Is the parhelia the new matrox chip?

[dchip]

So, after the earth is adequately shattered and the wonder of Parhelia being aligned with Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn is over, will the search functions on these boards be reactivated? These boards are a heavenly resource, when they are searchable.

[wkulecz]

I have both DSL and Cable Modem.

Flash, Javascript & ActiveX still suck.
What's wrong is more fundamental than mere speed!

--wally.

[Greebe]

They have the bandwidth, so that's a none issue. It's the cpu resources that was killing us... and the fact they needed to update the Linux kernal to address part of the problems of late.

Kinda know seeing that I was running defensive end for Ant and called them when their support led us to believe they shut us down yesterday.

Tis a pity when a communications company cannot communicate effectively and we're force to break out the BIG STICK!

[Brian Ellis]

If you want an example of a bad web site, try www.matrox.com To download all the data for Parhelia, be prepared for a long wait with all their Flash gubbinsry, where the bypass systems don't even work, the PDF files average about 1 Mb/page and so on. This is technology gone mad and could lose them more sales than they gain. I, for one, didn't wait to see everything, even though I was downloading as fast as my 56 kbit/s modem would allow, with a good connection.

Guess their website equals their service

Oh! Parhelia may be the bees' knees for gamers but I can't see it's going to offer me much. It won't make me type faster, will it? I can't see any advantage that I need for my office computer. And what about price? I couldn't find anything about cost/delivery time (or is this yet another of their pie-in-the-sky promises?).

[Dr Mordrid]

10 bit glyph antialiasing, very high 2D quality etc. etc. for workstations. It's also not just a gamers card but for those who do 3D/CAD and who could use very high quality video output since it does that in 10 bits as well and has HDTV-out capability.

As for the site: today was murder there even for those with cable/DSL service. There servers were under very heavy useage due to the release rush. Normally that site loads and responds very quickly.

As for the size of the *.pdf's; with a lot of imagery (which is the norm for press packets these days) that's about right. If you make 'em text oriented and absent pretty pictures reviewers like Tom Pabst might not get the message

Dr. Mordrid

[Captain Marvel]

Well I have cable & MATROX and the [H] were down half the day

[Indiana]

Tom didn't get the message even thought they had all these nice pictures in their pdfs...

I think PDF is a nice format: you can get high-quality manuals/spec sheets/... with decent layout in a widely accepted format that can be easily printed - and the file-sizes still are reasonable in most cases.

[Brian Ellis]

Indiana

I think you are missing the point. I agree that PDF is a good format but it is ridiculous to fill them with such graphics that it takes a goodly fraction of an hour to download, when the graphics serve no useful purpose other than to make the pages "look pretty" but give absolutely no information. The same goes for web pages with Flash sequences, hefty graphics or excessive scripts. A few weeks ago, I accessed a website where the Home Page had an aggregate file size of over 8 Mb, which took 40 minutes to download from a slow server. This is just counterproductive, plain stupid, arrogant and thoughtless. I informed the site owner, who was unaware of the problems, probably because the "professionals" who designed it demoed it from the hard disk. To give them credit, they had the Home Page replaced by a simple one within 24 hours.

I maintain that the 'Net has such limitations that anything presented on it should be minimalist for the intended purpose. If the purpose is commercial, then this is doubly important so as not to frighten away prospective clients to the competition. It is all too easy to forget that 86.6% of professional users in the UK are hardwired into the phone system through a simple modem (and probably 100% in at least half of the 200 or thereabouts countries in the world).