StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.

You're obviously not a Mac user.

Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.

I wouldn't call my recent experience in trying to get Ubuntu and Fedora Core 4 running on my Inspiron 9300 'real enjoyment' (read: they wouldn't install at all), but tinkering around with my hardware and software is something I enjoy doing at times.

But your point is taken that if someone makes their computer the central part of their life, they really need to get out more and maybe get a girlfriend.

You had problems with Ubuntu installing? There may be a few things you want to setup after installation that can be a pain (mine was the infamous Sagem Fast 800 modem), but it was a flawless install. Odd.

It just hung in the middle of the install routine.
I did a little digging afterwards and it turns out that there are a lot of 9300 owners that had the same problem and there is a workaround for it.
I'll mess around with it more next week while I'm on vacation.

I got SuSE 10 to run, but getting my printer (a Lexmark e232 laser) configured correctly was a PITA.

I'm using my laptop because I have a spare hard drive for it and that way I don't lose my windows install because I'm mucking around with linux.

Xon wrote:

Jawawithagun wrote:So the problem starts when you want to run Vista AND a game at the same time. Y'know, an OS is supposed to leave some resources for applications to use and not hog all of them itself.

Or if you had a vague understanding of how an OS works, you would realize that the OS gets out of the way when something else is inuse.

In the vast majority of the time, you only pay the bill for what you use. The graphical improvements in Vista are no exception

If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.

Actualy, for non-essential stuff it does "get out of the way" (or rather, pages the data to disk). Including the new 3d compositing engine if a game is run fullscreen. Imagine that...

Jawawithagun wrote:

Xon wrote:In the vast majority of the time, you only pay the bill for what you use. The graphical improvements in Vista are no exception

If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.

Nice reading comprehension there.

There is this little thing called on-demand-paging which means stuff is only in memory if it is actually being used and there is room for it. And if a thread/process is sleeping/waiting on something, it doesnt get any CPU time.

When you run a fullscreen game, the Vista graphics layer yields control of the video card and basicly goes to sleep. Any memory usage is paged out as required and it doesnt eat CPU time.

Xon wrote: When you run a fullscreen game, the Vista graphics layer yields control of the video card and basicly goes to sleep. Any memory usage is paged out as required and it doesnt eat CPU time.

As I very seldomly run fullscreen games but rather spend my time among windowed applications there will be no yielding of control.

Jawawithagun wrote:If you weren't still stuck in DOS times you would realise that applications build on top of the OS and it can't "get out of the way" if it is to provide its services to the applications.

You are aware that Windows can page sections of itself out when neccessary (IIRC, the NT kernel only requires ~5MB of RAM) and the scheduler will ensure that the foreground applications receive more time? It can very much get out of the way - the applications are not accessing all of the OS at the same time.

Jawawithagun wrote:As I very seldomly run fullscreen games but rather spend my time among windowed applications there will be no yielding of control.

Might I ask which windowed games you run that are so GPU-hungry that they'll compete with Aero? IIRC, they can also request that Windows drop down to the older render method as well - this was the original way of implementing OpenGL on Vista (which has since changed).

phongn wrote: Might I ask which windowed games you run that are so GPU-hungry that they'll compete with Aero? IIRC, they can also request that Windows drop down to the older render method as well - this was the original way of implementing OpenGL on Vista (which has since changed).

Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.

Jawawithagun wrote:Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.

With respect, what are you worried about, then? Windows will get out of the way (page itself out, give higher priority to your applications, etc.) and let you do your thing. Aren't fluid simulations usually a CPU-bound problem, anyways?

phongn wrote:

Jawawithagun wrote:Hm? Games? I'm not running games. Currently I'm running fluid simulations.

With respect, what are you worried about, then? Windows will get out of the way (page itself out, give higher priority to your applications, etc.) and let you do your thing. Aren't fluid simulations usually a CPU-bound problem, anyways?

CPU and RAM

Jawawithagun wrote:CPU and RAM

Aero offloads to the GPU so it reduces CPU load, and the required RAM is fuckall(and the graphics data tries to offloaded onto the GPU without keeping duplicate copies in main RAM, from some of the info I have read about DirectX10).

Durandal wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:People buy computers to run apps, not operating systems. I will upgrade my computer when there's a particular game that I want to play which runs like shit on my present rig, and not before. Buying a new computer so you can run a new OS is a truly bizarre way to waste your money. Games are recreation, ie- enjoyment. But I would suggest that anyone who derives real enjoyment from using a new OS is in dire need of a life.

You're obviously not a Mac user.

Mac? Oh yes, I've heard of that FreeBSD knock-off with the cult-like following.

Jawawithagun wrote:So the problem starts when you want to run Vista AND a game at the same time. Y'know, an OS is supposed to leave some resources for applications to use and not hog all of them itself.

This is something that the entire concept of paging was invented to prevent. The entire operating system isn't in memory all the time. The most popular paging algorithms will keep the most-referenced pages in memory and leave the least-referenced ones on disk, so if you're running a process which makes a bunch of calls to the graphics layer, the graphics layer stays in memory.

If you're playing a full-screen game, Vista won't be updating the pixels of your GUI, so Aero will be dereferenced and reside on disk instead of in memory because the addresses of those libraries won't be called by anything.

Durandal wrote:If you're playing a full-screen game, Vista won't be updating the pixels of your GUI, so Aero will be dereferenced and reside on disk instead of in memory because the addresses of those libraries won't be called by anything.

And when a page is sent to disk, an in memory copy is kept in a standby list. If anything hits the page when it is in the standby list, that gets used instead of pulling it off the disk. Otherwise the oldest entry in the standby list is used to fill any memory allocation requests.

So something can be paged to disk, and you dont always get hit with the penalty of reading the page off the disk if it was "just" written to disk

Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?

Darth Wong wrote:Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?

The minium system requirements have alwasy been bullshit. I've never seen reasonable minium system requirements in comercial software (aka games, MS stuff).

The recommended requirements for most MS stuff is normally 2-3 times better than the minium. And is much closer to the mark.

The current working requirements for Vista Beta are fairly reasonable as far as modern computers go. And that is a massive increase over the minium requirements to get WinXP working

I remember running Windows 95 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM.

The trick was to not run more than one application at a time.

Uraniun235 wrote:I remember running Windows 95 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM.

The trick was to not run more than one application at a time.

Sounds like VistaThirdWorld.

Hah!

To be fair, with 8 megs of RAM, you probably wouldn't want to run more than three apps at a time even if there was zero OS overhead.

But yeah, I remember having a choice between 640x480 in 16 bit color, or 800x600 in 256 colors. Fun times.

I had 95 on a 386 with 8MB RAM - it ran really well for the time as well. I think your graphics limitations were because of the graphics card rather then the processor. I had a 2meg graphics card (ZOMG! EXTREME! back then, at the consumer level), from the legendary Trident, and that let me run stuff at one higher res with proper color then most could back then (can't remember for the life of me if it was 800 or 1024).

I'm pretty sure you're right about the graphics card. I remember once complaining to my dad (from whom I'd inherited the computer) that it didn't play games nearly so well as his HOLY SHIT FAST Pentium 133, and he said "What? But that video card has a whole megabyte of memory!"

Darth Wong wrote:Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?

Minimum system requirements are literally the bare minimum. I have a lot of problems with Microsoft, but how they advertise their system requirements isn't one of them. Hell, Vista is coming with a new ratings control panel that tells you just how well your current computer will run Vista. They may even be releasing such a utility as freeware to help consumers get an idea of how well Vista will run on their box.

Other than that, I've used Vista on a fairly modest 2.4 GHz P4 with integrated graphics. It scores a 2 or so on the performance rating, but the GUI is still plenty responsive.

From a security perspective, if Windows Server 2003 is any indication of Microsoft's new attitude toward security, Vista users will be a lot better off by default.The implementation of least-required privileges and a sudo-like authentication method shows that they really want to move away from people running as administrator all the time. The problem is that they've got a whole lot of legacy software that requires administrator privileges to run for no real reason, andthat's due to an attitude of laxness about security that Microsoft themselves helped create. "Hey if the user's going to be admin by default anyway, let's just work from that assumption and write our software this way." That stuff is going to break.

Vista is only a first step toward better security for Microsoft. They have to drag their developers into a new model of programming whereby a program should have the code that executes privileged operations factored out into another application.

RThurmont wrote:I think Vista is going to be the finest Microsoft OS period, in spite of the shitty name. I plan on buying a $5,000-$10,000 gaming rig when it comes out. In the unlikely event that it blows, I've really been stocking up on XP hardware of late, so I'm well covered (and of course you can always go with Apple, or Linux, or a Sun workstation with Solaris...)

-WGW

Here's your $10,000 rig