The reason for bloat seems to me to be simplicity. For the user. Originally most OSes were nothing more then a thin layer between the user and the machine that gave the programmers basic interfaces to things like the hard drive and grahphics card. Not much more then BIOS.
Now everything is considered part of the OS, from the file browser to the control panel.
The reason being that while you could consider it to be part of some other product, it's much easier to say that you have Windows installed or MacOS rather then saying that you have Windows, notepad, the control panels, Explorer, etc etc...
You see this in Linux easliy. It's very easy to make a linux distro that contains no GUI tools, only CLI tools. You can also create a behemoth one that uses KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, X11, etc, etc.. Both could be called linux. While this is technically wrong because linux is just the kernel. Normal (read non-techie) people don't know and they don't care. Why should they? It's very confusing to most people that Redhat and Mandrake while both based on linux don't behave the same way when you use them. To most people, when something behaves differently it is different.
So MS was smart to lump everything into a big package and call that the OS, because it makes the users lives simpler.
Was the scheme of time to barrel. How long it took to find a barrel / box in the game. It showed exactly when the developer ran out of creative juice and started to put in cliche elements.
Funny because it was about as accurate as any other reviewing method for games.
Yeah but since win2k it's actually gotten harder to port. WinNT 3.5 or so was much easier to port. Why? because the display driver wasn't as integrated into the kernel. They started to move move of the drivers into kernel space with Win2k. Which means that it's harder to port.
Micro kernels are easier to port to different chips. Even the drivers are easier, but everything is slower.
I think that you are under estimating the battery life of a P4 laptop just a little. It's shorter then an Apple but I don't think that anyone is arguing that point.
Personally, I think the biggest problem with a P4 laptop is not the battery life, but the heat output. You can't easily use one of those on your lap. Unlike most mac laptops or a P3 laptop.
Yes there is, for example the 15-inch 867 mhz version shuts off the L3 cache. The 1-ghz 15-inch turns the proc down to 867 and shuts off the L3 cache. I assume that the 17-inch does the same but I'm not sure.
Speedstep is a good idea, but the real problem with the last gen of P4 laptops is that they just use more power for the main proc.
Still the proc is not the main user of battery in a laptop, that's still the screen. Followed by the hard drive.
It's called the eMarker http://www.pc4d.com/audio/78/emarker.shtml has a review of it, it's basically a time stamp marker that you can use to remember the song you were listening to.
I hate that this idea has sunk in through popular culture. Copying works is not the same as stealing. Copying a book, song or other media doesn't deprive the copyright holder of anything.
It does reduce to potential for a sale as once someone has an illegal copy of a CD, it means they don't have to buy a 'real' copy.
It's very hard to say that person-to-person copying reduces overall sales of entertainment. It is easy to say that large individual pirates that produce illegal copies of CDs and movies, then sells them on the street does though. Person-to-Person copying is too unreliable to scale well. Even napster was too much of a pain in the arse if you wanted to get whole albums easily (IMO). It was only worthwhile if you had a lot of time on your hands (and a fast internet connection). Now that I'm working all day I don't know how I"m going to find the hours required to find all the songs on an album, make sure they all download and then test them to make sure they work. The store is just much faster.
Is that you could instantly kill anything that comes into your Field of View. Just like the Airborne laser, a laser gun could have a mirror that reflects a laser to kill any target that the system detects. All it would need would be sensors (visual, audio, etc..) to determine where the targets were and quickly rotate the mirrors and fire.
Swat teams have those wands to see around corners, what about weapons that can fire around corners like that? Automatically, that kill as soon as they detect them.
You wouldn't need cover fire anymore, because targeting could be near 100%. The operator of the weapon wouldn't even need to be able to see.
( This is why it's stupid that phasors in star trek miss. How can they possiably miss when the phasor could easily detect and kill/stun anything in range )
This is only true in businesses that have a low barrier to entry. In the games industry, making a AAA quality title is getting harder every day thanks to technology. Just like movies, games are requiring multi-millions of dollars to make. A small team cannot do as much as a large team. I agree that games DON'T need to cost as much as they do. But the same can be said for all forms of entertainment. As long as people will spend more money on games, companies will try to make the biggest and most popular games they can.
Usually this means that games are not innovative or original. Just like with blockbuster movies, blockbuster games are not as innovative as the small games.
I have the master system converter still, it's how I play Zillion.;)
But the genesis was not popular because of the converter, it was popular because it came out before the SNES and it had good games. Backwards compatibility was just a fluke because nobody had a Master System.
I'm saying that if the SNES had backwards compatibility, then the Genesis would never have had gotten a foothold. Why would you want to buy all new games when you can slowly upgrade them?
The SNES had some great games out at first, Mario, Actraiser, F-Zero were some of the first.
I think that you are correct in saying that backwards compatability is a wildcard. However I think that it will be crucial to the fate of the PS3.
Why? The reason that the Genesis was able to overtake the Nintendo juggernaut was the SNESes lack of backwards compatability. Later, the SNES won but it took a long time. Without backwards compatibility, every new generation of consoles is exactly the same.
Right now the GameBoy is number one in portable handhelds, it also has backwards compatability. It can play the original Tetris that came out with the original gameboy over ten years ago. I don't think that this is just a fluke. Having good games helped the Game Boy, but the genius is the backwards compatability.
Also, all the link games except Ocarina are compeletly cartoony. The graphics are total cartoons. Have you seen the demos for Link yet? It's really quite amazing cartoony yes, but better then more cartoons because the animation actually runs at full speed. Most kids cartoons on TV only run at 20 frames per seconnd it seems to keep costs low. It makes a big difference.
but after all the bad drivers die off the remaining ones will all be awesome pilots. Too bad all the cool stuff will have been destroyed by the bad ones.:(
That's about the only way I'm going to be able to play that game as there is no way that I'm going to shell out $400 for one game. I've already spent enough on hardware for games. I think that many people feel the same way.
Actually, it could be a good investment, buying all the equiptment to make a Steel Battallion Arcade case to play in. Then sell that... hmmmm
I dunno, I'd say that 1/2 the time I walk over and the other half I email.
When you need a one word answer to a question sometimes email is better then getting up and walking. Especially ifwhat you are working on gets in your way of/.;)
IF you were to use just your computer to build it, it could take over a week. But MS does do nightly builds of the system. They just use lots and lots of computers.
The point I think the original poster was pointing to was that if China cannot build the binaries themselves, then there is no point to being able to look at the source code.
MS can give them all the source code they want. They just have to 'leave out' the part that is the security risk. Which seems to be the point of this whole deal.
It only takes a few lines of code to inject a nasty spy bug/flaw into the system. And if China can't even build their own binaries, then MS can insert many flaws into the OS they give to them.
average windows guy costs less is because they are simply not worth it.
Not to insult you top end Windows admins, but lets face it. The ability of Windows admins has a larger varience then that of Unix admins. The learning curve is much higher and they don't have quite the popularity. I think the reason that Windows techs are cheaper on average is because, on average, the Windows techs don't know as much and don't deserve the high salary.
If you want a good, professional Windows admin, then you are going to pay as much as the same quality of Unix admin.
I'm not saying that all benchmarks are useless, you should still do that. But if you go off what they say, buy the card and don't get the performance you want, then perhaps you should still have the option of returning the card.
Most people who buy these cards are not doing only work on them. They are mostly doing gaming.
Personally, I think that a good benchmark is just doing whatever you are going to be doing and timing that.
Are you going to be playing much of the 3D-Mark benchmark ? If the answer is yes, then you should use it, otherwise it's pure masterbation. Their site claims that the purpose of the benchmark is to give you an idea of what a typical DX7-DX9 game will give you in performance. However, the 'games' they use to test it are not games you can actually play. It's basically a graphics demo. Wow.
The only benchmarks even worth considering are the Quake, Unreal, etc. benchmarks that test real games being played. And even those results should be taken with a grain of salt. They are 'real world' results, but you have to take into account many factors to actually derive useful information from them. Such as RAM, CPU, resolution that marks were run at, etc.
If you are smart, then you will buy your graphic card from a place like Fry's that will let you return it if the performance is unsatisfactory. In this day and age where the graphics card costs more then a computer, you had better get your money's worth.
Probably because the people who do IT work for schools are not getting paid as well as the people doing IT work for most businesses.
At least at my high school, half of the computer techs were HS students. Half of those guys also had after school jobs working at a middle school or other school doing support for them. So they are mostly just kids.
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You can play Gran Turismo 3 over fire wire. You have to have hub and as many ps2s (and tvs) as players.
So it's cool, but not really easy to do.
The reason for bloat seems to me to be simplicity. For the user. Originally most OSes were nothing more then a thin layer between the user and the machine that gave the programmers basic interfaces to things like the hard drive and grahphics card. Not much more then BIOS.
Now everything is considered part of the OS, from the file browser to the control panel.
The reason being that while you could consider it to be part of some other product, it's much easier to say that you have Windows installed or MacOS rather then saying that you have Windows, notepad, the control panels, Explorer, etc etc...
You see this in Linux easliy. It's very easy to make a linux distro that contains no GUI tools, only CLI tools. You can also create a behemoth one that uses KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, X11, etc, etc.. Both could be called linux. While this is technically wrong because linux is just the kernel. Normal (read non-techie) people don't know and they don't care. Why should they? It's very confusing to most people that Redhat and Mandrake while both based on linux don't behave the same way when you use them. To most people, when something behaves differently it is different.
So MS was smart to lump everything into a big package and call that the OS, because it makes the users lives simpler.
Was the scheme of time to barrel. How long it took to find a barrel / box in the game. It showed exactly when the developer ran out of creative juice and started to put in cliche elements.
Funny because it was about as accurate as any other reviewing method for games.
I did like that site.
What did you think I ment, that the kernel had to be recompiled everytime the display driver changes?
Duh, that can't be true as how could the driver be plugable like it is without it being a loadable module.
Since the driver runs in kernel space instead of user space it does mean that the driver is less portable which was I tried to say (badly) before.
Yeah but since win2k it's actually gotten harder to port. WinNT 3.5 or so was much easier to port. Why? because the display driver wasn't as integrated into the kernel. They started to move move of the drivers into kernel space with Win2k. Which means that it's harder to port.
Micro kernels are easier to port to different chips. Even the drivers are easier, but everything is slower.
I think that you are under estimating the battery life of a P4 laptop just a little. It's shorter then an Apple but I don't think that anyone is arguing that point.
Personally, I think the biggest problem with a P4 laptop is not the battery life, but the heat output. You can't easily use one of those on your lap. Unlike most mac laptops or a P3 laptop.
Yes there is, for example the 15-inch 867 mhz version shuts off the L3 cache.
The 1-ghz 15-inch turns the proc down to 867 and shuts off the L3 cache. I assume that the 17-inch does the same but I'm not sure.
Speedstep is a good idea, but the real problem with the last gen of P4 laptops is that they just use more power for the main proc.
Still the proc is not the main user of battery in a laptop, that's still the screen. Followed by the hard drive.
It already exists, and Sony sells it.
It's called the eMarker
http://www.pc4d.com/audio/78/emarker.shtml
has a review of it, it's basically a time stamp marker that you can use to remember the song you were listening to.
I hate that this idea has sunk in through popular culture. Copying works is not the same as stealing. Copying a book, song or other media doesn't deprive the copyright holder of anything.
It does reduce to potential for a sale as once someone has an illegal copy of a CD, it means they don't have to buy a 'real' copy.
It's very hard to say that person-to-person copying reduces overall sales of entertainment. It is easy to say that large individual pirates that produce illegal copies of CDs and movies, then sells them on the street does though. Person-to-Person copying is too unreliable to scale well. Even napster was too much of a pain in the arse if you wanted to get whole albums easily (IMO). It was only worthwhile if you had a lot of time on your hands (and a fast internet connection). Now that I'm working all day I don't know how I"m going to find the hours required to find all the songs on an album, make sure they all download and then test them to make sure they work. The store is just much faster.
Is that you could instantly kill anything that comes into your Field of View. Just like the Airborne laser, a laser gun could have a mirror that reflects a laser to kill any target that the system detects. All it would need would be sensors (visual, audio, etc..) to determine where the targets were and quickly rotate the mirrors and fire.
Swat teams have those wands to see around corners, what about weapons that can fire around corners like that? Automatically, that kill as soon as they detect them.
You wouldn't need cover fire anymore, because targeting could be near 100%. The operator of the weapon wouldn't even need to be able to see.
( This is why it's stupid that phasors in star trek miss. How can they possiably miss when the phasor could easily detect and kill/stun anything in range )
Maybe the box in question wasn't critical, but if a hacker could use it to get access to other machines then it could be bad.
Armor's only as strong as the weakest link and what not.
Since when has california spent their money on the schools? They mostly spend money on prisons and highways.
This is only true in businesses that have a low barrier to entry. In the games industry, making a AAA quality title is getting harder every day thanks to technology. Just like movies, games are requiring multi-millions of dollars to make. A small team cannot do as much as a large team. I agree that games DON'T need to cost as much as they do. But the same can be said for all forms of entertainment. As long as people will spend more money on games, companies will try to make the biggest and most popular games they can.
Usually this means that games are not innovative or original. Just like with blockbuster movies, blockbuster games are not as innovative as the small games.
I have the master system converter still, it's how I play Zillion. ;)
But the genesis was not popular because of the converter, it was popular because it came out before the SNES and it had good games. Backwards compatibility was just a fluke because nobody had a Master System.
I'm saying that if the SNES had backwards compatibility, then the Genesis would never have had gotten a foothold. Why would you want to buy all new games when you can slowly upgrade them?
The SNES had some great games out at first, Mario, Actraiser, F-Zero were some of the first.
I think that you are correct in saying that backwards compatability is a wildcard. However I think that it will be crucial to the fate of the PS3.
Why? The reason that the Genesis was able to overtake the Nintendo juggernaut was the SNESes lack of backwards compatability. Later, the SNES won but it took a long time. Without backwards compatibility, every new generation of consoles is exactly the same.
Right now the GameBoy is number one in portable handhelds, it also has backwards compatability. It can play the original Tetris that came out with the original gameboy over ten years ago. I don't think that this is just a fluke. Having good games helped the Game Boy, but the genius is the backwards compatability.
I'm 24 and I've pre-ordered it.
Also, all the link games except Ocarina are compeletly cartoony. The graphics are total cartoons. Have you seen the demos for Link yet? It's really quite amazing cartoony yes, but better then more cartoons because the animation actually runs at full speed. Most kids cartoons on TV only run at 20 frames per seconnd it seems to keep costs low. It makes a big difference.
but after all the bad drivers die off the remaining ones will all be awesome pilots. Too bad all the cool stuff will have been destroyed by the bad ones. :(
That's about the only way I'm going to be able to play that game as there is no way that I'm going to shell out $400 for one game. I've already spent enough on hardware for games. I think that many people feel the same way.
Actually, it could be a good investment, buying all the equiptment to make a Steel Battallion Arcade case to play in. Then sell that... hmmmm
I dunno, I'd say that 1/2 the time I walk over and the other half I email.
/. ;)
When you need a one word answer to a question sometimes email is better then getting up and walking. Especially ifwhat you are working on gets in your way of
IF you were to use just your computer to build it, it could take over a week. But MS does do nightly builds of the system. They just use lots and lots of computers.
The point I think the original poster was pointing to was that if China cannot build the binaries themselves, then there is no point to being able to look at the source code.
MS can give them all the source code they want. They just have to 'leave out' the part that is the security risk. Which seems to be the point of this whole deal.
It only takes a few lines of code to inject a nasty spy bug/flaw into the system. And if China can't even build their own binaries, then MS can insert many flaws into the OS they give to them.
average windows guy costs less is because they are simply not worth it.
Not to insult you top end Windows admins, but lets face it. The ability of Windows admins has a larger varience then that of Unix admins. The learning curve is much higher and they don't have quite the popularity. I think the reason that Windows techs are cheaper on average is because, on average, the Windows techs don't know as much and don't deserve the high salary.
If you want a good, professional Windows admin, then you are going to pay as much as the same quality of Unix admin.
I'm not saying that all benchmarks are useless, you should still do that. But if you go off what they say, buy the card and don't get the performance you want, then perhaps you should still have the option of returning the card.
Most people who buy these cards are not doing only work on them. They are mostly doing gaming.
Personally, I think that a good benchmark is just doing whatever you are going to be doing and timing that.
Are you going to be playing much of the 3D-Mark benchmark ? If the answer is yes, then you should use it, otherwise it's pure masterbation. Their site claims that the purpose of the benchmark is to give you an idea of what a typical DX7-DX9 game will give you in performance. However, the 'games' they use to test it are not games you can actually play. It's basically a graphics demo. Wow.
The only benchmarks even worth considering are the Quake, Unreal, etc. benchmarks that test real games being played. And even those results should be taken with a grain of salt. They are 'real world' results, but you have to take into account many factors to actually derive useful information from them. Such as RAM, CPU, resolution that marks were run at, etc.
If you are smart, then you will buy your graphic card from a place like Fry's that will let you return it if the performance is unsatisfactory. In this day and age where the graphics card costs more then a computer, you had better get your money's worth.
Probably because the people who do IT work for schools are not getting paid as well as the people doing IT work for most businesses.
At least at my high school, half of the computer techs were HS students. Half of those guys also had after school jobs working at a middle school or other school doing support for them. So they are mostly just kids.