The most important difference for most endusers was DirectX support. NT4 came with DX3 and recent versions that supported 3D cards (DX6, DX7) were incompatible with Windows NT. Basically NT 4.0 was fine for desktop use at home if you didn't play any 3D games.
Do any of you remember the music video to Buddy Holly by Weezer on the Win95 cd?
Yeah ! I was wondering about that a few years ago and dug up the old CD to play it.
It's an AVI file (actually there are 2 versions of each video on the cd, for high and low end systems. It's amazing that AVI's already existed in 1995, yet pirates didn't use them for movies or music video's.
Around 2000 Microsoft wanted to junk the old AVI format and move to the new WMV format. Then some guy hacked an MS codec to support writing to AVI, calling it DivX and only then did pirates started using AVI format. Now it's 2005 and it's still the only format people want to use despite its problems.
5.5 MB zipped, 22 MB unzipped.
It also includes tools like q3radiant and q3map, tools for which others have written replacements, based on guesses what things might mean by studying the q3 binary gamefiles.
Now we can finally see what those mystery fields in the structs mean.
Yeah, the text mentions 10 reasons why it might succeed and 10 reasons it might fail, and this gets summarized on the headline as 20 reasons it will fail.
Welcome to news, the Slashdot way. Where truth or an unbiased opinion are significantly less important than fanboy-ism, choosing sides, selective quoting, a little distortion of facts and karma whoring.
Face it, this is just an entertainment site. The news stories are just references to real news, and they are modified to please the standard stereotype geek that likes Linux, dislikes Microsoft, favors AMD over Intel and ATI over nVidia.
This is considerably more difficult than one would think. Games typically have to perform tasks in a particular order, for example (extremely simplified): get inputs, move player, move AI players, move other objects, check for collisions, update parameters, display the next frame, loop.
Quite where we add this 2nd thread is difficult. Everything must happen in the same order in order for things like collision detection to function correctly.
Not neccesarily. One big problem with games is that the typical order (beginscene/render/endscene/present) is implemented with a busy-wait loop in the present part. This is the part where all data has been sent to the graphics card and the driver waits in a loop until it gets a 'scene completed' message from the card. This is why games always run at 100% CPU.
Games that don't use threading well (only threading for network/input/sound) put stuff in the loop you describe. Draw a scene, the driver waits for an 'OK', then you update the player, update the AI characters, do collision, calculate all new positions and start drawing. Because the drawing takes eg. 10 ms per frame for 100 FPS developers limit the AI/collision part to run in something like 1 ms or else the frame rate starts dropping. So the real AT would be limited to say 10% of the CPU time.
For example the 'move AI' part could be a bunch of threads, calculating new positions based on direction, collision etc.
Right now games like DOOM3 typically only display a few NPC's at the same time because of the timing problem. If the move AI thread can just keep running on the second CPU while the first CPU waits within the driver a game could support a few 100 enemies on-screen.
Strategy games with complicated pathfinding with hundreds of units on-screen like Warcraft 3 or Age of Mythology would profit enormously, if programmed for multithreading.
The Battlefield 2 demo is great, it's a 580 MB download though. But I played that every evening for a week, then I bought the game itself.
Although many forums are full of people complaining about bugs, I haven't had any problems yet. You will need a serious PC though, I have an XP 1700+ with 512 MB and a 9800 Pro card. That's fine for 1024x768 medium quality, if you have lesser hardware you can run 800x600 or on low quality. But the game is at its best with a brand new system with 2 GB memory and a 7800GTX card.
I still need to flash my MSI Turbo2 motherboard with the latest 3.6 bios. It's now 3.2.
Release notes mention that in 3.5 'boot from USB device' was added.
So I still need to boot an MSDOS (win98) floppy for this because burning a CDR with dos and the bios file would be too much.
But for booting from USB to be useful you would still need 2 PC's, one to prepare the USB stick to boot the other one. An USB storage device is meant to be dynamic. If you are going to keep an USB stick for rescue purposes you should consider a bootable CD, it would be much more cost-effective.
In both software and music "piracy," NO ACTUAL THEFT OCCURS. Duplication of bits occurs, but theft means that someone TAKES a thing and DEPRIVES YOU OF IT.
This from a guy who writes software for a living.
This is so boring... On every article mentioning piracy dozens of people immediately start beating the same old dead horse about no physical copies being stolen.
You should know better. The majority of people with jobs produce no actual physical products, just advice, knowledge, do administrative work etc. You say you are a programmer, so you should know. You produce no physical output, does that mean your work is worthless and you don't deserve a paycheck ? A doctor (except surgeons) just advise and prescribe medication, yet people pay them for it. People pay for knowledge and time as well. People going to concerts or the cinema don't get anything tangible as a result, entertainment isn't an object, yet people still pay for it.
Imagine I hire you as a programmer, and I let you work for 3 months on some software I need. You deliver a copy of what you have written on a CD (and of course keep your source code on your own PC). Unfortunately I pay you with a check that bounces, or I go bankrupt immediately. Too bad, no money for you. But it doesn't matter according to you right, you still have a copy, so you haven't lost anything.
As far as I understood, this operation didn't target popular internet sites with torrents to recent releases, but the release groups themselves, like Vengeance, Hoodlum, Myth, etc.
Those groups use very private ftp servers where only high-level courier groups have access. They get the warez and spread them to other places, like IRC. Then others get them from IRC and make torrents of them, spread those torrents on other IRC channels. Someone downloads a copy and creates a torrent for eg. the Pirate Bay and starts seeding.
What Joe Public sees on warez sites are the 4th/5th generation copies, or even later.
But this operation aimed to bring down the private FTP sites of the groups themselves, so probaly sites you or me would never have heard of and could never have gotten access to. But it does affect the availability of warez in general.
SWAT 4 has randomness, not in the geometry but in the start position of the hostages and enemies. Plus the criminals wander around in the level. Every time you play a level it can be completely different, sometimes an attempt where you almost cleared the building is followed by an attempt that fails almost immediately, where suddenly two terrorists walk into a room where you are busy handcuffing the first suspect and open fire.
The game offers much more gameplay pleasure than those boring scripted on-a-rail FPS games.
Don't you think that if you were running a business which relied on Drupal you would be sensible to arrange some kind of support with the core developers rather than just surf onto their website every time your business requirements changed ?
Why would any serious business rely on a company that can't even suffer a small setback of a few $1000, like a computer breaking down.
I'd be scared if I had a business that relied on another company and that company would immediately suspend its development, take its webpage offline and relies on donations and fundraisers whenever some hardware failed.
It's no fun going to a website for support only to see a static page saying oh no, our 200 GB harddisk crashed, we need your support. Donate money to... now, or else we're going under.
It baffles me that a culture so obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy can demonstrate such little attention to detail when it comes to communicating that knowledge with others, and it baffles me even more that many people become enraged when you attempt to help them correct and learn from their mistakes. Do hackers and geeks just not care about communicating effectively?
Many hackers are geeks or nerds, people who lack social skills and try to compensate for this by specializing in a very narrow skill, usually computer-related. This gives them a false superiority feeling to compensate for their own feeling of failure and worthlessness. This is also why they get angry when corrected, that hurts their illusion of superiority. But they don't realise this makes them undesirable people to talk to. Most hackers and good programmers are intolerable conceited assholes, see for example Bram Cohen who is such a smug bastard that it's hard to appreciate his bittorrent work because of his impossible arrogant attitude.
In reality a hacker/geek/nerd may be a coding god but they lack in so many other things. Think about hygiene, getting a decent haircut, wearing clean clothes, eating properly. Not to mention social skills with girls. That they are also seriously lacking in spelling is no surprise.
I did a quick test: a search for CSI Miami
Sure, you get a screen full of results, but almost all are on tvtorrents.tv, btefnet.net, torrentchannel.com etc, and as you know those sites were taken down. Clicking on those torrents just gives you host not found, a this domain is parked page, and one on torrentchannel.com game me a screen full of hardcore porn ! Ouch, I'm at work guys, don't do that
So on its debut its content is already severely outdated.
Yes, the whole bittorrent search is a joke, and a big anticlimax.
Many people had anticipated a large search site backed by a large database of torrents, filled by indexing all known torrent sites.
Instead it is blindly obvious by reading the page source, that it's just a one-page site that takes your input, adds filetype:torrent and passes that to an external search engine (mysearch.com but it could just as well be google).
The whole thing is a joke of a site anyway, after a day most people will realise they can just as well go to google directly and type the filetype:torrent themselves, and get the same barely useful results much faster.
You mean the young bastards with the laser pointers and cell phones? Or the Tall Guy sitting in front of you? Or the uncomfortable seats? Or the fact that you can't pause the movie?
Of course if you download the copy doing the rounds, you'll probably get all of the above lovingly encoded into your home viewing experience.
Slashdot, where people post even if they don't know what they're talking about.
The story is big news because unlike the usual release (a crappy cam version first, a screener a few weeks later) this time a near-perfect looking workprint DVD (with two large timers, that's true) is available already. The picture is quite good and the sound is proper 5.1
Of course some people have grabbed the pirate dvd copy and converted it, to low-res VCD format, to XVID, SVCD etc. And most of them did not understand anamorphic and converted it in such a way that the aspect ratio is wrong.
But the source is the same one, without what you describe, it's actually a high-quality copy.
This is a major blow to the industry of course. Usually they tolerate it because people like you already have the impression that illegal copies are low-quality cam versions with bad sound and people walking in front of the camera. But with a good copy available so soon, that's gotta hurt.
If you use Windows, open the task manager and go to the 'processes' tab. Choose View - select columns and tick the 'threads' column.
You'll see that almost all running processes use threads. Only the tiniest systray apps may be singlethreaded. Apps like Internet Explorer use dozens of threads, and will render a page with many jpg's or flash applets faster than a comparable single CPU/single core system.
The 'not many apps use threads' myth keeps on being spread, but anyone can see for himself just how many apps use threads.
Here in Holland there is a levy on blank media too. And for that, one has the legal right to copy music for own use (IANAL).
This is incorrect. Law differentiates between a right, a freedom and an obligation.
A right means that depriving others of that right is illegal. A freedom means that you are allowed if you can and if you can't, you're out of luck.
You have the freedom to copy a CD, not the right. If you cannot copy a (music) CD, or software, because you lack the skills or if your equipment isn't good enough (read: the copy protection is too strong) then you're just out of luck. You can if you could but there is no guarantee.
This means that companies can copy protect if they want to. If you had a right to make copies, they would have the obligation not to restrict your right and provide copyable CD's. But that's not the case.
It's the uploading that's not allowed. Oh and it's allowed to download if that means there will be an upload to make the download possible (like with filesharing thru bittorent)
Downloading is legal. Uploading is never legal, even if an upload is required to make the download possible.
Boris is correct. The law is the law, and the way some software is written or designed can't just change existing laws. Or else you could write new software in such a way that it forces users to break a law, does that mean that the existence of that software would void laws ? In that case programmers can make law disappear faster than judges or politicians, I am sure that is not the intention.
I once heard from a mobile phone salesperson that there are two reasons people buy prepaid:
1) They are cheating on someone who sees their phone bill.
2) They are using the phone to sell something the police might take issue with.
3) They are nerds who have no friends and dislike calling people. They'd rather send email. Pay $100 for a phone, make at least one call every 6 months, and you never have to pay anything except buy new credit once in a while (like $10 a year) when you do make the occasional call.
And the lack of 64bit applications is the fault of the closed source development model, opensource apps can easily be recompiled for 64bit architectures and instantly benefit from the additional registers etc, and often benefit from the increased address space quite easily.
On the contrary, if a new CPU with extra instructions, extra registers or a 64-bit CPU is introduced and a new version of the.NET framework becomes available, all.NET applications will automatically at maximum performance due to the JIT compiling this does.
Also, you vastly underestimate the work needed. Open source that makes assumptions about int size, that structs will get 32-bit alignment and use pointer arithmetic on them, etc. may compile but will crash when run.
Also if you recompile you need at least a new compiler. And if you compile a version that uses the new registers you would need to provide two versions, one for AMD64/intel64 and one for standard i686. But knowing open source the writer will probably compile for i386 and 95% of the people will just run those provided binaries without feeling the need to recompile.
As the old saying goes, A fool with a tool is still a fool
Tools might make programming easier, but you will always need your skills to achieve anything. Sure, some tools might make programming easier or faster, but in the end it doesn't mean anyone can be a programmer.
WINE, Mono, the Gimp, gcc, vim, yet another forked Linux distro, all software that starts with 'gnu' like gnuchess, what's wrong with imitations ?
That's what open source and before that gnu software was all about, wanting something for which you had no source, like the vi editor and imitating it. Spend 5 years until you have something that includes a whole framework, has 20x more lines of C code than the original and required 10x more memory to run.
The only downside is that it's just wasting developer productivity. A lot of hours are burned making something that resembles the original, or working on your own fork of some OSS.
Of course you can list some original ideas (and don't say Linux). Unfortunately the replies fail to include anything more useful than the gimmick 'tabbed browsing'...
And this point of view is exactly why new MMORPGs are bigger than ever, yet less inviting than ever. The market is at a wierd size. Not enough people interested in MMORPGs to niche-ify, yet enough people to require a large amount of content.
The runescape business model (make a quarter of the game world and three quarters of the skills free for everyone and encourage people to join as members to be able to use more skills and visit the rest of the world) seems to work pretty well. It's also an MMORPG that puts less emphasis on pretty graphics and highly detailed useless objects, so it probably doesn't require a team of 20 designers.
The heading is misleading. What do 'database performance' and testing a toy like mySQL have to do with eachother ?
MySQL may be fast, because its features are so limited. Sure, it stores and retrieves records, but its partial implementation of SQL (without subqueries etc) and blatant bugs that violate SQL (try inserting '123456' into a varchar(4) column, it will silently truncate to '1234' instead of giving a 'Inserted value too large for column' error) make it useless for anything reliable.
If 'fast' is your only important concern you should be using flat files or dbm/ndbm files, but there is more to a database than speed.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important difference for most endusers was DirectX support. NT4 came with DX3 and recent versions that supported 3D cards (DX6, DX7) were incompatible with Windows NT. Basically NT 4.0 was fine for desktop use at home if you didn't play any 3D games.
Yeah ! I was wondering about that a few years ago and dug up the old CD to play it.
It's an AVI file (actually there are 2 versions of each video on the cd, for high and low end systems. It's amazing that AVI's already existed in 1995, yet pirates didn't use them for movies or music video's.
Around 2000 Microsoft wanted to junk the old AVI format and move to the new WMV format. Then some guy hacked an MS codec to support writing to AVI, calling it DivX and only then did pirates started using AVI format. Now it's 2005 and it's still the only format people want to use despite its problems.
Now we can finally see what those mystery fields in the structs mean.
Welcome to news, the Slashdot way. Where truth or an unbiased opinion are significantly less important than fanboy-ism, choosing sides, selective quoting, a little distortion of facts and karma whoring.
Face it, this is just an entertainment site. The news stories are just references to real news, and they are modified to please the standard stereotype geek that likes Linux, dislikes Microsoft, favors AMD over Intel and ATI over nVidia.
Quite where we add this 2nd thread is difficult. Everything must happen in the same order in order for things like collision detection to function correctly.
Not neccesarily. One big problem with games is that the typical order (beginscene/render/endscene/present) is implemented with a busy-wait loop in the present part. This is the part where all data has been sent to the graphics card and the driver waits in a loop until it gets a 'scene completed' message from the card. This is why games always run at 100% CPU.
Games that don't use threading well (only threading for network/input/sound) put stuff in the loop you describe. Draw a scene, the driver waits for an 'OK', then you update the player, update the AI characters, do collision, calculate all new positions and start drawing. Because the drawing takes eg. 10 ms per frame for 100 FPS developers limit the AI/collision part to run in something like 1 ms or else the frame rate starts dropping. So the real AT would be limited to say 10% of the CPU time.
For example the 'move AI' part could be a bunch of threads, calculating new positions based on direction, collision etc.
Right now games like DOOM3 typically only display a few NPC's at the same time because of the timing problem. If the move AI thread can just keep running on the second CPU while the first CPU waits within the driver a game could support a few 100 enemies on-screen.
Strategy games with complicated pathfinding with hundreds of units on-screen like Warcraft 3 or Age of Mythology would profit enormously, if programmed for multithreading.
The Battlefield 2 demo is great, it's a 580 MB download though. But I played that every evening for a week, then I bought the game itself. Although many forums are full of people complaining about bugs, I haven't had any problems yet. You will need a serious PC though, I have an XP 1700+ with 512 MB and a 9800 Pro card. That's fine for 1024x768 medium quality, if you have lesser hardware you can run 800x600 or on low quality. But the game is at its best with a brand new system with 2 GB memory and a 7800GTX card.
So I still need to boot an MSDOS (win98) floppy for this because burning a CDR with dos and the bios file would be too much.
But for booting from USB to be useful you would still need 2 PC's, one to prepare the USB stick to boot the other one. An USB storage device is meant to be dynamic. If you are going to keep an USB stick for rescue purposes you should consider a bootable CD, it would be much more cost-effective.
This from a guy who writes software for a living.
This is so boring... On every article mentioning piracy dozens of people immediately start beating the same old dead horse about no physical copies being stolen.
You should know better. The majority of people with jobs produce no actual physical products, just advice, knowledge, do administrative work etc. You say you are a programmer, so you should know. You produce no physical output, does that mean your work is worthless and you don't deserve a paycheck ? A doctor (except surgeons) just advise and prescribe medication, yet people pay them for it. People pay for knowledge and time as well. People going to concerts or the cinema don't get anything tangible as a result, entertainment isn't an object, yet people still pay for it.
Imagine I hire you as a programmer, and I let you work for 3 months on some software I need. You deliver a copy of what you have written on a CD (and of course keep your source code on your own PC). Unfortunately I pay you with a check that bounces, or I go bankrupt immediately. Too bad, no money for you. But it doesn't matter according to you right, you still have a copy, so you haven't lost anything.
Those groups use very private ftp servers where only high-level courier groups have access. They get the warez and spread them to other places, like IRC. Then others get them from IRC and make torrents of them, spread those torrents on other IRC channels. Someone downloads a copy and creates a torrent for eg. the Pirate Bay and starts seeding.
What Joe Public sees on warez sites are the 4th/5th generation copies, or even later.
But this operation aimed to bring down the private FTP sites of the groups themselves, so probaly sites you or me would never have heard of and could never have gotten access to. But it does affect the availability of warez in general.
SWAT 4 has randomness, not in the geometry but in the start position of the hostages and enemies. Plus the criminals wander around in the level. Every time you play a level it can be completely different, sometimes an attempt where you almost cleared the building is followed by an attempt that fails almost immediately, where suddenly two terrorists walk into a room where you are busy handcuffing the first suspect and open fire. The game offers much more gameplay pleasure than those boring scripted on-a-rail FPS games.
Why would any serious business rely on a company that can't even suffer a small setback of a few $1000, like a computer breaking down. ... now, or else we're going under.
I'd be scared if I had a business that relied on another company and that company would immediately suspend its development, take its webpage offline and relies on donations and fundraisers whenever some hardware failed.
It's no fun going to a website for support only to see a static page saying oh no, our 200 GB harddisk crashed, we need your support. Donate money to
Many hackers are geeks or nerds, people who lack social skills and try to compensate for this by specializing in a very narrow skill, usually computer-related. This gives them a false superiority feeling to compensate for their own feeling of failure and worthlessness. This is also why they get angry when corrected, that hurts their illusion of superiority. But they don't realise this makes them undesirable people to talk to. Most hackers and good programmers are intolerable conceited assholes, see for example Bram Cohen who is such a smug bastard that it's hard to appreciate his bittorrent work because of his impossible arrogant attitude.
In reality a hacker/geek/nerd may be a coding god but they lack in so many other things. Think about hygiene, getting a decent haircut, wearing clean clothes, eating properly. Not to mention social skills with girls. That they are also seriously lacking in spelling is no surprise.
I did a quick test: a search for CSI Miami
Sure, you get a screen full of results, but almost all are on tvtorrents.tv, btefnet.net, torrentchannel.com etc, and as you know those sites were taken down. Clicking on those torrents just gives you host not found, a this domain is parked page, and one on torrentchannel.com game me a screen full of hardcore porn ! Ouch, I'm at work guys, don't do that
So on its debut its content is already severely outdated.
Yes, the whole bittorrent search is a joke, and a big anticlimax.
Many people had anticipated a large search site backed by a large database of torrents, filled by indexing all known torrent sites.
Instead it is blindly obvious by reading the page source, that it's just a one-page site that takes your input, adds filetype:torrent and passes that to an external search engine (mysearch.com but it could just as well be google).
The whole thing is a joke of a site anyway, after a day most people will realise they can just as well go to google directly and type the filetype:torrent themselves, and get the same barely useful results much faster.
Of course if you download the copy doing the rounds, you'll probably get all of the above lovingly encoded into your home viewing experience.
Slashdot, where people post even if they don't know what they're talking about.
The story is big news because unlike the usual release (a crappy cam version first, a screener a few weeks later) this time a near-perfect looking workprint DVD (with two large timers, that's true) is available already. The picture is quite good and the sound is proper 5.1
Of course some people have grabbed the pirate dvd copy and converted it, to low-res VCD format, to XVID, SVCD etc. And most of them did not understand anamorphic and converted it in such a way that the aspect ratio is wrong.
But the source is the same one, without what you describe, it's actually a high-quality copy.
This is a major blow to the industry of course. Usually they tolerate it because people like you already have the impression that illegal copies are low-quality cam versions with bad sound and people walking in front of the camera. But with a good copy available so soon, that's gotta hurt.
You'll see that almost all running processes use threads. Only the tiniest systray apps may be singlethreaded. Apps like Internet Explorer use dozens of threads, and will render a page with many jpg's or flash applets faster than a comparable single CPU/single core system.
The 'not many apps use threads' myth keeps on being spread, but anyone can see for himself just how many apps use threads.
A right means that depriving others of that right is illegal. A freedom means that you are allowed if you can and if you can't, you're out of luck.
You have the freedom to copy a CD, not the right. If you cannot copy a (music) CD, or software, because you lack the skills or if your equipment isn't good enough (read: the copy protection is too strong) then you're just out of luck. You can if you could but there is no guarantee.
This means that companies can copy protect if they want to. If you had a right to make copies, they would have the obligation not to restrict your right and provide copyable CD's. But that's not the case.
Downloading is legal. Uploading is never legal, even if an upload is required to make the download possible.
Boris is correct. The law is the law, and the way some software is written or designed can't just change existing laws.
Or else you could write new software in such a way that it forces users to break a law, does that mean that the existence of that software would void laws ? In that case programmers can make law disappear faster than judges or politicians, I am sure that is not the intention.
1) They are cheating on someone who sees their phone bill.
2) They are using the phone to sell something the police might take issue with.
3) They are nerds who have no friends and dislike calling people. They'd rather send email. Pay $100 for a phone, make at least one call every 6 months, and you never have to pay anything except buy new credit once in a while (like $10 a year) when you do make the occasional call.
On the contrary, if a new CPU with extra instructions, extra registers or a 64-bit CPU is introduced and a new version of the .NET framework becomes available, all .NET applications will automatically at maximum performance due to the JIT compiling this does.
Also, you vastly underestimate the work needed. Open source that makes assumptions about int size, that structs will get 32-bit alignment and use pointer arithmetic on them, etc. may compile but will crash when run.
Also if you recompile you need at least a new compiler. And if you compile a version that uses the new registers you would need to provide two versions, one for AMD64/intel64 and one for standard i686. But knowing open source the writer will probably compile for i386 and 95% of the people will just run those provided binaries without feeling the need to recompile.
As the old saying goes, A fool with a tool is still a fool
Tools might make programming easier, but you will always need your skills to achieve anything. Sure, some tools might make programming easier or faster, but in the end it doesn't mean anyone can be a programmer.
WINE, Mono, the Gimp, gcc, vim, yet another forked Linux distro, all software that starts with 'gnu' like gnuchess, what's wrong with imitations ? ...
That's what open source and before that gnu software was all about, wanting something for which you had no source, like the vi editor and imitating it. Spend 5 years until you have something that includes a whole framework, has 20x more lines of C code than the original and required 10x more memory to run.
The only downside is that it's just wasting developer productivity. A lot of hours are burned making something that resembles the original, or working on your own fork of some OSS.
Of course you can list some original ideas (and don't say Linux). Unfortunately the replies fail to include anything more useful than the gimmick 'tabbed browsing'
Hey who wants to improve open source when it's easier to fork off just to add your name to it ?
The runescape business model (make a quarter of the game world and three quarters of the skills free for everyone and encourage people to join as members to be able to use more skills and visit the rest of the world) seems to work pretty well. It's also an MMORPG that puts less emphasis on pretty graphics and highly detailed useless objects, so it probably doesn't require a team of 20 designers.
MySQL may be fast, because its features are so limited. Sure, it stores and retrieves records, but its partial implementation of SQL (without subqueries etc) and blatant bugs that violate SQL (try inserting '123456' into a varchar(4) column, it will silently truncate to '1234' instead of giving a 'Inserted value too large for column' error) make it useless for anything reliable.
If 'fast' is your only important concern you should be using flat files or dbm/ndbm files, but there is more to a database than speed.