But seriously, drop the ball mouse. Playskill goes way up when you pump up the DPI and drop in-game sensitivity. It lets you be more accurate while also moving the mouse faster.
Now that I've switched to a high DPI infrared mouse, I get accused of hacking all the time. It's great!
Yes, there's $20 cellphones. If you mass produce 500k of a model, then you can get the PCB costs down to about $7 populated. Throw in a $3 ARM MCU and $5 GSM chip and some required extras like SIM card, LCD and battery. Okay, maybe $20 is unrealistic - but $35 isn't.
Might want to google the Peek Pronto. The CEO had a teardown of one. Very tiny PCB with only a few chips on it. It does email through GSM.
There's never going to be a $20 netbook even if your labor costs were zero.
Just like there's never going to be a $20 HDD? Oh wait...
With the new SoCs coming out, where a single chip can do everything... I could see a $10 chip powering a netbook with all its peripherals, years in the future.
Give it an SD card slot, affordable $30 screen, and your actual costs are under $100.
Sounds like it. USPS isn't nearly that expensive, but UPS always hammers you with extra charges. They seem to also round up on the value of a product, so if something costs $29, that's the $50 bracket, and gets a $40 handling fee.
ATI fell behind with their GPUs at one point. Then AMD took over, and now they're accelerating faster than nVidia.
nVidia has always had the superior GPGPU architecture when it comes to performance, and perhaps ease of coding. I imagine optimizing their GPUs to handle more generic code better will open up some innovative stuff to developers, since the number of shaders is going to continue to scale upwards.
I have an Athlon II X2 245 @ 3.55ghz, and an 8800GS. I load games faster than my friends with C2Q's and Core i7's, but they get better framerates. Everyone is annoyed that my $70 CPU (when I purchased it) and $50 GPU (again, when I purchased it) do so well.
But... I think the fast loadtimes have more to do with the dual-proc WD HDD I have.
I don't even check recommended requirements anymore: I know that if it has a 360 or PS3 port (or the other way around), I can run it.
I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but you're absolutely right.
I haven't checked the requirements for any of the ~30 games I've bought on Steam.
I picked up an 8800GS a year back for $50 for my 2048x1152 monitor. Shockingly, most games run fine on med/high/veryhigh. And unlike my last monitor, lack of AA isn't so distracting. This one has quite fine pixels, which makes it a really good combo.
Also, define "full detail". Is that at medium? High? Maximum? What level of anisotropic filtering? Anti aliasing?
Real gamers play with minimum details on an old Athlon XP./inb4flamewar
I have two nitpicks.
1) If you tweak Crysis, it performs much better. 2) If you add an SSD for Crysis, it performs much better. In some cases, the minimum FPS doubles. 16fps isn't very playable, but a solid 30fps with vsync definitely is. UE3 gets around this problem(HDD latency) by streaming in textures, so rather than get a lower framerate, sometimes you'll just be staring at gaudy soup textures for a second.
P.S. I play L4D2 on an 8800GS (equiv to 9600GSO?) at 2048x1152. With AA off, everything else maxed, I get a solid 30fps. I would say the games you picked are exceptions rather than the rule. If you want them in their full graphical glory, then spend more money. On the other hand, if you would rather save $300, then tweak them or lower the detail levels slightly.
But a manned plane would be pretty neat. Hope it has enough batteries for the night - the solar UAV does a lot of gliding, which might not be possible with a heavier aircraft actually attempting to get somewhere.
Most likely Asus is getting a sweet deal because they pushed Linux netbooks heavily early on. I'm guessing other OEMs are slightly higher - but not significantly higher.
It's more the controller than the cell type. Most SSDs are stupid when it comes to writing files. Oh sure, they try to wear level - but certain cells that are constantly used by the FS will get nuked, regardless. That only changes when you have a smarter FS, or a controller that is fast enough and smart enough to ignore the OS requests and remap everything wherever it wants. And a lot of SSDs make the mistake of assuming every cell has the same longevity, which is a totally flawed assumption.
Controllers that can wear-level properly, giving you heavy-load lifespans of a dozen years, require a ton of R&D. If they get it wrong the SSD corrupts lots of data, which just isn't an option for enterprise markets. That's why startups like FusionIO (which are now in the lead for fast SSDs) had such expensive drives, at first. They spent years designing before bringing a product to market.
But hey, it is doable. The ioDrive is the proof. Software like ZFS is also proof. The "perfect" (or close to) FS or storage algorithms are possible, if you have the engineers and money to throw at it.
ioDrive already exists. Why reinvent the wheel when you can slap a few controllers on and save all that R&D? Especially since it'd take years to catch up to FusionIO.
4 controllers for the drives, then two RAID controllers to make it two groups of two, and another to make it one group of two groups of two. Perfect!... if you ignore the cost.
Heroes has other problems. Like all modern shows, it suffers from shitty inconsistent plot syndrome - also known as confused writer syndrome.
Oh look, that guy just turned into dust when his power was taken away. It sure would be dumb of us to mention a few episodes later that eclipses have taken away powers in the past. I mean, obviously losing his powers before didn't turn him into dust, but now it should.
Oh, and lets make Sylar unkillable. Now we'll kill him, and bring him back in some crazy way... and kill him again, then bring him back... kill him, bring him back...
Seriously? Give me some good writing. Heroes makes me want to shout insults at the characters... about as much as Stargate Universe.
OMG - it's refueling! NOBODY saw that coming? You're supposed to be smart characters. Almost ANY viewer could figure it out before the end of the LAST episode!
OMG! A time loop, at a known point in time! We can't use this to dupe organic stuff like food or antibiotics, but wouldn't it be a good time to stock up on guns? Maybe even try duping our clothes a few times, because I'm sure they'll start to degrade... OH! And a dozen kino surfboards! Yeah!
Nope, nope - it's far too much to ask. TV annoys me.
If you're burning wood, you're probably creating more emissions than a solar panel would while being manufactured.
After all, as dirty as that factory is... when you churn out 1 million panels per year, the picture changes a bit.
P.S. If any emission is an emission, then you being alive is hurting the environment. What do you breathe out? CO2? What do you fart? I bet it includes methane. What do you burp?
It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number, thus breaking the algorithm when it measures time deltas and causing it to mis focus before snapping the picture.
How do programmers make these mistakes? Hell, I wrote an FPS counter for a game that was aware of signed ints suddenly going negative, and accounted for it.
Slashdot Mirror
They never did that for the "Bush chimp" pictures.
That's political satire - not racism.
So, wait... which one is it? The article says 5 minutes in, and the video says 14 minutes in.
I remember my first happy.jpg
IBM Model M ftw!
But seriously, drop the ball mouse. Playskill goes way up when you pump up the DPI and drop in-game sensitivity. It lets you be more accurate while also moving the mouse faster.
Now that I've switched to a high DPI infrared mouse, I get accused of hacking all the time. It's great!
Yes, there's $20 cellphones. If you mass produce 500k of a model, then you can get the PCB costs down to about $7 populated. Throw in a $3 ARM MCU and $5 GSM chip and some required extras like SIM card, LCD and battery. Okay, maybe $20 is unrealistic - but $35 isn't.
Might want to google the Peek Pronto. The CEO had a teardown of one. Very tiny PCB with only a few chips on it. It does email through GSM.
There's never going to be a $20 netbook even if your labor costs were zero.
Just like there's never going to be a $20 HDD? Oh wait...
With the new SoCs coming out, where a single chip can do everything... I could see a $10 chip powering a netbook with all its peripherals, years in the future.
Give it an SD card slot, affordable $30 screen, and your actual costs are under $100.
Sounds like it. USPS isn't nearly that expensive, but UPS always hammers you with extra charges. They seem to also round up on the value of a product, so if something costs $29, that's the $50 bracket, and gets a $40 handling fee.
No. Nobody that can license x86 to them is interested.
They are toying with the idea of ARM-nVidia SoCs, though.
ATI fell behind with their GPUs at one point. Then AMD took over, and now they're accelerating faster than nVidia.
nVidia has always had the superior GPGPU architecture when it comes to performance, and perhaps ease of coding. I imagine optimizing their GPUs to handle more generic code better will open up some innovative stuff to developers, since the number of shaders is going to continue to scale upwards.
I have an Athlon II X2 245 @ 3.55ghz, and an 8800GS. I load games faster than my friends with C2Q's and Core i7's, but they get better framerates. Everyone is annoyed that my $70 CPU (when I purchased it) and $50 GPU (again, when I purchased it) do so well.
But... I think the fast loadtimes have more to do with the dual-proc WD HDD I have.
I don't even check recommended requirements anymore: I know that if it has a 360 or PS3 port (or the other way around), I can run it.
I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but you're absolutely right.
I haven't checked the requirements for any of the ~30 games I've bought on Steam.
I picked up an 8800GS a year back for $50 for my 2048x1152 monitor. Shockingly, most games run fine on med/high/veryhigh. And unlike my last monitor, lack of AA isn't so distracting. This one has quite fine pixels, which makes it a really good combo.
Also, define "full detail". Is that at medium? High? Maximum? What level of anisotropic filtering? Anti aliasing?
Real gamers play with minimum details on an old Athlon XP. /inb4flamewar
I have two nitpicks.
1) If you tweak Crysis, it performs much better.
2) If you add an SSD for Crysis, it performs much better. In some cases, the minimum FPS doubles. 16fps isn't very playable, but a solid 30fps with vsync definitely is. UE3 gets around this problem(HDD latency) by streaming in textures, so rather than get a lower framerate, sometimes you'll just be staring at gaudy soup textures for a second.
P.S. I play L4D2 on an 8800GS (equiv to 9600GSO?) at 2048x1152. With AA off, everything else maxed, I get a solid 30fps. I would say the games you picked are exceptions rather than the rule. If you want them in their full graphical glory, then spend more money. On the other hand, if you would rather save $300, then tweak them or lower the detail levels slightly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNHD41MLMk
But a manned plane would be pretty neat. Hope it has enough batteries for the night - the solar UAV does a lot of gliding, which might not be possible with a heavier aircraft actually attempting to get somewhere.
I did just upgrade... my monitor! :P
Are you referring to the insensitive clod meme? Yeah, it's not funny anymore.
Most likely Asus is getting a sweet deal because they pushed Linux netbooks heavily early on. I'm guessing other OEMs are slightly higher - but not significantly higher.
Hey, for $12, I'd buy Windows too!
It's more the controller than the cell type. Most SSDs are stupid when it comes to writing files. Oh sure, they try to wear level - but certain cells that are constantly used by the FS will get nuked, regardless. That only changes when you have a smarter FS, or a controller that is fast enough and smart enough to ignore the OS requests and remap everything wherever it wants. And a lot of SSDs make the mistake of assuming every cell has the same longevity, which is a totally flawed assumption.
Controllers that can wear-level properly, giving you heavy-load lifespans of a dozen years, require a ton of R&D. If they get it wrong the SSD corrupts lots of data, which just isn't an option for enterprise markets. That's why startups like FusionIO (which are now in the lead for fast SSDs) had such expensive drives, at first. They spent years designing before bringing a product to market.
But hey, it is doable. The ioDrive is the proof. Software like ZFS is also proof. The "perfect" (or close to) FS or storage algorithms are possible, if you have the engineers and money to throw at it.
ioDrive already exists. Why reinvent the wheel when you can slap a few controllers on and save all that R&D? Especially since it'd take years to catch up to FusionIO.
4 controllers for the drives, then two RAID controllers to make it two groups of two, and another to make it one group of two groups of two. Perfect!... if you ignore the cost.
Mine runs it at 2048x1152.
I just have trouble controlling my character at 7fps.
Like the TV show Heroes?
Heroes has other problems. Like all modern shows, it suffers from shitty inconsistent plot syndrome - also known as confused writer syndrome.
Oh look, that guy just turned into dust when his power was taken away. It sure would be dumb of us to mention a few episodes later that eclipses have taken away powers in the past. I mean, obviously losing his powers before didn't turn him into dust, but now it should.
Oh, and lets make Sylar unkillable. Now we'll kill him, and bring him back in some crazy way... and kill him again, then bring him back... kill him, bring him back...
Seriously? Give me some good writing. Heroes makes me want to shout insults at the characters... about as much as Stargate Universe.
OMG - it's refueling! NOBODY saw that coming? You're supposed to be smart characters. Almost ANY viewer could figure it out before the end of the LAST episode!
OMG! A time loop, at a known point in time! We can't use this to dupe organic stuff like food or antibiotics, but wouldn't it be a good time to stock up on guns? Maybe even try duping our clothes a few times, because I'm sure they'll start to degrade... OH! And a dozen kino surfboards! Yeah!
Nope, nope - it's far too much to ask. TV annoys me.
If you're burning wood, you're probably creating more emissions than a solar panel would while being manufactured.
After all, as dirty as that factory is... when you churn out 1 million panels per year, the picture changes a bit.
P.S. If any emission is an emission, then you being alive is hurting the environment. What do you breathe out? CO2? What do you fart? I bet it includes methane. What do you burp?
Absolutely. I think we can look to webpages as a shining example that users would never harm a system accidentally or on purpose.
Oh sorry, forgot - that was fixed before Vista came out of RC.
What password? I thought it was just a box you had to click, which could be navigated around with AutoHotkey scripts?
But the first thing I did when I wanted to change the DPI and UI size was go to Google.
And google had articles showing how to edit text files to get the job done. :P
It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number, thus breaking the algorithm when it measures time deltas and causing it to mis focus before snapping the picture.
How do programmers make these mistakes? Hell, I wrote an FPS counter for a game that was aware of signed ints suddenly going negative, and accounted for it.