141–150 of 183 posts
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What kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.
My Pentium 60 I bought in 1995 for $2200 came with 4 mb of RAM. I later upgraded it to 8 mb. 540 MB hard drive, 2x CD ROM drive. It ran just about everything I had until I built my next computer in ‘98
The wrong take on the right idea. Computer programs are like a gas, they’ll fill up whatever container they are put in. This is unfortunate as computers get faster the programs that run on them tend to get slower at nearly the same rate. Sure some things do grow in capability a whole lot, but much of what we do on computers is the same exchange of text with a bit of decoration that has been done for decades, and yet…
> We’re so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem. That was until 2010, now we've hit the wall with pure single threaded speed and parallel programming is much harder to scale. When you get a faster CPU your software doesn't need to change, but when you want it to run on more cores or machines it becomes a nuanced discussi…
Lately I've been feeling like computers have become fast enough . During the 1990s, the pace of improvement was staggering, and the impact of every hardware improvement was really felt. But these days, I've come to expect a 10-year life from my hardware. My previous PC, now 12 year old, worked admirably for 10 years. It ran The Witcher 2 just fine. It did everything just fine, except for the latest games; after some…
The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? For instance, Donkey Kong Country does run on an unmodified SNES purchased on its launch day, but its creation shouldn't have been possible were it not for the Silicon Graphics workstations used to create t…
> Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine. Well, if by "many" you mean "mostly games", yes. Not true for other kinds of software...
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I think the issue is that rather than making C++ better we have defaulted to relying on the hardware more. C++ is a deeply, deeply, flawed language - using something else isn't hard (and it doesn't have to be Rust). You'd be surprised at the amount of stuff you can get for free if you make it easy to express. My D scripts are usually shorter than my Python one's (and I write code I want to save not just "it'll do"-ty…
On a similar note: we rarely make use of abstractions that 'compile away', instead using abstractions that bring a runtime performance cost. An example of this is declarative GUI design. It's a good design idea to use a declarative language for this, as it helps with GUI design tooling (drag-and-drop editors), and eliminates the bugs that could arise from doing the work 'by hand' in a programming language. Most solut…
I specify "on the web" because almost all browsers execute the content retrieved from the website with no user interaction besides navigating to a url. Contrast that with operating systems, which all require separate download + run steps (and often a bit flip in between, to mark the file as executable). That's a lot more friction / time for the user to notice if something is not as they expect or want.
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On a similar note: we rarely make use of abstractions that 'compile away', instead using abstractions that bring a runtime performance cost. An example of this is declarative GUI design. It's a good design idea to use a declarative language for this, as it helps with GUI design tooling (drag-and-drop editors), and eliminates the bugs that could arise from doing the work 'by hand' in a programming language. Most solut…
At least on the web, this is a feature, not a bug. It allows the user to modify the page as they see fit. For example, ad blockers or "dark mode" extensions would have a much more difficult job if websites were delivered as optimized binaries. I specify "on the web" because almost all browsers execute the content retrieved from the website with no user interaction besides navigating to a url. Contrast that with opera…
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I can't speak to the services side of your comment, but my professional experience is in games. I worked as part of a team that once backported a game from the Xbox 360 to the PlayStation 2 (512 to 24 megabytes of RAM, much slower CPU, much more limited 'shaders' if you can call VU code 'shaders', etc). The PS2 had 32 megabytes of RAM, but by Sony submission requirements you weren't allowed to touch the bottom 8mb of…
The reason I chose those games as examples is because those are all games in which the core gameplay is doable on lesser hardware, but an important aspect of what made them enjoyable to me were the technical improvements over Wind Waker/Twilight Princess, MGS3 and Kingdom Hearts I & II. Breath of the Wild would not be Breath of the Wild as we know it without the subtle details, more objects in memory, more intelligen…
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That your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention: > mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. But a P90 could not only play wav files (in fact my 386 with 4MB of RAM could play and edit wav files in realtime just fine under Windows 3.1) but also both deco…
> That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. Developer work is expensive and there's always a backlog of fixes and features. Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user…
such a very-first-world country way of thinking.
Hell, I live in france, in a fairly affluent city (Bordeaux), and my two neighbors run their stuff on 15 year old computers as buying newer computers is not really an expense they can make that easily. But they will never be able to complain to anyone & make their voice heard (except to me, their computer geek neighbor) that things are slow - they don't even know that things could be faster.
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At least on the web, this is a feature, not a bug. It allows the user to modify the page as they see fit. For example, ad blockers or "dark mode" extensions would have a much more difficult job if websites were delivered as optimized binaries. I specify "on the web" because almost all browsers execute the content retrieved from the website with no user interaction besides navigating to a url. Contrast that with opera…
I agree it makes sense on the web, which is ultimately a document system, but for a native desktop application I figure it makes good sense to compile away as much as possible.