I know this is anal, but considering the lack of clear information about IP-over-powerlines, I will pose the following problem.
I am a sound freak. I replace components in store-bought devices, I spend hours adjusting proper placement of speakers and matching cable lengths to millimeter precision. Now if some big ignorant comms corporation starts pumping multi-mhz modulation on my power lines, that will most likely affect my hi-fi components due to high frequency aliasing componded by cheap cabling and long distances. Wouldn't that be VERY BAD for these multi-thousand-dollar amplifiers that rely on crystal-clean power to do their thing ? Conventional power conditioners are designed for filtering minor surges and dips in power, as well as light induced noise (interference). Now if the company injects 'noise' on purpose, with higher amplitude and reflections accumulated over hundreds of miles.. methinks it will seriously hinder the transient performance of my gear and that of many other, more wealthy and lawsuit-happy people.
I made a very simple live update system way back. It involved having all the latest files on a network share. Quite simply, every time the application was launched it would check that share for any files newer than its own and copy them over (thanks to a 30kbyte stub loader). Result: anyone who used my software was assured to have the latest version, and as a bonus if they were using it and it crashed, chances are they'd get a fix when they tried to reload it:)
I later used a variation on that scheme that involved a cron job on the server, checking regularly for new commits to the shared folder. It would then calculate windowed hashes of each file and the client update app would simply compare the server's hashes with its own (cached) hashes. This enabled me to minimize download times since it would only download the chunks that had been changed (in the case of large data heaps). It's not foolproof since I didn't do any insert/delete logic (add 1 byte to the beginning of the file and the rest is immediately invalidated)... but it was simple enough to justify the occasional forethought when releasing updates. It's like a castrated embedded version of rsync:) Damned easy to code too.
Considering the hell I've been thorugh with RTPatch and its ever-flaky software, it would be well worth writing my own smart binary diff (with proper shuffling detection and compression). These things really aren't that complicated to implement and the advantage of rolling your own is that you can include extra logic tailored for your application (or for that particular client).
Why does it take a news flash to tell people what they already know ?
It is obvious that lots and lots of authors/designers/people-who-have-shit-to-sell will post favorable reviews and heavily-biased opinions on forums because they can hide their identity, just like they "buy" reviews in magazines. That's how the world of capitalism works: brainwash them until you have their money.
Funny, I get a kick out of plugging absolutely anything in my XP-laden mega-notebook and doing whatever just seconds later. Webcam, network, camcorder, relatives' bargain-bin kodak digicams, outboard dvd burner, midi keyboard... everything just works transparently and I don't even need to fish the net for drivers.
On the other hand my linux install was an absolute headache to get working on this thing. I know my Debian damn well, but when it comes to supporting all these little toys that I've come to take for granted, it is just a nag. Download this, patch that, bootload this, make more room on/var.. blabbity blah it's a pain in the ass.
I guess I'm not nearly as hardcore as most linux folk. I use windows for daily work stuff, and Linux for everything server-side. The linux on my notebook is for apache mod development and various C/perl/php coding endeavours. I tried running an X desktop but it's just too much hassle and tweaking when all I want is to get my work done as quickly as possible.
Ok so I exaggerate, sarcasm is good for the laughter. I don't have stats but ask anyone, even your own mother, and she'll tell you that Nintendo stuff is marketed for kids. I know a few adults who enjoy Zelda, and I'm guilty of renting Metroid Prime to play on the kids' cube for a few hours, but look at the game selection: pokemon 1 to infinity, super smash bros 1-2-3-4, mario party 1-2-3-4, yugioh etc.. kids stuff! Easy games with little depth.
And for the record the few young adults I know that own gamecubes have yet to grow out of their parents' basement. So maybe I live in a small town, heck i dunno. If I ever find 200-300$ and don't know what to do with it, I might grab a Cube for the 3-4 games that interest me out of the lot, but it's still not going to displace my beloved Xbox.
I'd rather forego these ridiculous gadgets that are just milking the problem rather than fixing it. Years ago if you drove like an ass you either killed yourself, or killed others and landed in jail for the rest of your life. Nowadays with airbags, frame-sacrificing designs and all these fancy gadgets, people can have their accident and walk away (or at least be rolled away on a stretcher). Weeks or months later they can reiterate and cause more damage and stress.
It's excessively mean and probably close to a 'terrorist state of mind', but I think there are simply too many idiots on this planet. More deaths is a GOOD thing, it's called population control and it occurs naturally in every species except humans. The less bad drivers we have on the road, the less GOOD drivers such as myself will go postal in the middle of a busy intersection.
Evolution: it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
My home rig: Athlon XP2000, 1gig ram, 350gb total disk. Windows XP runs schweet, multitasking no prob.
My laptop: P4 2.0g, 512mb ram, 40gb disk. Windows XP runs great, but load any memory intensive app and you'll think it's a frickin' 486. Photoshop takes nearly a minute to load (vs about 4 seconds on my desktop).
I can also lock it up easily if I send files over the 1394 network, because of some retarded network 'enhancement' in WinXP where if the disk can't keep up with the incoming stream of data, rather than throttling the network it will start caching it in RAM, but it doesn't limit the amount of cache ram used so it eventually spills over into swap space and becomes doubly retarded. I'm thinking of foregoing the swap entirely to see if it helps.
Conclusion: RAM and hard disk speed make the biggest difference, because today's applications aren't so much CPU-hungry as they are resource-hungry, sometimes to a sloppy degree like my example above.
I'd still love to have a quad-opteron to help with my video encoding chores, but for everything else the RAM is king.
If someone walking down the street can receive satellite tv on a tiny phone, then why do I have to aim this 18" dish at exactly the right spot in the sky to get anything on a real tv ?
If someone's invented good quality live TV! Not for driving of course, but for all the other stuff I find myself doing while parked waiting for a work order to ring in. Right now I'm limited to loud music and watching DivX on the laptop. And believe me these waits can get really long. I've been wishing for a good TV-input accessory for my laptop for months (to hook up the Xbox).
For those people like me who work, eat and sleep in their cars, mobile toys are a godsend!
The reason why Nintendo's adult-rated games don't sell is because most of the time Nintendo consoles are bought by mothers for their kids, because every other console is marketed to the teen/young adult market with violence and skin. Let's say 80% of Cubes are used by young kids, of the remainder, another 60% are used by 'adults' who have yet to get laid, and whose best friends are "The Guy At The Video Store" and "That Blond Dude On Tech TV's X-Play". YOu know, the 25 year old types who still receive an allowance and use it on strategy guides and posters of the Final Fantasy girls (or guys!?)
So the few true 'adults' left with gamecubes, well we might buy that one M-rated game hidden under dozens of stupid Pokemon/YuGiOh sequels just for the hell of it.
So the stats suck. Meanwhile the PC crowd (and recently I learned, the PS2 crowd) are going jap-crazy for their soft porn 'games'. One that was recently demonstrated is called "Moving Gravure" and it's just a bunch of swimsuit pics morphing into one another to simulate full motion; of course with those wacky japanese girls performing various stupidly suggestive acts like eating fruit and stuff.
But then you realize that for the same 50$ you could just waltz down to the local strip club and have about as much play time with a real hunk of flesh.. and then you realize why the H-game industry is doomed from the get go here in north america.
Don't we already have 1gb smartmedia/compactflash ? Why not just cluster them together a-la RAID and build a decently-sized amazingly-fast solid-state storage device ?
I hate the 40gb drive in my notebook, it's the slowest part of the equation despite being a higher-end 5400rpm model. If I could slap together 32 x 1gb flash drives in a small-enough space, I'd most likely soil my pants over the blissful transfer speeds.
Bittorrent IS smarter. It's private P2P. You have to know someone who has the hash file. It's not built to allow every other 12 year old to download Fitty Cent bile and get sued for it. It's built for geeks to share their beloved digital possessions with other geeks in limited runs while making the most of each individual's personal bandwidth.
While Gnutella is a smarter kind of Napster/Kazaa, it is no more a holy grail of P2P than any other app. It's just more dumbified for the unwashed masses. Popular != Good
Awesome precision. Piece of shit manufacturing company. The thing broke within a few months because of cheap soft thin plastic. The 2 year warranty ended up being a jipp because nobody at Razer could get their act together to ship me the replacement, all I ever got was a UPS brokerage receipt that they never paid off. And then they went under. I still remember the pure joy of that lightning-fast mouse tracking. It was great for Quake, and even better for Photoshop/3DStudio. Just hold down the side button and spin the wheel down (turn down the pointer speed and you get hyper-precise oversampling for dead-on accurate pixel editing).
And now that they're back I'm feeling all giddy again to see their new product, but I remember how I was burnt the first time (for a $130 mouse, no less!). I'd rather see them get financially and logistically supported by a big guy like Logitech, or even one of the asian knockoff companies. They could do it cheaper, better, and with decent support (as in non-beta XP drivers!!).
I'm glad they're back in production, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed until I see an in-store demo or something.
Dell is probably getting rid of stagnant DVD+R drives. Dual-format drives are all the rage anyways, because the hardware manufacturers realize that it's a losing race to root for one over the other. It seems the hard-core crowd likes DVD-R, while the unwashed masses see DVD "Plus" and think it's newer/better/faster, and they seem to have more shelf space at Walmart/Bestbuy/.
I really do hope Dell is just liquidating their junk and not stocking more of these half-powered devices. I may be selfish, but I personally prefer DVD- (minus), if only because I've had pioneer DVD- drives for a few years now and have a sizeable stack of DVD archives.
Okay, but even a barton 2500 only runs at like 2ghz or something.. and a 3200 would be something like 2.4ghz. so I would see a 30-40% improvement in speed, but it's not enough. I remember going from a P2-333 to a Celeron OC'ed to 1.0 ghz (back when 1gig cpus didn't exist) and it was absolutely orgasmic. I was suddenly able to encode mp3's in realtime! I just read something about THG running a P4 at 5 ghz (with liquid nitro of course), well I would really be happy if I could get a 4-5ghz cpu today, something that I could really see an improvement.
I work with video quite a bit, and I hate having to wait 2 hours for an encode (often queuing it overnight), I want it to be done in 20-25 minutes so that I can just go read Slashdot or play a round of Bejeweled for a moment and have my results ready before I get sidetracked by the necessities of real life. It's kind of like CD burners, everyone would agree that upgrading from 32x to 48x is kind of pointless in that you save all of 15 seconds out of a 4 minute job. But a few years ago when we went from 2x to 16x almost overnight, that was something!
Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category
Yes, aim low so that today's product has to be reinvented every 6 months. That's why S3 has always been synonymous with cheap (as in broken). NVidia/ATI figured this out a couple years ago when they started marketing high-end AND low-end products within the same chip families. So then you make one set of drivers that works for the gamers as well as the budgeters, and at one point you can even sell your aging overstock for a lower price because it's still good enough to sell.
S3 making cut-rate low-performance hardware is nothing new, and it always shoots them in the foot. By the time the product is released, it's already obsolete and they have to start over for the next. Bigger R&D costs for low-margin sales, that makes no sense!
Besides, people are now used to NVidia and ATI as household names, because they've partnered with Nintendo and MS Xbox. But S3 ? I'm sure most non-gamers will think it's a taiwanese OEM supplier, and they will be damn right!
If you've been following AMD at all in the last few years, you'll know that roadmaps are a very poor estimate. They will make a press release stating that such-and-such is in production, but you might see it in-stock only 6 months later by the time they get it right.
Pisses me off too, I've been aching for a worthy replacement to this old XP2000, but there hasn't been any meaningful increases in clock speed yet. AMD64 may be the answer once they get to 3.2ghz and up.
Wouldn't you just love to build a super computer out of these tiny cubes ? Get a dozen, pop them in an old gutted VCR case and you just built a clustered TiVo.
In the ever growing race for computer ubiquity, is there anyone out there selling a board+cpu that can survive inside a waterproof shock-mounted case riding in my car ? And be able to run Diablo 2 while in heavy traffic in the middle of winter with the heater blowing full-tilt ?
I'm thinking VIA Epia, but I'm still not convinced on the heat problem.
We've got the free software, why not tweak it for cheap fast processors ? My Dell P4 laptop is nice and speedy yes, but for the same money I could have bought an even nicer Mac G5, or five Athlon-based desktops of equivalent performance.
(Before any of you chime in saying that losing documentation is stupid, how many of you who work in IT would be hard pressed to provide licenses to all of the software you use if the BSA knocked on your door today, hm?)
I wouldn't be hard pressed, I'd just reach for the gun rack. BSA is terrorism, no more no less. They walk in without even calling, 'demand the proof' in a very Agent Smith manner, calm yet obnoxious. And if you say "Sorry I already gave" they come back with rent-a-cops. Because they get paid for carrying out corporate extortion on behalf of the big companies that contract them. They are very finicky on what they consider 'proof', a printed store receipt or signed P.O. doesn't cut it for them, even though it is standard fare everywhere else, especially in court!
So the next time you get visited by the BSA, invite them in, take them to that dark cold 'license filing room' down the maintenance hall in the basement. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
Anyways back to the MT-32 issue: MT-32 is obsolete crap and Roland realized it isn't worth wasting money to find these decade-old copyright tracts because MT-32 doesn't produce income anymore, and never will. This is different from say, Atari/Hasbro suing left and right to protect Frogger and Missile Command, because they wanted to make room for the own half-assed remakes. Roland will never re-make the MT-32 because they have long since moved on to bigger and better things. Yeah, sometimes people get all retro and get all kinky over that lo-fi sound (like the Da-Da-Da Volkswagen commercials), but for the most part artists want freshly squeezed aurally perfect synth sounds to fuel new spurts of creativity. In the music industry, everything is a passing fad.
MT-32 was great for games in its day because the SB Pro/16/Adlib's FM synthesis was too simple and inflexible for traditional music reproduction. Oh it was great for electronic soundtracks in video games, but try to play a drum in FM, and you'll want to shoot your ears out. Under A Killing Moon actually had an option for "Digital Drums", which played FM music but with sampled drums instead of their sucky blip-blop-hiss FM homologues.
Today we have software wavetables that can suck up as much ram as you can fit on the motherboard, we're talking 64mb collections of sampled instuments that effortlessly blows away whatever synthesis tools the 80's and 90's ever spawned. MT-32 is commercially dead and buried.
This is beyond pointless because we all know this will be cracked and patched before it is even released. Legit users get annoyed, warez d00ds use the crack and nullify the protection entirely.
What really irks me is that they insist on having the CD in the drive, yet it is absolutely not required because they install 3-4 fricken' gigs of uncompressed crap to my hard drive and never read off the disc again. Console games don't need a hard drive and yet they seem to be surviving quite well. So the reasoning is this: run off the hard drive and do away with CD checks, or run off the disc and quit lining Maxtor's coffers with wasted disk space.
There is nothing more aggravating than watching the installer crank for 90 minutes copying several thousand raw 10kb data files, when it could have been done in about 3 minutes had the whole thing been tarred into one big chunk. And then having to futz with cracks and emulation tools when the inbred copy protection goes all false positive on a legit CD. Online keys are the way to go, I'm actually seriously considering the re-purchase of Diablo 2 + expansion because I have my old CD's from 3 years ago, but can't find the original jewel cases with cd keys, and of course you need unique keys to go on BattleNet. That is the power of cd keys. Convenient, simple, powerful!
I'm afraid we're thinking of different kinds of parking tickets. I mean the quarter-eating-meter-timed-out ticket, not the lame-excuse-for-a-parking-spot ticket.
In your example, that's just being a nuisance (a jerk). Jerks should be punished, respectful citizens should not. Which is why we all have homicidal fantasies when we get a 20$ parking ticket for being 5 minutes late to feed the meter, because it is simply unjustified. Nobody's safety is at stake, the only reason parking meters exist is to fill the municipal coffers, and that's no good of a reason at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is anal, but considering the lack of clear information about IP-over-powerlines, I will pose the following problem.
I am a sound freak. I replace components in store-bought devices, I spend hours adjusting proper placement of speakers and matching cable lengths to millimeter precision. Now if some big ignorant comms corporation starts pumping multi-mhz modulation on my power lines, that will most likely affect my hi-fi components due to high frequency aliasing componded by cheap cabling and long distances. Wouldn't that be VERY BAD for these multi-thousand-dollar amplifiers that rely on crystal-clean power to do their thing ? Conventional power conditioners are designed for filtering minor surges and dips in power, as well as light induced noise (interference). Now if the company injects 'noise' on purpose, with higher amplitude and reflections accumulated over hundreds of miles.. methinks it will seriously hinder the transient performance of my gear and that of many other, more wealthy and lawsuit-happy people.
I made a very simple live update system way back. It involved having all the latest files on a network share. Quite simply, every time the application was launched it would check that share for any files newer than its own and copy them over (thanks to a 30kbyte stub loader). Result: anyone who used my software was assured to have the latest version, and as a bonus if they were using it and it crashed, chances are they'd get a fix when they tried to reload it :)
:) Damned easy to code too.
I later used a variation on that scheme that involved a cron job on the server, checking regularly for new commits to the shared folder. It would then calculate windowed hashes of each file and the client update app would simply compare the server's hashes with its own (cached) hashes. This enabled me to minimize download times since it would only download the chunks that had been changed (in the case of large data heaps). It's not foolproof since I didn't do any insert/delete logic (add 1 byte to the beginning of the file and the rest is immediately invalidated)... but it was simple enough to justify the occasional forethought when releasing updates. It's like a castrated embedded version of rsync
Considering the hell I've been thorugh with RTPatch and its ever-flaky software, it would be well worth writing my own smart binary diff (with proper shuffling detection and compression). These things really aren't that complicated to implement and the advantage of rolling your own is that you can include extra logic tailored for your application (or for that particular client).
Why does it take a news flash to tell people what they already know ?
It is obvious that lots and lots of authors/designers/people-who-have-shit-to-sell will post favorable reviews and heavily-biased opinions on forums because they can hide their identity, just like they "buy" reviews in magazines. That's how the world of capitalism works: brainwash them until you have their money.
Funny, I get a kick out of plugging absolutely anything in my XP-laden mega-notebook and doing whatever just seconds later. Webcam, network, camcorder, relatives' bargain-bin kodak digicams, outboard dvd burner, midi keyboard... everything just works transparently and I don't even need to fish the net for drivers.
/var.. blabbity blah it's a pain in the ass.
On the other hand my linux install was an absolute headache to get working on this thing. I know my Debian damn well, but when it comes to supporting all these little toys that I've come to take for granted, it is just a nag. Download this, patch that, bootload this, make more room on
I guess I'm not nearly as hardcore as most linux folk. I use windows for daily work stuff, and Linux for everything server-side. The linux on my notebook is for apache mod development and various C/perl/php coding endeavours. I tried running an X desktop but it's just too much hassle and tweaking when all I want is to get my work done as quickly as possible.
Ok so I exaggerate, sarcasm is good for the laughter. I don't have stats but ask anyone, even your own mother, and she'll tell you that Nintendo stuff is marketed for kids. I know a few adults who enjoy Zelda, and I'm guilty of renting Metroid Prime to play on the kids' cube for a few hours, but look at the game selection: pokemon 1 to infinity, super smash bros 1-2-3-4, mario party 1-2-3-4, yugioh etc.. kids stuff! Easy games with little depth.
And for the record the few young adults I know that own gamecubes have yet to grow out of their parents' basement. So maybe I live in a small town, heck i dunno. If I ever find 200-300$ and don't know what to do with it, I might grab a Cube for the 3-4 games that interest me out of the lot, but it's still not going to displace my beloved Xbox.
Safer streets ? Less drivers.
I'd rather forego these ridiculous gadgets that are just milking the problem rather than fixing it. Years ago if you drove like an ass you either killed yourself, or killed others and landed in jail for the rest of your life. Nowadays with airbags, frame-sacrificing designs and all these fancy gadgets, people can have their accident and walk away (or at least be rolled away on a stretcher). Weeks or months later they can reiterate and cause more damage and stress.
It's excessively mean and probably close to a 'terrorist state of mind', but I think there are simply too many idiots on this planet. More deaths is a GOOD thing, it's called population control and it occurs naturally in every species except humans. The less bad drivers we have on the road, the less GOOD drivers such as myself will go postal in the middle of a busy intersection.
Evolution: it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
My home rig: Athlon XP2000, 1gig ram, 350gb total disk. Windows XP runs schweet, multitasking no prob.
My laptop: P4 2.0g, 512mb ram, 40gb disk. Windows XP runs great, but load any memory intensive app and you'll think it's a frickin' 486. Photoshop takes nearly a minute to load (vs about 4 seconds on my desktop).
I can also lock it up easily if I send files over the 1394 network, because of some retarded network 'enhancement' in WinXP where if the disk can't keep up with the incoming stream of data, rather than throttling the network it will start caching it in RAM, but it doesn't limit the amount of cache ram used so it eventually spills over into swap space and becomes doubly retarded. I'm thinking of foregoing the swap entirely to see if it helps.
Conclusion: RAM and hard disk speed make the biggest difference, because today's applications aren't so much CPU-hungry as they are resource-hungry, sometimes to a sloppy degree like my example above.
I'd still love to have a quad-opteron to help with my video encoding chores, but for everything else the RAM is king.
Got NOx ?
If someone walking down the street can receive satellite tv on a tiny phone, then why do I have to aim this 18" dish at exactly the right spot in the sky to get anything on a real tv ?
If someone's invented good quality live TV! Not for driving of course, but for all the other stuff I find myself doing while parked waiting for a work order to ring in. Right now I'm limited to loud music and watching DivX on the laptop. And believe me these waits can get really long. I've been wishing for a good TV-input accessory for my laptop for months (to hook up the Xbox).
For those people like me who work, eat and sleep in their cars, mobile toys are a godsend!
The reason why Nintendo's adult-rated games don't sell is because most of the time Nintendo consoles are bought by mothers for their kids, because every other console is marketed to the teen/young adult market with violence and skin. Let's say 80% of Cubes are used by young kids, of the remainder, another 60% are used by 'adults' who have yet to get laid, and whose best friends are "The Guy At The Video Store" and "That Blond Dude On Tech TV's X-Play". YOu know, the 25 year old types who still receive an allowance and use it on strategy guides and posters of the Final Fantasy girls (or guys!?)
So the few true 'adults' left with gamecubes, well we might buy that one M-rated game hidden under dozens of stupid Pokemon/YuGiOh sequels just for the hell of it.
So the stats suck. Meanwhile the PC crowd (and recently I learned, the PS2 crowd) are going jap-crazy for their soft porn 'games'. One that was recently demonstrated is called "Moving Gravure" and it's just a bunch of swimsuit pics morphing into one another to simulate full motion; of course with those wacky japanese girls performing various stupidly suggestive acts like eating fruit and stuff.
But then you realize that for the same 50$ you could just waltz down to the local strip club and have about as much play time with a real hunk of flesh.. and then you realize why the H-game industry is doomed from the get go here in north america.
I was almost forgetting: Flash devices = low power. The Microdrives chewed batteries like candy = not good.
Don't we already have 1gb smartmedia/compactflash ? Why not just cluster them together a-la RAID and build a decently-sized amazingly-fast solid-state storage device ?
I hate the 40gb drive in my notebook, it's the slowest part of the equation despite being a higher-end 5400rpm model. If I could slap together 32 x 1gb flash drives in a small-enough space, I'd most likely soil my pants over the blissful transfer speeds.
How about GTA: Real-Frickin-Car-Dealerships ?
I just think it would be cool to have realistic cars, not just pop mocks with crummy names.
I, for one, want to steal honda civics and smash them till they explode. Tee hee!
Bittorrent IS smarter. It's private P2P. You have to know someone who has the hash file. It's not built to allow every other 12 year old to download Fitty Cent bile and get sued for it. It's built for geeks to share their beloved digital possessions with other geeks in limited runs while making the most of each individual's personal bandwidth.
While Gnutella is a smarter kind of Napster/Kazaa, it is no more a holy grail of P2P than any other app. It's just more dumbified for the unwashed masses. Popular != Good
I had a Boomslang 2k about four years ago.
Awesome precision. Piece of shit manufacturing company. The thing broke within a few months because of cheap soft thin plastic. The 2 year warranty ended up being a jipp because nobody at Razer could get their act together to ship me the replacement, all I ever got was a UPS brokerage receipt that they never paid off. And then they went under. I still remember the pure joy of that lightning-fast mouse tracking. It was great for Quake, and even better for Photoshop/3DStudio. Just hold down the side button and spin the wheel down (turn down the pointer speed and you get hyper-precise oversampling for dead-on accurate pixel editing).
And now that they're back I'm feeling all giddy again to see their new product, but I remember how I was burnt the first time (for a $130 mouse, no less!). I'd rather see them get financially and logistically supported by a big guy like Logitech, or even one of the asian knockoff companies. They could do it cheaper, better, and with decent support (as in non-beta XP drivers!!).
I'm glad they're back in production, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed until I see an in-store demo or something.
Dell is probably getting rid of stagnant DVD+R drives. Dual-format drives are all the rage anyways, because the hardware manufacturers realize that it's a losing race to root for one over the other. It seems the hard-core crowd likes DVD-R, while the unwashed masses see DVD "Plus" and think it's newer/better/faster, and they seem to have more shelf space at Walmart/Bestbuy/.
I really do hope Dell is just liquidating their junk and not stocking more of these half-powered devices. I may be selfish, but I personally prefer DVD- (minus), if only because I've had pioneer DVD- drives for a few years now and have a sizeable stack of DVD archives.
Okay, but even a barton 2500 only runs at like 2ghz or something.. and a 3200 would be something like 2.4ghz. so I would see a 30-40% improvement in speed, but it's not enough. I remember going from a P2-333 to a Celeron OC'ed to 1.0 ghz (back when 1gig cpus didn't exist) and it was absolutely orgasmic. I was suddenly able to encode mp3's in realtime! I just read something about THG running a P4 at 5 ghz (with liquid nitro of course), well I would really be happy if I could get a 4-5ghz cpu today, something that I could really see an improvement.
I work with video quite a bit, and I hate having to wait 2 hours for an encode (often queuing it overnight), I want it to be done in 20-25 minutes so that I can just go read Slashdot or play a round of Bejeweled for a moment and have my results ready before I get sidetracked by the necessities of real life. It's kind of like CD burners, everyone would agree that upgrading from 32x to 48x is kind of pointless in that you save all of 15 seconds out of a 4 minute job. But a few years ago when we went from 2x to 16x almost overnight, that was something!
Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category
Yes, aim low so that today's product has to be reinvented every 6 months. That's why S3 has always been synonymous with cheap (as in broken). NVidia/ATI figured this out a couple years ago when they started marketing high-end AND low-end products within the same chip families. So then you make one set of drivers that works for the gamers as well as the budgeters, and at one point you can even sell your aging overstock for a lower price because it's still good enough to sell.
S3 making cut-rate low-performance hardware is nothing new, and it always shoots them in the foot. By the time the product is released, it's already obsolete and they have to start over for the next. Bigger R&D costs for low-margin sales, that makes no sense!
Besides, people are now used to NVidia and ATI as household names, because they've partnered with Nintendo and MS Xbox. But S3 ? I'm sure most non-gamers will think it's a taiwanese OEM supplier, and they will be damn right!
If you've been following AMD at all in the last few years, you'll know that roadmaps are a very poor estimate. They will make a press release stating that such-and-such is in production, but you might see it in-stock only 6 months later by the time they get it right.
Pisses me off too, I've been aching for a worthy replacement to this old XP2000, but there hasn't been any meaningful increases in clock speed yet. AMD64 may be the answer once they get to 3.2ghz and up.
Wouldn't you just love to build a super computer out of these tiny cubes ? Get a dozen, pop them in an old gutted VCR case and you just built a clustered TiVo.
In the ever growing race for computer ubiquity, is there anyone out there selling a board+cpu that can survive inside a waterproof shock-mounted case riding in my car ? And be able to run Diablo 2 while in heavy traffic in the middle of winter with the heater blowing full-tilt ?
I'm thinking VIA Epia, but I'm still not convinced on the heat problem.
When will AMD release an optimizing compiler ?
We've got the free software, why not tweak it for cheap fast processors ? My Dell P4 laptop is nice and speedy yes, but for the same money I could have bought an even nicer Mac G5, or five Athlon-based desktops of equivalent performance.
I want my 3DNOW, dammit! =)
(Before any of you chime in saying that losing documentation is stupid, how many of you who work in IT would be hard pressed to provide licenses to all of the software you use if the BSA knocked on your door today, hm?)
I wouldn't be hard pressed, I'd just reach for the gun rack. BSA is terrorism, no more no less. They walk in without even calling, 'demand the proof' in a very Agent Smith manner, calm yet obnoxious. And if you say "Sorry I already gave" they come back with rent-a-cops. Because they get paid for carrying out corporate extortion on behalf of the big companies that contract them. They are very finicky on what they consider 'proof', a printed store receipt or signed P.O. doesn't cut it for them, even though it is standard fare everywhere else, especially in court!
So the next time you get visited by the BSA, invite them in, take them to that dark cold 'license filing room' down the maintenance hall in the basement. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
Anyways back to the MT-32 issue: MT-32 is obsolete crap and Roland realized it isn't worth wasting money to find these decade-old copyright tracts because MT-32 doesn't produce income anymore, and never will. This is different from say, Atari/Hasbro suing left and right to protect Frogger and Missile Command, because they wanted to make room for the own half-assed remakes. Roland will never re-make the MT-32 because they have long since moved on to bigger and better things. Yeah, sometimes people get all retro and get all kinky over that lo-fi sound (like the Da-Da-Da Volkswagen commercials), but for the most part artists want freshly squeezed aurally perfect synth sounds to fuel new spurts of creativity. In the music industry, everything is a passing fad.
MT-32 was great for games in its day because the SB Pro/16/Adlib's FM synthesis was too simple and inflexible for traditional music reproduction. Oh it was great for electronic soundtracks in video games, but try to play a drum in FM, and you'll want to shoot your ears out. Under A Killing Moon actually had an option for "Digital Drums", which played FM music but with sampled drums instead of their sucky blip-blop-hiss FM homologues.
Today we have software wavetables that can suck up as much ram as you can fit on the motherboard, we're talking 64mb collections of sampled instuments that effortlessly blows away whatever synthesis tools the 80's and 90's ever spawned. MT-32 is commercially dead and buried.
This is beyond pointless because we all know this will be cracked and patched before it is even released. Legit users get annoyed, warez d00ds use the crack and nullify the protection entirely.
What really irks me is that they insist on having the CD in the drive, yet it is absolutely not required because they install 3-4 fricken' gigs of uncompressed crap to my hard drive and never read off the disc again. Console games don't need a hard drive and yet they seem to be surviving quite well. So the reasoning is this: run off the hard drive and do away with CD checks, or run off the disc and quit lining Maxtor's coffers with wasted disk space.
There is nothing more aggravating than watching the installer crank for 90 minutes copying several thousand raw 10kb data files, when it could have been done in about 3 minutes had the whole thing been tarred into one big chunk. And then having to futz with cracks and emulation tools when the inbred copy protection goes all false positive on a legit CD. Online keys are the way to go, I'm actually seriously considering the re-purchase of Diablo 2 + expansion because I have my old CD's from 3 years ago, but can't find the original jewel cases with cd keys, and of course you need unique keys to go on BattleNet. That is the power of cd keys. Convenient, simple, powerful!
I'm afraid we're thinking of different kinds of parking tickets. I mean the quarter-eating-meter-timed-out ticket, not the lame-excuse-for-a-parking-spot ticket.
In your example, that's just being a nuisance (a jerk). Jerks should be punished, respectful citizens should not. Which is why we all have homicidal fantasies when we get a 20$ parking ticket for being 5 minutes late to feed the meter, because it is simply unjustified. Nobody's safety is at stake, the only reason parking meters exist is to fill the municipal coffers, and that's no good of a reason at all.