Negatives... the thought of having mercury gas a few feet bothers me. Why, after figuring out just how bad mercury is, are we putting the stuff in more products that can expose people and especially children to it?
A typical CFL conatins about 4mg of mercury, compared to 500mg in a mercury thermometer or 3000mg in a mercury-switch thermometer.
In fact, if you use coal power, using a compact fluorescent bulb actually reduces the amount of mercury released into the environment.
If any of them are still working by next december (or well if they even last 6 months) we will probably replace the majority of bulbs (except some which are on dimmers) with them.
7 years is common. Most of ours purchased over the last 10 years are still going. The Home Depot house brand (n:vision) has a 5-year warranty, IIRC.
When I actually do turn it off and several hours turn it back on, it seems to be much dimmer at first. It definitely seems less bright than a normal 60-watt (which is what this one is rated to replace) It's adequate for my computer area.
This varies by brand. Note that you can replace a 60-Watt bulb with a 19-Watt CFL if you want to be sure that you exceed the brightness of the old bulb (most "60W equiv" CFLs are actually 13W or 14W). You're still saving 41W.
Also consider "daylight" CFLs; I personally prefer the whiter specrum they have.
Yes, this is one of the tricky aspects of so-called 'Trusted Computing'. To elaborate: one possibility in 'Trusted Computing' is to disallow certain programs from being run.
Such a feature has been available in XP since (at least) SP2. I'm sure that there are Kernel modules that disallow running certain programs by hash.
But these "protections" ultimately don't work very well. It doesn't take much to drastically alter the object code of a compiled program.
Your "example" problem doesn't actually exist. PVP-OVM doesn't work that way - it downsamples video as part of the VMR9 output path, not by changing the screen resolution or blurring the entire screen.
Let me reiterate: PVP-OVM (video) does not "down-res" your entire display. PUMA (audio) does not "down-res" your display or downsample your audio.
Has anyone who is complaining about Vista's DRM features actually USED the product?
What the hell is this article even about? The new DRM features in Vista include:
- PVP-UAB (sends video encrypted across the PCIe bus) - PVP-OPM (HDCP / ICT support)
That's it. Protected User Mode Audio is just an update to the Secure Audio Path that's already in Windows XP. Windows Media DRM isn't new, either - every copy of Windows XP already has it.
I am running Windows Vista right now. The quality of non-DRM content is not "reduced" by Vista. 1080p H.264 videos still play in 1080p. MP3s sound just like they did under XP. I can still record from line in. WMP11 still rips to unprotected MP3s or WMAs. I can still rip DVDs. My XVID/AC3 videos still play. My no-CD patched games still work. FairUse4WM still runs and can still crack WM-DRM.
Vista has meant absolutely NOTHING for me regarding DRM. DRM-encumbered content is still as easy to break as ever under Vista. You can still write, distribute, and use DRM circumvention programs using Vista.
There is very little new as far as DRM goes in Vista. This isn't an XBOX 360.
If a product doesn't support DRM then Vista may not allow it as a valid application (and can in fact remove the ability of applications to run *after* the fact when they are identified as a problem.)
What the hell are you talking about? There is no such revocation system in Vista - the only thing close is the fact that drivers must be signed in the x64 version.
Microsoft could certainly push an upgrade that breaks applications explicitly, but this would be blatantly anticompetitive.
FairUse4WM works fine in Vista, as does nearly every DRM circumvention program that I've tried.
I'm running Vista on a system with 768MB of PC3200, a 2.66GHz P4 (Northwood) and a GeForce 6200. Considering that Vista runs fine with any of the recent IGPs on the market (GeForce 6100/6150, Radeon Xpress, and Intel GMA950), and considering that 1GB of memory is pretty standard for midrange computers, no, Vista's requirements aren't too bad.
If you have purchased a computer in the last three years with 1GB of memory, you can run Vista, at least in the perfectly fine Aero Basic mode. If it has a newer IGP or practically any modern graphics card, you should be able to run Aero Glass.
Apple releases upgrades on a yearly basis; Microsoft seems to take 5 years to do it.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released on April 29, 2005. That's over 18 months after Panther (October 24, 2003). Morover, Leopard isn't due out until next year - and Tiger is already 17 months old.
Looks like Apple is on an 18-24 month release schedule, not a 12 month release schedule.
Apple releases updates on a quarterly basis; Microsoft seems to do it on a yearly basis.
That depends on what you mean by an update. Under your terminology, IE7 and Windows Media Player 11 both qualify as "updates", if not "upgrades". So does Media Center 2005, Tablet PC 2005, Microsoft Update, WGA (not that this adds good functionality, mind you), and a whole mess of other things.
And then there's XP x64, which isn't even really based on XP at all (it's a Windows Server derivative).
Has a major upgrade (e.g. Tiger-class) been released since 2001? I would argue that SP2 at least qualifies as such. SP2 introduced tons of new functionality, such as Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and WPA support, the Security Center, a new firewall, major changes in IE, and quite a bit more. Add in WMP9, WMP10, and WMP11, Internet Explorer 7, Windows Movie Maker 2, and all of the other component upgrades, and XP starts to look very different from what it did in 2001.
Is Vista late? Absolutely. It's at least two years, if not three years, behind the ball. Search looked good in Vista in 2003, but after Tiger, suddenly Microsoft is the copycat. And the Windows Sidebar / Gadgets? Apple beat Microsoft to that one as well. 3D accelerated UI? Apple has had it for four years now.
But, you know what? I don't really care that Vista is late. I have been using RC1 on my notebook, and it has been growing on me. It's not just "not bad", it's actually the best Windows release ever (by a good margin) and a welcome update from XP. Things that used to be a crapshoot in XP now just work. The search box on the Start menu is incredibly useful. I no longer find myself trying to look for a program; if I want Photoshop, I just type "photo" and press enter. Aero Glass may be a partial ripoff of Aqua, but, frankly, it looks better than Aqua and it runs great on my GeForce Go 6400.
XP has lasted 5 years, and it will probably continue to last much longer. Businesses don't mind that Microsoft hasn't been able to push out a release - it just meant more time for them to standardize and stabilize their platform without worrying about an upgrade.
XP was good enough for 650 million people. I bet that Vista will be too.
That community doesn't have a chance in the modern computing world. The code these days is too obfuscated from the hardware to really push it in the same way that you can with assembly. On the other hand though it's increasingly difficult to code anything impressive because of the wide arrange of hardware that's out there. You just can't write a demo or intro that'll run on everyone's machine without going through an API layer (operating system), and then you just can't push the hardware like you want to.
Apparently, you haven't heard of the TI-89 (12MHz M68000 / 256k) or the TI-83 (6MHz Z800 / 24k). There are plenty of students who have them (particularly the 83+, but also the 89), and you would never believe how much they loved to play calculator games - particularly good ones.
Despite all the data saying that hybrids do not create a net energy savings, a lot of people treat 'em as an eco-conscious status symbol.
The energy that goes into building a car outstrips, by far, the amount of gasoline you're going to burn during the 'normal' service life.
It's entirely possible that it requires more energy to build a car than it uses in its lifetime. But, did you ever think about this: what happens to an old car when it's scrapped? It gets melted down! Steel is the most recycled material on the planet by mass (just ahead of Aluminum).
You want to prove your point? Give us some data. Many of the "studies" that I have seen are ridiculously biased, including assuming that the battery is non recyclable (not true), that the car comes from all new materials (definitely not true), or that the service life of a Prius is 95,000 miles (also not true).
Even with all the crap its pre-catalytic converter setup will spew out, you'll still do less net harm than the building of a new car.
There are two distinct emissions problems - global climate change (CO2 emissions) and air quality (caused by NOX, particulate, and other emissions). If you live in LA, you know how bad the air quality can be. It would be far, far worse if everyone drove vehicles that were 20 years old.
You want to save energy? Use compact (or normal) fluorescent lights, ride the bus (or a bike), air dry your clothes, and keep the heat and AC turned down. Guess what? That's what I do. But it's easy for me because I'm a college student. If I had to commute 20 miles to work, you had better believe that I would have a car. It would probably be a used Civic or another small vehicle.
But you probably don't live that way. You probably own a vehicle, probably one made in the last 4 years. You probably use an electric dryer, you probably have at least some incandescent bulbs sitting around, and you probably like having the heat at 68+ (instead of 64-) and the AC at 72 (instead of 75+).
You know why people own hybrids? Because they are damn nice cars. The Prius drives better and is quieter than the Corolla. You can leave the AC on without running the motor. It has high-tech features like voice recognition, a touchscreen, backup camera, Bluetooth, and an RF key (usually only available on luxury vehicles). It has low maintenance costs. It's pretty comfortable, has great legroom, and decent cargo room.
If the Prius got 30 MPG, NO ONE WOULD BE COMPLAINING. It would just be another upper-mid-range vehicle. It wouldn't be outrageously priced either, considering the features it has. With leather (package 8), it could probably even be sold as a Lexus.
But since it gets 45MPG, suddenly it's an eco-vehicle. It's a car that only a nut would drive.
If you care about the environment, don't drive a car. But if you are buying a new car, maybe the features and performance of a hybrid will interest you. My parents drive the Prius because they like it, not because of the price of gas (the company pays for the gas for the company-owned minivan anyway).
The Prius is a $25,000 Lexus, minus the leather, heated power seats, and the fancy dealership.
The Civic EX is rated at 30/40 MPG, so if you drive on the highway a lot, you will probably see 33MPG. If you drive a lot in stop-and-go traffic, expect 25-30MPG out of the Civic EX and 40-45 MPG out of the Civic Hybrid.
costs $10,000 more
Apparently you paid $12,600 for your Civic, because the Civic Hybrid has an MSRP of $22,600.
Hint: The lowest-end Civic is $15,010, and it doesn't have air conditioning and has a manual transmission.
Hint 2: The Civic EX, which is comparable in feature set to the Civic Hybrid, costs $18,710, around $5000 less than the (better equipped) Civic Hybrid.
Is the hybrid more expensive? Absolutely. But hybrid technology is not inherently expensive. Transmissions - particularly automatic transmissions - are expensive, complex components with lots of complex precision parts. A high-power planetary-geared hybrid system (e.g. the Prius transmission) has fewer mechanical parts and fewer wear components. The Prius transmission has 12 moving parts, none of which is a clutch or a wear component. There is no torque converter and no clutch.
There is a trend in mechanical engineering of mechanical systems being replaced by simpler and simpler mechanical systems combined with more complex computer systems. Hybrid technology is just another part of that trend.
Blizzard isn't exactly great at running an MMO - every patch brings downtime (always more than was scheduled), lots of bugs, long queues, and server restarts. It was laughable that Blizzard had to take down their game for several hours every week - imagine if Visa or Wal-Mart did something like that.
GNOME has the right model. Release early, release often. Users see actual improvements, developers get actual user feedback. And Ubuntu gets the latest GNOME release in the hands of users.
Not that I'd call Mythbusters "science", but the Spectrum article was complete sensationalist bullshit. Here's a quote:
There is no smoking gun to this story: there is no definitive instance of an air accident known to have been caused by a passenger's use of an electronic device. Nonetheless, although it is impossible to say that such use has contributed to air accidents in the past, the data also make it impossible to rule it out completely.
So, essentially, they are saying that they don't have any evidence indicating that cellphones have actually caused an accident, but they are going to call cellphones "unsafe at any airspeed" because they can't rule out the possibility completely. In science, we call such results "inconclusive".
It gets better, though:
Results from our analysis imply that calls from on board scheduled commercial aircraft in the eastern United States occur at a rate of one to four per flight.
Basically, their analysis boils down to this: despite the fact that cellphones are used on airplanes all the time, and despite the fact that they haven't found a documented case of a cellphone contributing to an accident, they are still going to conclude that cellphones are unsafe. Where's the beef?
The RSX is GeForce 7800-derived, and while it's certainly no slouch, the 360's Xenos has several advantages:
- Xenos has more local memory (the RSX has 256M of local GDDR3 and access to another 256MB through the Cell with higher latency; Xenos has 512M of GDDR3 connected directly to the GPU) - Xenos has 10MB of eDRAM for the framebuffer; this means that antialiasing has a minimal performance impact (particularly since the eDRAM has integrated logic) - The shared memory architecture makes it easy for procedurally-generated content to be roundtripped from the GPU to the CPU and back again without flooding the bus with copies
The 360 has more general-purpose processing power. Cell's SPEs are impressive to say the least, but they aren't general purpose CPUs (for one thing, they can't access main memory directly, nor is their cache transparent to software). Things like AI or gameplay-dependent physics may not be feasible to do with the SPEs (because the calculations result in lots of memory accesses, branches, and other operations that traditional CPUs are good at optimizing). That's where the 360 pulls ahead - while Xenon is actually pretty lame for a modern CPU (compared to say, an Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duo), each core in Xenon is roughly analogous to the PPE in Cell. Xenon has 3 such cores, Cell has one.
All in all, there are advantages to both platforms, but the bottom line is that the 360 is easier to program and the PS3 just isn't going to be that much faster.
True, 2007 will not be the Year of Desktop Linux, but that's only because most people who won't buy Vista have no need to replace their old computers yet. Most of us will be moving games onto Mac or consoles, and abandoning the Windows desktop or laptop.
Windows is like x86. There have always been alternatives, often "better" alternatives. But Windows is still here. 5 versions of Mac OS X haven't really even dented Microsoft's marketshare. Nor has 10 years of KDE or 9 years of GNOME. RedHat couldn't kill XP. Ubuntu couldn't kill XP. Linspire couldn't kill XP.
Have you ever stopped to think, why? Maybe people use Windows because it supports the broadest range of hardware and software. Maybe they use it because it can be managed easily with Active Directory and other third party tools in the enterprise. Maybe they don't want to be locked into a specific platform. Maybe they like the interface.
At the end of the day, Windows lets me turn on the PC and get shit done. Could I use a Mac? Absolutely, but I'm not willing to be locked into a specific brand of hardware (hint: there's no $500 Mac notebook). Could I use Linux? Yes, although I work with graphic designers who use Photoshop (forget using that on Linux), I play WoW, I need to test with IE6/IE7, and a whole host of other reasons.
Linux is 90% there for me. Mac OS is probably even closer. But the $45 my OEM paid for Windows (if you think that large OEMs pay anywhere near retail or even OEM retial price for Windows, think again) just isn't that expensive.
I'm not sure how I feel about Vista. It feels a hell of a lot like XP did when it was released - rushed, incomplete, and full of flaws. But, you know what? It's now 5 years later, and XP really isn't that bad.
It's like that old quote: "There are two types of operating systems - those that everyone hates and those that no one uses."
While this might matter in Japan, where HDTV is standard in most households, in the US only 5 percent of households have an HDTV, and in most cases Dad won't let the kids play games on it, because he bought it to watch sports and pr0n.
Where the hell did you come up with 5%? Did you just pull it out of your ass?
According to this survey done in June 2005, HDTVs are owned by more than 24% of households in the US.
HDTV ownership will probably hit 50% before 2008, because of the crash in LCD TV prices.
The xBox360 doesn't have many games on a standard 480p normal TV that look that much different, and so far all the game reviews I've seen say that most of the games aren't that great.
Apparently you haven't played Dead Rising or Gears of War. The 360 actually had the highest rated launch titles of any of the next generation consoles (see Slashdot article several weeks back).
There are lots of great 360 titles, Live Arcade with original and classic titles, downloadable full demos, movies, trailers, and TV shows, an excellent online matchmaking and friends service, videoconferencing, and a lot more. It's shaping up to be a damn nice console.
While the actual flash technology might be capable of that kind of speed, the entire stack isn't. Compare the MB/s throughput of several hard drives here with the throughput of several USB flash drives here (both benchmarks done with SiSoft's Sandra).
Bottom line: The USB drives are topping out at an average of 8 MB/s, the hard drives are in the 60 MB/s range. That alone puts hard drives an average of 7.5 times faster.
Flash drives have great single block seek times because they don't have to move a head, but most benchmarks show that their ability to move large quantities of data quickly sucks.
You're comparing apples and oranges. USB flash drives are designed to be compact and cheap, not fast. You should compare hard drives with a genuine solid-state-drive, such as Samsung's which can average ~55MB/s.
Well, I've been using hibernation and sleep (S3) both successfully on three different notebooks (Toshiba M200, CL-56, EFL-30), two of which are "generic" Compal-branded (including my current notebook). I've never had hibernation fail, other than the time when I added more memory while the system was hibernated (oops). Nor has S3 ever failed, except when the battery died (and before I set the notebook to wake and hibernate when the battery got low).
S3 worked great under Ubuntu, too, on all three notebooks (though not with hardware 3D on the CL-56; ATI's Linux drivers were broken at that time).
Now, to be fair, all of those notebooks did have Intel CPUs (Pentium-M Banias/Dothan), wireless controllers (Pro 2200 / 2915), and chipsets (855 / 915 Express). But so do a lot of other PC notebooks (anything Centrino branded).
friend of mine has a (roughly) 5 year old VW Jetta, and he gets 49 mpg at 70 mph. Better than a hybred, without the hassle of throwing away a bunch of batteries in a handful of years.
I don't know what is funnier, the fact that you misspelled hybrid or the fact that you got so much wrong.
Diesel vehicles get better fuel economy largely because diesel contains more energy. About 30% more, in fact.
The important question is not MPG, it's miles vs. emissions, both greenhouse (CO2) and smog-forming (NOx, SOx, etc). In the case of the latter, many Diesel vehicles perform poorly (the Jetta your friend drives, for example, could not be sold as a new vehicle in California anymore because it doesn't meet the minimum emission standards).
Hybrid vehicles vary all over the map. Our Prius averages around 55-60MPG on the highway at 65MPH, and around 50MPG at 75MPH. That's better than the Jetta, which is actually a smaller vehicle.
Hybrid batteries are not trashed. Ni-MH batteries, like those in every modern hybrid, contain valuable metals (particularly Ni) which make recycling very, very attractive. Toyota, for example, even has a buyback program.
Hybrid technology and diesel engines are not mutually exclusive. Combined, they could achieve even better perforamance.
Predicted battery longevity for the Prius is 10+ years, possibly as long as the useful service life of the vehicle. HV battery cycles are very different from EV battery cycles.
Really? In the U.S. it's pretty common to have unlimited Internet access for $40/month. Now, of course there are different definitions of "unlimited", but for the sake of argument let's say that I download for 1 hour every night - that's pretty reasonable, right? With a 256 kbit Internet connection (most people would have even faster than that) I could download a little over 100 MB in an hour. In a month, that'd be 3 GB. $40/month divided by 3 GB is 0.0013 cents per kilobyte. That's 1/1000 of a cent (not of a dollar), or less than what the guy in the story was quoted.
FYI, but your numbers are a bit off. Comcast, for example, is "soft-capped" (e.g. they send you a nasty letter) at ~100GB/mo (varies by region), which, at their current rate of $42/mo, works out to $0.00000042 (0.000042 cents) per KB (SI units).
At.002 cents/KB, that's 47 times more expensive. At $.002/KB, Verizon is 4700 times more expensive.
The PS3 is actually shaping up to be a pretty nice console. Blu-Ray, Linux support, HDMI, nice CPU/GPU, USB/Bluetooth for controllers. It also seems to be pretty quiet, more so than the 360.
If Sony had released the high-end system at $500 (low end at $400), and hadn't made so many stupid blunders (no resolution scaling, lack of an online plan, limited availability), I think that the PS3 would be creaming the 360 right now.
There's nothing wrong with the PS3 that software patches and price cuts can't help. Unfortunately, as soon as Sony actually gets availability (early next year?), you can bet that MS will be ready with a $300 die-shrunk, cooler, and quieter Premium 360.
Its peculiar architecture means that it's difficult to make use of its full power for many types of tasks (don't ask me why they're selling Cell-based blade servers; it doesn't make much sense to me); but if you have an application that fits with what the Cell is optimized for, that thing is ungodly fast.
So is a GPU. So is a DSP. So is an FPGA. So is an ASIC.
There have always been ICs that are "insane" compared to CPUs - the CPU's power comes not from its raw performance, but in its ease of programmability and flexibility. My GeForce 6200 can do more GFLOPS than the fastest Core 2 Duo, but you're not going to run Linux on it.
Cell is a very interesting piece of hardware, and it will no doubt see wide use in many different applications. But calling it a "revolution" is just plain wrong. It's just a better, more integrated version of what we have been doing for years.
Quartz's ability to offload to the GPU much of the processing needed for window management was a major factor in my switch to the Mac a few years ago
Just to be clear, Windows has been accelerating desktop composition with the GPU since Windows 2000. Most modern GPUs support layered windows and VMR9 (video mixing/scaling) in hardware - try it on XP some time (you need a program to enable layered windows, like Glass2k, and a player that supports VMR9, like Media Center or Media Player Classic).
At a minimum, hardware bit blitting is supported. Try running XP (or Linux, for that matter) with unaccelerated VESA drivers. It's not pretty.
Corporate deployment of Vista will be slow because corporate deployment of new software is always slow. Many businesses are still using RHEL3 or, worse yet, even Red Hat Linux. Upgrading needs to be planned, and that takes time and money. Windows 2000 is still a big force in the enterprise, and it will be years before Vista starts to displace XP in businesses.
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A typical CFL conatins about 4mg of mercury, compared to 500mg in a mercury thermometer or 3000mg in a mercury-switch thermometer.
In fact, if you use coal power, using a compact fluorescent bulb actually reduces the amount of mercury released into the environment.
7 years is common. Most of ours purchased over the last 10 years are still going. The Home Depot house brand (n:vision) has a 5-year warranty, IIRC.
This varies by brand. Note that you can replace a 60-Watt bulb with a 19-Watt CFL if you want to be sure that you exceed the brightness of the old bulb (most "60W equiv" CFLs are actually 13W or 14W). You're still saving 41W.
Also consider "daylight" CFLs; I personally prefer the whiter specrum they have.
Such a feature has been available in XP since (at least) SP2. I'm sure that there are Kernel modules that disallow running certain programs by hash.
But these "protections" ultimately don't work very well. It doesn't take much to drastically alter the object code of a compiled program.
Your "example" problem doesn't actually exist. PVP-OVM doesn't work that way - it downsamples video as part of the VMR9 output path, not by changing the screen resolution or blurring the entire screen.
Let me reiterate: PVP-OVM (video) does not "down-res" your entire display. PUMA (audio) does not "down-res" your display or downsample your audio.
Has anyone who is complaining about Vista's DRM features actually USED the product?
What the hell is this article even about? The new DRM features in Vista include:
- PVP-UAB (sends video encrypted across the PCIe bus)
- PVP-OPM (HDCP / ICT support)
That's it. Protected User Mode Audio is just an update to the Secure Audio Path that's already in Windows XP. Windows Media DRM isn't new, either - every copy of Windows XP already has it.
I am running Windows Vista right now. The quality of non-DRM content is not "reduced" by Vista. 1080p H.264 videos still play in 1080p. MP3s sound just like they did under XP. I can still record from line in. WMP11 still rips to unprotected MP3s or WMAs. I can still rip DVDs. My XVID/AC3 videos still play. My no-CD patched games still work. FairUse4WM still runs and can still crack WM-DRM.
Vista has meant absolutely NOTHING for me regarding DRM. DRM-encumbered content is still as easy to break as ever under Vista. You can still write, distribute, and use DRM circumvention programs using Vista.
There is very little new as far as DRM goes in Vista. This isn't an XBOX 360.
What the hell are you talking about? There is no such revocation system in Vista - the only thing close is the fact that drivers must be signed in the x64 version.
Microsoft could certainly push an upgrade that breaks applications explicitly, but this would be blatantly anticompetitive.
FairUse4WM works fine in Vista, as does nearly every DRM circumvention program that I've tried.
I'm running Vista on a system with 768MB of PC3200, a 2.66GHz P4 (Northwood) and a GeForce 6200. Considering that Vista runs fine with any of the recent IGPs on the market (GeForce 6100/6150, Radeon Xpress, and Intel GMA950), and considering that 1GB of memory is pretty standard for midrange computers, no, Vista's requirements aren't too bad.
If you have purchased a computer in the last three years with 1GB of memory, you can run Vista, at least in the perfectly fine Aero Basic mode. If it has a newer IGP or practically any modern graphics card, you should be able to run Aero Glass.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released on April 29, 2005. That's over 18 months after Panther (October 24, 2003). Morover, Leopard isn't due out until next year - and Tiger is already 17 months old.
Looks like Apple is on an 18-24 month release schedule, not a 12 month release schedule.
That depends on what you mean by an update. Under your terminology, IE7 and Windows Media Player 11 both qualify as "updates", if not "upgrades". So does Media Center 2005, Tablet PC 2005, Microsoft Update, WGA (not that this adds good functionality, mind you), and a whole mess of other things.
And then there's XP x64, which isn't even really based on XP at all (it's a Windows Server derivative).
Has a major upgrade (e.g. Tiger-class) been released since 2001? I would argue that SP2 at least qualifies as such. SP2 introduced tons of new functionality, such as Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and WPA support, the Security Center, a new firewall, major changes in IE, and quite a bit more. Add in WMP9, WMP10, and WMP11, Internet Explorer 7, Windows Movie Maker 2, and all of the other component upgrades, and XP starts to look very different from what it did in 2001.
Is Vista late? Absolutely. It's at least two years, if not three years, behind the ball. Search looked good in Vista in 2003, but after Tiger, suddenly Microsoft is the copycat. And the Windows Sidebar / Gadgets? Apple beat Microsoft to that one as well. 3D accelerated UI? Apple has had it for four years now.
But, you know what? I don't really care that Vista is late. I have been using RC1 on my notebook, and it has been growing on me. It's not just "not bad", it's actually the best Windows release ever (by a good margin) and a welcome update from XP. Things that used to be a crapshoot in XP now just work. The search box on the Start menu is incredibly useful. I no longer find myself trying to look for a program; if I want Photoshop, I just type "photo" and press enter. Aero Glass may be a partial ripoff of Aqua, but, frankly, it looks better than Aqua and it runs great on my GeForce Go 6400.
XP has lasted 5 years, and it will probably continue to last much longer. Businesses don't mind that Microsoft hasn't been able to push out a release - it just meant more time for them to standardize and stabilize their platform without worrying about an upgrade.
XP was good enough for 650 million people. I bet that Vista will be too.
Apparently, you haven't heard of the TI-89 (12MHz M68000 / 256k) or the TI-83 (6MHz Z800 / 24k). There are plenty of students who have them (particularly the 83+, but also the 89), and you would never believe how much they loved to play calculator games - particularly good ones.
It's entirely possible that it requires more energy to build a car than it uses in its lifetime. But, did you ever think about this: what happens to an old car when it's scrapped? It gets melted down! Steel is the most recycled material on the planet by mass (just ahead of Aluminum).
You want to prove your point? Give us some data. Many of the "studies" that I have seen are ridiculously biased, including assuming that the battery is non recyclable (not true), that the car comes from all new materials (definitely not true), or that the service life of a Prius is 95,000 miles (also not true).
There are two distinct emissions problems - global climate change (CO2 emissions) and air quality (caused by NOX, particulate, and other emissions). If you live in LA, you know how bad the air quality can be. It would be far, far worse if everyone drove vehicles that were 20 years old.
You want to save energy? Use compact (or normal) fluorescent lights, ride the bus (or a bike), air dry your clothes, and keep the heat and AC turned down. Guess what? That's what I do. But it's easy for me because I'm a college student. If I had to commute 20 miles to work, you had better believe that I would have a car. It would probably be a used Civic or another small vehicle.
But you probably don't live that way. You probably own a vehicle, probably one made in the last 4 years. You probably use an electric dryer, you probably have at least some incandescent bulbs sitting around, and you probably like having the heat at 68+ (instead of 64-) and the AC at 72 (instead of 75+).
You know why people own hybrids? Because they are damn nice cars. The Prius drives better and is quieter than the Corolla. You can leave the AC on without running the motor. It has high-tech features like voice recognition, a touchscreen, backup camera, Bluetooth, and an RF key (usually only available on luxury vehicles). It has low maintenance costs. It's pretty comfortable, has great legroom, and decent cargo room.
If the Prius got 30 MPG, NO ONE WOULD BE COMPLAINING. It would just be another upper-mid-range vehicle. It wouldn't be outrageously priced either, considering the features it has. With leather (package 8), it could probably even be sold as a Lexus.
But since it gets 45MPG, suddenly it's an eco-vehicle. It's a car that only a nut would drive.
If you care about the environment, don't drive a car. But if you are buying a new car, maybe the features and performance of a hybrid will interest you. My parents drive the Prius because they like it, not because of the price of gas (the company pays for the gas for the company-owned minivan anyway).
The Prius is a $25,000 Lexus, minus the leather, heated power seats, and the fancy dealership.
The Civic EX is rated at 30/40 MPG, so if you drive on the highway a lot, you will probably see 33MPG. If you drive a lot in stop-and-go traffic, expect 25-30MPG out of the Civic EX and 40-45 MPG out of the Civic Hybrid.
Apparently you paid $12,600 for your Civic, because the Civic Hybrid has an MSRP of $22,600.
Hint: The lowest-end Civic is $15,010, and it doesn't have air conditioning and has a manual transmission.
Hint 2: The Civic EX, which is comparable in feature set to the Civic Hybrid, costs $18,710, around $5000 less than the (better equipped) Civic Hybrid.
Is the hybrid more expensive? Absolutely. But hybrid technology is not inherently expensive. Transmissions - particularly automatic transmissions - are expensive, complex components with lots of complex precision parts. A high-power planetary-geared hybrid system (e.g. the Prius transmission) has fewer mechanical parts and fewer wear components. The Prius transmission has 12 moving parts, none of which is a clutch or a wear component. There is no torque converter and no clutch.
There is a trend in mechanical engineering of mechanical systems being replaced by simpler and simpler mechanical systems combined with more complex computer systems. Hybrid technology is just another part of that trend.
Blizzard isn't exactly great at running an MMO - every patch brings downtime (always more than was scheduled), lots of bugs, long queues, and server restarts. It was laughable that Blizzard had to take down their game for several hours every week - imagine if Visa or Wal-Mart did something like that.
Welcome to the 90s Blizzard.
GNOME has the right model. Release early, release often. Users see actual improvements, developers get actual user feedback. And Ubuntu gets the latest GNOME release in the hands of users.
Seems to make sense to me.
The RSX is GeForce 7800-derived, and while it's certainly no slouch, the 360's Xenos has several advantages:
- Xenos has more local memory (the RSX has 256M of local GDDR3 and access to another 256MB through the Cell with higher latency; Xenos has 512M of GDDR3 connected directly to the GPU)
- Xenos has 10MB of eDRAM for the framebuffer; this means that antialiasing has a minimal performance impact (particularly since the eDRAM has integrated logic)
- The shared memory architecture makes it easy for procedurally-generated content to be roundtripped from the GPU to the CPU and back again without flooding the bus with copies
The 360 has more general-purpose processing power. Cell's SPEs are impressive to say the least, but they aren't general purpose CPUs (for one thing, they can't access main memory directly, nor is their cache transparent to software). Things like AI or gameplay-dependent physics may not be feasible to do with the SPEs (because the calculations result in lots of memory accesses, branches, and other operations that traditional CPUs are good at optimizing). That's where the 360 pulls ahead - while Xenon is actually pretty lame for a modern CPU (compared to say, an Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duo), each core in Xenon is roughly analogous to the PPE in Cell. Xenon has 3 such cores, Cell has one.
All in all, there are advantages to both platforms, but the bottom line is that the 360 is easier to program and the PS3 just isn't going to be that much faster.
Windows is like x86. There have always been alternatives, often "better" alternatives. But Windows is still here. 5 versions of Mac OS X haven't really even dented Microsoft's marketshare. Nor has 10 years of KDE or 9 years of GNOME. RedHat couldn't kill XP. Ubuntu couldn't kill XP. Linspire couldn't kill XP.
Have you ever stopped to think, why? Maybe people use Windows because it supports the broadest range of hardware and software. Maybe they use it because it can be managed easily with Active Directory and other third party tools in the enterprise. Maybe they don't want to be locked into a specific platform. Maybe they like the interface.
At the end of the day, Windows lets me turn on the PC and get shit done. Could I use a Mac? Absolutely, but I'm not willing to be locked into a specific brand of hardware (hint: there's no $500 Mac notebook). Could I use Linux? Yes, although I work with graphic designers who use Photoshop (forget using that on Linux), I play WoW, I need to test with IE6/IE7, and a whole host of other reasons.
Linux is 90% there for me. Mac OS is probably even closer. But the $45 my OEM paid for Windows (if you think that large OEMs pay anywhere near retail or even OEM retial price for Windows, think again) just isn't that expensive.
I'm not sure how I feel about Vista. It feels a hell of a lot like XP did when it was released - rushed, incomplete, and full of flaws. But, you know what? It's now 5 years later, and XP really isn't that bad.
It's like that old quote: "There are two types of operating systems - those that everyone hates and those that no one uses."
Where the hell did you come up with 5%? Did you just pull it out of your ass?
According to this survey done in June 2005, HDTVs are owned by more than 24% of households in the US.
HDTV ownership will probably hit 50% before 2008, because of the crash in LCD TV prices.
Apparently you haven't played Dead Rising or Gears of War. The 360 actually had the highest rated launch titles of any of the next generation consoles (see Slashdot article several weeks back).
There are lots of great 360 titles, Live Arcade with original and classic titles, downloadable full demos, movies, trailers, and TV shows, an excellent online matchmaking and friends service, videoconferencing, and a lot more. It's shaping up to be a damn nice console.
You're comparing apples and oranges. USB flash drives are designed to be compact and cheap, not fast. You should compare hard drives with a genuine solid-state-drive, such as Samsung's which can average ~55MB/s.
Well, I've been using hibernation and sleep (S3) both successfully on three different notebooks (Toshiba M200, CL-56, EFL-30), two of which are "generic" Compal-branded (including my current notebook). I've never had hibernation fail, other than the time when I added more memory while the system was hibernated (oops). Nor has S3 ever failed, except when the battery died (and before I set the notebook to wake and hibernate when the battery got low).
S3 worked great under Ubuntu, too, on all three notebooks (though not with hardware 3D on the CL-56; ATI's Linux drivers were broken at that time).
Now, to be fair, all of those notebooks did have Intel CPUs (Pentium-M Banias/Dothan), wireless controllers (Pro 2200 / 2915), and chipsets (855 / 915 Express). But so do a lot of other PC notebooks (anything Centrino branded).
I don't know what is funnier, the fact that you misspelled hybrid or the fact that you got so much wrong.
FYI, but your numbers are a bit off. Comcast, for example, is "soft-capped" (e.g. they send you a nasty letter) at ~100GB/mo (varies by region), which, at their current rate of $42/mo, works out to $0.00000042 (0.000042 cents) per KB (SI units).
At
XP already has IPv6.
The PS3 is actually shaping up to be a pretty nice console. Blu-Ray, Linux support, HDMI, nice CPU/GPU, USB/Bluetooth for controllers. It also seems to be pretty quiet, more so than the 360.
If Sony had released the high-end system at $500 (low end at $400), and hadn't made so many stupid blunders (no resolution scaling, lack of an online plan, limited availability), I think that the PS3 would be creaming the 360 right now.
There's nothing wrong with the PS3 that software patches and price cuts can't help. Unfortunately, as soon as Sony actually gets availability (early next year?), you can bet that MS will be ready with a $300 die-shrunk, cooler, and quieter Premium 360.
So is a GPU. So is a DSP. So is an FPGA. So is an ASIC.
There have always been ICs that are "insane" compared to CPUs - the CPU's power comes not from its raw performance, but in its ease of programmability and flexibility. My GeForce 6200 can do more GFLOPS than the fastest Core 2 Duo, but you're not going to run Linux on it.
Cell is a very interesting piece of hardware, and it will no doubt see wide use in many different applications. But calling it a "revolution" is just plain wrong. It's just a better, more integrated version of what we have been doing for years.
Nowhere. But the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive ($200)
works just fine with a PC!
Looks like you'll be buying HD-DVD.
Just to be clear, Windows has been accelerating desktop composition with the GPU since Windows 2000. Most modern GPUs support layered windows and VMR9 (video mixing/scaling) in hardware - try it on XP some time (you need a program to enable layered windows, like Glass2k, and a player that supports VMR9, like Media Center or Media Player Classic).
At a minimum, hardware bit blitting is supported. Try running XP (or Linux, for that matter) with unaccelerated VESA drivers. It's not pretty.
Corporate deployment of Vista will be slow because corporate deployment of new software is always slow. Many businesses are still using RHEL3 or, worse yet, even Red Hat Linux. Upgrading needs to be planned, and that takes time and money. Windows 2000 is still a big force in the enterprise, and it will be years before Vista starts to displace XP in businesses.