Actually, you may be disappointed if you buy SSDs for the boot speed. HDD manufacturers have done a remarkable job optimizing that. And in the case of an OS like Vista, the benefit from an SSD's low latency is dwarfed by the benefit from an HDD's raw read speed. Those 640GB Caviar drives are apparently one of the fastest booting HDDs/SSDs. (unless you go incredibly high end)
SSDs have been proven enormously helpful for games, though; especially games where you can't possibly store all the textures in memory, such as... Crysis.
Well, it would make some of my work go way faster. I imagine creating.ISO files would be whizz bang fast.
But no, I don't have a 24/7 need for it - maybe a 2h/1d need for it.:P It would mostly just be to boast that while most people are stuck at 100MB/sec, my computer is pumping through the gigabytes!;)
RAM drives would hit the SATA 3.0 cap, and they were available in 2005. The Gigabyte I-RAM could manage multiple GB of transfer per second(like all RAM can), but was capped by using a single 150MB/sec SATA1 port.:/
Luckily RAM is so cheap now, that if you really want a RAM drive, you just buy 16GB and create a software RAM drive.
I remember when someone stuck six FusionIO IODrives together and got about 2.2GB/sec of bandwidth out of a regular 2-socket server board. (like those Tyan ones, which can be had for well under $1000) It seriously makes me drool... though I suppose all I really need out of an SSD is 200MB/sec with minimal latency.
Any person threatening to move to Monaco already spends enough time there to know they like it there, and has clearly researched the laws in that part of the world.
So... I'm not convinced this tax thing is the reason they'd be leaving. And I agree with you about the influence they have.
No it isn't, because of the nature of how the consumer demands they price their CPUs.
Lets look at the P4 to C2D jump.
They still need money for R&D, so what are they supposed to do? Charge $100 for a 3.6ghz Pentium D(R&D all paid up), and $800 for a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo? Good luck selling that to consumers.
Nope. We demand prices based on the performance we get - not the realities of the product. If a P4 costs $100 then an equivalent performance C2D must cost close to that - lets say $150 - or we won't buy it. Intel would clearly have no choice but to sell a higher performing part for more money, to cover the R&D costs - but how can they do that without selling lower performing parts?
Answer: They can't. And there you have the reason it's not anti-trust. Consumers demand that that companies supply a product for a competitive price. It's up to the company to figure out how the heck they balance their books.
Now...
Lately I've noticed both Intel and AMD are targeting overclockers. First Intel with their hugely overclockable C2D's, and now AMD with their core unlockable Phenom II's. Near as I can tell, just about every tri-core Phenom II is a working quad.:O I must admit, they've got my money this time around!
Re:$800 bucks? Is it diamond encrusted?
on
Build an $800 Gaming PC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But then, it really depends how much money you want to spend on your games.
I pick all my games up on Steam when those 75% off sales come around.
TF2 - $10 Left4Dead - $20 Assassin's Creed - $10 Universe at War - $5
I imagine by the time I've bought 20 games, I've saved money by spending more money on a gaming PC.
But y'know, if you have no morals(or are a college student), PC games cost nothing!:P
most i can get on my console and not have to worry about compatibility, framerates etc.
Plus, you know, it's a PC, so you never have to worry about framerates like you do on a console. Have you seen the shit FPS a lot of those games get? I sure can tell when they drop below 60! At least with 25% of my computer's budget being spent on the GPU, I know it'll never lag for this generation of games.
And besides, I couldn't live without my mouse and keyboard.:) I imagine if I played Left4Dead on XBoxlive, I'd sorely miss all the accusations of aim hax.
So... $1k worth of parts, $19k markup, and at least $40k effort to create the software.
Yep, that's a $1000 UAV!:P
Re:Engine damage due to cars that are not prepared
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 1
How about Soy? Soy based fuels were first developed years and years ago. (I think by Ford?) Instead we're using it as a food, but apparently it's ideal for making plastics and fuel.
The thing is, soy is in everything. An unusually high percentage of the population has some negative reaction to it. Why not start using it as a fuel?
Zigbee is the most popular wireless module for DIY products/projects like the Arduino.
Current prices on sparkfun are $30 for an Arduino, and $25 for a wireless module. If the individual prices are that low, imagine how much markup companies like Insteon have? They're probably selling a $10 lightswitch for $45 plus shipping.
But Arduinos are great because you can reprogram them easily, on a whim, and they're powerful enough to control whatever the hell you want.
Oh, and a question (since I'm not actually into all this hardware hacking stuff); does a light dimmer use something like a potentiometer?
No. Large chunks of it are hexadecimal patterns that stuck in my head from when I learned how to create webpages.:P
F0D0C01S14ME;)
That's just 12 chars. Multiply by 4, then add the passphrase and typical stuff like random years/birthdays, plus an occasional symbol. I'm sure it'd be a pain to crack!
This is a solution for accessing any legacy soft and hard format, given sufficient resources.
Reverse engineering a binary format from a decade and a half ago is harder than converting old source code into new source code.
One requires a skilled individual, or maybe even team. The other requires a less skilled individual. Converting between programming languages isn't exactly rocket science. (it isn't assembly, either)
The enterprising novice only has to understand the source, and then re-implement it as a plugin in his favourite language.
(Contemplate what happens when current source code formats become incompatible...)
Do you really think C will be gone in a couple decades?;)
Those of us that love it do not. Those of us that do not love it, also do not. C is very resilient.
It's not so much thinking outside the box, as not forgetting what you put in it.
When you can't open documents from a decade and a half ago, because they were stored in some incompatible proprietary format, you can't help but get a bad taste in your mouth for the company that caused it.
Now if you can complete your required task by using free software instead, and you have a guarantee that format will always be supported... well, make the logical jump.
Even if it isn't always supported, you can save the sourcecode, and decades from now you just get some enterprising novice coder to create a plugin to load it, for some money and experience.;)
The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.
That means reasonably good graphics/sound effects(even if "bleeps and bloops" are the best possible), good level design, difficulty level which ramps up over time, etc.
Far too many modern games have poor level design, or difficulty fluctuates randomly, or the input scheme is awful. It can be quite irritating.
According to this spreadsheet, it'd take millenia to guess my best password.
But I suspect my password will be cracked by more advanced computers long before then. Or a keylogger will get me. Or I'll die of old age.
It's about 40-50 characters long before adding a passphrase to the end. It's not written down anywhere, either on paper or digitally. Like a true geek, I remember the whole thing in my head.
And no, I don't use this password on Slashdot. This is my special "only if it's direly important" password. For slashdot and most other sites, I use KeePass to generate passwords.
Opera used to be the worst one for javascript. Before Opera 9, so much DOM code was slightly different that it wasn't at all funny making compatible AJAX applications.
I remember at one point they had it so you had to use setProperty() to set any property on any DOM object. I'm sure glad they ditched that with Opera 9!
The only problems I've had with Firefox rendering, is every new version it breaks all my old AJAX applications, because stuff gets deprecated or requires a slightly different way of getting used. I've finally realized the benefit of just sticking with frameworks like JSON/JQuery, and letting other people figure the changes out.
The most disturbing thing about Firefox and Safari is their rendering was not consistent across operating systems. Seamonkey and Opera displayed identically on every OS tested.
I use them all the time. Tables are the only way to get a page to display properly on:
IE 5.5 -> 8 Firefox 2/3/Mac Safari Opera Seamonkey
And yes, Firefox 3 on a Mac does have rendering problems. If I remember correctly, last time I checked it handled CSS padding differently than every other browser.
The irony there is, every time a website fails to load in Safari, it works fine in Firefox. (And actually, Opera/Seamonkey too. Hmm...)
I somewhat agree with you - but I always want the option to turn gore off. Lets say a little kid comes over with some relative or something, and isn't exposed to that sort of stuff. Kids will naturally gravitate towards videogames and therefore, me. (when I'm playing them) I want to turn it off so I don't warp his mind.:P
I find excessive gore to be pointless, but dismemberment is handy in first person shooters.
What really blows me is when I'm playing a TBS, and after killing something gore goes everywhere. Seriously? What was the point of that? A stack with 1000 units gets knocked down to 10, and there's nothing, but once the stack falls over it erupts in blood everywhere?
Gore has to be somewhat realistic. It enhances non-pointless dismemberment.
Pointless dismemberment is where you shoot someone with a bullet or hit them with a machete, and everything goes flying everywhere because you did a crit for 200. >_> Tip: Shooting someone once will not blow all their limbs off, even if you get a "critical hit" (bypass armour)
Gore is done wrong in a lot of games. Often I just turn it off. I leave it on for games like Left4Dead, where it really enhances everything. It's nice being able to tell if you got a headshot, or hit an arm or a leg. It enhances your aim!
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe. :)
Actually, you may be disappointed if you buy SSDs for the boot speed. HDD manufacturers have done a remarkable job optimizing that. And in the case of an OS like Vista, the benefit from an SSD's low latency is dwarfed by the benefit from an HDD's raw read speed. Those 640GB Caviar drives are apparently one of the fastest booting HDDs/SSDs. (unless you go incredibly high end)
SSDs have been proven enormously helpful for games, though; especially games where you can't possibly store all the textures in memory, such as... Crysis.
Hehe. :)
Well, it would make some of my work go way faster. I imagine creating .ISO files would be whizz bang fast.
But no, I don't have a 24/7 need for it - maybe a 2h/1d need for it. :P It would mostly just be to boast that while most people are stuck at 100MB/sec, my computer is pumping through the gigabytes! ;)
RAM drives would hit the SATA 3.0 cap, and they were available in 2005. The Gigabyte I-RAM could manage multiple GB of transfer per second(like all RAM can), but was capped by using a single 150MB/sec SATA1 port. :/
Luckily RAM is so cheap now, that if you really want a RAM drive, you just buy 16GB and create a software RAM drive.
Oh - but in 2005 games didn't average 8GB each. :P
I really wish SATA 3.0 had a bigger jump than this. 600MB/sec is hardly anything for some of the high end SSDs and RAM-drives available.
If they become affordable, I'm definitely going for PCIe 4x SSDs, since they can hit 8GB/sec (80gbit) when RAID'd on server boards with tons of PCIe lanes.
I remember when someone stuck six FusionIO IODrives together and got about 2.2GB/sec of bandwidth out of a regular 2-socket server board. (like those Tyan ones, which can be had for well under $1000) It seriously makes me drool... though I suppose all I really need out of an SSD is 200MB/sec with minimal latency.
Any person threatening to move to Monaco already spends enough time there to know they like it there, and has clearly researched the laws in that part of the world.
So... I'm not convinced this tax thing is the reason they'd be leaving. And I agree with you about the influence they have.
No it isn't, because of the nature of how the consumer demands they price their CPUs.
Lets look at the P4 to C2D jump.
They still need money for R&D, so what are they supposed to do? Charge $100 for a 3.6ghz Pentium D(R&D all paid up), and $800 for a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo? Good luck selling that to consumers.
Nope. We demand prices based on the performance we get - not the realities of the product. If a P4 costs $100 then an equivalent performance C2D must cost close to that - lets say $150 - or we won't buy it. Intel would clearly have no choice but to sell a higher performing part for more money, to cover the R&D costs - but how can they do that without selling lower performing parts?
Answer: They can't. And there you have the reason it's not anti-trust. Consumers demand that that companies supply a product for a competitive price. It's up to the company to figure out how the heck they balance their books.
Now...
Lately I've noticed both Intel and AMD are targeting overclockers. First Intel with their hugely overclockable C2D's, and now AMD with their core unlockable Phenom II's. Near as I can tell, just about every tri-core Phenom II is a working quad. :O I must admit, they've got my money this time around!
But then, it really depends how much money you want to spend on your games.
I pick all my games up on Steam when those 75% off sales come around.
TF2 - $10
Left4Dead - $20
Assassin's Creed - $10
Universe at War - $5
I imagine by the time I've bought 20 games, I've saved money by spending more money on a gaming PC.
But y'know, if you have no morals(or are a college student), PC games cost nothing! :P
most i can get on my console and not have to worry about compatibility, framerates etc.
Plus, you know, it's a PC, so you never have to worry about framerates like you do on a console. Have you seen the shit FPS a lot of those games get? I sure can tell when they drop below 60! At least with 25% of my computer's budget being spent on the GPU, I know it'll never lag for this generation of games.
And besides, I couldn't live without my mouse and keyboard. :) I imagine if I played Left4Dead on XBoxlive, I'd sorely miss all the accusations of aim hax.
I don't quite follow.
Millionaire A stays, and pays more money. Millionaire B leaves, and pays the same amount of money in a different state.
End result - more tax revenue, spread around the whole country.
But if you don't give a crap about the other states, then by all means do whatever is best for your own state, and just your own state.
Computer wasn't originally IT specific, either. :P
I had two Seagate drives in RAID-1 die at the same time.
The culprit was shitty firmware. I didn't count on that - but luckily, everything important was also stored on another computer.
So... $1k worth of parts, $19k markup, and at least $40k effort to create the software.
Yep, that's a $1000 UAV! :P
How about Soy? Soy based fuels were first developed years and years ago. (I think by Ford?) Instead we're using it as a food, but apparently it's ideal for making plastics and fuel.
The thing is, soy is in everything. An unusually high percentage of the population has some negative reaction to it. Why not start using it as a fuel?
Zigbee is the most popular wireless module for DIY products/projects like the Arduino.
Current prices on sparkfun are $30 for an Arduino, and $25 for a wireless module. If the individual prices are that low, imagine how much markup companies like Insteon have? They're probably selling a $10 lightswitch for $45 plus shipping.
But Arduinos are great because you can reprogram them easily, on a whim, and they're powerful enough to control whatever the hell you want.
Oh, and a question (since I'm not actually into all this hardware hacking stuff); does a light dimmer use something like a potentiometer?
I love the idea of home automation, then I realize that my light switch isn't that far away.
Good thing you're not in a wheelchair.
No. Large chunks of it are hexadecimal patterns that stuck in my head from when I learned how to create webpages. :P
F0D0C01S14ME ;)
That's just 12 chars. Multiply by 4, then add the passphrase and typical stuff like random years/birthdays, plus an occasional symbol. I'm sure it'd be a pain to crack!
This is a solution for accessing any legacy soft and hard format, given sufficient resources.
Reverse engineering a binary format from a decade and a half ago is harder than converting old source code into new source code.
One requires a skilled individual, or maybe even team. The other requires a less skilled individual. Converting between programming languages isn't exactly rocket science. (it isn't assembly, either)
The enterprising novice only has to understand the source, and then re-implement it as a plugin in his favourite language.
(Contemplate what happens when current source code formats become incompatible...)
Do you really think C will be gone in a couple decades? ;)
Those of us that love it do not. Those of us that do not love it, also do not. C is very resilient.
It's not so much thinking outside the box, as not forgetting what you put in it.
When you can't open documents from a decade and a half ago, because they were stored in some incompatible proprietary format, you can't help but get a bad taste in your mouth for the company that caused it.
Now if you can complete your required task by using free software instead, and you have a guarantee that format will always be supported... well, make the logical jump.
Even if it isn't always supported, you can save the sourcecode, and decades from now you just get some enterprising novice coder to create a plugin to load it, for some money and experience. ;)
The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.
That means reasonably good graphics/sound effects(even if "bleeps and bloops" are the best possible), good level design, difficulty level which ramps up over time, etc.
Far too many modern games have poor level design, or difficulty fluctuates randomly, or the input scheme is awful. It can be quite irritating.
That was amazing! I need to try splitting my insightful posts in two.
According to this spreadsheet, it'd take millenia to guess my best password.
But I suspect my password will be cracked by more advanced computers long before then. Or a keylogger will get me. Or I'll die of old age.
It's about 40-50 characters long before adding a passphrase to the end. It's not written down anywhere, either on paper or digitally. Like a true geek, I remember the whole thing in my head.
And no, I don't use this password on Slashdot. This is my special "only if it's direly important" password. For slashdot and most other sites, I use KeePass to generate passwords.
Opera used to be the worst one for javascript. Before Opera 9, so much DOM code was slightly different that it wasn't at all funny making compatible AJAX applications.
I remember at one point they had it so you had to use setProperty() to set any property on any DOM object. I'm sure glad they ditched that with Opera 9!
The only problems I've had with Firefox rendering, is every new version it breaks all my old AJAX applications, because stuff gets deprecated or requires a slightly different way of getting used. I've finally realized the benefit of just sticking with frameworks like JSON/JQuery, and letting other people figure the changes out.
The most disturbing thing about Firefox and Safari is their rendering was not consistent across operating systems. Seamonkey and Opera displayed identically on every OS tested.
For anyone that didn't clue in, 500 miles is roughly 800km. (~804km, actually)
I use them all the time. Tables are the only way to get a page to display properly on:
IE 5.5 -> 8
Firefox 2/3/Mac
Safari
Opera
Seamonkey
And yes, Firefox 3 on a Mac does have rendering problems. If I remember correctly, last time I checked it handled CSS padding differently than every other browser.
The irony there is, every time a website fails to load in Safari, it works fine in Firefox. (And actually, Opera/Seamonkey too. Hmm...)
What!? You're giving the big evil corporation the benefit of the doubt!?
Well... fine. :P
But the stealing the default browser thing still applies. Microsoft has done that at least twice with IE.
I somewhat agree with you - but I always want the option to turn gore off. Lets say a little kid comes over with some relative or something, and isn't exposed to that sort of stuff. Kids will naturally gravitate towards videogames and therefore, me. (when I'm playing them) I want to turn it off so I don't warp his mind. :P
I find excessive gore to be pointless, but dismemberment is handy in first person shooters.
What really blows me is when I'm playing a TBS, and after killing something gore goes everywhere. Seriously? What was the point of that? A stack with 1000 units gets knocked down to 10, and there's nothing, but once the stack falls over it erupts in blood everywhere?
Gore has to be somewhat realistic. It enhances non-pointless dismemberment.
Pointless dismemberment is where you shoot someone with a bullet or hit them with a machete, and everything goes flying everywhere because you did a crit for 200. >_> Tip: Shooting someone once will not blow all their limbs off, even if you get a "critical hit" (bypass armour)
Gore is done wrong in a lot of games. Often I just turn it off. I leave it on for games like Left4Dead, where it really enhances everything. It's nice being able to tell if you got a headshot, or hit an arm or a leg. It enhances your aim!