3 posts tagged “technology”

{this is a techie post. the rest of you, move along}

Via Ars Technica, I came across this article speaking to Vista's inadequacy for gaming:

So, I've said it before and will say it again. Vista is a good operating system... but it's -far- from being even 90% reliable. When going from an XP machine to Vista, it feels like you just went from a Toyota Celica to a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. The only problem is, that it feels like your new Ferrari borrowed your Celicas engine. We'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

In the end, if you are making the move to Vista and are a gamer, you may as well prepare to partition your hard drive to dual boot. You are not going to want to go through the hassle of making your games run smooth in Vista, or go through the trouble of tweaking to make it happen. Hopefully within the next two months, NVIDIAs drivers will be much more refined and -all- games should run as they do on XP, or at least close to it. I regret not having an ATI card on hand to perform testing there as well, but it may not be a far stretch to expect a similar experience there.

Check out the rest of the article. He has test scores and FPS rates on many of today's popular games.

This made me think about a bunch of other related things:

• For the last month or so on the terrific TWIT podcast "Security Now," Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson have been discussing the recent paper by Peter Gutman revealing the extremity of the DRM baked into the Windows Vista kernel and the extent of the performance hit that results.
• Way back when, Scoble did an interview on Microsoft's Channel 9 developer network with a team called, "Windows Audio Video Excellence." This is a team focusing on video and audio playback on Windows Vista. In particular, they were proud of their work on "glitch free playback," which was a system that would keep video and audio content playing even under "resource-constrained situations." At the time it just seemed like Microsoft was playing catch-up to Apple, as anyone who had tried IMing and surfing and emailing while watching video in both OS X and XP knew that Windows just wasn't very good at doing that. However, hindsight always does seem to be 20/20, because now it seems like we know two things: 1.The "resource-intensive" system that they were anticipating is now clearly the DRM-heavy Vista kernel. Listen to some of Steve Gibson's podcasts and you will hear about systems bogging down with multiple levels of encryption and decryption. All so that Hollywood can be sure they can extort $20 more from you the next time they re-release Mission Impossible. 2.Microsoft either didn't have a similar performance-focused group for Gaming, or it was simply impossible for them to implement the Vista kernel and NOT negatively impact gaming performance.

What makes all this quite sad is that Windows Vista actually has a whole bunch of great stuff in it. It's a pity that many of the people who would most benefit (techies) are probably going to be scared away by all the sluggishness and draconian "security" measures.

In an office full of computers I sit next to the printers, so I spend my days listening to the constant churn of lasers fusing ink to paper and of my coworkers cursing and fighting with the machines to try to get their documents. With that in mind, Smeliana writes about paper, paperwork, and an unfortunate lack of moisturizer:

Before nanochips, paper was very very popular, for hundreds of years.""NO WAY!""Way, my loves. Now let me get back to what I was saying. You see, back when I was a young woman, I worked in a hospital and had a job that required huge amounts of information changing hands."
"DATA TRANSFERS!""Yes, children. But then they called it 'Paperwork' because everything was written on paper. Lots and lots of paper. Paper everywhere! Whole cabinets full of paper in stacks, held together with more paper of a different color and thickness to show that it was a special section. We called those different colored papers, 'Folders.'"
"Like in a filing system!"
"Exactly, my precious. In fact, we called them 'Files' just like we do today, but the difference is that instead of it all being encoded on a chip, it was printed onto separate pieces of paper. And we'd have filing cabinets full of this paper. Every house had paper. Every office had paper. And because of all this pesky paper people had to work nearby each other if they wanted to share information."

Does anyone know what the four Application icons between Keynote and iPhoto are?