Walter Koenig's character of Bester, the Psi-Cop, has a crippled hand, yet the book doesn't mention this at all.
No, Walter Koenig is missing a finger. He was missing a finger during StarTrek too, back in the 60s. JMS just decided that it fit the character, and emphasized it slightly. That isn't the kind of thing that is going to go into a script, especially when you don't really know who is going to be cast in the role.
I think the only time that the hand was even hinted at directly in the script was in Season 4 or 5, when there are some scenes taking place in Bester's apartment on Mars. Even though he is at home, he leaves one of the two gloves on, the one on his "crippled" hand. That was probably the only time it would have been mentioned in a script, and those books are a long way off anyhow.
Which doesn't involve a single pixel shader. Doom 3 only used shaders for post effects like the heat wave.
The GeForce 2 didn't have pixel shaders, which is why it is a bit odd that the article mentions it as a point.
My only guess is that they are insinuating that Microsoft pressured nVidia to delay implementing it in hardware until the GeForce 3. However, there are so many factual errors in this article that I really have to wonder if they truely know what they're talking about. Another prime example is when they go on about how much more successful the Radeon 9700 would have been if Microsoft backed it up. Problem is, not only did Microsoft back them up, the card was practically the reference implementation of DirectX 9.
Tim Buckley has stated over and over again that he did not even read Penny-Arcade before working on CAD, so it can't possibly be a ripoff. I have also heard him say this in person. I, for one, believe him.
Besides, CAD has such a vastly different style (Artistically, plot-wise (it has one), and character wise) that I don't understand how anybody could even confuse it with being a BLATANT ripoff. CAD is only 3 years old, so if CAD was a ripoff for "at least a couple of years", that would seem to indicate that it has been for the majority of its run. I really wonder if you have even read CAD (You know, every strip), or if you just looked at a few strips and declared judgement.
Penny-Arcade isn't the first gaming webcomic either, anyhow. There were a whole bunch that came before it.
No, they weren't forced to do anything. They could have simply switched over to vxworks sooner, like all their competitors were doing. Or, they could have released the GPL'd code without all the binary-only drivers that they provide for free, preventing people from actually using the code to do anything.
Linksys obviously looked the situation and decided that they could actually get good press by releasing the GPL code with everything needed to get it going, and made it easy for us.
See, Linksys might only sell a few percent of their routers for eventual linux modding, but think about it. All those luddites asking their techie friends what router to buy, and all the techies (Those few percentage points) are really stoked about their WRT54Gs, so they reccommend them to their luddite friends as good routers. I know I have.
Seriously. My modded WRT54G and DSL modem are plugged into a UPS, as the only devices. Last time I did a full rundown test, the UPS lasted 6 hours powering my internet connection.
Of course my laptop will only last 2 or 3 hours, but I can plug it into the UPS too when the laptop battery dies. I figure I can get maybe 4 hours total off the one UPS. 6 to 8 hours if I buy the addon battery pack for my UPS (Back-UPS RS 1500)
I have a dedicated server from ServerMatrix. When I initially ordered a server, THEY called ME to confirm that everything was in order. I gave them the requested info, and everything was fine; my server was placed online a few hours later.
This makes perfect sense to me, and was very reasonable. Services I have ordered through ServerMatrix since then have gone through my existing account, so no verification is required.
Faxing a copy of a credit card is also NOT unreasonable for orders that a retailer deems questionable. By forcing you to send a fax of the front and back of the credit card, they are forcing you to prove that have the physical card and are not using a stolen number (where you would not have the card). This prevents fraud.
I know that ServerMatrix requires this of some of their customers, though I didn't need to. I understand that it is an automated process with orders that their system deems a risk, and that it happens mostly on international orders. Somebody in Russia ordering a server with a credit card from a small company/bank is obviously a bigger risk than somebody living in the same city as the datacenter with a card from a major bank. So the person from russia might be asked to fax the front and back of their card, just to be sure.
Yeah, you can fake a fax to pretend you have the card, but it still helps prevent fraud, if not eliminate it.
SARS shut down travel in affected areas because it was airborne. All you had to do was be in the same room as an infected person, just like the common cold... or the flu.
Perhaps in some places, but it didn't shut down travel in or through Toronto.
SARS wasn't a pandemic or epidemic anyhow. During the whole episode, 813 died. On a global scale, that is totally insignificant. I'd imagine more people die of hunger every DAY. What I'm trying to say is that it was totally overblown, and it wasn't even that serious if you got infected with it, for the most part.
I'm no neuroscientist, but by that age, isn't your brain losing synapses faster than it is creating new ones? Would that not mean that somebody a bit younger than you (Say, 35) would have a brain that is in better condition?
I guess you're not qualified to have opinions, your decrepit brain can't be trusted. Sorry.
In the case of the store, I think discrimination laws would come into effect, preventing it outright. You can't discourage somebody from entering your store based on their age (Unless of course a law is involved, in the case of sex and alcohol). You also can't put up a sign in your window that says "No coloreds" and discourage non-caucassians to leave even if you serve them. Discrimination laws exist for a reason.
What if people my age are among his customers? The article mentions teens coming in to buy things and leaving as soon as possible. Why should it be harder to buy something at the shop for a teen than somebody in their 40s? I know that if I ran into a shop using this system, I'd take my business elsewhere. Why should I give money to somebody trying to drive me off?
I would suggest the other solution the article mentions as working very effectively to discourage teens from loitering; playing classical music in and around the store.
It was invented by a store owner and is being sold to store owners. The point of the device is to keep teens from loitering in and around the shops.
That's the illegal part. If people want to put it on their private property, well, fine.
Of course, there is the question about how legal it is to blare audio at 75db at all hours of the day and night. I would imagine that if enough people complained about the noise, the police would make somebody shut the thing off, if only at night.
Being 20, my opinion of anybody that uses one of these things is that they are idiots. I mean, how else am I supposed to react to somebody using a device to selectively annoy people my age? I'm hoping these things get banned in civilized countries.
Perhaps one would want to run a BitTorrent client on a machine. Some of the better clients such as Azureus are notoriously demanding on the CPU (and memory) front. Perhaps one might use it as a media server, which sometimes involves transcoding the video to a format supported by the output device (MPEG-2 or WMV).
You're also mistaken about software RAID's CPU usage. Doing some googling, one user reported a 5-disk RAID-5 array used 80% of the processing power of an Athlon 700 to do writes. The Cyrix 3 core isn't exactly screaming fast...
Anyhow, I was going under the assumption that the 1.0GHz C3 was the fastest processor. It turns out they actually go up to 1.4GHz.
And so the more important issue, which you're ignoring. Power usage. The ULV Pentium M has a TPD of only 5W, while the C3 at the same speed (1.2GHz) uses 17W. Or if you go for the C3-M, 12W.
Either way the Pentium M uses a fraction of the power. Considering the OP wanted a low-power solution, I think this is a fairly important factor.
Because software RAID-5 sucks CPU cycles. Because he might want other services on the box.
And because the Pentium-M draws HALF the power of the C3 while it is busy being faster, and he wants a low power solution. 5W is a nice improvement over 11W, or whatever the C3 was.
Because actual 3D games require far too much data to be practical as applets...
I disagree. The shareware release of Doom 1 was only 2.9MB compressed, and look at how much content it has. 2.9MB for all sounds, music, maps, code, etc. The game has a limited low-res textureset that is used creatively, used MIDI for music, and had a small number of sounds.
It isn't a matter of requireing too much data, it's a matter of not being able to use the same mindset when coding games for such platforms.
I'm not even a game developer, and I can think of a few tricks. For one thing, stream content as needed. Assume the player has broadband. Stream content as you play. Yes, have a loading screen, and use that initial load to grab the content for the first level. Then, while the user is playing, grab the content for the next level or two. Assuming low-end DSL (half a megabit), and 10MB of compressed content per level (Which can store a TON of content), you've got three minutes of load time per level. The initial load time is going to be the big crunch, because after that you can use gameplay time for downloading the next level.
You can also reduce initial load times by prioritizing content and streaming it in as-needed. If you have a level that is going to have 10 or 20 minutes of gameplay, then you don't need to load in sounds and textures that are only going to be used 15 minutes into the game. Those can be loaded while the user is playing. They only initially need to load stuff that is going to be present in the first few minutes of gameplay.
Another trick is procedural texture generation, where textures are mathematically generated rather than stored as bitmaps. And of course there's always the trick of combining multiple low-res textures to create higher res ones, like Halo did for terrain.
And assuming you have a 10 megabyte budget per level, you can always get more out of that by using textures from previously-loaded levels. This has the side effect of the game getting more graphically diverse as the player progresses, so it may not be something you want.
Anyhow, I think that considering how much can be done with a mere 2.9MB of data, having that much or more PER LEVEL can lead to some pretty good looking content.
There are a lot more Socket 370 motherboards than Pentium-M motherboards.
True, though there are still Pentium M mini ITX motherboards, and of course the Asus adapter lets you use it in any Asus board.
Plus, why pay Intel prices?
Because Pentium Ms have much higher performance while drawing less power. The 1GHz C3 is three or four years old, it can't compete because it is simply out of date. Plus I have a hard time trusting Cyrix derived cores ever since the horrible Cyrix M2.
Yes, the Pentium M costs more, but if you want a CPU that is faster and draws less power, it may be worth the cost.
You can, in some browsers, already use keywords as a sort of domain.
Take Firefox for example. I no longer type "slashdot.org" or "teknews.net" into the address bar. I simply type "slashdot" or "teknews". Firefox realizes the domain doesn't exist, and does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. In most case it sends me to the site whose name ends in that domain.
What about domains where the keyword doesn't link to the domain? Well, if I type "firefox" into the address bar and hit enter, I'm not going to go to firefox.com, but http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Now, chances are that that is actually where I want to go.
So, maybe this might make sense from a business perspective, but from a consumer perspective, it is already here.
Firefox doesn't re-use the memory though. It just keeps going up until it either consumes all system memory or it is restarted.
As mentioned in other posts, it may not be a memory leak if it can still reference unused bitmaps, but it doesn't seem to be ever removing the old bitmaps from the cache.
My solution to this so far has been SessionSaver; I can just terminate Firefox and re-open it. All my tabs and sessions are exactly like before I closed it, except memory usage is back to normal.
Firefox (on Windows) can and will suck up an infinite amount of memory. This is because under some circumstances (Well, always, at least for me and many other users) it does NOT remove the uncompressed images from memory when a tab is closed.
If I am opening and closing a lot of image-heavy tabs, after a while, my firefox instance is sucking up 800MB of system memory, and the ONLY way to free it is to restart firefox.
I don't care about firefox's memory usage with compressed versus uncompressed. If I'll get more speed with 90MB of uncompressed images, go for it. What I do have a problem with is how it doesn't bother to remove raw images that are no longer needed. Essentially, it is a really bad memory leak that they haven't fixed for ages.
As for reducing actual memory usage, a hybrid solution is best. At the very least all images on other tabs should remain compressed, and then decompressed when switching to that tab, going back to the compressed images from the old tab (Disk cache them, or keep both compressed and uncompressed in memory).
In addition, you can probably do smart-cacheing on images on the current tab. As the article author mentioned, keep uncompressed copies of only images near the current viewport. Another solution might be to store everything as compressed, even in the current tab, and modify the rendering engine so that images are drawn asynchronously. A 100ms delay while scrolling will cause noticeable hitching, but if you draw the rest of that page and throw in the image 100ms later, the user will have a much smoother experience. They can keep scrolling while the image is loaded in.
But disk capacity doesn't matter. If you want to push out a 30GB game over STEAM instead of via CD, then you're going to have to have internet connections that are five to ten times as fast. And that is not going to happen in a year or two.
But it was better than the original (Through plot, graphics, gameplay, etc), and sold much better, so it is a success. Just because some people don't like it doesn't mean it wasn't a success in the market.
I thought the game was fun, but average. I don't hold it up on a pedestel. But nobody can deny that gamers agreed that it was a big enough improvement to shatter records. So it seems to contradict the rather poor article.
I agree. I point at Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 as two games that were better than the originals, and had very strong sales. Obviously gamers WANT sequels (arguably more than they want new non-sequels), they just want them to be good.
Intel Yonah specs have just been leaked. What I find most surprising is the prices - 2.16GHz will set you back $640 for the processor alone. Making it rather unlikely that the iBook will ship at that speed.
Possibly. Intel will probably give a hefty discount to Apple. I'm surprised that the fastest Yonah will be that cheap, that's actually a bit cheaper than the current fastest Dothan, which sells for around $700 US.
If it's dual core, it will still be faster than the Powerbook for native apps. But it will also still be slower than the Powerbooks for professional apps, e.g. Photoshop.
Photoshop is a multithreaded application that gets big performance boosts from dual-core processors (or multiprocessor systems). I would imagine most other professional apps do to. About the only people who DON'T benefit from dual core are gamers. And there still aren't many Mac gamers.
It would also depend on if the G4 is clock-for-clock faster than the Pentium M.
I wonder if one could use one core to do a prefetch-translate in rosetta, leaving the other core to run the translated app at native speed.
You could probably email Transitive to ask them if QuickTransit supports that (Rosetta is Transitive's QuickTransit product). There doesn't seem to be any mention of it on Transitive's site, but considering Apple would have known if they'd be deploying on dual-core systems (Yonah's basic specs have been well known for MANY months, and Apple has a long history of dual-processor hardware) long in advance, I'm sure they've looked into it.
Exactly. And guess what? There has yet to be invented a CD that cannot be ripped via one mechanism or another. Exact Audio Copy tends to rip CD's protected by security-through-damage DRM, and the old analog method works for ANY CD.
And guess what? If I was presented with a CD that had Apple's DRM on it, guess what, I'd rip it myself before putting it on my iPod. Because if I own the damned CD, I don't want the music on my iPod encrypted.
I still support FairPlay on iTunes though, because it's Apple's store and they can do whatever they want (there are other places to get the music legally), and because it is the only way that that the music industry is going to permit their stuff to be sold online. I mean, I'd PREFER that iTunes didn't use DRM, but in its case I understand and accept it.
Slashdot Mirror
Walter Koenig's character of Bester, the Psi-Cop, has a crippled hand, yet the book doesn't mention this at all.
No, Walter Koenig is missing a finger. He was missing a finger during StarTrek too, back in the 60s. JMS just decided that it fit the character, and emphasized it slightly. That isn't the kind of thing that is going to go into a script, especially when you don't really know who is going to be cast in the role.
I think the only time that the hand was even hinted at directly in the script was in Season 4 or 5, when there are some scenes taking place in Bester's apartment on Mars. Even though he is at home, he leaves one of the two gloves on, the one on his "crippled" hand. That was probably the only time it would have been mentioned in a script, and those books are a long way off anyhow.
Which doesn't involve a single pixel shader. Doom 3 only used shaders for post effects like the heat wave.
The GeForce 2 didn't have pixel shaders, which is why it is a bit odd that the article mentions it as a point.
My only guess is that they are insinuating that Microsoft pressured nVidia to delay implementing it in hardware until the GeForce 3. However, there are so many factual errors in this article that I really have to wonder if they truely know what they're talking about. Another prime example is when they go on about how much more successful the Radeon 9700 would have been if Microsoft backed it up. Problem is, not only did Microsoft back them up, the card was practically the reference implementation of DirectX 9.
Tim Buckley has stated over and over again that he did not even read Penny-Arcade before working on CAD, so it can't possibly be a ripoff. I have also heard him say this in person. I, for one, believe him.
Besides, CAD has such a vastly different style (Artistically, plot-wise (it has one), and character wise) that I don't understand how anybody could even confuse it with being a BLATANT ripoff. CAD is only 3 years old, so if CAD was a ripoff for "at least a couple of years", that would seem to indicate that it has been for the majority of its run. I really wonder if you have even read CAD (You know, every strip), or if you just looked at a few strips and declared judgement.
Penny-Arcade isn't the first gaming webcomic either, anyhow. There were a whole bunch that came before it.
No, they weren't forced to do anything. They could have simply switched over to vxworks sooner, like all their competitors were doing. Or, they could have released the GPL'd code without all the binary-only drivers that they provide for free, preventing people from actually using the code to do anything.
Linksys obviously looked the situation and decided that they could actually get good press by releasing the GPL code with everything needed to get it going, and made it easy for us.
See, Linksys might only sell a few percent of their routers for eventual linux modding, but think about it. All those luddites asking their techie friends what router to buy, and all the techies (Those few percentage points) are really stoked about their WRT54Gs, so they reccommend them to their luddite friends as good routers. I know I have.
Seriously. My modded WRT54G and DSL modem are plugged into a UPS, as the only devices. Last time I did a full rundown test, the UPS lasted 6 hours powering my internet connection.
Of course my laptop will only last 2 or 3 hours, but I can plug it into the UPS too when the laptop battery dies. I figure I can get maybe 4 hours total off the one UPS. 6 to 8 hours if I buy the addon battery pack for my UPS (Back-UPS RS 1500)
I fully agree.
I have a dedicated server from ServerMatrix. When I initially ordered a server, THEY called ME to confirm that everything was in order. I gave them the requested info, and everything was fine; my server was placed online a few hours later.
This makes perfect sense to me, and was very reasonable. Services I have ordered through ServerMatrix since then have gone through my existing account, so no verification is required.
Faxing a copy of a credit card is also NOT unreasonable for orders that a retailer deems questionable. By forcing you to send a fax of the front and back of the credit card, they are forcing you to prove that have the physical card and are not using a stolen number (where you would not have the card). This prevents fraud.
I know that ServerMatrix requires this of some of their customers, though I didn't need to. I understand that it is an automated process with orders that their system deems a risk, and that it happens mostly on international orders. Somebody in Russia ordering a server with a credit card from a small company/bank is obviously a bigger risk than somebody living in the same city as the datacenter with a card from a major bank. So the person from russia might be asked to fax the front and back of their card, just to be sure.
Yeah, you can fake a fax to pretend you have the card, but it still helps prevent fraud, if not eliminate it.
SARS shut down travel in affected areas because it was airborne. All you had to do was be in the same room as an infected person, just like the common cold... or the flu.
Perhaps in some places, but it didn't shut down travel in or through Toronto.
SARS wasn't a pandemic or epidemic anyhow. During the whole episode, 813 died. On a global scale, that is totally insignificant. I'd imagine more people die of hunger every DAY. What I'm trying to say is that it was totally overblown, and it wasn't even that serious if you got infected with it, for the most part.
Now that I'm 41
I'm no neuroscientist, but by that age, isn't your brain losing synapses faster than it is creating new ones? Would that not mean that somebody a bit younger than you (Say, 35) would have a brain that is in better condition?
I guess you're not qualified to have opinions, your decrepit brain can't be trusted. Sorry.
In the case of the store, I think discrimination laws would come into effect, preventing it outright. You can't discourage somebody from entering your store based on their age (Unless of course a law is involved, in the case of sex and alcohol). You also can't put up a sign in your window that says "No coloreds" and discourage non-caucassians to leave even if you serve them. Discrimination laws exist for a reason.
What if people my age are among his customers? The article mentions teens coming in to buy things and leaving as soon as possible. Why should it be harder to buy something at the shop for a teen than somebody in their 40s? I know that if I ran into a shop using this system, I'd take my business elsewhere. Why should I give money to somebody trying to drive me off?
I would suggest the other solution the article mentions as working very effectively to discourage teens from loitering; playing classical music in and around the store.
It was invented by a store owner and is being sold to store owners. The point of the device is to keep teens from loitering in and around the shops.
That's the illegal part. If people want to put it on their private property, well, fine.
Of course, there is the question about how legal it is to blare audio at 75db at all hours of the day and night. I would imagine that if enough people complained about the noise, the police would make somebody shut the thing off, if only at night.
Being 20, my opinion of anybody that uses one of these things is that they are idiots. I mean, how else am I supposed to react to somebody using a device to selectively annoy people my age? I'm hoping these things get banned in civilized countries.
Perhaps one would want to run a BitTorrent client on a machine. Some of the better clients such as Azureus are notoriously demanding on the CPU (and memory) front. Perhaps one might use it as a media server, which sometimes involves transcoding the video to a format supported by the output device (MPEG-2 or WMV).
You're also mistaken about software RAID's CPU usage. Doing some googling, one user reported a 5-disk RAID-5 array used 80% of the processing power of an Athlon 700 to do writes. The Cyrix 3 core isn't exactly screaming fast...
Anyhow, I was going under the assumption that the 1.0GHz C3 was the fastest processor. It turns out they actually go up to 1.4GHz.
And so the more important issue, which you're ignoring. Power usage. The ULV Pentium M has a TPD of only 5W, while the C3 at the same speed (1.2GHz) uses 17W. Or if you go for the C3-M, 12W.
Either way the Pentium M uses a fraction of the power. Considering the OP wanted a low-power solution, I think this is a fairly important factor.
Because software RAID-5 sucks CPU cycles. Because he might want other services on the box.
And because the Pentium-M draws HALF the power of the C3 while it is busy being faster, and he wants a low power solution. 5W is a nice improvement over 11W, or whatever the C3 was.
Because actual 3D games require far too much data to be practical as applets...
I disagree. The shareware release of Doom 1 was only 2.9MB compressed, and look at how much content it has. 2.9MB for all sounds, music, maps, code, etc. The game has a limited low-res textureset that is used creatively, used MIDI for music, and had a small number of sounds.
It isn't a matter of requireing too much data, it's a matter of not being able to use the same mindset when coding games for such platforms.
I'm not even a game developer, and I can think of a few tricks. For one thing, stream content as needed. Assume the player has broadband. Stream content as you play. Yes, have a loading screen, and use that initial load to grab the content for the first level. Then, while the user is playing, grab the content for the next level or two. Assuming low-end DSL (half a megabit), and 10MB of compressed content per level (Which can store a TON of content), you've got three minutes of load time per level. The initial load time is going to be the big crunch, because after that you can use gameplay time for downloading the next level.
You can also reduce initial load times by prioritizing content and streaming it in as-needed. If you have a level that is going to have 10 or 20 minutes of gameplay, then you don't need to load in sounds and textures that are only going to be used 15 minutes into the game. Those can be loaded while the user is playing. They only initially need to load stuff that is going to be present in the first few minutes of gameplay.
Another trick is procedural texture generation, where textures are mathematically generated rather than stored as bitmaps. And of course there's always the trick of combining multiple low-res textures to create higher res ones, like Halo did for terrain.
And assuming you have a 10 megabyte budget per level, you can always get more out of that by using textures from previously-loaded levels. This has the side effect of the game getting more graphically diverse as the player progresses, so it may not be something you want.
Anyhow, I think that considering how much can be done with a mere 2.9MB of data, having that much or more PER LEVEL can lead to some pretty good looking content.
Sorry, you're wrong.
Current estimate of the population of Canada: ~32.4 million
Population of Oregon: ~3.4 million
Total: ~35.8 million
Population of California: ~33.9 million
You could claim that California had a higher population than either Canada or Oregon, but by claiming both you're just being arrogant.
There are a lot more Socket 370 motherboards than Pentium-M motherboards.
True, though there are still Pentium M mini ITX motherboards, and of course the Asus adapter lets you use it in any Asus board.
Plus, why pay Intel prices?
Because Pentium Ms have much higher performance while drawing less power. The 1GHz C3 is three or four years old, it can't compete because it is simply out of date. Plus I have a hard time trusting Cyrix derived cores ever since the horrible Cyrix M2.
Yes, the Pentium M costs more, but if you want a CPU that is faster and draws less power, it may be worth the cost.
You can, in some browsers, already use keywords as a sort of domain.
Take Firefox for example. I no longer type "slashdot.org" or "teknews.net" into the address bar. I simply type "slashdot" or "teknews". Firefox realizes the domain doesn't exist, and does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. In most case it sends me to the site whose name ends in that domain.
What about domains where the keyword doesn't link to the domain? Well, if I type "firefox" into the address bar and hit enter, I'm not going to go to firefox.com, but http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Now, chances are that that is actually where I want to go.
So, maybe this might make sense from a business perspective, but from a consumer perspective, it is already here.
Why use a Via C3 when you can use a ULV 1.2GHz Pentium M? They have a TDP of 5W, and I bet they're faster too.
Of course, there is also the regular LV Pentium M, which hits 1.5GHz at a TDP of 10W.
Firefox doesn't re-use the memory though. It just keeps going up until it either consumes all system memory or it is restarted.
As mentioned in other posts, it may not be a memory leak if it can still reference unused bitmaps, but it doesn't seem to be ever removing the old bitmaps from the cache.
My solution to this so far has been SessionSaver; I can just terminate Firefox and re-open it. All my tabs and sessions are exactly like before I closed it, except memory usage is back to normal.
Firefox (on Windows) can and will suck up an infinite amount of memory. This is because under some circumstances (Well, always, at least for me and many other users) it does NOT remove the uncompressed images from memory when a tab is closed.
If I am opening and closing a lot of image-heavy tabs, after a while, my firefox instance is sucking up 800MB of system memory, and the ONLY way to free it is to restart firefox.
I don't care about firefox's memory usage with compressed versus uncompressed. If I'll get more speed with 90MB of uncompressed images, go for it. What I do have a problem with is how it doesn't bother to remove raw images that are no longer needed. Essentially, it is a really bad memory leak that they haven't fixed for ages.
As for reducing actual memory usage, a hybrid solution is best. At the very least all images on other tabs should remain compressed, and then decompressed when switching to that tab, going back to the compressed images from the old tab (Disk cache them, or keep both compressed and uncompressed in memory).
In addition, you can probably do smart-cacheing on images on the current tab. As the article author mentioned, keep uncompressed copies of only images near the current viewport. Another solution might be to store everything as compressed, even in the current tab, and modify the rendering engine so that images are drawn asynchronously. A 100ms delay while scrolling will cause noticeable hitching, but if you draw the rest of that page and throw in the image 100ms later, the user will have a much smoother experience. They can keep scrolling while the image is loaded in.
But disk capacity doesn't matter. If you want to push out a 30GB game over STEAM instead of via CD, then you're going to have to have internet connections that are five to ten times as fast. And that is not going to happen in a year or two.
But it was better than the original (Through plot, graphics, gameplay, etc), and sold much better, so it is a success. Just because some people don't like it doesn't mean it wasn't a success in the market.
I thought the game was fun, but average. I don't hold it up on a pedestel. But nobody can deny that gamers agreed that it was a big enough improvement to shatter records. So it seems to contradict the rather poor article.
I agree. I point at Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 as two games that were better than the originals, and had very strong sales. Obviously gamers WANT sequels (arguably more than they want new non-sequels), they just want them to be good.
Due to the limited processing power in the original XBox (P3 733MHz, IIRC?), I highly doubt it has the processing power to decode an HD stream.
Besides, the price of an xbox and chip (~$210) is not far off from the core package of the xbox 360. So you're not saving an enormous amount of money.
Intel Yonah specs have just been leaked. What I find most surprising is the prices - 2.16GHz will set you back $640 for the processor alone. Making it rather unlikely that the iBook will ship at that speed.
Possibly. Intel will probably give a hefty discount to Apple. I'm surprised that the fastest Yonah will be that cheap, that's actually a bit cheaper than the current fastest Dothan, which sells for around $700 US.
If it's dual core, it will still be faster than the Powerbook for native apps. But it will also still be slower than the Powerbooks for professional apps, e.g. Photoshop.
Photoshop is a multithreaded application that gets big performance boosts from dual-core processors (or multiprocessor systems). I would imagine most other professional apps do to. About the only people who DON'T benefit from dual core are gamers. And there still aren't many Mac gamers.
It would also depend on if the G4 is clock-for-clock faster than the Pentium M.
I wonder if one could use one core to do a prefetch-translate in rosetta, leaving the other core to run the translated app at native speed.
You could probably email Transitive to ask them if QuickTransit supports that (Rosetta is Transitive's QuickTransit product). There doesn't seem to be any mention of it on Transitive's site, but considering Apple would have known if they'd be deploying on dual-core systems (Yonah's basic specs have been well known for MANY months, and Apple has a long history of dual-processor hardware) long in advance, I'm sure they've looked into it.
Exactly. And guess what? There has yet to be invented a CD that cannot be ripped via one mechanism or another. Exact Audio Copy tends to rip CD's protected by security-through-damage DRM, and the old analog method works for ANY CD.
And guess what? If I was presented with a CD that had Apple's DRM on it, guess what, I'd rip it myself before putting it on my iPod. Because if I own the damned CD, I don't want the music on my iPod encrypted.
I still support FairPlay on iTunes though, because it's Apple's store and they can do whatever they want (there are other places to get the music legally), and because it is the only way that that the music industry is going to permit their stuff to be sold online. I mean, I'd PREFER that iTunes didn't use DRM, but in its case I understand and accept it.
CDs, though, had better not have DRM.