"Yesterday, I had an hour to work with Apple's new Power Mac Quad G5, and for anyone in the broadcast, sciences, music, print and photography industries, I have some advice: Place your orders now!"
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Member since:2005-08-29
True.
Though really at some point you start wondering what all that complexity goes into.
I recently played with an XBox (hadn't played with a console for years) and the first thing I thought is, hey, some games are well done, always smooth. I played Spartan Total Warrior, lots of things moving, effects, always smooth. Are there any good games on a 733 mhz Celeron with a 64mb Nvidia GPU that plays that smooth on a PC even at 800x600 ? I'd say no. That's the hardware in an xbox however. The hardware doesn't change, so devs have to give their best to fit whatever they want to fit in.
My point is that the more power you have, the more you use it, and often without consideration. One can write a sucky java app and as long as it works with the top machine the developer won't care. You can just upgrade your hardware after all. Isn't money free these days?
When either Mac OS-X or Windows XP eat about 150 mb of ram without actually having launched a single end-user app maybe there's something wrong. And yes I know, there are caches, smooth font-rendering engines and all that. I know also "easier-to-code-for" systems mean more apps faster, but I am pretty sure good optimization can still go into Windows, OSX and Gnome. On any of these OS 256 mb is the minimum, and any confort (eg. no swapping when reading your mail) will require 384mb.
If you wish to run linux on a 64mb machine you have to go back to small window managers, editing configuration files by hand to add apps to your menu. Why can't we have both progress and keep a small size?
Member since:2005-07-06
"I do get what you mean; but people widly bend the truth when it comes to performance _anything_. I could boot GEOS on a commodore 64 is 30 seconds. Why is it that 25 years later my exponentially more powerful machine, still takes 30 seconds..."
How about the number of of operations your exponentially more powerful machine has also gone up exponentially? I take it that you're not booting into GEOS anymore...
Member since:I could boot Geos on my unmodified C64 and have 5k left to open stuff.
Of course that meant opening anything and trying to do some work in it immediately crashed the machine.
But I did like the idea behind it and it has survived albeit in a different form on another platform and I will always fondly remember my C64 days.
Member since:
2005-11-10
Yes, but 2 is an exponent of 1 (2^0)=1;(2^1)=2. Therefore 2 is exponentially bigger than 1. Of course, that's where the similarities end. 3 Processors is linear power.
I do get what you mean; but people widly bend the truth when it comes to performance _anything_. I could boot GEOS on a commodore 64 is 30 seconds. Why is it that 25 years later my exponentially more powerful machine, still takes 30 seconds...