While it is a ridiculous shitload of money, I did a quick cost comparison and it's actually a pretty good deal considering what's it in. Sure, you get the semi-sucky Dell versions of everything, which means a blah motherboard, blah (underclocked?) graphics card and a "1000w power supply" that competes with 700w models from Antec or Seasonic (same shit really), but you would have a hard time building an equivalent system for that kind of money, and you certainly won't get any kind of warranty from online dealers.
I hate to say it, but if you're in the market for a $5000 beast, this one ain't so bad. That said, if you're still somewhat sane you could build a rig that yields 90% of the performance for less than half the price, but clearly some people just have to have that last 0.2 ghz for $1500 more.
And my guess is that survival rates would plummet.
You say that like it's a bad thing...:P
What I'd love is some alcohol additive that neutralizes the hormonal response, so that the peg-legged hunchback at the end of the bar is just as ugly at 3 am as she was at 8 pm. That right there would probably solve a fair chunk of the overpopulation problem... at least in the southern parts!
Full disclosure: I am anti-Scientology, and generally anti-religion. If your imaginary friend is easily offended, maybe you should scroll past my humble paragraphs.
I've noticed many of the Scientology defenders cite the religion as helping with some challenge in their life, most often drug addiction, adultery or gambling. I don't know the method by which this assistance is administered, but I would say it is a good thing. What's not so good is how they turn around and bash psychology for essentially doing the same thing for less money.
The big problem is that this "help" is the value-add in their business model. They put a band-aid on your pathetic self-control issues, then sell you a religion before the buzz wears off, and they seem to pitch it so well that their converts truly believe it to be the "One True Way", and that everyone else is wrong and stupid... you know, like every other religion.
What the Diskeeper guy could/should be doing, rather than illegally coercing everyone to join in his quackery, is condense the relevant "teachings" he considers essential to his business into formal documentation, be it a management book or 1-2-3 day training seminar. If he wants to be another Cruise/Travolta trainwreck, that's his choice to make, but to force others down the same path is vile and short-sighted.
As for the performance, the biggest difference is usually overclocking capabilit. The review samples always shoot for the moon while the retail product falls a little short, but do you really care about hitting 850mhz vs 862mhz on that NVatia Gedeon N+1 ?
Well I do find that unfortunate, but I assure you where I live (Northrend, er I mean Canada), I have about 50 DSL providers to choose from, and they cover the entire spectrum from "worse than Bell" to "would you like a handjob while you wait" awesome. They only thing they borrow from the telco is the last-mile transit, after that you're on the reseller's network, and that's what makes all the difference.
Shameless, non-partisan ad: If you're in Ontario, check out TekSavvy. They will actually help you get around Bell's traffic shaping! =) Fantastic company all-around.
Abit has been suffering because their most popular boards are from the late 90's. They had some very serious quality control issues a few years back with the NForce3/4 and Intel 8xx boards, I personally witnessed a 30% defect rate when most manufacturers were below 5%. As a result, many distributors stopped selling Abit products and they became very difficult to source.
Perhaps the reason why they are "known" as good overclockers is because of the kind of people buying them: cheapskates and suckers who believe online reviews. There was nothing spectacular about the performance, you could achieve the same results on an MSI or Asus board, and I've seen a zillion folks do pretty damned well on garbage boards like Asrock and GigaByte. Abit just made it a bit easier to overclock with gimmicky little things like "uGuru", which is little more than a rudimentary stress tester with clock control.
Abit tried to position their products as high-end while sticking the price somewhere in the upper-mid-range. As a dealer this made them hard to sell, as most people either want the cheapest board available, or a true top-end "Deluxe/Premium/Platinum" kit, and Abit was neither.
I really won't miss them. I haven't sold an Abit product in nearly 5 years, they are already dead to me.
And as more and more users become interested in mass streaming media, a less restrictive ISP will suddenly show up and steal all their customers away.
It's bandwidth. Bandwidth is relatively cheap - what Comcast users are allocated in a month, most servers push out in a single day, yet my cable bill costs more than any one of my servers.
The infrastructure is already there, and much of it was built with government funds anyway. With deregulation and all that fun stuff, there is a lot of room for a new player to join the game, with a slightly less greedy image and a whole lotta more intertube goodness. In reality, these cheap alternatives already exist in many areas, they just don't advertise because, well, I don't expect the cable company to give good ad rates to its competitors... but they exist, and while some of them suck, a lot of them are far more generous than their colossal adversaries.
I've yet to find a squirrel cage blower that does not make an absurd racket at all speeds. Do tell where you find yours, as there are many applications where such a blower would be far more appropriate than conventional fans.
Well for one, this is a "preview", which usually means NVidia sent a bunch of propaganda for them to disseminate to the masses. These things come with NDAs and a variety of other restrictions, in exchange for getting the "scoop" on the new product, and raking in a few extra yen from the ad networks.
You will get a real review once the product hits the shelves, and a real person performs real tests. Anything else should be taken with a grain of salt, as most "review" sites exist to make money first and foremost, with the factual content being only second in importance.
They do, ever since NVidia implemented the PhysX API in their GPU drivers (for GeForce 8 and up).
On my PC, the PhysX control panel lets me choose between the GeForce or an AGEIA card. They rolled this out a few months ago, works on XP and Vista as far as I know.
I don't know very many people who play the latest games in 1024x768 anymore. Heck, I was playing Q3 that high in late '99. Today it's all about 1680x1050, 1920x1200... maybe a bunch of peeps on 1280x1024 laptops or CRTs.
Maybe I should try running Crysis in 320x240 for shits and giggles.
I believe the GP answered with a question, ideally for you to answer.
Many of you Americans are quick to bash socialism (for reasons I do not know), even while the "American way" is crashing down and ruining your so-called lives.
Tell me, what good does it do to give money to corporations, if they don't do anything for you in return ? Pure socialism only works on a small scale (think remote islands with no outsidevisitors), it is indeed quite fragile, but applying some aspects of socialism to a handful of areas can be quite beneficial to society at large.
If there is a product or service that can benefit the great majority of people, I think it should be owned and controlled by the government (thus the people) and turned into a non-profit. I'm not sure batteries are such an essential need, maybe later... but for many other things the socialism model leads to greater efficiency and no greedy bastards skimming off the top.
If anything, recent history should have taught you that corporations will take any funding and spend it in the most irresponsible way they can think of, usually by giving their top brass lavish bonuses for "bringing in the dough". I personally don't think one person's work in a management position can impact society in a way that justifies multi-million dollar bonuses, but I'm one of those goddamned socialists! What the hell do I know, right ?
Ultimately it might end-up in the same state as Commodore (which also lost its visionary CEO and slowly but surely died-out).
If being directly responsible for the computer industry crash of 1983 is what passes as "visionary" to you, well I have a C64 to sell you for the low low price of $99. Jack Tramiel was a loose cannon, so desperate to beat everyone that he beat his own company, by bargaining it out of existence. At that point, everyone was bleeding money, so he did the unconscionable and bought Atari's dying corpse for a song, and then used it as leverage to dick around with Amiga through his creative interpretations of contract and IP law. He still wasn't making any money, but he made damned sure no one else could either.
If that's the man against whom you want to compare Steve Jobs, well I must say I don't know what the hell you're smoking.
No, they were doing badly because the Mac suffered from stagnation. Open or closed doesn't matter so much when your product is obsolete from the start. There was very little reason to use a Mac in the 90's unless you were very specifically working in the print industry, or making music with Pro Tools. The Mac held very little appeal to the average home user.
Steve Jobs was the kick in the nuts management needed at the time, but after a decade of success, I'd think the tie-throttling imbeciles learned a thing or two about manufacturing popularity. They've been strategically acquiring 3rd party tech that fits their market, bringing all the profit in-house. They have strong relationships with the manufacturers and a retail model that sells itself with minimal effort.
Steve could retire tomorrow, and after the "ZOMG he's sick" Wall Street asshats find themselves a new zillionaire to stalk, the company will continue to do just fine. They will find a new spokesmodel, he/she will be completely forgettable, but they will be making money hand-over-fist, and that's really all that matters to them.
That's funny, I just switched the/. font to serif, and I find it illegible. Perhaps I'm too used to sans-serif fonts. I actually can't scan the text anymore, even after increasing the font size.
Fractional reserve is the root of our problems today. The system is designed to lend out more money than actually exists, thus the economy is overloaded by design, and inflation is guaranteed.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year, nor do they yield 3% more meat. You can say what you want about wealth, but there is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, and printing more money isn't going to change that.
These types of exchanges (stocks, commodities, etc...) are Gambling dressed up for high society
Sure they are, but they have billion-dollar marketing campaigns to convince us otherwise. Why the hell does a bank need an ad campaign ? Why is it spending what is supposed to be our money on self-promotion ?
A: Because there's a greedy bastard making a ton of money at the top.
The reason why everything is the way it is, is so that a bunch of people can legally skim off the top, have their dumb yachts, coke and whores and not have to work for it.
And we are the fools for willingly enabling that mass fraud.
Every time I read about Wine, I shrug and/or roll my eyes. I've tried many times to use it, but it simply does not work for the handful of Windows apps I actually need. I gave it another try just a few months ago, and I was again left high and dry, so I turned yet again to virtual machines. At this point, I have stopped caring about the project.
For the inevitable flamers among you, here's the short list of Windows apps I need, that Wine fails to support:
- Photoshop CS3 - Office 2007 - MSIE 6/7
IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom. And don't try to tell me to use The Gimp and OO.o, I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use. If it were just me in my little bubble, I'd be quite happy with unbranded alternatives, but my rent doesn't pay itself.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
That is a recent development, a failed attempt to "save" Firewire. It failed, of course.
Back when the Firewire vs USB2 battle was aflame, back when these things mattered, the total licensing cost was indeed ~$10 USD for a pair of Firewire ports (for daisy-chaining). It scaled non-linearly after that, because some patents were per-system, and some per-port.
We might take you more seriously if your comments didn't harbor such an accusatory tone. Apple has a long history behind their brand, and the last "open" system sold by Apple was the Apple IIc.
That has _nothing_ to do with the quality of Apple products. I'm just saying their track record points to a distinct lack of support for open formats and developer / power-user support.
You need to learn to distinguish fact from opinion. In your opinion, you like the iPod... frankly I like them too, but I know if what I need is openness and customization, then I should look elsewhere because the iPod will provide neither. That's what this article was about, and sales figures do nothing to represent those characteristics. They represent popularity.
It's funny, if I decide to not work for the rest of my life, and spend what little savings I had on hookers, booze and coke, does this mean the government will cover for me when I'm old, rotten and broke ?
Many artists make it big, then crash even worse than they were before the fame. I don't feel guilty for their lack of foresight. A pathetic fuck-up with an album cover is still just a pathetic fuck-up.
Why are they wasting everyone's time with USB 3.0, when the rest of the universe is shifting toward Ethernet as a common interconnect ? Note I didn't say IP, just Ethernet - good old CAT-5.
Frig, if the audio folks have already started that transition, then what the hell is Intel doing ? The audio industry is probably the most retarded in the world (according to my failed expectations), and even they see that Ethernet is a cost-effective and braindead simple replacement for all these proprietary cables we've had to contend with over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is a ridiculous shitload of money, I did a quick cost comparison and it's actually a pretty good deal considering what's it in. Sure, you get the semi-sucky Dell versions of everything, which means a blah motherboard, blah (underclocked?) graphics card and a "1000w power supply" that competes with 700w models from Antec or Seasonic (same shit really), but you would have a hard time building an equivalent system for that kind of money, and you certainly won't get any kind of warranty from online dealers.
I hate to say it, but if you're in the market for a $5000 beast, this one ain't so bad. That said, if you're still somewhat sane you could build a rig that yields 90% of the performance for less than half the price, but clearly some people just have to have that last 0.2 ghz for $1500 more.
And my guess is that survival rates would plummet.
You say that like it's a bad thing... :P
What I'd love is some alcohol additive that neutralizes the hormonal response, so that the peg-legged hunchback at the end of the bar is just as ugly at 3 am as she was at 8 pm. That right there would probably solve a fair chunk of the overpopulation problem... at least in the southern parts!
Full disclosure: I am anti-Scientology, and generally anti-religion. If your imaginary friend is easily offended, maybe you should scroll past my humble paragraphs.
I've noticed many of the Scientology defenders cite the religion as helping with some challenge in their life, most often drug addiction, adultery or gambling. I don't know the method by which this assistance is administered, but I would say it is a good thing. What's not so good is how they turn around and bash psychology for essentially doing the same thing for less money.
The big problem is that this "help" is the value-add in their business model. They put a band-aid on your pathetic self-control issues, then sell you a religion before the buzz wears off, and they seem to pitch it so well that their converts truly believe it to be the "One True Way", and that everyone else is wrong and stupid... you know, like every other religion.
What the Diskeeper guy could/should be doing, rather than illegally coercing everyone to join in his quackery, is condense the relevant "teachings" he considers essential to his business into formal documentation, be it a management book or 1-2-3 day training seminar. If he wants to be another Cruise/Travolta trainwreck, that's his choice to make, but to force others down the same path is vile and short-sighted.
They wear fonts with dick holes in 'em
No, this constitutes Business As Usual (tm).
As for the performance, the biggest difference is usually overclocking capabilit. The review samples always shoot for the moon while the retail product falls a little short, but do you really care about hitting 850mhz vs 862mhz on that NVatia Gedeon N+1 ?
Well I do find that unfortunate, but I assure you where I live (Northrend, er I mean Canada), I have about 50 DSL providers to choose from, and they cover the entire spectrum from "worse than Bell" to "would you like a handjob while you wait" awesome. They only thing they borrow from the telco is the last-mile transit, after that you're on the reseller's network, and that's what makes all the difference.
Shameless, non-partisan ad: If you're in Ontario, check out TekSavvy. They will actually help you get around Bell's traffic shaping! =) Fantastic company all-around.
Abit has been suffering because their most popular boards are from the late 90's. They had some very serious quality control issues a few years back with the NForce3/4 and Intel 8xx boards, I personally witnessed a 30% defect rate when most manufacturers were below 5%. As a result, many distributors stopped selling Abit products and they became very difficult to source.
Perhaps the reason why they are "known" as good overclockers is because of the kind of people buying them: cheapskates and suckers who believe online reviews. There was nothing spectacular about the performance, you could achieve the same results on an MSI or Asus board, and I've seen a zillion folks do pretty damned well on garbage boards like Asrock and GigaByte. Abit just made it a bit easier to overclock with gimmicky little things like "uGuru", which is little more than a rudimentary stress tester with clock control.
Abit tried to position their products as high-end while sticking the price somewhere in the upper-mid-range. As a dealer this made them hard to sell, as most people either want the cheapest board available, or a true top-end "Deluxe/Premium/Platinum" kit, and Abit was neither.
I really won't miss them. I haven't sold an Abit product in nearly 5 years, they are already dead to me.
And as more and more users become interested in mass streaming media, a less restrictive ISP will suddenly show up and steal all their customers away.
It's bandwidth. Bandwidth is relatively cheap - what Comcast users are allocated in a month, most servers push out in a single day, yet my cable bill costs more than any one of my servers.
The infrastructure is already there, and much of it was built with government funds anyway. With deregulation and all that fun stuff, there is a lot of room for a new player to join the game, with a slightly less greedy image and a whole lotta more intertube goodness. In reality, these cheap alternatives already exist in many areas, they just don't advertise because, well, I don't expect the cable company to give good ad rates to its competitors... but they exist, and while some of them suck, a lot of them are far more generous than their colossal adversaries.
I've yet to find a squirrel cage blower that does not make an absurd racket at all speeds. Do tell where you find yours, as there are many applications where such a blower would be far more appropriate than conventional fans.
Well for one, this is a "preview", which usually means NVidia sent a bunch of propaganda for them to disseminate to the masses. These things come with NDAs and a variety of other restrictions, in exchange for getting the "scoop" on the new product, and raking in a few extra yen from the ad networks.
You will get a real review once the product hits the shelves, and a real person performs real tests. Anything else should be taken with a grain of salt, as most "review" sites exist to make money first and foremost, with the factual content being only second in importance.
They do, ever since NVidia implemented the PhysX API in their GPU drivers (for GeForce 8 and up).
On my PC, the PhysX control panel lets me choose between the GeForce or an AGEIA card. They rolled this out a few months ago, works on XP and Vista as far as I know.
Screenshot
I don't know very many people who play the latest games in 1024x768 anymore. Heck, I was playing Q3 that high in late '99. Today it's all about 1680x1050, 1920x1200... maybe a bunch of peeps on 1280x1024 laptops or CRTs.
Maybe I should try running Crysis in 320x240 for shits and giggles.
It would probably be cheaper to invade China and steal the batteries :P At least they have a bunch of stuff worth plundering, unlike Iraq.
I believe the GP answered with a question, ideally for you to answer.
Many of you Americans are quick to bash socialism (for reasons I do not know), even while the "American way" is crashing down and ruining your so-called lives.
Tell me, what good does it do to give money to corporations, if they don't do anything for you in return ? Pure socialism only works on a small scale (think remote islands with no outsidevisitors), it is indeed quite fragile, but applying some aspects of socialism to a handful of areas can be quite beneficial to society at large.
If there is a product or service that can benefit the great majority of people, I think it should be owned and controlled by the government (thus the people) and turned into a non-profit. I'm not sure batteries are such an essential need, maybe later... but for many other things the socialism model leads to greater efficiency and no greedy bastards skimming off the top.
If anything, recent history should have taught you that corporations will take any funding and spend it in the most irresponsible way they can think of, usually by giving their top brass lavish bonuses for "bringing in the dough". I personally don't think one person's work in a management position can impact society in a way that justifies multi-million dollar bonuses, but I'm one of those goddamned socialists! What the hell do I know, right ?
Ultimately it might end-up in the same state as Commodore (which also lost its visionary CEO and slowly but surely died-out).
If being directly responsible for the computer industry crash of 1983 is what passes as "visionary" to you, well I have a C64 to sell you for the low low price of $99. Jack Tramiel was a loose cannon, so desperate to beat everyone that he beat his own company, by bargaining it out of existence. At that point, everyone was bleeding money, so he did the unconscionable and bought Atari's dying corpse for a song, and then used it as leverage to dick around with Amiga through his creative interpretations of contract and IP law. He still wasn't making any money, but he made damned sure no one else could either.
If that's the man against whom you want to compare Steve Jobs, well I must say I don't know what the hell you're smoking.
No, they were doing badly because the Mac suffered from stagnation. Open or closed doesn't matter so much when your product is obsolete from the start. There was very little reason to use a Mac in the 90's unless you were very specifically working in the print industry, or making music with Pro Tools. The Mac held very little appeal to the average home user.
Steve Jobs was the kick in the nuts management needed at the time, but after a decade of success, I'd think the tie-throttling imbeciles learned a thing or two about manufacturing popularity. They've been strategically acquiring 3rd party tech that fits their market, bringing all the profit in-house. They have strong relationships with the manufacturers and a retail model that sells itself with minimal effort.
Steve could retire tomorrow, and after the "ZOMG he's sick" Wall Street asshats find themselves a new zillionaire to stalk, the company will continue to do just fine. They will find a new spokesmodel, he/she will be completely forgettable, but they will be making money hand-over-fist, and that's really all that matters to them.
Fuck China (the government, not the people).
That's funny, I just switched the /. font to serif, and I find it illegible. Perhaps I'm too used to sans-serif fonts. I actually can't scan the text anymore, even after increasing the font size.
Mind you, I hardly read any hard-copy, so YMMV.
Banks have to get their money from somewhere
No, they don't.
Fractional reserve is the root of our problems today. The system is designed to lend out more money than actually exists, thus the economy is overloaded by design, and inflation is guaranteed.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year, nor do they yield 3% more meat. You can say what you want about wealth, but there is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, and printing more money isn't going to change that.
These types of exchanges (stocks, commodities, etc...) are Gambling dressed up for high society
Sure they are, but they have billion-dollar marketing campaigns to convince us otherwise. Why the hell does a bank need an ad campaign ? Why is it spending what is supposed to be our money on self-promotion ?
A: Because there's a greedy bastard making a ton of money at the top.
The reason why everything is the way it is, is so that a bunch of people can legally skim off the top, have their dumb yachts, coke and whores and not have to work for it.
And we are the fools for willingly enabling that mass fraud.
Every time I read about Wine, I shrug and/or roll my eyes. I've tried many times to use it, but it simply does not work for the handful of Windows apps I actually need. I gave it another try just a few months ago, and I was again left high and dry, so I turned yet again to virtual machines. At this point, I have stopped caring about the project.
For the inevitable flamers among you, here's the short list of Windows apps I need, that Wine fails to support:
- Photoshop CS3
- Office 2007
- MSIE 6/7
IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom. And don't try to tell me to use The Gimp and OO.o, I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use. If it were just me in my little bubble, I'd be quite happy with unbranded alternatives, but my rent doesn't pay itself.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
That is a recent development, a failed attempt to "save" Firewire. It failed, of course.
Back when the Firewire vs USB2 battle was aflame, back when these things mattered, the total licensing cost was indeed ~$10 USD for a pair of Firewire ports (for daisy-chaining). It scaled non-linearly after that, because some patents were per-system, and some per-port.
We might take you more seriously if your comments didn't harbor such an accusatory tone. Apple has a long history behind their brand, and the last "open" system sold by Apple was the Apple IIc.
That has _nothing_ to do with the quality of Apple products. I'm just saying their track record points to a distinct lack of support for open formats and developer / power-user support.
You need to learn to distinguish fact from opinion. In your opinion, you like the iPod... frankly I like them too, but I know if what I need is openness and customization, then I should look elsewhere because the iPod will provide neither. That's what this article was about, and sales figures do nothing to represent those characteristics. They represent popularity.
the livelihood of aging performers is at stake
Oh really ? And we care because ____ ?
It's funny, if I decide to not work for the rest of my life, and spend what little savings I had on hookers, booze and coke, does this mean the government will cover for me when I'm old, rotten and broke ?
Many artists make it big, then crash even worse than they were before the fame. I don't feel guilty for their lack of foresight. A pathetic fuck-up with an album cover is still just a pathetic fuck-up.
Why are they wasting everyone's time with USB 3.0, when the rest of the universe is shifting toward Ethernet as a common interconnect ? Note I didn't say IP, just Ethernet - good old CAT-5.
Frig, if the audio folks have already started that transition, then what the hell is Intel doing ? The audio industry is probably the most retarded in the world (according to my failed expectations), and even they see that Ethernet is a cost-effective and braindead simple replacement for all these proprietary cables we've had to contend with over the years.