Software that makes your jaw drop

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

XBoxLPU

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2001
4,249
1
0
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: Nothinman
The betterment of computerdom involves a migration away from Windows.

Hell, ya. Then people would be talking about tweaking stuff like OpenMosix to get highest performance out of their machines instead of banging their heads on some obscure registery settings to knock 15 seconds off of their boot-up times.

Only n00bs are like that.........
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
0
0
Originally posted by: XBoxLPU
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: Nothinman
The betterment of computerdom involves a migration away from Windows.

Hell, ya. Then people would be talking about tweaking stuff like OpenMosix to get highest performance out of their machines instead of banging their heads on some obscure registery settings to knock 15 seconds off of their boot-up times.

Only n00bs are like that.........

Well, ya. It was bit of a exageration, no insult intended and I apoligise if I offended.

But OpenMosix is definately the type of software that makes my jaw drop.

It's a simple way of adding clustering technology to a Linux computer thru some patches and some other software.

What it does is if you have 2 or more computers on a network that are setup to use it, it will dynamicly migrate proccessing threads from one computer to another to even out the workload. The great thing about it is that it doesn't need to have programs specially designed to utilize it, it just works with normal program proccessing threads.

So say your ripping a DVD or compiling software or something like that and you have a couple computers sitting around. Say a desktop, and then a standby or a server or whatever. So your ripping/encoding a DVD, and you decide you want to browse the internet or watch TV on your computer or play a game or whatever on your desktop. So then you open up your second application and the machine gets bogged down for a bit because your using 100% cpu time already on the DVD ripping/encoding.

Well what would happen after a couple seconds is that your encoding application will begin to have it's proccessing done on the other machine, and then send the results back to your desktop, all automagicly.

So you could have 2-3 or a dozen computers all hooked up in a network and your effectively sharing the proccessing power and memory in one big computer. It's a cluster, but it doesn't require any special programming technics to use like in a Beowolf style cluster.

Of course that's not the only one I like. Azureus is a pretty kick-@ss program. It's a wonderfull example of what you can accomplish with Java programming language...
 

UCJefe

Senior member
Jan 27, 2000
302
0
0
Originally posted by: ^Sniper^
Originally posted by: LouPoir
Originally posted by: Czar
Nasa World Wind


I agree

whats managed DX 9 that it uses?


Managed DirectX is just the DirectX 3D graphics API implemented in the .NET framework. If you're not a developer, you don't care. By the way, the C# source is shipped with the app. Pretty cool stuff. Oh, and I second + third + fourth NASA WorldWind for being the most jaw dropping app ever (other than maybe Keystone, but you get the point)!!
 

Elcs

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2002
6,278
6
81
Workbench

The best OS ever developed bar none. BRING BACK THE AMIGA!!! Bet you could rig one to play Doom3 :p
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81
Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Post software here that makes you grin with its coolness. My computer is kinda bare still and I want to put some worthwhile tools on it. Thanks!
FireFox? Please :p
What gets me going is Partition Magic 8 ;) When I see it in action, I just think... Wow!
A couple more that I think are cool are... Spybot Search & Destroy and Astra32. They are both very good at what they do.

If you just want something flashy... get a Mirror ball

 

Elcs

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2002
6,278
6
81
Originally posted by: Blain
Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Post software here that makes you grin with its coolness. My computer is kinda bare still and I want to put some worthwhile tools on it. Thanks!
FireFox? Please :p
What gets me going is Partition Magic 8 ;) When I see it in action, I just think... Wow!
A couple more that I think are cool are... Spybot Search & Destroy and Astra32. They are both very good at what they do.

If you just want something flashy... get a Mirror ball

Astra32?

Reminded me of a great program... AIDA32. Never leave a PC without it :)
 

Sunner

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
11,641
0
76
Nero, such a high quality program, and with version 6, it's still not overly bloated unlike just about every other piece of software out there.
Mozilla/Firefox, finally, the web is useful once again.
DC++, everything I've ever wanted(well, for my computer anyway) is there :D
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
18,998
0
0
Besides which SpinRite is OS independent! Gibson Research and every techie type should have it in his toolbox (even though it's a bit pricey). I notice that quite a few of the wares mentioned are OS independent - PartitionMagic, etc. Now that PM is under the Symantec, I wonder how long it will be before they manage to kill it with bloat...
. IAC, I'm getting more and more away from Win myself. I've got Suse on here and it lets me do most of the things I need to do. And I do recommend that everyone check into a "unix-like" OS. If you RE XP, you'll find sizable chunks of OpenSource unix code in there...
. And, Oh Yeah!, I forgot to mention Audacity.
.bh.

Where's the :sun: ?
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
Besides which SpinRite is OS independent!

Hardly, it requires DOS or Windows. It can make a bootable image so that you can boot DOS to run it, but it still requies DOS. The reason it works with all of those filesystems is because it works below them, working to recover data from indivdual sectors on the drive instead of clusters of data in the filesystem. The tool itself isn't bad, but I just really dislike Steve Gibson so I avoid his stuff whenever possible.

And it's in x86 assembler so it'll only run on 2 of my 5 machines.
 

Sniper82

Lifer
Feb 6, 2000
16,517
0
76
Checking out Nasa World Wind but I don't get it? Its just showing earth? Whats it suppost to do? Hows it work?
 

TAandy

Diamond Member
Oct 24, 2002
3,218
0
0
Originally posted by: Elcs
Workbench

The best OS ever developed bar none. BRING BACK THE AMIGA!!! Bet you could rig one to play Doom3 :p

:thumbsup: