I wouldn't be too worried about Peter Jackson over-mangling the story.
The reason is simple: PJ darn well knows that the movie(s) will literally be nitpicked to death. He has to stick to the book pretty closely for accuracy reasons or Tolkien fans will read the riot act to him on the scale of an Orc invasion.:-)
The reason why the Century 25 at Union Landing BETTER be good is the fact it's probably the first cinema complex I personally know of where EVERY SCREEN has full THX certification. Given that THX certification requires both quality sound levels AND quality picture projection, it's the only movie complex (other than the new Century complex at the Great Mall of the Bay Area, whose screens are also THX-certified) I'm willing to go see a movie, even at US$8.50 to US$9.00 evening prices.
I can't wait to see a lot of upcoming good movies this year, after a crappy 2000. HANNIBAL, PEARL HARBOR, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE, MONSTERS, INC., FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, A.I. and several other really good movies arriving this year bodes well for movie theater owners in 2001.
Given that Bush thinks the entire case was politically motivated, I think what we may see is that once Bush takes office within 90-120 days there WILL be a settlement out of court on this case.
Very likely, MS will pay a multi-million US dollar fine, and the entire case will be settled at that point.
Sure, one Michael Dell can give more than lip service to Linux, but the vast majority of Dell desktops, laptops and servers go out pre-loaded with Microsoft software. They'd rather see MS still be around for revenue reasons. People forget that Dell is a HUGE contributor to the Republican Party last year.
In my personal opinion, "stylish" cases are a waste of money.
I'd rather get a "bland and boring" beige case that sports the following features:
1. At least a 300W power supply.
2. Lots of drive bay expansion capabilities.
3. MUST be ATX form factor.
4. Have at least one secondary internal cooling fan in addition to the cooling fan on the power supply. If the cooling fan is directed towards the CPU, the better.
Re:Why we aren't as worried about nuclear war
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 4
Actually, building a nuclear device is NOT as simple as people think.
Getting the fissile material and explosive triggers are one thing, but ASSEMBLING a nuclear bomb is quite something else--it requires an extremely high level of precision machining that very few can afford.
That's why at most a terrorist nuclear device would have a yield of at most 4-5 kT. Mind you, a 4-5 kT device detonated in front of the New York Stock Exchange will still kill many thousands of people.:-(
Look, when you combine the #1 Internet service provider with the largest mass media company in the world, the result is that AOL Time Warner can dictate a very large fraction of what we read in magazines, what we see in movie theaters, what we see on TV (broadcast, cable AND DBS), and what we see on the Internet on commercial sites.
If this isn't frightening in terms of mass media control I don't know what is.
While you folks are celebrating the supposed breakup of Microsoft (which may now never happen given Judge Jackson's recent public comments and the incoming Bush administration), that case has been rendered moot by the now-certain merger of AOL and Time Warner.
Think about it: AOL Time Warner is now the world's most powerful mass media entity, something right out of the James Bond movie TOMORROW NEVER DIES. Look at what they will own now:
1. The #1 ISP in the USA.
2. The #2 internet broadband provider in the USA.
3. The #2 cable system provider in the USA.
4. The most powerful cable/satellite TV content provider in the world with CNN networks, HBO networks, Turner Broadcasting networks (TBS, TNT, and TCM), and TVKO pay-per-view.
5. Their own TV network (WB Network).
6. A massive movie and TV production combine (Warner Brothers, New Line and Gramercy).
7. One of the largest magazine publishers in the world.
8. One of the largest music publishers in the world.
9. One of the largest comics publishers in the world.
This has the potential for First Amendment abuses that border on frightening. It may give new meaning to the phrases "bias media" and "conflict of interest."
1. The combination of continiuing price drops on hard drives and new video compression techniques based on MPEG-4 technology will make is possible to have within 24 months TiVo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV units that record 1080i HDTV signals with almost NO loss of picture quality up to 25-30 hours at a time.
2. A new technique developed a few years ago allows for variable-depth "pits" on optical discs. This could result in DVD-like discs that store over 70 GB per disc, more than enough to have 1080i HDTV movies stored on a single disc.
Actually, one thing a LOT of Xbox detractors totally miss the point is the fact that anyone who knows how to write a DirectX-compatible game for the Windows 9x/ME/2000 platform is ready to write a game for Xbox.
People forget that many of the best PlayStation games also run on the PC platform: Madden NFL 2001, NHL Faceoff 2001, even Final Fantasy VII and VIII! And the graphics when running on the PC platform is flat-out great if you have the right graphics card.
Also, Microsoft has sent out thousands of Xbox developer kits already around the world, with most of the world's best-known game publishers already writing Xbox games (including a LONG list of Japanese companies). The only company I know o that is not writing for Xbox is Square, but I think they'll be on the bandwagon within a few month themselves.
And UNLIKE Sony, Microsoft is using as many easily-available components as possible. This will ensure that Microsoft will have massive supplies of Xbox consoles available worldwide by the time the machine ships around early October 2001.
In short, Sony's inability to ship enough PlayStation 2 units to meet worldwide demand will play right into Microsoft's hands.
I like the artwork of Howe and Lee because they do a better job of coming closer to what I feel is the "look" I've always imagined about these characters. That's why their artwork graced the last few Tolkien calendars.;-)
Be very glad that the artwork of Tim and Greg Hildebrandt weren't the basis for the costume design!:-)
Director Peter Jackson -strongly- knows that in bringing Lord of the Rings to movie form, there will be a LOT of nit-picking and people expect VERY high standards of adherence to the book itself. That's why he hired John Howe and Alan Lee--two artists who did illustrations for Tolkien calenders in the last few years--as conceptual artists.
Besides, I am very impressed from the stills I've seen that Jackson got the depiction of the hobbits CORRECT. It is exactly what I imagine a hobbit looks like.
I LOVE Joanne K. Rowling's works because it has a sense of imagination and wonder that is so seriously missing from most works of literature nowadays. In fact, I think Rowling's works will stand the test of time and will become classics within 30 years.
"I really don't have a problem with kids not reading so much as I have a problem with not enough good old books being brought to the silver screen. You can't expect a child of today to waste hours and hours of their life plodding through a book. It was great for me 20 years ago, but it can't compete with a PS2, nor should it have to. We have evolved."
You MUST be kidding. Care to wonder why Joanne Kathleen Rowling's HARRY POTTER books are selling at an incredible clip that makes the sales of Lord of the Rings during its heyday in the 1960's seem like a minor incident? And more impressively doing it in HARDCOVER? Explain why the 5.3 million initial print run of HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE sold out in less than a week after publication.
Look, if you have the right story that resonates effectively with readers, people will put down their videogames and start reading. I think if Peter Jackson can get the "gist" of the LoTR trilogy correct in the movies, expect a big bump-up in the sales of Tolkien's novels in very short order.
JRRT wrote the stories that became THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL well before he started LoTR.
Other than a few references in later chapters of LoTR, Bombadil could be left out with no problems, except my concerns about how does Mr. Jackson handle Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin leaving Crickhollow back to the Old East Road west of Bree.
Actually, I myself stay away from the i820, i840 and i850 chipsets because Intel seems to have WAY, WAY too many problems with these chipsets. They make the slight memory slowness of the VIA KT133 chipsets used on AMD Athlon Socket A motherboards seem like a minor problem in comparison.:-/
But again, we agree to disagree.:-) I personally contend that multimonitor setups are a very niche market that the vast majority of computer users won't use, if only because it'll hog way too much desk space. Especially now with the nice 21" monitors that can display 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate very cleanly.
While having more than one display is great if you're doing program or web page development, very high-end games or working in a financial brokerage house, that still is only a small fraction of the total computer market out there. For the average computer user out there, you really don't need more than one monitor.
Think about it: a top-quality 21" Sony, Viewsonic, Eizo NANAO or NEC monitor can display even beyond 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate. I believe some 21" monitors can display 1900x1440 at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate with no problems. And these monitors can be had for around US$1,000 to US$1,200.
At 1600x1200, you can easily read two 8.5" x 11" pages side by side; this makes it VERY useful for desktop publishing.
Anyway, most new computer users who buy higher-end systems usually run 1024x768 to 1280x1024 85 Hz with the 19" monitors out there. That's more than enough to see web pages clearly and do fairly decent quality print previews.
In short, while I do agree there is a place for setups with more than one monitor, that setup is not for the vast majority of computer users out there.
All right, dual displays may be "cool" but frankly, is the average home or business user going to need it, let alone pay for it? The percentage of computer users that need dual-display setups are a tiny fraction of the whole computer market, that's to be sure.
Besides, there's this issue of hogging desk space with multiple monitors even if they ARE TFT flat-panel units.
Think about it: outside of developers, very high-end gamers and people in stock brokerages, there's no real need for more than one monitor. Especially now with 21" diagonal displays running 1600x1200, more than enough to do even serious desktop publishing work.
Tell me: just how many people out there NEED a second graphics card?
That may be necessary for a very small number of games and some CAD programs, but given today's cheap 19" and 21" monitors running 1600x1200 resolution, you can have lots of display area AND still keep the menu commands on the same screen.
In short, the bug with the i850 chipset only affects people who primarily use legacy hardware. It's not that likely people will put in older graphics hardware into today's P4 systems given how good 3-D graphics cards and their ability to display 1600x1200 32-bit color have become.
In all the griping back and forth about why 3dfx failed and why Aureal failed against Creative Labs, there's one reason that nobody has discussed: the integration of reasonably high-quality video AND audio into the motherboard chipset.
Sure, we all laughed when Intel introduced the original i810 motherboard chipset, but by the time we got to the i815e chipset both graphics and sound quality were more than good enough for the majority of desktop computer users. Anyone who's tried a motherboard that uses the i815e chipset knows that graphics quality--2D and 3D--are not bad at all, and the i815e's sound card function is quite good with built-in wavetable MIDI sound.
The i815e is how many companies can produce very good systems at quite low cost. For example, the Micron PC RS2100 series computers sold at Best Buy uses a Celeron 700 MHz CPU on an i815e chipset motherboard, a pretty good combination for the majority of end users out there.
Think about it: how many people out there REALLY need a high-end graphics card and a high-end sound card outside of hardcore gamers? I don't think there's much demand outside of the hardcore gamer crowd, that's to be sure.
The reason why Serial ATA is being developed is simple: going to SCSI--especially Ultra2-Wide and Ultra 160--is a VERY expensive option.
Have you seen the cost of Ultra 160 SCSI adapters? Or how much the cabling costs? Or how much Ultra 160-compatible SCSI drives cost? Pretty expensive, and no thanks.
Serial ATA will of course initially cost more than UDMA/100, but it still would be much less expensive to implement than Ultra 160 SCSI. And because Serial ATA does not use those pesky flat ribbon cables, installation is also much less of a hassle, especially now you have much less interference with interior air flow of a system case, which will actually promote longer life of computer components. The best thing is that Serial ATA does not require a drastic change in the operating system to support it out of the box other than getting motherboard chipset drivers for the South Bridge chip that has the Serial ATA support, and given that most motherboard manufacturers include a CD-ROM disk with these drivers as standard....
What I find interesting is that the world is tiring of having the French dictate the tastes in international cuisine.
Small wonder why there is now great interest in the cuisine of China.
And people are discovering in major droves the cuisine of Italy (which in my opinion is WAY underrated) and also Spanish cuisine. I love Spanish food, especially from the Catalan region.
The problem with the Acadamie Francise is that in their zeal to protecting the language, they are threatening to turn that language into the modern equivalent of Latin.
After all, look at English, Russian, and even Japanese. They have borrowed a LOT of words from other languages to make it their own. After all, Modern English is 60% Germanic origin and 40% Romance origin (thanks to this thing called the Battle of Hastings in 1066). American English has particularly picked up words from other languages thanks to the various waves of immigration in US history. In fact, a number of words in Yiddish (spoken by the Jews that came from Eastern Europe to the USA in the late 19th Century) are now common English words!
You can rant and rave all you want, but let's face one fact: high end graphics cards are a very limited market item.
Think about it: how much do the best graphics cards using the nVidia GeForce2 series chipset cost? Well over US$300.
The thing here is that for the majority of computer users, they don't NEED that level of 3-D graphics acceleration.
With the advent of the Intel i81x series of motherboard chipsets with built-in graphics functions, that is more than enough for the average home user who uses the computer to surb the Web, run business applications, and the majority of games. The current Intel i815E chipset actually has a pretty decent on-board graphics accelerator--Anandtech and others who have tested the on-board video were pleasantly surprised that it worked reasonably well.
The reason why 3dfx failed was because their products never recovered from the debacle of the Voodoo3 series, which were overtaken by the nVidia Riva TNT/TNT2/TNT2 Ultra series a few years ago. The arrival of the nVidia GeForce series effectively sealed the doom of 3dfx.
Right now, only ATI and Matrox are the serious competitors left. ATI's latest Radeon chipset is actually very good, and Matrox's G450 chipset is also quite good.
One problem with the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and Gamecube is the fact you often need very specialized programming tools just to write the games for these systems--this costs major amounts of money to pull off.
I know I'll be flamed for htis, but this is why Microsoft's Xbox could be a very formidable competitor when it is released in September 2001. Think about it: Xbox is essentially a PC running a highly-optimized version of the Windows 2000 operating system code base. Given that there is a huge amount of Windows-based games out there, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that all the experience writing games for Windows 95/98/ME/2000 machines can be very easily applied to writing games for Xbox.
For example, a game like Diablo II or The Sims could in theory be a very fast and straightforward code conversion to run on Xbox.
This is why Electronic Arts has signed up to write games for Xbox. EA sells a lot of games to PC owners, and since the source code for the PC games can be easily ported to run on Xbox....
Also, don't forget that almost every Japanese game publisher (Namco, Koei, Hudsonsoft, Game Arts, and many others) are already writing games for Xbox. The only notable absentee is Square--and they may come onboard given their working relationship with Electronic Arts.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be too worried about Peter Jackson over-mangling the story.
:-)
The reason is simple: PJ darn well knows that the movie(s) will literally be nitpicked to death. He has to stick to the book pretty closely for accuracy reasons or Tolkien fans will read the riot act to him on the scale of an Orc invasion.
The reason why the Century 25 at Union Landing BETTER be good is the fact it's probably the first cinema complex I personally know of where EVERY SCREEN has full THX certification. Given that THX certification requires both quality sound levels AND quality picture projection, it's the only movie complex (other than the new Century complex at the Great Mall of the Bay Area, whose screens are also THX-certified) I'm willing to go see a movie, even at US$8.50 to US$9.00 evening prices.
I can't wait to see a lot of upcoming good movies this year, after a crappy 2000. HANNIBAL, PEARL HARBOR, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE, MONSTERS, INC., FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, A.I. and several other really good movies arriving this year bodes well for movie theater owners in 2001.
Folks,
Given that Bush thinks the entire case was politically motivated, I think what we may see is that once Bush takes office within 90-120 days there WILL be a settlement out of court on this case.
Very likely, MS will pay a multi-million US dollar fine, and the entire case will be settled at that point.
Sure, one Michael Dell can give more than lip service to Linux, but the vast majority of Dell desktops, laptops and servers go out pre-loaded with Microsoft software. They'd rather see MS still be around for revenue reasons. People forget that Dell is a HUGE contributor to the Republican Party last year.
In my personal opinion, "stylish" cases are a waste of money.
I'd rather get a "bland and boring" beige case that sports the following features:
1. At least a 300W power supply.
2. Lots of drive bay expansion capabilities.
3. MUST be ATX form factor.
4. Have at least one secondary internal cooling fan in addition to the cooling fan on the power supply. If the cooling fan is directed towards the CPU, the better.
Actually, building a nuclear device is NOT as simple as people think.
:-(
Getting the fissile material and explosive triggers are one thing, but ASSEMBLING a nuclear bomb is quite something else--it requires an extremely high level of precision machining that very few can afford.
That's why at most a terrorist nuclear device would have a yield of at most 4-5 kT. Mind you, a 4-5 kT device detonated in front of the New York Stock Exchange will still kill many thousands of people.
Alien54,
Look, when you combine the #1 Internet service provider with the largest mass media company in the world, the result is that AOL Time Warner can dictate a very large fraction of what we read in magazines, what we see in movie theaters, what we see on TV (broadcast, cable AND DBS), and what we see on the Internet on commercial sites.
If this isn't frightening in terms of mass media control I don't know what is.
Folks,
While you folks are celebrating the supposed breakup of Microsoft (which may now never happen given Judge Jackson's recent public comments and the incoming Bush administration), that case has been rendered moot by the now-certain merger of AOL and Time Warner.
Think about it: AOL Time Warner is now the world's most powerful mass media entity, something right out of the James Bond movie TOMORROW NEVER DIES. Look at what they will own now:
1. The #1 ISP in the USA.
2. The #2 internet broadband provider in the USA.
3. The #2 cable system provider in the USA.
4. The most powerful cable/satellite TV content provider in the world with CNN networks, HBO networks, Turner Broadcasting networks (TBS, TNT, and TCM), and TVKO pay-per-view.
5. Their own TV network (WB Network).
6. A massive movie and TV production combine (Warner Brothers, New Line and Gramercy).
7. One of the largest magazine publishers in the world.
8. One of the largest music publishers in the world.
9. One of the largest comics publishers in the world.
This has the potential for First Amendment abuses that border on frightening. It may give new meaning to the phrases "bias media" and "conflict of interest."
Folks,
I really doubt that Digital VHS will replace DVD.
There are two reasons for this:
1. The combination of continiuing price drops on hard drives and new video compression techniques based on MPEG-4 technology will make is possible to have within 24 months TiVo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV units that record 1080i HDTV signals with almost NO loss of picture quality up to 25-30 hours at a time.
2. A new technique developed a few years ago allows for variable-depth "pits" on optical discs. This could result in DVD-like discs that store over 70 GB per disc, more than enough to have 1080i HDTV movies stored on a single disc.
Actually, one thing a LOT of Xbox detractors totally miss the point is the fact that anyone who knows how to write a DirectX-compatible game for the Windows 9x/ME/2000 platform is ready to write a game for Xbox.
People forget that many of the best PlayStation games also run on the PC platform: Madden NFL 2001, NHL Faceoff 2001, even Final Fantasy VII and VIII! And the graphics when running on the PC platform is flat-out great if you have the right graphics card.
Also, Microsoft has sent out thousands of Xbox developer kits already around the world, with most of the world's best-known game publishers already writing Xbox games (including a LONG list of Japanese companies). The only company I know o that is not writing for Xbox is Square, but I think they'll be on the bandwagon within a few month themselves.
And UNLIKE Sony, Microsoft is using as many easily-available components as possible. This will ensure that Microsoft will have massive supplies of Xbox consoles available worldwide by the time the machine ships around early October 2001.
In short, Sony's inability to ship enough PlayStation 2 units to meet worldwide demand will play right into Microsoft's hands.
While getting the Intel Celeron to the 100 MHz FSB is a way-overdue step forward, it still can't compete against the AMD Duron.
The reason is simple: Duron's CPU core is WAY faster than the Celeron, thanks to the Duron's Athlon-derived FPU unit.
I like the artwork of Howe and Lee because they do a better job of coming closer to what I feel is the "look" I've always imagined about these characters. That's why their artwork graced the last few Tolkien calendars. ;-)
:-)
Be very glad that the artwork of Tim and Greg Hildebrandt weren't the basis for the costume design!
Lede,
Not to worry.
Director Peter Jackson -strongly- knows that in bringing Lord of the Rings to movie form, there will be a LOT of nit-picking and people expect VERY high standards of adherence to the book itself. That's why he hired John Howe and Alan Lee--two artists who did illustrations for Tolkien calenders in the last few years--as conceptual artists.
Besides, I am very impressed from the stills I've seen that Jackson got the depiction of the hobbits CORRECT. It is exactly what I imagine a hobbit looks like.
Moofie,
;-)
You hit it right on the nose.
I LOVE Joanne K. Rowling's works because it has a sense of imagination and wonder that is so seriously missing from most works of literature nowadays. In fact, I think Rowling's works will stand the test of time and will become classics within 30 years.
Trevor Goodchild wrote:
"I really don't have a problem with kids not reading so much as I have a problem with not enough good old books being brought to the silver screen. You can't expect a child of today to waste hours and hours of their life plodding through a book. It was great for me 20 years ago, but it can't compete with a PS2, nor should it have to. We have evolved."
You MUST be kidding. Care to wonder why Joanne Kathleen Rowling's HARRY POTTER books are selling at an incredible clip that makes the sales of Lord of the Rings during its heyday in the 1960's seem like a minor incident? And more impressively doing it in HARDCOVER? Explain why the 5.3 million initial print run of HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE sold out in less than a week after publication.
Look, if you have the right story that resonates effectively with readers, people will put down their videogames and start reading. I think if Peter Jackson can get the "gist" of the LoTR trilogy correct in the movies, expect a big bump-up in the sales of Tolkien's novels in very short order.
That is correct! ;-)
JRRT wrote the stories that became THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL well before he started LoTR.
Other than a few references in later chapters of LoTR, Bombadil could be left out with no problems, except my concerns about how does Mr. Jackson handle Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin leaving Crickhollow back to the Old East Road west of Bree.
John,
:-/
:-) I personally contend that multimonitor setups are a very niche market that the vast majority of computer users won't use, if only because it'll hog way too much desk space. Especially now with the nice 21" monitors that can display 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate very cleanly.
Actually, I myself stay away from the i820, i840 and i850 chipsets because Intel seems to have WAY, WAY too many problems with these chipsets. They make the slight memory slowness of the VIA KT133 chipsets used on AMD Athlon Socket A motherboards seem like a minor problem in comparison.
But again, we agree to disagree.
John,
While having more than one display is great if you're doing program or web page development, very high-end games or working in a financial brokerage house, that still is only a small fraction of the total computer market out there. For the average computer user out there, you really don't need more than one monitor.
Think about it: a top-quality 21" Sony, Viewsonic, Eizo NANAO or NEC monitor can display even beyond 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate. I believe some 21" monitors can display 1900x1440 at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate with no problems. And these monitors can be had for around US$1,000 to US$1,200.
At 1600x1200, you can easily read two 8.5" x 11" pages side by side; this makes it VERY useful for desktop publishing.
Anyway, most new computer users who buy higher-end systems usually run 1024x768 to 1280x1024 85 Hz with the 19" monitors out there. That's more than enough to see web pages clearly and do fairly decent quality print previews.
In short, while I do agree there is a place for setups with more than one monitor, that setup is not for the vast majority of computer users out there.
All right, dual displays may be "cool" but frankly, is the average home or business user going to need it, let alone pay for it? The percentage of computer users that need dual-display setups are a tiny fraction of the whole computer market, that's to be sure.
Besides, there's this issue of hogging desk space with multiple monitors even if they ARE TFT flat-panel units.
Think about it: outside of developers, very high-end gamers and people in stock brokerages, there's no real need for more than one monitor. Especially now with 21" diagonal displays running 1600x1200, more than enough to do even serious desktop publishing work.
Folks,
Tell me: just how many people out there NEED a second graphics card?
That may be necessary for a very small number of games and some CAD programs, but given today's cheap 19" and 21" monitors running 1600x1200 resolution, you can have lots of display area AND still keep the menu commands on the same screen.
In short, the bug with the i850 chipset only affects people who primarily use legacy hardware. It's not that likely people will put in older graphics hardware into today's P4 systems given how good 3-D graphics cards and their ability to display 1600x1200 32-bit color have become.
Folks,
In all the griping back and forth about why 3dfx failed and why Aureal failed against Creative Labs, there's one reason that nobody has discussed: the integration of reasonably high-quality video AND audio into the motherboard chipset.
Sure, we all laughed when Intel introduced the original i810 motherboard chipset, but by the time we got to the i815e chipset both graphics and sound quality were more than good enough for the majority of desktop computer users. Anyone who's tried a motherboard that uses the i815e chipset knows that graphics quality--2D and 3D--are not bad at all, and the i815e's sound card function is quite good with built-in wavetable MIDI sound.
The i815e is how many companies can produce very good systems at quite low cost. For example, the Micron PC RS2100 series computers sold at Best Buy uses a Celeron 700 MHz CPU on an i815e chipset motherboard, a pretty good combination for the majority of end users out there.
Think about it: how many people out there REALLY need a high-end graphics card and a high-end sound card outside of hardcore gamers? I don't think there's much demand outside of the hardcore gamer crowd, that's to be sure.
Folks,
The reason why Serial ATA is being developed is simple: going to SCSI--especially Ultra2-Wide and Ultra 160--is a VERY expensive option.
Have you seen the cost of Ultra 160 SCSI adapters? Or how much the cabling costs? Or how much Ultra 160-compatible SCSI drives cost? Pretty expensive, and no thanks.
Serial ATA will of course initially cost more than UDMA/100, but it still would be much less expensive to implement than Ultra 160 SCSI. And because Serial ATA does not use those pesky flat ribbon cables, installation is also much less of a hassle, especially now you have much less interference with interior air flow of a system case, which will actually promote longer life of computer components. The best thing is that Serial ATA does not require a drastic change in the operating system to support it out of the box other than getting motherboard chipset drivers for the South Bridge chip that has the Serial ATA support, and given that most motherboard manufacturers include a CD-ROM disk with these drivers as standard....
What I find interesting is that the world is tiring of having the French dictate the tastes in international cuisine.
Small wonder why there is now great interest in the cuisine of China.
And people are discovering in major droves the cuisine of Italy (which in my opinion is WAY underrated) and also Spanish cuisine. I love Spanish food, especially from the Catalan region.
advp,
:)
I agree 100% with your assessments!
The problem with the Acadamie Francise is that in their zeal to protecting the language, they are threatening to turn that language into the modern equivalent of Latin.
After all, look at English, Russian, and even Japanese. They have borrowed a LOT of words from other languages to make it their own. After all, Modern English is 60% Germanic origin and 40% Romance origin (thanks to this thing called the Battle of Hastings in 1066). American English has particularly picked up words from other languages thanks to the various waves of immigration in US history. In fact, a number of words in Yiddish (spoken by the Jews that came from Eastern Europe to the USA in the late 19th Century) are now common English words!
Folks,
You can rant and rave all you want, but let's face one fact: high end graphics cards are a very limited market item.
Think about it: how much do the best graphics cards using the nVidia GeForce2 series chipset cost? Well over US$300.
The thing here is that for the majority of computer users, they don't NEED that level of 3-D graphics acceleration.
With the advent of the Intel i81x series of motherboard chipsets with built-in graphics functions, that is more than enough for the average home user who uses the computer to surb the Web, run business applications, and the majority of games. The current Intel i815E chipset actually has a pretty decent on-board graphics accelerator--Anandtech and others who have tested the on-board video were pleasantly surprised that it worked reasonably well.
The reason why 3dfx failed was because their products never recovered from the debacle of the Voodoo3 series, which were overtaken by the nVidia Riva TNT/TNT2/TNT2 Ultra series a few years ago. The arrival of the nVidia GeForce series effectively sealed the doom of 3dfx.
Right now, only ATI and Matrox are the serious competitors left. ATI's latest Radeon chipset is actually very good, and Matrox's G450 chipset is also quite good.
Folks,
One problem with the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and Gamecube is the fact you often need very specialized programming tools just to write the games for these systems--this costs major amounts of money to pull off.
I know I'll be flamed for htis, but this is why Microsoft's Xbox could be a very formidable competitor when it is released in September 2001. Think about it: Xbox is essentially a PC running a highly-optimized version of the Windows 2000 operating system code base. Given that there is a huge amount of Windows-based games out there, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that all the experience writing games for Windows 95/98/ME/2000 machines can be very easily applied to writing games for Xbox.
For example, a game like Diablo II or The Sims could in theory be a very fast and straightforward code conversion to run on Xbox.
This is why Electronic Arts has signed up to write games for Xbox. EA sells a lot of games to PC owners, and since the source code for the PC games can be easily ported to run on Xbox....
Also, don't forget that almost every Japanese game publisher (Namco, Koei, Hudsonsoft, Game Arts, and many others) are already writing games for Xbox. The only notable absentee is Square--and they may come onboard given their working relationship with Electronic Arts.