No, pipelining helps push the clock frequency up. A non-pipelined processor would be faster at the same clock frequency because we would have no pipeline stalls.
That paragraph is a bit confusing... it's correct, but one of the key things that needs to be pointed out is that it simply would't be possible to have a non-pipelined processor running at anywhere close to modern speeds. I think the last x86 CPU with no pipelining at all was the 80286. Certainly you could get more than 12 MHz using modern techniques, but you wouldn't come anywhere close to even 1 GHz. I'm not even sure if you could break 100 MHz.
If anyone out there wants to know what the hell pipelining and the rest of this crap is -- go over to Ars Technica -- they have some excellent CPU design articles. HowStuffWorks may also have some stuff, but I've never looked for it.
I wish they had included the new EPIA stuff in their comparison. I would like to know just where they stand on a price / performance comparison.
Ok, I generally hate Tom's Hardware (deeply biased, inaccurate reporting, etc), but they do have at least one useful article.
This doesn't show the latest processors, obviously, but it does show a nice spectrum with a large number of tests. Ignore the "writing" and just look at the numbers. I used it earlier this year to build a Linux MP3 server w/ an Athlon 1.4. I would've gone for VIA except for the cruddy MP3 encoding results -- this box ripped and encoded ~600 CDs and so MP3 encoding performance was important to me. I still wonder if I shouldn't have just gone the VIA route and done all the ripping/encoding on my main PCs (which would have been drastically less convienent, but it's a one-time thing after all).
It's a good companion article to the one Anandtech printed.
Which the Rio has in spades as well. Admittedly, it's a different community than SliMP3's -- the developer is defunct, but the Rio hardware/software interface is so freaking simple that everything short of the ROM has been replaced now. And before Rio went bankrupt and was sold (both twice) they were fairly open about mods to the box as well.
the product is shaped by its users rather than by Rio's marketing department
I can pretty well assure you that the Rio Receiver is no longer shaped by the marketing department.
ease of use. Out of the box, it just works.
As does the Rio Receiver. As does all of the competition worth a crap in this particular field.
Yes, Rio is no more - they were sold to SonicBlue who (relatively promptly) went bankrupt and sold to D&M holdings. SB discontinued the Rio Receiver line when they held it, and D&M is not reviving it. So what? You can still find plenty of Rio Receivers out there for ~$50. So for the price of a single Squeezebox you can put in enough Rio Receivers to provide music to an entire house, or 3-4 rooms if you need to buy wireless bridges as well.
When you can't buy any more Rio Receivers for $50 then it's worth looking at more expensive options.
The poster specifically asked what the difference was to his $55 Rio Receiver. Both points you attempted to make have no relevance to the Rio Receiver -- they're true for it just as much as the SqueezeBox.
The SB has a smaller form factor, is completely open source, plays a wider variety of music sources, and has wifi built in. That's about it. It's lacking an integrated amp, which the Rio Receiver has (very useful for putting units into bedrooms, kitchens, and other areas that might not have an entertainment center). It's pretty hard to justify spending nearly 500% more on the SqueezeBox over the Rio Receiver given that feature list.
Slip 10% of the votes to X party or X candidate and I'll ensure that you get a multi-million dollar contract to do whatever the hell you want to.
How's that for greed incentive?
Now, it takes someone with even less ethics to take advantage of that than to beat a slot machine. It's pretty damn obvious that people are going to be affected by screwing with the voting system, while with a slot machine you can rationalize it to only affect some big gambling conglomerate (which doesn't have the greatest ethics itself after all). But the factor could still be there.
I don't always do what they say... but my ears are always open.
Which is the important bit really.
Shame I didn't traipse across your game awhile ago... I think both my wife and myself would enjoy it (especially her -- she likes puzzle games, pirates, and the social aspects of MMOG's). But we have a kid due in Feb and don't want to get sucked down into a game right now. We kicked the EQ habit a couple years ago (both of us were in a top 10 guild), so are rather wary of getting addicted again.
I'm surprised... because Bush on TV screams out for a public speaking mentor. There's a reason he's done so few press conferences -- he's absolutely abysmal on TV. No, I'm not a Bush basher, I'm a moderate, but I've yet to be inspired by even one of his appearances.
Contrast that to Reagan or Clinton, both of whom had very powerful charismas both in person and on TV. Reagan, obviously, had a great deal of experience with cameras. Clinton, by all accounts (even the most vehement haters) was one of the most personally charismatic presidents we've had since JFK. Whenever I see George W. Bush on TV I'm reminded of a dorky high school kid that's out of place.
Bush is going to win the next election. The Republicans are probably going to hold both houses of Congress too. It's not a situation I particularly like (as I said, I'm a moderate and Bush's politics are far too right wing for my likes; my politics are probably closest to Libretarian), but the Democrats are flailing about. They have no real platform, and they're failing to address serious issues in an alternate, but plausible manner.
So leave them. You can now you know, that's the entire point.
And I say this even though my wife works for Sprint (not PCS though).
Not all the companies are charging money for compliance. Not all the companies have long term contracts that are designed to lock you in. And even the ones that do will let you switch plans, or there's at least a termination option.
Is there anyone out there that doesn't think that this will wind up severely reducing cell phone rates? Companies used to be able to lock people in (particularly businesses or business people -- change that number and you get to change your business cards, your signage, your website, and everything else. THAT's the expensive bit.) by holding their phone numbers captive. They can't do that anymore. It's essentially eliminated a false monopoly on phone numbers and it's going to create competition. Instantly? Doubtful. But Hong Kong saw its cellphone rates drop 80% in the two years after adopting cell phone number portability. I doubt the US will see that radical of a drop, but even 20% will more than make up for any incidental charges you're paying right now.
Of course, I'm completely unsurprised that some people can't see the forest for the trees.
It's illegal for telemarketers to call your cell phone
No, it's merely against a DMA (Direct Marketing Association) rule, violate the rule and I presume the DMA can take action against you if you're a member. There's no requirement to be a member, of course, but as with most industry associations there are advantages, mainly in the lobbying and legal arenas I suspect.
The DMA also knows what will happen if they start calling cell phones -- there will be a Federal law akin to the Junk Fax law, and there will be no allowances for mistakes. Right now they at least get the "oops" factor and make damn sure that it gets entered on a do not call list (another advantage of the DMA I suspect -- you may not want to share numbers that just ask you not to call, but you do want to share numbers you should never call like cell phones and emergency service (hospitals/fire/police stations)).
By your logic we don't exist. After all, how could a human have been born without a human to bear it?
But good job on restating the chicken and egg problem in an obscure way.
The first molecular assembler can be built "by hand", just like the first robots were. We've already got the capability to shove around individual atoms (remember IBM spelling out "IBM" with Xenon atoms?), so it's at least theoretically possible (as long as we only need Xenon atoms to build it at least;) ).
I agree that most gamers don't know how to do balance right... but there's still a vast arena in which devs should listen to their customers. Fixing bugs, improving the UI, and minor tweaks can vastly improve a game. One of my biggest complaints about Q2 and Q3 is the absolutely miserable default interfaces. Compare them to UT and UT2k3 -- forget about gameplay (I enjoy both), just look at the UI. The Unreal interface is leaps and bounds beyond Q2/Q3 -- hell, in Q2 you couldn't even see all the players on the scoreboard in a large game. How silly is that?
Sure, mods can overcome these issues, but only if the users install them. That leaves the vast majority without.
There is one genre where devs really should listen to the players though -- MMORPGs. The top end users will have far, far more play time and actual experience with the game than the devs will. They'll know the weaknesses of the game and the smart ones will have good ideas on how to fix them. I'm not saying that devs should take the suggestions as raw change requests, but having input from the top players is a good thing.
Its not that hard to live within your means with $20 million.
No it's not, but it's absolutely amazing how many people can't. Look at virtually any lottery winner, most pop stars, or anyone else who goes from millionaire to zilch.
If you've got $20M in the bank, your yearly operating budget is a "mere" $1,00,000. Certainly more than enough to live on anywhere in the world, and live very comfortably, but you can't go spending money on anything you want to, and you probably can't afford to own more than 3 homes reasonably.
Hell, give me $5M and I'd have enough to never work again, but it's all about budgeting. (I could get away with less, but the closer I come to $200k/year the more likely I am to do some work; otherwise it'd be just raising kids, doing random stuff, and traveling).
Everytime a thread about anything home theater related the answer is the same -- go check out AVS Forum, it's answered there.
In this case go read the Home Theater Gaming/Console area and perhaps look into the Home Theater PC area. It's not clear if you were wanting to play PC games on your big screen TV (quite do able; for HD you'd want a TV with DVI input and a video card with DVI output) or console games (support varies widely, with the PS2 having the least support and the Xbox having the most).
As for why consoles don't support HD more -- it's simple. They don't have the power, and it's a great deal of additional development and QA time for a small segment of the market.
Consoles have really miserable resolution -- essentially 640x240 at 60 fps (NTSC; PAL is a bit more resolution at 50 fps). Yes, NTSC is roughly 640x480 resolution, but it's interlaced -- you don't have to draw half the screen every frame and you're foolish if you think the console games are doing so when they don't need to. If you change to a progressive scan picture then you're immediately at twice the work that needs to be done. Bump it up to a 720p 4:3 and you're nearly quadrupling the effort from there (or nearly 8x as much as a SD screen). Widescreen requires even more work. And remember, a 720p 4:3 image still has less resolution than a 1024x768 (XGA) monitor and only needs to run at a paltry 60 fps.
As for splitscreen -- if you split a 16:9 screen you don't get two 4:3 images. Supporting split screen 16:9 means you have to support at least 3 different aspect ratios... most likely you're already going to support horizontally split 4:3, so now it's 4 different aspect ratios. That's a whole lot of development and QA time, and probably not worth the effort (yet).
A few caveats -- gun games do not work with virtually any HDTV. The gun watches for the interlaced signal and most HDTVs (all digital systems, almost all RPs, and most FPs) will never display interlaced -- they upscale to progressive internally. If you want to play gun games then you'll need to move the system to an older CRT based TV.
If you use an Xbox, be aware that the Live console is still in 480i only. This can be an issue if you have a TV that has separate inputs for 480i/p and 480p/720p/1080i (all Samsung DLP RP's currently). There are ways around this (cable splitting, using a VGA adapter), but it's something to be aware of and consider when purchasing a TV.
If you do not get a DLP/LCD/LCoS based TV then you will have to be careful of burn-in. Proper calibration of the set can eliminate this danger, but most people don't calibrate. Plasma does have a burn-in issue as well, but it's not as severe as CRT.
I currently have my PS2 connected to my 46" Samsung DLP. No issues. Not many games support widescreen or 480p, but it really doesn't bug me. It's nice to play on a really big screen with a full surround system. I'm hoping to make my next PC portable enough to use as an occasional HTPC and play some games (HL2, D3) on it as well... should be a blast.
You're not flaming, you're making rational discussion. It would be uncouth of me to flame you back just because we disagree:)
When you need heating you need to prevent cold air to go in, right
Largely, but thermal radiation plays a bigger part in heating than in cooling as I understand it (and my understanding is far from perfect). Which is why doing things like using radiant barriers and white roofs help much more for reducing cooling costs than heating. The sun is going to be adding to your heat load regardless of how much insulation you put on your house. There's radiative cooling as well, of course, but in terms of watts per square meter it's just not as large in most climates (the more polar the climate the more it's an issue, obviously).
Of course, on a cost basis you're still better off with insulation than radiant barriers. They're not magic.
Look at that. Do you think the difference between heating and cooling does explain that ?
If you look at it per capita it becomes much more interesting (and looking at it as a raw number is useless... per capita doesn't show the whole picture either though). Realize that some of the countries (like the Northern European countries) are high because they are exceptionally low on the oil/natural gas consumption scale -- they have ready sources of electricity (mostly hydroelectric, Iceland also has geothermal) which are non-polluting and inexpensive to maintain. Even though Norway produces immense amounts of oil (3rd largest exporter in the world), it's smarter for them to sell it on the world market and use electricity to heat their homes.
Yes, the US consumes twice as much electrical power as France. We also have considerably more heavy industry. But I would agree that the US consumes more electrical power than is necessary. The US is behind in conservation, plain and simple. A lot of the "innovations" that are recent to the US have been in Europe for a decade or more. But it's still not as bad as some would have you believe -- the US is clearly not consuming vastly more electricity per capita than anyone else in the world. And none of this is factoring in manufacturing capability, which the US has more of than anyone else. Making stuff takes power.
Nifty site BTW. It's broken in some areas (look at Natural Gas consumption stats -- billions of cubic feet is not bigger than trllion [sic] cubic feet), but much easier to use for comparison purposes than the CIA World Factbook.
If we want to be fair we have to look at overall power production and consumption rates. Those are difficult to aggregate properly since you would have to seperate fuels used for electrical generation from those used for heating or other purposes. Looking at natural gas consumption, for instance, is deceptive since the US uses it for both heating and electrical generation.
I agree on this but what's the point to have cheap power if it fails ?
It really doesn't fail all that much though. The NE blackout was a rather exceptional condition, as was the Northern Italy blackout (which I know France was not responsible for). The California rolling blackouts have turned out to be entirely the fault of a corrupt utility company. And while there are sporadic power outages all the time, there's really not much you can do against tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters/occurances that cause the power outage. I can't recall the last time I had a power outage that wasn't directly tied to one of these.
I mean I think you will have more and more problems in the future if you don't upgrade your power grid.
I agree completely. And both the government and private corporations are to blame here. The Federal government has cut several bills to provide incentives or outright money toward power grid improvements. The state PSCs/PUCs have repeatedly denied rate hikes to address infrastructure issues. And the power companies are unwilling to reduce short term
One A/C system where I live but no heating devices. In France I had no A/C but a heating device. Quite the same.
Uh, no. Heating is considerably cheaper to do than cooling, even if you do both by electrical means. In most areas of the world where heating is a concern you don't do it electrically -- because burning gas is much more effective. It's also considerably easier to insulate against cold than it is against heat.
Since I arrived 6 months ago: none in Florida.
And exactly where do you live in Florida? Most of it has daily thunderstorms. Florida is the lightning strike capital of the world.
Many places in America still don't have any access to the powergrid. Ok the country is VERY BIG, but hey do you REALLY think it's normal ?
Yes, I do. Do you realize that France is only a bit bigger than twice the size of Colorado? Or that the US has nearly as many square kilometers of water as France has square kilometers of land? The US has to provide power to roughly 5x the number of people on roughly 20x the amount of land.
Take a look at Russia, the Ukraine, China, India, or any other large, geographically diverse country. How much of it is wired? Frankly, the US probably has more wired than any other country. Heck, if you want a fun comparison, go look at Canada -- they have communities off the grid too. Sure, they're way the heck up North, but that's where most of the unpowered commnities are in the US too (largely in Alaska, some in the Rockies -- good luck finding anyone off the grid not by their own choice in the Northeast, which is a much more accurate comparison to France).
France doesn't have to deal with a lot of the issues that the US does. Like ants that will happily chew through electrical insulation (fire ants in the SE US; between that and clay soil it makes burying cable extremely expensive)? No permafrost either. Tornados? Hurricanes? Nope.
Tell me what to envy to such a system in such an advanced country
I challenge you to show me another country that has anywhere close to the same issues and is doing better than the US. We could be doing better on fossil fuels (particularly oil -- we have absurd reserves of coal and natural gas; but even for oil we only import roughly twice as much as we produce), and I would certainly like to see the US move back toward nuclear power. But we have some of the cheapest power in the world, and the cost of power is a baseline for everything else in the economy. It's one of the key reasons that we have such a strong economy, and have had one since the advent of industrialization.
I also would like to add that here in Florida I spend more than 100$/month on electricity bill with many outages whereas in France I used to spend less than 40$/month with a MUCH better service.
Yes, and your temperatures between Florida and France are so similar. How much did you run fans, AC, and other cooling technologies in Florida as compared to France? Heck, how many people died in France this summer -- a summer which had highs several degrees lower than those in Florida (much less Arizonia or New Mexico)?
As for outages -- exactly how many thunderstorms did you have in Florida as compared to France?
Yes, there's things to envy about the French electrical grid. There's things to envy about the US grid as well. They're not directly comparable though. Anyone who thinks they are is simply uninformed.
And while piercing the corproate veil is, indeed, not the proper term, Canopy has long tried to shield itself from shady doings by wholly owned subsidiaries, largely involving money shuffling to benefit the primaries who hold position only at Canopy. With enough lawyers, time, and money it's possible to prove that SCO was not acting independantly but rather under Canopy's direction -- and that would allow IBM to include Canopy in the lawsuits that are being leveled at SCO.
As for Boies -- he's not issuing press releases, but he has filed false information in a court of law. Several of the statements in the initial filing are outright lies, which would be easily debunked by even a cursory fact check. If Boies starts filing false evidence during the course of the case he can be found derilict and disbarred. The exceptional amounts of stock being offered as payment, plus the buyout option, could also engender a conflict of interest and that would be another strike.
And it's still in IBM's interest to cause damage to everyone involved in the lawsuit -- including the lawyers and investors. I doubt they'll go as far as investors (and it'd be hard to do, even harder than the lawyers), but IBM has a definite vested interest in quashing SCO and related parties so hard that it'll make any other company think twice before doing anything similar. This lawsuit is going to cost IBM a great deal of money -- for what's looking increasinly frivolous. Governments aren't the only ones that seek to "send a message" by means of harsh sentences.
A settlement isn't something that can be appealed, as far as I know; and even if it could be, I'd bet certainly not by an uninvolved party.
Even if it could be appealed (and I forgot that it was a settlement, not a judicial ruling), we're long past the final date for filing an appeal.
As for an uninvolved party -- that's not true. AT&T sold all rights on the source code in question to Novell, who then sold it (with strings) to the company that is now SCO. So they are an involved party, albeit several purchases removed. Of course, that weakens their case -- they should damn well have known what they were and weren't purchasing, along with the legal entanglements involved. Failure to do so may very well be illegal, but in this case it would be the stockholders suing the company over failure of due diligence rather than the company suing anyone.
The more I read on this the more I wonder wtf is going on. It has long since passed the point of being rational. SCO may very well have a beef with IBM and contract violation, but it ends there. All the ranting and raving against Linux, BSD, and the rest of the industry is insane.
On an unrelated note, I'm glad to see IBM handling the case the way they are. I'm sincerely hoping that IBM is subpoening Canopus in order to pierce the corporate veil. This kind of intellectual property blackmail is exactly the kind of thing a large corporation doesn't want to see. It's very much in IBM's interest to burn the fields and salt the earth as a warning against anyone else who would try such spurious claims against them. They have to not only take down SCO, but also Canopus. And if the lawyers pull the same level of crap in the courtroom as they're pulling in the press then IBM will probably push to have them disbarred for conflict of interest, improper conduct, etc.
Anyone who has a legit complaint against IBM, Redhat, Linux, BSD, etc. should certainly pursue it in court. But so far SCO has failed to prove that they have any such complaint, and they appear to be throwing up a smokescreen to hide that.
By and large, and they're considerably cheaper as well.
That said, IIRC, even the P4 1.6GHz had a memory bandwidth greater than what PC133 memory could supply. The fact that the motherboard doesn't offer it is another issue. The P4 1.6 hails back to when Intel was pushing RAMBUS though, which is a whole different debacle.
My company has more than 30,000 seats. They could easily assembly PCs themselves and save money. In fact, there are many things they could do to save money. The moral here is that big companies aren't necessarily very bright.
No, you just don't understand business yet. Yes, they have 30k computers. What's their primary line of business? Unless it's making computers it makes no sense at all for them to hire a hundred people to assemble the PCs and do support on them -- because once you put together your own PCs you can no longer get hardware or software support from a single source. The amount of time and money that would be spent handling the constant failures (and in a sample set of 30,000 there's always going to be a hundred or so that need service) far exceeds whatever money could be recouped by buying parts on the cheap. You also have to factor in the additional HR load (particularly bad if PC assembly and maintainence is nowhere close to your line of business -- how do the HR people know who is and isn't a good candidate?) and similar issues (like space for the additional employees, warehousing of parts, inventory management, etc).
I've built every PC I've owned except the very first which was well over a decade ago. And even that system got the video, memory, and CPU upgraded before I replaced it. That's fine for me though -- I'm confident in being able to build and maintain the computers for my household. But I'll never do it for a friend or family member again. Doing free tech support for myself or wife is one thing. Doing it for someone else is another.
SIS isn't very active in the AMD motherboard front -- it's pretty much all Via and Nvidia. They do have some chipsets, sure, but they're not as fast as the other two are, nor do they have as many features.
Not even sure that SIS offers a AMD64 MB for that matter.
This may have been true but the average user just wants it to look good on paper
Ok, so go ask Average User how fast the CPU in the HP Pavilion 3000+ is. Odds are they'll say 3.0 GHz, which isn't true but is proof of AMD's success in "looking good on paper".
The issue that AMD has long had is poor motherboards. Via had a long, long time with poor chipsets/drivers which lead to crashes (this pretty much ended with the KT133A, but it's popped up every now and then since). They also had issues with MS not including the drivers for the chipsets with the OS (which is a death knell, especially for something like a motherboard -- the boards worked without the drivers, but they were dog slow). They also had some thermal problems, which were wonderfully overhyped by the hypemasters at Tom's Hardware (no, I won't provide a link -- if you don't know it you're better off).
Nowadays those issues are in the past. Nvidia has been producing rock solid motherboards for over a year now. Via has finally worked out its issues as well. Via even has chipset support in XP (and Win2k/ME IIRC). Anyone who spouts heat issues is an idiot -- Intel chips now have higher power consumption and heat dissipation than AMD does at the same effective processor speed.
AMD's had issues breaking into corporate PCs though, and still does. Most PCs sold for corporate use are Intel only. They've also had problems breaking into the notebook arena, and they're making a slow go of it in both areas. AMD has long had the enthusiast market, particularly the value-oriented gamers, but it's by no means a lock, and it's really not a very large market.
Setting nullable columns to null as a default is fine and dandy.
Setting not null columns to some unspecified default is, well, dangerous. Proper SQL would refuse to insert/update the row and throw an exception (or the equivalent thereof for the database). Blindly changing the data and accepting the change is a bad, bad thing.
Note -- I have lots of experience with commercial RDBMS (mostly Oracle, a good bit of Sybase and MS SQL Server) and nearly none with MySQL. Absolutely none with PostgreSQL. So my POV is tainted from that perspective.
exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second
So, exactly how long is that? In the US, that would be 10e-21 seconds. But this is being reported by the BBC, and most of the English speaking world outside of the US doesn't consider 1 billion = 1000 million (instead it's 1 million million). So is it 10e-21 seconds or 10e-36 seconds (if I did my math right, which I probably didn't)? That's a rather large difference, and I couldn't find a definitive reference in any of the linked articles or PhysicsWeb.
That said, how do you detect particles that exist for this short a period of time anyway?
I looked into these multi-game cabinets recently (as in, the last week) since it might be cool to have one in our newly refinished basement.
The consumer versions start at about $2500, if you find them at a good price -- you can pay another $1000 if you don't do your searching carefully. The commercial versions are an additional $500 (they're slightly larger, have a coin door, and are much, much heavier). The cocktail table version is another $300-500.
There's also some mega-multi game cabinets out there -- with up to 100 classic games ranging from Space Invaders to Street Fighter II. They top out at around $5000 with all the games and controls.
That said, I haven't seen any Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga combo units priced at more than $.25 except in places like Dave & Busters.
Oh, and I'm no longer thinking about getting one of these machines... they're way too expensive.
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No, pipelining helps push the clock frequency up. A non-pipelined processor would be faster at the same clock frequency because we would have no pipeline stalls.
That paragraph is a bit confusing... it's correct, but one of the key things that needs to be pointed out is that it simply would't be possible to have a non-pipelined processor running at anywhere close to modern speeds. I think the last x86 CPU with no pipelining at all was the 80286. Certainly you could get more than 12 MHz using modern techniques, but you wouldn't come anywhere close to even 1 GHz. I'm not even sure if you could break 100 MHz.
If anyone out there wants to know what the hell pipelining and the rest of this crap is -- go over to Ars Technica -- they have some excellent CPU design articles. HowStuffWorks may also have some stuff, but I've never looked for it.
I wish they had included the new EPIA stuff in their comparison. I would like to know just where they stand on a price / performance comparison.
Ok, I generally hate Tom's Hardware (deeply biased, inaccurate reporting, etc), but they do have at least one useful article.
This doesn't show the latest processors, obviously, but it does show a nice spectrum with a large number of tests. Ignore the "writing" and just look at the numbers. I used it earlier this year to build a Linux MP3 server w/ an Athlon 1.4. I would've gone for VIA except for the cruddy MP3 encoding results -- this box ripped and encoded ~600 CDs and so MP3 encoding performance was important to me. I still wonder if I shouldn't have just gone the VIA route and done all the ripping/encoding on my main PCs (which would have been drastically less convienent, but it's a one-time thing after all).
It's a good companion article to the one Anandtech printed.
.I was thinking more along the lines of, say, "dom" and "sub" which hardly offends anybody.
I think we have our replacement terms for the words now...
Oh, and I can think of a rather large number of people that would be offensive to (extreme right wing "Christians", overly left wing feminists, etc).
I guess the big question is -- which one gets put in the leather drive jacket?
community
Which the Rio has in spades as well. Admittedly, it's a different community than SliMP3's -- the developer is defunct, but the Rio hardware/software interface is so freaking simple that everything short of the ROM has been replaced now. And before Rio went bankrupt and was sold (both twice) they were fairly open about mods to the box as well.
the product is shaped by its users rather than by Rio's marketing department
I can pretty well assure you that the Rio Receiver is no longer shaped by the marketing department.
ease of use. Out of the box, it just works.
As does the Rio Receiver. As does all of the competition worth a crap in this particular field.
Yes, Rio is no more - they were sold to SonicBlue who (relatively promptly) went bankrupt and sold to D&M holdings. SB discontinued the Rio Receiver line when they held it, and D&M is not reviving it. So what? You can still find plenty of Rio Receivers out there for ~$50. So for the price of a single Squeezebox you can put in enough Rio Receivers to provide music to an entire house, or 3-4 rooms if you need to buy wireless bridges as well.
When you can't buy any more Rio Receivers for $50 then it's worth looking at more expensive options.
No, wrong.
The poster specifically asked what the difference was to his $55 Rio Receiver. Both points you attempted to make have no relevance to the Rio Receiver -- they're true for it just as much as the SqueezeBox.
The SB has a smaller form factor, is completely open source, plays a wider variety of music sources, and has wifi built in. That's about it. It's lacking an integrated amp, which the Rio Receiver has (very useful for putting units into bedrooms, kitchens, and other areas that might not have an entertainment center). It's pretty hard to justify spending nearly 500% more on the SqueezeBox over the Rio Receiver given that feature list.
The engineer greed factor is still missing.
Slip 10% of the votes to X party or X candidate and I'll ensure that you get a multi-million dollar contract to do whatever the hell you want to.
How's that for greed incentive?
Now, it takes someone with even less ethics to take advantage of that than to beat a slot machine. It's pretty damn obvious that people are going to be affected by screwing with the voting system, while with a slot machine you can rationalize it to only affect some big gambling conglomerate (which doesn't have the greatest ethics itself after all). But the factor could still be there.
I don't always do what they say... but my ears are always open.
Which is the important bit really.
Shame I didn't traipse across your game awhile ago... I think both my wife and myself would enjoy it (especially her -- she likes puzzle games, pirates, and the social aspects of MMOG's). But we have a kid due in Feb and don't want to get sucked down into a game right now. We kicked the EQ habit a couple years ago (both of us were in a top 10 guild), so are rather wary of getting addicted again.
Best of luck to you and your game though!
I'm surprised... because Bush on TV screams out for a public speaking mentor. There's a reason he's done so few press conferences -- he's absolutely abysmal on TV. No, I'm not a Bush basher, I'm a moderate, but I've yet to be inspired by even one of his appearances.
Contrast that to Reagan or Clinton, both of whom had very powerful charismas both in person and on TV. Reagan, obviously, had a great deal of experience with cameras. Clinton, by all accounts (even the most vehement haters) was one of the most personally charismatic presidents we've had since JFK. Whenever I see George W. Bush on TV I'm reminded of a dorky high school kid that's out of place.
Bush is going to win the next election. The Republicans are probably going to hold both houses of Congress too. It's not a situation I particularly like (as I said, I'm a moderate and Bush's politics are far too right wing for my likes; my politics are probably closest to Libretarian), but the Democrats are flailing about. They have no real platform, and they're failing to address serious issues in an alternate, but plausible manner.
So leave them. You can now you know, that's the entire point.
And I say this even though my wife works for Sprint (not PCS though).
Not all the companies are charging money for compliance. Not all the companies have long term contracts that are designed to lock you in. And even the ones that do will let you switch plans, or there's at least a termination option.
Is there anyone out there that doesn't think that this will wind up severely reducing cell phone rates? Companies used to be able to lock people in (particularly businesses or business people -- change that number and you get to change your business cards, your signage, your website, and everything else. THAT's the expensive bit.) by holding their phone numbers captive. They can't do that anymore. It's essentially eliminated a false monopoly on phone numbers and it's going to create competition. Instantly? Doubtful. But Hong Kong saw its cellphone rates drop 80% in the two years after adopting cell phone number portability. I doubt the US will see that radical of a drop, but even 20% will more than make up for any incidental charges you're paying right now.
Of course, I'm completely unsurprised that some people can't see the forest for the trees.
It's illegal for telemarketers to call your cell phone
No, it's merely against a DMA (Direct Marketing Association) rule, violate the rule and I presume the DMA can take action against you if you're a member. There's no requirement to be a member, of course, but as with most industry associations there are advantages, mainly in the lobbying and legal arenas I suspect.
The DMA also knows what will happen if they start calling cell phones -- there will be a Federal law akin to the Junk Fax law, and there will be no allowances for mistakes. Right now they at least get the "oops" factor and make damn sure that it gets entered on a do not call list (another advantage of the DMA I suspect -- you may not want to share numbers that just ask you not to call, but you do want to share numbers you should never call like cell phones and emergency service (hospitals/fire/police stations)).
By your logic we don't exist. After all, how could a human have been born without a human to bear it?
;) ).
But good job on restating the chicken and egg problem in an obscure way.
The first molecular assembler can be built "by hand", just like the first robots were. We've already got the capability to shove around individual atoms (remember IBM spelling out "IBM" with Xenon atoms?), so it's at least theoretically possible (as long as we only need Xenon atoms to build it at least
I agree that most gamers don't know how to do balance right... but there's still a vast arena in which devs should listen to their customers. Fixing bugs, improving the UI, and minor tweaks can vastly improve a game. One of my biggest complaints about Q2 and Q3 is the absolutely miserable default interfaces. Compare them to UT and UT2k3 -- forget about gameplay (I enjoy both), just look at the UI. The Unreal interface is leaps and bounds beyond Q2/Q3 -- hell, in Q2 you couldn't even see all the players on the scoreboard in a large game. How silly is that?
Sure, mods can overcome these issues, but only if the users install them. That leaves the vast majority without.
There is one genre where devs really should listen to the players though -- MMORPGs. The top end users will have far, far more play time and actual experience with the game than the devs will. They'll know the weaknesses of the game and the smart ones will have good ideas on how to fix them. I'm not saying that devs should take the suggestions as raw change requests, but having input from the top players is a good thing.
Its not that hard to live within your means with $20 million.
No it's not, but it's absolutely amazing how many people can't. Look at virtually any lottery winner, most pop stars, or anyone else who goes from millionaire to zilch.
If you've got $20M in the bank, your yearly operating budget is a "mere" $1,00,000. Certainly more than enough to live on anywhere in the world, and live very comfortably, but you can't go spending money on anything you want to, and you probably can't afford to own more than 3 homes reasonably.
Hell, give me $5M and I'd have enough to never work again, but it's all about budgeting. (I could get away with less, but the closer I come to $200k/year the more likely I am to do some work; otherwise it'd be just raising kids, doing random stuff, and traveling).
Everytime a thread about anything home theater related the answer is the same -- go check out AVS Forum, it's answered there.
In this case go read the Home Theater Gaming/Console area and perhaps look into the Home Theater PC area. It's not clear if you were wanting to play PC games on your big screen TV (quite do able; for HD you'd want a TV with DVI input and a video card with DVI output) or console games (support varies widely, with the PS2 having the least support and the Xbox having the most).
As for why consoles don't support HD more -- it's simple. They don't have the power, and it's a great deal of additional development and QA time for a small segment of the market.
Consoles have really miserable resolution -- essentially 640x240 at 60 fps (NTSC; PAL is a bit more resolution at 50 fps). Yes, NTSC is roughly 640x480 resolution, but it's interlaced -- you don't have to draw half the screen every frame and you're foolish if you think the console games are doing so when they don't need to. If you change to a progressive scan picture then you're immediately at twice the work that needs to be done. Bump it up to a 720p 4:3 and you're nearly quadrupling the effort from there (or nearly 8x as much as a SD screen). Widescreen requires even more work. And remember, a 720p 4:3 image still has less resolution than a 1024x768 (XGA) monitor and only needs to run at a paltry 60 fps.
As for splitscreen -- if you split a 16:9 screen you don't get two 4:3 images. Supporting split screen 16:9 means you have to support at least 3 different aspect ratios... most likely you're already going to support horizontally split 4:3, so now it's 4 different aspect ratios. That's a whole lot of development and QA time, and probably not worth the effort (yet).
A few caveats -- gun games do not work with virtually any HDTV. The gun watches for the interlaced signal and most HDTVs (all digital systems, almost all RPs, and most FPs) will never display interlaced -- they upscale to progressive internally. If you want to play gun games then you'll need to move the system to an older CRT based TV.
If you use an Xbox, be aware that the Live console is still in 480i only. This can be an issue if you have a TV that has separate inputs for 480i/p and 480p/720p/1080i (all Samsung DLP RP's currently). There are ways around this (cable splitting, using a VGA adapter), but it's something to be aware of and consider when purchasing a TV.
If you do not get a DLP/LCD/LCoS based TV then you will have to be careful of burn-in. Proper calibration of the set can eliminate this danger, but most people don't calibrate. Plasma does have a burn-in issue as well, but it's not as severe as CRT.
I currently have my PS2 connected to my 46" Samsung DLP. No issues. Not many games support widescreen or 480p, but it really doesn't bug me. It's nice to play on a really big screen with a full surround system. I'm hoping to make my next PC portable enough to use as an occasional HTPC and play some games (HL2, D3) on it as well... should be a blast.
You're not flaming, you're making rational discussion. It would be uncouth of me to flame you back just because we disagree :)
When you need heating you need to prevent cold air to go in, right
Largely, but thermal radiation plays a bigger part in heating than in cooling as I understand it (and my understanding is far from perfect). Which is why doing things like using radiant barriers and white roofs help much more for reducing cooling costs than heating. The sun is going to be adding to your heat load regardless of how much insulation you put on your house. There's radiative cooling as well, of course, but in terms of watts per square meter it's just not as large in most climates (the more polar the climate the more it's an issue, obviously).
Of course, on a cost basis you're still better off with insulation than radiant barriers. They're not magic.
Look at that. Do you think the difference between heating and cooling does explain that ?
If you look at it per capita it becomes much more interesting (and looking at it as a raw number is useless... per capita doesn't show the whole picture either though). Realize that some of the countries (like the Northern European countries) are high because they are exceptionally low on the oil/natural gas consumption scale -- they have ready sources of electricity (mostly hydroelectric, Iceland also has geothermal) which are non-polluting and inexpensive to maintain. Even though Norway produces immense amounts of oil (3rd largest exporter in the world), it's smarter for them to sell it on the world market and use electricity to heat their homes.
Yes, the US consumes twice as much electrical power as France. We also have considerably more heavy industry. But I would agree that the US consumes more electrical power than is necessary. The US is behind in conservation, plain and simple. A lot of the "innovations" that are recent to the US have been in Europe for a decade or more. But it's still not as bad as some would have you believe -- the US is clearly not consuming vastly more electricity per capita than anyone else in the world. And none of this is factoring in manufacturing capability, which the US has more of than anyone else. Making stuff takes power.
Nifty site BTW. It's broken in some areas (look at Natural Gas consumption stats -- billions of cubic feet is not bigger than trllion [sic] cubic feet), but much easier to use for comparison purposes than the CIA World Factbook.
If we want to be fair we have to look at overall power production and consumption rates. Those are difficult to aggregate properly since you would have to seperate fuels used for electrical generation from those used for heating or other purposes. Looking at natural gas consumption, for instance, is deceptive since the US uses it for both heating and electrical generation.
I agree on this but what's the point to have cheap power if it fails ?
It really doesn't fail all that much though. The NE blackout was a rather exceptional condition, as was the Northern Italy blackout (which I know France was not responsible for). The California rolling blackouts have turned out to be entirely the fault of a corrupt utility company. And while there are sporadic power outages all the time, there's really not much you can do against tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters/occurances that cause the power outage. I can't recall the last time I had a power outage that wasn't directly tied to one of these.
I mean I think you will have more and more problems in the future if you don't upgrade your power grid.
I agree completely. And both the government and private corporations are to blame here. The Federal government has cut several bills to provide incentives or outright money toward power grid improvements. The state PSCs/PUCs have repeatedly denied rate hikes to address infrastructure issues. And the power companies are unwilling to reduce short term
One A/C system where I live but no heating devices. In France I had no A/C but a heating device. Quite the same.
Uh, no. Heating is considerably cheaper to do than cooling, even if you do both by electrical means. In most areas of the world where heating is a concern you don't do it electrically -- because burning gas is much more effective. It's also considerably easier to insulate against cold than it is against heat.
Since I arrived 6 months ago: none in Florida.
And exactly where do you live in Florida? Most of it has daily thunderstorms. Florida is the lightning strike capital of the world.
Many places in America still don't have any access to the powergrid. Ok the country is VERY BIG, but hey do you REALLY think it's normal ?
Yes, I do. Do you realize that France is only a bit bigger than twice the size of Colorado? Or that the US has nearly as many square kilometers of water as France has square kilometers of land? The US has to provide power to roughly 5x the number of people on roughly 20x the amount of land.
Take a look at Russia, the Ukraine, China, India, or any other large, geographically diverse country. How much of it is wired? Frankly, the US probably has more wired than any other country. Heck, if you want a fun comparison, go look at Canada -- they have communities off the grid too. Sure, they're way the heck up North, but that's where most of the unpowered commnities are in the US too (largely in Alaska, some in the Rockies -- good luck finding anyone off the grid not by their own choice in the Northeast, which is a much more accurate comparison to France).
France doesn't have to deal with a lot of the issues that the US does. Like ants that will happily chew through electrical insulation (fire ants in the SE US; between that and clay soil it makes burying cable extremely expensive)? No permafrost either. Tornados? Hurricanes? Nope.
Tell me what to envy to such a system in such an advanced country
I challenge you to show me another country that has anywhere close to the same issues and is doing better than the US. We could be doing better on fossil fuels (particularly oil -- we have absurd reserves of coal and natural gas; but even for oil we only import roughly twice as much as we produce), and I would certainly like to see the US move back toward nuclear power. But we have some of the cheapest power in the world, and the cost of power is a baseline for everything else in the economy. It's one of the key reasons that we have such a strong economy, and have had one since the advent of industrialization.
I also would like to add that here in Florida I spend more than 100$/month on electricity bill with many outages whereas in France I used to spend less than 40$/month with a MUCH better service.
Yes, and your temperatures between Florida and France are so similar. How much did you run fans, AC, and other cooling technologies in Florida as compared to France? Heck, how many people died in France this summer -- a summer which had highs several degrees lower than those in Florida (much less Arizonia or New Mexico)?
As for outages -- exactly how many thunderstorms did you have in Florida as compared to France?
Yes, there's things to envy about the French electrical grid. There's things to envy about the US grid as well. They're not directly comparable though. Anyone who thinks they are is simply uninformed.
Yes, brain fart on Canopy.
And while piercing the corproate veil is, indeed, not the proper term, Canopy has long tried to shield itself from shady doings by wholly owned subsidiaries, largely involving money shuffling to benefit the primaries who hold position only at Canopy. With enough lawyers, time, and money it's possible to prove that SCO was not acting independantly but rather under Canopy's direction -- and that would allow IBM to include Canopy in the lawsuits that are being leveled at SCO.
As for Boies -- he's not issuing press releases, but he has filed false information in a court of law. Several of the statements in the initial filing are outright lies, which would be easily debunked by even a cursory fact check. If Boies starts filing false evidence during the course of the case he can be found derilict and disbarred. The exceptional amounts of stock being offered as payment, plus the buyout option, could also engender a conflict of interest and that would be another strike.
And it's still in IBM's interest to cause damage to everyone involved in the lawsuit -- including the lawyers and investors. I doubt they'll go as far as investors (and it'd be hard to do, even harder than the lawyers), but IBM has a definite vested interest in quashing SCO and related parties so hard that it'll make any other company think twice before doing anything similar. This lawsuit is going to cost IBM a great deal of money -- for what's looking increasinly frivolous. Governments aren't the only ones that seek to "send a message" by means of harsh sentences.
A settlement isn't something that can be appealed, as far as I know; and even if it could be, I'd bet certainly not by an uninvolved party.
Even if it could be appealed (and I forgot that it was a settlement, not a judicial ruling), we're long past the final date for filing an appeal.
As for an uninvolved party -- that's not true. AT&T sold all rights on the source code in question to Novell, who then sold it (with strings) to the company that is now SCO. So they are an involved party, albeit several purchases removed. Of course, that weakens their case -- they should damn well have known what they were and weren't purchasing, along with the legal entanglements involved. Failure to do so may very well be illegal, but in this case it would be the stockholders suing the company over failure of due diligence rather than the company suing anyone.
The more I read on this the more I wonder wtf is going on. It has long since passed the point of being rational. SCO may very well have a beef with IBM and contract violation, but it ends there. All the ranting and raving against Linux, BSD, and the rest of the industry is insane.
On an unrelated note, I'm glad to see IBM handling the case the way they are. I'm sincerely hoping that IBM is subpoening Canopus in order to pierce the corporate veil. This kind of intellectual property blackmail is exactly the kind of thing a large corporation doesn't want to see. It's very much in IBM's interest to burn the fields and salt the earth as a warning against anyone else who would try such spurious claims against them. They have to not only take down SCO, but also Canopus. And if the lawyers pull the same level of crap in the courtroom as they're pulling in the press then IBM will probably push to have them disbarred for conflict of interest, improper conduct, etc.
Anyone who has a legit complaint against IBM, Redhat, Linux, BSD, etc. should certainly pursue it in court. But so far SCO has failed to prove that they have any such complaint, and they appear to be throwing up a smokescreen to hide that.
If anything, they're conservative
By and large, and they're considerably cheaper as well.
That said, IIRC, even the P4 1.6GHz had a memory bandwidth greater than what PC133 memory could supply. The fact that the motherboard doesn't offer it is another issue. The P4 1.6 hails back to when Intel was pushing RAMBUS though, which is a whole different debacle.
My company has more than 30,000 seats. They could easily assembly PCs themselves and save money. In fact, there are many things they could do to save money. The moral here is that big companies aren't necessarily very bright.
No, you just don't understand business yet. Yes, they have 30k computers. What's their primary line of business? Unless it's making computers it makes no sense at all for them to hire a hundred people to assemble the PCs and do support on them -- because once you put together your own PCs you can no longer get hardware or software support from a single source. The amount of time and money that would be spent handling the constant failures (and in a sample set of 30,000 there's always going to be a hundred or so that need service) far exceeds whatever money could be recouped by buying parts on the cheap. You also have to factor in the additional HR load (particularly bad if PC assembly and maintainence is nowhere close to your line of business -- how do the HR people know who is and isn't a good candidate?) and similar issues (like space for the additional employees, warehousing of parts, inventory management, etc).
I've built every PC I've owned except the very first which was well over a decade ago. And even that system got the video, memory, and CPU upgraded before I replaced it. That's fine for me though -- I'm confident in being able to build and maintain the computers for my household. But I'll never do it for a friend or family member again. Doing free tech support for myself or wife is one thing. Doing it for someone else is another.
SIS isn't very active in the AMD motherboard front -- it's pretty much all Via and Nvidia. They do have some chipsets, sure, but they're not as fast as the other two are, nor do they have as many features.
Not even sure that SIS offers a AMD64 MB for that matter.
This may have been true but the average user just wants it to look good on paper
Ok, so go ask Average User how fast the CPU in the HP Pavilion 3000+ is. Odds are they'll say 3.0 GHz, which isn't true but is proof of AMD's success in "looking good on paper".
The issue that AMD has long had is poor motherboards. Via had a long, long time with poor chipsets/drivers which lead to crashes (this pretty much ended with the KT133A, but it's popped up every now and then since). They also had issues with MS not including the drivers for the chipsets with the OS (which is a death knell, especially for something like a motherboard -- the boards worked without the drivers, but they were dog slow). They also had some thermal problems, which were wonderfully overhyped by the hypemasters at Tom's Hardware (no, I won't provide a link -- if you don't know it you're better off).
Nowadays those issues are in the past. Nvidia has been producing rock solid motherboards for over a year now. Via has finally worked out its issues as well. Via even has chipset support in XP (and Win2k/ME IIRC). Anyone who spouts heat issues is an idiot -- Intel chips now have higher power consumption and heat dissipation than AMD does at the same effective processor speed.
AMD's had issues breaking into corporate PCs though, and still does. Most PCs sold for corporate use are Intel only. They've also had problems breaking into the notebook arena, and they're making a slow go of it in both areas. AMD has long had the enthusiast market, particularly the value-oriented gamers, but it's by no means a lock, and it's really not a very large market.
Setting nullable columns to null as a default is fine and dandy.
Setting not null columns to some unspecified default is, well, dangerous. Proper SQL would refuse to insert/update the row and throw an exception (or the equivalent thereof for the database). Blindly changing the data and accepting the change is a bad, bad thing.
Note -- I have lots of experience with commercial RDBMS (mostly Oracle, a good bit of Sybase and MS SQL Server) and nearly none with MySQL. Absolutely none with PostgreSQL. So my POV is tainted from that perspective.
Off to read the list now...
exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second
So, exactly how long is that? In the US, that would be 10e-21 seconds. But this is being reported by the BBC, and most of the English speaking world outside of the US doesn't consider 1 billion = 1000 million (instead it's 1 million million). So is it 10e-21 seconds or 10e-36 seconds (if I did my math right, which I probably didn't)? That's a rather large difference, and I couldn't find a definitive reference in any of the linked articles or PhysicsWeb.
That said, how do you detect particles that exist for this short a period of time anyway?
I looked into these multi-game cabinets recently (as in, the last week) since it might be cool to have one in our newly refinished basement.
The consumer versions start at about $2500, if you find them at a good price -- you can pay another $1000 if you don't do your searching carefully. The commercial versions are an additional $500 (they're slightly larger, have a coin door, and are much, much heavier). The cocktail table version is another $300-500.
There's also some mega-multi game cabinets out there -- with up to 100 classic games ranging from Space Invaders to Street Fighter II. They top out at around $5000 with all the games and controls.
That said, I haven't seen any Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga combo units priced at more than $.25 except in places like Dave & Busters.
Oh, and I'm no longer thinking about getting one of these machines... they're way too expensive.