My dad has/had this Tetris clone from around 1988/89. When you pushed Escape, the screen turned into a spreadsheet filled with numbers. You could even scroll through it with PgUp/PgDn.
Come to think of it, the real Tetris did this too, but with a more intelligent-looking spreadsheet.
Does sol.exe do anything like this? I doubt it. And MS is probably too scared to put it in (productivity lawsuits).
My mom works as a medical transcriptionist. Her entire department runs Windows 95, mostly on P3-era Celeron machines with 64MB RAM. The transcription software is super buggy...but the OS and system itself run fine. Upgrade? Haha, they barely have enough funding as is.
My laptop (recently aquired for free) runs Windows 3.0. I often type homework on it (from my bed) and transfer it using floppy to print. I'd like to upgrade to 3.1 so I can use WordPerfect 6, but Windows Write (heh) has been ok. And that stuff came out in 1990. Plus it's faster than any of my XP/Linux machines.:)
Re:Autovectorization
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Autovectorization is a feature pushed by Apple. Since their AltiVec isn't being exploited like it *can* be, they've gotta push it into the compiler to give themselves a speed boost on G4/G5 (and rightfully so).
Fedora is designated as a desktop OS. I don't think Red Hat even suggests using it as a server. I wouldn't either, at least not for anything real (I have a fc1 server at school just to learn how the stuff works; it doesn't really do anything).
It's got a what, 6, 7-month release cycle, and maybe 16 for updates. After that it changes radically, and you'd be breaking a bunch of stuff every year or more, just to keep yourself safe from exploits. Not to mention that its bleeding-edge nature keeps it from being all that stable anyway. (It's ok but far from others.)
If people want to use Red Hat on a server (which RH distros can accomplish very well), they should be using RHEL or one of the clones. Those are set up for that, and are marketed as such. I don't understand why people go and choose Fedora anyway.
Make Printing or CUPS work. Period. Don't make me fuck with it. Just make it work. And have more drivers than 10 yer old HP laserjets.
My CUPS here works pretty well. I had to configure the printer in the web browser, but that's no big deal. And, my 1yr. old HP 3820 (physically broken) and my 2yr. old Lexmark Z52 both have drivers. So much for 10yr. old LaserJets. (btw those things rule.;) The CUPS company does sell a $40 product with a lot more drivers, and there's quite a few 3rd-party CUPS drivers out there (probably the ones that end up in the commercial CUPS).
Have an installation proc that CLEARLY tells you what it requires of your disk partition and CLEARLY tells you what it's going to ignore.
Not sure what you're looking for exactly that today's graphical installers don't do.
Get mouse support in X to work better. Seriously, anyone who who builds a distro where the installation fails because of a fucking minor mouse configuration glitch in X should be shot.
Haha, when was that? Never had that displeasure. I'll go with you on that one, if it's really happened.
We don't need 4 or 5 6 windows managers. We need X term, K, and a lighterweight one like fluxbox or ICEWM but not both and absolutely either put all of the same apps in all the menus or strip them all down to minimum.
I like Gnome more, but that's offtopic. I agree that having 3 is ideal (failsafe xterm, K/G, and Fluxbox). As for the menus, yes, totally. There are menu creators for Fluxbox and probably all the others - distros should put those to use. (See Knoppix's menus)
Create the ability to change screen res on the fly w/o forcing a shutdown/restart of X and PLEASE indicate that settings you have already stored will not work if in fact they will not work.
Gnome has a program that does this. No forcing allowed, and does it as you wish.
Application installation apps need to have clearer discriptive lines of WHAT they do. Calling something "Monkeysoutmyass+glb.flx.x86windget.v.11.110.9.1.1.23bmourning_becomes_electra" does not help me in the fucking least.
Please, the exaggeration...:D I don't know about, say, RH, but Debian and Slackware have descriptions that are on-screen when you go to select them. The actual filenames are most for technical information, always have been.
Put applets that manage devices in ONE PLACE. ONE. not two not three. ONE.
Mandrake and SuSE have this mostly done. Others do, in fact, need work.
You need:
one office suite
one IM client for AOL/Yahoo. etc.
one IRC
one image management app
one burner
one real/quicktime/etcetera
one file manager
Default installs of at least Ubuntu and Mandrake are like this. Well, Mdk 9.2. But then again, they'd be fools if they changed that.
You need to make the appearance of the filesystem in the file manager MORE simple not LESS simple. if that means making a linear type arrangement like windows then so be it.
I find that I don't touch the filesystem much, save for/home and/mnt. Everything else is accessible either through menus, or the application path.
Make applications uninstallers obvious.
This has always been right in the package management. What are you suggesting?
I must ask this...what color are pixels when not lit? For example, my old 386 laptop has an "inverse" mode, because, according to TFM, it's bad for all the pixels to be "lit black" at once.
I use the XFce weather applet at home, and have seen the Gnome one. They are very handy. Especially since the weather here has been somewhat erratic I have to check every morning to see what I should wear.
if it makes the difference between all the kde libs being able to fit into core and not, then it could easily give a 2x speedup.
I've checked top. The machine was still swapping, abeit less than the 3.1 machine. So no, not everything fit into RAM.
KDE fans always talk about how the team is optimizing it all the time. While I don't doubt that *something* is being done, in my own tests, there is contrary performance.
Let's take the P1s I've run KDE on - a p1/133 with 40MB ram, and a p1/166 with 32MB ram. Both are low-end machines without a doubt. (And the one with less ram had a brand new hard drive.) One machine ran KDE 1.1, and the other ran 3.1.4.
In short, 1.1 was moderately fast, but 3.1.4 was so slow that it'd be unusable to the average person (I have a lot of computer patience myself). I'd say the difference was around twofold faster for 1.1.
Perhaps it's not the KDE team's goal to run on 32 or 40MB machines. Which I guess is okay - anyone running Linux on one of them is probably using Fluxbox or something. But still, the performance between old and new went way down - which it shouldn't if any optimization is taking place. (And I hardly believe that the extra 8MB ram given to 1.1 helped it *that* much.)
Let's hope you're not serious.
I did testing on Gnome 1.4 vs. KDE 2.2.2 today (Debian stable on a Dell p2/~300), and Gnome started up in about half the time. The gap closed a bit later on...I used both Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.1 on a p1/166, and Gnome started up only a little bit faster. That all is moot though, because KDE has always had lag problems with icon drawing and stuff.
I can say something similar. I have a Linksys USB wifi card...in Windows it would drop out a lot, requiring me to constantly move the card around to pick the signal back up. On linux, with linux-wlan-ng, this never happens, even though the driver version is "0.2.1-pre23".
The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things. You need that NIC support, after all!;)
It is? I have a first generation Prescott 2.8E socket 478, and a Gigabyte motherboard. It's been running at 50C lately...how would I go about turning this on?
I ran 3.1 on a P/166 with 32MB ram. Typical program load times (that is, with included KDE/Qt apps) was around 20-30 seconds. More recently I used 1.1 on a P/133 with 40MB ram. Load times? About a third of that.
Not to sound mean...but faster now than then? Bullocks.
Well, yeah, I know that...but, it certainly helps if there's a whole desktop that can run well along with. After all, you could just use Windows 95 otherwise.
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OMG!
Come to think of it, the real Tetris did this too, but with a more intelligent-looking spreadsheet.
Does sol.exe do anything like this? I doubt it. And MS is probably too scared to put it in (productivity lawsuits).
My laptop (recently aquired for free) runs Windows 3.0. I often type homework on it (from my bed) and transfer it using floppy to print. I'd like to upgrade to 3.1 so I can use WordPerfect 6, but Windows Write (heh) has been ok. And that stuff came out in 1990. Plus it's faster than any of my XP/Linux machines. :)
Autovectorization is a feature pushed by Apple. Since their AltiVec isn't being exploited like it *can* be, they've gotta push it into the compiler to give themselves a speed boost on G4/G5 (and rightfully so).
Look more carefully at my post. I said RHEL or one of the clones. White Box is as free as Fedora.
It's got a what, 6, 7-month release cycle, and maybe 16 for updates. After that it changes radically, and you'd be breaking a bunch of stuff every year or more, just to keep yourself safe from exploits. Not to mention that its bleeding-edge nature keeps it from being all that stable anyway. (It's ok but far from others.)
If people want to use Red Hat on a server (which RH distros can accomplish very well), they should be using RHEL or one of the clones. Those are set up for that, and are marketed as such. I don't understand why people go and choose Fedora anyway.
My CUPS here works pretty well. I had to configure the printer in the web browser, but that's no big deal. And, my 1yr. old HP 3820 (physically broken) and my 2yr. old Lexmark Z52 both have drivers. So much for 10yr. old LaserJets. (btw those things rule.
Have an installation proc that CLEARLY tells you what it requires of your disk partition and CLEARLY tells you what it's going to ignore.
Not sure what you're looking for exactly that today's graphical installers don't do.
Get mouse support in X to work better. Seriously, anyone who who builds a distro where the installation fails because of a fucking minor mouse configuration glitch in X should be shot.
Haha, when was that? Never had that displeasure. I'll go with you on that one, if it's really happened.
We don't need 4 or 5 6 windows managers. We need X term, K, and a lighterweight one like fluxbox or ICEWM but not both and absolutely either put all of the same apps in all the menus or strip them all down to minimum.
I like Gnome more, but that's offtopic. I agree that having 3 is ideal (failsafe xterm, K/G, and Fluxbox). As for the menus, yes, totally. There are menu creators for Fluxbox and probably all the others - distros should put those to use. (See Knoppix's menus)
Create the ability to change screen res on the fly w/o forcing a shutdown/restart of X and PLEASE indicate that settings you have already stored will not work if in fact they will not work.
Gnome has a program that does this. No forcing allowed, and does it as you wish.
Application installation apps need to have clearer discriptive lines of WHAT they do. Calling something "Monkeysoutmyass+glb.flx.x86windget.v.11.110.9.1.1 .23bmourning_becomes_electra" does not help me in the fucking least. :D I don't know about, say, RH, but Debian and Slackware have descriptions that are on-screen when you go to select them. The actual filenames are most for technical information, always have been.
Please, the exaggeration...
Put applets that manage devices in ONE PLACE. ONE. not two not three. ONE.
Mandrake and SuSE have this mostly done. Others do, in fact, need work.
You need:
one office suite
one IM client for AOL/Yahoo. etc.
one IRC
one image management app
one burner
one real/quicktime/etcetera
one file manager
Default installs of at least Ubuntu and Mandrake are like this. Well, Mdk 9.2. But then again, they'd be fools if they changed that.
You need to make the appearance of the filesystem in the file manager MORE simple not LESS simple. if that means making a linear type arrangement like windows then so be it. /home and /mnt. Everything else is accessible either through menus, or the application path.
I find that I don't touch the filesystem much, save for
Make applications uninstallers obvious.
This has always been right in the package management. What are you suggesting?
Is it vice-versa now?
11 times the life. Not minutes.
I use the XFce weather applet at home, and have seen the Gnome one. They are very handy. Especially since the weather here has been somewhat erratic I have to check every morning to see what I should wear.
if it makes the difference between all the kde libs being able to fit into core and not, then it could easily give a 2x speedup.
I've checked top. The machine was still swapping, abeit less than the 3.1 machine. So no, not everything fit into RAM.
KDE fans always talk about how the team is optimizing it all the time. While I don't doubt that *something* is being done, in my own tests, there is contrary performance.
Let's take the P1s I've run KDE on - a p1/133 with 40MB ram, and a p1/166 with 32MB ram. Both are low-end machines without a doubt. (And the one with less ram had a brand new hard drive.) One machine ran KDE 1.1, and the other ran 3.1.4.
In short, 1.1 was moderately fast, but 3.1.4 was so slow that it'd be unusable to the average person (I have a lot of computer patience myself). I'd say the difference was around twofold faster for 1.1.
Perhaps it's not the KDE team's goal to run on 32 or 40MB machines. Which I guess is okay - anyone running Linux on one of them is probably using Fluxbox or something. But still, the performance between old and new went way down - which it shouldn't if any optimization is taking place. (And I hardly believe that the extra 8MB ram given to 1.1 helped it *that* much.)
Ubuntu?
That's everyone's problem.
PS: I don't care, I like the iPod.
Let's hope you're not serious.
I did testing on Gnome 1.4 vs. KDE 2.2.2 today (Debian stable on a Dell p2/~300), and Gnome started up in about half the time. The gap closed a bit later on...I used both Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.1 on a p1/166, and Gnome started up only a little bit faster. That all is moot though, because KDE has always had lag problems with icon drawing and stuff.
I can say something similar. I have a Linksys USB wifi card...in Windows it would drop out a lot, requiring me to constantly move the card around to pick the signal back up. On linux, with linux-wlan-ng, this never happens, even though the driver version is "0.2.1-pre23".
The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things. You need that NIC support, after all! ;)
It is? I have a first generation Prescott 2.8E socket 478, and a Gigabyte motherboard. It's been running at 50C lately...how would I go about turning this on?
*claps*
PS: No sarcasm whatsoever.
PS: I'm waiting for White Box to clone the new release. ;)
These days, it's known as LC. As in, LC4, or LC5. They did this because it became a commercial product of @stake, now owned (or 0wn3d) by Symantec.
256MB a must? See, this is what I'm talking about. Why do we need that much RAM to run a desktop?
Silly you. ;) 95 was never fast on 4mb. I've seen it used with 8mb, and it was still slow.
I ran 3.1 on a P/166 with 32MB ram. Typical program load times (that is, with included KDE/Qt apps) was around 20-30 seconds. More recently I used 1.1 on a P/133 with 40MB ram. Load times? About a third of that.
Not to sound mean...but faster now than then? Bullocks.
Well, yeah, I know that...but, it certainly helps if there's a whole desktop that can run well along with. After all, you could just use Windows 95 otherwise.