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I've been using this for some time now and like it a lot. Typically, the major problem with these applications is texture management - something that isn't an issue in the 2D world - and this one seems to do it very well on my ancient GeForce256. Once Longhorn comes out (:)) then this kind of thing will become more prevalent, if for no other reason than much of what you need to do it is built into the OS - video here. The other approach is not to make a desktop replacement, but create a while new platform.

You can read this for a little more info.

Peercy and Olano (Click on "PDF" in the upper right)

Presentation

ASHLI

GPGPU

More than Moore's Law

Moore's law : still for wimps

Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.

OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.

Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?

Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?

And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?

Do you even remember PixelFlow from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.

Over at ExtremeTech, they have a great article right now that compares OGG/WMA/MP3/AAC codecs and their conclusion is that AAC is the best overall codec in terms of quality. Codec Shootout

So, Perhaps, AAC needs to be "broken" in order to prevent an inferior codec standard from gaining too much momentum. This already happened with MP3. Personally, I like the idea of OGG, and it received a strong 2nd place finish in the report.

quote
The JoyDress is integrated with flexible vibrapads that vibrate by programmed impulses from a thin, user-controlled command pad connected by tiny wires. It enhances the feeling of body consciousness with pleasant sensations that energize feelings, stimulate blood circulation, and give you a gentle massage.
/quote

You can look at the pictures and then try to find the gadget. It usually went like this for me :

"Woah, nice!"
"Oh, she's holding a phone."

This picture looks like a good concept. After beating up that guy for looking way better then me (see : Fight Club), I can mug him of that expensive gadget.

Yup...it's called the JoyDress.

The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC

I don't think this is true anymore, at least not if you're willing to turn your computer resolution down to the low levels your console displays. With Halo, for instance, it looks like you can get 640x480x50fps (i.e. approximately TV resolution with better-than-interlaced-TV framerate) with a GeforceFX 5200 ($55 on pricewatch) or with a Radeon 9200 ($40 on pricewatch). Oh, and you can get both those cards with TV Out at that price, so you can use your larger TV screen if you want.

"Several readers wrote to me from .mac addresses, and one of them actually looked into this. He wrote to an Apple representative and asked, "Is Apple willing to license FairPlay to other hardware vendors and/or other online download providers? If so, can you send me details about the licensing agreement?" The short but sweet reply he received from her was, "The answer is no."

"Several readers wrote to me from .mac addresses, and one of them actually looked into this. He wrote to an Apple representative and asked, "Is Apple willing to license FairPlay to other hardware vendors and/or other online download providers? If so, can you send me details about the licensing agreement?" The short but sweet reply he received from her was, "The answer is no." What I don't understand is why Apple doesn't make the iPod capable of playing WMA files. If that's where they make their money, wouldn't it make sense for them to make it capable of supporting all those other online music stores? Give people using MusicMatch, Napster, BuyMusic.com, or Wal-Mart's online service a reason to buy an iPod, right? The hardware is capable of it; it uses PortalPlayer silicon and software, just like Creative, Rio Audio, Samsung, and many others. I spoke with Microsoft and confirmed that they certainly would license WMA to Apple in a heartbeat."

Has everyone already completely forgotten about LaGrande?

The tech sites certainly don't seem to be making much fuss about the fact that Prescott has this technology already in it. I wonder how they can be that unknowing of it. There was this big Extremetech article on LaGrande though.

Even on Slashdot no-one seems to be bringing it up these days. For me, the benchmarks aren't even worth looking at with the knowledge that these processors are the beginning of the DRM revolution. Seems they're being able to sneak the technology inside every PC just as they've planned it.

Still, sticking with AMD is going to be just a temporary measure. Is there any talk about integrating DRM into the PowerPC? If not, maybe the next motherboard upgrade could be a Pegasos or one could just go with a Mac.

Here is one Check out entries 4 and 6. Same type of interconnect between nodes, the Opteron cluster has 316 CPU's more, and is slower.

Here

The first example is scientific code, where communcation is high both between CPU's and between nodes

Not by a long shot. Embedded platforms use PPC, Motorolla 68K, embedded MIPS, ARM, x86, SuperH, i960, and a host of other CPU platforms. For a good overview of embedded processors check out this article over at extremetech.

Extremetech also has a review too. They have a more negative opinion. link

Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.

OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look at the comparisons for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.

Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.

OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look at the comparisons for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.

Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.

OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look at the comparisons for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.

Taking into account that they bash the Apple/Quicktime MPEG-4 quality, and that the article is published by Ziff-Davis (Who I consider to be the least credible source for information in the industry), you might as well be reading an article published by Microsoft about how great WMV is.

OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look at the comparisons for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.

Well, seeing how bad ET's iTunes Bad, WMA Good article was, I figure Doom9's codec comparison is better than this.

And yes, Doom9's comparison includes XViD.

In reference to your "munge together" bit, check these out:

The LJ article I mentioned

A similar article

check this article out about turbotax spyware

You should try reading the actual article I wrote on the project before you make that call...

As this is almost certainly the vehicle by which DRM will become all-encompassing, perhaps we should do something about stopping it.

I doubt we can, of course, but stranger things have happened.

Tech-Report Prescott Review
accelenation Prescott Review
Ace's Hardware Prescott Review
Gamers Depot Prescott Review
HardTecs4U
Hexus
K-Hardware Prescott Review,
Legit Reviews Prescott Review
LostCircuits
MBReview Prescott Review
VR-Zone
X-bit labs Prescott Review
XtremeSystems Prescott Review
Extreme-tech Prescott Review

Tom's Hardware has been running a great series of articles reviewing motherboards for the Athlon64. ExtremeTech also has a good review of Athlon64 motherboards. And AnandTech recently wrote up a useful AMD 2004 CPU roadmap.

I've been looking at this a lot lately since I was just about to build a new box. Ultimately, I decided not to go with a Athlon64 (too expensive for the limited benefit), but I did find reading all these articles useful in making that decision.

Tom's Hardware has been running a great series of articles reviewing motherboards for the Athlon64. ExtremeTech also has a good review of Athlon64 motherboards. And AnandTech recently wrote up a useful AMD 2004 CPU roadmap.

I've been looking at this a lot lately since I was just about to build a new box. Ultimately, I decided not to go with a Athlon64 (too expensive for the limited benefit), but I did find reading all these articles useful in making that decision.

Alright, let's stop letting microsoft do all our visual design. Evidenced here. That looks remarkably like WinXP's Control Panel. I'm sorry, but the general trend in desktop distros, especially ones with KDE, is to make things look like windows. Can we please try to innovate a little more on the user interface? I use Enlightenment, I think it does a fairly good job of this. I mean, some of the top downloads for themes are based on Mac's OS X. We need a defined Linux-look and feel that's not based on something developed by someone else. The Linux desktop should not try to be a clone of the Windows. see here.

ExtremeTech has a good recent article on building your own home theater PC (basically, a high end PC-based PVR). Nice configuration they got there. I'm thinking of doing something similar, but with the Antec Overture case.

ExtremeTech has a good recent article on building your own home theater PC (basically, a high end PC-based PVR). Nice configuration they got there. I'm thinking of doing something similar, but with the Antec Overture case.

I'm not the only one that has seem this; check the benchmarks. I'm sure if you Google-around you can find more.

Perhaps the limiting factor is the machine you're using? When I connected the same drive to an older laptop, the transfer rate dropped to about 1/3 the rated speed. The bottleneck may be elsewhere in your I/O path.

In addition, all PC USB 2.0/Firewire interfaces are not equal, and my testing was performed with a 2.4.22-based Linux kernel. There are many variables that will impact performance, and isolating a constriction is not a trivial task.

You're right--the TouchStream is an amazing keyboard. When I still had my evaluation unit, I brought it home to use when programming. Man, it's a coder's dream. It's so easy to scroll through pages of code--and, as long as you're not writing a ton of text, it's a nice keyboard to type on (but it's really easy to get typos).

Just read about USB On-The-Go today. Could be just the thing you are thinking of. But it looks like it may be a little while of yet. USB On-The-Go

If anyone needs more than my pcmag.com article and Jem's reviews above, I wrote more in-depth keyboard reviews on ExtremeTech.

I wrote a full review of the TouchStream ST (a full keyboard from FingerWorks, the brainy company that makes the iGesture NumPad). I really liked it, actually. As a full keyboard, it can replace just about anything out there--and I found the gesture-sensing ability of the kb to work very well, and save me a ton of time with simple actions like cut, copy, paste.

The NumPad is a little too small and too limited to be useful--plus it's too expensive. -robyn

Has anyone used Kopete? It looks pretty sexy. It's built into Xandros so I wonder how useful it is. I use Gaim at home and I have a few quibbles with it.

Why 30"? What's wrong with this (although it supports HDCP) or this.

It's not much larger. See here

Good point... The new generation of VIA processors continue to create interesting possibilities.

This article has some information on upcoming VIA processors/boards. A new processor package that is about the size of a penny, and the nano-ITX board for ultra small devices looks really cool.

But, the thing I want in that article is the proto Dual Processor C5P motherboard, with dual ethernets and a DVI display output. That would make a great little linux server and/or gateway box.

eMac: $800.

Lindows PC and an LCD panel: $500.

Giving a word processing and web machine to both grandmas: Priceless.

From the article: "One feature not on this list is compression of texture, color and Z data." I thought S3 invented S3 texture compression.

that's fine... just break it up into 282 smaller files. In the mean time, I'll just go out and get a set of seven huge drives to store them on. Thanks!

(although I also remember there being someone else who did a study on fooling a broad range of biometric sensors).

On a related note, ExtremeTech has an article detailing how to build a fast PC for $800. The final recommendation uses an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU with 512 MB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, and a GeForce 5600XT video card.

video still has to be output to either analog monitor output or digital to the DVI output

You said you'd start worrying when the connection between a computer and its display fell subject to digital restrictions management. Have you looked into DVI's DRM?

I don't have to worry about someone running a hack version of my application

But you do have to worry about losing goodwill when your users yell about not being able to get THEIR DATA out of your program.

Every bios maker thats aggreed to produce these chips are allowing people to turn it off.

How long do you think that promise will last?

But if i was IT manager I would make sure it is on, I don't want my employees running unsigned software.

Easy: give them programs that can handle negative numbers. But seriously, much of what starts on business computers eventually spreads to the home market. What if the top five PC vendors that "sell" computers to residential users change to a 10-year rental model, claiming to be those users' "IT manager"?

Take a look at this which talks about the future MIPS machines, which will still run Irix. Irix, despite its weirdness, can still do things Linux can't. Go take a look at a very high end Irix server (something like an Origin 2k or 3k), and you'll see the difference.

Personally, I always thought the Aureal cards were damn good, myself.

Personally, I always thought the Aureal cards were damn good, myself.

Q1 '04

see also the SMP dual C5P mini-itx:

Small is beautiful @ extremetech

Most of these articles are from 6 months ago, the last time MS released information on how its Xbox division was doing. But I would be very surprised if these unspecified manufacturing process improvements have made up for the estimated $100 per console hit MS was taking in May.

Look, there's no reason to resort to ad-hominem attacks. The Xbox is losing money. MS is buying a share of the gaming market. That's not an indictment of the product, or even the business plan. But it's a fact.

This isn't a FET like the transistors found in computers (and just about everything else). This is bi-polar technology that uses much more power than FET.

True, but there are technologies that combine CMOS and Bipolar for faster CPU designs (I think BiCMOS was more heavily used back in the 90s). Also IBM is working on mixed material, mixed technology that combines SiGe bipolar chips on a CMOS silicon-on-insulator wafer. You never know what those researchers will do next.