Worked fine for me. Quite impressive although I am sure that DirectX is doing most of the work, all they've created is a texture generator (a good one, the textures are pretty good), a map generator (maps aren't that inspiring or involved at the moment, but there are nice touches) and then a few baddies and weapons and a way to walk around the map firing the weapons at the baddies (with nice graphical effects for some of the ammo).
Yeah, but it is cheaper than it used to be whilst getting a speed bump. Instead of being overpriced and underpowered for being a budget system it is now a reasonable priced budget system that will compare reasonably well with other OEM budget systems (not white box systems though).
Most computers for the past year or so and probably longer have supported booting off of USB devices. Ever tried installing a generic Linux install on a USB key and trying that? You'd have to disable swap though...
At last a reasonably priced Apple computer. And the international prices don't have the standard 50% Apple International tax, they are reasonably close to the US prices after currency conversion!
For a laugh earlier I configured a system on Dells site with similar features. This was a 2.6GHz Celeron 2400C system. It came out higher priced than the eMac (eMac 549, Dell 580) for as close a match of specification as possible (and I made sure that warranties, etc, were minimal on the Dell, I'm not an Apple owner so I won't cheat like that!). Certainly not a bad deal in my opinion, especially with iLife and Panther included (after a year of using XP, I realise how much I loathe it). The Dell looked like a turd as well, if that matters to you!:)
... except in whatever use, something else is cheaper and better.
At home - CDRs or DVDRs are a lot cheaper and the drives are a fraction of the cost. The average user doesn't have that great a need to backup a lot of stuff anyway, or have a need for 25MB/s backup. Anyway, at $60 a go, you won't use these for archival purposes anyway. For a floppy disk replacement it would be nice though, although what need does the average person have for floppies that can't be addressed by a CDRW or DVDRW, a network or USB flash media?
So... maybe you own a small server centre and want to offer backup to your clients. You can have one USB version of this drive and swap cartridges as you plug it into each server and backup. Of course you will have to manage the servers yourself as most servers won't have a nice accessible button to use on the front to activate a backup application automatically...
If Iomega want to get this format accepted even a little bit, they need to open up the specification (maybe at a reasonable charge) to other companies to make drives and media. Optical writable media succeeded because it was a standard. One company cannot create a standard on its own.
Those SDLT devices cost $3000 or more a pop, they are full height (2 5.25" bays) as well.
Of course there are ~$1000 tape drives from Quantum as well, but they don't offer the same speed (about 1/5th the speed) of this removeable hard drive and have similar capacities.
Not really comparable to a $400 drive that fits in a single 5.25" bay (hmmm, an 8cm wide cartridge? Wonder if a 3.5" bay drive is doable?) to be honest.
It doesn't change traffic light behaviour, it will just make it turn earlier than it would have.
If someone is incapable of stopping when a green light turns amber then red on a road in whatever conditions, they shouldn't be driving.
This method is great. It provides immediate punishment to the person speeding. Psychology tests show that immediate punishment is the most effective - much better than a $50 fine through the post a week later.
It also turns other drivers against speeders, until speeding is a big no-no in society. Like drunk driving is something that only scum that deserve to die do these days, yet was accepted 20 years ago.
I know all that! I was replying to the original post which was talking about standard PCI and low throughput, and I was giving some real world figures to his speculated figures, and explaining that gigE is available already on motherboards in non-PCI limited versions (Intel CSA, nVidia integrated, etc). I also corrected the common statement that PCI-X is PCIe.
PCIe graphics cards will be 16x from the start. It looks like 1x, 4x and 16x will be the common configurations (and not 2x, 8x and 12x which are the other options). 1x gets 250MBps in each direction (more than enough for a discrete gigE controller), and 4x will get 1GBps in each direction.
Tests using PCI Gigabit chips (e.g., broadcom, 3com, intel) get around 500Mbps or so.
Intel CSA attached gigabit chips (on Intel chipset motherboards only) perform better. CSA is a dedicated link from the northbridge to a gigE controller.
Of course, nForce3 250Gb integrates gigE inside, and gets over 800Mbps performance. See the preceeding/. story! Of course, that controller is attached to the processor by a 6.4GB/s link!
Also, PCI-X != PCIe. PCIe (PCI Express) is the upcoming high speed serial version of PCI that operates on a point-to-point basis. PCI-X is the extended faster variant of 64-bit 66MHz PCI running at up to 133MHz (1GB/s PCI essentially) in a bus configuration.
At least with tabs Mozilla is really quick - opening a new tab takes no time at all, yet with IE opening a new window there is a perceptible pause. Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window"... weird logic that leads to even more delay.
Firefox 0.8 has been the least stable version of Mozilla/FireWibble I've used though. It eats memory like a whore in a chocolate dick factory. It crashes and takes down Windows with it (this is really odd, but it does, I can't explain it, no decent OS should be taken down by a rogue application).
This will become useful for those people who buy music from iTMS and who have more computers / AAC devices than what AAC DRM allows.
Hopefully it won't be used by people to create AAC albums for download, that will lead to harsher DRM in the future that may be even harder to remove.
If Apple had any sense, then they will have watermarked the AAC files in some way to identify the owner of the file (okay, the owner of the license to play the music contained within the file) - this was probably a requirement to get iTMS off the ground to be honest. If you use this software to remove the DRM and then share the files, don't be surprised if you get in trouble for it down the line!
It is a bit hard to enforce strictly the right for the music owner to play the music they own on any device in the house or on their person, or in their car, whilst preventing the copying of said music to another person's computer/car/etc.
Especially as that creation, the CD-R, bypasses a lot of the issues:)
Now if only music was cheaper in the shops, and the artist got a fair proportion of the proceeds... the problem with copied music would be a lot less. Hell, if music was free to download at 64kbps mono (for example) then everyone can preview the music (the argument for file sharing) and then choose to buy the high quality version, or just use the naff version. File sharing is the Radio of the 21st century. Adapt or die.
Whilst the idea of making something familiar to people switching from Windows is all very nice and that, there are some issues:
1) It doesn't need to be exactly analogous in order for someone to know what is going on. Windows users appears to handle the change from classic interface to XP interface without suddenly dying!
2) I can see that they have recreated some of Windows' worst aspects as well in the name of familiarity. I saw the old 16-colour drop down box in one of the screenshots, surely a relic from the 80's or something! Sadly this also means that Windows' nasty way of having configuration utilities spread everywhere is recreated - whereas a single configuration utility like KDE's is much better overall, especially if it was simplified.
I really don't see why they have to recreate the frustrating aspects of Windows! Shouldn't they be striving to improve upon Windows whilst retaining familiarity?
I don't know what the Sun Java Desktop is like personally, but it is probably pretty good - Gnome and StarOffice and all that jazz.
As such it should handle what most people use a PC for pretty well - internet, e-mail, chatting, letter to the bank manager.
You don't need Windows XP for these tasks.
Now the price is a bit high given the hardware - you could build the same for a lot less, but Walmart will be making a slice and Sun will be too I imagine.
And these boxes will be faster than 2.8GHz Celeron boxes judging from reviews online.
It is more like the classic AmigaOS (From Workbench 1.0 in 1985 to present) behaviour, which has always been a spatial filesystem view.
Spatial does not mean "open folders in new window" - it has that per-window location, size, view mode, etc aspect to it as well. AmigaOS also let you locate Icons within each window where you wanted and then snapshot their locations along with the window, so still more advanced, but maybe Gnome will get there 20 years afterwards...
Now it only needs an option for the default action when double clicking (Either: "Open new window" or "Open new window and close parent") so my weaker middle button doesn't die too soon. Because of the latter you need an "Open Parent Window" button on the UI, although the popup on the bottom left seems to suffice it isn't exactly obvious.
Still, it is looking like a nice clean desktop now. I wonder what would happen if KDE put some effort into making their system clean and simple?
That is true - the major labels are moaning because their sales are going down, because file sharing enables their customers to discover new music and buy that instead of the engineered pap.
Actually some of the mixes of Toxic are pretty good, you could almost classify some of them as EBM / Electro-Industrial.
And I own the first Britney album. It was cheap. Forgive me! I repent. I also own two Kylie albums.
Yeah. Students don't have money anyway, hardly a lost sale.
3 years down the line the ex-student who now has a job sees the CD in a shop and goes "ooh, that was good, I'll get it". If it is cheap pap-pop it'll probably be in the bargain bin as well, bonus!
Why not just make a low resolution version available for download. e.g., VideoCD resolution (384x276 IIRC) but DivX for smaller file size.
On a TV these resolutions are perfectly acceptable (well, sucks if you have HDTV, do they have built-in Gaussian Blur for low-res material?). It isn't DVD quality either so that won't be an issue. As long as it will play in my DivX enabled DVD player I'd be happy.
Anyway, DVD quality versions appear as soon as the show is broadcast on digital anyway, direct MPEG2 stream rip and reformat into DivX.
Aye. It would make sense for a record company to actually actively put songs on the file sharing networks for their popular artists because it would increase sales further!
The only conclusion I can make is that the RIAA are RETARDED. They appear to be wanting to REDUCE their sales!
If it wasn't for file sharing, I wouldn't have gone to see a band play live on Sunday (Icon of Coil, for those of you into industrial/EBM stuff, support from Deathboy, the most excellent Swarf [playing live in USA soon, go and see them if you can] and Solitary Experiments).
I wouldn't have this 3 CD limited edition box set of Blutengel sitting next to me here. I wouldn't have 3 Cryonica Tanz compilation CDs so I can pick other bands I like and then buy their stuff...
I wouldn't even be into this whole genre! I'd still be looking around local music stores in a bored manner because there is nothing new or exciting on offer.
Couldn't Arianespace bring back Ariane3 or something to compete in that area? Or will they just upgrade ASAP (300kg per payload on Ariane 5) to allow bigger devices?
Can you make a fully functional useful satellite in 300kg? Imagine launching 4 at the same time and then being able to offer a few hundred digital TV channels off your own satellite network... heh!
Slashdot Mirror
Worked fine for me. Quite impressive although I am sure that DirectX is doing most of the work, all they've created is a texture generator (a good one, the textures are pretty good), a map generator (maps aren't that inspiring or involved at the moment, but there are nice touches) and then a few baddies and weapons and a way to walk around the map firing the weapons at the baddies (with nice graphical effects for some of the ammo).
Yeah, but it is cheaper than it used to be whilst getting a speed bump. Instead of being overpriced and underpowered for being a budget system it is now a reasonable priced budget system that will compare reasonably well with other OEM budget systems (not white box systems though).
Most computers for the past year or so and probably longer have supported booting off of USB devices. Ever tried installing a generic Linux install on a USB key and trying that? You'd have to disable swap though...
At last a reasonably priced Apple computer. And the international prices don't have the standard 50% Apple International tax, they are reasonably close to the US prices after currency conversion!
:)
For a laugh earlier I configured a system on Dells site with similar features. This was a 2.6GHz Celeron 2400C system. It came out higher priced than the eMac (eMac 549, Dell 580) for as close a match of specification as possible (and I made sure that warranties, etc, were minimal on the Dell, I'm not an Apple owner so I won't cheat like that!). Certainly not a bad deal in my opinion, especially with iLife and Panther included (after a year of using XP, I realise how much I loathe it). The Dell looked like a turd as well, if that matters to you!
This application (mass data storage via a tape library) simply isn't what the Iomega drive is targetted at.
I can't think of much that it would be the first choice product for though.
... except in whatever use, something else is cheaper and better.
... maybe you own a small server centre and want to offer backup to your clients. You can have one USB version of this drive and swap cartridges as you plug it into each server and backup. Of course you will have to manage the servers yourself as most servers won't have a nice accessible button to use on the front to activate a backup application automatically...
At home - CDRs or DVDRs are a lot cheaper and the drives are a fraction of the cost. The average user doesn't have that great a need to backup a lot of stuff anyway, or have a need for 25MB/s backup. Anyway, at $60 a go, you won't use these for archival purposes anyway. For a floppy disk replacement it would be nice though, although what need does the average person have for floppies that can't be addressed by a CDRW or DVDRW, a network or USB flash media?
So
If Iomega want to get this format accepted even a little bit, they need to open up the specification (maybe at a reasonable charge) to other companies to make drives and media. Optical writable media succeeded because it was a standard. One company cannot create a standard on its own.
Those SDLT devices cost $3000 or more a pop, they are full height (2 5.25" bays) as well.
Of course there are ~$1000 tape drives from Quantum as well, but they don't offer the same speed (about 1/5th the speed) of this removeable hard drive and have similar capacities.
Not really comparable to a $400 drive that fits in a single 5.25" bay (hmmm, an 8cm wide cartridge? Wonder if a 3.5" bay drive is doable?) to be honest.
OTOH, at least the Quantum product will work.
It doesn't change traffic light behaviour, it will just make it turn earlier than it would have.
If someone is incapable of stopping when a green light turns amber then red on a road in whatever conditions, they shouldn't be driving.
This method is great. It provides immediate punishment to the person speeding. Psychology tests show that immediate punishment is the most effective - much better than a $50 fine through the post a week later.
It also turns other drivers against speeders, until speeding is a big no-no in society. Like drunk driving is something that only scum that deserve to die do these days, yet was accepted 20 years ago.
I know all that! I was replying to the original post which was talking about standard PCI and low throughput, and I was giving some real world figures to his speculated figures, and explaining that gigE is available already on motherboards in non-PCI limited versions (Intel CSA, nVidia integrated, etc). I also corrected the common statement that PCI-X is PCIe.
PCIe graphics cards will be 16x from the start. It looks like 1x, 4x and 16x will be the common configurations (and not 2x, 8x and 12x which are the other options). 1x gets 250MBps in each direction (more than enough for a discrete gigE controller), and 4x will get 1GBps in each direction.
Tests using PCI Gigabit chips (e.g., broadcom, 3com, intel) get around 500Mbps or so.
/. story! Of course, that controller is attached to the processor by a 6.4GB/s link!
Intel CSA attached gigabit chips (on Intel chipset motherboards only) perform better. CSA is a dedicated link from the northbridge to a gigE controller.
Of course, nForce3 250Gb integrates gigE inside, and gets over 800Mbps performance. See the preceeding
Also, PCI-X != PCIe. PCIe (PCI Express) is the upcoming high speed serial version of PCI that operates on a point-to-point basis. PCI-X is the extended faster variant of 64-bit 66MHz PCI running at up to 133MHz (1GB/s PCI essentially) in a bus configuration.
I was waiting for someone to pick up on my poor grammar there! I hadn't had any coffee when I wrote it.
:)
If there was an edit function then I'd have fixed it to read:
"It eats memory like a fat whore in a chocolate dick factory eats chocolate dicks."
which is marginally better albeit not perfect.
Of course, the imagery therein might be a bit too much for some of the less mature geeks here, hehe
I'm running XP. This didn't happen under any previous version of Mozilla or Firebird either.
I have other machines running FreeBSD and Linux.
Firefox is an application that somehow takes down windows.
Yes, even the keyboard stops responding.
This has happened several times, every time is when I do something with Firefox. To be fair, it might be a plug-in issue.
It happens rarely enough to not be an issue, and my install of Windows XP is 1 year old now, which probably makes it a rather geriatric install.
Regardless, an application crash/fault shouldn't bring down the OS. It is like Windows XP has a "WIN32_StopEverything" API call that is being called!
At least with tabs Mozilla is really quick - opening a new tab takes no time at all, yet with IE opening a new window there is a perceptible pause. Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window" ... weird logic that leads to even more delay.
Firefox 0.8 has been the least stable version of Mozilla/FireWibble I've used though. It eats memory like a whore in a chocolate dick factory. It crashes and takes down Windows with it (this is really odd, but it does, I can't explain it, no decent OS should be taken down by a rogue application).
This will become useful for those people who buy music from iTMS and who have more computers / AAC devices than what AAC DRM allows.
:)
... the problem with copied music would be a lot less. Hell, if music was free to download at 64kbps mono (for example) then everyone can preview the music (the argument for file sharing) and then choose to buy the high quality version, or just use the naff version. File sharing is the Radio of the 21st century. Adapt or die.
Hopefully it won't be used by people to create AAC albums for download, that will lead to harsher DRM in the future that may be even harder to remove.
If Apple had any sense, then they will have watermarked the AAC files in some way to identify the owner of the file (okay, the owner of the license to play the music contained within the file) - this was probably a requirement to get iTMS off the ground to be honest. If you use this software to remove the DRM and then share the files, don't be surprised if you get in trouble for it down the line!
It is a bit hard to enforce strictly the right for the music owner to play the music they own on any device in the house or on their person, or in their car, whilst preventing the copying of said music to another person's computer/car/etc.
Especially as that creation, the CD-R, bypasses a lot of the issues
Now if only music was cheaper in the shops, and the artist got a fair proportion of the proceeds
Whilst the idea of making something familiar to people switching from Windows is all very nice and that, there are some issues:
1) It doesn't need to be exactly analogous in order for someone to know what is going on. Windows users appears to handle the change from classic interface to XP interface without suddenly dying!
2) I can see that they have recreated some of Windows' worst aspects as well in the name of familiarity. I saw the old 16-colour drop down box in one of the screenshots, surely a relic from the 80's or something! Sadly this also means that Windows' nasty way of having configuration utilities spread everywhere is recreated - whereas a single configuration utility like KDE's is much better overall, especially if it was simplified.
I really don't see why they have to recreate the frustrating aspects of Windows! Shouldn't they be striving to improve upon Windows whilst retaining familiarity?
Someone fetch me when it is April 2nd.
I don't know what the Sun Java Desktop is like personally, but it is probably pretty good - Gnome and StarOffice and all that jazz.
As such it should handle what most people use a PC for pretty well - internet, e-mail, chatting, letter to the bank manager.
You don't need Windows XP for these tasks.
Now the price is a bit high given the hardware - you could build the same for a lot less, but Walmart will be making a slice and Sun will be too I imagine.
And these boxes will be faster than 2.8GHz Celeron boxes judging from reviews online.
It is more like the classic AmigaOS (From Workbench 1.0 in 1985 to present) behaviour, which has always been a spatial filesystem view.
...
Spatial does not mean "open folders in new window" - it has that per-window location, size, view mode, etc aspect to it as well. AmigaOS also let you locate Icons within each window where you wanted and then snapshot their locations along with the window, so still more advanced, but maybe Gnome will get there 20 years afterwards
Now it only needs an option for the default action when double clicking (Either: "Open new window" or "Open new window and close parent") so my weaker middle button doesn't die too soon. Because of the latter you need an "Open Parent Window" button on the UI, although the popup on the bottom left seems to suffice it isn't exactly obvious.
Still, it is looking like a nice clean desktop now. I wonder what would happen if KDE put some effort into making their system clean and simple?
That is true - the major labels are moaning because their sales are going down, because file sharing enables their customers to discover new music and buy that instead of the engineered pap.
Actually some of the mixes of Toxic are pretty good, you could almost classify some of them as EBM / Electro-Industrial.
And I own the first Britney album. It was cheap. Forgive me! I repent. I also own two Kylie albums.
Yeah. Students don't have money anyway, hardly a lost sale.
3 years down the line the ex-student who now has a job sees the CD in a shop and goes "ooh, that was good, I'll get it". If it is cheap pap-pop it'll probably be in the bargain bin as well, bonus!
Why not just make a low resolution version available for download. e.g., VideoCD resolution (384x276 IIRC) but DivX for smaller file size.
On a TV these resolutions are perfectly acceptable (well, sucks if you have HDTV, do they have built-in Gaussian Blur for low-res material?). It isn't DVD quality either so that won't be an issue. As long as it will play in my DivX enabled DVD player I'd be happy.
Anyway, DVD quality versions appear as soon as the show is broadcast on digital anyway, direct MPEG2 stream rip and reformat into DivX.
Aye. It would make sense for a record company to actually actively put songs on the file sharing networks for their popular artists because it would increase sales further!
The only conclusion I can make is that the RIAA are RETARDED. They appear to be wanting to REDUCE their sales!
If it wasn't for file sharing, I wouldn't have gone to see a band play live on Sunday (Icon of Coil, for those of you into industrial/EBM stuff, support from Deathboy, the most excellent Swarf [playing live in USA soon, go and see them if you can] and Solitary Experiments).
...
I wouldn't have this 3 CD limited edition box set of Blutengel sitting next to me here. I wouldn't have 3 Cryonica Tanz compilation CDs so I can pick other bands I like and then buy their stuff
I wouldn't even be into this whole genre! I'd still be looking around local music stores in a bored manner because there is nothing new or exciting on offer.
Couldn't Arianespace bring back Ariane3 or something to compete in that area? Or will they just upgrade ASAP (300kg per payload on Ariane 5) to allow bigger devices?
... heh!
Can you make a fully functional useful satellite in 300kg? Imagine launching 4 at the same time and then being able to offer a few hundred digital TV channels off your own satellite network