Few to no new Windows computers these days come with restore disks. My new Sony Vile... err, Vaio RC series from April 2006 has no restore CDs and while restore disks can be made, supposedly you get one chance to make these disks. I had been seriously considering buying an OEM copy of Windows XP MCE, just so I have restore disks that would have lasted longer.
Yeah, it is too bad Hitler killed the jewish inventor who made Einstein. Just imagine what could have happened in science if the this inventor's prototype made it into mass production.
See there is a moderately funny joke that involves Hitler, a thinly veiled reference to the Holocaust, and jewish people without being totally antisemitic. Though I am probably wrong about the joke not being antisemitic or for that matter even being funny.
Goodbye sweet, sweet karma.
If you think this is bad, I have done as bad or even worse on slashdot when I mentioned that a racist name for Arabs was "sand nigger."
Small correction: There are PCIe FW 800 cards however, they use a PCI FW chipset and a PCI to PCIe bridge chip. I have no idea though if the PCI to PCIe bridge supports a 64-bit length. If the PCI to PCIe bridge only supported a 32-bit length it would be sort of stupid as full speed FW 800 would saturate the bus. Then again there are native PCIe FW 400 cards so native PCIe FW 800 cards can't be that far off.
There are many unfilmable books, here are two more unfilmable authors and books. For instance one would be the Inhibitor series by Alastair Reynolds. The four books in the series are long and have many events happening, the hardcover edition of "Chasm City" is 524 pages, with the rest of the books in the series about the same length. "Chasm City" also has three major plotlines that are told at the same time and that intersect and would haver to be told at the same time even though each plotline take place years and light-years apart from each other.
Any Well World novel by Jack L. Chalker would also be a bad choice, too. First off even though there are four or five major characters in "The Sea is Full of Stars" and all of them go through several horrifying transformations that would require new actors/CGI models for each transformation. To top it off, three of the characters end up having their personalities scrambled together, but by the end they have their personalities mostly returned to their original states. While these characters do remain distinct, keeping track of them in the backdrop of a movie would be nearly impossible.
I am sure that there are more books/authors like these, but these two popped into my mind first.
I think an example of why publishers and dev houses are so cautious is they look at what happened to Troika and see what creativity got them. Early last year (2005) Troika went bankrupt. Troika developed three published games: Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil(ToEE), and Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines(VtM:B). All of these games are very creative are and each has elements that are excellent and on the whole I think they are good games. However, they all seem to suffer from many of the same flaws, such as bugs, unfinished areas, and serious computing requirements for their time. All of these games have several show stopping bugs require their respective official patches and many benefit from unofficial patches released by fans. There are several unfinished areas in ToEE where there are empty chests in some areas and other annoyances. Every Troika game required a high-end PC of the time to play them. When I played these games I never noticed any serious slowdowns, though I had a mid to high range PC when each game was released. I did notice some slowdowns, but I never thought they were serious. However, reports from users in forums seemed to give me the impression that a mid to low range computer at that time just could not play these games at a resonable speed.
Hey now be careful, some Macs play the sound of breaking glass when the machine doesn't POST properly. Though I liked the sound of the car crash on the first generation PowerMacs when the machine would not POST. IIRC all of the Blue and White G3 Macs and newer Macs have boring, but actually useful beeps when the machine can't POST.
Ugh, don't remind me of the Powerbook 5300, the real Apple laptops that are bricks with LEDs. I won't get into details, but there were several problems with this model, from batteries that caught fire to motherboards that needed major reworking to be even somewhat stable, not that the version of MacOS at the time, which was MacOS 7.5.5, was very stable in the first place. It would take some major screw-ups for Apple to put anything remotely as bad as the Powerbook 5300.
The Apple 30" panel and for that matter the Dell 30" panel need a dual link DVI port. The ATI Radeon X1900 series, the ATI Radeon X1800 series, and those ATI X1600 series cards with two DVI ports can each drive two 30" panels. I would only think though that 3D gaming would be possible only on an X1800 or an X1900, you might even want to consider a Crossfire setup, then you could run three 30" panels. I have not seen any benchmarks on 30" panels with any card, which would be interesting to see. There is also one dual link DVI on the ATI Radeon X1300 series.
While nVidia's website does not mention it there is also one dual link DVI port on most to all of the nVidia 7800 series cards, so in this department the 7800 series is in the same department as the X1300. The other DVI port on the 7800 is a single link DVI port and this DVI port can only drive displays up to 1600x1200@60Hz. The 7800 series is still better off than the 7300 series, which no dual link ports.
For that matter, the newer ATI Radeons can run HDMI ports on HDTVs at 1080p. I'm not sure if nVidia cards can drive an HDTV on the HDMI. There was some talk of adding driver support for this a while ago. I would assume that they have, but who knows? If a 7800 series nVidia card can display on HDMI it would probably only be able to display at 1080i.
No as I said in other replies this is a real bug that only affects machines running Windows XP with 1GB or more of RAM. The acpi daemon error in Linux was something about an invalid endpoint in the ACPI tree. At any rate, a new BIOS for my laptop is available and I have flashed the BIOS. This may clear up the acpi error in Linux, but I know that supporting ACPI is a nightmare in Linux and this may not fix the problem.
Get the patch from Microsoft, you will have to call them directly at their 1-800 number, mention the Knowledge Base article number and they will e-mail you the link for the fix, for free. The KB article states that this is only a problem with computers running with 1GB or more of RAM and only for some computers, the Knowledge Base article is more descriptive of the problem. The patch is related to KB Article Number 909095.
Get the patch from Microsoft, you will have to call them directly at their 1-800 number and they will e-mail you the link for the fix. The patch is related to KB Article Number 909095.
Windows is full of bugs like these. I own a laptop, running Windows XP, it is an Acer 8100 series. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB from the installed 1GB of RAM. Occasionally the computer would not enter hibernate while in standby and would instead wake up, stay awake and suck down battery power. XP would throw up an error about being unable to complete the API because of insufficient resources. Why a machine with 2GB of RAM would ever have not enough resources is beyond me. At any rate, to obtain the fix I had to call the support line at Microsoft and get e-mailed a URL and password for a password protected archive. Installing the files from this archive fixed the problem, but that is too much work for something that should have been caught in SP2. Supposedly this fix will show up in XP SP3, whenever that happens.
I still have trouble with the laptop not going to sleep all of the time when closing the lid. Sometimes after I close the laptop it displays a scrambled screen. I am afaid of trying to get this fixed if this is a hardware problem, because in my opinion, laptops disassembled and reassembled outside the factorey are never quite the same as they were. Maybe I just need to flash the BIOS.
Yes, I tried to run Linux on this computer, Fedora Core 4, X did not work properly, and Linux would lock up if the pcmcia deamon started and every few seconds the acpi daemon would print a message to the console complaining about something in the BIOS. Granted X stopped working after I tried to set the screen resolution to 1680x1050, the native resolution of the panel.
So? FYI, Sony did not demo a playable PS2 until about a month before it launched in Japan.
This isn't very acceptable, but Sony can do what it wants and people will still buy.
Absolutely false. Neither MS nor ATI have some magical shader patents (no idea where you came up with this). MS simply specifies what will go into the next version of DirectX and the hardware manufacturers add this capability, although they are of course free to add features above and beyond this. For example, nVidia 7800 series offers Vertex Fetch. Anyway, since PS3 utilizes OpenGL (not DX) the DirectX specifications mean nothing anyway.
While I am no expert, the Sony patent does not mean much to me and is newer than many of the Microsoft and ATI patents. Yes even nVidia has some patents and I an sure that there are many more patents for pixel shaders.
I don't know how all of the licensing agreements are all set up, but its hard for me to believe that two companies like Microsoft and Sony would ever share patents.
Are you seriously trying to say that the PS3 GPU will not have shaders? Can I have what you're smoking?
Yes, I am. I am speculating that the PS3 will not have shaders because Sony does not have access to the required patents.
First off, while the X1800XL/XT and the 7800GT/GTX would be faster they put out way too much heat, require too much power and have memory busses that would require a PCB with too many layers to be cost effective.
I disagree with the statement that the "[X1600 series] [is] one of the worst video cards of this generation". While the mid-range X1600 is not as fast as the high-end members of X800 series, as one might expect, the X1600 is still no slouch, it is faster than the 6600 and the X700 from the last generation. While I am not sure what speed of memory the new iMacs use, they do use GDDR3, which puts these new Macs in the same range as the X1600XT. Also the X1600 has more features than the X700 or the 6600. These are not "checklist" type features for instance there is support for two Dual Link DVI ports which is more than the 6600 or the X700 is capeable of. Much of the complaints around the X1600 was about their price/performace ratio when they were priced at $250 for the X1600XL and $200 for the X1600 Pro when first announced. However, the X1600 series never sold for these prices, an X1600 will set you back about $175 and the X1600 Pro is about $130. Currently the architecture of X1600 may seem kind of lop-sided and unusual because it has better shader performance over polygon pushing power. However, the new R580 from ATI, which will be named the X1900 supposedly will be four X1600 cores lashed together and will probably easily outpace the current 7800 series and X1800 series.
Both Sony and nVidia are masters at hype. Maybe I can provide a scenario of two that defates some of this hype.
Has Sony yet demoed, with videos, a working PS3 system with all of the hardware in final silicon? I'm not sure they have. If they have please correct me. If they have not it seems very late to not have a working PS3 system since the release date is this spring. Just to spread some FUD, perhaps one of the reasons is that Sony does not have a working demo is that Sony does not have access to critical patents relating to programmable shaders (pixel and vertex shaders). Many critical of these shader patents belong to Microsoft, more shader patents belong to ATI, and even some more of these patents belong to Nintendo. I doubt that Sony will have licensing deals with Microsoft ATI, or Nintendo, as they are all direct competitors in the console market. While nVidia may have access to these patents, the licensing agreements probably only apply the design and manufacture of PC graphics cards. So without programmable shaders in silicon what do you do? If Sony has enough patentts it is possible the PS3 may emulate as many of these shaders as possible with the CPU, hence the Cell processor and all of its extra hardware. In general, vertex shaders are not all that diffcult to emulate on modern PCs, however pixel shaders are very slow when emulated on a PC. If Sony has the option,(remember those pantents) I would imagine that the PS3 would emulate many of these shaders. If this is the case the Cell processor will be spending many of its CPU cycles on emulating shaders. This is not a good thing as much of the power of the Cell processor would be wasted in emulating shaders.
If Sony could not even emulate these shaders, the PS3 would have to fall back on the nVidia graphics chip. Without shaders about all the nVidia graphics chip would be good at would be good for in both cases is pushing polygons. This is not where the future of 3D graphics is. The only real advantage for using higher polygon count objects over lower polygon count objects is that the higher polygon count objects look better in profile, which is not a great advantage. Effects like motion blur and many lighting effects only work with programmable shaders. If this is the case, while the objects on the PS3 would look smoother in profile, the effectsn and the general look of the graphics woulf look much like the PS2. This would also be bad, obviously.
That's nothing, I have an Acer TravelMate 8104 which has a 15.4" screen with a resolution of 1680x1050.
Granted, out of the box Windows XP was set to a larger text size. With the text set like this, Windows XP looked uglier than usual, I turned the text to normal size and I have used it this way ever since.
To some degree the individual pixels on a 15.4" 1680x1050 are tiny. It would be nice, however, if some company made a desktop LCD panel with small pixel pitches. Such a panel could have a pixel pitch a bit larger than my Acer's screen. The screen could have a more standard resolution of 1600x1200 on a screen size of 17", or what about a 20" panel with a resolution of 2560x1600?
Windows XP SP3 is coming at least a URL at Microsoft says. Of course, Microsoft could turn SP3 into a Service Release and avoid the hassle of having to continue to support XP in two or three years. In any case I got this URL when I had to call Microsoft. My problem was that I had have an Acer laptop with 2GB of RAM and my computer had trouble going into hibernate. The way the computer was set up it would be in standby after a period of inactivity. Then, after an hour it would try to go into hibernate and sometimes, but not always, fail, display the message "Unable to complete API because of insufficient resources" and go back inton standby. Instead of releasing the fix on Windows Update or even as a publicly available download. I had to call Microsoft on the phone and get emailed the URL for a password protected archive with the fix in it. Now my laptog goes into hibernate fine, but it seems like it was a bit too much work. Of course, my problem may be that I have an Acer laptop with 2GB of RAM in the first place.
Personally, I like TEG better than Risk anyway. I think that TEG is better because it has some small tweaks that make the rules more balanced rules than Risk. I also like how the default world map is divided and connected in TEG as compared to how the map is divided and connected in Risk. Best of all a free client and server for TEG is available at http://teg.sourceforge.net/
Re:What's with all the Apu comments?
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
You forgot the other term: "sand nigger".
(Ugh, I bet I'll lose even more karma that you for this)
Remember that slashdot story a few weeks ago about how there can be negative information in physics and if combined with positive information you would have no information, this "senior IT person" appears to have a great deal of negative information. Something should be done before he is able to spread his negative information. I understand that nails and specifically roofing nails contain a large amount of positive information. All that would be necessary for pubjames to do would be to attach this note with two roofing nails. (We don't want to use more than two nails as the less information that this "senior IT person" has the better.)
I spent 30 minutes on this post, and as you can see you can overwork a joke and make it no longer funny.
Yes, the statement is correct, nobody likes the 6600GT. It has a poor reference card heatsink and heatsink attachment design, the heatsink likes to break its seal with the die on the GPU making the card overheat and lockup. The memory bandwidth is insufficient, the 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus and a 1000MHZ memory clock. Consequently, there is not enough memory bandwidth to turn on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Since the 6600GT only has 8 pipelines and due to its insufficent memory bandwith, some features that the 6600GT has, like High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and DirectX Shader model 3.0, are in a practical sense unsusable in any game. Not that DirectX 9 Pixel Shader 3.0 brings much to the table, the only feature added is dynamic branching over Pixel Shader 2.0 and dynamic branching is so GPU intensive that it is unsuable even on a 7800GTX. I also forget to mention the wretched Vertex Shader performance of the 6600GT even when only Vertex Shader 2.0 is used. The 6800GT is basically a bad card, stay away from every 6600GT.
My Geology professors had an interesting solution when they went to Antartica in the late 1970's and had to name all sorts of newly discovered features, some got named after themselves. If you don't believe me here it is.
> Although he has had some missteps IMO such as saying Windows Me should be far more reliable than Windows 98.;-) I guess he had to eat his own words there...
With one big qualification, Windows ME is the best and probably the most stable version of Windows 9x. (Great now now I almost certainly will get a flame for claiming this.) The qualification is that the first thing that MUST be done after installing Windows ME is to go to Windows Update and get every patch available. After that Windows ME is much more stable and is probably even more stable than Windows 98SE. Still though for a new computer with Windows I would suggest Windows XP SP2. I say this because Windows XP SP2 and Windows XP SP1 are now the only non-server versions of Windows currently supported by Microsoft.
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Few to no new Windows computers these days come with restore disks. My new Sony Vile... err, Vaio RC series from April 2006 has no restore CDs and while restore disks can be made, supposedly you get one chance to make these disks. I had been seriously considering buying an OEM copy of Windows XP MCE, just so I have restore disks that would have lasted longer.
Yeah, it is too bad Hitler killed the jewish inventor who made Einstein. Just imagine what could have happened in science if the this inventor's prototype made it into mass production.
See there is a moderately funny joke that involves Hitler, a thinly veiled reference to the Holocaust, and jewish people without being totally antisemitic. Though I am probably wrong about the joke not being antisemitic or for that matter even being funny.
Goodbye sweet, sweet karma.
If you think this is bad, I have done as bad or even worse on slashdot when I mentioned that a racist name for Arabs was "sand nigger."
Small correction: There are PCIe FW 800 cards however, they use a PCI FW chipset and a PCI to PCIe bridge chip. I have no idea though if the PCI to PCIe bridge supports a 64-bit length. If the PCI to PCIe bridge only supported a 32-bit length it would be sort of stupid as full speed FW 800 would saturate the bus. Then again there are native PCIe FW 400 cards so native PCIe FW 800 cards can't be that far off.
There are many unfilmable books, here are two more unfilmable authors and books. For instance one would be the Inhibitor series by Alastair Reynolds. The four books in the series are long and have many events happening, the hardcover edition of "Chasm City" is 524 pages, with the rest of the books in the series about the same length. "Chasm City" also has three major plotlines that are told at the same time and that intersect and would haver to be told at the same time even though each plotline take place years and light-years apart from each other.
Any Well World novel by Jack L. Chalker would also be a bad choice, too. First off even though there are four or five major characters in "The Sea is Full of Stars" and all of them go through several horrifying transformations that would require new actors/CGI models for each transformation. To top it off, three of the characters end up having their personalities scrambled together, but by the end they have their personalities mostly returned to their original states. While these characters do remain distinct, keeping track of them in the backdrop of a movie would be nearly impossible.
I am sure that there are more books/authors like these, but these two popped into my mind first.
I think an example of why publishers and dev houses are so cautious is they look at what happened to Troika and see what creativity got them. Early last year (2005) Troika went bankrupt. Troika developed three published games: Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil(ToEE), and Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines(VtM:B). All of these games are very creative are and each has elements that are excellent and on the whole I think they are good games. However, they all seem to suffer from many of the same flaws, such as bugs, unfinished areas, and serious computing requirements for their time. All of these games have several show stopping bugs require their respective official patches and many benefit from unofficial patches released by fans. There are several unfinished areas in ToEE where there are empty chests in some areas and other annoyances. Every Troika game required a high-end PC of the time to play them. When I played these games I never noticed any serious slowdowns, though I had a mid to high range PC when each game was released. I did notice some slowdowns, but I never thought they were serious. However, reports from users in forums seemed to give me the impression that a mid to low range computer at that time just could not play these games at a resonable speed.
Hey now be careful, some Macs play the sound of breaking glass when the machine doesn't POST properly. Though I liked the sound of the car crash on the first generation PowerMacs when the machine would not POST. IIRC all of the Blue and White G3 Macs and newer Macs have boring, but actually useful beeps when the machine can't POST.
Ugh, don't remind me of the Powerbook 5300, the real Apple laptops that are bricks with LEDs. I won't get into details, but there were several problems with this model, from batteries that caught fire to motherboards that needed major reworking to be even somewhat stable, not that the version of MacOS at the time, which was MacOS 7.5.5, was very stable in the first place. It would take some major screw-ups for Apple to put anything remotely as bad as the Powerbook 5300.
I also have no idea who/what "Morbo" is and I have probably been here longer than than the grandparent or you because I have a lower slashdot UID.
The Apple 30" panel and for that matter the Dell 30" panel need a dual link DVI port. The ATI Radeon X1900 series, the ATI Radeon X1800 series, and those ATI X1600 series cards with two DVI ports can each drive two 30" panels. I would only think though that 3D gaming would be possible only on an X1800 or an X1900, you might even want to consider a Crossfire setup, then you could run three 30" panels. I have not seen any benchmarks on 30" panels with any card, which would be interesting to see. There is also one dual link DVI on the ATI Radeon X1300 series.
While nVidia's website does not mention it there is also one dual link DVI port on most to all of the nVidia 7800 series cards, so in this department the 7800 series is in the same department as the X1300. The other DVI port on the 7800 is a single link DVI port and this DVI port can only drive displays up to 1600x1200@60Hz. The 7800 series is still better off than the 7300 series, which no dual link ports.
For that matter, the newer ATI Radeons can run HDMI ports on HDTVs at 1080p. I'm not sure if nVidia cards can drive an HDTV on the HDMI. There was some talk of adding driver support for this a while ago. I would assume that they have, but who knows? If a 7800 series nVidia card can display on HDMI it would probably only be able to display at 1080i.
No as I said in other replies this is a real bug that only affects machines running Windows XP with 1GB or more of RAM. The acpi daemon error in Linux was something about an invalid endpoint in the ACPI tree. At any rate, a new BIOS for my laptop is available and I have flashed the BIOS. This may clear up the acpi error in Linux, but I know that supporting ACPI is a nightmare in Linux and this may not fix the problem.
Get the patch from Microsoft, you will have to call them directly at their 1-800 number, mention the Knowledge Base article number and they will e-mail you the link for the fix, for free. The KB article states that this is only a problem with computers running with 1GB or more of RAM and only for some computers, the Knowledge Base article is more descriptive of the problem. The patch is related to KB Article Number 909095.
Get the patch from Microsoft, you will have to call them directly at their 1-800 number and they will e-mail you the link for the fix. The patch is related to KB Article Number 909095.
Windows is full of bugs like these. I own a laptop, running Windows XP, it is an Acer 8100 series. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB from the installed 1GB of RAM. Occasionally the computer would not enter hibernate while in standby and would instead wake up, stay awake and suck down battery power. XP would throw up an error about being unable to complete the API because of insufficient resources. Why a machine with 2GB of RAM would ever have not enough resources is beyond me. At any rate, to obtain the fix I had to call the support line at Microsoft and get e-mailed a URL and password for a password protected archive. Installing the files from this archive fixed the problem, but that is too much work for something that should have been caught in SP2. Supposedly this fix will show up in XP SP3, whenever that happens.
I still have trouble with the laptop not going to sleep all of the time when closing the lid. Sometimes after I close the laptop it displays a scrambled screen. I am afaid of trying to get this fixed if this is a hardware problem, because in my opinion, laptops disassembled and reassembled outside the factorey are never quite the same as they were. Maybe I just need to flash the BIOS.
Yes, I tried to run Linux on this computer, Fedora Core 4, X did not work properly, and Linux would lock up if the pcmcia deamon started and every few seconds the acpi daemon would print a message to the console complaining about something in the BIOS. Granted X stopped working after I tried to set the screen resolution to 1680x1050, the native resolution of the panel.
So? FYI, Sony did not demo a playable PS2 until about a month before it launched in Japan.
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0 &f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&RS=%22vertex+shader%22+AND+AN%2Fn Vidia&Refine=Refine+Search&Query=%22vertex+shader% 22+AND+AN%2FMicrosoft
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0 &f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&RS=(%22vertex+shader%22+AND+AN%2F Microsoft)&Refine=Refine+Search&Query=%22vertex+sh ader%22+AND+AN%2FATI
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm &r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&Query=%22vertex+shader%22+AND +Sony
This isn't very acceptable, but Sony can do what it wants and people will still buy.
Absolutely false. Neither MS nor ATI have some magical shader patents (no idea where you came up with this). MS simply specifies what will go into the next version of DirectX and the hardware manufacturers add this capability, although they are of course free to add features above and beyond this. For example, nVidia 7800 series offers Vertex Fetch. Anyway, since PS3 utilizes OpenGL (not DX) the DirectX specifications mean nothing anyway.
You mean these Microsoft patents relating to vertex shaders:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Or these ATI patents:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Sony has all of one vertex shader patent here:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
While I am no expert, the Sony patent does not mean much to me and is newer than many of the Microsoft and ATI patents. Yes even nVidia has some patents and I an sure that there are many more patents for pixel shaders.
I don't know how all of the licensing agreements are all set up, but its hard for me to believe that two companies like Microsoft and Sony would ever share patents.
Are you seriously trying to say that the PS3 GPU will not have shaders? Can I have what you're smoking?
Yes, I am. I am speculating that the PS3 will not have shaders because Sony does not have access to the required patents.
First off, while the X1800XL/XT and the 7800GT/GTX would be faster they put out way too much heat, require too much power and have memory busses that would require a PCB with too many layers to be cost effective.
I disagree with the statement that the "[X1600 series] [is] one of the worst video cards of this generation". While the mid-range X1600 is not as fast as the high-end members of X800 series, as one might expect, the X1600 is still no slouch, it is faster than the 6600 and the X700 from the last generation. While I am not sure what speed of memory the new iMacs use, they do use GDDR3, which puts these new Macs in the same range as the X1600XT. Also the X1600 has more features than the X700 or the 6600. These are not "checklist" type features for instance there is support for two Dual Link DVI ports which is more than the 6600 or the X700 is capeable of. Much of the complaints around the X1600 was about their price/performace ratio when they were priced at $250 for the X1600XL and $200 for the X1600 Pro when first announced. However, the X1600 series never sold for these prices, an X1600 will set you back about $175 and the X1600 Pro is about $130. Currently the architecture of X1600 may seem kind of lop-sided and unusual because it has better shader performance over polygon pushing power. However, the new R580 from ATI, which will be named the X1900 supposedly will be four X1600 cores lashed together and will probably easily outpace the current 7800 series and X1800 series.
Both Sony and nVidia are masters at hype. Maybe I can provide a scenario of two that defates some of this hype.
Has Sony yet demoed, with videos, a working PS3 system with all of the hardware in final silicon? I'm not sure they have. If they have please correct me. If they have not it seems very late to not have a working PS3 system since the release date is this spring. Just to spread some FUD, perhaps one of the reasons is that Sony does not have a working demo is that Sony does not have access to critical patents relating to programmable shaders (pixel and vertex shaders). Many critical of these shader patents belong to Microsoft, more shader patents belong to ATI, and even some more of these patents belong to Nintendo. I doubt that Sony will have licensing deals with Microsoft ATI, or Nintendo, as they are all direct competitors in the console market. While nVidia may have access to these patents, the licensing agreements probably only apply the design and manufacture of PC graphics cards. So without programmable shaders in silicon what do you do? If Sony has enough patentts it is possible the PS3 may emulate as many of these shaders as possible with the CPU, hence the Cell processor and all of its extra hardware. In general, vertex shaders are not all that diffcult to emulate on modern PCs, however pixel shaders are very slow when emulated on a PC. If Sony has the option,(remember those pantents) I would imagine that the PS3 would emulate many of these shaders. If this is the case the Cell processor will be spending many of its CPU cycles on emulating shaders. This is not a good thing as much of the power of the Cell processor would be wasted in emulating shaders.
If Sony could not even emulate these shaders, the PS3 would have to fall back on the nVidia graphics chip. Without shaders about all the nVidia graphics chip would be good at would be good for in both cases is pushing polygons. This is not where the future of 3D graphics is. The only real advantage for using higher polygon count objects over lower polygon count objects is that the higher polygon count objects look better in profile, which is not a great advantage. Effects like motion blur and many lighting effects only work with programmable shaders. If this is the case, while the objects on the PS3 would look smoother in profile, the effectsn and the general look of the graphics woulf look much like the PS2. This would also be bad, obviously.
That's nothing, I have an Acer TravelMate 8104 which has a 15.4" screen with a resolution of 1680x1050.
Granted, out of the box Windows XP was set to a larger text size. With the text set like this, Windows XP looked uglier than usual, I turned the text to normal size and I have used it this way ever since.
To some degree the individual pixels on a 15.4" 1680x1050 are tiny. It would be nice, however, if some company made a desktop LCD panel with small pixel pitches. Such a panel could have a pixel pitch a bit larger than my Acer's screen. The screen could have a more standard resolution of 1600x1200 on a screen size of 17", or what about a 20" panel with a resolution of 2560x1600?
With WinFlash, which does flashes the BIOS from Windows.
Windows XP SP3 is coming at least a URL at Microsoft says. Of course, Microsoft could turn SP3 into a Service Release and avoid the hassle of having to continue to support XP in two or three years. In any case I got this URL when I had to call Microsoft. My problem was that I had have an Acer laptop with 2GB of RAM and my computer had trouble going into hibernate. The way the computer was set up it would be in standby after a period of inactivity. Then, after an hour it would try to go into hibernate and sometimes, but not always, fail, display the message "Unable to complete API because of insufficient resources" and go back inton standby. Instead of releasing the fix on Windows Update or even as a publicly available download. I had to call Microsoft on the phone and get emailed the URL for a password protected archive with the fix in it. Now my laptog goes into hibernate fine, but it seems like it was a bit too much work. Of course, my problem may be that I have an Acer laptop with 2GB of RAM in the first place.
Personally, I like TEG better than Risk anyway. I think that TEG is better because it has some small tweaks that make the rules more balanced rules than Risk. I also like how the default world map is divided and connected in TEG as compared to how the map is divided and connected in Risk. Best of all a free client and server for TEG is available at http://teg.sourceforge.net/
You forgot the other term: "sand nigger".
(Ugh, I bet I'll lose even more karma that you for this)
Remember that slashdot story a few weeks ago about how there can be negative information in physics and if combined with positive information you would have no information, this "senior IT person" appears to have a great deal of negative information. Something should be done before he is able to spread his negative information. I understand that nails and specifically roofing nails contain a large amount of positive information. All that would be necessary for pubjames to do would be to attach this note with two roofing nails. (We don't want to use more than two nails as the less information that this "senior IT person" has the better.)
I spent 30 minutes on this post, and as you can see you can overwork a joke and make it no longer funny.
Yes, the statement is correct, nobody likes the 6600GT. It has a poor reference card heatsink and heatsink attachment design, the heatsink likes to break its seal with the die on the GPU making the card overheat and lockup. The memory bandwidth is insufficient, the 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus and a 1000MHZ memory clock. Consequently, there is not enough memory bandwidth to turn on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Since the 6600GT only has 8 pipelines and due to its insufficent memory bandwith, some features that the 6600GT has, like High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and DirectX Shader model 3.0, are in a practical sense unsusable in any game. Not that DirectX 9 Pixel Shader 3.0 brings much to the table, the only feature added is dynamic branching over Pixel Shader 2.0 and dynamic branching is so GPU intensive that it is unsuable even on a 7800GTX. I also forget to mention the wretched Vertex Shader performance of the 6600GT even when only Vertex Shader 2.0 is used. The 6800GT is basically a bad card, stay away from every 6600GT.
My Geology professors had an interesting solution when they went to Antartica in the late 1970's and had to name all sorts of newly discovered features, some got named after themselves. If you don't believe me here it is.
. cfm?gaz_id=129623
. cfm?gaz_id=128547
Mount Ojakangas:
http://aadc-maps.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/display_name
Matsch Ridge:
http://aadc-maps.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/display_name
> Although he has had some missteps IMO such as saying Windows Me should be far more reliable than Windows 98. ;-) I guess he had to eat his own words there...
With one big qualification, Windows ME is the best and probably the most stable version of Windows 9x. (Great now now I almost certainly will get a flame for claiming this.) The qualification is that the first thing that MUST be done after installing Windows ME is to go to Windows Update and get every patch available. After that Windows ME is much more stable and is probably even more stable than Windows 98SE. Still though for a new computer with Windows I would suggest Windows XP SP2. I say this because Windows XP SP2 and Windows XP SP1 are now the only non-server versions of Windows currently supported by Microsoft.