As expected, Nintendo is using a severely underpowered chip that is at least 5 years obsolete in pure technological terms.
It seems to have more actual vertex shading power than the iPhone 3GS.
In this market, going for streamlined capabilities and lower power consumption probably beats DirectX 10.1 support. (which the SGX535 only has in theory - there's no drivers out to provide such capabilities?)
I'm interested in seeing how much RAM they stick on it. Since they're Nintendo, I'll bet on... 64-128MB.
Although in all seriousness, boards with PCI ports won't stop being produced overnight. You'll only have issues if you need a board with lots of them. Companies like Asus are still pushing out boards with a couple PCI ports.
Here's a passive heatsink board with 1, and a GF7025 board with 2:
How about user licensing? $36/yr per user, giving you access to whatever version of Windows you need, on however many PCs you own?
It's stable income, and a good deal for power users. I know they give OEMs steep discounts - this would put more profit back in their pockets, assuming people would go for subscription software.
Wireless N router, or Wireless N modem? I hate those combo units.
Right now I'm using a SpeedTouch 516 modem. It has one ethernet port. It works well with my ADSL, and I can stick wireless routers, gigabit switches, etc. behind it.; I'm tired of ISPs trying to pack everything into those all-in-one units, usually in a poor fashion that requires bi-weekly rebooting.
P.S. Where did my AJAX comment box go? For some reason slashdot started loading new pages whenever I click on comments? Ugh...!
I suspect it's more than 5%. Most gamers care, as would most people doing software development, or anything involving VMs. 10-15% would be a more reasonable estimate.
You also have to factor in people getting "that computer guy" to build their PCs for them.
Personally the one good thing about this format is that if people LIKE the damned show they won't just cancel it because some asshat made a political move on another producer.
$50/mo for Cable. How many shows could you fund personally per year, getting TV that connects with you?
I see this as the logical progression - moving from channel-centric to show-centric, with easy ways to contribute to just that show. (and/or company)
I also prefer desktops, but where I am from, (India), we do have power cuts quite often.
Where I live in Canada, we get quite a few as well - but most last under 2 seconds. I don't know what causes them, but they turn off all the lights and electronics very briefly.
Except, of course, my computer. My newest PSU must have a super capacitor? It stays on right through them - but my monitor and speakers don't.
I forgot to mention - new drives (even WD Blacks) are a lot quieter than the last few generations of desktop HDDs. You also have the option of SSDs. Everything is getting more quiet, more power efficient, etc.
If I wanted a desktop that likewise rarely turned on its fans, I'd have to pick hardware that really is not that mainstream and I suspect that it would not be cheaper than a purpose built laptop machine.
And there's where you'd be wrong.
I've been doing it for a few years now...
In the past few years, which you apparently skipped, it's become possible to build nearly-silent (yet very powerful) desktops. All you hear is a bit of air noise - less than any moderately powerful laptop produces.
I'm guessing you checked out around the P4 era? At that point many desktop PCs were consuming about 150-250 watts. My old Athlon XP is almost as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
But today, unless you require a super powerful videocard, 50-60 watts is a reasonable estimate for a 6-core PC. That goes up when you're using all the cores, but I suspect for you that won't happen very often. Even with every core in use, a good aftermarket heatsink will remain virtually silent, as would a good GPU heatsink. Cards as powerful as a GTS 250 can be made nearly inaudible, even to sensitive hearing like my own.
Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time, as are the CPU-speed wars. Computers have, and will continue to, get lighter and quieter and more energy efficient, not faster. And, thus, laptops will continue plummeting in price.
I'm pretty sure I'm sane, and keep opting for desktops. When you can get twice the CPU/GPU power for less money, and get it in a form factor that doesn't make as much noise, that's worth buying. Being able to rip out and replace older or defective components is another perk.
Desktops won't disappear. They aren't as popular now, but it'll be a long time before they vanish entirely.
You can get a crazy 6-core system for under $1000. I haven't seen anything similar for laptops even in the $2000+ range.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 1
And as for your wife using her desktop...yeah, only a fool would sit there and unplug stuff from a desktop to hook it to a laptop to use it. OTOH, only a fool wouldn't have bought a KVM in the first place, which is what normal people who have both a laptop and a desktop do.
I go for desktops because they're cheaper.
8GB of RAM, Phenom II X6, Radeon 4870, 2x1TB WD Black, etc. + nice PSU/Case comes to about $900. Good luck getting close to that with a laptop.
HOWEVER, I am no apologist here. At least in the USA, providers charge very high fees for text messages. If I send a 15 character text message to my wife, we get charged $0.40. A few pennies may be fair, but far more than $0.39 of that $0.40 is profit. Furthermore, SMS is configured to be parasitic - my friends (and spammers) like to send me text messages without my authorization. That costs me $0.20 every time, and there is no way for me to stop them without giving up my wireless service altogether.
There are VOIP providers that offer calling anywhere in North America for 1 cent per minute - or as much as 2 cents, if you want a toll free number. (So that people can call you and pay nothing) The numbers themselves cost between $1-2/mo. These companies make a profit.
I have trouble believing cell towers are so expensive that providing service costs many million times as much.
Why don't you grab a PCIe SSD? An ioDrive or something? Those can score 150k IOPS in real-world tests, for only a couple thousand dollars. If IOPS matter more than capacity, they deliver.
Windows XP is released in dozens of languages with support contracts for all of them, and has two supported service packs, and a third 64-bit edition based off Windows Server 2003.
Each of those has to be regression tested and the fix needs to be guaranteed to not break anything for all of those customers with support contracts.
->
Windows' Help and Support Center
I have a few things to say. First, while this is part of Windows's core, it is not a "core component". Pushing out a fix is quite a bit more minor than fixing up a kernel exploit or some other flaw. Very little (perhaps nothing) depends on this service - and most PCs already have it disabled, with no ill effects.
A few things were settled in the last Slashdot thread: 1) This guy doesn't represent Google. 2) This guy has waited for years for Microsoft to fix other critical vulnerabilities. (this also means he has experience measuring bullshit responses) 3) This guy picked a mostly benign exploit to make his point.
Microsoft has a history of poor patch times. I recall some IE6 exploits going unpatched for 500+ days. If you don't think that's okay, then you need to reexamine what you think this guy is doing. I'll give you a hint - he's making a point, which will ultimately help far more than it hurts.
The only DMCA notices I've gotten were for things I never downloaded or uploaded.
For example, a Prince of Persia widescreen crack. After examining the files the torrent listed, I deleted it and played it on my older PC with its 4:3 monitor.
Sure enough, a month later, I got one of those notices. Game piracy... haha!
It's especially funny, because I bought two retail copies, because I thought so much of the game. This whole industry is clueless.
But somehow, I don't think they're complete morons, so I'm going to assume they have some modest idea WTH they were doing, and they aren't going to be humbled by 5 seconds of thought by a random/.er.
Designing a server that companies will actually buy? Not rewriting/compiling software to run on ARM is a perk, which probably outweighs increased cost and power consumption.
When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image.
But isn't rotating a JPEG photo a lossy operation? We really need to have rotation commands built into the file format itself...
I've seen people rotate photos the wrong direction, then rotate back the other way twice - but they double clicked once instead, so now it's still on its side. They keep clicking, to spin it around - but the computer lags for a second, so they click, and click, and click. Then it rotates all of a sudden, 5+ times, and is sitting upside down. So they click it again and again...
Would re-saving a photo 10+ times reduce quality?
I repeat - we need rotation commands built into the file format itself. Allowing lossless manipulation of gamma, saturation, brightness, contrast, rotation, etc. on lossy images would be a good thing. Meta-data could do it, but only if all software is aware, and doesn't strip that info away. Making it part of the file format makes it a more reliable locked-in-stone feature.
I'd suggest Steam, but a lot of people don't seem to believe they'll be around in 20 years - hence that insane "I must have a disc" requirement I keep hearing.
Well, for you, there's GOG. No DRM, so you can backup all the installers onto external HDD or DVD.
I'm not worried, though - Steam's track record is far superior to these other distribution services. XBoxLive/PSN will be good and dead before Steam disappears. (Microsoft already shutoff XBox1 Live, didn't they? That means in about 6-8 years, XBox360 Live will be shut down?)
Im sure his hotfix and one man testing matches MS's extensive testing.
It's for XP, so it probably exceeds it.
Judging by all the individuals on the MSFN forums that did Win2k hotfixes better than Microsoft, from 2006 on... and now all the people there fixing bugs in Microsoft's XP hotfixes... I'm guessing that one person can do better testing and fixes than Microsoft. And my guess is based on different individuals doing so hundreds of times.
Seriously, do you think any company would just release this fix immediately without serious testing?
Successfully not using Windows makes you a troll and/or Microsoft hater? Get a life.
I found it informative that even as far as a decade and a half back, there's people out there that found solutions. That's pre-OSX, so I'm guessing he's been using various linux distros, which I'd like to find out more about. We all know of Ubuntu - but what did people do 14 years ago, when there seemingly were no full-featured alternatives?
VLC, Mplayer, Perrian, etc on OSX can play better than Flash, that is not the same thing as "perfectly fine". VLC and Mplayer a quite optimized so with a fast enough CPU they can grunt through playback without help. That doesn't mean it's working fine. Use VLC or Mplayer on Windows or Linux on the same hardware and the CPU use is drastically reduced because hardware acceleration works.
Playing 1080 video in Windows XP, my Phenom II X4 faces a staggering 6% CPU usage.
For home systems, you don't have the malicious admin worry - and if you're looking at tape backups, you're probably competent enough to secure your local network.
I just use live backups. My primary concern is disks silently yet rapidly dying, and live backups solve that. Add some revisioning, and accidentally deleting a file or overwriting it is solved. Now all that's left is fires or other house-destroying events, and theft. Theft is easily solved by hiding your NAS in creative ways.
If you have absolutely critical info that cannot be lost... encrypted online backup services can act as offsite backup. Make sure you get one where your privacy is guaranteed - if you lose the passkey, you lose all your files.
Slashdot Mirror
As expected, Nintendo is using a severely underpowered chip that is at least 5 years obsolete in pure technological terms.
It seems to have more actual vertex shading power than the iPhone 3GS.
In this market, going for streamlined capabilities and lower power consumption probably beats DirectX 10.1 support. (which the SGX535 only has in theory - there's no drivers out to provide such capabilities?)
I'm interested in seeing how much RAM they stick on it. Since they're Nintendo, I'll bet on... 64-128MB.
Don't worry - VIA is still pushing out hardware that meets your requirements. Parallel, Serial - PCI and PCIe! :P
US: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138187
Canada: http://pccyber.com/?v=Product&i=MB-BS-VIOTECH3100%2B
Although in all seriousness, boards with PCI ports won't stop being produced overnight. You'll only have issues if you need a board with lots of them. Companies like Asus are still pushing out boards with a couple PCI ports.
Here's a passive heatsink board with 1, and a GF7025 board with 2:
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=50891&vpn=AT5NM10-I&manufacture=ASUS
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=50891&vpn=AT5NM10-I&manufacture=ASUS
How about user licensing? $36/yr per user, giving you access to whatever version of Windows you need, on however many PCs you own?
It's stable income, and a good deal for power users. I know they give OEMs steep discounts - this would put more profit back in their pockets, assuming people would go for subscription software.
Wireless N router, or Wireless N modem? I hate those combo units.
Right now I'm using a SpeedTouch 516 modem. It has one ethernet port. It works well with my ADSL, and I can stick wireless routers, gigabit switches, etc. behind it.; I'm tired of ISPs trying to pack everything into those all-in-one units, usually in a poor fashion that requires bi-weekly rebooting.
P.S. Where did my AJAX comment box go? For some reason slashdot started loading new pages whenever I click on comments? Ugh...!
I suspect it's more than 5%. Most gamers care, as would most people doing software development, or anything involving VMs. 10-15% would be a more reasonable estimate.
You also have to factor in people getting "that computer guy" to build their PCs for them.
Personally the one good thing about this format is that if people LIKE the damned show they won't just cancel it because some asshat made a political move on another producer.
$50/mo for Cable. How many shows could you fund personally per year, getting TV that connects with you?
I see this as the logical progression - moving from channel-centric to show-centric, with easy ways to contribute to just that show. (and/or company)
I also prefer desktops, but where I am from, (India), we do have power cuts quite often.
Where I live in Canada, we get quite a few as well - but most last under 2 seconds. I don't know what causes them, but they turn off all the lights and electronics very briefly.
Except, of course, my computer. My newest PSU must have a super capacitor? It stays on right through them - but my monitor and speakers don't.
Sometimes I really wish /. had an edit button.
I forgot to mention - new drives (even WD Blacks) are a lot quieter than the last few generations of desktop HDDs. You also have the option of SSDs. Everything is getting more quiet, more power efficient, etc.
If I wanted a desktop that likewise rarely turned on its fans, I'd have to pick hardware that really is not that mainstream and I suspect that it would not be cheaper than a purpose built laptop machine.
And there's where you'd be wrong.
I've been doing it for a few years now...
In the past few years, which you apparently skipped, it's become possible to build nearly-silent (yet very powerful) desktops. All you hear is a bit of air noise - less than any moderately powerful laptop produces.
I'm guessing you checked out around the P4 era? At that point many desktop PCs were consuming about 150-250 watts. My old Athlon XP is almost as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
But today, unless you require a super powerful videocard, 50-60 watts is a reasonable estimate for a 6-core PC. That goes up when you're using all the cores, but I suspect for you that won't happen very often. Even with every core in use, a good aftermarket heatsink will remain virtually silent, as would a good GPU heatsink. Cards as powerful as a GTS 250 can be made nearly inaudible, even to sensitive hearing like my own.
Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time, as are the CPU-speed wars. Computers have, and will continue to, get lighter and quieter and more energy efficient, not faster. And, thus, laptops will continue plummeting in price.
I'm pretty sure I'm sane, and keep opting for desktops. When you can get twice the CPU/GPU power for less money, and get it in a form factor that doesn't make as much noise, that's worth buying. Being able to rip out and replace older or defective components is another perk.
Desktops won't disappear. They aren't as popular now, but it'll be a long time before they vanish entirely.
But that is most laptops today.
Laptops are usually 2-3x as expensive...
You can get a crazy 6-core system for under $1000. I haven't seen anything similar for laptops even in the $2000+ range.
And as for your wife using her desktop...yeah, only a fool would sit there and unplug stuff from a desktop to hook it to a laptop to use it. OTOH, only a fool wouldn't have bought a KVM in the first place, which is what normal people who have both a laptop and a desktop do.
I go for desktops because they're cheaper.
8GB of RAM, Phenom II X6, Radeon 4870, 2x1TB WD Black, etc. + nice PSU/Case comes to about $900. Good luck getting close to that with a laptop.
HOWEVER, I am no apologist here. At least in the USA, providers charge very high fees for text messages. If I send a 15 character text message to my wife, we get charged $0.40. A few pennies may be fair, but far more than $0.39 of that $0.40 is profit. Furthermore, SMS is configured to be parasitic - my friends (and spammers) like to send me text messages without my authorization. That costs me $0.20 every time, and there is no way for me to stop them without giving up my wireless service altogether.
There are VOIP providers that offer calling anywhere in North America for 1 cent per minute - or as much as 2 cents, if you want a toll free number. (So that people can call you and pay nothing) The numbers themselves cost between $1-2/mo. These companies make a profit.
I have trouble believing cell towers are so expensive that providing service costs many million times as much.
Why don't you grab a PCIe SSD? An ioDrive or something? Those can score 150k IOPS in real-world tests, for only a couple thousand dollars. If IOPS matter more than capacity, they deliver.
Windows XP is released in dozens of languages with support contracts for all of them, and has two supported service packs, and a third 64-bit edition based off Windows Server 2003.
Each of those has to be regression tested and the fix needs to be guaranteed to not break anything for all of those customers with support contracts.
->
Windows' Help and Support Center
I have a few things to say. First, while this is part of Windows's core, it is not a "core component". Pushing out a fix is quite a bit more minor than fixing up a kernel exploit or some other flaw. Very little (perhaps nothing) depends on this service - and most PCs already have it disabled, with no ill effects.
A few things were settled in the last Slashdot thread:
1) This guy doesn't represent Google.
2) This guy has waited for years for Microsoft to fix other critical vulnerabilities. (this also means he has experience measuring bullshit responses)
3) This guy picked a mostly benign exploit to make his point.
Microsoft has a history of poor patch times. I recall some IE6 exploits going unpatched for 500+ days. If you don't think that's okay, then you need to reexamine what you think this guy is doing. I'll give you a hint - he's making a point, which will ultimately help far more than it hurts.
Oh oh! We could use Mechanical Turk to verify the veracity of the "Junk" clicks!
The only DMCA notices I've gotten were for things I never downloaded or uploaded.
For example, a Prince of Persia widescreen crack. After examining the files the torrent listed, I deleted it and played it on my older PC with its 4:3 monitor.
Sure enough, a month later, I got one of those notices. Game piracy... haha!
It's especially funny, because I bought two retail copies, because I thought so much of the game. This whole industry is clueless.
But somehow, I don't think they're complete morons, so I'm going to assume they have some modest idea WTH they were doing, and they aren't going to be humbled by 5 seconds of thought by a random /.er.
Designing a server that companies will actually buy? Not rewriting/compiling software to run on ARM is a perk, which probably outweighs increased cost and power consumption.
Sounds like similar considerations to those that are important for ARM/MIPS CPUs.
When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image.
But isn't rotating a JPEG photo a lossy operation? We really need to have rotation commands built into the file format itself...
I've seen people rotate photos the wrong direction, then rotate back the other way twice - but they double clicked once instead, so now it's still on its side. They keep clicking, to spin it around - but the computer lags for a second, so they click, and click, and click. Then it rotates all of a sudden, 5+ times, and is sitting upside down. So they click it again and again...
Would re-saving a photo 10+ times reduce quality?
I repeat - we need rotation commands built into the file format itself. Allowing lossless manipulation of gamma, saturation, brightness, contrast, rotation, etc. on lossy images would be a good thing. Meta-data could do it, but only if all software is aware, and doesn't strip that info away. Making it part of the file format makes it a more reliable locked-in-stone feature.
Sounds like you need to buy stuff on PC.
I'd suggest Steam, but a lot of people don't seem to believe they'll be around in 20 years - hence that insane "I must have a disc" requirement I keep hearing.
Well, for you, there's GOG. No DRM, so you can backup all the installers onto external HDD or DVD.
I'm not worried, though - Steam's track record is far superior to these other distribution services. XBoxLive/PSN will be good and dead before Steam disappears. (Microsoft already shutoff XBox1 Live, didn't they? That means in about 6-8 years, XBox360 Live will be shut down?)
Im sure his hotfix and one man testing matches MS's extensive testing.
It's for XP, so it probably exceeds it.
Judging by all the individuals on the MSFN forums that did Win2k hotfixes better than Microsoft, from 2006 on... and now all the people there fixing bugs in Microsoft's XP hotfixes... I'm guessing that one person can do better testing and fixes than Microsoft. And my guess is based on different individuals doing so hundreds of times.
Seriously, do you think any company would just release this fix immediately without serious testing?
No no, of course not...
What anti-MS post?
Successfully not using Windows makes you a troll and/or Microsoft hater? Get a life.
I found it informative that even as far as a decade and a half back, there's people out there that found solutions. That's pre-OSX, so I'm guessing he's been using various linux distros, which I'd like to find out more about. We all know of Ubuntu - but what did people do 14 years ago, when there seemingly were no full-featured alternatives?
VLC, Mplayer, Perrian, etc on OSX can play better than Flash, that is not the same thing as "perfectly fine". VLC and Mplayer a quite optimized so with a fast enough CPU they can grunt through playback without help. That doesn't mean it's working fine. Use VLC or Mplayer on Windows or Linux on the same hardware and the CPU use is drastically reduced because hardware acceleration works.
Playing 1080 video in Windows XP, my Phenom II X4 faces a staggering 6% CPU usage.
You are correct.
For home systems, you don't have the malicious admin worry - and if you're looking at tape backups, you're probably competent enough to secure your local network.
I just use live backups. My primary concern is disks silently yet rapidly dying, and live backups solve that. Add some revisioning, and accidentally deleting a file or overwriting it is solved. Now all that's left is fires or other house-destroying events, and theft. Theft is easily solved by hiding your NAS in creative ways.
If you have absolutely critical info that cannot be lost... encrypted online backup services can act as offsite backup. Make sure you get one where your privacy is guaranteed - if you lose the passkey, you lose all your files.