>> AOL are 
>> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per 
>> minute as well.
> 
>   Well, it was dialup. What do you expect?

Even back then, may ISPs offered per-minute charges OR flat-rate 
charges. AOL are charging you both ways at the same time.

>   (Heck, even *today* some people still use dialup and pay per minute.
> Naturally this is becoming rarer and rarer, as with ADSL you get a
> connection which is a thousand times faster at a fraction of the cost.)

A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec 
broadband. ;-)

But up to a hundred times faster? Sure.

>> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just 
>> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
> 
>   Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
> probably required more than those 4 MB.

Well, I guess if you want to cache page layout, and you have a page 
that's moderately large, even on plain text you could eat hundreds of KB 
quite fast. You wouldn't have to sprinkle many image files in to exceed 
4 MB - even if we assume the software is actually efficient.

>> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes 
>> you feel sad...
> 
>   Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
> with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P

Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging. [The 
largest file I've ever downloaded was 4GB, and that took 3 days. I think 
it was Star Wreck - damn amusing, BTW!]

But yes, not so long ago, writing a program that "achieves realtime MP3 
decoding" was seen as a major achievement, and *encoding* could take 
days. I was shocked to discover the other day that my copy of WinAmp is 
using about 0.25% CPU to decode a Vorbis file in realtime. [Recall that 
Vorbis is more CPU-intensive than MP3.]

I find it staggering how my Amiga took over 2 *hours* to render 
SKYVASE.POV (uh, why?), yet PCs toay can do it in mere seconds. At a 
much higher resolution. With AA.

And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain 
applications to start up. WTF?

[Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given 
that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that 
one go.]

PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a 
handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no 
reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why 
is it so slow?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message