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And to reply to TFA poster, READ

This hardware never stops changing, stay current or fall behind. I read the pulp version of cpu and read daily RSS feeds from half dozen hardware sites...and even still I have to look up what processors run at and their cache sizes. For the foreseeable future, we can look forward to more gibberish hardware names w/ some fleeting allusion to it's lineage but nothing related to it's abilities. Good stuff.

I agree. Ian Drew is the vice president of marketing at ARM Ltd. ARM sells chip technologies used in embedded devices and their competitors are Intel and AMD. Of course ARM Ltd would love if everyone bought "specialized" devices powered by the ARM Ltd technology instead of Intel/AMD powered general use netbooks. How he thinks a specific embedded device is less constrained than a netbook is beyond me. I think it's cool to browse the web from my ARM Ltd powered 42in LCD TV but I'll bet my next years salary that I can do more on the internet with my $250 netbook than I can with that TV. Think about ti though.. You will pay more for a web enabled DVD player, TV, and home stereo receiver, do you really need all three to be web enabled? The additional cost of those with the web enabled features will probably cost as much as a netbook plugged into the TV that you can browse from plus provide about 100x more functionality.

Here is an interview he had back in Jan 2009
http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?guid=&searchtype=0&article=articles/archive/c0901/67c01/67c01.asp&articleid=52267&WordList=&bJumpTo=True

The article states 5-6%, which jives with benchmarks I've found.

ACPI isn't friendly. Since all mobo manufacturers make their own quirky implementations that they provide drivers for Windows for, so things tend to work better on XP. Linux is stuck reverse-engineering that stuff. Some machines work well, some don't. The worse your machine works, the further from ACPI specs you know it is.

that's doubtful. all three of those solutions are about half the price of the cheapest Atom netbook. perhaps an Atom 330 w/ a generic mini-ITX motherboard would be cheaper than the C7 + EPIA, but a VIA C3 CPU/motherboard combo starts at around $60. and general-purpose processing power isn't what VIA processors aim towards. if you buy a VIA processor, it's going to be for:

• its ridiculously fast encryption capabilities due to VIA's Padlock Security Engine. in AES benchmarks the VIA CoreFusion Luke (based off of the 1 GHz Nehemiah C3 core) performs 13x faster than a 2.4 GHz P4--while using almost 1/7th the amount of power (TDP of 10W versus 67.6W). meanwhile, the 1.2 GHz C3 performs 6x faster than the 3 GHz P4.
• low power consumption->low heat output->longer battery life and less noise. using a 16 stage fully-pipelined superscalar architecture w/ a specialized 128-bit vector FPU (2 in the VIA Nano), SWAR/SIMD instruction sets, out-of-order execution & advanced branch prediction, and on-die encryption & twin RNGs, VIA processors achieve the highest per-Watt performance of just about any processor on the market.
• their multimedia-specific design. VIA embedded processors are exceptionally well suited to multimedia applications when paired with VIA's robust digital media IGP chipsets. not only do they possess on-die Floating Point "media" units, but by offloading processor-intensive tasks like video encoding/decoding and audio processing to off-die coprocessors, VIA embedded systems handle multimedia applications extremely efficiently. because of hardware-accelerated video processing, VIA systems can often match the performance of systems with twice their clock speed.
• hacker-friendly open hardware. features like LVDS connectors, LPC interface, pico-ITX form-factor, Linux support, etc. make VIA embedded solutions perfect for building set-top boxes, embedded devices, and personal hacking projects.

it's simply silly to try to compare Intel Atom netbooks with VIA embedded systems that are designed specifically for embedded multimedia applications. a netbook doesn't come with dual monitor support, TV out, S/PDIF, MPEG-2/4 hardware acceleration, a video capture interface, HDTV encoding, video de-blocking, etc. if you build a VIA set-top box, you're obviously not going to use it for gaming or to run Windows Vista. but as a set-top box, VIA solutions are more than adequate. so any additional processing power is just meaningless dicksizing with no real world benefits.

besides, the C7's successor--the VIA Nano--wipes the floor with the Intel Atom in multimedia encoding (LAME mp3 audio encoding, Windows Media Encoder video encoding, DivX movie encoding, Vista Movie Maker, TMPG VOB to WMV, etc.), HD video playback (1080p), and even in general-purpose computing performance.

They were nice enough to post their methodology and samples, although since the research and findings were posted by a group with a vested interest, there could easily be some... interpretation of the numbers. My guess for only citing 2006 and later is because Adobe took over in 2005, and I doubt that Macromedia was doing any significant statistical analysis of their user base.

And just as a fun comparison... In 2005, 88% of PC had some form of 'potentially unwanted programs' installed. http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles/archive/c0509/46c09/46c09.as p&guid= not quite as well laid out as the Adobe page, but for non-peer reviewed stuff who cares ;)

-Rick

He seems to be less anti-DirectX these days:

"JC: DX9 has its act together well. I like the version of DirectX on the 360. Microsoft is doing well with DX10 on tightening the specs and the exactness."

Of course, he's still calls it like it is:

"The new features are not exactly well-thought-out. Most developers are pretty happy with DX9. The changes with DX10 aren't as radical. It's not like getting pixel shaders for the first time. Single-pass shaders are nice with DX10, but it's a smaller change. "

Oh really? Did you bother to look at the numbers of the old cards before you said that? The 7800GTX has 24 (!) shader units. That's better than 32 how?

From: http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles/archive/c0508/12c08/12c08.as p&guid=

Okay, the 8500 (the $100 model) only has 16. But how does that compare to the 7800GTX I paid $500 for? The $200 8600 has 32, and all the other specs are higher also.

It makes -no- sense to buy a 7800 once the 8500 and 8600 are released.

I'm not affiliated with them at all, but honestly, I love the editorials in CPU Magazine ... I like the product reviews in Maximum PC a bit better, but the editorial content in CPU makes it worth my subscription. The Saint's editorials in particular tend to point out a *LOT* of flaws in MS's practices and licensing...

Those two are about the only ones I read completely through every month, of the half dozen magazines I get (I also read most of Linux Journal as well).

6 to 8 thousand? I laugh at your puny half-size system. You need to pay at least $15000 to have a competitive system at a lan party these days:

http://www.voodoopc.com/showroom.aspx?productID=10 90

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0601%2F14c01%2F 14c01.asp&articleid=29318&guid=972259F0597543C89D8 154D4FF63D608

8 grand. ha ha ha.

This months CPU (computer power user) features a gold-dipped voodoo system selling for a base price of $15000 (and going up with options).

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0601%2F14c01%2F 14c01.asp&articleid=29318&guid=972259F0597543C89D8 154D4FF63D608

http://www.voodoopc.com/showroom.aspx?productID=10 90

Enjoy!

Yes, this is actually the application that I used the touchscreen for. The hardware is featured in the November CPU magazine. It works well with MythTV, lets you navigate the menus, etc. An excerpt from the article is here:
http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0511%2F24c11%2F 24c11.asp&articleid=28671&guid=E32C504C6FF0444E887 913BB8925ED65&searchtype=0&WordList=&bJumpTo=True
If you can take a look at the magazine, you'll get a better picture of how this is all setup. It was a fun project and the touchscreen interface was more elegant than say a Matrix Orbital LCD screen.

...build your own notebook.

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article .asp?article=articles/archive/c0509/31c09a/31c09a. asp&guid=8211E93568BC44CCBB9A7980FB4250D3

Not exactly what you're describing, but it's a start.

I remember reading a story about this from one of the people on the DirectX 1.0 developer team.

Impressed, whyever for? Stuff like that is why I normally put together my own desktops. I wanted to stay away from laptops to avoid having to deal with some Windows-taxing OEM, but at least there seems to be a burgeoning whitebox, if not a DIY market for them.

Thats what really is "Ugly, Boring & Uninspired" http://www.computerpoweruser.com/images/smartcompu ting/fullsize/00631340.jpg

When will this stop. Is there that little news, or are the editors days too filled writing articles for better paying gigs and such?

And for those of you who want to know what the advantages of this router are, here's the relevant part of the article from the link I provided:

Even more exciting is the router's GameFuel technology. Gimmicky as it may sound, GameFuel is the means whereby D-Link's DGL-4300 balances time-sensitive packets with the rest of your network traffic using dynamic fragmentation to divide larger packages into smaller streams and packet prioritization to classify the importance of packets according to a number of parameters.

And although the mechanics behind GameFuel are undoubtedly far more complicated, the only real concern is if the technology works. To test, I connected my workstation to one of the LAN ports and connected a wireless client to the same broadband connection; initiating two 500MB file transfers to the remote laptop at 54Mbps. Then, I fired up a P2P app on my workstation and began downloading several large DivX files. Imagine my surprise when, despite all of the concurrent network traffic, I was able to play Half-Life 2 Deathmatch without a hiccup.

I'm very interested in this router and may purchase it (or the nicer 4600) in the near future. I don't play online games but I'm interested in VoIP, P2P, and Shoutcast hosting. Any combination of these things was impossible in the past but this router sounds like the answer. It got a great review in Computer Power User (CPU) magazine which I believe to be a very reputable source.

I'm a little wary of the claim of better ping times though. This may be a statement concerning QoS packet scheduling because I've heard from a few sources (including Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel) that 1000baseT has higher latency than 10/100. However, D-Link boasts that the router's onboard processor is much faster than most, allowing many more simultaneous connections, so perhaps it can direct packets more quickly than comparable products.

I should mention here that Linksys has absolutely abhorrent customer support and that I highly recommend supporting the competitive companies. I'm on my 2nd (non-consecutive) Linksys router and it's been very unreliable from the get go. Their tech support advised me to wait a while before calling back, and when I did they told me my 1 month replacement window had expired. 8 days ago after MUCH frustration with 3 techs and a manager they finally agreed to send me a replacement (shipped at my expense) in 3 working days and I've recieved no such thing.

Linksys is riding on its laurels. Hopefully they'll get the message when people start buying imaginative new products from competitors.

They may be the largest provider with the merge, but they're going to have to find another key innovation to keep customers than just high-speed internet.

The SnapServer is a pretty cool concept - we use several here at the office for NAS-only, and they work quite well and are a, well, snap to set up. For the home user? You might think so... or not. You can get an open-source server on a nice PC platform running Linux for under $200. Don't believe me? Check out Rob's column in Computer Power User (CPU). No intentional karma whoring going on here. I'm getting underway in doing my own little X-Box/NAS/Media Server project as soon as the parts come in...

Liquid Audio's days are numbered [...] The board voted unanimously in favor of a $57 million stockholder cash payout. They would rather sell the company, but if there is no buyer then they would probably have to liquidate the company.

Anyone here who owns an IBM desktop or laptop wonder why they can not get linux to boot on it?

Well according to the July edition of CPU magazine,(sorry its not online) IBM secretly implemented palidome drm chips implementating Microsoft/intel's trustworthy computing called tcpa in almost every desktop sold! Andhere are the crippled laptops, and here are the crippled servers. Infact the system is so locked down with each component trusting one another that if you replace the floppy drive for example the system will not run! Remember the motherboard and the eide card both trust the floppy drive with the right encyption sequence in it. Readit and weep.

Oh and yes I submited this to Rob and he did not post it here. Grrr. I encourage everyone reading this to submit it as a story because this is x100 times as worse as what sony is doing.