...most incidences of online theft are under the magical felony number which makes an individual counts of fraud usually not worth pursuing.
I've had my ID stolen and used to exploit Household Bank's lax policies no fewer than 3 times by the same person, from the same address, in Chicago.
Each time the scumbag ran up just about $4900 then stopped using the account. At $5k it's a felony. They don't even bother sending the police to the guys shipping address because it's not enough for them to get a good case. I expect the next collection call any day now (looks at watch)... You'd think they'd flag my social security number and not give accounts to "me" any more. No they just hand out their money like it ain't no thang.
The people running that bank and working there are scumbags too. The last time around, Household's collector told my wife that I'm having an affair with someone in Chicago. Funny, since I've never been there and I'm home every night, in Maryland, where I live. My wife thought it was hilarious.
Oh well, it's their money I guess. It's kind of a pain in the ass when it happens, but I just tell them "Look you been robbed, again, by the same guy. You might want to flag my social security number and not give accounts to people using my information". Then I call the credit bureau, report the fraud and they take it off my report.
It's the banks causing the problem, not the police. The bank people are stupid. The retail people don't even bother asking for ID. I still can't believe the government is bailing banks out and preventing natural selection from doing it's thing.
This country's laws are written to promote theft and fraud, and our government supports and endorses stupidity. Fraud and socialism is what this country is all about.
Star Wars is written mostly with 10 year olds in mind as entertainment for kids. If you try to enjoy it from the perspective of an adult, of course it's going to be lacking.
It's really a bigger league Power Rangers kind of franchise. I think too many people watch a new Star Wars flick with too much expectation. I'm not sure whether they are looking for the meaning of life or an oscar worthy film, or whatever they expect, but if it's more than what a 10 year old is looking for, the expectations are too much.
The only problem I have with any of Lucas' movies is the last 2 were a little too mature for 10 year olds(so are a little too intense or scary). Lucas said that himself that the last movie was for adults. I think it was a huge mistake, because you can never make adults happy with a Star Wars movie, but kids eat it up. I think Episode III proved it. I just wish my kid didn't have to wait until he's much older to see it.
I'm glad to see Lucas has gone back to kid's movies. I'm going to see the new one with my son. I'm sure he'll love it. I'll love it too, because I'm expecting to see a kid's action film, not find the hidden meaning of life within a star wars plot.
I'm surprised the great state of Texas isn't pursuing the RIAA for violation of their PI License laws regarding digital investigations. I wonder if they are licensed in the state of Texas...
They could easily collect a lot of cash and get several arrests from the RIAA(or agents) by using every suit they've filed in Texas since 2006 as evidence.
If the law gets overturned, computer professionals win. If the RIAA gets fined and their people arrested, everyone wins.
I don't see a bad outcome of any states with laws like this filing suits against the RIAA, no matter who wins. It seems like all that would need to happen is for the victim of an RIAA suit to file a complaint about an unlicensed investigator.
Imagine if the RIAA's contractor had to fight lawsuits and answer charges in every state that has laws like this. They'd be in real trouble and possibly do some jail time.
Yea and you can easily "bump" most locks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping in case you don't know about this). That doesn't mean you shouldn't use one.
It's not the bank's responsibility to make sure your private info stays secret. It *is* their responsibility to make a best effort in verifying who you are.
The banks that are worth their salt let you define your own question and the answer to it, which is much much harder to crack. Do your part and come up with a better solution than "maiden name or city of birth". Every EH guy I've worked with was very receptive to anything that exceeded requirements and usually endorsed the idea if it was any good.
> Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."
Sad but true... Beyond that, we need more open source drivers, and if a distro bundled all of them so installation was painless, more users would glom on.
As it is life is challenging for regular people if they need to go find proprietary drivers, and it's challenging for distro maintainers since they don't want to taint their distro or violate distribution requirements.
Hardware manufacturers should either become OS neutral, or open the specs and leave drivers to other people. That would really level the playing field for users, who also happen to be keeping the hardware mfgrs in business.
ROFL. It took us 2 weeks and 7 documents to change a freaking phone number.
By the time you submit the change for review, go to 2 change control meetings (only once per week and you are required to be in 2 of them, once for QA, once for PROD) get it through QA, and all the other necessary meetings, 2 weeks is a short amount of time to change a phone number. With an index you have the added overhead of a DBA involved.
I now work for a software company and am once again an engineer instead of a paper pusher. I'll never work in the financial or medical sector again.... NEVER. If they doubled my current salary, I'd consider it. Working in a bank means skill rot. All you do is sit in meetings and do mind numbing amounts of documentation that no one will ever look at.
This is precisely the attitude that causes the problem. Just because you don't understand why it's a vulnerability doesn't mean it isn't.
When XSS first surfaced I thought the same thing. To me it seemed like you had to hack yourself for it to work. After the EH I convinced my boss to get them to give us a walkthrough on why it's dangerous.
Once I grokked the danger I had a change of heart. However, I did what they told me and took it seriously, even when I didn't understand why at the time.
Turns out they were right. There's a reason why people hire "experts". Usually they know what they are talking about. Instead of resisting it you should try and learn something about defensive coding.
If you build your apps up from the start with defense in depth in mind, nothing is counterproductive to implement and from that point on you'll never have that vulnerability again.
Ads offer very little measurable ROI. Their only effect is branding, the benefits of which can't be measured.
I've known this since 1998 when I built an ad server that measures actual ROI and we started taking customers and building statistics.
Actual conversions usually measured around.002% For a particularly compelling campaign that has something useful to offer, it can be higher.
It's the same as TV advertising. I can't believe people still don't understand this and it surprises them.
In the news: "Advertisers discover that >gasp 8 years later, banner ads still have little measurable ROI"
The concept that they might is broken./shrug
You can't measure people that see an ad at work, then go home, surf straight to site and convert. This and a thousand other reasons are why you can't measure the value.
To expand on this, not everyone needs Google's API to do AJAX. It's possible to write cross browser AJAX code and not end up with 10k of javascript. My own stuff ended up being 1.58k total.
This code reads xml (generated by server side processing on the fly), and generates large dynamic arrays of form controls, as well as the typical list population stuff. In my case, that's all I needed.
It will actually _add_ to a user's experience if they are on a slow modem, since the static html would be 100k +. The AJAX powered stuff is under 8k source they are downloading.
If I used googles API it would take 2-3x as long for someone on a slow connection. Anyone that's seen the broadband penetration numbers for the U.S. (just hit 50% in April) realizes that page size is, indeed, still important.
Add that fact to the fact that you become dependent on google's site being up when you use google's API to generate your interfaces, and it's simply not an attractive option for some (apparently most) people.
It's Google's API so it doesn't suprise me that they are just about the only one's using it. AJAX is Really Simple(tm) stuff. You are better off grokking it and writing the minimum you need to do the job.
I do use google maps though; that's cool stuff. However since my site will work if the map server dies, I don't feel so cagey about using it.
Actually it's application service providers using clustered virtualization technologies to provide web 2.0 on the grid.
The cloud comes from the guy at the desk in the corner of the datacenter where it all runs, right after he eats a bacon egg and cheese croissant from burger king.
His evil plans are coming together and he wants to eat your bebbeh.
Actually he has a good point in that you don't want to just go blindly patching everything the day the patch comes out. A lot of patches are trivial and fix hardware that has nothing to do with you. This can lead to downtime if the patch causes a new bug.
You can break an otherwise healthy system with a bunch of patches you don't need. By the same token if you don't patch a security issue right away it can lead to system compromise.
Therefore full disclosure of the security issues a patch fixes is necessary. Any system admin worth his salt knows it's a bad idea to just go around fixing stuff if it isn't broken. It can cause you to lose your job.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Without knowledge of what you are fixing and why, you are playing Russian roulette. If you tell your CIO you installed a kernel patch and broke critical systems "just because", he's not going to like that answer.
If you tell him your server got comprimised because you didn't install an important security update because you didn't know it was a security update, this would cause you to possibly lose your job.
If you say to your CIO "I have to install every kernel patch, because it's linux and they never tell us what they are doing and why, so if it breaks, don't blame me." You CIO may say "This isn't working out, move to Sun or AIX." after it breaks critical systems more than once.
If you run all the scenarios disclosure starts to make sense if you are an administrator or user, the people who a lack of information affects the most.
Without administrators or users, you got nuthin'.
Disclosure doesn't necessarily need to be full specific disclosure. Linus just needs to say "Install this patch because it fixes a security problem, but I'm not telling you what it is."
We don't care what it is. If we are told we need to install a release because it fixes an important security issue, we will. We don't need to know what that security issue is.
"He is neither a hacker, nor a computer genius possessing some kind of unique skills, he's just someone proving for yet another time that it's not a matter of lack of capabilities for committing cybercrime, but a matter of courage to so. "
He's a cut-and-paste script kiddie, not a talented system breaker. The real system breakers are the people that actually wrote the code.
His real talent is using google and ctrl+c/ctrl+v.
ROFL. A monkey can break vulnerable systems with a payload/rootkit someone coded for them and some balls. The NZ gov is a bunch of idiots.
>In this case, the use of Apple's software on non-apple branded equipment would mean that the DRM functionality of that software (The requirements of an EFI firmware as well as a special ROM circuit) had been defeated, and thus is a violation of the DMCA as well as the software licence agreement.
What if they simply added firmware that did the same job as the apple firmware and didn't tamper with the operating system software or defeat it?
Surely there's no law against *adding* DMCA hooks to the hardware? You are enabling, not defeating in this case.
Johnson: Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer software to distribute media to each other?
ISP CEO: No that's a terrible idea! They'll get sued by the RIAA and MPAA. I have a better idea. Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer *hardware* technology to distribute media to each other?!?!?
Johnson: Brilliant idea sir! That way we can charge them for the hardware:P
No a reputation gained by walking by city offices, peeking in the window and seeing half of them playing solitaire, minesweeper or scrabble at 2PM.
You can see it in Tempe, Arizona where the offices are at ground level (or at least they were in 1992) Same people every day, playing games all freaking day. I worked at a coffee shop and I noticed it once, so I started checking every day at various times during the day during my breaks. Solitaire and minesweeper every single time I walked by.
Here's an article about what the Governor of Montana did.
Sorry but as a tax payer, this pisses me off, especially when they rip an attitude when I call because I need a service I'm paying for, or go to buy a permit and they are staring at the screen for 20 minutes before they'll acknowledge me, despite coughing, AHEMing, and making every effort to get their attention.
No it has the same bandwidth to each GPU. They don't share texture memory. If they did, it would be a crapload faster than 2 4870s in crossfire mode.
As it is, the 4870s in crossfire edge it out. They alternate frames and use discrete memory allocated to the individual GPUs for textures. It's a pair of RV770 GPU's with the same problem on one PCB.
4870's that aren't memory starved will smoke this, like I said in the last post. This card is still memory starved. It's 2 256 data paths, one to each GPU. The author is mistaken. One look at the PCB layout will show you this. Each GPU has 4 ddr5 IC's flanking it.
While it has 1024MB of memory on the card, it really only has 512MB of texture memory that will be duplicated for each GPU.
They need to get the memory bus width straightened out. The 4870 GPU does 1.2 tfps(Teraflops), the nvidia 280GX something like 933Gfps, but the 280GX beats it handily in framerates.
This is largely because 280 can get the textures from memory to GPU hella faster (115Gbps vs 141Gbps, 256 bit bus vs 512 bit on the 280) for compositing. As well the 280 has 1GB video memory.
Given equal memory subsystems the 4870 would smoke it. The memory subsystem on the 4870 is a huge handicap.
Unless the upcoming dual GPU doubles the memory bandwidth, it's no contest, the 280 GX wins. I'm hoping they do since I just bought a 790FX crossfire chipset motherboard. I'd be happy with a pair of 512 bit 1GB 4870s. I just hope they make them.
I have a laptop. It rarely leaves my desk at work because when I do think I'm going to do work at home, and take it home, it never leaves the case:P
Chalk it up to having a 7 year old son. I just look at him, then look at the case, and I can't do it.
If I do get the creative urge to work at 1AM, there's nothing stopping me from using my PC at home and emailing myself whatever I did. Being a developer is pretty cool sometimes, since the file sizes are tiny.
Copyright law is the law. Forget about the philosophical bullshit. The law is the law whether it's wrong or right. If you violate the law, you are a criminal.
How about if we just say "criminal" instead of "thief".
It's more accurate and there's no room for interpretation or semantic hair splitting.
ROFL. If you are going to throw acronyms around you should define them once like "FISA(Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)" in your article, as a courtesy to your readers. I read your op piece and had absolutely no idea what you were talking about until the last paragraph.
Good writers do this for their readers. You shouldn't assume that everyone knows what every political/legal acronym means...
Slashdot Mirror
...most incidences of online theft are under the magical felony number which makes an individual counts of fraud usually not worth pursuing.
I've had my ID stolen and used to exploit Household Bank's lax policies no fewer than 3 times by the same person, from the same address, in Chicago.
Each time the scumbag ran up just about $4900 then stopped using the account. At $5k it's a felony. They don't even bother sending the police to the guys shipping address because it's not enough for them to get a good case. I expect the next collection call any day now (looks at watch)... You'd think they'd flag my social security number and not give accounts to "me" any more. No they just hand out their money like it ain't no thang.
The people running that bank and working there are scumbags too. The last time around, Household's collector told my wife that I'm having an affair with someone in Chicago. Funny, since I've never been there and I'm home every night, in Maryland, where I live. My wife thought it was hilarious.
Oh well, it's their money I guess. It's kind of a pain in the ass when it happens, but I just tell them "Look you been robbed, again, by the same guy. You might want to flag my social security number and not give accounts to people using my information". Then I call the credit bureau, report the fraud and they take it off my report.
It's the banks causing the problem, not the police. The bank people are stupid. The retail people don't even bother asking for ID. I still can't believe the government is bailing banks out and preventing natural selection from doing it's thing.
This country's laws are written to promote theft and fraud, and our government supports and endorses stupidity. Fraud and socialism is what this country is all about.
-Viz
Star Wars is written mostly with 10 year olds in mind as entertainment for kids. If you try to enjoy it from the perspective of an adult, of course it's going to be lacking.
It's really a bigger league Power Rangers kind of franchise. I think too many people watch a new Star Wars flick with too much expectation. I'm not sure whether they are looking for the meaning of life or an oscar worthy film, or whatever they expect, but if it's more than what a 10 year old is looking for, the expectations are too much.
The only problem I have with any of Lucas' movies is the last 2 were a little too mature for 10 year olds(so are a little too intense or scary). Lucas said that himself that the last movie was for adults. I think it was a huge mistake, because you can never make adults happy with a Star Wars movie, but kids eat it up. I think Episode III proved it. I just wish my kid didn't have to wait until he's much older to see it.
I'm glad to see Lucas has gone back to kid's movies. I'm going to see the new one with my son. I'm sure he'll love it. I'll love it too, because I'm expecting to see a kid's action film, not find the hidden meaning of life within a star wars plot.
Grow up?
-Viz
I'm surprised the great state of Texas isn't pursuing the RIAA for violation of their PI License laws regarding digital investigations. I wonder if they are licensed in the state of Texas...
They could easily collect a lot of cash and get several arrests from the RIAA(or agents) by using every suit they've filed in Texas since 2006 as evidence.
If the law gets overturned, computer professionals win.
If the RIAA gets fined and their people arrested, everyone wins.
I don't see a bad outcome of any states with laws like this filing suits against the RIAA, no matter who wins. It seems like all that would need to happen is for the victim of an RIAA suit to file a complaint about an unlicensed investigator.
Imagine if the RIAA's contractor had to fight lawsuits and answer charges in every state that has laws like this. They'd be in real trouble and possibly do some jail time.
-Viz
...when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.
-Machiavelli
Yea and you can easily "bump" most locks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping in case you don't know about this). That doesn't mean you shouldn't use one.
It's not the bank's responsibility to make sure your private info stays secret. It *is* their responsibility to make a best effort in verifying who you are.
The banks that are worth their salt let you define your own question and the answer to it, which is much much harder to crack. Do your part and come up with a better solution than "maiden name or city of birth". Every EH guy I've worked with was very receptive to anything that exceeded requirements and usually endorsed the idea if it was any good.
-Viz
> Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."
Sad but true...
Beyond that, we need more open source drivers, and if a distro bundled all of them so installation was painless, more users would glom on.
As it is life is challenging for regular people if they need to go find proprietary drivers, and it's challenging for distro maintainers since they don't want to taint their distro or violate distribution requirements.
Hardware manufacturers should either become OS neutral, or open the specs and leave drivers to other people. That would really level the playing field for users, who also happen to be keeping the hardware mfgrs in business.
-Viz
ROFL. It took us 2 weeks and 7 documents to change a freaking phone number.
By the time you submit the change for review, go to 2 change control meetings (only once per week and you are required to be in 2 of them, once for QA, once for PROD) get it through QA, and all the other necessary meetings, 2 weeks is a short amount of time to change a phone number. With an index you have the added overhead of a DBA involved.
I now work for a software company and am once again an engineer instead of a paper pusher. I'll never work in the financial or medical sector again.... NEVER. If they doubled my current salary, I'd consider it. Working in a bank means skill rot. All you do is sit in meetings and do mind numbing amounts of documentation that no one will ever look at.
-Viz
> Most of them are complete crap
This is precisely the attitude that causes the problem. Just because you don't understand why it's a vulnerability doesn't mean it isn't.
When XSS first surfaced I thought the same thing. To me it seemed like you had to hack yourself for it to work. After the EH I convinced my boss to get them to give us a walkthrough on why it's dangerous.
Once I grokked the danger I had a change of heart. However, I did what they told me and took it seriously, even when I didn't understand why at the time.
Turns out they were right. There's a reason why people hire "experts". Usually they know what they are talking about. Instead of resisting it you should try and learn something about defensive coding.
If you build your apps up from the start with defense in depth in mind, nothing is counterproductive to implement and from that point on you'll never have that vulnerability again.
-Viz
Ads offer very little measurable ROI. Their only effect is branding, the benefits of which can't be measured.
I've known this since 1998 when I built an ad server that measures actual ROI and we started taking customers and building statistics.
Actual conversions usually measured around .002% For a particularly compelling campaign that has something useful to offer, it can be higher.
It's the same as TV advertising. I can't believe people still don't understand this and it surprises them.
In the news: "Advertisers discover that >gasp 8 years later, banner ads still have little measurable ROI"
The concept that they might is broken. /shrug
You can't measure people that see an ad at work, then go home, surf straight to site and convert. This and a thousand other reasons are why you can't measure the value.
-Viz
>Not everyone needs AJAX.
To expand on this, not everyone needs Google's API to do AJAX. It's possible to write cross browser AJAX code and not end up with 10k of javascript. My own stuff ended up being 1.58k total.
This code reads xml (generated by server side processing on the fly), and generates large dynamic arrays of form controls, as well as the typical list population stuff. In my case, that's all I needed.
It will actually _add_ to a user's experience if they are on a slow modem, since the static html would be 100k +. The AJAX powered stuff is under 8k source they are downloading.
If I used googles API it would take 2-3x as long for someone on a slow connection. Anyone that's seen the broadband penetration numbers for the U.S. (just hit 50% in April) realizes that page size is, indeed, still important.
Add that fact to the fact that you become dependent on google's site being up when you use google's API to generate your interfaces, and it's simply not an attractive option for some (apparently most) people.
It's Google's API so it doesn't suprise me that they are just about the only one's using it. AJAX is Really Simple(tm) stuff. You are better off grokking it and writing the minimum you need to do the job.
I do use google maps though; that's cool stuff. However since my site will work if the map server dies, I don't feel so cagey about using it.
-Viz
Actually it's application service providers using clustered virtualization technologies to provide web 2.0 on the grid.
The cloud comes from the guy at the desk in the corner of the datacenter where it all runs, right after he eats a bacon egg and cheese croissant from burger king.
His evil plans are coming together and he wants to eat your bebbeh.
-Viz
Actually he has a good point in that you don't want to just go blindly patching everything the day the patch comes out. A lot of patches are trivial and fix hardware that has nothing to do with you. This can lead to downtime if the patch causes a new bug.
You can break an otherwise healthy system with a bunch of patches you don't need. By the same token if you don't patch a security issue right away it can lead to system compromise.
Therefore full disclosure of the security issues a patch fixes is necessary. Any system admin worth his salt knows it's a bad idea to just go around fixing stuff if it isn't broken. It can cause you to lose your job.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Without knowledge of what you are fixing and why, you are playing Russian roulette. If you tell your CIO you installed a kernel patch and broke critical systems "just because", he's not going to like that answer.
If you tell him your server got comprimised because you didn't install an important security update because you didn't know it was a security update, this would cause you to possibly lose your job.
If you say to your CIO "I have to install every kernel patch, because it's linux and they never tell us what they are doing and why, so if it breaks, don't blame me." You CIO may say "This isn't working out, move to Sun or AIX." after it breaks critical systems more than once.
If you run all the scenarios disclosure starts to make sense if you are an administrator or user, the people who a lack of information affects the most.
Without administrators or users, you got nuthin'.
Disclosure doesn't necessarily need to be full specific disclosure. Linus just needs to say "Install this patch because it fixes a security problem, but I'm not telling you what it is."
We don't care what it is. If we are told we need to install a release because it fixes an important security issue, we will. We don't need to know what that security issue is.
-Viz
The funny thing is all he did was cobble together known available exploits.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1502
"He is neither a hacker, nor a computer genius possessing some kind of unique skills, he's just someone proving for yet another time that it's not a matter of lack of capabilities for committing cybercrime, but a matter of courage to so. "
He's a cut-and-paste script kiddie, not a talented system breaker. The real system breakers are the people that actually wrote the code.
His real talent is using google and ctrl+c/ctrl+v.
ROFL. A monkey can break vulnerable systems with a payload/rootkit someone coded for them and some balls. The NZ gov is a bunch of idiots.
-Viz
>In this case, the use of Apple's software on non-apple branded equipment would mean that the DRM functionality of that software (The requirements of an EFI firmware as well as a special ROM circuit) had been defeated, and thus is a violation of the DMCA as well as the software licence agreement.
What if they simply added firmware that did the same job as the apple firmware and didn't tamper with the operating system software or defeat it?
Surely there's no law against *adding* DMCA hooks to the hardware? You are enabling, not defeating in this case.
-Viz
Johnson: Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer software to distribute media to each other?
ISP CEO: No that's a terrible idea! They'll get sued by the RIAA and MPAA. I have a better idea. Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer *hardware* technology to distribute media to each other?!?!?
Johnson: Brilliant idea sir! That way we can charge them for the hardware :P
No a reputation gained by walking by city offices, peeking in the window and seeing half of them playing solitaire, minesweeper or scrabble at 2PM.
You can see it in Tempe, Arizona where the offices are at ground level (or at least they were in 1992) Same people every day, playing games all freaking day. I worked at a coffee shop and I noticed it once, so I started checking every day at various times during the day during my breaks. Solitaire and minesweeper every single time I walked by.
http://helenair.com/articles/2008/04/15/top/65st080415_games.txt
Here's an article about what the Governor of Montana did.
Sorry but as a tax payer, this pisses me off, especially when they rip an attitude when I call because I need a service I'm paying for, or go to buy a permit and they are staring at the screen for 20 minutes before they'll acknowledge me, despite coughing, AHEMing, and making every effort to get their attention.
-Viz
The answer is whatever the developers say it should be. The contents of the packages will reflect the philosophy of the people that run the distro.
It's not right, wrong or otherwise, it just is.
As a user, you should pick a distro with a philosophy that matches your own. There's distros on both sides of this fence. Pick one.
No it has the same bandwidth to each GPU. They don't share texture memory. If they did, it would be a crapload faster than 2 4870s in crossfire mode.
As it is, the 4870s in crossfire edge it out. They alternate frames and use discrete memory allocated to the individual GPUs for textures. It's a pair of RV770 GPU's with the same problem on one PCB.
4870's that aren't memory starved will smoke this, like I said in the last post. This card is still memory starved. It's 2 256 data paths, one to each GPU. The author is mistaken. One look at the PCB layout will show you this. Each GPU has 4 ddr5 IC's flanking it.
While it has 1024MB of memory on the card, it really only has 512MB of texture memory that will be duplicated for each GPU.
-Viz
>90C
8800 GTX?
-Viz
They need to get the memory bus width straightened out. The 4870 GPU does 1.2 tfps(Teraflops), the nvidia 280GX something like 933Gfps, but the 280GX beats it handily in framerates.
This is largely because 280 can get the textures from memory to GPU hella faster (115Gbps vs 141Gbps, 256 bit bus vs 512 bit on the 280) for compositing. As well the 280 has 1GB video memory.
Given equal memory subsystems the 4870 would smoke it. The memory subsystem on the 4870 is a huge handicap.
Unless the upcoming dual GPU doubles the memory bandwidth, it's no contest, the 280 GX wins. I'm hoping they do since I just bought a 790FX crossfire chipset motherboard. I'd be happy with a pair of 512 bit 1GB 4870s. I just hope they make them.
-Viz
I have a laptop. It rarely leaves my desk at work because when I do think I'm going to do work at home, and take it home, it never leaves the case :P
Chalk it up to having a 7 year old son. I just look at him, then look at the case, and I can't do it.
If I do get the creative urge to work at 1AM, there's nothing stopping me from using my PC at home and emailing myself whatever I did. Being a developer is pretty cool sometimes, since the file sizes are tiny.
-Viz
>what is killing PC gaming
Score:5, Hilarious
Sounds like someone needs some updated hardware 8)
-Viz
Copyright law is the law.
Forget about the philosophical bullshit. The law is the law whether it's wrong or right.
If you violate the law, you are a criminal.
How about if we just say "criminal" instead of "thief".
It's more accurate and there's no room for interpretation or semantic hair splitting.
-Viz
WTF is FISA?
ROFL. If you are going to throw acronyms around you should define them once like "FISA(Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)" in your article, as a courtesy to your readers. I read your op piece and had absolutely no idea what you were talking about until the last paragraph.
Good writers do this for their readers. You shouldn't assume that everyone knows what every political/legal acronym means...
-Viz
>Rendezvous with Rama
+5