Look, I'm sorry. If you had any idea of what games actually were selling, you'd know that the biggest ones are all like the Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon.
The reason why FPS games have lots of violence is that they would not be any fun without it. It's not that id is selling out to the market and putting in violence despite having a more subtle artistic vision. Like everybody else, they are trying to make a fun game. Their other stuff has been fun, and this one will be too.
I should first issue a disclaimer that I haven't tried to hack around with the StarOffice code, nor have I looked at Gobe code. However, just from the mere size and responsiveness of Gobe, I have the impression that it must be a fairly clean bunch of code. It does a lot without being bloated, and it might not turn out to be terribly hard to get it to do more.
In a way, it's a little sad that open source fans can't all get behind one specific office suite. I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office. There are many people doing just this, and there is finally a little bit of buzz in the non-techie world about StarOffice.
Gobe office will complicate this, because in many ways, it's as good as StarOffice (better at some things, worse at others). Techies who advocate a GPL office suite will no longer speak with a single voice, and managers who are contemplating a MS-software purge in their offices get scared because now they must undergo the agony of deciding which suite to train their staff on. This might make them more likely just to say "aw, forget it" and fork up the MS licensing fees. I mean, there will be flames all over the internet to the effect that "Now that GOBE is free, there is no point in maintaining OpenOffice anymore" and others that say "GOBE will die an ungraceful death because OpenOffice is just too far ahead." Managers will freak out and start worrying that the horse they pick will die mid-race, and then they'll have to retrain their staff again. Well, anyway, it's a thing to watch out for.
Having said that, I have a feeling I'll be a GOBE user real soon. I've played with it at a friend's house and I was pretty impressed by the performance.
Wow, I have just discovered the secret to getting stinking rich: If you are in a position of power, threaten to convert all computers in your juristiction to free software.
Then wait for the "how much do you need to kill your plan" call from Redmond, and laugh all the way to the bank.
This is a very good point and really makes you wonder how many of the people who submit stories here are paid off by corporations to go into the internet and create buzz. If you think this is paranoia, just look at the front page of ArsTechnica and read down to the story about how Sony/Ericsson (Yes... SONY... hmmm) are paying hot women to go into bars with a new cell phone and try to talk men into buying one for themselves, all without revealing they are actually Sony/Ericsson saleswomen.
I can tell you that paying geeks to hype their products on/. would be a lot cheaper and reach a potentially wider audience, and could be done without anyone finding out (unlike with the models, who are instructed to reveal they work for Sony/Ericsson if you corner them and ask them directly).
Sounds like a serious memory leak! But as to your main point, the one about NMN being to fresh to be benchmarked reliably, I guess that makes sense. On the other hand, its pickyness about hardware would make a site that provides information about what setups work (and how well) very useful. But yeah, you're right that right now, NWN tests would basically reveal a lot more about the errors of the programmers than intrinsic qualities of the hardware.
It seems to me that NWN is currently the single biggest cause of "forced" graphics card updates. I've seen several reports that even with a GF4-4600 and a top-of-the-line processor, some situations cause unacceptable FPS slowdowns when the AA is enabled (though the game looks otherwise great).
I seriously doubt that people are buying these cards to play Quake or Serious Sam, so why is it always these games that get benchmarked?
Because various 3D engines use different technologies, and these are in turn supported differently by the card manufacturers, it's not possible to simply extrapolate from Quake results to NWN.
You'd be much wiser to buy a new computer. I mean seriously, the only computers with "software" playback problems are 400MHz or below. Somehow, it seems this is a tiny market. For god's sake, for $99 you can buy a very fancy Athlon complete with heatsink, and the thing will decode MPEG4 and anything else you care to throw at it.
Of course, I'm sure the price will drop to something like $20, and assume the real use of the technology is for living room equipment that is not yet out. I support that use, but a PCI card sound just stupid. Where is their market?
You might be right about the bios swap. That's why it is probably a good idea to buy a $199 Xbox now, while the units in the stores still have the vanilla bios. If you were going to do it anyway it might as well be now, because the next price drop from $199 will not happen for a while.
Also, if you want to mod and resell Xboxes yourself, you'd probably do yourself a favor if you bought yourself a pile of these "Hungarians." I expect that as soon as Xbox production finishes its migration from Hungary to China, that will coincide with some bios and system board alterations, many of which will be designed the defeat the current generation of mod chips.
The Xbox will never stop being mod-chipable, but Microsoft is free to escalate the war, forcing mod chip producers to make very intricate (expensive) chips which are a PITA to install.
Of course, one way to avoid all that is to go buy up the remaining Hungarians now, because you know for sure these babies will mod. Just don't buy games for them. MS doesn't need the money.
Why did he use all this energy to stop the pillar from falling (while letting Dooku escape) when all he had to do is push Obi and Ani out of danger. Don't tell me that Yoda can't do that within miliseconds. Also, since he can move large objects like spacecraft, why didn't he "force" Dooku's ship out of the docking bay, leaving the count stranded?
I can think of two reasons: 1) Lucas didn't want him to, or 2) Yoda is really pretty stupid.
Screw that. I'm not helping out some multinational pharmacutical company while the same people sit on their hands and let millions of people die of AIDS, and refuse to sell them treatment pills unless they pay 10X what it costs to make them. I'd rather work for the RIAA than contribute anything to pieces of shit like that.
These guys have quite a bit of documentation, but most of it is about how their network protocol works and how much their servers cost. Great, but it doensn't really answer the natural question, which is: what is the point of all this?
This is a shame, because there are many exciting things we could do with a global chess computer. The obvious "let's play it against Kramnik or Kasparov" would actually be a lot of fun. With my computer conspiring against the human, it wouldn't be clear who I'd be rooting for!
However, there are lots of other cool things we could do with this. I assume the code itself is some sort of open source--so maybe, we could set up a team tournament, where Team Slashdot plays Team AnandTech. The various teams could also do tweaks to the code to give themselves an advantage. Or, on a larger scale, we could play a America vs Europe game, where continental patriotism would encourage you to contribute your clock cycles to victory.
Another obvious modification that is not mentioned in the documents is human intervention. This sort of computing power would be great if you want to investigate a certain line of play, but this in combination with the human intuition of Grandmasters should be able to coax the computer to give privilidged analysis to certain lines over others. Otherwise, the computers would crank away on the unpromising lines just as much as the ones that might realistically be played.
It is this, the sort of human-directed chess machine that has the potential to show us some of the greatest chess games ever witnessed. This is some exciting stuff....
Well, potentially. However, the intentions of the ChessBrain authors is so far totally mysterious, and I think that's a shame. They seem like nuts-and-bolts people, and these distributed projects need "vision" people to attract a lot of CPUs. I don't have many clock cycles to spare, but I know I'd have a hard time resisting if I could contribute to my continent's victory over our transatlantic enemies. Apart from that, working out a system where this chess super-computer could serve as a tool to augment the play of teams of Grandmasters (or vice versa) would be genuinely interesting from a research point of view, as well as being perhaps the most exciting chess event ever.
Anyway, if ChessBrain doesn't turn into any of these things, I hope another distributed chess project does.
Am I the only young person who notices that the only people who express their dissent at stupid things in this world today are old? This is a terrible sign! I seriously think that historians will view this decade as the "era of new conformity," sort of like the 50s without the commies.
I'm serious: Take for example the only people you see speaking out in public against the idiotic "War on Terror"--they are old! Even academics who find it just as stupid as I do keep their mouths shut, even if they have tenure.
The same goes for this "Intellectual Property" debate. I would be shocked if there weren't many young artists who agree with every word that Bowie says about the subject. Still, they keep a low profile and don't rock the boat, because we live in a climate where that gets you severely punished. I wasn't there, but I suspect in the 60's and 70's people faced the same dilemmas, but they said "fuck it, I'll say what I think and see what happens." But then again, maybe the government and the corporations have us under a tighter clamp now than any other time in Western history since constitutions started being written.
Sure, we all have a right to free speech, but the system has made it so that speaking freely is severely against our interest. This means that even though we won't go to jail, we will get fired, spied upon, harassed, and vilified as friends of terrorists. (How long will it take before somebody argues that abolishing IP laws would be "caving in to terrorism"? Surely they will find some stupid, tenuous connection.)
Anyway, this era makes me sick. You people suck. I might as well burn my books now to save you the trouble, because when these old-school rebels die, nobody will raise their voice in protest.
If you want better FCC leadership, you have to stop voting for idiots. Whenever Republicans take power they just sell off as much public property as possible to the megacorporations that finance the party. It's not like that wasn't predictable. Despite this selloff, our deficit is growing again at Reaganesque rates.
One problem with the American system is that when Republican rulers make laws they basically give away all government-administered property and services to huge companies, and it's much harder to take them back. I wonder how long it will be before the US Postal Service is sold off to UPS and FedEx, PBS to FOX, and the Grand Canyon will become a Disney theme park. When that happens, I hope Canada has the heart to issue lots work visas to pissed-off US Americans. I'm thinking about getting in line right now.
It looks to me like Transmeta chips are on absolutely tiny dies and use very little energy. For all those compromises, the performance seems acceptable. Now, I'm not a chip designer, and that may be reflected in my next comment... but I'm asking myself why don't they just stick more transistors onto the die, and maybe more cache? I mean, if a Crusoe were scaled up to the die size/power consumption of a P4 or an Athlon, it seems to me it would kick their asses, even with the code-morphing handicap.
Now I know it's more complicated than just adding more transistors. Still, though, they seem to have a good design, and it seems to me like they should just add more horsepower to each part of the chip. It would have the potential to be a great server chip, and if my wildest dreams came true, it would outperform the Motorolla's best chips by such a margin that Apple would pay Linus to write a code-morphing routine to have the chip emulate a PowerPC. It would be a seamless transition for Mac users, and it would make Macs competitive again for price-conscious performance users.
The truth is that even though several markets around the world (for example in Australia) have some ISPs that offer tiered pricing, this hasn't been implemented on a huge scale (as it would be if AT&T and Time Warner picked up the scheme).
There is no question in my mind that large-scale tiered pricing would really pour cold water on all of the internet. Alongside every single click we'd make, we'd find ourselves calculating whether this is a wise use of our allotted bandwidth. ("If I watch that BBC video now, I might not have enough allotted bytes left to catch my favorite streaming radio show from France later tonight." "I could check to see what was posted on usenet, but just downloading the headers for the few groups I monitor is over 200MB. I can't afford that!" "Hey, the demo of a game I'm interested in is available for download, but if I get it, my wife won't be able to use the internet for the rest of the month. Better not!")
Basically, Americans would become second-class internet citizens if tiered pricing is put into effect. Video and voice over IP are going to be technologies that only Europeans and Koreans (and maybe some Canadians) will have the unmetered freedom to explore. I'm not sure what the next big application for the internet will be, but when it comes, you can bet it will use a lot of bandwidth, and you can bet that if US broadband is metered and you pay by the byte, Americans won't be anywhere near first to notice and take advantage of its potential. We will be the pedestrians of the internet.
The majority of people on the internet are already non-US-Americans. There is no way to prevent that. However, the USA is still far ahead in terms of buisinesses that make money from the internet. Inertia does not carry you far in this market. Just look at Netscape, Lycos and countless others who seemed invincible not very long ago. What has kept us ahead is that we have a head start on using the net, and we do a good job educating the next generation. As soon as we fall behind, others will be happy to take over our place.
Broadband might look to some like an entertainment service not too different from cable TV. It's a natural assosiation to make, given that they go across the same wire and the bills go to the same place. However, in terms of economic externalities, there is a world of difference. The country gets no benefit from the broad availability of cable TV (yet we regulate the industry to keep the prices low, which seems as stupid as regulating tobacco producers to keep the prices of cigarettes low). There is a huge economic and educational benefit provided by unrestricted and fast internet access. How many billions of dollars flowed into our treasury as a result of kids basically playing on the internet and inventing something? And how many dollars will be lost when their parents drag them away from the computer in fear that their bill will force them to cancel the family vacation?
Yes, I'm close to saying that it is our patriotic duty to see to it that as many Americans as possible have fast and unlimited access to the internet. We will reap the benefits of this later, and they will outweigh the costs by orders of magnitude. Remember, Canada has understood this for a long time, and even though they have a much more scattered population, far more of them have broadband, and they are paying far less than we are (because of direct government action). I understand the situation is similar in Republic of Korea. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to see where the next generation of internet billionares will come from.
Like electricity and telephone, broadband must be regulated by the government. Actually, if I had my way, the government would just nationalize all the lines, a la Cuba. I honestly think that forward-looking countries would see internet access as a service they must provide for the entire population, for the same reason that the government provides us with basic education. I know that most readers here don't have socialist leanings to the same degree I do, but you won't be laughing at me when you're old and you find we have "unrestricted-capitalismized" ourselves out of a huge emerging market.
From the slides, it looks like they intend to use this exclusively with DDR-200, at least around the launch. I think this is a wise move by Intel, and bad news for Rambus!
No, seriously, it seems that initial releases of the Hammer will have 2X the clock frequency of the McKinleys. I hope Intel includes an "Opteron rating" into the names of the various models just to help us keep things straight!
Well, he could keep his case, but only if he's not buying Intel, because the P4 heatsink requires a special P4-compatible case. Anyway, it's no big deal. Get a new case--a case with a modern power supply isn't much more expensive than a modern power supply alone, and you'll need one of those for sure. I recommend you buy a bare-bones system from someone. You can get decent DDR motherboard in a case with a power supply and an Athlon 1800+ starting at about $200 (+ shipping). That's not so terrible. Actually, I think this is a good time to upgrade, I mean, after the chip price cut and after a significant drop in DDR prices.
However, if you're happy with your Celeron, hold on to it as long as it serves you and then jump straight to the Hammer. I'm sure you'll find some use for that sort of horsepower. I know three years ago nobody would have thought that you'd need anythig more than a 2GHz chip, but that's before everybody started encoding their own movies. Then, all of the sudden, the previous generation of chips, which had seemed totally adequate, just couldn't do the job. I'm not sure what we will ask of the Hammer generation, but I'm sure we'll think of something.
Please write back when you have looked up the energy consumption (~heat production) of a new Athlon compared to a (.18-micron) P4. I think you'll find the difference is negligible, certainly not enough to make a difference in room temperature.
As for getting a good frame rate in Quake3, your comment is pretty stupid. Unless you have an ancient graphics card, you surely get a higher frame rate with your Athlon than the refresh frequency of your monitor. I know I like playing at 1600X1200, and I still get better than 85fps, which is all my monitor can display.
If you've fallen for Intel brainwashing, that's your own problem. Just don't go thinking you're insightful when all you do is repeat their FUD without really taking the time to look at real specs.
I'm no buisiness student, but even I'm awake enough to recognize there is a large (and rich) untapped market here. Only the very nerdy and adventurous will do the research to assemble their own HTPC. Still, many seem to do it.
Now imagine if Gateway or Philips or Apple or Toshiba just pre-built an HTPC system, with workarounds for the most annoying compromises that enthusiasts now have to make. These compromises include: Inappropriate cases, noisy fans, terrible RF interferance from badly shielded D/A converters stuck inside the case... and worst of all, terrible, incoherent controls.
It seems dead obvious to me that since there are RF remote controls and also RF optical mice, there should be an RF remote control/mouse. You know, laser on the bottom, buttons on the top, plus two big "click" buttons at the front and a mouse wheel. Doesn't it just seem like an obvious step? So why isn't it out yet?
Next, there needs to be a universal media player which plays by default in "full screen" mode and has the same controls for TV play, PVR playback and the playback of other video media (either on the hard drive or elsewhere on the LAN). Every feature of the media player would be controlled by the remote. For example, the "Pause" button would pause whatever was playing, be it a DVD, live TV or a video file.
Next, there would need to be a flexible file browser which is actually usable at the very low resolutions available on a TV. Its default setting would be to show only playable media files (and it would be able to scan the entire network, not just the living room HD).
There. That's it. Everything else is already available. Granted, to design the remote might cost a bit, but all the technology in it is already very mature. It's basically a mouse/remote frankenstein--not terribly fanciful. Making an appropriate case would not be hard. Finding a manufacturer for the right graphics card would not be hard. Shielding the audio D/A converter to meet audiophile standards would not be hard (at worst, you'd have a break-out box). Writing a pretty interface for a file browser would not be terribly labor intensive, especially if you basically just skinned Konqueror. God damn. I wish I owned a hardware company. I'd make them rich!
Somebody, please hurry and do this before the CPTCBATOA or whatever bill passes, rendering this sort of thing illegal.
I totally agree with you. If you thought you might buy an X-box anyway, you really should do it now. There won't be another price drop for a while, but the longer you wait, the more time MS will have to streamline their manufacturing process and lower production costs. If you hit them now, their loss on the unit will be at its higherst.
Another thing to consider is that MS will probably try to tweak future X-box wiring to disable the current modchips. Sure, modchip makers will eventually adapt, but it will be a source of FUD against the whole practice of chip-modding. Basically, what I'm saying is that X-boxes will never be easier to crack than they are now. That's another reason to buy one now. The only problem with the plan is resisting the urge to buy games for it while you're waiting for the right modchip and software to come along. Still, it's possible. Just buy it, stick it in your closet, and take it out when you can cheaply modify it into a living room Linux machine / DivX movie player / downloaded-games machine. Hey, it will cost $199 when all this stuff is ready, and it costs $199 now. Just buy it now!
Until Wolfram makes a perdiction about an observation, and the observation has not been predicted by present theories, all he's got is pseudoscience.
If he really thinks he's doing physics, his propositions will be testable, and it's up to him to provide a test that would show him right and his detractors wrong. Running a simulation is Mathematica is not a physics experiment. You would get the same results no matter what the universe was really like. Until I hear some novel predictions about blackbody radiation or the microwave background radiation or the distribution of galaxies or some such thing, I will continue to think that this "theory" is physically untestable, and no better than astrology or Freud's theory of the self.
Now, please notice that Wolfram makes no claim that this will ever produce testable resutls. This is the first sign of a sham. For more, consult the Crackpot Index and take note that this book scores higher than Pons & Fleischman.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why FPS games have lots of violence is that they would not be any fun without it. It's not that id is selling out to the market and putting in violence despite having a more subtle artistic vision. Like everybody else, they are trying to make a fun game. Their other stuff has been fun, and this one will be too.
n/t
In a way, it's a little sad that open source fans can't all get behind one specific office suite. I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office. There are many people doing just this, and there is finally a little bit of buzz in the non-techie world about StarOffice.
Gobe office will complicate this, because in many ways, it's as good as StarOffice (better at some things, worse at others). Techies who advocate a GPL office suite will no longer speak with a single voice, and managers who are contemplating a MS-software purge in their offices get scared because now they must undergo the agony of deciding which suite to train their staff on. This might make them more likely just to say "aw, forget it" and fork up the MS licensing fees. I mean, there will be flames all over the internet to the effect that "Now that GOBE is free, there is no point in maintaining OpenOffice anymore" and others that say "GOBE will die an ungraceful death because OpenOffice is just too far ahead." Managers will freak out and start worrying that the horse they pick will die mid-race, and then they'll have to retrain their staff again. Well, anyway, it's a thing to watch out for.
Having said that, I have a feeling I'll be a GOBE user real soon. I've played with it at a friend's house and I was pretty impressed by the performance.
Then wait for the "how much do you need to kill your plan" call from Redmond, and laugh all the way to the bank.
I can tell you that paying geeks to hype their products on /. would be a lot cheaper and reach a potentially wider audience, and could be done without anyone finding out (unlike with the models, who are instructed to reveal they work for Sony/Ericsson if you corner them and ask them directly).
Sounds like a serious memory leak! But as to your main point, the one about NMN being to fresh to be benchmarked reliably, I guess that makes sense. On the other hand, its pickyness about hardware would make a site that provides information about what setups work (and how well) very useful. But yeah, you're right that right now, NWN tests would basically reveal a lot more about the errors of the programmers than intrinsic qualities of the hardware.
I seriously doubt that people are buying these cards to play Quake or Serious Sam, so why is it always these games that get benchmarked?
Because various 3D engines use different technologies, and these are in turn supported differently by the card manufacturers, it's not possible to simply extrapolate from Quake results to NWN.
Of course, I'm sure the price will drop to something like $20, and assume the real use of the technology is for living room equipment that is not yet out. I support that use, but a PCI card sound just stupid. Where is their market?
I assume that if you're displaying the Xbox DivX on your TV, you won't really get any use out of higher resolutions anyways.
Also, if you want to mod and resell Xboxes yourself, you'd probably do yourself a favor if you bought yourself a pile of these "Hungarians." I expect that as soon as Xbox production finishes its migration from Hungary to China, that will coincide with some bios and system board alterations, many of which will be designed the defeat the current generation of mod chips.
The Xbox will never stop being mod-chipable, but Microsoft is free to escalate the war, forcing mod chip producers to make very intricate (expensive) chips which are a PITA to install.
Of course, one way to avoid all that is to go buy up the remaining Hungarians now, because you know for sure these babies will mod. Just don't buy games for them. MS doesn't need the money.
I can think of two reasons: 1) Lucas didn't want him to, or 2) Yoda is really pretty stupid.
Screw that. I'm not helping out some multinational pharmacutical company while the same people sit on their hands and let millions of people die of AIDS, and refuse to sell them treatment pills unless they pay 10X what it costs to make them. I'd rather work for the RIAA than contribute anything to pieces of shit like that.
This is a shame, because there are many exciting things we could do with a global chess computer. The obvious "let's play it against Kramnik or Kasparov" would actually be a lot of fun. With my computer conspiring against the human, it wouldn't be clear who I'd be rooting for!
However, there are lots of other cool things we could do with this. I assume the code itself is some sort of open source--so maybe, we could set up a team tournament, where Team Slashdot plays Team AnandTech. The various teams could also do tweaks to the code to give themselves an advantage. Or, on a larger scale, we could play a America vs Europe game, where continental patriotism would encourage you to contribute your clock cycles to victory.
Another obvious modification that is not mentioned in the documents is human intervention. This sort of computing power would be great if you want to investigate a certain line of play, but this in combination with the human intuition of Grandmasters should be able to coax the computer to give privilidged analysis to certain lines over others. Otherwise, the computers would crank away on the unpromising lines just as much as the ones that might realistically be played.
It is this, the sort of human-directed chess machine that has the potential to show us some of the greatest chess games ever witnessed. This is some exciting stuff. ...
Well, potentially. However, the intentions of the ChessBrain authors is so far totally mysterious, and I think that's a shame. They seem like nuts-and-bolts people, and these distributed projects need "vision" people to attract a lot of CPUs. I don't have many clock cycles to spare, but I know I'd have a hard time resisting if I could contribute to my continent's victory over our transatlantic enemies. Apart from that, working out a system where this chess super-computer could serve as a tool to augment the play of teams of Grandmasters (or vice versa) would be genuinely interesting from a research point of view, as well as being perhaps the most exciting chess event ever.
Anyway, if ChessBrain doesn't turn into any of these things, I hope another distributed chess project does.
I'm serious: Take for example the only people you see speaking out in public against the idiotic "War on Terror"--they are old! Even academics who find it just as stupid as I do keep their mouths shut, even if they have tenure.
The same goes for this "Intellectual Property" debate. I would be shocked if there weren't many young artists who agree with every word that Bowie says about the subject. Still, they keep a low profile and don't rock the boat, because we live in a climate where that gets you severely punished. I wasn't there, but I suspect in the 60's and 70's people faced the same dilemmas, but they said "fuck it, I'll say what I think and see what happens." But then again, maybe the government and the corporations have us under a tighter clamp now than any other time in Western history since constitutions started being written.
Sure, we all have a right to free speech, but the system has made it so that speaking freely is severely against our interest. This means that even though we won't go to jail, we will get fired, spied upon, harassed, and vilified as friends of terrorists. (How long will it take before somebody argues that abolishing IP laws would be "caving in to terrorism"? Surely they will find some stupid, tenuous connection.)
Anyway, this era makes me sick. You people suck. I might as well burn my books now to save you the trouble, because when these old-school rebels die, nobody will raise their voice in protest.
One problem with the American system is that when Republican rulers make laws they basically give away all government-administered property and services to huge companies, and it's much harder to take them back. I wonder how long it will be before the US Postal Service is sold off to UPS and FedEx, PBS to FOX, and the Grand Canyon will become a Disney theme park. When that happens, I hope Canada has the heart to issue lots work visas to pissed-off US Americans. I'm thinking about getting in line right now.
Now I know it's more complicated than just adding more transistors. Still, though, they seem to have a good design, and it seems to me like they should just add more horsepower to each part of the chip. It would have the potential to be a great server chip, and if my wildest dreams came true, it would outperform the Motorolla's best chips by such a margin that Apple would pay Linus to write a code-morphing routine to have the chip emulate a PowerPC. It would be a seamless transition for Mac users, and it would make Macs competitive again for price-conscious performance users.
There is no question in my mind that large-scale tiered pricing would really pour cold water on all of the internet. Alongside every single click we'd make, we'd find ourselves calculating whether this is a wise use of our allotted bandwidth. ("If I watch that BBC video now, I might not have enough allotted bytes left to catch my favorite streaming radio show from France later tonight." "I could check to see what was posted on usenet, but just downloading the headers for the few groups I monitor is over 200MB. I can't afford that!" "Hey, the demo of a game I'm interested in is available for download, but if I get it, my wife won't be able to use the internet for the rest of the month. Better not!")
Basically, Americans would become second-class internet citizens if tiered pricing is put into effect. Video and voice over IP are going to be technologies that only Europeans and Koreans (and maybe some Canadians) will have the unmetered freedom to explore. I'm not sure what the next big application for the internet will be, but when it comes, you can bet it will use a lot of bandwidth, and you can bet that if US broadband is metered and you pay by the byte, Americans won't be anywhere near first to notice and take advantage of its potential. We will be the pedestrians of the internet.
The majority of people on the internet are already non-US-Americans. There is no way to prevent that. However, the USA is still far ahead in terms of buisinesses that make money from the internet. Inertia does not carry you far in this market. Just look at Netscape, Lycos and countless others who seemed invincible not very long ago. What has kept us ahead is that we have a head start on using the net, and we do a good job educating the next generation. As soon as we fall behind, others will be happy to take over our place.
Broadband might look to some like an entertainment service not too different from cable TV. It's a natural assosiation to make, given that they go across the same wire and the bills go to the same place. However, in terms of economic externalities, there is a world of difference. The country gets no benefit from the broad availability of cable TV (yet we regulate the industry to keep the prices low, which seems as stupid as regulating tobacco producers to keep the prices of cigarettes low). There is a huge economic and educational benefit provided by unrestricted and fast internet access. How many billions of dollars flowed into our treasury as a result of kids basically playing on the internet and inventing something? And how many dollars will be lost when their parents drag them away from the computer in fear that their bill will force them to cancel the family vacation?
Yes, I'm close to saying that it is our patriotic duty to see to it that as many Americans as possible have fast and unlimited access to the internet. We will reap the benefits of this later, and they will outweigh the costs by orders of magnitude. Remember, Canada has understood this for a long time, and even though they have a much more scattered population, far more of them have broadband, and they are paying far less than we are (because of direct government action). I understand the situation is similar in Republic of Korea. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to see where the next generation of internet billionares will come from.
Like electricity and telephone, broadband must be regulated by the government. Actually, if I had my way, the government would just nationalize all the lines, a la Cuba. I honestly think that forward-looking countries would see internet access as a service they must provide for the entire population, for the same reason that the government provides us with basic education. I know that most readers here don't have socialist leanings to the same degree I do, but you won't be laughing at me when you're old and you find we have "unrestricted-capitalismized" ourselves out of a huge emerging market.
From the slides, it looks like they intend to use this exclusively with DDR-200, at least around the launch. I think this is a wise move by Intel, and bad news for Rambus!
No, seriously, it seems that initial releases of the Hammer will have 2X the clock frequency of the McKinleys. I hope Intel includes an "Opteron rating" into the names of the various models just to help us keep things straight!
Those are the "official" prices. Their actual prices are a whole lot lower. Check Pricewatch.
However, if you're happy with your Celeron, hold on to it as long as it serves you and then jump straight to the Hammer. I'm sure you'll find some use for that sort of horsepower. I know three years ago nobody would have thought that you'd need anythig more than a 2GHz chip, but that's before everybody started encoding their own movies. Then, all of the sudden, the previous generation of chips, which had seemed totally adequate, just couldn't do the job. I'm not sure what we will ask of the Hammer generation, but I'm sure we'll think of something.
As for getting a good frame rate in Quake3, your comment is pretty stupid. Unless you have an ancient graphics card, you surely get a higher frame rate with your Athlon than the refresh frequency of your monitor. I know I like playing at 1600X1200, and I still get better than 85fps, which is all my monitor can display.
If you've fallen for Intel brainwashing, that's your own problem. Just don't go thinking you're insightful when all you do is repeat their FUD without really taking the time to look at real specs.
Now imagine if Gateway or Philips or Apple or Toshiba just pre-built an HTPC system, with workarounds for the most annoying compromises that enthusiasts now have to make. These compromises include: Inappropriate cases, noisy fans, terrible RF interferance from badly shielded D/A converters stuck inside the case... and worst of all, terrible, incoherent controls.
It seems dead obvious to me that since there are RF remote controls and also RF optical mice, there should be an RF remote control/mouse. You know, laser on the bottom, buttons on the top, plus two big "click" buttons at the front and a mouse wheel. Doesn't it just seem like an obvious step? So why isn't it out yet?
Next, there needs to be a universal media player which plays by default in "full screen" mode and has the same controls for TV play, PVR playback and the playback of other video media (either on the hard drive or elsewhere on the LAN). Every feature of the media player would be controlled by the remote. For example, the "Pause" button would pause whatever was playing, be it a DVD, live TV or a video file. Next, there would need to be a flexible file browser which is actually usable at the very low resolutions available on a TV. Its default setting would be to show only playable media files (and it would be able to scan the entire network, not just the living room HD).
There. That's it. Everything else is already available. Granted, to design the remote might cost a bit, but all the technology in it is already very mature. It's basically a mouse/remote frankenstein--not terribly fanciful. Making an appropriate case would not be hard. Finding a manufacturer for the right graphics card would not be hard. Shielding the audio D/A converter to meet audiophile standards would not be hard (at worst, you'd have a break-out box). Writing a pretty interface for a file browser would not be terribly labor intensive, especially if you basically just skinned Konqueror. God damn. I wish I owned a hardware company. I'd make them rich!
Somebody, please hurry and do this before the CPTCBATOA or whatever bill passes, rendering this sort of thing illegal.
Another thing to consider is that MS will probably try to tweak future X-box wiring to disable the current modchips. Sure, modchip makers will eventually adapt, but it will be a source of FUD against the whole practice of chip-modding. Basically, what I'm saying is that X-boxes will never be easier to crack than they are now. That's another reason to buy one now. The only problem with the plan is resisting the urge to buy games for it while you're waiting for the right modchip and software to come along. Still, it's possible. Just buy it, stick it in your closet, and take it out when you can cheaply modify it into a living room Linux machine / DivX movie player / downloaded-games machine. Hey, it will cost $199 when all this stuff is ready, and it costs $199 now. Just buy it now!
If he really thinks he's doing physics, his propositions will be testable, and it's up to him to provide a test that would show him right and his detractors wrong. Running a simulation is Mathematica is not a physics experiment. You would get the same results no matter what the universe was really like. Until I hear some novel predictions about blackbody radiation or the microwave background radiation or the distribution of galaxies or some such thing, I will continue to think that this "theory" is physically untestable, and no better than astrology or Freud's theory of the self.
Now, please notice that Wolfram makes no claim that this will ever produce testable resutls. This is the first sign of a sham. For more, consult the Crackpot Index and take note that this book scores higher than Pons & Fleischman.