Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Nov 2007 19:01 UTC, submitted by xpnet.com Research STaff
"'What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away'. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000). But despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call 'The Great Moore's Law Compensator'. In fact, the hard numbers below represent what is perhaps the first ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption."
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RE[4]: My old Pentium 166
by joshv on Fri 16th Nov 2007 15:07
in reply to "RE[3]: My old Pentium 166"
Member since:2006-03-18
Yeah, and I played Wolfenstein on my 286. Certainly it was rather highly optimized code, but it was also doing a hell of a lot less, with much lower visual detail. You simply couldn't play modern games, at an acceptable framerate on my old P166.
As for sound, there are certainly modern bitrates and codecs that would tax the P166, if not pegging the CPU, making it much more likely to skip when doing something else. And just forget about any modern video codec.
My point is that there are tasks that actually utilize much of the power available in modern systems - those tasks don't happen to involve editing office documents.
RE[4]: My old Pentium 166
by Blackwizard on Sat 17th Nov 2007 09:46
in reply to "RE[3]: My old Pentium 166"
Member since:2007-10-11
It can also run MDK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDK_(video_game)
at a decent framerate, while doing the 3d rendering entirely in software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDK_(video_game)
at a decent framerate, while doing the 3d rendering entirely in software.
Agreed. I also ran Battlzone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_%28computer_game%29) on AMD-K5 with 100MHz frequency and 16Mb ram - it worked very fine even in software rendering mode (my video card did not support 3D acceleration at that time).
RE[5]: My old Pentium 166
by Rugxulo on Thu 22nd Nov 2007 06:21
in reply to "RE[3]: My old Pentium 166"
Member since:2007-10-09
I think a P166 would be plenty good enough for Quake. (But I barely ever bothered running it, seemed fine though.) And I guess .MP3 wasn't the best example (runs easily), but you may (?) have a point. Just saying, you don't need all these newer computers with tons of RAM just for multimedia and games. Heck, look at ye olde XBox 1 (PIII 733 Mhz) or even the (old but cool) Atari Lynx. Quite good without all the extra fluff! :-)
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:38 UTC
"The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:30 UTC, submitted by JRepin
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.More News »
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2005-12-31
" For example, that P166 couldn't do video encoding/decoding for crap. It could barely handle MP3s, and forget about 3D games."
I beg to differ.
My P166 MMX laptop uses about 5-10% CPU playing back mp3s with Mplayer.
It can also run MDK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDK_(video_game)
at a decent framerate, while doing the 3d rendering entirely in software.
Software is not highly optimised nowadays because programmers no longer need to do so. This is a good thing as it makes code faster to write and more maintainable. It also encourages reusable code rather than tightly written special purpose code.
MULTICS is an example of this. The later *nix clones were simpler and more reliable as they no longer needed all the optimisation and memory sharing tricks required to run a multiuser OS in only 32kB of ram.