Why do the graphics card manufactures feel the need to completely update the capabilities of their cards every six months? What's the point? As it is, there is such a huge range of cards out there that many games don't even take advantage of the features in a Geforce2, let alone geforce4.
If they'd just let things stabilise a bit, the PC world would end up more like the console world, where a limited system is driven to its limits because it's a staionary target. That way, you get excellent graphics without a card that requires a whole PCI slot for its cooling fan. Did you see some of the things they managed to do with the PSone after a few years?
The scene: quiet train from a little country town heading to London full of commuters. Some low conversation, most people are either working or reading the paper. Nobody is making any noise that is audible more than a few seats away.
The train passes within range of a phone mast and suddenly three phones ring: "Hello? I'm on the train...blah..blah..blah" echoes up and down the carriage.
Headphones won't block it out unless you turn the music up so loud everyone else can hear it too. You can't sit and read while someone is bellowing about their new cat to someone on the phone. If you're trying to have a conversation you have to speak more loudly to be heard, starting a ripple effect as everyone gradually gets louder.
Maybe not, but at least yelling at a child might serve some purpose (don't hit your sister, don't stick your head out the window etc). I've listened to people shout on their phones about how wonderful their new mobile phone is. Where's the point in that?
I think the problem is more the volume at which people talk on the phones. The number of times while commuting I've sat while somebody bellows at a mobile:
"I'm on the train. ON THE TRAIN. YES. I'LL BE THERE IN FIVE....hello? HELLO..."
is countless. Travelling on Connex southcentral was bad enough without having to put up with that as well.
Isn't that exactly how every mobile phone's SMS entry works? Personally, I think predictive text could be a good text entry system, it's just so badly implemented on so many phones it annoys the hell out of me.
No, there is some interface source code but there is still a large object file in the kernel module distribution that does most of the important stuff for which no source is supplied.
The copyright notice from the source code that is available is hardly GPL, anyway:/* _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_BEGIN_
*
* Copyright 1999-2001 by NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. All
* information contained herein is proprietary and confidential to NVIDIA
* Corporation. Any use, reproduction, or disclosure without the written
* permission of NVIDIA Corporation is prohibited.
*
* _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_END_
*/
Why does 'Linux' need to unite? The strength of Linux is in choice. Some like Mandrake, some Debian. So install what you like. If we standardise we lose one of our main strengths.
Linux is about choice. After all, it's just a kernel. Anything we put on top of it is up the distributors. The whole one 'environment to bind them, that's what we need' argument is based on the success of Microsoft, something which all Unix users detest because of its detrimental effect on choice.
...horse and cart salesman Brian Stoneage in a speech today slammed manufacturers of horseless carriages. Speaking to a horse industry conference, Mr Stoneage said "These so-called 'cars' are destroying my business. They're horrible things - I could fry an egg on the engine of one."
Most of the problems with Linux are caused by Microsoft's domination of the market.
Companies don't release drivers for anything beyond Windows, few people bother writing portable sofware. Why bother? Windows is the only operating system in existence, right? Everybody should have to pay Microsoft in order to own a computer, right?
Fortunately, Microsoft are unintentionally doing everything they can to push users away from Windows through their attempts to acheive even greater profits and dominance.
Yep, them Athlons are damn fast. At ~60W per processor, a rack of 128 Athlons would consume 7.7kW for the processors alone, so I guess you'd need some decent air-con.
I don't get it either. All you need is their account number and sort code, you type in the amount on your account web page and off it goes within two days, with all the usual banking practices observed. Even the venerable Lloyds TSB in the UK let you do that.
I'm pretty sure that's not there anymore. Or maybe it's just hidden behind all the scaffolding that's there now. I am generally pretty sleepy in the morning when i walk past Earls court.
Not really very in depth reviews, were they? A few difficulties with the installer, some font trouble and suddenly they call Debian useless.
No, Debian isn't perfect. No, I wouldn't recommend a newbie install it. But, if you are an actual linux user, rather than someone who just has a Linux partition on their machine and never uses it, Debian is far better than the reviews suggest.
The reviewers are making the classic mistake of confusing ease-of-learning with usability. If something takes a week to learn, but saves you a day on the time to do a task everytime you do it from then on, then if you're going to do the task more than seven times in your life it makes sense to spend the time learning.
"* Data Starved Processors - Why don't these modern server chipsets support 16MB or so of SRAM for L3 cache? Hell, they should probably support 64MB or so.
I always wondered this. Even back in the days of the k6-3 (256k L2 cache on die), an L3 cache, which was actually the on-board L2 cache on the socket-7 board, improved performance significantly.
MS mice are good (especially the new optical ones), but their joysticks are poor compared to something like Saitek's (MS joysticks have very short throws, making fine control in flight sims harder).
I used to like the old-style MS natural keyboards, but the new ones have sacrificed build quality and replaced it with loads of pointless buttons no one uses.
Users could actually record game output in real-time...a compressed movie of your game play saved on your HD.
Or you could always record a gamedemo (available Quake1 onwards, I believe). much less data to handle. If you really then really do want to convert the demo to a video of some sort, do it after the game, when you also have the time to mpeg-or-whatever encode it.
Despite the popularity of Internet streaming, it is not currently possible to stream live output from graphics cards over the Internet. The connections, processors and codecs are all fast enough today. Sadly, all of this horsepower is being held back by one remaining weak link: the texture download speed of today's graphics card drivers.
Excuse me? The bandwidth off the graphics cards they test is in the 10megabyte/s range! Not many users have that sort of bandwidth on their internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been bombing them on and off since the last Gulf War, so we have been at war with them really.
Why do the graphics card manufactures feel the need to completely update the capabilities of their cards every six months? What's the point? As it is, there is such a huge range of cards out there that many games don't even take advantage of the features in a Geforce2, let alone geforce4.
If they'd just let things stabilise a bit, the PC world would end up more like the console world, where a limited system is driven to its limits because it's a staionary target. That way, you get excellent graphics without a card that requires a whole PCI slot for its cooling fan. Did you see some of the things they managed to do with the PSone after a few years?
The scene: quiet train from a little country town heading to London full of commuters. Some low conversation, most people are either working or reading the paper. Nobody is making any noise that is audible more than a few seats away.
The train passes within range of a phone mast and suddenly three phones ring: "Hello? I'm on the train...blah..blah..blah" echoes up and down the carriage.
Headphones won't block it out unless you turn the music up so loud everyone else can hear it too. You can't sit and read while someone is bellowing about their new cat to someone on the phone. If you're trying to have a conversation you have to speak more loudly to be heard, starting a ripple effect as everyone gradually gets louder.
That's what bothers me so much.
Maybe not, but at least yelling at a child might serve some purpose (don't hit your sister, don't stick your head out the window etc). I've listened to people shout on their phones about how wonderful their new mobile phone is. Where's the point in that?
I think the problem is more the volume at which people talk on the phones. The number of times while commuting I've sat while somebody bellows at a mobile:
"I'm on the train. ON THE TRAIN. YES. I'LL BE THERE IN FIVE....hello? HELLO..."
is countless. Travelling on Connex southcentral was bad enough without having to put up with that as well.
Isn't that exactly how every mobile phone's SMS entry works? Personally, I think predictive text could be a good text entry system, it's just so badly implemented on so many phones it annoys the hell out of me.
No, there is some interface source code but there is still a large object file in the kernel module distribution that does most of the important stuff for which no source is supplied.
/* _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_BEGIN_
The copyright notice from the source code that is available is hardly GPL, anyway:
*
* Copyright 1999-2001 by NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. All
* information contained herein is proprietary and confidential to NVIDIA
* Corporation. Any use, reproduction, or disclosure without the written
* permission of NVIDIA Corporation is prohibited.
*
* _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_END_
*/
wos.mimas.ac.uk. Ok, so it doesn't contain fulltext for all articles, but any university will have access to the fulltext online from the publisher.
Yes, I agree that all publicly funded research (ie almost all of it) ought to be publicly available. Unlikely to ever happen though.
Scientists don't read the papers they cite! Not exactly news. I know professors who haven't even read the papers with their name on the authors' list.
In much of the scientific world, hardly anyone reads any paper in any but the most scant detail. Sad but true.
Why does 'Linux' need to unite? The strength of Linux is in choice. Some like Mandrake, some Debian. So install what you like. If we standardise we lose one of our main strengths.
Linux is about choice. After all, it's just a kernel. Anything we put on top of it is up the distributors. The whole one 'environment to bind them, that's what we need' argument is based on the success of Microsoft, something which all Unix users detest because of its detrimental effect on choice.
But of course, we all know that clock speed isn't actually a performance measure at all.
...horse and cart salesman Brian Stoneage in a speech today slammed manufacturers of horseless carriages. Speaking to a horse industry conference, Mr Stoneage said "These so-called 'cars' are destroying my business. They're horrible things - I could fry an egg on the engine of one."
I'm logged in on a gnome2 debian installation with a home directory mounted on NFS, so, no, it doesn't refuse to work.
This was a problem with gnome1 too, You just have to have an NFS server that supports file locking - version 3 or greater I think.
There I am wondering why my Debian machine's update script won't work, I bring up slashdot and find this story.
Most of the problems with Linux are caused by Microsoft's domination of the market.
Companies don't release drivers for anything beyond Windows, few people bother writing portable sofware. Why bother? Windows is the only operating system in existence, right? Everybody should have to pay Microsoft in order to own a computer, right?
Fortunately, Microsoft are unintentionally doing everything they can to push users away from Windows through their attempts to acheive even greater profits and dominance.
and I can assure you that an AthlonMP 2200+ is quite a bit faster than a MIPS R14000 @ 600MHz.
from Spec.org:
Yep, them Athlons are damn fast. At ~60W per processor, a rack of 128 Athlons would consume 7.7kW for the processors alone, so I guess you'd need some decent air-con.specfp2000 Peak Base:
Advanced Micro Devices Epox 8KHA+ Motherboard, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+ 671 624
SGI SGI Origin 300 1X 600MHz R14000A 495 472
$1 ~ 1euro. European population 380 million. That's a lot of EU computers and not really all that much money.
I don't get it either. All you need is their account number and sort code, you type in the amount on your account web page and off it goes within two days, with all the usual banking practices observed. Even the venerable Lloyds TSB in the UK let you do that.
Am I missing something about PayPal?
I'm pretty sure that's not there anymore. Or maybe it's just hidden behind all the scaffolding that's there now. I am generally pretty sleepy in the morning when i walk past Earls court.
Ben
I found the experimental gnome2 debian version locked my X server up all the time as well. i never did manage to fix it.
Not really very in depth reviews, were they? A few difficulties with the installer, some font trouble and suddenly they call Debian useless.
No, Debian isn't perfect. No, I wouldn't recommend a newbie install it. But, if you are an actual linux user, rather than someone who just has a Linux partition on their machine and never uses it, Debian is far better than the reviews suggest.
The reviewers are making the classic mistake of confusing ease-of-learning with usability. If something takes a week to learn, but saves you a day on the time to do a task everytime you do it from then on, then if you're going to do the task more than seven times in your life it makes sense to spend the time learning.
"* Data Starved Processors - Why don't these modern server chipsets support 16MB or so of SRAM for L3 cache? Hell, they should probably support 64MB or so.
I always wondered this. Even back in the days of the k6-3 (256k L2 cache on die), an L3 cache, which was actually the on-board L2 cache on the socket-7 board, improved performance significantly.MS mice are good (especially the new optical ones), but their joysticks are poor compared to something like Saitek's (MS joysticks have very short throws, making fine control in flight sims harder).
I used to like the old-style MS natural keyboards, but the new ones have sacrificed build quality and replaced it with loads of pointless buttons no one uses.
there's always SDL, openGL/AL. DirectX is nasty - why would anyone want to pollute Linux with it.
Users could actually record game output in real-time...a compressed movie of your game play saved on your HD.
Or you could always record a gamedemo (available Quake1 onwards, I believe). much less data to handle. If you really then really do want to convert the demo to a video of some sort, do it after the game, when you also have the time to mpeg-or-whatever encode it.Despite the popularity of Internet streaming, it is not currently possible to stream live output from graphics cards over the Internet. The connections, processors and codecs are all fast enough today. Sadly, all of this horsepower is being held back by one remaining weak link: the texture download speed of today's graphics card drivers.
Excuse me? The bandwidth off the graphics cards they test is in the 10megabyte/s range! Not many users have that sort of bandwidth on their internet connection.