A PDA with a full size keyboard? :-)
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 1
Heh, that'd be a sight to see.
But if you really want to, you can get a Bluetooth keyboard and carry it around with your PDA...
You missed the point.
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe you don't like them, but I do.
Yes, it may become trendy for some to take pictures with their cellphones and then email (or MMS) the pictures to their friends and families.
That's a camera phone, not a smartphone. Not comparable to PDAs.
If I need to take pictures, I can use my digital cameras. If I need to do serious computing stuffs (not only number crunching) I can use my laptop. If I need to jot down something, there're pens and paper. If I need to play games, I have PS/2 / X BOX game systems.
Let's see you fit all that in your pocket:-)
Seriously, the whole point of a smartphone is not that it matches the capabilities of any one of those items, but that it provides the basic capabilities of all of them, in one convenient device that is always with you. And they're integrated, which makes for some interesting new capabilities.
I have a digital camera, a laptop, pen and paper and even an XBox, and I use them all, on occasions. I also have a smartphone, and I use it more than any one of those devices, mostly because it's right there in my pocket, not back at home.
Need a simpler/cheaper smartphone, that's all
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 1
Of course there's a big price difference - the smart phone has a colour screen, twice the RAM (and an SD slot), plays MP3 & video AND includes a full cellular phone, email, web and VPN connectivity.
You can get a cheapo phone with basic organiser capabilities for half the price of the Zire, free on a plan, even with colour. Consider also that most people with a PDA will probably have a cellular phone too, and would see benefit in carrying one device rather than two.
What you're looking for is a phone with no more than the specs of the Zire (PalmOS, moderate resolution B/W display, 8 MB RAM, no camera etc), and I think that could appear in the near future for maybe $150-200, or around that of the Zire and a phone.
Re:Doesn't the phone turn into a PDA?
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 1
I don't see the point in a distinction. Is it a PDA with phone capabilities? Is it a phone with PDA capabilities?
There is a distinction, and it's mostly in the form factor & interface.
Something that's the same rough size & proportions as a phone, and has a phone-style keypad/interface is a phone with a PDA (e.g. SE P800). Something that's, say, wider & has a qwerty keyboard - or no keyboard/keypad (e.g. Treo 600 is a PDA with phone. They both have similar capabilities, just different focus.
I'm not counting phones with small screens & organiser functions, or iPaqs with phone modules attached.
Smart phones have bigger screens
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The screensize on my SE P800 is most of the size of the phone (the phone keypad flips down for full access), and the resolution is better than most Palm devices. It's certainly good enough for most PDA things, and anything I do. Any larger, and it wouldn't fit in a pocket.
If I want to do something that requires a bigger screen (like watch a movie and actually enjoy it), I use a 15" laptop. I'm sure there's room for devices inbetween - bag-size rather than pocket-size, but a decent resolution display can be very usable even on a pocket-sized device.
I totally identify with all your comments. OK, I don't get completely under the blankets, but I can get much more of me under the blankets with an ebook than a paperback:-)
Here's a couple of other big points for me:
Reading in the car at night.
The backlight makes all the difference. My wife can read her book while I'm driving, or vice versa. Great for long trips, and far less distracting than a maplight.
Reading anywhere, any time.
Since I use my phone (Sony Ericsson P800) as an ebook reader (+ organiser etc), I virtually always have it with me. So if I'm waiting for 10 minutes for someone, I can read a few more pages, instead of looking bored. I also carry a book or two for my wife, and even a few kids stories, so I have something to read them at a moment's notice.
Easier paging
It's true that most ebook readers have less text per page on their smaller screens (especially a phone, even a relatively large one like the P800's), but this is compensated by using the P800's scrollwheel to page up & down. It's so easy to advance a page, or flip back a few pages to check something that it more than makes up for the smaller format. Especially when the smaller format means it also fits in my pocket. Oh, and searching back for the first reference to a character is so much easier too.
A convenient online library
OK, admittedly this is slightly dodgier, but it shouldn't have to be. I look forward to the time when you can borrow ebooks from a real online library, just like their dead-tree counterparts only easier.
I recently lived for a while in Toronto, Canada, and whatever else you can say about them, their library system is excellent. I could go to their website & reserve any book in any of the city's libraries, and in a day or two (if there wasn't a queue) I'd get a phone call from their computer telling me it had arrived at my local branch. I'd stop in while walking to work & pick it up. It was so damn convenient, I read heaps of books without the risk of shelling out good money for a bad read (also some of my favourite books I'd left in storage in Australia).
Moving back to Sydney, Australia, the library system here feels like the dark ages. Each library branch has their own website (a few do form mini-networks, so you can search 3 or 4 branches at once), so you're limited to whatever's available in the branch at the current time. I can reserve a book online - if I pay a dollar for the privilege - but they still won't ship books from other branches to my local branch for me.
So now, if I hear about a book that might be interesting, I go to IRC & download a scanned copy. The occasional OCR error aside (fine in most books, annoying in a few), the convenience over my local library system - combined with the other ebook advantages - makes it the way I read everything now, except for the few new releases I know I'm going to enjoy & keep (which I buy in paperback).
But even those, and for my current library, I download the electronic text as soon as I can, for the sheer convenience of having it always with me, readable anywhere, any time, any circumstances.
I can assure you, text on my ebook reader of choice (a Sony Ericsson P800 phone) is a lot easier to read than a poor dotmatrix printout. I can keep it small but still legible for myself, or I can increase the size of the text so that my mother can read it without her reading glasses (which can't be done with a paperback).
Nor do I get eyestrain or headache, even after hours of reading. Even in the near-dark (which I would get with a paperback, mind you).
Not only am I satisfied with the overall experience, but my wife almost bought a P800 herself, just to read her books on, instead of the same book on paperback. She, like me, quickly came to prefer the experience & convenience of a decent ebook reader. (She didn't buy a second P800 in the end, she just borrows mine on the rare occasions when I'm not using it myself).
I would be delighted in a 600 dpi screen, especially one that was readable in moderately-low light without requiring a backlight (for better battery life), but it's a minor issue at most. The higher resolution of a book is outweighed most of the time by the flexibility & convenience of having all my current books always available, in any circumstances.
Face it - the only way we'll see the end of x86 is if someone builds a new, non-x86 chip that can still run all that existing x86 code at least as well as the best existing x86 processors. Otherwise it's just another niche architecture, and no-one's going to "upgrade" to it.
Intel forgot that, or thought they could force it on people anyway. AMD remembered, but took the easy way out & just extended things. Similarly, IBM got it wrong with OS/2, and MS jumped straight in with Windows. Note how long it took before MS was able to phase out DOS completely, even so.
The Tyan Thunder K8W mobo is the dual Opteron board to have. Perhaps not for "consumers", but certainly as a workstation board it's unparalleled.
8 DIMM slots (4 attached to each CPU, unlike every other workstation board out there) means 8 GB using cheaper 1 GB DIMMs, or 16 GB max. It also means up to 10 or 12 GB/s of total bandwidth:-) No other dually motherboard I have seen offers both AGP and memory connected to each CPU.
Add to that an AGP Pro slot, a few PCI-X slots (100 MHz and 133 MHz), 4-way SATA RAID 0+1, Gigabit LAN (connected to PCI-X), Firewire etc, and you have the most desirable mobo available today - if you can afford it.
Some apps require large blocks of contiguous memory - and with only 2GB of address space available, you can actually run into address space fragmentation problems long before you run out of physical memory. There simply isn't a large enough span of addresses available to map the memory into.
Other things compete for address space too. System DLLs map themselves into various places, leaving too-small gaps between them. Threads reserve 1 MB each, for the stack grow. Some PCI boards (e.g. HiDef video capture) map their buffer memory into your address space for easy access - which can be as large as 512MB!
Yes, more address space is needed even more than more physical memory.
Since I moved from Canada back to Australia, I now pay AUD$99 (maybe CDN$90) per month for an ADSL link that gives me 50 KB/s down, 13 KB/s up, on a good day.
There are cheaper options, but most are volume-capped (usually 3-6 GB/month), whereas my ISP uses "unlimited", prioritised traffic (based on previous 30 days usage).
If it works as claimed, then it's amazing, regardless of the build-quality. If it doesn't work as claimed, then it's not because it's hand-built - it's because its bunkum.
Or it works as intended, but you've misinterpreted their claims to mean something more amazing than it really is. Which may be deliberate, on their part.
Perhaps Microsoft should put in patches the way that the rest of the game consoles do it - you put the updated libraries onto the individial game discs that need them.
They can and do. When you boot a game, it doesn't read the OS off the HD, it reads it off the disc.
Using the hard drive to hold patches just brings us back to Windows DLL Hell.
Since the HD files are only used when running the dashboard, not while running 3rd party software (i.e. games), "DLL Hell" is not an issue. Patching the firmware might be a concern, but they can't do that - only ship it with new machines.
The only thing that is affected by patching the system dashboard is the system dashboard, which is a controlled environment (as far as Microsoft is concerned, anyway). There should be no non-MS software on the HD's system partition, or using the HD files, so as long as MS test it successfully on one Xbox, it will work on all of them.
If you install 3rd party software on the HD yourself (e.g. EvolutionX or Linux), and it gets broken by a patch MS pushes at you, I'm sure they don't care in the slightest. I doubt anyone else seriously believes MS has any obligation to worry about breaking anything except what they told you it would do - run the dashboard and play games.
Yep, fair enough. Though as I've said elsewhere, these are still betas. Let's reserve judgement until they're made public.
Let's also hope that the pressure on nVidia to get the Det50s out & counter ATi's HL2 scores doesn't push them into a premature release with those kind of quality issues.
Yes, apparently they do, though I'd call this excusable in a beta driver. One can only hope that this will be improved before they are publicly released. I'm sure the public will be checking.
Reduced image quality, missing/wrong fog etc invalidate any useful benchmark scores, but I still think Valve could at least have mentioned the possibility of further improvements from the future Det50s.
Second, check out this image quality comparison over at DriverHeaven with Aquamark 3. It sure looks to me like nVidia is back to their old tricks again.
...with one notable point; those beta drivers are not publicly available yet. I personally will be waiting until nVidia present them as finished, before passing judgements like that.
Also I noted that, while the beta Det50 image was noticeably worse (darker, more banded, and more pixelated in the yellow stripes on the ship's upper left), the 44.xx and 45.xx images were fine - but the ATi Cat 3.4 and 3.7 images both had pixelated stripes, almost as bad as the 51.75 image. To me that suggests that nVidia can get it right, and it's ATi that needs to lift their driver game.
Well, they're both willing to cut shady corners to be competitive; we've seen that. Not that isn't common, in today's world. The bigger a company gets, the more they have to lose, and the more shareholder pressure there is to succeed at any cost.
But how many games can you list that "work with _nothing_ other" than recent cards? Certainly HalfLife 2 isn't one of them - their stated minimum required gfx card is a TNT. Even Doom 3 will work fine on an original GeForce.
Sure it'll be slower, but you just have to turn down the eye candy (resolution, AA, AF and other visual effects) to make it playable. And you can't complain about not getting the fancy picture on your 1998 hardware (well, you can, but I won't be listening:-)
Valve spent 5x the time optimising HL2 for (the much larger market of) nVidia hardware. It's just that nVidia optimised their hardware for Doom 3, not for DX9. This is a turnaround from their TNT days, and now it's biting them.
BTW, where is this "proof" of reduced image quality to which you refer? All I'd heard of was some incorrect fogging (which is obviously bad, and is doubtless a bug that we can hope will be fixed before the Det50s are out of beta).
After Valve blasts nVidia for having sucky hardware, and nVidia is like, but, but, what about our new Det 50 drivers, one might be left wondering why Valve didn't even mention the existance of drivers that would improve the situation (supposedly by a lot). Not only does Valve of course have the beta Det 50s - and so did the press - but they refused to even entertain the thought of testing with the supposedly much more optimised drivers (nVidia claim that all their driver effort for the last few months has been devoted exclusively to the upcoming Det 50s).
Why? Well, one stated reason was a policy to test only with "publicly available hardware, and publicly available software". Laudable enough, considering that non-public drivers could have any number of bugs or "optimisations" that could render the game incorrectly and thus misrepresent its performance.
Indeed, Valve referred to an issue where fog was completely left out of an entire level, and though they didn't point any fingers, it was later revealed that yes, the beta Det 50s were the culprit.
For further info, you should read this report on the performance of the beta Release 50 Detonators. Summary: not much difference - at least for DX8-level games. DX9 is where the focus supposedly was, and there is a 25% gain in the PS2.0 test in 3DMark03, which is something.
However, who knows if it'll translate to a 25% gain in HalfLife 2 - probably not, in itself. And given recent 3DMark/nVidia events, even that much is uncertain, until the drivers are released for public examination. In any case, it's a long way short of the 100% gain needed for the 5900 Ultra to just draw even with the 9800 Pro.
nVidia apparently have a strong lead in Doom 3 scores, though (admittedly with the partial-precision NV3X-specific code path), so they will no doubt be hoping that Doom 3 outsells HalfLife 2... Myself, I have a 9600 Pro in my sights, just in time for the HL2 release:-)
BTW, regarding the release delay? According to Gabe Newell, "First I've heard of it". So there you are. Only 16 days to go...
How about google [link]? They've certainly made notes on some of my recent activity...
So I guess you don't mind receiving a few hundred penis enlargement ads each day, the way you've been broadcasting your email address..
Not just more memory, more address space
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Obviously for some high-demand apps, having >4 GB of memory is a Very Good Thing. But for some apps (especially under Windows), a 64 bit processor can be bring another big benefit to the table: a full 64 bit address space. Obviously this is needed for more memory, but even with only 2 GB of RAM, a Windows app that uses large contiguous areas of memory can run into serious address space fragmentation long before they run out of memory.
In Windows, you only get 2 GB of address space for your process (WinXP & expensive Win2K Server versions can give 3 GB, which helps). Into this address space is loaded your executable code (including all system DLLs) and your stack (by default 1 MB of address space is reserved for every thread), and these tend to be scattered around a bit, which breaks up the available address range considerably.
Now if your app needs to allocate large (200+ MB) areas of memory, how many of those do you think you can get from a 2 GB RAM machine? Not enough:-) In fact you may find that as little as 50-60% of your available RAM can be allocated into large chunks, and all the rest is only available as countless smaller fragments. The larger the contiguous RAM blocks you want, the less of them you can allocate.
With a 64 bit CPU, there's no more problem. The MMU can map scattered pages of your available physical RAM to any contiguous section of the massive 64 bit address range, and you can utilise all the RAM you have in any size chunk you wish:-)
If "real-world" is your thang, it's a graphics-intensive (but non-Adobe) app that really benefits from fast CPUs. It has versions on x86 (albeit pre-V3), PPC and MIPS. Supports SMP systems too.
Further, it didn't originate from the Mac world OR the PC, but from SGI-space. It's had time to be optimised for x86, and Apple have also had a crack at it (at least for V3).
I, for one, would welcome new ove^H^H^Hbenchmarks I could relate to.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought they already were...
But if you really want to, you can get a Bluetooth keyboard and carry it around with your PDA...
Yes, it may become trendy for some to take pictures with their cellphones and then email (or MMS) the pictures to their friends and families.
That's a camera phone, not a smartphone. Not comparable to PDAs.
If I need to take pictures, I can use my digital cameras. If I need to do serious computing stuffs (not only number crunching) I can use my laptop. If I need to jot down something, there're pens and paper. If I need to play games, I have PS/2 / X BOX game systems.
Let's see you fit all that in your pocket :-)
Seriously, the whole point of a smartphone is not that it matches the capabilities of any one of those items, but that it provides the basic capabilities of all of them, in one convenient device that is always with you. And they're integrated, which makes for some interesting new capabilities.
I have a digital camera, a laptop, pen and paper and even an XBox, and I use them all, on occasions. I also have a smartphone, and I use it more than any one of those devices, mostly because it's right there in my pocket, not back at home.
You can get a cheapo phone with basic organiser capabilities for half the price of the Zire, free on a plan, even with colour. Consider also that most people with a PDA will probably have a cellular phone too, and would see benefit in carrying one device rather than two.
What you're looking for is a phone with no more than the specs of the Zire (PalmOS, moderate resolution B/W display, 8 MB RAM, no camera etc), and I think that could appear in the near future for maybe $150-200, or around that of the Zire and a phone.
There is a distinction, and it's mostly in the form factor & interface.
Something that's the same rough size & proportions as a phone, and has a phone-style keypad/interface is a phone with a PDA (e.g. SE P800). Something that's, say, wider & has a qwerty keyboard - or no keyboard/keypad (e.g. Treo 600 is a PDA with phone. They both have similar capabilities, just different focus.
I'm not counting phones with small screens & organiser functions, or iPaqs with phone modules attached.
If I want to do something that requires a bigger screen (like watch a movie and actually enjoy it), I use a 15" laptop. I'm sure there's room for devices inbetween - bag-size rather than pocket-size, but a decent resolution display can be very usable even on a pocket-sized device.
A touch thicker, a touch lighter
screen is 208x320 (vertical format) and very bright
Full bluetooth etc
expandable memory (16MB to 128MB, Memory Stick Duo)
plays MP3/Ogg and MP4 video (and comes with a stereo headset)
Runs Symbian/UIQ (which I happen to prefer over PalmOS)
Great for eBooks (probably my major use)
No keyboard, but I could never use one that small, with my large fingers, and the Jot recognition works very well.
This earlier article blames the email problems on buggy email software that Telstra installed recently.
Thank heavens, they're only bouncing one email in ten now :-)
Here's a couple of other big points for me:
Reading in the car at night.
The backlight makes all the difference. My wife can read her book while I'm driving, or vice versa. Great for long trips, and far less distracting than a maplight.
Reading anywhere, any time.
Since I use my phone (Sony Ericsson P800) as an ebook reader (+ organiser etc), I virtually always have it with me. So if I'm waiting for 10 minutes for someone, I can read a few more pages, instead of looking bored. I also carry a book or two for my wife, and even a few kids stories, so I have something to read them at a moment's notice.
Easier paging
It's true that most ebook readers have less text per page on their smaller screens (especially a phone, even a relatively large one like the P800's), but this is compensated by using the P800's scrollwheel to page up & down. It's so easy to advance a page, or flip back a few pages to check something that it more than makes up for the smaller format. Especially when the smaller format means it also fits in my pocket. Oh, and searching back for the first reference to a character is so much easier too.
A convenient online library
OK, admittedly this is slightly dodgier, but it shouldn't have to be. I look forward to the time when you can borrow ebooks from a real online library, just like their dead-tree counterparts only easier.
I recently lived for a while in Toronto, Canada, and whatever else you can say about them, their library system is excellent. I could go to their website & reserve any book in any of the city's libraries, and in a day or two (if there wasn't a queue) I'd get a phone call from their computer telling me it had arrived at my local branch. I'd stop in while walking to work & pick it up. It was so damn convenient, I read heaps of books without the risk of shelling out good money for a bad read (also some of my favourite books I'd left in storage in Australia).
Moving back to Sydney, Australia, the library system here feels like the dark ages. Each library branch has their own website (a few do form mini-networks, so you can search 3 or 4 branches at once), so you're limited to whatever's available in the branch at the current time. I can reserve a book online - if I pay a dollar for the privilege - but they still won't ship books from other branches to my local branch for me.
So now, if I hear about a book that might be interesting, I go to IRC & download a scanned copy. The occasional OCR error aside (fine in most books, annoying in a few), the convenience over my local library system - combined with the other ebook advantages - makes it the way I read everything now, except for the few new releases I know I'm going to enjoy & keep (which I buy in paperback).
But even those, and for my current library, I download the electronic text as soon as I can, for the sheer convenience of having it always with me, readable anywhere, any time, any circumstances.
Nor do I get eyestrain or headache, even after hours of reading. Even in the near-dark (which I would get with a paperback, mind you).
Not only am I satisfied with the overall experience, but my wife almost bought a P800 herself, just to read her books on, instead of the same book on paperback. She, like me, quickly came to prefer the experience & convenience of a decent ebook reader. (She didn't buy a second P800 in the end, she just borrows mine on the rare occasions when I'm not using it myself).
I would be delighted in a 600 dpi screen, especially one that was readable in moderately-low light without requiring a backlight (for better battery life), but it's a minor issue at most. The higher resolution of a book is outweighed most of the time by the flexibility & convenience of having all my current books always available, in any circumstances.
Face it - the only way we'll see the end of x86 is if someone builds a new, non-x86 chip that can still run all that existing x86 code at least as well as the best existing x86 processors. Otherwise it's just another niche architecture, and no-one's going to "upgrade" to it.
Intel forgot that, or thought they could force it on people anyway. AMD remembered, but took the easy way out & just extended things. Similarly, IBM got it wrong with OS/2, and MS jumped straight in with Windows. Note how long it took before MS was able to phase out DOS completely, even so.
8 DIMM slots (4 attached to each CPU, unlike every other workstation board out there) means 8 GB using cheaper 1 GB DIMMs, or 16 GB max. It also means up to 10 or 12 GB/s of total bandwidth :-) No other dually motherboard I have seen offers both AGP and memory connected to each CPU.
Add to that an AGP Pro slot, a few PCI-X slots (100 MHz and 133 MHz), 4-way SATA RAID 0+1, Gigabit LAN (connected to PCI-X), Firewire etc, and you have the most desirable mobo available today - if you can afford it.
Some apps require large blocks of contiguous memory - and with only 2GB of address space available, you can actually run into address space fragmentation problems long before you run out of physical memory. There simply isn't a large enough span of addresses available to map the memory into.
Other things compete for address space too. System DLLs map themselves into various places, leaving too-small gaps between them. Threads reserve 1 MB each, for the stack grow. Some PCI boards (e.g. HiDef video capture) map their buffer memory into your address space for easy access - which can be as large as 512MB!
Yes, more address space is needed even more than more physical memory.
Since I moved from Canada back to Australia, I now pay AUD$99 (maybe CDN$90) per month for an ADSL link that gives me 50 KB/s down, 13 KB/s up, on a good day.
There are cheaper options, but most are volume-capped (usually 3-6 GB/month), whereas my ISP uses "unlimited", prioritised traffic (based on previous 30 days usage).
Or it works as intended, but you've misinterpreted their claims to mean something more amazing than it really is. Which may be deliberate, on their part.
They can and do. When you boot a game, it doesn't read the OS off the HD, it reads it off the disc.
Using the hard drive to hold patches just brings us back to Windows DLL Hell.
Since the HD files are only used when running the dashboard, not while running 3rd party software (i.e. games), "DLL Hell" is not an issue. Patching the firmware might be a concern, but they can't do that - only ship it with new machines.
The only thing that is affected by patching the system dashboard is the system dashboard, which is a controlled environment (as far as Microsoft is concerned, anyway). There should be no non-MS software on the HD's system partition, or using the HD files, so as long as MS test it successfully on one Xbox, it will work on all of them.
If you install 3rd party software on the HD yourself (e.g. EvolutionX or Linux), and it gets broken by a patch MS pushes at you, I'm sure they don't care in the slightest. I doubt anyone else seriously believes MS has any obligation to worry about breaking anything except what they told you it would do - run the dashboard and play games.
Let's also hope that the pressure on nVidia to get the Det50s out & counter ATi's HL2 scores doesn't push them into a premature release with those kind of quality issues.
Reduced image quality, missing/wrong fog etc invalidate any useful benchmark scores, but I still think Valve could at least have mentioned the possibility of further improvements from the future Det50s.
Also I noted that, while the beta Det50 image was noticeably worse (darker, more banded, and more pixelated in the yellow stripes on the ship's upper left), the 44.xx and 45.xx images were fine - but the ATi Cat 3.4 and 3.7 images both had pixelated stripes, almost as bad as the 51.75 image. To me that suggests that nVidia can get it right, and it's ATi that needs to lift their driver game.
But how many games can you list that "work with _nothing_ other" than recent cards? Certainly HalfLife 2 isn't one of them - their stated minimum required gfx card is a TNT. Even Doom 3 will work fine on an original GeForce.
Sure it'll be slower, but you just have to turn down the eye candy (resolution, AA, AF and other visual effects) to make it playable. And you can't complain about not getting the fancy picture on your 1998 hardware (well, you can, but I won't be listening :-)
BTW, where is this "proof" of reduced image quality to which you refer? All I'd heard of was some incorrect fogging (which is obviously bad, and is doubtless a bug that we can hope will be fixed before the Det50s are out of beta).
Why? Well, one stated reason was a policy to test only with "publicly available hardware, and publicly available software". Laudable enough, considering that non-public drivers could have any number of bugs or "optimisations" that could render the game incorrectly and thus misrepresent its performance.
Indeed, Valve referred to an issue where fog was completely left out of an entire level, and though they didn't point any fingers, it was later revealed that yes, the beta Det 50s were the culprit.
For further info, you should read this report on the performance of the beta Release 50 Detonators. Summary: not much difference - at least for DX8-level games. DX9 is where the focus supposedly was, and there is a 25% gain in the PS2.0 test in 3DMark03, which is something.
However, who knows if it'll translate to a 25% gain in HalfLife 2 - probably not, in itself. And given recent 3DMark/nVidia events, even that much is uncertain, until the drivers are released for public examination. In any case, it's a long way short of the 100% gain needed for the 5900 Ultra to just draw even with the 9800 Pro.
nVidia apparently have a strong lead in Doom 3 scores, though (admittedly with the partial-precision NV3X-specific code path), so they will no doubt be hoping that Doom 3 outsells HalfLife 2... Myself, I have a 9600 Pro in my sights, just in time for the HL2 release :-)
BTW, regarding the release delay? According to Gabe Newell, "First I've heard of it". So there you are. Only 16 days to go...
So I guess you don't mind receiving a few hundred penis enlargement ads each day, the way you've been broadcasting your email address..
In Windows, you only get 2 GB of address space for your process (WinXP & expensive Win2K Server versions can give 3 GB, which helps). Into this address space is loaded your executable code (including all system DLLs) and your stack (by default 1 MB of address space is reserved for every thread), and these tend to be scattered around a bit, which breaks up the available address range considerably.
Now if your app needs to allocate large (200+ MB) areas of memory, how many of those do you think you can get from a 2 GB RAM machine? Not enough :-) In fact you may find that as little as 50-60% of your available RAM can be allocated into large chunks, and all the rest is only available as countless smaller fragments. The larger the contiguous RAM blocks you want, the less of them you can allocate.
With a 64 bit CPU, there's no more problem. The MMU can map scattered pages of your available physical RAM to any contiguous section of the massive 64 bit address range, and you can utilise all the RAM you have in any size chunk you wish :-)
Further, it didn't originate from the Mac world OR the PC, but from SGI-space. It's had time to be optimised for x86, and Apple have also had a crack at it (at least for V3).
I, for one, would welcome new ove^H^H^Hbenchmarks I could relate to.