Someone already posted it, but in case anyone else is interested, here's the actors bio off of Starwars.com-- seems he's playing a character titled "Count Dooku".
Whichever person with moderator points modded this Off-Topic, please shoot yourself, and spare us more of your idiotic moderation skills. Suggesting Kylix is a completely fair stance.
The thing is, almost all the features desired are already handled in the class framework for Delphi (the exception being Serial communications, which really are quite simple under Win32, which leaves writing your own cross-platform class(es) to handle it, or finding someone elses and porting them or using them). About the only time you'd ever use a Win32 API call is for a feature that wasn't implemented that you needed, and that's what {$IFDEF...} is for.
How can you say it wouldn't be? It still would be, because personal experience (read: how well it runs in the REAL WORLD, not in IW's "benchmarks") would automatically tell me that "Gee, look, it performs as well as or better than Windows 2000 does for our users, and adds new features and functionality that we could really use".
So, what exactly was your point?
On a side note, for a write-up of some kernel (some not-so-kernel, really) that I mentioned in my original reply in this thread, check out MSDN Online. It's the same article that's printed in the magazine, complete with images where needed.. It sheds some light on the prefetching optimizations I mentioned.
Check out CNN's write-up of the teaser; apperently the author of this article thought it'd be worthwhile to list tons of thoughts of people who posted on starwars.com's message boards, such as these--
-- It was "dark" in style, according to at least two posters.
-- Natalie Portman, who stars as Queen Amidala, looked "hot."
"It was freakin' awesome!!!!" posted jacenggf.
I dunno... the middle one, about Natalie Portman, just struck me as funny for a news outlet to quote.
His link works so long as you (if you're in Windows AND IE) right-click the link and "Copy Shortcut" (Slashdot's line-wrapping crap inserts a space in the text URL, so it's semi-broken I believe).
Re:Nintendo's Warranty
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Gamecube Guts
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· Score: 1
Yep, completly true. Of course, it IS possible that the US GameCube will have a longer warranty than all of the other previous consoles, but I really doubt it. (This 90-day warranty issue goes back as far as the original NES, so I don't see it changing. =))
About a mandatory warranty-- it sounds nice on one hand, but on the other it doesn't. As long as the consumer is made aware of the short warranty, I figure the "let the buyer beware" position should suffice. (And the warranty, atleast for Nintendo products, is almost always on the box someplace.) It is interesting that it's required in the UK though, I didn't know that. =)
Re:Gamecube control is a cheap piece o' crap
on
Gamecube Guts
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· Score: 1
It still beats the X-Box controller, which was seemingly designed for people with HUGE hands. Their Japanese controller is a lot better designed..
BTW, the guy who gutted his Cube just lost the warranty...
Oh HEAVENS, not the warranty!
Let's think about this for a second--
GameCube isn't released in the United States yet, this guys is most likely an import, and can't be serviced in the United States for warranty repair anyways.
In the United States anyways, Nintendo's warranty usually lasts a whopping 90 days, after that you're on your own anyways. (Whee, THREE whole months of assurance that the thing doesn't have any defects-- Nintendo sure is confident in their QA department, aren't they? (Of course, I should note, as far as I know every other console maker has a similarly short warranty period, so I guess they're all in the same boat regarding quality assurance)).
It'd be neat if the warranty lasted longer though, it really would. I'd think there should be some pride involved with this kind of thing.
Re:Glad someone has the guts !
on
Gamecube Guts
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· Score: 1
Some of us don't even buy PC's, we buy parts and assemble them ourselves. [snicker]
Seriously, I imagine most people here are familiar with the inner workings of PC's and/or hardware of some variety, and most are likely inquisitive enough to tear apart a PC to see what components were used (for pre-assembled systems, anyways).
They did test other apps besides Office apps-- they tested Adobe Illustrator. And the point is moot-- these optimizations apply to ANY application which uses DLL's to share functionality; XP notes the order in which these DLL's are loaded, then makes a special pre-fetch file which helps the OS better load the app during the next startup.
Illustrator's start time improvement wasn't as pronounced as Word's start time improvement, but it was still a few seconds quicker, indicating that the optimizations do work for any vendor's app (even if that app wasn't specifically targetted for XP).
No kidding, the latest issue of Maximum PC has a review of Windows XP and gave it a 10/Kick-Ass rating. In their benchmarks, they show disk access speeds (as taken from Sandra on both 2K and XP), as well as app start-up speed (time it takes to start an app like Illustrator or Word). ESPECIALLY in the startup area, XP kicked ass. In 2000, Word would take (according to their benchmarks) around 6 seconds to be fully interactive. On XP, though, it took less than a second. According to the issue of MSDN I just got, which has an article on kernel enhancements (which some aren't really kernel enhancements, but they're all lumped together anyways), they state that load times were improved because of a multi-pronged effort in the system to optimize application startup. When applied to the boot process (another thing that Maximum PC showed a major improvement with under XP compared to 2000), the system goes so far as to have the defragmenter take all of the important startup files and put them into one contiguous space (thus allowing the boot loader to read the whole mess in at once).
I mean, I shouldn't be surprised that Taco and crew would be this biased, but c'mon! Atleast do some honest reporting, and not people-programming. We all have our reasons to hate MS, but XP certainly isn't one of them (atleast, not for the reasons stated in the article-- performance being the big one).
Actually in Windows '95 with LFN, the long filenames are stored as one big filename as you described for Unix filenames, except AFAIK they always use 16-bit Unicode characters to create the name and terminate it with a NULL (two 0 bytes in a row).
As another person already pointed out, in normal FAT the '.' isn't stored as part of the filename though, and an extra byte isn't allocated for null termination-- the structure is exactly 8 bytes for the filename, and 3 bytes for the extension. The '.' is silently inserted by the OS.
Heh, me too.. I remembered ordering one earlier this year and wondering if I'd actually ever receive it (I ordered it along with a few other things, as I recall, Sega shipped everything but the Broadband adapter, and I eventually called out of concern, only to have the rep on the other end of the line attempt to restore my faith.. thankfully, it did come).
It's REALLY too bad Sega turned what was an otherwise awesome toy into a concrete brick by doing that BIOS tweak in later models (including mine, unfortunately) that disabled CD-R usability.. [sigh] I'd have liked to have seen NetBSD or Linux running on this thing. =(
I'm so sorry-- who's fucked up idea was it to charge so much for Worldgroup/MBBS? =) Maybe a quick history of Galacticomm, from someone who was inside the company, would help (if you're feeling so inclined, anyway). EG: More details on staff that worked on it, as well as info on if/when the company changed hands, and so on.
Funny stuff so far though, I never knew that he was this screwed up.
Worldgroup got sold off to worldgroupware.com, which STILL gouges potential customers for every penny and dime they can-- case in point; you want to buy it (as if buying a BBS software package is worth ANYTHING, but let's pretend it is) you have to fork out not $100, not $200, not $500, not even $1000.. you have to pay $7000 for the privilege of running their software. Want more than 128 users at a time? You have to CALL and ask to be graced with that heart-attack inducing price (apperently they cared enough about peoples' health to know that if you saw the price for the 128 user or less copy, you might not be able to handle the price they demand for >128 users).
All this, and the software hasn't been updated in a few years, and the support just doesn't exist. Galacticomm I think still exists, but what they market/sell I don't know.. they may still be up at gcomm.com, if you're curious anyways.. Galacticomm also changed their name to "netVillage" (their page appears to still be up, and actually, gcomm.com and netvillage.com look entirely different, so don't ask me which one still represents the original gcomm..) during the recent past, and for awhile (and apperently still) try to sell hosting of Worldgroup systems (or their expertise at setting them up and maintaining them) rather than selling the software itself (again though, supposedly worldgroupware.com owns it, so I don't understand this arrangement they have, but shrug).
The old BX chipset doesn't handle the 133 MHz frontside bus that the Tualatin would require, and unlike the issue the guy posting this story described (Intel possibly not being entirely truthful about old 133 FSB mobo's supporting Tualatin), your situation is pretty much sealed. IMHO, I'd grab two 850's, they're cheaper than Tualatin's (which go for over $200, while two P3 850's shouldn't set you back more than $120-130 a piece), and it's a full 400 MHz faster than what you use right now. Short of that, you could just grab a new motherboard (you use a Tyan, you might find the Tyan S2507D motherboard to be right up your alley-- it sports dual Socket 370 slots, uses the latest Via chipset that supports Tualatins, and should be priced at around $100-150 (I haven't found any online yet at Pricewatch.com or Streetprices.com, so you might have to wait a few weeks)).
I run a Tyan Tiger 133 (S1834D), and it's been stable since the day I got it (in case you're worried about issues with Via vs. Intel chipsets, since supposedly the BX was a rock solid mobo (and most attributed this to Intel's BX chipset, which is nice and all, but I think the real issue was that other mobo manufacturers didn't use Via's chipset correctly, or BIOS compatibility was weak). Hope this helps. =)
Yah, that's what I heard anyways, and you're right about IBM's involvement-- to me, IBM has always been the technology leader, but I don't buy their drives because I've had friends who had "bad luck" with them.. Usually the technology gets licensed or copied so fast that the other manufacturers seem to have no problem keeping up (atleast as far as retail offerings go), and usually surpassing IBM at drive size fights (noting that Maxtor and WD both beat IBM to >75GB drives.. I don't think IBM even offers anything better than 75GB yet, I could be wrong though).
It's interesting to me that you have good luck with Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement). Atleast that's what I read sometime back (and naturally I can't find the place I read that, so take this information with a BIG helping of salt).
Also, about Maxtor, I've had nothing but good luck with their drives (as well as WD's, as you noted too), and bad luck with Seagate drives (never tried Quantum, so I can't say one way or the other). The one thing I like about Maxtor is their RMA/return/replacement policy-- you give them a valid credit card number, they put a hold on your account for the price of the drive you're supposedly returning, and they immediatly ship out a replacement drive the next day (before you've even shipped back your defective unit). You have 30 days (I believe) to return the drive before they ding your credit card for the price of the drive.
About the concerns regarding proper handling, you're right about OEM drives, but this guy returned his drive 2 or 3 times, and you'd think the guys running tech support/RMA would have some training on how to handle the drive (if indeed that's the reason the drives are failing). Of course, it could have been any of the other (correct) causes of failure you listed (PC on floor, lots of walking; PC on concrete, tips over or is jarred alot; etc).
If someone can shed some light on the manufacturing processes of Maxtor and WD HDD's, I'd be thankful for the enlightenment though-- I'd hate to be seen as talking out of my ass.
PS: If you don't believe me, just try whipping your optical ball mouse left to right, over virtually any surface, but particularly sub-optimal ones, and you'll see the cursor get totally lost and move in seemingly random directions.
I've tried to reproduce this with my optical mouse (a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB -- http://www.microsoft.com/mouse/), and CAN'T-- sure, when I do quick motions left to right (or the other way around) it fluctuates up and down ever so slightly, but this is more likely do to the fact that I'm really not moving the mouse EXACTLY left to right on a perfect line (in the natural position for using a mouse, your hand moves left to right more like the long blade on a cars windshield wiper). This is just moving left-to-right on a 1024x768 Windows desktop, I mention this in case you meant to try this someplace else (eg: in a specific game or something).
Regardless, I imagine optical mice will become the norm soon, and the technology is ever improving (it's my understanding that the processor inside current optical mice rivals a 486, if you can believe that.. quite a little bit 'o CPU power for something as basic as a moving input device if you ask me). I'm sure the old-style ball mice will be relegated to either a) collector's items or b) elitist "true" gamers (and at a premium price).
Right, and I agree with what you're saying about Linux advocates providing their own numbers for consumers/decision makers to digest...
BUT... when it's an insignificant benchmark, is it REALLY news worthy? Pipes are UNUSED in Win32 code, things like COM/COM+ and other methods of IPC have long since taken hold in Windows software development. Pipes may play a large role in Linux software, but the comparison should be between best IPC implementations, not between Linux Pipes vs. Windows Pipes. THAT'd be a worthy benchmark to read and use to make decisions...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.starwars.com/bio/christopherlee.html
Whichever person with moderator points modded this Off-Topic, please shoot yourself, and spare us more of your idiotic moderation skills. Suggesting Kylix is a completely fair stance.
The thing is, almost all the features desired are already handled in the class framework for Delphi (the exception being Serial communications, which really are quite simple under Win32, which leaves writing your own cross-platform class(es) to handle it, or finding someone elses and porting them or using them). About the only time you'd ever use a Win32 API call is for a feature that wasn't implemented that you needed, and that's what {$IFDEF ...} is for.
How can you say it wouldn't be? It still would be, because personal experience (read: how well it runs in the REAL WORLD, not in IW's "benchmarks") would automatically tell me that "Gee, look, it performs as well as or better than Windows 2000 does for our users, and adds new features and functionality that we could really use".
So, what exactly was your point?
On a side note, for a write-up of some kernel (some not-so-kernel, really) that I mentioned in my original reply in this thread, check out MSDN Online. It's the same article that's printed in the magazine, complete with images where needed.. It sheds some light on the prefetching optimizations I mentioned.
Check out CNN's write-up of the teaser; apperently the author of this article thought it'd be worthwhile to list tons of thoughts of people who posted on starwars.com's message boards, such as these--
I dunno... the middle one, about Natalie Portman, just struck me as funny for a news outlet to quote.1) There's a link further up that should be modded up, this link doesn't by-pass the check for QuickTime Pro (AFAIK!).
2) QuickTime most certainly is NOT superior to DVD video. I've seen MPEG-2 streams that look much nicer than this and are comparativly sized.
Someone mod the parent up!
His link works so long as you (if you're in Windows AND IE) right-click the link and "Copy Shortcut" (Slashdot's line-wrapping crap inserts a space in the text URL, so it's semi-broken I believe).
Yep, completly true. Of course, it IS possible that the US GameCube will have a longer warranty than all of the other previous consoles, but I really doubt it. (This 90-day warranty issue goes back as far as the original NES, so I don't see it changing. =))
About a mandatory warranty-- it sounds nice on one hand, but on the other it doesn't. As long as the consumer is made aware of the short warranty, I figure the "let the buyer beware" position should suffice. (And the warranty, atleast for Nintendo products, is almost always on the box someplace.) It is interesting that it's required in the UK though, I didn't know that. =)
It still beats the X-Box controller, which was seemingly designed for people with HUGE hands. Their Japanese controller is a lot better designed..
Oh HEAVENS, not the warranty!
Let's think about this for a second--
It'd be neat if the warranty lasted longer though, it really would. I'd think there should be some pride involved with this kind of thing.
Some of us don't even buy PC's, we buy parts and assemble them ourselves. [snicker]
Seriously, I imagine most people here are familiar with the inner workings of PC's and/or hardware of some variety, and most are likely inquisitive enough to tear apart a PC to see what components were used (for pre-assembled systems, anyways).
I run Windows XP on a single-CPU Pentium III 800, and it performs as well as or better than 2000 on my system.
That's the only review I need.
They did test other apps besides Office apps-- they tested Adobe Illustrator. And the point is moot-- these optimizations apply to ANY application which uses DLL's to share functionality; XP notes the order in which these DLL's are loaded, then makes a special pre-fetch file which helps the OS better load the app during the next startup.
Illustrator's start time improvement wasn't as pronounced as Word's start time improvement, but it was still a few seconds quicker, indicating that the optimizations do work for any vendor's app (even if that app wasn't specifically targetted for XP).
No kidding, the latest issue of Maximum PC has a review of Windows XP and gave it a 10/Kick-Ass rating. In their benchmarks, they show disk access speeds (as taken from Sandra on both 2K and XP), as well as app start-up speed (time it takes to start an app like Illustrator or Word). ESPECIALLY in the startup area, XP kicked ass. In 2000, Word would take (according to their benchmarks) around 6 seconds to be fully interactive. On XP, though, it took less than a second. According to the issue of MSDN I just got, which has an article on kernel enhancements (which some aren't really kernel enhancements, but they're all lumped together anyways), they state that load times were improved because of a multi-pronged effort in the system to optimize application startup. When applied to the boot process (another thing that Maximum PC showed a major improvement with under XP compared to 2000), the system goes so far as to have the defragmenter take all of the important startup files and put them into one contiguous space (thus allowing the boot loader to read the whole mess in at once).
I mean, I shouldn't be surprised that Taco and crew would be this biased, but c'mon! Atleast do some honest reporting, and not people-programming. We all have our reasons to hate MS, but XP certainly isn't one of them (atleast, not for the reasons stated in the article-- performance being the big one).
Actually in Windows '95 with LFN, the long filenames are stored as one big filename as you described for Unix filenames, except AFAIK they always use 16-bit Unicode characters to create the name and terminate it with a NULL (two 0 bytes in a row).
As another person already pointed out, in normal FAT the '.' isn't stored as part of the filename though, and an extra byte isn't allocated for null termination-- the structure is exactly 8 bytes for the filename, and 3 bytes for the extension. The '.' is silently inserted by the OS.
Heh, me too.. I remembered ordering one earlier this year and wondering if I'd actually ever receive it (I ordered it along with a few other things, as I recall, Sega shipped everything but the Broadband adapter, and I eventually called out of concern, only to have the rep on the other end of the line attempt to restore my faith.. thankfully, it did come).
It's REALLY too bad Sega turned what was an otherwise awesome toy into a concrete brick by doing that BIOS tweak in later models (including mine, unfortunately) that disabled CD-R usability.. [sigh] I'd have liked to have seen NetBSD or Linux running on this thing. =(
I'm so sorry-- who's fucked up idea was it to charge so much for Worldgroup/MBBS? =) Maybe a quick history of Galacticomm, from someone who was inside the company, would help (if you're feeling so inclined, anyway). EG: More details on staff that worked on it, as well as info on if/when the company changed hands, and so on.
Funny stuff so far though, I never knew that he was this screwed up.
Worldgroup got sold off to worldgroupware.com, which STILL gouges potential customers for every penny and dime they can-- case in point; you want to buy it (as if buying a BBS software package is worth ANYTHING, but let's pretend it is) you have to fork out not $100, not $200, not $500, not even $1000.. you have to pay $7000 for the privilege of running their software. Want more than 128 users at a time? You have to CALL and ask to be graced with that heart-attack inducing price (apperently they cared enough about peoples' health to know that if you saw the price for the 128 user or less copy, you might not be able to handle the price they demand for >128 users).
All this, and the software hasn't been updated in a few years, and the support just doesn't exist. Galacticomm I think still exists, but what they market/sell I don't know.. they may still be up at gcomm.com, if you're curious anyways.. Galacticomm also changed their name to "netVillage" (their page appears to still be up, and actually, gcomm.com and netvillage.com look entirely different, so don't ask me which one still represents the original gcomm..) during the recent past, and for awhile (and apperently still) try to sell hosting of Worldgroup systems (or their expertise at setting them up and maintaining them) rather than selling the software itself (again though, supposedly worldgroupware.com owns it, so I don't understand this arrangement they have, but shrug).
The old BX chipset doesn't handle the 133 MHz frontside bus that the Tualatin would require, and unlike the issue the guy posting this story described (Intel possibly not being entirely truthful about old 133 FSB mobo's supporting Tualatin), your situation is pretty much sealed. IMHO, I'd grab two 850's, they're cheaper than Tualatin's (which go for over $200, while two P3 850's shouldn't set you back more than $120-130 a piece), and it's a full 400 MHz faster than what you use right now. Short of that, you could just grab a new motherboard (you use a Tyan, you might find the Tyan S2507D motherboard to be right up your alley-- it sports dual Socket 370 slots, uses the latest Via chipset that supports Tualatins, and should be priced at around $100-150 (I haven't found any online yet at Pricewatch.com or Streetprices.com, so you might have to wait a few weeks)).
I run a Tyan Tiger 133 (S1834D), and it's been stable since the day I got it (in case you're worried about issues with Via vs. Intel chipsets, since supposedly the BX was a rock solid mobo (and most attributed this to Intel's BX chipset, which is nice and all, but I think the real issue was that other mobo manufacturers didn't use Via's chipset correctly, or BIOS compatibility was weak). Hope this helps. =)
Yah, that's what I heard anyways, and you're right about IBM's involvement-- to me, IBM has always been the technology leader, but I don't buy their drives because I've had friends who had "bad luck" with them.. Usually the technology gets licensed or copied so fast that the other manufacturers seem to have no problem keeping up (atleast as far as retail offerings go), and usually surpassing IBM at drive size fights (noting that Maxtor and WD both beat IBM to >75GB drives.. I don't think IBM even offers anything better than 75GB yet, I could be wrong though).
It's interesting to me that you have good luck with Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement). Atleast that's what I read sometime back (and naturally I can't find the place I read that, so take this information with a BIG helping of salt).
Also, about Maxtor, I've had nothing but good luck with their drives (as well as WD's, as you noted too), and bad luck with Seagate drives (never tried Quantum, so I can't say one way or the other). The one thing I like about Maxtor is their RMA/return/replacement policy-- you give them a valid credit card number, they put a hold on your account for the price of the drive you're supposedly returning, and they immediatly ship out a replacement drive the next day (before you've even shipped back your defective unit). You have 30 days (I believe) to return the drive before they ding your credit card for the price of the drive.
About the concerns regarding proper handling, you're right about OEM drives, but this guy returned his drive 2 or 3 times, and you'd think the guys running tech support/RMA would have some training on how to handle the drive (if indeed that's the reason the drives are failing). Of course, it could have been any of the other (correct) causes of failure you listed (PC on floor, lots of walking; PC on concrete, tips over or is jarred alot; etc).
If someone can shed some light on the manufacturing processes of Maxtor and WD HDD's, I'd be thankful for the enlightenment though-- I'd hate to be seen as talking out of my ass.
I've tried to reproduce this with my optical mouse (a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB -- http://www.microsoft.com/mouse/), and CAN'T-- sure, when I do quick motions left to right (or the other way around) it fluctuates up and down ever so slightly, but this is more likely do to the fact that I'm really not moving the mouse EXACTLY left to right on a perfect line (in the natural position for using a mouse, your hand moves left to right more like the long blade on a cars windshield wiper). This is just moving left-to-right on a 1024x768 Windows desktop, I mention this in case you meant to try this someplace else (eg: in a specific game or something).
Regardless, I imagine optical mice will become the norm soon, and the technology is ever improving (it's my understanding that the processor inside current optical mice rivals a 486, if you can believe that.. quite a little bit 'o CPU power for something as basic as a moving input device if you ask me). I'm sure the old-style ball mice will be relegated to either a) collector's items or b) elitist "true" gamers (and at a premium price).
It's really sad, but I figured that out quickly... [sigh]
Right, and I agree with what you're saying about Linux advocates providing their own numbers for consumers/decision makers to digest...
BUT... when it's an insignificant benchmark, is it REALLY news worthy? Pipes are UNUSED in Win32 code, things like COM/COM+ and other methods of IPC have long since taken hold in Windows software development. Pipes may play a large role in Linux software, but the comparison should be between best IPC implementations, not between Linux Pipes vs. Windows Pipes. THAT'd be a worthy benchmark to read and use to make decisions...
Hey, what group of morons modded this troll up?