My point was about added value for a device that cost almost the price of a decent used laptop.
At the price it cost to produce a chip that is ALREADY being produced, cutting down part of it and making a new waffer costs a lot too I guess, so even if the chip costs 25 cents more to produce per unit, how % is that on a 500$ device? I'd pay 501$ for that extra value.
While YOU might not use floating point, while YOU may not see the use of it, ask yourself why are 3d embedded chipsets being manufactured right now? if there would be 0 need for that, people wouldn't put up R&D efforts on them.
Gameboy advance? hey, why paying 250$ for a device plus some games if for the double of that price I can get the same plus UTILITIES and mp3 player and video playback and sync with my devices and surf on the net?
There's a lot of places to cut to save money, processor features is not one of them. Go ask intel with their celeron 300.
Besides, who has a full color PDA and never tried any games on it? okay... and who wouldn't like 3d games or similar on it?... thought so:)
...after investigations have revealed that Mohammad, alias "Burger," who led the Parliament attack, was in constant touch with his counterparts in Pakistan
Why did they remove the floating point unit portion of most Handheld processors? I have a E115, without FP it's pretty useless for games like quake... I ran quake 1 on it, 0.5FPS max, while it know a 3d chipset would have done the job, I still don't get it... you're trying to cut everything down for the least power usage, okay, fine with me, how about switching off the portions of the chip that is not used and turn it on when called? it's already done with other functions in other microprocessors and it would keep the lifespan of the PDA more than 1 year. Especially at the price they cost, it's not much asking.
>>1. Microsoft declined to tell U.S. officials Friday how many consumers downloaded and installed its fix during the first 24 hours it was available.
>The reasons for point 1 are quite clear though. Acting on point 1 would indicate what a fiction the sales figures for XP really are.
Funny, my first reaction was "they won't tell how many ACTUALLY downloaded the patch versus the number of sales" That way they wouldn't have to tell the fbi that after 24 hours only "5%" (fictionnal number) were patched, this goes without saying that it would make their fast "security"-patching model look terribly bad in practice (even if good on paper).
Milena, Widow of Connar has sent us:
Death sued for sounding too close to Microsoft's flagship product's name.
Steeve Ballmer (CEO): A lot of people on the internet do jokes about blue screen of DEATH, when people die, we hear about Widows, people KILL their systems after installing non-certified drivers, DEADLY VIRUS are crippling our systems, all this will change. You know how our stupid our userbase is, If people are stupid enough to buy an OS for 300$ instead of going for an OEM version, these same people could be associating death with our flagship product, Windows, we fought really hard to get the trademarks for that name, heck, I even had to look like a complete monkey to get public awareness on our side, Death will either have to cease to exist or change some of it's naming convention. Microsoft will fight death.... to the death if we have to god damn it!.
I've bought a pile of EDO 32 megs when it was worth near nothing, for maxing out my older PCs, now I sell them for 3 or 4 times as much on ebay:) I've bought a load of 512MB ECC DDR when it was worth next to nothing a few months ago.., it's already doubled back:) hell, f** the.COMs:)
Seriously, it's always the same curves every year for the memory, end of the summer, prices at their lowest, a month before xmas, "something happens" and the prices jumps back (xmas sales being the non-official reason).
I'd rather put 2x or 3x the price of that and get a laptop that will do 10 times more stuff.
The good news is, for people that actually want a pda, and think that the Palm II is a bit obsolete, can not get a E115 for way cheaper than it was just 2 years ago. You get the extra features without the heavy price tag, besides for 1/3 the price of that E200 unit you won't be paranoid about breaking it or losing it...
Still, the high-end segment is really cool, must be nice running a gameboy emulator on that little beast.
Too late... they've stroke already...
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 2
2 thing, a "logical" rant and a suggestion on the technological side:
[RANT]
After that they'll accuse people of being dishonnest downloading MP3s and burning CD-Rs to play the music.
What, now I will have to buy the album, pay tax on the album, pay RIAA tax, buy a cd-r, pay tax on the cd-r, pay RIAA extra tax on the media, then transferring the non-functionning CD to computer, lose quality, write the cd to cd-r so my sony player can work with it...and the steps goes on for every new cd bought.
I'm sorry but my vinil player still play vinil CDs, I don't see why I should be penalized as a consumer for all this crap. They should invest their money in a new buisness scheme that would make people buy more cds (I.E. offer them the compilation THEY want for the amazingly overpriced media for a start),
[/RANT]
While at it, if you're planning on changing the hardware altogether to make it compatible with your new format how about MAKING A NEW FORMAT that would make people jump on your new technology, you know, INNOVATION, that way you could introduce whatever crap you want on top of it for protecting your stuff, while being completely compatible with ALL players, that would be a win win situation for both you and the consumers. Something like DVD audio or whatever, more quality, better D/A components, more storage, better compilations, more for your money and more for the consumer.
Man.. if every buisness would act like you do, I'd probably wouldn't be able to read my 360K floppies on my good ol XT... (whisper, badsectors) oh wait...
They are probably using either C-Cube or Zoran (or any similar MPEG2/MJPEG chips). While quality can vary from a chip to another, I'd look more at the maximum datarate that each unit is recording at. The bigger the better in terms of quality.
I hate the fact that they sell the systems with "30 hours of playback" 30 hours, you can stick 30 hours of video on a cdrom with low bitrates, it means NOTHING. What you want to check for if they don't give the true numbers, is the size of the hard drive and the minimal recording time (i.e. if they say you can record minimal of 20 hours on a 40GB drive, you do the maths for the datarate: (sorry if I don't multiply by 1024 or if I miss anything, this is intended as "raw".
So, 40GB for 20 hours.
40,000MB/(20 hours x 60 minutes x 60 secons) = 0.55MB/sec.
Mjpeg looks "okay" on a standard el-cheapo TV at about 1MB/sec. (its blocky on a vga monitor but depending on the quality of your tv, it's smooths a bit on the output so you notice it a bit less). Personnaly when I deal with video that I want to store with a good MJPEG codec, I don't go under 3-4MB/sec. For replaying with the video (i.e. decompress, add some effect, recompress) I don't go under 5MB/sec (if not uncompressed).
That's for MJPEG with 4:2:2 colorspace, if they use a DV codec, it's 4:1:1 colorspace so there's more pixel quality for the same given bandwith compared to 4:2:2 MJPEG.
Anyways I'm going off here, what you want to do is apply the above formula when you can't get the datarate and pick the highest number... you won't care if it means less storage, because you can ramp up the compression afterwars anyways. And besides, drives are going down in price everyday, and since your concern is about quality and not storage, this is one of the option you might want to look for.
I'm sure electronic-wise, aside from some extra stuff like component out or nice extras like that, the Codec level and overall theorical compressed quality is about the same from a machine to another, so probably the biggest difference (aside from the added features like component out if some don't have it) will be that number which will be hardcoded in the firmware. Some might want to go with lower values to be sure that the drive will follow (but then again most drives do over 10MB/sec sustained easily nowadays) or for any other reasons like marketting for more storage than the competition.
>How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night (without opening a window)"
Well of course, here gentlement we have BUZZWORD.C to get your story posted for sure:)
[Snip]
char without opening a window;
[Snip] ;SSFS function to get story posted.
SubmitStoryForSure(without opening a window);
end.
One sentense: Congratulations to all the people that beleived in teamwork, online community and and people that pursued this issue until the end without letting their hopes up; this is a nice step.
Why in the world would I put my hard-earned cash on a barely competing technology that has a hard time finding a home, and didn't live up to ANY of the hypes they've blattantly generated, why would I want to support it in the first place?
I don't want to be a troll (well I don't care, karma tops at 50 anyways:) ) it's just that personnaly, I'd support technology that are doing more work in the labs than in the PR room. But that's my opinion and that's why I am saying "ask", can someone enlighten me? (with something else than a flamethrower please:) )
Put your CPU to the same pricing that AMD is doing, do an equivalent $/mflop, you'll notice how much rambus memory isn't the biggest chunk of the pie unless you go to 1GB and above.
Oh, that would chunk in your profits... right:), better Rambust than you... Oh well... if at LEAST one of you two suffer, I'll live with that:)
>I'd say that piracy was a large part of the demise of the Amiga.
STFU, there were PLENTY of dedicated and TALENTED developpers on amiga while PC had a far less % compared to it's userbase.
AMINET is the living proof of that, for every PC "warez" you would see on BBSes, you'd have one excellent Shareware comming out on aminet.
Commodore 64 had as much piracy, if not more... and it's still the computer brand that can claim something microsoft-esque in terms of "homes with computer at that time, % had that X model" just like microsoft has X% of the desktop market. There was the apple computer, but it was nowhere near as popular as the commodore 64.
What killed the amiga is the poor management, and the new CEO (a stupid.com-like cretin) that didn't invest any money, killed/slowed developpement of the next generation amiga, and spent money on useless crap like a.COM CEO. You should get Dave Haynies's tape "dead bed vigil", he was one of the big brain behin the amiga's design and it would give you some insight on what happened.
Oh I just did a quick search on google.com for the amiga story and died
here's an interresting piece:
In 1994, Commodore died. (Big news.) When they fell, with them went all the advanced Amiga development still in progress - the RISC architecture stuff, PCI systems, Hombre, the various DSP and graphics card projects, new operating systems, and most importantly, AAA.
AAA was originally conceived in 1987, as a next-generation Amiga architecture when it became clear the original Amiga chipset would not be state of the art forever. Systems like IBM's PS/2 and the Apple Macintosh II were beating the Amiga in terms of color displays - 256 colors onscreen out of 262,144 in 320x200 on the PS/2 and 256 colors out of sixteen million in 640x480 on the Mac II, were knocking the pants off 32 colors out of 4096 in 320x400 on the Amiga - and the "trick" HAM mode was at once better and worse than 256 color modes. AAA began as little more than a hypothetical "Wouldn't it be cool if." As far back as 1987, RJ Mical and others were publicly mentioning a future Amiga chipset capable of 1024x1024 in 256 colors.
But reality was a different story. The Amiga chipset was modified only twice between 1985 and 1990 - the "VLSI upgrade" Denise in 1986 that added halfbrite, and the Enhanced Chip Set of the A3000 in 1990 that added Productivity (31KHz) screenmodes, Super High Res (1280x200, 1280x400), border blanking and sprite-in-border, tweakable frequencies, and upped the Chip RAM to 2MB. Colors were still stuck at 4096. High resolutions were still limited to 16 colors. Sound could be kicked to a higher sampling rate ONLY if the screenmode was set to Productivity - one of the more bizarre side-effects of the Amiga's tightly coupled architecture. But the core of the Amiga's graphical heart had remained largely unchanged since the original Lorraine breadboard closet-sized hardwire prototypes in 1984.
In 1990 Commodore finally bit the bullet and said "Let's revamp the Amiga chipset." AAA, the Advanced Amiga Architecture, went from being an abstract "What if we could make the Amiga do this?" to a work in progress. It quickly became clear AAA would not come quickly - it would be at least 1992 before a working Amiga based on AAA could hit store shelves - but the marketplace needed something in the meantime. So someone had the idea to build an intermediate chipset, called AA, to at least bring the Amiga up to 1990 standards while they worked on the much more advanced AAA. AA would feature increased color depth in all screen resolutions, plus several high-scan-rate screen modes for use on multiscan monitors - again, no change to the Paula sound chip, no change to the floppy controller, the entire system was still based on the same old pixel clock, etc. But hopefully no one would complain after using eight-bitplane HAM modes (for 262,144 colors simultaneously and beyond) - giving Ed Hepler and the rest of the AAA miracle-workers time to roll out AAA. Dave Haynie, Greg Berlin and others began building a new modular Amiga from the A3000 architecture, putting the first AA chips in it and adding things like the superfast 68040 processor and an AT&T 3210 digital signal processor.
Then tragedy struck - or more precisely, Mehdi Ali.
Ali fired Dr. Henri Rubin, head of engineering, and replaced him with Bill Sydnes, formerly with IBM, the "genius" responsible for such landmark successes as the PCjr. Needless to say, the idea of something as modern as AA didn't set well with him - particularly since it was a product of the previous administration - and as we all know, one of the jobs of new management is to erase all evidence of the previous administration. So AA was cancelled, AAA put even farther back on the burner, and all of a sudden everyone's busy making Sydnes' "toy" Amigas.
Needless to say, the A600 (a 68000, ECS machine in a dinky C64-like case and limited expansion but with a $700 price tag that was $100 more than the A500) went over like a lead balloon, especially since they discontinued the top-selling A500 in hopes of "encouraging" people to buy the A600 instead. The A1000+, which by all accounts would have been an underpowered and overpriced A3000 without the expansion, was cancelled the day they finished the prototype - Commodore's distributors and salespeople saw it and said "There's no way in hell we can sell that piece of shit." The CDTV was a technical success in some respects (brand new for the blossoming CD-ROM entertainment market) but failed commercially because no one really knew what it was supposed to be - the "stealth computer" thing worked all too well. Not to mention it was the last Amiga to still use Kickstart 1.3...
Finally Sydnes was all out of stupid ideas, and he finally shrugged and said, "OK, let's see you guys do better."
The A3000+ was no longer feasible. They were on a tight schedule and there were bugs in the DSP system that needed fixing, amongst other problems. They had the AA (now called AGA) chipset working more or less, they had the 68030 motherboard of the 1000+, they had the 3640 68040 accelerator for the A3000, they had a way to shoehorn the AGA chips onto the 1000+'s ECS motherboard, and they were able to slap together an AGA system on short notice in 1992.
Amiga lovers went crazy over the awesome A4000 - a 68040 processor, unlimited RAM, Kickstart 3.0, the high-density floppy drive, and the long-awaited 256 color chipset. Never mind the 68040 was clocked a few MHz different than the motherboard - 25MHz instead of 28MHz - and the memory architecture was designed for a 68030, less than optimal for the 68040. Kickstart 3.0 was a work in progress - all the retargetable stuff they hoped to add wasn't done in time, the new Datatypes feature was a memory hog, it was more like 2.2 than 3.0. The high-density floppy drive was painfully slow - the disk controller in the chipset couldn't handle disk access at double speed so they had to just cut the motor speed in half instead. And anyone who's used a 256 color Workbench on the AGA chipset, even with a fast processor, will tell you exactly how wonderful sluggish screen redraws can be. The A4000 was good, but it could have been much better - and this fact was not lost on Commodore's engineers.
AAA was again on the table. While the A4000 was on its own rollercoaster (thanks to Sydnes' inability to order enough parts to build them) Ed Hepler and others were back at work on the stunning new chipset. In addition to the expected 24-bit modes and higher resolutions, they built in speed increases and other cool things. They added HAM10 modes - for 24-bit color that used only as much memory as two 32-color screens. They added support for chip RAM up to 8MB. They added a floppy controller that could drive high density floppies - even the EHD kind, at 3.5MB - at full speed. Sound went up to full 16 bit, eight voice, 44KHz - basically CD-quality. Graphics resolutions hit 1024x768 and beyond. The copper could feed the blitter - thus doing animations while the main processor sat idle. Best of all, the chipset could be "doubled" - a motherboard could be built with TWO apiece of several chips for a 64-bit graphics architecture.
By 1994, two AAA motherboards existed, the "Nyx" systems. The initial silicon run of AAA was something like 94% operational - there were some serious flaws in one of the chips that would take a few months to iron out in time for the final silicon run. One of the motherboards didn't work, and the other one worked well enough to give the graphics a test run but it couldn't boot Workbench.
Then April 29 rolled around. Commodore's international parent company finally collapsed under Mehdi Ali's weight. The layoffs at the West Chester plant were ridiculous - something like 40 people remained. What was left at West Chester had no funds with which to actually build anything - AAA moved at a snail's pace, almost transistor by transistor.
Screw that piracy argument, piracy is what made the C64 and Amiga popular in the first place, I do not endorse piracy, but I seriously hate it when someone use the Amiga name to discriminate something that is taken out of context to suit his argument.
"Major Games costs 30-50$ each because there's not a lot of volume in sales, if there would be more sales, the price would go down dramatically"
10 years later.. Major games, 30-50$... While the complexity and everything surrounding a game got more complex, the price tag is still the same.
Same goes with a lot of high-end software.
On another note,
There are 3 takes , 2 extreme, 1 middle.
Middle: extended kind of piracy (like trialware) or sometime students have to learn somehow, and school arent' always the best avenues, students can't afford Max, autocad, and blablabla, and when they find a job, the employer needs to buy a seat of that software that the student knows, so basically, in the end, the money gets pumped in the system. That theory is good IF the employer is legit and honnest. In that case, Govs needs to target companies (which are the one MAKING money out of the software) but not in a super-intrusive-will-take-3-days-to-go-thru-all-th e-stuff kinda way. unfortunately there's not a "best way" for this that would suit both the employers and the prosecutors.
The other problem is sometimes cashflow (especially for startups) doesn't allow to blast the required "200,000$" in a single payment (run a software budget analisis for 10-15 employees, a server based on M$ and the basic tools required to do the job depending on what kind of company it is, and it runs up quite fast) Some people are honnest and try to catch up with the licenses (I knew 2 startups that weren't legal from the beginning and catched up over a year or 2 and became totally legit afterwards, ok of course I know also a lot of small companies that are producing off pirated software and that disgust me,
but there's ONE point that I saw that made me think: the argument for one was to ban all the M$ products and buy 1 license of every software they were using, not 5 like required for every seat, the argument was "if we buy everything needed, we go bankrupt, I'd rather not be fully legal and have a job than being legal and broke (and no, these weren't companies that had 50 employees and making gazillion cash) , besides (they added), you cut on the salary of the employees to give some extra $ to uncle Gates's pockets, which doesn't create anymore quality jobs than I do."
While I have mixed feeling about that, the conclusion we can get from this is: if there could be a leasing option or renting option and the system would be more flexible, maybe there would be less piracy and people would tend to be more legit.
The 2 other points of view are "*everything* should be free" which shows how immature and short-sighted some people can be, and "everyone stealing software should get shot, there's 0.00 reason for copying a software, even if it's to try, to get a snapshot, to do backup copies, whatever, there's NO reasons"... heh.. no need to comment on that.
Stealing Monsters INC for example is totally lame, some movies aren't worth the C$8-10 entry fee, heck, they're not even worth the gas it would take me to drive to the theatre that is 10 miles from my home... But that movie ROCKED.
Anyone who downloads it to watch it for the first time on his PC or TV-out, unless he has a dolby surround system and a 60 inch plasma, is totally nuts and ruins his own viewing experience.
Heck, even if he has that, encoding screeners (VHS tapes) is FaR from the result you'll see at the theatre.
They shouldn't be arrested for piracy... but for major mental illness... We shouldn't let people with that kind of judgment wander off the streets:)
Ultrium tapes can backup 100GB Native but the price tag is way out of line for small buisness or home use (5000$+ a 100GB drive, ouch).. same goes with any dataloading systems... The only cheap tape backup I've found that was giving the best storage/price (aside from buying those used DSS 4/8 gig drives) is those 33GB Native VXA drives.
Just had a little argument with them this weekend ending up me asking to close the account.
Basically what happened is I "referred" my friend here at my job so he added his buisness credit card and created an account. He did the steps (following the link I cut and pasted from the browser to make a "click to this link so I can get my 5$ referee" used his account to buy 105$US goods, (so basically upgraded the account to international verified, plus email checked, he even received his 5$ bonus after completing the steps). Problem? I didn't get my 5$ as refering person.
5$ is nothing, but it's a damn good test to see how customer service works. I e-mailed them, telling the situation, that he did complete all the steps, but I don't even see him in my referee database, and that it's like maybe the cookies or the fact that he used the same computer that I was logued on before manage to screw up something in the automated process. I gave the information of the other account, and told them that they could email him to confirm (or even check the logs, they would see it came from the same IP address (intranet here and 1 internet feed).
Now, any good customer service wouldn't have argued, seeing that they made already more than the lousy 5$ of profit with my buying habbits, it would have been a no-brainer to just doublecheck the logs and fix that. They didn't. They say I probably missed a step (I didn't, triple-checked). I assumed it was their system, I never for a second thought that maybe it was on purpose, etc...
I found their responde not really good, I was a bit dissapointed at that kind of attitude toward a stupid 5$ so I went on the web and looked if anyone else had problems or if it was current practice, you know, just to check if everything is okay and since you have no control on what they could actually do, might as well doublecheck before receiving money. I found a site "paypalwarning.com" that really rang a bell... I responded to paypal mentionning that site and the fact that I was starting to feel uneasy doing buisness with them, seeing how bad they hang on a 5$ that they owe me for refering someone, and the fact that it seems to be current practice to do bad stuff to their customers... they didn't move. So I asked to close my account and my CC expires in january so I am not too much worried.
While a lot of people are trying to abuse the system, or any system in place, there are honnest people that aren't asking for the moon and understands that buisness are there to make a profit. Acting unethical like that with people that are like me drives off buisness and worse, usually you keep the bad apples and/or newbies altogether which can become a nightmare to manage and hard to turn to a profit because of the support costs.
It was only 5$, but the principle is if you can screw me or your system screws up on it, what will happen when I'll process 100s of $? Making people feel safe about their transactions is the KEY to E-commerce, price is only one small factor. Service and security are bigger concerns IMHO.
The concept is superb, I thought paypal would become the next "Ebay" of the net, seems like they are another.com with poor managing skills or seriously not committed to their customers.
At least he pointed where SSE2 was optimized, he did compare oranges with oranges as far as the x86 platform goes.
Tom missed the obvious comparing Intel-heavily-optimized-SSE2-scene (skull with radiosity) with Athlon like if it was a simple 3d benchmark (he never mentionned the SSE2 optimisation in the radiosity engine that newtek boosted in 7.0b). At least Ace points it out and points out the difference in the render pipeline, which I find VERY professionnal and reliable, tom sucked big time at it, he even got nice emails telling him how to best benchmark on lightwave to make his number constant and not falling into the "specifically optimized for x or y operation" and like he does best: he didn't listen and continued with his flawed benchmarking on the LW platform.
I've based a renderfarm on this little baby (Lightwave and 3DSmax), the only bad thing I can say about it is that with the new MP-X chipset around the block, it's kinda expensive (motherboard) compared to the price that competing products will probably have. Also the fact that you need to use ECC DDR SDRAM doesn't help the price tag when you multiply that by many nodes and trying to save every penny possible (for a single workstation it doesn't matter much though).
For the power it gives, it's still "relatively" cheap (especially if you're looking for a more powerful intel solution) and *STABLE* (stable being one of the most required feature for a renderfarm, with power of course). The TigerMP is a mature product, we don't know how the MP-X will perform or how stable the implementation will be (we can assume it's going to be good tho). But to do the job TODAY, I didn't see anything touching the XP1700/1800 + TigerMP combo for the price/performance/stability.
Still, the real power is going to be with the Hammer... that's a beast I can't wait for.
I thought that was the oldest server, when did they appear?
I think I started chatting back in 92 AFAICR... I do remember typing irc.eff.org:) but 9 years of beer really wears a brain out...
Anyways, it's really a shame that these servers are going offline one by one, I guess it's more like "we don't have anyone that wishes to administer our irc server but we don't want to look like [insert any unjustified insults here] so we'll go out with a comment that will put more preasure agains those lame script kiddies, diverting the real issues", I'm sure most DDoS exploits can be patched easily, so it's probably the lack of people that wishes to administer the server. We can't blame them for that, I mean, most of us used the service, but how many would actually give away a box and bandwidth for it?
Of course, having the power to/kill is worth it... but I guess it grows old:)
Slashdot Mirror
My point was about added value for a device that cost almost the price of a decent used laptop.
:)
At the price it cost to produce a chip that is ALREADY being produced, cutting down part of it and making a new waffer costs a lot too I guess, so even if the chip costs 25 cents more to produce per unit, how % is that on a 500$ device? I'd pay 501$ for that extra value.
While YOU might not use floating point, while YOU may not see the use of it, ask yourself why are 3d embedded chipsets being manufactured right now? if there would be 0 need for that, people wouldn't put up R&D efforts on them.
Gameboy advance? hey, why paying 250$ for a device plus some games if for the double of that price I can get the same plus UTILITIES and mp3 player and video playback and sync with my devices and surf on the net?
There's a lot of places to cut to save money, processor features is not one of them. Go ask intel with their celeron 300.
Besides, who has a full color PDA and never tried any games on it? okay... and who wouldn't like 3d games or similar on it?... thought so
Screw Burger, he had his time.
Anyone care to give us the pre-punch (i.e. history) of this? :)
Why did they remove the floating point unit portion of most Handheld processors? I have a E115, without FP it's pretty useless for games like quake... I ran quake 1 on it, 0.5FPS max, while it know a 3d chipset would have done the job, I still don't get it... you're trying to cut everything down for the least power usage, okay, fine with me, how about switching off the portions of the chip that is not used and turn it on when called? it's already done with other functions in other microprocessors and it would keep the lifespan of the PDA more than 1 year. Especially at the price they cost, it's not much asking.
This is frustrating.
At least Compaq understood this.
>>1. Microsoft declined to tell U.S. officials Friday how many consumers downloaded and installed its fix during the first 24 hours it was available.
>The reasons for point 1 are quite clear though. Acting on point 1 would indicate what a fiction the sales figures for XP really are.
Funny, my first reaction was "they won't tell how many ACTUALLY downloaded the patch versus the number of sales" That way they wouldn't have to tell the fbi that after 24 hours only "5%" (fictionnal number) were patched, this goes without saying that it would make their fast "security"-patching model look terribly bad in practice (even if good on paper).
Milena, Widow of Connar has sent us:
Death sued for sounding too close to Microsoft's flagship product's name.
Steeve Ballmer (CEO): A lot of people on the internet do jokes about blue screen of DEATH, when people die, we hear about Widows, people KILL their systems after installing non-certified drivers, DEADLY VIRUS are crippling our systems, all this will change. You know how our stupid our userbase is, If people are stupid enough to buy an OS for 300$ instead of going for an OEM version, these same people could be associating death with our flagship product, Windows, we fought really hard to get the trademarks for that name, heck, I even had to look like a complete monkey to get public awareness on our side, Death will either have to cease to exist or change some of it's naming convention. Microsoft will fight death.... to the death if we have to god damn it!.
I've bought a pile of EDO 32 megs when it was worth near nothing, for maxing out my older PCs, now I sell them for 3 or 4 times as much on ebay :) I've bought a load of 512MB ECC DDR when it was worth next to nothing a few months ago.., it's already doubled back :) hell, f** the .COMs :)
Seriously, it's always the same curves every year for the memory, end of the summer, prices at their lowest, a month before xmas, "something happens" and the prices jumps back (xmas sales being the non-official reason).
I'd rather put 2x or 3x the price of that and get a laptop that will do 10 times more stuff.
The good news is, for people that actually want a pda, and think that the Palm II is a bit obsolete, can not get a E115 for way cheaper than it was just 2 years ago. You get the extra features without the heavy price tag, besides for 1/3 the price of that E200 unit you won't be paranoid about breaking it or losing it...
Still, the high-end segment is really cool, must be nice running a gameboy emulator on that little beast.
Where they've hit is already public knowledge...
2 thing, a "logical" rant and a suggestion on the technological side:
[RANT]
After that they'll accuse people of being dishonnest downloading MP3s and burning CD-Rs to play the music.
What, now I will have to buy the album, pay tax on the album, pay RIAA tax, buy a cd-r, pay tax on the cd-r, pay RIAA extra tax on the media, then transferring the non-functionning CD to computer, lose quality, write the cd to cd-r so my sony player can work with it...and the steps goes on for every new cd bought.
I'm sorry but my vinil player still play vinil CDs, I don't see why I should be penalized as a consumer for all this crap. They should invest their money in a new buisness scheme that would make people buy more cds (I.E. offer them the compilation THEY want for the amazingly overpriced media for a start),
[/RANT]
While at it, if you're planning on changing the hardware altogether to make it compatible with your new format how about MAKING A NEW FORMAT that would make people jump on your new technology, you know, INNOVATION, that way you could introduce whatever crap you want on top of it for protecting your stuff, while being completely compatible with ALL players, that would be a win win situation for both you and the consumers. Something like DVD audio or whatever, more quality, better D/A components, more storage, better compilations, more for your money and more for the consumer.
Man.. if every buisness would act like you do, I'd probably wouldn't be able to read my 360K floppies on my good ol XT... (whisper, badsectors) oh wait...
They are probably using either C-Cube or Zoran (or any similar MPEG2/MJPEG chips). While quality can vary from a chip to another, I'd look more at the maximum datarate that each unit is recording at. The bigger the better in terms of quality.
I hate the fact that they sell the systems with "30 hours of playback" 30 hours, you can stick 30 hours of video on a cdrom with low bitrates, it means NOTHING. What you want to check for if they don't give the true numbers, is the size of the hard drive and the minimal recording time (i.e. if they say you can record minimal of 20 hours on a 40GB drive, you do the maths for the datarate: (sorry if I don't multiply by 1024 or if I miss anything, this is intended as "raw".
So, 40GB for 20 hours.
40,000MB/(20 hours x 60 minutes x 60 secons) = 0.55MB/sec.
Mjpeg looks "okay" on a standard el-cheapo TV at about 1MB/sec. (its blocky on a vga monitor but depending on the quality of your tv, it's smooths a bit on the output so you notice it a bit less). Personnaly when I deal with video that I want to store with a good MJPEG codec, I don't go under 3-4MB/sec. For replaying with the video (i.e. decompress, add some effect, recompress) I don't go under 5MB/sec (if not uncompressed).
That's for MJPEG with 4:2:2 colorspace, if they use a DV codec, it's 4:1:1 colorspace so there's more pixel quality for the same given bandwith compared to 4:2:2 MJPEG.
Anyways I'm going off here, what you want to do is apply the above formula when you can't get the datarate and pick the highest number... you won't care if it means less storage, because you can ramp up the compression afterwars anyways. And besides, drives are going down in price everyday, and since your concern is about quality and not storage, this is one of the option you might want to look for.
I'm sure electronic-wise, aside from some extra stuff like component out or nice extras like that, the Codec level and overall theorical compressed quality is about the same from a machine to another, so probably the biggest difference (aside from the added features like component out if some don't have it) will be that number which will be hardcoded in the firmware. Some might want to go with lower values to be sure that the drive will follow (but then again most drives do over 10MB/sec sustained easily nowadays) or for any other reasons like marketting for more storage than the competition.
You're right, you're WAY of the mark.
did you know you sounded arrogant?
did you know that This was the last link visited by your dad Last time he used your computer?
> 3. I have no problem with Jon Katz, prior to this review.
No shit sherlock, NOBODY has problems with Jon Katz PRIOR to his reviews.
But some mystical force at works can't stop us from bitching AFTER his reviews :)
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This is almost funny
One sentense: Congratulations to all the people that beleived in teamwork, online community and and people that pursued this issue until the end without letting their hopes up; this is a nice step.
Why in the world would I put my hard-earned cash on a barely competing technology that has a hard time finding a home, and didn't live up to ANY of the hypes they've blattantly generated, why would I want to support it in the first place?
:) ) it's just that personnaly, I'd support technology that are doing more work in the labs than in the PR room. But that's my opinion and that's why I am saying "ask", can someone enlighten me? (with something else than a flamethrower please :) )
I don't want to be a troll (well I don't care, karma tops at 50 anyways
Put your CPU to the same pricing that AMD is doing, do an equivalent $/mflop, you'll notice how much rambus memory isn't the biggest chunk of the pie unless you go to 1GB and above.
:), better Rambust than you... Oh well... if at LEAST one of you two suffer, I'll live with that :)
Oh, that would chunk in your profits... right
>I'd say that piracy was a large part of the demise of the Amiga.
.com-like cretin) that didn't invest any money, killed/slowed developpement of the next generation amiga, and spent money on useless crap like a .COM CEO. You should get Dave Haynies's tape "dead bed vigil", he was one of the big brain behin the amiga's design and it would give you some insight on what happened.
s html)
STFU, there were PLENTY of dedicated and TALENTED developpers on amiga while PC had a far less % compared to it's userbase.
AMINET is the living proof of that, for every PC "warez" you would see on BBSes, you'd have one excellent Shareware comming out on aminet.
Commodore 64 had as much piracy, if not more... and it's still the computer brand that can claim something microsoft-esque in terms of "homes with computer at that time, % had that X model" just like microsoft has X% of the desktop market. There was the apple computer, but it was nowhere near as popular as the commodore 64.
What killed the amiga is the poor management, and the new CEO (a stupid
Oh I just did a quick search on google.com for the amiga story and died
here's an interresting piece:
In 1994, Commodore died. (Big news.) When they fell, with them went all the advanced Amiga development still in progress - the RISC architecture stuff, PCI systems, Hombre, the various DSP and graphics card projects, new operating systems, and most importantly, AAA.
AAA was originally conceived in 1987, as a next-generation Amiga architecture when it became clear the original Amiga chipset would not be state of the art forever. Systems like IBM's PS/2 and the Apple Macintosh II were beating the Amiga in terms of color displays - 256 colors onscreen out of 262,144 in 320x200 on the PS/2 and 256 colors out of sixteen million in 640x480 on the Mac II, were knocking the pants off 32 colors out of 4096 in 320x400 on the Amiga - and the "trick" HAM mode was at once better and worse than 256 color modes. AAA began as little more than a hypothetical "Wouldn't it be cool if." As far back as 1987, RJ Mical and others were publicly mentioning a future Amiga chipset capable of 1024x1024 in 256 colors.
But reality was a different story. The Amiga chipset was modified only twice between 1985 and 1990 - the "VLSI upgrade" Denise in 1986 that added halfbrite, and the Enhanced Chip Set of the A3000 in 1990 that added Productivity (31KHz) screenmodes, Super High Res (1280x200, 1280x400), border blanking and sprite-in-border, tweakable frequencies, and upped the Chip RAM to 2MB. Colors were still stuck at 4096. High resolutions were still limited to 16 colors. Sound could be kicked to a higher sampling rate ONLY if the screenmode was set to Productivity - one of the more bizarre side-effects of the Amiga's tightly coupled architecture. But the core of the Amiga's graphical heart had remained largely unchanged since the original Lorraine breadboard closet-sized hardwire prototypes in 1984.
In 1990 Commodore finally bit the bullet and said "Let's revamp the Amiga chipset." AAA, the Advanced Amiga Architecture, went from being an abstract "What if we could make the Amiga do this?" to a work in progress. It quickly became clear AAA would not come quickly - it would be at least 1992 before a working Amiga based on AAA could hit store shelves - but the marketplace needed something in the meantime. So someone had the idea to build an intermediate chipset, called AA, to at least bring the Amiga up to 1990 standards while they worked on the much more advanced AAA. AA would feature increased color depth in all screen resolutions, plus several high-scan-rate screen modes for use on multiscan monitors - again, no change to the Paula sound chip, no change to the floppy controller, the entire system was still based on the same old pixel clock, etc. But hopefully no one would complain after using eight-bitplane HAM modes (for 262,144 colors simultaneously and beyond) - giving Ed Hepler and the rest of the AAA miracle-workers time to roll out AAA. Dave Haynie, Greg Berlin and others began building a new modular Amiga from the A3000 architecture, putting the first AA chips in it and adding things like the superfast 68040 processor and an AT&T 3210 digital signal processor.
Then tragedy struck - or more precisely, Mehdi Ali.
Ali fired Dr. Henri Rubin, head of engineering, and replaced him with Bill Sydnes, formerly with IBM, the "genius" responsible for such landmark successes as the PCjr. Needless to say, the idea of something as modern as AA didn't set well with him - particularly since it was a product of the previous administration - and as we all know, one of the jobs of new management is to erase all evidence of the previous administration. So AA was cancelled, AAA put even farther back on the burner, and all of a sudden everyone's busy making Sydnes' "toy" Amigas.
Needless to say, the A600 (a 68000, ECS machine in a dinky C64-like case and limited expansion but with a $700 price tag that was $100 more than the A500) went over like a lead balloon, especially since they discontinued the top-selling A500 in hopes of "encouraging" people to buy the A600 instead. The A1000+, which by all accounts would have been an underpowered and overpriced A3000 without the expansion, was cancelled the day they finished the prototype - Commodore's distributors and salespeople saw it and said "There's no way in hell we can sell that piece of shit." The CDTV was a technical success in some respects (brand new for the blossoming CD-ROM entertainment market) but failed commercially because no one really knew what it was supposed to be - the "stealth computer" thing worked all too well. Not to mention it was the last Amiga to still use Kickstart 1.3...
Finally Sydnes was all out of stupid ideas, and he finally shrugged and said, "OK, let's see you guys do better."
The A3000+ was no longer feasible. They were on a tight schedule and there were bugs in the DSP system that needed fixing, amongst other problems. They had the AA (now called AGA) chipset working more or less, they had the 68030 motherboard of the 1000+, they had the 3640 68040 accelerator for the A3000, they had a way to shoehorn the AGA chips onto the 1000+'s ECS motherboard, and they were able to slap together an AGA system on short notice in 1992.
Amiga lovers went crazy over the awesome A4000 - a 68040 processor, unlimited RAM, Kickstart 3.0, the high-density floppy drive, and the long-awaited 256 color chipset. Never mind the 68040 was clocked a few MHz different than the motherboard - 25MHz instead of 28MHz - and the memory architecture was designed for a 68030, less than optimal for the 68040. Kickstart 3.0 was a work in progress - all the retargetable stuff they hoped to add wasn't done in time, the new Datatypes feature was a memory hog, it was more like 2.2 than 3.0. The high-density floppy drive was painfully slow - the disk controller in the chipset couldn't handle disk access at double speed so they had to just cut the motor speed in half instead. And anyone who's used a 256 color Workbench on the AGA chipset, even with a fast processor, will tell you exactly how wonderful sluggish screen redraws can be. The A4000 was good, but it could have been much better - and this fact was not lost on Commodore's engineers.
AAA was again on the table. While the A4000 was on its own rollercoaster (thanks to Sydnes' inability to order enough parts to build them) Ed Hepler and others were back at work on the stunning new chipset. In addition to the expected 24-bit modes and higher resolutions, they built in speed increases and other cool things. They added HAM10 modes - for 24-bit color that used only as much memory as two 32-color screens. They added support for chip RAM up to 8MB. They added a floppy controller that could drive high density floppies - even the EHD kind, at 3.5MB - at full speed. Sound went up to full 16 bit, eight voice, 44KHz - basically CD-quality. Graphics resolutions hit 1024x768 and beyond. The copper could feed the blitter - thus doing animations while the main processor sat idle. Best of all, the chipset could be "doubled" - a motherboard could be built with TWO apiece of several chips for a 64-bit graphics architecture.
By 1994, two AAA motherboards existed, the "Nyx" systems. The initial silicon run of AAA was something like 94% operational - there were some serious flaws in one of the chips that would take a few months to iron out in time for the final silicon run. One of the motherboards didn't work, and the other one worked well enough to give the graphics a test run but it couldn't boot Workbench.
Then April 29 rolled around. Commodore's international parent company finally collapsed under Mehdi Ali's weight. The layoffs at the West Chester plant were ridiculous - something like 40 people remained. What was left at West Chester had no funds with which to actually build anything - AAA moved at a snail's pace, almost transistor by transistor.
(from http://flyingmice.com/squid/amiga/amiga_unsolved.
Screw that piracy argument, piracy is what made the C64 and Amiga popular in the first place, I do not endorse piracy, but I seriously hate it when someone use the Amiga name to discriminate something that is taken out of context to suit his argument.
"Major Games costs 30-50$ each because there's not a lot of volume in sales, if there would be more sales, the price would go down dramatically"
h e-stuff kinda way. unfortunately there's not a "best way" for this that would suit both the employers and the prosecutors.
10 years later.. Major games, 30-50$... While the complexity and everything surrounding a game got more complex, the price tag is still the same.
Same goes with a lot of high-end software.
On another note,
There are 3 takes , 2 extreme, 1 middle.
Middle: extended kind of piracy (like trialware) or sometime students have to learn somehow, and school arent' always the best avenues, students can't afford Max, autocad, and blablabla, and when they find a job, the employer needs to buy a seat of that software that the student knows, so basically, in the end, the money gets pumped in the system. That theory is good IF the employer is legit and honnest. In that case, Govs needs to target companies (which are the one MAKING money out of the software) but not in a super-intrusive-will-take-3-days-to-go-thru-all-t
The other problem is sometimes cashflow (especially for startups) doesn't allow to blast the required "200,000$" in a single payment (run a software budget analisis for 10-15 employees, a server based on M$ and the basic tools required to do the job depending on what kind of company it is, and it runs up quite fast) Some people are honnest and try to catch up with the licenses (I knew 2 startups that weren't legal from the beginning and catched up over a year or 2 and became totally legit afterwards, ok of course I know also a lot of small companies that are producing off pirated software and that disgust me,
but there's ONE point that I saw that made me think: the argument for one was to ban all the M$ products and buy 1 license of every software they were using, not 5 like required for every seat, the argument was "if we buy everything needed, we go bankrupt, I'd rather not be fully legal and have a job than being legal and broke (and no, these weren't companies that had 50 employees and making gazillion cash) , besides (they added), you cut on the salary of the employees to give some extra $ to uncle Gates's pockets, which doesn't create anymore quality jobs than I do."
While I have mixed feeling about that, the conclusion we can get from this is: if there could be a leasing option or renting option and the system would be more flexible, maybe there would be less piracy and people would tend to be more legit.
The 2 other points of view are "*everything* should be free" which shows how immature and short-sighted some people can be, and "everyone stealing software should get shot, there's 0.00 reason for copying a software, even if it's to try, to get a snapshot, to do backup copies, whatever, there's NO reasons"... heh.. no need to comment on that.
On a side note...
:)
Stealing Monsters INC for example is totally lame, some movies aren't worth the C$8-10 entry fee, heck, they're not even worth the gas it would take me to drive to the theatre that is 10 miles from my home... But that movie ROCKED.
Anyone who downloads it to watch it for the first time on his PC or TV-out, unless he has a dolby surround system and a 60 inch plasma, is totally nuts and ruins his own viewing experience.
Heck, even if he has that, encoding screeners (VHS tapes) is FaR from the result you'll see at the theatre.
They shouldn't be arrested for piracy... but for major mental illness... We shouldn't let people with that kind of judgment wander off the streets
Ultrium tapes can backup 100GB Native but the price tag is way out of line for small buisness or home use (5000$+ a 100GB drive, ouch).. same goes with any dataloading systems... The only cheap tape backup I've found that was giving the best storage/price (aside from buying those used DSS 4/8 gig drives) is those 33GB Native VXA drives.
Just had a little argument with them this weekend ending up me asking to close the account.
.com with poor managing skills or seriously not committed to their customers.
Basically what happened is I "referred" my friend here at my job so he added his buisness credit card and created an account. He did the steps (following the link I cut and pasted from the browser to make a "click to this link so I can get my 5$ referee" used his account to buy 105$US goods, (so basically upgraded the account to international verified, plus email checked, he even received his 5$ bonus after completing the steps). Problem? I didn't get my 5$ as refering person.
5$ is nothing, but it's a damn good test to see how customer service works. I e-mailed them, telling the situation, that he did complete all the steps, but I don't even see him in my referee database, and that it's like maybe the cookies or the fact that he used the same computer that I was logued on before manage to screw up something in the automated process. I gave the information of the other account, and told them that they could email him to confirm (or even check the logs, they would see it came from the same IP address (intranet here and 1 internet feed).
Now, any good customer service wouldn't have argued, seeing that they made already more than the lousy 5$ of profit with my buying habbits, it would have been a no-brainer to just doublecheck the logs and fix that. They didn't. They say I probably missed a step (I didn't, triple-checked). I assumed it was their system, I never for a second thought that maybe it was on purpose, etc...
I found their responde not really good, I was a bit dissapointed at that kind of attitude toward a stupid 5$ so I went on the web and looked if anyone else had problems or if it was current practice, you know, just to check if everything is okay and since you have no control on what they could actually do, might as well doublecheck before receiving money. I found a site "paypalwarning.com" that really rang a bell... I responded to paypal mentionning that site and the fact that I was starting to feel uneasy doing buisness with them, seeing how bad they hang on a 5$ that they owe me for refering someone, and the fact that it seems to be current practice to do bad stuff to their customers... they didn't move. So I asked to close my account and my CC expires in january so I am not too much worried.
While a lot of people are trying to abuse the system, or any system in place, there are honnest people that aren't asking for the moon and understands that buisness are there to make a profit. Acting unethical like that with people that are like me drives off buisness and worse, usually you keep the bad apples and/or newbies altogether which can become a nightmare to manage and hard to turn to a profit because of the support costs.
It was only 5$, but the principle is if you can screw me or your system screws up on it, what will happen when I'll process 100s of $? Making people feel safe about their transactions is the KEY to E-commerce, price is only one small factor. Service and security are bigger concerns IMHO.
The concept is superb, I thought paypal would become the next "Ebay" of the net, seems like they are another
At least he pointed where SSE2 was optimized, he did compare oranges with oranges as far as the x86 platform goes.
Tom missed the obvious comparing Intel-heavily-optimized-SSE2-scene (skull with radiosity) with Athlon like if it was a simple 3d benchmark (he never mentionned the SSE2 optimisation in the radiosity engine that newtek boosted in 7.0b). At least Ace points it out and points out the difference in the render pipeline, which I find VERY professionnal and reliable, tom sucked big time at it, he even got nice emails telling him how to best benchmark on lightwave to make his number constant and not falling into the "specifically optimized for x or y operation" and like he does best: he didn't listen and continued with his flawed benchmarking on the LW platform.
Kudos Ace.
I've based a renderfarm on this little baby (Lightwave and 3DSmax), the only bad thing I can say about it is that with the new MP-X chipset around the block, it's kinda expensive (motherboard) compared to the price that competing products will probably have. Also the fact that you need to use ECC DDR SDRAM doesn't help the price tag when you multiply that by many nodes and trying to save every penny possible (for a single workstation it doesn't matter much though).
For the power it gives, it's still "relatively" cheap (especially if you're looking for a more powerful intel solution) and *STABLE* (stable being one of the most required feature for a renderfarm, with power of course). The TigerMP is a mature product, we don't know how the MP-X will perform or how stable the implementation will be (we can assume it's going to be good tho). But to do the job TODAY, I didn't see anything touching the XP1700/1800 + TigerMP combo for the price/performance/stability.
Still, the real power is going to be with the Hammer... that's a beast I can't wait for.
>The cluephone is ringing... pick it up, I'm certain it's for you :P
:)
Ever configured a Router?
I thought that was the oldest server, when did they appear?
:) but 9 years of beer really wears a brain out...
/kill is worth it... but I guess it grows old :)
I think I started chatting back in 92 AFAICR... I do remember typing irc.eff.org
Anyways, it's really a shame that these servers are going offline one by one, I guess it's more like "we don't have anyone that wishes to administer our irc server but we don't want to look like [insert any unjustified insults here] so we'll go out with a comment that will put more preasure agains those lame script kiddies, diverting the real issues", I'm sure most DDoS exploits can be patched easily, so it's probably the lack of people that wishes to administer the server. We can't blame them for that, I mean, most of us used the service, but how many would actually give away a box and bandwidth for it?
Of course, having the power to