You couldn't count the number of highschool students who want to go off to be a game programmer because 'games are so fun'. They tend to think that it's two hours a day coding and six hours a day having fun playing games.
The real life of a game developer is 60-80 hour weeks, running the same code over and over trying to find some obscure bug in some function that performs some obtuse mathmatical function. There's incredible pressure to deliver before a competitor delivers something similar. After a couple months, the stuff you're working on will make you want to cry because you've done it so much. Then, if your game flops, you get to look for another job.
You should first talk to him to discuss the lifestyle that he'll have to follow in most of that line of work and ask if he wants to devote several years of his life to that. It seems glamorous from the outside as a game player but it is a type job where your life will completely pass you by and all you'll have to show for it is poor health, poor eyesight, and little money.
I did everything available before Burning Crusade was released. I quit the second time about a week before BC came out. I tried to get back into it before BC but I couldn't stand the boredom and not even the anticipation of new content could get me back into it. After you do the new content (and the old content) 10 times and can follow a script on how to do it, they aren't so much skill dependant anymore as they are just following a script accurately and not messing up. It gets to be where the times someone screws up and wipes the raid are the raids you remember, not the successes because they are all the same (boring). How many times do you talk about raids as being "remember that time Legolasssssss1231231231 screwed up and wiped us when the BigUglyMob agrod wrong?" as opposed to "Remember that 134th time we went in and cleared the instance just like we did the 133rd time?" That should be a clue.
I quit the game once, came back eight months later, and tried to play it again and after two weeks, couldn't stand it so I cancelled my account again.
The two weeks were right before Burning Crusades came out. I cancelled again about a week before BC. I just realized that it was a boring game and after doing all the new content 10 times, it'd be boring again. So, no, I didn't do most of that stuff because I quit a boring game before they came out.
There are many very challenging encounters in WoW, many who demand very tight coordination between team members.
Yeah, and after you do them 10 times and get the script down, it's rinse-and-repeat.
You haven't played in a while then as there have been changes to address travel time. Before the changes, there were work-arounds, though. If you sit at your keyboard and don't use autopilot, you can use WTZ (warp-to-zero) and it makes traveling very fast.... you can cover vast distances in 15 minutes (several systems a minute in anything but a capital ship). Before WTZ was put into the game, people had bookmarks that did the same thing.
If you were sitting around watching timers, you weren't playing the game. You may have had more fun exploring lowsec/zerosec space or investigated the alliances that, through game mechanics, actually control areas of space (and benefit from having that control), build their own space stations, and have epic wars with other player alliances.
Re:Well.. What are they doing wrong? ...
on
Rethinking the MMOG
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· Score: 1
2. Make levels not mean so much. 3. Make quests driven by players (player made content) 5. Let the players deal with them but if they become a real problem, let the GMs deal with them. 6. Player made content. That's how you solve the content problem. Unfortunately, few MMOs have it (WoW doesn't - trade skills are not player made content). 7. Yeah.
There is already a game that does most of what you say, and I already play it (have for over a year now). It ain't WoW and most WoW lovers hate it.
WoW is not that hard. That's why so many people play it. Some of the boss encounters are interesting, I'll give it that, but when you've done it for the 100th time, it isn't anymore. I played WoW for 8 months, had multiple level 60s, had done pretty much everything in the game, and was extremely bored. Everything turned into a grind... kill 1000s of mobs to raise faction, kill 1000s of mobs to get pairs of nuts to turn in for stuff, do 100s of BGs to get points to buy items, do any of the instanced stuff for the 100th time this month, etc. etc. etc. I quit the game once, came back eight months later, and tried to play it again and after two weeks, couldn't stand it so I cancelled my account again. I'll never play it again. I don't play games to be graphical chat rooms. I like to be challenged. So, I play other games now that have some challenge to them.
Programmers aren't simply 'drivers' of 'cars'. Programmers are more analogous to mechanics in your scenario (fixing bugs, for example, in code is like fixing a bug in an engine). Users are simply 'drivers'. Sure, users don't need to know how to program at all, but a mechanic had better know how a car works.
Yup. Creating threads is easy... have a function of the appropriate signature and call pthread_create or CreateThread to your heart's content. Data partitioning (solving/minimizing data contention), that's the 'hard' part and they haven't really had luck doing this automagically yet. Even with OpenMP you still have to tell the compiler where it can do it's 'magic'.
99.99% of the time, multi-thredded programming is not needed, and can actually *Slow* things down as mutexes block each other, killing performance - It takes a certain amount of time to establish a mutex, so two threads working on a single bit of memory can perform like a dog as each try to block, and unblock the other..
Your first statement is generally true - you should use multi-threaded programming when/where it makes sense. The rest of your statement calls out a common issue that all multi-threaded (even multi-process) programming has to deal with - data contention. Most people who program multi-threaded code know about this already, since data partitioning and contention are what you typically spend the majority of time analyzing when you write multi-threaded code. Your example displays what would be horribly written multi-threaded code and is not the norm, since it is the very thing that multi-threaded programmers spend 90% or more of their time trying to avoid.
GS: What do you think of Microsoft's support of Japanese developers? Do you think that, in terms of its support or its documentation of the system, there's anything Microsoft could be doing to encourage more Japanese teams to work on 360 games?
HS: It's very good overall. Support has been outstanding. But the problem is, for example, Epic's Unreal Engine 3. It's developed in English, of course. And unless you've got programmers who can understand English or are bilingual...we've got numerous bilingual staff, programmers who are highly capable of speaking and understanding English, so they can understand the updated information and versions with respect to the development of UE3. But unless you've got programmers who can understand English, they actually can't read the materials. And even though translation takes place, there is a lag. Oftentimes when they read [about] a version, the very version that they read is outdated. So those are some of the challenges associated with the language barrier. That's one area that Microsoft is poor in: documentation.
So the development environment and support are "very good" and the two complaints about the documentation that make it "poor" are: multi-lingual support in some documentation (example: Unreal Engine3 [by Epic, not even Microsoft]) and version differences because by the time the documentation gets translated, it's sometimes out of date. So the challenges are associated with the language barrier, thus yielding "poor" because of the lack of, or out of date, Japanese versions of the documentation, for example in non-Microsoft documents (no mention specifically if this is also in relation to Microsoft documentation of development tools, which he says is 'very good'.
I've never used the words "insane" or "crazy" to mean something like "beyond all expectations" before.
Did you see that motorcyle stunt rider do a flip? It was *insane*!
That may not be what he meant, but it's easy to read the whole article that way (with a little bit of slang) and it make complete sense in the other direction from the dictionary definitions of the words.
No, I played hours a night 7 nights a week doing missions, trying to earn enough cash to afford a ship that can survive 2.5 minutes in 0.0 space without having to CONSTANTLY look over my shoulder. I'm well aware that all you have to do is train up and have the cash, but those are both time consuming in the extreme. Yes its a lot quicker now that you get hundreds of thousands of skill points instead of the meager couple thousand I started with.
Actually, what you want is impossible. There is no player in all of Eve who can cruise around 0.0 space without constantly looking over his shoulder. The best one could do is cruise around 0.0 space that his corporation has sovereignty over, but even that does not make him immune to being killed by another player, it just makes it more likely that he would be notified of a hostile in the area sooner. In 0.0, if they aren't "blue", then you *must* assume they are hostile. It's that simple. And... there is no ship in the game that can't be killed by another gang so searching for such a ship is pointless. No matter what you fly or how many skill points or how much money you have, you can (and probably will) be killed flying around lowsec/0.0 solo. In fact, there are several mantras: 1. Do not undock in any ship that you cannot afford to lose. (slightly relaxed in highsec but still somewhat true, depending) 2. If you plan to fly into lowsec/0.0 space, assume that whatever ship you are in is already blown up, because it most likely will be.
If either of the two points above don't sit well with you while you are in a particular ship, you probably should put it back in your hangar and pick another ship to fly.
Yes, there's lots of solo content. If you don't mind doing the same mindless shit over, and over, and over again.
Yeah, just doing missions or mining is that way. In lowsec/0.0 it's never the same thing from minute to minute as it is almost entirely PvP on a 1-on-1, 1-on-many, many-on-many, or OMG-LOOK-AT-ALL-THOSE-SHIPS!!!!one
Our tastes in gaming obviously differ, and thus we view the EVE experience differently. To me its a game that caters entirely to the hardcore community, and that's fine it just means I shan't be playing (even though by most standards I am a hardcore gamer).
That's perfectly fine:) To each his own and it's good that there is choice in the MMO world. Maybe we'll see each other in LotR:O (my next game to pick up):)
Eve has been around for 3+ years now and is still growing, slowly, but growing. Even one year ago when I first signed on, the record for simultanous players was around 16000. These days, it's normally in the high 20s and the record is double that a year ago (around 33000 simultaneous). Granted, it's probably two orders of magnitude lower than WoW, but it doesn't try to cater to the masses... it's a niche game.
Here's a quick comparison. I never once in WoW got very excited about anything and I've done most all the content before BC (didn't do the Slithus stuff because I quit before that was put in). In Eve, I've had so much adrenalin pumping that my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't control my ship.
The death penalty in EvE is one half of the double edged sword of Damocles waiting to smite CCP. The other is the barrier to entry, which they didn't actually "fix" at all with the last upgrade. I spent about 4 months as an active player, with a couple months in the middle not logging in except to change training skills, and still couldn't do much of anything interesting without having to join a corp, do the shitwork they assigned me to at the outset, and maybe eventually working my way up to a cool ship or something interesting. To me if a game isn't solo-able to a large extent then its a waste of my time, as I refuse to be dependent on other people for my leisure time.
Whether your not you are in a corp (or even an NPC corp) has no bearing on whether your not you can get into a cool ship or 'something'. You train up for it and buy it on your own and *pow* you're in your cool ship or 'something' as soon as you can afford to buy it and no one can stop you (as long as the ship is for sale somewhere). The game is soloable to a large extent. I've been playing for just over a year now and the only time I join gangs are when I want to do so, usually to help a newer pilot out finishing a mission, inviting newer players to join me on tougher missions so they can make some money and have fun shooting bigger npc ships, or when we gang up to go hunting in lowsec/zerosec for other players.
Sounds like you may have spent that four months waiting on someone to hold your hand and give you stuff. That won't happen unless there's some reason to do so and/or you are somewhat trusted already. You can't expect to join a corp and get access to the coffers right away because there's too many spies and corporate thieves around. You have to earn trust before you'll get handouts. So yeah, you were wasting your time.
Branch prediction and OOE are the end all be all and the saving grace of all things holy; CPU makers are taking them out because compilers can do a good enough or even better job of it now and to lower power and continue to increase speed they need that silicon for other things.
After all, the Itanium (which embraced exactly what you speak of) was such a huge success and well regarded by the community for its amazing integer performance.
The CPUs that have remove these things (are in-order, for example) are currently in consoles and are for power savings as well as real-estate savings. You have to cut something if you want more cores on the die. However, the performance of those cores (like the ones in the XBox360, the Wii, and the PPU in the PS3) are not that fast by today's standards. They tend to be compared with processors from two generations back (Pentium III and G4) on general purpose code. Plus, there are plenty of types of codes that really need OOOE and good branch prediction to keep the processor running at high efficiency (AI, for example).
Rather than trying to grok and understand the direction of things like Cell or Niagra,
Actually, both the Cell and Niagra are discussed fairly often and both are considered interesting. Just because some posters don't agree with you that the Cell is the answer to all our prayers simply means that there are different opinions. I think the direction is fairly well understood at this point, particularly since Intel and AMD have both jumped on the asymmetric cores bandwagon and talked about their plans quite a bit.
I think the thing that bothers me the most about Linux is IT advocacy. IT shouldn't be an advocate of any product, because it needs to make determinations between them. I think my eyes are messing with me. IT shouldn't be an advocate of any product? Am I missing something?
He's right, it's our job to determine the best product for a given task given budget constraints, resources available, etc. But once we determine the best product, how can we NOT advocate it?
Well, from my experience (and yes, I've done a bit of IT myself) is that many of these 'evaluations' are prejudicial. Meaning, from the start, IT has already decided what product will not be considered, or at the very least, will not be given equal consideration. For example, an employee says "we need photoshop because it does what we want and it's the industry standard", IT says "use The Gimp, it's just as good and it runs on Linux and is free". IT *may* have evaluated it from the standpoint of cost, familiarity, and available resources (maybe you only have Linux boxes there already) but will have missed the boat on what was actually required and desired.
These type decisions and the attitude of "we know what's best for you, even though you want to use a popular product, we're gonna make you use this other thing because it's cheaper and it runs on something we're already familiar with (Linux) and we know what's best for you, and, in case you missed it, we know what's best for you" is what makes IT and the rest of the company sometimes have friction.
This sounds like just an effort to become a popular site by being a drama-fest, a "Jerry Springer" site. I'm sure they'll be branching out to other areas (different jobs) soon enough.
Sounds like LaTeX... only that LaTeX has been around a lot longer. XML is pretty bad stuff. It works because it's kind of the only game in town and, no, I don't have a better alternative (right now:)) The main difference is that XML has been elevated to buzzword status so it gets lots of attention. Put it in anywhere and everywhere... it'll solve all your problems!
I saw a good sig once: XML is like violence. If a little bit doesn't fix things, just use more of it.
Don't you know? You're always supposed to wait for the x.1 version before you buy Microsoft stuff. The first version is hurried and the x.1 version has lots of bug fixes (not that all are fixed or new ones introduced, but it's always better than the x.0 version if you have to use it).
On the desktop I'm using now (Win2003), it sucks up 1.6gb just to boot. By the time I log in and start doing work, it is stretching 2Gb
You don't mention what tools you are using but: - There's probably a lot of file caching going on so that doesn't matter as it will discard unused cache to fulfill your memory allocation requests as you run (low overhead). - If you're running SQLServer, for example, by default it grabs a huge chunk of memory for caching. You can control how much it uses for this (set the max value) in the configuration tool. At one time, it defaulted to as much as all your memory minus 128M for the OS or something similarly large. Step 1 was to drop it down to a more reasonable level (like 256M total). - Look for lots of other 'tools' that start on boot or on login and grab up memory... things like indexing services and the like.
I've programmed in both and, other than the fact that you can't use sockets in the Wait... APIs (as you mention - but the BSD socket code is layered on top of native Win32, so you'd be passing objects created by two different subsystems to one subsystem's call, which shouldn't be expected to work), the rest of your post is either lack of experience with Win32 threads or subjective preference on your part.
Personally, I've found situations using each API where the functionality desired was very difficult to replicate in the other API. It usually requires some rethinking, is all. And, last I checked, there were things you could do in either API that weren't easily reproducable in the other API.
However, both APIs tend to evolve towards each other over time so it becomes less of an issue.
If you notice, it is red. This is actually useful at depth as light of those wavelengths are filtered by the water so that even at relatively shallow depths, reds appear as grays. At 'deep' depths, no red wavelengths of light are found (from the surface/sun) so animals that are red at that depth are 'colorless'.
Slashdot Mirror
You couldn't count the number of highschool students who want to go off to be a game programmer because 'games are so fun'. They tend to think that it's two hours a day coding and six hours a day having fun playing games.
The real life of a game developer is 60-80 hour weeks, running the same code over and over trying to find some obscure bug in some function that performs some obtuse mathmatical function. There's incredible pressure to deliver before a competitor delivers something similar. After a couple months, the stuff you're working on will make you want to cry because you've done it so much. Then, if your game flops, you get to look for another job.
You should first talk to him to discuss the lifestyle that he'll have to follow in most of that line of work and ask if he wants to devote several years of his life to that. It seems glamorous from the outside as a game player but it is a type job where your life will completely pass you by and all you'll have to show for it is poor health, poor eyesight, and little money.
Maybe a non-repetitive game :)
I did everything available before Burning Crusade was released. I quit the second time about a week before BC came out. I tried to get back into it before BC but I couldn't stand the boredom and not even the anticipation of new content could get me back into it. After you do the new content (and the old content) 10 times and can follow a script on how to do it, they aren't so much skill dependant anymore as they are just following a script accurately and not messing up. It gets to be where the times someone screws up and wipes the raid are the raids you remember, not the successes because they are all the same (boring). How many times do you talk about raids as being "remember that time Legolasssssss1231231231 screwed up and wiped us when the BigUglyMob agrod wrong?" as opposed to "Remember that 134th time we went in and cleared the instance just like we did the 133rd time?" That should be a clue.
The two weeks were right before Burning Crusades came out. I cancelled again about a week before BC. I just realized that it was a boring game and after doing all the new content 10 times, it'd be boring again. So, no, I didn't do most of that stuff because I quit a boring game before they came out.
Yeah, and after you do them 10 times and get the script down, it's rinse-and-repeat.
You haven't played in a while then as there have been changes to address travel time. Before the changes, there were work-arounds, though. If you sit at your keyboard and don't use autopilot, you can use WTZ (warp-to-zero) and it makes traveling very fast.... you can cover vast distances in 15 minutes (several systems a minute in anything but a capital ship). Before WTZ was put into the game, people had bookmarks that did the same thing.
If you were sitting around watching timers, you weren't playing the game. You may have had more fun exploring lowsec/zerosec space or investigated the alliances that, through game mechanics, actually control areas of space (and benefit from having that control), build their own space stations, and have epic wars with other player alliances.
2. Make levels not mean so much.
3. Make quests driven by players (player made content)
5. Let the players deal with them but if they become a real problem, let the GMs deal with them.
6. Player made content. That's how you solve the content problem. Unfortunately, few MMOs have it (WoW doesn't - trade skills are not player made content).
7. Yeah.
There is already a game that does most of what you say, and I already play it (have for over a year now). It ain't WoW and most WoW lovers hate it.
WoW is not that hard. That's why so many people play it. Some of the boss encounters are interesting, I'll give it that, but when you've done it for the 100th time, it isn't anymore. I played WoW for 8 months, had multiple level 60s, had done pretty much everything in the game, and was extremely bored. Everything turned into a grind... kill 1000s of mobs to raise faction, kill 1000s of mobs to get pairs of nuts to turn in for stuff, do 100s of BGs to get points to buy items, do any of the instanced stuff for the 100th time this month, etc. etc. etc. I quit the game once, came back eight months later, and tried to play it again and after two weeks, couldn't stand it so I cancelled my account again. I'll never play it again. I don't play games to be graphical chat rooms. I like to be challenged. So, I play other games now that have some challenge to them.
Programmers aren't simply 'drivers' of 'cars'. Programmers are more analogous to mechanics in your scenario (fixing bugs, for example, in code is like fixing a bug in an engine). Users are simply 'drivers'. Sure, users don't need to know how to program at all, but a mechanic had better know how a car works.
Yup. Creating threads is easy... have a function of the appropriate signature and call pthread_create or CreateThread to your heart's content. Data partitioning (solving/minimizing data contention), that's the 'hard' part and they haven't really had luck doing this automagically yet. Even with OpenMP you still have to tell the compiler where it can do it's 'magic'.
Heh, yeah... band printers and such from the dot-matrix days of yore.
I could swear I've heard this approach mentioned before. Is anyone else getting a sense of deja vu?
From TFA:
So the development environment and support are "very good" and the two complaints about the documentation that make it "poor" are: multi-lingual support in some documentation (example: Unreal Engine3 [by Epic, not even Microsoft]) and version differences because by the time the documentation gets translated, it's sometimes out of date. So the challenges are associated with the language barrier, thus yielding "poor" because of the lack of, or out of date, Japanese versions of the documentation, for example in non-Microsoft documents (no mention specifically if this is also in relation to Microsoft documentation of development tools, which he says is 'very good'.
I've never used the words "insane" or "crazy" to mean something like "beyond all expectations" before.
Did you see that motorcyle stunt rider do a flip? It was *insane*!
That may not be what he meant, but it's easy to read the whole article that way (with a little bit of slang) and it make complete sense in the other direction from the dictionary definitions of the words.
Actually, what you want is impossible. There is no player in all of Eve who can cruise around 0.0 space without constantly looking over his shoulder. The best one could do is cruise around 0.0 space that his corporation has sovereignty over, but even that does not make him immune to being killed by another player, it just makes it more likely that he would be notified of a hostile in the area sooner. In 0.0, if they aren't "blue", then you *must* assume they are hostile. It's that simple. And... there is no ship in the game that can't be killed by another gang so searching for such a ship is pointless. No matter what you fly or how many skill points or how much money you have, you can (and probably will) be killed flying around lowsec/0.0 solo. In fact, there are several mantras:
1. Do not undock in any ship that you cannot afford to lose. (slightly relaxed in highsec but still somewhat true, depending)
2. If you plan to fly into lowsec/0.0 space, assume that whatever ship you are in is already blown up, because it most likely will be.
If either of the two points above don't sit well with you while you are in a particular ship, you probably should put it back in your hangar and pick another ship to fly.
Yeah, just doing missions or mining is that way. In lowsec/0.0 it's never the same thing from minute to minute as it is almost entirely PvP on a 1-on-1, 1-on-many, many-on-many, or OMG-LOOK-AT-ALL-THOSE-SHIPS!!!!one
That's perfectly fine
Eve has been around for 3+ years now and is still growing, slowly, but growing. Even one year ago when I first signed on, the record for simultanous players was around 16000. These days, it's normally in the high 20s and the record is double that a year ago (around 33000 simultaneous). Granted, it's probably two orders of magnitude lower than WoW, but it doesn't try to cater to the masses... it's a niche game.
Here's a quick comparison. I never once in WoW got very excited about anything and I've done most all the content before BC (didn't do the Slithus stuff because I quit before that was put in). In Eve, I've had so much adrenalin pumping that my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't control my ship.
Whether your not you are in a corp (or even an NPC corp) has no bearing on whether your not you can get into a cool ship or 'something'. You train up for it and buy it on your own and *pow* you're in your cool ship or 'something' as soon as you can afford to buy it and no one can stop you (as long as the ship is for sale somewhere). The game is soloable to a large extent. I've been playing for just over a year now and the only time I join gangs are when I want to do so, usually to help a newer pilot out finishing a mission, inviting newer players to join me on tougher missions so they can make some money and have fun shooting bigger npc ships, or when we gang up to go hunting in lowsec/zerosec for other players.
Sounds like you may have spent that four months waiting on someone to hold your hand and give you stuff. That won't happen unless there's some reason to do so and/or you are somewhat trusted already. You can't expect to join a corp and get access to the coffers right away because there's too many spies and corporate thieves around. You have to earn trust before you'll get handouts. So yeah, you were wasting your time.
J. Edgar no doubt ;)
After all, the Itanium (which embraced exactly what you speak of) was such a huge success and well regarded by the community for its amazing integer performance.
The CPUs that have remove these things (are in-order, for example) are currently in consoles and are for power savings as well as real-estate savings. You have to cut something if you want more cores on the die. However, the performance of those cores (like the ones in the XBox360, the Wii, and the PPU in the PS3) are not that fast by today's standards. They tend to be compared with processors from two generations back (Pentium III and G4) on general purpose code. Plus, there are plenty of types of codes that really need OOOE and good branch prediction to keep the processor running at high efficiency (AI, for example).
Actually, both the Cell and Niagra are discussed fairly often and both are considered interesting. Just because some posters don't agree with you that the Cell is the answer to all our prayers simply means that there are different opinions. I think the direction is fairly well understood at this point, particularly since Intel and AMD have both jumped on the asymmetric cores bandwagon and talked about their plans quite a bit.
By the way, 'grok and understand' is redundant.
Well, from my experience (and yes, I've done a bit of IT myself) is that many of these 'evaluations' are prejudicial. Meaning, from the start, IT has already decided what product will not be considered, or at the very least, will not be given equal consideration. For example, an employee says "we need photoshop because it does what we want and it's the industry standard", IT says "use The Gimp, it's just as good and it runs on Linux and is free". IT *may* have evaluated it from the standpoint of cost, familiarity, and available resources (maybe you only have Linux boxes there already) but will have missed the boat on what was actually required and desired.
These type decisions and the attitude of "we know what's best for you, even though you want to use a popular product, we're gonna make you use this other thing because it's cheaper and it runs on something we're already familiar with (Linux) and we know what's best for you, and, in case you missed it, we know what's best for you" is what makes IT and the rest of the company sometimes have friction.
This sounds like just an effort to become a popular site by being a drama-fest, a "Jerry Springer" site. I'm sure they'll be branching out to other areas (different jobs) soon enough.
Sounds like LaTeX... only that LaTeX has been around a lot longer. XML is pretty bad stuff. It works because it's kind of the only game in town and, no, I don't have a better alternative (right now :)) The main difference is that XML has been elevated to buzzword status so it gets lots of attention. Put it in anywhere and everywhere... it'll solve all your problems!
I saw a good sig once:
XML is like violence. If a little bit doesn't fix things, just use more of it.
Don't you know? You're always supposed to wait for the x.1 version before you buy Microsoft stuff. The first version is hurried and the x.1 version has lots of bug fixes (not that all are fixed or new ones introduced, but it's always better than the x.0 version if you have to use it).
You don't mention what tools you are using but:
- There's probably a lot of file caching going on so that doesn't matter as it will discard unused cache to fulfill your memory allocation requests as you run (low overhead).
- If you're running SQLServer, for example, by default it grabs a huge chunk of memory for caching. You can control how much it uses for this (set the max value) in the configuration tool. At one time, it defaulted to as much as all your memory minus 128M for the OS or something similarly large. Step 1 was to drop it down to a more reasonable level (like 256M total).
- Look for lots of other 'tools' that start on boot or on login and grab up memory... things like indexing services and the like.
I've programmed in both and, other than the fact that you can't use sockets in the Wait... APIs (as you mention - but the BSD socket code is layered on top of native Win32, so you'd be passing objects created by two different subsystems to one subsystem's call, which shouldn't be expected to work), the rest of your post is either lack of experience with Win32 threads or subjective preference on your part.
Personally, I've found situations using each API where the functionality desired was very difficult to replicate in the other API. It usually requires some rethinking, is all. And, last I checked, there were things you could do in either API that weren't easily reproducable in the other API.
However, both APIs tend to evolve towards each other over time so it becomes less of an issue.
If you notice, it is red. This is actually useful at depth as light of those wavelengths are filtered by the water so that even at relatively shallow depths, reds appear as grays. At 'deep' depths, no red wavelengths of light are found (from the surface/sun) so animals that are red at that depth are 'colorless'.