Re:Lifetime Warranty?
on
VisionTek Folds
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· Score: 3, Informative
The pro cards generally had faster cores, higher quality memory and capacitors, better warranties, and drivers that were optimized for professional work. The drivers could be used on regular Geforce cards by doing some precision saudering, but the other benefits didn't materialize doing so.
At least they're not like hard drive manufacturers who LIE about their sizes.
I'm not a big fan of the way HDD manufacturers label their products, but there are legitimate reasons for doing it the way they do.
For one, hard drives are not organized or built around binary trees, so it is more convenient to use the definition of "megabyte" which refers to 1,000,000 bytes rather than 2^10 bytes. Additionally, one could argue that using "megabyte" to refer to 2^10 bytes is actually the measurement that is lying because mega, giga, tera, exa, etc. are all standard prefixes that refer to powers of 1,000; not powers of 2^10. Computers simply adopted these prefixes because 2^10 happens to conveniently be fairly close to what a real "kilobyte" would be. (1000 vs 1024)
This may seem like a trivial and silly waste of time, and it probably is, but the number 196 is interesting. Why? Read this quote:
Whether all numbers eventually become palindromic under this process is unproved, but all numbers less than 10,000 have been tested. Every one becomes a palindrome in a relatively small number of steps (of the 900 3-digit numbers, 90 are palindromes to start with and 735 of the remainder take less than 5 reversals and additions to yield a palindrome). Except, that is, for 196. This number had been carried through 50,000 reversals and additions by P. C. Leyland, yielding a number of more than 26,000 digits without producing a palindrome. Later, P. Anderton continued the process up to 70,928 digits without encountering a palindrome.
ALL numbers up to 10,000 become palindromes very quickly... except for the number 196?
Do you research every engine part and electronics component of the cars you buy? Do you inspect the materials under the plaster and wood of a new house?
Even then, ask yourself: Are there any *unreliable* but popular sources for hardware information? No? Read a review from Tom's Hardware or C|net recently?
Applications that are "specifically optimized for the Pentium IV" generally are identical but use the SSE2 instructions. Sometimes they are compiled around some of the P4's rediculous weaknesses, such as it's incredibly slow handling of bit shift instructions. (8 clocks, IIRC on the Pentium IV. The Athlon can do up to three per clock
Anyone can tack on vector instructions to a CPU. The problem is the underlying architecture of the P4, which isn't as easy to fix.
The AMD Hammer series will have those same SSE2 instructions AND a superior architecture (to even the AthlonXP).
While most Slashdot readers see through computer marketing hype, the average person (you know, the other 99%) doesn't have the time or the inclination to do real research on every PC component they purchase. Is that Intel's fault? No. Is it Intel's moral responsibility to at the very least not imply that a 1.8GHz P4 isn't faster than a 1.6GHz Athlon, or a 1.4GHz P3 Tualatin? Yes. How many advertisements from the companies in question had lines like, "Tired of that old 1GHz PC? Get the latest 1.5GHz screamer!"
I believe that the primary complaint was that people were being misled into thinking that, say, a 1.6GHz P4 system is 60% faster than a 1GHz Athlon or P3, which is definitely not the case unless the only application the system runs is Q3, or a few of the rather limited number that the P4 runs very well. While I don't believe any vendor really explicitly stated anything similar to "a 2.0GHz system is necessarily twice as fast as a 1.0GHz system!", the companies did imply such a conclusion by comparing clockspeeds (without coming to any conclusion except the higher clockspeed is fast, though not saying "faster") or by using ads with lines that implied the same.
One can be misleading without blatantly lying.
Whether the companies in question were just unethical or did something illegal is the question. I would hazard a guess that the lawsuit has no strong legal grounds.
Does this mean that JC (John Carmack, not the other one) has caved in and will be using Direct3D, or can he use OpenGL without Microsoft throwing a fit?
"The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000."
It says "$20,000" not $22,000" (though they may have changed the story. It is C|net after all.
Air New Zealand plans to use 150 Linux servers per mainframe, but the company tested the ability to run 10,000 copies of Linux simultaneously doing real work, Care said. 10,000 copies on one machine. Damn.
On desktop computers, Houston said that StarOffice or its open-source sibling OpenOffice may be "good enough" for basic tasks but are harder to use than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's studies of the 11 most frequently used operations in Microsoft Office took on average 2.5 times less time than in StarOffice, he said.
1) Did anyone consider that, maybe, those users were experienced in MS Office and used to it'ss way of doing those things? Not that I think OpenOffice is better than MS Office (all things considered) but sheesh.
2) My grandmother finds OO easier to use. It doesn't try to guess what you want to do all the time and force you to go with it's idea. For example, making bulleted lists with 1-line separations is a PITA for an inexperienced Word user. It works fine in OO, and because many other things work the way she tells OO to do them, she uses OO exclusively despite having Office 2K. There are still the standard problems reading MS Office's format though.
No, actually I thought that it supported multiple drives, but like parallel ATA only one could be accessed at a time, and that SATA was able to queue commands similar to SCSI to improve performance in this situation. I'll have to read up on it a bit more I suppose, thanks for the info.
RAID. ATA100 and ATA133 are already a major bottleneck compared to real server array setups (which use SCSI). 150MB/sec is just another bottleneck. Those high maximum rates are not meant to be useful for current single drives. Remember, people made the same complaints when ATA66 came out. Now we have drives that are significantly faster than ATA33--it's just a matter of who gets ahead first, the interface standard or the hardware.
Doesn't sound as good as the Klipsch Promedia? Ouch... The ProMedia series is famous for being very powerful for the money, but the sound quality is definitely below par. The mids are week and "flubbery", the highs are slightly colorized and overly enthusiastic. The lows are nice, but the transition from tweeters to subwoofer is off a bit. Monsoon speakers are good for those who want real sound quality from a PC at a sane (in fact, even cheaper than the Klipsch) price point. They are nowhere near as powerful though. Klipsch are for gamers and those who watch DVDs on their PC, where accurate sound reproduction takes a back seat to thumping. They are not good for the music listener at that price point.
I have heard (no pun intended) that the new 5.1 Klipsch system solves many of these problems.
Note that I have nothing against Klipsch--in fact, my home theater system uses KSB 3.1's, but the ProMedias do have their weaknesses.
Just in case you younger folks don't recall exactly just how long ago BitBoys started promising hardware, there were quite a few people that I talked to that decided to delay purchasing a 3DFX Voodoo 2(!!) because the BitBoys card was "right around the corner.
This is a whole different realm of late, approachable only by the likes of HURD and possibly Duke Nukem as mentioned earlier.
I believe that the press doesn't like the term "cracker" because the average reader would too easily confuse it with the small bread wafer of the same name.:)
Defcon used to be an "underground" convention where hacks and stories were openly shared as if everyday conversation. The events, which were fewer, were far more interesting and had fewer Joe Computer User's. The last time I went to Defcon, 2/3 of the "Hacker's Jeopardy" questions had nothing to do with computing whatsoever (causing a friend's team to lose--they answered the obscure encryption questions correctly but knew nothing of politics and pre-WW1 history history) and almost nobody was able to break into any of the servers in CTF. There were entirely too many people on LSD and just about everyone was too drunk to speak coherantly. There were some interesting talks and some interesting people, but Defcon is becoming just another computer technology and open source convention. Give a talk about breaking in to a system and the feds, which are 3/4 of the people there, will have a discussion with you. If any of this has changed, please post.
Note that Defcon is still the absolute best place to get clothing, besides maybe ThinkGeek.
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The pro cards generally had faster cores, higher quality memory and capacitors, better warranties, and drivers that were optimized for professional work. The drivers could be used on regular Geforce cards by doing some precision saudering, but the other benefits didn't materialize doing so.
One more note is that whether people should research their purchases or not, misleading advertising is still misleading advertising.
That's true. I need to stop posting right after I get up. :)
At least they're not like hard drive manufacturers who LIE about their sizes.
I'm not a big fan of the way HDD manufacturers label their products, but there are legitimate reasons for doing it the way they do.
For one, hard drives are not organized or built around binary trees, so it is more convenient to use the definition of "megabyte" which refers to 1,000,000 bytes rather than 2^10 bytes. Additionally, one could argue that using "megabyte" to refer to 2^10 bytes is actually the measurement that is lying because mega, giga, tera, exa, etc. are all standard prefixes that refer to powers of 1,000; not powers of 2^10. Computers simply adopted these prefixes because 2^10 happens to conveniently be fairly close to what a real "kilobyte" would be. (1000 vs 1024)
This may seem like a trivial and silly waste of time, and it probably is, but the number 196 is interesting. Why? Read this quote:
Whether all numbers eventually become palindromic under this process is unproved, but all numbers less than 10,000 have been tested. Every one becomes a palindrome in a relatively small number of steps (of the 900 3-digit numbers, 90 are palindromes to start with and 735 of the remainder take less than 5 reversals and additions to yield a palindrome). Except, that is, for 196. This number had been carried through 50,000 reversals and additions by P. C. Leyland, yielding a number of more than 26,000 digits without producing a palindrome. Later, P. Anderton continued the process up to 70,928 digits without encountering a palindrome.
ALL numbers up to 10,000 become palindromes very quickly... except for the number 196?
Do you research every engine part and electronics component of the cars you buy? Do you inspect the materials under the plaster and wood of a new house?
Even then, ask yourself: Are there any *unreliable* but popular sources for hardware information? No?
Read a review from Tom's Hardware or C|net recently?
Applications that are "specifically optimized for the Pentium IV" generally are identical but use the SSE2 instructions. Sometimes they are compiled around some of the P4's rediculous weaknesses, such as it's incredibly slow handling of bit shift instructions. (8 clocks, IIRC on the Pentium IV. The Athlon can do up to three per clock
Anyone can tack on vector instructions to a CPU. The problem is the underlying architecture of the P4, which isn't as easy to fix.
The AMD Hammer series will have those same SSE2 instructions AND a superior architecture (to even the AthlonXP).
Where will the Pentium IV be then?
While most Slashdot readers see through computer marketing hype, the average person (you know, the other 99%) doesn't have the time or the inclination to do real research on every PC component they purchase. Is that Intel's fault? No. Is it Intel's moral responsibility to at the very least not imply that a 1.8GHz P4 isn't faster than a 1.6GHz Athlon, or a 1.4GHz P3 Tualatin? Yes.
How many advertisements from the companies in question had lines like, "Tired of that old 1GHz PC? Get the latest 1.5GHz screamer!"
I believe that the primary complaint was that people were being misled into thinking that, say, a 1.6GHz P4 system is 60% faster than a 1GHz Athlon or P3, which is definitely not the case unless the only application the system runs is Q3, or a few of the rather limited number that the P4 runs very well. While I don't believe any vendor really explicitly stated anything similar to "a 2.0GHz system is necessarily twice as fast as a 1.0GHz system!", the companies did imply such a conclusion by comparing clockspeeds (without coming to any conclusion except the higher clockspeed is fast, though not saying "faster") or by using ads with lines that implied the same.
One can be misleading without blatantly lying.
Whether the companies in question were just unethical or did something illegal is the question. I would hazard a guess that the lawsuit has no strong legal grounds.
Does this mean that JC (John Carmack, not the other one) has caved in and will be using Direct3D, or can he use OpenGL without Microsoft throwing a fit?
"The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000."
It says "$20,000" not $22,000" (though they may have changed the story. It is C|net after all.
Air New Zealand plans to use 150 Linux servers per mainframe, but the company tested the ability to run 10,000 copies of Linux simultaneously doing real work, Care said.
10,000 copies on one machine. Damn.
On desktop computers, Houston said that StarOffice or its open-source sibling OpenOffice may be "good enough" for basic tasks but are harder to use than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's studies of the 11 most frequently used operations in Microsoft Office took on average 2.5 times less time than in StarOffice, he said.
1) Did anyone consider that, maybe, those users were experienced in MS Office and used to it'ss way of doing those things? Not that I think OpenOffice is better than MS Office (all things considered) but sheesh.
2) My grandmother finds OO easier to use. It doesn't try to guess what you want to do all the time and force you to go with it's idea. For example, making bulleted lists with 1-line separations is a PITA for an inexperienced Word user. It works fine in OO, and because many other things work the way she tells OO to do them, she uses OO exclusively despite having Office 2K. There are still the standard problems reading MS Office's format though.
No, actually I thought that it supported multiple drives, but like parallel ATA only one could be accessed at a time, and that SATA was able to queue commands similar to SCSI to improve performance in this situation. I'll have to read up on it a bit more I suppose, thanks for the info.
RAID. ATA100 and ATA133 are already a major bottleneck compared to real server array setups (which use SCSI). 150MB/sec is just another bottleneck.
Those high maximum rates are not meant to be useful for current single drives. Remember, people made the same complaints when ATA66 came out. Now we have drives that are significantly faster than ATA33--it's just a matter of who gets ahead first, the interface standard or the hardware.
"It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"
Doesn't sound as good as the Klipsch Promedia? Ouch...
The ProMedia series is famous for being very powerful for the money, but the sound quality is definitely below par. The mids are week and "flubbery", the highs are slightly colorized and overly enthusiastic. The lows are nice, but the transition from tweeters to subwoofer is off a bit. Monsoon speakers are good for those who want real sound quality from a PC at a sane (in fact, even cheaper than the Klipsch) price point. They are nowhere near as powerful though. Klipsch are for gamers and those who watch DVDs on their PC, where accurate sound reproduction takes a back seat to thumping. They are not good for the music listener at that price point. I have heard (no pun intended) that the new 5.1 Klipsch system solves many of these problems. Note that I have nothing against Klipsch--in fact, my home theater system uses KSB 3.1's, but the ProMedias do have their weaknesses.
That's "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
"Where do you want to go today?" is Microsoft's.
First bird that came to my mind: Turkey Buzzard.
No, that would be Microsoft Airlines.
As we all know, right now is the best time to be in the airline business...
Seriously though, I wish them intelligence. I'd wish them luck, but intelligence seems to be so much more scarce.
Whoa, imagine a beo--No, must... not...
I bet their luck will be reversed if you tell them about Freshmeat. ;-)
This post should be moderated up.
Actually, funding is almost always a challenge in the government. That they fund so many, many projects and agencies is what makes them spend so much.
Just in case you younger folks don't recall exactly just how long ago BitBoys started promising hardware, there were quite a few people that I talked to that decided to delay purchasing a 3DFX Voodoo 2(!!) because the BitBoys card was "right around the corner.
This is a whole different realm of late, approachable only by the likes of HURD and possibly Duke Nukem as mentioned earlier.
No, you've gotta wait until 2.4.19's been tested for a few years.
Now we just need to make global laws that mandate prison and castration, and probably torture, for repeat college degree/pornography spammers. :)
I believe that the press doesn't like the term "cracker" because the average reader would too easily confuse it with the small bread wafer of the same name. :)
Defcon used to be an "underground" convention where hacks and stories were openly shared as if everyday conversation. The events, which were fewer, were far more interesting and had fewer Joe Computer User's.
The last time I went to Defcon, 2/3 of the "Hacker's Jeopardy" questions had nothing to do with computing whatsoever (causing a friend's team to lose--they answered the obscure encryption questions correctly but knew nothing of politics and pre-WW1 history history) and almost nobody was able to break into any of the servers in CTF.
There were entirely too many people on LSD and just about everyone was too drunk to speak coherantly. There were some interesting talks and some interesting people, but Defcon is becoming just another computer technology and open source convention. Give a talk about breaking in to a system and the feds, which are 3/4 of the people there, will have a discussion with you.
If any of this has changed, please post.
Note that Defcon is still the absolute best place to get clothing, besides maybe ThinkGeek.