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

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>> 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!

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> 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.

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> 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 ...

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>> 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 

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> 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

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>> 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


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.

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>> 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.

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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 

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.


-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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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

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