{{cite needed}}. Not saying it's superior to Apache but having used both I wouldn't call IIS a "crappy web server". Though these days dynamic content is the name of the game so the web server is less important (reduced to more of a front end that passes along the nifty gritty to the PHP/Java/Net/etc back end).
Even media players have built in web servers these days; works with PHP too.
I've made similar observations. Even with the latest hardware, PNG compression is slower than saving raw 24-bit BMP files across a Gigabit network; this despite the fact that PNG reduce the file size with about 70 to 80% (on images of scanned text).
That said, large Jpeg files are indeed slow to open, but this may be partly due to the software used to open them. Not that I know, but the algorithms might make assumptions that fail on large jpeg images. I've at least noticed that "good" PNG compressors not only take vastly longer to compress images but surprisingly do a much worse job with the large images I worked with - yet being much better on the same images just reduced to lower resolutions.
Haven't you seen South Park? We all go to hell, while only you Mormons go up there. Then again, heaven is apparently an eternity of boredom so no great loss on our part.
Not that I understand the point of hell. If we have displeased "God" then why not simply end our existence? It's not like we'd prefer exciting over eternal torment. And what sick individual would want to keep anyone - no matter how bad they lived - in eternal torment? A bit like ripping wings off mosquitoes then reattaching them to do it all over again, and again, and again.
x86 is clock for clock faster. This does not mean that an ARM chip can't be clock for clock faster, but with current x86 and ARM implementations that's the simple truth. ARM's strengths however does not lie in clock for clock performance, but price/performance and performance/power usage.
It's true that AMD chips are faster than Pentium III chips at some operations, but clock for clock performance of the original K7 was worse @ 1.4 GHz than a hypothetical PIII @ 1.4 GHz due to other issues (mind you, the original PIII topped out @ 1 GHz so in absolute terms it was slower). The Athlon XP rectified this, but it was not good enough to beat a 2.0 GHz PIV when itself ran at 1.4 GHz. According to AMD themselves you needed 1667 MHz to mach a 2.0 GHz PIV.
An x86 is still clock for clock faster than ARM chips. That means a 600 MHz Core 2 is faster than a 600 MHz Cortex-A9.
Also, AMD 1.4 GHz CPUs was never faster than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 3 (presume you meant a Pentium M as the PIII topped out at 1.4 GHz), nor was it faster than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or even an 1.4 GHz PIII for that matter.
ARM executes instructions a hell of a lot faster than x86.
The fastest ARM chips have always been slower than x86 CPUs - With the possible exception of way back in '85. That is in no way a hell of a lot faster.
Ahh.. the good 'ol 91% score. Golden that one. Though even back then games like Bubsy 3D could run away with a 70.. but that may have been related to the two page add in the same magazine (Edge I think).
FireWire needs DMA, which is toothed as a security risk by high paid "experts" every now and then. I think it was up on Slashdot for the n-time a month or three back.
FireWire can read all your memory! People with haxor Firewire skills can steal all your data! They just need physical access to your computer - i.e. come into your home and plug something into your Firewire port! What ever will we do?!
Good point. I've read about research into generating 3D environments from pictures. It'd be a cool bit of tech if they manage to work it out. Imagine having every city on earth rendered in perfect 3D.
I stumbled on a fan made patch for DOS MOO2 recently that fixes the annoying money bug. I was tempted to track down the Mac version simply for that bug, not any more:)
If MOO3 simply had been a polished MOO 2 it would have been great, however they instead went for some sort of realism - forgetting about the fun. The best part of MOO3 was the AARs some fans posted, almost made me like the game.
The PPC CPUs did a bit better in the 94-96 area but even back then the PPC benchmarks wasn't all that impressive (comparing fastest to fastest, not fastest to mid range like many comparisons did).
During the same period we got the Nx586 ('94), Cyrix ('95), and K5 ('96); all by design teams that made PPC's look big. (Useless trivia: The Cyrix is now found in the OLPC by the name 'geode' and the Nx586 was bought and reworked into the AMD K6.)
I think Motorola would have been better served by staying with the 68K arch instead of messing with 88K and, later, PPC. They would have been almost as fast, and exactly what their customers wanted instead of a promise they never managed to deliver (being a huge performance delta on x86).
Imagine that you where designing a computer for the future back in the eighties. What chip to choose:
1. The segmented 8085 work alike 16-bit CPU
2. A 16-bit CPU with 32-bit registers and address space
3. Another 16-bit CPU with 32-bit registers and address space, this one cheaper that (2)
4. Another segmented 16-bit CPU, but works more like an 6502
I'd probably go for number 3, Apple went for 2 and 4 (in the Apple II). Who could have guessed we'd be posting over a world spanning nettwork using supered up 8-bit CPUs 30 year later? Number 2 lasted some 13-14 years, so Apple probably made the best choice they could have made - after all back then number 1 and 4 was clearly dead ends.
The internal instruction sets of x86 CPUs are likely to be very ugly with plenty of warts. This since Intel has full control over it, meaning they can work it exactly to their needs to get around odd scheduling constraints and special cases that may vary from CPU core revision to CPU core revision. The instructions are probably also horizontal (making them big and inefficient), since they'll never travel outside the CPU, with no support for trapping illegal instructions, privileged instructions and other iffities world exposed instruction sets need.
Bottom line, real world exposure it a bad idea since the internal instruction set was never designed for it.
You forget about Dual Booting in a FAT partition, and also about using IBM's Boot Manager to create a multi-OS environment, something Windows amde no provision for whatsoever. OS/2 was very well behaved in that regard, and even OS/2 2.0 could be configured to boot from a logical drive in an extended partition if need be. Windows have always been a bit finicky on the booting front. For instance it's seemingly impossible to get Windows XP to boot or install correctly on my current system despite quite a bit of hair pulling. Windows 95 is indeed way worse in this regard. Still, a flexible boot manager and install program is not exactly what comes to mind when I think 'backwards compatibility'. OS/2 cannot utilize either DOS or Win 3.1 drivers, Windows 95 can. It might not seem like a big deal but it makes a huge impact on the underlying OS architecture.
Windows 95 also 'provided' direct hardware access. I recall that there were apps back then that required it and I doubt they could run on OS/2.
I do agree that OS/2 bettered Windows 95 in most things, though the single threaded event queue was stupid:)
Remember that IBM's WorkPlace Shell was released before NT came out, so NT's Program Manager was competing against the WPS. OS/2 1.x's interface was nothing to write home about, but even the early WPS incarnations in OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 were pretty slick once you got used to them. BTW did you know that Stardoc made a 4x game that was implemented by moving icons across the screen (for spaceships and such). The WPS must have been pretty flexible to make that feasible.
Oy, I still use Winamp. Every now and then Winamp will throw a 'guru meditation error' which basically means delete and reinstall. It also renders incorrectly on Vista and eats a suspicious amount of CPU time. Every time I install it tries to add various links, set my home page, sign me up for free MP3s and install shell extensions and a systray app.
I just wanted you to know what you're missing out on:)
There were better user interfaces, better backwards compatibility( both DOS and Windows 3.x ), and better kernel/OS but at a cost of a couple of megs of RAM. Better backwards compatibility? I know OS2 ran DOS/Windows in a VM (which is rather heavy handed) but it did diddely squat for hardware drivers.
NT had potential but it required over 2X the hardware of OS/2 or UNIX and provided such a poor user interface. Never thought much of Program Manager but I would hardly call what OS/2 and UNIX had back then better. REXX was sort of cool and the Unix command line was better thought out, but that was about it.
But as usual, if people don't know what they are missing, they'll think what they have is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Technically, Windows 95 was a piece of shit but a few hundred million dollars in marketing suckered the public into accepting it. I do remember making fun of Win95 back then, as one of the few that thought OS/2 to be superior, but my original Win95 install lasted for years with hardly a problem. Windows 95 did crash quite often when running DOS or 3D games, but it did not crash even once while doing actual work. My first 'real' crash was actually by a Windows 2000 BSOD, which was quite a shocker. Coincidently Vista harked up its first BSOD for the exact same reason the other day, Heh.
Any IQ test where I score over 100 gives me a good chuckle. I scored 89 on a 'real' IQ test, but got 110 (with penalty!) on this one. Penalty to drive up hits! Not dumb at all:D
You forgot Sega's 'cycles': Sega is one of those companies that sometimes tried too hard (VNU), and sometimes didn't try at all (Sonic Blast/kart/pinball/etc.)
"3D chip on the cartridge? Screw that, we'll make an addon with TWO of them!" On paper the 32X wasn't that dumb an idea, however they should have made it cheap enough to bundle with the games that needed it. The actual 32X was pretty much like upgrading your computer by purchasing an entirely new one, put it alongside the old one and use some video capture device to merge the output images and sound. Dumb.
"Console with a 32-bit CPU? Yeah well we've got ELEVEN processors!!1" The Saturn did indeed have waay too many CPUs. It's just like the old arcade machines that used a CPU for everything, but in the arcade world time to marked is more important than future cost reduction - putting serious hurt on Sega as they battled the elegantly designed PSX on price.
"64 bit? We can do 128!" Not sure why the dreamcast bombed but the weird controllers was likely partly responsible for that.
I'd also like to add that its pretty annoying that steam will preload a game I never intend on buying, but if I want to get the demo it is packaged entirely separately from the preloaded full game -- If they just made the demos re-use assets out of the full version you'd have a lot more people trying them out that on a boring weekend that otherwise won't spend the time to download a demo. You're right. The full game has been preloaded alongside the demo. That's dumb.
Depends on how much they want you to pay for portal.. by level 9 you've played over half the game IIRC, and if they want you to pay full retail price for ~3-4 levels it just seems silly. Is the game really that short? From what I recall the 'first slice' didn't feature the secondary portal- so I figured it was no more than 1/3 of the game. If it's only 3 more levels then meh. Custom levels might be fun though.
I'm one of those guys that would have bought a game I instead pirated, IOW I'm the one they're out to get.
OTOH I also bought several games I've never gotten into-- From CoD4 to Chaos Engine (ancient top down shooter for you younglings), and I might just as well have thrown money out the window. Pirating is a nice way to make sure you actually like the game before shelling out - Demos are nice in theory but they tend to.. well.. suck.
Valve has the right idea with how they're promoting Portal. I'm on the verge of buying that title thanks to Portal "the first slice", which is the full game with a block that prevents me from playing past level 9. Neat. It gives me the full experience, and I can use my 'demo' savegames on the full version too.
I have cracked all my games though. If I had to replace the DVD every time I wanted to play a game I might as well blow the dust of the Xbox 360. If TCM makes DVD's mandatory then that's that for PC gaming as far as I'm concerned.
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IIS is a pretty crappy web server
{{cite needed}}. Not saying it's superior to Apache but having used both I wouldn't call IIS a "crappy web server". Though these days dynamic content is the name of the game so the web server is less important (reduced to more of a front end that passes along the nifty gritty to the PHP/Java/Net/etc back end).
Even media players have built in web servers these days; works with PHP too.
I've made similar observations. Even with the latest hardware, PNG compression is slower than saving raw 24-bit BMP files across a Gigabit network; this despite the fact that PNG reduce the file size with about 70 to 80% (on images of scanned text).
That said, large Jpeg files are indeed slow to open, but this may be partly due to the software used to open them. Not that I know, but the algorithms might make assumptions that fail on large jpeg images. I've at least noticed that "good" PNG compressors not only take vastly longer to compress images but surprisingly do a much worse job with the large images I worked with - yet being much better on the same images just reduced to lower resolutions.
Haven't you seen South Park? We all go to hell, while only you Mormons go up there. Then again, heaven is apparently an eternity of boredom so no great loss on our part.
Not that I understand the point of hell. If we have displeased "God" then why not simply end our existence? It's not like we'd prefer exciting over eternal torment. And what sick individual would want to keep anyone - no matter how bad they lived - in eternal torment? A bit like ripping wings off mosquitoes then reattaching them to do it all over again, and again, and again.
BTW, do mosquitoes go to hell?
x86 is clock for clock faster. This does not mean that an ARM chip can't be clock for clock faster, but with current x86 and ARM implementations that's the simple truth. ARM's strengths however does not lie in clock for clock performance, but price/performance and performance/power usage.
It's true that AMD chips are faster than Pentium III chips at some operations, but clock for clock performance of the original K7 was worse @ 1.4 GHz than a hypothetical PIII @ 1.4 GHz due to other issues (mind you, the original PIII topped out @ 1 GHz so in absolute terms it was slower). The Athlon XP rectified this, but it was not good enough to beat a 2.0 GHz PIV when itself ran at 1.4 GHz. According to AMD themselves you needed 1667 MHz to mach a 2.0 GHz PIV.
An x86 is still clock for clock faster than ARM chips. That means a 600 MHz Core 2 is faster than a 600 MHz Cortex-A9.
Also, AMD 1.4 GHz CPUs was never faster than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 3 (presume you meant a Pentium M as the PIII topped out at 1.4 GHz), nor was it faster than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or even an 1.4 GHz PIII for that matter.
ARM executes instructions a hell of a lot faster than x86.
The fastest ARM chips have always been slower than x86 CPUs - With the possible exception of way back in '85. That is in no way a hell of a lot faster.
The K5 was the AMD 29000 redux, the Nx586 became the K6.
Yeah, may have been CVG.
Ahh.. the good 'ol 91% score. Golden that one. Though even back then games like Bubsy 3D could run away with a 70.. but that may have been related to the two page add in the same magazine (Edge I think).
Quartz Extreme is off by default up to 10.4 (don't know about 10.5), so MacOSX can run without it.
FireWire needs DMA, which is toothed as a security risk by high paid "experts" every now and then. I think it was up on Slashdot for the n-time a month or three back.
FireWire can read all your memory! People with haxor Firewire skills can steal all your data! They just need physical access to your computer - i.e. come into your home and plug something into your Firewire port! What ever will we do?!
Good point. I've read about research into generating 3D environments from pictures. It'd be a cool bit of tech if they manage to work it out. Imagine having every city on earth rendered in perfect 3D.
If MOO3 simply had been a polished MOO 2 it would have been great, however they instead went for some sort of realism - forgetting about the fun. The best part of MOO3 was the AARs some fans posted, almost made me like the game.
One could argue that CGI porn that looks real should be handled by the law as real. Making CGI look "not real" isn't difficult after all.
During the same period we got the Nx586 ('94), Cyrix ('95), and K5 ('96); all by design teams that made PPC's look big. (Useless trivia: The Cyrix is now found in the OLPC by the name 'geode' and the Nx586 was bought and reworked into the AMD K6.)
I think Motorola would have been better served by staying with the 68K arch instead of messing with 88K and, later, PPC. They would have been almost as fast, and exactly what their customers wanted instead of a promise they never managed to deliver (being a huge performance delta on x86).
Imagine that you where designing a computer for the future back in the eighties. What chip to choose:
1. The segmented 8085 work alike 16-bit CPU
2. A 16-bit CPU with 32-bit registers and address space
3. Another 16-bit CPU with 32-bit registers and address space, this one cheaper that (2)
4. Another segmented 16-bit CPU, but works more like an 6502
I'd probably go for number 3, Apple went for 2 and 4 (in the Apple II). Who could have guessed we'd be posting over a world spanning nettwork using supered up 8-bit CPUs 30 year later? Number 2 lasted some 13-14 years, so Apple probably made the best choice they could have made - after all back then number 1 and 4 was clearly dead ends.
The internal instruction sets of x86 CPUs are likely to be very ugly with plenty of warts. This since Intel has full control over it, meaning they can work it exactly to their needs to get around odd scheduling constraints and special cases that may vary from CPU core revision to CPU core revision. The instructions are probably also horizontal (making them big and inefficient), since they'll never travel outside the CPU, with no support for trapping illegal instructions, privileged instructions and other iffities world exposed instruction sets need. Bottom line, real world exposure it a bad idea since the internal instruction set was never designed for it.
Nokia already sells something akin to an Arm based computer and it'll probably use the A9 whenever it comes.
Windows 95 also 'provided' direct hardware access. I recall that there were apps back then that required it and I doubt they could run on OS/2.
I do agree that OS/2 bettered Windows 95 in most things, though the single threaded event queue was stupid :)
Remember that IBM's WorkPlace Shell was released before NT came out, so NT's Program Manager was competing against the WPS. OS/2 1.x's interface was nothing to write home about, but even the early WPS incarnations in OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 were pretty slick once you got used to them. BTW did you know that Stardoc made a 4x game that was implemented by moving icons across the screen (for spaceships and such). The WPS must have been pretty flexible to make that feasible.Oy, I still use Winamp. Every now and then Winamp will throw a 'guru meditation error' which basically means delete and reinstall. It also renders incorrectly on Vista and eats a suspicious amount of CPU time. Every time I install it tries to add various links, set my home page, sign me up for free MP3s and install shell extensions and a systray app.
:)
I just wanted you to know what you're missing out on
Any IQ test where I score over 100 gives me a good chuckle. I scored 89 on a 'real' IQ test, but got 110 (with penalty!) on this one. Penalty to drive up hits! Not dumb at all :D
I'm one of those guys that would have bought a game I instead pirated, IOW I'm the one they're out to get.
OTOH I also bought several games I've never gotten into-- From CoD4 to Chaos Engine (ancient top down shooter for you younglings), and I might just as well have thrown money out the window. Pirating is a nice way to make sure you actually like the game before shelling out - Demos are nice in theory but they tend to.. well.. suck.
Valve has the right idea with how they're promoting Portal. I'm on the verge of buying that title thanks to Portal "the first slice", which is the full game with a block that prevents me from playing past level 9. Neat. It gives me the full experience, and I can use my 'demo' savegames on the full version too.
I have cracked all my games though. If I had to replace the DVD every time I wanted to play a game I might as well blow the dust of the Xbox 360. If TCM makes DVD's mandatory then that's that for PC gaming as far as I'm concerned.