Lets assume we write a portable version of code instead of a Windows tied version.
The backends are nearly always portable -- that's what you need for a server after all, and it's in your interest to port that to as many platforms as possible (especially whatever platforms are popular in a hosted services environment).
You use OpenGL, have to write a different core sound driver for each platform you target, different installers, maybe a few other tweaks, and that's it.
That's it? Nice way of tossing that off there like it doesn't matter.
Having to write different sound engines is the worst bit... what a freaking nightmare for both development and QA (which, BTW, you completely forgot -- you must QA everything 3x as much because you now have 3 target platforms -- assuming that just because something works on one platform is going to guarantee you bugs on the non-tested platforms). Using OpenGL isn't the magic drop in replacement for DirectX that some seem to think it is. Yes, all the functionality is there. But DirectX has cleaned up a lot since the pre DX5 days, and more since then. Both APIs are hopelessly convoluted still, but at least with DirectX you have a huge freaking support infrastructure. Talk shit about MS all you want (and I do, frequently), but their developer support is superb.
But 5% of 300 million is 1.5 million. If 1% of that market buys the game, you've got 150,000 more customers.
Ignoring the really bad math on your part, you've also ignored the minor fact that most of that 1.5M are not in a position to be buying the game. Macs used for business purposes aren't likely to be buying games. Nor are Linux boxes used as servers. So cut that 1.5M by half and then take out your 1% -- which is still a gross overestimation.
You've also got a very portable game which minus the graphics engine should work on an xbox
Yes, and my car could compete in NASCAR if I merely replaced the engine, struts, and transmission.
If you're looking at the Xbox to port, then you're better off with DirectX -- you'll have to go there anyway for Xbox and it works just fine on Windows PCs. Who do you think the bigger market is? Xbox or Linux/Mac? I'm ignoring PS2 and Gamecube because you're going to have to rewrite massive portions of the code to go to either one from PC, so they're a major undertaking from either point of view.
It's not like you need to write anything in assembly which was the old excuse.
I'm glad you know more about this than John Carmack. I don't know about D3, but previous engines have always had hand tuned assembly in core routines.
Or is 150,000*$30 (aka $4.5 million) not worth the upfront extra work to write portable code in the first place?
Your math is wrong (see above or other posters) and so is your business sense. You haven't accounted for QA or support, both of which are going to be very expensive. No, it's not worth the extra work. I respect that some companies are willing to do the work anyway, but they've also yet to show a profit for doing so -- but they're making enough money to be willing to sacrifice some profit to do this. Don't try and paint it any other way.
If I understand what I'm seeing, the BTX is reversed from the ATX: the Rear Panel I/O is to the left of the Card Slots instead of to the right like AT/ATX have been.
Think you're looking at it backwards.
If you look at figure 1 it clearly shows the rear panel I/O on top of the I/O card slots. Figure 2 is the confusing one, since it does show what you suggest, but if this is a view from the bottom then it works out right.
I haven't read through the spec (I'm not THAT interested), but the only way for it to be reversed would be for the entire case to be flipped, with the motherboard being mounted to the left side (as facing the box) instead of the right -- which is a departure from all the way back to the first tower cases. Certainly possible though. Scanning through the volumetric specs doesn't give any conclusive information one way or another, but I may have just missed it.
There's dozens of them available. Which one would you like to use? Remember, it must be portable to all of the systems that sendmail is portable to, and you're going to create a dependancy between the two. Remember that the library must be under a license that's compatible with the existing sendmail license.
Sendmail is so old that it's unlikely that this will ever occur... the code is too crufty and the required platform support too broad to make it worth the effort.
Remember that sendmail dates back to 1982, which is long, long before these issues were prevalent. Automatic buffer checking wasn't done because it was so expensive on the systems of the times. After all, C is a language designed for writing OS's in, where speed comes before all else (at least in old school design -- nowadays it's another matter since hardware is fast and cheap, even in embedded systems).
This is just a neato way to make your old case and PSU obsolete come next upgrade. Hooray!
Glad you RTFA.
The PS is identical - same connectors (as long as you have the newer PS w/ the 4-pin 12V connector), same lines, etc.
Doesn't look like the case needs to change either, although I haven't looked into the nitty gritty details of the mounting holes (appear to be the same at first glance) or volumetric zones (which look interesting; my first glance doesn't show any problems with cases that follow the true ATX spec and don't try to provide side vent holes for the CPU).
At least BabyAT to ATX made some sense, in that it generally relocated the hotter CPUs next to PSU fans, etc...
The ATX form factor made no sense at all when it was first released. Which is why it was revised quickly to make up for the utterly braindead ideas in it. The original spec called for the power supply to pull air inward and vent onto the CPU. So you had a huge heat source (the PS) sucking in cool air and then blowing the now warmed air onto an even warmer part of the case that desperately needs cooling (the CPU). The ATX 1.03 spec quickly remedied that and reversed the airflow of the PS back outwards.
Now you "merely" have one huge heat source (the CPU) located right between two other huge heat sources (PS and video). Yeah, that makes "sense".
Not to mention issues with putting this into a small form factor case where there is inadequate specs on maximum heights for components.
I won't even touch the laptop suggestion... other posters have done it justice already.
AnandTech has pricing... $724 in 1000 lots for the 3.2GHz P4EE.
Which is a ridiculous price. But all of the P4's above the 2.6C are absurdly priced anyway (as are all the Athlon XP's above 2800 rating).
If you want the absolute bleeding edge then you're going to pay for it, whether it's from Intel, AMD, ATI, or nVidia. Whining about one particular manufacturer "price gouging" just shows bias and an unclear view of the market.
Good suggestions, but not always doable in practice.
Open data standards for payroll and accounting data? I'm sure there are some... they're probably old as dirt and about as fun to utilize nowadays too (yes, I've just spent a couple weeks learning the horrors of X.12 in the shipping industry -- it's used all over but it's archaic, has over 3 decades of different revisions, and an utter PITA to actually use). You can roll your own format (we did... we're in a position to) and make it reasonably open (again, we did... at least to our customers), but the odds of getting someone else to write to your format is low, especially for things like payroll/accounting. You could also reverse engineer their data files (a coworker did so for a flat file database at a former company, producing a real time importer for Sybase/Oracle), but that takes some pretty serious skill and money.
Don't think that it's just MS producing "proprietary" data. Virtually everyone does. And it's not the big, obvious formats that are a problem -- those have enough people looking at them to crack the nut eventually -- it's the small, uncommon formats that will keep you locked in. And it's equally unlikely that you'll easily find replacements that are low cost and open format. Companies have an incentive to lock you in... the counterbalancing force to this is that in a competitive market place they also have incentive to read other people's formats, which will either lead to a common format or to everyone figuring out how to import everyone else's data.
In general, without government mandates, it tends toward the latter rather than the former.
Depends upon the state (at least in the US; I bet other countries vary even more than the US does).
Texas has very strict licensing of engineers and the usage of the word in titles, business cards, etc. In that state you must go through certification and become a Professional Engineer to use the term. Getting a PE is very much non-trivial and includes (IIRC) a bare minimum of 5 years of experience in the field plus extensive testing and professional review.
Georgia, on the other hand, has no licensing whatsoever AFAIK. I can call myself a "Software Engineer" and there's nothing that can be done about it.
I'm fairly indifferent about the whole thing... but I can understand where the defensive nature of the trade associations come in. After all, who else remembers the late-80s/early-90s jokes of garbageman being renamed to "Waste Resource Engineer"? It's a dilution of the term, and a term which has a rather large dollar figure associated with it just as "M.D." for medicine and "attourney" or "esquire" for law do.
spelling errors(show me a programmer that can spell in English!)
Hi there, damn good to meet you.
Yeah, I make typos or grammatical mistakes every once in awhile, but neither I nor most of my coworkers (on the C++ side at least... the Java coders are another issue) have major spelling problems.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that we all hate writing docs.
This is presuming that your cable company hasn't disabled the serial port.
Mine has.
Otherwise I could use my TiVo to change channels via serial port, which is an officially supported feature in Series2 boxes, and a (fairly trivial) hack in Series 1 boxes.
While I agree, there are a rather large number of people who can't get satellite due to the birds being obstructed by landscape, buildings, or orientation (the latter mostly if you're in an apartment/condo). I'm one of them -- you have no idea how much I'd like to ditch my cable company or how long I've wanted to.
I've had DirecTV installers come out to my house twice... both times they said the sats were obscured by trees. Which trees? Well, since they gave me different answers I don't know. I'd be willing to cut down the trees in the way (70-80' tall southern pine), but I'm not going to cut down more than I need to. I know the direction and inclination of the sats, but that really doesn't help much -- there's a half dozen or so trees that could be an issue and a vague compass reading isn't going to help.
So I, and many others, are stuck with cable.
There's also the issue that this is going to be very harmful to the satellite business -- in a few years you'll be able to use cable directly with your TV, no box. Sat. vendors will still be using boxes, and they're a serious negative for the public both in expense and increased complexity. Both Echostar and DirecTV have already lambasted the new standard for being set without their input.
Nvidia certainly didn't made its card to perform good in DirectX's new API, and I don't see the problem.
The problem is that it doesn't perform well in ANY API. Even Carmack has stated this. The FX line simply has too few registers to do the job well, and they require funky commands like clearing them prior to reuse -- which further slows things down. The only way to get better performance out of the card is to reduce graphics quality, since you can use a single 32-bit FP register as two 16-bit FP registers -- but you'll wind up with increased banding and other visual artifacts due to the loss of precision.
Oh, and ATI has OpenGL drivers as well. They work too.
As far as DX goes -- may as well get used to it. Complaining that games are written for DX is about as good as complaining that games aren't written for DOS anymore. DX has far more developer support available than OpenGL, and provides ports to two of the major gaming systems (PC and Xbox) with minimal work. OpenGL does not have a good porting path to any of the consoles, and the Linux and Mac markets simply aren't big enough to be worth the time and money.
Well until recently the www.steampowered.com FAQ (which is now offline) said that it would require connection to Steam for LAN party play, and while you could play SP w/o Steam, the first time you did anything that connected to Steam would make it require a Steam connection in the future.
That's where this information comes from... if Valve didn't want people getting pissed about this then they shouldn't have had that in their FAQ. I'm guessing the FAQ is now offline so they can change that and other info.
I agree that it's absurd, and I was rather surprised to read it in their FAQ. Fortunately it seems that they've realized just how stupid an idea it was... although I don't quite get why they're going to enforce it for 2 or so week still.
What kind of a fairyland do you live in wherein everbody knows and follows every law and regulation?
Well the credit card company or debt collection company damn well should know the FCRA. If you had been the person they were looking for that message on your answering machine couldn't been used to fine them for considerably more than the $19k they were trying to collect on. The FCRA is not a law to cross.
That said, most likely the company did know but they didn't properly train whoever made that call. Doesn't matter as far as the court is concerned.
Yes, laws get broken, but that's why the court system is there -- to convince people and companies that it really is in their best interests to not break the law. Not that it always works, but that's the theory at least. In the case of the FCRA it really has worked for the vast majority of cases.
The moral of the story seems to be that hybrids are ugly
The Honda Civic Hybrid is the exact same body style as the regular Civic, which is generally not considered "ugly". Of course, tasts vary. I'd agree that the Prius looks a good deal better than the Insight.
Oddly enough they are not all that aerodynamic. In spite of its "futuristic" (read: ugly) lines, the Honda Insight has a.24 CD, and my '89 Nissan 240SX has a.26 CD.
Apples and oranges. Compare the Insight to a equivalent compact car (like the Civic, Corolla, Neon, or Sentra), not to a sports car that inherently has a lower profile and completely different capabilities and market segment.
That said, I agree with your final statement. I'll be interested to see what Toyota puts out in '05. I have no intention of replacing my car anytime soon, but if I was buying a new car right now I'd probably opt for a hybrid. Yes, they cost more. Yes, you can theoretically get equivalent mileage out of a much older car or out of a diesel. No, the emissions on those other two cars aren't anywhere close to as low as the hybrid.
Hopefully by the time it is time to replace my car (in 5+ years) they'll have true family sedan sized hybrids or other low emissions vehicles available at somewhat reasonable prices.
You can't talk about performance of games that haven't been released yet, like HL2
Fine. We'll talk about Tomb Raider then. Sorry, but when your top of the line card has half (or less) of the performance of the competitor's card -- with the difference being between playable framerate and unplayable frame rate -- then your card is indeed slow.
My point is that we're essentially talking about a handful of games here, and these are not games that are particularly well optimized.
A handful of games, yes. But I'm happy to know that suddenly you're an expert on whether or not the games are well optimized. I'm sure that you know far more about this than the people who are actually writing the games, or people with such paltry graphics knowledge like John Carmack.
And while it may be a handful of games, the same could be said for the games that utilized 3D back when it was GeForce2 vs Voodoo vs ATI Rage3D. If you dismissed the benchmarks then as only a "handful of games" and bought a Voodoo or Rage3D then you were going to be cursing yourself when you had to go buy a new card a year later since yours was now utterly useless. And yes, I know plenty of people who got to be in that wonderful position.
If 3D game XYZ was targeted for the Xbox, it would rock and roll and be plenty fast.
What BS. Console freaks who say this (and yes, I own a console as well) don't have a damn clue about what resolutions they're playing. Standard NTSC video is all of 640x240 resolution. You don't have to render anything but every other line, and you better believe that the consoles don't. Xbox has a maximum resolution of 1280x720 or 1920x525 (the former is far more intensive graphically, and is why virtually no Xbox games support 720p widescreen -- if they support 720p it's 4:3 only, giving a paltry resolution of 960x720). Yawn. And on top of that the most advanced platform of the three out there -- Xbox -- only supports a subset of DX8 level graphics. We're talking about DX9 level now and the quality differences involved are not insignificant.
The sad part is that high-end PC gaming is moribund, except for a small class of fanboy games. Everyone else has either given up or bought a console.
You know, someone has said this every year for the past 15 years and they've been wrong each and every year.
Mass market PC gaming is growing like crazy, though.
And mass market PC gaming is merely what high end PC gaming was a year prior.
I said that it's a damn nice card, whose only offense isn't being as fast as a newer card. But that's like arguing that one fighter jet is 200Mph faster than another.
The only offense is that the FX is a fighter jet that can't even get off the ground, but costs more to buy and use than the one that actually flies. That's a pretty damned big difference.
Who cares, especially if that jet sits in the hangar 90% of the time anyway?
Well if you don't care then why the hell are you even buying a new graphics card? The FX line provides virtually nothing over the Ti line of cards. If your jet is only going to sit in the hanger, why even buy it now? Buy it when you'll actually use it -- you'll get it for less to boot.
Considering that no one has even remotely pushed the limits of the GeForce 3
If all you play is Q3, that's true.
If you play some of the newer games, a GF3 isn't adequate. If you want to play the newest DX9 games then a GF3 is completely inadequate (for the full experience). Go look at the framerates coming out of HL2 -- AnandTech has a good article this morning.
The FX is only "slow" in the minds of fanboys who live for incremental performance increases without regard to power consumption or expense
Right. Whatever.
I suppose a 33% improvement in frame rate is "incremental". Especially when you're talking about 45 fps vs 60 fps. How meaningless. Power or expense? You mean that because the GeForce FX consumes more power and costs more than the ATI cards that it's better, right? Gotcha.
You can buy $50 cards that run older games at absurd frame rates. You can buy $100 cards that run most current games at adequate frame rates. But if you want to run the next generation of games -- HL2, Doom3, and other OpenGL2/DX9 games at adequate frame rates then you're looking at the latest and greates from either ATI or nVidia. And when you do that the FX line is slow. And not as pretty as the Radeon line. For more money, more noise, and more heat.
Hell, a $200 Radeon card is besting the $400 FX card. That's how slow the FX cards are.
Neither one can open source their drivers because there are large chunks of code they don't own. In nVidia's case it's even worse -- a large amount of their codebase has the letters S-G-I all over it due to legal issues dating back to the origin of nVidia.
There's other reasons, but they're just icing on the cake -- there's simply no way for either company to open source their drivers even if they wanted to.
It makes no sense when you bother to list the rest of the facts.
- ATI makes drivers for linux, and they don't suck - ATI works hard on making sure their cards support OpenGL, because it's an industry standard, particularly in the commercial (CAD, 3D rendering) world. - Carmack has repeatedly stated that the nVidia shader implementation is inferior to the ATI implementation, requiring a NV3X specific path that uses much lower resolution while still not having as much performance. - Your last "point" is wholly incorrect and has no basis in reality. It was 3Dfx, not 3DLabs, and by the time that nVidia bought 3Dfx GLIDE was utterly dead. Not to mention that DX8 worked extremely well with nVidia hardware, except for later revisions which started doing shader stuff -- ATI's implementations were invariably faster and prettier. Funny that. And don't go whining about "the API was at fault!" because there were 4 different shader revisions in DX8, and ATI and nVidia used different revisions because they suited their cards better.
The reality is that nVidia dropped the ball bigtime on shaders, and it's showing up now - not only in DX9 but also in OpenGL. Go ahead and try to explain that away. Meanwhile people who don't have some strange illogical reason to defend one company or another will simply go out and buy whichever card is currently reigning -- and that would be an ATI card currently. Who knows, in a year or two nVidia may be back on top, and we'll be back to buying their cards. It wasn't all that long ago that it was ATI with the sub-standard cards, cheating drivers, and so forth. Times change. Get with the picture.
Three generations I think... good. As I said, I don't own any ATI products so I'm not as up to speed on their drivers as nVidia's.
Very good to see though. I don't realistically expect support dating back any further than the Radeon line. The previous cards used radically different silicon.
OpenGL is ahead of DX and always will be. You get faster access to new features through vendor extensions and often better access to them.
You may be able to access more advanced features, but that also ties you down to writing specific code for each card you want to support. That's a freaking nightmare. API's are supposed to help you avoid doing that. As I said, both OpenGL and DX have had issues regarding this, but OpenGL's issues are far more prevelant and pervasive than DX's are at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 will fix a good bit of this, but it's not out yet (no.. it's not... all the pieces are in place but it hasn't been ratified yet).
or instance Carmack has talked about how he is better able to access some of the advanced shader features on Nvidia cards through the OpenGL exposed elements than through MS's DX9 interface which was coauthored with ATI
He's also commented on how miserably slow the nVidia cards are with the higher shader functions, even after dropping the precision back to 12 or 16-bit (compared to 32-bit in DX9, which ATI supports fully).
Hell, read the TechReport's discussion on HL2 and nVidia -- spending 5x more time optimizing the NV3X codepath than the generic DX9 codepath and still not even reaching the generic's performance is not a good way to spend your time. If I was a game developer (I'm not) I sure as hell wouldn't do that for most cards. The only reason Valve or id did so for nVidia is because they are such a huge market segment. Do you think they'll be looking at any optimizations for S3 or Matrox? Doubt it.
Until ATI stops writing crappy drivers and prematurly killing still sold hardware I won't be supporting them.
Same. Which is why my next card is probably going to be ATI -- they've ceased doing either of the above. I'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them, but their drivers and support have been very good for the past couple years. Which also happens to coincide with them firing their entire driver team. Which also occurred at the same time as the utter lack of driver support you reference. The new team seems much better about actually doing their jobs.
And, yes, OpenGL is inferior to DX at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 fixes most of the issues (particularly in the shader department), but it's far less mature than DX9 is.
And while DX isn't immune to vendor-specific code (see the discussion by Gabe Newell on this and NV3X in HL2, or the shader issues that occurred in DX8), MS is making efforts to reduce or eliminate those occurances. I suspect we'll see some pop up as DX9 becomes more mature, but they'll be resolved in DX10 just as the DX8 issues were resolved in DX9.
I'm not a MS fanboy, but the reality is that you can get a hell of a lot more support if you develop for DX than for OpenGL. That matters to a lot of developers. The downside is that you inherently limit your platform choices... but the reality is that there's 3.5 gaming platforms out there right now -- PC/Xbox (1.5), PS2, and GameCube. Porting anything between them is a virtual rewrite of the graphics engine anyway, so portability isn't a huge concern. The Mac and Linux markets are essentially non-existant.
He should've said "Half Life 2 is DX only" -- yes, there are code paths for DX6 up to DX9. There is no OpenGL support in Source, and Gabe Newell has said repeatedly that there never will be any.
Check AnandTech tomorrow... as well as most of the other sites covering this. It appears that Valve allowed them to do their own testing, but aren't allowing them to publish it until tomorrow.
Your statement about buying back one generation is also very accurate... I doubt there will be much speed difference between an ATI 9700 Pro and the 9800 Pro, and the 9500 Pro may actually be faster than the 9600 Pro. The difficulty is in finding these cards now -- the R350 line has been out for awhile and the R300 line isn't being manufactured anymore.
Alternately, look at buying the non "Pro" versions of the cards -- the Radeon 9800 is $100 less than the 9800 Pro and there's not much speed difference between them.
If you want to save more money you can go back two generations of cards, but then you'll be back in DX8 territory and give up a lot of the visual effects in HL2, D3, and other forthcoming games. That's just not a smart buy to me.
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Lets assume we write a portable version of code instead of a Windows tied version.
The backends are nearly always portable -- that's what you need for a server after all, and it's in your interest to port that to as many platforms as possible (especially whatever platforms are popular in a hosted services environment).
You use OpenGL, have to write a different core sound driver for each platform you target, different installers, maybe a few other tweaks, and that's it.
That's it? Nice way of tossing that off there like it doesn't matter.
Having to write different sound engines is the worst bit... what a freaking nightmare for both development and QA (which, BTW, you completely forgot -- you must QA everything 3x as much because you now have 3 target platforms -- assuming that just because something works on one platform is going to guarantee you bugs on the non-tested platforms). Using OpenGL isn't the magic drop in replacement for DirectX that some seem to think it is. Yes, all the functionality is there. But DirectX has cleaned up a lot since the pre DX5 days, and more since then. Both APIs are hopelessly convoluted still, but at least with DirectX you have a huge freaking support infrastructure. Talk shit about MS all you want (and I do, frequently), but their developer support is superb.
But 5% of 300 million is 1.5 million. If 1% of that market buys the game, you've got 150,000 more customers.
Ignoring the really bad math on your part, you've also ignored the minor fact that most of that 1.5M are not in a position to be buying the game. Macs used for business purposes aren't likely to be buying games. Nor are Linux boxes used as servers. So cut that 1.5M by half and then take out your 1% -- which is still a gross overestimation.
You've also got a very portable game which minus the graphics engine should work on an xbox
Yes, and my car could compete in NASCAR if I merely replaced the engine, struts, and transmission.
If you're looking at the Xbox to port, then you're better off with DirectX -- you'll have to go there anyway for Xbox and it works just fine on Windows PCs. Who do you think the bigger market is? Xbox or Linux/Mac? I'm ignoring PS2 and Gamecube because you're going to have to rewrite massive portions of the code to go to either one from PC, so they're a major undertaking from either point of view.
It's not like you need to write anything in assembly which was the old excuse.
I'm glad you know more about this than John Carmack. I don't know about D3, but previous engines have always had hand tuned assembly in core routines.
Or is 150,000*$30 (aka $4.5 million) not worth the upfront extra work to write portable code in the first place?
Your math is wrong (see above or other posters) and so is your business sense. You haven't accounted for QA or support, both of which are going to be very expensive. No, it's not worth the extra work. I respect that some companies are willing to do the work anyway, but they've also yet to show a profit for doing so -- but they're making enough money to be willing to sacrifice some profit to do this. Don't try and paint it any other way.
If I understand what I'm seeing, the BTX is reversed from the ATX: the Rear Panel I/O is to the left of the Card Slots instead of to the right like AT/ATX have been.
Think you're looking at it backwards.
If you look at figure 1 it clearly shows the rear panel I/O on top of the I/O card slots. Figure 2 is the confusing one, since it does show what you suggest, but if this is a view from the bottom then it works out right.
I haven't read through the spec (I'm not THAT interested), but the only way for it to be reversed would be for the entire case to be flipped, with the motherboard being mounted to the left side (as facing the box) instead of the right -- which is a departure from all the way back to the first tower cases. Certainly possible though. Scanning through the volumetric specs doesn't give any conclusive information one way or another, but I may have just missed it.
There's dozens of them available. Which one would you like to use? Remember, it must be portable to all of the systems that sendmail is portable to, and you're going to create a dependancy between the two. Remember that the library must be under a license that's compatible with the existing sendmail license.
Sendmail is so old that it's unlikely that this will ever occur... the code is too crufty and the required platform support too broad to make it worth the effort.
Remember that sendmail dates back to 1982, which is long, long before these issues were prevalent. Automatic buffer checking wasn't done because it was so expensive on the systems of the times. After all, C is a language designed for writing OS's in, where speed comes before all else (at least in old school design -- nowadays it's another matter since hardware is fast and cheap, even in embedded systems).
This is just a neato way to make your old case and PSU obsolete come next upgrade. Hooray!
Glad you RTFA.
The PS is identical - same connectors (as long as you have the newer PS w/ the 4-pin 12V connector), same lines, etc.
Doesn't look like the case needs to change either, although I haven't looked into the nitty gritty details of the mounting holes (appear to be the same at first glance) or volumetric zones (which look interesting; my first glance doesn't show any problems with cases that follow the true ATX spec and don't try to provide side vent holes for the CPU).
At least BabyAT to ATX made some sense, in that it generally relocated the hotter CPUs next to PSU fans, etc...
The ATX form factor made no sense at all when it was first released. Which is why it was revised quickly to make up for the utterly braindead ideas in it. The original spec called for the power supply to pull air inward and vent onto the CPU. So you had a huge heat source (the PS) sucking in cool air and then blowing the now warmed air onto an even warmer part of the case that desperately needs cooling (the CPU). The ATX 1.03 spec quickly remedied that and reversed the airflow of the PS back outwards.
Now you "merely" have one huge heat source (the CPU) located right between two other huge heat sources (PS and video). Yeah, that makes "sense".
Not to mention issues with putting this into a small form factor case where there is inadequate specs on maximum heights for components.
I won't even touch the laptop suggestion... other posters have done it justice already.
AnandTech has pricing... $724 in 1000 lots for the 3.2GHz P4EE.
Which is a ridiculous price. But all of the P4's above the 2.6C are absurdly priced anyway (as are all the Athlon XP's above 2800 rating).
If you want the absolute bleeding edge then you're going to pay for it, whether it's from Intel, AMD, ATI, or nVidia. Whining about one particular manufacturer "price gouging" just shows bias and an unclear view of the market.
So, I suppose that a motherboard with a fan on the north bridge is just as quiet as one without a fan, right?
Acoustics may not be the best word to use, but it's certainly valid. From Webster's:
Good suggestions, but not always doable in practice.
Open data standards for payroll and accounting data? I'm sure there are some... they're probably old as dirt and about as fun to utilize nowadays too (yes, I've just spent a couple weeks learning the horrors of X.12 in the shipping industry -- it's used all over but it's archaic, has over 3 decades of different revisions, and an utter PITA to actually use). You can roll your own format (we did... we're in a position to) and make it reasonably open (again, we did... at least to our customers), but the odds of getting someone else to write to your format is low, especially for things like payroll/accounting. You could also reverse engineer their data files (a coworker did so for a flat file database at a former company, producing a real time importer for Sybase/Oracle), but that takes some pretty serious skill and money.
Don't think that it's just MS producing "proprietary" data. Virtually everyone does. And it's not the big, obvious formats that are a problem -- those have enough people looking at them to crack the nut eventually -- it's the small, uncommon formats that will keep you locked in. And it's equally unlikely that you'll easily find replacements that are low cost and open format. Companies have an incentive to lock you in... the counterbalancing force to this is that in a competitive market place they also have incentive to read other people's formats, which will either lead to a common format or to everyone figuring out how to import everyone else's data.
In general, without government mandates, it tends toward the latter rather than the former.
Depends upon the state (at least in the US; I bet other countries vary even more than the US does).
Texas has very strict licensing of engineers and the usage of the word in titles, business cards, etc. In that state you must go through certification and become a Professional Engineer to use the term. Getting a PE is very much non-trivial and includes (IIRC) a bare minimum of 5 years of experience in the field plus extensive testing and professional review.
Georgia, on the other hand, has no licensing whatsoever AFAIK. I can call myself a "Software Engineer" and there's nothing that can be done about it.
I'm fairly indifferent about the whole thing... but I can understand where the defensive nature of the trade associations come in. After all, who else remembers the late-80s/early-90s jokes of garbageman being renamed to "Waste Resource Engineer"? It's a dilution of the term, and a term which has a rather large dollar figure associated with it just as "M.D." for medicine and "attourney" or "esquire" for law do.
spelling errors(show me a programmer that can spell in English!)
Hi there, damn good to meet you.
Yeah, I make typos or grammatical mistakes every once in awhile, but neither I nor most of my coworkers (on the C++ side at least... the Java coders are another issue) have major spelling problems.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that we all hate writing docs.
You don't use digital cable without a box.
That's the entire point of the story.
This is presuming that your cable company hasn't disabled the serial port.
Mine has.
Otherwise I could use my TiVo to change channels via serial port, which is an officially supported feature in Series2 boxes, and a (fairly trivial) hack in Series 1 boxes.
While I agree, there are a rather large number of people who can't get satellite due to the birds being obstructed by landscape, buildings, or orientation (the latter mostly if you're in an apartment/condo). I'm one of them -- you have no idea how much I'd like to ditch my cable company or how long I've wanted to.
I've had DirecTV installers come out to my house twice... both times they said the sats were obscured by trees. Which trees? Well, since they gave me different answers I don't know. I'd be willing to cut down the trees in the way (70-80' tall southern pine), but I'm not going to cut down more than I need to. I know the direction and inclination of the sats, but that really doesn't help much -- there's a half dozen or so trees that could be an issue and a vague compass reading isn't going to help.
So I, and many others, are stuck with cable.
There's also the issue that this is going to be very harmful to the satellite business -- in a few years you'll be able to use cable directly with your TV, no box. Sat. vendors will still be using boxes, and they're a serious negative for the public both in expense and increased complexity. Both Echostar and DirecTV have already lambasted the new standard for being set without their input.
Nvidia certainly didn't made its card to perform good in DirectX's new API, and I don't see the problem.
The problem is that it doesn't perform well in ANY API. Even Carmack has stated this. The FX line simply has too few registers to do the job well, and they require funky commands like clearing them prior to reuse -- which further slows things down. The only way to get better performance out of the card is to reduce graphics quality, since you can use a single 32-bit FP register as two 16-bit FP registers -- but you'll wind up with increased banding and other visual artifacts due to the loss of precision.
Oh, and ATI has OpenGL drivers as well. They work too.
As far as DX goes -- may as well get used to it. Complaining that games are written for DX is about as good as complaining that games aren't written for DOS anymore. DX has far more developer support available than OpenGL, and provides ports to two of the major gaming systems (PC and Xbox) with minimal work. OpenGL does not have a good porting path to any of the consoles, and the Linux and Mac markets simply aren't big enough to be worth the time and money.
Well until recently the www.steampowered.com FAQ (which is now offline) said that it would require connection to Steam for LAN party play, and while you could play SP w/o Steam, the first time you did anything that connected to Steam would make it require a Steam connection in the future.
That's where this information comes from... if Valve didn't want people getting pissed about this then they shouldn't have had that in their FAQ. I'm guessing the FAQ is now offline so they can change that and other info.
I agree that it's absurd, and I was rather surprised to read it in their FAQ. Fortunately it seems that they've realized just how stupid an idea it was... although I don't quite get why they're going to enforce it for 2 or so week still.
What kind of a fairyland do you live in wherein everbody knows and follows every law and regulation?
Well the credit card company or debt collection company damn well should know the FCRA. If you had been the person they were looking for that message on your answering machine couldn't been used to fine them for considerably more than the $19k they were trying to collect on. The FCRA is not a law to cross.
That said, most likely the company did know but they didn't properly train whoever made that call. Doesn't matter as far as the court is concerned.
Yes, laws get broken, but that's why the court system is there -- to convince people and companies that it really is in their best interests to not break the law. Not that it always works, but that's the theory at least. In the case of the FCRA it really has worked for the vast majority of cases.
The moral of the story seems to be that hybrids are ugly
.24 CD, and my '89 Nissan 240SX has a .26 CD.
The Honda Civic Hybrid is the exact same body style as the regular Civic, which is generally not considered "ugly". Of course, tasts vary. I'd agree that the Prius looks a good deal better than the Insight.
Oddly enough they are not all that aerodynamic. In spite of its "futuristic" (read: ugly) lines, the Honda Insight has a
Apples and oranges. Compare the Insight to a equivalent compact car (like the Civic, Corolla, Neon, or Sentra), not to a sports car that inherently has a lower profile and completely different capabilities and market segment.
That said, I agree with your final statement. I'll be interested to see what Toyota puts out in '05. I have no intention of replacing my car anytime soon, but if I was buying a new car right now I'd probably opt for a hybrid. Yes, they cost more. Yes, you can theoretically get equivalent mileage out of a much older car or out of a diesel. No, the emissions on those other two cars aren't anywhere close to as low as the hybrid.
Hopefully by the time it is time to replace my car (in 5+ years) they'll have true family sedan sized hybrids or other low emissions vehicles available at somewhat reasonable prices.
You can't talk about performance of games that haven't been released yet, like HL2
Fine. We'll talk about Tomb Raider then. Sorry, but when your top of the line card has half (or less) of the performance of the competitor's card -- with the difference being between playable framerate and unplayable frame rate -- then your card is indeed slow.
My point is that we're essentially talking about a handful of games here, and these are not games that are particularly well optimized.
A handful of games, yes. But I'm happy to know that suddenly you're an expert on whether or not the games are well optimized. I'm sure that you know far more about this than the people who are actually writing the games, or people with such paltry graphics knowledge like John Carmack.
And while it may be a handful of games, the same could be said for the games that utilized 3D back when it was GeForce2 vs Voodoo vs ATI Rage3D. If you dismissed the benchmarks then as only a "handful of games" and bought a Voodoo or Rage3D then you were going to be cursing yourself when you had to go buy a new card a year later since yours was now utterly useless. And yes, I know plenty of people who got to be in that wonderful position.
If 3D game XYZ was targeted for the Xbox, it would rock and roll and be plenty fast.
What BS. Console freaks who say this (and yes, I own a console as well) don't have a damn clue about what resolutions they're playing. Standard NTSC video is all of 640x240 resolution. You don't have to render anything but every other line, and you better believe that the consoles don't. Xbox has a maximum resolution of 1280x720 or 1920x525 (the former is far more intensive graphically, and is why virtually no Xbox games support 720p widescreen -- if they support 720p it's 4:3 only, giving a paltry resolution of 960x720). Yawn. And on top of that the most advanced platform of the three out there -- Xbox -- only supports a subset of DX8 level graphics. We're talking about DX9 level now and the quality differences involved are not insignificant.
The sad part is that high-end PC gaming is moribund, except for a small class of fanboy games. Everyone else has either given up or bought a console.
You know, someone has said this every year for the past 15 years and they've been wrong each and every year.
Mass market PC gaming is growing like crazy, though.
And mass market PC gaming is merely what high end PC gaming was a year prior.
I said that it's a damn nice card, whose only offense isn't being as fast as a newer card. But that's like arguing that one fighter jet is 200Mph faster than another.
The only offense is that the FX is a fighter jet that can't even get off the ground, but costs more to buy and use than the one that actually flies. That's a pretty damned big difference.
Who cares, especially if that jet sits in the hangar 90% of the time anyway?
Well if you don't care then why the hell are you even buying a new graphics card? The FX line provides virtually nothing over the Ti line of cards. If your jet is only going to sit in the hanger, why even buy it now? Buy it when you'll actually use it -- you'll get it for less to boot.
Considering that no one has even remotely pushed the limits of the GeForce 3
If all you play is Q3, that's true.
If you play some of the newer games, a GF3 isn't adequate. If you want to play the newest DX9 games then a GF3 is completely inadequate (for the full experience). Go look at the framerates coming out of HL2 -- AnandTech has a good article this morning.
The FX is only "slow" in the minds of fanboys who live for incremental performance increases without regard to power consumption or expense
Right. Whatever.
I suppose a 33% improvement in frame rate is "incremental". Especially when you're talking about 45 fps vs 60 fps. How meaningless. Power or expense? You mean that because the GeForce FX consumes more power and costs more than the ATI cards that it's better, right? Gotcha.
You can buy $50 cards that run older games at absurd frame rates. You can buy $100 cards that run most current games at adequate frame rates. But if you want to run the next generation of games -- HL2, Doom3, and other OpenGL2/DX9 games at adequate frame rates then you're looking at the latest and greates from either ATI or nVidia. And when you do that the FX line is slow. And not as pretty as the Radeon line. For more money, more noise, and more heat.
Hell, a $200 Radeon card is besting the $400 FX card. That's how slow the FX cards are.
Bravo! Someone who has a clue!
Neither one can open source their drivers because there are large chunks of code they don't own. In nVidia's case it's even worse -- a large amount of their codebase has the letters S-G-I all over it due to legal issues dating back to the origin of nVidia.
There's other reasons, but they're just icing on the cake -- there's simply no way for either company to open source their drivers even if they wanted to.
It makes no sense when you bother to list the rest of the facts.
- ATI makes drivers for linux, and they don't suck
- ATI works hard on making sure their cards support OpenGL, because it's an industry standard, particularly in the commercial (CAD, 3D rendering) world.
- Carmack has repeatedly stated that the nVidia shader implementation is inferior to the ATI implementation, requiring a NV3X specific path that uses much lower resolution while still not having as much performance.
- Your last "point" is wholly incorrect and has no basis in reality. It was 3Dfx, not 3DLabs, and by the time that nVidia bought 3Dfx GLIDE was utterly dead. Not to mention that DX8 worked extremely well with nVidia hardware, except for later revisions which started doing shader stuff -- ATI's implementations were invariably faster and prettier. Funny that. And don't go whining about "the API was at fault!" because there were 4 different shader revisions in DX8, and ATI and nVidia used different revisions because they suited their cards better.
The reality is that nVidia dropped the ball bigtime on shaders, and it's showing up now - not only in DX9 but also in OpenGL. Go ahead and try to explain that away. Meanwhile people who don't have some strange illogical reason to defend one company or another will simply go out and buy whichever card is currently reigning -- and that would be an ATI card currently. Who knows, in a year or two nVidia may be back on top, and we'll be back to buying their cards. It wasn't all that long ago that it was ATI with the sub-standard cards, cheating drivers, and so forth. Times change. Get with the picture.
Three generations I think... good. As I said, I don't own any ATI products so I'm not as up to speed on their drivers as nVidia's.
Very good to see though. I don't realistically expect support dating back any further than the Radeon line. The previous cards used radically different silicon.
OpenGL is ahead of DX and always will be. You get faster access to new features through vendor extensions and often better access to them.
You may be able to access more advanced features, but that also ties you down to writing specific code for each card you want to support. That's a freaking nightmare. API's are supposed to help you avoid doing that. As I said, both OpenGL and DX have had issues regarding this, but OpenGL's issues are far more prevelant and pervasive than DX's are at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 will fix a good bit of this, but it's not out yet (no.. it's not... all the pieces are in place but it hasn't been ratified yet).
or instance Carmack has talked about how he is better able to access some of the advanced shader features on Nvidia cards through the OpenGL exposed elements than through MS's DX9 interface which was coauthored with ATI
He's also commented on how miserably slow the nVidia cards are with the higher shader functions, even after dropping the precision back to 12 or 16-bit (compared to 32-bit in DX9, which ATI supports fully).
Hell, read the TechReport's discussion on HL2 and nVidia -- spending 5x more time optimizing the NV3X codepath than the generic DX9 codepath and still not even reaching the generic's performance is not a good way to spend your time. If I was a game developer (I'm not) I sure as hell wouldn't do that for most cards. The only reason Valve or id did so for nVidia is because they are such a huge market segment. Do you think they'll be looking at any optimizations for S3 or Matrox? Doubt it.
Until ATI stops writing crappy drivers and prematurly killing still sold hardware I won't be supporting them.
Same. Which is why my next card is probably going to be ATI -- they've ceased doing either of the above. I'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them, but their drivers and support have been very good for the past couple years. Which also happens to coincide with them firing their entire driver team. Which also occurred at the same time as the utter lack of driver support you reference. The new team seems much better about actually doing their jobs.
Maybe because HL2 is a DX-only game?
And, yes, OpenGL is inferior to DX at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 fixes most of the issues (particularly in the shader department), but it's far less mature than DX9 is.
And while DX isn't immune to vendor-specific code (see the discussion by Gabe Newell on this and NV3X in HL2, or the shader issues that occurred in DX8), MS is making efforts to reduce or eliminate those occurances. I suspect we'll see some pop up as DX9 becomes more mature, but they'll be resolved in DX10 just as the DX8 issues were resolved in DX9.
I'm not a MS fanboy, but the reality is that you can get a hell of a lot more support if you develop for DX than for OpenGL. That matters to a lot of developers. The downside is that you inherently limit your platform choices... but the reality is that there's 3.5 gaming platforms out there right now -- PC/Xbox (1.5), PS2, and GameCube. Porting anything between them is a virtual rewrite of the graphics engine anyway, so portability isn't a huge concern. The Mac and Linux markets are essentially non-existant.
He should've said "Half Life 2 is DX only" -- yes, there are code paths for DX6 up to DX9. There is no OpenGL support in Source, and Gabe Newell has said repeatedly that there never will be any.
Check AnandTech tomorrow... as well as most of the other sites covering this. It appears that Valve allowed them to do their own testing, but aren't allowing them to publish it until tomorrow.
Your statement about buying back one generation is also very accurate... I doubt there will be much speed difference between an ATI 9700 Pro and the 9800 Pro, and the 9500 Pro may actually be faster than the 9600 Pro. The difficulty is in finding these cards now -- the R350 line has been out for awhile and the R300 line isn't being manufactured anymore.
Alternately, look at buying the non "Pro" versions of the cards -- the Radeon 9800 is $100 less than the 9800 Pro and there's not much speed difference between them.
If you want to save more money you can go back two generations of cards, but then you'll be back in DX8 territory and give up a lot of the visual effects in HL2, D3, and other forthcoming games. That's just not a smart buy to me.