Never underestimate the number of people who want their software to plug & play as reliably as a USB device.
The irony here is, Windows has a better track record for USB sticks and external HDDs.
With Windows, you yank out the cord. With OSX, you unmount volume, yank out the cord, and if you're unlucky it tells you there's a write failure 30 seconds later.;-)
Not intended to be flame. I've used OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6. It pisses me off that they can get some things so right (printers) and others so wrong. (external HDDs)
Did I tell you about the time a Mac fried my HDD enclosure through a firewire port? Or the time it screwed up a camera card by creating a.trashes folder? I had to format that thing in Win2k, because the POS Kodak camera would lock up afterwards.
The sad thing is that environmentalists have a sort of knee jerk reaction every time they hear the word nuclear
I think it's a small but vocal minority. I doubt any environmentalist that thoroughly researched it would recommend coal or gas over nuclear. (those are the current solutions in the US)
Certainly, we should avoid living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor, just to be safe - but denying such an efficient form of energy generation because of possible risks seems fool hearty - and perhaps even hypocritical. For example, there's significantly more evidence out there that genetically modified corn (and the fructose produced from it) is causing all sorts of genetic damage and diseases(obesity, heart disease, etc.), but that doesn't stop us from shoving it down our faces, because it tastes good.
But GPUs are about 100x faster than CPUs at rendering. Imperfect rendering, but with how much they've advanced, they'd do fine for something like Toy Story.
Factor in the doubling of speed every X months, and a high end modern GPU could probably render Toy Story realtime 1600p no problem.
The guy below you says those machines have a theoretical speed of 15mflops. Pretty soon GPUs will be approaching ~2-3tflops (theoretical), so estimating low... 1500000mflops / 15mflops = 100,000 times faster than each of those machines.
If it was a task that doesn't split well, I'd say perhaps software inefficiency would prevent the GPU from managing it - but rendering is what GPUs excel at.
Coders working with the beagleboard have found the A8 to be roughly on-par with a P3 per mhz.
Most SoCs containing an A8, such as the OMAP3530, also have a powerful DSP co-processor and SGX 530 GPU. Skilled coders can offload a lot - and all this consumes about 400mw.
Probably decompressing textures or level data. Even highly optimized, though, that would still take multiple seconds.
But I wasn't arguing against it. I said Superfetch was handy. I was just also pointing out that the numbers were off. If it were RAM usage or CPU usage, and the amounts were off by 600%, you'd understand.:P
So sorry for being anal! I seem to have started an interesting debate, though.
Primary among them - when you page-fault, and then page-in, you do not need to zero-out that page. This is why I said your calculation for the time required to zero out 2GB of memory has no relevance to the topic at hand.
Oh? I was under the impression it was a security requirement for Windows. Something about not letting new processes sniff what was previously held in those memory pages.
SSDs are quick where it counts when loading a game - access times, and read speeds. Most games load a few hundred megabytes off the HDD, and decompress those textures and levels into thousands.
Lets say for argument that a game only needs to load 200MB, then decompress it. The SSD would take about 1 second to load that data, and the CPU would take a while to decompress it.
If you're burdening your CPU with zeroing out pages, it could cause the loading to take longer. As demonstrated, perhaps as much as a half-second longer. When your load times are so short already, this is actually a noticeable amount of time.
If zeroing out pages does not in fact apply, then I'm sorry for making an invalid argument.
I have a Samsung 2343BWX. Rather than having real buttons, it has touch sensors on the front, which lack tactile feedback. An interesting design choice, but probably fine - except that they often don't work for my fingers. I have to sit there tapping them over and over until my finger finally registers. It'll usually accept my thumb, but my smaller fingers simply don't work.
I have a similar problem with the new trackpads on these netbooks. I'll be trying to move the cursor with a single finger, and suddenly the cursor changes into a ball thing, or the webpage zooms in. It's very annoying. Trackpads from 4+ years ago don't seem to have this issue, but the new ones are utter shit.
My favourite trackpad is definitely the old Acer one, with the indented buttons just below it. You can get anywhere on the screen by moving your finger on that pad, without other commands happening accidentally.
People like to say Superfetch has no effect on the start speeds of unfetched programs.
If starting a game - many of which could easily consume 2GB - Superfetch could possibly delay the game starting by a quarter to a half second.
If you have a regular HDD, and the game takes 15 seconds to load, this would not be noticeable. If you have an SSD, and the game takes 3 seconds to load, this might be noticeable. I believe this is why OCZ recommends disabling Superfetch for their SSDs.
I'd say it's relevant, because understanding what's going on lets us make more educated decisions as technology changes.
The older I get the more I wonder about the relationships in our Universe. Now, it may just be cognitive cob-webs but who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem?
I personally don't care. Atheists tend to be almost religious in spreading the word of no-god. I really don't care. I do good stuff with my life. If there's a god when I die, then he may or may not judge me, and something may happen to me, depending on your religion of choice. If there isn't, then I didn't waste any time in church.:P Instead I was being nice to people, and helping people, and playing videogames.
I agree about the hubris part though - in science, theories that seem to fit are often regarded as fact. In 50 years, most of this fact will be completely rewritten. It's good when we re-examine our theories to see if they're completely wrong.
Err.. what is more like 100ms? Where are you getting these numbers from?
The time to zero out 2GB of memory?
It's a pretty simple calculation. Divide the amount of RAM(GB) by your RAM bandwidth(GB/sec) and multiply by 1000(1 sec) to get the miliseconds it might take. Oh sure, there's probably CPU optimizations to speed it up - but your OS is still running and doing other stuff in the background, and has to mark down the pages as free. Those are extra tasks that also take time.
The net result is a guesstimate, but will be pretty close to how long it takes, and is significantly above 30ms unless you have a ton of memory bandwidth.
For a worst case scenario, where there are no optimizations, an average dual-channel DDR3 1600mhz PC would take ~170ms (excluding OS overhead) to free 2GB of RAM. I'm guessing the optimizations are quite extensive, but not enough to hit 30ms to free 2GB. On an older DDR2 machine, it would take even longer.
Perhaps someone else that knows more about CPUs and memory could chime in? A Sun/Java engineer?:P
Can't you just go with a nice Radeon 5 series and run the games under different user accounts on separate monitors? Sure, you'd need tons of RAM and a nice quad-core to back it up... but it should still cost much closer to $1200, if that's what floats your boat.
You seem to like to argue ifs, so I'll argue one back.
If you buy games when on sale, you save $30 per game per copy, helping recoup that $500 quite quickly. You can buy PC controllers for $10 flat, and monitors for $99.99, so you save money on peripherals as well. And then you have a wicked gaming setup that can be used for tons of other stuff.
It's whatever floats your boat, mate. People are good at making whatever they desire the most economical solution.:P
XP has the same caching mechanisms as Linux. By default it uses 4MB of cache(per drive?), but if you enable the LargeSystemCache regkey, or change the setting in the System Properties, it uses all but 4MB.
The memory appears free in the XP task manager - but if you start a program up that you closed recently, it may start instantly with a minimal amount of disk IO.
If you have enough memory, I suggest turning Pagefile off. It makes it so every program is always responsive, because stuff assumed to be cached to disk is actually in memory. The downside is, programs often cache hundreds of megabytes of files they want access to, but don't currently need. This will now all be in RAM, which means you run out way easier. I've had TF2 crash from lack of memory when it hit 1.5GB/3.7GB, because of all the other programs sucking down RAM from the "VM size" column. This is the reason many sites call the XP "No Pagefile" option unstable - even though it works like a charm. When you do run out of RAM, there's nowhere for that memory to go. At least with Superfetch, you still have a Pagefile for when you do run out.
To state it again. This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
It's more like 100ms on an average PC, but yes, you are correct.
But since background stuff will be happening too, maybe 120ms...
If 120ms isn't an acceptable delay, then you need an OS where programs are geared for low disk IO usage, and low memory usage. That will prevent any software from interfering with any other software, giving very fast and consistent performance.
Selection of software is big. For example, the difference between My Uninstaller and Add/Remove in XP is huge. You wouldn't notice on a fast PC, but on an older one you would!
Superfetch is a crutch. A handy one, but it shouldn't actually be necessary to use it have great startup performance for your favourite apps.
Don't be too hasty. The Government would have passed draconian copyright legislation a long time ago (they've tried a few times) if it weren't for the fact that it's a minority government.
Yes, Harper is fully in support of DMCA-type legislation. He tried to pass some anti-circumvention thing a while ago. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad we have Liberals that are doing nothing except blocking this shit.:P
But most PC games have launch sales of at least 10% off. The last game I saw that didn't launch at $39.99 was Mass Effect 2, but it had a sale bringing it down to that within 2 weeks, on both Steam and NCIX. (I'm Canadian)
Aside from the fact that you can usually use one copy on two PCs in the same household, (but perhaps not at the same time) that puts the price at $60 vs $80. Or $60 vs $40.
Or you can just wait a year and pick it up for $10 or $5. (That's what I usually do)
Slashdot Mirror
Never underestimate the number of people who want their software to plug & play as reliably as a USB device.
The irony here is, Windows has a better track record for USB sticks and external HDDs.
With Windows, you yank out the cord. With OSX, you unmount volume, yank out the cord, and if you're unlucky it tells you there's a write failure 30 seconds later. ;-)
Not intended to be flame. I've used OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6. It pisses me off that they can get some things so right (printers) and others so wrong. (external HDDs)
Did I tell you about the time a Mac fried my HDD enclosure through a firewire port? Or the time it screwed up a camera card by creating a .trashes folder? I had to format that thing in Win2k, because the POS Kodak camera would lock up afterwards.
I mean that was a well-reasoned, even-keeled reply in a Microsoft article. Are you sure you're supposed to be on slashdot?
Oh, allow me!
It's a CONSPIRACY! Microsoft orchestrated this leak to suggest that their spy policies are less invasive than Google's!
But we all see through their thinly veiled actions! While this document covers law enforcement, it doesn't cover the NSA or partner companies!
It's clear that this is just more insidious and evil behaviour from Microsoft!
P.S. How'd I do?
My Athlon II X2 + 8800GS pulled 95w from the wall, according to my Kill-A-Watt.
Now I have a Phenom II X4 and GTS 250. It pulls about 107w from the wall when idle, and as much as 160w when gaming. (~175w when encoding video)
The funny thing is, I've seen old P4 computers drawing 250w+.
I downloaded the beta a few hours ago.
The first thing I noticed was, while the Supreme Commander 2 Demo was downloading, the UI kept locking up for ~120 seconds. (0% CPU)
The second thing I noticed was level load times dropped about 30% in TF2.
Browsing feels a whole lot quicker now - except during the freezes. :P
If you have Ubuntu, download Ubuntu Tweak and enable the Firefox betas. I found them to be more stable and more up to date.
The sad thing is that environmentalists have a sort of knee jerk reaction every time they hear the word nuclear
I think it's a small but vocal minority. I doubt any environmentalist that thoroughly researched it would recommend coal or gas over nuclear. (those are the current solutions in the US)
Certainly, we should avoid living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor, just to be safe - but denying such an efficient form of energy generation because of possible risks seems fool hearty - and perhaps even hypocritical. For example, there's significantly more evidence out there that genetically modified corn (and the fructose produced from it) is causing all sorts of genetic damage and diseases(obesity, heart disease, etc.), but that doesn't stop us from shoving it down our faces, because it tastes good.
And we're worried about Nuclear? Why exactly?
But GPUs are about 100x faster than CPUs at rendering. Imperfect rendering, but with how much they've advanced, they'd do fine for something like Toy Story.
Factor in the doubling of speed every X months, and a high end modern GPU could probably render Toy Story realtime 1600p no problem.
The guy below you says those machines have a theoretical speed of 15mflops. Pretty soon GPUs will be approaching ~2-3tflops (theoretical), so estimating low... 1500000mflops / 15mflops = 100,000 times faster than each of those machines.
If it was a task that doesn't split well, I'd say perhaps software inefficiency would prevent the GPU from managing it - but rendering is what GPUs excel at.
As pointed out elsewhere, the NBC Olympic coverage has not kept up with how people want to consume media these days.
But pirates rejoice, because EZTV's coverage has been perfect. :P
Coders working with the beagleboard have found the A8 to be roughly on-par with a P3 per mhz.
Most SoCs containing an A8, such as the OMAP3530, also have a powerful DSP co-processor and SGX 530 GPU. Skilled coders can offload a lot - and all this consumes about 400mw.
Another one is VPSVille.ca It was a tossup between them and VPSLink, but ultimately I decided on them. I'm Canadian. :P
They have a neat VPS management panel. Aside from automated backups, you can also do manual ones.
I doubt OLED will make it to monitors any time soon. It'd have to compete with S-IPS, which is far far cheaper.
Probably decompressing textures or level data. Even highly optimized, though, that would still take multiple seconds.
But I wasn't arguing against it. I said Superfetch was handy. I was just also pointing out that the numbers were off. If it were RAM usage or CPU usage, and the amounts were off by 600%, you'd understand. :P
So sorry for being anal! I seem to have started an interesting debate, though.
Primary among them - when you page-fault, and then page-in, you do not need to zero-out that page. This is why I said your calculation for the time required to zero out 2GB of memory has no relevance to the topic at hand.
Oh? I was under the impression it was a security requirement for Windows. Something about not letting new processes sniff what was previously held in those memory pages.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?47212-Vista-32-64-SSD-Windows-Registry-tweaks
SSDs are quick where it counts when loading a game - access times, and read speeds. Most games load a few hundred megabytes off the HDD, and decompress those textures and levels into thousands.
Lets say for argument that a game only needs to load 200MB, then decompress it. The SSD would take about 1 second to load that data, and the CPU would take a while to decompress it.
If you're burdening your CPU with zeroing out pages, it could cause the loading to take longer. As demonstrated, perhaps as much as a half-second longer. When your load times are so short already, this is actually a noticeable amount of time.
If zeroing out pages does not in fact apply, then I'm sorry for making an invalid argument.
Perhaps not completely changed, but in the literal sense they will be completely rewritten. :P
Poor wording on my part. It's irony that my wording is correct if taken to mean exactly what it says.
Most trackpads and touchscreens don't like me.
I have a Samsung 2343BWX. Rather than having real buttons, it has touch sensors on the front, which lack tactile feedback. An interesting design choice, but probably fine - except that they often don't work for my fingers. I have to sit there tapping them over and over until my finger finally registers. It'll usually accept my thumb, but my smaller fingers simply don't work.
I have a similar problem with the new trackpads on these netbooks. I'll be trying to move the cursor with a single finger, and suddenly the cursor changes into a ball thing, or the webpage zooms in. It's very annoying. Trackpads from 4+ years ago don't seem to have this issue, but the new ones are utter shit.
My favourite trackpad is definitely the old Acer one, with the indented buttons just below it. You can get anywhere on the screen by moving your finger on that pad, without other commands happening accidentally.
People like to say Superfetch has no effect on the start speeds of unfetched programs.
If starting a game - many of which could easily consume 2GB - Superfetch could possibly delay the game starting by a quarter to a half second.
If you have a regular HDD, and the game takes 15 seconds to load, this would not be noticeable. If you have an SSD, and the game takes 3 seconds to load, this might be noticeable. I believe this is why OCZ recommends disabling Superfetch for their SSDs.
I'd say it's relevant, because understanding what's going on lets us make more educated decisions as technology changes.
The older I get the more I wonder about the relationships in our Universe. Now, it may just be cognitive cob-webs but who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem?
Oh no! Your brain may be degrading!
I personally don't care. Atheists tend to be almost religious in spreading the word of no-god. I really don't care. I do good stuff with my life. If there's a god when I die, then he may or may not judge me, and something may happen to me, depending on your religion of choice. If there isn't, then I didn't waste any time in church. :P Instead I was being nice to people, and helping people, and playing videogames.
I agree about the hubris part though - in science, theories that seem to fit are often regarded as fact. In 50 years, most of this fact will be completely rewritten. It's good when we re-examine our theories to see if they're completely wrong.
Ex: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/11/24/1955209/New-Theory-of-Gravity-Decouples-Space-amp-Time
Err.. what is more like 100ms? Where are you getting these numbers from?
The time to zero out 2GB of memory?
It's a pretty simple calculation. Divide the amount of RAM(GB) by your RAM bandwidth(GB/sec) and multiply by 1000(1 sec) to get the miliseconds it might take. Oh sure, there's probably CPU optimizations to speed it up - but your OS is still running and doing other stuff in the background, and has to mark down the pages as free. Those are extra tasks that also take time.
The net result is a guesstimate, but will be pretty close to how long it takes, and is significantly above 30ms unless you have a ton of memory bandwidth.
For a worst case scenario, where there are no optimizations, an average dual-channel DDR3 1600mhz PC would take ~170ms (excluding OS overhead) to free 2GB of RAM. I'm guessing the optimizations are quite extensive, but not enough to hit 30ms to free 2GB. On an older DDR2 machine, it would take even longer.
Perhaps someone else that knows more about CPUs and memory could chime in? A Sun/Java engineer? :P
http://www.aptera.com/
I'd snap one of these up in a shot, if they ever become available and affordable.
Delays, delays, delays!
Can't you just go with a nice Radeon 5 series and run the games under different user accounts on separate monitors? Sure, you'd need tons of RAM and a nice quad-core to back it up... but it should still cost much closer to $1200, if that's what floats your boat.
You seem to like to argue ifs, so I'll argue one back.
If you buy games when on sale, you save $30 per game per copy, helping recoup that $500 quite quickly. You can buy PC controllers for $10 flat, and monitors for $99.99, so you save money on peripherals as well. And then you have a wicked gaming setup that can be used for tons of other stuff.
It's whatever floats your boat, mate. People are good at making whatever they desire the most economical solution. :P
XP has the same caching mechanisms as Linux. By default it uses 4MB of cache(per drive?), but if you enable the LargeSystemCache regkey, or change the setting in the System Properties, it uses all but 4MB.
The memory appears free in the XP task manager - but if you start a program up that you closed recently, it may start instantly with a minimal amount of disk IO.
If you have enough memory, I suggest turning Pagefile off. It makes it so every program is always responsive, because stuff assumed to be cached to disk is actually in memory. The downside is, programs often cache hundreds of megabytes of files they want access to, but don't currently need. This will now all be in RAM, which means you run out way easier. I've had TF2 crash from lack of memory when it hit 1.5GB/3.7GB, because of all the other programs sucking down RAM from the "VM size" column. This is the reason many sites call the XP "No Pagefile" option unstable - even though it works like a charm. When you do run out of RAM, there's nowhere for that memory to go. At least with Superfetch, you still have a Pagefile for when you do run out.
To state it again. This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
It's more like 100ms on an average PC, but yes, you are correct.
But since background stuff will be happening too, maybe 120ms...
If 120ms isn't an acceptable delay, then you need an OS where programs are geared for low disk IO usage, and low memory usage. That will prevent any software from interfering with any other software, giving very fast and consistent performance.
Selection of software is big. For example, the difference between My Uninstaller and Add/Remove in XP is huge. You wouldn't notice on a fast PC, but on an older one you would!
Superfetch is a crutch. A handy one, but it shouldn't actually be necessary to use it have great startup performance for your favourite apps.
Don't be too hasty. The Government would have passed draconian copyright legislation a long time ago (they've tried a few times) if it weren't for the fact that it's a minority government.
Yes, Harper is fully in support of DMCA-type legislation. He tried to pass some anti-circumvention thing a while ago. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad we have Liberals that are doing nothing except blocking this shit. :P
Three words:
Old Fat PS3.
Vote with your money and get a nice Linux PC for cheap.
But most PC games have launch sales of at least 10% off. The last game I saw that didn't launch at $39.99 was Mass Effect 2, but it had a sale bringing it down to that within 2 weeks, on both Steam and NCIX. (I'm Canadian)
Aside from the fact that you can usually use one copy on two PCs in the same household, (but perhaps not at the same time) that puts the price at $60 vs $80. Or $60 vs $40.
Or you can just wait a year and pick it up for $10 or $5. (That's what I usually do)