On windows there is a compensation control in the form of start menu written in react that needs 7 msedgewebview processes to run so that you can search for an app.
It's not just that it's compressed - the OS is also intelligently handling which memory should be on hardware vs. virtual. Effectively a lot of the memory concerns have been offloaded to the OS and the VM where one exists.
Yes - I didn't mean to imply it was only one of the OSes. Further up the comments people were talking about how memory efficiency is now more important but I was trying to make the point that with compression and virtual memory it still doesn't matter all that much even if memory is double the price.
If running low on memory seems to matter less now than it did a couple of decades ago, I'd rather say that's because fast SSDs make swapping a lot faster. Even though virtual memory and swapping were available even on PCs since Windows 3.x or so, running out of memory could still make multitasking slow as molasses due to thrashing and the lack of memory for disk cache. The performance hit from swapping can be a lot less noticeable now.
Of course compression being now computationally cheap also helps.
Hacker News does weird stuff to post / comment timestamps if a post is resurrected from the second chance pool. Makes both the post and comment look new even though they’re not. Not sure why, it’s kind misleading, I guess they want to hide the necromancy for some reason.
The era of bespoke arcade hardware died in the late 90s really. They couldn’t really keep up with consoles / PC with a declining market. By the early 2000s arcades were mostly console derived, beyond the Sega trio of Naomi (Dreamcast), Chihiro (Xbox) and Triforce (Gamecube), Konami and Namco mostly used PlayStation 2 derived hardware. By the late 00’s we were mostly looking at PC based stuff.
The Gamecube was competitive on graphics with PS2 and Xbox. It was the Wii where there console side moved away from keeping up in the cutting edge graphics race.
I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…
I think the big thing that held gamecube back was the lack of other 'utility', at least as someone who was in college at the time.
Can't play DVDs (PS2, or XBox with the remote accessory,) can't even play audio CDs. Let's remember that this was also an era where half or less of the on campus freshmen had a desktop computer for their dorm, let alone something like a laptop.
That said one could also argue that Nintendo was more focused on mobile at the time, between the GBA and DS, both of which certainly carried them through that era.
I think one could argue that the DS's success alongside the challenges Gamecube had for adoption, led to the philosophy involved in the Wii's design.
True. I remember there was a window of time in which the PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get, or at least the cheapest in most stores. That was about the time when most consumers were feeling pressure to drop VHS. It was also pretty common for people to have CD binders full of pirated movies on DVD, very popular in colleges then, and kids bringing home those huge stashes of movies also motivated a lot of people to replace their VCRs. The PS2 with it's DVD playing functionality was well timed and well priced.
I can't recall if the PS2 was cheaper than available DVD players when it launched, but I do distinctly remember it being true of the PS3 and Blu-ray for some time given how new it was then
This mostly describes stuff to do with the [Windows] NT [OS][/2] (delete as appropriate) kernel layer, which normal mere mortals aren't supposed to interact with. You're supposed to use stuff like the Win32 KERNEL32.DLL not the more direct DLL, NTDLL.DLL (a DLL). Of course, true hackers scorn such abstractions.
IIRC Microsoft's internal email still ran on Xenix at the time (until Exchange betas got good enough for internal use c. 1995?), so perhaps more trademarks than some sort of absolute hatred of Unix. Also note that one of the two APIs that NT OS/2 was initially going to support was POSIX, albeit perhaps more because the US government wanted that than a true love of UNIX. Although the design rationale document (ntdesrtl) does lament that existing POSIX test suites tend to also test "...UNIX
folklore that happens to be permissible under an interpretation of the POSIX spec".
Did Microsoft never run Microsoft Mail internally?
It was an email system that ran on top of file system. If I recall, mail clients connected over a networked drive to access mailboxes. So it was never regarded as being very scalable.
Yes, MS Mail for PC Networks used a shared file system for email.
The Workgroup Apps (WGA) divison ran MS Mail for PC Networks since they produced MS Mail. Gotta dogfood your product. The WGA email system used a Xenix gateway to connect with the rest of Microsoft.
The rest of Microsoft ran MS Mail for Windows with a Xenix email backend and address book, since MS was already using Xenix before MS Mail for PC Networks existed.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 contained a one postoffice-version of MSMail, (which could be upgraded to the full version).
When were you watching? The US All Channel Receiver Act was passed in 1962. Prior to that UHF stations did struggle in the first decade of UHF TV in the US as few TVs had UHF tuners. The situation improved after that as they became standard and more and more people could actually watch the extra channels.
Just as a slight extension to this, in the UK VHF was used for the original 405 line (~376i) analogue TV system used for 1936-39 and then 1946 until it turned off in the 1980s, so any ariels still up probably haven't been used for decades.
UHF was used for the newer 625 line (576i) PAL colour TV system, starting in 1964 with the launch of BBC2 (colour in 1967) and then BBC1 and ITV in 1969 when they went into colour. Analogue TV was switched off in 2012, and digital TV is only UHF only.
BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting) was a failed satellite TV service notably using a smaller square dish compared to their rival Sky (old Sky analogue dishes were quite bigger than the "minidish" used for digital, and you don't see them around much either). They also used the fairly obscure DMAC TV system, whilst Sky used standard PAL. The pretty quickly "merged" with Sky, hence Sky's legal name for a long time was British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB).
There are actually existing copies of 405-line TV programmes on tape, because domestic VCRs would quite happily record it. Each "stripe" of a head rotation is a complete field, and as long as they're coming every 1/50th of a second it doesn't really care what if any line sync pulses you want to feed it.
I don't remember us having 405-line TV because by the time they built out transmitters that far north in the early 70s there was no point, but I remember going round to a neighbour's house down south with my dad in the late 70s when they asked him to repair their TV. I remember the objectionably loud 10kHz line whistle which my elderly neighbours just couldn't hear :-)
Not from the era, but I suspect serious enterprise stuff (accounts, ERP etc.) in the 80s would generally be on minicomputers and mainframes, so you’re probably getting into stuff like RPG, PL/I, COBOL and myriad other languages that have faded away from common use.
That U-turn was very fast. I guess they realised whilst Animate only has a small user base nowadays, they tend to people who really need that specific tool (with no Adobe tool providing an alternative) like animation studios. It’s still dead (Jim) but at least its zombie corpse will keep on shambling along for users.
reply