You don't have any problems viewing HD movies on your 40MHz SPARC? How about encoding
video, how long does that take?
________________________________
From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tue, February 9, 2010 5:06:30 PM
Subject: Re: Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog
Yes, the same things. Here, quoted from the message that you trimmed:
"Playing music, playing video files, telnetting, sshing, editing, compiling,
browsing the web, etc etc etc."
I'll add "viewing PDF files and generating documentation" since they came
to mind since I sent that. About the only thing I do on my system now that I didn't
back then was run CPU emulators and edit pictures.
Yes, the GUI is prettier, and it supports drag-and-drop (which I almost never use), but
other than that, there's not much difference. The OS *supports* the apps. I spend
most of my time in the apps.
-Dave
On Feb 9, 2010, at 6:00 PM, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
The same things? Doubtful. How fancy a GUI does your
SPARCstation run compared to your more modern PPC?
________________________________
From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tue, February 9, 2010 4:46:33 PM
Subject: Re: Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog
Feelings? No, experience. Big difference. Experience with and knowledge of the past.
There is NO RATIONAL REASON why a GUI-based OS should need more than a billion bytes of
memory and a billion-plus clock cycles per second just to boot. You and I (and many
others on this list) have plenty of examples of machines that do the same thing with a
tiny fraction of those resources.
Windows, OS X, and Linux (but only with Gnome or KDE) are fat, bloated, slow, lumbering
pigs, and it's due to sloppy programming and misapplication of tools. That is my
assertion. My proof is that I use my dual 1.8GHz PPC with 4GB of RAM for the EXACT SAME
STUFF every day that I used my 40MHz SPARC with 32MB of RAM to do every day, and I bump up
against the performance limitations of both to essentially the same degree.
--Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL