First image I had in my mind was the little car on the web side was the Pod Stewie was using when he got inside Peter to kill all his reproductive system so he wouldn't have a brother, funny episode...
Hmm.. come to think of it, if that thing ever grows popular, it will really look like sperms and eggs when you'll watch the streets from above:)
Have it your way, I'm suing every artists and their managers and their record label, that has it's files shared online, willingly or not, for not protecting their property the right way, thus devaluating the price of my CDs that I can't resale because everybody made cheap copies and nobody wants them anymore.
Hey.. that doesn't sound as stupid as I thought... any pro bono lawyers? MAKE MONEY FAST!:)
Don't be too impressed with the numbers of the Lightwave rendering benchmark, the scene used is heavily Radiosity-based, which Newtek (makers of lightwave) publicly said that was SSE2-optimized, if they'd run the same application benchmark but with any other math-intensive scenes like raytrace, etc.. the gap wouldn't be that impressive. I use Dual Xenon and Dual MPs at work, I've noticed the difference, and Tom being tom, he still goes on doing flawed benchmarks (flawed because he doesn't mention that little fact even if a lot of people told him).
At least he does other benchmarks to round-up the possibilities of errors.
>What exactly am I supposed to do with a machine like that? I develop Java software. My IDE, app server and build scripts each open their own JVM instance. I really haven't seen any performance problems with a 450mhz with 512MB ram. ---
I'm doing 3D animation, the fastest, the less hours I spend waiting for my renders to come out. That's ONE application... it's not because you're still playing tradewars in ascii on an XT that some other people won't benefit from advances in technologies.
In your everyday life, other technologies benefit from it, CAD benefit from it, movies studio benefit from more power, Science, etc. I can't beleive some people are SO much self-centered that they pull out comments like this (neither moderators modding the parent up), I mean, if you have the IQ to come here and read the articles, how can you think like that?
Granted, these changes are kinda pointless for most people, after 1GHZ cpu and a geforce2, you don't need much more to enjoy what most end user technologies have to offer, but there are still DESKTOP users out there that enjoys powerfull machines for other things than showing off:), just ask any hobbyist 3d animator for example, and no, buying a lot of cheap machines to do a renderfarm doesn't always cut it, at least not when you want to preview some effects like volumetrics before sending them to a final render.
I don't want to flame, but Inflation is one thing, recession is another thing, this and that is very nice but, why is it that they always find CLEVER ways to tax us, that seems so good (like in this case, hey if you use it you pay for it, which of course is acceptable in theory). But when you do the maths, they NEVER reduce taxes the other way around so that it would actually benefit (let's say in this case, people that aren't using the roads) like it is supposed to.
What happens is they put that tax, it's an extra burden on the average class, they won't reduce your federal taxes for infrastrucure claiming they will do more roadwork with the new funds (and 2-3 years after that, it will still be like it was 2-3 years before that, exept you'll have yer ANOTHER tax to pay without any true benefits...)
If they want to get more money, how about trimming all the exceeding balance in their own gestion. Cut those 100$ Restaurants bills, cut that second car that you get for being minister or heck, stop making M.$ studies that you won't even follow just so you can tell us you at least evaluated the idea, if you want to rip us off and have it your own way, no need to zap even more money, money that could be better used.
This is a global problem in north america, Canada suffers from the same problem, big time, look at the federal tax, GST, 7%, funny thing is you pay that tax over the provencial tax, which is HELL to manage, example, if your province has 7% tax, and you buy something that costs 10$, you pay 7% tax on the 10$ and AFTER you pay 7%GST on the new total (10.70) so basically you're paying a tax on the tax. This was for the debt and supposed to stay there only a year or 2 when times were bad, did they remove it? Nope. Did they reduce it? Nope... it's been there for years, they made a promise that it would be gone or there would be tax reduction, nothing seen the light. It's not off topic, it's just an example on where all these "new ideas that will benefit the poor class" gets the votes and in return you get nothing. Remember that some people there are payed probably twice or more what you are doing annually just to come out with new ways to get bigger salaries and budgets.
Like my previous posts, the big question I am asking myself since 2 years about USA: WTF?
They are doing EVERYTHING to kill their own buisness. They put crazy protection schemes that screws up joe nobody's CD in his old CD player, they do everything to kill online music sharing instead of building a successful buisness model on top of it, they put up stuff like DMCA that upsets just about everyone exept large corporation that don't even think before publicly using hot terms like "terrorist" to describe some developpers, and now, with such an announcement, they simply WACK in the face the people WITH MONEY (because, you NEED money to buy a half decent TV with hdtv support, and you need LOADS of it to buy a decent screen size with HDTV support). What message are all these moves sending to the consumers?
"We can't decide on a standard, but be an early adopter with only 1% support of channels for the technology you payed good money for, and we'll make it obsolete even before getting to 2%"
"We want your money, once we have it, we don't give a rats ass about you anymore, get on with it"
And the most lame but starting to become excusable: "Well I've got ripped once, twice, now I'll support the piracy system because I have to buy one hacked hardware and I don't have to deal with this shit no more!"
Protecting content is one thing, I had nothing against DVD being encrypted BEFORE becoming public and mainstream, at least then, NOBODY was had, everything was "standard" and you knew that it would probably take something like a new format before everything you bought got obsolete, and that new format would be backward compatible like dvds are to CDs.
TVs aren't cheap like DVD players, and especially HDTV units with decent size and features. If this passes, you just gave a go to pirates to make devices to "clean the signal off that dirt and make it work on older sets" (or circomvention device under the DMCA I guess), for a totally legit use. You'll have fun in court because IANAL but I'm sure there's going to be a big grey zone if such an issue arises.
God I'm glad I'm living in Canada sometimes, we have a clown as a prime minister, but at least they aren't pulling that kind of pathetic moves on us, yet:).
See? this is where I think the Gov. is failing. We got something that we all commonly HATE: SPAM.
We have a common target on which we'd love to see some LEGISTLATION against it, for once.
And what is the Gov. doing? Passing laws left and right to protect big corporation, to reduce your rights as consumers, to be a complete pain in the ass and give themselves the right to sue the planet, but what is being done for the VOTERS, the USERS, the people paying the tax dollars?
Well this is one case of an EASY win of public opinion, heck, they could even pass a few bad things without people noticing it because we'd be so impressed that our elected people actually did something for the PEOPLE.
Ok this sounds like I am frustrated against the system but you get the idea... of course a global spam law and action will be taken one day... when all the big corporations will be really pissed. Or major ISP be fed up paying bandwidth for SPAM, Look now AT&T is starting the run, shouldn't take long now before we get something out of this.
I think blocking ASIA would be a good thing, a pain in the start, obviously, but for a good cause, when they'll see they can't conduct buisness properly, they'll move and close those open relays and hey, screw human rights on spammer, you can KILL the biggest of them and I don't see anyone here who'll be really upset, for once:).
Spam is doing 20% of the global traffic, the numbers are about right with what I see in my mailbox, as for my hotmail mailbox though, it's more like 95%.
Of course a lot of you will say "where does it fit, why would I want this" well the fact is it's not a majority of people that owns a PVR or a media station box (new buzzword?) should ring a bell.
I wanted one of these since I saw the replay/tivo hardware, but 2 things stopped me, first generation so probably there would be firmware issues, better revisions not too far ahead, etc.. and the other was the price for the non-upgradability (well without hacking it:) ) that it offered (and we can also add the price/meg of the HDDs that are getting very interresting the more the time go), and HDTV support, I could go on for days. OF COURSE the positive aspect of being an early adopter is that you already have the technology and can actually do something while the others wish.. but if I would have bought it right off I wouldn't have wanted to spend again on another box. The dream machine of course is some kind of tivo, with ethernet access, dual IDE brackets, divx codec in firmware, transcoder from grabbed->divx realtime, DVD+RW, and for most of you "not running windows":).
This machine is a step in the right direction, and yes I am an avid amiga fan, if you think all the amiga people are lame zealots, you probably never owned or programmed or enjoyed that piece of advanced technology way ahead of it's time. That being said, I don't beleive it would do a comeback on the desktop unless it doesn't repeat all of linux's errors or arguable moves, even then, there would be a great need of marketting power and it doesn't mean it would still take off...(just look at where BE is today...) Nevertheless, amiga was famous for video, for one thing, whether it was for video processing, all it's gazillion video output possibilities, colors or advanced features, when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.
I think it's very nice to see amiga striking tangible deals like this and finally see a product, it's not what everybody wanted (i.e. a computer that rights off the bat kills windows mac and linux and is so revolutionnary that it will be the second video toaster), this will probably never happen because of the current infrastructure in companies, and besides, a lot of projects have tried before, and there are already 1000s of people paid just to think of the future and desings, and they aren't all FOC people. The time when one person could really change things in the computer realm is probably over (of course there's always exeptions so I keep an open mind) what you need to target now is "what is going to be the next electronic revolution and how can I bypass all my competitors" Cellular technology is gaining a lot since a few years, so is HDTV or any new video technology... I just hope they do the right moves and not to many errors, I wish them the best.
The last media player that microsoft did that was a "real" mediaplayer was 6.4... since then (7.0+) it's BLOATED, SLOW, the skin system truely feels like molasse, and heck, even in my PDA I installed another mpeg player and divx player because I couldn't stand media player...
It's too bad now, we don't have the choice of extra features without going to uninstall stuff (which you should be able to choose if you want them installed in the first place). But that's how MS seems to be doing their things since a few years... Do a great product, basic funtionnality, add some meat, fix the bugs, see it taking off, and finally, add a LOT of eyecandy/useless stuff, bloat the thing, make it take 4x the amount of memory, and finally, like almost all succesful net-related programs, add spyware.
At least you can still use media player 6.4 for everything on the net right now, I hope it stays like that for a while... it should.. since the basics is "playing back a movie/audio with a codec", whatever you add around it, the basics still remains the same (unless they move all the Digital right management out of the codecs if it's not already the case).
If you want to do some kind of renderfarming or number crunching across a network, why would you need *MANY* copies of win2k Server? I might have missed a point, but win2k datacenter is about load balancinglike bandwidth managing, IO requests, and uptime if one of the machines fails, etc...
If the server holds the data and you have a potential of a lot of clients doing requests (thus I/O, Bandwidth, like a P2P crunching system to name a popular example) In that example, I don't see why you'd want to switch to microsoft if you got it to work on linux, you'll need to have a very good knowledge (or hire someone with) of Microsoft Server products if you want to move to anything more than a standalone server. Also last time I checked with M$ for that solution because I wanted a safer domain and maximum uptime, everything was doubled for 2 machines, I thought it would be a bit cheaper than that but heck, for the price of the Advanced server VS the standalone, with 25 users, you can get an extra tape drive and cheap RAID1 to mirror your critical drives (on a small buisness server)
So if you mention that you WISH you'll get donations, and you want raw computing power, instead of buying MS licenses, concentrate on the goal you try to acheive: distributed crunching power with scalable servers, so basically you'll need HARDWARE to crunch. (I still don't get why you'd NEED server to run number crunching, workstations can do the same and transmit to a server, like I was stating before). Check what you have, check what you need, design around that, do a cost analysis since it seems to be very critical in your case.
There are some cases where you'll want MS servers, here at work I've setted up a MS server to have less configuration and troubleshooting issues with my win2k Pro machines (at least I know when something screws up it's MS related for sure:)) , but in your case I'd say keep with what you've got unless you get a buttload of funding and a very good reason to move to win2k (which I don't really see), because a datacenter plus admin will cost you in the 6 digits to maintain and license.
5 mins of pumping gives 1 minute of battery life..
on
Foot-Powered Laptop
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· Score: 2
From the website:
Output Power: 0 to 6 Watts / 18 Volts Direct Current (DC18V)
Funny, my laptop draws about 30W of power... I don't know if he talks about powering a PDA or a laptop, but in the case of most modern laptops with almost gigahertz processors with 3d graphics chips and dvd players and 40GB hdd, all of which are power-optimized of course, but still eating a few watts here left and right, it adds up pretty quickly.
Just look at the power rating of your battery, 5000mA/hr 12Volts for example, the battery lasts about 2 hours, if you do quick maths, 5A/hr @ 12 Volts gives you 60Watts/hr, which obvioulsy means you can plug 60Watts power for about 1hr then the battery dies, so effectively, 30W for 2 hours is about right. Now if that device can output 0 to 6 watts, let's take the best case scenario... 6 watts... you'd have to pump 10 hours to keep 2 hours on your laptop.
Unless you're running on a 486 with 10.4 DSTN LCD, I don't see how this is really practical for modern computers... unless you plug the whole office on this to power the server and keep the employees in shape:), or buy 2 of them when they'll reach 3rd generation with 15W output.. you'll look like your pedalling at your desk... heh...
Actually, I'd say that videogames probably PREVENT a lot of violence... check how people are absorbed in Quake-Style games, and how emotionnal they get sometimes while playing (spacebar-tapping harder, moving their shoulders, etc) I mean, this is an EXCELLENT aggressivity release...it disconnect you totally and make you forget all the crappy day I had...
My position is really simple: If someone has to be violent and go up and shoot people at a certain moment in his life, he'll do it, period. Videogames WON'T be what is going to trigger it, look at molesting parents, peer preasure in school, gangs, etc. The problem with americans and Canada (I am canadian) is that they NEED to blame ONE source for all their problems, they need to see it's not THEIR fault, but OTHERS, while it could be true in some cases (being others), it's completely irrationnal to blame Videogames to this extent.
You know what's ironic about all this? When they'll discover it doesn't change anything, they won't remove that law, they'll simply encourage more piracy among younger people (which is, by the way, a great way to educate them into NEVER buying stuff in the future), and helping of killing a part of an industry that sells well and that they are getting buttload taxes from. Sometimes I wonder how a politician thinks, heck I wonder if they think at all when they are pulling stuff like this.
Porn, Movies, TV shows, Blueprints for buildings... and now we'll get digitized books on gnutella to clug the bandwidth even more... Brilliant, "if we can't kill them pirates, let's drown them"
Ne1 played that game? the first part (harvesting) was kinda boring but as soon as you would get into a fight with aliens it was freaking cool...
Thing is the game was so lame for starting, it probably killed itself, but once you were set, god.. addictive...
To ring a bell: You had to collect minerals from other blanets, build better vessels with R&D, there was always one metal you'd need and trying to add more cargo to your transport ships.. you would start with a mining machine on one ship and harvest the meteor I think... oh here's better:
I am still forcing everyone in the company which I am working as IT admin, to stay on Win2k. When I buy win2k licenses these days, it's a bit more expensive than BEFORE winXP came out... which is odd. Anyways, Win2k is the best OS MS ever did, and it's the first time I am not missing my old amiga's OS. XP on the other hand is great for home users for the look and ease of use, but it's basically just 2K with a buttload of useless (for professionnals) services added, decreasing overall performance, and killing your privacy. I'd like to see the sales figures of XP pro compared to win2k in corporate environments because I'm sure I'm not the only one who had reserves buying that after evaluating it.
Ever played Neuromancer? it was ported to C64, PC, and amiga.
That game was a bit linear in some aspects, but for a C64 adventure game, it was way ahead of it's time, BBS, hacking, AI, Action (cyberspace), etc.. that game simply made me drool. Even now and then sometimes I pop my DOS laptop and complete it, I'd wish so much for a NeuroMancer II based on today's technologies, it would be a major MAJOR piece of game if it would be done well. Back then all these buzzwords weren't even common, heck, "multimedia" wasn't even a buzzword.
I don't understand why Sierra shoved all these King quest, hero quest, space quest, larry tries to get laid quest, etc.. when better games like monkey islant, maniac mansion, zak mc kraken or neuromancer beatting them down (not graphically but story-wise and adventure-wise) didn't get pushed as much. I guess it's a matter of taste.
They've publicly said they would support that FBI magic lantern backdoor crap even when it wasn't forced on them.
They make software that is supposed to PROTECT your system, now the first thing they do is a PR saying they will support it 100% in all of their product (i.e. not finding it) which by definition voids the product's safeness because anyone could *potentially* exploit this since the "feature" is now public knowledge.
I am sure there's already things like this in Windows, in firewalls or antiviral software, but it's *NOT* issued in a PR, it's *NOT* public knowledge and if someone would have to exploit it, he would have to dissasemble everything and do a hell of a tracing job. I wouldn't say anything bad if it was forced on them, but issuing such a PR really pissed me off as a system administrator. It meant that not only if you want to hack a system, target Mcafee's holes, but it made me paranoid enough to switch products. The guys behind the best antivirus software back in the DOS days really went down with the years, first screwing up windows registries, then that PR thing, now this/. story?... put that dog to sleep and move to a company that doesn't make their users feel like a cash cow, eventhough that's what they are:).
innovate new technologies that will want the user to migrate to your new system, NEEDING THE HARDWARE to play it back because it will bring ADDED value/features.
This is like seeing a good movie at the theatre, would you have enjoyed a ripped screener on your x inch monitor at home or did you get a good experience watching it at the theatre with the big screen the big sound and all? yes you can reproduce that at home, but at a price, a price most people pirating the movies cannot afford. Think lord of the rings for example. Did they go bankrupt? No... far from that!
It's not my job to bring new ideas and tell these companies about the future, there are people paid 10x what I am doing right now to market new ideas and so on, if they can't deliver, they aren't worth the price they are paid, and the industry deserves to die like any buisness doing wrong decisions, if tomorrow my CEO would do something stupid, the gov wouldn't jump in at 100MPH to save us, I don't see why this should be any different for anyone else...
To get back to my point, if they would innovate on new ideas that would make the experience so much better than pirating it, they wouldn't lose. They can't blame their content being more and more crappy and more of the same to pirates, that's only a lame excuse. I still see movies making tons of money, big success, and I still go to the theatre when there's good stuff out.
HDTV is starting to appear mainstream (took a while) see? copy that to a DIVX file, its going to be huge and cumberstone to move around at a decent quality and no loss in resolution, copy it to a VHS or SVHS? you lose the initial quality, this is just an example.
Put new technologies with good content, I'm sure people will gladly pay for it. The fact that a lot of movies are being pirated and it's "hurting sales' is simply because they suck too much to go see in the theatre in the first place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that EVERY protection scheme got broken, it pisses me off to see that the profit I am paying big corporation goes in barriers instead of innovating to bring me, the customer, a better experience for every $ invested.
They are at the service of the customers (customer by definition: someone that PAID to get a good), not the other way around, some people there seems to forget that very basic rule.
I won't pay 600$ for something I can do with my computer and graphic card that has video in/out and some tivo-like software.
Of course at 150-200$ without hard drive, it would be really interresting, but that would be for geeks, because most people don't want the hassle to stick disk drive in the machine.
Then again I wonder how well it would have done with "swappable bays" with cheap 40giggers, you could carry them around, they don't generate that much heat so you could pad the drive container a bit, plus I'm sure it would be a used feature, heck add a "bay" thing that connects to your IDE port on your tower and you're set, you could swap from tv to computer to friends without hassles.
The idea is to have the most features and bypass the long workaround for a good price. Right now we can go from tv to computer and computer to tv with a bit of messing around, a device that would simplify all that would be a nice addition but it won't happen without hacking, since everybody seems to be going to content protection and instead of giving features and helping for the workarounds, they are doing the exact opposite, putting content scrambling and balbabla, of course this WON'T sell. At all.
One thing is look at all the TiVo hacking since a year, LAN? why LAN? because you want the video accessible on your computer, bigger drive? why hacking for bigger drive and not ordering a unit that has the drive already? Because there are still some people are not dumb enough to pay 2x the price of a storage device when they can stick it themselves.
Anyone that will come out with such a device will be a winner. There is a demand for a lan/swappablebay/noprotection/etc tivo out of the box for a good price, but... no one wants to do such a monster out of the box, even if its pretty simple, simply because they cannot afford gazzilion of $ for fighting MPAA lawyers.
Get a 3ware escalade card in march they'll support 48bits-LBA in the new firmware, you'll be able to hookup those 160GB monsters in raid-0 (or raid-5) with a tenfold increase in performance, without taking up all the PCI slots.
the TX2 is a nice little card, but you can only use 2 drives per board for getting the "full speed" (else if you use master/secondary, 4 drives will give you the raid speed of 2 in stripe) and then you'd have to stripe your raid-0 drives in software. Instead of wasting PCI slots and using an underperforming card, you pay a couple of bucks more and you get the real thing with full speed and hardware raid5.
There are a lot of raid benchmarks at storagereview.com as well. IDE raid is so damn cheap.
In one submission, slashdot managed to/. all the major or high-profile uTCP/IP stack-powered web servers on the internet... I hope the C64 uServer was overclocked to a wh00ping 8mhz to handle all the requests:)
By pushing their already-obsolete itanic platform (shoving would be more appropriate) by killing anything else that is better (alpha, Mips on NT gone, probably a good conspiracy theory, and any processors that I might forget) and saying how perfect the Itanic is for YEARS, and saying that AMD's road is not a good look at the future and [insert any marketting hype] [insert anything meaning AMD won't cut it with this approach] [insert both point #1 and #2 which means the same thing but change a few words], Announcing this processor simply goes against ALL what they fought for in the last 2+ years. This gives a huge tap in the back of AMD, but at the same time, it's scary because if they don't both use the same extensions, it will segment the market even more. SSE2 is nice, even if I do a lot of 3d, buying a P4 over a dual AthlonMP system won't give me much of a boost, primarely because the rest of the Floating poiont engine in the P4 is terrible when not optimized, and because SSE2 optimization, when implemented fully, will be when the P4 will be obsolete.
Where I am getting at is I don't want to see 2 separate x86-64bits extensions or I'll be really pissed.
Anyways, good for AMD, if they've flexed intel into doing such a move, it shows that they did their homework correctly and Intel probably sat on their cashcow until they had to get their act together.
Too bad the press is all "Intel inside" sold-out... they won't remember how intel pushed against that so hard, now they'll think only present and say "look here's a new processor, wow!!" and be amazed at nothing.
Itanium sucks, what were the last specs? 120W per processor? a pound heatsink? god someone put that puppy out of misery.
Let's wait and see, announcement are just words, let's see how they will react when there's going to be another big security hole (because there always are going to be, and that on just about any platforms, but especially with Microsoft), if they've really changed philosophy, they will react more quickly (as in programmer-wise and not PR-marketting-wise), and not handle this as a press release taking their customers for complete idiots and reacting immaturely blaming people that finds the bugs as "terrorists".
And anyways, for those of us that are on some security mailing lists like NTbugtraq, we'll see how the people got their discovery handled by Microsoft, if they change for real, maybe we won't read as many "We notified microsoft 3 weeks ago about this matter and nothing was done, now it's time to bring it public" and then having the Microsoft PR and legal team on their back.
I think they are starting to feel the heat of people that are really not satisfied and claiming that buisness damage due to insecure OS should be fined to the creator of the OS, especially when they claim it's secure. Heh.. good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
First image I had in my mind was the little car on the web side was the Pod Stewie was using when he got inside Peter to kill all his reproductive system so he wouldn't have a brother, funny episode...
:)
Hmm.. come to think of it, if that thing ever grows popular, it will really look like sperms and eggs when you'll watch the streets from above
Have it your way, I'm suing every artists and their managers and their record label, that has it's files shared online, willingly or not, for not protecting their property the right way, thus devaluating the price of my CDs that I can't resale because everybody made cheap copies and nobody wants them anymore.
:)
Hey.. that doesn't sound as stupid as I thought... any pro bono lawyers? MAKE MONEY FAST!
Don't be too impressed with the numbers of the Lightwave rendering benchmark, the scene used is heavily Radiosity-based, which Newtek (makers of lightwave) publicly said that was SSE2-optimized, if they'd run the same application benchmark but with any other math-intensive scenes like raytrace, etc.. the gap wouldn't be that impressive. I use Dual Xenon and Dual MPs at work, I've noticed the difference, and Tom being tom, he still goes on doing flawed benchmarks (flawed because he doesn't mention that little fact even if a lot of people told him).
At least he does other benchmarks to round-up the possibilities of errors.
>What exactly am I supposed to do with a machine like that? I develop Java software. My IDE, app server and build scripts each open their own JVM instance. I really haven't seen any performance problems with a 450mhz with 512MB ram.
:), just ask any hobbyist 3d animator for example, and no, buying a lot of cheap machines to do a renderfarm doesn't always cut it, at least not when you want to preview some effects like volumetrics before sending them to a final render.
---
I'm doing 3D animation, the fastest, the less hours I spend waiting for my renders to come out. That's ONE application... it's not because you're still playing tradewars in ascii on an XT that some other people won't benefit from advances in technologies.
In your everyday life, other technologies benefit from it, CAD benefit from it, movies studio benefit from more power, Science, etc. I can't beleive some people are SO much self-centered that they pull out comments like this (neither moderators modding the parent up), I mean, if you have the IQ to come here and read the articles, how can you think like that?
Granted, these changes are kinda pointless for most people, after 1GHZ cpu and a geforce2, you don't need much more to enjoy what most end user technologies have to offer, but there are still DESKTOP users out there that enjoys powerfull machines for other things than showing off
$0.02
I don't want to flame, but Inflation is one thing, recession is another thing, this and that is very nice but, why is it that they always find CLEVER ways to tax us, that seems so good (like in this case, hey if you use it you pay for it, which of course is acceptable in theory). But when you do the maths, they NEVER reduce taxes the other way around so that it would actually benefit (let's say in this case, people that aren't using the roads) like it is supposed to.
What happens is they put that tax, it's an extra burden on the average class, they won't reduce your federal taxes for infrastrucure claiming they will do more roadwork with the new funds (and 2-3 years after that, it will still be like it was 2-3 years before that, exept you'll have yer ANOTHER tax to pay without any true benefits...)
If they want to get more money, how about trimming all the exceeding balance in their own gestion. Cut those 100$ Restaurants bills, cut that second car that you get for being minister or heck, stop making M.$ studies that you won't even follow just so you can tell us you at least evaluated the idea, if you want to rip us off and have it your own way, no need to zap even more money, money that could be better used.
This is a global problem in north america, Canada suffers from the same problem, big time, look at the federal tax, GST, 7%, funny thing is you pay that tax over the provencial tax, which is HELL to manage, example, if your province has 7% tax, and you buy something that costs 10$, you pay 7% tax on the 10$ and AFTER you pay 7%GST on the new total (10.70) so basically you're paying a tax on the tax. This was for the debt and supposed to stay there only a year or 2 when times were bad, did they remove it? Nope. Did they reduce it? Nope... it's been there for years, they made a promise that it would be gone or there would be tax reduction, nothing seen the light. It's not off topic, it's just an example on where all these "new ideas that will benefit the poor class" gets the votes and in return you get nothing. Remember that some people there are payed probably twice or more what you are doing annually just to come out with new ways to get bigger salaries and budgets.
Like my previous posts, the big question I am asking myself since 2 years about USA: WTF?
:).
They are doing EVERYTHING to kill their own buisness. They put crazy protection schemes that screws up joe nobody's CD in his old CD player, they do everything to kill online music sharing instead of building a successful buisness model on top of it, they put up stuff like DMCA that upsets just about everyone exept large corporation that don't even think before publicly using hot terms like "terrorist" to describe some developpers, and now, with such an announcement, they simply WACK in the face the people WITH MONEY (because, you NEED money to buy a half decent TV with hdtv support, and you need LOADS of it to buy a decent screen size with HDTV support). What message are all these moves sending to the consumers?
"We can't decide on a standard, but be an early adopter with only 1% support of channels for the technology you payed good money for, and we'll make it obsolete even before getting to 2%"
"We want your money, once we have it, we don't give a rats ass about you anymore, get on with it"
And the most lame but starting to become excusable: "Well I've got ripped once, twice, now I'll support the piracy system because I have to buy one hacked hardware and I don't have to deal with this shit no more!"
Protecting content is one thing, I had nothing against DVD being encrypted BEFORE becoming public and mainstream, at least then, NOBODY was had, everything was "standard" and you knew that it would probably take something like a new format before everything you bought got obsolete, and that new format would be backward compatible like dvds are to CDs.
TVs aren't cheap like DVD players, and especially HDTV units with decent size and features. If this passes, you just gave a go to pirates to make devices to "clean the signal off that dirt and make it work on older sets" (or circomvention device under the DMCA I guess), for a totally legit use. You'll have fun in court because IANAL but I'm sure there's going to be a big grey zone if such an issue arises.
God I'm glad I'm living in Canada sometimes, we have a clown as a prime minister, but at least they aren't pulling that kind of pathetic moves on us, yet
See? this is where I think the Gov. is failing. We got something that we all commonly HATE: SPAM.
:).
We have a common target on which we'd love to see some LEGISTLATION against it, for once.
And what is the Gov. doing? Passing laws left and right to protect big corporation, to reduce your rights as consumers, to be a complete pain in the ass and give themselves the right to sue the planet, but what is being done for the VOTERS, the USERS, the people paying the tax dollars?
Well this is one case of an EASY win of public opinion, heck, they could even pass a few bad things without people noticing it because we'd be so impressed that our elected people actually did something for the PEOPLE.
Ok this sounds like I am frustrated against the system but you get the idea... of course a global spam law and action will be taken one day... when all the big corporations will be really pissed. Or major ISP be fed up paying bandwidth for SPAM, Look now AT&T is starting the run, shouldn't take long now before we get something out of this.
I think blocking ASIA would be a good thing, a pain in the start, obviously, but for a good cause, when they'll see they can't conduct buisness properly, they'll move and close those open relays and hey, screw human rights on spammer, you can KILL the biggest of them and I don't see anyone here who'll be really upset, for once
Spam is doing 20% of the global traffic, the numbers are about right with what I see in my mailbox, as for my hotmail mailbox though, it's more like 95%.
Of course a lot of you will say "where does it fit, why would I want this" well the fact is it's not a majority of people that owns a PVR or a media station box (new buzzword?) should ring a bell.
:) ) that it offered (and we can also add the price/meg of the HDDs that are getting very interresting the more the time go), and HDTV support, I could go on for days. OF COURSE the positive aspect of being an early adopter is that you already have the technology and can actually do something while the others wish.. but if I would have bought it right off I wouldn't have wanted to spend again on another box. The dream machine of course is some kind of tivo, with ethernet access, dual IDE brackets, divx codec in firmware, transcoder from grabbed->divx realtime, DVD+RW, and for most of you "not running windows" :).
I wanted one of these since I saw the replay/tivo hardware, but 2 things stopped me, first generation so probably there would be firmware issues, better revisions not too far ahead, etc.. and the other was the price for the non-upgradability (well without hacking it
This machine is a step in the right direction, and yes I am an avid amiga fan, if you think all the amiga people are lame zealots, you probably never owned or programmed or enjoyed that piece of advanced technology way ahead of it's time. That being said, I don't beleive it would do a comeback on the desktop unless it doesn't repeat all of linux's errors or arguable moves, even then, there would be a great need of marketting power and it doesn't mean it would still take off...(just look at where BE is today...) Nevertheless, amiga was famous for video, for one thing, whether it was for video processing, all it's gazillion video output possibilities, colors or advanced features, when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.
I think it's very nice to see amiga striking tangible deals like this and finally see a product, it's not what everybody wanted (i.e. a computer that rights off the bat kills windows mac and linux and is so revolutionnary that it will be the second video toaster), this will probably never happen because of the current infrastructure in companies, and besides, a lot of projects have tried before, and there are already 1000s of people paid just to think of the future and desings, and they aren't all FOC people. The time when one person could really change things in the computer realm is probably over (of course there's always exeptions so I keep an open mind) what you need to target now is "what is going to be the next electronic revolution and how can I bypass all my competitors" Cellular technology is gaining a lot since a few years, so is HDTV or any new video technology... I just hope they do the right moves and not to many errors, I wish them the best.
The last media player that microsoft did that was a "real" mediaplayer was 6.4... since then (7.0+) it's BLOATED, SLOW, the skin system truely feels like molasse, and heck, even in my PDA I installed another mpeg player and divx player because I couldn't stand media player...
It's too bad now, we don't have the choice of extra features without going to uninstall stuff (which you should be able to choose if you want them installed in the first place). But that's how MS seems to be doing their things since a few years... Do a great product, basic funtionnality, add some meat, fix the bugs, see it taking off, and finally, add a LOT of eyecandy/useless stuff, bloat the thing, make it take 4x the amount of memory, and finally, like almost all succesful net-related programs, add spyware.
At least you can still use media player 6.4 for everything on the net right now, I hope it stays like that for a while... it should.. since the basics is "playing back a movie/audio with a codec", whatever you add around it, the basics still remains the same (unless they move all the Digital right management out of the codecs if it's not already the case).
If it works, maybe we can do the same thing with NSYNC before releasing them into the wild.... :)
If you want to do some kind of renderfarming or number crunching across a network, why would you need *MANY* copies of win2k Server? I might have missed a point, but win2k datacenter is about load balancinglike bandwidth managing, IO requests, and uptime if one of the machines fails, etc...
:)) , but in your case I'd say keep with what you've got unless you get a buttload of funding and a very good reason to move to win2k (which I don't really see), because a datacenter plus admin will cost you in the 6 digits to maintain and license.
If the server holds the data and you have a potential of a lot of clients doing requests (thus I/O, Bandwidth, like a P2P crunching system to name a popular example) In that example, I don't see why you'd want to switch to microsoft if you got it to work on linux, you'll need to have a very good knowledge (or hire someone with) of Microsoft Server products if you want to move to anything more than a standalone server. Also last time I checked with M$ for that solution because I wanted a safer domain and maximum uptime, everything was doubled for 2 machines, I thought it would be a bit cheaper than that but heck, for the price of the Advanced server VS the standalone, with 25 users, you can get an extra tape drive and cheap RAID1 to mirror your critical drives (on a small buisness server)
So if you mention that you WISH you'll get donations, and you want raw computing power, instead of buying MS licenses, concentrate on the goal you try to acheive: distributed crunching power with scalable servers, so basically you'll need HARDWARE to crunch. (I still don't get why you'd NEED server to run number crunching, workstations can do the same and transmit to a server, like I was stating before). Check what you have, check what you need, design around that, do a cost analysis since it seems to be very critical in your case.
There are some cases where you'll want MS servers, here at work I've setted up a MS server to have less configuration and troubleshooting issues with my win2k Pro machines (at least I know when something screws up it's MS related for sure
From the website:
:), or buy 2 of them when they'll reach 3rd generation with 15W output.. you'll look like your pedalling at your desk... heh...
Output Power: 0 to 6 Watts / 18 Volts Direct Current (DC18V)
Funny, my laptop draws about 30W of power... I don't know if he talks about powering a PDA or a laptop, but in the case of most modern laptops with almost gigahertz processors with 3d graphics chips and dvd players and 40GB hdd, all of which are power-optimized of course, but still eating a few watts here left and right, it adds up pretty quickly.
Just look at the power rating of your battery, 5000mA/hr 12Volts for example, the battery lasts about 2 hours, if you do quick maths, 5A/hr @ 12 Volts gives you 60Watts/hr, which obvioulsy means you can plug 60Watts power for about 1hr then the battery dies, so effectively, 30W for 2 hours is about right. Now if that device can output 0 to 6 watts, let's take the best case scenario... 6 watts... you'd have to pump 10 hours to keep 2 hours on your laptop.
Unless you're running on a 486 with 10.4 DSTN LCD, I don't see how this is really practical for modern computers... unless you plug the whole office on this to power the server and keep the employees in shape
Actually, I'd say that videogames probably PREVENT a lot of violence... check how people are absorbed in Quake-Style games, and how emotionnal they get sometimes while playing (spacebar-tapping harder, moving their shoulders, etc) I mean, this is an EXCELLENT aggressivity release...it disconnect you totally and make you forget all the crappy day I had...
My position is really simple: If someone has to be violent and go up and shoot people at a certain moment in his life, he'll do it, period. Videogames WON'T be what is going to trigger it, look at molesting parents, peer preasure in school, gangs, etc. The problem with americans and Canada (I am canadian) is that they NEED to blame ONE source for all their problems, they need to see it's not THEIR fault, but OTHERS, while it could be true in some cases (being others), it's completely irrationnal to blame Videogames to this extent.
You know what's ironic about all this? When they'll discover it doesn't change anything, they won't remove that law, they'll simply encourage more piracy among younger people (which is, by the way, a great way to educate them into NEVER buying stuff in the future), and helping of killing a part of an industry that sells well and that they are getting buttload taxes from. Sometimes I wonder how a politician thinks, heck I wonder if they think at all when they are pulling stuff like this.
Porn, Movies, TV shows, Blueprints for buildings... and now we'll get digitized books on gnutella to clug the bandwidth even more... Brilliant, "if we can't kill them pirates, let's drown them"
Ne1 played that game? the first part (harvesting) was kinda boring but as soon as you would get into a fight with aliens it was freaking cool...
Thing is the game was so lame for starting, it probably killed itself, but once you were set, god.. addictive...
To ring a bell: You had to collect minerals from other blanets, build better vessels with R&D, there was always one metal you'd need and trying to add more cargo to your transport ships.. you would start with a mining machine on one ship and harvest the meteor I think... oh here's better:
Deuteros, a sequel to millenium
realdoll.com? :)
I am still forcing everyone in the company which I am working as IT admin, to stay on Win2k. When I buy win2k licenses these days, it's a bit more expensive than BEFORE winXP came out... which is odd. Anyways, Win2k is the best OS MS ever did, and it's the first time I am not missing my old amiga's OS. XP on the other hand is great for home users for the look and ease of use, but it's basically just 2K with a buttload of useless (for professionnals) services added, decreasing overall performance, and killing your privacy. I'd like to see the sales figures of XP pro compared to win2k in corporate environments because I'm sure I'm not the only one who had reserves buying that after evaluating it.
Ever played Neuromancer? it was ported to C64, PC, and amiga.
That game was a bit linear in some aspects, but for a C64 adventure game, it was way ahead of it's time, BBS, hacking, AI, Action (cyberspace), etc.. that game simply made me drool. Even now and then sometimes I pop my DOS laptop and complete it, I'd wish so much for a NeuroMancer II based on today's technologies, it would be a major MAJOR piece of game if it would be done well. Back then all these buzzwords weren't even common, heck, "multimedia" wasn't even a buzzword.
I don't understand why Sierra shoved all these King quest, hero quest, space quest, larry tries to get laid quest, etc.. when better games like monkey islant, maniac mansion, zak mc kraken or neuromancer beatting them down (not graphically but story-wise and adventure-wise) didn't get pushed as much. I guess it's a matter of taste.
They've publicly said they would support that FBI magic lantern backdoor crap even when it wasn't forced on them.
/. story?... put that dog to sleep and move to a company that doesn't make their users feel like a cash cow, eventhough that's what they are :).
They make software that is supposed to PROTECT your system, now the first thing they do is a PR saying they will support it 100% in all of their product (i.e. not finding it) which by definition voids the product's safeness because anyone could *potentially* exploit this since the "feature" is now public knowledge.
I am sure there's already things like this in Windows, in firewalls or antiviral software, but it's *NOT* issued in a PR, it's *NOT* public knowledge and if someone would have to exploit it, he would have to dissasemble everything and do a hell of a tracing job. I wouldn't say anything bad if it was forced on them, but issuing such a PR really pissed me off as a system administrator. It meant that not only if you want to hack a system, target Mcafee's holes, but it made me paranoid enough to switch products. The guys behind the best antivirus software back in the DOS days really went down with the years, first screwing up windows registries, then that PR thing, now this
/rant
Stop putting restrictions to obsolete stuff,
innovate new technologies that will want the user to migrate to your new system, NEEDING THE HARDWARE to play it back because it will bring ADDED value/features.
This is like seeing a good movie at the theatre, would you have enjoyed a ripped screener on your x inch monitor at home or did you get a good experience watching it at the theatre with the big screen the big sound and all? yes you can reproduce that at home, but at a price, a price most people pirating the movies cannot afford. Think lord of the rings for example. Did they go bankrupt? No... far from that!
It's not my job to bring new ideas and tell these companies about the future, there are people paid 10x what I am doing right now to market new ideas and so on, if they can't deliver, they aren't worth the price they are paid, and the industry deserves to die like any buisness doing wrong decisions, if tomorrow my CEO would do something stupid, the gov wouldn't jump in at 100MPH to save us, I don't see why this should be any different for anyone else...
To get back to my point, if they would innovate on new ideas that would make the experience so much better than pirating it, they wouldn't lose. They can't blame their content being more and more crappy and more of the same to pirates, that's only a lame excuse. I still see movies making tons of money, big success, and I still go to the theatre when there's good stuff out.
HDTV is starting to appear mainstream (took a while) see? copy that to a DIVX file, its going to be huge and cumberstone to move around at a decent quality and no loss in resolution, copy it to a VHS or SVHS? you lose the initial quality, this is just an example.
Put new technologies with good content, I'm sure people will gladly pay for it. The fact that a lot of movies are being pirated and it's "hurting sales' is simply because they suck too much to go see in the theatre in the first place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that EVERY protection scheme got broken, it pisses me off to see that the profit I am paying big corporation goes in barriers instead of innovating to bring me, the customer, a better experience for every $ invested.
They are at the service of the customers (customer by definition: someone that PAID to get a good), not the other way around, some people there seems to forget that very basic rule.
I won't pay 600$ for something I can do with my computer and graphic card that has video in/out and some tivo-like software.
Of course at 150-200$ without hard drive, it would be really interresting, but that would be for geeks, because most people don't want the hassle to stick disk drive in the machine.
Then again I wonder how well it would have done with "swappable bays" with cheap 40giggers, you could carry them around, they don't generate that much heat so you could pad the drive container a bit, plus I'm sure it would be a used feature, heck add a "bay" thing that connects to your IDE port on your tower and you're set, you could swap from tv to computer to friends without hassles.
The idea is to have the most features and bypass the long workaround for a good price. Right now we can go from tv to computer and computer to tv with a bit of messing around, a device that would simplify all that would be a nice addition but it won't happen without hacking, since everybody seems to be going to content protection and instead of giving features and helping for the workarounds, they are doing the exact opposite, putting content scrambling and balbabla, of course this WON'T sell. At all.
One thing is look at all the TiVo hacking since a year, LAN? why LAN? because you want the video accessible on your computer, bigger drive? why hacking for bigger drive and not ordering a unit that has the drive already? Because there are still some people are not dumb enough to pay 2x the price of a storage device when they can stick it themselves.
Anyone that will come out with such a device will be a winner. There is a demand for a lan/swappablebay/noprotection/etc tivo out of the box for a good price, but... no one wants to do such a monster out of the box, even if its pretty simple, simply because they cannot afford gazzilion of $ for fighting MPAA lawyers.
Get a 3ware escalade card in march they'll support 48bits-LBA in the new firmware, you'll be able to hookup those 160GB monsters in raid-0 (or raid-5) with a tenfold increase in performance, without taking up all the PCI slots.
the TX2 is a nice little card, but you can only use 2 drives per board for getting the "full speed" (else if you use master/secondary, 4 drives will give you the raid speed of 2 in stripe) and then you'd have to stripe your raid-0 drives in software. Instead of wasting PCI slots and using an underperforming card, you pay a couple of bucks more and you get the real thing with full speed and hardware raid5.
There are a lot of raid benchmarks at storagereview.com as well. IDE raid is so damn cheap.
In one submission, slashdot managed to /. all the major or high-profile uTCP/IP stack-powered web servers on the internet... I hope the C64 uServer was overclocked to a wh00ping 8mhz to handle all the requests :)
By pushing their already-obsolete itanic platform (shoving would be more appropriate) by killing anything else that is better (alpha, Mips on NT gone, probably a good conspiracy theory, and any processors that I might forget) and saying how perfect the Itanic is for YEARS, and saying that AMD's road is not a good look at the future and [insert any marketting hype] [insert anything meaning AMD won't cut it with this approach] [insert both point #1 and #2 which means the same thing but change a few words], Announcing this processor simply goes against ALL what they fought for in the last 2+ years. This gives a huge tap in the back of AMD, but at the same time, it's scary because if they don't both use the same extensions, it will segment the market even more. SSE2 is nice, even if I do a lot of 3d, buying a P4 over a dual AthlonMP system won't give me much of a boost, primarely because the rest of the Floating poiont engine in the P4 is terrible when not optimized, and because SSE2 optimization, when implemented fully, will be when the P4 will be obsolete.
Where I am getting at is I don't want to see 2 separate x86-64bits extensions or I'll be really pissed.
Anyways, good for AMD, if they've flexed intel into doing such a move, it shows that they did their homework correctly and Intel probably sat on their cashcow until they had to get their act together.
Too bad the press is all "Intel inside" sold-out... they won't remember how intel pushed against that so hard, now they'll think only present and say "look here's a new processor, wow!!" and be amazed at nothing.
Itanium sucks, what were the last specs? 120W per processor? a pound heatsink? god someone put that puppy out of misery.
Let's wait and see, announcement are just words, let's see how they will react when there's going to be another big security hole (because there always are going to be, and that on just about any platforms, but especially with Microsoft), if they've really changed philosophy, they will react more quickly (as in programmer-wise and not PR-marketting-wise), and not handle this as a press release taking their customers for complete idiots and reacting immaturely blaming people that finds the bugs as "terrorists".
And anyways, for those of us that are on some security mailing lists like NTbugtraq, we'll see how the people got their discovery handled by Microsoft, if they change for real, maybe we won't read as many "We notified microsoft 3 weeks ago about this matter and nothing was done, now it's time to bring it public" and then having the Microsoft PR and legal team on their back.
I think they are starting to feel the heat of people that are really not satisfied and claiming that buisness damage due to insecure OS should be fined to the creator of the OS, especially when they claim it's secure. Heh.. good thing.