Except that Microsoft's version actually looks good, not clunky, and has laid out the window in a decent way for the standard monitor format that people have. The buttons are clear and not too large. The entries are compact and readable.
I hate outlook because it has too many quirks, hopefully Evolution is not copying these as well. Outlook preferences are terrible. Then again, that's what happens when you create such a functional application.
The Evolution and Gnome people have a very long way to go.They'll get there one day I'm sure.
Disclaimer: I like having different applications do different things, and launch each other as necessary. I dislike the BigBlobOfFunctionality(tm) approach to software. I understand that PHBs like BigBlobOfFunctionality because they don't have to learn what the minimise button does.
The compose-email dialog looked like Word 6. Seriously, is there any need for something so clunky? I hope it has a simple option in the preferences, a single click "Optimised Interface" setting that removes unnecessary cruft, auto-sets Plain Text everywhere, makes things secure,...
The list of folders was minimal. It seemed more important to have massive buttons to access various bits of functionality within Evolution for some reason. I hope you can get rid of these, or move them onto a vertically tabbed sidebar or something.
I haven't used it, so I don't know how it performs. Hopefully it should be fine.
Luckily with 3D engines, even if you sneakily only use them in a 2D manner, you can use off the shelf textures (e.g., one of the RPGs in the article looks like it looks a lot of standard brick/mud/rooftile/etc textures)... and even better use the 3D hardware to do the hard work of making it look good by lighting it, shading it and so on.
It's a lot easier to do graphics when you don't have to worry about the shading. A brick+mortar pattern turns into a few textures: splotchy red pattern with pale yellow mortar, a bump-map, fine for the mortar and rough and pitted for the bricks and so on. I think this is what is needed for the next generation of "good-enough" graphics artists:)
Still, it is a long job, with only the possible reward of seeing it in a game that maybe 100 people will ever play.
Things have come on a long way since my days of drawing 16x16 pixel 32-colour graphics in DPaint IV. I'm still pissed off I lost all those disks though.
I hear that next Christmas' "Full Edition on HD-DVD" will be 1 long 12 hour film. However to make it authentic, they will be breaking it up into ~2 hour sections. You start watching the film after you've have second breakfast (obviously you've got to let your guests have their first breakfast, and then come around your place to watch the marathon film session), and then at the first break you can have elevenses. Another 2 hours of film followed by lunch. Then you watch some more, and then have afternoon tea. Following that you watch some more, then have tea, then more, then dinner, then some more followed by supper.
The current Durons run fine on any Socket A motherboard including tasty nForce2 ones. Even so, a cheap Athlon XP or Sempron will also suffice, and they are cheaper than corresponding Celerons. I never read Ars Technica either, and your witty "arse" joke is rather puerile... especially given that AMD don't pay hardware review sites. Now Intel on the other hand... THG, AT...
The P4 core loves bandwidth. The low cache on the Celeron kills performance. Getting a slower Celeron is okay I suppose, it won't be affected as much. Faster Celerons showed extremely bad scaling, in lots of REAL WORLD benchmarks, not just the artificial ones.
I suppose that you can't see the difference, you have nothing that needs it. To be fair, doubling the memory in a system is a better investment than another 20% clockspeed though.
I suppose my point was that for $x, you could get okay performance with Celeron, or good performance with a different processor.
In fact, the 89W TDP measurement for A64 processors is for the entire family, a 3200+ will rarely get above 75W at max load. The 90nm processors will be even better, probably not above 60W (although the power density is a lot higher of course). AMD already has 35W TDP 90nm processors out for mobiles.
Of course a 1.4GHz Duron will outperform a 2GHz Celeron P4. See the comparisons on numerous websites that have done the comparison.
P4 based Celerons on the 400MHz FSB are crippled sad creatures. The latest revision which ups the bus to 533MHz (and the L2 cache? I forget) improves the situation somewhat, but I think they start at 2.8GHz (and being based on the Prescott core, they eat power like a geek drinks Mt.Dew). Celerons are cheap, and they are also cheap. I don't think they provide good value.
The only thing I agree with is that bleeding edge stuff is a fool's game.
That isn't what I'd call an upgrade from dual-333MHz PII though!
The C3 is pretty dire unless you suddenly want to spend all your time doing encryption. The FPU is very weak, the integer is also weak. There's a reason it is low power!
Not much. Apart from the Pentium-M, for which there exists a couple of motherboards outside the laptop market... Transmeta's new Efficeon should run at 1.5GHz. VIA's C7 might make 1.5GHz when it is released.
AMD sell a 35W Opteron, 1.8GHz I believe, I'm not sure. Maybe it is 55W @ 2GHz.
OTOH AMD's consumer processors include Cool'n'Quiet which downclocks the processor when you don't need lots of processing power, and hence cuts the power consumption a lot. With a decent fan the fan will also slow down.
AMD sold around 100,000 Opterons in Q2 however. This should increase to 200,000 in Q3 given recent products from HP, Sun, IBM etc, especially with the increase in 4P systems.
Of course, the ASP of Itanium is a lot higher, so Intel need to sell a lot fewer Itaniums to get the same money back as AMD. On the other hand, AMD haven't sunk $billions into K8!
Lionheart was my fave game on the Amiga. Well, at least my fave platform game:)
Re:Why still ugly text?
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My parent's first teletext capable TV had a lovely bold font that was really readable.
The next TV had the skinny 'spectrum' style font that most screenshots you see use.
You have to remember that in the UK, PAL has around 284 vertical lines of resolution, so a 40x25 screen only had around 10 pixels per character vertically to define stuff in. I think most TV sets use a standard ROM with the 256 8x10 pixel fonts stored within.
One advantage to having teletext hardware in the TV however was that the TV itself could use them for its on-screen display functionality, e.g., to set up brightness, contrast, etc. That probably saved a chip or two inside the set.
In comparison, the modern digital text services suck. They look nicer with the smoother fonts and stuff, but they are too clunky. It must be a failure of the digital receivers which are either only decoding the video part of the MPEG2 stream, OR the data part of the stream. So when you enter 'interactive' mode, you have to wait for the box to download the world and everything. Each time.
Cheers! Yes, that is pretty much how I was thinking it worked.
Aside: I remember having an old Sony Trinitron 14" TV once, and it had a similar system for changing channel. It was very annoying if a fly decided to walk across the buttons, because the channels would change as the fly walked across!
This is about all 3 types of scrollwheel, including the clickwheel.
It doesn't say how they work though. I assume on the later ones it detects static electricity or something from the finger and with a timer it seems how fast you are rotating or something?
Isn't Nocona (new Xeon) the only EM64T processor from Intel at the moment?
Maybe they don't even have that processor to test with? It is a recent release. It would also really affect the base tests, it being a server processor, not a desktop processor.
As far as I can tell, the AMD processors won most of the tests that were done. On a couple that were done, you can tell that they didn't have a 64-bit integer codebase though, e.g., that John The Ripper thing that showed no improvement in 64-bit mode over 32-bit mode for tasks that 64-bit is really a lot better at doing (see the OpenSSL results!)
The text of the article has been changed without comment though. They had misinterpreted the OpenSSL results. There is a thread on AcesHardware about the review however that mentions this.
Yeah, reading the article usually helps. Not that AnandTech have been particurly accurate recently with many reviews.
That and AMD have been having some QC issues which seem to be getting worse and not better.
Oh yeah? like what?
At least they have high end processors you can buy that don't double as a spaceheater like Intel's Prescott. Prescott... currently on the E stepping, i.e., the 5th stepping, in order to try and get it cool. Several reviews saying that their P4 overheated at stock clock and then throttled is not good.
Intel's only good processor in the x86 arena is the Pentium-M, which is a good solid processor. Shame it doesn't have any of the features like NX, or 64-bit capability... oh well. And yes, 64-bit capability is useful in many server tasks, especially SSL and similar encryption/decryption tasks.
Please don't be in Bar Hill! It'd be amusing for the parent poster to get a reply from two different people in the same village, heh.
But yes, my ~800 sq. ft house is big enough for a small family. It is just that we don't have a games room, or a family room, or a "den"... I would like a separate room for amenities though, I hate having the washing machine in the kitchen.
I believe that most new starter homes in the UK are between 600 and 1000 sq. ft. and are probably expected to be good for at least a couple and one child.
There is so little space in the UK for a growing population, which leads to smaller living spaces. Quite why new houses in the UK don't have cellars these days is beyond me, they sound like a sensible way to gain another 300 sq. ft. of utility / games / etc space for the mere price of having to dig a hole before laying the foundations.
For your information, my house which is around 800 sq. ft. and detached is probably currently worth around £160k, or nearly $300k. It is cheap for the area. To be honest it is large enough actually, I only use the bedroom to sleep in and store my clothes for example. It is a squeeze though sometimes, it would be nice to have a larger house, but I don't need a larger house!
Yeah, why drink Guinness when you have Skullsplitter (9%) and Russian Stoat (11%) to drink instead by the pint! Well, half pint after some incidents...
What is it... Wednesday night. Since Sunday I've had 5 bottles of wine. 2500 calories by your calculations! I had about 4 pints of beer in the same timescale.
Of course a lot of this wine is drunk watching Farscape, Babylon 5, Angel, Buffy, Twin Peaks and more... so that is perfectly fine:)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Microsoft's version actually looks good, not clunky, and has laid out the window in a decent way for the standard monitor format that people have. The buttons are clear and not too large. The entries are compact and readable.
I hate outlook because it has too many quirks, hopefully Evolution is not copying these as well. Outlook preferences are terrible. Then again, that's what happens when you create such a functional application.
The Evolution and Gnome people have a very long way to go.They'll get there one day I'm sure.
It looks quite clunky.
...
Disclaimer: I like having different applications do different things, and launch each other as necessary. I dislike the BigBlobOfFunctionality(tm) approach to software. I understand that PHBs like BigBlobOfFunctionality because they don't have to learn what the minimise button does.
The compose-email dialog looked like Word 6. Seriously, is there any need for something so clunky? I hope it has a simple option in the preferences, a single click "Optimised Interface" setting that removes unnecessary cruft, auto-sets Plain Text everywhere, makes things secure,
The list of folders was minimal. It seemed more important to have massive buttons to access various bits of functionality within Evolution for some reason. I hope you can get rid of these, or move them onto a vertically tabbed sidebar or something.
I haven't used it, so I don't know how it performs. Hopefully it should be fine.
Yes, finding a good graphics artist is hard.
... and even better use the 3D hardware to do the hard work of making it look good by lighting it, shading it and so on.
:)
Luckily with 3D engines, even if you sneakily only use them in a 2D manner, you can use off the shelf textures (e.g., one of the RPGs in the article looks like it looks a lot of standard brick/mud/rooftile/etc textures)
It's a lot easier to do graphics when you don't have to worry about the shading. A brick+mortar pattern turns into a few textures: splotchy red pattern with pale yellow mortar, a bump-map, fine for the mortar and rough and pitted for the bricks and so on. I think this is what is needed for the next generation of "good-enough" graphics artists
Still, it is a long job, with only the possible reward of seeing it in a game that maybe 100 people will ever play.
Things have come on a long way since my days of drawing 16x16 pixel 32-colour graphics in DPaint IV. I'm still pissed off I lost all those disks though.
I hear that next Christmas' "Full Edition on HD-DVD" will be 1 long 12 hour film. However to make it authentic, they will be breaking it up into ~2 hour sections. You start watching the film after you've have second breakfast (obviously you've got to let your guests have their first breakfast, and then come around your place to watch the marathon film session), and then at the first break you can have elevenses. Another 2 hours of film followed by lunch. Then you watch some more, and then have afternoon tea. Following that you watch some more, then have tea, then more, then dinner, then some more followed by supper.
"Hurrah! A rat, something to eat and drink at last!
Dunno what this transmitter thing is, must have got trapped around the creature somewhere..."
Spam Will Always Live Longer Over Wireless
C7 appears to be pretty much the same core as the C3 with a new bus unit and some more security features. Not that much has come out about the C7 yet.
The current Durons run fine on any Socket A motherboard including tasty nForce2 ones. Even so, a cheap Athlon XP or Sempron will also suffice, and they are cheaper than corresponding Celerons. I never read Ars Technica either, and your witty "arse" joke is rather puerile ... especially given that AMD don't pay hardware review sites. Now Intel on the other hand ... THG, AT ...
The P4 core loves bandwidth. The low cache on the Celeron kills performance. Getting a slower Celeron is okay I suppose, it won't be affected as much. Faster Celerons showed extremely bad scaling, in lots of REAL WORLD benchmarks, not just the artificial ones.
I suppose that you can't see the difference, you have nothing that needs it. To be fair, doubling the memory in a system is a better investment than another 20% clockspeed though.
I suppose my point was that for $x, you could get okay performance with Celeron, or good performance with a different processor.
In fact, the 89W TDP measurement for A64 processors is for the entire family, a 3200+ will rarely get above 75W at max load. The 90nm processors will be even better, probably not above 60W (although the power density is a lot higher of course). AMD already has 35W TDP 90nm processors out for mobiles.
Of course a 1.4GHz Duron will outperform a 2GHz Celeron P4. See the comparisons on numerous websites that have done the comparison.
P4 based Celerons on the 400MHz FSB are crippled sad creatures. The latest revision which ups the bus to 533MHz (and the L2 cache? I forget) improves the situation somewhat, but I think they start at 2.8GHz (and being based on the Prescott core, they eat power like a geek drinks Mt.Dew). Celerons are cheap, and they are also cheap. I don't think they provide good value.
The only thing I agree with is that bleeding edge stuff is a fool's game.
That isn't what I'd call an upgrade from dual-333MHz PII though!
... I'd get the PIII.
The C3 is pretty dire unless you suddenly want to spend all your time doing encryption. The FPU is very weak, the integer is also weak. There's a reason it is low power!
C3 1.2GHz or PIII 800MHz
Not much. Apart from the Pentium-M, for which there exists a couple of motherboards outside the laptop market ... Transmeta's new Efficeon should run at 1.5GHz. VIA's C7 might make 1.5GHz when it is released.
AMD sell a 35W Opteron, 1.8GHz I believe, I'm not sure. Maybe it is 55W @ 2GHz.
OTOH AMD's consumer processors include Cool'n'Quiet which downclocks the processor when you don't need lots of processing power, and hence cuts the power consumption a lot. With a decent fan the fan will also slow down.
Or get an iMac G5.
AMD sold around 100,000 Opterons in Q2 however. This should increase to 200,000 in Q3 given recent products from HP, Sun, IBM etc, especially with the increase in 4P systems.
Of course, the ASP of Itanium is a lot higher, so Intel need to sell a lot fewer Itaniums to get the same money back as AMD. On the other hand, AMD haven't sunk $billions into K8!
Lionheart was my fave game on the Amiga. Well, at least my fave platform game :)
My parent's first teletext capable TV had a lovely bold font that was really readable.
The next TV had the skinny 'spectrum' style font that most screenshots you see use.
You have to remember that in the UK, PAL has around 284 vertical lines of resolution, so a 40x25 screen only had around 10 pixels per character vertically to define stuff in. I think most TV sets use a standard ROM with the 256 8x10 pixel fonts stored within.
One advantage to having teletext hardware in the TV however was that the TV itself could use them for its on-screen display functionality, e.g., to set up brightness, contrast, etc. That probably saved a chip or two inside the set.
In comparison, the modern digital text services suck. They look nicer with the smoother fonts and stuff, but they are too clunky. It must be a failure of the digital receivers which are either only decoding the video part of the MPEG2 stream, OR the data part of the stream. So when you enter 'interactive' mode, you have to wait for the box to download the world and everything. Each time.
Yeah, that's what I meant, I just expressed it poorly :p
It's quite clever how they can detect the amount of change in capacitance to get 1/1000" accuracy too!
Cheers! Yes, that is pretty much how I was thinking it worked.
Aside: I remember having an old Sony Trinitron 14" TV once, and it had a similar system for changing channel. It was very annoying if a fly decided to walk across the buttons, because the channels would change as the fly walked across!
This is about all 3 types of scrollwheel, including the clickwheel.
It doesn't say how they work though. I assume on the later ones it detects static electricity or something from the finger and with a timer it seems how fast you are rotating or something?
Pretty useless article from a geek point of view.
Isn't Nocona (new Xeon) the only EM64T processor from Intel at the moment?
Maybe they don't even have that processor to test with? It is a recent release. It would also really affect the base tests, it being a server processor, not a desktop processor.
As far as I can tell, the AMD processors won most of the tests that were done. On a couple that were done, you can tell that they didn't have a 64-bit integer codebase though, e.g., that John The Ripper thing that showed no improvement in 64-bit mode over 32-bit mode for tasks that 64-bit is really a lot better at doing (see the OpenSSL results!)
The text of the article has been changed without comment though. They had misinterpreted the OpenSSL results. There is a thread on AcesHardware about the review however that mentions this.
Yeah, reading the article usually helps. Not that AnandTech have been particurly accurate recently with many reviews.
Oh yeah? like what?
At least they have high end processors you can buy that don't double as a spaceheater like Intel's Prescott. Prescott
Intel's only good processor in the x86 arena is the Pentium-M, which is a good solid processor. Shame it doesn't have any of the features like NX, or 64-bit capability
Please don't be in Bar Hill! It'd be amusing for the parent poster to get a reply from two different people in the same village, heh.
... I would like a separate room for amenities though, I hate having the washing machine in the kitchen.
But yes, my ~800 sq. ft house is big enough for a small family. It is just that we don't have a games room, or a family room, or a "den"
I believe that most new starter homes in the UK are between 600 and 1000 sq. ft. and are probably expected to be good for at least a couple and one child.
There is so little space in the UK for a growing population, which leads to smaller living spaces. Quite why new houses in the UK don't have cellars these days is beyond me, they sound like a sensible way to gain another 300 sq. ft. of utility / games / etc space for the mere price of having to dig a hole before laying the foundations.
For your information, my house which is around 800 sq. ft. and detached is probably currently worth around £160k, or nearly $300k. It is cheap for the area. To be honest it is large enough actually, I only use the bedroom to sleep in and store my clothes for example. It is a squeeze though sometimes, it would be nice to have a larger house, but I don't need a larger house!
Yeah, why drink Guinness when you have Skullsplitter (9%) and Russian Stoat (11%) to drink instead by the pint! Well, half pint after some incidents ...
I've got a wine gut :(
... Wednesday night. Since Sunday I've had 5 bottles of wine. 2500 calories by your calculations! I had about 4 pints of beer in the same timescale.
... so that is perfectly fine :)
What is it
Of course a lot of this wine is drunk watching Farscape, Babylon 5, Angel, Buffy, Twin Peaks and more