Exactly the thing that's got me wondering. They usually introduce a newer generation a step up (Like my 8850 example) and keep the pricing at a premium while slowly refining and phasing out or lowering costs on the previous model. All good business sense, but particularly perplexing when they make that move without a threat on the shelves. Particularly now, while ATI has yet to ship anything that makes the 8800GTS feel threatened, let alone the GTX.
ATI could also announce the All-In-Wonder 3000HFHD! (*Holy Fucking High Definition!) with a gig of RAM, twice the speed of an 8800GTX and a pricetag of $500 tomorrow, but what're the chances of them shipping enough to make a dent before nVidia could slap out something quicker? With nVidia firmly in the iteration and improvement phase of design for the NV9X series, ATI's still looking like they're playing serious catchup just to get on the same field.
I'm a firm believer that ATI/AMD is a real threat to nVidia down the road, but they've got a lot of work to do in order to truly leverage that potential.
I've gotta disagree with that. You want a card with a good memory setup for things like Photoshop, just because you're working with such huge data structures on your screen. You don't want $20 cards, but a $50 card will likely do the trick.
I worked at a newspaper for a while, and they had a number of Pagemaker 7.5 machines running with some really lousy on-board graphics that were sold as "High-Spec" by the con artist offering tech support for the place for years previously. It took me bringing in my old GeForce 4 MX and dropping it into my workstation for the publisher to realize he'd been scammed, and order three more cards from Newegg to go into all the production machines. The speed increase working with these cards was gigantic - it felt to the production manager like she'd been given a whole new computer on her desk. $150 later, and speeds flipping between pages of broadsheet layout went from 20 seconds to instantaneous on three boxes, probably saving several work hours per week.
No upgrades until 2012? For a $1300 system using a single GTX? No, that's not going to happen. Within 2 years there will be games available, that you'll probably want, which will bring that machine to its knees. How do I know this? I played the Crysis demo on an C2D E6420 overclocked to 3Ghz with a single 8800GTS 640M card last night. With all the spiffy detail turned on (Under DX10) I got something close to 20fps at best, at 1680x1050. With monitor resolutions expected to increase, transistor counts on silicon continuing to take leaps and bounds, I -know- that my card has about 2 years of serving me at -best- before something vastly cheaper and far superior comes out... And I got about six months before something almost meeting those criteria hit.
My current system is planned to last until about midyear 2008 without any major upgrades, but the motherboard should carry me through to the end of LGA775's lifespan at least. I'll probably get a new CPU first, then a new video card, and probably do incremental upgrades until the end of LGA775 before I migrate to the next big thing.
It's really impossible to build a machine today that'll last five years - hence, why I -also- get the consoles. It's not even really a matter of being a die-hard gamer, it's just prioritizing entertainment options and trying to hit the peaks on the price-performance curve when you can.
I've gotta disagree, as someone that really dislikes the MS Juggernaut(tm) that the 360 is just a repackaged PC. It -is- a multi-core PPC based box, after all, using a custom video chip that may be based on but not completely copied from a PC design. As far as gaming systems go - and I have all three of the current generation's machines, I really have a lot of respect for what Microsoft's done with the 360. Sony reached too far too fast and too arrogantly, the Wii has great potential and innovation but really -is- hampered by hardware limitations, but the 360 seems to have struck a decent balance.
So far, I have about 20 games for the 360, about 5 for the Wii and a whopping 0 for the PS3. Though that will change with Rock Band, because I'm hopeful that Sony might make the microtransactions for songs less expensive or at least on par - and Microsoft really screwed the pooch on wireless controllers.
I would have initially assumed that nVidia, fearing a threat from ATI, would have taken a different route to try and get the big bucks. Drop the price on existing cards by a hundred bucks or so, use the NV92 used for the 8800GT as the 8850GT in order to differentiate the price features, and charge a premium price for it in the $350 range.
This way, early adopters don't feel like they got screwed into mild feature obsolecense by a card that costs half as much, people wanting the upgrades see more reason to buy the 8850GT because "Hey, it's a xx50 model - new features and still cheaper than the one I already bought!" without the lingering ball-ache of a $150 price drop - and, you've still got cards that devastate the existing ATI lineup with the potential to say "Well, screw ATI, now we're releasing the 8850GTS and GTX with more RAM, more monster cooling and both higher and lower prices." if ATI/AMD comes out with something that actually competes, unlike the 2900HD.
However, I do believe that nVidia is going to take a few pretty big steps in regards to more powerful cards before Christmas. The only real question is how much more power, and how much will they cost? The GTS and GTX models that are out now still dominate and command a high price that's out of reach for a lot of people. Are they just going to drop both the existing models like a hot potato as soon as new ones come out, or multi-tier with them some how?
That's a really good question. The GTS production costs were certainly higher, as it's a dual-slot card that uses more components, material and a larger die size, but as a GTS 640MB owner I'm feeling somewhat kicked in the sac. Yes, I'm fully aware that newer cards come out every few months, but it seems a little bit of a slap in the face when something comes out cheaper, arguably faster, and more manageable than your $400 piece of gear -without- a credible marketplace threat.
It's hard to imagine they're more per unit on the GT than the GTS, but sales volume will definitely make up for any shortcomings in that area. I have to hope that there's still some compelling reason why a user might decide to buy a GTS instead of a pair of GT's for SLI mode, particularly while motherboard support for PCIe's latest version has yet to really penetrate the market. I -think- my X38 based board has it, but since it's not an nVidia board and they haven't opened SLI up to other makers, it's largely useless.
However, this would be an excellent time for nVidia to start letting Intel use SLI on chipsets. They're going to get steamrolled by ATI in a generation or two if the AMD/ATI partnership continues to open up specifications, release better drivers, and jack up performance.
Seriously, I have to ask this. I know what Steam does, how it works, and I use it regularly. Where's the beef?
Are people upset that they feel forced to run a background application in order to play games? That I can understand, but if you cared that much about what ran in the background, you wouldn't be bitching about a Windows application because you wouldn't be running it would you?
Does online activation tweak people? I could understand this, if they weren't able to play in offline mode after activating once. This a perfectly reasonable method of copy protection, IMHO, because it does one mostly unobtrusive check and then immediately lets you turn off the net connection requirement to play in the future.
Are they worried about being able to play the game years from now or if Steam up and dies? Okay, understandable - but that's when you check with your friendly neighborhood pirate (If Valve doesn't do something like unlock everyone's copies before shutting off the lights.)
For me, Steam gives me a lot of advantages. I don't have to go to deal with Gamestop idiots. I can preload the game so it takes less time to unlock - even with the inevitable server overload on release days - than it would to install the game from CD or DVD. I can open Steam on a laptop or other computer and play the same games I bought on my desktop without needing to keep CD's handy. And above all else, Valve keeps adding features and games to Steam -beyond- just their own product. It helps to put money in the pockets of developers instead of the publishers, or at least sets up a way that can enable developers to have a lot more freedom in publishing methods down the road.
It's a hell of a lot less "Rental" than any MMO ever has been, and as a running application, Valve's put a good deal of work into making Steam run fairly transparently. On Vista x64 right now, it's using... Ten megs of memory. I think I can spare that, to know that my games are up to date and ready to play at any time I decide I want to.
Cake, and grief counseling. Far more appropriate. I just switched my primary desktop to Vista this past weekend (More a "Why the hell not, gotta learn it to support it -someday-) resignation, and have seen that after it's patched... Vista's still a buggy bastard. I haven't seen Explorer shit itself as frequently as I have this past three days since Windows ME.
I strongly feel that we're not going to have a winner in the next-generation format wars for at least another year to two years, with HD-DVD's recent landing of some exclusivity deals and Sony's built-in install base for BluRay players among the few, the maybe-proud PS3 owners. I've pretty much relegated myself to knowing that I'll have to own both player formats, and as much as I wanted to start out with an HD-DVD player, this news of impending PS2 compatibility removal is what drove the addition of a PS3 to the A/V rack yesterday.
I have never been a Sony fanboy - not much a fanboy for anything, really - but after walking out of Best Buy with two BluRay movies and not a single game I have to admit I know what Sony was talking about when they said they were selling a home entertainment system and not a games console. The sheer potential in this hardware is pretty amazing, the recent firmware additions of things like remote play (PSP streaming) and upscaling playback really make DVD's look good even though PS2 games sometimes look... well, horrible might be the best way to describe it.
If Sony had all these features at launch, and hadn't been so damnably smug about how superior the system really was, I think things could have been a hell of a lot different. They might have retained some exclusives, and given gamers more reason than I have to want to put games on the machine. (Wireless Rock Band, woo!)
However, if backwards compatibility isn't a big thing for you, and you can afford to lose the SD/MMC/CF slots, and two USB ports, then the new 40G PS3 might be a good thing worth looking into. The hard drive is user upgradeable, and you can get 100 gig SATA drives for under $60 these days so the drive capacity itself isn't any kind of big deal. Of course, it'd be a lot more useful if they unlocked the video chip to be used by Linux installations...
... I really, really don't know what words can be used to describe what I just read. Really. I don't. September 11th and Nazi gold jokes are bad enough, but is the world really ready for a movie featuring Dave Foley scratching his fully exposed balls?
There's always the Steam option for PC's. If Take Two wants to really start putting the hurt on GameStop and EBGames who're letting themselves get pushed into the censorship game, they can just take them out of the loop entirely. Then again, not like you can get PC games there anyhow.
Not to feed the troll we both replied to, but I'd have to say a lot more than $15 million per state goes into PEG programs. I know of several programs around the country that operate with budgets in the millions such as Washington State's public access channel for government video, and one program in Michigan that's particularly large. The budget for the program I work for is nowhere -near- these levels, but we're also new enough not to have any outside sponsors or supporters other than our franchise fee cut which should be settled this week. Some smaller states such as Maine might be under fifteen million, but any large state may well be multiples of that - though I wouldn't know where the funding came from in those particular cases.
If the cable companies are as stingy as the one here (Charter) has been, it's no surprise to me that the majority of PEG funds are outside the franchise fee system.
I'm an IT manager for a new Public Access entity in Nevada, and let me tell you something - it's a well-spent few thousand dollars per town. As recently as nine months ago, I didn't think public access was an important thing at all but that changed once I saw just how many people really rely on PEG (Public, Education, Government) access channels for a lot of local information and content. You don't watch public access, but grandma does and she's not exactly wired in with DSL nine times out of ten. As we're starting from the ground up, I have a pretty clear insight as to just how much this kind of operation can cost and how much it costs to maintain it and though I can't give you our budget numbers (we haven't had them approved yet, that happens this weekend) I can tell you that our program is going to be running on a shoestring compared to others that get far more than a million dollars per year in operating expenses and have accumulated hundreds of thousands in (highly depreciated) equipment.
Also keep in mind that the money that funds public access is considered part of the cable company's fee structure, and on the proposed agreement for our city (up for voting this week) it comes out to fifteen cents per monthly bill in charges that actually go to funding capital improvements and buildout to our Public Access program.
Now, what do communities get from public access?
In our city, we don't have network affiliates of our own, so our public access is the only way for people to see a community bulletin board and community events videos from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Boys and Girls Clubs, local youth sports, and of course all sorts of religious content for those people so inclined. In addition, we also broadcast city government meetings live and in reruns so city residents can stay informed even with just the most basic cable account.
Most PEG programs are non-profits under a 501(c)3 so we're not in it for the money.
Also, from the examples given in your posting I'd have to say you really don't know much about just what communities use PEG channels for. There may be cases where "townies" get a power trip, but for every case where someone's lawn is regulated to 1.75" (which is more of a homeowner's association nightmare than a local legislative one) you'll get ten major ones such as regulations on billboards and new building developments that actually draw huge crowds of interested viewers both on television and in the hearing room.
Prior to my latest experiences in handhelds, I bought a Tapwave Zodiac PalmOS based PDA and one of the early ones to support playing MP3's in the background. It was definitely something that had to be hacked into the OS, and sadly, PalmOS 5.2 and its various foibles (HotSync, no WiFi support, crappy browsers) put me off on the platform almost entirely. I grew to resent PalmOS for being able to choke the life out of a PDA with the capability for accelerated graphics and video, barely existing networking, and two SD-Card slots.
My first PDA was a Palm IIIc, and at the time I loved it. But as time moved on, I traded it for an Apple Newton 2100 of all things, and to this day I feel like the Newton was the early star of PDA's. Sure it had its own problems, and many of them, but in comparison to PalmOS and later Windows Mobile, it just feels responsive and appropriate to the job you give it. My hopes were that the Zodiac with all its nifty features would become the next generation's Newton - and sadly I was proven correct in the worst possible way - Tapwave's crap marketing and lousy vendor support.
PalmOS actually feels more "hacked together" when it comes to multimedia and connectivity than Windows Mobile, and that's saying something.
with such a low uid, i'd expect better from you.. but i'll bite. you do realize there are 480x640 windows mobile pda's right? the only better screen in a small form factor is some nokia garbage, but its propretiary as hell and i don't see it lasting very long. so mr i-dont-make-wise-decisions, what would you recommend for mobile computing?
and don't say a laptop because i'm not going to pull one out when i'm standing up on the subway during rushhour
I don't think anyone's going to see this so long after the article went up, but let me explain just what's annoyed me about Windows Mobile.
I'm going to start by saying the choice of this particular Windows Mobile device was not mine. My boss ordered four of them from his son who's a Sprint rep, and I got one as IT Manager - but was never consulted on the plan, or the phones, or any other aspect of the purchase other than "I'd really prefer not to go a hundred dollars over my personal plan, please."
Sure, the screen size of 320x240 is a problem, but my underlying disgust goes far beyond that. It's just a good example of the kind of contradiction Windows Mobile seems to be. Is it a PC? Well, it's got "Outlook", "Excel", "Word" and "Powerpoint" but none of these are nearly the same as the desktop counterparts - sure they'll read some of the files, but not all, and it won't look the same. The configuration options (under the new Vista Windows Mobile Device Center) are barely flexible and offer really weak options for synchronization. For example, if I want only one folder on my desktop PC's Outlook tree to sync, it creates folders for -all- my folders on the device, including ones I don't want synced. They might be empty, but they're all there.
Powerpoint doesn't even let you change the order of slides.
Word would be best described as "Wordpad Mobile".
The Terminal Services Client should have, by this point in time, some kind of scaling feature. We're how many versions into PocketPC / Windows Mobile and we're still stuck navigating windows with as many as two nested scrollbars in order to get things working?
My phone's radio seems to turn itself off at random. I don't know why - I can't find a setting for it - but it just seems to decide "Hey, I want to turn off my antenna even though I have half my battery remaining." with no externally visible indicator.
WiFi on a phone at this point just seems useless. Why? Well, here's a good question - if I open up Internet Explorer, the phone decides it needs to dial the Sprint PCS Vision network and block any phonecalls coming into my phone (unless I hack the registry) and send them right to voicemail. If I happen to manually connect to a wireless access point, it may work - or may not. The phone seems to have issues dealing with WPA at times, and at others seems to work just fine. With the default settings, if the phone was in my pocket or on my belt while driving through town, I'd hear a series of WiFi detect tones that pop up dialogs asking me if I want to join the network I passed for three seconds. Turning it off, I have to manually turn on WiFi any time I'm someplace that has it - and again, it'll try and connect through PCS Vision.
The PPC-6700 seems to like going to sleep at random and it seems a crapshoot whether I have to hit the 'ok' button or the power button to wake it back up.
Oh, and the most retarded thing about the design of Windows Mobile / PocketPC / etc: Why the HELL should I have to go into Settings->System->Memory in order to close applications most of the time? The problem with Windows Mobile is that they designed a mobile device's interface after a desktop PC. Even the Apple Newton didn't make this mistake, and once they worked out the handwriting recognition to where it actually matched up with the hype, I think they made one of the best portable computing devices ever marketed. And that was ten years ago.
The reason behind not wanting to pay $.25 per-picture was because I just disagreed with the idea of paying Verizon to get pictures from my phone to the net. I already paid for the phone that took the image, and then paid for the bandwidth/time to upload the image to the Internet. They wanted another quarter to put it on Verizon's webserver. Okay. So I hacked it to go on my own.
And honestly, the money situation is a nice and refreshing change from where I'd been in the past - broke. Now I'm not, so I can afford to take the stands I wanted to all along.
Nope, incorrectly paraphrased. Let me clarify this sentence:
My boyfriend and I were in exactly the same situation. We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one.
The hardware design of the phone was great. The hardware (for a Verizon phone) had some hack potential. In addition to being a well-designed phone, it felt substantial.
However, to clarify further, I didn't like that the phone was designed by Motorola to give me features Verizon did not want me to have for free. I did not like that Verizon took these design features away from what was otherwise a great piece of hardware.
The removal of OBEX by Verizon was largely a symbolic "fuck you" to the customer that combined well with the other major issue that I left unmentioned (and should have said something about) which is the choice of BREW instead of Java for the phone's development environment. Verizon needs to sign and therefore charge for programs you install to your phone thanks to BREW, where the E815 was designed for either BREW or Java which other companies that released the phone used. As I don't typically like the idea of a "fuck you" from a company I pay every month, I decided it was worth my money to prove a point and make the switch elsewhere. Yes, I know I paid Verizon off to go away, and therefore you could say they "won", however at the same time there's now a mark in the ledgers at Verizon that says "One more person told us to fuck off and paid money to do it." hence, my own symbolic "fuck you".
We liked the phone. We did not like what Verizon did to it.
My boyfriend and I were in exactly the same situation. We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one. I hacked my phone to allow DUN, got my own photo upload server working so I didn't have to use Verizon's $.25 (twenty five cents, not twenty five hundredths of a cent for all you confused Verizon readers) method of uploading to the web, and in general made my phone run just a little bit better.
However, I was pissed about the lack of real OBEX profiles, and then when my camera lens just shattered mysterously one day (No, I have no idea how) they wanted me to pay $100 for a far inferior phone if I was to replace it. So, we both said screw it, took the $350 hit on the early termination and went to T-Mobile. The coverage with T-Mobile is definitely not as good as Verizon's, but the plans are far better. We're paying more overall for our new phones, but now we've got the BlackBerry 8100 "Pearl" which is just an amazing piece of hardware. Nothing crippled, and at least I know it's lacking full OBEX support for a damn good reason - security as a corporate oriented device instead of a money grab. Unlike a lot of early BlackBerry devices the speaker and microphone actually work really well, and if it's any worse than the E815's excellent sound quality, it's not enough that I remember it from my first days with the Pearl.
I won't do business with Verizon anymore, period. They might have the best service area, but at least I don't feel like I'm supporting a company that actively wants to screw me.
And on a tangent, my workplace just got me a Sprint PPC-6700 Windows Mobile 5.0 brick. I hate this phone. It's a crappy PDA combined with a crappy phone in a form factor the size of a lumpy can of sardines. The only redeeming feature is Terminal Services Client, and let me just say that's no fun to use when you need to pan around a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 desktop at 320x240. No goddamn fun at all. Fuck Windows Mobile.
I'm still on my first G2 iPod that I've had for over three years now. I replaced the battery with one I bought online for a song that doubled the capacity of the original model, and it's still working just -fine-. 10 gigs is just fine for me at this point, and for a music player I don't need a color screen or video.
Though I do want one of the new 60G video models when I come up with the cash, but it's far from -needed-.
I haven't followed the projects since way back, but IPCop was originally a fork of SmoothWall meant to stay completely Free after a "dickishness inclined" project founder pissed a good number of people off with particularly ugly actions and statements. Not to mention a downright hostile stance toward helping non-paid users and threatening critics with lawsuits (myself being one of the recipients of an indirect threat levelled against me through my college where I once hosted some email correspondence with some of the SmoothWall team) in order to silence people speaking up about issues with said founder being... well, a douchebag.
If you are given lawful instructions by a police officer, you are a damn fool not to listen to them.
However, if you are ordered to do something that you feel violates your civil rights by someone that you feel is racially profiling or discriminating against you based on the color of your skin, and surrounded by people that can back you up (with testimony, video or photo evidence) you're a fool not to employ non-violent resistance in protest.
It looks to me like this situation straddles the line. Lawful orders given by officers that may have acted on prejudice, and followed it up with excessive force. Ugly for -everyone- involved, but far, far worse for the officers. There were three officers, and I'm sure the situation could have been handled a hell of a lot better.
And as to tasers and the lingering effect, that differs depending on the individual. Some people can get up and walk, some people can't move extremities with any serious control, and I've seen some people that could -barely- talk when they were hit. It's perfectly reasonable to say this guy might not have been able to control his limbs well enough to give the officers what they wanted (even if he was so inclined).
This was neither a case of a completely innocent person being tasered, nor was it a case of officers being abusive dicks for the fun of it. It straddled the line. But in any case where you have the line being straddled like this, the people with the authority, the guns, the tasers and the nightsticks are the ones most at fault. They were entrusted with authority to uphold and represent the law, and they misused it. Do I think they should be fired? Not sure - but an investigation should definitely be conducted.
As to the scenario you point out at the end of your post, I have to say that on the -surface- of it, that's a completely bullshit charge against the officers. I just read an article on that particular incident, so I know the specifics of what you're referring to, and I have to say I completely agree that it sounds like a justifiable shoot.
But this tasering isn't nearly the same sort of situation. The officers were not (from what I saw/heard) being threatened with harm, nor was anyone else. The officers made unrealistic demands once he -was- tasered, and were treating him like a violent suspect which was not the case from what I was able to make out on that video.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly the thing that's got me wondering. They usually introduce a newer generation a step up (Like my 8850 example) and keep the pricing at a premium while slowly refining and phasing out or lowering costs on the previous model. All good business sense, but particularly perplexing when they make that move without a threat on the shelves. Particularly now, while ATI has yet to ship anything that makes the 8800GTS feel threatened, let alone the GTX.
ATI could also announce the All-In-Wonder 3000HFHD! (*Holy Fucking High Definition!) with a gig of RAM, twice the speed of an 8800GTX and a pricetag of $500 tomorrow, but what're the chances of them shipping enough to make a dent before nVidia could slap out something quicker? With nVidia firmly in the iteration and improvement phase of design for the NV9X series, ATI's still looking like they're playing serious catchup just to get on the same field.
I'm a firm believer that ATI/AMD is a real threat to nVidia down the road, but they've got a lot of work to do in order to truly leverage that potential.
I've gotta disagree with that. You want a card with a good memory setup for things like Photoshop, just because you're working with such huge data structures on your screen. You don't want $20 cards, but a $50 card will likely do the trick.
I worked at a newspaper for a while, and they had a number of Pagemaker 7.5 machines running with some really lousy on-board graphics that were sold as "High-Spec" by the con artist offering tech support for the place for years previously. It took me bringing in my old GeForce 4 MX and dropping it into my workstation for the publisher to realize he'd been scammed, and order three more cards from Newegg to go into all the production machines. The speed increase working with these cards was gigantic - it felt to the production manager like she'd been given a whole new computer on her desk. $150 later, and speeds flipping between pages of broadsheet layout went from 20 seconds to instantaneous on three boxes, probably saving several work hours per week.
No upgrades until 2012? For a $1300 system using a single GTX? No, that's not going to happen. Within 2 years there will be games available, that you'll probably want, which will bring that machine to its knees. How do I know this? I played the Crysis demo on an C2D E6420 overclocked to 3Ghz with a single 8800GTS 640M card last night. With all the spiffy detail turned on (Under DX10) I got something close to 20fps at best, at 1680x1050. With monitor resolutions expected to increase, transistor counts on silicon continuing to take leaps and bounds, I -know- that my card has about 2 years of serving me at -best- before something vastly cheaper and far superior comes out... And I got about six months before something almost meeting those criteria hit.
My current system is planned to last until about midyear 2008 without any major upgrades, but the motherboard should carry me through to the end of LGA775's lifespan at least. I'll probably get a new CPU first, then a new video card, and probably do incremental upgrades until the end of LGA775 before I migrate to the next big thing.
It's really impossible to build a machine today that'll last five years - hence, why I -also- get the consoles. It's not even really a matter of being a die-hard gamer, it's just prioritizing entertainment options and trying to hit the peaks on the price-performance curve when you can.
I've gotta disagree, as someone that really dislikes the MS Juggernaut(tm) that the 360 is just a repackaged PC. It -is- a multi-core PPC based box, after all, using a custom video chip that may be based on but not completely copied from a PC design. As far as gaming systems go - and I have all three of the current generation's machines, I really have a lot of respect for what Microsoft's done with the 360. Sony reached too far too fast and too arrogantly, the Wii has great potential and innovation but really -is- hampered by hardware limitations, but the 360 seems to have struck a decent balance.
So far, I have about 20 games for the 360, about 5 for the Wii and a whopping 0 for the PS3. Though that will change with Rock Band, because I'm hopeful that Sony might make the microtransactions for songs less expensive or at least on par - and Microsoft really screwed the pooch on wireless controllers.
I would have initially assumed that nVidia, fearing a threat from ATI, would have taken a different route to try and get the big bucks. Drop the price on existing cards by a hundred bucks or so, use the NV92 used for the 8800GT as the 8850GT in order to differentiate the price features, and charge a premium price for it in the $350 range.
This way, early adopters don't feel like they got screwed into mild feature obsolecense by a card that costs half as much, people wanting the upgrades see more reason to buy the 8850GT because "Hey, it's a xx50 model - new features and still cheaper than the one I already bought!" without the lingering ball-ache of a $150 price drop - and, you've still got cards that devastate the existing ATI lineup with the potential to say "Well, screw ATI, now we're releasing the 8850GTS and GTX with more RAM, more monster cooling and both higher and lower prices." if ATI/AMD comes out with something that actually competes, unlike the 2900HD.
However, I do believe that nVidia is going to take a few pretty big steps in regards to more powerful cards before Christmas. The only real question is how much more power, and how much will they cost? The GTS and GTX models that are out now still dominate and command a high price that's out of reach for a lot of people. Are they just going to drop both the existing models like a hot potato as soon as new ones come out, or multi-tier with them some how?
That's a really good question. The GTS production costs were certainly higher, as it's a dual-slot card that uses more components, material and a larger die size, but as a GTS 640MB owner I'm feeling somewhat kicked in the sac. Yes, I'm fully aware that newer cards come out every few months, but it seems a little bit of a slap in the face when something comes out cheaper, arguably faster, and more manageable than your $400 piece of gear -without- a credible marketplace threat.
It's hard to imagine they're more per unit on the GT than the GTS, but sales volume will definitely make up for any shortcomings in that area. I have to hope that there's still some compelling reason why a user might decide to buy a GTS instead of a pair of GT's for SLI mode, particularly while motherboard support for PCIe's latest version has yet to really penetrate the market. I -think- my X38 based board has it, but since it's not an nVidia board and they haven't opened SLI up to other makers, it's largely useless.
However, this would be an excellent time for nVidia to start letting Intel use SLI on chipsets. They're going to get steamrolled by ATI in a generation or two if the AMD/ATI partnership continues to open up specifications, release better drivers, and jack up performance.
Why the hate on Steam?
Seriously, I have to ask this. I know what Steam does, how it works, and I use it regularly. Where's the beef?
Are people upset that they feel forced to run a background application in order to play games? That I can understand, but if you cared that much about what ran in the background, you wouldn't be bitching about a Windows application because you wouldn't be running it would you?
Does online activation tweak people? I could understand this, if they weren't able to play in offline mode after activating once. This a perfectly reasonable method of copy protection, IMHO, because it does one mostly unobtrusive check and then immediately lets you turn off the net connection requirement to play in the future.
Are they worried about being able to play the game years from now or if Steam up and dies? Okay, understandable - but that's when you check with your friendly neighborhood pirate (If Valve doesn't do something like unlock everyone's copies before shutting off the lights.)
For me, Steam gives me a lot of advantages. I don't have to go to deal with Gamestop idiots. I can preload the game so it takes less time to unlock - even with the inevitable server overload on release days - than it would to install the game from CD or DVD. I can open Steam on a laptop or other computer and play the same games I bought on my desktop without needing to keep CD's handy. And above all else, Valve keeps adding features and games to Steam -beyond- just their own product. It helps to put money in the pockets of developers instead of the publishers, or at least sets up a way that can enable developers to have a lot more freedom in publishing methods down the road.
It's a hell of a lot less "Rental" than any MMO ever has been, and as a running application, Valve's put a good deal of work into making Steam run fairly transparently. On Vista x64 right now, it's using... Ten megs of memory. I think I can spare that, to know that my games are up to date and ready to play at any time I decide I want to.
... and grief counseling.
Cake, and grief counseling. Far more appropriate. I just switched my primary desktop to Vista this past weekend (More a "Why the hell not, gotta learn it to support it -someday-) resignation, and have seen that after it's patched... Vista's still a buggy bastard. I haven't seen Explorer shit itself as frequently as I have this past three days since Windows ME.
I strongly feel that we're not going to have a winner in the next-generation format wars for at least another year to two years, with HD-DVD's recent landing of some exclusivity deals and Sony's built-in install base for BluRay players among the few, the maybe-proud PS3 owners. I've pretty much relegated myself to knowing that I'll have to own both player formats, and as much as I wanted to start out with an HD-DVD player, this news of impending PS2 compatibility removal is what drove the addition of a PS3 to the A/V rack yesterday.
I have never been a Sony fanboy - not much a fanboy for anything, really - but after walking out of Best Buy with two BluRay movies and not a single game I have to admit I know what Sony was talking about when they said they were selling a home entertainment system and not a games console. The sheer potential in this hardware is pretty amazing, the recent firmware additions of things like remote play (PSP streaming) and upscaling playback really make DVD's look good even though PS2 games sometimes look... well, horrible might be the best way to describe it.
If Sony had all these features at launch, and hadn't been so damnably smug about how superior the system really was, I think things could have been a hell of a lot different. They might have retained some exclusives, and given gamers more reason than I have to want to put games on the machine. (Wireless Rock Band, woo!)
However, if backwards compatibility isn't a big thing for you, and you can afford to lose the SD/MMC/CF slots, and two USB ports, then the new 40G PS3 might be a good thing worth looking into. The hard drive is user upgradeable, and you can get 100 gig SATA drives for under $60 these days so the drive capacity itself isn't any kind of big deal. Of course, it'd be a lot more useful if they unlocked the video chip to be used by Linux installations...
... I really, really don't know what words can be used to describe what I just read. Really. I don't. September 11th and Nazi gold jokes are bad enough, but is the world really ready for a movie featuring Dave Foley scratching his fully exposed balls?
There's always the Steam option for PC's. If Take Two wants to really start putting the hurt on GameStop and EBGames who're letting themselves get pushed into the censorship game, they can just take them out of the loop entirely. Then again, not like you can get PC games there anyhow.
Pot, Kettle. I'm sure you have a lot in common to talk about.
Not to feed the troll we both replied to, but I'd have to say a lot more than $15 million per state goes into PEG programs. I know of several programs around the country that operate with budgets in the millions such as Washington State's public access channel for government video, and one program in Michigan that's particularly large. The budget for the program I work for is nowhere -near- these levels, but we're also new enough not to have any outside sponsors or supporters other than our franchise fee cut which should be settled this week. Some smaller states such as Maine might be under fifteen million, but any large state may well be multiples of that - though I wouldn't know where the funding came from in those particular cases.
If the cable companies are as stingy as the one here (Charter) has been, it's no surprise to me that the majority of PEG funds are outside the franchise fee system.
I'm an IT manager for a new Public Access entity in Nevada, and let me tell you something - it's a well-spent few thousand dollars per town. As recently as nine months ago, I didn't think public access was an important thing at all but that changed once I saw just how many people really rely on PEG (Public, Education, Government) access channels for a lot of local information and content. You don't watch public access, but grandma does and she's not exactly wired in with DSL nine times out of ten. As we're starting from the ground up, I have a pretty clear insight as to just how much this kind of operation can cost and how much it costs to maintain it and though I can't give you our budget numbers (we haven't had them approved yet, that happens this weekend) I can tell you that our program is going to be running on a shoestring compared to others that get far more than a million dollars per year in operating expenses and have accumulated hundreds of thousands in (highly depreciated) equipment.
Also keep in mind that the money that funds public access is considered part of the cable company's fee structure, and on the proposed agreement for our city (up for voting this week) it comes out to fifteen cents per monthly bill in charges that actually go to funding capital improvements and buildout to our Public Access program.
Now, what do communities get from public access?
In our city, we don't have network affiliates of our own, so our public access is the only way for people to see a community bulletin board and community events videos from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Boys and Girls Clubs, local youth sports, and of course all sorts of religious content for those people so inclined. In addition, we also broadcast city government meetings live and in reruns so city residents can stay informed even with just the most basic cable account.
Most PEG programs are non-profits under a 501(c)3 so we're not in it for the money.
Also, from the examples given in your posting I'd have to say you really don't know much about just what communities use PEG channels for. There may be cases where "townies" get a power trip, but for every case where someone's lawn is regulated to 1.75" (which is more of a homeowner's association nightmare than a local legislative one) you'll get ten major ones such as regulations on billboards and new building developments that actually draw huge crowds of interested viewers both on television and in the hearing room.
When did RIM get bought out by Verizon?
Prior to my latest experiences in handhelds, I bought a Tapwave Zodiac PalmOS based PDA and one of the early ones to support playing MP3's in the background. It was definitely something that had to be hacked into the OS, and sadly, PalmOS 5.2 and its various foibles (HotSync, no WiFi support, crappy browsers) put me off on the platform almost entirely. I grew to resent PalmOS for being able to choke the life out of a PDA with the capability for accelerated graphics and video, barely existing networking, and two SD-Card slots.
My first PDA was a Palm IIIc, and at the time I loved it. But as time moved on, I traded it for an Apple Newton 2100 of all things, and to this day I feel like the Newton was the early star of PDA's. Sure it had its own problems, and many of them, but in comparison to PalmOS and later Windows Mobile, it just feels responsive and appropriate to the job you give it. My hopes were that the Zodiac with all its nifty features would become the next generation's Newton - and sadly I was proven correct in the worst possible way - Tapwave's crap marketing and lousy vendor support.
PalmOS actually feels more "hacked together" when it comes to multimedia and connectivity than Windows Mobile, and that's saying something.
Fuck Windows Mobile.
with such a low uid, i'd expect better from you.. but i'll bite. you do realize there are 480x640 windows mobile pda's right? the only better screen in a small form factor is some nokia garbage, but its propretiary as hell and i don't see it lasting very long. so mr i-dont-make-wise-decisions, what would you recommend for mobile computing?
and don't say a laptop because i'm not going to pull one out when i'm standing up on the subway during rushhour
I don't think anyone's going to see this so long after the article went up, but let me explain just what's annoyed me about Windows Mobile.
I'm going to start by saying the choice of this particular Windows Mobile device was not mine. My boss ordered four of them from his son who's a Sprint rep, and I got one as IT Manager - but was never consulted on the plan, or the phones, or any other aspect of the purchase other than "I'd really prefer not to go a hundred dollars over my personal plan, please."
Sure, the screen size of 320x240 is a problem, but my underlying disgust goes far beyond that. It's just a good example of the kind of contradiction Windows Mobile seems to be. Is it a PC? Well, it's got "Outlook", "Excel", "Word" and "Powerpoint" but none of these are nearly the same as the desktop counterparts - sure they'll read some of the files, but not all, and it won't look the same. The configuration options (under the new Vista Windows Mobile Device Center) are barely flexible and offer really weak options for synchronization. For example, if I want only one folder on my desktop PC's Outlook tree to sync, it creates folders for -all- my folders on the device, including ones I don't want synced. They might be empty, but they're all there.
Powerpoint doesn't even let you change the order of slides.
Word would be best described as "Wordpad Mobile".
The Terminal Services Client should have, by this point in time, some kind of scaling feature. We're how many versions into PocketPC / Windows Mobile and we're still stuck navigating windows with as many as two nested scrollbars in order to get things working?
My phone's radio seems to turn itself off at random. I don't know why - I can't find a setting for it - but it just seems to decide "Hey, I want to turn off my antenna even though I have half my battery remaining." with no externally visible indicator.
WiFi on a phone at this point just seems useless. Why? Well, here's a good question - if I open up Internet Explorer, the phone decides it needs to dial the Sprint PCS Vision network and block any phonecalls coming into my phone (unless I hack the registry) and send them right to voicemail. If I happen to manually connect to a wireless access point, it may work - or may not. The phone seems to have issues dealing with WPA at times, and at others seems to work just fine. With the default settings, if the phone was in my pocket or on my belt while driving through town, I'd hear a series of WiFi detect tones that pop up dialogs asking me if I want to join the network I passed for three seconds. Turning it off, I have to manually turn on WiFi any time I'm someplace that has it - and again, it'll try and connect through PCS Vision.
The PPC-6700 seems to like going to sleep at random and it seems a crapshoot whether I have to hit the 'ok' button or the power button to wake it back up.
Oh, and the most retarded thing about the design of Windows Mobile / PocketPC / etc: Why the HELL should I have to go into Settings->System->Memory in order to close applications most of the time? The problem with Windows Mobile is that they designed a mobile device's interface after a desktop PC. Even the Apple Newton didn't make this mistake, and once they worked out the handwriting recognition to where it actually matched up with the hype, I think they made one of the best portable computing devices ever marketed. And that was ten years ago.
So now you ask, what do I "mr-don
The reason behind not wanting to pay $.25 per-picture was because I just disagreed with the idea of paying Verizon to get pictures from my phone to the net. I already paid for the phone that took the image, and then paid for the bandwidth/time to upload the image to the Internet. They wanted another quarter to put it on Verizon's webserver. Okay. So I hacked it to go on my own.
And honestly, the money situation is a nice and refreshing change from where I'd been in the past - broke. Now I'm not, so I can afford to take the stands I wanted to all along.
Nope, incorrectly paraphrased. Let me clarify this sentence:
My boyfriend and I were in exactly the same situation. We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one.
The hardware design of the phone was great.
The hardware (for a Verizon phone) had some hack potential.
In addition to being a well-designed phone, it felt substantial.
However, to clarify further, I didn't like that the phone was designed by Motorola to give me features Verizon did not want me to have for free. I did not like that Verizon took these design features away from what was otherwise a great piece of hardware.
The removal of OBEX by Verizon was largely a symbolic "fuck you" to the customer that combined well with the other major issue that I left unmentioned (and should have said something about) which is the choice of BREW instead of Java for the phone's development environment. Verizon needs to sign and therefore charge for programs you install to your phone thanks to BREW, where the E815 was designed for either BREW or Java which other companies that released the phone used. As I don't typically like the idea of a "fuck you" from a company I pay every month, I decided it was worth my money to prove a point and make the switch elsewhere. Yes, I know I paid Verizon off to go away, and therefore you could say they "won", however at the same time there's now a mark in the ledgers at Verizon that says "One more person told us to fuck off and paid money to do it." hence, my own symbolic "fuck you".
We liked the phone. We did not like what Verizon did to it.
My boyfriend and I were in exactly the same situation. We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one. I hacked my phone to allow DUN, got my own photo upload server working so I didn't have to use Verizon's $.25 (twenty five cents, not twenty five hundredths of a cent for all you confused Verizon readers) method of uploading to the web, and in general made my phone run just a little bit better.
However, I was pissed about the lack of real OBEX profiles, and then when my camera lens just shattered mysterously one day (No, I have no idea how) they wanted me to pay $100 for a far inferior phone if I was to replace it. So, we both said screw it, took the $350 hit on the early termination and went to T-Mobile. The coverage with T-Mobile is definitely not as good as Verizon's, but the plans are far better. We're paying more overall for our new phones, but now we've got the BlackBerry 8100 "Pearl" which is just an amazing piece of hardware. Nothing crippled, and at least I know it's lacking full OBEX support for a damn good reason - security as a corporate oriented device instead of a money grab. Unlike a lot of early BlackBerry devices the speaker and microphone actually work really well, and if it's any worse than the E815's excellent sound quality, it's not enough that I remember it from my first days with the Pearl.
I won't do business with Verizon anymore, period. They might have the best service area, but at least I don't feel like I'm supporting a company that actively wants to screw me.
And on a tangent, my workplace just got me a Sprint PPC-6700 Windows Mobile 5.0 brick. I hate this phone. It's a crappy PDA combined with a crappy phone in a form factor the size of a lumpy can of sardines. The only redeeming feature is Terminal Services Client, and let me just say that's no fun to use when you need to pan around a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 desktop at 320x240. No goddamn fun at all. Fuck Windows Mobile.
I'm still on my first G2 iPod that I've had for over three years now. I replaced the battery with one I bought online for a song that doubled the capacity of the original model, and it's still working just -fine-. 10 gigs is just fine for me at this point, and for a music player I don't need a color screen or video.
Though I do want one of the new 60G video models when I come up with the cash, but it's far from -needed-.
Couldn't happen to a douchebaggier douchebag.
Fortunately, I did hear some time ago that he left the project. Don't judge today's SmoothWall on yesterday's... douchebag.
Damn, I just love the word douchebag. It needs more usage.
I haven't followed the projects since way back, but IPCop was originally a fork of SmoothWall meant to stay completely Free after a "dickishness inclined" project founder pissed a good number of people off with particularly ugly actions and statements. Not to mention a downright hostile stance toward helping non-paid users and threatening critics with lawsuits (myself being one of the recipients of an indirect threat levelled against me through my college where I once hosted some email correspondence with some of the SmoothWall team) in order to silence people speaking up about issues with said founder being... well, a douchebag.
You are correct - to a point.
If you are given lawful instructions by a police officer, you are a damn fool not to listen to them.
However, if you are ordered to do something that you feel violates your civil rights by someone that you feel is racially profiling or discriminating against you based on the color of your skin, and surrounded by people that can back you up (with testimony, video or photo evidence) you're a fool not to employ non-violent resistance in protest.
It looks to me like this situation straddles the line. Lawful orders given by officers that may have acted on prejudice, and followed it up with excessive force. Ugly for -everyone- involved, but far, far worse for the officers. There were three officers, and I'm sure the situation could have been handled a hell of a lot better.
And as to tasers and the lingering effect, that differs depending on the individual. Some people can get up and walk, some people can't move extremities with any serious control, and I've seen some people that could -barely- talk when they were hit. It's perfectly reasonable to say this guy might not have been able to control his limbs well enough to give the officers what they wanted (even if he was so inclined).
This was neither a case of a completely innocent person being tasered, nor was it a case of officers being abusive dicks for the fun of it. It straddled the line. But in any case where you have the line being straddled like this, the people with the authority, the guns, the tasers and the nightsticks are the ones most at fault. They were entrusted with authority to uphold and represent the law, and they misused it. Do I think they should be fired? Not sure - but an investigation should definitely be conducted.
As to the scenario you point out at the end of your post, I have to say that on the -surface- of it, that's a completely bullshit charge against the officers. I just read an article on that particular incident, so I know the specifics of what you're referring to, and I have to say I completely agree that it sounds like a justifiable shoot.
But this tasering isn't nearly the same sort of situation. The officers were not (from what I saw/heard) being threatened with harm, nor was anyone else. The officers made unrealistic demands once he -was- tasered, and were treating him like a violent suspect which was not the case from what I was able to make out on that video.
World War II (Largely)
Desert Storm (Gulf War I)
Invasion of Grenada
Invasion of Panama
War in Afghanistan