Indeed, here is the original slashdot story. Of course AOL quickly ended development at nullsoft, it lived on after the protocol had been reverse engineered and others picked up where nullsoft left off.
Oh please, stores tend to stock the more expensive cards because the kind of person that wants a new videocard is going to want something fast. Guess what? fast videocards are expensive! There's no retail market for slow cards, people who don't care about how fast thier card is are happy with the one that came with their OEM system. There's the people building a new system from parts, but they tend to want a fast videocard too and they almost always buy all their parts online anyways.
As for the great game dev/chip maker conspiracy, you may think game devs "needlessly" require high-end cards, but you couldn't be farther from the truth. One of the banes of people who buy high end cards is that games don't take full advantage of their shiny new toy. Beyond that, almost all games can be set to a "fugly mode" that will run on all but the most obsolete system. The thing is the fugly mode is just that, fugly. Gamers want their games to look good, they expect this years games to look better than last's. Better graphics require, you guessed it, a faster videocard! Nobody's forcing people to buy new cards, you want to stick with 320x200 sprite based games then so right ahaead. Just don't expect the rest of the world to feel the same as you do.
Finally, that consoles will/are killing PC gaming line has been thrown around since the SNES. It hasn't/isn't, PC gaming isn't going anywhere. You don't like it, stick with consoles.
please, this dead horse gets wheeled out every time a story that has to do with graphics cards gets posted. It been rebutted a hundred times before, I'm not going to bother posting another one.
Every consumer graphics card for several generations has had a unified memory arch. Everything from the z-buffer to shadder programs gets thrown in the same heap until all the onboard memory is ocupied and things start being swaped to main system memory (a situation to be avoided). And the z-buffer doesn't double memory ussage, it uses the same amount as the primary framebuffer (well, not necessarily but now-a-days it's usualy the case).
ED2K is not centralized, it's topology is similar to the untrapeer/leaf system used by gnutella except the "servers" run separate software and host many more users each (up to 100,000).
As another poster said, the jury's still out on the real Gnutella2 but Shareaza is certainly not superior to emule. Shareaza uses more bandwidth the emule, all it takes is a cursury check of the stats page in emule then the amount transfered to connected hubs in Shareaza to confirm this. Most people using emule use sharereactor or similar sites (and there's a lot of content on SR) so they've already seen all the metadata they just want to download the file.
Another great source of new anime is via BitTorrent, AnimeSuki provides links to most new fansubs as they come out. Since a lot of fansub groups now distro with BitTorrent you can often get new releases within hour(s) of them hitting the net.
Todays "cutting edge" games are designed to play on 3 or 4 year old hardware
Bwhahaha, I'd love to see you run Comanche 4 or BF1942 at 1600x1200x32 with all the settings on max on 3-4 year old hardware. Even with settings turned down it isn't exactly going to be smooth. People have be using this same bullshit argument for years. Just because you can get a game to run playably on 2 year old hardware suddenly OMFG GAMES ARE DESIGNED TO RUN ON ANCIENT HARDWARE YOU ARE WASTING YOUR MONEY IF YOU'RE RUNNING EVEN REMOTELY NEW HARDWARE. BULLSHIT, just because games have adjustable graphics settings so you can play on older hardware doesn't mean getting new hardware gets you nothing. Try running BF1942 on a GF1 then run it on a 9700, the GF1 will look like absolute ass once you've seen what it looks like on the 9700 with all the settings cranked. People have better hardware than you, get over it and stop spouting bullshit about penis extentions and the like.
Re:RAID can mean different things...
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't quite understand where this Inexpensive crap came from. RAID was around long before IDE RAID controllers started showing up and of course SCSI RAID arrays almost always use very expesive disks. It's Redunant Array of Independent Disks, always has always will be.
I'm sorry but thoes rankings are totaly off. They put WD at dead last yet Dell, which goes through many times as many drives as these guys see, rank them as thier #2 suplier (they were #1 for a while but a single slightly bad batch droped them to 2nd, that's how demanding Dell and other major OEMs are). Clearly they're nowhere near as bad as IBM, which is ranked second (WTF?).
Duh, they'll just claim thoes picture are faked too.
Re:what do you mean by leaked?
on
Doom 3 Alpha Leaked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It was most definatly not on purpose. It is the demo that was shown at e3 and it most likely was leaked by someone at ATI. Id seems to have gone the silent route with it, they will probably never publicly discuss this incident.
Congrats! You just totaly missed the point of the original post. You souldn't need a USB-howto. It should be that you plug in a USB device, point at some drivers, and it works. Windows has managed to do this, Linux hasn't but it better if anyone is to take it seriously as a desktop OS.
You want to come up with a real argument or just make stupid quips and quote people? Parallel interfaces are limited by well eshablished physical properies of electricity traveling through a conductor, thoes properties arn't going away any time soon and pretty much every known method of transmitting 1s and 0s has similar properties. Parallel interfaces came along because signal processors of the time were slow enough that these physical properties weren't a problem. Now that we can send signals of high enough frequency that things like clock skew do become a problem it makes sense that we abandon the parallel interface and never look back.
Eh, parallel is on the way out for good. You've obviously never heard of a little thing called clock skew. It's what makes your DS3 example impractical since the bits won't all arive at the same time, with the run lengths you're talking about with a DS3 the potential difference would be too large to effectivly compensate for.
Excpect SerialATA is actualy cheaper to implement than ParallelATA and there's no latency issues like those that killed RDRAM, SATA is unquestionably faster than ATA100. SATA will be taking over in place of parallel, it's only a matter of time.
1. The "PCI problem" is going to get fixed next year when the next gen busses (Hypertansport, PCI-X, etc.) start appearing on motherboards.
2. That 40MB/s is sustained throughput, HDs can burst from cache much faster than that. This is going to become more of an issue as HD manufactures have finally started putting more cache on their drives.
The head of the APCS program at my high school (one of the best APCS departments in the nation) used to say exactly that. Saying CS is programming is like saying physics is learning to throw a ball and hit a target. Theory and practice are not the same, last I checked this was not a new concept.
I dunno, there's a lot of money to be made with this on the people who would go out and spend $800 on two top-of-the-line cards. Probably enough profit potential there to offset those upgrading by buying a second older card.
Incorect, as far as GFX cards go there's always a need for more performance. The original poster is corect in saying it was AGP that killed SLI, it made it impractical.
Personaly I would LOVE to see a return of SLI-like cofigs. Because of the highly parallel nature of rendering you could have one card render the top half of the screen and another do the bottom and get close to a 2x performance boost. This would be especialy usefull in this age of new graphics cards coming out every 9 months: buy a top-of-the-line card then pick up a second one on the cheap. Now instead of spending $400 every upgrade cycle you're spending $400+100 every other cycle.
Each and every one of your bulleted points either largly irrelevent for desktops or based on obsolete arguments against IDE, such as CPU ussage. With UDMA CPU ussage for IDE has been cut down to the point where it doesn't noticably slow down the system. Also IDE drives are NOT "throwaway" quality. IDE drive manufacturers have to maintain very low failure rates because of the razor thin margins they live on (as low as $1 a drive). Having to replace a failed drive eats the profits from several dozen new HD sales, obviously they can't afford that.
As for price, last I checked the price per GB of SCSI drives was 4-5x that of IDE. That's not including the cost of a SCSI controller. No power user who isn't either sunning a server or a flaming elitist (hint) would use SCSI on the desktop.
One last thing, what is this "never having to deal with a software compatibility hassle; never having to deal with an interoperability hassle with another device in my loaded system; and never having less than the best performance that I expect from the equipment"? I've never had any such hassles with IDE.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, here is the original slashdot story. Of course AOL quickly ended development at nullsoft, it lived on after the protocol had been reverse engineered and others picked up where nullsoft left off.
Oh please, stores tend to stock the more expensive cards because the kind of person that wants a new videocard is going to want something fast. Guess what? fast videocards are expensive! There's no retail market for slow cards, people who don't care about how fast thier card is are happy with the one that came with their OEM system. There's the people building a new system from parts, but they tend to want a fast videocard too and they almost always buy all their parts online anyways.
As for the great game dev/chip maker conspiracy, you may think game devs "needlessly" require high-end cards, but you couldn't be farther from the truth. One of the banes of people who buy high end cards is that games don't take full advantage of their shiny new toy. Beyond that, almost all games can be set to a "fugly mode" that will run on all but the most obsolete system. The thing is the fugly mode is just that, fugly. Gamers want their games to look good, they expect this years games to look better than last's. Better graphics require, you guessed it, a faster videocard! Nobody's forcing people to buy new cards, you want to stick with 320x200 sprite based games then so right ahaead. Just don't expect the rest of the world to feel the same as you do.
Finally, that consoles will/are killing PC gaming line has been thrown around since the SNES. It hasn't/isn't, PC gaming isn't going anywhere. You don't like it, stick with consoles.
please, this dead horse gets wheeled out every time a story that has to do with graphics cards gets posted. It been rebutted a hundred times before, I'm not going to bother posting another one.
Every consumer graphics card for several generations has had a unified memory arch. Everything from the z-buffer to shadder programs gets thrown in the same heap until all the onboard memory is ocupied and things start being swaped to main system memory (a situation to be avoided). And the z-buffer doesn't double memory ussage, it uses the same amount as the primary framebuffer (well, not necessarily but now-a-days it's usualy the case).
Raven Shield, America's Army, NOLF2, C&C Generals, Icewind Dale 2, SOF2, shall I continue?
Please stop pretending Linux is a viable gaming platform. It isn't, end of story.
ED2K is not centralized, it's topology is similar to the untrapeer/leaf system used by gnutella except the "servers" run separate software and host many more users each (up to 100,000).
As another poster said, the jury's still out on the real Gnutella2 but Shareaza is certainly not superior to emule. Shareaza uses more bandwidth the emule, all it takes is a cursury check of the stats page in emule then the amount transfered to connected hubs in Shareaza to confirm this. Most people using emule use sharereactor or similar sites (and there's a lot of content on SR) so they've already seen all the metadata they just want to download the file.
Apparently the next release (1.4) will include just this in the form of the Gentoo Reference Platform.
Another great source of new anime is via BitTorrent, AnimeSuki provides links to most new fansubs as they come out. Since a lot of fansub groups now distro with BitTorrent you can often get new releases within hour(s) of them hitting the net.
Todays "cutting edge" games are designed to play on 3 or 4 year old hardware
Bwhahaha, I'd love to see you run Comanche 4 or BF1942 at 1600x1200x32 with all the settings on max on 3-4 year old hardware. Even with settings turned down it isn't exactly going to be smooth. People have be using this same bullshit argument for years. Just because you can get a game to run playably on 2 year old hardware suddenly OMFG GAMES ARE DESIGNED TO RUN ON ANCIENT HARDWARE YOU ARE WASTING YOUR MONEY IF YOU'RE RUNNING EVEN REMOTELY NEW HARDWARE. BULLSHIT, just because games have adjustable graphics settings so you can play on older hardware doesn't mean getting new hardware gets you nothing. Try running BF1942 on a GF1 then run it on a 9700, the GF1 will look like absolute ass once you've seen what it looks like on the 9700 with all the settings cranked. People have better hardware than you, get over it and stop spouting bullshit about penis extentions and the like.
I don't quite understand where this Inexpensive crap came from. RAID was around long before IDE RAID controllers started showing up and of course SCSI RAID arrays almost always use very expesive disks. It's Redunant Array of Independent Disks, always has always will be.
Win2k directx support sucks
uhh no, win2k supports directx perfectly fine.
I'm sorry but thoes rankings are totaly off. They put WD at dead last yet Dell, which goes through many times as many drives as these guys see, rank them as thier #2 suplier (they were #1 for a while but a single slightly bad batch droped them to 2nd, that's how demanding Dell and other major OEMs are). Clearly they're nowhere near as bad as IBM, which is ranked second (WTF?).
Duh, they'll just claim thoes picture are faked too.
It was most definatly not on purpose. It is the demo that was shown at e3 and it most likely was leaked by someone at ATI. Id seems to have gone the silent route with it, they will probably never publicly discuss this incident.
Congrats! You just totaly missed the point of the original post. You souldn't need a USB-howto. It should be that you plug in a USB device, point at some drivers, and it works. Windows has managed to do this, Linux hasn't but it better if anyone is to take it seriously as a desktop OS.
You want to come up with a real argument or just make stupid quips and quote people? Parallel interfaces are limited by well eshablished physical properies of electricity traveling through a conductor, thoes properties arn't going away any time soon and pretty much every known method of transmitting 1s and 0s has similar properties. Parallel interfaces came along because signal processors of the time were slow enough that these physical properties weren't a problem. Now that we can send signals of high enough frequency that things like clock skew do become a problem it makes sense that we abandon the parallel interface and never look back.
Eh, parallel is on the way out for good. You've obviously never heard of a little thing called clock skew. It's what makes your DS3 example impractical since the bits won't all arive at the same time, with the run lengths you're talking about with a DS3 the potential difference would be too large to effectivly compensate for.
4 of them in RAID 0?
This won't be an issue since SATA is strictly point-to-point, every drive gets it's own 150MB/s link.
Excpect SerialATA is actualy cheaper to implement than ParallelATA and there's no latency issues like those that killed RDRAM, SATA is unquestionably faster than ATA100. SATA will be taking over in place of parallel, it's only a matter of time.
1. The "PCI problem" is going to get fixed next year when the next gen busses (Hypertansport, PCI-X, etc.) start appearing on motherboards.
2. That 40MB/s is sustained throughput, HDs can burst from cache much faster than that. This is going to become more of an issue as HD manufactures have finally started putting more cache on their drives.
The head of the APCS program at my high school (one of the best APCS departments in the nation) used to say exactly that. Saying CS is programming is like saying physics is learning to throw a ball and hit a target. Theory and practice are not the same, last I checked this was not a new concept.
I dunno, there's a lot of money to be made with this on the people who would go out and spend $800 on two top-of-the-line cards. Probably enough profit potential there to offset those upgrading by buying a second older card.
Incorect, as far as GFX cards go there's always a need for more performance. The original poster is corect in saying it was AGP that killed SLI, it made it impractical.
Personaly I would LOVE to see a return of SLI-like cofigs. Because of the highly parallel nature of rendering you could have one card render the top half of the screen and another do the bottom and get close to a 2x performance boost. This would be especialy usefull in this age of new graphics cards coming out every 9 months: buy a top-of-the-line card then pick up a second one on the cheap. Now instead of spending $400 every upgrade cycle you're spending $400+100 every other cycle.
Each and every one of your bulleted points either largly irrelevent for desktops or based on obsolete arguments against IDE, such as CPU ussage. With UDMA CPU ussage for IDE has been cut down to the point where it doesn't noticably slow down the system. Also IDE drives are NOT "throwaway" quality. IDE drive manufacturers have to maintain very low failure rates because of the razor thin margins they live on (as low as $1 a drive). Having to replace a failed drive eats the profits from several dozen new HD sales, obviously they can't afford that.
As for price, last I checked the price per GB of SCSI drives was 4-5x that of IDE. That's not including the cost of a SCSI controller. No power user who isn't either sunning a server or a flaming elitist (hint) would use SCSI on the desktop.
One last thing, what is this "never having to deal with a software compatibility hassle; never having to deal with an interoperability hassle with another device in my loaded system; and never having less than the best performance that I expect from the equipment"? I've never had any such hassles with IDE.