The Radeon does a reasonable job with WoW, at least the 64MB model. It's no speed demon, but outside of extremely busy areas, it does a workmanlike job at 1024x768. It's faster than my Centrino (Pentium M) notebook with integrated video. Apple claims that the graphics performance from the integrated video will be slightly better...whatever that means.
1GB of RAM improved the performance on my Mini. I'm sure the processor upgrade will help, too, but it'll still be bound by the graphics.
No doubt you could undercut Dell on the system, but, speaking only from my experience, there may not be much of a payoff. I work for a 20,000+ employee company and we used to buy a mix of Dell and Compaq systems. The IT department figured out that they could buy the parts and build their own white box systems (literally - the cases were some cheap white box). They saved a lot of money on the front end, that's for sure. They even standardized the hardware and software BOM. And now, a year later, we're stuck with all of the problems that came from this grand experiment. The systems are unstable, whatever warranties that are left are serviced by different vendors and no real productive work can be done on these machines. The back end support costs pretty much ate up everything that was saved on the front end.
We're back to buying from Dell. We buy the same stuff that everybody else does and I have to say that my Precision 470 kicks the white box's ass. Yeah, there's a fairly big difference in price, but there's a huge difference in performance and I don't have any concerns that five hours into a seven hour electrical simulation the system will lock up.
That $2200 machine probably could have been built in-house for a lot less, but after getting stung by the true expense of cheap hardware, it was worth it.
Microsoft doesn't support OEM installs - the OEM is on the hook for all support. When I ran tech support for a major (not Dell) computer manufacturer about 8 years ago, the agreement was that we provided support for the configuration as shipped and in return, our cost per license of Windows NT was about $45. We also provided the physical media and documentation. Back then, you actually got an OS CD, not a restore image.
The rules haven't changed and, I suspect, the licensing deals are pretty similar. Microsoft makes plenty of money from OEM sales, but I wouldn't say that they soak the vendors - at least not the major vendors. -h-
For $20 you can get a pair of headphones that give you (or at least, me) the same perceived quality as $1000 speakers.
Assuming that the $1000 speakers are the "Valued at $1000" speakers that the guy at the flea market sells for a hundred bucks. Or the ones from the back of the van that the guy has to move quick before the manager finds out about them.
Or, I guess they could be $1000 speakers driven by a $25 pawn shop amplifier. Who knows?
Umm, yes it should. Doppler Effect. The sound should change when you move your head because you're altering how fast a sound wave reaches your ears. Yanno, getting more into realistic physics and stuff for full immersion in a game.
Not the Doppler effect, just the time delta between the sound reaching each ear. That's the major tool that we use to tell direction in audio.
David Sirlin (www.sirlin.net) is currently a Producer / Game Designer at Backbone Entertainment. He's a multiple-time national Street Fighter tournament champion, author of the book Playing to Win, co-organizer of the Evolution Fighting Game Championships national tournament series, past member of Street Fighter Team USA (representing America at an annual international tournament held in Japan), and one of the main subjects of Bang the Machine (a documentary film about the competitive Street Fighter scene). He also did a two-year stint in the World of Warcraft.
Somehow I think that Mr. Silin's competitive accolades have blinded him to the fact that WoW is only...a game. And perhaps it's just me, but the best life lessons that I've received have been from, well, life.
If I volunteer professional services for a nonprofit, I'll take a tax deduction equal to the pay I would have received if I had been originally paid for my time.
Better hope that you don't get audited. That deduction is specifically not allowed by the IRS.
Constitutional monarchies are usually representative democracies where the monarch has no political power? Yes.
In which case, it would be a Constitutional Monarchy with a Parliamentary Democracy (see Canada). Do a bit of research - constitutional monarchies generally exist alongside a parliamentary democracy which is most definitely not the same thing as a representative democracy. In a representative democracy (or republic), the government is responsible to the people (by dint of being directly elected by them). In a parliamentary democracy, the government is primarily responsible to the parliament (by dint of being appointed by it).
If you think politics is polarized now, imagine our two party system with the president being appointed by the House of Representatives. Yikes.
Swedish security police and state department shutting down a political party's web site for showing a picture of Muhammed (Sweden is supposedly a democracy)
You mean for violating a law that was passed with the support of a majority of the population?
Austria sentencing a British author to three years in prison for having non-conformant views (Austria is supposedly a democracy)
You mean for violating a law that was passed with the support of a majority of the population?
I'm not saying that they were right (primarily because I don't think that they were), but a very fine analog of democracy is "mob rule". Just because a government is democratic doesn't mean that you automatically get a Bill of Rights. Neither government is a US-style democracy, that's for sure.
I believe that he is referring to the disagreement between the the singular of "journalist's" and plural of "their". Now that's anal. It's also a grammar error.
That's not the copyright. Lennon's estate and Paul McCartney own the copyrights to the music and the lyrics. They assigned publishing rights to a third party, who then pays them royalties based on their copyright ownership.
And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them.
Naturally - they still hold the copyright on the lyrics and music. So the performance moves into the public domain, but that doesn't mean nearly as much as the copyright status of the lyrics and music. Nobody will be performing songs from "Please Please Me" for free. But royalty payments for the album itself will dry up.
What?? You replaced an amd64 box with a mac mini? You are crazy.
Well, I suppose it could be said that I'm crazy and I'd have a tough time arguing the point.
I didn't really replace the AMD64 box with the Mini - I really just use the Mini more than the AMD64. There's no getting around the fact that a Mac Mini can't compete with the Windows box in terms of processing and graphics speed. So, when that's the important factor, I use the AMD64 box.
A close second place to noise (which I agree could be overcome with some good fan choices) is the physical size and asthetics of the box. It just doesn't fit into the living room well (which is my wife's opinion, and, as we know, her opinion gets 90% of the vote in the house). So, in my case, the Mac Mini was an excellent choice.
Besides, I already have an iPod and a VW Beetle - I might as well join the Sierra Club and start wearing Birkenstocks.
Slashdot Mirror
wait, what does america produce these days, other than malls and walmarts?
Oh, about $12 trillion worth of odds and ends.
-h-
The Radeon does a reasonable job with WoW, at least the 64MB model. It's no speed demon, but outside of extremely busy areas, it does a workmanlike job at 1024x768. It's faster than my Centrino (Pentium M) notebook with integrated video. Apple claims that the graphics performance from the integrated video will be slightly better...whatever that means.
1GB of RAM improved the performance on my Mini. I'm sure the processor upgrade will help, too, but it'll still be bound by the graphics.
-h-
No doubt you could undercut Dell on the system, but, speaking only from my experience, there may not be much of a payoff. I work for a 20,000+ employee company and we used to buy a mix of Dell and Compaq systems. The IT department figured out that they could buy the parts and build their own white box systems (literally - the cases were some cheap white box). They saved a lot of money on the front end, that's for sure. They even standardized the hardware and software BOM. And now, a year later, we're stuck with all of the problems that came from this grand experiment. The systems are unstable, whatever warranties that are left are serviced by different vendors and no real productive work can be done on these machines. The back end support costs pretty much ate up everything that was saved on the front end.
We're back to buying from Dell. We buy the same stuff that everybody else does and I have to say that my Precision 470 kicks the white box's ass. Yeah, there's a fairly big difference in price, but there's a huge difference in performance and I don't have any concerns that five hours into a seven hour electrical simulation the system will lock up.
That $2200 machine probably could have been built in-house for a lot less, but after getting stung by the true expense of cheap hardware, it was worth it.
As far as servers go, we use Suns.
-h-
Microsoft doesn't support OEM installs - the OEM is on the hook for all support. When I ran tech support for a major (not Dell) computer manufacturer about 8 years ago, the agreement was that we provided support for the configuration as shipped and in return, our cost per license of Windows NT was about $45. We also provided the physical media and documentation. Back then, you actually got an OS CD, not a restore image.
The rules haven't changed and, I suspect, the licensing deals are pretty similar. Microsoft makes plenty of money from OEM sales, but I wouldn't say that they soak the vendors - at least not the major vendors.
-h-
Guess you'd better revise your definition.
So painfully true - Google News used to link to /. stories as "news items". Apparently somebody wised up.
For $20 you can get a pair of headphones that give you (or at least, me) the same perceived quality as $1000 speakers.
Assuming that the $1000 speakers are the "Valued at $1000" speakers that the guy at the flea market sells for a hundred bucks. Or the ones from the back of the van that the guy has to move quick before the manager finds out about them.
Or, I guess they could be $1000 speakers driven by a $25 pawn shop amplifier. Who knows?
Umm, yes it should. Doppler Effect. The sound should change when you move your head because you're altering how fast a sound wave reaches your ears. Yanno, getting more into realistic physics and stuff for full immersion in a game.
Not the Doppler effect, just the time delta between the sound reaching each ear. That's the major tool that we use to tell direction in audio.
-h-
For those of you who don't know how to copy and past with a PC, ctrl-C copies and ctrl-V pastes. Brilliant!
David Sirlin (www.sirlin.net) is currently a Producer / Game Designer at Backbone Entertainment. He's a multiple-time national Street Fighter tournament champion, author of the book Playing to Win, co-organizer of the Evolution Fighting Game Championships national tournament series, past member of Street Fighter Team USA (representing America at an annual international tournament held in Japan), and one of the main subjects of Bang the Machine (a documentary film about the competitive Street Fighter scene). He also did a two-year stint in the World of Warcraft.
Somehow I think that Mr. Silin's competitive accolades have blinded him to the fact that WoW is only...a game. And perhaps it's just me, but the best life lessons that I've received have been from, well, life.
-h-
If I volunteer professional services for a nonprofit, I'll take a tax deduction equal to the pay I would have received if I had been originally paid for my time.
Better hope that you don't get audited. That deduction is specifically not allowed by the IRS.
-h-
Constitutional monarchies are usually representative democracies where the monarch has no political power? Yes.
In which case, it would be a Constitutional Monarchy with a Parliamentary Democracy (see Canada). Do a bit of research - constitutional monarchies generally exist alongside a parliamentary democracy which is most definitely not the same thing as a representative democracy. In a representative democracy (or republic), the government is responsible to the people (by dint of being directly elected by them). In a parliamentary democracy, the government is primarily responsible to the parliament (by dint of being appointed by it).
If you think politics is polarized now, imagine our two party system with the president being appointed by the House of Representatives. Yikes.
-h-
If you say so. By the way, Sweden is a monarchy. I should have caught that for you.
-h-
Swedish security police and state department shutting down a political party's web site for showing a picture of Muhammed (Sweden is supposedly a democracy)
You mean for violating a law that was passed with the support of a majority of the population?
Austria sentencing a British author to three years in prison for having non-conformant views (Austria is supposedly a democracy)
You mean for violating a law that was passed with the support of a majority of the population?
I'm not saying that they were right (primarily because I don't think that they were), but a very fine analog of democracy is "mob rule". Just because a government is democratic doesn't mean that you automatically get a Bill of Rights. Neither government is a US-style democracy, that's for sure.
-h-
I believe that he is referring to the disagreement between the the singular of "journalist's" and plural of "their". Now that's anal. It's also a grammar error.
Language evolves. Or maybe it's Designed Intelligently.
It changes.
I wonder if it would be possible to moderate this entire story as "-1, Flamebait".
In Soveit Russia, Police's job is a part of the porn
In Soviet Russia, spelling misses you.
So, it is a requirement that there be Democrats on the commission.
No, it is a requirement that no more than three commissioners can be from the same party.
That's not the copyright. Lennon's estate and Paul McCartney own the copyrights to the music and the lyrics. They assigned publishing rights to a third party, who then pays them royalties based on their copyright ownership.
-h-
Well, actually, Michael Jackson and Sony own the copyrights on most of the Beatles' music.
They own the copyrights of the performances, not of the lyrics and music.
And, for what it's worth, it looks like Sony will own MJ's half of the catalog soon.
-h-
Dude, you need to lay off the weed for a while - it's starting to affect your reading comprehension.
-h-
And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them.
Naturally - they still hold the copyright on the lyrics and music. So the performance moves into the public domain, but that doesn't mean nearly as much as the copyright status of the lyrics and music. Nobody will be performing songs from "Please Please Me" for free. But royalty payments for the album itself will dry up.
Of course, a lot can happen in seven years.
-h-
What?? You replaced an amd64 box with a mac mini? You are crazy.
Well, I suppose it could be said that I'm crazy and I'd have a tough time arguing the point.
I didn't really replace the AMD64 box with the Mini - I really just use the Mini more than the AMD64. There's no getting around the fact that a Mac Mini can't compete with the Windows box in terms of processing and graphics speed. So, when that's the important factor, I use the AMD64 box.
A close second place to noise (which I agree could be overcome with some good fan choices) is the physical size and asthetics of the box. It just doesn't fit into the living room well (which is my wife's opinion, and, as we know, her opinion gets 90% of the vote in the house). So, in my case, the Mac Mini was an excellent choice.
Besides, I already have an iPod and a VW Beetle - I might as well join the Sierra Club and start wearing Birkenstocks.
-h-
Have fun trying to migrate mail.
Piece o'cake. Import messages from Outlook to Thunderbird. Copy Thunderbird mailboxes to Mac. Import mailboxes to Entourage. Tada!