called "The Penguin Must Die":)
It is somewhat amusing that we finally get a sweet little Linux handheld, and people are instantly trying to remove Linux.:) On the other hand, I think Linux has been a major benefit so far, it is amazing how quickly things are being ported to this device.
I'm a GP2X early adopter, and owned a GP32 (2, actually).
To answer some of your points:
I've found DivX/XVid playback very smooth, in fact noticeably smoother than both mine and a friend's standalone players. I've seen one clip so far that was jerky, and chalked it up to the encoding. But, this thing is running mplayer so it should be able to easily take upgrades and improved codec support.
Emulators: It looks like you've only tried NK's emulators. Significantly, he released very early versions of NES and SNES emus with no interface beyond a ROM selector, and requires the installation of SDL libs to run. Most people are pretty dissapointed with them. But give it some time, the damn thing's only been out for a month.
You want GOOD emulation? Try Reesy's DrMD Sega Genesis emulator. It's pretty close to PERFECT. Ditto for the PCEngine (TurboGrafx-16) emulator. So right there, you've got hundreds and hundreds of great game possibilities. There are also tons of other emulators in various stages... I understand NeoGeo is quite good but I haven't tried it yet. (There's so much else to try!) I have C64 emulation running well enough to play Impossible Mission perfectly, which makes me very happy.
There's also ScummVM for Lucasarts emu (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, etc), and really sweet ports of Quake, Duke3D, and Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control II).
There is new, great shit coming out every single day. Just in the last 2 days we've seen: An early but playable port of Exult (Ultima VII engine), a new version of Duke3D, a Mandelbrot generator written in ARM assembler, an early Flash player (no sound), new version of MAME, a remake of PacMan, an Atari2600 emu, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and various homebrew games and utils.
Lacking software??? Not a chance. I lack the time to try all the existing software and it's only been out for a month!
I bought this thing for emulation and am already very happy with what is possible, and I have complete faith (based on my experience with the GP32) that there will be perfect NES and SNES emus out within a few months. DivX/XVid/MP3/Ogg playback, ebook reading, and native games are just gravy. Heck, nobody is even really tapping the power of the second CPU yet that I know of. Endless potential in this baby, and the community is just exploding for it.
Slashdot Mirror
This one is classic.
Back on a university co-op term, I was working tech-support for a stock market trading floor in downtown Toronto.
So one of the traders calls me over in a panic (to these guys, every minute of downtime could be costing them thousands). His monitor is blank. I nudge the mouse. It was his fucking screen saver. *sigh*.
Is that some sort of attempt at a pr0n joke? ;P By "intensive usage" I mean having a dozen or so tabs open all day at work developing various websites and having stuff like phpMyAdmin, and Java/PHP docs open (and the occasional /. story ;). On a 3Ghz windows machine with a GB of RAM. Bread and butter stuff.
By "ridiculously slow" I mean it gets to the point where when you click on a tab, there is a 2 or 3 second delay before it switches. And something is not releasing resources because I can close the program and the process is invariably still running with 140MB+ until I End Task it.
I notice this behaviour on my home computer too, so I'm confident it's the browser and not the machine.
Re track record: http://www.brilliantscreen.com/Clients.asp
Re Whedon: http://whedonesque.com/comments/9347 (They say nothing is "official", but no flat out denials I can see)
Have to wait and see on this one. I have my doubts Fox will give up the rights though, even if everything else works out great.
Yup.. no argument on that point. They do indeed LOOK like they belong to the story above, which is dumb.
3 (see first update)
I note they've changed them now to be rectangular instead of with rounded corners to differentiate them from the main stories. I guess that helps somewhat.
If you have any better ideas on how to improve the appearance, CmdrTaco indicated yesterday he is open to suggestions: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/19/17525
Use uTorrent. You can elect not to download individual files. In fact in the latest version, it gives you a checklist of files right in the initial download dialog to select or deselect files, even before you start the torrent.
And it does it with a ~100KB executable with no bigass Java VM in the background. uTorrent is simply as feature rich as Azureus, but way smaller, lighter, and faster. I used Azureus for a long time, but once I tried uTorrent once I never looked back.
"Well, if you stick some headlines in a little grey box attached to a "main" story, wouldn't you assume they are related to the main story?"
Maybe at first glance, but if every single one does NOT actually relate to the story above, I would realize that assumption was wrong...
For Firefox, I want it to stop becoming ridiculously slow after intensive usage, and continue to use 140MB in the background after I close all of its windows...
Seriously, what's with the memory leak?
Not all geeks are control freaks, and Windows is (unfortunately) essential for your gamer-variety geek. ;)
Um, it's obviously spaghetti sauce bestowed upon us by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, spread into a fine paste by the vastness of space, and given motion by His Noodly Appendage.
Dude! Rechargable NiMH AAs! I haven't used disposable AA's in years.
I don't know what encoding settings you're using, but high-res (640x480) hour-long TV shows are regularly released in the "scene" at half-CD size, or 350MB. Heck, full movies are aimed at CD size. Drop 3 x 650MB DivX's on a 2GB card and you've got 6 hours of video ready to go.
As fasr as resizing goes, I've shrunken widescreen movies down to 320x172, with a one-pass quality-based XVid encoding with a quality of 3 (1 being highest, 32 lowest), with decent 160kbit sound, and can easily get a full 2 hour movie to about 300-350MB which plays perfect on the GP2X.
At that rate, you could fit something like 12 hours of excellent quality (for a 320x240 screen that is) video on a 2GB card. I want to try fitting the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy on one someday. Nudge the quality down a bit more (quality 4, 128kbit sound?) and I think an entire season (say 24 episodes at 45 minutes each) of TV is completely achievable in 2GB.
But hey, you are right, if you are looking for a video jukebox, a hard-disk based unit will definitely be more cost/capacity efficient than this. I'll keep my GP2X myself though... it is literally a solid state, general purpose palmtop computer.
Just so you know, there is a dedicated group of devs working on what they call "HH" or "Hardcore Homebrew" for the GP2X, basically a micro OS that will skip Linux entirely and run directly on the bare hardware.
:)
:) On the other hand, I think Linux has been a major benefit so far, it is amazing how quickly things are being ported to this device.
That would be pretty nice if it gains some traction, lose Linux's overhead, and the 20-second boot time as well.
Look for a thread on the GP32x.com gp2X dev forums called "The Penguin Must Die"
It is somewhat amusing that we finally get a sweet little Linux handheld, and people are instantly trying to remove Linux.
I'm a GP2X early adopter, and owned a GP32 (2, actually).
To answer some of your points:
I've found DivX/XVid playback very smooth, in fact noticeably smoother than both mine and a friend's standalone players. I've seen one clip so far that was jerky, and chalked it up to the encoding. But, this thing is running mplayer so it should be able to easily take upgrades and improved codec support.
Emulators: It looks like you've only tried NK's emulators. Significantly, he released very early versions of NES and SNES emus with no interface beyond a ROM selector, and requires the installation of SDL libs to run. Most people are pretty dissapointed with them. But give it some time, the damn thing's only been out for a month.
You want GOOD emulation? Try Reesy's DrMD Sega Genesis emulator. It's pretty close to PERFECT. Ditto for the PCEngine (TurboGrafx-16) emulator. So right there, you've got hundreds and hundreds of great game possibilities. There are also tons of other emulators in various stages... I understand NeoGeo is quite good but I haven't tried it yet. (There's so much else to try!) I have C64 emulation running well enough to play Impossible Mission perfectly, which makes me very happy.
There's also ScummVM for Lucasarts emu (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, etc), and really sweet ports of Quake, Duke3D, and Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control II).
There is new, great shit coming out every single day. Just in the last 2 days we've seen: An early but playable port of Exult (Ultima VII engine), a new version of Duke3D, a Mandelbrot generator written in ARM assembler, an early Flash player (no sound), new version of MAME, a remake of PacMan, an Atari2600 emu, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and various homebrew games and utils.
Lacking software??? Not a chance. I lack the time to try all the existing software and it's only been out for a month!
I bought this thing for emulation and am already very happy with what is possible, and I have complete faith (based on my experience with the GP32) that there will be perfect NES and SNES emus out within a few months. DivX/XVid/MP3/Ogg playback, ebook reading, and native games are just gravy. Heck, nobody is even really tapping the power of the second CPU yet that I know of. Endless potential in this baby, and the community is just exploding for it.