Alright, I just had to write back :)

> Do you think MS is going  to tell them that's a bad idea?

No, because they're a bunch of scumbags, we all know that :)  Actually,
better watch what I say here or the MSGang might come and attack me ;-)

> more often.  Real operating systems don't require you to reboot to change
> your IP address

I agree there, that's anoying.

> The standard is TCP/IP and the OS is Unix.

I've never used Unix (infortunately), but NT seemed to work well for me in
that respect, maybe in more complex situations it falls.

> Most Unix servers stay online for months or years without restarting

That's not exactly what I meant, I just meant it does pretty well,
considering we always shut it down every few weeks, just to give it a rest.
I'm sure it could go longer.  The only thing I'm worried about is that one
day when we turn it back on, the hard drive will seize up!!!  (I've heard a
few cases of it happening, I just hope it doens't happen to me!)

>Pardon me, did you miss the part where I said I write software for NT and

No, just explaining it to anyone else reading, I understand fully that you
know your way around NT!  I was suprised to hear that it still is fixed
though, looks like MS has been lying... again...

I suppose it all comes down to what you want to use it for.  Obviously for
high-end work it is great, I guess for low-end work it isn't worth it.


--
Lance.


---
For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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My brother has a 486 running 98 and it runs it fine.  It's actually sitting
next to me right now (well not sitting, but you know!).  It's pretty fast
really, more than I'd suspected running 98.  It even run Excel reasonably
fast, but I must say that the Developer Studio and VC++ don't run that
great.  It's been through many years of POV-Raying so I guess that's why
it's so fast in it's retirement :)  Unfortunately, it is going to be
obsolete in 5 days time when a new Dell laptop arrives *BIG GRIN*

--
Lance.


---
For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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Lance Birch wrote:
> 
> My brother has a 486 running 98 and it runs it fine.
> --
> Lance.
 
I was really questioning the ability of w-95 to run on 8 megs
of memory rather than it's ablilty to run on a 486. I guess
that is what swap files are for - OUCH !

-- 
Ken Tyler

tyl### [at] pacbellnet

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:)

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In article <36A8C89B.D8DE77AF@bahnhof.se> , Spider <spi### [at] bahnhofse>  wrote:

>> Is there any way to tell the operating system in a dual-processor
>> environment to use both processors in floating-point operations? Does
>> processor-switching occur fast enough for small operations like this to
>> speed up otherwise non-dual-supporting applications?
>Not that I am aware... 

You are not aware of it...


     Thorsten

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Mike <Ama### [at] aolcom> wrote:

  > Linux is better for old hardware.  If you have new hardware, chances are
  > there are no Linux drivers for it.

true, if you take a random pick of the newest hardware, chances are it won't
work. so choose your hardware wisely. for example, buy a G200 for 2D, and a
Voodoo 2 for 3D. pick what works. that G200 *flies*.

  > I've also heard that Xwindows can be as unstable as 95/98.

only on some drivers. most servers are pretty solid. last time I've had
X crash was a long time ago, and I telnetted in and restarted X. the OS
never went down.

  > I can't attest to this because I could not get it to run on account of
  > the aforementioned driver problems, although Linux seems to be used most
  > frequently in text mode for servers and render farms, where a GUI is not
  > needed.

http://www.gnome.org/

  > This NT user is very happy with the OS.  It doesn't crash all the time,
  > doesn't slow down, and doesn't balk at me every 5 minutes.  When I got 5
  > programs running and am copying data between them it never slows down.

?.. the NT machines at work choke when I do something as simple as copy from
a floppy disk. and if that disk happens to have a bad block, NT just halts
until you remove the floppy. pathetic.

  > I for one am looking forward to the death of the 90's line of windows!

I'm looking forward to the death of the entire line of windows.

and to pull this all ontopic: POVray rules on this dual PPro/200 Linux box.
easy scripting and a job queueing system keep both my CPUs busy when I need
to render stuff. and when I do, I don't notice any slowdown of interactive
applications at all. NT just doesn't compare, it doesn't come close.

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I Use NT 4 too and  :[
 I fully  AGREE with Ronald !!!!!!!!!!!
NT4 :eats RAM -is NOT so stable - and is NOT faster !

Ronald L. Parker ha scritto nel messaggio
<36a7c2f3.90621449@news.povray.org>...
>On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 08:39:01 +1000, "Lance Birch"
><zon### [at] satcomnetau> wrote:
>
>>NT is so much faster than Win 95/98 that it isn't funny!!!
>
>That is a ridiculous statement.  In fact, unless you have an obscene
>amount of memory, NT is much slower because it eats so much memory
>just standing still.  For example, my current installation of NT5
>eats up 64M at boot time.  Even when I upgraded to 128M, it's no
>faster than 98.
>
>>NT is a good power Operating System.  It's lucky that Microsoft have
finally
>>come to their senses in dropping the 95/98 series and going to Windows
2000
>>(aka NT 6.0).
>
>NT 5.0.  And once you've tried NT, you'll wish you had 98 back.  Trust
>me; I regularly use and write software for both, and 98 boots much
>more quickly and uses far less memory.  As for availablility of
>drivers for your weird hardware, better use Linux instead.
>
>>I've never run POV-Ray under NT, but I'm sure that it would have speed
>>improvements doing so.
>
>Nope.  None.  In fact, because of the swapping thing, it will run
>slower on moderately large scenes unless you throw memory at it.
>POV-Ray is mainly dependent on FPU speed; the operating system has
>almost no effect on rendering speed (especially if you render with the
>display off.)
>
>NT really is a crappy OS.  It is not suitable for desktops, and the
>fact that MS is pushing it as the next desktop OS is proof of just
>how much they care about money and how little they care about users.
>It's also not suitable for servers, because it crashes so often and
>eats so many resources when idle.  So of what use IS NT?  Well, it
>makes MS, Intel, and Micron a whole heap of money.  Isn't that enough?
>

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All I can say is, have you tried using 3D Studio MAX with Windows 98?  You'd
go running back to NT faster than you could say "Blue Screen of Death"...

--
Lance.


---
For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 16:32:14 +1000, Lance Birch 
	<zon### [at] satcomnetau> wrote:
>All I can say is, have you tried using 3D Studio MAX with Windows 98?  You'd
>go running back to NT faster than you could say "Blue Screen of Death"...

All I can say is, if you have the $$$$ to buy 3DS MAX, you can 
probably afford an extra few hundred for NT and some more RAM.  
The point I was originally trying to make is that NT doesn't run 
POV any faster, and on the average desktop machine it will 
actually run far more slowly.

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>I agree.  NT is for those who need and use large amounts of memory.  But
>how many desktop users with 32M of RAM are going to "upgrade" to win2k
>because they think it's the next logical step?  Do you think MS is going
>to tell them that's a bad idea?


Considering that I regularly use  most of my 96Meg memory using POV I think
that counts as "large amounts of memory"

>If I only had to boot once a day, that'd be nice.  Since I'm doing real
work,
>however, developing device drivers and applications, I have to boot NT far
>more often.  Real operating systems don't require you to reboot to change
>your IP address, or to install or remove a video driver, or to change the
>size of your swap file.


Windows2000 (aka NT 5.0) does that... we have two machines running the Beta
and we were pleasantly surprised when we changed the network driver, changed
the protocols and the IP addresses and it just happily used the nw
settings....

I write client server software for a mission critical system using NT. My
developement machine gets rebooted (on average) less than once a month. We
have NT servers (single and dual processors) that have been running
continuously for nearly a year....

>Obviously raytracing is a completely different task than 3DSMAX and has
>different priorities.  I thought we covered this.


Look at the POVBench site... I noticed almost no difference between the
different OSs... apart from DOS being about 10% behind everyone else!

>>For the first:  Why not?  The rendering station at my school seems to cope
>>well with it.  It is also only a P233 with 64Mb of RAM.
>
>Then it's four times the machine most consumers currently running 98 have.
>The average machine in the field is probably no better than a P166, and
>I'm guessing most users have 32M or less RAM.


P233/64Meg... you cannot find a machine in the shops less than P266 or P300
now!!!!
With RAM being so cheap (about $2/Meg) 64Meg is becoming the minimum spec...

>There is only one major network standard, and there's only one OS
>that was designed from the ground up to support it.  The standard is
>TCP/IP and the OS is Unix.


We run NT servers for Web, news, mail, real-time data all over TCP/IP with
no trouble at all...

>Most Unix servers stay online for months or years without restarting.
Before
>MS came along, rebooting or even shutting down a machine was virtually
unheard
>of.


Thats because it took four men in white coats to get it up and running
again! I repeat that we have NT servers that haven't been rebooted since
their last hardware upgrade a year ago!

>The result is the same: one resource-hogging app
>can kill every other app on the system, no matter what they tell you.
>Granted, the pool of available resources is a bit larger, but it is still a
>fixed-size pool.

Fixed by the size of virtual memory, rather than an arbitrary ("they'll
never need all that") limit in the OS... A badly behaved app kan shaft ANY
OS even UNIX... I know I've done it!

I am the last person to claim that NT is perfect, but it is better than
w95/98 and is no worse than UNIX for a processor/memory intensive task like
running POV...

Rarius

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