If so, why don't I see a matching increase in quality of printed materials? I thought DTP folks were working in relatively fixed constraints. If I'm making a magazine no page is going to consume more than (pixels wide)*(pixels tall)*(bitdepth).
All the shops I see are still using the same resolution and bitdepth that they were five years ago, but the computers at the desks are easily three or four times the speed.
Are you folks jacking up your working resolution way above what it should be just to spin your (virtual) wheels? I can't see a reason to run a resolution more than 2x the printable resolution (which is what, 2400dpi these days?).
Not in my opinion. I care about the earth quite a bit. I just get frustrated with the type of people who won't allow the construction of, say, a wind-power array offshore because it might bother some fish. When it comes down to it, I'd rather have non-fossil-based power, a few fish and a dozen whales are well worth it.
I'm not upset at you Joe, this is more of a separate rant:
I think the earth is just SO much more resilient than we've been lead to believe. Really.
So you rub out a few square miles of ocean floor, a whale dies, some dead fish float to shore. Oh well. It's not the end of the world.
I'm really upset at how resistant to change most of us have become. If we continue sitting around bickering over trivial issues like a few miles of tundra in Alaska or some bit-too-warm seawater in the middle of the pacific we're not going to get off this planet before nature herself torches us with a 100% natural meteor.
That said, I think it can't be SO HARD to find people who have moderate values, who can evaluate the costs/benefits of this type of issue. Our politicians seem more interested in bickering or trading favors than implementing mutually beneficial solutions.
I think it's time for a new political party made out of business-minded freedom-lovers who don't have ties to mega-corporations or the christian religion (or ANY religion).
I remember when the movie 'High Fidelity' came out my girlfriend wanted it on tape ASAP, she ended up buying from a company that sells to the rental stores. The tape ran her $110, but she had it WEEKS before it was out en-masse, which is what she wanted.
I would assume that rental games are sold in the same manner, it costs a lot initially but then you don't have to calculate royalties. Everybody wins!
I remember when applying a filter to a 24MB image took overnight, now they happen in a minute or so. Have we reached the point where it doesn't really matter how fast your computer is at PhotoShop/Illustrator because everything is fast enough? Or has the image size/filter complexity gone way up since the mid-1990s?
I stand corrected. OT came out in 7.5, but it was really nasty and didn't seem to come into it's own until 7.6. 7.6 was Apple's 'Let's be done with 7' release, it seems, just like 9.2 is their 'lets be done with classic' release. The 'crap rolled into one monolithic system' comment referred to the removal of the enablers and the integration of a number of extensions and technologies.
But they SHOULD have given Win98 Second Edition to anybody who paid for Win98, just like they SHOULD have given Win95B to anyone who paid for Win95.
Microsoft and Apple are very different in this respect, Apple likes to give bugfix and minor enhancements away because it's an investment in their user base. Microsoft likes to wait it out and then charge you for what you thought you were paying for last year.
On a side note: GPL'd software tends to tell you that it can't do a damn thing, but then you download it and look at the compile options and see that it does exactly what you were hoping it could do. Updates and upgrades are free, and bugfixes are usually hours in the making, not days or longer.
Apple generally charges for feature updates and not for bug fixes. Sometimes there's a little bit of both, but 9.2 was just 9.0 with some bug fixes and very minor revisions. 7.6 was just all the crap that had accumulated from 7.5 and back rolled into a more monolithic system, but they added a new networking core which was major enough to charge for it.
It's better than your tax dollars paying the millitary to put up their own sattelites to handle usually unneeded bandwidth. Do you have any idea how efficient these private companies are compared to Uncle Sam? Even in a bidding war I'll bet we're paying under 10% what a home-grown green-painted sattelite would cost.
The number one cost in making these will be the engineering labor to integrate the components. If there are standardized ways of connecting these parts then we are in the same place we are today and we're very close in our thinking. I agree that more will be integrated onto a single big chip, I think that's a great idea, I think the CPU, memory controller, several I/O DSPs, and a huge L1 cache should be packed onto the CPU core or in the same IC. On low-cost systems integrating the GPU might make sense too, but the implementation I find most likely for this is a whole mini-AGP bus INSIDE the Main-IC, custom-designing a CPU-GPU bridge for each processor will be way too costly and time-consuming. The devices ought to have seperate logic but in some cases be inside the same package for size/heat/cost issues.
I think we're on the same page but in different paragraphs.:-)
The problem there is that such deep integration costs more than the benefits it produces. While it makes sense to stick the memory controller and maybe a few I/O processors on the CPU core it's very diffucult to cost-justify including a GPU and audio. It would cost millions to integrate the GPU on to the CPU, and any changes in the design of either part would nescessitate both the GPU and CPU teams to hash it out. There's little advantage to integrating the CPU and GPU, AGP is a very fast and cheap way to get tons of data back and forth between those components, and I don't know of anything that pushes AGP to it's limits, the bottleneck is more often than not the GPU and the GPU-VRAM pipe.
What I do see in the future is more modular designs. Eventually this serial craze will boil down to the chipset level and there will be packet/serial interfaces between key components. Since the different components will 'speak' to each-other instead of signalling over customized paralell interfaces there will be much greater flexibility and reduced R&D costs. This type of system would be much slower with today's technology, but advances in serial signalling, superconduction, and fiber optics will bring us much closer to a modular future.
Not true! I have my KT266a motherboard here running a barton, it's just got the FSB underclocked, it runs cool and faster than my old tbird. And this system has PC3200 DDR RAM=, it just is running at PC2100 speeds right now. My next purchase wil be a new mobo that can take FULL advantage of the CPU an RAM. Look at the Intel side, they change the PHYSICAL pinout so you CAN'T do this. The athlon has been on one single pinout while intel has done FC-PGA, FC-PGA2, 427(?), 472(?).
DOn't underestimate the power and value you can get from underclocking.
having faster clients does not harm the 'other end' at all, it helps reduce retransmissions on the server end from packet loss, allows for shorter connection durations (get each client handled QUICKLY so others can get a whack), and pushes for better server connectivity in the long run. if 10,000 slashdotters on 56K modems are trying to look at your site all at once and they switch to 100Mbit connections, the server will be able to handle more of them because it will be able to handle each page view in less time.
But there's still no GCC profile for the C3, you have to compile with -m486 because the C3 lacks optimized calls. Somebody at VIA really needs to contribute a profile for the C3 so GCC-3.3 and later can make the most of this chip.
Also, the C3 is great for what it is, but it's a total dog for real-world use. I put a C3/800 into my girlfriend's machine and she made me put the Celeron/600 back the same day.
The EPIA/800 here is great for playing MP3s and playing StarCraft on TV, but it can't even emulate a SNES without choking, and I had to reencode all my videos at higher bitrates and put a better NIC in it to get decent video output. I'm waiting for the EPIAs with the new 'nemi-somethingorother' core to show face so I can get something DONE with the architecture.
I know a lot of idiots who installed XP and don't pick anything harder than '123' for their admin password. Most of the people I deal with always say "What would a hacker want with me? I don't keep anything important on the computer." Eventhough they keep their email, finances, personal correspondence, and credit information on them.
Agreed, but outside of the ultra-cheap "uncle's friend made it from spare parts" PCs this is rare. Maybe I just have higher standards, but I don't let my clients mix RAM vendors inside the same box. I had a machine that got RAM errors like you were describing all the time, and I had to underclock the FSB. If you stick to Intel or VIA chipsets, keep your PCs clean, and don't mix RAM parts you will be a happy geek forever after.
and sometimes batches of hardware go bad all at the same time. I've been decommissioning 133MHz Pentiums for work recently (stripping and wiping them, then it's off to the trash) and there are batches of machines with consecutive serial numbers that all had their boards replaced, others with consecutive serials have replacement hard drives. Most are in original condition, but sometimes bad batches of parts make it into good machines.
There oughtta be a website where you can post your part, part #, and serial to see how often certain hardware is failing.
I know people whose job it is to run servers at major banks who don't know that there are alternatives to Windows. I spoke with a server administrator three days ago who thought there was only Windows and a little OS/2 to run legacy apps in the world anymore. I mentioned Linux, she said she had heard of it before, but that it was just for hobbyists and had no decent features. My manager at the biggest computer company in RI asked me if Linux had a User Interface yet, just last week. I told him I could name over 10 UIs for linux in under a minute, he thought I was being a jerk.
Um, not quite.. FireWire is a Serial Interface like USB or your COM port, but FireWire has a SCSI layer so it's just as easy to send a SCSI command to something on the FW bus as it is to the drive on your SCSI card. Some companies are working on making SCSI packets play nice inside IP packets, so you could mount a 'SCSI' drive over your network connection directly. This is way oversimplified, but SCSI is just a set of commands and frames to stick them in, the pipe you push those frames in is relatively arbitrary (apologies to device driver programmers, I make it sound so simple)
I agree on all but one point. RAM errors will usually cause Windows to die repeatedly during boot (NT, 2K, and XP kernels do a RAM check at boot), but bad RAM is well under 0.1% (one-of-a-thousand) the cause of most windows crashes in my experience.
ahh, you can just allow all to access the 'public' ports and just keep track how much bandwidth was used by each MAC.
As for spoofing, it's an economy of scale, 99.5% of users will not spoof at all, and trying to enforce that 0.5% costs more than just letting them do it.
At URI the student ID cards have up to $20 in 'URI Dollars' on them, you can get a card writer and keep 'refreshing' your $20 and buy sodas for all your pals, but it ends up being such a waste of time that nobody does it.
People are generally pretty honest, just look at how well an operation like eBay works, it relies almost completely on honesty and it's very effective because it's more trouble to be dishonest than it is to just follow the rules.
You allow the user's registered MAC on both ports in their room, and all 'public' ports (academic buildings, lounges, outdoor WiFi cafes, etc.) Doesn't seem too hard to me.
Schools should set up gnutella ultrapeers close to their routers and have all outgoing requests for peers return the school's gnutella 'consolidator' this would force most P2P traffic to search INSIDE the school's network border before searching the outside, it would also reduce chatter and repetition on the gnutella network. Limewire oughtta produce this and sell it to the schools as a 'P2P interference reducer'. ISPs could also save a LOT of loot doing this, as they wouldn't need to purchase as much bandwidth from the higher-ups.
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If so, why don't I see a matching increase in quality of printed materials? I thought DTP folks were working in relatively fixed constraints. If I'm making a magazine no page is going to consume more than (pixels wide)*(pixels tall)*(bitdepth).
All the shops I see are still using the same resolution and bitdepth that they were five years ago, but the computers at the desks are easily three or four times the speed.
Are you folks jacking up your working resolution way above what it should be just to spin your (virtual) wheels? I can't see a reason to run a resolution more than 2x the printable resolution (which is what, 2400dpi these days?).
Not in my opinion. I care about the earth quite a bit. I just get frustrated with the type of people who won't allow the construction of, say, a wind-power array offshore because it might bother some fish. When it comes down to it, I'd rather have non-fossil-based power, a few fish and a dozen whales are well worth it.
I'm not upset at you Joe, this is more of a separate rant:
I think the earth is just SO much more resilient than we've been lead to believe. Really.
So you rub out a few square miles of ocean floor, a whale dies, some dead fish float to shore. Oh well. It's not the end of the world.
I'm really upset at how resistant to change most of us have become. If we continue sitting around bickering over trivial issues like a few miles of tundra in Alaska or some bit-too-warm seawater in the middle of the pacific we're not going to get off this planet before nature herself torches us with a 100% natural meteor.
That said, I think it can't be SO HARD to find people who have moderate values, who can evaluate the costs/benefits of this type of issue. Our politicians seem more interested in bickering or trading favors than implementing mutually beneficial solutions.
I think it's time for a new political party made out of business-minded freedom-lovers who don't have ties to mega-corporations or the christian religion (or ANY religion).
I remember when the movie 'High Fidelity' came out my girlfriend wanted it on tape ASAP, she ended up buying from a company that sells to the rental stores. The tape ran her $110, but she had it WEEKS before it was out en-masse, which is what she wanted.
I would assume that rental games are sold in the same manner, it costs a lot initially but then you don't have to calculate royalties. Everybody wins!
I remember when applying a filter to a 24MB image took overnight, now they happen in a minute or so. Have we reached the point where it doesn't really matter how fast your computer is at PhotoShop/Illustrator because everything is fast enough? Or has the image size/filter complexity gone way up since the mid-1990s?
I stand corrected. OT came out in 7.5, but it was really nasty and didn't seem to come into it's own until 7.6. 7.6 was Apple's 'Let's be done with 7' release, it seems, just like 9.2 is their 'lets be done with classic' release. The 'crap rolled into one monolithic system' comment referred to the removal of the enablers and the integration of a number of extensions and technologies.
But they SHOULD have given Win98 Second Edition to anybody who paid for Win98, just like they SHOULD have given Win95B to anyone who paid for Win95.
Microsoft and Apple are very different in this respect, Apple likes to give bugfix and minor enhancements away because it's an investment in their user base. Microsoft likes to wait it out and then charge you for what you thought you were paying for last year.
On a side note: GPL'd software tends to tell you that it can't do a damn thing, but then you download it and look at the compile options and see that it does exactly what you were hoping it could do. Updates and upgrades are free, and bugfixes are usually hours in the making, not days or longer.
Apple generally charges for feature updates and not for bug fixes. Sometimes there's a little bit of both, but 9.2 was just 9.0 with some bug fixes and very minor revisions. 7.6 was just all the crap that had accumulated from 7.5 and back rolled into a more monolithic system, but they added a new networking core which was major enough to charge for it.
Inverters are really inefficient. They suck a TON of juice.
It's better than your tax dollars paying the millitary to put up their own sattelites to handle usually unneeded bandwidth. Do you have any idea how efficient these private companies are compared to Uncle Sam? Even in a bidding war I'll bet we're paying under 10% what a home-grown green-painted sattelite would cost.
The number one cost in making these will be the engineering labor to integrate the components. If there are standardized ways of connecting these parts then we are in the same place we are today and we're very close in our thinking. I agree that more will be integrated onto a single big chip, I think that's a great idea, I think the CPU, memory controller, several I/O DSPs, and a huge L1 cache should be packed onto the CPU core or in the same IC. On low-cost systems integrating the GPU might make sense too, but the implementation I find most likely for this is a whole mini-AGP bus INSIDE the Main-IC, custom-designing a CPU-GPU bridge for each processor will be way too costly and time-consuming. The devices ought to have seperate logic but in some cases be inside the same package for size/heat/cost issues.
:-)
I think we're on the same page but in different paragraphs.
The problem there is that such deep integration costs more than the benefits it produces. While it makes sense to stick the memory controller and maybe a few I/O processors on the CPU core it's very diffucult to cost-justify including a GPU and audio. It would cost millions to integrate the GPU on to the CPU, and any changes in the design of either part would nescessitate both the GPU and CPU teams to hash it out. There's little advantage to integrating the CPU and GPU, AGP is a very fast and cheap way to get tons of data back and forth between those components, and I don't know of anything that pushes AGP to it's limits, the bottleneck is more often than not the GPU and the GPU-VRAM pipe.
What I do see in the future is more modular designs. Eventually this serial craze will boil down to the chipset level and there will be packet/serial interfaces between key components. Since the different components will 'speak' to each-other instead of signalling over customized paralell interfaces there will be much greater flexibility and reduced R&D costs. This type of system would be much slower with today's technology, but advances in serial signalling, superconduction, and fiber optics will bring us much closer to a modular future.
Not true! I have my KT266a motherboard here running a barton, it's just got the FSB underclocked, it runs cool and faster than my old tbird. And this system has PC3200 DDR RAM=, it just is running at PC2100 speeds right now. My next purchase wil be a new mobo that can take FULL advantage of the CPU an RAM. Look at the Intel side, they change the PHYSICAL pinout so you CAN'T do this. The athlon has been on one single pinout while intel has done FC-PGA, FC-PGA2, 427(?), 472(?).
DOn't underestimate the power and value you can get from underclocking.
Am I the only one who never wants to know what God used to make the doughnut hole?
The US Tax Code. It's held there by some old tape with Nixonian ramblings.
having faster clients does not harm the 'other end' at all, it helps reduce retransmissions on the server end from packet loss, allows for shorter connection durations (get each client handled QUICKLY so others can get a whack), and pushes for better server connectivity in the long run. if 10,000 slashdotters on 56K modems are trying to look at your site all at once and they switch to 100Mbit connections, the server will be able to handle more of them because it will be able to handle each page view in less time.
But there's still no GCC profile for the C3, you have to compile with -m486 because the C3 lacks optimized calls. Somebody at VIA really needs to contribute a profile for the C3 so GCC-3.3 and later can make the most of this chip.
Also, the C3 is great for what it is, but it's a total dog for real-world use. I put a C3/800 into my girlfriend's machine and she made me put the Celeron/600 back the same day.
The EPIA/800 here is great for playing MP3s and playing StarCraft on TV, but it can't even emulate a SNES without choking, and I had to reencode all my videos at higher bitrates and put a better NIC in it to get decent video output. I'm waiting for the EPIAs with the new 'nemi-somethingorother' core to show face so I can get something DONE with the architecture.
I know a lot of idiots who installed XP and don't pick anything harder than '123' for their admin password. Most of the people I deal with always say "What would a hacker want with me? I don't keep anything important on the computer." Eventhough they keep their email, finances, personal correspondence, and credit information on them.
Agreed, but outside of the ultra-cheap "uncle's friend made it from spare parts" PCs this is rare. Maybe I just have higher standards, but I don't let my clients mix RAM vendors inside the same box. I had a machine that got RAM errors like you were describing all the time, and I had to underclock the FSB. If you stick to Intel or VIA chipsets, keep your PCs clean, and don't mix RAM parts you will be a happy geek forever after.
and sometimes batches of hardware go bad all at the same time. I've been decommissioning 133MHz Pentiums for work recently (stripping and wiping them, then it's off to the trash) and there are batches of machines with consecutive serial numbers that all had their boards replaced, others with consecutive serials have replacement hard drives. Most are in original condition, but sometimes bad batches of parts make it into good machines.
There oughtta be a website where you can post your part, part #, and serial to see how often certain hardware is failing.
I know people whose job it is to run servers at major banks who don't know that there are alternatives to Windows. I spoke with a server administrator three days ago who thought there was only Windows and a little OS/2 to run legacy apps in the world anymore. I mentioned Linux, she said she had heard of it before, but that it was just for hobbyists and had no decent features. My manager at the biggest computer company in RI asked me if Linux had a User Interface yet, just last week. I told him I could name over 10 UIs for linux in under a minute, he thought I was being a jerk.
Um, not quite.. FireWire is a Serial Interface like USB or your COM port, but FireWire has a SCSI layer so it's just as easy to send a SCSI command to something on the FW bus as it is to the drive on your SCSI card. Some companies are working on making SCSI packets play nice inside IP packets, so you could mount a 'SCSI' drive over your network connection directly. This is way oversimplified, but SCSI is just a set of commands and frames to stick them in, the pipe you push those frames in is relatively arbitrary (apologies to device driver programmers, I make it sound so simple)
I agree on all but one point. RAM errors will usually cause Windows to die repeatedly during boot (NT, 2K, and XP kernels do a RAM check at boot), but bad RAM is well under 0.1% (one-of-a-thousand) the cause of most windows crashes in my experience.
ahh, you can just allow all to access the 'public' ports and just keep track how much bandwidth was used by each MAC.
As for spoofing, it's an economy of scale, 99.5% of users will not spoof at all, and trying to enforce that 0.5% costs more than just letting them do it.
At URI the student ID cards have up to $20 in 'URI Dollars' on them, you can get a card writer and keep 'refreshing' your $20 and buy sodas for all your pals, but it ends up being such a waste of time that nobody does it.
People are generally pretty honest, just look at how well an operation like eBay works, it relies almost completely on honesty and it's very effective because it's more trouble to be dishonest than it is to just follow the rules.
You allow the user's registered MAC on both ports in their room, and all 'public' ports (academic buildings, lounges, outdoor WiFi cafes, etc.) Doesn't seem too hard to me.
Schools should set up gnutella ultrapeers close to their routers and have all outgoing requests for peers return the school's gnutella 'consolidator' this would force most P2P traffic to search INSIDE the school's network border before searching the outside, it would also reduce chatter and repetition on the gnutella network. Limewire oughtta produce this and sell it to the schools as a 'P2P interference reducer'. ISPs could also save a LOT of loot doing this, as they wouldn't need to purchase as much bandwidth from the higher-ups.