>>People on the Autism spectrum, including people with Asperger's, are able to hear high-frequency sounds much better than the average person >>BTW, I downloaded all the tones at Free Mosquito Ringtones, and I was able to hear all of them, from 8 khz to 22 khz.
Ditto. I can hear a very high pitched whine coming from a muted television shut behind a wooden television door. What frequency is that? 20khz? 22khz?
My church uses a sort of teen repellent to keep deer away from the columbarium, but it drives me absolutely fucking nuts, since they leave it on during church services. After church, I literally run away from the building since the sound is so irritating.
I'm 30, and do have measured hearing loss from too many rock concerts.
But at the same time, I don't know how accurate hearing tests are, as the human brain isn't really calibrated to deal with the sorts of sine waves they produce in the tests.
Heh, I remember Phil Karn from the days when cable modems were first being deployed in San Diego (he's an engineer at Qualcomm). He wrote the first linux client to allow computers to connect to the cable modem network (this being back in the days when roadrunner required a weird login application), and was also pretty active on the local USENET forum for RR... also wrote some papers on how to make nuclear weapons or something... good times, good times...
Weird seeing a name you knew briefly 10 years later...
>>It was also a law that the California Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional, so it seems like in retrospect it was a pretty good call.
I am finally comfortable with the government here in California now that we have the courts handling all judicial, executive, and legislative functions.
It's neat that not only can they declare a law unconstitutional, but they can write their own as well ("the law now says gays can marry!", and order the local governments to execute it!
>>He'd be much better off running his own company with no bosses.
He ought to start a consulting company to provide IT services to the City of SF.
Reading over all the background in the story, it's quite possible he could do it at a much larger profit than he was making as a wage slave, while still reducing the city's costs. And he wouldn't have to report to the PHBs that seem to be the root cause of the conflict here.
Of course, it being SF, common sense isn't likely to prevail.
>>However the situation is still messed up, the City should never have allowed one person to take on so much responsibility, and at the first sign that he was becoming indispensable, they should have moved him to another project.
According to the article, Childs was very overworked, and was pushing for the city to hire a second person to rotate tasks with him, including reasons that you mention.
The bureaucrats, it seems, refused.
Of course, the article is all third-hand information, but I find that kind of situation very plausible. Budget restrictions forcing people into situations like that happen all the time, and short sighted managers are pandemic.
AoC does it right, I think. If you have a "find the missing boy" quest, instead of wandering aimlessly through an entire zone, or looking online for spoilers (which is how WoW works), it highlights a circle on your map, so you only have to look around in a restricted area. Makes it much more fun.
>>There is a big difference between telling a lay jury "this match had a one in a 113 billion chance of occurring at random" versus "this is an event that occurs randomly on a routine basis." Non-statisticians have a hard time getting their head around the concept of correction for multiple hypothesis testing.
To give an apocryphal quote by Mark Twain: "People use statistics the same way drunks use lampposts - for support, not illumination."
The lack of ability to reason statistically is extremely common in America. I mean extremely common - even in grad students publishing papers on stats, or in the technologically literate crowd. I'd used to write examples of egregiously bad stats in my livejournal in papers and news reports, but gave up because it was so common.
The DNA testing example is actually an example we studied in the Bayseian/conditional chapter of my stats textbook. It described an actual court case in LA where I got was convicted solely by DNA evidence (there was no other evidence to convict him, and he wasn't lucky enough to have an alibi) because the prosecutor confused the odds that (in this case) the odds of the match randomly matching being only one-in-a-million, and those are some pretty powerful odds. Of course, that would mean that in LA alone, there would be 6 people (on average) matching the DNA, and so the chance of the guy being guilty is actually only 1/6 or so.
The problem I have with the DNA "this has a one in 113 billion chance of matching" is that this is an extrapolated number based on certain premises of independence between the different loci. Whereas the more we learn about DNA, the more we learn that there is a high degree of covariability, certainly enough that (as the article shows), the odds of a match are actually much much higher.
>>While there is measurable impairment at a.08 BAC, most drunk driving accidents are caused by recidivist alcoholics with a much higher BAC..08??
Here in California, for a 20 year old like the guy in the article, the cutoff is.01. According to the DMV, a 280 pound 20 year old who drinks a single beer and waits four hours for it to wear off is "definitely unlawful": http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/pgs72duichart.htm
And it's not necessarily illegal for 20 year olds to drink, either... with parental consent it's actually legal.
While I think 0.08 has definitely impairment (four drinks in one hour... most people will feel it), the one drink in four hours law is just unbelievable.
>>This never should have been possible in a city government the size of San Francisco
I think it had less to do with being a city the "size of San Francisco" and more to do with the "San Francisco" part. I lived there for three years, and the government was just as nutty as the people living there.
Who says you can't get a representative government?
Seriously, you could stay up all night having a good laugh by reading the various proposals the City of SF has proposed or passed - the homeless hilton, the George W. Bush waste center, the ban on bottled water, the partial ban on plastic bags, banning throwing away recyclables and then arresting people who hunt through the trash for recyclables, etc. etc. etc. ad hilariousum.
>>In San Francisco, where you think they'd have no problem finding competent replacements.
As my buddy who lives in Mountain View (which is where all the techies actually are - it's about 45 minutes to an hour south of the actual city), "Those San Franciscans are weird." And he's lived in the Bay Area all his life. In other words, the technologically minded people live in the south bay, the nuts live in the city.
Just to piss him off, though, I intentionally confuse SF and Mt. View whenever I see him. =)
It pisses the hell out of me to hear people howling about global warming in one breath and then advocating not only a ban on nuclear power with the other, but also a ban on breeder reactors, which would get rid of the waste... which is the only main issue they have with nuclear power to begin with!
I'd laugh, except that is how our current laws are working right now. Here in California: no offshore drilling (and Ole' Pelosi will do her best to keep it that way), no breeder reactors, and all electricity customers have to pay money each month to decommission the nuclear plants we currently have!
>>If the EULA says you cannot mod or you cannot create an add-on then you can't
Courts have found at various times EULAs to be enforceable and not enforceable. In the EU, they are extremely restricted in terms of what they can specify. I kind of wish the US had a consumer bill of rights equal to the EU's. You know, things like the First Sale Doctrine actually getting codified into law...
But it wasn't really a EULA issue - the court ruled, quote (from the ruling.pdf): "Ninth Circuit law holds that the copying of software to RAM constitutes "copying" for purposes of section 106 of the Copyright Act. MAI Sys. Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993). Thus, if a person is not authorized by the copyright holder (through a license) or by law (through section117, which will be discussed below) to copy the software to RAM, the person is guilty of copyright infringement because the person has exercised a right (copying) that belongs exclusively to the copyright holder."
This is in clear violation of the actual copyright law (which unequivocally states that copying into RAM is not an actual copy), so glider should win on appeal, if they can overcome the hordes of evil lawyers Blizzard possesses.
Yeah, I used to go to LAN Parties with Mark Basinger, the guy who made the Diablo emulator, that Blizzard managed to convince a judge with a horribly warped view of the law that it was illegal.
Must be nice having billions of dollars to spend on evil lawyers.
>>Should we consider the airlines worth rescuing? (Again?) And why do you think lower fuel costs will do this?
Because the fuel costs are the main things that are killing them right now. Lower fuel costs will save a rather important sector of our economy, and would do so without billions of bail-out dollars. The free market, via Coal Liquefaction, would solve the problem instead.
>>The reality is, the U.S. airlines are in the situation they are in mostly due to the regulatory situation and inefficient management. And when we see that a company like Southwest does just fine, we have to wonder how much is really due to regulation
Guess again. Want to know why Southwest is doing fine when the other airlines are getting destroyed? Southwest locked in their gas prices at $60 a barrel. Makes you reconsider, eh?
>>Oh... well then we may as well make CO2 factories then !!
Just because you haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Venter has stated he needs a ton of CO2 for his new custom-bacteria project to convert into fuel. A FT conversion process throws out CO2 which can be trapped and fed to him.
>>We are so used to noisy dirty cars and filthy means of making energy that we just accept it.
Uh, no. We have had catalytic converters installed on all cars made since '86 which eliminate 90% or so of actual pollutants... CO2 isn't "dirty", by the way, it is just related to global warming.
If you ever go to China or southeast Asian countries without pollution controls for their cars, you'll be amazed by how much better air quality is in America.
>>Electric cars, are quiet and don't pollute.
And we have limited infrastructure for them. Gasoline, by comparison, we have infrastructure for.
>>When you burn coal you generate fly ash a toxic, radioactive compound that has to be dumped somewhere. Don't say underground. That's crap.
Who said anything about burning coal?? I'd love to eliminate all coal burning power plants, just for the reasons you mention - they spit out, well, an infinitely greater amount of radiation and pollution than nuclear plants (since nuclear plants don't emit either radiation or pollution). I was talking about Coal Liquefaction (google it), which converts the coal directly into gasoline.
>>Sasol (the âoeevilâ South African company) built a fairly large GTL plant in Qatar (in association with Chevron).
I never said Sasol was evil. In fact, my father (an ordinary man, not a bigwig) has talked with them several times about the cost of building their plants, how much gasoline would cost per barrel coming out of it, etc.
>>Love it how you simplify complex geopolitical situations into evil and not evil.
You must be new here.
And yeah, it's not especially surprising, since I don't want to end up writing a bloody dissertation about everything from the Siege of Stalingrad (which was about Nazi oil) to institutionalized racism and the reactionary riots in South Africa which were quite monstrous for their part. It's Slashdot. People just skip the large posts anyway.
>>Switched to a Netgear VPN824V3 and the problem has pretty much disappeared.
Every single Netgear wireless router I've ever owned was shit, and needed to be rebooted on a (very) regular basis. This includes everything from their bargain-bin routers to the super-duper-hyperprototype-N-plus routers.
>>While it can be harder to get the money back, you can definitely stop them from taking any more of your money in the future.
Credit Card companies that I talked to in the past (when an MMORPG refused to unsubscribe me, a similar situation to the HGL issue here), said they couldn't block future purchases from the company, but that I'd have to dispute each one.
Unfortunately: >>Note however that the last time I had to do that sort of thing, my bank (Abbey in the UK) had to issue me a new debit card to stop the payments, they couldn't (or wouldn't) simply refuse them....that is the only solution when you get into a situation like that.
If one technology could really change the world, it would be coal liquefaction. It's an 80 year old, proven, technology - that no one has ever heard of.
What is it? It solves the gasoline crunch by converting coal (which is crazy abundant, especially in America) into gasoline. It throws off energy as a byproduct (which helps solve our energy grid needs) as well as CO2 -- which sounds bad, but can be trapped easily since it is in a closed loop.
Cleanly converting coal to gas is more expensive than the normal FT process, but still produces gas at around the $2 a gallon level, which would be enough to kickstart our economy, rescue the airlines, save energy costs for poor people (as much wealthy environmentalists hate to admit it, poor people are the ones that get fucked by sky-high gas and energy costs), and produce CO2, which is needed for, aha!, Craig Venter's latest pet project, which involves custom bacteria that consume large amounts of C02, and which he's publicly stated he needs a large supply thereof.
Best of all, it's a mature technology. It was used to power the entire Nazi war machine in WWII, and South Africans under apartheid. Not because evil countries have an affinity for it, but because they were cut off from the world's oil supplies.
And yet when Coal Liquefaction was debated in congress, retarded children like our very own Senator Feinstein claimed that it was an immature technology, and voted it down.
Offloading the sound processing to the SB X-Fi bought me about 10-20 fps in games when I benchmarked it immediately before and after installation. On-board sound requires your CPU to do math, and if you have a lot of stuff going on, with various filters being applied to them, it makes a noticeable difference. More importantly, it stopped the occasional hitches and slowdowns I'd get, especially with winamp running in the background.
Plus, the sound that comes out of it sounds a lot better (or more precisely, can sound a lot better, depending on your settings).
I'm not someone that likes to buy toys or waste money on random crap for my computer, but I do think it's worth the hundred bucks, especially because my system stopped hesitating, which was bothering the hell out of me.
I have an A630 as well, and it fucks up all the time when using the automated XP windows photo downloader thingy. It gets an error while trying to read from the camera, and starts skipping photos. No problems under Vista, though.
However, nothing stops me from just popping the memory card out and reading the photos off that way, and it goes much faster as well.
Slashdot Mirror
>>People on the Autism spectrum, including people with Asperger's, are able to hear high-frequency sounds much better than the average person
>>BTW, I downloaded all the tones at Free Mosquito Ringtones, and I was able to hear all of them, from 8 khz to 22 khz.
I think you just diagnosed yourself!
Ditto. I can hear a very high pitched whine coming from a muted television shut behind a wooden television door. What frequency is that? 20khz? 22khz?
My church uses a sort of teen repellent to keep deer away from the columbarium, but it drives me absolutely fucking nuts, since they leave it on during church services. After church, I literally run away from the building since the sound is so irritating.
I'm 30, and do have measured hearing loss from too many rock concerts.
But at the same time, I don't know how accurate hearing tests are, as the human brain isn't really calibrated to deal with the sorts of sine waves they produce in the tests.
>>Apparently the balance for this company is at 180 days. That's a bit short for my taste, but that's what this company has decided.
A bit short?? Man, I'd hate to have a one-year contract with this company.
"I'm sorry, sir, but there's no record of your milestones for this year...."
Heh, I remember Phil Karn from the days when cable modems were first being deployed in San Diego (he's an engineer at Qualcomm). He wrote the first linux client to allow computers to connect to the cable modem network (this being back in the days when roadrunner required a weird login application), and was also pretty active on the local USENET forum for RR... also wrote some papers on how to make nuclear weapons or something... good times, good times...
Weird seeing a name you knew briefly 10 years later...
>>I guess Newsom is an MCSE/CCNA and therefore is trusted.
Nah, he's just in Childs' .hosts file.
>>It was also a law that the California Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional, so it seems like in retrospect it was a pretty good call.
I am finally comfortable with the government here in California now that we have the courts handling all judicial, executive, and legislative functions.
It's neat that not only can they declare a law unconstitutional, but they can write their own as well ("the law now says gays can marry!", and order the local governments to execute it!
Judges always give fair rulings, right?
>>He'd be much better off running his own company with no bosses.
He ought to start a consulting company to provide IT services to the City of SF.
Reading over all the background in the story, it's quite possible he could do it at a much larger profit than he was making as a wage slave, while still reducing the city's costs. And he wouldn't have to report to the PHBs that seem to be the root cause of the conflict here.
Of course, it being SF, common sense isn't likely to prevail.
>>However the situation is still messed up, the City should never have allowed one person to take on so much responsibility, and at the first sign that he was becoming indispensable, they should have moved him to another project.
According to the article, Childs was very overworked, and was pushing for the city to hire a second person to rotate tasks with him, including reasons that you mention.
The bureaucrats, it seems, refused.
Of course, the article is all third-hand information, but I find that kind of situation very plausible. Budget restrictions forcing people into situations like that happen all the time, and short sighted managers are pandemic.
Yeah, EQ was pretty terrible like that.
AoC does it right, I think. If you have a "find the missing boy" quest, instead of wandering aimlessly through an entire zone, or looking online for spoilers (which is how WoW works), it highlights a circle on your map, so you only have to look around in a restricted area. Makes it much more fun.
>>There is a big difference between telling a lay jury "this match had a one in a 113 billion chance of occurring at random" versus "this is an event that occurs randomly on a routine basis." Non-statisticians have a hard time getting their head around the concept of correction for multiple hypothesis testing.
To give an apocryphal quote by Mark Twain: "People use statistics the same way drunks use lampposts - for support, not illumination."
The lack of ability to reason statistically is extremely common in America. I mean extremely common - even in grad students publishing papers on stats, or in the technologically literate crowd. I'd used to write examples of egregiously bad stats in my livejournal in papers and news reports, but gave up because it was so common.
The DNA testing example is actually an example we studied in the Bayseian/conditional chapter of my stats textbook. It described an actual court case in LA where I got was convicted solely by DNA evidence (there was no other evidence to convict him, and he wasn't lucky enough to have an alibi) because the prosecutor confused the odds that (in this case) the odds of the match randomly matching being only one-in-a-million, and those are some pretty powerful odds. Of course, that would mean that in LA alone, there would be 6 people (on average) matching the DNA, and so the chance of the guy being guilty is actually only 1/6 or so.
The problem I have with the DNA "this has a one in 113 billion chance of matching" is that this is an extrapolated number based on certain premises of independence between the different loci. Whereas the more we learn about DNA, the more we learn that there is a high degree of covariability, certainly enough that (as the article shows), the odds of a match are actually much much higher.
>>While there is measurable impairment at a .08 BAC, most drunk driving accidents are caused by recidivist alcoholics with a much higher BAC. .08??
Here in California, for a 20 year old like the guy in the article, the cutoff is .01. According to the DMV, a 280 pound 20 year old who drinks a single beer and waits four hours for it to wear off is "definitely unlawful":
http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/pgs72duichart.htm
And it's not necessarily illegal for 20 year olds to drink, either... with parental consent it's actually legal.
While I think 0.08 has definitely impairment (four drinks in one hour... most people will feel it), the one drink in four hours law is just unbelievable.
>>This never should have been possible in a city government the size of San Francisco
I think it had less to do with being a city the "size of San Francisco" and more to do with the "San Francisco" part. I lived there for three years, and the government was just as nutty as the people living there.
Who says you can't get a representative government?
Seriously, you could stay up all night having a good laugh by reading the various proposals the City of SF has proposed or passed - the homeless hilton, the George W. Bush waste center, the ban on bottled water, the partial ban on plastic bags, banning throwing away recyclables and then arresting people who hunt through the trash for recyclables, etc. etc. etc. ad hilariousum.
>>In San Francisco, where you think they'd have no problem finding competent replacements.
As my buddy who lives in Mountain View (which is where all the techies actually are - it's about 45 minutes to an hour south of the actual city), "Those San Franciscans are weird." And he's lived in the Bay Area all his life. In other words, the technologically minded people live in the south bay, the nuts live in the city.
Just to piss him off, though, I intentionally confuse SF and Mt. View whenever I see him. =)
Amen, brother!
It pisses the hell out of me to hear people howling about global warming in one breath and then advocating not only a ban on nuclear power with the other, but also a ban on breeder reactors, which would get rid of the waste... which is the only main issue they have with nuclear power to begin with!
I'd laugh, except that is how our current laws are working right now. Here in California: no offshore drilling (and Ole' Pelosi will do her best to keep it that way), no breeder reactors, and all electricity customers have to pay money each month to decommission the nuclear plants we currently have!
Ugh.
>>If the EULA says you cannot mod or you cannot create an add-on then you can't
Courts have found at various times EULAs to be enforceable and not enforceable. In the EU, they are extremely restricted in terms of what they can specify. I kind of wish the US had a consumer bill of rights equal to the EU's. You know, things like the First Sale Doctrine actually getting codified into law...
But it wasn't really a EULA issue - the court ruled, quote (from the ruling .pdf):
"Ninth Circuit law holds that the copying of software to RAM constitutes "copying"
for purposes of section 106 of the Copyright Act. MAI Sys. Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc.,
991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993). Thus, if a person is not authorized by the copyright
holder (through a license) or by law (through section117, which will be discussed below) to
copy the software to RAM, the person is guilty of copyright infringement because the person
has exercised a right (copying) that belongs exclusively to the copyright holder."
This is in clear violation of the actual copyright law (which unequivocally states that copying into RAM is not an actual copy), so glider should win on appeal, if they can overcome the hordes of evil lawyers Blizzard possesses.
Yeah, I used to go to LAN Parties with Mark Basinger, the guy who made the Diablo emulator, that Blizzard managed to convince a judge with a horribly warped view of the law that it was illegal.
Must be nice having billions of dollars to spend on evil lawyers.
>>Should we consider the airlines worth rescuing? (Again?) And why do you think lower fuel costs will do this?
Because the fuel costs are the main things that are killing them right now. Lower fuel costs will save a rather important sector of our economy, and would do so without billions of bail-out dollars. The free market, via Coal Liquefaction, would solve the problem instead.
>>The reality is, the U.S. airlines are in the situation they are in mostly due to the regulatory situation and inefficient management. And when we see that a company like Southwest does just fine, we have to wonder how much is really due to regulation
Guess again. Want to know why Southwest is doing fine when the other airlines are getting destroyed? Southwest locked in their gas prices at $60 a barrel. Makes you reconsider, eh?
>>Oh ... well then we may as well make CO2 factories then !!
Just because you haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Venter has stated he needs a ton of CO2 for his new custom-bacteria project to convert into fuel. A FT conversion process throws out CO2 which can be trapped and fed to him.
>>We are so used to noisy dirty cars and filthy means of making energy that we just accept it.
Uh, no. We have had catalytic converters installed on all cars made since '86 which eliminate 90% or so of actual pollutants... CO2 isn't "dirty", by the way, it is just related to global warming.
If you ever go to China or southeast Asian countries without pollution controls for their cars, you'll be amazed by how much better air quality is in America.
>>Electric cars, are quiet and don't pollute.
And we have limited infrastructure for them. Gasoline, by comparison, we have infrastructure for.
>>When you burn coal you generate fly ash a toxic, radioactive compound that has to be dumped somewhere. Don't say underground. That's crap.
Who said anything about burning coal?? I'd love to eliminate all coal burning power plants, just for the reasons you mention - they spit out, well, an infinitely greater amount of radiation and pollution than nuclear plants (since nuclear plants don't emit either radiation or pollution). I was talking about Coal Liquefaction (google it), which converts the coal directly into gasoline.
>>Sasol (the âoeevilâ South African company) built a fairly large GTL plant in Qatar (in association with Chevron).
I never said Sasol was evil. In fact, my father (an ordinary man, not a bigwig) has talked with them several times about the cost of building their plants, how much gasoline would cost per barrel coming out of it, etc.
>>Love it how you simplify complex geopolitical situations into evil and not evil.
You must be new here.
And yeah, it's not especially surprising, since I don't want to end up writing a bloody dissertation about everything from the Siege of Stalingrad (which was about Nazi oil) to institutionalized racism and the reactionary riots in South Africa which were quite monstrous for their part. It's Slashdot. People just skip the large posts anyway.
>>Problem is that the other liter goes up on smoke .. I mean CO2.
Which I talked about. There's actually a demand for high percentage CO2 air.
>>The energy solution you want is nuclear. No emissions.
Absolutely. For the power grid.
But nuclear has nothing to do with gas prices, except indirectly, as it will free up more coal to be converted into gasoline.
>>Switched to a Netgear VPN824V3 and the problem has pretty much disappeared.
Every single Netgear wireless router I've ever owned was shit, and needed to be rebooted on a (very) regular basis. This includes everything from their bargain-bin routers to the super-duper-hyperprototype-N-plus routers.
>>While it can be harder to get the money back, you can definitely stop them from taking any more of your money in the future.
Credit Card companies that I talked to in the past (when an MMORPG refused to unsubscribe me, a similar situation to the HGL issue here), said they couldn't block future purchases from the company, but that I'd have to dispute each one.
Unfortunately: ...that is the only solution when you get into a situation like that.
>>Note however that the last time I had to do that sort of thing, my bank (Abbey in the UK) had to issue me a new debit card to stop the payments, they couldn't (or wouldn't) simply refuse them.
If one technology could really change the world, it would be coal liquefaction. It's an 80 year old, proven, technology - that no one has ever heard of.
What is it? It solves the gasoline crunch by converting coal (which is crazy abundant, especially in America) into gasoline. It throws off energy as a byproduct (which helps solve our energy grid needs) as well as CO2 -- which sounds bad, but can be trapped easily since it is in a closed loop.
Cleanly converting coal to gas is more expensive than the normal FT process, but still produces gas at around the $2 a gallon level, which would be enough to kickstart our economy, rescue the airlines, save energy costs for poor people (as much wealthy environmentalists hate to admit it, poor people are the ones that get fucked by sky-high gas and energy costs), and produce CO2, which is needed for, aha!, Craig Venter's latest pet project, which involves custom bacteria that consume large amounts of C02, and which he's publicly stated he needs a large supply thereof.
Best of all, it's a mature technology. It was used to power the entire Nazi war machine in WWII, and South Africans under apartheid. Not because evil countries have an affinity for it, but because they were cut off from the world's oil supplies.
And yet when Coal Liquefaction was debated in congress, retarded children like our very own Senator Feinstein claimed that it was an immature technology, and voted it down.
>>So if you offload the sound processing to the sound card, and the graphics processing to the graphics card, what exactly is left for your CPU to do?
Stuff.
But no, seriously, whatever it is that pegs my CPU when running Crysis or Age of Conan.
Offloading the sound processing to the card makes a very noticeable difference.
>>Who are these people who buy sound cards?
Offloading the sound processing to the SB X-Fi bought me about 10-20 fps in games when I benchmarked it immediately before and after installation. On-board sound requires your CPU to do math, and if you have a lot of stuff going on, with various filters being applied to them, it makes a noticeable difference. More importantly, it stopped the occasional hitches and slowdowns I'd get, especially with winamp running in the background.
Plus, the sound that comes out of it sounds a lot better (or more precisely, can sound a lot better, depending on your settings).
I'm not someone that likes to buy toys or waste money on random crap for my computer, but I do think it's worth the hundred bucks, especially because my system stopped hesitating, which was bothering the hell out of me.
I have an A630 as well, and it fucks up all the time when using the automated XP windows photo downloader thingy. It gets an error while trying to read from the camera, and starts skipping photos. No problems under Vista, though.
However, nothing stops me from just popping the memory card out and reading the photos off that way, and it goes much faster as well.