It turns out that the memory isn't the part that cranks the costs up. RAM is pretty damn cheap; the difference between memory costs for 64MB and 128MB is negligable. But to add a 128-bit memory bus, you have to add more layers to the card, which boosts production costs significantly. With the 32-bit bus on these cards, a 3-layer video card becomes possible, rather than 6-8 layers on something like a 6800GT.
There were actually five Bab5 movies (/me fires up the FTP client): I: In the Beginning (Earth-Minbari War, editorialized by Londo) II: Thirdspace (Set Between winning the Shadow War and the assault on earth, the B5 crew finds a portal to another dimension left by the Vorlons) III: The River Of Souls (Elaboration on the Soul Keeper concept introduced in one of the first episodes) IV: The Legend of the Rangers -- which, by the way, I quite liked. I think it's been much maligned. Ranger movie V: A Call To Arms -- this set the backplot for the spin-off Crusade.
AMDs weren't exactly crappy knock offs. In fact, if you bought a 386 or early 486 from Intel, there was a chance that it was made by AMD, since Intel licensed some production from them for those lines of chips. Now, granted, when AMD (and Cyrix) went retail, their chips (while still not crappy) had well overinflated performance ratings.
What's not to like is that Microsoft should be able to release an update for their operating system that doesn't horribly, horribly break 20% of the time. It's a failure that these holes were present anyway. It's like purchasing a car and recieving a beautiful brochure image with a note saying the rest of the car will be delivered in a year or two.
And I'm not worried about my job. Users will always be stupid. Always:-)
Re:and they don't for the millions of machines
on
The Verdict on WinXP SP2?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It tells me those machines are pretty typical. I work for a tier 1 helpdesk on a fairly large (~20k people) campus, mainly supporting student machines. After SP2 was released, nearly half my problems were "SP2 not installing cleanly" problems. I've had a lot of different issues -- mostly networking (a full stack reset after uninstalling SP2 usually fixes these), but quite a few more serious errors like "Unmountable Boot Volume" in a blue-screen loop after installation. As far as failure rate, I'd have to say SP2 is the worst update as far as failure rate goes.
The root cause of a lot of these problems are viruses, spyware, and adware, which is funny because those problems are what SP2 is supposed to fix. Anything that mucks around with any system files gives SP2 fits, especially the network stack. Luckily, most people have either got SP2 now, or have automatic updates disabled until such time as they can reinstall Windows so that they can update their machines again.
I don't think you are correct. I remember the red/blue color scheme going all the way back to at least Bush/Clinton in '92. It may have extended a significant amount before that, but I'm too young to remember.
You must forget -- all my cards ARE All-in-Wonder cards. Again, I've noticed no problems. I have many more problems with my Mobility chip, but that's Dell's fault, not ATI's -- when I download the third-party Omega drivers, the card runs great.
Well, I've been playing Call of Duty since it was released on an ATI card, so I don't know which driver issue that would be. I can't speak to the Dues Ex issue, as I don't play it. The quality of nVidia's cards are not uniform, as they don't build them themselves. The quality of ATI's cards -- as long as you get a built-by-ATI card -- are uniform, so you know what you are getting.
Well, since your post is all happenstance, I should counter with mine. I've purchased 8 video cards in the past 7 years. 3 of those have failed: 2 Geforce 2 MX400s, and 1 Geforce 4 Ti 4200. My ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, All-in-Wonder 9600, All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, and Radeon 7500 have all been golden. It's also pretty widely accepted that the anti-aliasing algorithm employeed by ATIs 9xxx and Xxxx cards are superior to nVidia's algorithm, since the pixels are gamma adjusted and (compared to the Geforce FX series) the grid on which AA sampling is done is better. This round, ATI and nVidia are essentially tied, but complaining against ATI for bad hardware and bad drivers is so 1999.
... or not, considering that he's using a (Socket 754) Semperon 3100+, which doesn't support dual-channel memory. Not that even Athlon XPs got that much out of dual-channel (10%, at most...)
That's 333Mhz BEFORE clock-quadding. So it's actually an effective FSB of 1332Mhz. This probably isn't the highest FSB overclock achieved so far, but it is unusual to get such a high overclock on the top of the line (i.e. highest multiplier) chip.
One reason that pops to mind is that some people are still running Windows XP on FAT32 volumes. Those people have a 4GB maximum file size limit, which may cause a problem for large DVD ISOs. This, of course, isn't a problem on NTFS, where the default maximum file size (dependant on cluster size) is something like 16 terabytes (minus 64KB).
... I once read Slashdot from a computer terminal at the women's basketball hall of fame in Knoxville, TN. I noticed that their computer wasn't properly locked down (They were using a web-based app in IE and had forgetten to disable the Ctrl-O shortcut for "Open...") and loaded Slashdot to show my sister how.
In my experience, dealing with large files gives you tons of fragmentation on NTFS. Mind you, we may have different definitions of large files: mine is anything > 200MB (typ. 400MB, mostly videos). I also do a lot of deletion/insertion (I typically download something, watch it, and then delete it). I had no defragmentation for the first month, and when I finally got around to installing Diskeeper, my fragmentation was "58%" (something like 5 fragments/file). I usually run on the hairy edge of free space (80-95%), so this contributes a large percentage of the framentation.
Oh, really? What would you call, well, basically any of the alternate universe stories with the Intendant (aka Kira)? Or Sisqo and Dax in the alternate universe? Now that I think about it, though, I don't recall any sexual act actually being performed on screen, just strong implication. But no more or less then what was implied in the T'Pol/Trip scene in Enterprise
Re:Clifford Stoll's two books
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, because a card catalog is obviously just as good as a computer at cross-referencing information. Think about what you are saying, people! You can learn a lot more on the Internet with the proper technique then you can in a library, simply because information flows faster. 5 years ago, I may have agreed with you. But as a much larger percentage of information goes online, the balance tips more and more favorably to the side of the digital age. If you want to have your kid spent lots of time in a library, great: but don't get upset when he gets left behind by kids who can find everything he found in an entire afternoon in one hour on the Internet.
Unforunately, Spybot S&D doesn't remove everything. If I were to choose one program to run, I'd choose Ad-aware. Not only does it typically catch more stuff, it also has an easier interface if the lUser ever has to use it.
My qualifications? I deal with around 25 spyware-related calls per week at a teir 1 helpdesk for a top 20 university. That's of a total of 35-40 calls, so you can tell that it is far more than 12% of my workload...
...consuming only 70% of the power of the AMD Athlon 64 mobile chip with about as much CPU power.
Eh? I don't think so. The Athlon 64 mobile chip (at least the 3000+) achieves near performance parity with the desktop chip. Near as I can tell, the IPC of the Athlon and Pentium-M archetectures is nearly the same per clock (and I own one of each). For instance, my 1.3Ghz Pentium-M performs equivilantly in benchmarks to my Athlon 1800+ desktop (which is handicapped by PC133 memory). But the clock speed of the Pentium Ms is far below the clock of the Athlon mobile, and it wasn't designed to ramp in clock speed at all. The Athlon, on the other hand, has shown itself to be quite the clock speed maven, going from a 550Mhz Duron Slot-A to the short-lived Throughbred-B Athlon 2800+ at 2.25Ghz (and the soon-to-be-released Athlon 64 3700+ at 2.4Ghz)
I agree, though; it will be interesting to see AMD as the overly-hot higher clockspeed contender in this new processor race. AMD has never done particularly well with mobile chips (as witnessed by Intel's 85% market share in the mobile sector); perhaps this will force their hand on that front somewhat.
Two words: stack reset. IE is just integrated enough into the OS to get utterly fucked when the TCP/IP configuration of Windows is the slightest bit off. For any version of Windows prior to XP, remove TCP/IP and reinstall it. For XP, open a command prompt and type "netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt", and then merge Winsock and Winsock2 keys from a working registry. There are utilities which will do it for you.
I attend Vanderbilt University, and it's pretty far down. We *don't* have wireless in the larger lecture halls for the express reason that students would goof off on the Internet instead of paying attention. Also, there is very little outdoor coverage. Even our main engineering complex only has specific floors covered, simply because it is a huge complex (and the third level is the ground level). I rather fail to see how we ranked at all, unless there are only 100 colleges in the US with wireless!
Then again, they also ranked my hometown 100th in the list of most unwired cities, and until January, I had *never* come across a wireless access point in that city. Ever. (Recently, an Internet cafe opened up near the movie theatre with wireless access for free with purchase...)
What? You may have heard of the ATI Radeon 9100 IGP. Same type of deal. I also hear a rumor that Intel's not-so-extreme graphics are getting an overhaul in the 915/925 series of chipsets...
I've always wondered why motherboard manufactuers didn't use the mobile graphics chips and integrate them. Seems like an easy one chip solution, and you pop an ATI M11 (Radeon 9700 Mobility) and you'd have a nice little graphics chip for very little overhead. Heck, with the better cooling environment available in a desktop you could probably even clock it higher.
Boss: "If Linux is $699, we'll take 20!" You: "Yes, that's $699 per copy. Made out to Computers Association for Shell Hawking. Actually, just make it to the acronym: CASH"
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that the memory isn't the part that cranks the costs up. RAM is pretty damn cheap; the difference between memory costs for 64MB and 128MB is negligable. But to add a 128-bit memory bus, you have to add more layers to the card, which boosts production costs significantly. With the 32-bit bus on these cards, a 3-layer video card becomes possible, rather than 6-8 layers on something like a 6800GT.
There were actually five Bab5 movies (/me fires up the FTP client):
I: In the Beginning (Earth-Minbari War, editorialized by Londo)
II: Thirdspace (Set Between winning the Shadow War and the assault on earth, the B5 crew finds a portal to another dimension left by the Vorlons)
III: The River Of Souls (Elaboration on the Soul Keeper concept introduced in one of the first episodes)
IV: The Legend of the Rangers -- which, by the way, I quite liked. I think it's been much maligned. Ranger movie
V: A Call To Arms -- this set the backplot for the spin-off Crusade.
These were all TNT (?) Movies of the Week.
AMDs weren't exactly crappy knock offs. In fact, if you bought a 386 or early 486 from Intel, there was a chance that it was made by AMD, since Intel licensed some production from them for those lines of chips. Now, granted, when AMD (and Cyrix) went retail, their chips (while still not crappy) had well overinflated performance ratings.
Actually, this happens to me every year. My uncle is the assistant vice president for human resources as Colgate-Palmolive, so he has his reasons :-)
What's not to like is that Microsoft should be able to release an update for their operating system that doesn't horribly, horribly break 20% of the time. It's a failure that these holes were present anyway. It's like purchasing a car and recieving a beautiful brochure image with a note saying the rest of the car will be delivered in a year or two.
:-)
And I'm not worried about my job. Users will always be stupid. Always
It tells me those machines are pretty typical. I work for a tier 1 helpdesk on a fairly large (~20k people) campus, mainly supporting student machines. After SP2 was released, nearly half my problems were "SP2 not installing cleanly" problems. I've had a lot of different issues -- mostly networking (a full stack reset after uninstalling SP2 usually fixes these), but quite a few more serious errors like "Unmountable Boot Volume" in a blue-screen loop after installation. As far as failure rate, I'd have to say SP2 is the worst update as far as failure rate goes.
The root cause of a lot of these problems are viruses, spyware, and adware, which is funny because those problems are what SP2 is supposed to fix. Anything that mucks around with any system files gives SP2 fits, especially the network stack. Luckily, most people have either got SP2 now, or have automatic updates disabled until such time as they can reinstall Windows so that they can update their machines again.
I don't think you are correct. I remember the red/blue color scheme going all the way back to at least Bush/Clinton in '92. It may have extended a significant amount before that, but I'm too young to remember.
You must forget -- all my cards ARE All-in-Wonder cards. Again, I've noticed no problems. I have many more problems with my Mobility chip, but that's Dell's fault, not ATI's -- when I download the third-party Omega drivers, the card runs great.
Well, I've been playing Call of Duty since it was released on an ATI card, so I don't know which driver issue that would be. I can't speak to the Dues Ex issue, as I don't play it. The quality of nVidia's cards are not uniform, as they don't build them themselves. The quality of ATI's cards -- as long as you get a built-by-ATI card -- are uniform, so you know what you are getting.
Well, since your post is all happenstance, I should counter with mine. I've purchased 8 video cards in the past 7 years. 3 of those have failed: 2 Geforce 2 MX400s, and 1 Geforce 4 Ti 4200. My ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, All-in-Wonder 9600, All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, and Radeon 7500 have all been golden. It's also pretty widely accepted that the anti-aliasing algorithm employeed by ATIs 9xxx and Xxxx cards are superior to nVidia's algorithm, since the pixels are gamma adjusted and (compared to the Geforce FX series) the grid on which AA sampling is done is better. This round, ATI and nVidia are essentially tied, but complaining against ATI for bad hardware and bad drivers is so 1999.
... or not, considering that he's using a (Socket 754) Semperon 3100+, which doesn't support dual-channel memory. Not that even Athlon XPs got that much out of dual-channel (10%, at most...)
Wrong. Counterstrike uses the Half-Life engine.
That's 333Mhz BEFORE clock-quadding. So it's actually an effective FSB of 1332Mhz. This probably isn't the highest FSB overclock achieved so far, but it is unusual to get such a high overclock on the top of the line (i.e. highest multiplier) chip.
One reason that pops to mind is that some people are still running Windows XP on FAT32 volumes. Those people have a 4GB maximum file size limit, which may cause a problem for large DVD ISOs. This, of course, isn't a problem on NTFS, where the default maximum file size (dependant on cluster size) is something like 16 terabytes (minus 64KB).
... I once read Slashdot from a computer terminal at the women's basketball hall of fame in Knoxville, TN. I noticed that their computer wasn't properly locked down (They were using a web-based app in IE and had forgetten to disable the Ctrl-O shortcut for "Open...") and loaded Slashdot to show my sister how.
In my experience, dealing with large files gives you tons of fragmentation on NTFS. Mind you, we may have different definitions of large files: mine is anything > 200MB (typ. 400MB, mostly videos). I also do a lot of deletion/insertion (I typically download something, watch it, and then delete it). I had no defragmentation for the first month, and when I finally got around to installing Diskeeper, my fragmentation was "58%" (something like 5 fragments/file). I usually run on the hairy edge of free space (80-95%), so this contributes a large percentage of the framentation.
Yes, because a card catalog is obviously just as good as a computer at cross-referencing information. Think about what you are saying, people! You can learn a lot more on the Internet with the proper technique then you can in a library, simply because information flows faster. 5 years ago, I may have agreed with you. But as a much larger percentage of information goes online, the balance tips more and more favorably to the side of the digital age. If you want to have your kid spent lots of time in a library, great: but don't get upset when he gets left behind by kids who can find everything he found in an entire afternoon in one hour on the Internet.
Unforunately, Spybot S&D doesn't remove everything. If I were to choose one program to run, I'd choose Ad-aware. Not only does it typically catch more stuff, it also has an easier interface if the lUser ever has to use it.
My qualifications? I deal with around 25 spyware-related calls per week at a teir 1 helpdesk for a top 20 university. That's of a total of 35-40 calls, so you can tell that it is far more than 12% of my workload...
Eh? I don't think so. The Athlon 64 mobile chip (at least the 3000+) achieves near performance parity with the desktop chip. Near as I can tell, the IPC of the Athlon and Pentium-M archetectures is nearly the same per clock (and I own one of each). For instance, my 1.3Ghz Pentium-M performs equivilantly in benchmarks to my Athlon 1800+ desktop (which is handicapped by PC133 memory). But the clock speed of the Pentium Ms is far below the clock of the Athlon mobile, and it wasn't designed to ramp in clock speed at all. The Athlon, on the other hand, has shown itself to be quite the clock speed maven, going from a 550Mhz Duron Slot-A to the short-lived Throughbred-B Athlon 2800+ at 2.25Ghz (and the soon-to-be-released Athlon 64 3700+ at 2.4Ghz)
I agree, though; it will be interesting to see AMD as the overly-hot higher clockspeed contender in this new processor race. AMD has never done particularly well with mobile chips (as witnessed by Intel's 85% market share in the mobile sector); perhaps this will force their hand on that front somewhat.
Two words: stack reset. IE is just integrated enough into the OS to get utterly fucked when the TCP/IP configuration of Windows is the slightest bit off. For any version of Windows prior to XP, remove TCP/IP and reinstall it. For XP, open a command prompt and type "netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt", and then merge Winsock and Winsock2 keys from a working registry. There are utilities which will do it for you.
I attend Vanderbilt University, and it's pretty far down. We *don't* have wireless in the larger lecture halls for the express reason that students would goof off on the Internet instead of paying attention. Also, there is very little outdoor coverage. Even our main engineering complex only has specific floors covered, simply because it is a huge complex (and the third level is the ground level). I rather fail to see how we ranked at all, unless there are only 100 colleges in the US with wireless!
Then again, they also ranked my hometown 100th in the list of most unwired cities, and until January, I had *never* come across a wireless access point in that city. Ever. (Recently, an Internet cafe opened up near the movie theatre with wireless access for free with purchase...)
... I mean, I have to restart every now and then for updates and stuff. Occasionally I pass out in the warm glow of automatic weapons fire...
What? You may have heard of the ATI Radeon 9100 IGP. Same type of deal. I also hear a rumor that Intel's not-so-extreme graphics are getting an overhaul in the 915/925 series of chipsets...
I've always wondered why motherboard manufactuers didn't use the mobile graphics chips and integrate them. Seems like an easy one chip solution, and you pop an ATI M11 (Radeon 9700 Mobility) and you'd have a nice little graphics chip for very little overhead. Heck, with the better cooling environment available in a desktop you could probably even clock it higher.
Boss: "If Linux is $699, we'll take 20!"
You: "Yes, that's $699 per copy. Made out to Computers Association for Shell Hawking. Actually, just make it to the acronym: CASH"