Processor / OS

[hrothgar]

Here is a suggestion / question

 

When Fred and Uday go to redesign the BBO software, they're going to need to make some decisions about hardware / Operating System requirements.

 

Please note, I am NOT trying to restart the whole Open Source debate. Rather, I'm worried about something a lot more fundamental. There are some very sweet toolkits available for graphics rendering on Windows. However, a lot of these are designed for gamers who have pretty high systems, tricked out graphics cards, and the like. I know that BBO has lot of members from countries like China and Turkey where the average systems are much older and less powerful than the one on my desk (or even my laptop).

 

Question 1: Is there any good way that BBO can determine what type of computers are "popular" with its end users? I suspect that the application can query the OS and processor, however, this raises some privacy issues.

 

Question 2: If this doesn't prove practical, do folks have any other ideas how one might get this info? I'm skeptical about surveys and the like because there are real dangers with bias. (For example, it might be reasonable to assume that non-English speakers have less powerful systems than native english speakers. Non-english speakers are also less likely to complete a survey written in English)

[uday]

about 35% of users are dot net capable, fwiw

we have access to some OS info and could get a rough idea of OSs in use.

[Sigi_BC84]

I think one should rule everything out that requires Windows XP or heavy downloads. As nice at it would be to use .NET or Java, both require heavy downloads (very inconvenient for modem users). If you don't happen to have .NET installed (i.e. you don't have an updated Windows XP or any other OS) you are either locked out of using BBO without major hassles or at least required to make a ~22 MB download (takes hours on a slow modem link).

 

Java doesn't come preinstalled with Windows either, unfortunately (it's not as big as .NET but it's a separate download in any case if the user doesn't happen to have it already). At least it comes for all major platforms and you really don't have to worry on compatibility here.

 

I don't see at the moment where BBO could make sensible use of a graphic toolkit aimed at games. Just for drawing the cards you certainly would not need that. A good idea is to use scalable vector graphics for the cards, but the SVG libraries are lightweight and you can always cache bitmaps and redraw only when the user resizes the window.

 

There are several cross-platform GUI toolkits such as Qt or WxWindows which don't have heavy hardware requirements and would make the client portable to other platforms such as MacOS or Linux. Nothing will be as fast on old machines as the current client, though, I guess.

 

Here is my suggestion for the target platform (in terms of hardware performance): any machine that is running Firefox, IE 5, Opera 8 or any other recent web browser reasonably fast should be required to run BBO reasonably fast -- since one would assume that internet connected machines will have a browser installed and running anyway.

 

--Sigi

[mgoetze]

I don't see how you are going to find out that I'm actually running BBO in a virtual machine, and would greatly prefer a native OS X version... In fact, I spent the past few months away from BBO because I didn't have Windows available to me.

[Miron]

I'm a bit affraid of .NET:

1. The instalation problems as mentioned.

2. It is slow, when I run application which is slow, it is always .NET (no idea why - even when the developers say it is optimalizied).

 

Is it possible to port .NET outside Windows? (never have heard of it, but I'm stucked in windows :D )

[mgoetze]

Is it possible to port .NET outside Windows? (never have heard of it, but I'm stucked in windows :D )

http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page