Half-life was written in Visual C++ (as was Quake, I think), what's your point? As for Borland, they won't even open up their compiler, what makes you think they'd open up the IDE? (Though they should, god knows they're not getting any more market share in the commercial market)
Huh? What planet are you from? MSVC is probably the second best compiler available next to Intel's own C++ 4.5. From an eweek article (which you can find at here )
"Even in pre-release form, Visual C++ 6.0 yielded the fastest time we've ever measured for any development tool running the language-neutral, CPU-intensive Tak benchmark. The Microsoft 6.0 beta compiler yielded code that ran an astonishing 20 percent faster than Version 5.0, when using all of the 6.0 version's aggressive new optimizations for Pentium-class processors. Visual C++ 6.0 even achieved a surprising 10 percent edge in Tak speed over Watcom C++ 10.5, our previous record holder among acceptably stable C++ implementations. We reserve judgment on Microsoft's success in implementing
new C++ features in this release while also maintaining reliability; in our tests, however, we encountered no problems with generated code. Visual C++ offers several different approaches to pleasing the performance-
sensitive user. In situations where some of an application's features are rarely used, and where a delay on first invocation is acceptable to most users, Visual C ++ 6.0 applications will be able to defer their loading of dynamic link libraries to accelerate application startup. Alternatively, libraries can be loaded on startup in the usual manner to speed subsequent invocations"
Oh, I'm not standing on the sidelines, I've washed my hands of the whole business and use BeOS instead.
I think you're talking about two groups of people here. One group is afraid to jump on the bandwagon and support "the cause." And the other group (me) simply uses NT because they like it better and could care less about "the cause." Although I am interested in Linux, and admire the OSS community for "shutting up and showing the code," from my point of view (as a very media/3D oriented person) NT is simply a better OS. However, I inhabit/. because I'm interested in the stuff they post. Your comment sounds awefully like "we don't need any non-linux weenies here, go to MS's site."/. has no need to become a totally Linux/OSS oriented site. People have said before that yes,/. is pro Linux because the creators are pro-linux. There is nothing wrong with that. However/. is STILL news for nerds. Whether or not you'll use it, this release is important. Not only because it is relevant to Mozilla (that's secondary) but because it has an impact on the market. If this thing is up to snuff, it makes for some competition to IE. (God knows that Netscape 6 by itself won't be able to compete) Similarly,/. SHOULD cover relases of Office. Not so much because people will use it, but because it effects the market. Same thing for DirectX, COM, and other Windows technologies. Also, nobody complained when the news of the (then propriatry) V2_OS was posted. Nobody complained about the Inferno posting. Nobody complained about the FreeQNX posting, etc. None of these have anything to do with Linux or OSS, but all of these are interesting to nerds. I just think you've got a problem with MS and want/. to censor for you. You don't understand why more Linux-ites don't adopt the stance taken by Linus. He was quoted as saying "I don't think that MS is hell and Bill Gates is Saten." He even said that he would take a job at MS if they had a job cool enough. (This is taken from an interview in boot magazine.) All in all, a very reasonable stance.
Indirectly, I'm correct. Windows is the only OS IE runs on (I know there is a Sun port, but you call that running?) and if IE is the best browser for/., then indirectly, Windows is the best OS for/.
BTW> I think Windows is actually the best OS from which to browse/. Under NetPositive, things like the password section glitch up, under Navigator everything looks ugly, and is slow, under Mozilla, things are unstable, etc. Under IE, everything looks perfect!
Oh god, somebody shoot me. You know, it's people like you which cause people like me to think that/. should be renamed LinuxDot: New for Linux weenies. Seriously though, the developmet of Galeon was posted, so why not this? Just because it isn't for Linux, it doesn't "deserve" to be on/.? Maybe/. should stop posting articles about all sattilites that don't run Linux. Given the fact that Linux (and OSS in general) are about creating a more friendly software environment where people help each other out...
A lot of nerds DO use Windows you know. I for one, would much rather use NT than Linux. It's not a religious thing, I just like NT better. And when Linux with GNOME takes up less memory than NT4, please call me up so I can faint at how they squeezed that fat thing into 18MB of RAM. Geez...
You just reminded me of something. USB was designed originally to get rid of serial and parallel ports and unify the connection method. In fact, it has now done the opposite. Instead of two kinds of ports on the back, you now are going to have 4 (more if you've got firewire like Sony's VAIO line), two of which (USB 1/2) look very similar. Again, Apple has the right idea, and the PC industry just doesn't "get it."
What about drives? Drives report geometry in 3D anyway. You'd have to change the firmware of all drives, or implement similar kludges in all new harddrives. In the end, it is probably too much work for too little gain.
Actually, I was reading a BYTE magazine circa 1993. It talked about OpenDoc and SOM and all. SOM reminded my of a COM with inheritance, it has CORBA complient (but didn't depend on it) and OpenDoc was pretty good as well. It just seemed that they were good technologies that never really caught on. However they had a lot of merit, and if IBM released them, then they might get another chance.
Complaints about an obsolete, bottlenecking technology on/.? Increadible? When somone says "X should DIE!" People say "what for, it works!" When people say "IDE should DIE!" people say "YEAH!"
Look, SCSI does this too. To the BIOS, the linier SCSI drive is mapped into the 3D geometry, and mapped back into linier by the OS. In fact, I think IDE drives these days do that too. Also, there is nothing wrong with IDE. Sure it is popular to curse IDE, but if you do, you're not using it right. With the advent of UltraDMA, IDE drives have as low a CPU usage as SCSI drives, and with UDMA100, IDE drives have more bandwidth than all but Ultra160SCSI and FibreChannel. IDE drives still have lower TPS, but on a desktop machine, that really doesn't matter. This is proven by the new IDE drives (like the 75GXP.) The 75GXP actually performs as fast as some 10,000RPM SCSI drives on the outer tracks. IDE really isn't a bottle neck in this situation.
Not really. If you haven't got enough RAM, a hard-drive twice as fast wouldn't improve performance. What really improves, however, is general usage. For example, when I upgraded to my Matrox 20giger (the previous fastest harddrive before the IBM) from my old 6.4 GB one, Quake didn't run any faster, but stuff like recompiling X or the kernel, unzipping tar files, starting up, etc, all became much faster.
I would like to see Open Source implementations of the following.
OS/2> At least make it free for personal use. The bloody thing is still $200 or so. I mean it only gets used in a small market, so why not free it up? They can't possibly be making much money of it.
SOM> There needs to be a CORBA independant object model on free OSs. Nothing against CORBA, but there needs to be a lighter weight alternative.
OpenDOC> The perfect thing to boost up Linux. Of course both GNOME and KDE are working object models and embedding, but OpenDOC/SOM are both more mature, and a good deal lighter in weight. However, they might have problems opening this up due to the cooperation with Apple.
Oh, I figured out your problem with the MP3s. The default media player in BeOS is a bit flaky, it tries to load everything into memory at the same time (instead of streaming.) If you download SoundPlay 4.0 from BeBits, the performance is a lot better. (Thank god, I though 5.0 was worse than 4.5 in this regard.) I can put in 14 MP3s on SoundPlay without maxing out the processor on my 300MHz 128MB machine.
The 14% isn't SMP, it's how much of Dell's sales are from servesr. I'm assuming that a large percentage of Dell's servers are SMP machines. Dell is a pretty big player in the server market, so I'm guessing that a larger percentage of their sales are from servers (and workstations) however, even for them, servers account for only 14% of sales. And I wasn't limiting myself to x86 machines. The 5.x million server operating systems include WindowsNT, Linux, and other UNIXs.
Okay, I've looked up some of the statitics. First, even large server manufacters like Dell say that servers account for only about 14% of their sales. If you look at the sales of WindowsNT (which has 38% of the server market) IDC pegs it at about 2.1 million units last year. (The report is from july). Do that math, and that means about 5.1 million server OSs shipped last year. This is a pretty good indication of the number of servers shipped last year. Now, take into account that IDC says 112.5 million PCs were shipped last year, and the fact that not all servers are SMP machines, you can easily see that hte SMP market IS just a few percent of the computing market.
I mentioned server space. However, server space is a lot smaller. Think of this. A business may buy 100 desktops for a workgroup, and only two or three servers for that workgroup. Most of the time servers are expense, low volume items. At home, there are no servers, and the home market is huge. So in terms of percentage of total machines that are SMP, it is a very small percentage.
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Half-life was written in Visual C++ (as was Quake, I think), what's your point? As for Borland, they won't even open up their compiler, what makes you think they'd open up the IDE? (Though they should, god knows they're not getting any more market share in the commercial market)
Last I recall, I think MSVC took the lead in optimizations around version 6.
Yet another compiler with crappy inline ASM. Is it just me, or is MSVC inline ASM the prettiest thing around?
Huh? What planet are you from? MSVC is probably the second best compiler available next to Intel's own C++ 4.5. From an eweek article (which you can find at here )
"Even in pre-release form, Visual C++ 6.0 yielded the fastest time we've ever measured for any development tool running the language-neutral, CPU-intensive Tak benchmark. The Microsoft 6.0 beta compiler yielded code that ran an astonishing 20 percent faster than Version 5.0, when using all of the 6.0 version's aggressive new optimizations for Pentium-class processors. Visual C++ 6.0 even achieved a surprising 10 percent edge in Tak speed over Watcom C++ 10.5, our previous record holder among acceptably stable C++ implementations. We reserve judgment on Microsoft's success in implementing
new C++ features in this release while also maintaining reliability; in our tests, however, we encountered no problems with generated code. Visual C++ offers several different approaches to pleasing the performance-
sensitive user. In situations where some of an application's features are rarely used, and where a delay on first invocation is acceptable to most users, Visual C ++ 6.0 applications will be able to defer their loading of dynamic link libraries to accelerate application startup. Alternatively, libraries can be loaded on startup in the usual manner to speed subsequent invocations"
Oh, I'm not standing on the sidelines, I've washed my hands of the whole business and use BeOS instead.
/. because I'm interested in the stuff they post. Your comment sounds awefully like "we don't need any non-linux weenies here, go to MS's site." /. has no need to become a totally Linux/OSS oriented site. People have said before that yes, /. is pro Linux because the creators are pro-linux. There is nothing wrong with that. However /. is STILL news for nerds. Whether or not you'll use it, this release is important. Not only because it is relevant to Mozilla (that's secondary) but because it has an impact on the market. If this thing is up to snuff, it makes for some competition to IE. (God knows that Netscape 6 by itself won't be able to compete) Similarly, /. SHOULD cover relases of Office. Not so much because people will use it, but because it effects the market. Same thing for DirectX, COM, and other Windows technologies. Also, nobody complained when the news of the (then propriatry) V2_OS was posted. Nobody complained about the Inferno posting. Nobody complained about the FreeQNX posting, etc. None of these have anything to do with Linux or OSS, but all of these are interesting to nerds. I just think you've got a problem with MS and want /. to censor for you. You don't understand why more Linux-ites don't adopt the stance taken by Linus. He was quoted as saying "I don't think that MS is hell and Bill Gates is Saten." He even said that he would take a job at MS if they had a job cool enough. (This is taken from an interview in boot magazine.) All in all, a very reasonable stance.
I think you're talking about two groups of people here. One group is afraid to jump on the bandwagon and support "the cause." And the other group (me) simply uses NT because they like it better and could care less about "the cause." Although I am interested in Linux, and admire the OSS community for "shutting up and showing the code," from my point of view (as a very media/3D oriented person) NT is simply a better OS. However, I inhabit
Indirectly, I'm correct. Windows is the only OS IE runs on (I know there is a Sun port, but you call that running?) and if IE is the best browser for /., then indirectly, Windows is the best OS for /.
It happens all the time. It's called a sexual harrasment lawsuit.
BTW> I think Windows is actually the best OS from which to browse /. Under NetPositive, things like the password section glitch up, under Navigator everything looks ugly, and is slow, under Mozilla, things are unstable, etc. Under IE, everything looks perfect!
Oh god, somebody shoot me. You know, it's people like you which cause people like me to think that /. should be renamed LinuxDot: New for Linux weenies. Seriously though, the developmet of Galeon was posted, so why not this? Just because it isn't for Linux, it doesn't "deserve" to be on /.? Maybe /. should stop posting articles about all sattilites that don't run Linux. Given the fact that Linux (and OSS in general) are about creating a more friendly software environment where people help each other out...
A lot of nerds DO use Windows you know. I for one, would much rather use NT than Linux. It's not a religious thing, I just like NT better. And when Linux with GNOME takes up less memory than NT4, please call me up so I can faint at how they squeezed that fat thing into 18MB of RAM. Geez...
You just reminded me of something. USB was designed originally to get rid of serial and parallel ports and unify the connection method. In fact, it has now done the opposite. Instead of two kinds of ports on the back, you now are going to have 4 (more if you've got firewire like Sony's VAIO line), two of which (USB 1/2) look very similar. Again, Apple has the right idea, and the PC industry just doesn't "get it."
Why can't I just rip from my CD? Or am I missing something...
Hey, if you're willing to sell me a 500MHz 51GB/64MB computer for $300, I'm game.
How can OpenDOC need WPS. There are OpenDOC implementations on things that don't have WPS (such as NT and AIX.)
What about drives? Drives report geometry in 3D anyway. You'd have to change the firmware of all drives, or implement similar kludges in all new harddrives. In the end, it is probably too much work for too little gain.
Actually, I was reading a BYTE magazine circa 1993. It talked about OpenDoc and SOM and all. SOM reminded my of a COM with inheritance, it has CORBA complient (but didn't depend on it) and OpenDoc was pretty good as well. It just seemed that they were good technologies that never really caught on. However they had a lot of merit, and if IBM released them, then they might get another chance.
Well, that guy was talking BIOSs and all, so I was assuming the discussion was about PCs.
Complaints about an obsolete, bottlenecking technology on /.? Increadible? When somone says "X should DIE!" People say "what for, it works!" When people say "IDE should DIE!" people say "YEAH!"
PS> X should DIE!
Look, SCSI does this too. To the BIOS, the linier SCSI drive is mapped into the 3D geometry, and mapped back into linier by the OS. In fact, I think IDE drives these days do that too. Also, there is nothing wrong with IDE. Sure it is popular to curse IDE, but if you do, you're not using it right. With the advent of UltraDMA, IDE drives have as low a CPU usage as SCSI drives, and with UDMA100, IDE drives have more bandwidth than all but Ultra160SCSI and FibreChannel. IDE drives still have lower TPS, but on a desktop machine, that really doesn't matter. This is proven by the new IDE drives (like the 75GXP.) The 75GXP actually performs as fast as some 10,000RPM SCSI drives on the outer tracks. IDE really isn't a bottle neck in this situation.
Not really. If you haven't got enough RAM, a hard-drive twice as fast wouldn't improve performance. What really improves, however, is general usage. For example, when I upgraded to my Matrox 20giger (the previous fastest harddrive before the IBM) from my old 6.4 GB one, Quake didn't run any faster, but stuff like recompiling X or the kernel, unzipping tar files, starting up, etc, all became much faster.
I would like to see Open Source implementations of the following.
OS/2> At least make it free for personal use. The bloody thing is still $200 or so. I mean it only gets used in a small market, so why not free it up? They can't possibly be making much money of it.
SOM> There needs to be a CORBA independant object model on free OSs. Nothing against CORBA, but there needs to be a lighter weight alternative.
OpenDOC> The perfect thing to boost up Linux. Of course both GNOME and KDE are working object models and embedding, but OpenDOC/SOM are both more mature, and a good deal lighter in weight. However, they might have problems opening this up due to the cooperation with Apple.
Oh, I figured out your problem with the MP3s. The default media player in BeOS is a bit flaky, it tries to load everything into memory at the same time (instead of streaming.) If you download SoundPlay 4.0 from BeBits, the performance is a lot better. (Thank god, I though 5.0 was worse than 4.5 in this regard.) I can put in 14 MP3s on SoundPlay without maxing out the processor on my 300MHz 128MB machine.
The 14% isn't SMP, it's how much of Dell's sales are from servesr. I'm assuming that a large percentage of Dell's servers are SMP machines. Dell is a pretty big player in the server market, so I'm guessing that a larger percentage of their sales are from servers (and workstations) however, even for them, servers account for only 14% of sales. And I wasn't limiting myself to x86 machines. The 5.x million server operating systems include WindowsNT, Linux, and other UNIXs.
Okay, I've looked up some of the statitics. First, even large server manufacters like Dell say that servers account for only about 14% of their sales. If you look at the sales of WindowsNT (which has 38% of the server market) IDC pegs it at about 2.1 million units last year. (The report is from july). Do that math, and that means about 5.1 million server OSs shipped last year. This is a pretty good indication of the number of servers shipped last year. Now, take into account that IDC says 112.5 million PCs were shipped last year, and the fact that not all servers are SMP machines, you can easily see that hte SMP market IS just a few percent of the computing market.
I mentioned server space. However, server space is a lot smaller. Think of this. A business may buy 100 desktops for a workgroup, and only two or three servers for that workgroup. Most of the time servers are expense, low volume items. At home, there are no servers, and the home market is huge. So in terms of percentage of total machines that are SMP, it is a very small percentage.
I want to be able to decode 3 P0rn DVD's at the same time! One ALWAYS NEEDS MORE SPEED!