Invisible wrote:

> In which universe is a machine with a 200 GB HD and more than 1 GB of 
> RAM considered "moderate"? That sounds pretty high-end to me...

Pff, I only have a 512MB memory graphics card, 200 GB harddrive is easy 
as possible, and even little timmy down the street has 2GB of ram. ;) 
It's actually (by todays standards) a very moderate system. Bottom of 
midrange.

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Invisible wrote:

> [What's it made of? Lead??]

Silicon, mostly. a few threads of gold, maybe a ceramic outer case, with 
  a very small possibility of a heat-conducting metal pad. :D

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> It's a direct dump of the binary format internal structure into XML. 
> When you see a tag called <useWord97LineBreaks>, what should your 
> implementation do?

I would assume you would need to know what the behavior difference in a 
Word97 linebreak versus a normal line break.

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>> *one raised eyebrow*
>>
>> You're telling me a game making intense use of 3D hardware [not to 
>> mention CPU-intensive physics simulations] will actually work under 
>> software emulation?
>>
> 
> Software emulation???
> 
> Wine will convert the DirectX calls into OpenGL calls. (well, not 
> "convert"; it just has a DirectX "library" where all functions just call 
> OpenGL functions)

Wait - Wine attempts to perform emulation at the API level?

Damn, that's even harder than hardware emulation! o_O [At least the 
hardware is mostly documented somewhere...]

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> How many people use a supercomputer to read their email? ;-)
> 
> Anyone using gmail? :-)

No - what is it?

[NO! I'M KIDDING THIS TIME!!]

That's using a supercomputer - or more accurately, an entire cluster of 
perfectly ordinary computers - to *store* your email, not read it.

> I was just thinking the other day, what kinds of computers are we 
> running that not that long ago, the US considered a 486 a 
> "supercomputer" enough to restrict its export to countries that might 
> use it to do nuclear bomb simulations. And now there's probably an order 
> of magnitude more power in the graphics chip of a game console than what 
> used to be a supercomputer 15 years ago.

Pretty mental, eh?

Wanna speculate how many FLOPS you can get out of a Commodore 64? Since 
it has a 1 MHz clock and typically takes around 4 clock cycles per 
instruction, and all float processing has to be done in software, I'm 
thinking were somewhere in the kFLOPS range?

What does, say, an Intel Xeon 3.66 GHz generate? How about a 
top-of-the-line nVidia GeForce GPU? (I know it's MFLOPS, but I couldn't 
tell you how many exactly...)

> Not that Windows is great either. They just have a user base that 
> expects computers to be easy to use, and a financial need to keep those 
> users happy. Plus, lots of Linux weenies don't know Windows' 
> capabilities and complain it doesn't work when it does. :-)

I still contend that AmigaDOS was easier than any version of Windoze 
I've ever touched. But I'm minority like that...

[Perhaps somebody will claim Mac OS X is the way to go?]

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>> In which universe is a machine with a 200 GB HD and more than 1 GB of
>> RAM considered "moderate"? That sounds pretty high-end to me...
> 
> My 3+ year old desktop is slightly higher spec'ed than that.
> High end today is quad core processor, 4 GB+ memory and 1/2 TB disk space.

Damn - what on earth could you possibly use 1 TB of disk for?? o_O

I only know 1 person who has nearly that much space - and he uses it for 
illegal media downloads. (Not something I do, obviously.)

My current motherboard doesn't even *support* more than 4 GB of RAM. 
Although I guess RAM is much cheaper now than it used to be.

Dual-core is becomming common, but I don't think I've met anybody yet 
who can afford quad-core. (Since that almost necessarily requires you to 
buy Intel, who are still quite expensive.)

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Warp wrote:

>   It's incredible how you find ways to bash C++ in every possible context.

The human mind is a truly increadible thing. Maybe one day we'll figure 
out how it works...

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> Wait - Wine attempts to perform emulation at the API level?

Yes, that's the ONLY thing it does. Well, and some tweaking for the PE 
executable format, but not much more.

> Damn, that's even harder than hardware emulation! o_O [At least the 
> hardware is mostly documented somewhere...]

Correct, it doesn't emulate hardware. It's not an emulator. WINE = Wine 
Is Not an Emulator.

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>> [What's it made of? Lead??]
> 
> Silicon, mostly. a few threads of gold, maybe a ceramic outer case, with 
>  a very small possibility of a heat-conducting metal pad. :D

AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+?

Have you *seen* the heat sink??

It's bigger than the damn CPU - by at least an order of magnitude!

I'm presuming the whole thing is encased in solid metal to promote heat 
dissapation or something...

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> Tht was an answer, not a question. :-)
>>
> 
> You were talking about the slow-ass GMail web interface?

No, I was talking about how many people use supercomputers to read email.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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