Ack! I'm being sandwiched by 4 digit UIDs! But seriously, I didn't even mention the worst case of bad performance per clock, the abomination that is the Pentium 4 Prescott.
Are you serious? CPUs are doing a lot more per clock than they did in the past. In case you haven't noticed the sort of invisible 4ghz wall that we've been staring up at for the past 4 or 5 years, clock speeds actually have stayed pretty constant but raw performance as measured by benchmarks and such has been improving drastically - look at Core i7 benchmarks vs Core 2 Duo, or Phenom II vs Phenom vs Athlon X2. Really though, most people don't need more processing power than what a 2ghz dual core provides, if that, so it seems like things aren't improving, but they really have been making significant strides each year.
I do agree on the hibernation bit though; it takes forever for my laptop's 3gigs to get written to disk. Now I just resort to sleep mode in Vista, which actually works, so it's not too big of an issue.
I think they probably locked the clocks on the memory though, as most good overclocking motherboards will let you do. I'm not sure whether there actually exists RAM that will let run stabley at twice its normal clock speed, since on AMD chips the RAM speed is directly proportional to the CPU clock speed. The same probably goes for the PCI-E buses, those probably had to be locked as well.
That is basically what UAC in Vista tries to address, but people seem to find it annoying and disable it. With UAC on, even if you're logged in as an admin account, programs will run with reduced privileges unless elevated. There is a handy middle-ground mode, accessible only using a program called TweakUAC or I presume the registry, which has all programs running unprivileged but doesn't do popups all over the place. I use this and it's rather nice.
There is actually something handy called AdSweep that works with Chrome, but it's not regex based like Adblockplus so it seems to only work on sites that are built into it. It's better than nothing, I guess, but there are still about 300 other things that Firefox does for me that Chrome is far from doing, and a lot of them hinge on a good extension platform. I just don't think it can get better than XUL/js for extension writing.
Ah, I didn't actually know that, and was not intentionally misleading. I guess I was kind of relaying what I heard/thought was factual. Thanks for correcting me.
AD came with Windows 98 actually. And I think the issue is not whether a monopoly is legal, but whether they abused their monopoly power. I definitely would agree that they abused their monopoly back then but the situation now is very different. OS X includes a lot more built in than Windows, and it's steadily gaining market share, so the decisions made back then are not as applicable now. Especially since, as I mentioned in my other post, a lot of programs are actually being stripped out of Windows 7, I don't think Microsoft is abusing its monopoly position nearly as much as in the past. However, the abuses that are happening are likely happening behind the scenes, with OEM deals and such, which are probably more important to monitor.
My last bit was mostly in jest; however, I do need some sort of browser to download other browsers with. But I think the browser thing is irrelevant in this day and age. However, I think some restrictions that eg. the EU have, like not bundling Windows Media player, are kind of ridiculous. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a modern operating system to come without a media player.
I actually agree. In the early days of the internet, when Netscape was being sold, bundling IE with Windows was definitely wrong, but these days, browsers are free. I need something to download Firefox with on a new computer, and ftp is a bit hard unless you memorize URLs. Also, Windows 7 is actually removing a lot of stuff from the core OS that was in Vista, such as the Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, in favor of splitting them off into the Windows Live suite. On a side note, WLMM is quite possibly the worst video editing software ever, and makes WMM look amazing.
This does not actually work, as I've done it numerous times. There's also a scheduled task that reenables it, among other things. I have been trying to disable it for a while and have not been able to get it to go away. Just gave up at this point.
I suppose it can sort of seem exponential when plugins like Flash or unruly javascript start to chew through a lot of memory, but in terms of order of growth, there's no way that opening a new tab somehow magically increases the memory usage of other tabs, or that the overhead for the second tab is exponentially higher than that of the first. If anything, the overhead per tab probably goes down. I think one main problem is how much Firefox caches in memory; eg. if I've opened 30ish tabs and a few youtube videos in HQ or HD, my memory usage can easily go past 300MB, and then closing them all doesn't do much for the memory usage. If it ever gets bad enough that it affects performance I usually just have to close it.
Uh, I would not call IA64 leaner; VLIW is a huge mess and forces the compiler to do a lot of optimization, and if it can't do the optimization then performance sucks. Of course the market rejected it.
That is true for the most part. I'm not even sure why RAM needs large heat sinks and stuff. But uh, I guess most RAM will not run at higher voltages, which sometimes become necessary when you overclock, so that might be one semi-valid reason, assuming you think overclocking is worth anything in the first place.
I don't think Kingston or Hynix are really cheap brands. Each brand has its cheap lines and expensive lines, eg. here is a completely reasonably priced Crucial dual channel kit. Really though, most of the "high end" stuff is either over-priced or triple channel stuff for Core i7 motherboards, which are ridiculously expensive themselves, or FB-DIMMs, which are really only useful in servers.
Exactly. The people complaining about it not being a similarly specced laptop are missing the point. The average user does not need a $2800 laptop. Kind of makes me grimace every time I see a random college kid with a Macbook Pro.
I think you sort of missed the point. What he's saying is that for 90% of people, the fact that processors today have 2-4 cores and execute many more instructions per clock than the ones five years ago is irrelevant. This is probably why netbooks are becoming popular, despite having CPUs about as powerful as the CPUs from 5 years ago.
I don't think it's even branded at all - they just resell it at a huge markup. But yeah, it seems like most companies do that these days, although I think Apple does it the worst. But PC manufacturers are not far behind in overpricing RAM upgrades.
I'm a little confused. I mean, I understand that Microsoft probably intentionally lowballed the requirements for Vista, but how did they knuckle under (buckle?) to Microsoft and Intel by skimping on RAM? I think the real problem was manufacturers skimping on RAM despite the fact that DDR2 prices have plummeted (and are still plummeting). My parents' computer from 2003, which finally died a few weeks ago, was the cheapest thing at CompUSA and it had 512MB RAM. You'd think that by 2008 we would have moved past that...
Right, so I should probably include relevant links for those too lazy to Google. Consider this a mini-guide to homebrew on the Wii.
The Homebrew Channel: This is essentially a launcher for unsigned code on the Wii. Follow the instructions on the page to install it onto your pre 4.0 Wii. As of now, there are no hacks to install it on 4.0 but it will only be a matter of time. This page also includes the Twilight Hack, which is a hacked save file for Twilight Princess that causes the Wii to crash and I presume elevate privileges so that you can run unsigned code from SD. The idea is that you run the Twilight Hack, which launched the HBC installer, and then it's on your Wii's system memory.
HackMii: The blog of Team Twiizers, the group that does all the ground breaking hacking of the Wii. Definitely add them to your RSS reader if you decide to hack your Wii. It's also an interesting technical read. Note that Team Twiizers are firmly against piracy, and any mention of it there will not be tolerated.
WiiBrew: Also run by Team Twiizers and co, this is the wiki for Wii homebrew. Contains apps and general information about Wii hacking, as well as technical information on the software and security of the Wii. In particular, this list is a fairly thorough list of legit homebrew applications on the Wii.
The Homebrew Browser: This gets a special mention out of all the apps because it's basically a package repository type program for the Wii. The guy also runs a blog at codemii.com with updates on included applications and also a few basic Wii coding tutorials.
Phew. That's probably the most effort I've ever spent on a Slashdot post. These links should be enough to get anyone started. Since I'm tired of typing HTML tags, I'll just list a few recommended apps: GeeXBoX is an excellent media center app, and there's also a handful of mplayer ports, then there's all the emulators, Gecko OS lets you tweak a few aspects of the System menu as well as use cheats (but don't use them online, people have been getting banned), FTPii is useful if you're too lazy to take your SD card out of your Wii, there are a few Wii Linux distros in their infancy, and of course, a plethora of games (including Quake!).
One last thing, Team Twiizers is working on something called BootMii, which is essentially a replacement of some very low level boot code on the Wii. Once this is finished, Wii homebrew will essentially have complete access to everything on the Wii. Keep an eye out for it; among other things it should make a Wii relatively brick-proof. It'll be on Hackmii of course.
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Ack! I'm being sandwiched by 4 digit UIDs! But seriously, I didn't even mention the worst case of bad performance per clock, the abomination that is the Pentium 4 Prescott.
Are you serious? CPUs are doing a lot more per clock than they did in the past. In case you haven't noticed the sort of invisible 4ghz wall that we've been staring up at for the past 4 or 5 years, clock speeds actually have stayed pretty constant but raw performance as measured by benchmarks and such has been improving drastically - look at Core i7 benchmarks vs Core 2 Duo, or Phenom II vs Phenom vs Athlon X2. Really though, most people don't need more processing power than what a 2ghz dual core provides, if that, so it seems like things aren't improving, but they really have been making significant strides each year.
I do agree on the hibernation bit though; it takes forever for my laptop's 3gigs to get written to disk. Now I just resort to sleep mode in Vista, which actually works, so it's not too big of an issue.
I think they probably locked the clocks on the memory though, as most good overclocking motherboards will let you do. I'm not sure whether there actually exists RAM that will let run stabley at twice its normal clock speed, since on AMD chips the RAM speed is directly proportional to the CPU clock speed. The same probably goes for the PCI-E buses, those probably had to be locked as well.
That is basically what UAC in Vista tries to address, but people seem to find it annoying and disable it. With UAC on, even if you're logged in as an admin account, programs will run with reduced privileges unless elevated. There is a handy middle-ground mode, accessible only using a program called TweakUAC or I presume the registry, which has all programs running unprivileged but doesn't do popups all over the place. I use this and it's rather nice.
I don't think Nintendo consoles are ever sold at a loss.
I'm almost certain that the summary and the article are inaccurate on that regard though.
There is actually something handy called AdSweep that works with Chrome, but it's not regex based like Adblockplus so it seems to only work on sites that are built into it. It's better than nothing, I guess, but there are still about 300 other things that Firefox does for me that Chrome is far from doing, and a lot of them hinge on a good extension platform. I just don't think it can get better than XUL/js for extension writing.
Ah, I didn't actually know that, and was not intentionally misleading. I guess I was kind of relaying what I heard/thought was factual. Thanks for correcting me.
AD came with Windows 98 actually. And I think the issue is not whether a monopoly is legal, but whether they abused their monopoly power. I definitely would agree that they abused their monopoly back then but the situation now is very different. OS X includes a lot more built in than Windows, and it's steadily gaining market share, so the decisions made back then are not as applicable now. Especially since, as I mentioned in my other post, a lot of programs are actually being stripped out of Windows 7, I don't think Microsoft is abusing its monopoly position nearly as much as in the past. However, the abuses that are happening are likely happening behind the scenes, with OEM deals and such, which are probably more important to monitor.
My last bit was mostly in jest; however, I do need some sort of browser to download other browsers with. But I think the browser thing is irrelevant in this day and age. However, I think some restrictions that eg. the EU have, like not bundling Windows Media player, are kind of ridiculous. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a modern operating system to come without a media player.
I actually agree. In the early days of the internet, when Netscape was being sold, bundling IE with Windows was definitely wrong, but these days, browsers are free. I need something to download Firefox with on a new computer, and ftp is a bit hard unless you memorize URLs. Also, Windows 7 is actually removing a lot of stuff from the core OS that was in Vista, such as the Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, in favor of splitting them off into the Windows Live suite. On a side note, WLMM is quite possibly the worst video editing software ever, and makes WMM look amazing.
This does not actually work, as I've done it numerous times. There's also a scheduled task that reenables it, among other things. I have been trying to disable it for a while and have not been able to get it to go away. Just gave up at this point.
I suppose it can sort of seem exponential when plugins like Flash or unruly javascript start to chew through a lot of memory, but in terms of order of growth, there's no way that opening a new tab somehow magically increases the memory usage of other tabs, or that the overhead for the second tab is exponentially higher than that of the first. If anything, the overhead per tab probably goes down. I think one main problem is how much Firefox caches in memory; eg. if I've opened 30ish tabs and a few youtube videos in HQ or HD, my memory usage can easily go past 300MB, and then closing them all doesn't do much for the memory usage. If it ever gets bad enough that it affects performance I usually just have to close it.
Uhh, I was talking about orders of growth not functions.
No he's not, wtf? It's linear, not exponential. Not even polynomial, just linear. Geez.
Uh, I would not call IA64 leaner; VLIW is a huge mess and forces the compiler to do a lot of optimization, and if it can't do the optimization then performance sucks. Of course the market rejected it.
Right. I was just pointing out that this has always been the case.
That is true for the most part. I'm not even sure why RAM needs large heat sinks and stuff. But uh, I guess most RAM will not run at higher voltages, which sometimes become necessary when you overclock, so that might be one semi-valid reason, assuming you think overclocking is worth anything in the first place.
I don't think Kingston or Hynix are really cheap brands. Each brand has its cheap lines and expensive lines, eg. here is a completely reasonably priced Crucial dual channel kit. Really though, most of the "high end" stuff is either over-priced or triple channel stuff for Core i7 motherboards, which are ridiculously expensive themselves, or FB-DIMMs, which are really only useful in servers.
Exactly. The people complaining about it not being a similarly specced laptop are missing the point. The average user does not need a $2800 laptop. Kind of makes me grimace every time I see a random college kid with a Macbook Pro.
I think you sort of missed the point. What he's saying is that for 90% of people, the fact that processors today have 2-4 cores and execute many more instructions per clock than the ones five years ago is irrelevant. This is probably why netbooks are becoming popular, despite having CPUs about as powerful as the CPUs from 5 years ago.
Even the high end stuff is still way cheaper on newegg than from any manufacturer, be it Apple, Dell, HP, or whomever. It's the exact same RAM.
I don't think it's even branded at all - they just resell it at a huge markup. But yeah, it seems like most companies do that these days, although I think Apple does it the worst. But PC manufacturers are not far behind in overpricing RAM upgrades.
Your sig is pure evil. Nicely done!
I'm a little confused. I mean, I understand that Microsoft probably intentionally lowballed the requirements for Vista, but how did they knuckle under (buckle?) to Microsoft and Intel by skimping on RAM? I think the real problem was manufacturers skimping on RAM despite the fact that DDR2 prices have plummeted (and are still plummeting). My parents' computer from 2003, which finally died a few weeks ago, was the cheapest thing at CompUSA and it had 512MB RAM. You'd think that by 2008 we would have moved past that...
Oh right, forgot about that. I don't import games and in fact haven't had time to play a Wii game in ages.
Right, so I should probably include relevant links for those too lazy to Google. Consider this a mini-guide to homebrew on the Wii.
Phew. That's probably the most effort I've ever spent on a Slashdot post. These links should be enough to get anyone started. Since I'm tired of typing HTML tags, I'll just list a few recommended apps: GeeXBoX is an excellent media center app, and there's also a handful of mplayer ports, then there's all the emulators, Gecko OS lets you tweak a few aspects of the System menu as well as use cheats (but don't use them online, people have been getting banned), FTPii is useful if you're too lazy to take your SD card out of your Wii, there are a few Wii Linux distros in their infancy, and of course, a plethora of games (including Quake!).
One last thing, Team Twiizers is working on something called BootMii, which is essentially a replacement of some very low level boot code on the Wii. Once this is finished, Wii homebrew will essentially have complete access to everything on the Wii. Keep an eye out for it; among other things it should make a Wii relatively brick-proof. It'll be on Hackmii of course.