It won't save you anything. Businesses exist to make profits.
On the other hand, when the thronging masses all try to download an update, it's much more likely that you will be able not just to download it, but to download it quickly, so at least there will be some benefit.
You still can stick in a dual-core CPU, and you'll be just fine. You just can't switch from a DDR to a DDR2 memory subsystem.
Think about it - not only will a DDR2 memory controller pinout be incompatible with a DDR memory controller, the memory sockets on the board aren't the same, either. There's just no reasonable way of doing it - but you can do just what you mentioned, go to a dual-core chip with DDR memory.
Personally, I never buy a motherboard with future CPU upgrades in mind. It's just not worth it, upgrading your CPU within the same general architecture rarely gives you much real-world performance.
The real performance boosts come from radical architectural changes - new memory subsystems, new processer types, new interconnect, etc. - and for any of those, you're going to need a new motherboard, period.
"huge giant hard drives"? We're still talking about 3.25" hard drives spinning at 5400 RPM. The power draw was little more than today's - we're talking about a couple of watts at most.
Sure, power supplies are inefficient, but when you're talking about a total system draw of ~50 watts, it would take HUGE inefficiencies to make up for just having a CPU draw 100+ watts.
Like I said, I measured less than 47 watts at the wall for a dual-CPU machine under moderate load. Go try that with an idling P4, and see what you get. I've got a P3/650 with 5 hard drives and a RAID controller that under load still draws less than 70 watts - again, you'd just *barely* be getting some of the new CPUs to warm up with that much, without even getting into inefficiencies, video, or anything else.
As in, a machine from 10 years ago still uses just as many watts, if not more.
You think so? Early pentiums didn't even need a heat sink. Mid-range models had a very small heat sink, no fan. Later ones needed a heat sink and fan that (by today's standards) were miniscule.
In the P2 range, heat sinks/fans got a little bigger, then in the P3 range, a little more, then in the P4 range they got huge. Why is that? Because the CPUs started sucking more and more and more power. At the same time, greater integration in motherboard chipsets resulted in equal or lower power draws. And we didn't have video cards with 400 million transistors 10 years ago, either.
I have a Celeron 400, which at the time I purchased it wasn't *that* bad of a chip. The thing has been running - OVERCLOCKED - for two years since the CPU fan *fell off*. Not just occasional use, constant-duty as a server. The only downtime was from a power outtage. Try that with your P4.
Here's a breakdown of CPU power usage:
Pentium line: 10.1-15.5 watts Penrium MMX: 13-17 watts P2 Klamath: 16-43 watts P2 deschutes: 21-27 watts P3 Coppermine: 14-24 watts P4 williamette: 49-71 watts P4 Northwood: up to 81 watts P4 Prescott: up to 103 watts Pentium D: Up to 130 watts
Because of leakage current, newer computers use more just to idle the CPU than some older computers take for the entire system, including power supply inefficiencies and all. I have a dual Pentium-133 that I measured the power draw for the total system, from the wall, and the entire thing combined was using less power than a P4 CPU at idle.
There are a lot of things in the article that make me think that these guys are throwing a bit of smoke and confusion - or just don't know what they're doing. Here's one example:
According to Lutz, the number of possible combinations of flights and prices for all the airline carriers between two major cities has been estimated by researchers at MIT to be 10 to the 30th power.
Sure, if you want *every single* combination. Yes, I could fly from Denver to Las Vegas via Miami, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angelas, Houston, Salt Lake, and *then* to Las Vegas - with up to 7 day layovers in every city - but that's just silly.
But by assuming just a few simple sanity checks (such as fewer than X stopovers, change carriers fewer than Y times, longest layover no more than Z hours, or "dont-use-puddle-jumper=1"), I would imagine that you could pull that number from 10^30 down to no more than 10^3 - perhaps less than 10^2. When you trim the size of your data set by 27 or 28 orders of magnitude before you even start your processing, then suddenly those 700 or so transactions/second start looking a lot easier.
Then, of course, there's yet another old standby of people needing lots of computations: Don't repeat your work. Insert a machine or process that watches each incoming request, and caches the results in a lookup table for future use. Yes, there are implementation challenges (such as marking entries as dirty when route information changes), but $50k in programming could save them more than $1m in hardware.
or they can only include so many AI objects in the background
It's not just the number of AI-driven objects, but the quality of AI.
Well, let's say that you're on a battlefield-type game. You could be facing a few squadrons of infantry, a few squadrons of armor, and at least some air support. Then you could have some sort of central command. Yes, you could get by with rudimentary AI and suck like so many other games, but to be realistic, you need individual-level AI and group-level AI all the way up. And in a situation like that, you're easily dealing with 30+ objects, and potentially 100+ AI-driven objects. (Imagine a large space-flight battle inspired by the Star Wars movies - hundreds of small ships, dozens of medium ships, and a few large ships, with individual, squadron, wing, and command-level AI.) Don't forget that after graphics, audio, and all other aspects of the game, the AI doesn't exactly get a large time-share on the CPU. I'll get back to this in just a moment...
The feeling of immersion in video games is a very key componant in how much fun they are to play. We're at a point now where video cards can crank out some incredibly immersive graphics. With 5.1 (and higher) audio, that's at a pretty reasonable level as well. The two areas that are now most noticeably lagging are AI and physics. When a game like Far Cry implements very basic, rudimentary group-level AI, it's actually newsworthy, because AI in video games generally does suck. And physics, well, that's in an even worse state - but physics, at least, is about to become hardware-accelerated, which will be a big boon.
That leaves... AI. A beautiful world with realistic physics, allowing you to truy interact with all of your super-realistically-rendered environment, with good directional sound to make you look over your shoulder is still going to feel very artificial without good AI. Now, after all of that, remember that the CPUs that are going into these consoles are designed almost solely around cranking out polygons, and they're reputed to be pretty darn lousy at AI. I'm sure that the games for these consoles will be beautiful. I'm just not expecting them to be very smart.
Whenever people buy a Nintendo console, they're always telling me how great it will be to play old games.
You bet. A good game is a good game. I still occasionally play Civ2, for crying out loud. And when I installed the x86_64 version of Windows XP, yes, I was sad that it would no longer work...
Yeah, some guy got Doom 3 to run on an old Voodoo card, too, what's your point?
The whole point of Doom 3 was that it was supposed to be gorgeous, and have all of the advanced graphics technology. Gameplay? Come on, it was horrible. (Sorry, Id fanboys, it really was.) But it was gorgeous, and it was gorgeous for a reason: It was supposed to immerse you in the world.
On the XBox, things are different - you don't even have the graphical glory that made it somewhat bearable. The immersion isn't there, and it simply *is not* what it was originally designed to be. Sorry, but it isn't.
Whereas my p4 1.6 with only 128 megs of ram (really need to upgrade) and a gf4ti4200 runs doom3 like shit.
Like I said, one guy even got it to play on an old Voodoo card. One of my friends played it fairly satisfactorily on an Athlon 1600 (although with 512 megs) and some video card that he picked up for $50 or so on ebay.
In my opinion, *most* console games are nothing more than eye-candy where you can control a character, gameplay is an afterthought. But that's beside the point...
Some game concepts don't require a lot of CPU power. Civilization is one of the all-time greats, and despite MicroProse's horrible coding, still played on old, weak hardware. On the other hand, some game concepts aren't as easy to get along with, when you start trying to fill a large world with lots of AI-driven characters, then things become very different.
That's just it... the games will be designed so that the processers are "fast enough", meaning the games that come out will be limitted in what they can do.
Now imagine if broadcast ratings dropped 12% at once?
Eh. They wouldn't care. Those 12% are nothing but freeloaders in their eyes... even though they may view advertising, they aren't actually paying money directly to anyone in the industry. Cable companies, satellite companies... they want to get paid to show you more advertising.
but why send mega numbers of suddenly obsolete TVs to the landfill?
Money, man, money. The spectrum now used by over-the-air transmission is potentially worth *billions* of dollars. The FCC wants to get their hands on that money, and fast.
FCC official thinking to himself...
"Oh, wait... it will cost American consumer many times that to replace all of their television sets? Well, that's a shame. But wait... those consumers will also have to pay sales tax on those new televisions. Bonus..."
Ballmer and the rest of the MS folks have been at this game for many years. Every so often, they say something to the effect of "You know, we realize that things are pretty bad, and we're going to change that." But in the end, they never do.
It's just a ploy to make the disgruntled Microsoft users believe that there's a ray of hope, so that they don't abandon ship.
Years ago in the "Windows NT 5.0 Rapid Deployment Conference" (Before it was even going to be called Windows 2000), Jim Allchin stood up and told us all how horrible NT4 was, and effectively that they had "seen the light". 2000 had many of the same problems that he admitted to NT 4 having on that platform. They didn't fix them, they just tried to make us all feel better. And they've done it over and over since then, nothing's changed.
Providers don't buy transfer, they buy (or trade) bandwidth. Because of that, selling transfer (as opposed to bandwidth) becomes a stickier situation, plannign capacity becomes much tougher, and they're less able to deal with peak demands.
I've always thought that selling transfer to be hokey. Every time I see someone with a cut-rate hosting company with a web page that says "This web page has exceeded it's monthly transfer allocation...", I shake my head in disbelief.
(The only reason for doing that is because they're putting many domains on one machine, and using name-based virtual hosting - making rate-limitting much more difficult. With IP-based virtual hosting, then a relatively cheap Linux router can rate-limit quite well.)
Yes the U.S. has a much lower population density, it has an older infrastructure, and so on so forth.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the US government has a real knack for regulating the industry where said regulation will not benefit the consumer, while not regulating when it would help the consumer.
Besides that, the taxes on telecommunication lines are just insane. A few years ago, our company was paying over $200 in taxes on a line that cost $400.
Sure, the provider may not have the bandwidth to throw more than a few hundred mbits or a gbit or whatever they decided
Here's the beauty of being a large player in a well-connected city: You don't necessarily need to buy huge upstream pipes, all you need is a presence in a major peering location - then you can work out "non-transit" peering with the other major players. You're not buying bandwidth from them, they're just agreeing to take packets from you that are destined for their network anyway. You can get rid of a lot of customer's packets without shelling out much money that way...
As an example, the provider that we use has always given us absolutely fan-freaking-tastic performance getting our packets anywhere they need to go, because they have such agreements with hundreds of different networks - everything from the big players to relatively "small" players like the Microsoft and Yahoo networks. It's an entirely different ball game from someone who just buys pipes from one or a few upstream providers.
I can't think of a legal use that my 3Mb connection isn't perfectly capable of handling
There are things I'd like to download from work fairly often that my 3 mbps connection is just too slow for, and I'll wait until I go in the next day.
Here's another example: I regularly sync up the photos I've taken to a storage server at the office for backups. Uncompressed file sizes can be over 300 megs *per image*. It doesn't take many of those to make you wish you had more than 768k. Even if I had 3mbps up, it would still take a lot longer than I would like.
Nevermind that when the line goes down your screwed big time as is the case here but how in the world can you function on one line normally? Wouldn't the bandwidth of a country be too great for one line to handle? Hell we had to expand to 3 t-one lines in my office because we were hogging too much bandwith with 2 lines, an office of 70 people.
What you don't realize is that your three t1 lines were only discreet lines from a box out on the side of the street into your building. At that box, they were simply channels on a larger line.
I know that they use fiber or what not but can the cable really handle all that bandwidth?
Well, an OC192 can carry 10 gbps. That's an awful lot of bandwidth. Besides, it probably wasn't one single fiber - you don't go to all of the expense of laying an undersea cable with just *one* fiber in it.
I imagine the movie industry has unlimited means to create the perfec theater and experience.
You would think so, wouldn't you? : ) Unfortunately, in a room as large as a theater, you simply can't make the audio experience really great over the entire area. In fact, all of the theaters I've been to have a relatively modest "sweet spot" area where the sound is really good, and in the rest of the theater, it's just so-so.
Someone who's never heard a good 5.1 system before would find the "rest of the theater" to be pretty good - better than their homes. But once you've experienced a good 5.1 setup, then you definitely notice the difference.
My setup at home is relatively modest - I purchased everything when I was in college and pretty poor, I had to watch for the *really* good deals. I ended up with a decent 5.1 receiver, a DVD player, Infinity fronts and center, Pioneer rears, and a pair of 18" subs that I got for the steal-of-the century. (That's another story.) Overall, I spent about $1,000 - but that was years ago when prices were much higher, other than the subs, you could get similar or better equipment now for about $500 to $600.
I spent a lot of time getting the room design, speaker placement, and adjustments right, and it paid off - the system sounds fantastic. Because it's all designed around where a few people are sitting, those people get it the way it should be. Everyone who comes over tells me that it sounds better than the theaters. One of my friends who is a huge movie buff, and gets to watch a lot of movies on a $15,000 setup, has told me that as far as the audio, my house gives just as good of experience as the high-end setups. (The size of the screen is a different matter!)
Well, for home theater, your speakers really don't have to be *that* great. Yeah, I know, that will piss of the elitists pretty badly.
When it comes down to it, everyone that I've met or talked to, when given a chance to experience both, has preferred watching a movie in a well-thought-out 5.1 environment with modest (but not terrible) speakers over watching in even a "dolby surround" (still really only 2 discreet channels, with some "magic" done on it) environment with really good speakers.
For music, that's not necessarily the case, but for movies, it's been my experience 100% of the time.
The funny thing is that they're not really omnidirectional, at least not until you get to *really* low frequencies.
I have a pair of very nice 18" subwoofers in my home entertainment system. I've occasionally covered the eyes of a test subject, spun them around, played low frequencies through the subs, and asked them to point to where the sound is coming from.
Above about 25-30 Hz, every single person was able to point exactly to the subwoofers. Below about 20-22 Hz, then they can't - but at that point, you're not really hearing it, just feeling it, which is a lot less precise.
The good bit here is that precious few subwoofers are able to even go down to 25 Hz with any reasonableness, and quite a few never even make it down to 30 Hz.
I have a vision too, and I don't need millions of fucking dollars to put it to work
It's not that he has vision, it's that he's able to make his vision reality. That doesn't necessarily mean that he *ought* to get that much money, but it does mean that he *can*.
Lots of people have vision. Few ever make that vision happen, and that's what seperates the haves from the have-nots.
You know most of those movies could have been done in a year or two in CG
If I'm not mistaken, it took a year or two of CG *on top* of the actual acting.
Really, let's see you produce ten minutes of film of the quality that the LOtR films were. If you can't, then shut up, and quit whining. If you can, you'll have a very lucrative future ahead of you. Remember, it's not the vision, it's making it happen.
The heat is actually the evil twin of the industry's other largest problem: Power delivery. As processers consume more heat, and customers install more and more CPUs, a LOT of data centers are struggling to deliver enough electricity, and then they're struggling to keep the place cool.
It's the flip side of the same problem, but while you can easily sense that the room is getting really, really warm, you can't sense that their power feeds and UPS systems are very near capacity unless there's a failure.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't save you anything. Businesses exist to make profits.
On the other hand, when the thronging masses all try to download an update, it's much more likely that you will be able not just to download it, but to download it quickly, so at least there will be some benefit.
You still can stick in a dual-core CPU, and you'll be just fine. You just can't switch from a DDR to a DDR2 memory subsystem.
Think about it - not only will a DDR2 memory controller pinout be incompatible with a DDR memory controller, the memory sockets on the board aren't the same, either. There's just no reasonable way of doing it - but you can do just what you mentioned, go to a dual-core chip with DDR memory.
steve
Personally, I never buy a motherboard with future CPU upgrades in mind. It's just not worth it, upgrading your CPU within the same general architecture rarely gives you much real-world performance.
The real performance boosts come from radical architectural changes - new memory subsystems, new processer types, new interconnect, etc. - and for any of those, you're going to need a new motherboard, period.
steve
"huge giant hard drives"? We're still talking about 3.25" hard drives spinning at 5400 RPM. The power draw was little more than today's - we're talking about a couple of watts at most.
Sure, power supplies are inefficient, but when you're talking about a total system draw of ~50 watts, it would take HUGE inefficiencies to make up for just having a CPU draw 100+ watts.
Like I said, I measured less than 47 watts at the wall for a dual-CPU machine under moderate load. Go try that with an idling P4, and see what you get. I've got a P3/650 with 5 hard drives and a RAID controller that under load still draws less than 70 watts - again, you'd just *barely* be getting some of the new CPUs to warm up with that much, without even getting into inefficiencies, video, or anything else.
steve
As in, a machine from 10 years ago still uses just as many watts, if not more.
You think so? Early pentiums didn't even need a heat sink. Mid-range models had a very small heat sink, no fan. Later ones needed a heat sink and fan that (by today's standards) were miniscule.
In the P2 range, heat sinks/fans got a little bigger, then in the P3 range, a little more, then in the P4 range they got huge. Why is that? Because the CPUs started sucking more and more and more power. At the same time, greater integration in motherboard chipsets resulted in equal or lower power draws. And we didn't have video cards with 400 million transistors 10 years ago, either.
I have a Celeron 400, which at the time I purchased it wasn't *that* bad of a chip. The thing has been running - OVERCLOCKED - for two years since the CPU fan *fell off*. Not just occasional use, constant-duty as a server. The only downtime was from a power outtage. Try that with your P4.
Here's a breakdown of CPU power usage:
Pentium line: 10.1-15.5 watts
Penrium MMX: 13-17 watts
P2 Klamath: 16-43 watts
P2 deschutes: 21-27 watts
P3 Coppermine: 14-24 watts
P4 williamette: 49-71 watts
P4 Northwood: up to 81 watts
P4 Prescott: up to 103 watts
Pentium D: Up to 130 watts
Because of leakage current, newer computers use more just to idle the CPU than some older computers take for the entire system, including
power supply inefficiencies and all. I have a dual Pentium-133 that I measured the power draw for the total system, from the wall, and the entire thing combined was using less power than a P4 CPU at idle.
steve
There are a lot of things in the article that make me think that these guys are throwing a bit of smoke and confusion - or just don't know what they're doing. Here's one example:
According to Lutz, the number of possible combinations of flights and prices for all the airline carriers between two major cities has been estimated by researchers at MIT to be 10 to the 30th power.
Sure, if you want *every single* combination. Yes, I could fly from Denver to Las Vegas via Miami, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angelas, Houston, Salt Lake, and *then* to Las Vegas - with up to 7 day layovers in every city - but that's just silly.
But by assuming just a few simple sanity checks (such as fewer than X stopovers, change carriers fewer than Y times, longest layover no more than Z hours, or "dont-use-puddle-jumper=1"), I would imagine that you could pull that number from 10^30 down to no more than 10^3 - perhaps less than 10^2. When you trim the size of your data set by 27 or 28 orders of magnitude before you even start your processing, then suddenly those 700 or so transactions/second start looking a lot easier.
Then, of course, there's yet another old standby of people needing lots of computations: Don't repeat your work. Insert a machine or process that watches each incoming request, and caches the results in a lookup table for future use. Yes, there are implementation challenges (such as marking entries as dirty when route information changes), but $50k in programming could save them more than $1m in hardware.
steve
The diameter of a size? And here I thought size had a magnitude only!
You think so? Imagine this...
"How large is that object?"
"It's seven, sir."
Size needs at least units, and quite often takes direction. "It's seven cubic feet", or "It's seven stories tall."
steve
or they can only include so many AI objects in the background
It's not just the number of AI-driven objects, but the quality of AI.
Well, let's say that you're on a battlefield-type game. You could be facing a few squadrons of infantry, a few squadrons of armor, and at least some air support. Then you could have some sort of central command. Yes, you could get by with rudimentary AI and suck like so many other games, but to be realistic, you need individual-level AI and group-level AI all the way up. And in a situation like that, you're easily dealing with 30+ objects, and potentially 100+ AI-driven objects. (Imagine a large space-flight battle inspired by the Star Wars movies - hundreds of small ships, dozens of medium ships, and a few large ships, with individual, squadron, wing, and command-level AI.) Don't forget that after graphics, audio, and all other aspects of the game, the AI doesn't exactly get a large time-share on the CPU. I'll get back to this in just a moment...
The feeling of immersion in video games is a very key componant in how much fun they are to play. We're at a point now where video cards can crank out some incredibly immersive graphics. With 5.1 (and higher) audio, that's at a pretty reasonable level as well. The two areas that are now most noticeably lagging are AI and physics. When a game like Far Cry implements very basic, rudimentary group-level AI, it's actually newsworthy, because AI in video games generally does suck. And physics, well, that's in an even worse state - but physics, at least, is about to become hardware-accelerated, which will be a big boon.
That leaves... AI. A beautiful world with realistic physics, allowing you to truy interact with all of your super-realistically-rendered environment, with good directional sound to make you look over your shoulder is still going to feel very artificial without good AI. Now, after all of that, remember that the CPUs that are going into these consoles are designed almost solely around cranking out polygons, and they're reputed to be pretty darn lousy at AI. I'm sure that the games for these consoles will be beautiful. I'm just not expecting them to be very smart.
steve
Whenever people buy a Nintendo console, they're always telling me how great it will be to play old games.
You bet. A good game is a good game. I still occasionally play Civ2, for crying out loud. And when I installed the x86_64 version of Windows XP, yes, I was sad that it would no longer work...
steve
Yeah, some guy got Doom 3 to run on an old Voodoo card, too, what's your point?
The whole point of Doom 3 was that it was supposed to be gorgeous, and have all of the advanced graphics technology. Gameplay? Come on, it was horrible. (Sorry, Id fanboys, it really was.) But it was gorgeous, and it was gorgeous for a reason: It was supposed to immerse you in the world.
On the XBox, things are different - you don't even have the graphical glory that made it somewhat bearable. The immersion isn't there, and it simply *is not* what it was originally designed to be. Sorry, but it isn't.
Whereas my p4 1.6 with only 128 megs of ram (really need to upgrade) and a gf4ti4200 runs doom3 like shit.
Like I said, one guy even got it to play on an old Voodoo card. One of my friends played it fairly satisfactorily on an Athlon 1600 (although with 512 megs) and some video card that he picked up for $50 or so on ebay.
steve
In my opinion, *most* console games are nothing more than eye-candy where you can control a character, gameplay is an afterthought. But that's beside the point...
Some game concepts don't require a lot of CPU power. Civilization is one of the all-time greats, and despite MicroProse's horrible coding, still played on old, weak hardware. On the other hand, some game concepts aren't as easy to get along with, when you start trying to fill a large world with lots of AI-driven characters, then things become very different.
steve
That's just it... the games will be designed so that the processers are "fast enough", meaning the games that come out will be limitted in what they can do.
steve
Now imagine if broadcast ratings dropped 12% at once?
Eh. They wouldn't care. Those 12% are nothing but freeloaders in their eyes... even though they may view advertising, they aren't actually paying money directly to anyone in the industry. Cable companies, satellite companies... they want to get paid to show you more advertising.
steve
but why send mega numbers of suddenly obsolete TVs to the landfill?
Money, man, money. The spectrum now used by over-the-air transmission is potentially worth *billions* of dollars. The FCC wants to get their hands on that money, and fast.
FCC official thinking to himself...
"Oh, wait... it will cost American consumer many times that to replace all of their television sets? Well, that's a shame. But wait... those consumers will also have to pay sales tax on those new televisions. Bonus..."
steve
Ballmer and the rest of the MS folks have been at this game for many years. Every so often, they say something to the effect of "You know, we realize that things are pretty bad, and we're going to change that." But in the end, they never do.
It's just a ploy to make the disgruntled Microsoft users believe that there's a ray of hope, so that they don't abandon ship.
Years ago in the "Windows NT 5.0 Rapid Deployment Conference" (Before it was even going to be called Windows 2000), Jim Allchin stood up and told us all how horrible NT4 was, and effectively that they had "seen the light". 2000 had many of the same problems that he admitted to NT 4 having on that platform. They didn't fix them, they just tried to make us all feel better. And they've done it over and over since then, nothing's changed.
steve
Providers don't buy transfer, they buy (or trade) bandwidth. Because of that, selling transfer (as opposed to bandwidth) becomes a stickier situation, plannign capacity becomes much tougher, and they're less able to deal with peak demands.
I've always thought that selling transfer to be hokey. Every time I see someone with a cut-rate hosting company with a web page that says "This web page has exceeded it's monthly transfer allocation...", I shake my head in disbelief.
(The only reason for doing that is because they're putting many domains on one machine, and using name-based virtual hosting - making rate-limitting much more difficult. With IP-based virtual hosting, then a relatively cheap Linux router can rate-limit quite well.)
steve
Yes the U.S. has a much lower population density, it has an older infrastructure, and so on so forth.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the US government has a real knack for regulating the industry where said regulation will not benefit the consumer, while not regulating when it would help the consumer.
Besides that, the taxes on telecommunication lines are just insane. A few years ago, our company was paying over $200 in taxes on a line that cost $400.
steve
steve
Sure, the provider may not have the bandwidth to throw more than a few hundred mbits or a gbit or whatever they decided
Here's the beauty of being a large player in a well-connected city: You don't necessarily need to buy huge upstream pipes, all you need is a presence in a major peering location - then you can work out "non-transit" peering with the other major players. You're not buying bandwidth from them, they're just agreeing to take packets from you that are destined for their network anyway. You can get rid of a lot of customer's packets without shelling out much money that way...
As an example, the provider that we use has always given us absolutely fan-freaking-tastic performance getting our packets anywhere they need to go, because they have such agreements with hundreds of different networks - everything from the big players to relatively "small" players like the Microsoft and Yahoo networks. It's an entirely different ball game from someone who just buys pipes from one or a few upstream providers.
steve
I can't think of a legal use that my 3Mb connection isn't perfectly capable of handling
There are things I'd like to download from work fairly often that my 3 mbps connection is just too slow for, and I'll wait until I go in the next day.
Here's another example: I regularly sync up the photos I've taken to a storage server at the office for backups. Uncompressed file sizes can be over 300 megs *per image*. It doesn't take many of those to make you wish you had more than 768k. Even if I had 3mbps up, it would still take a lot longer than I would like.
steve
Nevermind that when the line goes down your screwed big time as is the case here but how in the world can you function on one line normally? Wouldn't the bandwidth of a country be too great for one line to handle? Hell we had to expand to 3 t-one lines in my office because we were hogging too much bandwith with 2 lines, an office of 70 people.
What you don't realize is that your three t1 lines were only discreet lines from a box out on the side of the street into your building. At that box, they were simply channels on a larger line.
I know that they use fiber or what not but can the cable really handle all that bandwidth?
Well, an OC192 can carry 10 gbps. That's an awful lot of bandwidth. Besides, it probably wasn't one single fiber - you don't go to all of the expense of laying an undersea cable with just *one* fiber in it.
steve
I imagine the movie industry has unlimited means to create the perfec theater and experience.
You would think so, wouldn't you? : ) Unfortunately, in a room as large as a theater, you simply can't make the audio experience really great over the entire area. In fact, all of the theaters I've been to have a relatively modest "sweet spot" area where the sound is really good, and in the rest of the theater, it's just so-so.
Someone who's never heard a good 5.1 system before would find the "rest of the theater" to be pretty good - better than their homes. But once you've experienced a good 5.1 setup, then you definitely notice the difference.
My setup at home is relatively modest - I purchased everything when I was in college and pretty poor, I had to watch for the *really* good deals. I ended up with a decent 5.1 receiver, a DVD player, Infinity fronts and center, Pioneer rears, and a pair of 18" subs that I got for the steal-of-the century. (That's another story.) Overall, I spent about $1,000 - but that was years ago when prices were much higher, other than the subs, you could get similar or better equipment now for about $500 to $600.
I spent a lot of time getting the room design, speaker placement, and adjustments right, and it paid off - the system sounds fantastic. Because it's all designed around where a few people are sitting, those people get it the way it should be. Everyone who comes over tells me that it sounds better than the theaters. One of my friends who is a huge movie buff, and gets to watch a lot of movies on a $15,000 setup, has told me that as far as the audio, my house gives just as good of experience as the high-end setups. (The size of the screen is a different matter!)
steve
Well, for home theater, your speakers really don't have to be *that* great. Yeah, I know, that will piss of the elitists pretty badly.
When it comes down to it, everyone that I've met or talked to, when given a chance to experience both, has preferred watching a movie in a well-thought-out 5.1 environment with modest (but not terrible) speakers over watching in even a "dolby surround" (still really only 2 discreet channels, with some "magic" done on it) environment with really good speakers.
For music, that's not necessarily the case, but for movies, it's been my experience 100% of the time.
steve
yeah, i know low frequencies are omnidirectional.
The funny thing is that they're not really omnidirectional, at least not until you get to *really* low frequencies.
I have a pair of very nice 18" subwoofers in my home entertainment system. I've occasionally covered the eyes of a test subject, spun them around, played low frequencies through the subs, and asked them to point to where the sound is coming from.
Above about 25-30 Hz, every single person was able to point exactly to the subwoofers. Below about 20-22 Hz, then they can't - but at that point, you're not really hearing it, just feeling it, which is a lot less precise.
The good bit here is that precious few subwoofers are able to even go down to 25 Hz with any reasonableness, and quite a few never even make it down to 30 Hz.
steve
I have a vision too, and I don't need millions of fucking dollars to put it to work
It's not that he has vision, it's that he's able to make his vision reality. That doesn't necessarily mean that he *ought* to get that much money, but it does mean that he *can*.
Lots of people have vision. Few ever make that vision happen, and that's what seperates the haves from the have-nots.
You know most of those movies could have been done in a year or two in CG
If I'm not mistaken, it took a year or two of CG *on top* of the actual acting.
Really, let's see you produce ten minutes of film of the quality that the LOtR films were. If you can't, then shut up, and quit whining. If you can, you'll have a very lucrative future ahead of you. Remember, it's not the vision, it's making it happen.
steve
The heat is actually the evil twin of the industry's other largest problem: Power delivery. As processers consume more heat, and customers install more and more CPUs, a LOT of data centers are struggling to deliver enough electricity, and then they're struggling to keep the place cool.
It's the flip side of the same problem, but while you can easily sense that the room is getting really, really warm, you can't sense that their power feeds and UPS systems are very near capacity unless there's a failure.
steve