Yesterday somebody said something about a "raspberry pie". So when I got 
home, I looked it up. It turns out Raspberry Pi is a kind of cheap, 
minimal computer system. It's powered by a 700MHz ARM11, which 
apparently is comparable in computational power to a 300MHz Pentium-II. 
It also has some kind of GPU onboard, which HDMI output. It's powered by 
USB, and the entire thing costs $35.

Naturally, I immediately asked myself whether you could build a cheap 
render farm out of these things. Having uttered the words aloud, at 
least one website about this subject must now exist. A trivial Google 
query verified this fact; there are indeed *several* such pages. They 
conclude that 100 Raspberries have roughly the same compute power is a 
£80 Intel Core i3. (100 x $35 = $3,500 >> £80)

In summary, you *can* do this, but the price per FLOPS is very poor. Or, 
it is if you use the *CPU*. My next question is what the hell happens if 
you try to use the *GPU* instead. I haven't seen an answer to this yet. 
(I also haven't looked very hard.)

Obviously the next important question is "can it run Haskell?" And the 
answer is obviously "yes" - although it seems it's difficult to compile 
anything particularly large on the actual machine itself, due to it 
having "only" 512MB of RAM.

You know, when I first learned Haskell, 512MB of RAM constituted a 
*very* high-end system. What the heck has the world come to when you 
need more RAM than that just to compile some source code?

(Then again, I haven't tried it personally. Perhaps they mean it can't 
really *huge* stuff like the entire Haskell compiler or something. They 
don't really quantify what constitutes "big".)

The goal of this project appears to be to churn out cheap computers that 
kids can mess around with to learn about computers and programming and 
stuff, similar to the way I did with the C64 when I was a kid. Trouble 
is, no kid today would find something as primitive as a C64 interesting, 
with its piffling 16-colour graphics and monophonic sound.

And there's the rub. It's got to be modern and powerful for anyone to be 
interesting. But if it's modern and powerful, it's going to be far too 
complex to tinker with at the level you would with the C64. If you have 
a C64, it's *feasible* to write a short machine code routine which 
performs a key-scan and pokes the video hardware in response to 
different key presses. You could, given a month of Sundays, 
realistically build your own micro-OS.

*Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something 
as complex as Linux to power it. Recall that Linux is the result of 
decades of effort by thousands of expert coders across the entire world. 
(And no, I'm not just talking about the kernel. The kernel, by itself, 
doesn't give you a runnable OS.) Nobody has the time or resources to 
write an entire OS in their spare time.

Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the 
screen turn green or hear a sound play or something. The GPU on the 
Raspberry Pi are closed-source; you need to sign an NDA just to see what 
registers it has! Nobody is going to be experimenting with that anytime 
soon.

So, yes, it's a small hand-held computer with Python on it. But it's 
basically a normal PC, but smaller and cheaper. The fact that it's a 
bare PCB doesn't make it any more inviting to tinkering or whatnot. I 
suspect most kids are being to be really disinterested in this thing.

Now, the big kids who should know better? They might find this 
interesting...

Post a reply to this message

Le 2013-03-20 17:21, Orchid Win7 v1 a écrit :
>
> Now, the big kids who should know better? They might find this
> interesting...

I seem to remember someone (Clipka?) trying to get POV to run on one...

Also, aside from the propeller-head scene, sone of the obvious 
applications for it would be as "single-function terminals" such as cash 
registers, call-center agent sets, ticket booths (movie theatres, train 
stations, etc...)

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

Post a reply to this message

does it have a GPU at all?  if it is there, it may be more underwhelming than
any in the cheapest smartphone out there.  after all, it's not meant to run
games or smooth user interfaces, but to be tinkered by cli geeks... :)

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:59:19 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:

> Also, aside from the propeller-head scene, sone of the obvious
> applications for it would be as "single-function terminals" such as cash
> registers, call-center agent sets, ticket booths (movie theatres, train
> stations, etc...)

Media centers seems fairly popular as well.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 21/03/2013 01:51 AM, nemesis wrote:
> does it have a GPU at all?  if it is there, it may be more underwhelming than
> any in the cheapest smartphone out there.  after all, it's not meant to run
> games or smooth user interfaces, but to be tinkered by cli geeks... :)

Supposedly it's meant to have hardware-accelerated real-time MPEG and 
H.264 decoding. It has HDMI output, after all...

It runs OpenGL and OpenVG, but I have no idea what 3D performance would 
be like. Unimpressive, I would imagine. (Remember, they're trying to 
make this thing cheap.)

Post a reply to this message

>> Also, aside from the propeller-head scene, sone of the obvious
>> applications for it would be as "single-function terminals" such as cash
>> registers, call-center agent sets, ticket booths (movie theatres, train
>> stations, etc...)

Seems reasonable. I could use one as an SSH server, for example.

(For reasons unknown, a bazillion SSH *clients* for Windows exist, but 
not one single *server* that doesn't cost £££.)

> Media centers seems fairly popular as well.

I must admit, I have no idea what that actually means.

Post a reply to this message

> And there's the rub. It's got to be modern and powerful for anyone to be
> interesting. But if it's modern and powerful, it's going to be far too
> complex to tinker with at the level you would with the C64. If you have
> a C64, it's *feasible* to write a short machine code routine which
> performs a key-scan and pokes the video hardware in response to
> different key presses. You could, given a month of Sundays,
> realistically build your own micro-OS.
>
> *Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something
> as complex as Linux to power it.

Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or 
multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC 
interpreter. By default the stuff you write will run as a single-task 
you have complete control over the machine. Also the whole GUI is 
ridiculously fast and responsive as it was originally designed for ARM 
processors under 50 MHz (the web browser is way faster than whatever the 
one included in raspbian, although not as feature-rich).

> Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the
> screen turn green or hear a sound play or something.

You can issue poke commands from BASIC directly in RiscOS - IIRC ?<addr> 
is a variable you can use to read or write a byte to that address, or 
!<addr> to read/write a 4-byte word in one go. RiscOS BASIC also allows 
you to drop into the assembler very simply and then obviously reading 
and writing to memory is easily possible. The assembly language is 
pretty easy to learn.

The version of RiscOS for the pi also contains new software interrupts 
(that are easily called from BASIC) to read and write to the GPIO pins 
on the PCB. The following program will output a square wave on one of 
the pins (apparently at about 300 kHz).

REPEAT
SYS "GPIO_WriteData" ,17,1
SYS "GPIO_WriteData" ,17,0
UNTIL FALSE

> The GPU on the
> Raspberry Pi are closed-source; you need to sign an NDA just to see what
> registers it has! Nobody is going to be experimenting with that anytime
> soon.

AFAIK they haven't managed to get GPU access in RiscOS yet. If you 
wanted to do GPU stuff then you'd be better off with Linux, for example 
I use mine mainly with xbmc as a media centre, plays 1080p videos fine 
from an external drive through HDMI to a TV, so the GPU must be involved 
somewhere.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
[SNIP]
> *Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something
> as complex as Linux to power it.
Not true, have a look at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/
> Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the
> screen turn green or hear a sound play or something.
> The GPU on the
> Raspberry Pi are closed-source; you need to sign an NDA just to see what
> registers it has! Nobody is going to be experimenting with that anytime
> soon.
The GPU itself is closed source just as the GPU in your PC is.
Well, the Linux API is open so you do have a way to poke it and also the
framebuffer is available for bare metal programmers, AKAIK.
> So, yes, it's a small hand-held computer with Python on it. But it's
> basically a normal PC, but smaller and cheaper. The fact that it's a
> bare PCB doesn't make it any more inviting to tinkering or whatnot.
Does your PC have GPIO pins that you can access by simply writing '1' or '0' to
a file? I thought not. The Pi is the cheapest and easiest way to do physical
computing.

> I suspect most kids are being to be really disinterested in this thing.
There's actually a lot of kids writing their own stuff either in scratch or in
python.
>
> Now, the big kids who should know better? They might find this
> interesting...

Regards
Aydan

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:45:43 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> Also, aside from the propeller-head scene, sone of the obvious
>>> applications for it would be as "single-function terminals" such as
>>> cash registers, call-center agent sets, ticket booths (movie theatres,
>>> train stations, etc...)
> 
> Seems reasonable. I could use one as an SSH server, for example.
> 
> (For reasons unknown, a bazillion SSH *clients* for Windows exist, but
> not one single *server* that doesn't cost £££.)

Wrong.  Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.

>> Media centers seems fairly popular as well.
> 
> I must admit, I have no idea what that actually means.

A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

>> (For reasons unknown, a bazillion SSH *clients* for Windows exist, but
>> not one single *server* that doesn't cost £££.)
>
> Wrong.  Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.

It seems rather silly to install an entire Unix emulator just to run one 
tiny application... but sure, I guess that works.

>>> Media centers seems fairly popular as well.
>>
>> I must admit, I have no idea what that actually means.
>
> A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.

Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do this?"

Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy "digital 
picture frames"...

Post a reply to this message

On 21/03/2013 10:13 AM, scott wrote:
>> And there's the rub. It's got to be modern and powerful for anyone to be
>> interesting. But if it's modern and powerful, it's going to be far too
>> complex to tinker with at the level you would with the C64. If you have
>> a C64, it's *feasible* to write a short machine code routine which
>> performs a key-scan and pokes the video hardware in response to
>> different key presses. You could, given a month of Sundays,
>> realistically build your own micro-OS.
>>
>> *Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something
>> as complex as Linux to power it.
>
> Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or
> multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC
> interpreter.

It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more 
complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the 
C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change 
video mode, before you even *draw* anything...

> Also the whole GUI is
> ridiculously fast and responsive as it was originally designed for ARM
> processors under 50 MHz (the web browser is way faster than whatever the
> one included in raspbian, although not as feature-rich).

I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was 
flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the 
system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI 
responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes* 
for GNOME to load!! o_O

>> Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the
>> screen turn green or hear a sound play or something.
>
> You can issue poke commands from BASIC directly in RiscOS - IIRC ?<addr>
> is a variable you can use to read or write a byte to that address, or
> !<addr> to read/write a 4-byte word in one go. RiscOS BASIC also allows
> you to drop into the assembler very simply and then obviously reading
> and writing to memory is easily possible. The assembly language is
> pretty easy to learn.

The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small 
graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a 
twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.

> AFAIK they haven't managed to get GPU access in RiscOS yet. If you
> wanted to do GPU stuff then you'd be better off with Linux, for example
> I use mine mainly with xbmc as a media centre, plays 1080p videos fine
> from an external drive through HDMI to a TV, so the GPU must be involved
> somewhere.

By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)

Post a reply to this message

>> The GPU on the
>> Raspberry Pi are closed-source; you need to sign an NDA just to see what
>> registers it has! Nobody is going to be experimenting with that anytime
>> soon.
> The GPU itself is closed source just as the GPU in your PC is.

That is correct. But my PC wasn't designed to be hacked on by hobby 
programmers. It was designed to get real work done.

> Well, the Linux API is open so you do have a way to poke it and also the
> framebuffer is available for bare metal programmers, AKAIK.

I'll bet it's a tad more complex than "if you poke a 1 at this address, 
then this pixel changes colour" though.

> Does your PC have GPIO pins that you can access by simply writing '1' or '0' to
> a file? I thought not. The Pi is the cheapest and easiest way to do physical
> computing.

Yeah, I have no idea what GPIO is, nor what it might be useful for. Does 
it just mean that you can change the logic level of the pin by writing 
some bytes to memory? What are the voltage levels? Presumably you can 
*read* from these pins as well?

It sounds sort-of interesting, but I'm not sure what you could 
realistically use it for. The best I can come up with is putting the Pi 
in a box and connecting the GPIO pins to some buttons so you can control 
the device while it does... whatever the hell it does.



On an unrelated note... I have a small graphing calculator at home. It's 
powered by a Z80, and has a low-res LCD and a bazillion buttons. You can 
"program" it in that you can store small datasets on it, and you can 
make it walk through menu screens in a defined order. Now, if that puppy 
were actually programmable for real... OK, actually nobody else but me 
would care, I guess. :-P

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:29:42 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> (For reasons unknown, a bazillion SSH *clients* for Windows exist, but
>>> not one single *server* that doesn't cost £££.)
>>
>> Wrong.  Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.
> 
> It seems rather silly to install an entire Unix emulator just to run one
> tiny application... but sure, I guess that works.

You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin 
DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).

>>>> Media centers seems fairly popular as well.
>>>
>>> I must admit, I have no idea what that actually means.
>>
>> A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.
> 
> Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do
> this?"

Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on 
your TV?

Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format so 
you can access them all without having to take them out of the case? (I 
know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to MP3s 
- some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn through use).

> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy "digital
> picture frames"...

I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that 
deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're 
displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Like, under AmigaOS the 
> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI 
> responsiveness.

That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at least
a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
memory speed, HD speed...)

The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:57:35 -0400, Warp wrote:

> The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.

Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy 
loops.

(Mostly joking)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

>>> Wrong.  Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.
>>
>> It seems rather silly to install an entire Unix emulator just to run one
>> tiny application... but sure, I guess that works.
>
> You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin
> DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).

Presumably I still have to create a folder called "etc" containing a 
folder named "sshd" containing a file named "sshd.conf" though. (?) And 
somehow tell Cygwin where the hell that folder is...

>>> A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.
>>
>> Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do
>> this?"
>
> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
> your TV?

Where would you get these files from?

> Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format so
> you can access them all without having to take them out of the case? (I
> know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to MP3s
> - some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn through use).

This is the only source I can think of - and I'm the sort of person who 
would play the actual physical disks rather than the lower-quality 
recompressed versions.

Besides, aren't all DVDs copy-protected anyway?

>> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy "digital
>> picture frames"...
>
> I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that
> deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're
> displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)

I guess it's more that I'm the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't 
actually have any pictures I want to look at. (Apart from the Zazzle 
posters covering every inch of my walls...)

Post a reply to this message

Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> > The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> > some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.

> Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy 
> loops.

> (Mostly joking)

I don't own it, but I'm pretty certain that if I launched MS Office,
I would not notice any slowdown anywhere.

Andrew's problem is that he's saying "I run program A on the Amiga and
program B on the PC, and the former is more responsive than the latter."

So what? That's like saying that rendering one frame of some CGI movie
on a 1000-computer renderfarm using Maya takes 48 hours, while rendering
some scene with POV-Ray on a 80486 takes 5 minutes. Does that mean that
the 80486 or POV-Ray are faster than Maya on the 1000-computer renderfarm?

If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
things.

For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
and let's compare it to a PC.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>> responsiveness.
>
> That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at least
> a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
> memory speed, HD speed...)
>
> The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.

To be clear: The P4 obviously wipes the floor with the Amiga if you ask 
it to do something that's actually compute-bound, like running POV-Ray. 
(IIRC, Skyvase.pov takes about 2 *hours* on a stock Amiga 1200. Even a 
P4 can polish it off faster than that.) I'm talking specifically about 
GUI responsiveness.

It's perfectly possible for a PC running Windows to perform far, far 
slower than an Amiga. Consider the following factors:

* Virtual memory paging. (Apparently 128MB RAM just isn't enough for 
Windows NT, never mind Windows XP. The Amiga's piffling 2MB is 
apparently *plenty* for the native AmigaOS - rather unsurprisingly.)

* Network lag. (Remember, if you browse to a network share, the entire 
GUI freezes while Windows waits for a reply. Multi-threading? What's that?)

* Video drivers. (If you don't install the drivers for your graphics 
card, at least under Windows NT, the system performs *laughably* slowly. 
I mean a C64 could out-run this! Never mind an actual Amiga... If you 
*do* install the drivers but they're just a bit crap, expect poor 
performance.)

* Antivirus software. (Even when my Amiga was running such, it never 
seemed to have any measurably performance impact. Ever tried installing 
Norton System Works? It's *notorious* for slowing PCs down to the point 
of near unusability.)

So yes, a P4 is *vastly* superior to the Amiga's 68020 in terms of 
compute power. (A fact easily verified by comparing Debian 68k agains 
Debian i386.) But compute performance is *not* the only metric of 
importance when considering apparent user responsiveness.

Having said all that, in the main PC hardware seems to have finally 
reached the point where an expensive PC is as fast as my 20-year old 
Amiga in terms of visible responsiveness.

Post a reply to this message

On 21/03/2013 09:16 PM, Warp wrote:
> If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
> things.
>
> For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
> PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
> and let's compare it to a PC.

Thing is, your typical user cares about "I click on this folder, and it 
takes 15 seconds to open" verses "I click on this folder and the window 
opens in under 200ms". To a user, that *is* "the same thing".

Yes, *clearly* a modern OS is doing way more work than AmigaOS was ever 
capable of. But in terms if *visible responsiveness*, the Amiga was much 
better than PCs of the time.

As I say, if you run a copy of Windows 7 on a decent spec PC today, it's 
usually fast enough now. Back in the days of the Pentium 4, this was 
usually not the case.

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:09:41 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin
>> DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).
> 
> Presumably I still have to create a folder called "etc" containing a
> folder named "sshd" containing a file named "sshd.conf" though. (?) And
> somehow tell Cygwin where the hell that folder is...

You've never actually used Cygwin before, have you?  Because if you had, 
you wouldn't have to ask that question.

>> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
>> your TV?
> 
> Where would you get these files from?

Rip DVDs, free videos from the 'net - plenty of sources.

>> Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format
>> so you can access them all without having to take them out of the case?
>> (I know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to
>> MP3s - some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn
>> through use).
> 
> This is the only source I can think of - and I'm the sort of person who
> would play the actual physical disks rather than the lower-quality
> recompressed versions.

Presuming you created lower-quality recompressed versions (which isn't 
necessarily the only way to rip DVDs).

> Besides, aren't all DVDs copy-protected anyway?

Only to keep honest people honest.  And some honest people still will rip 
their DVDs.

>>> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy
>>> "digital picture frames"...
>>
>> I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that
>> deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're
>> displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)
> 
> I guess it's more that I'm the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't
> actually have any pictures I want to look at. (Apart from the Zazzle
> posters covering every inch of my walls...)

I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day 
to.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:16:20 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> > The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you
>> > added some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it
>> > slower.
> 
>> Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy
>> loops.
> 
>> (Mostly joking)
> 
> I don't own it, but I'm pretty certain that if I launched MS Office,
> I would not notice any slowdown anywhere.
> 
> Andrew's problem is that he's saying "I run program A on the Amiga and
> program B on the PC, and the former is more responsive than the latter."
> 
> So what? That's like saying that rendering one frame of some CGI movie
> on a 1000-computer renderfarm using Maya takes 48 hours, while rendering
> some scene with POV-Ray on a 80486 takes 5 minutes. Does that mean that
> the 80486 or POV-Ray are faster than Maya on the 1000-computer
> renderfarm?
> 
> If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
> things.
> 
> For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
> PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
> and let's compare it to a PC.

You're assuming a lot about the environment though - my point (aside from 
joking about it) was that Amiga generally didn't do a lot of multitasking 
(though it was one of the early multitasking OSes IIRC), so it could 
actually have a more responsive interface than modern systems that are 
doing a lot more than an older system.

It's the complement to Moore's law (some call it May's Law).

Jim

Post a reply to this message

> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day
> to.

That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that 
as their Windows backdrop.

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:39:10 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the
>> Day to.
> 
> That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that
> as their Windows backdrop.

I occasionally pick them up and use them myself as wallpapers, too.  Some 
digital frames can deal with an RSS feed input, and APOD provides one. :)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

> You're assuming a lot about the environment though - my point (aside from
> joking about it) was that Amiga generally didn't do a lot of multitasking
> (though it was one of the early multitasking OSes IIRC), so it could
> actually have a more responsive interface than modern systems that are
> doing a lot more than an older system.

On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely 
everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which 
takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the 
network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes 
unresponsive. The Amiga seems to be a lot more threaded; it might take 
45 seconds to load all those filenames from floppy disk, but the actual 
disk *window* opens faster than you can blink.

I think the other issue is virtual memory. The Amiga doesn't have it. 
The OS doesn't support it, and the version of the 68000 they used lacks 
an MMU, so you can't have it even if you want it. Around the 1990s PCs 
typically had nowhere near enough RAM to prevent excessive paging. Why, 
one of the PCs at college used to take *twenty minutes* to load MS 
Access. An SQL database under AmigaOS took about 15 seconds to load.

The other thing is networking. Windows seems to assume that all network 
shares operate at LAN speed. If you try to browse a slow network share, 
the whole system becomes unresponsive. The Amiga, by contrast, has no 
networking support in the first place. And nobody installs software onto 
a network share and expects an Amiga to run it at local speeds...

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:46:33 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
> unresponsive.

I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't, 
clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully 
in some cases.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>> unresponsive.
>
> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully
> in some cases.

I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster 
than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it 
was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.

Either way, I concur with your analysis - Windows tended to be awful at 
dealing with blocking. In particular, it was always *hopeless* at trying 
to cancel things.

AmigaOS is designed to run entirely off of slow-arse 3.25" floppy disks. 
Those guys *had* to design the OS to deal with the delays effectively. 
And the platform has special graphics blitting hardware, which the OS 
makes maximum use of for snappy visual responses. (It also has hardware 
sprite overlay, for a responsive mouse pointer.)

If you run Debian (which has no special optimisations for such 
hardware), you find that it crawls along alarmingly slowly. I mean, slow 
to the point that you can't tell if the OS is actually functioning or 
not. Twenty minutes for GNOME to start!

Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's 
due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases 
is anybody's guess...

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:03:04 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely
>>> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which
>>> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the
>>> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes
>>> unresponsive.
>>
>> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
>> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very
>> effectively/gracefully in some cases.
> 
> I seem to recall that when I first experienced Linux, it seemed faster
> than Windows. Then again, it may have just been me *imagining* that it
> was faster, because that's what I wanted to believe.

I don't think so - Linux deals with blocking I/O differently - though 
arguably, when the block device I/O buffers fill up, the system load does 
spike and the side effects aren't very pretty.

> Today Windows seems a lot less laggy than it used to be. Whether that's
> due to code improvements or just the vast hardware performance increases
> is anybody's guess...

It's probably a little of both.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 21/03/2013 9:39 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day
>> to.
>
> That *does* sound kind of righteous... One of the guys at work has that
> as their Windows backdrop.

I used to have that. Now I have the BBC test card W
I have a Nasa image as my logon screen.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Thing is, your typical user cares about "I click on this folder, and it 
> takes 15 seconds to open" verses "I click on this folder and the window 
> opens in under 200ms". To a user, that *is* "the same thing".

There's a certain language that you use that's different from normal
language. In order to understand it, one requires some interpretation.

For example, when you say "15 seconds", what that really means is
"0.15 seconds". Or when you say "postal-stamp sized", what that really
means is "postal-card sized". Or when you say "constantly" (eg. "the
screen has to be constantly cleaned") what you really mean is "every
two weeks." Or when you say "2 inches" (eg. "you have to look at the
screen from 2 inches away") it really means "20 inches."

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely 
> everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which 
> takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the 
> network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes 
> unresponsive.

I have a theory: You actually live in a parallel universe where things
are different, and somehow there's a rift in the multi-dimensional
space-time continuum that causes your posts to leak to this universe
from yours.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 21/03/2013 10:36 PM, Warp wrote:
> I have a theory: You actually live in a parallel universe where things
> are different, and somehow there's a rift in the multi-dimensional
> space-time continuum that causes your posts to leak to this universe
> from yours.

Close, I believe that he was expelled from a parallel universe because 
they did not believe in capital punishment.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

>> Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or
>> multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC
>> interpreter.
>
> It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more
> complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the
> C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change
> video mode, before you even *draw* anything...

Actually it's just a single command in BASIC, something like

MODE "X1920 Y1200 C16M"

will do the trick. Of course if you want to iterate which modes are 
available then that's a few more lines. And it you want the memory 
address of the screen buffer, that's also one line. Then of course you 
can start writing directly to screen memory. So in 3 lines of BASIC you 
can change mode and poke a pixel directly to the screen - it doesn't get 
much simpler than that.

> I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was
> flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the
> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
> responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes*
> for GNOME to load!! o_O

Ditto here, obviously Windows/Debian is doing hugely more behind the 
scenes than older/simpler OS's, but still it's frustrating when you have 
an 8-core 4 GHz machine and it takes more than 100ms to open a window 
and display some icons. I assume Windows at least does a million 
registry reads for every file in a folder to look up actions, load icons 
etc, probably virus scan it blah blah blah.

> The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small
> graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a
> twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.

I don't understand why it would be any different. You have a screen 
buffer in RAM that you can directly read and write to, or if you prefer 
the OS provides plenty of functions for drawing basic shapes.

> By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)

Yes, for the price why not!

Post a reply to this message

> For example, when you say "15 seconds", what that really means is
> "0.15 seconds". Or when you say "postal-stamp sized", what that really
> means is "postal-card sized". Or when you say "constantly" (eg. "the
> screen has to be constantly cleaned") what you really mean is "every
> two weeks." Or when you say "2 inches" (eg. "you have to look at the
> screen from 2 inches away") it really means "20 inches."

I just tested on my 1-year old work PC (Intel W3680 12GB RAM Win7) and 
it *literally* takes 2 seconds after I open Control Panel for all the 
icons to finish loading the first time (subsequent times are faster). 
Loading the equivalent window on my 12MHz Acorn was instant (ie <200 ms 
probably). I think that's the sort of thing Andrew means by the GUI 
being more responsive. Obviously it's doing different things, but most 
end users don't care about how it's been implemented.

Post a reply to this message

> I don't think that it runs everything as one thread (it doesn't,
> clearly), but that I/O blocking isn't handled very effectively/gracefully
> in some cases.

Like working with files on a slow network link, or a CD/DVD that is hard 
to read, or a hard drive with a few bad sectors, or a floppy that isn't 
formatted, or having a shortcut on your desktop pointing to a 
non-existant network location, or ...

Post a reply to this message

>> It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more
>> complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the
>> C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change
>> video mode, before you even *draw* anything...
>
> Actually it's just a single command in BASIC, something like
>
> MODE "X1920 Y1200 C16M"
>
> will do the trick. Of course if you want to iterate which modes are
> available then that's a few more lines. And it you want the memory
> address of the screen buffer, that's also one line. Then of course you
> can start writing directly to screen memory. So in 3 lines of BASIC you
> can change mode and poke a pixel directly to the screen - it doesn't get
> much simpler than that.

Yeah, that's not too bad, actually. You're not going to learn about 
low-level hardware access, but it sounds much easier than trying to get 
OpenGL to actually work.

>> I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was
>> flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the
>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>> responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes*
>> for GNOME to load!! o_O
>
> Ditto here, obviously Windows/Debian is doing hugely more behind the
> scenes than older/simpler OS's, but still it's frustrating when you have
> an 8-core 4 GHz machine and it takes more than 100ms to open a window
> and display some icons. I assume Windows at least does a million
> registry reads for every file in a folder to look up actions, load icons
> etc, probably virus scan it blah blah blah.

The Amiga has various video hardware acceleration, all of which GNOME 
will be completely ignoring. Hence the slowness.

Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's seen Windows running slowly. 
Warp seems to think I'm from a parallel universe or something...

>> The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small
>> graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a
>> twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.
>
> I don't understand why it would be any different. You have a screen
> buffer in RAM that you can directly read and write to, or if you prefer
> the OS provides plenty of functions for drawing basic shapes.

I had assumed "you need an NDA" means that you can't find out where the 
framebuffer is.

>> By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)
>
> Yes, for the price why not!

You make a compelling argument.

The device comes as a naked board, right? I wonder how easy it is to 
break it... Last I heard, devices like that don't like static discharge. 
(Great for something designed as an inexpensive toy for kids!)

I had a look, and you can buy a kit including one of these things from 
Maplin, but they want £90 for it...

Post a reply to this message

> Yeah, I have no idea what GPIO is, nor what it might be useful for. Does
> it just mean that you can change the logic level of the pin by writing
> some bytes to memory? What are the voltage levels? Presumably you can
> *read* from these pins as well?
>
> It sounds sort-of interesting, but I'm not sure what you could
> realistically use it for. The best I can come up with is putting the Pi
> in a box and connecting the GPIO pins to some buttons so you can control
> the device while it does... whatever the hell it does.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=15

Post a reply to this message

>> I don't understand why it would be any different. You have a screen
>> buffer in RAM that you can directly read and write to, or if you prefer
>> the OS provides plenty of functions for drawing basic shapes.
>
> I had assumed "you need an NDA" means that you can't find out where the
> framebuffer is.

I think the NDA refers to the inner workings of the accelerated GPU 
stuff, ie the mpeg decoding, 3d graphics transforms and all that stuff. 
So with something like RiscOS you're stuck with only being able to write 
directly to the screen memory (or using the OS routines). There is no 
option to utilise any of the hardware acceleration (which the OS 
routines can't do either).

> The device comes as a naked board, right? I wonder how easy it is to
> break it... Last I heard, devices like that don't like static discharge.
> (Great for something designed as an inexpensive toy for kids!)
>
> I had a look, and you can buy a kit including one of these things from
> Maplin, but they want £90 for it...

I got mine from amazon along with a clear plastic case and a USB hub for 
about half that. You'll want a few SD cards as well, but they cost 
almost nothing now and most people have some lying around from cameras.

Post a reply to this message

>> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
>> your TV?
>
> Where would you get these files from?

You can get them by ripping DVDs, recording from TV (although you 
probably need a proper PC to do that), copying from friends, or 
downloading from the internet (of course check the legality first for 
each of those in your country).

You can also use iPlayer on it. And it plays music.

Post a reply to this message

On 22/03/2013 8:47 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>
> Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's seen Windows running slowly.
> Warp seems to think I'm from a parallel universe or something...
>
It is not that you think windows runs slowly. Windows can be a real 
sloth at times, probably because we load it up with scores of programs 
and data. My last work’s laptop running Win7 started really fast and was 
very responsive. I did not install anything extra on it and splash 
screens came and went in an instant.
The impression that you are not of this world is, in my opinion, because 
you state your opinions as facts with exaggerated examples.
I have always said, a hundred thousand million times. Don’t exaggerate. ;-)

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:25:40 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> I have always said, a hundred thousand million times. Don’t exaggerate.
> ;-)

Oh, now, be fair, it was a few billion times. ;)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 22/03/2013 3:43 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:25:40 +0000, Stephen wrote:
>
>> I have always said, a hundred thousand million times. Don’t exaggerate.
>> ;-)
>
> Oh, now, be fair, it was a few billion times. ;)
>

So now you want to argue over how many zeros are in a billion. ;-)
I believe we, as a group, had this dissuasion last millennium.


-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:33:29 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> On 22/03/2013 3:43 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:25:40 +0000, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> I have always said, a hundred thousand million times. Don’t
>>> exaggerate.
>>> ;-)
>>
>> Oh, now, be fair, it was a few billion times. ;)
>>
>>
> So now you want to argue over how many zeros are in a billion. ;-)
> I believe we, as a group, had this dissuasion last millennium.

Nah, I don't want to argue about that. ;)

I want a new series of Clue. ;)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 22/03/2013 5:07 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:33:29 +0000, Stephen wrote:

>>>
>> So now you want to argue over how many zeros are in a billion. ;-)
>> I believe we, as a group, had this dissuasion last millennium.
>
> Nah, I don't want to argue about that. ;)
>
> I want a new series of Clue. ;)
>

"You'll have had your chips, then, Dougal?"

I've no idea then the next series will be broadcast. It was recorded at 
the end of last year.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:34:30 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> On 22/03/2013 5:07 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:33:29 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> 
> 
>>> So now you want to argue over how many zeros are in a billion. ;-)
>>> I believe we, as a group, had this dissuasion last millennium.
>>
>> Nah, I don't want to argue about that. ;)
>>
>> I want a new series of Clue. ;)
>>
>>
> "You'll have had your chips, then, Dougal?"

"And I've had me tea, too!"

> I've no idea then the next series will be broadcast. It was recorded at
> the end of last year.

They usually turn up in June IIRC.  But I didn't realise they had 
recorded a series already that hadn't aired yet.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 21-3-2013 22:21, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>>> responsiveness.
>>
>> That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at
>> least
>> a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
>> memory speed, HD speed...)
>>
[snip]
> So yes, a P4 is *vastly* superior to the Amiga's 68020 in terms of
> compute power. (A fact easily verified by comparing Debian 68k agains
> Debian i386.) But compute performance is *not* the only metric of
> importance when considering apparent user responsiveness.
>
> Having said all that, in the main PC hardware seems to have finally
> reached the point where an expensive PC is as fast as my 20-year old
> Amiga in terms of visible responsiveness.

I am afraid Andy is correct here (except for his prediction/observation 
that the PC almost caught up, any generation of a PC system was 
responsive when it came out of the box, but that stopped after you had 
used it for some time).
The Amiga was a multiprocessor system with the GUI almost entirely 
handled by a coprocessor/firmware/hardware, the distinction is hard to 
make in this case. That meant that neither IO nor computations would 
interrupt the GUI; even if you completely overloaded the machine with 
computations and disk access the system was totally responsive visually. 
Many times my Amiga completely hung on something but I could still move 
the windows in real time, the mouse was functioning, even the buttons 
could be pressed.
The only way a modern PC could even come close to such GUI performance 
is when one processor would be set aside for GUI only with no other 
tasks and even then the other processes could steal so many cycles that 
the GUI is slowed down markedly.

You can now complain that the screen resolution of the Amiga was much 
less, that it was not a full implementation of a preemptive multiuser 
system, that it had no virtual memory etc. But that is all irrelevant to 
the observation that the Amiga had the best GUI response of any system I 
have seen yet.

-- 
When you ask a group of experts in their field how to allocate
research money, they are quite likely to advise to give it
to the larger research groups, headed by experts in their field

Post a reply to this message

On 22/03/2013 8:12 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> They usually turn up in June IIRC.  But I didn't realise they had
> recorded a series already that hadn't aired yet.

I thought I saw that they had done a series of recordings before 
Christmas and the last one was for the Xmas Special. I did not read it 
properly, as I was looking for when the next broadcast will be. And some 
of the fan sites can be "So! gushing".

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

Le 2013-03-21 17:09, Orchid Win7 v1 a écrit :
>>> Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do
>>> this?"
>>
>> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
>> your TV?
>
> Where would you get these files from?
>

My Canon EOS Rebel T3i, for example...

>> Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format so
>> you can access them all without having to take them out of the case? (I
>> know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to MP3s
>> - some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn through use).
>
> This is the only source I can think of - and I'm the sort of person who
> would play the actual physical disks rather than the lower-quality
> recompressed versions.
>

It's harder to put crayon on a .mp4 than on a DVD and a 3 year old 
doesn't mind the occasional compression artifact.

> Besides, aren't all DVDs copy-protected anyway?
>

You may want to sit down for this, but I got news for you...



-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 18:44:46 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> On 22/03/2013 8:12 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> They usually turn up in June IIRC.  But I didn't realise they had
>> recorded a series already that hadn't aired yet.
> 
> I thought I saw that they had done a series of recordings before
> Christmas and the last one was for the Xmas Special. I did not read it
> properly, as I was looking for when the next broadcast will be. And some
> of the fan sites can be "So! gushing".

LOL

The site I look at is the "officially unofficial" site - they seem to be 
on target with the timeframes, but right now the upcoming series is all 
"TBD".

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 23/03/2013 7:18 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> You may want to sit down for this, but I got news for you...

LOL

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On 23/03/2013 7:35 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> The site I look at is the "officially unofficial" site - they seem to be
> on target with the timeframes, but right now the upcoming series is all
> "TBD".

Sometimes the BBC will tell you when the next broadcast will be. I do go 
to the "officially unofficial" site but I tried digging deeper. I did 
not find anything but that thought stuck. Anyway June is too long to 
wait. I will go away and invent a time machine.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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