How will the authorities know if the taxi driver had the radio turned on or off? Will they have a sting operation where an undercover officer hails a taxi, gets in, and then busts the the driver if they turn on the radio but haven't payed the fee?
Possibly. Remember, many locales have speed limits on their roadways. How do authorities know that you aren't exceeding them? Just because some people exceed the limits and they can't (yet) truly control a driver's speed, doesn't mean that they'll recind the law. Really, they don't unless you are in the vicinity of a patrol car. Otherwise, the authorities have no clue.
I do believe that there are people that need the horsepower. But there are probably 10 people that don't for the one that does. Animators, video people, developers, engineers and scientists probably do. People running Office anything or some web client probably do not.
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A system starts to "feel" faster when it is about twice as fast. You won't get your work done any faster, but it is a much more reactive and enjoyable machine to work with.
If CPU performance is the _only_ differentiator, maybe. Back in the PII days, I had a 166MHz Alpha (21066) for a personal machine and at work, a PII, 300MHz, both systems ran Windows NT 4.0.
In just about every way, the PII was supposed to be two times or more times better, but the Alpha system actually felt "snappier", despite the computation performance and bandwidth of the PII being tested as 2x faster.
Why should it be illegal if the users have agreed to a valid disclaimer ?
There is a man that I know that knows quite a bit about how people can weasel out of things that they sign and agree, and several of them could be used in such a case. The trick is making them work. I really don't know if this sort of thing would work on a "click here" agreement.
Actually, I was able to get the voltage regulators and heat sinks on ebay auctions as well, as they are often pulled and replaced with upgrade kits. I added a second CPU to my second hand workstation. It was a bit of a hassle as I bought parts from four separate auctions, but I only spent $100.
This is one of those topics where people who are wrong are not going to change.
LeGoS, iNc. can go kiss my arse. They make good (very durable but expensive) blocks, their legal department, among other things, leave a lot to be desired.
People that nitpick the finer points of grammar and spelling on a public forum are in the same sinking cruise liner, IMO.
A disproportionate amount of anime pr0n gets brought over and translated here in the USA. Go look in most large direct-sales video stores that carry a dedicated selection of anime. It's really pathetic.
Anime porn is pathetic, but otherwise I disagree with your statement, I believe what you see is the fault of the store, not what is "brought over". What ends up on the shelves on any particular store doesn't really reflect what is released, just what happens to sell in *that* store.
Except for a local FYE / (formerly Disc Jockey?) which has a very small anime section, locally and in several other locales I have checked around the US, the hentai that is on the shelves usually only amounts to 5% of the anime, at most. Best Buy, Suncoast, Media Play, Electronics Boutique and the "indie" shops carry about that much or less of the porn kind of anime, the exceptions may be the stores that specifically stock porn.
A mail order catalog that I happen to get has a small tear-out section of hentai that accounts for maybe twenty pages out of 300. The tear-out section is obstensibly their attempt at serving everyone so the catalog can be kept in places where there might be children.
There are too many cases of people leaving prison and getting right back into "the game", sometimes even commiting crimes within 24 hours!
Being incarcerated in itself doesn't solve things and turn people around. Indeed, even the punisment isn't a good deterrence. I really don't know what is a good solution.
This is one of those cases where people generally don't change unless the _want_ to change, and even that is hard, or if there is an extreme stressor that brings it about, and I wonder if prison is doing damage. I want people to be punished, but I also don't want the punishment to make them worse.
Funny how you feel prison should be something that treats poeple like animals...
Are you suggesting that people aren't animals?:)
But that's beside the point, there has to be a humane way of punishing people, somewhere in between, yet one that isn't just like life "outside" but being confined.
You know, I am not sure, but from the security certificate request, I think anti-leech.com just tried to put "gator" on my computer. Lesson: Get ad-aware.
Nice that people that accuse end users as being theives, yet they don't feel there is anything wrong with _stealing_ information about *ME* using my own property and my own bandwidth.
Right now, I block maybe as many as twenty ad servers because they have spyware, or serve Flash ads that chunk up my dad's K6-III to a crawl, and I _know_ that he's not going to upgrade simply because ads don't work well. So who do I bill for a faster computer to play them?
Yes -- I have a couple PIII-600 'Katami' CPUs here and they are worth ~$150 each used on eBay (too slow for PriceWatch).
The reason is that they are fastest chips supported on certain older OEM workstation and server configs, not because they are any better than newer CPUs.
Hmm, wow.
The Xeon workstation that I have supports 550 MHz max speed, 100MHz FSB. A 550MHz cartridge with 2MB (full clock) cache runs about $200 on eBay, which I think the PIII variation only has 512k cache at half clock, yet is possibly not as good of a value.
Right now, most users don't need to perform such operations, as it is, video is as extreme as it gets for most people, and that's more about bandwidth and RAM. The people that DO need to perform them can get higher-end computers that are designed for such tasks. Besides, a lot of people would probably like that stuff you outlined, but wouldn't pay much of a premium to get it, even if it were possible yet.
For a while, it was gamers that was a big part of pushing the market for faster CPUs, but now, as many others suggest, that horsepower focus is now in the video cards, so gamers really aren't as much of that picture any more. Game companies don't want to offend the less hardcore gamers by requiring the latest systems, as such there is often less benefit to getting the latest.
A shift away from the PC market could mean that they will no longer be trying so hard to compete with intel.
That doesn't mean that they won't try, and doesn't mean they really are pulling out of the PC CPU market. I take it as "not putting all your eggs in one basket".
It might mean that they are shifting what they want to put into the PC market. For one thing, the MHz race didn't exactly focus on wattage efficiency, with neither AMD nor Intel exactly getting awards for not releasing space heater products.
As it was, AMD and Intel didn't approach the overall market in the same way, although it might be limitations on the part of less available funding on AMD's part.
AMD sort of had their breadwinning technology horse backwards. AMD probably took a big hit by releasing their better CPU and chipsets for single CPU systems sooner than its multi-CPU counterpart. The multi-CPU market is often where the money is, and AMD multi-CPU systems by way of CPUs and chipsets have lagged in technology introduction.
Intel often kept its latest goodies close to its Xeon line and with time, trickled down some of those technologies to the regular CPUs.
As for AMD, I hope they keep making great processors. I've become annoyed with Intel's focus on GHz. Intel's idea of performance seems to be, "Let's just throw lots of clock cycles around!"
To be fair, AMD got caught up in the MHz race too, and they are, what, only 10%-15% better per clock? That's easy to beat if you have a 20% faster clock.
I am still somewhat bitter with AMD's pathetic K6 releases, their performance simply didn't measure up as well as others claimed, even with "integer" operations.
I was also wary of how easy it is to crack a core, AMD's physical chip design is simply too unstable, even the frigging huge heat sink is only held on by a tiny clip. Not exactly the positive bolt-on lock that the heat sinks that my Alpha and Xeon system have.
An 800mhz PIII chip costs 89$, on pricewatch (which I would never buy from by the way). 87$ buys you an Athlon 2100 cpu, which is just about 1ghz faster then the intel part
Older parts sometimes cost more partly because they aren't in production any more, but have some amount of latent demand as replacement and upgrade parts for older computers. I hadn't noticed it too much with CPUs but it's often the case with RAM.
As someone pointed out, a 2400+ Althon system costs about as much as a 2400MHz P4 system.
Re:Multiple architectures turns out to be very har
on
Transmeta Astro Processor
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For one, there simply wasn't much of a market in emulating non-x86 architectures. The available software and knowledge base, particularly for embedded design, is much higher in x86. For the systems that must have non-x86 architecture, generally they'd just get the real system rather than an emulation "hack", as often these other architectures are chosen to get the maximum reliability or performance characteristics that those markets require.
Also, because CISC breaks down to multiple smaller operations easier than RISC, CISC is much easier to get performance advantages with code morphing.
I haven't really tried the PDAs with built-in other stuff, but I think it might be nice to have a built-in camera and cell phone, or a cell phone with a PDA and camera function. If it is an idea that is accepted, then I would think that future product versions should have improvements to make such a combination more acceptable to more people. For some people, having to keep track of one object might be easier than tracking three. For others, having three objects might reduce the risks should you loose something.
A camera probably doesn't need to be high resolution, it would probably be comparable to my dad's old VGA resolution Mavica. If one needs a good camera, buy a good camera, but I think history has proven that something that is "good enough" will do the job despite obvious improvements that a better product would have.
As for the cohesive plot arcs, the assumed "laws" of syndicated television seemed to preclude them. The extras for STNG said that they finally gave in on no episode-to-episode continuity after the "Best of Both Worlds", to make "Family" to deal with Worf's dishonor and Picard's Borg-ification, the writers and producers said that those plot arcs demanded attention and got them.
Of course, there a lot of factors, but the creator of Babylon 5 had to fight *hard* to beat his show through to keep a story arc. I think it was a good thing that he didn't back down on that so easily as otherwise it might have been just another DS9 - oops, there are accusations that DS9 was based on B5 as it was announced not too long after JMS pitched it to Paramount.
This is a hot topic that isn't so easily explained away so simplistically.
DTS is bit-inefficient, and is very bandwidth hungry, as it compresses less.
DTS isn't _just_ a codec, you get the engineering and mixing services with it, and I suspect that the engineering has a lot to do with the improved quality. I believe that Dolby allows just about anyone to get an encoder, DTS only has a few labs that are allowed to use it.
Another problem with DTS on a DVD is that DTS takes about 2x the bandwidth to get the better quality audio, and depenging on the situation, the improvement is marginal for most people. Full-bandwidth DTS takes 15% of the available bandwidth available for DVD-Video, in some cases, taking away from the bandwidth available from the video compression and actual disc space for value-added material, such as extras. The highest bitrate DD uses about 5% of the available bandwidth per track.
Another handicap of DD is that sometimes mixers make sacrifices to make it more downward compatible with ProLogic decoders.
One thing that DTS is pretty well known for doing is mixing their audio to be an average 4dB louder than DD at the same reference level - for someone that isn't on to that trick, DTS is definitely going to sound better, clearer. not _just_ on the merits of the codec. A lot of people might not be able to tell the difference as quickly.
that just like DVD-region encoding and similar BS that this will begin to disappear in a few years, if the standard is to survive.
I wouldn't count on region coding to go away. The DVD-Video format has been available for five years and so far no major (and very few minor) DVD content producer has recanted them, except for the asian piracy rings. The game companies keep producing new consoles with too, consoles have been doing it for quite a long time.
"of course it would have to be thinner, and it would be cool if the keyboard could be folded completly around to the back like a magazine."
Isn't that a lot like the Compaq version? Well, not quite, as it detaches and attaches to the back, but at least I think the computer would optionally operate as a tablet or optionally operate as a conventional laptop.
There is some stuff where a keyboard isn't efficient for the task for most people. There are a lot of times when I see people wish they could make a quick sketch and email it. It sounds to me like such a tablet would be an answer if this can be done.
As for people being able to type quicker on a keyboard than write, I think that mainly applies for techies and secretaries.
I believe that a portable tablet with docks and attachable/detachable keyboard would be _extremely_ handy.
I've wanted a device like this for a few years now, particularly so I can look at data sheets, drawings and "paperwork" without having to either haul around paper and not have a keyboard constantly in my way.
Not necessarily true. I have a Geforce2 MX DH Pro, and it worked great w/ Win98 (as great as win98 can be).
Actually, his comment is somewhat correct as Win98 isn't an NT-based Windows system:
"Note that while what you're saying is true for XP, earlier NT-based Windows systems (including 2000)"
A fact or two of that post you responded to did have some issues, I have a dual-head ATI card that works as multi-monitor, pretty nicely in Windows 2000.
Note that while what you're saying is true for XP, earlier NT-based Windows systems (including 2000) don't allow true multi-display. Well, except if you're using a Matrox card. They're the only ones to have worked around this at the driver-level.
I think it is also a hardware level issue, as there is something about their protocols that made handling multiple cards easier, where the boards can interoperate, features that didn't seem to show up in competing cards for a while.
I do have some Permedia 2 cards where the DEC-made drivers allowed three identical cards to run as a multi-monitor arrangement in NT4.0.
Slashdot Mirror
How will the authorities know if the taxi driver had the radio turned on or off? Will they have a sting operation where an undercover officer hails a taxi, gets in, and then busts the the driver if they turn on the radio but haven't payed the fee?
Possibly. Remember, many locales have speed limits on their roadways. How do authorities know that you aren't exceeding them? Just because some people exceed the limits and they can't (yet) truly control a driver's speed, doesn't mean that they'll recind the law. Really, they don't unless you are in the vicinity of a patrol car. Otherwise, the authorities have no clue.
I do believe that there are people that need the horsepower. But there are probably 10 people that don't for the one that does. Animators, video people, developers, engineers and scientists probably do. People running Office anything or some web client probably do not.
A system starts to "feel" faster when it is about twice as fast. You won't get your work done any faster, but it is a much more reactive and enjoyable machine to work with.
If CPU performance is the _only_ differentiator, maybe. Back in the PII days, I had a 166MHz Alpha (21066) for a personal machine and at work, a PII, 300MHz, both systems ran Windows NT 4.0.
In just about every way, the PII was supposed to be two times or more times better, but the Alpha system actually felt "snappier", despite the computation performance and bandwidth of the PII being tested as 2x faster.
Why should it be illegal if the users have agreed to a valid disclaimer ?
There is a man that I know that knows quite a bit about how people can weasel out of things that they sign and agree, and several of them could be used in such a case. The trick is making them work. I really don't know if this sort of thing would work on a "click here" agreement.
Is it really that hard to believe that something is so overused that someone might get tired of it?
Actually, I was able to get the voltage regulators and heat sinks on ebay auctions as well, as they are often pulled and replaced with upgrade kits. I added a second CPU to my second hand workstation. It was a bit of a hassle as I bought parts from four separate auctions, but I only spent $100.
This is one of those topics where people who are wrong are not going to change.
LeGoS, iNc. can go kiss my arse. They make good (very durable but expensive) blocks, their legal department, among other things, leave a lot to be desired.
People that nitpick the finer points of grammar and spelling on a public forum are in the same sinking cruise liner, IMO.
A disproportionate amount of anime pr0n gets brought over and translated here in the USA. Go look in most large direct-sales video stores that carry a dedicated selection of anime. It's really pathetic.
Anime porn is pathetic, but otherwise I disagree with your statement, I believe what you see is the fault of the store, not what is "brought over". What ends up on the shelves on any particular store doesn't really reflect what is released, just what happens to sell in *that* store.
Except for a local FYE / (formerly Disc Jockey?) which has a very small anime section, locally and in several other locales I have checked around the US, the hentai that is on the shelves usually only amounts to 5% of the anime, at most. Best Buy, Suncoast, Media Play, Electronics Boutique and the "indie" shops carry about that much or less of the porn kind of anime, the exceptions may be the stores that specifically stock porn.
A mail order catalog that I happen to get has a small tear-out section of hentai that accounts for maybe twenty pages out of 300. The tear-out section is obstensibly their attempt at serving everyone so the catalog can be kept in places where there might be children.
I agree.
There are too many cases of people leaving prison and getting right back into "the game", sometimes even commiting crimes within 24 hours!
Being incarcerated in itself doesn't solve things and turn people around. Indeed, even the punisment isn't a good deterrence. I really don't know what is a good solution.
This is one of those cases where people generally don't change unless the _want_ to change, and even that is hard, or if there is an extreme stressor that brings it about, and I wonder if prison is doing damage. I want people to be punished, but I also don't want the punishment to make them worse.
Funny how you feel prison should be something that treats poeple like animals...
:)
Are you suggesting that people aren't animals?
But that's beside the point, there has to be a humane way of punishing people, somewhere in between, yet one that isn't just like life "outside" but being confined.
You know, I am not sure, but from the security certificate request, I think anti-leech.com just tried to put "gator" on my computer. Lesson: Get ad-aware.
Nice that people that accuse end users as being theives, yet they don't feel there is anything wrong with _stealing_ information about *ME* using my own property and my own bandwidth.
Right now, I block maybe as many as twenty ad servers because they have spyware, or serve Flash ads that chunk up my dad's K6-III to a crawl, and I _know_ that he's not going to upgrade simply because ads don't work well. So who do I bill for a faster computer to play them?
Yes -- I have a couple PIII-600 'Katami' CPUs here and they are worth ~$150 each used on eBay (too slow for PriceWatch).
The reason is that they are fastest chips supported on certain older OEM workstation and server configs, not because they are any better than newer CPUs.
Hmm, wow.
The Xeon workstation that I have supports 550 MHz max speed, 100MHz FSB. A 550MHz cartridge with 2MB (full clock) cache runs about $200 on eBay, which I think the PIII variation only has 512k cache at half clock, yet is possibly not as good of a value.
Right now, most users don't need to perform such operations, as it is, video is as extreme as it gets for most people, and that's more about bandwidth and RAM. The people that DO need to perform them can get higher-end computers that are designed for such tasks. Besides, a lot of people would probably like that stuff you outlined, but wouldn't pay much of a premium to get it, even if it were possible yet.
For a while, it was gamers that was a big part of pushing the market for faster CPUs, but now, as many others suggest, that horsepower focus is now in the video cards, so gamers really aren't as much of that picture any more. Game companies don't want to offend the less hardcore gamers by requiring the latest systems, as such there is often less benefit to getting the latest.
A shift away from the PC market could mean that they will no longer be trying so hard to compete with intel.
That doesn't mean that they won't try, and doesn't mean they really are pulling out of the PC CPU market. I take it as "not putting all your eggs in one basket".
It might mean that they are shifting what they want to put into the PC market. For one thing, the MHz race didn't exactly focus on wattage efficiency, with neither AMD nor Intel exactly getting awards for not releasing space heater products.
As it was, AMD and Intel didn't approach the overall market in the same way, although it might be limitations on the part of less available funding on AMD's part.
AMD sort of had their breadwinning technology horse backwards. AMD probably took a big hit by releasing their better CPU and chipsets for single CPU systems sooner than its multi-CPU counterpart. The multi-CPU market is often where the money is, and AMD multi-CPU systems by way of CPUs and chipsets have lagged in technology introduction.
Intel often kept its latest goodies close to its Xeon line and with time, trickled down some of those technologies to the regular CPUs.
As for AMD, I hope they keep making great processors. I've become annoyed with Intel's focus on GHz. Intel's idea of performance seems to be, "Let's just throw lots of clock cycles around!"
To be fair, AMD got caught up in the MHz race too, and they are, what, only 10%-15% better per clock? That's easy to beat if you have a 20% faster clock.
I am still somewhat bitter with AMD's pathetic K6 releases, their performance simply didn't measure up as well as others claimed, even with "integer" operations.
I was also wary of how easy it is to crack a core, AMD's physical chip design is simply too unstable, even the frigging huge heat sink is only held on by a tiny clip. Not exactly the positive bolt-on lock that the heat sinks that my Alpha and Xeon system have.
An 800mhz PIII chip costs 89$, on pricewatch (which I would never buy from by the way). 87$ buys you an Athlon 2100 cpu, which is just about 1ghz faster then the intel part
Older parts sometimes cost more partly because they aren't in production any more, but have some amount of latent demand as replacement and upgrade parts for older computers. I hadn't noticed it too much with CPUs but it's often the case with RAM.
As someone pointed out, a 2400+ Althon system costs about as much as a 2400MHz P4 system.
For one, there simply wasn't much of a market in emulating non-x86 architectures. The available software and knowledge base, particularly for embedded design, is much higher in x86. For the systems that must have non-x86 architecture, generally they'd just get the real system rather than an emulation "hack", as often these other architectures are chosen to get the maximum reliability or performance characteristics that those markets require.
Also, because CISC breaks down to multiple smaller operations easier than RISC, CISC is much easier to get performance advantages with code morphing.
I haven't really tried the PDAs with built-in other stuff, but I think it might be nice to have a built-in camera and cell phone, or a cell phone with a PDA and camera function. If it is an idea that is accepted, then I would think that future product versions should have improvements to make such a combination more acceptable to more people. For some people, having to keep track of one object might be easier than tracking three. For others, having three objects might reduce the risks should you loose something.
A camera probably doesn't need to be high resolution, it would probably be comparable to my dad's old VGA resolution Mavica. If one needs a good camera, buy a good camera, but I think history has proven that something that is "good enough" will do the job despite obvious improvements that a better product would have.
As for the cohesive plot arcs, the assumed "laws" of syndicated television seemed to preclude them. The extras for STNG said that they finally gave in on no episode-to-episode continuity after the "Best of Both Worlds", to make "Family" to deal with Worf's dishonor and Picard's Borg-ification, the writers and producers said that those plot arcs demanded attention and got them.
Of course, there a lot of factors, but the creator of Babylon 5 had to fight *hard* to beat his show through to keep a story arc. I think it was a good thing that he didn't back down on that so easily as otherwise it might have been just another DS9 - oops, there are accusations that DS9 was based on B5 as it was announced not too long after JMS pitched it to Paramount.
This is a hot topic that isn't so easily explained away so simplistically.
DTS is bit-inefficient, and is very bandwidth hungry, as it compresses less.
DTS isn't _just_ a codec, you get the engineering and mixing services with it, and I suspect that the engineering has a lot to do with the improved quality. I believe that Dolby allows just about anyone to get an encoder, DTS only has a few labs that are allowed to use it.
Another problem with DTS on a DVD is that DTS takes about 2x the bandwidth to get the better quality audio, and depenging on the situation, the improvement is marginal for most people. Full-bandwidth DTS takes 15% of the available bandwidth available for DVD-Video, in some cases, taking away from the bandwidth available from the video compression and actual disc space for value-added material, such as extras. The highest bitrate DD uses about 5% of the available bandwidth per track.
Another handicap of DD is that sometimes mixers make sacrifices to make it more downward compatible with ProLogic decoders.
One thing that DTS is pretty well known for doing is mixing their audio to be an average 4dB louder than DD at the same reference level - for someone that isn't on to that trick, DTS is definitely going to sound better, clearer. not _just_ on the merits of the codec. A lot of people might not be able to tell the difference as quickly.
that just like DVD-region encoding and similar BS that this will begin to disappear in a few years, if the standard is to survive.
I wouldn't count on region coding to go away. The DVD-Video format has been available for five years and so far no major (and very few minor) DVD content producer has recanted them, except for the asian piracy rings. The game companies keep producing new consoles with too, consoles have been doing it for quite a long time.
"of course it would have to be thinner, and it would be cool if the keyboard could be folded completly around to the back like a magazine."
Isn't that a lot like the Compaq version? Well, not quite, as it detaches and attaches to the back, but at least I think the computer would optionally operate as a tablet or optionally operate as a conventional laptop.
There is some stuff where a keyboard isn't efficient for the task for most people. There are a lot of times when I see people wish they could make a quick sketch and email it. It sounds to me like such a tablet would be an answer if this can be done.
As for people being able to type quicker on a keyboard than write, I think that mainly applies for techies and secretaries.
I believe that a portable tablet with docks and attachable/detachable keyboard would be _extremely_ handy.
I've wanted a device like this for a few years now, particularly so I can look at data sheets, drawings and "paperwork" without having to either haul around paper and not have a keyboard constantly in my way.
Not necessarily true. I have a Geforce2 MX DH Pro, and it worked great w/ Win98 (as great as win98 can be).
Actually, his comment is somewhat correct as Win98 isn't an NT-based Windows system:
"Note that while what you're saying is true for XP, earlier NT-based Windows systems (including 2000)"
A fact or two of that post you responded to did have some issues, I have a dual-head ATI card that works as multi-monitor, pretty nicely in Windows 2000.
Note that while what you're saying is true for XP, earlier NT-based Windows systems (including 2000) don't allow true multi-display. Well, except if you're using a Matrox card. They're the only ones to have worked around this at the driver-level.
I think it is also a hardware level issue, as there is something about their protocols that made handling multiple cards easier, where the boards can interoperate, features that didn't seem to show up in competing cards for a while.
I do have some Permedia 2 cards where the DEC-made drivers allowed three identical cards to run as a multi-monitor arrangement in NT4.0.