A couple quickies - does Opera now offer the same kind of form entry memory IE does?
It says so, but I've never used it.
That would be a no then... IE simply does it. First time you fill in a form w/ name, address, etc. you type as normal. The following times, as long as the form titles are similar, it will drop down a list of entries once you start typing. So instead of typing my address I can type the first few chars and hit down arrow, enter. Very convienent.
username/password entry memory
Sounds terribly insecure. Opera does not do that, and I wouldn't want it to.
In theory it should be totally secure. Assuming, of course, your browser doesn't have any backdoors into it's own memory space, and your OS is reasonably secure as well. All it does is auto-fill the forms so you just have to click enter instead of remembering what bloody password you used for THIS site. And, as I said initially, it asks if you want to remember the PW. If you click no then it won't remember your username or the pw. If you click yes then next time you surf there and start to enter your userid it will let you autocomplete the userid (as above) and then fill in the password field automagically.
This is the kind of thing that users want, and the kind of thing that should be done. As long as the overall system is secure. I use this feature for some stuff, like webboards, but not for REALLY important passwords - like my online banking. Those are kept only in my wetwired memory.
It can be hit, but not like what was shown in the movie (yes it is out -- it bears fairly little relation to the book, but is a pretty good movie. If you can handle the very well presented nuclear explosion killing a few million people on US soil. It's gut wrenching.)
SPOILER ALERT
The movie showed an aircraft carrier in the Northern Sea (or thereabouts) getting hit by multiple Russian bombers with no warning and no air defense except for its own AEGIS cannons.
Reality is that there are always 2 or more jets and usually an AWACS plane in the air to provide air defense and early warning. Carriers are big. Carriers are slow. Carriers are expensive. And pilots need the training anyway, in all conditions.
On top of that this was shortly after a nuclear explosion inside of the continental US. SOP dictates that US forces would instantly go to highest readiness after such an incident - which would mean that carrier would have at last a full flight wing in the air, as well as being dead center of its carrier group. Any hostile trying to take out the carrier would have to go through a ring of aircraft - including AWACS with downward looking radar that doesn't really care if you're skimming the wave tops - followed by a ring of destroyers and cruisers. All fully armed with sea-to-air missiles and AEGIS anti-missile guns. Carrier groups are very expensive to operate. They're also pretty well impenetrable unless you use a nuke or somehow sneak a submarine in through thermal layers (and generally carrier groups have friendly hunter-killer subs nearby to prevent just that).
OK, don't push the standards to the edge; use two-year old standards
Er... you're kidding, right?
Two year old standards are crap... there's a reason the newer "standards" came out (or why various browsers just did their own thing) -- it's because the old standards didn't do what was needed.
Frankly, IE is the defacto standard now. In the areas where IE performs differently from the standard, IE should (usually) be considered the proper guide. Things like PNG excluded.
Why? Because IE is what is on everyone's desktop. It may not be on yours, but you are part of the 5% that doesn't use it then. And that's too small a group to bother with the immense amount of testing needed.
This is exactly how it was back when Netscape was 90% of the marketshare. And it's how it was back when BSD was the de facto standard for TCP/IP -- where BSD did not comply to the RFC, you ignored the RFC. Because you had to talk to BSD-based TCP/IP stacks or you couldn't talk to 90% of the Internet.
Get over the fact that IE is from Microsoft... writing a browser to be "standards compliant" doesn't make a lick of difference when the rest of the world is ignoring the "standard".
easy download management including pausing and resuming
Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).
Er, so which one is it? Good or bad?
I'd bet that most people use ftp via web client now, unless you have needs for things like automatic FTPing on a scheduled basis or often do FTPing (since browsers are usually stateless and don't keep the control connection open - problematic with ftp sites that are hard to login to).
Sigh... all the Opera features I've forgotten and loved...
A couple quickies - does Opera now offer the same kind of form entry memory IE does (e.g. - for names, addresses, etc. -- not the quick entry list that was in Opera 5, but auto-completion like IE does), as well as username/password entry memory (which IE manages to do the right thing and ASK you if you want to remember new ones every time instead of globally doing yes or no)?
Has Opera improved on it's popup disabling, or is it still all or none? I like the way Mozilla does it - click on a new link that has a popup and it works. But onLoad/onUnload JS don't work if more than x milliseconds after the mouse click.
BTW - in Opera (v5 at least), graphic disabling was G. No click needed:)
I used NS 4.x (whatever the last version prior to 4.5 bloat was - I don't recall now) for years. I finally got fed up with the slow rendering, poor rendering, and crashes. So I switched to Opera 5. It was great - fast, worked well, and life was good.
Then I started hitting a bunch of random websites that simply wouldn't work with Opera 5. Sometimes changing it to ID as Netscape worked. Sometimes ID'ing as IE worked. Increasingly it just wouldn't work, period -- usually it was the javascript engine crapping out. And while I will heartily agree that it was probably because the page in question was non-standard, it didn't make an ounce of difference - that page had information I needed and it wasn't rendering under Opera.
So to my everlasting shame I switched to IE. I try to keep it up to date and patched, but I still don't like that it's inherently bug prone.
And I have to admit one other dirty fact - I rather like it. Yes, I miss tabbed browsing from Opera (which took me a bit to get used to, but I do prefer it). I really miss gestures. But I like the auto-completion features (despite an abiding fear that they're not wonderfully secure...), I like knowing that pretty much every page will render as it was designed to (excepting PNG stuff... blearg), and it's fast. Opera was fast too, but I still remember the horrors of NS 4.x.
Yes, once I get my Mandrake box up and running I'll be checking out Mozilla at home -- yes, different platform and whatnot, but I'm more willing to screw with my Linux box than I am a Windows box. Linux is easier to reinstall, and less likely to start getting flaky from DLL hell.
I should also check out Opera 6, since I hear it's mostly fixed the JS issues. C.F. above - my Windows box is stable, and I like it that way.
Unreal Tournament II is coming out in a month and will not run well at all on a GF2 MX... unless you go super low res and turn off most of the eye candy.
Of course, it is UT2, so most people will turn off the eye candy just because it's annoying.
Er, I suspect you're looking at a Ti4600. The SRP on the Ti4200 is $199 (USD), which I believe is the same in Europe.
Frankly, if you're going to buy a GF4, the best buy is the Ti4400. You can find them for about $230 - only $10-20 more than a 128 MB Ti4200 and considerably faster.
I definitely agree with the previous post though - the absolute best bang for the buck right now is the GF3 Ti200. These cards were twice the price 2 months ago and are only 6 months old. The GF4 is not a good buy ATM -- the NV30 is coming out in 2-4 months and should absolutely blow the old stuff out of the water (as will the R300, the Perhilion, and 3DLabs's card). Both the ATI R300 and the NV30 should be fully DX9 compatible too (which Perhelion and 3DLabs are not).
I'm in kind of a tight spot... I'm seriously looking at buying a new computer, but don't know what graphics card to get, if any. Unfortunately my old card is a 32MB GF2, which is rather constricting at this point (if only because of the memory). I'll probably go GF3 Ti200, since I think Doom3 will be the next big thing that would want more, and it's over a year away.
And if you bother to go find follow-up comments to that statement, you'll discover Carmack saying that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
You're testing the next generation card vs. the current generation. May as well compare a GF4 Ti4600 to a Radeon 7500 and see which one does better.
The NV30 hasn't been taped yet. There's no silicon to test. So while you can't say whether or not the NV30 will be better than the R300, it's still a faulty comparison for NV25 vs R300. And since the NV30 is supposed to be released in August/September (color me doubtful, since they don't have prelim silicon yet), there's not going to be much of a gap between their releases either.
Frankly, even if NV30 doesn't have the edge on R300 on paper I'll buy it in a second over ATI. Why? Because ATI's drivers suck, their support sucks, and anyone who's been burned by ATI over the past 20 years will know what I'm talking about. They have long had a tendancy to release poor to middling drivers and then rapidly desupport the card. Nvidia, on the other hand, is still supporting the original TNT with current drivers - the card they made 4 years or so ago. Plus, as Carmack observes, Nvidia's drivers make their cards surpass ATI - which any benchmark will show you.
Now if only Nvidia would put some decent output stages on the reference design... output quality at high resolutions is one area where ATI has long been better. And Matrox trounces them both.
Yes, and the Junk Fax law, which is constitutional and has been upheld in a court of law, bans all unsolicited advertisement faxes. Why? Because there is a direct cost to be paid for receiving these commercial faxes, and it is unfair for the recipient to suffer the burdon of that cost.
If the content of the fax is not an advertisement then it's not illegal to send it unsolicited. Thus I cannot be prosectued if I accidentally fax you a 1000 page document on the sex life of llamas, unless I try to sell you some llamas within the document.
If you don't think that emails have a cost associated with them, you are quite incorrect. On a specious level, there's the cost of bandwidth to the ISP, the drive storage of the data, processing time of same, and the time it takes me, the end user, to realize that only 3 out of 120 emails I got today weren't SPAM and to delete them. On the specific level, if you have email access on a cellphone, or have maximum bandwidth allocations on your ISP, you can cite some very specific costs associated with that SPAM.
The precedent exists and it's not a bad one. The onslaught of email SPAM makes the old junk faxes look like a bad joke. MAPS and the like don't solve the problem - they mask it. The bandwidth is still being consumed and it's going up constantly.
Yes, because we all know, there's tons of money to be made by enforcing patents against open source software.
I mean, just think of how much you could rape the OpenOffice.org team for alone. I'm sure you could squeeze out at least four or maybe even five dollars.
If I can prove that you are costing me money to receive the email (e.g. - I pay to get email to my cellphone, I have download caps, etc.) then a class action suit could probably be levied against you for any number of things - from the junk fax law all the way down to improper seizure of chattel (which goes all the way back to the Magna Carta for precedent I believe!).
Now if you provide a removal procedure it's another ball of wax. And the one issue that may need a law is selling my personal data (e.g. - email) without my permission. Until more states/countries get opt-in laws (as opposed to opt-out) then that's probably legal. And slimy. But SPAM is slimy in the first place.
I can understand the issue of MHz vs systems that do multiple transfers per clock cycle (it's rather similar to the old bps vs baud difference for modems, where 9600 bps modems ran at 2400 baud using a Grey map to transmit 4 bits of data per cycle). Given that, MT/s should be equivalent to 2*MHz for DDR since there are two transfers per cycle.
If so, then I'm missing something... since 333 MHz DDR I would have 666 MT/s by that definition, which is already higher than the spec'd maximum you list for DDR II.
Been there, done that. Local public utility commission referred me to the cable company. That's it.
This was after a lightning induced surge did $500 of damage to my electronics because the cable company didn't bother to ground their wire. They refused to acknowledge culpability and the PUC didn't give a crap.
The thin veer of regulation doesn't count for anything when it's the monopoly pulling the strings behind the puppets. The cable "regulation" is significantly different than gas, power, or water since they are considered essential services (and yes, they are, far more so than internet).
And write this off as whining, but it's funny how it seems to be the same thing happening over and over again in any market where there is no choice for such services. And how things are markably different in the few markets where there is actual competition.
Did you even read the article? Hell, did you read the synopsis?
The answer is obviously no.
There's nothing about creating anti-spam laws. It's about prosecuting someone under existing fraud and consumer protection laws.
You want technical solutions? Sure, whatever. They don't work. They'll never work. There will always be open relays out there to abuse, and even if you block them the bandwidth is being consumed. So you haven't solved the problem - you've just masked it.
The only hope is to use existing, rock-solid laws such as those stated above, to prosecute spammers into oblivion. If successful, MonsterHut is facing several billion dollars in fines, and I seriously doubt that the CEO or CTO will be able to hide behind the corporate veil on this one. Push them out of the US and other leading countries and they'll wind up with no bandwidth to do this kind of thing. Then your technical solutions can come to bear - countries without laws? Blackhole them. Then they'll pass laws and throw out the spammers, or relegate themselves to the 19th century.
Government is supposed to look out for it's citizens. This is a fine example of it doing exactly that instead of protecting the corporate entity.
What exactly is MT/s as you refer to it? It's apparantly Mega data transfers/sec, but I haven't found anything that relates this to more common measurements such as MB/s or similar. (My guess - what it sounds like, with overall bandwidth being MT/s * bus width)
Apparantly current DDR is running 200-400 MT/s (although the Micron page that had this information was rather odd in and of itself, with higher CAS times giving a higher MT/s), so this is either a significant upgrade (300%) or moderate (50%) if those numbers are right.
I admit that this might seem silly but I have never really wanted to get myself an Athlon based computer. I know too many people that have funny crases and wierd stuff happening, probably the fault of the chipset more that the processor (VIA, ewww) but still. My P3 has been great.
And my AMD systems, of which I've built several, have also been great. And cost significantly less than Intel (and I say this holding Intel stock).
The issues with problematic systems are usually due to one of two things.
1) Cheap hardware. All components are not the same. Buy cheapo hardware, get an unstable system. The biggest factors are the motherboard, memory, and video card. Oh, and MSI is not one of the better brands for reliability.
2) Bad drivers. Don't upgrade the drivers unless you need to -- if the system is unstable, you need to. Otherwise leave the thing alone.
So, WTF? For fifty bucks I'll buy the Intel thank you
Clearly this is your choice, and comfort level is a big factor in these things. But I think your prices are off.
The below prices are from Newegg, which isn't the cheapest place (anymore), but I've done business with them a lot now. They have good prices, good shipping, and excellent customer support.
Intel P4 1.6A, Retail - $137 MSI 6566E (Intel i845 chipset) - $90 Gigabyte GA-8IE (Intel i845, dunno if GB is good for Intel though) - $105 256MB RDRAM 800 MHz Memory (Corsair) - $100
Total (MSI/GB) - $327/$342
Difference: $79/$91 (or $145/$167 Canadian)
That's about 3x what you said... obviously using different suppliers, and the price drop hasn't figured in yet, but still much more substantial, especially when you consider percentages.
Could you go cheaper on the Intel system? Sure. You could use DDR instead of RDRAM. You could use a non-Intel chipset. But you've now nuked performance so much that the Athlon system is performing 20-30% faster. And it's still cheaper.
I'm not saying don't buy Intel. Just realize that a lot of the "funny crashes" are no more than FUD, and people have just as many issues with Intel systems if they buy cheap components. If you're happy to pay the price premium for Intel for peace of mind, then that's fine. But to say that it's insubstantial is incorrect (particularly since an Athlon 1600+ is faster than a P4 1.6A on most benchmarks).
As LarryBoy noted, that would require that God lie.
And while you may disagree, I'd rather not believe in a God than believe in a God that chooses to be deceptive in such a fashion.
Of course, it doesn't reconcile some of the other issues with the Bible, but a large number of those issues are due to faulty translations/interpretations.
Customers will bitch, a few will change providers (those lucky few that can)
That's the real issue. Change providers? To who? Cable is an unregulated monopoly in the US, so you can't just change cable companies and get different service. And the FCC and Congress decided that allowing customers to choose their ISP on cable/DSL was unimportant, so you are stuck with AT&T/Charter/Time Warner/whoever for what you do have. DSL is going down the same path now, if you can even get it.
What other options are there really? Partial T1 tends to be too expensive, even in major cities with heavy telecomm systems.
The rule is simple - when there is no competition then the companies have all of the cards. Traditionally the consumer has the ultimate power in the form of voting with their wallet. However when there is a monopoly that sole ability is removed, because the consumer has no place else to go.
It's sad, really... the Telecomm Act of 1996 was supposed to fix all this. All it's done is move us backwards 50 years AND removed government oversight. Happy happy, joy joy.
Domino doesn't need more publicity. It needs to be put into a grave. And then shot.
Domino well predates Exchange (Lotus Notes was the precursor to Domino), and it's generally considered expensive, hard to admin, and difficult to use. It is, however, much more flexible than Exchange.
Actually I do use CVS, and at work no less. Our lead developer is a big proponent of using open source tools where it makes sense, and I'm all for it. Our project isn't big enough to expose most of the hairy bits of CVS though.
But I'm not Linus, and I don't have to manage the kernel tree. If he's decided that CVS does not meet his needs then that's all there is to it. CVS apparantly annoys him in various areas, and I know that when something annoys me the likelihood of my using it is somewhere around zero.
So basically, use CVS and lose Linus, or use BitKeeper and keep him.
Besides which, if people would actually bother reading the links, you don't have to submit Bitkeeper pulls for patches. Regular old diffs are fine, as long as there's enough changelog info.
RMS is an extremist. Always has been. In that role, he has fought for the complete freedom of software. IMHO, it's an admirable, idealistic view of the world
To take a different whack at this, why on Earth is this admirable? Extremisim is never admirable. It's the same thing as fanatacism. And fanatics never make clear, reasonable choices because their particular issue outweighs everything else. That's why it's called fanaticism or extremism.
Oh, I'm sure some people will say something about it being for a "good cause". But how are we to determine what the good causes and the bad causes are? It's a very subjective thing, and while I think that the free (liber) software movement has done some wonderful things, I also think there are rational limits to it and that RMS doesn't have any concept of what those limits are.
Don't use BitKeeper? Ok, whatever. Use what? CVS? No, because it doesn't meet my needs. So use what? Nothing at all? Something that doesn't work? Or something that does get the job done and so what if it's not idealogically pure? The real world (which is where fanatics dare not tread, lest they discover that their idealistic world has naught but a thin thread tying it to reality) says that you use what works. Ideals are fine, but understand that it may very well cost you far more than what that ideal is worth.
Throughout history it hasn't been the fanatics that have changed the course of human events. It's been those who are idealistic, but also understand how the world works. Fanatics merely cause aberations, and often do more harm than good to those who they're trying to help.
OpenOffice can read/write most.doc and.xls files, with good results from what I hear. MS will not have to release it's file formats - their business applications aren't even being vaguely referenced in the anti-trust suit and are not part of the suit, period.
The other points are good... although I'd somewhat question the value of the education bit. Apple has had deep discounts for decades and it hasn't gotten them anything.
And precisely what are you going to fight with then? Rocks?
Go ahead and drop an EMP on top of yourself. We'll have howitzers pounding you from 18-21 miles away, and they really don't give a crap about carbon fibers. (The current Paladin SPG fires 8 rounds/min at up to 18 miles away. The proposed Crusader fires 10/min at 21 miles).
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A couple quickies - does Opera now offer the same kind of form entry memory IE does?
It says so, but I've never used it.
That would be a no then... IE simply does it. First time you fill in a form w/ name, address, etc. you type as normal. The following times, as long as the form titles are similar, it will drop down a list of entries once you start typing. So instead of typing my address I can type the first few chars and hit down arrow, enter. Very convienent.
username/password entry memory
Sounds terribly insecure. Opera does not do that, and I wouldn't want it to.
In theory it should be totally secure. Assuming, of course, your browser doesn't have any backdoors into it's own memory space, and your OS is reasonably secure as well. All it does is auto-fill the forms so you just have to click enter instead of remembering what bloody password you used for THIS site. And, as I said initially, it asks if you want to remember the PW. If you click no then it won't remember your username or the pw. If you click yes then next time you surf there and start to enter your userid it will let you autocomplete the userid (as above) and then fill in the password field automagically.
This is the kind of thing that users want, and the kind of thing that should be done. As long as the overall system is secure. I use this feature for some stuff, like webboards, but not for REALLY important passwords - like my online banking. Those are kept only in my wetwired memory.
SPOILER ALERT
The movie showed an aircraft carrier in the Northern Sea (or thereabouts) getting hit by multiple Russian bombers with no warning and no air defense except for its own AEGIS cannons.
Reality is that there are always 2 or more jets and usually an AWACS plane in the air to provide air defense and early warning. Carriers are big. Carriers are slow. Carriers are expensive. And pilots need the training anyway, in all conditions.
On top of that this was shortly after a nuclear explosion inside of the continental US. SOP dictates that US forces would instantly go to highest readiness after such an incident - which would mean that carrier would have at last a full flight wing in the air, as well as being dead center of its carrier group. Any hostile trying to take out the carrier would have to go through a ring of aircraft - including AWACS with downward looking radar that doesn't really care if you're skimming the wave tops - followed by a ring of destroyers and cruisers. All fully armed with sea-to-air missiles and AEGIS anti-missile guns. Carrier groups are very expensive to operate. They're also pretty well impenetrable unless you use a nuke or somehow sneak a submarine in through thermal layers (and generally carrier groups have friendly hunter-killer subs nearby to prevent just that).
OK, don't push the standards to the edge; use two-year old standards
Er... you're kidding, right?
Two year old standards are crap... there's a reason the newer "standards" came out (or why various browsers just did their own thing) -- it's because the old standards didn't do what was needed.
Frankly, IE is the defacto standard now. In the areas where IE performs differently from the standard, IE should (usually) be considered the proper guide. Things like PNG excluded.
Why? Because IE is what is on everyone's desktop. It may not be on yours, but you are part of the 5% that doesn't use it then. And that's too small a group to bother with the immense amount of testing needed.
This is exactly how it was back when Netscape was 90% of the marketshare. And it's how it was back when BSD was the de facto standard for TCP/IP -- where BSD did not comply to the RFC, you ignored the RFC. Because you had to talk to BSD-based TCP/IP stacks or you couldn't talk to 90% of the Internet.
Get over the fact that IE is from Microsoft... writing a browser to be "standards compliant" doesn't make a lick of difference when the rest of the world is ignoring the "standard".
easy download management including pausing and resuming
Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).
Er, so which one is it? Good or bad?
I'd bet that most people use ftp via web client now, unless you have needs for things like automatic FTPing on a scheduled basis or often do FTPing (since browsers are usually stateless and don't keep the control connection open - problematic with ftp sites that are hard to login to).
Sigh... all the Opera features I've forgotten and loved...
:)
A couple quickies - does Opera now offer the same kind of form entry memory IE does (e.g. - for names, addresses, etc. -- not the quick entry list that was in Opera 5, but auto-completion like IE does), as well as username/password entry memory (which IE manages to do the right thing and ASK you if you want to remember new ones every time instead of globally doing yes or no)?
Has Opera improved on it's popup disabling, or is it still all or none? I like the way Mozilla does it - click on a new link that has a popup and it works. But onLoad/onUnload JS don't work if more than x milliseconds after the mouse click.
BTW - in Opera (v5 at least), graphic disabling was G. No click needed
I hear you... sadly.
I used NS 4.x (whatever the last version prior to 4.5 bloat was - I don't recall now) for years. I finally got fed up with the slow rendering, poor rendering, and crashes. So I switched to Opera 5. It was great - fast, worked well, and life was good.
Then I started hitting a bunch of random websites that simply wouldn't work with Opera 5. Sometimes changing it to ID as Netscape worked. Sometimes ID'ing as IE worked. Increasingly it just wouldn't work, period -- usually it was the javascript engine crapping out. And while I will heartily agree that it was probably because the page in question was non-standard, it didn't make an ounce of difference - that page had information I needed and it wasn't rendering under Opera.
So to my everlasting shame I switched to IE. I try to keep it up to date and patched, but I still don't like that it's inherently bug prone.
And I have to admit one other dirty fact - I rather like it. Yes, I miss tabbed browsing from Opera (which took me a bit to get used to, but I do prefer it). I really miss gestures. But I like the auto-completion features (despite an abiding fear that they're not wonderfully secure...), I like knowing that pretty much every page will render as it was designed to (excepting PNG stuff... blearg), and it's fast. Opera was fast too, but I still remember the horrors of NS 4.x.
Yes, once I get my Mandrake box up and running I'll be checking out Mozilla at home -- yes, different platform and whatnot, but I'm more willing to screw with my Linux box than I am a Windows box. Linux is easier to reinstall, and less likely to start getting flaky from DLL hell.
I should also check out Opera 6, since I hear it's mostly fixed the JS issues. C.F. above - my Windows box is stable, and I like it that way.
Unreal Tournament II is coming out in a month and will not run well at all on a GF2 MX... unless you go super low res and turn off most of the eye candy.
Of course, it is UT2, so most people will turn off the eye candy just because it's annoying.
Er, I suspect you're looking at a Ti4600. The SRP on the Ti4200 is $199 (USD), which I believe is the same in Europe.
Frankly, if you're going to buy a GF4, the best buy is the Ti4400. You can find them for about $230 - only $10-20 more than a 128 MB Ti4200 and considerably faster.
I definitely agree with the previous post though - the absolute best bang for the buck right now is the GF3 Ti200. These cards were twice the price 2 months ago and are only 6 months old. The GF4 is not a good buy ATM -- the NV30 is coming out in 2-4 months and should absolutely blow the old stuff out of the water (as will the R300, the Perhilion, and 3DLabs's card). Both the ATI R300 and the NV30 should be fully DX9 compatible too (which Perhelion and 3DLabs are not).
I'm in kind of a tight spot... I'm seriously looking at buying a new computer, but don't know what graphics card to get, if any. Unfortunately my old card is a 32MB GF2, which is rather constricting at this point (if only because of the memory). I'll probably go GF3 Ti200, since I think Doom3 will be the next big thing that would want more, and it's over a year away.
And if you bother to go find follow-up comments to that statement, you'll discover Carmack saying that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
You're testing the next generation card vs. the current generation. May as well compare a GF4 Ti4600 to a Radeon 7500 and see which one does better.
The NV30 hasn't been taped yet. There's no silicon to test. So while you can't say whether or not the NV30 will be better than the R300, it's still a faulty comparison for NV25 vs R300. And since the NV30 is supposed to be released in August/September (color me doubtful, since they don't have prelim silicon yet), there's not going to be much of a gap between their releases either.
Frankly, even if NV30 doesn't have the edge on R300 on paper I'll buy it in a second over ATI. Why? Because ATI's drivers suck, their support sucks, and anyone who's been burned by ATI over the past 20 years will know what I'm talking about. They have long had a tendancy to release poor to middling drivers and then rapidly desupport the card. Nvidia, on the other hand, is still supporting the original TNT with current drivers - the card they made 4 years or so ago. Plus, as Carmack observes, Nvidia's drivers make their cards surpass ATI - which any benchmark will show you.
Now if only Nvidia would put some decent output stages on the reference design... output quality at high resolutions is one area where ATI has long been better. And Matrox trounces them both.
Yes, and the Junk Fax law, which is constitutional and has been upheld in a court of law, bans all unsolicited advertisement faxes. Why? Because there is a direct cost to be paid for receiving these commercial faxes, and it is unfair for the recipient to suffer the burdon of that cost.
If the content of the fax is not an advertisement then it's not illegal to send it unsolicited. Thus I cannot be prosectued if I accidentally fax you a 1000 page document on the sex life of llamas, unless I try to sell you some llamas within the document.
If you don't think that emails have a cost associated with them, you are quite incorrect. On a specious level, there's the cost of bandwidth to the ISP, the drive storage of the data, processing time of same, and the time it takes me, the end user, to realize that only 3 out of 120 emails I got today weren't SPAM and to delete them. On the specific level, if you have email access on a cellphone, or have maximum bandwidth allocations on your ISP, you can cite some very specific costs associated with that SPAM.
The precedent exists and it's not a bad one. The onslaught of email SPAM makes the old junk faxes look like a bad joke. MAPS and the like don't solve the problem - they mask it. The bandwidth is still being consumed and it's going up constantly.
Yes, because we all know, there's tons of money to be made by enforcing patents against open source software.
I mean, just think of how much you could rape the OpenOffice.org team for alone. I'm sure you could squeeze out at least four or maybe even five dollars.
Doh. I'm half asleep today. Bonk.
And yes, I just made a wonderful example of myself for why MHz is a bad thing here.
Thanks for the clarification.
If I can prove that you are costing me money to receive the email (e.g. - I pay to get email to my cellphone, I have download caps, etc.) then a class action suit could probably be levied against you for any number of things - from the junk fax law all the way down to improper seizure of chattel (which goes all the way back to the Magna Carta for precedent I believe!).
Now if you provide a removal procedure it's another ball of wax. And the one issue that may need a law is selling my personal data (e.g. - email) without my permission. Until more states/countries get opt-in laws (as opposed to opt-out) then that's probably legal. And slimy. But SPAM is slimy in the first place.
I can understand the issue of MHz vs systems that do multiple transfers per clock cycle (it's rather similar to the old bps vs baud difference for modems, where 9600 bps modems ran at 2400 baud using a Grey map to transmit 4 bits of data per cycle). Given that, MT/s should be equivalent to 2*MHz for DDR since there are two transfers per cycle.
If so, then I'm missing something... since 333 MHz DDR I would have 666 MT/s by that definition, which is already higher than the spec'd maximum you list for DDR II.
Clarification would be welcome.
Been there, done that. Local public utility commission referred me to the cable company. That's it.
This was after a lightning induced surge did $500 of damage to my electronics because the cable company didn't bother to ground their wire. They refused to acknowledge culpability and the PUC didn't give a crap.
The thin veer of regulation doesn't count for anything when it's the monopoly pulling the strings behind the puppets. The cable "regulation" is significantly different than gas, power, or water since they are considered essential services (and yes, they are, far more so than internet).
And write this off as whining, but it's funny how it seems to be the same thing happening over and over again in any market where there is no choice for such services. And how things are markably different in the few markets where there is actual competition.
Did you even read the article? Hell, did you read the synopsis?
The answer is obviously no.
There's nothing about creating anti-spam laws. It's about prosecuting someone under existing fraud and consumer protection laws.
You want technical solutions? Sure, whatever. They don't work. They'll never work. There will always be open relays out there to abuse, and even if you block them the bandwidth is being consumed. So you haven't solved the problem - you've just masked it.
The only hope is to use existing, rock-solid laws such as those stated above, to prosecute spammers into oblivion. If successful, MonsterHut is facing several billion dollars in fines, and I seriously doubt that the CEO or CTO will be able to hide behind the corporate veil on this one. Push them out of the US and other leading countries and they'll wind up with no bandwidth to do this kind of thing. Then your technical solutions can come to bear - countries without laws? Blackhole them. Then they'll pass laws and throw out the spammers, or relegate themselves to the 19th century.
Government is supposed to look out for it's citizens. This is a fine example of it doing exactly that instead of protecting the corporate entity.
What exactly is MT/s as you refer to it? It's apparantly Mega data transfers/sec, but I haven't found anything that relates this to more common measurements such as MB/s or similar. (My guess - what it sounds like, with overall bandwidth being MT/s * bus width)
Apparantly current DDR is running 200-400 MT/s (although the Micron page that had this information was rather odd in and of itself, with higher CAS times giving a higher MT/s), so this is either a significant upgrade (300%) or moderate (50%) if those numbers are right.
I admit that this might seem silly but I have never really wanted to get myself an Athlon based computer. I know too many people that have funny crases and wierd stuff happening, probably the fault of the chipset more that the processor (VIA, ewww) but still. My P3 has been great.
And my AMD systems, of which I've built several, have also been great. And cost significantly less than Intel (and I say this holding Intel stock).
The issues with problematic systems are usually due to one of two things.
1) Cheap hardware. All components are not the same. Buy cheapo hardware, get an unstable system. The biggest factors are the motherboard, memory, and video card. Oh, and MSI is not one of the better brands for reliability.
2) Bad drivers. Don't upgrade the drivers unless you need to -- if the system is unstable, you need to. Otherwise leave the thing alone.
So, WTF? For fifty bucks I'll buy the Intel thank you
Clearly this is your choice, and comfort level is a big factor in these things. But I think your prices are off.
The below prices are from Newegg, which isn't the cheapest place (anymore), but I've done business with them a lot now. They have good prices, good shipping, and excellent customer support.
Athlon Thunderbird 1600+, Retail: $79
MSI KT3 Ultra (Via KT333) - $86
Gigabyte GA-7VRX (Via KT333, my preference currently) - $89
256MB DDR333 Memory (Crucial) - $83
Total (MSI/GB) - $248/$251
Intel P4 1.6A, Retail - $137
MSI 6566E (Intel i845 chipset) - $90
Gigabyte GA-8IE (Intel i845, dunno if GB is good for Intel though) - $105
256MB RDRAM 800 MHz Memory (Corsair) - $100
Total (MSI/GB) - $327/$342
Difference: $79/$91 (or $145/$167 Canadian)
That's about 3x what you said... obviously using different suppliers, and the price drop hasn't figured in yet, but still much more substantial, especially when you consider percentages.
Could you go cheaper on the Intel system? Sure. You could use DDR instead of RDRAM. You could use a non-Intel chipset. But you've now nuked performance so much that the Athlon system is performing 20-30% faster. And it's still cheaper.
I'm not saying don't buy Intel. Just realize that a lot of the "funny crashes" are no more than FUD, and people have just as many issues with Intel systems if they buy cheap components. If you're happy to pay the price premium for Intel for peace of mind, then that's fine. But to say that it's insubstantial is incorrect (particularly since an Athlon 1600+ is faster than a P4 1.6A on most benchmarks).
As LarryBoy noted, that would require that God lie.
And while you may disagree, I'd rather not believe in a God than believe in a God that chooses to be deceptive in such a fashion.
Of course, it doesn't reconcile some of the other issues with the Bible, but a large number of those issues are due to faulty translations/interpretations.
Customers will bitch, a few will change providers (those lucky few that can)
That's the real issue. Change providers? To who? Cable is an unregulated monopoly in the US, so you can't just change cable companies and get different service. And the FCC and Congress decided that allowing customers to choose their ISP on cable/DSL was unimportant, so you are stuck with AT&T/Charter/Time Warner/whoever for what you do have. DSL is going down the same path now, if you can even get it.
What other options are there really? Partial T1 tends to be too expensive, even in major cities with heavy telecomm systems.
The rule is simple - when there is no competition then the companies have all of the cards. Traditionally the consumer has the ultimate power in the form of voting with their wallet. However when there is a monopoly that sole ability is removed, because the consumer has no place else to go.
It's sad, really... the Telecomm Act of 1996 was supposed to fix all this. All it's done is move us backwards 50 years AND removed government oversight. Happy happy, joy joy.
Domino doesn't need more publicity. It needs to be put into a grave. And then shot.
Domino well predates Exchange (Lotus Notes was the precursor to Domino), and it's generally considered expensive, hard to admin, and difficult to use. It is, however, much more flexible than Exchange.
Actually I do use CVS, and at work no less. Our lead developer is a big proponent of using open source tools where it makes sense, and I'm all for it. Our project isn't big enough to expose most of the hairy bits of CVS though.
But I'm not Linus, and I don't have to manage the kernel tree. If he's decided that CVS does not meet his needs then that's all there is to it. CVS apparantly annoys him in various areas, and I know that when something annoys me the likelihood of my using it is somewhere around zero.
So basically, use CVS and lose Linus, or use BitKeeper and keep him.
Besides which, if people would actually bother reading the links, you don't have to submit Bitkeeper pulls for patches. Regular old diffs are fine, as long as there's enough changelog info.
RMS is an extremist. Always has been. In that role, he has fought for the complete freedom of software. IMHO, it's an admirable, idealistic view of the world
To take a different whack at this, why on Earth is this admirable? Extremisim is never admirable. It's the same thing as fanatacism. And fanatics never make clear, reasonable choices because their particular issue outweighs everything else. That's why it's called fanaticism or extremism.
Oh, I'm sure some people will say something about it being for a "good cause". But how are we to determine what the good causes and the bad causes are? It's a very subjective thing, and while I think that the free (liber) software movement has done some wonderful things, I also think there are rational limits to it and that RMS doesn't have any concept of what those limits are.
Don't use BitKeeper? Ok, whatever. Use what? CVS? No, because it doesn't meet my needs. So use what? Nothing at all? Something that doesn't work? Or something that does get the job done and so what if it's not idealogically pure? The real world (which is where fanatics dare not tread, lest they discover that their idealistic world has naught but a thin thread tying it to reality) says that you use what works. Ideals are fine, but understand that it may very well cost you far more than what that ideal is worth.
Throughout history it hasn't been the fanatics that have changed the course of human events. It's been those who are idealistic, but also understand how the world works. Fanatics merely cause aberations, and often do more harm than good to those who they're trying to help.
standard file formats
.doc and .xls files, with good results from what I hear. MS will not have to release it's file formats - their business applications aren't even being vaguely referenced in the anti-trust suit and are not part of the suit, period.
OpenOffice can read/write most
The other points are good... although I'd somewhat question the value of the education bit. Apple has had deep discounts for decades and it hasn't gotten them anything.
And precisely what are you going to fight with then? Rocks?
Go ahead and drop an EMP on top of yourself. We'll have howitzers pounding you from 18-21 miles away, and they really don't give a crap about carbon fibers. (The current Paladin SPG fires 8 rounds/min at up to 18 miles away. The proposed Crusader fires 10/min at 21 miles).