On Saturday 20 May 2006 10:14, Adam Bower wrote:
On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 09:37:20AM +0100, Bob Dove wrote:
it is all overkill and I'll stick to 'doze 2K. Of course, it is the gaming fraternity who need the blistering power that BBBG is tapping into. Problem
I'm not so certain of that tbh, as most people who want to play games now just buy consoles don't they? Only the real nutters who have lots of money play games on PC's now. This is why Microsoft released the Xbox and Xbox 360. I've pretty much ditched PC gaming entirely as it's far too expensive to keep up with the constant hardware upgrade cycle, and I think I'm going to stick with gaming consoles.
You're not wrong there! Still struggling to keep up with PC gaming over here, and to do so with the extra requirements of doing it through wine.
Trouble is, there's lots you can't do on a console at the moment, including but not limited to PC-quality FPS titles (console games use weighted crosshairs, proximity deceleration and suchlike to compensate for the 10-thumbs nature of controllers, and this tends to spoil the game even when you do use a keyboard and mouse), RPG games (mustn't....mention....recent console RPG guis.), and the most important thing, the only way to make and run custom content, or to make and run Free games on a console is to try and run it as a PC itself.
As soon as these little issues are pegged, I'll be happy to stop being expected to buy a new <insert computer part here> every 3 months.
On Saturday 20 May 2006 12:38, Brett Parker wrote:
On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:27:30AM +0100, Ted Harding Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
However, no doubt there are some linux applications for which even No 1 would be overloaded -- though I'd be curious to know what they are!
Ahh, you don't run openoffice.org, then (either that, or you have the patience of a saint ;). Even on fairly beefy hardware OO.o takes more time to load than I like - which is why I generally stick to abiword and gnumeric when those evil Word and Excel documents come in... anything that I write myself will (most likely) be in either (some breed of) XHTML or LaTeX, or, now, ReStructured Text. Spreadsheets are mostly avoidable, that's what god gave us database servers and scripting languages for, right? :)
I find that OOo sticks in the craw when discussing migration with people.
On a purely theoretical level yeah, it's got all the bells and whistles, but I just can't in good conscience say "yep, that's what I use", because it's molasses-fast right now.
The gnome/kde word processors would see far more time on my desktop if I were into that kind of app. Of course it's emacs all the way in reality.
If it didn't *still* have stability issues for me, I'd have to have the excellent AbiWord right at the top of my list for that sort of end-user type word processor, if only for being fast and having a concise and lightweight feature set (luggers who know me to be a lover of emacs, kde, etc. may guffaw there ;) ), and your comments on spreadsheets are about on the money for me.
In a more general sense, I think people should be made aware of the fact that running a rich graphical desktop does have a cost in terms of memory and suchlike, even if that cost is nowhere near the slice that windows XP takes, or the stiff penalties XP imposes on functionality.
If people are ever given misleading ideas about that, they're bound to be disappointed, which is not good.
Ten