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On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:41:08 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> 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.
That sounds like a plan.
Meantime, we've been listening to some series from the mid 90's. We miss
Willie. And Humph. Jack's getting the 'curmudgeon' routine down well,
but nobody does it the way Humph did.
Jim
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On 23/03/2013 7:47 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:41:08 +0000, Stephen wrote:
>> I will go away and invent a time machine.
>
> That sounds like a plan.
>
I decided just to render one, instead.
But I found a render on My HDD. So I suppose that I had better go and
build the scene. To avoid any problems with causality.
> Meantime, we've been listening to some series from the mid 90's. We miss
> Willie.
I never really took to Willie R. Too much of a middle class snob to my
mind. He was funny, though.
> And Humph. Jack's getting the 'curmudgeon' routine down well,
> but nobody does it the way Humph did.
>
That is Jack Dee's normal persona. He does well but Humph had years on
the rest of the team and could look on everyone with the contempt of an
adult with adolescents. He does very well but he is a youngster amongst
giants. I think that in the long run they would have done better picking
someone else as the chairman, someone with a different style. Maybe
supper nannie. ;-)
--
Regards
Stephen
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On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:23:19 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> On 23/03/2013 7:47 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:41:08 +0000, Stephen wrote:
>
>>> I will go away and invent a time machine.
>>
>> That sounds like a plan.
>>
>>
> I decided just to render one, instead.
> But I found a render on My HDD. So I suppose that I had better go and
> build the scene. To avoid any problems with causality.
LOL
>> Meantime, we've been listening to some series from the mid 90's. We
>> miss Willie.
>
> I never really took to Willie R. Too much of a middle class snob to my
> mind. He was funny, though.
I don't know much about Willie other than that I found him funny on
Clue. :) But he often had one-liners that would just bring the house
down, and even the other guys who were on the team at the time just don't
have the comedic sense of timing that he did.
About the closest they come now to that kind of timing is in the game
Word for Word, when (almost always as the second word), Tim will say
"Pardon?" and then the other player will repeat what he said previously,
to which Tim says "No, that was my word."
That one makes me chuckle every time, even though it's entirely
predictable.
>> And Humph. Jack's getting the 'curmudgeon' routine down well,
>> but nobody does it the way Humph did.
>>
>>
> That is Jack Dee's normal persona. He does well but Humph had years on
> the rest of the team and could look on everyone with the contempt of an
> adult with adolescents. He does very well but he is a youngster amongst
> giants. I think that in the long run they would have done better picking
> someone else as the chairman, someone with a different style. Maybe
> supper nannie. ;-)
Yeah, I've seen Jack on QI and a few other things (Kingdom, IIRC), and it
does seem to be something even his characters have in common with him.
But I don't know who else they could've picked - they couldn't "promote"
any of the panelists because that just wouldn't work - that group of
panelists works well together, even with the floating guest spot (which
they really should just let Rob Broydon fill full time), but putting
Barry or Graeme in charge (I couldn't see Tim doing it) would change the
entire dynamic.
But I think Jack does his own thing - he doesn't try to be Humph, and
that's a good thing. I think if he did that, it wouldn't work at all.
His demeanor is similar, but also distinctly different.
Jim
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Am 20.03.2013 22:21, schrieb Orchid Win7 v1:
> 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
As a side note, it might be worth mentioning that last time I checked,
the Raspberry Pi's floating point math was still buggy (at least with
Raspbian Linux; I suspect the hardware is ok, but the Pi's
floating-point engine needs some software support for full IEEE standard
conformance, and that part might still be wanting).
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Le 2013-03-21 18:03, Orchid Win7 v1 a écrit :
> 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!
What else did you expect from loading X11 with a heavy window manager on
top of it on a system that only has 2 MB of ram?
You'd need at least 8MB to start X11 with a lightweight window manager
without having it trip over itself in the process.
--
/*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 24/03/2013 12:41 AM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> Le 2013-03-21 18:03, Orchid Win7 v1 a écrit :
>> 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!
>
> What else did you expect from loading X11 with a heavy window manager on
> top of it on a system that only has 2 MB of ram?
>
> You'd need at least 8MB to start X11 with a lightweight window manager
> without having it trip over itself in the process.
Why? What does it need so much RAM for?
Also, I believe (not 100% sure) I had already added more RAM at this
point. I think I had either 6MB or 10MB at the time.
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> 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.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this...
The mouse was drawn as a hardware sprite overlay, so moving the mouse
pointer involves poking new coordinates into some video registers. This
takes a handful of compute cycles, and is easily implemented by a single
interrupt handler.
By default, dragging a window shows an outline. I believe there was an
option somewhere to show full window contents while dragging. The Amiga
had a dedicated chip for blitting areas of memory around, and
particularly for blitting image data. That means the CPU just has to
program a few parameters into this chip, and the window gets copied to
its new location. Again, doesn't require much CPU power.
Several parts of the OS are stored in an on-board ROM. (In particular,
the pre-emptive task scheduler, the file-system drivers and the GUI
rendering code.) That doesn't mean you *have* to use these; it just
means that if you do, they don't need to be loaded from disk.
> 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.
Indeed. The Amiga was quite good at not doing that thing where
everything stops responding until some event occurs.
(Having said that, without memory protection hardware, one rogue process
could crash the entire machine. But on the first hand, buggy software
was rare on that platform.)
> 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.
Well, my understanding is that modern graphics cards have hardware
acceleration for graphical tasks too. So the situation shouldn't be too
much different than how it was with the Amiga's custom hardware.
> 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.
640x768 for the highest video resolution, which *is* fairly limited.
(But we're talking about a long-obsolete platform, after all.)
Pre-emptive: Yes. The OS is 100% pre-emptive. If some program goes into
an infinite loop, you can kill it, and it *will* die. If some program
tries to use all available RAM, it gets killed, and so forth.
Multi-user: No. Not even slightly. But hey, it's a home computer. It has
no networking capabilities at all, so there's less call for multiple users.
Virtual memory: The CPU used lacks the necessary MMU hardware to
implement either virtual addressing, memory protection or virtual
memory. Later on you could buy add-on cards that included the MMU, and a
few people made software that allows virtual memory.
(Adding memory protection would have broken applications. In particular,
the OS messaging system fundamentally relies on zero-copy pointer
passing, which doesn't work if each application lives in a different
address space.)
> But that is all irrelevant to
> the observation that the Amiga had the best GUI response of any system I
> have seen yet.
Indeed.
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On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:41:39 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
> You'd need at least 8MB to start X11 with a lightweight window manager
> without having it trip over itself in the process.
That's not true - I know plenty of people who use 1-2 GB systems with FVWM
or XFCE with no problems at all.
Heck, this desktop I'm using has only 6 GB of memory, and it runs GNOME3
flawlessly.
Jim
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On Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:23:19 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:41:39 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>
>> You'd need at least 8MB to start X11 with a lightweight window manager
>> without having it trip over itself in the process.
>
> That's not true - I know plenty of people who use 1-2 GB systems with
> FVWM or XFCE with no problems at all.
>
> Heck, this desktop I'm using has only 6 GB of memory, and it runs GNOME3
> flawlessly.
m-/
To self: "8MB is not 8GB. 8MB is not 8GB"
Sorry, obviously I misread and thought you said 8 GB as a minimum
requirement. ;)
Jim
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On 24/03/2013 05:24 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Sorry, obviously I misread and thought you said 8 GB as a minimum
> requirement. ;)
0wned.
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