bit more of a miscalculation to take on Oracle. Unless they actually do have valid patents. Or the calculation is that it's worth killing the company in order to annoy Oracle and RH.
Because this new card uses the 260's memory bus and memory effects dominate at higher resolutions with AA turned up? Because its core clock is the same as the 260? Yes, its cores have the same number of shaders as a 280, but if you run at 1920x1200 or above it's probably more like a pair of 260's in SLI than a pair of 280's - and there's no point in having a $500 card if you play on a crappy screen.
The funny thing is, XP Home will be receiving security patches from Windows Update long after Vista Ultimate according to current Microsoft roadmaps.
They planned to have 5-year lifetimes for their consumer OS's but Vista wasn't ready in time, so XP Home got extended to expire when XP Pro does in 2014 - which is more than 5 years after the release to retail of the consumer editions of Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate) which are scheduled to be killed off in 2012.
Of course, it's possible that Windows 7 will be as late as Vista was, and they'll have to extend the home versions of Vista too...
Remind me again why I should "upgrade" this machine's OS ?
and Sun's X4600 ships with Linux (RHEL or SLES, if you don't like Solaris) and up to.25TB already, in a 4U box. such a sweet machine: 8 Opterons, 16GB per core, GNU/Linux...
I didn't get it. I paid my $23.49 for the CD copy and international shipping, the server was fubar and I can't get my copy now because the download limit was exceeded by my futile attempts to get more than 8.6MB of the zip file. I've emailed them twice now and got no reply, which is pretty shoddy. I've been a fan for 17 years - I bought halo 2 through 4 on vinyl, ffs - and am now quite pissed off.
ditto, got 8.6 MB with wget, now getting 302 errors. I paid the $10 and the extortionate $13.49 shipping for the cd copy too. Useless bastards, can't even prioritize paid downloads over freeloaders. I've been a fan for 17 years too, but now almost wish I'd just bought it in a store and given the artist less money.
Yes. The people who believed the sticker were really uninformed, that's why the lawsuit could succeed. They looked at the info provided by MS and thought they were informed, that their new PC they were buying would be able to run Vista when it was released
Many people - including Mike Nash, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management - thought that were well informed in advance of purchase by the sticker on their machine that said "Vista Capable", then they tried to run Vista and it sucked. They trusted Microsoft to set reasonable minimum requirements and got screwed.
Of course, Microsoft's minima have always been over-optimistic at best, and all techies know that just because they tell you XP Pro requires a 233MHz Pentium MMX and 64MB of RAM, or Server 2003 Enterprise Edition requires a 133MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, it doesn't make it a good idea to try it. Joe Average shouldn't need to consult his resident geek about whether the sticker is lying
Someone senior at MS should take the rap for this. If you're going to sign off on a set of minimum requirements for any software why would you not make sure to spend at least a week using it on a box with that spec? If it runs like a dog, bump upwards. No excuses, Mr Allchin...
So, you're advocating swifter justice? Locking people up without a trial? What?
Um, swifter justice would be good, yes. As would locking people charged with murder up before - not the same thing as without - trial.
I wasn't advocating anything, just disapproving of those exceptional cases where someone with access to lots of money, or with a previously good character, can get bail despite being accused of a heinous crime.
And seriously? You think that by commenting on a foolish judicial decision (and thereby implying agreement with normal practice in most countries over centuries) that I'm advocating brutal repression? And that loss of life caused by free-roaming indicted murderers is acceptable loss? WTF?
Yup. Just like the London Police Inspector (same rank as Lieutenant in the US) who was bailed in September - innocent until proven guilty, he paid £200,000 (~ US$400,000) to walk around free while awaiting trial for the strangling of his wife with a cable tie.
He used the time to shoot dead his wife's mother, then kill himself with the same gun...
ofc, in at least one of these cases we're talking about using a Free program (DOSBox) to execute a Free program (Quake) which operates on proprietary data (id's PAK file)...
HCW have a more detailed article discussing power usage of the current generation, which makes the Wii look impressive from a green or financial perspective - and that's confirmed looking at the last gen numbers vs the 360 which shows the Wii does more with less juice than PS2, GC and DC. It's still using more power than any console before the DC used, but it is a step in the right direction.
Meh, it's not that cheap for an untried product. If the Neo Advanced was nearer $300 (including international shipping) then sure, I'd sign right up. But $450, or $300 for the Base version is just too much. If they can drop the prices by a 25-30% for the 2nd gen I'm sure they'd make a load more sales.
Unsurprising, given that the reviews point to the HD 2900 XT being slower than the 8800 GTX (and the 8800 Ultra). It does surprise me, though, that ATI are 6 months behind and still couldn't beat NVIDIA for the performance crown - but it's nice to see a real fight again on price/performance, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the HD 2600 XT stacks up against the 8600 GTS (for those of us with a sanity budget restriction in place).
I still want a comparison of every DX10 card available, running a selection of say 10 of the most popular games from the last 3 years with all the pretty options turned up to the max, on XP and on Vista, in both a top-end God Box and a typical 18-month old good-but-not-outstanding-for-its-age PC.
2 tables of aggregate fps scores at the beginning not the end, one for XP and one for Vista, each with one row per card and 4 columns: normal PC @1280x1024; normal PC @1600x1200; god box @1280x1024; god box @1600x1200.
That would be a useful review. And if AMD and NVIDIA want to give me samples of their wares and the funds for the god box I'll happily do it and write the article for y'all...
Craptacular indeed (great new word) - the only thing craptacularer was the Celeron D they had out at the same time, which despite the name was not dual-core. Very amusing though, watching the 'tards with enough knowledge to be dangerous and who wanted a cheap PC,
"That one's a 'D', that's got 2 processors, that makes the internet faster"
I don't understand why this is bad. If they make a profit, they stay in the business and make more fun games in the years to come. If they don't they go bust, and we don't get the shiny games. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo aren't in the games business as an extra - it's the only thing they do. There is no Office division making obscene profits to subsidize the games division. They can't wait for the next massive movie to bring in some profit. And that's why gamers love Nintendo, not because they're somehow a "man of the people", but because they exist to make games. Nothing else.
a profit on per-console sales. This is unheard of, ESPECIALLY for Nintendo
Not sure where you got that from, but I've read that Microsoft are no longer making a loss on the 360 - one year in was the break-even point. I've also read articles in dead-tree format (Edge, probably) to the effect that Nintendo made a profit on the Cube from very early in its lifecycle, about 6 months in, and before that never took a loss on their hardware. Sony also made a profit on the Playstation and PS2 for most of their lifecycles. Sega took losses only on the Saturn and Dreamcast, and MS lost money all through the original Xbox's run. It's not the norm for gaming hardware to be a loss leader, companies only do it when they're desperate (trying to get into a market or maintain position) and think they can cover it from elsewhere and/or reduce costs quickly enough to survive.
previous difficult launches such as the DS
Well, its first year sales were worse than the GBA, but it outsold the PSP over the first 6 months of their lives, then had a worse second Christmas season, then the Lite turned things around to the point where sales by the end of '06 were 3:2 vs the PSP. At this point they're trouncing Sony in hand-held and under-TV consoles. Whether they can maintain this or not, it has been worth doing because they have made money. Which is kinda the point of being in business.
It's not a contract, it's a software licence, which isn't the same thing in law.
And it is stupid to have such things as EULA's which only a lawyer could possibly understand the full meaning and implications of - but haven't all the millions of computer users the world over "agreed" to them without such an understanding? Or has everyone else received their classes in understanding the licences for Microsoft Windows and Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Sun Java, Macromedia Flash and everything else that is loaded on their PCs as part of their basic education, on a day I was off school?
The question is whether the GPL (any version) is harder to understand than any other licence. If not, then you don't need a lawyer just for the GPL v3.
Yes, if you use a free, community-supported distro and are happy with that, know your way around it and don't mind upgrading to the next release every few months, then it may be cheaper. Assuming you have some sysadmin skills and your own time has no value.
However, if you're in the market for a new laptop, if might be worth asking yourself if a few extra currency units on a kilo-currency unit investment means so much to you that you'd rather buy something you don't want (and possibly actually hate using) from a company you intensely dislike, when doing so deprives a Linux vendor of the revenue it'd earn if you bought its product, thus undermining the very community you claim to be a part of. If you pay for your Linux distro, the community wins. Engineers get paid. Support organisations get built up. Knowledge expands, and we become mainstream in the desktop sphere. Thence, world domination.
And from a more selfish p.o.v., if you want something stable, predictable and supported by ISVs, an OS that you can put on to the machine and never upgrade (much more important with laptops than desktops) for the life of the machine... guess what? That'll cost you. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I order all our Dell workstations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux preinstalled (one of 2 reasons I have for choosing Dell), and it'll be great to be able to do the same with laptops. (This post brought to you by a Dell XPS M1210 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS.)
Slashdot Mirror
yep. my main is 12", so >=10" does not a netbook make.
bit more of a miscalculation to take on Oracle. Unless they actually do have valid patents. Or the calculation is that it's worth killing the company in order to annoy Oracle and RH.
Because this new card uses the 260's memory bus and memory effects dominate at higher resolutions with AA turned up? Because its core clock is the same as the 260? Yes, its cores have the same number of shaders as a 280, but if you run at 1920x1200 or above it's probably more like a pair of 260's in SLI than a pair of 280's - and there's no point in having a $500 card if you play on a crappy screen.
The problem with everything being done in VBA is that it's proprietary and Microsoft are choosing to switch off its "universal" availability in favour of VSTA/VSTO and removed it from the most recent version (on Mac) so that it "cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros". Anti-competitive lock-in to force business to use Windows? Nah, not MS.
also, this does not happen if you're running BIND in a chroot jail. So those falling to this are doubly dumb.
The funny thing is, XP Home will be receiving security patches from Windows Update long after Vista Ultimate according to current Microsoft roadmaps.
They planned to have 5-year lifetimes for their consumer OS's but Vista wasn't ready in time, so XP Home got extended to expire when XP Pro does in 2014 - which is more than 5 years after the release to retail of the consumer editions of Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate) which are scheduled to be killed off in 2012.
Of course, it's possible that Windows 7 will be as late as Vista was, and they'll have to extend the home versions of Vista too...
Remind me again why I should "upgrade" this machine's OS ?
and used to be part of the Post Office, an even bigger monopoly.
and Sun's X4600 ships with Linux (RHEL or SLES, if you don't like Solaris) and up to .25TB already, in a 4U box. such a sweet machine: 8 Opterons, 16GB per core, GNU/Linux ...
I didn't get it. I paid my $23.49 for the CD copy and international shipping, the server was fubar and I can't get my copy now because the download limit was exceeded by my futile attempts to get more than 8.6MB of the zip file. I've emailed them twice now and got no reply, which is pretty shoddy. I've been a fan for 17 years - I bought halo 2 through 4 on vinyl, ffs - and am now quite pissed off.
ditto, got 8.6 MB with wget, now getting 302 errors. I paid the $10 and the extortionate $13.49 shipping for the cd copy too. Useless bastards, can't even prioritize paid downloads over freeloaders. I've been a fan for 17 years too, but now almost wish I'd just bought it in a store and given the artist less money.
Yes. The people who believed the sticker were really uninformed, that's why the lawsuit could succeed. They looked at the info provided by MS and thought they were informed, that their new PC they were buying would be able to run Vista when it was released
Many people - including Mike Nash, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management - thought that were well informed in advance of purchase by the sticker on their machine that said "Vista Capable", then they tried to run Vista and it sucked. They trusted Microsoft to set reasonable minimum requirements and got screwed.
Of course, Microsoft's minima have always been over-optimistic at best, and all techies know that just because they tell you XP Pro requires a 233MHz Pentium MMX and 64MB of RAM, or Server 2003 Enterprise Edition requires a 133MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, it doesn't make it a good idea to try it. Joe Average shouldn't need to consult his resident geek about whether the sticker is lying
Someone senior at MS should take the rap for this. If you're going to sign off on a set of minimum requirements for any software why would you not make sure to spend at least a week using it on a box with that spec? If it runs like a dog, bump upwards. No excuses, Mr Allchin...
Meh, my Blueberry iMac runs Fedora 7
Um, swifter justice would be good, yes. As would locking people charged with murder up before - not the same thing as without - trial.
I wasn't advocating anything, just disapproving of those exceptional cases where someone with access to lots of money, or with a previously good character, can get bail despite being accused of a heinous crime.
And seriously? You think that by commenting on a foolish judicial decision (and thereby implying agreement with normal practice in most countries over centuries) that I'm advocating brutal repression? And that loss of life caused by free-roaming indicted murderers is acceptable loss? WTF?
Insightful, my arse.
Yup. Just like the London Police Inspector (same rank as Lieutenant in the US) who was bailed in September - innocent until proven guilty, he paid £200,000 (~ US$400,000) to walk around free while awaiting trial for the strangling of his wife with a cable tie.
He used the time to shoot dead his wife's mother, then kill himself with the same gun ...
Um, you must be new here. Every /.er knows that IIS=>59L *
* ERROR_UNEXP_NET_ERR
ofc, in at least one of these cases we're talking about using a Free program (DOSBox) to execute a Free program (Quake) which operates on proprietary data (id's PAK file) ...
HCW have a more detailed article discussing power usage of the current generation, which makes the Wii look impressive from a green or financial perspective - and that's confirmed looking at the last gen numbers vs the 360 which shows the Wii does more with less juice than PS2, GC and DC. It's still using more power than any console before the DC used, but it is a step in the right direction.
Meh, it's not that cheap for an untried product. If the Neo Advanced was nearer $300 (including international shipping) then sure, I'd sign right up. But $450, or $300 for the Base version is just too much. If they can drop the prices by a 25-30% for the 2nd gen I'm sure they'd make a load more sales.
Unsurprising, given that the reviews point to the HD 2900 XT being slower than the 8800 GTX (and the 8800 Ultra). It does surprise me, though, that ATI are 6 months behind and still couldn't beat NVIDIA for the performance crown - but it's nice to see a real fight again on price/performance, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the HD 2600 XT stacks up against the 8600 GTS (for those of us with a sanity budget restriction in place).
I still want a comparison of every DX10 card available, running a selection of say 10 of the most popular games from the last 3 years with all the pretty options turned up to the max, on XP and on Vista, in both a top-end God Box and a typical 18-month old good-but-not-outstanding-for-its-age PC.
2 tables of aggregate fps scores at the beginning not the end, one for XP and one for Vista, each with one row per card and 4 columns: normal PC @1280x1024; normal PC @1600x1200; god box @1280x1024; god box @1600x1200.
That would be a useful review. And if AMD and NVIDIA want to give me samples of their wares and the funds for the god box I'll happily do it and write the article for y'all ...
Craptacular indeed (great new word) - the only thing craptacularer was the Celeron D they had out at the same time, which despite the name was not dual-core. Very amusing though, watching the 'tards with enough knowledge to be dangerous and who wanted a cheap PC,
"That one's a 'D', that's got 2 processors, that makes the internet faster"
I don't understand why this is bad. If they make a profit, they stay in the business and make more fun games in the years to come. If they don't they go bust, and we don't get the shiny games. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo aren't in the games business as an extra - it's the only thing they do. There is no Office division making obscene profits to subsidize the games division. They can't wait for the next massive movie to bring in some profit. And that's why gamers love Nintendo, not because they're somehow a "man of the people", but because they exist to make games. Nothing else.
Not sure where you got that from, but I've read that Microsoft are no longer making a loss on the 360 - one year in was the break-even point. I've also read articles in dead-tree format (Edge, probably) to the effect that Nintendo made a profit on the Cube from very early in its lifecycle, about 6 months in, and before that never took a loss on their hardware. Sony also made a profit on the Playstation and PS2 for most of their lifecycles. Sega took losses only on the Saturn and Dreamcast, and MS lost money all through the original Xbox's run. It's not the norm for gaming hardware to be a loss leader, companies only do it when they're desperate (trying to get into a market or maintain position) and think they can cover it from elsewhere and/or reduce costs quickly enough to survive.
Well, its first year sales were worse than the GBA, but it outsold the PSP over the first 6 months of their lives, then had a worse second Christmas season, then the Lite turned things around to the point where sales by the end of '06 were 3:2 vs the PSP. At this point they're trouncing Sony in hand-held and under-TV consoles. Whether they can maintain this or not, it has been worth doing because they have made money. Which is kinda the point of being in business.
Except the shared bus the Xeons sit on is a seriously limiting factor, no-one in HPC is using Xeons because of it.
A better bet would be a Sun Fire X4600 type of machine, 8 dual-core Opterons and 128GB of memory in a 4U server chassis.
This is well known, and having played with one, it's a very nice machine. Unlike its 24TB cousin ...
It's not a contract, it's a software licence, which isn't the same thing in law.
And it is stupid to have such things as EULA's which only a lawyer could possibly understand the full meaning and implications of - but haven't all the millions of computer users the world over "agreed" to them without such an understanding? Or has everyone else received their classes in understanding the licences for Microsoft Windows and Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Sun Java, Macromedia Flash and everything else that is loaded on their PCs as part of their basic education, on a day I was off school?
The question is whether the GPL (any version) is harder to understand than any other licence. If not, then you don't need a lawyer just for the GPL v3.
Yes, if you use a free, community-supported distro and are happy with that, know your way around it and don't mind upgrading to the next release every few months, then it may be cheaper. Assuming you have some sysadmin skills and your own time has no value.
However, if you're in the market for a new laptop, if might be worth asking yourself if a few extra currency units on a kilo-currency unit investment means so much to you that you'd rather buy something you don't want (and possibly actually hate using) from a company you intensely dislike, when doing so deprives a Linux vendor of the revenue it'd earn if you bought its product, thus undermining the very community you claim to be a part of. If you pay for your Linux distro, the community wins. Engineers get paid. Support organisations get built up. Knowledge expands, and we become mainstream in the desktop sphere. Thence, world domination.
And from a more selfish p.o.v., if you want something stable, predictable and supported by ISVs, an OS that you can put on to the machine and never upgrade (much more important with laptops than desktops) for the life of the machine... guess what? That'll cost you. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I order all our Dell workstations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux preinstalled (one of 2 reasons I have for choosing Dell), and it'll be great to be able to do the same with laptops. (This post brought to you by a Dell XPS M1210 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS.)