No kidding. When Southerners ask me "You want me to plug it up?", I know what they mean, but I can't help but think "Sure. Plug your computer up. Plug it up with dirt, with sand, with toilet paper, whatever you want. But first, would you mind putting the power plug *IN* the wall for me?"
To be fair, there is an up-side to helping out Southerners: They're almost always incredibly polite. Even when they were angry, they were almost always polite. I'd much rather deal with a polite Southerner than a rude, demanding person from certain other parts of the country.
Here's a side-story: I spent a few years in a Spanish-speaking country, and became pretty fluent in Spanish. When I'd take support calls from persons whose native language was Spanish, they were almost universally nice, polite, and easy to work with as long as I spoke English with them. As soon as I started speaking Spanish to them (to try and make it easier), they would invariable get VERY demanding. I never could figure out why that happened.
I don't have any problem with any person in the world providing the support. I don't care what country they're from, really. But I do expect two things from them:
1. They should be proficient in the basic responsibilities of their job. 2. They should be understandable.
Unfortunately, finding a support rep that meets even one of those qualifications seems to be quite the accomplishment for most companies.
You can't really compare a computer to a car in terms of support. People don't buy a car, take out some of the factory components, put in some of their own, modify some of the others, change the computer code, and then take it back to the factory to ask why their car doesn't work with all of their modifications.
I worked the support end of things for a couple of years. I even worked one of the 900 numbers where we would help the customer with anything they wanted. Software, hardware, education, programming, whatever they wanted. And after the time I put in, I can say that 95% of the calls fell very neatly into two categories:
(a) Bad hardware from manufacturer. These were nearly always easy to accurately diagnose, and set up an appointment for a replacement.
(b) Something the customer did to their computer.
As for support for (a), it should certainly be there. And guess what - it's easy to provide. Support for (b) is a crock. "Yeah, I done installed 47 different applications, got infected by thirty viruses, installed some crap-ware, and now I want your company to cover the cost of making all 47 of those programs work again." Tough. Eat it.
If you think it's a loss-leader, then take the loss. But myself, I've seen that it's nothing but a loss. People will come in after screwing up their machines, ask you what they can do, not accept your answers, keep asking you over and over to try and get you to say something they like, and finally get frustrated and leave. Or, if they do take your advice, they generally screw it up again, and again, and again, and again.
If you make $100 selling a computer, is it really worth your while to then spend 20 to 30 hours helping that person later on? Not really. And that does the customer a disservice: I can't tell you how many fly-by-night, corner-store computer shops start up, sell a bunch of computers, and a year later get swamped in support costs, go out of business, and their (ex) customers who have legitimate support needs are then screwed.
Support from a manufacturer should be limitted to:
(a) We'll make sure that the hardware is working correctly. (b) If we sold you an OEM version of Windows, we'll give you the Windows support that you would otherwise have been able to get from Microsoft. (c) We'll ensure that the other software we sold you works as intended. (d) In order to ensure points (b) through (c), we may have to restore your hard drive to the way it was when you bought it, and you'll lose anything you haven't backed up. Sorry, your customizations are your responsibility.
That's not coming from me just as someone who occasionally still has to provide support, but from me as a consumer. I'd much rather buy from a company that will backup its product, but not swamp itself in extraneous support costs that will put it out of business.
The downside is that as the AMD chips are going to be backward-compatible with older boards, I imagine that the dual-core chip will still only have the single 128-bit memory controller.
While that will still give you twice as many available CPU iterations, that means that the two cores will be fighting for memory bandwidth. In the case of Intel's chips, that's business-as-usual: But for the Opterons, where each processor brings its own memory controller, it just doesn't feel right. : (
The benefits of HT, as currently implemented, are pretty insignificant compared to the benefits of multiprocessing, as the possible performance boost is very small, it certainly doesn't give you the ability to handle more interrupts, and it doesn't let you decrease the number of context-switches.
As for building a more intelligent core to take advantage of the extra transistors, that just might make sense - but it would also take hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars in development, and the chip wouldn't appear for a good number of years (look at the Itanium). It's a lot easier and cheaper to slap two cores on the same die and call it done. Because Intel is scurrying to try and play catch-up to AMD in the high-end market, time-to-market is critical for them.
It's actually a lot higher than one in four people. Of those who responded to my survey, a full 100% of people had downloaded movies from the Internet.
The fact that I only asked one person doesn't make it "junk research" at all, honest!
It's easy to say the words "remote access", isn't it?
Call your local provider, ask them about getting a line to the South Pole. Keep calling until you find someone who can provide it. Once you do, ask them how much it will cost. Now, calculate how many slaves you'd have to keep working in full-time positions to be able to afford any decent amount of bandwidth.
These benchmarks show the Opteron 150, a $600, real-world-available chip handily beating a $850, non-real-world-available chip. But that's still not the half of it.
Wait until tests are run on multi-CPU machines. Because the Opterons scale so much better than Xeons, the performance advantage of the Opteron will be even greater.
When I've bought a quad Xeon machine, I've never been at all impressed with the scalability. When I bought a quad Opteron, I was blown away.
did you know only 2% of America's spectrum allocation is determined by auction?
That's a bad thing? The last I had heard, I thought that slashdotters weren't in favor of the large, faceless companies.
steve
Re:What about refresh rate?
on
3D Monitor
·
· Score: 1
There are a number of LCDs that perform acceptably for games, they're just a lot more expensive than the "regular" LCDs. And, of course, you still get stuck with other LCD restrictions.
Like you, I still prefer my behemoth, desk-covering 21" CRT over any LCD.
A power supply with a built-in battery, or at least hookups to attack a battery.
Really. It would be so much better than a UPS. With a UPS, you convert 120V->12/24/48V (depending on model), then back to 120V, then your PS converts it back down to 12V yet again. You pay for all of the switching and conversion twice, lose efficiency in all of the conversions, have more parts to fail, and rely on the UPS to switch to battery quickly (which they don't always do).
With a battery in the power supply, you'd convert from 120V->12V->3.3/5V. You've got less than half of the parts to fail, and there is no switching time. The cost of the power supplies would probably rise no more than $5 if done in volume to have hookups for the battery. You supply a deep-cycle marine battery, and for about the same cost as a low-end UPS, you've got something that will keep your PC running for a very long time.
Id's MSRP was $55. Of course, that leaves a hefty margin for the retailer. Because everyone in the world has been panting for it, virtually nobody is going to sell it for less than the MSRP - they want to make all of the money off of it that they can.
Don't get me wrong, Id isn't exactly going broke off of the game, but neither is anyone else along the chain.
I thought long and hard about what video card to buy. In the end, I decided that if the video card couldn't give me D3 in full glory, it wouldn't matter if the card was cheap, I'd still feel like I was missing something (and, in fact, I would be.)
I decided on a 256-meg GeForce 6800GT. I picked one up for $400, which was honestly a lot of money (I felt WRONG at the register!). But spending $200 or $300, and not getting the full experience wouldn't have been worth it to me - if I couldn't have afforded the $400 card, I would have just waited until I could.
As a slight consolation, I can hope that the card I bought will be fairly useful for some time to come.
My ATI drivers were about 6 weeks old which I hoped would be late enough - but they weren't. Updated the drivers and I was away, no problems.
For crying out loud, you're talking about ATI: A company that has, for over a decade, been notorious for flaky drivers (although not as bad as trident!). You can buy the cards for performance, that's fine - but you're just going to have to accept that driver issues will be a problem.
The 32 meg GF2 won't cut it - but with a better video card, you'd likely be able to play a fairly decent game. But a GF2 just doesn't have the features, horsepower, or memory to handle it.
In your options, turn up the brightness. You'll find it much more enjoyable. But in answer to your question, the reason it's so freaking dark is because (a) it's supposed to be scary, and (b) the entire environment is based on dynamic lighting.
The darkness really does add to the scary feel, and it's tough to show off dynamic lighting when everything's brightly lit.
About a month ago, I upgraded my motherboard, memory, and CPU to handle Doom 3. Today, I spent $400 on a GeForce 6800GT. Playing D3 is honestly amazing.
The ironic part? After spending all of that money on hardware to play Doom 3, I got the game from a bit torrent. It feels a bit funny to have blown almost $1,000 on hardware to play a game, but not spend the $50 to buy the game itself.
Mobile AthlonXP 2500+: $88 Abit NF7-S motherboard: $69.18 Total: $158
Note that the mobile AthlonXP 2500+ is all but guaranteed to hit 3200+ speeds in that motherboard - and likely higher. In other words, for about half of the price, you'll get the equivalent of a 3200+ chip instead of a 3000+ chip.
Yes, Athlon64's are nifty. But the aforementioned XP-M is going to have enough horsepower to run pretty much all of the games that the Athlon64 3000+ will run. If you want the niftiness and have the money, buy the Athlon64 - but if you're really on a budget, there are much cheaper ways you can still get outstanding performance!
No kidding, brainiac. Now tell us something we haven't already known for years.
AMD actually does a pretty good job of labelling their chips - in common apps, an amd 2800+ (for example) does pretty much on par with a P4 2800. There isn't exact parity, some apps fall one way, some fall another, and occasional special apps fall greatly one way or another - but on the whole, the PR ratings are pretty close.
After doing anything for 8 or 9 hours a day as a job, a lot of the fun is gone out of it. I use to program for fun, before I got a job doing it. Now, about all I enjoy doing on the computer at home is email and video games.
On the other hand, my other hobby, woodturning, is extremely enjoyable. My wife got me a lathe for my birthday a year and a half ago, and I've really enjoyed it. Where I used to think that anything other than using the computer was boring, now I've found something really enjoyable that doesn't involve me staring at a monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. When Southerners ask me "You want me to plug it up?", I know what they mean, but I can't help but think "Sure. Plug your computer up. Plug it up with dirt, with sand, with toilet paper, whatever you want. But first, would you mind putting the power plug *IN* the wall for me?"
To be fair, there is an up-side to helping out Southerners: They're almost always incredibly polite. Even when they were angry, they were almost always polite. I'd much rather deal with a polite Southerner than a rude, demanding person from certain other parts of the country.
Here's a side-story: I spent a few years in a Spanish-speaking country, and became pretty fluent in Spanish. When I'd take support calls from persons whose native language was Spanish, they were almost universally nice, polite, and easy to work with as long as I spoke English with them. As soon as I started speaking Spanish to them (to try and make it easier), they would invariable get VERY demanding. I never could figure out why that happened.
steve
I don't have any problem with any person in the world providing the support. I don't care what country they're from, really. But I do expect two things from them:
1. They should be proficient in the basic responsibilities of their job.
2. They should be understandable.
Unfortunately, finding a support rep that meets even one of those qualifications seems to be quite the accomplishment for most companies.
steve
You can't really compare a computer to a car in terms of support. People don't buy a car, take out some of the factory components, put in some of their own, modify some of the others, change the computer code, and then take it back to the factory to ask why their car doesn't work with all of their modifications.
I worked the support end of things for a couple of years. I even worked one of the 900 numbers where we would help the customer with anything they wanted. Software, hardware, education, programming, whatever they wanted. And after the time I put in, I can say that 95% of the calls fell very neatly into two categories:
(a) Bad hardware from manufacturer. These were nearly always easy to accurately diagnose, and set up an appointment for a replacement.
(b) Something the customer did to their computer.
As for support for (a), it should certainly be there. And guess what - it's easy to provide. Support for (b) is a crock. "Yeah, I done installed 47 different applications, got infected by thirty viruses, installed some crap-ware, and now I want your company to cover the cost of making all 47 of those programs work again." Tough. Eat it.
If you think it's a loss-leader, then take the loss. But myself, I've seen that it's nothing but a loss. People will come in after screwing up their machines, ask you what they can do, not accept your answers, keep asking you over and over to try and get you to say something they like, and finally get frustrated and leave. Or, if they do take your advice, they generally screw it up again, and again, and again, and again.
If you make $100 selling a computer, is it really worth your while to then spend 20 to 30 hours helping that person later on? Not really. And that does the customer a disservice: I can't tell you how many fly-by-night, corner-store computer shops start up, sell a bunch of computers, and a year later get swamped in support costs, go out of business, and their (ex) customers who have legitimate support needs are then screwed.
Support from a manufacturer should be limitted to:
(a) We'll make sure that the hardware is working correctly.
(b) If we sold you an OEM version of Windows, we'll give you the Windows support that you would otherwise have been able to get from Microsoft.
(c) We'll ensure that the other software we sold you works as intended.
(d) In order to ensure points (b) through (c), we may have to restore your hard drive to the way it was when you bought it, and you'll lose anything you haven't backed up. Sorry, your customizations are your responsibility.
That's not coming from me just as someone who occasionally still has to provide support, but from me as a consumer. I'd much rather buy from a company that will backup its product, but not swamp itself in extraneous support costs that will put it out of business.
steve
The downside is that as the AMD chips are going to be backward-compatible with older boards, I imagine that the dual-core chip will still only have the single 128-bit memory controller.
While that will still give you twice as many available CPU iterations, that means that the two cores will be fighting for memory bandwidth. In the case of Intel's chips, that's business-as-usual: But for the Opterons, where each processor brings its own memory controller, it just doesn't feel right. : (
steve
The benefits of HT, as currently implemented, are pretty insignificant compared to the benefits of multiprocessing, as the possible performance boost is very small, it certainly doesn't give you the ability to handle more interrupts, and it doesn't let you decrease the number of context-switches.
As for building a more intelligent core to take advantage of the extra transistors, that just might make sense - but it would also take hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars in development, and the chip wouldn't appear for a good number of years (look at the Itanium). It's a lot easier and cheaper to slap two cores on the same die and call it done. Because Intel is scurrying to try and play catch-up to AMD in the high-end market, time-to-market is critical for them.
steve
It's actually a lot higher than one in four people. Of those who responded to my survey, a full 100% of people had downloaded movies from the Internet.
The fact that I only asked one person doesn't make it "junk research" at all, honest!
steve
It's easy to say the words "remote access", isn't it?
Call your local provider, ask them about getting a line to the South Pole. Keep calling until you find someone who can provide it. Once you do, ask them how much it will cost. Now, calculate how many slaves you'd have to keep working in full-time positions to be able to afford any decent amount of bandwidth.
steve
You come home, someone's obviously been inside your house. Your door is open, they've gone through everything in the house.
After days of searching everything in the house, it's determined that they didn't actually take anything. What's the big deal?
steve
These benchmarks show the Opteron 150, a $600, real-world-available chip handily beating a $850, non-real-world-available chip. But that's still not the half of it.
Wait until tests are run on multi-CPU machines. Because the Opterons scale so much better than Xeons, the performance advantage of the Opteron will be even greater.
When I've bought a quad Xeon machine, I've never been at all impressed with the scalability. When I bought a quad Opteron, I was blown away.
steve
did you know only 2% of America's spectrum allocation is determined by auction?
That's a bad thing? The last I had heard, I thought that slashdotters weren't in favor of the large, faceless companies.
steve
There are a number of LCDs that perform acceptably for games, they're just a lot more expensive than the "regular" LCDs. And, of course, you still get stuck with other LCD restrictions.
Like you, I still prefer my behemoth, desk-covering 21" CRT over any LCD.
steve
It's supported 64-bit for as long as I can remember.
steve
A power supply with a built-in battery, or at least hookups to attack a battery.
Really. It would be so much better than a UPS. With a UPS, you convert 120V->12/24/48V (depending on model), then back to 120V, then your PS converts it back down to 12V yet again. You pay for all of the switching and conversion twice, lose efficiency in all of the conversions, have more parts to fail, and rely on the UPS to switch to battery quickly (which they don't always do).
With a battery in the power supply, you'd convert from 120V->12V->3.3/5V. You've got less than half of the parts to fail, and there is no switching time. The cost of the power supplies would probably rise no more than $5 if done in volume to have hookups for the battery. You supply a deep-cycle marine battery, and for about the same cost as a low-end UPS, you've got something that will keep your PC running for a very long time.
steve
Id's MSRP was $55. Of course, that leaves a hefty margin for the retailer. Because everyone in the world has been panting for it, virtually nobody is going to sell it for less than the MSRP - they want to make all of the money off of it that they can.
Don't get me wrong, Id isn't exactly going broke off of the game, but neither is anyone else along the chain.
steve
I thought long and hard about what video card to buy. In the end, I decided that if the video card couldn't give me D3 in full glory, it wouldn't matter if the card was cheap, I'd still feel like I was missing something (and, in fact, I would be.)
I decided on a 256-meg GeForce 6800GT. I picked one up for $400, which was honestly a lot of money (I felt WRONG at the register!). But spending $200 or $300, and not getting the full experience wouldn't have been worth it to me - if I couldn't have afforded the $400 card, I would have just waited until I could.
As a slight consolation, I can hope that the card I bought will be fairly useful for some time to come.
steve
My ATI drivers were about 6 weeks old which I hoped would be late enough - but they weren't. Updated the drivers and I was away, no problems.
For crying out loud, you're talking about ATI: A company that has, for over a decade, been notorious for flaky drivers (although not as bad as trident!). You can buy the cards for performance, that's fine - but you're just going to have to accept that driver issues will be a problem.
steve
After Carmack swore so long ago that he wouldn't use Direct3D, Doom 3 is indeed a DirectX game.
steve
The 32 meg GF2 won't cut it - but with a better video card, you'd likely be able to play a fairly decent game. But a GF2 just doesn't have the features, horsepower, or memory to handle it.
steve
In your options, turn up the brightness. You'll find it much more enjoyable. But in answer to your question, the reason it's so freaking dark is because (a) it's supposed to be scary, and (b) the entire environment is based on dynamic lighting.
The darkness really does add to the scary feel, and it's tough to show off dynamic lighting when everything's brightly lit.
steve
About a month ago, I upgraded my motherboard, memory, and CPU to handle Doom 3. Today, I spent $400 on a GeForce 6800GT. Playing D3 is honestly amazing.
The ironic part? After spending all of that money on hardware to play Doom 3, I got the game from a bit torrent. It feels a bit funny to have blown almost $1,000 on hardware to play a game, but not spend the $50 to buy the game itself.
Next paycheck, I think I'll go buy the game.
steve
The game is so smegging linear that it makes me cry. It's like they took the level design from the original doom.
Well, they've been saying for years that this would be a remake of... the original doom.
steve
Prices from Newegg:
Athlon64 3000+ $175
MSI motherboard: $115
Total: $290
Mobile AthlonXP 2500+: $88
Abit NF7-S motherboard: $69.18
Total: $158
Note that the mobile AthlonXP 2500+ is all but guaranteed to hit 3200+ speeds in that motherboard - and likely higher. In other words, for about half of the price, you'll get the equivalent of a 3200+ chip instead of a 3000+ chip.
Yes, Athlon64's are nifty. But the aforementioned XP-M is going to have enough horsepower to run pretty much all of the games that the Athlon64 3000+ will run. If you want the niftiness and have the money, buy the Athlon64 - but if you're really on a budget, there are much cheaper ways you can still get outstanding performance!
steve
The future is here!
No, it's not! It won't be here for another three... oh, never mind. Now it is here.
steve
No kidding, brainiac. Now tell us something we haven't already known for years.
AMD actually does a pretty good job of labelling their chips - in common apps, an amd 2800+ (for example) does pretty much on par with a P4 2800. There isn't exact parity, some apps fall one way, some fall another, and occasional special apps fall greatly one way or another - but on the whole, the PR ratings are pretty close.
steve
After doing anything for 8 or 9 hours a day as a job, a lot of the fun is gone out of it. I use to program for fun, before I got a job doing it. Now, about all I enjoy doing on the computer at home is email and video games.
On the other hand, my other hobby, woodturning, is extremely enjoyable. My wife got me a lathe for my birthday a year and a half ago, and I've really enjoyed it. Where I used to think that anything other than using the computer was boring, now I've found something really enjoyable that doesn't involve me staring at a monitor.
steve