Only now that current consoles are getting closer to the end of their lifespan and some cost $99 (which is the cost of the middle of the road video card. Radeon 9600 SE is $83 on pricewatch.com....)
When those consoles were new, they were $299, which is the cost of a cutting edge video card - the video card that only the die-hard enthusiast (penis wagger) needs to buy. The fastest processors and video cards simply aren't required to play many video games, unless you're a) a sucker b) need 400 FPS.
For people bitching about upgrades costing so much money...why not buy best bang for the buck hardware, and save yourself some pain?
Everyone upgrades to a processor that has 10-20% more speed, with 2-3x the cost. Plot out the best speed/$, and buy that. Do the same with the video card. Buy into architectures where you know the roadmaps for the processor/motherboard have room to upgrade.
Example: I got a Nvidia 2 motherboard that goes to *at least* an athlon 3200+, and got a nice 2100+ for $80. I got 1/2 a gig of ram for $60. The motherboard, case, PSU, etc were $250 (ok, it's expensive because it's a small form factor - shuttle XPC.) I got a geforce 4 4200 for about $150.
If I need a 50% processor speed increase, I'll buy an athlon 3200 when they're $100. If I need a newer video card, I'll buy a radeon 9800 when the next gen video card come out, so it'll be $150-200 (depending on how impatient I am.)
So, I can't play *every* game in 1600x1200. I can play them all comfortably at 1024x768, and many at 1280x1024. You can't do that on a console either - they're producing shitty frame rates at 640x480. But it doesn't cost me much to own the PC, and upgrading will not cost me much either.
I figure I do one 'refresh' every 18-24 months for $300-$400. I do one new build about once every 4 years (and I still save the cases, PSU, hard drives, CD-ROM, etc...so those rebuilds don't cost more than $600...)
Where is this $1000 comming from? Are people ordering new PCs once a year?
Geforce 4MX is a piece of crap card. That's equivilant to a Geforce 2. A Geforce 3 is a better card than a 4MX, and the xbox has a much better video card than the 4MX - it's roughly equivilant to a Geforce 3.5.
So, you have a bargain bin video card that doesn't support many of the rendering features of the game that many PCs and the Xbox do support. That would explain your crap graphics.
Of course, if you wanted to record HDTV off a satellite or cable TV, you're screwed. From the website FAQ:
Q. Can I record cable or satellite HD programs? A. No. All HDTV card "stores" high-def signals in their raw data form and decodes the signal during playback. Since Cable and Satellite services do not use 8VSB modulation, their signals require dedicated tuners, and once decoded, cannot be routed to the input of the HDTV PC cards.
Speaking as a molecular biologist / bioinformatics guy...
How 'bout "lab on a chip"? I'd prefer a sequencer on a chip, so I can tell exactly what base you have at your 3 billion positions. Let me do that to 100,000 people of various ethnicities and diseases, and I'll give you back a bucket full of cures.
I don't know if there's going to be a single technology that is like the atom bomb, because the technology to generate data for genetic studies is ramping up at a level similar to Moore's law. There's fierce competition to develope the fastest ways to determine what your genetic sequence looks like (we do it a base at a time at targeted locations now - single base genotyping). While the scale that data can be collected on has grown dramatically, there hasn't been any fantastic breakthroughts - or should I say that people are making breakthroughs all the time?
50 years ago, there wasn't much we could do. Now we can sequence our own genes. Or build our own genes from scratch. Sequence an animal in MONTHS (they aren't less complex than humans, we're just better at in now than a few years ago.) We can look at the expression of protiens or RNA in your cells. We're slowly determining the structure of protiens. We're learning basic facts about how genetic networks can be constructed.
There will be no single bullet, just a constant grinding away at mysteries. There will be plenty of technology to assist, but it will still be up to the brightest of us to figure out the best way to use it.
My girlfriend digs all sorts of porn that I'd never seen (I'm not a big porno fan myself, I like the real thing a whole lot more...) Funny when the girlfriend gives *you* the porno education...
One of the problems with the idea that traits can be removed 'without mishap' is not often a clear case. There are certain traits, like diabetes, which can be *beneficial* in the proper enviornment.
Take a disease where you're very careful with your consumption of calories. Put yourself in a situation where there's a history of food scarcity. Wow, suddenly, you have an advantage. But this advantage only comes out in certain situations.
The problem I have with genetic engineering is the removal of variation in the genome that might have advantagous properties in a different enviornment. Having a large, diverse gene pool is the best way to survive cataclysm. Some people are going to make it through, and then those genes will become prevelant in the population they found (this is called a population bottleneck, and it's been seen in history a number of times.)
-Jim (I only program software to analyse population genetics data, what do I know?)
I figured I'd weigh in on this discussion as I work in the bioinformatics field (the merger of biotech and computers, neat stuff). I've spent the last 5 years of my life working at places like the WhiteHead Center for Genome Research http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/genome/gc.html working on the study of complex traits.
As much as I'd love to see some of the bits in this article come true, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Complex traits are incredibly hard to study, and there are only a handful of non-mendelian traits (the not so simple ones) that have/real/ links to genetic causes. These studies often take a very long time, and are a hit or miss proposition.
The best we can do right now is construct candidate gene approaches (read: make your best guess when you don't know what 90% of the genome does), and hope you hit something. Our group spent 2 and one half years looking for a signal for diabetes, and found one that is only interesting when combined with all the other data generated by a number of other labs.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10973253&dopt=Abstrac t
(sorry, I can't get the link to not include the space between the c and t in "Abstract")
The genome isn't about to cough out it's secrets in the next week so that we can magically hack it. We know that there is a long string of 4 letters, be we have no idea what they mean. I'll be thrilled to know we figure out some semi-significant portion of this information in the next 20 years. This one dimensional view of the genome will need to also be expanded into a 3 dimensional view of the protiens and how they fold and splice together...and while sequences are being added to public databases very quickly, the structures of the things actually doing something (proteins) is growing at a much slower rate.
MiniDisc format does have benefits, though I only see them in the portable models. Those benefits: Very small sized players that play for very long lengths of time on build in rechargable batteries. You can also carry around a large amount of music at a lower cost than mp3 players that are of a similar size.
Once someone gets the ipod to be PC compatable, I might be interested in changing formats. But then I have to trade up to a bigger, more expensive player that only has a 1/4 of the battery life.
If people are removed from the economic chain, then who will be the consumers of all the products?
The function of society to a business is as consumers of their product. Demand for a product gives money to the producer. A land of poor people who can't purchase products topels the economy.
I think the balance between supply and demand is over the long term self-regulating, like a biological system.
One idea I've read in a few stories for regulating genes like this:
Use some other commonly found substance (but not too common) as a trigger, that sets off the cascade to produce the drug of choice.
In the story I read (was it "Our Neural Chernobyl"?), the genetic hackers used a particular soda to trigger their drug of choice. Pretty cool idea, and it takes care of having too much of a good thing...
Slashdot Mirror
Only now that current consoles are getting closer to the end of their lifespan and some cost $99 (which is the cost of the middle of the road video card. Radeon 9600 SE is $83 on pricewatch.com....)
When those consoles were new, they were $299, which is the cost of a cutting edge video card - the video card that only the die-hard enthusiast (penis wagger) needs to buy. The fastest processors and video cards simply aren't required to play many video games, unless you're a) a sucker b) need 400 FPS.
For people bitching about upgrades costing so much money...why not buy best bang for the buck hardware, and save yourself some pain?
Everyone upgrades to a processor that has 10-20% more speed, with 2-3x the cost. Plot out the best speed/$, and buy that. Do the same with the video card. Buy into architectures where you know the roadmaps for the processor/motherboard have room to upgrade.
Example: I got a Nvidia 2 motherboard that goes to *at least* an athlon 3200+, and got a nice 2100+ for $80. I got 1/2 a gig of ram for $60. The motherboard, case, PSU, etc were $250 (ok, it's expensive because it's a small form factor - shuttle XPC.) I got a geforce 4 4200 for about $150.
If I need a 50% processor speed increase, I'll buy an athlon 3200 when they're $100. If I need a newer video card, I'll buy a radeon 9800 when the next gen video card come out, so it'll be $150-200 (depending on how impatient I am.)
So, I can't play *every* game in 1600x1200. I can play them all comfortably at 1024x768, and many at 1280x1024. You can't do that on a console either - they're producing shitty frame rates at 640x480. But it doesn't cost me much to own the PC, and upgrading will not cost me much either.
I figure I do one 'refresh' every 18-24 months for $300-$400. I do one new build about once every 4 years (and I still save the cases, PSU, hard drives, CD-ROM, etc...so those rebuilds don't cost more than $600...)
Where is this $1000 comming from? Are people ordering new PCs once a year?
Geforce 4MX is a piece of crap card. That's equivilant to a Geforce 2. A Geforce 3 is a better card than a 4MX, and the xbox has a much better video card than the 4MX - it's roughly equivilant to a Geforce 3.5.
So, you have a bargain bin video card that doesn't support many of the rendering features of the game that many PCs and the Xbox do support. That would explain your crap graphics.
Of course, if you wanted to record HDTV off a satellite or cable TV, you're screwed. From the website FAQ:
Q. Can I record cable or satellite HD programs?
A. No. All HDTV card "stores" high-def signals in their raw data form and decodes the signal during playback. Since Cable and Satellite services do not use 8VSB modulation, their signals require dedicated tuners, and once decoded, cannot be routed to the input of the HDTV PC cards.
D'oh.
Speaking as a molecular biologist / bioinformatics guy...
How 'bout "lab on a chip"? I'd prefer a sequencer on a chip, so I can tell exactly what base you have at your 3 billion positions. Let me do that to 100,000 people of various ethnicities and diseases, and I'll give you back a bucket full of cures.
I don't know if there's going to be a single technology that is like the atom bomb, because the technology to generate data for genetic studies is ramping up at a level similar to Moore's law. There's fierce competition to develope the fastest ways to determine what your genetic sequence looks like (we do it a base at a time at targeted locations now - single base genotyping). While the scale that data can be collected on has grown dramatically, there hasn't been any fantastic breakthroughts - or should I say that people are making breakthroughs all the time?
50 years ago, there wasn't much we could do. Now we can sequence our own genes. Or build our own genes from scratch. Sequence an animal in MONTHS (they aren't less complex than humans, we're just better at in now than a few years ago.) We can look at the expression of protiens or RNA in your cells. We're slowly determining the structure of protiens. We're learning basic facts about how genetic networks can be constructed.
There will be no single bullet, just a constant grinding away at mysteries. There will be plenty of technology to assist, but it will still be up to the brightest of us to figure out the best way to use it.
-Jim
My girlfriend digs all sorts of porn that I'd never seen (I'm not a big porno fan myself, I like the real thing a whole lot more...) Funny when the girlfriend gives *you* the porno education...
One of the problems with the idea that traits can be removed 'without mishap' is not often a clear case. There are certain traits, like diabetes, which can be *beneficial* in the proper enviornment.
Take a disease where you're very careful with your consumption of calories. Put yourself in a situation where there's a history of food scarcity. Wow, suddenly, you have an advantage. But this advantage only comes out in certain situations.
The problem I have with genetic engineering is the removal of variation in the genome that might have advantagous properties in a different enviornment. Having a large, diverse gene pool is the best way to survive cataclysm. Some people are going to make it through, and then those genes will become prevelant in the population they found (this is called a population bottleneck, and it's been seen in history a number of times.)
-Jim
(I only program software to analyse population genetics data, what do I know?)
I figured I'd weigh in on this discussion as I work in the bioinformatics field (the merger of biotech and computers, neat stuff). I've spent the last 5 years of my life working at places like the WhiteHead Center for Genome Research http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/genome/gc.html working on the study of complex traits.
/real/ links to genetic causes. These studies often take a very long time, and are a hit or miss proposition.
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10973253&dopt=Abstrac t
As much as I'd love to see some of the bits in this article come true, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Complex traits are incredibly hard to study, and there are only a handful of non-mendelian traits (the not so simple ones) that have
The best we can do right now is construct candidate gene approaches (read: make your best guess when you don't know what 90% of the genome does), and hope you hit something. Our group spent 2 and one half years looking for a signal for diabetes, and found one that is only interesting when combined with all the other data generated by a number of other labs.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
(sorry, I can't get the link to not include the space between the c and t in "Abstract")
The genome isn't about to cough out it's secrets in the next week so that we can magically hack it. We know that there is a long string of 4 letters, be we have no idea what they mean. I'll be thrilled to know we figure out some semi-significant portion of this information in the next 20 years. This one dimensional view of the genome will need to also be expanded into a 3 dimensional view of the protiens and how they fold and splice together...and while sequences are being added to public databases very quickly, the structures of the things actually doing something (proteins) is growing at a much slower rate.
MiniDisc format does have benefits, though I only see them in the portable models. Those benefits: Very small sized players that play for very long lengths of time on build in rechargable batteries. You can also carry around a large amount of music at a lower cost than mp3 players that are of a similar size.
Once someone gets the ipod to be PC compatable, I might be interested in changing formats. But then I have to trade up to a bigger, more expensive player that only has a 1/4 of the battery life.
If people are removed from the economic chain, then who will be the consumers of all the products?
The function of society to a business is as consumers of their product. Demand for a product gives money to the producer. A land of poor people who can't purchase products topels the economy.
I think the balance between supply and demand is over the long term self-regulating, like a biological system.
One idea I've read in a few stories for regulating genes like this:
Use some other commonly found substance (but not too common) as a trigger, that sets off the cascade to produce the drug of choice.
In the story I read (was it "Our Neural Chernobyl"?), the genetic hackers used a particular soda to trigger their drug of choice. Pretty cool idea, and it takes care of having too much of a good thing...