Another advantage of closed servers on college campuses is that the traffic doesn't leave your network. While your network may run on fiber, chances are your T3 has somewhat more limited bandwidth. If your students do most of their chatting (and file trading) through local machines, it saves real money on upstream. The odd off-network connection cannot compete with what is transfered around the dorms proper.
There were rumors of G5's coming out in 2001 (at which point they would be bearably fast).
Then again in 2002.
Now again in 2003.
They're not that fast anymore. Honestly I don't see why Microsoft would be cringing in their shoes at the prospect of competing with a 4k$ quad-proc with "up to" 2ghz chips. Even with the RISC boost, that puts them in a class with systems half of their cost.
This by itself would not be enough to justify worry.
If you are, you may need support for many years for that OS version 9.x. There can be libraries that your application relies upon, but those older-version libraries might not be present in newer versions of the software that contain exploits you would want to patch, or features you might like to build around.
Food for thought.
And if you don't need Red Hat's service plan... why not just run Debian -> Stable?
But what you are talking about is a rural poverty fund, not a rural service fund. I know many rural dwellers who make a good living, and many rich city-dwellers who keep rural houses for vacationing.
Haphazardly giving money to phone companies as compensation for a mandate that they serve everyone isn't going to help that subsistence farmer who can't afford to pay 30 dollars a month for a phone bill anyway. Likewise, there are many kids in the city without access to technology and whose families regularly appeal to my grandmother's church for help paying for electricty and water bills, let alone phones.
The point of the original bill was that the cost of service for those who can afford it should subsidize those who cannot. The current system does not do that, and should be changed.
Actually, the ITX machines do use much less electricity. Mini-ITX.com has a 55w passively cooled sealed PSU that will power most setups.
And if you have the inclination and about 425 pounds to spare, you can get a totally fanless Via setup with a silent Seagate Barracuda (the 5400 RPM Seagate IV is legendary). That's as silent as you can get without resorting to Compact Flash.
Pros: Dead silent Cheap replacement parts High coolness factor Sort-of expandable Low power consumption
How about a Universal Housing Fund, so that rural people can help pay for some of the outrageous apartment costs in the city?
The fund might have been important years ago when there were areas of the globe that were threatened by a lack of telecommunications, but now with cellular towers going up everywhere one can only consider the fund an anachronism.
It costs 1400 dollars per month to rent the tiny apartment above ours. Out in rural California it was 600 dollars to rent a huge house. A few more dollars are going from my TCL to subsidize someone else's, who lives for half of what I'm paying?
I'm all for taking from the rich to give to the poor, but I don't think this is the most direct way to go about it.
Stay away from the shuttles, they're pricey. You can pick up a compatible P3 LAN motherboard, a cheap PSU, some PC133 RAM, and an 800 mhz Socket 370 C3 for around 100 dollars. Put it in a box with a pre-existing HDD and a fan, and you have a server for 1/8th the cost of a new Laptop.
After setting it up, you won't interact with it via the screen / keyboard anyway, so don't bother.
And if your C3 costs are getting too high, pick up a $200 lindows box at walmart.com. Just remember to upgrade the fans to Panaflos, as the walmart box is tremendously, tremendously loud.
Re:Sorry, I'm just not that excited this time arou
on
Gran Turismo 4 Preview
·
· Score: 1
That could be easily rectified by not having to pay for damages to your car. A nonexistant repair model is far better than a nonexistant damage model. You crash, careening around the course... you are punished by having to start over.
From a gameplay perspective it makes perfect sense.
(I'll never understand why Racing games don't have enough money and RPG's have too many random enemy encounters. Neither should be too tight or too frequently forced that people complain about it, especially in games with 500 cars or 50 hours of gameplay)
Hopefully by that time the RIAA will have no money.
The RIAA seems to be forgetting that it is in an entertainment industry. You cannot afford to have bad feelings floating around about your label / company in entertainment. For years, that has meant that the labels used the RIAA to do their dirty work, but people seem to be getting wise. More agressive and dirty tactics leads to a more annoyed public with less happy-happy associations with CD purchases.
Furthermore, besides technophiles, which kids are most likely to engage in music piracy? At my college, it was musicians. DJ's, Singers, Guitarists... the musicians wanted to expand their horizons so much that they engaged in the kind of activities that lost this kid his savings. How much are you willing to bet that the musicians formerly on his network will jump at the chance to work for the RIAA?
Labels may have to make a more substantive distancing between themselves and the RIAA if they want to continue bottling and selling the spirit of youth. And sponsors? Pepsi steals your life's savings?
The RIAA will probably wise up and back off, but one can only hope that they flame out and burn.
It appears they are doing distance color washing with blur, and generally toning down the image to mimmoc a television broadcast. Whereas Ridge Racer's ilk went for hypercolor, the artists on GT4 appear to have chosen realistically muted shades of grey and dirty brown. Texturing seems to be pretty spot-on too, without delving too much into the extremely textured look of many games. Thankfully GTA3's much abused car-top reflections appear to be muted too. In fact, between the muted colors and muted textures, the game is definitely not a visual feast for the eyes, which is perfect for a realistic racer.
David Hufford, a product manager in Microsoft's Xbox group, said the Media Center PC remains the central digital entertainment hub of the home, at least to Microsoft's thinking.... Hufford said it's easier for Microsoft to innovate its console with new add-ons like Music Mixer because the Xbox has a built-in hard drive that easily stores new digital entertainment applications.
We have a product manager who actually believes in the "Media PC," who believes a karoke software product is an original add-on which will sell a videogame, and who refers to "innovating [the] console" by writing software.
Obviously, Mr. Hufford could use a tighter grasp on reality. For example, here is an interview snippet ripped from Gamespy.
David Hufford: My name is David Hufford and I work on the Marketing team at Xbox, so my primary job is to market all things Xbox, including this new game controller.
GameSpy: What are you calling this new controller?
David Hufford: We're calling it Xbox Controller S.
GameSpy: What does the S stand for?
David Hufford: Well, there's not a lot of science behind it, it's more of an art thing. I think we were all in a room and thought it would be a cool name, so we just came up with it.
Sounds brilliant, doesn't he?
Actually, that one is taken a bit out of context. He doesn't flub the rest of the interview, and he doesn't flub the other interviews available for googling (though he does use the phrases "super-hot" and "kicks butt" too often for someone in a professional communications position). So he does sound like he is qualified to talk about whether or not Half-Life 2 will make the console, although he's equally likely to be one of the people who described Microsoft BOB as a "totally awesome innovation, dude."
After all of that tortureous and unnecessary deconstruction of the messenger, it isn't that surprising that Half-Life 2 wouldn't make the big X. The bare minimum specs have always hovered around the XBox level: 700 Mhz CPU with a good DX6 card. And, sadly, the minimum specs for computer games are generally set at what will actually physically play the game, albeit at 320x240 and 5 frames per second. If the XBox is at the minimum specs for the game, the XBox will be too slow to play it satisfactorily.
Firestone, Goodyear, Michelin, Continental etc all redesign the wheel every year. They try new designs with varied rubber thickness, sidewall materials, traction depth, doping materials. There are plastic wheels that prevent shopping carts from leaving the parking lot, airless rubber wheels in public bicycles in Prauge, castor wheels that come in pairs and run on carpet. There are wheel bearings in the axles of your car, wheels used to roll the drum in your drier, wheels that hampsters like to play in. Wheels are turning in the pully being used to haul furnature to the 4th floor, they turn in the CD player running in the 4th floor apartment, and they will be used to roll the refridgerator into its final position where the wheels in the compressor will turn to cool food.
I'll wrap this up before this tirade degrades into "The Kentucky Fried Movie." The fact of the matter is when people say "re-invent the wheel," they almost always mean "redesign the wheel" or "re-implement the wheel," both of which happens every day in our wheel-obsessed society.
This is more like asking a Pilot or an Air Traffic Controller to compare two planes than a farmer (as others have suggested), but I don't think anyone will be satisfied until at least a few mechanics can get into the systems with wrenches.
Even then, if SCO would kindly display what lines they believe are duplicated so that the Linux community can begin the task of tracking down the contributors, then we can have a discussion. Having NDA'd analyists examine the code only is like having the city and a city-appointed lawyer have discussions about the legality of your house while you are explicitly forbidden from coming to the table. Because so much of our livelihood depends upon it, and we have invested so much in it, nobody will accept the judgement unless we are allowed to see the proof.
And even then, of course, there will need to be proof that this *is* SCO code, and not just same-function code, statistical coincidence, or code that SCO stole from Linux.
BTW, caldera has a list (with pictures!) of the board of directors here. Perhaps a few million phone calls will convince them to do what they should have done in the first place and tell us what code exactly they think is copied. Without being able to research their claims due to the choice of the board of directors, we should at least investigate their board of directors.
And after that take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal listing the board of directors, their names, their addresses, and how much money they lost for SCO while contributing to it's demise. Plus any additional tidbits that might make them unemployable in the future.
You can't just burn. You have to remember to salt.
I find it interesting that it was ATI that blew the whistle on NVIDIA, and NVIDIA that blew the whistle on ATI. Personally I hope they both pour more resources into auditing the behavior of eachother's drivers, so that cheats like this can be revealed.
This is not an nVidia problem? This is a benchmark problem, because they weren't wily enough to prevent nVidia from cheating tremendously and repeatedly?
People are crying about this because they rely upon benchmarks as a gague of how powerful a card is, and make purchasing decisions around such knowledge. Sure, some of them forget that a %5 difference is meaningless in real-world performance, but that doesn't mean that the overall scores are meaningless. nVidia's last round of cheats pretended that the card was 25% faster overall than it actually was. This particular cheat ads between 8 and 18 percent to the total, with the largest false total going to the most expensive card.
In other words, if you bought a $300 nVidia card on the strength of this benchmark, you bought a card that is %40 slower than it should be because nVidia went out of its way to lie about the speed.
ATI optimized for the test, they re-ordered the way in which the card handled executions similar to the way someone might re-order their day for maximum efficiency. It was a cheat, but a minor one that only added 2% to the score. nVidia's cheat involved dropping instructions entirely, equivalent to doing more in a day by checking things off your list without actually doing them, letting the food rot in the kitchen and the dirty laundry pile up.
The sad fact of the matter is that nVidia now has a big problem, in that their fastest card which managed to eeek out ATI's fastest cards can no longer claim that crown, and yet it is ATI's turn next to introduce faster cards. Their technology can compete, but can't demand the premium that graphics card developers rely upon to survive. Furthermore, this cheat comes after nVidia promised to clean up their act and remove all cheats from their driver. Not only did they cheat, they promised to clean up their act and yet cheated again in the very driver that is supposed to be clean. Their public image is bloody shot, significantly worse than ATI's was over their Quake 3 debackle. ATI fell back on their technology and released superior cards, but nVidia doesn't seem to be able to head down that road.
To get back to the poster's original position, the benchmark should try to outsmart the developers, though being a test for future games they have to stay abreast of display technology more than cheating techniques. But blaming the benchmark not the nVidia for cheating is like discovering that during a Car-and-Driver top-test the Ford team took a shortcut shaving %40 off of the race course and congratulating them on their ingenuity.
What they did was indefensible. They knew it, they appologized, and they did it again.
David Jones, who isn't really known outside of the industry, has today announced that he is working on two new games at his Scotland-based Real Time Worlds development studio. Working alongside Jones are a couple of suits.
-hype deleted- "My goal is to create and ride gravy trains. Our whole team have experience with gravy trains, from those that make them to those that supervise those that make them."
They have all worked on gravy trains, C|net has confirmed.
-vague hype deleted-
-vague hype deleted-
We'll bring you more information on both of the games in development at Real Time Worlds as soon as it becomes available.
My roommate's company communicates internally via AIM. Much of their product can be configured over a Web Browser (given access codes), and many meetings happen over the phone. And, of course, support issues are brought up via e-mail. In short, except for an empty chair nobody would know she was working from the beach or the waiting room at the doctor's office. With SSH support, she would have no reason to actually be in the office, and could work from the middle of a cafe or (more often) traffic.
I on the other hand would use the browser capability to find resturants, movie times, and driving directions. If I had one of these on me, I would have recieved a job offer via e-mail on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. AIM, AOL Mail, and Texting are useless to me (One company that I contract with uses Jabber, but that's it), but that doesn't mean they aren't viable functions.
Whether or not you need such connectivity all of the time is very different than whether or not such connectivity would be useful. If the screen was good enough, such a device could replace all of the maps in your car for the entire western world, could be used on vacation to check your e-mail to coordinate things back home (or do telnet over e-mail), or whatever you need.
Quite frankly, the better question is "why not?" When cellular phones were originally released, people looked at the normal house-based usage patterns and asked why anyone would need such a thing all of the time. "That's what answering machines are for," they said. Now people coordinate expeditions and friends as if they were available anytime. The sidekick could be used, for example, to check for speedtraps as you drive, or even better to track the locations of officers that day. Anytime http allows for reading online documentation about the computer that is sitting broken in front of you. You can post to a board for a group of people instead of trying to call them individually. You could look for interesting things to do in the city while you are still in the city and not after you have returned home. Or you could just read the BBC while sitting on the bus.
Sounds good to me. When does that number-portability thingie kick in again?
Something wrong with the numbers
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
According to the article, C&W posted a net loss of 6.4 billion pounds on revenues of 4.4 million.
Either there is something wrong with those numbers, or the happy days of the internet boom are back!
As a rough estimate based on no real facts, I would guess 1996. I remember during the successful launch of Escape Velocity there was a lot of talk of the sell-through rates of time-limited or functionally impared shareware vs. perfectly functional shareware.
Unfortunately, if you want to increase your overall sales significantly, you must provide value to the customer above and beyond the simple emotional satisfaction of "doing the right thing." Disabling the product after a length of time is a popular tactic with Windows Shareware authors, though not so much on the Mac where it is easier to bypass. Adding value to a shareware program can include features such as additional levels, additional abilities, or other such things that leave the unpaid version "crippled" in comparison. Many authors combined the two into time-crippled shareware. Recently, there has been a shift to adware products, whose incentive for registration is a removal of annoying ad bars.
Either way, it is all about incentivizing the registration process to raise total income, and it has long been an accepted practice in the shareware community (not that the shareware community exists anymore).
Vivendi has announced that the new Metallica game will be titled WaRaRaRgah! WaRaRaRgah! Wghhhaaaa Wghhaaa Wghhhaaaaaaa! "It's just like the real Lars experience." said the spokesperson.
Rejected titles included "Sanitarium: Welcome to where mimes are killed" "Enter Night: Bake my tan ought to never never LAN" "Hero of the day: Still the Balkins, beat a Paul." "But those titles were rejected, as while they accuratly portreyed the lyrical style of the band, they failed to capture Metallica's more... indecipherable qualities," said our vaguely defined spokesperson.
Slashdot Mirror
just nobody noticed.
Amazing! (tm) "Their Lawyers" (tm) are a little lax (tm) in educating their De-signers (tm) about the branches of IP (tm) law.
(c) 2003 Cgenman (tm) All rights reserved.
Another advantage of closed servers on college campuses is that the traffic doesn't leave your network. While your network may run on fiber, chances are your T3 has somewhat more limited bandwidth. If your students do most of their chatting (and file trading) through local machines, it saves real money on upstream. The odd off-network connection cannot compete with what is transfered around the dorms proper.
How are the large timeframes of interplanetary travel handled in the simulation?
There were rumors of G5's coming out in 2001 (at which point they would be bearably fast).
Then again in 2002.
Now again in 2003.
They're not that fast anymore. Honestly I don't see why Microsoft would be cringing in their shoes at the prospect of competing with a 4k$ quad-proc with "up to" 2ghz chips. Even with the RISC boost, that puts them in a class with systems half of their cost.
This by itself would not be enough to justify worry.
If you are, you may need support for many years for that OS version 9.x. There can be libraries that your application relies upon, but those older-version libraries might not be present in newer versions of the software that contain exploits you would want to patch, or features you might like to build around.
Food for thought.
And if you don't need Red Hat's service plan... why not just run Debian -> Stable?
But what you are talking about is a rural poverty fund, not a rural service fund. I know many rural dwellers who make a good living, and many rich city-dwellers who keep rural houses for vacationing.
Haphazardly giving money to phone companies as compensation for a mandate that they serve everyone isn't going to help that subsistence farmer who can't afford to pay 30 dollars a month for a phone bill anyway. Likewise, there are many kids in the city without access to technology and whose families regularly appeal to my grandmother's church for help paying for electricty and water bills, let alone phones.
The point of the original bill was that the cost of service for those who can afford it should subsidize those who cannot. The current system does not do that, and should be changed.
Actually, the ITX machines do use much less electricity. Mini-ITX.com has a 55w passively cooled sealed PSU that will power most setups.
And if you have the inclination and about 425 pounds to spare, you can get a totally fanless Via setup with a silent Seagate Barracuda (the 5400 RPM Seagate IV is legendary). That's as silent as you can get without resorting to Compact Flash.
Pros:
Dead silent
Cheap replacement parts
High coolness factor
Sort-of expandable
Low power consumption
Cons:
Bang per dollar
How about a Universal Housing Fund, so that rural people can help pay for some of the outrageous apartment costs in the city?
The fund might have been important years ago when there were areas of the globe that were threatened by a lack of telecommunications, but now with cellular towers going up everywhere one can only consider the fund an anachronism.
It costs 1400 dollars per month to rent the tiny apartment above ours. Out in rural California it was 600 dollars to rent a huge house. A few more dollars are going from my TCL to subsidize someone else's, who lives for half of what I'm paying?
I'm all for taking from the rich to give to the poor, but I don't think this is the most direct way to go about it.
Stay away from the shuttles, they're pricey. You can pick up a compatible P3 LAN motherboard, a cheap PSU, some PC133 RAM, and an 800 mhz Socket 370 C3 for around 100 dollars. Put it in a box with a pre-existing HDD and a fan, and you have a server for 1/8th the cost of a new Laptop.
After setting it up, you won't interact with it via the screen / keyboard anyway, so don't bother.
And if your C3 costs are getting too high, pick up a $200 lindows box at walmart.com. Just remember to upgrade the fans to Panaflos, as the walmart box is tremendously, tremendously loud.
BTW, for more silencing tips, visit SilentPCReview.com. That's Silent PC Review dot C-O-M.
That could be easily rectified by not having to pay for damages to your car. A nonexistant repair model is far better than a nonexistant damage model. You crash, careening around the course... you are punished by having to start over.
From a gameplay perspective it makes perfect sense.
(I'll never understand why Racing games don't have enough money and RPG's have too many random enemy encounters. Neither should be too tight or too frequently forced that people complain about it, especially in games with 500 cars or 50 hours of gameplay)
Hopefully by that time the RIAA will have no money.
The RIAA seems to be forgetting that it is in an entertainment industry. You cannot afford to have bad feelings floating around about your label / company in entertainment. For years, that has meant that the labels used the RIAA to do their dirty work, but people seem to be getting wise. More agressive and dirty tactics leads to a more annoyed public with less happy-happy associations with CD purchases.
Furthermore, besides technophiles, which kids are most likely to engage in music piracy? At my college, it was musicians. DJ's, Singers, Guitarists... the musicians wanted to expand their horizons so much that they engaged in the kind of activities that lost this kid his savings. How much are you willing to bet that the musicians formerly on his network will jump at the chance to work for the RIAA?
Labels may have to make a more substantive distancing between themselves and the RIAA if they want to continue bottling and selling the spirit of youth. And sponsors? Pepsi steals your life's savings?
The RIAA will probably wise up and back off, but one can only hope that they flame out and burn.
It appears they are doing distance color washing with blur, and generally toning down the image to mimmoc a television broadcast. Whereas Ridge Racer's ilk went for hypercolor, the artists on GT4 appear to have chosen realistically muted shades of grey and dirty brown. Texturing seems to be pretty spot-on too, without delving too much into the extremely textured look of many games. Thankfully GTA3's much abused car-top reflections appear to be muted too. In fact, between the muted colors and muted textures, the game is definitely not a visual feast for the eyes, which is perfect for a realistic racer.
David Hufford, a product manager in Microsoft's Xbox group, said the Media Center PC remains the central digital entertainment hub of the home, at least to Microsoft's thinking. ... Hufford said it's easier for Microsoft to innovate its console with new add-ons like Music Mixer because the Xbox has a built-in hard drive that easily stores new digital entertainment applications.
We have a product manager who actually believes in the "Media PC," who believes a karoke software product is an original add-on which will sell a videogame, and who refers to "innovating [the] console" by writing software.
Obviously, Mr. Hufford could use a tighter grasp on reality. For example, here is an interview snippet ripped from Gamespy.
David Hufford: My name is David Hufford and I work on the Marketing team at Xbox, so my primary job is to market all things Xbox, including this new game controller.
GameSpy: What are you calling this new controller?
David Hufford: We're calling it Xbox Controller S.
GameSpy: What does the S stand for?
David Hufford: Well, there's not a lot of science behind it, it's more of an art thing. I think we were all in a room and thought it would be a cool name, so we just came up with it.
Sounds brilliant, doesn't he?
Actually, that one is taken a bit out of context. He doesn't flub the rest of the interview, and he doesn't flub the other interviews available for googling (though he does use the phrases "super-hot" and "kicks butt" too often for someone in a professional communications position). So he does sound like he is qualified to talk about whether or not Half-Life 2 will make the console, although he's equally likely to be one of the people who described Microsoft BOB as a "totally awesome innovation, dude."
After all of that tortureous and unnecessary deconstruction of the messenger, it isn't that surprising that Half-Life 2 wouldn't make the big X. The bare minimum specs have always hovered around the XBox level: 700 Mhz CPU with a good DX6 card. And, sadly, the minimum specs for computer games are generally set at what will actually physically play the game, albeit at 320x240 and 5 frames per second. If the XBox is at the minimum specs for the game, the XBox will be too slow to play it satisfactorily.
Firestone, Goodyear, Michelin, Continental etc all redesign the wheel every year. They try new designs with varied rubber thickness, sidewall materials, traction depth, doping materials. There are plastic wheels that prevent shopping carts from leaving the parking lot, airless rubber wheels in public bicycles in Prauge, castor wheels that come in pairs and run on carpet. There are wheel bearings in the axles of your car, wheels used to roll the drum in your drier, wheels that hampsters like to play in. Wheels are turning in the pully being used to haul furnature to the 4th floor, they turn in the CD player running in the 4th floor apartment, and they will be used to roll the refridgerator into its final position where the wheels in the compressor will turn to cool food.
I'll wrap this up before this tirade degrades into "The Kentucky Fried Movie." The fact of the matter is when people say "re-invent the wheel," they almost always mean "redesign the wheel" or "re-implement the wheel," both of which happens every day in our wheel-obsessed society.
Balance that perspective.
While not a codemonkey, Laura seems to have reasonable credentials.
Here is her gigaweb bio, and a brief from the Yankee Group (scroll down, page 2).
This is more like asking a Pilot or an Air Traffic Controller to compare two planes than a farmer (as others have suggested), but I don't think anyone will be satisfied until at least a few mechanics can get into the systems with wrenches.
Even then, if SCO would kindly display what lines they believe are duplicated so that the Linux community can begin the task of tracking down the contributors, then we can have a discussion. Having NDA'd analyists examine the code only is like having the city and a city-appointed lawyer have discussions about the legality of your house while you are explicitly forbidden from coming to the table. Because so much of our livelihood depends upon it, and we have invested so much in it, nobody will accept the judgement unless we are allowed to see the proof.
And even then, of course, there will need to be proof that this *is* SCO code, and not just same-function code, statistical coincidence, or code that SCO stole from Linux.
BTW, caldera has a list (with pictures!) of the board of directors here. Perhaps a few million phone calls will convince them to do what they should have done in the first place and tell us what code exactly they think is copied. Without being able to research their claims due to the choice of the board of directors, we should at least investigate their board of directors.
-C
And after that take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal listing the board of directors, their names, their addresses, and how much money they lost for SCO while contributing to it's demise. Plus any additional tidbits that might make them unemployable in the future.
You can't just burn. You have to remember to salt.
I find it interesting that it was ATI that blew the whistle on NVIDIA, and NVIDIA that blew the whistle on ATI. Personally I hope they both pour more resources into auditing the behavior of eachother's drivers, so that cheats like this can be revealed.
At least someone is checking.
This is not an nVidia problem? This is a benchmark problem, because they weren't wily enough to prevent nVidia from cheating tremendously and repeatedly?
People are crying about this because they rely upon benchmarks as a gague of how powerful a card is, and make purchasing decisions around such knowledge. Sure, some of them forget that a %5 difference is meaningless in real-world performance, but that doesn't mean that the overall scores are meaningless. nVidia's last round of cheats pretended that the card was 25% faster overall than it actually was. This particular cheat ads between 8 and 18 percent to the total, with the largest false total going to the most expensive card.
In other words, if you bought a $300 nVidia card on the strength of this benchmark, you bought a card that is %40 slower than it should be because nVidia went out of its way to lie about the speed.
ATI optimized for the test, they re-ordered the way in which the card handled executions similar to the way someone might re-order their day for maximum efficiency. It was a cheat, but a minor one that only added 2% to the score. nVidia's cheat involved dropping instructions entirely, equivalent to doing more in a day by checking things off your list without actually doing them, letting the food rot in the kitchen and the dirty laundry pile up.
The sad fact of the matter is that nVidia now has a big problem, in that their fastest card which managed to eeek out ATI's fastest cards can no longer claim that crown, and yet it is ATI's turn next to introduce faster cards. Their technology can compete, but can't demand the premium that graphics card developers rely upon to survive. Furthermore, this cheat comes after nVidia promised to clean up their act and remove all cheats from their driver. Not only did they cheat, they promised to clean up their act and yet cheated again in the very driver that is supposed to be clean. Their public image is bloody shot, significantly worse than ATI's was over their Quake 3 debackle. ATI fell back on their technology and released superior cards, but nVidia doesn't seem to be able to head down that road.
To get back to the poster's original position, the benchmark should try to outsmart the developers, though being a test for future games they have to stay abreast of display technology more than cheating techniques. But blaming the benchmark not the nVidia for cheating is like discovering that during a Car-and-Driver top-test the Ford team took a shortcut shaving %40 off of the race course and congratulating them on their ingenuity.
What they did was indefensible. They knew it, they appologized, and they did it again.
With unlimited data plans, I can't wait for the first developer to get VoIP working.
David Jones, who isn't really known outside of the industry, has today announced that he is working on two new games at his Scotland-based Real Time Worlds development studio. Working alongside Jones are a couple of suits.
-hype deleted- "My goal is to create and ride gravy trains. Our whole team have experience with gravy trains, from those that make them to those that supervise those that make them."
They have all worked on gravy trains, C|net has confirmed.
-vague hype deleted-
-vague hype deleted-
We'll bring you more information on both of the games in development at Real Time Worlds as soon as it becomes available.
My roommate's company communicates internally via AIM. Much of their product can be configured over a Web Browser (given access codes), and many meetings happen over the phone. And, of course, support issues are brought up via e-mail. In short, except for an empty chair nobody would know she was working from the beach or the waiting room at the doctor's office. With SSH support, she would have no reason to actually be in the office, and could work from the middle of a cafe or (more often) traffic.
I on the other hand would use the browser capability to find resturants, movie times, and driving directions. If I had one of these on me, I would have recieved a job offer via e-mail on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. AIM, AOL Mail, and Texting are useless to me (One company that I contract with uses Jabber, but that's it), but that doesn't mean they aren't viable functions.
Whether or not you need such connectivity all of the time is very different than whether or not such connectivity would be useful. If the screen was good enough, such a device could replace all of the maps in your car for the entire western world, could be used on vacation to check your e-mail to coordinate things back home (or do telnet over e-mail), or whatever you need.
Quite frankly, the better question is "why not?" When cellular phones were originally released, people looked at the normal house-based usage patterns and asked why anyone would need such a thing all of the time. "That's what answering machines are for," they said. Now people coordinate expeditions and friends as if they were available anytime. The sidekick could be used, for example, to check for speedtraps as you drive, or even better to track the locations of officers that day. Anytime http allows for reading online documentation about the computer that is sitting broken in front of you. You can post to a board for a group of people instead of trying to call them individually. You could look for interesting things to do in the city while you are still in the city and not after you have returned home. Or you could just read the BBC while sitting on the bus.
Sounds good to me. When does that number-portability thingie kick in again?
According to the article, C&W posted a net loss of 6.4 billion pounds on revenues of 4.4 million.
Either there is something wrong with those numbers, or the happy days of the internet boom are back!
As a rough estimate based on no real facts, I would guess 1996. I remember during the successful launch of Escape Velocity there was a lot of talk of the sell-through rates of time-limited or functionally impared shareware vs. perfectly functional shareware.
Unfortunately, if you want to increase your overall sales significantly, you must provide value to the customer above and beyond the simple emotional satisfaction of "doing the right thing." Disabling the product after a length of time is a popular tactic with Windows Shareware authors, though not so much on the Mac where it is easier to bypass. Adding value to a shareware program can include features such as additional levels, additional abilities, or other such things that leave the unpaid version "crippled" in comparison. Many authors combined the two into time-crippled shareware. Recently, there has been a shift to adware products, whose incentive for registration is a removal of annoying ad bars.
Either way, it is all about incentivizing the registration process to raise total income, and it has long been an accepted practice in the shareware community (not that the shareware community exists anymore).
Vivendi has announced that the new Metallica game will be titled WaRaRaRgah! WaRaRaRgah! Wghhhaaaa Wghhaaa Wghhhaaaaaaa! "It's just like the real Lars experience." said the spokesperson.
Rejected titles included "Sanitarium: Welcome to where mimes are killed" "Enter Night: Bake my tan ought to never never LAN" "Hero of the day: Still the Balkins, beat a Paul." "But those titles were rejected, as while they accuratly portreyed the lyrical style of the band, they failed to capture Metallica's more... indecipherable qualities," said our vaguely defined spokesperson.