fitten, you have the patience of Jobe and I have the utmost respect for you to deal with that knob in the manner you did. Polite, elegant, factual, and you never stooped to his level.
You are correct and I will back you on the fact that this is not a comparison between the same compiler on different platforms. If you are comparing CPUs, you want the best code available to accomplish the task and that would mean assembly. But since SPEC wants the code portable, it's in a higher level language. This means you want a compiler which will produce code that runs best for the particular processor. For x86 platforms, that is usually the Intel compiler. GCC produces slower code in 98% of situations. That tells you nothing about the CPU, only the optimization abilities of different compilers.
Throwing that "scientific method" argument at this approach is completely nonsensical UNLESS you're comparing the code generated by the same compiler on two different platforms, which isn't the point here.
The whole point of comparing CPUs is to say "Hey, CPU, perform this task and tell me how long you took. I don't care how you do it, as long as the end results are accurate. Take any shortcuts and speed advantages you can." By deliberately giving the CPU bad code that makes it take longer than necessary is unfair. Apple should have used every advantage they had at their disposal (Altivec, G5 optimizations, etc) but also give the P4 the same chance. Allow it SSE2, give it the tweaked malloc function. THEN see who comes out on top. Anything less is a sham and is designed to deceive potentional buyers.
If your product is as good as you say it is, it will stand on it's own merit and not require trickery. That is what bothers me about Apple. Almost every ad I ever see for them is a mudslinging campaign against the x86 platform. They have a good system, and they should point out what they have and how it is advantageous to the buyer, such as "DVD-R to let you burn movies or up to 4.7GB of data!", "Up to 8GB of RAM supported which allows much faster image processing than before!". Instead you see crap like "sending other Unixes to/dev/null" and those goofy ads with the people who can barely tie their shoes slamming the Windows sytem for being so hard to use and the mac "just works". It's sad, and it reminds me of the election campaigns where senators never tell you how they're going to improve the economy, only how badly their opponent is going to screw it up. That's just tacky, and I have no respect for those individuals.
The whole "troll" comment has totally lost it's entire meaning on this message board. People have turned into complete idiots and whenever they find a statement they don't agree with, don't like, or just plain rubs them the wrong way, they INSTANTLY label it a troll. It's pathetic, and these people need to come back down to earth and take a good, long look at what they're posting.
A troll is a post specifically designed to get responses (usually angry ones). Before you throw out the troll label, actually READ the comment, ok? 95% of the posts I see people calling trolls, are simply a person stating their view on a subject. Nothing more. Yes, that's right, some people actually have a different viewpoint than YOU! I figured once people reached the age of 10, they would know this. Apparently a lot of folks on this board never mentally matured past that point though...
If you honestly believe that CD prices would drop if all music piracy were eliminated, then you are a bigger fool than even your past posts would indicate.
The music industry (they really deserve the title of Syndicate) lied in the past about CD prices. Even though CDs are far easier for them to produce, they still hold a higher cost than cassette tapes. They told us that the prices would come down when the technology had matured and paid for itself. That time has long passed. Prices are still high.
They love their dough, they rake it in with minimal effort, and I'm supposed to cry for them and point fingers at other people because THEY tell me to? All because THEY think their profits should be even higher than they are when every other industry is struggling in these times?
I picked up programming on the C64 as well. Great little computer! If you want one, you should be able to find them easily at garage sales, discount marts (Value Village up here in Canada), or as a last resort, EBay.
I've got about 5 of them and I never paid more than $5 each. Same goes for the 1541 disk drives. $5.
I'm hoping that WinZip changes the file extension for their new format to make it clear to anyone who gets ahold of such a file that it is not a standard Zip file.
And how much time will it be before someone just writes a program that handles both formats natively? RAR, ACE, and all the other compressors already do handle Zip file just fine.
"Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work? What about my children? What about my grandchildren?"
Well guess what? You can do the same thing that people in EVERY other industry do: Save up the money you made from your "innovative" creation and leave it to them in your will.
I hate this notion that people who come up with IP rather than any other form of work are somehow more special than everyone else. That somehow they deserve to be compensated for the rest of their lives, even if they do nothing else for society.
Sue them in order to pander their non-essential wares? I think that's taking it just wee bit too far. It's fucking satellite TV here, not rations and penicillin to a war torn country.
Besides, I really doubt that you'd even get a court case like that through the door. A company suing a FOREIGN government for the right to sell TV? It even sounds ridiculous.
Every recent laptop I've seen already does this automatically. There's a program that runs that will alter the power-profile based on whether it's plugged in or running on battery, and what application/game you're running.
However, the Vaio I used that had these types of features DIDN'T have them available in the BIOS. In fact, the BIOS had very few options. This means you have to use the Win32 software to change all the features. Kinda screws you if you want to use something other than Bill's Baby.
Nah, I'd rather see SCO get crushed in court. If people find out IBM basically paid-off SCO by buying them out, you'll see all kinds of nutcase lawsuits coming out of the woodwork claiming "patent infringment" by people hoping to get money thrown at them to go away.
The price of a T1 is artificially high. Has been for quite some time. It's obvious they can provide the same throughput for a small fraction of the cost of a T1 and still make a profit.
Companies ALWAYS gouge when selling "business" services/products. Take a look at what a hospital pays for something as simple as rubber gloves. You'll be amazed.
Exactly! Check the source address, see if it matches what was assigned to the port. If not, shut the guy down for 10 minutes. This would prevent almost all DoS attacks if every ISP did it.
Of course, there must be a reason they don't.. I'm assuming it's just too CPU intensive to do something like that for every packet. Perhaps every 100th packet? People who are DoSing are likely to be sending out thousands of these packets anyways, so you'd probably still catch them.
As opposed to supporting Nintendo or Sony? Those companies aren't any better when it comes to consumer rights. They'd try and shut you down just the same.
All of these huge companies will not hesistate to squash you if you get in the way of their big plan! Microsoft is not exclusive in this line of thinking.
Whenever a new patch comes out for Half-Life/Counter-Strike, good luck trying to get it from the severely hammered mirrors. We're talking 1KB/sec here. Most of the mirrors direct you to that god-awful FilePlanet site too where you're looking at a 100+ min wait to START downloading your file.
Hop onto P2P and grab it from someone who's already downloaded it. Works wonderfully and since so the program is so popular, a lot of people have what you're looking for and it downloads nice and quickly.
Check out UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) or WinUAE and you should still be able to run most of these demos. Considering how complex the Amiga is, UAE gives amazing results.
I highly doubt they're going to make a lot of profit (if they make ANY). The target audience is small, to say the least. Considering the effort involved in what they've done, I'd say they deserve all of it.
These demos were given out for FREE years ago, you can still get them for free today and watch them for free (if you can run them). What you're paying for is the convenience of watching them on DVD instead of trying to configure old hardware to do it.
Where in the original Pac-Man game did it ever refer to the enemies as "monsters"? As far as I remember, it just called them Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde. But they sure as hell LOOKED like ghosts so that's what everyone I knew called them.
Oh, admit it, you're lagging behind in all kinds of useless technologies! If you were with the times, you could be transmitting the smell of your flatulence over the airways to your also-up-to-date cellphone-weilding buddy!
Or you could be using a tiny joystick to paint tiny little pictures on your tiny little phone to send to some tiny little friend. Isn't that USEFUL?!
Exactly! It IS possible for them to invent a standard and pronounce the acronym wrong.
As for the giga/jiga issue, I do realise it was originally meant to be pronounced "jiga", but giga has now become the standard. Besides, when you talk about 2 Jigs of RAM, it sounds like you talking about fishing, not computers.
You can get an kernel-module RPM package for RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 that gives you instant NTFS (read-only) support, which is probably good enough for most users:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.ht ml
Yeah, I got it too, although I noticed it with Duke3D as well. I guess it was any game with the build engine that made me motion sick. But not as badly as Dark Forces did. I couldn't play that game for more than 20 minutes without feeling sick to my stomach.
Anyone know what causes this with some games for some people? Is the frame rate too high/low or something?
100k sales is "poor" now? Sheesh, what's this world coming to? Everybody wants variety. Games, movies, music that don't conform to the standard. But people keep pushing this notion though that something HAS to be the best/make the most money or it's a complete failure and it's considered crap. It seems there is no room for middle ground and that has a direct impact on the variety that is available. Funny, isn't it?
Take a good look at how many cool games were canceled because some suit thought it wouldn't boost their bottom line by as much as the next game which conformed to the formula for success.
I truly do miss the days were games were created by 1 or 2 people. Now it's all a big Hollywood event with 50+ people on a single project (it's not even a game anymore, it's a "project"). Expenses go through the roof and the game is now HAS to be a big seller or the investment is shot. It really sucks.
For me, the king of games is Richard Garriott. No other series ever gave me more hours of gameplay and satisfaction than the Ultima series did.
Miyamoto is okay, I find games like Mario and Zelda to be fun for a few minutes here and there, but I just can't get into them. They're too... shallow. I know shallow is probably a bad word here as the levels are large, with hidden items abound, but the gameplay itself I find too simplistic. I feel limited by the game engine.
I don't think low end systems are such a concern in this case, as you need a beefy computer (450MHz and 96+ MB of RAM) to play the game itself anyways. With this speed of a system, I don't think there's any codec that'll slow you down.
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The DVD+R/RW standard is technologically superior to DVD-R/RW. So your reasoning for not supporting Sony is purely political.
Check out the comparison herefitten, you have the patience of Jobe and I have the utmost respect for you to deal with that knob in the manner you did. Polite, elegant, factual, and you never stooped to his level.
/dev/null" and those goofy ads with the people who can barely tie their shoes slamming the Windows sytem for being so hard to use and the mac "just works". It's sad, and it reminds me of the election campaigns where senators never tell you how they're going to improve the economy, only how badly their opponent is going to screw it up. That's just tacky, and I have no respect for those individuals.
You are correct and I will back you on the fact that this is not a comparison between the same compiler on different platforms. If you are comparing CPUs, you want the best code available to accomplish the task and that would mean assembly. But since SPEC wants the code portable, it's in a higher level language. This means you want a compiler which will produce code that runs best for the particular processor. For x86 platforms, that is usually the Intel compiler. GCC produces slower code in 98% of situations. That tells you nothing about the CPU, only the optimization abilities of different compilers.
Throwing that "scientific method" argument at this approach is completely nonsensical UNLESS you're comparing the code generated by the same compiler on two different platforms, which isn't the point here.
The whole point of comparing CPUs is to say "Hey, CPU, perform this task and tell me how long you took. I don't care how you do it, as long as the end results are accurate. Take any shortcuts and speed advantages you can." By deliberately giving the CPU bad code that makes it take longer than necessary is unfair. Apple should have used every advantage they had at their disposal (Altivec, G5 optimizations, etc) but also give the P4 the same chance. Allow it SSE2, give it the tweaked malloc function. THEN see who comes out on top. Anything less is a sham and is designed to deceive potentional buyers.
If your product is as good as you say it is, it will stand on it's own merit and not require trickery. That is what bothers me about Apple. Almost every ad I ever see for them is a mudslinging campaign against the x86 platform. They have a good system, and they should point out what they have and how it is advantageous to the buyer, such as "DVD-R to let you burn movies or up to 4.7GB of data!", "Up to 8GB of RAM supported which allows much faster image processing than before!". Instead you see crap like "sending other Unixes to
The whole "troll" comment has totally lost it's entire meaning on this message board. People have turned into complete idiots and whenever they find a statement they don't agree with, don't like, or just plain rubs them the wrong way, they INSTANTLY label it a troll. It's pathetic, and these people need to come back down to earth and take a good, long look at what they're posting.
A troll is a post specifically designed to get responses (usually angry ones). Before you throw out the troll label, actually READ the comment, ok? 95% of the posts I see people calling trolls, are simply a person stating their view on a subject. Nothing more. Yes, that's right, some people actually have a different viewpoint than YOU! I figured once people reached the age of 10, they would know this. Apparently a lot of folks on this board never mentally matured past that point though...
If you honestly believe that CD prices would drop if all music piracy were eliminated, then you are a bigger fool than even your past posts would indicate.
The music industry (they really deserve the title of Syndicate) lied in the past about CD prices. Even though CDs are far easier for them to produce, they still hold a higher cost than cassette tapes. They told us that the prices would come down when the technology had matured and paid for itself. That time has long passed. Prices are still high.
They love their dough, they rake it in with minimal effort, and I'm supposed to cry for them and point fingers at other people because THEY tell me to? All because THEY think their profits should be even higher than they are when every other industry is struggling in these times?
Fuck them.
I picked up programming on the C64 as well. Great little computer! If you want one, you should be able to find them easily at garage sales, discount marts (Value Village up here in Canada), or as a last resort, EBay.
I've got about 5 of them and I never paid more than $5 each. Same goes for the 1541 disk drives. $5.
I'm hoping that WinZip changes the file extension for their new format to make it clear to anyone who gets ahold of such a file that it is not a standard Zip file.
And how much time will it be before someone just writes a program that handles both formats natively? RAR, ACE, and all the other compressors already do handle Zip file just fine.
"Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work? What about my children? What about my grandchildren?"
Well guess what? You can do the same thing that people in EVERY other industry do: Save up the money you made from your "innovative" creation and leave it to them in your will.
I hate this notion that people who come up with IP rather than any other form of work are somehow more special than everyone else. That somehow they deserve to be compensated for the rest of their lives, even if they do nothing else for society.
Sue them in order to pander their non-essential wares? I think that's taking it just wee bit too far. It's fucking satellite TV here, not rations and penicillin to a war torn country.
Besides, I really doubt that you'd even get a court case like that through the door. A company suing a FOREIGN government for the right to sell TV? It even sounds ridiculous.
Since the connection is digital, it shouldn't be tough to add a layer of encryption onto your conversation. Let 'em monitor scrambled data.
Every recent laptop I've seen already does this automatically. There's a program that runs that will alter the power-profile based on whether it's plugged in or running on battery, and what application/game you're running.
However, the Vaio I used that had these types of features DIDN'T have them available in the BIOS. In fact, the BIOS had very few options. This means you have to use the Win32 software to change all the features. Kinda screws you if you want to use something other than Bill's Baby.
Nah, I'd rather see SCO get crushed in court. If people find out IBM basically paid-off SCO by buying them out, you'll see all kinds of nutcase lawsuits coming out of the woodwork claiming "patent infringment" by people hoping to get money thrown at them to go away.
The line needs to be drawn.
The price of a T1 is artificially high. Has been for quite some time. It's obvious they can provide the same throughput for a small fraction of the cost of a T1 and still make a profit.
Companies ALWAYS gouge when selling "business" services/products. Take a look at what a hospital pays for something as simple as rubber gloves. You'll be amazed.
Exactly! Check the source address, see if it matches what was assigned to the port. If not, shut the guy down for 10 minutes. This would prevent almost all DoS attacks if every ISP did it.
Of course, there must be a reason they don't.. I'm assuming it's just too CPU intensive to do something like that for every packet. Perhaps every 100th packet? People who are DoSing are likely to be sending out thousands of these packets anyways, so you'd probably still catch them.
As opposed to supporting Nintendo or Sony? Those companies aren't any better when it comes to consumer rights. They'd try and shut you down just the same.
All of these huge companies will not hesistate to squash you if you get in the way of their big plan! Microsoft is not exclusive in this line of thinking.
Whenever a new patch comes out for Half-Life/Counter-Strike, good luck trying to get it from the severely hammered mirrors. We're talking 1KB/sec here. Most of the mirrors direct you to that god-awful FilePlanet site too where you're looking at a 100+ min wait to START downloading your file.
Hop onto P2P and grab it from someone who's already downloaded it. Works wonderfully and since so the program is so popular, a lot of people have what you're looking for and it downloads nice and quickly.
Check out UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) or WinUAE and you should still be able to run most of these demos. Considering how complex the Amiga is, UAE gives amazing results.
I highly doubt they're going to make a lot of profit (if they make ANY). The target audience is small, to say the least. Considering the effort involved in what they've done, I'd say they deserve all of it.
These demos were given out for FREE years ago, you can still get them for free today and watch them for free (if you can run them). What you're paying for is the convenience of watching them on DVD instead of trying to configure old hardware to do it.
Where in the original Pac-Man game did it ever refer to the enemies as "monsters"? As far as I remember, it just called them Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde. But they sure as hell LOOKED like ghosts so that's what everyone I knew called them.
Oh, admit it, you're lagging behind in all kinds of useless technologies! If you were with the times, you could be transmitting the smell of your flatulence over the airways to your also-up-to-date cellphone-weilding buddy!
Or you could be using a tiny joystick to paint tiny little pictures on your tiny little phone to send to some tiny little friend. Isn't that USEFUL?!
Exactly! It IS possible for them to invent a standard and pronounce the acronym wrong.
As for the giga/jiga issue, I do realise it was originally meant to be pronounced "jiga", but giga has now become the standard. Besides, when you talk about 2 Jigs of RAM, it sounds like you talking about fishing, not computers.
You can get an kernel-module RPM package for RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 that gives you instant NTFS (read-only) support, which is probably good enough for most users:
t ml
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.h
Yeah, I got it too, although I noticed it with Duke3D as well. I guess it was any game with the build engine that made me motion sick. But not as badly as Dark Forces did. I couldn't play that game for more than 20 minutes without feeling sick to my stomach.
Anyone know what causes this with some games for some people? Is the frame rate too high/low or something?
100k sales is "poor" now? Sheesh, what's this world coming to? Everybody wants variety. Games, movies, music that don't conform to the standard. But people keep pushing this notion though that something HAS to be the best/make the most money or it's a complete failure and it's considered crap. It seems there is no room for middle ground and that has a direct impact on the variety that is available. Funny, isn't it?
Take a good look at how many cool games were canceled because some suit thought it wouldn't boost their bottom line by as much as the next game which conformed to the formula for success.
I truly do miss the days were games were created by 1 or 2 people. Now it's all a big Hollywood event with 50+ people on a single project (it's not even a game anymore, it's a "project"). Expenses go through the roof and the game is now HAS to be a big seller or the investment is shot. It really sucks.
For me, the king of games is Richard Garriott. No other series ever gave me more hours of gameplay and satisfaction than the Ultima series did.
Miyamoto is okay, I find games like Mario and Zelda to be fun for a few minutes here and there, but I just can't get into them. They're too... shallow. I know shallow is probably a bad word here as the levels are large, with hidden items abound, but the gameplay itself I find too simplistic. I feel limited by the game engine.
I don't think low end systems are such a concern in this case, as you need a beefy computer (450MHz and 96+ MB of RAM) to play the game itself anyways. With this speed of a system, I don't think there's any codec that'll slow you down.