We have identified over one million lines of our IP in Microsoft's source code. While I cannot share most of them because they are a trade secret, here are three of the most glaring examples:
#include
for( ; ; )
if(!stop) {
Many of these lines have been copied verbatim several thousand times. We do not want to, but are forced to sue Microsoft for unlicensed use of our intellectual property. We will institute a licensing program called gplSource which will allow Windows users to obtain the legal rights to use our IP. This cost will be significantly discounted to early adopters. Already at least three Fortune 500 companies have seen the validity of our claims and have paid these fees on a per-CPU basis to continue using Windows. While we cannot divulge their names, they do exist. Really!
Apparently, in addition to Windows, the Linux source code has been leaked as well. Fortunately for all of us, a little known company which apparently owns the IP to Unix, C++, space flight, and breathing has kindly made it legal to use their IP, for a fee.
Re:Really? Infamous?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't believe that the parent post was intended as flamebait, saying that KDE has won no real awards, but that he may have been saying that it doesn't matter if any awards were won--it is a useful piece of software, and that is what matters.
Considering the GW Bush has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, can you really take many awards seriously?
An important note: Many problems with installations are from people ordering their stuff from a backwater sleezeball company. I recommend you get your stuff directly from DirecTV or from a reputable vendor like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. Calling 1-800-DIRECTV does not necessarily get you to DirecTV itself! It is a national # setup to route you to a local dealer. If you want to actually get your stuff from direcTV, call the general customer service phone # at 800-355-5000 and do whatever you need to do to talk to someone from the phone menu. It doesn't matter who. Then, ask for the sales department. They will ask if you have a credit card (say YES) and if you have ever had DirecTV before (say NO).
Disclaimer: Until just recently, I worked for DirecTV (left of my own volition for a more flexible job). That said, here is my honest opinion and/or observations about your questions:
Comcast is the local cable provider in my area, and are playing TV spots about how satellite TV signals can be lost when it rains, when the wind blows, and even when the dog sneezes (I'm sure the dog sneezing excuse in the commercials are more for humor than fact).
This is bullshit. Many cable companies, including my own (CableOne), make similar statements. Consider the source. If your dish is properly aligned, the weather has to be quite severe to interrupt your signal. If it is quite severe, you will probably get signal interruptions, freeze-framing, pixelization, etc. A few anecdotal examples: My grandmother has a sparse tree (not sure of the species, it has leaves so is not a pine) directly in front of her dish. When I visited during the monsoon season, most of her transponders had a signal strength of 75-85. DirecTV recommends a signal strength of 70 or higher in clear weather to prevent signal loss in trivially bad weather. 80, IMO, is a safer number to shoot for. If you are a true geek, you will probably fine tune it to get it in the high 90's.;-)
- I have never lost picture, even in fairly severe snowstorms. I made sure my dish was well aligned though.
If the dish is poorly aligned usually due to a customer self-installation or due to an installation by Halstedt Communications, an installation company known by DirecTV employees for being almost universally incompetent. Unofficially, of course.
What has been Slashdot readers' experience with cable and satellite TV? I'm looking at trying to balance cost versus quality of signal and picture. How much does the weather affect the signal quality of satellite TV reception?
Digital cable and DirecTV have a nearly identical picture quality from what I have seen. Many channels in "digital" cable packages are analog, then you pay to add a set of digital channels on top of the analog base package. Analog picture quality varies based on a great number of factors, and IMO goes from "fairly decent" to "almost as good as pure digital." IIRC, DirecTV's picture is 480^2 MPEG-2 video, but I cannot recall for sure. Digital cable is probably the same or similar.
Weather does not effect picture quality at all. Generally, you either have it or you don't. Freeze-framing and pixelization can occur with very bad signal strength, but I consider this "not having it at all"
If all but obviously severe weather effects your satellite signal, call and have your vendor come and fix it. There is no reason that you should have to put up with losing your signal more than during a couple of really bad storms per year, and even then, not for more than half an hour (unless the storm lasts quite a long time).
Some satellite packages include a DVR (Comcast doesn't offer one yet in my area). Is it worth getting the DVR supplied by the satellite company (DirectTV, DishNetwork), or is buying a separate TiVo a better option? As a geek, I'm also interested in getting NASA TV."
All vendors' PVRs except DirecTV's are very basic. Tivo is, IMHO, simply a superior service, giving you much more than just recording. HOWEVER, it does have a monthly fee. Some PVR services (the very basic ones) do not. A few important notes: If you get a Tivo for anything other than DirecTV, the recording will not really be digital. Non-DirecTV Tivos are designed to accept an analog signal (to be compatible with a wide variety of TV services), so that analog signal is converted to digital to actually record to disk, then back to analog again for playback. If you have a digital connection from your RV to Tivo, only the one conversion takes place. Tivo for non-DirecTV is also much more expensive. $12.00USD per month last time I checked. It is $4.99 for DirecTV customers (whether you use a DirecT
What brand of motherboard do they put in these things? Usually Intel (modified to use the proprietary Dell power supply)
What's the wattage of the Power Supply? The wattage of the Dell power supplies is generally sufficient to run the Dell just fine plus a few hard drives and other upgrades. The problem is that they use proprietary power supplies. There is NO TECHNICAL REASON to do this other than to lock customers in. If you charge enough for a replacement unit, customers will probably just buy a new PC instead. The power supplies are like ATX, and at least a few years ago used an ATX-look alike connector. They may have changed this, because plugging a standard ATX PS into Dell motherboards would let the smoke out of the PS, possibly the Dell itself. Fun.
What kind of RAM is used? DDR Dual Channel? What brand is the RAM? Dell usually uses major brand RAM--whatever they can get cheapest in bulk. Not an issue. The RAM generally uses conservative timings, but then, timings really don't matter for most applications beyond 1-5% performance.
What brand is the hard-drive? What is the rotational speed of the hdd? How much cache does the hdd have? Dell often uses Seagate or, IIRC, Maxtor. Not an issue, really.
Sounds like a decent deal as long as they are using decent hardware. Decent Dells (i.e. not the super cheap systems with integrated video, etc.) use pretty good hardware. The problem is that the pretty good hardware is also pretty proprietary. Some parts are interchangeable, particularly with their overpriced gaming systems, but you buy Dell for the support (on paper at least) and because they are cheap. If you are a business, you buy them because they are a major OEM and give great support if you are a big buyer. And because they are cheap.
Dells are not meant for geeks that can build their own system from parts. They are meant for the other 95% of people that want a little black box that just works, and if it doesn't, has a toll-free number to call for help.
"Dell clones" do not exist because Dell does not make their own laptops. All PC vendors except IBM resell laptops made by Clevo, Arima, or some other Taiwanese ODM.
That said, it is entirely possible that the company you pointed to uses the same ODM as Dell, in which case it may indeed be easy to get more or less the same laptop for a lower price.
Interested parties may also look at www.powernotebooks.com and www.pctorque.com. These guys sell Eurocom and Sager (=Clevo) laptops at lower prices than many. It is a good way to get the same laptop, POSSIBLY MINUS SUPPORT, for a lower price.
This is my opinion of DirecWay, take it for what it is worth (which may not be much):
- Direcway is pretty fast. While Direcway gives you an estimate of 400-600Kbit/sec, in reality you can often get 1+Mbit
- Direcway's equipment is VERY exepensive. Direcway actually takes a loss on the install/equipment package, but it still costs in the neighborhood of $600USD
- Direcway gives you a lot of geek points. It is a fully 2-way satellite system (DirecPC was only 1-way, using an analog modem for upstream). Unfortunately, or fortunately depemding on your opinion, you cannot install it. By federal law you are REQUIRED to ahve it installed professionally, because it is a 2-way system.
- I would personally avoid Direcway because it is Windows/MacOSX only. This is their definition of "Operating system agnostic"--Seriously! www.getdway.com actually defines OS agnosticism as working with Mac and Windows! I found this pretty disgusting.
- While technically you have "unlimited use", if you download more than about 230MB in a short period of time, you are rate-limited to analog modem speeds. This means the next time you download a Linux or BSD ISO, your first 230 or so MB (I forget the exact value) will go fine, but after that it will take forever. This is to reduce the use of bandwidth by those that "abuse" the system. Bandwidth abusers are a particularly big problem for satellite, because satellite bandwidth is quite expensive. Still, it sucks.
- Other than for gaming, the latency really isn't that bad. For gaming, you are better off with an analog modem.
Overall, if cable/DSL/wireless are available, go for them. If only analog is available, satellite is MUCH better. At worst, latency is bad and bandwidth is only somewhat faster than a modem when you "abuse" your bandwidth. I use cable for internet access myself, because it is better than satellite, and DirecTV for TV, because it is better than cable.
I am using Xvid 2-pass encoding in the full resolution of the original source (less the black spacing bars of widescreen video) with max quality settings, using the original audio, sometimes doing noise filtering. I think the primary reason may be that I tend to encode at extremely high bitrates--as high as the encoder thinks it can make use of, usually about 800MB/hr depending on the complexity and motion in the video clip. In my case, the Babylon 5 DVDs are a bit noisy too, so may be more difficult than some to encode.
I am not an advanced Java programmer, as most of my coding is C or C++, sometimes asm. I was mostly referring to commercial Java applications I have used, such as JBuilder. SWING is so high level, I am really not sure how one could screw it up. Well, actually I take that back--Seibel Systems sells a trouble ticket package that gets GUI widget data from a remote server every time--when you click on a drop menu, when you open a list, etc. It does no caching, even if the values don't change for months. THAT is a great way to screw up a GUI. Another app I have used (and am going to write a replacement for because it just sucks _so much_) updates it menu data from _FTP_ on every use of a widget. I would sure like to find the idiot that dreamed up that design. Some of the other Java work I've done, which may have been bad Java, was terribly slow as well. Loading a series of GIFs, for example, simply takes forever. This was using relatively straight forward Java APIs, though there are probably faster replacements. In any case, I don't claim to be a Java expert or professional Java developer, but I am hardly someone that should be burger flipping instead.:)
I'm not sure. I am encoding the videos with very high quality settings, and they end up pretty large (1.5GB for a 2 hr movie--I am looking to archive). If I encode in lower quality, it can go faster, but there are other factors such as the encoder used, settings, 2 pass vs. 1 pass, etc. I am still pretty new to DivX transcoding, so I may very well be doing something wrong.:)
I have to disagree. First of all, games are not necessarily limited only by the video card. Certainly if you run the latest games in the highest resolution with 8x AA, your video card will be the bottleneck, but often times only these extreme situations make that true.
Morrowind, for example, doesn't really care much about your video card. If you have a Geforce 3, it is happy. It does, however, care about your CPU. If your CPU is not god incarnate, your frame rate will be limited, particularly in some of the more dynamic scenes. The fastest CPU at the time of release, the P4 2.53GHz, could not muster much of a frame rate regardless of video card.
Any 2D game will be CPU limited as well. Baldur's Gate 2 still chugs on some of the extremely large fights even on my AthlonXP 2500+.
In Starcraft, I assure you that my carrier attack will slow your frame rate regardless of your CPU.;-)
Other than in video games, I am currently transcoding a Babylon 5 video from MPEG-2 to DivX (using Xvid) on my laptop. It is an Athlon64 3200+--the fastest laptop processor money can buy (well, strictly for video transcoding, the highest end Pentium IVs are actually slightly faster) and it takes about 6 hours for a 2hr movie, 3 hours for an episode. If I had a 20GHz Athlon64 it would still take forever.
To come to a point, yes, modern operating systems do tend to run fine on modern fast processors (with the possible exception of WindowsXP and anything running KDE or Gnome2::ducks::), but there exists quite a bit more software than old games and operating systems.
A few other examples:
- There isn't a computer on the planet fast enough to install Gentoo Linux quickly.
- FreeBSD's make world will be noticeable non-instantaneous for many GHz to come.
- Waiting for Visual C++ in Windows to compile... Well, anything at all, is not instantaneous even on an 8-way Xeon.
- Waiting for Regedit in Windows to search for a certain key or value will NEVER be fast on ANY computer. I don't know what search algorithm Microsoft chose for that thing, but it's damn slow for searching through just 10 or so megabytes of data.
- Anything ever written with SWING in Java. It was slow in 1996 and it's slow now. To avoid flames, I love Java as a language, but SWING is slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses.
The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the poster.
Socket 745 Athlons have a single 64-bit memory bus, not a 128-bit memory bus. (probably just a typo)
In any case, it is important to remember: Athlons are not Pentium IVs. Athlons do not have the performance hit that P4s have with lower bandwidth. Currently, very few applications care whether you have single or dual channel memory--the performance difference is in the low single digits. After Athlon64s significantly ramp up in clock speed, we wil begin to see a greater advantage of having more bandwidth, but not before.
Also, I wanted to note that currect 512K Athlon64s DO NOT have a smaller die space. They are more or less 1MB chips with half the cache disabled. Future revisions will actually cut out the cache, but for the time being AMD needed to market a cheaper Athlon64, and didn't have the time or money to modify manufacturing equipment to manufacture a third completely different die. That said, die space doesn't directly have anything to do with how overclockable a chip is.
Socket 939 will allow motherboard manufacturers to easily make 4-layer designs. In English: Cheaper motherboards for the dual channel Athlon64s.
Athlons are efficient with their use of memory bandwidth, so current Athlon64s don't really care about the second memory channel much at the moment. It has a minimal effect on performance. However, since processor technology moves more quickly than memory technology, future 3+GHz processors will start to see a significant benefit from the added bandwidth. Of course, by then, DDR2 will be readily available so we'll just have to see how it all turns out.
IIRC, copper conducts heat better than silver... why not make a copper paste
Copper is a great conductor of heat, but not as good as silver. Copper: 402 k(W/mK) @ 300 kelvin Silver: 430 k(W/mK) -- 7% better (in certain conditions). Diamond beats them all at 895 k(W/mK). Actually, there's a superfluid form of Helium-2 which, at already very low temperatures, blows anything else away in terms of heat conductivity. Of course, since it has to already be near absolute zero in temperature to have reasonably thermal conductivity, it would probably not make the best thermal "grease."
In addition to the Pentium-M (low power consumption, low clockspeed, high performance) mentioned in above posts, Intel still sells ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) Pentium III's. Either one of the two above options would be sufficient on their own, but Intel also largely owns the ARM architecture (not x86 compatible, but VERY low power consumption).
VIA processors to date have been crap, and Transmeta's have been great on a per-watt metric, but otherwise suck. Both are soon to release new products which will hopefully be competitive.
It is AMD that has a weak low-power portfolio, having only the Geode processor (correct me if I am mistaken)--sufficient to power terminals and perhaps small routers, but little else.
Before you run off blaming the evil Marketing demons, let me ask you this.....what readily quantifiable measure would you use instead to compare systems for the broad range of users and applications - all other things being the same? (memory, disk, etc.)
Imperfect a measure that it may be, it's a hell of a lot easier to relate to and compare than "how many FPS of Quake3 can I get?" or "how quickly can it compile the 2.6 kernel?"
That very question has long been a topic of heated debate. Years ago, AMD launched an initiative to create a nonbiased (so they say), general purpose universal benchmark. It never went anywhere as far as I know. Overall, Winbench 'XX is a good benchmark because it shows actual performance in real-world applications (albeit somewhat old ones). For games, the only reliable means of benchmarking is to test those individual games, or at least assume similar performance across many games that use the same game engine. The game industry is converging because of the extreme difficulty of developing truly sophisticated 3D graphics engines. I predict that within 5 years, there will be at most 3-5 major game engines used by 90% of high-budget games. A general benchmark of these 3-5 engines (or however many there turn out to be) could be used, either taking their average and giving an overall "gaming score", or predicting the performance of the many games based on each engine based on extensive benchmarking of a few titles using each.
Server benchmarking is not an issue, because those involved in the tests often know what they are doing.
As far as unix benchmarking, well, that is a major pain in the ass. That certainly does not mean that we should rely on clockspeed, or god forbid on BogoMIPS. A standard benchmark based on the compilation time of a certain version of BASh was proposed not too long ago. Because many Unix geeks are developers, this would not be a bad start. As for pure CPU tests, perhaps a mix of BZip2, large-scale encryption, and... other things might be good. As with any benchmark, there are always caveats and special conditions involved. If one simply averages the scores of many benchmarks things happen such as one candidate doing rediculously well one one (possibly unimportant) part of the benchmark, thus throwing the average way out of kilter.
Benchmarking is a science, an art, and a rather large pain in the ass.
" Out here in "Reality World", as I like to call it, it _does_ matter. You see - performance is performance, whether it comes via IPC or high clock speed."
Yes, high clockspeed "speed demon" chips can and often do outperform high-IPC "braniac" chips. Whether the final performance of the fastest Pentium IVs ends up being as high or even higher than the fastest competitor does not change the fact that Intel has made no effort to dispel the MHz myth--and it IS a myth, and have in fact encouraged it. I said nothing of final performance figures. I was stating that the marketing gimmick is that MHz is an accurate measure of speed, which it is not--even between different revisions of Intel's own Pentium IV core, let alone in comparison to their competitors.
"Until the Athlon64/Opterons AMD had no answer to the P4. They just couldn't quite keep up. And you people harped on the same thing "Ooh, it's a marketing gimmick!"."
Athlons and Pentium IVs have been leapfrogging each-other for years. If you believe that 32-bit Athlons were never competitive with Pentium IVs, you are quite mistaken. I would be happy to help you research the issue.
You want a marketing gimmick? How about selling a 64-bit CPU to people who have like 512M of memory. There's your gimmick.
You may not be aware of this, but it is actually an intelligent idea to fix problems before they become problems. --LBA-48 was introduces before more than a tiny fraction of people had hard drives that were larger than the 128GB limit. Is it a marketing gimmick that LBA-48 supports multi-petabyte drives? (2^48-1 512 byte sectors).
--Serial ATA, and even ATA100 were introduced long before any hard disk drive could possibly approach 100MB/sec sustained transfer rate. Even today's world's fastest hard drive, the Fujitsu MAS3735, cannot quite reach 80MB/sec. DId you know, however, that the same situation occurred with ATA66, ATA33, ATA16, etc.? Perhaps engineers should have waited until the performance barriers were making drive upgrades pointless before introducing faster means of communication? After all, "no hard drive could possibly even approach 33MB/sec" --1995.
The same applies to 64-bit processors. The average Dell comes with what, 256MB RAM? Probably 512MB now? That is 1/8 of the "4 GB barrier" of 32-bit pointers. Actually, that barrier is either 1.5GB, 2GB, or 3GB depending on your operating system. Now, let's think: Have you ever seen the average amount of RAM in a system double? I seem to remember 4MB being "plenty" and 16MB being "wastefull and rediculous". I seem to remember 32MB being the standard, and anything over 128MB was an unwise waste of money. Do you think that maybe, possibly, that pattern might repeat? Perhaps--since it has happened every few years for decades--the average amount of RAM in a system might increase? Applications might want more than 4GB of address space? Quake 5 may require 6GB RAM minimum (16GB recommended)?
In case you were not aware, the 64-bit mode of the Athlon64 provides real performance benefits, whether software cares about the extra address space or not. Many algorithms, particularly encryption, data management, HL math, high precision math, media en/decoding, and compression can make use of the larger register size. The fact that there are double the number of GPRs (that stands for "General Purpose Register" Ohhh, ahhh) and that the amount of data that one can fit into those GPRs has quadrupled, helps ALL software that is more than a 20-line assembly language experiment. Hell, even having 16GPRs (twice as many as previous x86 chips), the AMD64 architecture is still considered register-starved. Look at the PowerPC, the IA64, the AXP, the UltraSPARC, and just about any other mainstream high-performance processor architecture. You may want to look at the reviews from reputable publications showing substantial performance gains from 64-bit Opteron software, including software that could not care less if you have >4GB of memory. Hint: Tom's Hardware is not on that list.
More clockspeed = more sales. 95% of computer users (or is it 94%, with recent improvements in public education) believe in the MHz Myth mentioned on the front page.
The MHz myth is the belief that the OneTrue measure of CPU performance is clockspeed. A 2GHz CPU is twice as fast as a 1GHz CPU. A 4GHz CPU is twice as fast as a 2GHz CPU.
While it may not seem common to many of us, if you speak with a large number of average people about computer performance, you will quickly want to kill yourself. Or them. Or both.
This isn't the fault of the general public, as Intel's marketing machine takes advantage of this common belief. Intel Pentium IV processors are some of the highest clocked processors in the world, and they benefit from everyone that thinks this somehow matters.
Slashdot Mirror
We have identified over one million lines of our IP in Microsoft's source code. While I cannot share most of them because they are a trade secret, here are three of the most glaring examples:
#include
for( ; ; )
if(!stop) {
Many of these lines have been copied verbatim several thousand times. We do not want to, but are forced to sue Microsoft for unlicensed use of our intellectual property.
We will institute a licensing program called gplSource which will allow Windows users to obtain the legal rights to use our IP. This cost will be significantly discounted to early adopters.
Already at least three Fortune 500 companies have seen the validity of our claims and have paid these fees on a per-CPU basis to continue using Windows. While we cannot divulge their names, they do exist. Really!
For those who haven't used Gentoo (why?), ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" means "emerge unstable software, even if it is known to be poorly tested."
Therefore, the parent was correct.
Apparently, in addition to Windows, the Linux source code has been leaked as well. Fortunately for all of us, a little known company which apparently owns the IP to Unix, C++, space flight, and breathing has kindly made it legal to use their IP, for a fee.
I don't believe that the parent post was intended as flamebait, saying that KDE has won no real awards, but that he may have been saying that it doesn't matter if any awards were won--it is a useful piece of software, and that is what matters.
Considering the GW Bush has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, can you really take many awards seriously?
An important note:
Many problems with installations are from people ordering their stuff from a backwater sleezeball company.
I recommend you get your stuff directly from DirecTV or from a reputable vendor like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.
Calling 1-800-DIRECTV does not necessarily get you to DirecTV itself!
It is a national # setup to route you to a local dealer.
If you want to actually get your stuff from direcTV, call the general customer service phone # at 800-355-5000 and do whatever you need to do to talk to someone from the phone menu. It doesn't matter who. Then, ask for the sales department. They will ask if you have a credit card (say YES) and if you have ever had DirecTV before (say NO).
Disclaimer: Until just recently, I worked for DirecTV (left of my own volition for a more flexible job). That said, here is my honest opinion and/or observations about your questions:
;-)
Comcast is the local cable provider in my area, and are playing TV spots about how satellite TV signals can be lost when it rains, when the wind blows, and even when the dog sneezes (I'm sure the dog sneezing excuse in the commercials are more for humor than fact).
This is bullshit. Many cable companies, including my own (CableOne), make similar statements. Consider the source.
If your dish is properly aligned, the weather has to be quite severe to interrupt your signal. If it is quite severe, you will probably get signal interruptions, freeze-framing, pixelization, etc.
A few anecdotal examples:
My grandmother has a sparse tree (not sure of the species, it has leaves so is not a pine) directly in front of her dish. When I visited during the monsoon season, most of her transponders had a signal strength of 75-85. DirecTV recommends a signal strength of 70 or higher in clear weather to prevent signal loss in trivially bad weather. 80, IMO, is a safer number to shoot for. If you are a true geek, you will probably fine tune it to get it in the high 90's.
- I have never lost picture, even in fairly severe snowstorms. I made sure my dish was well aligned though.
If the dish is poorly aligned usually due to a customer self-installation or due to an installation by Halstedt Communications, an installation company known by DirecTV employees for being almost universally incompetent. Unofficially, of course.
What has been Slashdot readers' experience with cable and satellite TV? I'm looking at trying to balance cost versus quality of signal and picture. How much does the weather affect the signal quality of satellite TV reception?
Digital cable and DirecTV have a nearly identical picture quality from what I have seen. Many channels in "digital" cable packages are analog, then you pay to add a set of digital channels on top of the analog base package. Analog picture quality varies based on a great number of factors, and IMO goes from "fairly decent" to "almost as good as pure digital." IIRC, DirecTV's picture is 480^2 MPEG-2 video, but I cannot recall for sure. Digital cable is probably the same or similar.
Weather does not effect picture quality at all. Generally, you either have it or you don't. Freeze-framing and pixelization can occur with very bad signal strength, but I consider this "not having it at all"
If all but obviously severe weather effects your satellite signal, call and have your vendor come and fix it. There is no reason that you should have to put up with losing your signal more than during a couple of really bad storms per year, and even then, not for more than half an hour (unless the storm lasts quite a long time).
Some satellite packages include a DVR (Comcast doesn't offer one yet in my area). Is it worth getting the DVR supplied by the satellite company (DirectTV, DishNetwork), or is buying a separate TiVo a better option? As a geek, I'm also interested in getting NASA TV."
All vendors' PVRs except DirecTV's are very basic. Tivo is, IMHO, simply a superior service, giving you much more than just recording. HOWEVER, it does have a monthly fee. Some PVR services (the very basic ones) do not.
A few important notes:
If you get a Tivo for anything other than DirecTV,
the recording will not really be digital. Non-DirecTV Tivos are designed to accept an analog signal (to be compatible with a wide variety of TV services), so that analog signal is converted to digital to actually record to disk, then back to analog again for playback. If you have a digital connection from your RV to Tivo, only the one conversion takes place.
Tivo for non-DirecTV is also much more expensive. $12.00USD per month last time I checked. It is $4.99 for DirecTV customers (whether you use a DirecT
ODM stands for oderint dum metuant, which means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us."
No, just kidding. It stands for Original Design Manufacturer.
And don't call me an MBA!
What brand of motherboard do they put in these things?
Usually Intel (modified to use the proprietary Dell power supply)
What's the wattage of the Power Supply?
The wattage of the Dell power supplies is generally sufficient to run the Dell just fine plus a few hard drives and other upgrades. The problem is that they use proprietary power supplies. There is NO TECHNICAL REASON to do this other than to lock customers in. If you charge enough for a replacement unit, customers will probably just buy a new PC instead.
The power supplies are like ATX, and at least a few years ago used an ATX-look alike connector. They may have changed this, because plugging a standard ATX PS into Dell motherboards would let the smoke out of the PS, possibly the Dell itself.
Fun.
What kind of RAM is used? DDR Dual Channel? What brand is the RAM?
Dell usually uses major brand RAM--whatever they can get cheapest in bulk. Not an issue. The RAM generally uses conservative timings, but then, timings really don't matter for most applications beyond 1-5% performance.
What brand is the hard-drive? What is the rotational speed of the hdd? How much cache does the hdd have?
Dell often uses Seagate or, IIRC, Maxtor. Not an issue, really.
Sounds like a decent deal as long as they are using decent hardware.
Decent Dells (i.e. not the super cheap systems with integrated video, etc.) use pretty good hardware. The problem is that the pretty good hardware is also pretty proprietary. Some parts are interchangeable, particularly with their overpriced gaming systems, but you buy Dell for the support (on paper at least) and because they are cheap. If you are a business, you buy them because they are a major OEM and give great support if you are a big buyer. And because they are cheap.
Dells are not meant for geeks that can build their own system from parts. They are meant for the other 95% of people that want a little black box that just works, and if it doesn't, has a toll-free number to call for help.
"Dell clones" do not exist because Dell does not make their own laptops. All PC vendors except IBM resell laptops made by Clevo, Arima, or some other Taiwanese ODM.
That said, it is entirely possible that the company you pointed to uses the same ODM as Dell, in which case it may indeed be easy to get more or less the same laptop for a lower price.
Interested parties may also look at www.powernotebooks.com and www.pctorque.com. These guys sell Eurocom and Sager (=Clevo) laptops at lower prices than many. It is a good way to get the same laptop, POSSIBLY MINUS SUPPORT, for a lower price.
Thankyou for the advice. I am still in the experimental stage, so will try your suggestions and see how it turns out.
Disclaimer: I work for DirecTV.
This is my opinion of DirecWay, take it for what it is worth (which may not be much):
- Direcway is pretty fast. While Direcway gives you an estimate of 400-600Kbit/sec, in reality you can often get 1+Mbit
- Direcway's equipment is VERY exepensive. Direcway actually takes a loss on the install/equipment package, but it still costs in the neighborhood of $600USD
- Direcway gives you a lot of geek points. It is a fully 2-way satellite system (DirecPC was only 1-way, using an analog modem for upstream). Unfortunately, or fortunately depemding on your opinion, you cannot install it. By federal law you are REQUIRED to ahve it installed professionally, because it is a 2-way system.
- I would personally avoid Direcway because it is Windows/MacOSX only. This is their definition of "Operating system agnostic"--Seriously! www.getdway.com actually defines OS agnosticism as working with Mac and Windows! I found this pretty disgusting.
- While technically you have "unlimited use", if you download more than about 230MB in a short period of time, you are rate-limited to analog modem speeds. This means the next time you download a Linux or BSD ISO, your first 230 or so MB (I forget the exact value) will go fine, but after that it will take forever. This is to reduce the use of bandwidth by those that "abuse" the system. Bandwidth abusers are a particularly big problem for satellite, because satellite bandwidth is quite expensive. Still, it sucks.
- Other than for gaming, the latency really isn't that bad. For gaming, you are better off with an analog modem.
Overall, if cable/DSL/wireless are available, go for them. If only analog is available, satellite is MUCH better. At worst, latency is bad and bandwidth is only somewhat faster than a modem when you "abuse" your bandwidth.
I use cable for internet access myself, because it is better than satellite, and DirecTV for TV, because it is better than cable.
This is my opinion and obviously not DirecTV's.
I am using Xvid 2-pass encoding in the full resolution of the original source (less the black spacing bars of widescreen video) with max quality settings, using the original audio, sometimes doing noise filtering. I think the primary reason may be that I tend to encode at extremely high bitrates--as high as the encoder thinks it can make use of, usually about 800MB/hr depending on the complexity and motion in the video clip.
In my case, the Babylon 5 DVDs are a bit noisy too, so may be more difficult than some to encode.
I am not an advanced Java programmer, as most of my coding is C or C++, sometimes asm. I was mostly referring to commercial Java applications I have used, such as JBuilder. :)
SWING is so high level, I am really not sure how one could screw it up. Well, actually I take that back--Seibel Systems sells a trouble ticket package that gets GUI widget data from a remote server every time--when you click on a drop menu, when you open a list, etc. It does no caching, even if the values don't change for months. THAT is a great way to screw up a GUI.
Another app I have used (and am going to write a replacement for because it just sucks _so much_) updates it menu data from _FTP_ on every use of a widget. I would sure like to find the idiot that dreamed up that design.
Some of the other Java work I've done, which may have been bad Java, was terribly slow as well. Loading a series of GIFs, for example, simply takes forever. This was using relatively straight forward Java APIs, though there are probably faster replacements.
In any case, I don't claim to be a Java expert or professional Java developer, but I am hardly someone that should be burger flipping instead.
I'm not sure. I am encoding the videos with very high quality settings, and they end up pretty large (1.5GB for a 2 hr movie--I am looking to archive). If I encode in lower quality, it can go faster, but there are other factors such as the encoder used, settings, 2 pass vs. 1 pass, etc. :)
I am still pretty new to DivX transcoding, so I may very well be doing something wrong.
"Everybody, get prepared to be blown away."
Like the last two tries?
I have to disagree.
;-)
::ducks::), but there exists quite a bit more software than old games and operating systems.
First of all, games are not necessarily limited only by the video card. Certainly if you run the latest games in the highest resolution with 8x AA, your video card will be the bottleneck, but often times only these extreme situations make that true.
Morrowind, for example, doesn't really care much about your video card. If you have a Geforce 3, it is happy. It does, however, care about your CPU. If your CPU is not god incarnate, your frame rate will be limited, particularly in some of the more dynamic scenes. The fastest CPU at the time of release, the P4 2.53GHz, could not muster much of a frame rate regardless of video card.
Any 2D game will be CPU limited as well. Baldur's Gate 2 still chugs on some of the extremely large fights even on my AthlonXP 2500+.
In Starcraft, I assure you that my carrier attack will slow your frame rate regardless of your CPU.
Other than in video games, I am currently transcoding a Babylon 5 video from MPEG-2 to DivX (using Xvid) on my laptop. It is an Athlon64 3200+--the fastest laptop processor money can buy (well, strictly for video transcoding, the highest end Pentium IVs are actually slightly faster) and it takes about 6 hours for a 2hr movie, 3 hours for an episode. If I had a 20GHz Athlon64 it would still take forever.
To come to a point, yes, modern operating systems do tend to run fine on modern fast processors (with the possible exception of WindowsXP and anything running KDE or Gnome2
A few other examples:
- There isn't a computer on the planet fast enough to install Gentoo Linux quickly.
- FreeBSD's make world will be noticeable non-instantaneous for many GHz to come.
- Waiting for Visual C++ in Windows to compile... Well, anything at all, is not instantaneous even on an 8-way Xeon.
- Waiting for Regedit in Windows to search for a certain key or value will NEVER be fast on ANY computer. I don't know what search algorithm Microsoft chose for that thing, but it's damn slow for searching through just 10 or so megabytes of data.
- Anything ever written with SWING in Java. It was slow in 1996 and it's slow now. To avoid flames, I love Java as a language, but SWING is slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses.
The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the poster.
I find it entertaining that you sometimes wish you were stupid, then immediately proclaim that you don't understand something. ;-)
Seriously though, Anandtech has a decent explanation of AMDs rather creative roadmap here.
Socket 745 Athlons have a single 64-bit memory bus, not a 128-bit memory bus. (probably just a typo)
In any case, it is important to remember: Athlons are not Pentium IVs. Athlons do not have the performance hit that P4s have with lower bandwidth. Currently, very few applications care whether you have single or dual channel memory--the performance difference is in the low single digits. After Athlon64s significantly ramp up in clock speed, we wil begin to see a greater advantage of having more bandwidth, but not before.
Also, I wanted to note that currect 512K Athlon64s DO NOT have a smaller die space. They are more or less 1MB chips with half the cache disabled. Future revisions will actually cut out the cache, but for the time being AMD needed to market a cheaper Athlon64, and didn't have the time or money to modify manufacturing equipment to manufacture a third completely different die. That said, die space doesn't directly have anything to do with how overclockable a chip is.
Socket 939 will allow motherboard manufacturers to easily make 4-layer designs.
In English: Cheaper motherboards for the dual channel Athlon64s.
Athlons are efficient with their use of memory bandwidth, so current Athlon64s don't really care about the second memory channel much at the moment. It has a minimal effect on performance. However, since processor technology moves more quickly than memory technology, future 3+GHz processors will start to see a significant benefit from the added bandwidth. Of course, by then, DDR2 will be readily available so we'll just have to see how it all turns out.
So you predict Google users will start eating each other?
IIRC, copper conducts heat better than silver... why not make a copper paste
Copper is a great conductor of heat, but not as good as silver.
Copper: 402 k(W/mK) @ 300 kelvin
Silver: 430 k(W/mK) -- 7% better (in certain conditions).
Diamond beats them all at 895 k(W/mK).
Actually, there's a superfluid form of Helium-2 which, at already very low temperatures, blows anything else away in terms of heat conductivity. Of course, since it has to already be near absolute zero in temperature to have reasonably thermal conductivity, it would probably not make the best thermal "grease."
In addition to the Pentium-M (low power consumption, low clockspeed, high performance) mentioned in above posts, Intel still sells ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) Pentium III's.
Either one of the two above options would be sufficient on their own, but Intel also largely owns the ARM architecture (not x86 compatible, but VERY low power consumption).
VIA processors to date have been crap, and Transmeta's have been great on a per-watt metric, but otherwise suck. Both are soon to release new products which will hopefully be competitive.
It is AMD that has a weak low-power portfolio, having only the Geode processor (correct me if I am mistaken)--sufficient to power terminals and perhaps small routers, but little else.
Before you run off blaming the evil Marketing demons, let me ask you this.....what readily quantifiable measure would you use instead to compare systems for the broad range of users and applications - all other things being the same? (memory, disk, etc.)
... other things might be good. As with any benchmark, there are always caveats and special conditions involved. If one simply averages the scores of many benchmarks things happen such as one candidate doing rediculously well one one (possibly unimportant) part of the benchmark, thus throwing the average way out of kilter.
Imperfect a measure that it may be, it's a hell of a lot easier to relate to and compare than "how many FPS of Quake3 can I get?" or "how quickly can it compile the 2.6 kernel?"
That very question has long been a topic of heated debate. Years ago, AMD launched an initiative to create a nonbiased (so they say), general purpose universal benchmark. It never went anywhere as far as I know.
Overall, Winbench 'XX is a good benchmark because it shows actual performance in real-world applications (albeit somewhat old ones). For games, the only reliable means of benchmarking is to test those individual games, or at least assume similar performance across many games that use the same game engine. The game industry is converging because of the extreme difficulty of developing truly sophisticated 3D graphics engines. I predict that within 5 years, there will be at most 3-5 major game engines used by 90% of high-budget games. A general benchmark of these 3-5 engines (or however many there turn out to be) could be used, either taking their average and giving an overall "gaming score", or predicting the performance of the many games based on each engine based on extensive benchmarking of a few titles using each.
Server benchmarking is not an issue, because those involved in the tests often know what they are doing.
As far as unix benchmarking, well, that is a major pain in the ass. That certainly does not mean that we should rely on clockspeed, or god forbid on BogoMIPS. A standard benchmark based on the compilation time of a certain version of BASh was proposed not too long ago. Because many Unix geeks are developers, this would not be a bad start. As for pure CPU tests, perhaps a mix of BZip2, large-scale encryption, and
Benchmarking is a science, an art, and a rather large pain in the ass.
Your point is well taken though.
" Out here in "Reality World", as I like to call it, it _does_ matter. You see - performance is performance, whether it comes via IPC or high clock speed."
Yes, high clockspeed "speed demon" chips can and often do outperform high-IPC "braniac" chips. Whether the final performance of the fastest Pentium IVs ends up being as high or even higher than the fastest competitor does not change the fact that Intel has made no effort to dispel the MHz myth--and it IS a myth, and have in fact encouraged it.
I said nothing of final performance figures. I was stating that the marketing gimmick is that MHz is an accurate measure of speed, which it is not--even between different revisions of Intel's own Pentium IV core, let alone in comparison to their competitors.
"Until the Athlon64/Opterons AMD had no answer to the P4. They just couldn't quite keep up. And you people harped on the same thing "Ooh, it's a marketing gimmick!"."
Athlons and Pentium IVs have been leapfrogging each-other for years. If you believe that 32-bit Athlons were never competitive with Pentium IVs, you are quite mistaken. I would be happy to help you research the issue.
You want a marketing gimmick? How about selling a 64-bit CPU to people who have like 512M of memory. There's your gimmick.
You may not be aware of this, but it is actually an intelligent idea to fix problems before they become problems.
--LBA-48 was introduces before more than a tiny fraction of people had hard drives that were larger than the 128GB limit. Is it a marketing gimmick that LBA-48 supports multi-petabyte drives? (2^48-1 512 byte sectors).
--Serial ATA, and even ATA100 were introduced long before any hard disk drive could possibly approach 100MB/sec sustained transfer rate. Even today's world's fastest hard drive, the Fujitsu MAS3735, cannot quite reach 80MB/sec. DId you know, however, that the same situation occurred with ATA66, ATA33, ATA16, etc.? Perhaps engineers should have waited until the performance barriers were making drive upgrades pointless before introducing faster means of communication? After all, "no hard drive could possibly even approach 33MB/sec" --1995.
The same applies to 64-bit processors.
The average Dell comes with what, 256MB RAM? Probably 512MB now? That is 1/8 of the "4 GB barrier" of 32-bit pointers. Actually, that barrier is either 1.5GB, 2GB, or 3GB depending on your operating system.
Now, let's think: Have you ever seen the average amount of RAM in a system double? I seem to remember 4MB being "plenty" and 16MB being "wastefull and rediculous". I seem to remember 32MB being the standard, and anything over 128MB was an unwise waste of money.
Do you think that maybe, possibly, that pattern might repeat? Perhaps--since it has happened every few years for decades--the average amount of RAM in a system might increase? Applications might want more than 4GB of address space? Quake 5 may require 6GB RAM minimum (16GB recommended)?
In case you were not aware, the 64-bit mode of the Athlon64 provides real performance benefits, whether software cares about the extra address space or not. Many algorithms, particularly encryption, data management, HL math, high precision math, media en/decoding, and compression can make use of the larger register size.
The fact that there are double the number of GPRs (that stands for "General Purpose Register" Ohhh, ahhh) and that the amount of data that one can fit into those GPRs has quadrupled, helps ALL software that is more than a 20-line assembly language experiment. Hell, even having 16GPRs (twice as many as previous x86 chips), the AMD64 architecture is still considered register-starved. Look at the PowerPC, the IA64, the AXP, the UltraSPARC, and just about any other mainstream high-performance processor architecture.
You may want to look at the reviews from reputable publications showing substantial performance gains from 64-bit Opteron software, including software that could not care less if you have >4GB of memory. Hint: Tom's Hardware is not on that list.
Is a 10%-30% performance boost a gimmick?
More clockspeed = more sales. 95% of computer users (or is it 94%, with recent improvements in public education) believe in the MHz Myth mentioned on the front page.
The MHz myth is the belief that the OneTrue measure of CPU performance is clockspeed. A 2GHz CPU is twice as fast as a 1GHz CPU. A 4GHz CPU is twice as fast as a 2GHz CPU.
While it may not seem common to many of us, if you speak with a large number of average people about computer performance, you will quickly want to kill yourself. Or them. Or both.
This isn't the fault of the general public, as Intel's marketing machine takes advantage of this common belief. Intel Pentium IV processors are some of the highest clocked processors in the world, and they benefit from everyone that thinks this somehow matters.