True, I forgot about that. However, this doesn't seem like a huge problem. One that has to be tackled, but not something mindblowingly difficult.
Plus, the NES was a special case that was all sorts of weird. Bank switching, external RAM, all sorts of craziness. The GBA hardware really is much more straightforward.:)
DS games did use the same hardware. The ARM7TDMI chip (the GBA core) was used for 2D rendering and most basic tasks, and marshaled its own use of the sound and video hardware of the system. The ARM9E chip was used for 3D rendering. Even if they've removed the ARM7 and are running everything on a beefed up ARM9E, I doubt they'd have removed the rest of the hardware. The DS already needed it.
I tried the new Chrome 2 Beta which might not be what you're talking about. Definitely not ready for primetime by any means. Slow, clunky feeling, didn't load pages properly, etc. The old Chrome seems okay, except it has a problem rendering popular social networking sites.
Uh...I'm using 2.0.168.0, and it's crazy-fast, and social networking sites all load just fine. Are you on a single-core machine?
Firefox's memory usage, test shows, is 1/2 that of Chrome or IE 8 with the same 10 tabs open.
Nnnnnnnnnno it's not. I've duplicated those tests myself, last night. Firefox (with adblock plus, which I consider a requirement) used over two hundred megabytes of RAM when opening ten Youtube videos.
Iron (my Chrome deriv of choice)? Hundred and twenty.
Firefox fail.
It has plugins, cooler themes, is very fast, configurable. So if by "better" you mean "faster"...Chrome 1 is pretty quick as long as you don't mind rendering issues.
Given the KHTML/WebKit guys' reputation for actually targeting the spec (as opposed to Gecko--hello, moz-* CSS attributes), when there's a discrepancy between Gecko and WebKit, I'm going to assume that WebKit does it more correctly unless evidence to the contrary can be found.
And no, Firefox is not very fast, that's the whole fucking problem people have with it!
Some students I know will jump at the chance to spend time learning how stuff works with somebody willing to teach them. They're also the students who apply to Google Summer of Code, bust their asses to get good internships, and generally display drive that offsets their lesser natural skill. They're not the ones who say "I wish I could do what you do," because they're sitting down, shutting up, and applying themselves to get there.
Other students I know will say "I wish I could do what you do," but don't apply themselves to try to get there. They just drift through, getting shitty internships (if any at all) and shitty summer jobs at the ice cream shack. They might wish they could do it, but the key is something unspoken: "I wish I could do what you do without spending any time on it."
The former are people I love working with. I'll spend a ton of time sitting down and teaching them, until they get the issue at hand. (I enjoy teaching a lot, too.) It's the latter who are far more common and far more obnoxious, and the ones I was talking about in the OP.
The DSi has 256MB of Flash memory onboard. Plenty of room for the ROM, and while you raise a good point, it isn't particularly hard to re-invent paging.;)
And the DS had the same 2D video chipset and sound chipset as the GBA, I see no reason for that to have changed.
No, it's not. I run ABP/NoScript on Firefox on this machine and SRWare Iron (a Chrome derivative) with its adblocker. Firefox is dogshit-slow in comparison.
The only reasons Firefox is still on my machine are Firebug and Web Developer.
The DS has an ARM7TDMI and ARM9 inside. The former is clocked at something like 33MHz, the ARM9 (which is used primarily for 3D rendering) at 67MHz. Specs are a little skiffy on the DSi, but the primary processor is an ARM9E at 133MHz. It also has 16MB of RAM, which is something like four times the capacity of the regular DS.
Given the specs of the machine, I don't think it'll be long before the ARM7TDMI and friends can be emulated. It's not exactly like DOSBox on a PC, but it's not that far off.
I mean, if you need more than 16MB of RAM and a 133MHz ARM9E to emulate a machine of the same processor family (right down to Thumb instructions) that's got less than 512kB of RAM and is a quarter the speed...
I'm not working for anyone else. That's the point of kicking ass and taking names now: it gives me the technical bearing to effectively run the technical side of a business, and has given me enough time to study and learn about the business operations side of things.
I have worked myself into a position where I am able to, at least at first, give the finger to the idea of going out and getting a "regular job." Busting ass gives you options.
I'm paying them an embarrassing amount of money for the little slip of paper that says I am employable. (In part to make my family happy, I'll be the first male college graduate in my family's history.) Work that just goes over and over the same crap again, the same stuff I've been doing for years, is not fun, not interesting, and not profitable.
The latter's the key. When somebody is paying me to deal with their boring, repetitive tasks, I am benefitting in a very real way--so they get done. If you want busywork done, you'd better make it worthwhile.
Many of my professors understand this. They get why I'm OK with kicking ass on exams and pulling an A- average in a course: because I'm spending less time on the busywork and more time on other, more relevant stuff.
I think I'm coming off as someone who knows his stuff cold and is well aware that he's a self-starter who has cultivated the drive that most of his peers don't have.
I'm not an arrogant sort, but what looks like vanity to some is reasoned self-assessment to others. I don't expect everybody to have had the same kind of experience I have. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to bust their asses as much as I do.
Flash yes--Silverlight, not so much. Silverlight's ability to integrate horizontally and vertically with other.NET stuff is going to be a lot more useful than a video codec in the future.
(Side note - I just installed the new Chromium on Windows, and this thing flies. Chrome 1 was too slow for my tastes, but this is awesome. I absolutely love this.)
And yet it's folks like you and me (I personally don't care one way or the other about open source aside from the fact that it works, I'd love to have one easily investigated platform to sell software on) who try to tell them this...
I love this post. I love it far more than I should love a bunch of letters and markup. I am going to steal that phrase and use it whenever this discussion comes up.
More applications are arguably illegal to run on Linux than on Windows due to patent encumbrance.
A small group of people cares about DRM. Fewer, now, that iTunes is all DRM-free.
Nobody cares about viruses. They are an accepted part of running Windows. Whether they should be or not does not matter. They are. And modern anti-virus is getting pretty good. Furthermore, why the fuck will people buy Linux to get away from viruses when OS X doesn't have them and is considered trendy and cool?
Why are you bothering the users with shit they don't care about?
Nobody gives a fuck about Microsoft being a monopoly. The people who that appeals to are the nerds who just don't like Microsoft. You need to appeal to regular people.
The mass market doesn't care how easy to install an OS is, or how easy it is to get new applications (that aren't the same as the ones they already use, remember). The mass market cares about writing a paper (and they expect Office, though this is an area you can get people to think about), watching Youtube (how's Flash doin', gents?), and visiting Facebook.
They also care why they should buy--yes, buy, not download-and-install--the weird thing (Linux) instead of the regular thing (Windows) or the cool thing (Mac). And none of those potential ads come close to touching upon that.
And, uh, you're wrong. Non-technical people (and techies with a sense of humor) got a great laugh out of John Hodgman as the PC being a complete dork. They were funny. Not always entirely accurate, but the people they were aimed at don't care. They want something cool, not something that's got 4.2 gigawatts of powar!111.
As can be seen from all the "BUT LOOK AT THE FEEEEEEEEEEEATURES" me-too Linux ads, the nerd crew still hasn't figured this out.
Slashdot Mirror
True, I forgot about that. However, this doesn't seem like a huge problem. One that has to be tackled, but not something mindblowingly difficult.
Plus, the NES was a special case that was all sorts of weird. Bank switching, external RAM, all sorts of craziness. The GBA hardware really is much more straightforward. :)
DS games did use the same hardware. The ARM7TDMI chip (the GBA core) was used for 2D rendering and most basic tasks, and marshaled its own use of the sound and video hardware of the system. The ARM9E chip was used for 3D rendering. Even if they've removed the ARM7 and are running everything on a beefed up ARM9E, I doubt they'd have removed the rest of the hardware. The DS already needed it.
I tried the new Chrome 2 Beta which might not be what you're talking about. Definitely not ready for primetime by any means. Slow, clunky feeling, didn't load pages properly, etc. The old Chrome seems okay, except it has a problem rendering popular social networking sites.
Uh...I'm using 2.0.168.0, and it's crazy-fast, and social networking sites all load just fine. Are you on a single-core machine?
Firefox's memory usage, test shows, is 1/2 that of Chrome or IE 8 with the same 10 tabs open.
Nnnnnnnnnno it's not. I've duplicated those tests myself, last night. Firefox (with adblock plus, which I consider a requirement) used over two hundred megabytes of RAM when opening ten Youtube videos.
Iron (my Chrome deriv of choice)? Hundred and twenty.
Firefox fail.
It has plugins, cooler themes, is very fast, configurable. So if by "better" you mean "faster"...Chrome 1 is pretty quick as long as you don't mind rendering issues.
Given the KHTML/WebKit guys' reputation for actually targeting the spec (as opposed to Gecko--hello, moz-* CSS attributes), when there's a discrepancy between Gecko and WebKit, I'm going to assume that WebKit does it more correctly unless evidence to the contrary can be found.
And no, Firefox is not very fast, that's the whole fucking problem people have with it!
Firefox works. Works well.
Please come back from Bizarro World. We miss you.
Maybe this'll refine my OP a little more...
Some students I know will jump at the chance to spend time learning how stuff works with somebody willing to teach them. They're also the students who apply to Google Summer of Code, bust their asses to get good internships, and generally display drive that offsets their lesser natural skill. They're not the ones who say "I wish I could do what you do," because they're sitting down, shutting up, and applying themselves to get there.
Other students I know will say "I wish I could do what you do," but don't apply themselves to try to get there. They just drift through, getting shitty internships (if any at all) and shitty summer jobs at the ice cream shack. They might wish they could do it, but the key is something unspoken: "I wish I could do what you do without spending any time on it."
The former are people I love working with. I'll spend a ton of time sitting down and teaching them, until they get the issue at hand. (I enjoy teaching a lot, too.) It's the latter who are far more common and far more obnoxious, and the ones I was talking about in the OP.
The DSi has 256MB of Flash memory onboard. Plenty of room for the ROM, and while you raise a good point, it isn't particularly hard to re-invent paging. ;)
And the DS had the same 2D video chipset and sound chipset as the GBA, I see no reason for that to have changed.
Sorry. When I say "ARM7TDMI and friends", I mean the hardware in the GBA. Was being too cute for my own good.
No, it's not. I run ABP/NoScript on Firefox on this machine and SRWare Iron (a Chrome derivative) with its adblocker. Firefox is dogshit-slow in comparison.
The only reasons Firefox is still on my machine are Firebug and Web Developer.
There are derivatives of Chrome that have ad blocking support now. I'm using Iron now. It's insanely fast.
If you're still using Firefox for something other than Web Developer and Firebug, I'd be willing to say you're doing it wrong.
IE8 kicks ass. The new release of Chrome (although I use SRWare Iron, which is a derivative that includes an adblocker) kicks way more ass.
Firefox has bilged the "not turning into a slow pile of shit" test.
The DS has an ARM7TDMI and ARM9 inside. The former is clocked at something like 33MHz, the ARM9 (which is used primarily for 3D rendering) at 67MHz. Specs are a little skiffy on the DSi, but the primary processor is an ARM9E at 133MHz. It also has 16MB of RAM, which is something like four times the capacity of the regular DS.
It should allow for some much improved games.
Given the specs of the machine, I don't think it'll be long before the ARM7TDMI and friends can be emulated. It's not exactly like DOSBox on a PC, but it's not that far off.
I mean, if you need more than 16MB of RAM and a 133MHz ARM9E to emulate a machine of the same processor family (right down to Thumb instructions) that's got less than 512kB of RAM and is a quarter the speed...
I'm not working for anyone else. That's the point of kicking ass and taking names now: it gives me the technical bearing to effectively run the technical side of a business, and has given me enough time to study and learn about the business operations side of things.
I have worked myself into a position where I am able to, at least at first, give the finger to the idea of going out and getting a "regular job." Busting ass gives you options.
Ding ding ding.
I'm paying them an embarrassing amount of money for the little slip of paper that says I am employable. (In part to make my family happy, I'll be the first male college graduate in my family's history.) Work that just goes over and over the same crap again, the same stuff I've been doing for years, is not fun, not interesting, and not profitable.
The latter's the key. When somebody is paying me to deal with their boring, repetitive tasks, I am benefitting in a very real way--so they get done. If you want busywork done, you'd better make it worthwhile.
Many of my professors understand this. They get why I'm OK with kicking ass on exams and pulling an A- average in a course: because I'm spending less time on the busywork and more time on other, more relevant stuff.
I was on ADD meds for a while, actually. Stopped before college because they killed my ability to think creatively and apply my knowledge effectively.
I've got a 3.62 GPA right now. When I said I wasn't in the top 5% of grades, I meant exactly that.
I think I'm coming off as someone who knows his stuff cold and is well aware that he's a self-starter who has cultivated the drive that most of his peers don't have.
I'm not an arrogant sort, but what looks like vanity to some is reasoned self-assessment to others. I don't expect everybody to have had the same kind of experience I have. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to bust their asses as much as I do.
People don't want cars. They want to get from point A to point B nice and quick and maybe do so in a little bit of style.
Flash works fine, thank you very much.
I went and took a look. Shit itself spectacularly with pulseaudio. Interesting, that.
Flash yes--Silverlight, not so much. Silverlight's ability to integrate horizontally and vertically with other .NET stuff is going to be a lot more useful than a video codec in the future.
(Side note - I just installed the new Chromium on Windows, and this thing flies. Chrome 1 was too slow for my tastes, but this is awesome. I absolutely love this.)
And yet it's folks like you and me (I personally don't care one way or the other about open source aside from the fact that it works, I'd love to have one easily investigated platform to sell software on) who try to tell them this...
I love this post. I love it far more than I should love a bunch of letters and markup. I am going to steal that phrase and use it whenever this discussion comes up.
More applications are arguably illegal to run on Linux than on Windows due to patent encumbrance.
A small group of people cares about DRM. Fewer, now, that iTunes is all DRM-free.
Nobody cares about viruses. They are an accepted part of running Windows. Whether they should be or not does not matter. They are. And modern anti-virus is getting pretty good. Furthermore, why the fuck will people buy Linux to get away from viruses when OS X doesn't have them and is considered trendy and cool?
Why are you bothering the users with shit they don't care about?
Nobody gives a fuck about Microsoft being a monopoly. The people who that appeals to are the nerds who just don't like Microsoft. You need to appeal to regular people.
The mass market doesn't care how easy to install an OS is, or how easy it is to get new applications (that aren't the same as the ones they already use, remember). The mass market cares about writing a paper (and they expect Office, though this is an area you can get people to think about), watching Youtube (how's Flash doin', gents?), and visiting Facebook.
They also care why they should buy--yes, buy, not download-and-install--the weird thing (Linux) instead of the regular thing (Windows) or the cool thing (Mac). And none of those potential ads come close to touching upon that.
You nailed it. This campaign is terrible news for people who want Linux to spread on the desktop.
And, uh, you're wrong. Non-technical people (and techies with a sense of humor) got a great laugh out of John Hodgman as the PC being a complete dork. They were funny. Not always entirely accurate, but the people they were aimed at don't care. They want something cool, not something that's got 4.2 gigawatts of powar!111.
As can be seen from all the "BUT LOOK AT THE FEEEEEEEEEEEATURES" me-too Linux ads, the nerd crew still hasn't figured this out.