Has anybody cracked one of the new Xeons apart yet? How do we know that Intel didn't really slip two cores onto the same processor card... then, one processor would appear as one, two as four!! They sell for thousands more than they cost to make, anyways, right? Who's going to know?
It's like the warmth that comes from a vinyl record, as opposed to the cold clarity of a CD.
An interesting opinion, but I find the opposite to be true. I still own a giant stack of vinyl records, which I haven't listened to since my turntable died about five years ago. I keep them for the cover art... and really, that's why I bought them. I listened to them on turntables of various sorts, and even the BEST one sounded flat, scratchy, and "vacant." (FWIW, I prefer to listen to what many refer to as EuroTrash Pop. Roxette, specifically.)
To me, there is nothing quite like putting in a good CD player and set of speakers in my car (I have an hour commute into the city for work), popping in a CD, and then cranking the volume to the brink of distortion. At that perfect volume, right before semi-permanent hearing loss, you get the full depth and breadth of the music as it was recorded. OK, yes, it's not coming out the way it sounded in the studio exactly, but you get a certain amount of "blur" at that volume that lets you get lost in the sound completely. You can almost see the notes being stamped on the clef if you focus hard enough.
Once again, the message from the corporation seems to be,
"It's only a bad idea if the customer find out we're doing it."
How many other companies are screwing the pooch, and are hoping we don't find out so that they'll have to make a big to-do about listening to their customers and ending the suspect business practices?
Don't fool yourself into thinking they axe management and marketting before they lay off the "line workers." It's the "workers" who get axed first.
This rings true to me as well. I work in the IT division (about 1500 employees) of a bank with 26,000 employees here in the US. I've been here four years, and have seen a couple cycles of this sort of "resource management" go through, company-wide AND tech division-wide.
Typically what happens is: Mucky-muck bossman is either retiring or moving on to new company. Announces reductions in staff, the "low-hanging fruit" (front-line folks with lower performance reviews, project teams that don't add directly to the bottom line) is let go with severence and job-placement.
New manager (anywhere from mid-level manager to CTO/CEO) takes over within 4-12 weeks, and announces "REORGANIZATION!" Instantly all managers who were promoted through the ranks by their predecessor, or who are not "loyal to them," get the axe with a VERY generous compensation arrangement. (I knew one very good gentleman/manager who was here for 31 years. He got a year paid severence package.)
Without fail, this cycle seems to happen every 24-36 months, no matter which area of the bank you're in... retail sales, loan processing, application development, server operations...
...and I'm willing to be it works like this at other companies as well. Part of the games beaurocrats play.
Like that Dilbert strip, all the PHBs sitting around discussing the skeletons they have to hide, so it's time for a re-org. Dilbert asks PHB why they keep re-orging. PHB asks Dilbert what he does when he gets a flat tire, and Dilbert says, "If I'm you, I rotate the tires and keep driving!"
If there's no point in driving a Quake3 style engine any faster (because it's already fast enough) then what will you be able to do with this new hardware that you couldn't do with older stuff?
IANJC, but I think I can try an answer.
I play Quake3 online about 2 hours a night. At 1024x768x32, no less, on a TFT (which effectively limits famerates since the refresh is so much slower than modern tubes).
70 fps is plenty good for me in Quake3, and I don't really have much desire to go higher. But my GF2 won't do 2xAA over about 9 frames per second. This helps smooth out the picture considerably. So the newer cards will support the same old engines running with full-scene anti-aliasing at 4x at a "usable" framerate. No big change for coding there.
Another thing John talked about in his last remarks, though, was poly count. Your models and scenes can have beaucoup more polys when you juice up the core speed on a new processor, making the whole gaming experience a lot more realistic-looking.
John also talked in previous.plan files about vertex and pixel-shading, and how applying multiple lighting effects on single pixels can make things a lot cooler in actual gameplay. The eyecandy factor for this is hella-big.
As a side note, the one disappoitning thing is that while the GF4Ti cards (NV25 chipset) include a second Vertex Shading Unit in teh chip, there is *NO* dedicated pixel shading unit at all, as there was in the GF3. Why is this??
They go into this in the Tom's article, and it sounds as though the NV25 still supports pixel shading versions 1.1 and 1.3 (whatever that means), but won't support 1.4 until the next chipset. And *THEN* they should be fully DirectX 8.1-compliant.
On the other hand, why should that matter, as John Carmack uses OpenGL, not Direct3D.;D
"I hope if I buy a GeForce4, it'll last, in both speed and 3D technology. "
Hey buddy, cope. If you're not realizing by now that you're going to be able to run the latest and greatest games with all the eye candy without shelling out $200-$400 every 12 months, that's YOUR problem, not the industry's.
This is like my neighbors who were mad at *ME* for telling them they could not load WindowsXP on their 486 DX2/66. But we paid $4000 for this machine ten years ago! That was almost half the cost of a car! And it still works! They ended up going to WalMart and buying an HP, with monitor and CD burner, for $699. Now they quit whining... until 5 years from now then it won't run Microsoft AOL version 15.2.
As for me, I have too many other interests to shell out $400 for a video card. I buy games 18-24 months after they come out, at the $19.95 (or lower) price. I *NEVER* pay more than $130 for a video card, and I'm extremely pleased with my price/performance return. Go look at newegg.com for the GeForce2 GTS-V for $49 and you'll see what card I'm running; it gives me 70 frames per second at high quality in Quake3.
If that isn't enough for you, well, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to pay more for the Cadillac.
I'm pretty sure from look at the mirror site, these are actually 1280x1024 resolution. Which I would like even better than my current 1024x768 LCD I have at home!
(WalMart sells them for $369.00 US now. With free mouse!;)
A carrying case is going to save you from hip checking a wall?
Mine has, on multiple occaisions. I paid bucks for mine at handspring.com, the neoprene hip belt-loop thingy. It has plastic inserts and good foam padding.
Seems to me that if something is big and fragile enough to need a carrying case it would be just a bit of a PITA to deal with.
I dunno, I was just over at Macintouch reading the iPod reader reports, and everyone and their mother is griping about the lack of a carrying case, and pointing to a handful of companies that offer good ones to fit the iPod.
It seems to ME that anybody who's going to invest $400 in a small electronic device that they're going to toss around for (hopefully) a few years, they'd want a cheap and replaceable way to give it a little more ruggedness.
I've had a Visor for two years now, and have gone through two hip-holster padded carrying cases for it. I have no scratches or cracks on my Visor. I know only one person who carries his Palm around with no protection, and his is nicked and dented like sin. It's only a matter of time before he body-checks the wall with it in his pocket and breaks the screen.
34 gigs of music? You've either got far too much time on your hands, no life, have never bought a CD - ever, and just download everything.
Not so.
I have legally (and probably blindly) purchased several hundred CDs and boxed sets featuring music that I enjoy over the past 13 years. (In fairness, MANY of these came used from the local CD Warehouse when I was working in a college town.) I have also legally purchased dozens and dozens of cassette tapes and vinyl records.
I spent about six weeks using my two main PCs to rip the CDs to my local hard drives at 128 kbps.
I then used file sharing networks (for over a year now) to collect all the music I had on cassette tape and vinyl. That *IS* fair use, right? I purchased the music, I should be able to listen to it in my home or in my car, right?
Yes, I have previewed music I do not own-- I won't lie. But if I like it enough to listen on a regular basis, I do pay The Cartel their due. (Sadly.)
I'm still waiting for the revolution where the majority of artists direct-market and end up making more money.
For one, how many people are like you and have 34gb of music in MP3s?
I'll be honest, my personal playlist is about 2500 songs, as a subset of the 9600+ I have total. (That's just the byproduct of buying hundreds of CDs as a dumb kid/teen, for two or three songs that I was willing to listen to.)
A 20gig portable like the Riot would be the perfect walkman-style device for me, since that would be more than my "preferred music" rotation. But trimming it down to 5 gigs would be a little hard, since I like a lot of variety.
My point here is, if my passenger wants more music (like an entire REM album as it appears on CD), he can just punch it up on myflatscreen PC in the car. That's why I put all 34 gigs there.
I'm using the money I save to build another server."
Oh thats right, I forgot that the iPod is so much more expensive
My point was that the difference in price between my Iopener MP3 player ($99) and this portable craze ($399) is signifigant.
I'm currently building a server to replace the "aging" Celeron 533 I put together. I've got 200 gigs of data to stick somewhere, and I found a rackmount ATX case ($89 at compgeeks.com), a dual P3 motherboard for $47 (same URL), so once I add a couple more components, and the two retail P3-1GHz at $140 each... I've got a complete server for less than $600.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
That's FUD.
It took me 11 hours to put all 34 gigs of my music on an external USB drive for my car.
You've bough into Job's marketing hype. He's managed to convince you that the Firewire interface alone is enough to overlook the price premium.
Yes, the iPod looks cool, and transfers files fast, but it costs way too much compared to what you get with this Rio Riot.
If you can't afford a couple of hours to initially load your music, but would rather pay $400 for something with 25% of the HD space and no carrying case, have at it!
I'm using the money I save to build another server.
USB is 12Mbps. It would take 3.9 hours to populate a 20GB disk.
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about
I'm sick of hearing this. "Firewire is in many new PCs and sound cards, and it is a zillion times faster!"
I have a 40 gig USB HD for my iOpener-based car MP3 player. It took me about 11 hours to completely upload all 34 gigs of my music to it. When I want to add music, I plug it into my PC (or almost *ANY* PC or Mac, since USB *IS* ubiquitous at this point), it mounts, and I spend 10 minutes putting another couple of albums worth of music onto it.
If the initial load is *THAT* important to you-- that is you want your favorite 5 gigs uploaded in 15 minutes, instead of a couple of hours-- then pay the premium. I personally am willing to let the thing run overnight once to get my favorite 20 gigs onto it.
Fact is, with the Riot you're getting a device with 4 times the storage space, plus an FM tuner, for the same price. Oh, and you get a carrying case, too!
The gee-whiz effect Mr. Jobs used to have on me is gone. I marvel at the products, gasp at the price, then leave some other (more liquid) consumer to pay the premium.
Slashdot Mirror
The real shocker in this article is not that the Canadian government is doing something so tech-savvy in provisding ISP services...
... but that the province of Alberta actually has 422 cities!
(In fact, according to this google cached page, there are only 9 cities over 25,000 population!)
Color me amazed!
-RT
Has anybody cracked one of the new Xeons apart yet? How do we know that Intel didn't really slip two cores onto the same processor card... then, one processor would appear as one, two as four!! They sell for thousands more than they cost to make, anyways, right? Who's going to know?
:)
Hmmm?!?
The picture would be a copy of the Constitution with a pile of shit on top of it, just below someone wiping his ass with hundred dollar bills.
...make sure it's one of those fatcat stereotypes, like the guy with the mustache and top hat on the Monopoly box.
He should be smoking a cigar and holding a snifter of brandy, wearing a monocle.
*DUCKS*
Based on this article, if the company only employs one person, s/he must be...
A LAWYER!
It's like the warmth that comes from a vinyl record, as opposed to the cold clarity of a CD.
:)
An interesting opinion, but I find the opposite to be true. I still own a giant stack of vinyl records, which I haven't listened to since my turntable died about five years ago. I keep them for the cover art... and really, that's why I bought them. I listened to them on turntables of various sorts, and even the BEST one sounded flat, scratchy, and "vacant." (FWIW, I prefer to listen to what many refer to as EuroTrash Pop. Roxette, specifically.)
To me, there is nothing quite like putting in a good CD player and set of speakers in my car (I have an hour commute into the city for work), popping in a CD, and then cranking the volume to the brink of distortion. At that perfect volume, right before semi-permanent hearing loss, you get the full depth and breadth of the music as it was recorded. OK, yes, it's not coming out the way it sounded in the studio exactly, but you get a certain amount of "blur" at that volume that lets you get lost in the sound completely. You can almost see the notes being stamped on the clef if you focus hard enough.
At least that's my experience. YMMV.
Once again, the message from the corporation seems to be,
"It's only a bad idea if the customer find out we're doing it."
How many other companies are screwing the pooch, and are hoping we don't find out so that they'll have to make a big to-do about listening to their customers and ending the suspect business practices?
Don't fool yourself into thinking they axe management and marketting before they lay off the "line workers." It's the "workers" who get axed first.
This rings true to me as well. I work in the IT division (about 1500 employees) of a bank with 26,000 employees here in the US. I've been here four years, and have seen a couple cycles of this sort of "resource management" go through, company-wide AND tech division-wide.
Typically what happens is: Mucky-muck bossman is either retiring or moving on to new company. Announces reductions in staff, the "low-hanging fruit" (front-line folks with lower performance reviews, project teams that don't add directly to the bottom line) is let go with severence and job-placement.
New manager (anywhere from mid-level manager to CTO/CEO) takes over within 4-12 weeks, and announces "REORGANIZATION!" Instantly all managers who were promoted through the ranks by their predecessor, or who are not "loyal to them," get the axe with a VERY generous compensation arrangement. (I knew one very good gentleman/manager who was here for 31 years. He got a year paid severence package.)
Without fail, this cycle seems to happen every 24-36 months, no matter which area of the bank you're in... retail sales, loan processing, application development, server operations...
...and I'm willing to be it works like this at other companies as well. Part of the games beaurocrats play.
Like that Dilbert strip, all the PHBs sitting around discussing the skeletons they have to hide, so it's time for a re-org. Dilbert asks PHB why they keep re-orging. PHB asks Dilbert what he does when he gets a flat tire, and Dilbert says, "If I'm you, I rotate the tires and keep driving!"
Sorry, you're right. I was thinking of the MX, not the Ti.
If there's no point in driving a Quake3 style engine any faster (because it's already fast enough) then what will you be able to do with this new hardware that you couldn't do with older stuff?
.plan files about vertex and pixel-shading, and how applying multiple lighting effects on single pixels can make things a lot cooler in actual gameplay. The eyecandy factor for this is hella-big.
;D
IANJC, but I think I can try an answer.
I play Quake3 online about 2 hours a night. At 1024x768x32, no less, on a TFT (which effectively limits famerates since the refresh is so much slower than modern tubes).
70 fps is plenty good for me in Quake3, and I don't really have much desire to go higher. But my GF2 won't do 2xAA over about 9 frames per second. This helps smooth out the picture considerably. So the newer cards will support the same old engines running with full-scene anti-aliasing at 4x at a "usable" framerate. No big change for coding there.
Another thing John talked about in his last remarks, though, was poly count. Your models and scenes can have beaucoup more polys when you juice up the core speed on a new processor, making the whole gaming experience a lot more realistic-looking.
John also talked in previous
As a side note, the one disappoitning thing is that while the GF4Ti cards (NV25 chipset) include a second Vertex Shading Unit in teh chip, there is *NO* dedicated pixel shading unit at all, as there was in the GF3. Why is this??
They go into this in the Tom's article, and it sounds as though the NV25 still supports pixel shading versions 1.1 and 1.3 (whatever that means), but won't support 1.4 until the next chipset. And *THEN* they should be fully DirectX 8.1-compliant.
On the other hand, why should that matter, as John Carmack uses OpenGL, not Direct3D.
"I hope if I buy a GeForce4, it'll last, in both speed and 3D technology. "
Hey buddy, cope. If you're not realizing by now that you're going to be able to run the latest and greatest games with all the eye candy without shelling out $200-$400 every 12 months, that's YOUR problem, not the industry's.
This is like my neighbors who were mad at *ME* for telling them they could not load WindowsXP on their 486 DX2/66. But we paid $4000 for this machine ten years ago! That was almost half the cost of a car! And it still works! They ended up going to WalMart and buying an HP, with monitor and CD burner, for $699. Now they quit whining... until 5 years from now then it won't run Microsoft AOL version 15.2.
As for me, I have too many other interests to shell out $400 for a video card. I buy games 18-24 months after they come out, at the $19.95 (or lower) price. I *NEVER* pay more than $130 for a video card, and I'm extremely pleased with my price/performance return. Go look at newegg.com for the GeForce2 GTS-V for $49 and you'll see what card I'm running; it gives me 70 frames per second at high quality in Quake3.
If that isn't enough for you, well, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to pay more for the Cadillac.
...with two 15-inch (1024x768) LCD monitors...
;)
Are you sure they're 1024x768? The Panasonic Japan website lists SXGA resolution (15.7", instead of the 15.0 we're used to seeing).
IIRC:
VGA=640x480
SVGA=800x600
XGA=1024x768
SXGA=1280x1024
I'm pretty sure from look at the mirror site, these are actually 1280x1024 resolution. Which I would like even better than my current 1024x768 LCD I have at home!
(WalMart sells them for $369.00 US now. With free mouse!
It's also a bad name because it's way too cacophonic.
You know, you're right. I think based on all the StarWars FanBoy talk I've seen since 1983, they should have called this one
Star Wars Episode II - Boba Fett is the awesomest ever!!!!
:P
It just seems like he's jumping on the cloning bandwagon we've been seeing lately in sciencefiction.
Perhaps you've heard of a little movie from 1977, called "Star Wars?" Later retitled "Star Wars - A New Hope?"
There's this little plot piece in there that goes soemthing like this:
Luke: "You fought with my father in the Clone Wars?!?"
Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi: "Yes, your father was one of the best fighter pilots in the Galaxy..."
I'd hardly think that coming up with a premise twenty-five years ago qualifies as "jumping on the cloning bandwagon" of today.
:P
Spammers should be deported to Afghanistan, where they can share the nation's one surviving 300 baud modem...
:)
I thought Junis had upgraded to 1200 baud?
Has JonKatz flown over and interviewed him in person yet?
A carrying case is going to save you from hip checking a wall?
Mine has, on multiple occaisions. I paid bucks for mine at handspring.com, the neoprene hip belt-loop thingy. It has plastic inserts and good foam padding.
Wrong. iPod uses a 1.8 inch drive, and nobody else makes them. And none are bigger than 5 gig.
Oh, I'm sorry, you were trolling and looking for l00sers. Carry on.
Mrs Palmer? and her 5 daughters?
:)
Fifth grade called, they want their joke back.
Yeah, but will all that get you the ladies?
If it does, I'm in big trouble. My wife is the jealous type.
Seems to me that if something is big and fragile enough to need a carrying case it would be just a bit of a PITA to deal with.
;)
I dunno, I was just over at Macintouch reading the iPod reader reports, and everyone and their mother is griping about the lack of a carrying case, and pointing to a handful of companies that offer good ones to fit the iPod.
It seems to ME that anybody who's going to invest $400 in a small electronic device that they're going to toss around for (hopefully) a few years, they'd want a cheap and replaceable way to give it a little more ruggedness.
I've had a Visor for two years now, and have gone through two hip-holster padded carrying cases for it. I have no scratches or cracks on my Visor. I know only one person who carries his Palm around with no protection, and his is nicked and dented like sin. It's only a matter of time before he body-checks the wall with it in his pocket and breaks the screen.
Of course, he's not as clumsy as me either.
34 gigs of music? You've either got far too much time on your hands, no life, have never bought a CD - ever, and just download everything.
:)
Not so.
I have legally (and probably blindly) purchased several hundred CDs and boxed sets featuring music that I enjoy over the past 13 years. (In fairness, MANY of these came used from the local CD Warehouse when I was working in a college town.) I have also legally purchased dozens and dozens of cassette tapes and vinyl records.
I spent about six weeks using my two main PCs to rip the CDs to my local hard drives at 128 kbps.
I then used file sharing networks (for over a year now) to collect all the music I had on cassette tape and vinyl. That *IS* fair use, right? I purchased the music, I should be able to listen to it in my home or in my car, right?
Yes, I have previewed music I do not own-- I won't lie. But if I like it enough to listen on a regular basis, I do pay The Cartel their due. (Sadly.)
I'm still waiting for the revolution where the majority of artists direct-market and end up making more money.
That's wacky.
Thanks!
For one, how many people are like you and have 34gb of music in MP3s?
I'll be honest, my personal playlist is about 2500 songs, as a subset of the 9600+ I have total. (That's just the byproduct of buying hundreds of CDs as a dumb kid/teen, for two or three songs that I was willing to listen to.)
A 20gig portable like the Riot would be the perfect walkman-style device for me, since that would be more than my "preferred music" rotation. But trimming it down to 5 gigs would be a little hard, since I like a lot of variety.
My point here is, if my passenger wants more music (like an entire REM album as it appears on CD), he can just punch it up on myflatscreen PC in the car. That's why I put all 34 gigs there.
I'm using the money I save to build another server."
... I've got a complete server for less than $600.
Oh thats right, I forgot that the iPod is so much more expensive
My point was that the difference in price between my Iopener MP3 player ($99) and this portable craze ($399) is signifigant.
I'm currently building a server to replace the "aging" Celeron 533 I put together. I've got 200 gigs of data to stick somewhere, and I found a rackmount ATX case ($89 at compgeeks.com), a dual P3 motherboard for $47 (same URL), so once I add a couple more components, and the two retail P3-1GHz at $140 each
Not to stray too far offtopic, of course.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
That's FUD.
It took me 11 hours to put all 34 gigs of my music on an external USB drive for my car.
You've bough into Job's marketing hype. He's managed to convince you that the Firewire interface alone is enough to overlook the price premium.
Yes, the iPod looks cool, and transfers files fast, but it costs way too much compared to what you get with this Rio Riot.
If you can't afford a couple of hours to initially load your music, but would rather pay $400 for something with 25% of the HD space and no carrying case, have at it!
I'm using the money I save to build another server.
USB is 12Mbps. It would take 3.9 hours to populate a 20GB disk.
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about
I'm sick of hearing this. "Firewire is in many new PCs and sound cards, and it is a zillion times faster!"
I have a 40 gig USB HD for my iOpener-based car MP3 player. It took me about 11 hours to completely upload all 34 gigs of my music to it. When I want to add music, I plug it into my PC (or almost *ANY* PC or Mac, since USB *IS* ubiquitous at this point), it mounts, and I spend 10 minutes putting another couple of albums worth of music onto it.
If the initial load is *THAT* important to you-- that is you want your favorite 5 gigs uploaded in 15 minutes, instead of a couple of hours-- then pay the premium. I personally am willing to let the thing run overnight once to get my favorite 20 gigs onto it.
Fact is, with the Riot you're getting a device with 4 times the storage space, plus an FM tuner, for the same price. Oh, and you get a carrying case, too!
The gee-whiz effect Mr. Jobs used to have on me is gone. I marvel at the products, gasp at the price, then leave some other (more liquid) consumer to pay the premium.