I don't know about you guys (gals?), but I've been running with a dual-tower setup for the last two years. I've got my mobo/cpu in one tower, and the hard drives in another right next to it. I do this because putting them all together produces too much heat, but as you can imagine, my IDE cables are just barely long enough.
What I'd like to see is some sort of bus-extension cable, which I think would be possible with Serial ATA due to its simplified wiring scheme. Give me a shielded 2-3' cable that breaks off into 4-8 separate SATA connectors so that I can relocate the hard drives easily.
I know I could accomplish something similar with current tech by using a PCI-to-PCI-bridge and housing the entire IDE controller in the second case, but those things are prohibitively expensive in my situation. If this serial thing allows longer cable runs, then it's obvious that a 20$ cable is financially better than a 600$ PCI bridge.
More expensive ? The only reason La-Cie is more expensive is because they're screwing the unsavvy. Get a Plextor, or go back to Yamaha even. They're really tough to beat these days, when compared to the zillions of other CD writer brands that have popped up in the last year or two. It's fairly simple, cheaper drives are more likely to fail because they're aimed at the casual Kazaa user that burns a disc or two per week, while I burn 30 or 40. Plextor has never let me down, and I've been gazing at a Yamaha 40x for a few months now:)
Cheap ? If by cheap you mean "non-scsi" then yes I go for cheap stuff. Nowadays I run Seagates, and they are doing better than my old Maxtors at any rate. If you can afford those 500$ scsi drives then more power to ya, I'll keep trucking along with my 'cheap' IDEs.
Geeze. My Ford Focus nets me 47 mpg, only because it has a rather very efficient small-block engine. No hybrid energy going on in there, just supertuned combustion timing. I was also originally looking for a small hybrid, mainly because I'm sick of blowing 150-200$ per month on fuel, but with the current state of hybrid cars it's just not worth it. They're not that much more efficient (except maybe that little honda thing that looks like a squirrel on wheels), and they're twice the price of a regular car.
And how are you supposed to trick out a hybrid engine ? Replace the stock wiring with gold-plated heavy-gauge 1000-strand cable ? Upgrade the batteries to something with more power output ? Overclock the engine mgmt cpu ? I feel more at home talking about fuel-to-air ratios, forced air intakes and rebored shafts; let's not forget NOS:)
The bottom line is : some people want a car to take them places, others want a car to _drive_.
Nah, I'm not a total retard, I'm just very demanding and trying to make the most of cheap hardware. I just don't have the moolah to invest in better equipment right now, since nobody is buying new PCs or contracting shop-online sites anymore and my expensive services are not in demand. I don't expect much better from a 60$ hard drive, but I figure Maxtor and friends aren't making much money from me after all the warranty service I put them through. If they would put a little 2% extra effort in their manufacturing process, maybe their drives wouldn't crash so damned often in my thrash-hungry workstation.
It's a sad day indeed when I whine about hitting the PCI bus' max bandwidth on my drive array. Yet that's what I want out of my PC for the work I do; give me >200mb/sec speeds on a set of drives that will last more than 6 months. That's all I care about.
When will your replacement, under guarantee, be turning up?
When hell freezes over. Pioneer has been having lots of trouble keeping up with demand, so by the time I had returned my burner for repair/replacement, it was already indefinitely out of stock. Here we are 7 months later and they've just started trickling out new units about 35% cheaper than the original, so I vow to get an other as soon as my finances permit.
Don't ya worry, my gear is fine. The problem is that I'm incredibly violent with my hard drives, they thrash at least 60-80gb daily, lots of video and audio processing going on, with a good deal of iso shuffling).
Many people have told me to go SCSI for the higher quality drives, but I have a hard time justifying the sick price hike. I get 40gb drives for a little over 60$USD, while their scsi counterparts, at 36gb, cost at least 400$ for something half decent. Then I'd need a raid controller, which surely won't be as cheap as my 40$ Abit Hotrod ide card. Now if my PC were a real money maker, I'd make the jump, but this is mostly hobby and entertainment. There is no money made, so there is no money to be spent.
Well she-it, you should work for M$. Thanks for the explanation, I'm actually interested now. Sounds like a solution to these migraine headaches I've been getting lately during late night hackfests.
At first I thought all this stuff was just glorified castrated middleware; "This 100k$ library will let you ask that machine over there to run this app over here and send back the results." Now I realize that was just the most buzz-enabled portion, that which sells well to idiot managers.
What about the Ron Popeil EasyCool. Not only do you get the EasyCool, but if you call now we'll give you a second EasyCool FREE, but that's not all; you also get the Super Shammy, with 20% better absorption to clean up the mess left behind by the EasyCool. "You might fry that chip, but you won't make a mess!" CALL NOW!
I want this NVRAM stuff. I've lost count of the drives that have died at my hands. I must have replaced at least a dozen hard drives in three years, all in my desktop PC. Give me something with no moving parts so that I can finally be rid of this headcrash-a-phobia. I'm just not the kind of guy who does regular backups because there is no suitable backup medium for my kind of quantity. 20gb tape drives cost a fortune, and spare hard drives are just too fragile. DVD-R was looking good, right up until my DVD burner died 3 weeks after purchase.
Now give me something like NVRAM in the 40-80gig amount that I can lug around in a backpack without scratching the platters and I will give you oral pleasure like you have never had before:)
I must be missing something important, because I don't see what all the fuss is about.NET. Sounds to me like the developer's analog to the 'XP' suffix, and little more. "Look,.NET is different..NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread.".NET is just a name tacked onto every piece of software these days. Screw this J# crap, wherever Java is needed, Microsoft isn't, else we'd be using Visual Basic for that same crap.
Ironic that your nick is "Gigs";) I know a little (anecdotal) bit about how uncapping works. It involves some sort of spoofing or whatnot, but why is it that a computer can fudge the cable modem's configuration ? Shouldn't it only accept reconfiguration from the ISP itself on the coax port ? If I start sending SNMP packets from my desktop, I expect those packets to be dropped at the modem, as the only trusted source can be the ISP through the coax line.
The way I originally saw things, you'd need to modify the modem's BIOS to have it ignore the bandwidth limits imposed by the config file.
Anyways, these cable ISPs should stop advertising unlimited service and high speed. If I buy a cable modem to be used on the 'unlimited' service I'm paying for, then I expect to use 'unlimited' bandwidth, right up until my PCI bus overheats and kills my motherboard. If you've sending out 4 megabits, then sell me 4 megabits, don't sell me 'high speed unlimited'. Then I might actually feel like I'm doing something wrong if I go over those 4 megabits.
Besides, they are just making examples out of them.
And that's supposed to make things right ? Let's see.. I'm absolutely pissed at this one parking cop who seems to really REALLY like me, he has this habit of leaning on my door and waiting for the meter to expire, ticket pre-printed. How about I beat the shit out of him and smile for the 6pm news in the hopes that his buddies will cower in fear and never ticket me again ? It doesn't make me any less a criminal for physically assaulting an innocent prick. What this ISP is doing is very very wrong, they are abusing of their power (as usual) and are trying to stuff this into our minds that getting gangbanged by a corporate entity is "O.K.". So they uncapped the modem, so fucking what ? Cut them off, send them a surcharge bill and launch a collection agency on their asses. End of fucking story. No need to paint the walls red for a few hundred dollars out of a couple hundred million that are being unjustly extorted from the masses anyway.
I totally worship Atari, just like a guy will worship his first girlfriend, because Atari was my first computing/gaming experience. I buy a new Atari-logo shirt every year to replace the previous one that's all worn and tattered. And now, I must tell you that today's Atari sucks; it is now little more than a trademark.
The real Atari, that almost created the whole gaming industry, vanished into obliving when Nolan Bushnell left. The spirit of Atari died at the hands of Jack Tramiel and bros. They sold away the sense of community among Atari owners and turned the whole organisation into a color-by-numbers business, produce this, release that, literally taking away what made Atari unique in the first place : innovation.
These days, the Atari name and logo seem to be passed around whomever cares to borrow it. Hasbro, Midway, Activision... all to cash in on old-timers' nostalgia. The most notorious is Hasbro, they quite brutally raped the classics when they released their series of remakes. Frogger 3D, Centipede 3D, Asteroids 3D, Missile Command 3D: shit, shit, shit and more shit. Atari is no longer about computers and games, these days it's all about money.
This isn't a 30th anniversary, _my_ Atari died when I was still just a child. I'm sick of seeing the good name being pimped left and right. It's just fucking with my memories.
Would you believe that some people just want faster Kazaa, and will believe anyone who claims they can boost their modem ? Maybe it's just the neighborhood, but I receive spam about uncapping my modem every few weeks. "Enjoy faster browsing speeds with your existing internet provider. Make the most of your unlimited internet."
I'm sure at least a handful of naive folks have had their modems uncapped by such con artists, just like some people don't understand why it's still illegal to watch premium cable even though they paid 200$ for a 'black box' descrambler.
Now the even stupider part of this scenario is the actual seizing of equipment. "The cable modem is illegally modified, so we'll confiscate all your computer equipment. Even the Apple-IIe over there, it might hold evidence!". Let's say I splice some wires off of my neighbor's phone line and rack up his bill with 1-900 charges, will the cops come and take all my phones away ? Nah, they'll just cut the wires and arrest me for fraud or something, or maybe the neighbor will just take me to small claims court. Another example: if I drive away from a pump station without paying for the fuel, will the cops seize my vehicle ? Hell no, they'll just charge me with petty theft and again I will be open for a lawsuit by the gas station.
These people abused the service, their service should be cut and then they should be sued for what they stole, plus damages and a punitive fine. But give them back their fricking hardware. The cops have no business here, they delivered the message and that's where it ends.
I was hoping to visit H2K2 this year, just for fun, but the main thing holding me back is money. Yes, I know renting space/gear/bandwidth costs money, but couldn't they find some sort of sponsoring ? Considering that I'd have to drive about 7 hours to get there, then be stuck sleeping in a hotel for 2-3 nights at 100$/night, and the con organisers still want 50$ out of me just to enter the premises ? This isn't like Comdex or CES, where the whole point of going there is to network with others who share similar interests, and just might happen to have money to get you out of that 9-5 shit job at AOL. Those events are often worth the cost because you get to form functional relationships. H2K2 is just a bunch of people getting together for fun and distraction. You have little or no chance of selling anything at H2K2, even if you're trying to sell your own underpaid carcass. Sure, you'll hear from Dmitry Sklyarov, Kevin Mitnick and Jello Biafra, but when you walk out of that hall after the 3 days, what have you gained ? Motivation perhaps, hardly any new knowledge.. it's just not a business-type-thing, therefore it should be loads cheaper.
I guess this means my shiny new DVD burner is already obsolete. Backing up my desktop to 4.7gb DVD-RW discs was decent, but now if I end up with a TB or two on my raid array, I'll have to find another backup system. And no, tapes don't cut it, nor does carrying an extra pair of hard drives around. Where's that 155tb optical disc we've been hearing about for the last ten years ?
"You want great looking Anti-Aliasing? The Parhelia is for you. You want killer frame rates? You might have to look elsewhere."
Why does this so vividly remind me of 3Dfx vs NVidia a little over two years ago ? 3Dfx had their uber-AA system, but it would drag Quake3 to about 8 frames per second while the butt-ugly TNT2 just cruised along at a clean 40 fps (which was remarkable back then). 3Dfx collapsed months later when they learned one of the golden rules of computing : quantity over quality.
Granted, Matrox' prime market isn't the gaming sector, they've truly carved their throne in the business sector, filling in the gap left behind by Number Nine, but now they're trying to market at the gamers with this feature-packed chipset, yet I fear they're going to fall flat on their ass just like last time. If we've learned anything from NVidia, it's that people are willing to buy gobs of GPU power at insane prices. Your Geforce2 is too slow to play UT2 in 1600x1280 ? Then get the Geforce4, with two GPUs this time for more power.
If Matrox wants a share of my gaming budget, they'll have to start putting more raw goodness into their boards. Heck, just figure out how to link two or four Matrox GPUs and make then spew pixels like there's no tomorrow.
It was originally called XPod, but that would have been confusing, so they renamed it XPlay. As long as 'XP' is in there for marketing purposes. Now how should we pronounce it ? X-Play, XP-Lay ? Will it enhance my laying eXPerience ? Maybe if they threw in a wireless vibration function:)
Well actually, the corporate (Select license) editions of M$ apps are devoid of activation crippleware. Hence my hassle-free WinXP at work. Besides, if you don't like the product activation, I'm sure someone out there has crafted a tool to disable it (other than a 10lb sledge).
Screw the data system. Have people register directly for the timeslots they want, and stop accepting entries when said timeslot is fully staffed. First come, first shift. Nothing sucks more than variable shift work.
Warning: I know more stuff about CD-R than your mothers, but probably less than Yamaha's genii.
First of all, CD's aren't purely encoded as 0=high and 1=low; they go through a differential encoding process. A '1' corresponds to a transition between low and high, and a '0' means just stay at the same level, just picture an XOR process on the bits. Now there are rules, like having to break long strings of '0' bits to keep the reader from getting confused. You also need to break long strings of '1' bits because they create an up-down-up-down pattern that is also too regular. This stuff is done by the burner itself, by the fabled EFM encoder hated by all CloneCD users:)
To print these graphics on the disc, Yamaha probably just switches off the EFM and lets their software directly control the laser pulses uncooked. This means you won't be able to do it on just any old burner because even if you did use the proper software, the burner would fudge your graphics in-transit and smooth out the resulting image quite dramatically (remember, readers don't like long valleys).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you guys (gals?), but I've been running with a dual-tower setup for the last two years. I've got my mobo/cpu in one tower, and the hard drives in another right next to it. I do this because putting them all together produces too much heat, but as you can imagine, my IDE cables are just barely long enough.
What I'd like to see is some sort of bus-extension cable, which I think would be possible with Serial ATA due to its simplified wiring scheme. Give me a shielded 2-3' cable that breaks off into 4-8 separate SATA connectors so that I can relocate the hard drives easily.
I know I could accomplish something similar with current tech by using a PCI-to-PCI-bridge and housing the entire IDE controller in the second case, but those things are prohibitively expensive in my situation. If this serial thing allows longer cable runs, then it's obvious that a 20$ cable is financially better than a 600$ PCI bridge.
More expensive ? The only reason La-Cie is more expensive is because they're screwing the unsavvy. Get a Plextor, or go back to Yamaha even. They're really tough to beat these days, when compared to the zillions of other CD writer brands that have popped up in the last year or two. It's fairly simple, cheaper drives are more likely to fail because they're aimed at the casual Kazaa user that burns a disc or two per week, while I burn 30 or 40. Plextor has never let me down, and I've been gazing at a Yamaha 40x for a few months now :)
Cheap ? If by cheap you mean "non-scsi" then yes I go for cheap stuff. Nowadays I run Seagates, and they are doing better than my old Maxtors at any rate. If you can afford those 500$ scsi drives then more power to ya, I'll keep trucking along with my 'cheap' IDEs.
Geeze. My Ford Focus nets me 47 mpg, only because it has a rather very efficient small-block engine. No hybrid energy going on in there, just supertuned combustion timing. I was also originally looking for a small hybrid, mainly because I'm sick of blowing 150-200$ per month on fuel, but with the current state of hybrid cars it's just not worth it. They're not that much more efficient (except maybe that little honda thing that looks like a squirrel on wheels), and they're twice the price of a regular car.
:)
And how are you supposed to trick out a hybrid engine ? Replace the stock wiring with gold-plated heavy-gauge 1000-strand cable ? Upgrade the batteries to something with more power output ? Overclock the engine mgmt cpu ? I feel more at home talking about fuel-to-air ratios, forced air intakes and rebored shafts; let's not forget NOS
The bottom line is : some people want a car to take them places, others want a car to _drive_.
Nah, I'm not a total retard, I'm just very demanding and trying to make the most of cheap hardware. I just don't have the moolah to invest in better equipment right now, since nobody is buying new PCs or contracting shop-online sites anymore and my expensive services are not in demand. I don't expect much better from a 60$ hard drive, but I figure Maxtor and friends aren't making much money from me after all the warranty service I put them through. If they would put a little 2% extra effort in their manufacturing process, maybe their drives wouldn't crash so damned often in my thrash-hungry workstation.
It's a sad day indeed when I whine about hitting the PCI bus' max bandwidth on my drive array. Yet that's what I want out of my PC for the work I do; give me >200mb/sec speeds on a set of drives that will last more than 6 months. That's all I care about.
When will your replacement, under guarantee, be turning up?
When hell freezes over. Pioneer has been having lots of trouble keeping up with demand, so by the time I had returned my burner for repair/replacement, it was already indefinitely out of stock. Here we are 7 months later and they've just started trickling out new units about 35% cheaper than the original, so I vow to get an other as soon as my finances permit.
Don't ya worry, my gear is fine. The problem is that I'm incredibly violent with my hard drives, they thrash at least 60-80gb daily, lots of video and audio processing going on, with a good deal of iso shuffling).
Many people have told me to go SCSI for the higher quality drives, but I have a hard time justifying the sick price hike. I get 40gb drives for a little over 60$USD, while their scsi counterparts, at 36gb, cost at least 400$ for something half decent. Then I'd need a raid controller, which surely won't be as cheap as my 40$ Abit Hotrod ide card. Now if my PC were a real money maker, I'd make the jump, but this is mostly hobby and entertainment. There is no money made, so there is no money to be spent.
I had a Pioneer DVR-A03 (retail kit). Cost me 900$ CDN back then (about 575 USD). These days they're 589$ CDN (about 375 USD). I want a new one :)
Well she-it, you should work for M$. Thanks for the explanation, I'm actually interested now. Sounds like a solution to these migraine headaches I've been getting lately during late night hackfests.
At first I thought all this stuff was just glorified castrated middleware; "This 100k$ library will let you ask that machine over there to run this app over here and send back the results." Now I realize that was just the most buzz-enabled portion, that which sells well to idiot managers.
What about the Ron Popeil EasyCool. Not only do you get the EasyCool, but if you call now we'll give you a second EasyCool FREE, but that's not all; you also get the Super Shammy, with 20% better absorption to clean up the mess left behind by the EasyCool. "You might fry that chip, but you won't make a mess!" CALL NOW!
Ok, To each its own. Now we're really neutral :)
I want this NVRAM stuff. I've lost count of the drives that have died at my hands. I must have replaced at least a dozen hard drives in three years, all in my desktop PC. Give me something with no moving parts so that I can finally be rid of this headcrash-a-phobia. I'm just not the kind of guy who does regular backups because there is no suitable backup medium for my kind of quantity. 20gb tape drives cost a fortune, and spare hard drives are just too fragile. DVD-R was looking good, right up until my DVD burner died 3 weeks after purchase.
:)
Now give me something like NVRAM in the 40-80gig amount that I can lug around in a backpack without scratching the platters and I will give you oral pleasure like you have never had before
I must be missing something important, because I don't see what all the fuss is about .NET. Sounds to me like the developer's analog to the 'XP' suffix, and little more. "Look, .NET is different. .NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread." .NET is just a name tacked onto every piece of software these days. Screw this J# crap, wherever Java is needed, Microsoft isn't, else we'd be using Visual Basic for that same crap.
Ironic that your nick is "Gigs" ;) I know a little (anecdotal) bit about how uncapping works. It involves some sort of spoofing or whatnot, but why is it that a computer can fudge the cable modem's configuration ? Shouldn't it only accept reconfiguration from the ISP itself on the coax port ? If I start sending SNMP packets from my desktop, I expect those packets to be dropped at the modem, as the only trusted source can be the ISP through the coax line.
The way I originally saw things, you'd need to modify the modem's BIOS to have it ignore the bandwidth limits imposed by the config file.
Anyways, these cable ISPs should stop advertising unlimited service and high speed. If I buy a cable modem to be used on the 'unlimited' service I'm paying for, then I expect to use 'unlimited' bandwidth, right up until my PCI bus overheats and kills my motherboard. If you've sending out 4 megabits, then sell me 4 megabits, don't sell me 'high speed unlimited'. Then I might actually feel like I'm doing something wrong if I go over those 4 megabits.
Besides, they are just making examples out of them.
And that's supposed to make things right ? Let's see.. I'm absolutely pissed at this one parking cop who seems to really REALLY like me, he has this habit of leaning on my door and waiting for the meter to expire, ticket pre-printed. How about I beat the shit out of him and smile for the 6pm news in the hopes that his buddies will cower in fear and never ticket me again ? It doesn't make me any less a criminal for physically assaulting an innocent prick. What this ISP is doing is very very wrong, they are abusing of their power (as usual) and are trying to stuff this into our minds that getting gangbanged by a corporate entity is "O.K.". So they uncapped the modem, so fucking what ? Cut them off, send them a surcharge bill and launch a collection agency on their asses. End of fucking story. No need to paint the walls red for a few hundred dollars out of a couple hundred million that are being unjustly extorted from the masses anyway.
I totally worship Atari, just like a guy will worship his first girlfriend, because Atari was my first computing/gaming experience. I buy a new Atari-logo shirt every year to replace the previous one that's all worn and tattered. And now, I must tell you that today's Atari sucks; it is now little more than a trademark.
The real Atari, that almost created the whole gaming industry, vanished into obliving when Nolan Bushnell left. The spirit of Atari died at the hands of Jack Tramiel and bros. They sold away the sense of community among Atari owners and turned the whole organisation into a color-by-numbers business, produce this, release that, literally taking away what made Atari unique in the first place : innovation.
These days, the Atari name and logo seem to be passed around whomever cares to borrow it. Hasbro, Midway, Activision... all to cash in on old-timers' nostalgia. The most notorious is Hasbro, they quite brutally raped the classics when they released their series of remakes. Frogger 3D, Centipede 3D, Asteroids 3D, Missile Command 3D: shit, shit, shit and more shit. Atari is no longer about computers and games, these days it's all about money.
This isn't a 30th anniversary, _my_ Atari died when I was still just a child. I'm sick of seeing the good name being pimped left and right. It's just fucking with my memories.
In other news, a crack team of researchers led by world-famous physicist Mister Wizard, have been found guilty of pulling numbers out of their ass.
Would you believe that some people just want faster Kazaa, and will believe anyone who claims they can boost their modem ? Maybe it's just the neighborhood, but I receive spam about uncapping my modem every few weeks. "Enjoy faster browsing speeds with your existing internet provider. Make the most of your unlimited internet."
I'm sure at least a handful of naive folks have had their modems uncapped by such con artists, just like some people don't understand why it's still illegal to watch premium cable even though they paid 200$ for a 'black box' descrambler.
Now the even stupider part of this scenario is the actual seizing of equipment. "The cable modem is illegally modified, so we'll confiscate all your computer equipment. Even the Apple-IIe over there, it might hold evidence!". Let's say I splice some wires off of my neighbor's phone line and rack up his bill with 1-900 charges, will the cops come and take all my phones away ? Nah, they'll just cut the wires and arrest me for fraud or something, or maybe the neighbor will just take me to small claims court. Another example: if I drive away from a pump station without paying for the fuel, will the cops seize my vehicle ? Hell no, they'll just charge me with petty theft and again I will be open for a lawsuit by the gas station.
These people abused the service, their service should be cut and then they should be sued for what they stole, plus damages and a punitive fine. But give them back their fricking hardware. The cops have no business here, they delivered the message and that's where it ends.
I was hoping to visit H2K2 this year, just for fun, but the main thing holding me back is money. Yes, I know renting space/gear/bandwidth costs money, but couldn't they find some sort of sponsoring ? Considering that I'd have to drive about 7 hours to get there, then be stuck sleeping in a hotel for 2-3 nights at 100$/night, and the con organisers still want 50$ out of me just to enter the premises ? This isn't like Comdex or CES, where the whole point of going there is to network with others who share similar interests, and just might happen to have money to get you out of that 9-5 shit job at AOL. Those events are often worth the cost because you get to form functional relationships. H2K2 is just a bunch of people getting together for fun and distraction. You have little or no chance of selling anything at H2K2, even if you're trying to sell your own underpaid carcass. Sure, you'll hear from Dmitry Sklyarov, Kevin Mitnick and Jello Biafra, but when you walk out of that hall after the 3 days, what have you gained ? Motivation perhaps, hardly any new knowledge.. it's just not a business-type-thing, therefore it should be loads cheaper.
I guess this means my shiny new DVD burner is already obsolete. Backing up my desktop to 4.7gb DVD-RW discs was decent, but now if I end up with a TB or two on my raid array, I'll have to find another backup system. And no, tapes don't cut it, nor does carrying an extra pair of hard drives around. Where's that 155tb optical disc we've been hearing about for the last ten years ?
"You want great looking Anti-Aliasing? The Parhelia is for you. You want killer frame rates? You might have to look elsewhere."
Why does this so vividly remind me of 3Dfx vs NVidia a little over two years ago ? 3Dfx had their uber-AA system, but it would drag Quake3 to about 8 frames per second while the butt-ugly TNT2 just cruised along at a clean 40 fps (which was remarkable back then). 3Dfx collapsed months later when they learned one of the golden rules of computing : quantity over quality.
Granted, Matrox' prime market isn't the gaming sector, they've truly carved their throne in the business sector, filling in the gap left behind by Number Nine, but now they're trying to market at the gamers with this feature-packed chipset, yet I fear they're going to fall flat on their ass just like last time. If we've learned anything from NVidia, it's that people are willing to buy gobs of GPU power at insane prices. Your Geforce2 is too slow to play UT2 in 1600x1280 ? Then get the Geforce4, with two GPUs this time for more power.
If Matrox wants a share of my gaming budget, they'll have to start putting more raw goodness into their boards. Heck, just figure out how to link two or four Matrox GPUs and make then spew pixels like there's no tomorrow.
It was originally called XPod, but that would have been confusing, so they renamed it XPlay. As long as 'XP' is in there for marketing purposes. Now how should we pronounce it ? X-Play, XP-Lay ? Will it enhance my laying eXPerience ? Maybe if they threw in a wireless vibration function :)
Well actually, the corporate (Select license) editions of M$ apps are devoid of activation crippleware. Hence my hassle-free WinXP at work. Besides, if you don't like the product activation, I'm sure someone out there has crafted a tool to disable it (other than a 10lb sledge).
Screw the data system. Have people register directly for the timeslots they want, and stop accepting entries when said timeslot is fully staffed. First come, first shift. Nothing sucks more than variable shift work.
Warning: I know more stuff about CD-R than your mothers, but probably less than Yamaha's genii.
:)
First of all, CD's aren't purely encoded as 0=high and 1=low; they go through a differential encoding process. A '1' corresponds to a transition between low and high, and a '0' means just stay at the same level, just picture an XOR process on the bits. Now there are rules, like having to break long strings of '0' bits to keep the reader from getting confused. You also need to break long strings of '1' bits because they create an up-down-up-down pattern that is also too regular. This stuff is done by the burner itself, by the fabled EFM encoder hated by all CloneCD users
To print these graphics on the disc, Yamaha probably just switches off the EFM and lets their software directly control the laser pulses uncooked. This means you won't be able to do it on just any old burner because even if you did use the proper software, the burner would fudge your graphics in-transit and smooth out the resulting image quite dramatically (remember, readers don't like long valleys).