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"Really? Based on what metric?"

Based on piracy rates. I never said that a game couldn't be a success in the PC game market. I pointed out that, as the Tweakgames article stated, only two things actually had an impact on piracy rates:

1. The popularity of the game. If the game was more popular, the piracy rate was higher.

2. The presence of restrictive and intrusive DRM, which if not broken, actually does have the impact of lowering piracy rates until it is broken.

Nothing else made a difference. If a $20 game was as popular as a $60 game, it had the same level of piracy.

Did you even read the article I linked to?

"The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise."

Are they?

That's not a glib question. I started computer gaming in 1989 (and yes, I started out as a game pirate - I outgrew it by the age of 17, though). The PC game market is a wasteland today compared even to then. Only about ten years ago console ports were rare - now they're become more and more the norm. Most of the PC game market is concentrated in MMOs now. While there are still some big releases for the PC game market (eg., Starcraft II and Diablo III), most of the non-MMO releases start out on the console market, and the PC version comes out months later.

It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today. Yes, there are some big players still there, such as Stardock and Blizzard, but even Bioware is now starting its games on the console before the PC. The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.

And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:

March 27, 2009 - Stardock unveils a low customer impact DRM solution named GOO (Game Object Obfuscation). Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/stardock-goo-drm-copy-piracy,7390.html

May 1, 2009 - The Escapist, and a few others, report that Stardock has major piracy issues with Demigod (which does have DRM). Of 120,000 games connecting to the servers on the opening weekend, only 18,000 are legitimate. After the team spends a couple of days working on the servers, the CEO declares a victory against the pirates. Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91400-Stardock-CEO-Demigod-Beats-Piracy

Now, that's a far cry from the DRM used by Ubisoft. But, it is important to note that Stardock DID end up implementing a very customer-friendly DRM solution, and got hit badly by piracy issues.

"The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be."

And with that, I KNOW you didn't read the article I linked to. That is a complete mischaracterization of the economic argument. You'll find a proper description here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html

Please read that before you reply.

My argument is that quick boot times are a marginal gain. I never said there was "no advantage" for laptop users, and, in fact, that's why I said there was little advantage.

Once the machine is up and running, given enough RAM (which is cheap these days), the speed bottleneck is no longer the disk for the class of user I've mentioned. The user will not see any difference between a SATA HDD and an SSD in terms of performance.

Better battery life is definitely not a a given.

As for less chance of failure -- well that's a nonstarter. Even with wear-leveling, the MTBF between SSDs and HDDs is no contest; HDDs win every time. I have plenty of PCs with HDDs lying around that are 10-15 years old. I worked on one machine not long ago that had two HDDs in it that are easily 25 years old. Still working, no problems.

The site has split up the article into a million pages. If you don't care to click a jillion times, here's the link for the results.

I can't help to find the testing biased. With lovely tidbits like...

"After reviewing the JavaScript benchmarks, we've decided that Tom's has no choice but to run all of them in the future. While I personally lean toward JSBenchmark, since it isn't affiliated with any browser, its results don't reflect the outcome in Dromaeo. Until the reason for Opera's devastating Mozilla score can be explained, I believe we'll have to run all of them to get the clearest picture. If you disagree, or have an opinion on a better way to benchmark JavaScript, sound off in the comments section below."

Or the conclusions, where out out of 13 categories, Safari won 3, Opera 4, Chrome 3, Firefox 3 and IE only one (shared with FF). Yet, they proclaimed Chrome as the winner. Lovely.

Yes, i'm an Opera fan, but i also like Firefox and Chrome a lot. I'd just like to read fair reviews.

As always, Firefox ate much less memory than competitors...specially against opera & chrome.

A lot of these speed tests always compare javascript performance, which I have to say matters less for me on a day to day usage than other things.

At the end of the article (10 pages later), they do break it out into categories. The winner of the 'page load' category is: Firefox.

I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.

Shortcut to summary: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-10.html

analysis and conclusions

I just installed Opera 10.5 and it's decently good enough for me to continue using it .

The link was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html

That's what I thought too but I am still not sure. What got me thinking was the "Excalibur" machine mentioned in a story about a tour through WD's premises and the comment in the text:

The drive gets inserted into a bay, whereupon its media is filled with a servo pattern to fill the tracks with data. This will confirm that all of the media is able to store information.

Anon cause I'm locked down right now.
The PS3 Slim is unaffected because they had to use different hw to fit the same things inside. Much like they did with the PS2 Slim.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ps3-playstation-cell-chip-45nm,8497.html Is one example. I do not have time to look for the others, but I've seen them. Anyone else here with more time to back this up with tangible info?

Tom's Hardware has tackled this too. Just mentioning it for the sake of completeness.

Ok, replying to Parent instead of myself.

MythTV has a feature called Timestretch that does this

Supposedly VLC can also do this.

As well as WinAmp, Media Player classic with external filters, gomplayer, the list goes on and on.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/236916-49-timestretching-more-stretching-time-times

I'm kind of hoping Tivo adds something like this eventually.

a) Perhaps, but often not as efficiently or as quickly.
b) Almost always not. OpenGL implementations often (or did) just make a few changes and then make calls DirectX, just adding another layer before actual rendering.

For the past 8 years or so OpenGL has been lagging behind DirectX in features and performance in some cases 3+ years or more. That's quite a huge difference in some cases.

Here's one of the better write ups on the subject that goes into much more detail than I can afford to in this thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

Welcome to jumping on a new technology, you got burned, as everyone with the exception of Samsung and Intel drives of the time used the same Jmicron controller. OCZ actually went and designed some cache and paired controllers into their middle offering (I forget the name), and I believe switched to Samsung controllers and single layer flash for a time on the high end. (I don't know what their current offerings are)

Everyone else for the most part kept selling parts that used the same chip as the OCZ Value Series. Most makers, including OCZ released firmware updates. You likely got pretty much what you paid for at that time in the SSD race.

Any other product from that time, even including Intel and Samsung didn't deal with what you've got which is random writes to fragmented memory. The problem comes from it having to erase a block, then rewrite the block. That's likely several times your data's size. It would cause especially windows machines to freeze for a few seconds. Most Linux testers I saw, didn't have quite the same problem of complete lockup, due to differences in how Linux caches to memory and when it writes to disk, but still had issues with very limited IO on fragmented devices.

In fact: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247280-32-slow-freeze-stuttering-vista-outlook-solved
So while it may suck for you, take a look at where the links point to.

Because of the fact that they were the only ones that seemed to be trying to seriously solve or work around problems, if I were to get a new SSD, I'd probably get an OCZ. Of course, jumping on new or old technologies, tends to cause problems.

Here's a relatively recent tom's hardware article comparing powerline, wireless, and MoCA networking:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/powerline-wireless-networking,2470-5.html

I read a very good article last night, seems like its right up your street: here.

Its a comparison of different streaming options in a house that's not wired up to your specifications. Page 8 shows that with coax you should be able to get 68Mbps streaming video via UDP, which should be more than sufficient for your streaming needs. The only thing is that you'll have to buy a coax/ethernet adaptor. Not cheap, but a whole lot easier than rewiring.

My bad... it's called SuperFetch, and here's what MicroSoft has to say about it:
http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx
and here is tomshardware's analysis of it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed,1532.html

As a PC owner with a polarized projector setup, I'm mush more interested in ATI's Catalyst 10.3 coming out in March that will have 3D support in the stereoscopic sense. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/catalyst-eyefinity-radeon,2559-2.html (Yes, I know it's offtopic. It still makes me giddy and I don't have anyone else to tell.)

I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards to me. The conclusion of this review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-karmic-koala,2484-13.html also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every six month release schedule?

NVIDIA® Optimus Technology intelligently, automatically, and seamlessly transitions between the powerful NVIDIA® ION GPU, and battery-saving integrated graphics

Let's put things into perspective, shall we. The original ION chipset used an integrated 9300/9400 GPU, and was being touted by NVIDIA as being 'powerful'. Now let's see where that falls on the Tom's Hardware Graphics Card Heirarchy chart. That's it way down there roughly comparable to an FX5900 or an ATI 9800. Sure it has some newer features (DX10, HD video decoding, etc), but in terms of general power, it's incredibly weak, even for 5-6 year old games. Now, assuming they've managed to bump things up a bit with the ION2, it still will only move it up a few levels on that chart. So in a nutshell, don't expect to be able to play games like Dragon Age: Origins on a netbook anytime soon.

http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/525-10-western-digital-tour.html

The [Windows 7] translucent thing is more a distraction than anything else

There's several ways to disable that

1. Press Start, type Window Color and Appearance, press Enter, Uncheck Enable Transparency details
2. Press Start, type Change the theme, press Enter, click on Windows Classic details
3. Press Start, type services.msc, press Enter, scroll down and right click on Desktop Window Manager Session Manager, choose Properties, change Startup Type to Disabled, click Stop, then click OK details

I use #3, as I don't see a need for any of the special effects, but don't mind the general appearance of the Windows 7 theme. Disabling dwm also seems to free up some memory.

I haven't tested #1 or #2, but assume they work.

You can still go [>]

to their mobile site [>]

to realize [>]

it's not annoying [>]

But it doesn't work! [> Conclusion]

Great Job Guys! 404.

... has everyone forgotten the dreaded Seagate 'stiction' problems? And those fun fixes? I was told they were due to contamination, but found out later, not so. But I banged my share of them around just to get them running long enough to copy off the data. Ah, Ghost.

Or the Miniscribe brick scandal, which not a quality control problem, illustrates how your favorite drive manufacturer can become a casualty of even bad accounting?

Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.

Try a processor with AES-NI. Tom's Hardware got 3570MByte, or 27Gbit/s out of a single Intel i5. With the new Xeons in March, you'll get x3 cores, x2 sockets in a single system.

What I don't get is how you can have such a high requirement for bandwidth but not the budget for enough hardware to just bruteforce this - even a single gigabit connection worth of traffic costs much more than a stack of 1u servers every month.

Since 2009.03.27:

                      System Availability: 99.9270%
                                      Total Uptime: 321d 11h:16m:42s
                                  Total Downtime: 0d 5h:38m:22s
                                  Total Reboots: 11
          Mean Time Between Reboots: 29.25 days
                          Total Bluescreens: 0

Oh, yeah? Compare it to this:

$ uptime
  09:46:06 up 913 days, 17:34, 6 users, load average: 0.17, 0.15, 0.07
$ uname -a
Linux stoeng01 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 19:00:28 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Of course, this is a server that has a redundant UPS with a diesel generator. My personal computers I turn off whenever I'm not using them, it saves power and reduces my "carbon footprint".

Those 5 hours? Most of them were spent when I added more RAM, but had either a bad module or a bad slot, so I took that long to finally give up and disable 4 modules from BIOS, leaving 3GB (instead of 5GB what I wanted and 1GB of what was before).

Perhaps you should have googled it before wasting your time. Or blaming the hardware, which is what most MS-Windows users do when they get stumped by their OS limitations.

I can't comment on any pending litigation, nor am I an attorney.

As far as the EU anti-trust stuff reading this article:
http://www.internetnews.com/breakingnews/article.php/3853706

1. i4i is a patent case between two corporations hence it isn't germane to the conversation.
2. The India case involves 4 alleged pirates I believe. Don't know much about it.
3. With regard to German price-fixing, Microsoft has stated that it will comply with the finding and be in full compliance of German law. When you have as large an ecosystem as Microsoft with so many partners, retailers, distributors, and vendors, business processes must always be stringently reviewed on a periodic basis to ensure compliances with all applicable rules and regulations. Microsoft Germany is doing exactly this in this matter. Are you really going to fault them for it?
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-office-price-fixing,7533.html

That $200 PC is unlikely to be very good for gaming

Most cheap PCs use GMA, a Voodoo3-class GPU by Intel that's OK at 2D and PS1-complexity 3D but lives up to its "Graphics My Ass" nickname at anything above that. Aspire Revo, on the other hand, uses an NVIDIA GPU that handily beats GMA in 3D Mark. I haven't seen any benchmarks of NVIDIA ION against the Hollywood chipset in a Wii console, but I'd be surprised if ION scored far behind Hollywood's predecessor, the Flipper chipset in the GameCube.

Some of us might want both wii games *and* a media player without having to buy multiple devices.

Then buy one of the other consoles, which can play both major-label games and noninteractive media.

And most importantly, for the principle of it - you buy the device, you don't rent it, you should be able to use it for any purpose you see fit

I agree with you in principle. But it takes effort to make a video game, and above a certain level of complexity, making one for free tends to burn out the developer. At some point, a developer will want to charge for missions beyond the demo, but there's a strong sentiment against charging in the console homebrew community. So if a project is too big for WiiBrew.org but too small for WarioWorld.com (Nintendo's official developer program), a developer will need to establish himself on another platform, and as far as I can tell, the least bad platform for that is a PC.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/GTA-IV-1.0.3,1402.html

One frame more for a quad core processor over the closest dual core.

Not exactly a "requirement"

Unofficial but true. Tom's Hardware has a bunch of benchmarks. The only dual core CPUs that manage 60 FPS are the i5s with hyper-threading, and they are beaten by less expensive Phenom II quad cores.

The other thing that bothers me about the marketshare numbers is that Microsoft is working the Bing advertising to a point where I can't avoid seeing it. I also notice that somehow Bing seems to be popping up in places that I didn't even think they could. Notice what's powering the map on that page?

Add in the $500 Bing agreement with Verizon.

Add in the fact that Bing is really doing well taking share from their partner.

To me, it boils down to this: I don't trust many people.

I hardly trust Google, but I have yet to see them engage in practices where they abuse their market share. Please correct me if I've missed something.

I know what Microsoft does when they dominate market share... And right now, this product is gaining market share because MS is pouring money into it at a pace that they can't intend on maintaining. I don't know what their plan is, but I have a feeling that this one's not following the "embrace" part of their normal business model. I can't wait to see what they do once Bing closes in on 30% (assuming it keeps gaining). My guess is that they'll find a way to blend it with the desktop OS, and "integrate" it with the desktop search. I'm also sure that desktop search will extend to the general web.

You don't know what you are talking about.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-ion-atom,2153-10.html

Its weird how so much support is going towards the mac, that no one appreciates the simplicity of the laptop for what it is.

Its power efficient, and cheap.
And let me go into a bit more detail. The intel atom is a cpu designed by intel to run on as little power as possible.
The core 2 duo was not. It has power saving features, but its not designed with power being a primary factor.

The same things can be said for the chipsets.
I was unable to an exact comparison between the 2 chipsets since the details, but toms hardware did a match thats close enough.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-ion-atom,2153-10.html
The result is that the 945GC is up to 35% more power efficient. I expect its the same case with the intel core 2 duo vs the atom, if not, even more in favour.

The fact is that's a huge saving on power. Using the atom and 950gc you could get 3 hours batter life where the other only gets 2.

And laptops are meant to be portable. Anyone whos takes a laptop around with them, is well aware of the power concerns. That 1 hour can be the difference between moving with the laptop freely, and having to bring a power adapter and sit with it rooted to a power socket.

As i'm typing this post out, its on an atom netbook, its power consumption so low that its passively cooled. Try that with a core 2 duo and its matching gpu.

A few other things i'll touch on.
Its stupid to point out that for only 190 more euro you get a more powerful computer. But that's 50% more expensive then this laptop offering!

More memory isn't necessarily a good thing. At least on windows i can enter or leave hibernation mode in 26 seconds because i use 1gig of memory. If i had 3 gigs, it'd jump to about 45 seconds both ways. as well as draining more power, and increasing the price needlessly.

Its not a Mac. Seriously. Comparing Linux to mac, and talking about the mac favorably... I have to wonder where slashdot's culture is headed on threads like these.

If you want a top of the line gaming laptop, so be it. Just don't snub laptops that are aimed at a cheaper/work environment because it doesn't suit you.

Toms Hardware's review here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5670,2533.html TLDR: While it does support DX11, its not powerful enough to really do much with it, barely keeping 30 FPS at 1680x1050.

Also, there were rumors that if a motherboard manufacturer was thinking of making new AMD boards, Intel allegedly would hint that the manufacturer might face a shortage of Intel chipsets.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/early-athlon-motherboard-review,123-2.html?xtmc=athlon_boards_chipset_shortage_taipei&xtcr=2

Do realize that your P4 consumes a lot more power than a previous-generation (65nm) Core 2 Duo, and in some tests even more than a Core 2 Extreme. Modern 45nm chips use even less power. So really, you're dumping money down the power/heat drain by not using a newer processor. Even if you don't need the speed, it makes a difference in terms of the electric bills. Your point about electricity is completely and entirely invalid.

The problem with the OLPC is the Negroponte is an ivy league moron IMHO. He could have sold it to the first world, gotten the economies of scale on his side, and used the profits to subsidize the third world sales, possibly even bringing the price down to $100 each like originally planned. But what does he do?

He tries to "force" charity with the G1G1 program, instead of selling to the first world in a normal manner (like we don't have poor kids? WTF?) and let the EEE and other Netbooks steal any momentum he could have had, he burns and pisses off the FLOSS community, which he frankly needed more than air to get decent performance out of such a tiny machine, by going with MSFT and putting XP on the things, which BTW as someone who has used every version of every MSFT OS, including WinFlip and XP Embedded, putting MSFT anything on a flash based device is suicide because MSFT never made an OS that don't hit swap like there is no tomorrow, and has just generally burned his bridges and missed every opportunity to make the OLPC into a true "laptop for every child".

So I hope when they go under, which with Negroponte at the helm they will, someone buys the OLPC designs and sells the OLPC to the world. Because there was some really great ideas like the mesh network, the daylight readable screen, and the crank for providing power when in BFN. But sadly it looks like Negroponte has done missed the boat and it will end up being ARM Netbooks that end up breaking the $100 barrier and thus becoming the "laptop for any kid". Sad to see such potential wasted, but Negroponte has pretty much proven, at least to me, that he just don't have what it takes to lead the OLPC to greatness.

Hah, that's rich.

It's not even real competition. NvIDIA's Chinese foundry'll just release another bad batch, the vendors' Indian and Filipino tech support will just tell their angry customers that it was the customers' fault and to fuck off, NvIdia'll exit the x86 market, and we'll be back to square one. I know this because I've dealt with HP's Magandas over this issue, and they had no shame.

Mods, meet my middle finger.

Let's assume I don't have a Kill a watt, which I don't -- can you link me to some study defending your point?

Just about any thorough review of any modern processor will list power consumption under idle and under load. For basically the first result I found in Google, containing some older processors and some newer ones, see this page. It appears common to have a 70+ watt difference between idle and full load.

Depending on the season and the availability of air conditioning, cooling costs come into play as well. If the machines/room are improperly cooled they can also slightly shorten the expected lifespan of some components. On an individual basis these costs are small, but for 5,000 computers these things add up.

If this guy really cared about distributed computing (perhaps not SETI@home, but folding@home or something), he should have worked to make this a learning experience. Have the school district take credit for the computing power, and teach kids about distributed computing. Still, given the power costs that's an expensive lesson.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947-8.html

Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Asus-Nvidia-Supercomputer-Cores-960,8943.html I know it costs more but when you consider you'll get 1.1 teraflops of power, it'll munch away at a mental speed. All this in a standard PC tower!!!

I remember having a not-so-ancient 2D video card that was fairly small. The Diamond Monster 3D [Accelerator] card that I got later, on the other hand, was pretty large :)

try again.

DirectX 11 Support for hardware
tessellation will be an explicit part of the DirectX standard for the first time. To date, ATI's HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series have all contained a hardware tessellation unit

DX11 and DX10.1 will be sharing a lot of features. DX10.0 does not. All the people getting an 8800gt for example, got screwed by that. I'm glad NV has a DX10.1 solution, but when will anyone have a copy of the DX11 card to test?

Sorry though, I meant to link the 5750, I was looking through stuff. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102859

Surprisingly, it almost can

It's a little better: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gt-240,2475-8.html

I prefer the performance graphs/comparisons at Tom's Hardware.

You are uninformed. The drives are fast enough that they hit the cap for a single SATA connection.
Here's a review of 16 Intel drives in raid-0
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-6gb-raid,2388.html

Its not quite 1600% faster but its about 1300% faster than the peak transfer rate of a single SATA connection.

Then again.. if you really wanted performance for cheap, you could get 8 of the new 40 gig Kingston (intel based) drives and raid-0 them for the same price as the Fusion ioXtreme card. I'd challenge someone to come up with a better performance solution for ~$900
Note: I have no idea if there is an 8 port hardware raid 0 card available anywhere that can do 1.5GBps but if there is, I'd love to see it. Software raid-0 should still beat the pants off the fusion drive.

Ummm... Windows Vista and onwards is more secure out of the box. I mean, Mac OS X hasn't even really implemented ASLR yet. That Mac OS X is more secure is a common misconception.

Read this: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-leopard,8704.html

Charlier Miller covers why he thinks Windows is more secure than Mac OS X.