I swear, cellphone UI design must be done by retards.
I have a feeling its some PHB behind the issues.
Wow, I forgot to mention that my phone does not have a ring at a moderate level AND vibrate option. Vibrate only works with no volume on the ringer or when the ringer is at full volume. Keep in mind that it took extra code to make it that way vs a simple toggle for vibrate on or off.
No, seriously, what aren't they thinking of using cell phones for these days
Phone calls.
This may be because I'm from the US, and we get the crap phones here from what I hear. The UI on these things gets worse every year. I wish there were "open" phones with a free SDK so I could make the UI worthwhile. My current phone is pretty simple, so I can tolerate the numerous issues I have with it, but are these people on crack when they program these things?
My phone is paid for by my employer and is "part of my job", I don't want or need a cell phone personally.
The first option under menu is contacts, which has its own button already. The recent call list has dialed numbers first, then received numbers, then the one you want, missed numbers. The contact list is purely alphabetical, so I either have to bastardize someone's name that I call frequently to put it on the top of the list, or scroll down past the numbers I don't use frequently to get to the number I use frequently. Oh, but I could use the voice recognition to call right? Well, it doesn't recognize what I say. The phone does not tell me I have a voicemail or that I have missed a call unless I open it up. The two color LED would be perfect for this notification, but instead, its only used to tell me that the phone is on by obnoxiously blinking or that the phone is charging (as if my plugging it in and the screen saying "Charging" isn't good enough). Fortunately, I can turn off the blinking LED that tells me the phone is powered on. Being that I seem to go through on average one phone a year, being able to transfer the numbers would be a nice feature. There are a slew of unintuitive icons on the top of the screen, and I guess I have to look at the book to know what those mean. The settings don't have any information about what the setting is used for. For example, under System/Select System it says "Home is B" and the three options for "Selecting the system" are Home only, Automatic A, Automatic B. So WTF is "Home is B"?
Some prices do go down, even more so when compared to inflation.
How much did a car cost in 1920? How much did a color TV with a remote cost in 1965? How much did a computer cost in 1984 or a VCR? How much did a DVD player cost in 1997?
The difference in those markets is that there is competition and supply and demand.
Personally, I don't pay for recorded music. I'm not much into charity.
Also, plastic bumpers are plastic on purpose too: that's how they withstand a 5 mph impact with zero damage. Imagine somebody accidentally backing into a fire hydrant or something. With a 5 mph-rated bumper it's no big deal, but if they had a chrome bumper they'd be paying $1000 or so to replace it.
Also, keep in mind that front to back collisions are the most common, so even if there are issues with side impact, common bumper heights and working bumpers would be nice. It cost me almost $3,000 to fix my $7,000 car after a 3mph collision. No, I don't believe in paying the extra thousands of dollars for insurance when its cheaper to do otherwise.
Movies @ 1024i are pretty, but they are not hundreds of dollars prettier then Movies @ 480p (err what ever EDTV/DVDs are recorded at).
So, nobody buys those expensive large HDTVs?
I paid over $300 for my first DVD player before large movie rental companies had much or any DVD content. I've never owned a VCR personally, yet my family bought one in the early 80s when I was a kid.
Trust me, DVDs don't look very good on a quality $3,000+ TV compared to 1080p.
I'm not a complete dummy, and I know that streaming requires X bandwidth per connection, and yes I know about multicast a little.
But doesn't the cable/OTH model seem superior to streaming? It works on existing hardware and cables, and streaming over the internet at HDTV resolutions seems to be coming no sooner than y3k.
You my friend, are a clueless consumer (sarcasm, bear with me).
Today, the average consumer knows all of the TV jargon and terminology. To test your skills and those of a random friend, you must know all of the following:
Macrovision, DRM, DCMA, FBI, and bubba who will love you despite your crimes for watching TV.
Forgive me, I may have missed one or two or hundreds of other letters or terms.
Apple needs to get into the TV market. Remember when your options for a TV were what kind of wood finish you wanted, when you wanted it delivered, and did you want to spend extra for color?
The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come.
I'm asking this because I do not know, and would like to.
What is the fundamental difference between "streaming" and broadcasting hundreds of cable TV channels to every business and home?
I've never seen cable TV say "buffering..." or lags or whatnot like I have seen streaming video off the net.
What is the fundamental difference? Certainly bit for bit copies are not necessary.
OK, since you brought it up, WTF is up with these tags?
I've read the FAQ about 5 times, and I've seen and submitted my own tags, but I have no clue what they are supposed to add.
I'm not trying to troll here, I'm apparently just dumb or something. I cannot figure out the purpose of the tags, or is the purpose to be revealed later for something like being able to only display certain articles with certain tags or vice versa. I dunno.
I hear you, I recently went from an SUV to a compact car and it took me weeks to accommodate to being in a smaller, lower to the ground car.
Provided you do not have a complex about what other people think, you would be surprised how carefully people will drive around you once you depress the Hazard light button.
It gets rid of tailgaters, the whole nine yards. I mean people get away from you like you are bleeding and are known to have HIV. Its hilarious:)
Not quite. While I agree that this class of vehicle is more dangerous in itself (not colliding with other cars), the thing is that in a collision between a Hummer and a car, the car will still suffer most of the damage. Vehicles like that and even "regular" SUVs are a real danger on the roads. The whole thing has become a sort of arms race about whoever can feel the safest by knowing they'll "win" in the event of a collision.
Car safety is almost an oxymoron.
Imagine if all cars had a working (read: NOT plastic) bumper that was at a standardized height, and that the guard rails on the road were also at that height. Add a little reinforcement or force deflector in the doors at that height, and *poof* safer cars on the road.
Passenger "cars" should have a maximum weight and above that they are either illegal or they are required to pay a death tax much like a gas guzzler tax.
And cellphone usage while driving should be a deathable offense which is enforceable by any citizen with no questions asked.
I know I'm in the minority of the population because I use a phone as a phone, but one feature that would be nice is an easy "I'm temporarily not available to answer the phone" option that is easy to set like putting the phone on vibrate. This feature must go away when the phone is unclammed or used for the first time so the user will not forget.
In 20 years, Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a network will likely be just as useful for link-state routing models as it is now.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-- Edsger Dijkstra
CS is/was overrated in my opinion. I know, here comes the overrated and flamebate mods, but working in the field for a couple of years w/o a CS class under my belt and only working with one computer scientist from the 70s or so, and knowing one recent PhD computer scientist who now works at a national lab. Well, I see more computers than computer scientists or telescopes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't 99% or so of all CS majors that stay in the field go into programming?
Again, in my experience and opinion, CS programs do not emphasize programming enough, for that matter other important things like OSes, DBs, APIs, standards, documentation, coding conventions and practices.
Few people in a programming environment want to work with a computer scientist. Programmers want to work with other programmers. Performance is not much of an issue to the point that you need a CS to come up with algorithms that are new and unique to the problem. Programming primarily consists of things like inventory, payroll, scheduling, POS devices, and things like that. Sure there are some places for CS people where performance is pushing the envelope like CAD/CAM/games, but those are a small percentage of what is being programed on a daily basis.
the Opteron still lacks or does not have good implementationse of the cache coherency and other caching features of NUMAlink used in the Origin servers/clusters.
I have an SGI running Linux that has NUMAlink with cache coherency with stock Itanium CPUs and of course NUMAlinks. Is this something that cannot be extended from what SGI has done to use the cache coherency over HTX?
I have repeatedly been forced (as a customer) to make different divisions within IBM talk to each other. It would seem to be good, but it really is almost the same.
That is consistent with my limited experience with IBM hardware and software. IBM is so huge that nobody there knows more than 0.00001% of what is going on. This may have changed from November of 2000 when I first and last dealt with them, but that was only an install of a project that didn't go much further than an install. The install was rough, getting our apps running in Websphere, never really happened because the project failed before it ever really took off.
As an earlier slashdot article mentioned, Oracle is/was looking at buying Novell and Suse. And it would seem logical for Oracle to ship a bootable DVD that had Oracle and Linux already there for a particular platform. I've been looking for such a product for years.
Yes, a good sized Oracle DB is going to be on a dedicated box, that hopefully is comfortably housed on a private network and shielded from the net via a firewall.
Oracle is very demanding of an OS and hardware as well.
If I were as large as Oracle, I would have already either partnered or bought an OS and shipped the thing as an integrated product.
These things are becoming more ubiquitous with things like managed routers, printers with OSes on them, DVRs, consumer level firewall/NAT boxes, etc.
A DB/OS combo would probably be a very viable product. The only opposition would be from I guess people that believe that Windows/Solaris/insert OS of choice here is better, more compatible, or whatever than whatever Oracle chose as its OS. Its still possible, and probably a good idea for them to still sell a 3rd party add on DB like they do now for a host of OSes, but an integrated DB and OS would be welcome by me, and I'm sure a couple of others in the world.
A fast FFT processor, for example, would make the life easier for a lot of Photoshop filters users (with the help of special drivers and plugins), it would also help the GNU Radio quite a bit, as well as other multimedia/signal/data processing applications.
There have been tons of addon cards that do FFTs, TCP offloading NICs, physics engines, or whatever you want. The problem is twofold. 1) These cards are expensive, or at the least nonfree and nonstandard as the rest of the computer and need software support to drive them 2) They often do not give the performance as advertised.
Take for example an FFT card for Photoshop filters. The image is in GPU memory and in system RAM. The image must be sent from system RAM over to the PCI card. Even if the card was sitting off of a HyperTransport, which is about the fastest external bus available on a PC today is only 3.2 GB/s. PCI is between 133 MB/s to 2133 MB/s for the new PCI-X second generation. Its common for memory busses to be in excess of 3.2 GB/s and some of the new Itaniums have something like 10.5 GB/s memory busses now.
Back to price. These cards are a niche product, so the price has to be high because the demand is low. The price of these cards can skyrocket very quickly because its common for these things to have RAM on them for cache and buffering, and this cache is often needed in the 1-4+ gigabyte range, which is not cheap in itself.
I'm not saying that I would not welcome something like an effective FFT offloading engine, but there is so much pre/post processing on the data that needs to come through the main system memory through the CPU, that the offloaders don't give you much.
For high performance computing, memory bandwidth is frequently the bottleneck, and has been for years. High end GPUs are a little different because they have had specialized busses for years (AGP and the like), and they also have the advantage of being told what to do by the CPU, given some data, and then internally processing it, and dumping the data straight to the monitor. The CPU does not need that data back. Its more or less a one way operation, the other offloader cards are usually a 2 way operation. Even in the case of TCP offloader cards, performance often does not keep up with software and general CPU improvements. Also, TCP offloaders don't work very well with things like software firewalls that want their hands in monkeying with the TCP data as well.
So, I believe at this point in time, offloader cards are not too valuable. Maybe for a specific problem or set of problems, but I haven't found one that could significantly improve performance yet.
SpacetitoX was able to boost one benchmark's result from 61 frames per second to 91.
So, the fastest LCDs in terms of refresh rate are those that have 12ns or ~83 Hz refresh rate, most are still in the 60 to 70 Hz range.
I guess its impressive to have an LCD being told to refresh its pixels faster than it can, but...
I would assume that Apple set the refresh rate of the card to match the monitor for other reasons like heat and battery life. But then again, Apple has never really been know to be a gaming platform.
Also, this brings up an excellent question. So, if someone dual boots a Mac, changes the hardware settings and breaks the machine or cripples its performance, is that worthy of a call to Apple for support?
Slashdot Mirror
I swear, cellphone UI design must be done by retards.
I have a feeling its some PHB behind the issues.
Wow, I forgot to mention that my phone does not have a ring at a moderate level AND vibrate option. Vibrate only works with no volume on the ringer or when the ringer is at full volume. Keep in mind that it took extra code to make it that way vs a simple toggle for vibrate on or off.
I don't get it.
No, seriously, what aren't they thinking of using cell phones for these days
Phone calls.
This may be because I'm from the US, and we get the crap phones here from what I hear. The UI on these things gets worse every year. I wish there were "open" phones with a free SDK so I could make the UI worthwhile. My current phone is pretty simple, so I can tolerate the numerous issues I have with it, but are these people on crack when they program these things?
My phone is paid for by my employer and is "part of my job", I don't want or need a cell phone personally.
The first option under menu is contacts, which has its own button already. The recent call list has dialed numbers first, then received numbers, then the one you want, missed numbers. The contact list is purely alphabetical, so I either have to bastardize someone's name that I call frequently to put it on the top of the list, or scroll down past the numbers I don't use frequently to get to the number I use frequently. Oh, but I could use the voice recognition to call right? Well, it doesn't recognize what I say. The phone does not tell me I have a voicemail or that I have missed a call unless I open it up. The two color LED would be perfect for this notification, but instead, its only used to tell me that the phone is on by obnoxiously blinking or that the phone is charging (as if my plugging it in and the screen saying "Charging" isn't good enough). Fortunately, I can turn off the blinking LED that tells me the phone is powered on. Being that I seem to go through on average one phone a year, being able to transfer the numbers would be a nice feature. There are a slew of unintuitive icons on the top of the screen, and I guess I have to look at the book to know what those mean. The settings don't have any information about what the setting is used for. For example, under System/Select System it says "Home is B" and the three options for "Selecting the system" are Home only, Automatic A, Automatic B. So WTF is "Home is B"?
What a waste of time and resources.
Some prices do go down, even more so when compared to inflation.
How much did a car cost in 1920? How much did a color TV with a remote cost in 1965? How much did a computer cost in 1984 or a VCR? How much did a DVD player cost in 1997?
The difference in those markets is that there is competition and supply and demand.
Personally, I don't pay for recorded music. I'm not much into charity.
I suddenly want to dig out the 1984 commercial again.
Text of dialog: http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/1984.html
Quicktime of ad: http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm
That ad is known by many as the best ad ever. AFAIK, it only was played once during the 1984 American Superbowl commercial challenge.
Enjoy!
Also, plastic bumpers are plastic on purpose too: that's how they withstand a 5 mph impact with zero damage. Imagine somebody accidentally backing into a fire hydrant or something. With a 5 mph-rated bumper it's no big deal, but if they had a chrome bumper they'd be paying $1000 or so to replace it.
1 50.htmlr bumpercrashratings.html
Really?
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2002/03/13/037
http://www.roadandtravel.com/crashratings/0908rea
Also, keep in mind that front to back collisions are the most common, so even if there are issues with side impact, common bumper heights and working bumpers would be nice. It cost me almost $3,000 to fix my $7,000 car after a 3mph collision. No, I don't believe in paying the extra thousands of dollars for insurance when its cheaper to do otherwise.
Movies @ 1024i are pretty, but they are not hundreds of dollars prettier then Movies @ 480p (err what ever EDTV/DVDs are recorded at).
So, nobody buys those expensive large HDTVs?
I paid over $300 for my first DVD player before large movie rental companies had much or any DVD content. I've never owned a VCR personally, yet my family bought one in the early 80s when I was a kid.
Trust me, DVDs don't look very good on a quality $3,000+ TV compared to 1080p.
I'm not a complete dummy, and I know that streaming requires X bandwidth per connection, and yes I know about multicast a little.
But doesn't the cable/OTH model seem superior to streaming? It works on existing hardware and cables, and streaming over the internet at HDTV resolutions seems to be coming no sooner than y3k.
Blu-Ray? What's that?
You my friend, are a clueless consumer (sarcasm, bear with me).
Today, the average consumer knows all of the TV jargon and terminology. To test your skills and those of a random friend, you must know all of the following:
LDTV 240p30, 288p25 (CIF)
SDTV 480i60 (NTSC), 480p30, 576i50 (PAL, SÉCAM), 576p25
EDTV 480p60, 576p50, 720i50, 720i60, 720p24, 720p25, 720p30
HDTV 720p50, 720p60, 1080i50, 1080i60, 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p30
DVI, HDMI, coax, optical, RCA, component, composite, Svideo, VGA, XVGA, WXVGA, SVGA, BNC
DD, DTS, SDDS, Dolby Pro Logic, mono, 2.0, 2.1, 5.0, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1
4x3 vs 16x9 (You MUST know this better than your equipment, because they will fuck it up).
Oxygen free copper, binding posts, spades, banana plugs
Not to mention the newcomers on the block like:
Macrovision, DRM, DCMA, FBI, and bubba who will love you despite your crimes for watching TV.
Forgive me, I may have missed one or two or hundreds of other letters or terms.
Apple needs to get into the TV market. Remember when your options for a TV were what kind of wood finish you wanted, when you wanted it delivered, and did you want to spend extra for color?
The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come.
I'm asking this because I do not know, and would like to.
What is the fundamental difference between "streaming" and broadcasting hundreds of cable TV channels to every business and home?
I've never seen cable TV say "buffering..." or lags or whatnot like I have seen streaming video off the net.
What is the fundamental difference? Certainly bit for bit copies are not necessary.
Most logged in users are seeing tags now too.
OK, since you brought it up, WTF is up with these tags?
I've read the FAQ about 5 times, and I've seen and submitted my own tags, but I have no clue what they are supposed to add.
I'm not trying to troll here, I'm apparently just dumb or something. I cannot figure out the purpose of the tags, or is the purpose to be revealed later for something like being able to only display certain articles with certain tags or vice versa. I dunno.
Electric cars don't burn energy while sitting at traffic lights.
And, when you're braking to get to that traffic light, some of the energy from braking can be put back into the batteries.
The bitch is that you cannot refuel your vehicle in a few minutes.
I hear you, I recently went from an SUV to a compact car and it took me weeks to accommodate to being in a smaller, lower to the ground car.
Provided you do not have a complex about what other people think, you would be surprised how carefully people will drive around you once you depress the Hazard light button.
It gets rid of tailgaters, the whole nine yards. I mean people get away from you like you are bleeding and are known to have HIV. Its hilarious
Not quite. While I agree that this class of vehicle is more dangerous in itself (not colliding with other cars), the thing is that in a collision between a Hummer and a car, the car will still suffer most of the damage. Vehicles like that and even "regular" SUVs are a real danger on the roads. The whole thing has become a sort of arms race about whoever can feel the safest by knowing they'll "win" in the event of a collision.
Car safety is almost an oxymoron.
Imagine if all cars had a working (read: NOT plastic) bumper that was at a standardized height, and that the guard rails on the road were also at that height. Add a little reinforcement or force deflector in the doors at that height, and *poof* safer cars on the road.
Passenger "cars" should have a maximum weight and above that they are either illegal or they are required to pay a death tax much like a gas guzzler tax.
And cellphone usage while driving should be a deathable offense which is enforceable by any citizen with no questions asked.
I know I'm in the minority of the population because I use a phone as a phone, but one feature that would be nice is an easy "I'm temporarily not available to answer the phone" option that is easy to set like putting the phone on vibrate. This feature must go away when the phone is unclammed or used for the first time so the user will not forget.
This is just another example of legislators usurping parents' roles.
I'm assuming its still perfectly legal for parents to allow the kids to play a violent game or for them to buy it for their kids right?
In 20 years, Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a network will likely be just as useful for link-state routing models as it is now.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-- Edsger Dijkstra
CS is/was overrated in my opinion. I know, here comes the overrated and flamebate mods, but working in the field for a couple of years w/o a CS class under my belt and only working with one computer scientist from the 70s or so, and knowing one recent PhD computer scientist who now works at a national lab. Well, I see more computers than computer scientists or telescopes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't 99% or so of all CS majors that stay in the field go into programming?
Again, in my experience and opinion, CS programs do not emphasize programming enough, for that matter other important things like OSes, DBs, APIs, standards, documentation, coding conventions and practices.
Few people in a programming environment want to work with a computer scientist. Programmers want to work with other programmers. Performance is not much of an issue to the point that you need a CS to come up with algorithms that are new and unique to the problem. Programming primarily consists of things like inventory, payroll, scheduling, POS devices, and things like that. Sure there are some places for CS people where performance is pushing the envelope like CAD/CAM/games, but those are a small percentage of what is being programed on a daily basis.
The x86 has *always* been behind in those types of technologies
The x86 came out when disco was still cool.
usually pretty far ahead in tricks to make the x86 ISA fast
going on 30 years of hacking and PhDing the chip will do something.
I've been ready for x86 to die for years now, but then Apple joined the club.
the Opteron still lacks or does not have good implementationse of the cache coherency and other caching features of NUMAlink used in the Origin servers/clusters.
I have an SGI running Linux that has NUMAlink with cache coherency with stock Itanium CPUs and of course NUMAlinks. Is this something that cannot be extended from what SGI has done to use the cache coherency over HTX?
I don't know, but hopefully someone does.
Thanks for the link.
This upgrade to HTX is welcome, and "A good thing(TM)". I posted about it earlier today before hearing about 3.0 coming out here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183891&cid
It was ignored from moderation, but I thought it was a good post, if I say so myself
I am surprised the editors did not link to this rumor that McNealy is stepping down from a few days ago on Slashdot.
Funny McNealy dismissed this as a 22 year old rumor only a few days ago.
a) most rumors are true, they sometimes take more than a lifetime to be confirmed or believed
b) rumor has it that slashdot editors don't know what is posted on slashdot hence the frequent inability for there to be unique or follow up articles
On topic, I don't know if a new CEO will help Sun. I guess it could not hurt them any worse than they have been for the past few years.
I have repeatedly been forced (as a customer) to make different divisions within IBM talk to each other. It would seem to be good, but it really is almost the same.
That is consistent with my limited experience with IBM hardware and software. IBM is so huge that nobody there knows more than 0.00001% of what is going on. This may have changed from November of 2000 when I first and last dealt with them, but that was only an install of a project that didn't go much further than an install. The install was rough, getting our apps running in Websphere, never really happened because the project failed before it ever really took off.
As an earlier slashdot article mentioned, Oracle is/was looking at buying Novell and Suse. And it would seem logical for Oracle to ship a bootable DVD that had Oracle and Linux already there for a particular platform. I've been looking for such a product for years.
Yes, a good sized Oracle DB is going to be on a dedicated box, that hopefully is comfortably housed on a private network and shielded from the net via a firewall.
Oracle is very demanding of an OS and hardware as well.
If I were as large as Oracle, I would have already either partnered or bought an OS and shipped the thing as an integrated product.
These things are becoming more ubiquitous with things like managed routers, printers with OSes on them, DVRs, consumer level firewall/NAT boxes, etc.
A DB/OS combo would probably be a very viable product. The only opposition would be from I guess people that believe that Windows/Solaris/insert OS of choice here is better, more compatible, or whatever than whatever Oracle chose as its OS. Its still possible, and probably a good idea for them to still sell a 3rd party add on DB like they do now for a host of OSes, but an integrated DB and OS would be welcome by me, and I'm sure a couple of others in the world.
A fast FFT processor, for example, would make the life easier for a lot of Photoshop filters users (with the help of special drivers and plugins), it would also help the GNU Radio quite a bit, as well as other multimedia/signal/data processing applications.
There have been tons of addon cards that do FFTs, TCP offloading NICs, physics engines, or whatever you want. The problem is twofold. 1) These cards are expensive, or at the least nonfree and nonstandard as the rest of the computer and need software support to drive them 2) They often do not give the performance as advertised.
Take for example an FFT card for Photoshop filters. The image is in GPU memory and in system RAM. The image must be sent from system RAM over to the PCI card. Even if the card was sitting off of a HyperTransport, which is about the fastest external bus available on a PC today is only 3.2 GB/s. PCI is between 133 MB/s to 2133 MB/s for the new PCI-X second generation. Its common for memory busses to be in excess of 3.2 GB/s and some of the new Itaniums have something like 10.5 GB/s memory busses now.
Back to price. These cards are a niche product, so the price has to be high because the demand is low. The price of these cards can skyrocket very quickly because its common for these things to have RAM on them for cache and buffering, and this cache is often needed in the 1-4+ gigabyte range, which is not cheap in itself.
I'm not saying that I would not welcome something like an effective FFT offloading engine, but there is so much pre/post processing on the data that needs to come through the main system memory through the CPU, that the offloaders don't give you much.
For high performance computing, memory bandwidth is frequently the bottleneck, and has been for years. High end GPUs are a little different because they have had specialized busses for years (AGP and the like), and they also have the advantage of being told what to do by the CPU, given some data, and then internally processing it, and dumping the data straight to the monitor. The CPU does not need that data back. Its more or less a one way operation, the other offloader cards are usually a 2 way operation. Even in the case of TCP offloader cards, performance often does not keep up with software and general CPU improvements. Also, TCP offloaders don't work very well with things like software firewalls that want their hands in monkeying with the TCP data as well.
So, I believe at this point in time, offloader cards are not too valuable. Maybe for a specific problem or set of problems, but I haven't found one that could significantly improve performance yet.
SpacetitoX was able to boost one benchmark's result from 61 frames per second to 91.
So, the fastest LCDs in terms of refresh rate are those that have 12ns or ~83 Hz refresh rate, most are still in the 60 to 70 Hz range.
I guess its impressive to have an LCD being told to refresh its pixels faster than it can, but...
I would assume that Apple set the refresh rate of the card to match the monitor for other reasons like heat and battery life. But then again, Apple has never really been know to be a gaming platform.
Also, this brings up an excellent question. So, if someone dual boots a Mac, changes the hardware settings and breaks the machine or cripples its performance, is that worthy of a call to Apple for support?
Perhaps we can rename them "fundamental variables."
Or, perhaps, "fundamental flaw".
Dijkstra will be aghast when in the future it is discovered that the universe requires "goto"s too!
In the future, you will probably need setjmp() followed by longjmp().