Slashdot Mirror

I don't think Sony would like paying Microsoft royalties one bit on thier bread and butter.

Sony has invested heavily on the DVD format and is looking towards the future.

Remember Sony has a high aminosity towards Mircosoft due to circumstances in the set top box market and Sony's open support for linux.

Like in the Eric Frank Russell story "U-turn", "[m]ay you live in interesting times."

I'm sorry I can't address your question for good remote filesystems in the face of an unreliable network. My network has been relatively reliable and that's been a decreasing concern. Perhaps network reliability will be less of a concern for you, too, in future.

Lately, what I've been looking for is a remote filesystem that provides performance, security, flexibility, the latter in reference to being able to log into someone else's desktop machine and easily get my home directory mounted, whether from a big server up 24x7, or from my desktop.

Some have dabbled with DCE/DFS, but I've heard that's slowly dieing, ponderous to set up, performance suffers.

SFS looks intriguing, but I haven't heard pro or con about its performance. It appears to be secure and flexible.

NFS is an old friend and, yes, if the network or the server dies, a lot of local sessions will hang interminably 'NFS server not responding'. But, this doesn't happen as much as it did 5 years ago.

Right now we're running NFS v3, but the new NFSv4 looks like it has a better security model.

Finally (and you shouldn't even think about this if network reliability is an issue), simple block service like iSCSI looks promising as a way of interchangeably moving around from desktop to desktop and getting your same home directory no matter where you are. More, you could conceivably even get your own flavor of OS booting, be it Red Hat 9, Win2K, XP, Gentoo, etc. Don't know about its security; it's heavily dependent on a reliable, high-performance network, but looks like a good way to get the most storage for your dollar (NAS instead of SAN).

Sony is actively pushing the Blu-Ray format. There is already the HD BDZ-S77 Blu-Ray HD recorder/player devices being sold in Japan.

Blu-Ray can hold 23GB on a disk, but more importantly it can have very high-speed data transfers, and the pro Blu-Ray devices even have two heads for faster transfer.

my humble piece in norwegian

some pictures down the page

English explaination of the "parallax" technology

Sharps own specification page

It's only supprted by Windows XP sp1a, by the way.

penhead

it on Digit Life first.

It seems the FX series dosent really have proper DX9 support. Directx9 calls for FP24 support internally, but the FX series only has Fp16 and FP32 support.
Read This Quote: If it were not the NV35's results, the numbers in the table wouldn't be so different, right? It's well known that ATi chips use 24 bit floating-point numbers internally in the R300 core and this precision is not influenced by the partial precision modifier. But it's interesting that NVIDIA uses 16 bit floating-point numbers irrespective of the operation precision requested(!), though the partial precision term was introduced by NVIDIA's request, NV3x GPUs support 32 bit floating-point precision under OpenGL NV_fragment_program extension, and NVIDIA advertised their new-generation videochips as capable of TRUE 32bit floating-point rendering!

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/gffx/5900u.htm l#p34

36,2 - 23,4 (decrease by 35%)
1024 to 1600 (increase by 60%)

So wheres the "fillrate is king" in this example? why is the heads edgy in doom3? becuase we've belived fillrate is king? graphics are nothing without polygons, and im glad 3dmark03 pushes this.

A benchmark that uses the Dawn quality would be interesting, perfectly round objects with soft shadows and lots of pixel and shader effects, with a real forest behind this time. Cinematic FX my buttybutt, its only useful as tech-demo hype. (btw ATIs monkey demo is still not a real forest, behind the first leaf layer its just a cubemap, check the polycount)

It also seems that the Transmeta processor has an average power usage of around 7W whereas the Nehamiah (according to Digit Life) has an idle power usage of ~5W and a max of around 15-20W.

This is the chip that kills intel's god awful dependency on rambus, about time. VIA did release a chipset that supported ddr quite some time back IIRC, but the performance was god awful so it was 'overlooked'.

The i875 is not the chip that kills intel's god awful dependency on rambus, that was the i845D released in December 2001, and absolutely ubiquitous in review systems and consumer PCs since then.

VIA's P4X266 was not overlooked because of the performance, which was perfectly decent, but because Intel sued VIA for patent infringement over it, causing most motherboard manufacturers to avoid it for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Intel. VIA eventually set up a platform division mostly to sell motherboards based around the P4X266 because almost no-one else would.

Confident exposition, "facts" that anyone who's even read a few articles on any hardware review site in the past year should know are false, +5 interesting. Man, that is not a good sign...

I agree with the OP that the x86 architecture is probably limited by it's high degree of backward compatibility. I don't have technical facts to back this up, but I think common-sense would agree with me here.

Well, yes and no. How about I quote an article that vaguely touches on the matter? Here's a random article that came up when I searched for "microinstructions x86". It somewhat explains the issues (though the author doesn't seem to understand that floating point registers, MMX registers, and SSE registers are all general purpose registers for most purposes).

Ah, but my point. The x86 is natively CISC (Complex Instruciton Set Computer) which means instructions have variable length and variable arguments. (Of course, SSE and MMX are both SIMD and have instructions varrying from 2 to 5 bytes long, so they're working against the whole RISC idea, but they've got their own special units.) Meanwhile, the SPARC is RISC based. In short, it's easier to make a RISC processor run faster. But that might not matter so much.

x86 implementation of the present day is essentially a RISC processor on the back end. The native CISC instructions are transformed into micro-instructions. This transformation is done in a decoder. So long as that transformation can be done quickly and the micro-instructions well pipelined, the decoder unit shouldn't be too much of a killer.

Having said that, it's worth mentioning some of the strange things that the decoder has to dedicate silicon to. Some trouble instructions are problematic in more than one way, as noted previously with plex86, PUSHF which pushes the current CPU flags (e.g. interrupt flag (enabled/disabled), zero flag (last comparison equal/last sub result in a zero)) onto the stack is problematic. Then there are others which are just a bad idea. PUSHA is an old instruction which pushes all of the 386 general purpose registers on to the stack (including (E)SP, even though it's ignored when POPA is called). These instructions are those sort of useless instructions which came from the philosophy that computers should, on the lower level, start to emulate the higher level languages they're normally programmed in. That idea didn't pan out, especially as RISC became clearly superior. Another similar strangeness is found in XLATB which I haven't seen used in my natural life by a human nor a compiler, but is still supported in modern CPUs. That's not even to get into BCD instructions...

As it stands, though, last I checked what most hurt computer performance in real situations are cache misses and branch mispredictions. I have seen HP make a processor that was completely backwards incompatible that solved this problem. That is, it forced you to recompile all of your old code. It packed instructions around every branch which indicated the full length of both paths. Then both paths could be evaluated at a low cost, and the results of the untaken path thrown away. Other similar things were done to increase the success of cache prefetch and whatnot. Server only, of course -- no one wants a non-backwards compatible processor on their desktop.

But, back to the article which is about new instructions which will improve some processing intensive applications. However, the article notes, problems with branch misprediction are not solved in the new Intel chip. The processor will be clocked faster (and hence, so will the cache) so the problem may be a bit less noticable.

But therein is the

The software solution may seem to help with some computer setups, but that's because many computers are misconfigured: a 56k modem with compression needs to be hooked up to the computer at 230kbps or 460kbps because when the modem performs the decompression, it will need to send a high-speed data stream to the computer. The best solution for those high data rates is to just get a modern USB modem.

Tom's Hardware may have their own opinion, but I
happened to read about Audigy vs. "something else", with actual measurements and all.
Audigy scored kind of pale. However, if you're into sound mainly for games, it's insignificant, because Audigy is pretty good after all.

Fibre chanels I thought were used because
1) Huge expansivity .
2) Faster speeds, esp. over LAN (Storage area networks)
Why would one want to use it in a home setup?
You probably are not going to buy more than 3 or 4 Harddisks. I say if you want speed use more RAM(*though you wont get much for $250 * results might vary). If you want expansivity(not too much) and relatively fast (depends on a lot of stuff) access speeds and standards based setup, may I suggest iSCSI

more coverage, from Tom's Hardware Guide (and here), to some site i've never even heard of...

If you measure quality with a thermometer, I suppose you're right.

The AMD Athlon XP lacks for any integrated overheating protection means, and the most of systems based on it do not have any correct thermocontrol mechanisms. At present Athlon XP based systems do have thermal problems and are not protected from serious failures of cooling systems.

Gotta love Google ;-)

Here are some other useful SL-C700 links I've found in the last week or so:

MobileNews article with LOTSA pix (in Japanese, but the pix are easy to see).

Here is a mobigeeks blurb (with several off-links to other interesting places, also a forum).

About a quarter of the way down this page, there are some good closeup pix.

Here is an nvmax.com article, describing Dynamism's efforts, and several other off-links.

Here is Sharp's own page, also in Japanese, but has a couple of decent pix.

Here's a German article, with a good description of the specs.

Yep, NEC has announced a Crusoe desktop for the Japanese market. No surprise if the company will present new PowerMate eco for the North American and European markets

NEC announces PC on 1GHz Crusoe TM5800

Try again, coward.

"As for graphics workstations, office computers with thousands of documents and moreover file-servers, NTFS shows higher performance."

This site has some pics of the camera!

http://www.digit-life.com/news.html

looks to me like ogg beats mp3 for 128 and 160kbps.

Transferring 20G over USB1.1 would be a pain. Using USB2.0, on the other hand... look here: USB2.0 vs FireWire.

Why wouldn't Microsoft just write an XBOX->DX8 wrapper?

No need, the graphics API on the XBox is DirectX.

See

• http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0003/14.xbox.s html
• http://www.digit-life.com/articles/xbox/
• http://www.activewin.com/faq/x-box.shtml

As an added bonus the networking APIs are the same DirectPlay APIs on the PC.

"In the Bee Line network MMS messages were successfully transferred from one phone to another, also 7650, but an attempt to send an MMS to the SonyEricsson T68i failed, because the phones have different capabilities in displaying images, i.e. they are incompatible on this level."

A review with lots of great pictures can be found here.

You might appreciate a review like this one: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/zoltrixpro6/
They actually take the time to try and gauge the quality of the DACs/ADCs with another, reference soundcard. I thought it was much better than "Joe, the Janitor, likes this better than the other one."

Same here (Plexwriter 10/12/32A).

The great thing about Plextors insn't the reading, though, it's the writing. I've never seen a CD burned in a Plextor fail anywhere. Which is more than I can say for a lot of other drives I've tried (Philips, HP, Sony, etc.), regardless of the CD-R brand.

Here's a table comparing the BLER (block error) ratio of several CD writers:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/cdrw5/

RMN
~~~

First, that massive 20 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be needed, every bit of it. There is no bandwidth-saving logic on the chip at all, unlike ATI & nVidia's latest. Since occlusion detection can make a significant difference, and Z compression & fast Z clear also help a great deal (ATI claims their 8.8 GB/s performs like a 12+ GB/s system, a 36% boost), the Parhelia could be considered to have only 55% more bandwidth than a GF4 Ti4600 instead of 110%. If the next-gen offerings from ATI & nVidia have similar memory specs, the Parhelia could be at a significant disadvantage almost as soon as it comes out.

Second, the Digit-Life article mentions that early scores (from very raw drivers) show a mere 20-30% increase in scores over a Ti4600. Now admittedly this should increase, but Matrox are not known for their 3D driver optimisations, and nVidia are. A unified driver architecture will give you a head start right out of the gate, as you can take some advantage of previous optimisations immediately, whereas Matrox will have more work in front of them to get their drivers performing near the potential of the hardware. Look at ATI; it took them 6 months of focussed effort (and the odd quality hack along the way) to get their drivers up to scratch. Matrox have not traditionally given their 3D side or their software side as much attention, in my experience.

To me, while the triple-head feature could be useful to some (though I dislike external DACs - it's difficult to sync them closely to internal DACs, causing monitor beats), the 10 bit colour is to be applauded, and the vertex handling sounds very nice, anyone looking for performance would be better advised to wait for R300 and NV30.

On a slightly different note, was anyone else disappointed by the quality of the 16x AA screenshots? I expected more. The edge-only AA feature sounds like a very good idea (though it will not help alpha textures, just like multisampled implementations), but I'm a bit jaded after the miracles promised by ATI's SmoothVision didn't exactly set the world on fire. Guess we'll have to wait for performance figures.

Also, I wonder what their yields will be like. 80 million transistors on a 0.15 micron process sounds like something that's difficult to do cheaply.

Try the digit life article rewritten by the original author in english.

Why cant someone put such a processor, 256Mb of ram, a silent slow disk, vga, nic and ethernet into a small box (no extreme design, just something slightly smaller than a minitower).

There is nothing snake oilish about these compression claims. Only a few ISPs are supporting it, but the v.42 compression standard has been out for a while. Check out this comparison to see how it differs from older compression standards. The key is that these claimed ratios are in ideal situations -- ie, when you're downloading a great deal of text, not the high-bandwidth consuming images or video streams. Those are already highly compressed, and so are unlikely to benefit from further compression. In fact, it is a fairly trivial consequence that any compression method will make some kinds of files larger, not smaller. A fatter pipe is the only solution sometimes, and that just isn't going to happen with POTS.

Kyro uses tile based renedering depending on the overdraw of the scene that 12m triangles/sec can act like 2-3 times that. Same thing with fillrate.

Name a card that achieves more than a few fps in 4x agp mode versus 2x.

This is the best technical presentation I've seen to date and is what people pointed me to when I asked questions about truform, good luck.

There's a bunch of other good reviews of the set in all its forms and splendor.


Digit-Life
HardOCP
AnandTech
AMDDb
Via Hardware


</karmawhoring>

It's already heading our way. Check out:

Disposable cell phone Disposable cell phone

But, we should always consider the other side of our use and toss society:

Disposable cell phone and the toxic price

Don't all SBLive! cards have SP/DIF output?

Or. More to the point, six channels worth of it?

Pinouts of the Live's expansion headers are on this page, and Hoontech sells a fairly cheap ($25-35) adapter offering some digital IO capabilities.

Or. CVS ALSA, these days, supports the digital output of the Live 5.1 cards, which have a coaxial digital output on the back panel. OEM-packaged Live 5.1 cards are also a fairly cheap $25-35.

Seems to work fairly well for me, driving an Audio Alchemy DDE 1.1 (which I'm using as a DAC instead of the thing built into the sound card).

Knowing the processor socket is a good thing
(unless intel deprecates it too early).

Another good thing is the MAP, Mobile AGP Package, which can make it possible for some upgradability of the graphics too (like some people succeded in upgrading their Dell PC's to Geforce2Go).
Read about Nvidias cool 64 Mb MAP package.

Maybe someone knows when you can expect mobiles with this option on the market so you can buy one without having to wait for the good graphics chips to be available.
Also, there's talk about intel working for more standards in modular mobiles, any examples? I'd love a MiniPCI with both Firewire and 100 MBps networking, that socket is just to good for a measly modem.

I've compared the same site with and without mod_gzip over a modem, and mod_gzip is definately faster. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Compr ession/PPP.html agrees - fewer packets because of smaller data = faster performance on a modem. In addition, V.42bis checks to see if its own compression would be beneficial or not, and if not, it switches over to transparent mode. V.44 does the same thing, and compresses better. At http://www.digit-life.com/articles/compressv44vsv4 2bis/, if you look at table3, you'll see that pkzip compresses everything [that's not already compressed] about twice as much as either modem standard.

So, mod_gzip *does* in fact help out modem users, as it compresses data much more than any modem does, reducing the total amount of data to be sent by a greater amount while simultaneously reducing the number of packets sent.

I use mod_gzip, and everyone else should too. :)

That's a pretty crappy test criteria-- limiting the input to 128kbit/sec-- for those of us itnerested in achieving as-close-to-CD-as-possible performance from our compressed music.

I don't claim to have golden ears, but I can distinctly hear the difference between different playback engines (example; on a Mac, the Audion playback engine is considerable better sounding than iTunes) and different encoding engines with nearly the same settings (LAME is, by far and away, the best I have heard yet).

In any case, it would be useful to have an expanded test that includes higher bitrates for those that listen to tunes on something other than crappy computer speakers.

Ogg vs. LAME article

An excellent Ars article that only covers differences between mp3 encoders.

MP3 tech has a bunch of useful resources.

One of the best sites around, r3mix offers a wealth of technical information, some very well executed scientific and listening tests, and a section that destroys a lot of the myths surrounding mp3s.

This is not news, as there are several of these players out right now. I've been in the market for one for about a month. Supply is very limited as is information, so hopefully Philips (yes, one 'l' not two) device will spur more interest. Check out this link for info on the media and players. Unfortunately, most of the ones listed in the article are unavailable or hard to find.

Personally, I find them better than standard MP3 players because for half the money I get 3 times the storage, plus I can swap out disks easily. These things are actually very available. A computer show never goes by where I don't see them. And the size advantage is nice in some cases. I fly a hang glider and I want something small that I don't have to make extra room for in my harness.

Now if only it supports a flash ROM so I can write an ogg vorbis decoder for it.

Hey,

For video, there are no choices that are compatable with Linux and support both;

I. 3D (good, current-generation)

II. TV-out (RCA and/or S-video)

You could try a VGA to TV converter. The Guillemot VGA-to-TV
Converter Deluxe-2 is good, according to this article. And only $120.

It might be worth your taking a look. You should be able to get 3D through it, because it just deals with the VGA output.

Michael

Tom's Hardware had a Micro ATX demo motherboard, but does a full ATX demo board for nvidia's new chipset exist?

How does this board benchmark against the MSI K7-Master? Is the inverted PCI slot supposed to be a CNR riser?

Yes (from Asus), dunno (but look here for benchmarks), and I think so :-)

I take that back - my bad. This is debatable, see the benchmarks at http://www.digit-life.com/articles/gf3/index.html for more info.
Of course, these are using pre-release drivers. If anything NVidia has shown us they can do wonderful things regarding performance with their drivers, so perhaps these numbers will change and my original statement will stand. ;)