When will I *need* a Directx 9 card?

On 8 Dec 2003 06:01:24 -0800, (Mark) wrote:

Darthy wrote in message . ..
Hey, imagine this.... if XBOX kills Windows PC Gaming (which is WHAT
they are doing) And Linux has Desktop Productivity... WTF do you need
Windows for? Funny if it backfires.

This is what has puzzled me: Microsoft reportedly make almost all
their money from Windows and Office, yet they've set up the Xbox to
try to compete against Windows gaming, deliberately pulling PC games
like Halo onto the Xbox instead. Since gaming is about the only reason
why the average home user ever needs a new PC (and, therefore a new
copy of Windows and quite likely a new copy of Office), if the Xbox
'wins', then Microsoft will lose a ton of money.

Mark

Nothing puzzling about this.

The X-Box is simply the opening volley in a much larger battle to move
M$ from your PC/Bedroom into the Living/Dining room.

The X-Box is stage 1
The HomeStation(X-Box successor) is Stage 2

The idea is to have an M$ 'Box' in every home takinga dominant role in
entertainment(Gaming/TV/Video/Films on demand over Broadband etc)

This was undertaken when M$ was going to be crippled by the DOJ and so
they began to look for alternative revenue streams.

On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 06:45:27 GMT, Darthy
wrote:


I wanna see the XBOX go down in flames...

Then Sony would have the market to themselves and all the usual
behavior of monopolists would ensue.

Higher prices/less choice etc.

If next gen consoles had not been released we would all still be
playing on the PSX.

There would have been no market incentive to change.

Anyone remember the PS2(Tekken) tech demos released just as the DC was
about to debut?

I wanna see the XBOX go down in flames...

Then Sony would have the market to themselves and all the usual
behavior of monopolists would ensue.

You've obviously forgotten that the market would merely return to the way it
looked BEFORE M$ entered it! Ie, divided up (fairly unevenly) between Sony
and Nintendo.

There wouldn't be any kind of monopoly.

Good morning Darthy;

"Darthy" wrote in message
...
On 8 Dec 2003 06:01:24 -0800, (Mark) wrote:

Darthy wrote in message
. ..
Hey, imagine this.... if XBOX kills Windows PC Gaming (which is WHAT
they are doing) And Linux has Desktop Productivity... WTF do you need
Windows for? Funny if it backfires.

This is what has puzzled me: Microsoft reportedly make almost all
their money from Windows and Office, yet they've set up the Xbox to
try to compete against Windows gaming, deliberately pulling PC games
like Halo onto the Xbox instead. Since gaming is about the only reason
why the average home user ever needs a new PC (and, therefore a new
copy of Windows and quite likely a new copy of Office), if the Xbox
'wins', then Microsoft will lose a ton of money.

Thats what I was thinking when I read this Thread...

Any **** ass 500Mhz computer can run MS Office, read email and display
pictures just fine.... Speed is only for:

1 - 3D Games (most PCs are not good for gaming)
2 - 3D Applications (rendering) (even less people than gamers)
3 - 2D rendering (Photoshop)
4 - Media Encoding (Video, Audio) (Still less than gamers)

Other than that... what is speed needed for?

I have a friend, he says his system is JUST fine... a 300Mhz Celeron
on Windows98se / 256mb RAM.

It depends on what your friend does with his computer and what he uses
for software. I have Autosketch v6. On my new computer at high resolution
(1280x960), a drawing is displayed virtually all at once. On my older
computer, it will literally draw one line at a time. The older machine is a
350Mhz K6-2 with a 32Mb video AGP card. It runs Word Perfect Office just
fine.

The IBM PC as originally conceived wasn't intended for games. It's
software was originally loaded by cassette, 8" disk drive, then later hard
drive. In the amount of time required to load a good typing program from
tape, my new computer will load Win XP, a dozen utilities and Outlook
Express. Is it any faster? Well, it can accommodate a lot more information
at a time.



--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!

I had a chuckle about real men using real computers. Yeah, they have
come a long way from the abacus to Big Blue. I recall using a mainframe
nearly 20 years ago. It had a 1 Kw power supply, 1 Mb of memory, tape
drives utilizing 2300' (10") reels, card reader, a 20 Mb disk drive (four
26" platters), managed eight 48K programmable white page terminals, plus an
operator console.
To start it, a 3" card deck was loaded into the reader, 2 system tapes &
3 scratch tapes were readied. A reset was pressing the "Halt, Clear
Terminal, Start Load" buttons on the main panel. A restart meant adding the
latest Journal & History tapes.
That equipment was 1970's technology. Today, you could place a server,
a CD drive, and several hard drives into the space required for a single
tape drive.

Cheers,
John

On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 10:06:40 GMT, "Lenny" wrote:


I wanna see the XBOX go down in flames...

Then Sony would have the market to themselves and all the usual
behavior of monopolists would ensue.

You've obviously forgotten that the market would merely return to the way it
looked BEFORE M$ entered it! Ie, divided up (fairly unevenly) between Sony
and Nintendo.


As I said a monopoly.

Microsoft has a monopoly even though technically it has
alternatives(LINUX/APPLE etc)

The difference as you admit is fairly unevenly to the point that a lot
of X-Box gamers would probably have bought the PS2 for more mature
gaming than the Gamecube and its children-centric games..

This would have made the gap even more pronounced.

There is no such thing as a complete monopoly(Even in communist
countries) so when the word is used it means a near monopoly where
the gap is so vast between 1st and 2nd that the leader can pretty much
do what they like.

I dont believe the market would have returned to just a 2-horse race.
Even with the DC bowing out the games market can sustain a 3rd player.

So someone would have stepped into the ring.

Good afternoon John;

"J.Clarke" wrote in message
d...
On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 13:00:02 GMT
"John Fraser" wrote:

Good morning Darthy;

"Darthy" wrote in message
...
On 8 Dec 2003 06:01:24 -0800, (Mark) wrote:

Darthy wrote in message
. ..
Hey, imagine this.... if XBOX kills Windows PC Gaming (which is
WHAT they are doing) And Linux has Desktop Productivity... WTF do
you need Windows for? Funny if it backfires.

This is what has puzzled me: Microsoft reportedly make almost all
their money from Windows and Office, yet they've set up the Xbox to
try to compete against Windows gaming, deliberately pulling PC
games like Halo onto the Xbox instead. Since gaming is about the
only reason why the average home user ever needs a new PC (and,
therefore a new copy of Windows and quite likely a new copy of
Office), if the Xbox'wins', then Microsoft will lose a ton of
money.

Thats what I was thinking when I read this Thread...

Any **** ass 500Mhz computer can run MS Office, read email and
display pictures just fine.... Speed is only for:

1 - 3D Games (most PCs are not good for gaming)
2 - 3D Applications (rendering) (even less people than gamers)
3 - 2D rendering (Photoshop)
4 - Media Encoding (Video, Audio) (Still less than gamers)

Other than that... what is speed needed for?

I have a friend, he says his system is JUST fine... a 300Mhz Celeron
on Windows98se / 256mb RAM.

It depends on what your friend does with his computer and what he
uses
for software. I have Autosketch v6. On my new computer at high
resolution(1280x960), a drawing is displayed virtually all at once.
On my older computer, it will literally draw one line at a time. The
older machine is a 350Mhz K6-2 with a 32Mb video AGP card. It runs
Word Perfect Office just fine.

There's also computational fluid dynamics, finite element stress
analysis, dynamic modelling, any kind of iterative algorithm that goes
for more than a few steps, multibody orbit problems, signal processing,
data reductions of various kinds, cryptanalysis, compiles, the list goes
on and on. Now, admittedly few people do these things, but that doesn't
mean that the ones who do do not need speed. There is a tendency these
days to forget that a computer _computes_.

--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

I quite agree that anything which requires a considerable amount of
calculation in a short period of time requires expedience. Big Blue isn't
simply an icon. I wasn't demeaning faster machines. I do appreciate that a
weatherman doesn't want to wait four hours for a calculation to run for the
weather on the six o'clock news. My point is as you and Darth stated, most
don't need hot rods to do a 1/4 mile in 5 seconds, just a family car which
is capable of exceeding the speed limit to some degree to show a reserve of
power.

In my case, it wasn't speed that necessitated a newer computer, but
coping with more demanding software that did the same job as its
predecessor. My first computer in 1989 had an 8 Mhz 80286 CPU (NexT), 640K
of RAM, 20M hard drive, Hercules video card running MS-DOS 4.01. It was
obsolete when I bought it (80386 was new). Progress being a wonderful
thing, it wasn't long before my computer was the slowest machine on the
block and the least capable. It did everything I wanted it to do and it
served its purpose well. It was as much a learning platform as a tool.
But, it had its limits and moved at a crawl as compared to a 486 which made
its debut about the time it died.

Thanks for mentioning some stuff I overlooked.

Cheers,
John

1 - 3D Games (most PCs are not good for gaming)
2 - 3D Applications (rendering) (even less people than gamers)
3 - 2D rendering (Photoshop)
4 - Media Encoding (Video, Audio) (Still less than gamers)

Production use:
---------------
Engineering.
Mathematics.
Operations Research.
Computational Chemistry.
Various kinds of software development.
Other disciplines involving frequent compute cycles...

C//

"juha" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 06:37:25 GMT, Darthy
wrote:

On 8 Dec 2003 06:01:24 -0800, (Mark) wrote:

Darthy wrote in message
. ..
Hey, imagine this.... if XBOX kills Windows PC Gaming (which is WHAT
they are doing) And Linux has Desktop Productivity... WTF do you need
Windows for? Funny if it backfires.

This is what has puzzled me: Microsoft reportedly make almost all
their money from Windows and Office, yet they've set up the Xbox to
try to compete against Windows gaming, deliberately pulling PC games
like Halo onto the Xbox instead. Since gaming is about the only reason
why the average home user ever needs a new PC (and, therefore a new
copy of Windows and quite likely a new copy of Office), if the Xbox
'wins', then Microsoft will lose a ton of money.

Thats what I was thinking when I read this Thread...

Any **** ass 500Mhz computer can run MS Office, read email and display
pictures just fine.... Speed is only for:

1 - 3D Games (most PCs are not good for gaming)
2 - 3D Applications (rendering) (even less people than gamers)
3 - 2D rendering (Photoshop)
4 - Media Encoding (Video, Audio) (Still less than gamers)

Other than that... what is speed needed for?

Programming. When you compile, and recompile, and recompile, and
recompile... the speed can really become an issue.


Agree.

--
Derek

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 07:30:20 +0200, juha
wrote:

On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 06:37:25 GMT, Darthy
wrote:

On 8 Dec 2003 06:01:24 -0800, (Mark) wrote:

Darthy wrote in message . ..
Hey, imagine this.... if XBOX kills Windows PC Gaming (which is WHAT
they are doing) And Linux has Desktop Productivity... WTF do you need
Windows for? Funny if it backfires.

This is what has puzzled me: Microsoft reportedly make almost all
their money from Windows and Office, yet they've set up the Xbox to
try to compete against Windows gaming, deliberately pulling PC games
like Halo onto the Xbox instead. Since gaming is about the only reason
why the average home user ever needs a new PC (and, therefore a new
copy of Windows and quite likely a new copy of Office), if the Xbox
'wins', then Microsoft will lose a ton of money.

Thats what I was thinking when I read this Thread...

Any **** ass 500Mhz computer can run MS Office, read email and display
pictures just fine.... Speed is only for:

1 - 3D Games (most PCs are not good for gaming)
2 - 3D Applications (rendering) (even less people than gamers)
3 - 2D rendering (Photoshop)
4 - Media Encoding (Video, Audio) (Still less than gamers)

Other than that... what is speed needed for?

Programming. When you compile, and recompile, and recompile, and
recompile... the speed can really become an issue.

Of course... sorry... I didnt quite forget that one.

I'm refering to the typical HOME user... Mom, Pops and most kids.


--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!