Agreed. I think the reporter either borrowed elements of that story or got his facts mixed up between the two. The story read like a mix between this suicide and Brandons.
I think the fact that AMD chip based computers are now being sold by all the leading PC manufacturers except (for the time being) Dell probably has helped AMD significantly. Due to the antitrust lawsuits, Intel is not going to be able to beat up on companies that want to source chips from AMD. The other point is that the brand "Pentium" which was once upon a time what people asked for when they went to purchase a computer, is not the force it used to be. For most people now the price and the features (can it burn dvds? use the Internet? can I plug my camera into it) are what people are looking for when shopping. They don't really care if it's a Pentim or an AMD. But the vast majority of non-techies do not know who AMD is or that they might have an Athlon in their system. And they don't care.
The rips I'm talking about are 720 horizontal res, I think DIVX encoded sourced from HDTV. They are 700+ MB for a hour show (minus commercials) and are the sharpest I've seen. Not all posts are that good quality though. There are the SVCD and low bitrate DIVX/XVID ones.
I personally have a Pentium 233MHz, a Pentium 3 850MHz, a Celeron 2GHz, a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and a Pentium 4 3.2GHz which are all still ticking. So does that mean I should get an Intel next time? I think I'll take a look at the options when I need to buy and then decide which manufacturer to go with.
Part of the OS is open source. Part is not. Darwin stand alone is open source. Mac OS X is only partially constructed from open source components. Want to hack and recompile OS X? Good luck. You can't. You can submit changes to Darwin if you like. OS X is NOT an open source operating system in the same sense as BSD and Linux distros are! You cannot recompile OS X to run on the hardware of your choice. You cannot have access to the entire source code base of OS X. OS X cannot be freely distributed. OS X is not distributed under an open source license. It isn't just the Window server. The Apple APIs are not open source either. Take a look at this diagram Mac OS X Architecture. See all the parts above Darwin? Guess what? Most are not open source. Net result - OS X may benefit from open source software, but you - the end user (or should I say end geek) - do not benefit from OS X in the same manner you do from a fully open source OS such as BSD or GNU/Linux. No full source code access. Absolutely no legal portability of the OS to other non-Apple hardware platforms (even of the same architecture). You can not base your own software off of the source code from anything other than the Darwin portion of OS X.
It's about the only place you'll see the shader model 3.0 shininess in? Shininess makes people happy. Ooooh, look at the shiny, happy, high polygon models. *warm feeling*
I don't tend to overclock, but there are some chips that have been released which often times had a lot of overhead for easy overclocking. Was I stupid to overclock my Celeron 300A to 450Mhz by changing one setting in the bios?
And it's mostly important to ATI and Nvidia because it will convince people that they need a new video card even if their current one runs all current games fine.
Apple keeps the entire top layer of Mac OS X proprietary. Is Aqua open source no? Cocoa? Carbon? Quartz? Quicktime? Apple leverages open source technology in OS X but OS X is not open source. Understand?
Where on Slashdot does it say "only for Linux, FreeBSD and OS X" users? I believe the "news for nerds" allows for coverage of gaming, as many nerds play computer and video games. The biggest computer game platform is Windows. This benchmark is to show how video cards perform under current Windows gaming technologies (i.e. DirectX). Oh and by the way, since you seem to have a problem with closed source... how does OS X fit in? Sure Darwin is open source, but OS X is not just Darwin and is just as proprietary as Windows. Indeed with a Mac, Apple ultimately controls both the hardware and software. So this fits into the open source geek mentality exactly how?
Thanks to the wonder of copy protection. And lets give a hand to Starforce, the wonderful copy protection that installs on the driver level and intercepts all your HD access. Nice! That one won't cause any problems. I'm really disappointed that Heroes of Might and Magic V is going to use Starforce. I've bought every Heroes game since the first but I guess I'm just going to have to pass on this one.
OK, if you are real lucky you can get better than a green. The key word being "lucky". I've never had even a blue come out of one let alone a purple and have turned in plenty. No one on my guild has either.
According to the War Effort Ranking page, even though the resource turn in is complete, the gates are still not open. It now has a green box and a number 1/17. Can anyone enlighten me as to what happens AFTER the turn in is complete but before the gates are open? What does that number mean?
Nothing! The AQ "world event" is basically a time sync to get people to run around and farm items like linen to make bandages for the war effort. You turn in the bandages (or cooking, mining and herb items) in exchange for war effort tokens. You can turn the tokens in for either a reputation increase in the faction of your choice (limited to character race factions such as Human, Dwarf etc. on Alliance) or in exchange for a package with a few scrolls and a green item. The item level being relative to the difficulty of getting the turn in item (i.e. Runecloth turn ins net a level 50ish green, whereas linen would give you a much lower level item). Of course auction house pricing on the turn in items went up over night - stacks of runecloth on my server were going for 4 times the pre-event pricing.
Yes. For example, in real life you always have the option (bladder willing) of peeing on a police officer. Now most of us, most of the time would not choose to whip out the snake and hose the old pig down. Postal however lets us realize this fantasy. It also simulates the amazing beat down that you would likely receive in real life when wielding actual pee against an actual agent of law enforcement. Thus the simulation, while providing "release" and fantasy, reinforces the consequences of urinating on our fine, upstanding defenders of justice.
I agree - I think this article was a bit sloppy. So theoretically Altivec should be faster, but I would like to see an even comparison rather than the RAM difference when doing encoding. Some background on how Quicktime is optimized would be nice as well. What about the MP3 encoding? Is that something that can be significantly sped up via Altivec? I just found it interesting that the MP3 encoding was much faster than the G5 iMac, almost matching the PowerMac.
The point is that in real world usage many applications run on a single thread. Therefore the only benefit in speed boost to a single threaded application is that the other processor core can handle background tasks or OS related threads, potentially freeing up a bit of speed maybe. A single threaded application will not run twice as fast on a dual core processor, although a benchmark designed to run on both cores will come close. The biggest benefit for most users in a dual core system will be from multitasking and not having the OS lose the snappy feel when an app is running.
You need a few more keys for most modern games. Lets see for Call of Duty 2:
basic movement (forward, backward, strafe) lean left and lean right jump standard fire melee attack aim down sight (zoom) select weapon throw grenade select grendae run crouch go prone stand up
OS X runs best in 1GB+ of RAM. All the Macs we have with 512MB or less are significantly slower than those with more. OS X is not a lightweight operating system. The Quicktime test in particular was a bit dubious. Especially if you note how well the iMac performed in the MP3 compression test, where memory wouldn't have been a constraint. Then again it could be that Quicktime is not as optimized for Intel just yet.
"the only thing GW *doesn't* have is the addictiveness of World of Warcraft"
It also doesn't have the ability to jump over even a slight bump in the game world. Or to slide down a steep incline. The contrived pathing in the game drove me nuts. I can see a spot two feet away from me, but I have to wander around this path to get there because there is a two foot drop to that spot. I'm sure most people don't care about that, but as a player who loves exploring and clambering all around the landscape it was irritating.
The comparison comes from the fact that the Dreamcast was launched a year before Sony's PS2 much as the 360 has been launched before the PS3. Sega was hoping on getting a "next generation" system out early and derailing Sony's dominance in the market. The Dreamcast was initially well received and broke console sales records. Then the juggernaut that was the PS2 hit and sealed the fate of the Dreamcast. The point is that Microsoft is trying to gain a "first out of the gate" advantage, but console release history has shown that their really may not be any advantage to being first. Of course one of the things that drove the early PS2 sales was the internal DVD drive. At the time DVD players were still relatively expensive and the bonus of getting a console with a DVD player built in was a big hit (perhaps more so in Japan than the US). Sony is trying to do the same thing with Blue Ray and the PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I think the reporter either borrowed elements of that story or got his facts mixed up between the two. The story read like a mix between this suicide and Brandons.
I think the fact that AMD chip based computers are now being sold by all the leading PC manufacturers except (for the time being) Dell probably has helped AMD significantly.
Due to the antitrust lawsuits, Intel is not going to be able to beat up on companies that want to source chips from AMD.
The other point is that the brand "Pentium" which was once upon a time what people asked for when they went to purchase a computer, is not the force it used to be. For most people now the price and the features (can it burn dvds? use the Internet? can I plug my camera into it) are what people are looking for when shopping. They don't really care if it's a Pentim or an AMD.
But the vast majority of non-techies do not know who AMD is or that they might have an Athlon in their system. And they don't care.
"Well there is no group by that name"
I got the name wrong. The group is:
alt.binaries.battlestar-galactica
The rips I'm talking about are 720 horizontal res, I think DIVX encoded sourced from HDTV. They are 700+ MB for a hour show (minus commercials) and are the sharpest I've seen. Not all posts are that good quality though. There are the SVCD and low bitrate DIVX/XVID ones.
I personally have a Pentium 233MHz, a Pentium 3 850MHz, a Celeron 2GHz, a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and a Pentium 4 3.2GHz which are all still ticking.
So does that mean I should get an Intel next time?
I think I'll take a look at the options when I need to buy and then decide which manufacturer to go with.
Almost always has HDTV rips. I usually watch these instead of my standard Tivo'd off cable ones because the quality is that much better.
Is there a big ass battle or something that happens when the gong is rung?
Part of the OS is open source. Part is not. Darwin stand alone is open source. Mac OS X is only partially constructed from open source components. Want to hack and recompile OS X? Good luck. You can't. You can submit changes to Darwin if you like. OS X is NOT an open source operating system in the same sense as BSD and Linux distros are!
You cannot recompile OS X to run on the hardware of your choice. You cannot have access to the entire source code base of OS X. OS X cannot be freely distributed. OS X is not distributed under an open source license.
It isn't just the Window server. The Apple APIs are not open source either. Take a look at this diagram Mac OS X Architecture. See all the parts above Darwin? Guess what? Most are not open source.
Net result - OS X may benefit from open source software, but you - the end user (or should I say end geek) - do not benefit from OS X in the same manner you do from a fully open source OS such as BSD or GNU/Linux. No full source code access. Absolutely no legal portability of the OS to other non-Apple hardware platforms (even of the same architecture). You can not base your own software off of the source code from anything other than the Darwin portion of OS X.
It's about the only place you'll see the shader model 3.0 shininess in?
Shininess makes people happy.
Ooooh, look at the shiny, happy, high polygon models.
*warm feeling*
I don't tend to overclock, but there are some chips that have been released which often times had a lot of overhead for easy overclocking.
Was I stupid to overclock my Celeron 300A to 450Mhz by changing one setting in the bios?
Yes but some of the demos look pretty cool!
Woo woo!
And it's mostly important to ATI and Nvidia because it will convince people that they need a new video card even if their current one runs all current games fine.
Apple keeps the entire top layer of Mac OS X proprietary. Is Aqua open source no? Cocoa? Carbon? Quartz? Quicktime?
Apple leverages open source technology in OS X but OS X is not open source.
Understand?
Where on Slashdot does it say "only for Linux, FreeBSD and OS X" users?
I believe the "news for nerds" allows for coverage of gaming, as many nerds play computer and video games. The biggest computer game platform is Windows. This benchmark is to show how video cards perform under current Windows gaming technologies (i.e. DirectX).
Oh and by the way, since you seem to have a problem with closed source... how does OS X fit in? Sure Darwin is open source, but OS X is not just Darwin and is just as proprietary as Windows. Indeed with a Mac, Apple ultimately controls both the hardware and software. So this fits into the open source geek mentality exactly how?
Thanks to the wonder of copy protection. And lets give a hand to Starforce, the wonderful copy protection that installs on the driver level and intercepts all your HD access. Nice! That one won't cause any problems.
I'm really disappointed that Heroes of Might and Magic V is going to use Starforce. I've bought every Heroes game since the first but I guess I'm just going to have to pass on this one.
OK, if you are real lucky you can get better than a green. The key word being "lucky". I've never had even a blue come out of one let alone a purple and have turned in plenty. No one on my guild has either.
Auras however are available at lvl 30.
According to the War Effort Ranking page, even though the resource turn in is complete, the gates are still not open. It now has a green box and a number 1/17. Can anyone enlighten me as to what happens AFTER the turn in is complete but before the gates are open? What does that number mean?
Nothing! The AQ "world event" is basically a time sync to get people to run around and farm items like linen to make bandages for the war effort. You turn in the bandages (or cooking, mining and herb items) in exchange for war effort tokens. You can turn the tokens in for either a reputation increase in the faction of your choice (limited to character race factions such as Human, Dwarf etc. on Alliance) or in exchange for a package with a few scrolls and a green item. The item level being relative to the difficulty of getting the turn in item (i.e. Runecloth turn ins net a level 50ish green, whereas linen would give you a much lower level item).
Of course auction house pricing on the turn in items went up over night - stacks of runecloth on my server were going for 4 times the pre-event pricing.
Yes. For example, in real life you always have the option (bladder willing) of peeing on a police officer. Now most of us, most of the time would not choose to whip out the snake and hose the old pig down. Postal however lets us realize this fantasy. It also simulates the amazing beat down that you would likely receive in real life when wielding actual pee against an actual agent of law enforcement. Thus the simulation, while providing "release" and fantasy, reinforces the consequences of urinating on our fine, upstanding defenders of justice.
I agree - I think this article was a bit sloppy. So theoretically Altivec should be faster, but I would like to see an even comparison rather than the RAM difference when doing encoding. Some background on how Quicktime is optimized would be nice as well.
What about the MP3 encoding? Is that something that can be significantly sped up via Altivec? I just found it interesting that the MP3 encoding was much faster than the G5 iMac, almost matching the PowerMac.
The point is that in real world usage many applications run on a single thread. Therefore the only benefit in speed boost to a single threaded application is that the other processor core can handle background tasks or OS related threads, potentially freeing up a bit of speed maybe. A single threaded application will not run twice as fast on a dual core processor, although a benchmark designed to run on both cores will come close.
The biggest benefit for most users in a dual core system will be from multitasking and not having the OS lose the snappy feel when an app is running.
You need a few more keys for most modern games. Lets see for Call of Duty 2:
basic movement (forward, backward, strafe)
lean left and lean right
jump
standard fire
melee attack
aim down sight (zoom)
select weapon
throw grenade
select grendae
run
crouch
go prone
stand up
BF2 is pretty similar.
OS X runs best in 1GB+ of RAM. All the Macs we have with 512MB or less are significantly slower than those with more. OS X is not a lightweight operating system.
The Quicktime test in particular was a bit dubious. Especially if you note how well the iMac performed in the MP3 compression test, where memory wouldn't have been a constraint. Then again it could be that Quicktime is not as optimized for Intel just yet.
If he had rewritten the information it would have been fine. Whole paragraphs were copied verbatim without noting the source.
"the only thing GW *doesn't* have is the addictiveness of World of Warcraft"
It also doesn't have the ability to jump over even a slight bump in the game world. Or to slide down a steep incline. The contrived pathing in the game drove me nuts. I can see a spot two feet away from me, but I have to wander around this path to get there because there is a two foot drop to that spot.
I'm sure most people don't care about that, but as a player who loves exploring and clambering all around the landscape it was irritating.
The comparison comes from the fact that the Dreamcast was launched a year before Sony's PS2 much as the 360 has been launched before the PS3. Sega was hoping on getting a "next generation" system out early and derailing Sony's dominance in the market. The Dreamcast was initially well received and broke console sales records. Then the juggernaut that was the PS2 hit and sealed the fate of the Dreamcast.
The point is that Microsoft is trying to gain a "first out of the gate" advantage, but console release history has shown that their really may not be any advantage to being first.
Of course one of the things that drove the early PS2 sales was the internal DVD drive. At the time DVD players were still relatively expensive and the bonus of getting a console with a DVD player built in was a big hit (perhaps more so in Japan than the US). Sony is trying to do the same thing with Blue Ray and the PS3.