No, wrong. A lot of gamers, like me, use Q3 benchmarks to roughyl measure how well a piece of hardware performs on games in general, not just on Q3.
I hope you meant that you use Q3 benchmarks as well as others, because if you don't plan on running Q3 you won't pay attention solely to Q3 benchmarks, and you definitly won't "use Q3 benchmarks to measure how a piece of hardware performs in general." Remember how Unreal ran really, really well on 3dfx cards, and on that one specific "benchmark" it would outperform competition that would spank it silly in every other performance assesment? Well, people didn't (or, people with any sense didn't) buy a Voodoo3/5 if their game of choice was Q3, because it obviously didn't perform as well then. True, you can't judge a video card's long-term (what, 6 months?:P) value, especially off of one benchmark. It seems that if one's buying decisions are so upset by a single benchmark, then one probably plans on extensively using the hardware for that one function (e.g. the voodoos for UT, or one of these cards for Q3). That, or one is just really gullible, and as I said before in this case should be greatly confused by all of the largely differing numbers that they put in big print on the boxes.
I agree that it is a shady practice, I just don't think that one single and moderately specalized benchmark should influence buying decisions so much. Thats like reading this article and deciding that because its so adept at performing one function that its great for anything. Perhaps its not exactly the same, but IMHO it is just as silly.
Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.
The only reason potential customers have for paying attention to Quake3 benchmarks is because thats what they plan on running. For the typical non-gaming home buyer, Quake3 benchmarks are just as meaningless as theoretical memory bandwidth. For gamers, Quake3 benchmarks matter because thats what they'll play. People who refer to specific benchmarks are intentionally doing so, and the benchmarks they pay attention to are chosen entirely because they are relevant to their plans for usage.
Of course, some people are always impressed by "big numbers", in which case your agument applies to every single hype-word on the boxes, in which case the Quake3 benchmark is only one of a huge number of fabrications that marketing will place on a box.
I liked the N&O's article better, it focuses on Dr. Dave Bradley. For those who don't know, he wrote the original bios code and, of course, "invented" control-alt-delete. Besides working at IBM, he's als an adjunct instructor at NCSU, and teaches programming and basic computer design classes.
Yeah, I read about it in "Readers' Digest" almost 2 years ago. I had been looking for the story, but couldn't find it. Does anyone know which issue it was in?
They're still learning from their mistakes, and I doubt it is your place to say that NASA doesn't know anything about what its doing. Sure, they make mistakes, but I'd bet that if news agencies focused on your daily activities, there would be people all over thinking "gee, he doesn't know what he's doing". And you're probably not handling $1/4 billion projects, or responsible for putting a man on the moon. I'm sorry, but your cynical view and lack of respect for NASA is appaling.
Yes, the "Pegasus" rocket broke, but they still destroyed both the rocket and its payload (the plane). I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but I think they have already got a backup plane/rocket ready to test, hopefully sometime soon.
At our school, we've had a home-made one for years in the nuclear engineering department. =)
The main problem with using the rail gun anywhere was the size of the capacitors needed to reach the extrmemely high voltage it required to fire. I didn't see anywhere on their site that they managed to reduce this overhead, has anyone?
Intel and AMD's 64-bit strategies are remarkably divergent
No kidding. IA-64 is not even using the x86 ISA, while the Sledgehammer will extend the x86 ISA to 64-bits.
Intel will probably come out with an x86-compatible 64-bit processor around the same time AMD introduces theirs.
Actually, so far Intel has not announced any plans to extend the x86 ISA to 64 bits, their IA-64 uses EPIC "technology", and can not natively run x86 code. But, it will be "compatible", but not nearly as compatible as the Sledgehammer, which will natively execute older programs compiled for the 32-bit x86 ISA.
If not, AMD will be well-poised to take over the desktop market
This sort of depends upon exactly how good the Itanium (Intel/HP's IA-64 processor) turns out to be. Remember, Intel has already taken big steps to try and turn programmers toward their new 64-bit ISA, and Intel is planning the Itanium for desktops as well. If it turns out that Intel can manage to get programs desktop users are accustomed to using to be made explicitly for their IA-64 and not AMD's 64-bit x86, then many desktop users might feel pressured to switch completely away from x86. 'Fortunatly' for AMD, Intel has totally blown off Microsoft, and not included them in the development of this at all, so maybe AMD will be able to garner some support from MS.
BTW, there is a lot of info on this, starting about 10 months ago, in the Silicon Insider, located at real world tech.
Or are there x86 boxes out there that have it? Even though there aren't many, more and more x86 mobo's have them. Look at anandtech's coverage of Computex, here for some info on some upcoming motherboards with fully-fledged PCI slots. Also, the third day coverage, here has some other motherboards with 64-bit PCI.
On a side note, it is pretty cool that a lot of these newer boards (those supporting ATA-100) have the HighPoint HPT370 controller, which is a RAID controller as well. How convenient! =)
...the most important thing about RAM is the capability for RANDOM access...
Actually, I would have to say that the most important aspect of "RAM" is that it is actually RWM, meaning that it can be written to as well as read from. Without the capability for being written to, "RAM" would be very much less usefull than it is now. The rest of your comment I pretty much agree with.
This makes soo much sense...
on
Napster Wars
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Obviously, those major labels need protection from the RIAA. They need every penny they can get! Heaven forbid, that they, in their infinite wisdom, see that, if anyone, the small labels would be suffering more.While I would admit that programs such as Napster would help small labels, they probably would be helped more by just being played on the radio, because then at least someone would be paying them something.
Granted it came with a system, but it was made by Microsoft. The questionable items:software page says "Anyone selling OEM software without the machine is potentially infringing upon the software company's copyright. Be wary of offers to buy software in jewel cases only with no other original packaging or manuals." It looks like it would be legal if it is a "real" version, like you say. Will they stop me?What do you think?
As previously stated, goto anandtech and look at AMd's roadmap, and you will see that this is a "socket a" chip, and you'll probably need a motherboard with the KZ133 chipset for it. No, in fact, this isn't justifiable, and it is all Intel's fault. Perhaps you've not seen this before, but remmeber how Cyrix was sued 7 times or whatever, and VIA is in a lot of hot water right now with intel? Its because they basically used technology intel decided it owns in their products. I am not debating whether this is "right" or not, but it is the reason AMD will not make a chip that will go on mobo's designed for Intel chips (eg, slot 1): Intel would sue them. It is most certainly NOT AMD's fault that they can't just go make chips using the same interface as Intel's chips. See, Intel is able to controll most motherboard and chipset manafacturers, because those companies get most of their money making stuff tailored around Intel's line of products. Because Intel is a competitive company, it will obviously try to limit AMD's hold in the market. Thus they force AMD to design their own interface, and they also make chipset manafacturers (right now, VIA) suffer if they design chipsets around AMD's proucts. It costs money to design these chipsets, and even more money to get the market to accept them as viable and adopt them. Thus, AMD suffers because they have to waste resources creating and marketing their technologies, while Intel is accepted as the defacto standard.
And if had bothered to look at the link I provided, you'd see that RIAA thinks that making MP3s from your own CDs is illegal, even if it is for your own use. Where does it say that? This sentence is the only one with "mp3". "While MP3s may be popular, if the artist and record company have not specifically authorized the music to be freely traded on the Net, then posting MP3s to an Internet site or downloading them to your computer hard drive is copyright infringement." I don't know where you got that idea from, but obviously not from the link you provided.
I will agree that the whole section dealing with computer recordings is vague, but no where does it explicitly say "you simply can't posess any mp3's!"
I think the point was that the Nationalsozialistische Partei Deutschlands (er, spelling, sorry) did not just rise to power in a day, and kill all the Jews before anyone knew what happenned. the point is that the NSA's efforts to oversee all communication paralells the efforts of the early struggling nazi party. yes, the Nazi's also had problems becoming accepted, and many germans attempted to rebel against their rule (ever hear of Die WeiBe Rose?). And perhaps we should not call anyone a communist, lest they would be assocciated with Stalin, who murdered more Soviets, and whose 5 year plan totally raped the environment of the USSR. Nor should we call anyone an Aztec, or perhaps we should not call anyone a "white man", as historically the white people (yes, i am white) have been gerally the most oppressive toward people who they see as "different". And the Romans had been declining practically ever since Sulla's reign (around the last century BC), who also coincidentally murdered a bunch of people. It was a combination of internal weaknesses (the slave to citizen ratio in Italy during this time was 3:1) and pressure from outisde. Sorry if this is too off topic, but it a reply, so technically its not too off topic.:P
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No, wrong. A lot of gamers, like me, use Q3 benchmarks to roughyl measure how well a piece of hardware performs on games in general, not just on Q3.
:P) value, especially off of one benchmark. It seems that if one's buying decisions are so upset by a single benchmark, then one probably plans on extensively using the hardware for that one function (e.g. the voodoos for UT, or one of these cards for Q3). That, or one is just really gullible, and as I said before in this case should be greatly confused by all of the largely differing numbers that they put in big print on the boxes.
I hope you meant that you use Q3 benchmarks as well as others, because if you don't plan on running Q3 you won't pay attention solely to Q3 benchmarks, and you definitly won't "use Q3 benchmarks to measure how a piece of hardware performs in general." Remember how Unreal ran really, really well on 3dfx cards, and on that one specific "benchmark" it would outperform competition that would spank it silly in every other performance assesment? Well, people didn't (or, people with any sense didn't) buy a Voodoo3/5 if their game of choice was Q3, because it obviously didn't perform as well then. True, you can't judge a video card's long-term (what, 6 months?
I agree that it is a shady practice, I just don't think that one single and moderately specalized benchmark should influence buying decisions so much. Thats like reading this article and deciding that because its so adept at performing one function that its great for anything. Perhaps its not exactly the same, but IMHO it is just as silly.
Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.
The only reason potential customers have for paying attention to Quake3 benchmarks is because thats what they plan on running. For the typical non-gaming home buyer, Quake3 benchmarks are just as meaningless as theoretical memory bandwidth. For gamers, Quake3 benchmarks matter because thats what they'll play. People who refer to specific benchmarks are intentionally doing so, and the benchmarks they pay attention to are chosen entirely because they are relevant to their plans for usage.
Of course, some people are always impressed by "big numbers", in which case your agument applies to every single hype-word on the boxes, in which case the Quake3 benchmark is only one of a huge number of fabrications that marketing will place on a box.
I liked the N&O's article better, it focuses on Dr. Dave Bradley. For those who don't know, he wrote the original bios code and, of course, "invented" control-alt-delete. Besides working at IBM, he's als an adjunct instructor at NCSU, and teaches programming and basic computer design classes.
Yeah, I read about it in "Readers' Digest" almost 2 years ago. I had been looking for the story, but couldn't find it. Does anyone know which issue it was in?
They're still learning from their mistakes, and I doubt it is your place to say that NASA doesn't know anything about what its doing. Sure, they make mistakes, but I'd bet that if news agencies focused on your daily activities, there would be people all over thinking "gee, he doesn't know what he's doing". And you're probably not handling $1/4 billion projects, or responsible for putting a man on the moon. I'm sorry, but your cynical view and lack of respect for NASA is appaling.
Yes, the "Pegasus" rocket broke, but they still destroyed both the rocket and its payload (the plane).
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but I think they have already got a backup plane/rocket ready to test, hopefully sometime soon.
At our school, we've had a home-made one for years in the nuclear engineering department. =)
The main problem with using the rail gun anywhere was the size of the capacitors needed to reach the extrmemely high voltage it required to fire.
I didn't see anywhere on their site that they managed to reduce this overhead, has anyone?
Intel and AMD's 64-bit strategies are remarkably divergent
No kidding. IA-64 is not even using the x86 ISA, while the Sledgehammer will extend the x86 ISA to 64-bits.
Intel will probably come out with an x86-compatible 64-bit processor around the same time AMD introduces theirs.
Actually, so far Intel has not announced any plans to extend the x86 ISA to 64 bits, their IA-64 uses EPIC "technology", and can not natively run x86 code. But, it will be "compatible", but not nearly as compatible as the Sledgehammer, which will natively execute older programs compiled for the 32-bit x86 ISA.
If not, AMD will be well-poised to take over the desktop market
This sort of depends upon exactly how good the Itanium (Intel/HP's IA-64 processor) turns out to be. Remember, Intel has already taken big steps to try and turn programmers toward their new 64-bit ISA, and Intel is planning the Itanium for desktops as well. If it turns out that Intel can manage to get programs desktop users are accustomed to using to be made explicitly for their IA-64 and not AMD's 64-bit x86, then many desktop users might feel pressured to switch completely away from x86. 'Fortunatly' for AMD, Intel has totally blown off Microsoft, and not included them in the development of this at all, so maybe AMD will be able to garner some support from MS.
BTW, there is a lot of info on this, starting about 10 months ago, in the Silicon Insider, located at real world tech.
I use 196 myself
You use how much? 196? What did you do, get a 128mb dimm, a 64 mb dimm, and... a 4mb dimm? How odd.
...the good ol' GUS MAX of course!! =)
Or are there x86 boxes out there that have it?
Even though there aren't many, more and more x86 mobo's have them. Look at anandtech's coverage of Computex, here for some info on some upcoming motherboards with fully-fledged PCI slots. Also, the third day coverage, here has some other motherboards with 64-bit PCI.
On a side note, it is pretty cool that a lot of these newer boards (those supporting ATA-100) have the HighPoint HPT370 controller, which is a RAID controller as well. How convenient! =)
...the most important thing about RAM is the capability for RANDOM access...
Actually, I would have to say that the most important aspect of "RAM" is that it is actually RWM, meaning that it can be written to as well as read from. Without the capability for being written to, "RAM" would be very much less usefull than it is now.
The rest of your comment I pretty much agree with.
Obviously, those major labels need protection from the RIAA. They need every penny they can get! Heaven forbid, that they, in their infinite wisdom, see that, if anyone, the small labels would be suffering more.While I would admit that programs such as Napster would help small labels, they probably would be helped more by just being played on the radio, because then at least someone would be paying them something.
Granted it came with a system, but it was made by Microsoft.
The questionable items:software page says "Anyone selling OEM software without the machine is potentially infringing upon the software company's copyright. Be wary of offers to buy software in jewel cases only with no other original packaging or manuals."
It looks like it would be legal if it is a "real" version, like you say.
Will they stop me?What do you think?
As previously stated, goto anandtech and look at AMd's roadmap, and you will see that this is a "socket a" chip, and you'll probably need a motherboard with the KZ133 chipset for it.
No, in fact, this isn't justifiable, and it is all Intel's fault. Perhaps you've not seen this before, but remmeber how Cyrix was sued 7 times or whatever, and VIA is in a lot of hot water right now with intel? Its because they basically used technology intel decided it owns in their products. I am not debating whether this is "right" or not, but it is the reason AMD will not make a chip that will go on mobo's designed for Intel chips (eg, slot 1): Intel would sue them.
It is most certainly NOT AMD's fault that they can't just go make chips using the same interface as Intel's chips. See, Intel is able to controll most motherboard and chipset manafacturers, because those companies get most of their money making stuff tailored around Intel's line of products. Because Intel is a competitive company, it will obviously try to limit AMD's hold in the market. Thus they force AMD to design their own interface, and they also make chipset manafacturers (right now, VIA) suffer if they design chipsets around AMD's proucts. It costs money to design these chipsets, and even more money to get the market to accept them as viable and adopt them. Thus, AMD suffers because they have to waste resources creating and marketing their technologies, while Intel is accepted as the defacto standard.
Where does it say that? This sentence is the only one with "mp3". "While MP3s may be popular, if the artist and record company have not specifically authorized the music to be freely traded on the Net, then posting MP3s to an Internet site or downloading them to your computer hard drive is copyright infringement."
I don't know where you got that idea from, but obviously not from the link you provided.
I will agree that the whole section dealing with computer recordings is vague, but no where does it explicitly say "you simply can't posess any mp3's!"
I think the point was that the Nationalsozialistische Partei Deutschlands (er, spelling, sorry) did not just rise to power in a day, and kill all the Jews before anyone knew what happenned. the point is that the NSA's efforts to oversee all communication paralells the efforts of the early struggling nazi party. yes, the Nazi's also had problems becoming accepted, and many germans attempted to rebel against their rule (ever hear of Die WeiBe Rose?). And perhaps we should not call anyone a communist, lest they would be assocciated with Stalin, who murdered more Soviets, and whose 5 year plan totally raped the environment of the USSR. Nor should we call anyone an Aztec, or perhaps we should not call anyone a "white man", as historically the white people (yes, i am white) have been gerally the most oppressive toward people who they see as "different". And the Romans had been declining practically ever since Sulla's reign (around the last century BC), who also coincidentally murdered a bunch of people. It was a combination of internal weaknesses (the slave to citizen ratio in Italy during this time was 3:1) and pressure from outisde. Sorry if this is too off topic, but it a reply, so technically its not too off topic. :P