The 9700 is only 4 years old, and can't handle any modern game at decent resolutions. It can do Doom III at 640x480, if that's what you want from your PC gaming experience. Three and a half years ago I bought a 9500 (not cheap at the time either), and slowly stopped playing PC games as they got jerkier and jerkier.
However you can upgrade to around 4x the power for under $100 now. The problem is that will require a new everything, because of the damned switch from AGP to PCIe. Oh, you can get modern cards in AGP format, at a 50% premium. Argh. And you have to be sure that you don't want to upgrade your PC in the near future, which is always at the back of any geeks mind. I know that a better graphics card + more memory would keep me sorted for a couple more years, but I want that dual-core beast!
Strategy games, with their reams of text and stats, are good on high definition displays - PC monitors for the majority of us. They're probably more playable on consoles now, if you've got a HDTV, but that's a big if.
FPSs could suddenly be better on the Wii, because of the controller. However ignoring that, a mouse and keyboard are much better than a standard console controller unless you are very good with your fingers. In which case I ask why you're playing console games and aren't out there pleasuring some nubile young pretty thing?
Some of his points are good - I don't want to sit down and deal with a PC in the evening if I just want to play a game. I will get a guaranteed quality of game with the console, given a sensible choice in game.
Me? I'm too stingy to buy the latest games, I'll quite happily wait for the price to drop. That also means my PC hardware requirements are a year out of date when it comes to PC games (currently playing Chronicles of Riddick, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Vampire Masquerade, with Quake 4 SE in the post) which saves me more money. Exceptions: Guitar Hero, GTA:SA and GT4, on the PS2 - all games with a long life and ongoing appeal.
So in terms of people buying games because of the graphics or audio, Shadow of the Beast comes to mind, way before Shadow of the Colossus. The late 80s is when people started paying money for games not only because of the gameplay, but because of the graphics, because the systems became adept at graphics.
Not to say that earlier games weren't art, the Freescape games - Driller for example, brought 3D environments to home computers in the mid 80s. The game is ludicrously short, made long because 3D was slow back then. Also Jeff Minter had the original version of his lightsynth out at that time, although I forget the name of the 'game'. Certainly that should qualify as art. Later on, you could say that Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake were all very popular because of the graphics as well as the gameplay.
Of course, we are talking here about the game as an art medium, rather than just the graphics within the game. I.e., the storyline, the music, the graphics, the direction, and more, altogether.
It doesn't look like they're taking cost or popular opinion into account.
Wii: $199, with hopefully revolutionary must-have controller mechanism.
Controller fad might die off, but it will still be fun to use. Lots of games. Weaker hardware allows cheap cost. Price is at the point where you can pick it up without thinking if theres a game that appeals. Free online play. Ideal christmas present for children too - cheap, and ideal for secondary TVs in the house rather than the main HDTV.
360: $299 - $399 PS£: $499 - $599
Both of these are 'stop and think' purchases for anyone. You really have to justify the purchase.
Of course, the price will come down over time for both of these - the PS3 will drop quite drastically once BluRay drives become cheaper to make, say around 2008. There'll probably be price parity by the end of 2008, Microsoft might have moved to HD-DVD inside the console. The Wii will be cheaper too, and fun games can spread like a fever like Guitar Hero has in my circle of friends. And Nintendo is popular because of the DS.
At a time when people are tightening their purses and wallets because of higher cost of living, a high priced console is not the ideal product. Some games might be so 'must have' that a lot of consoles will sell, but I really do think that it will be 40-30-30 this time around - which wins is in the air right now.
Nevermind that Sony is not popular right now, and can't do anything right.
I wonder which one is better in general use. The 770's large legible crisp 800x480 colour display, or a PDA-esque 320x240 colour display. The former is good for web browsing, the latter is pretty awful. Now if Sony price it significantly lower than the 770 they might have a chance.
Never mind it is Sony that makes it, a company that can do no good these days.
Although I thought they'd avoid the issue of Ceres instead of granting it planetary status of any sort.
What about all the other KB objects that are roughly spherical under their own gravity. Are they all going to be called Plutons?
I'm surprised at Charon too, I understand that the centre of gravity of the two is outside either of their masses, but Charon is more of an orbiting hunk of ice and dust and crap than a planet - on its own it'd be very ignorable.
Formats are likely to be WMA (PlaysForSure or similar DRM if purchased) and MP3.
WMA is a far more proprietary format than AAC, and Fairplay is nicer DRM than PlaysForSure. Also if you choose to buy your music in CD format you won't have to worry about DRM on the music you rip.
Neither are Sony though, let's all laugh at ATRAC and Sony's DRM.
By the time Zune comes out, Apple will have refreshed their iPod line. Comparing future Zune devices to nearly year old iPods is disingenious, unless Apple mess up and don't actually improve the display in their next generation video device.
Don't rely on being able to take any electronic device on flights in the future. Recent events have shown that in the war against terror (i.e., the war of fear upon citizens) that silly levels of restrictions will be imposed upon the slightest whiff of a threat.
iPods run Linux. It'll take some time for a Zune device to run Linux, although the hardware is probably 95% the same as an iPod (ARM based SOC, etc).
No. Bullshit. Fact is, Palm devices were terrible compared to Windows Mobile devices from the same period. Utterly pisspoor.
The hardware of the devices running Windows CE or Windows Mobile 2003 was better than the Palm hardware. Not quite as nice as the Psion 5 series of course.
Everything else the Palm was better at.
Windows Mobile 2005 finally is quite reasonable. Sadly it took 5 years for Microsoft to get there.
I find it heinous that on a PDA such as the Dell X3x series, losing battery power loses everything that isn't in the firmware. That didn't happen on my Palm IIIc back in the day, and that would last a very long time before running out of juice as well, not 3 days.
Fact is, the Palm software was far better targetted at the tasks people wanted a PDA for than the Windows CE software. PocketIE, Word, Excel were jokes of an application, when for a small amount of money you could buy excellent software for the Palm platform that did the same.
Experience has taught me that actual functionality and ease of use is better than pure hardware specifications and looks when it comes to any device that is in essence a computer - PDAs, Phones, MP3 players, etc. This is where Microsoft fail quite consistently. PDAs are items that the user will put effort into learning to use. MP3 players aren't. If Microsoft mess the software up, they've got no hope. However they will sort out the problems within 5 years. In the PDA market this worked because Palm couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery. However Apple could organise a piss up in Saudi Arabia and get good press for it, this won't be easy for Microsoft.
The Cell processor can do ~200 GFLOPS - not IEEE quality FLOPS however, however they're 'good enough single precision FLOPs' for it's target uses. This is probably why this new supercomputer won't get into the Top500 list, because it's very specialised and thus probably nowhere near as good at IEEE conformant calculations.
The Cell processor is not running at 200GHz. There's this concept called 'parallelisation', it's how your graphics card can do dozens, if not hundreds, of operations per clock cycle. In Cell's case it can do 8 (number of SPUs) * 4 (128-bit registers, SIMD) * 2 (units) = 64 SP FLOPS per clock cycle, and that's not including the PPU which has VMX128 and an FPU itself.
However make the Cell processor calculate IEEE conformant FLOPS, and it gets a double precision score of around 20GFLOPS. Still good though.
The above was from memory, details may vary, figures are roughly correct, YMMV, etc.
Why? How could the Newton be made better and still be a Newton? Color? Don't need it. Memory and processor? Got beacoup for a PDA. Wifi and bluetooth would be nice, but with two PCMCIA card slots, that's not a big problem.
If Apple were to re-release the Newton (hah, yeah right, damn you apple), I'm sure it would be using more modern features.
It could use a very high DPI greyscale OLED display - they're long lasting, lean on power consumption, and compact. Alternatively, and only to keep up with the Jones', it would have a colour TFT display - at the price of battery life. It would use a modern PDA processor that was far faster than the StrongARM previously used, maybe one of TI's OMAP processors, or an Intel (Marvell) XScale. The Newton OS would still run on this.
Integration of necessary technology for a modern device would have to be done - namely bluetooth and wifi. Addition of an SD card reader too.
I'm sure that Apple would also style it nicely - they've come a long way since the 90s! However the aesthetics of a device are an unimportant factor compared to battery life, screen quality and software usability and suitability.
As long as Apple kept the long battery life as the number one priority, they'd have a desirable device that was actually useful for the users. The battery life is a core issue for mobile devices, and this is why UMPC devices are pointless. People still use Newtons. I doubt that people will be using the same UMPC or Windows Mobile PDA in 10 years time however (even if production was stopped).
However I think we'll actually see Apple expand the iPod OS to incorporate further features instead of the Newton OS returning. We might possibly see Mac OS X cut down as well - the one-click interface is very well suited to these tasks.
Anyone else get amused by the screenshots of the UMPC with things like "Press F1 for help" and so on?
The Cell CPU is based upon a PowerPC Processing Element* (PPE), and 8 vector units that have nothing to do with PowerPC at all (SPU).
* this is not based off of PPC4xx or 5xx, but appears to be a new PowerPC core that also has two-thread SMT and VMX128, an extended register set version of Altivec/VMX. XBox360 has three of these cores, and the PS3 has one, but possibly an updated variant that will perform better.
The Gamecube's Gecko processor is based upon the PPC750 core, with added SIMD instructions, custom for Nintendo AFAIK.
Adium beats out all other IM clients I've ever used. It's for Mac OS X, it's free & it's got a stupid icon. http://www.adiumx.com/
Now if you're talking features like VOIP and Video, then you have a point, at least for people who actually use these features. There certainly needs to be some work done on libraries that can also handle these features. Adium uses libgaim, so some concerted effort on getting the required protocols, codecs, etc, in place would be great. Actually, getting gaim's direct connect to work correctly when using NAT would be a good (and probably required) start.
In terms of x86, 64-bit provides 8 more general purpose integer registers, which given the amount of register starvation of x86 is very welcome and does help increase performance. There are also more FP and XMM / SSEx registers. The instruction set is cleaner in 64-bit mode too.
In terms of executable size, the 64-bit opcodes are longer (1 prefix byte IIRC), however due to the increased register count there are fewer loads and stores.
64-bit can benefit some algorithms a lot, especially encryption/decryption related ones which can do 64-bits of work at a time instead of 32. However in this case it is probably better to include hardware encryption facilities such as VIA's Padlock system in their C3/C7 processors.
Note that 64-bit x86 is an outlier here, moving from 32-bits to 64-bits on other platforms doesn't have the same benefits, apart from algorithms like encryption mentioned earlier which are register-size dependent. Also these other platforms (e.g., PPC, Alpha) have a decent number of registers in the first place.
In terms of current offerings, a fair comparison would be, for example, a Turion X2 vs. a Core Duo. That's if you can get the former of course.
The fact that Intel's current laptop offering is 32-bit only shouldn't be an excuse to compare a new 65nm Core Duo with an old 130nm Athlon XP.
Soon it will all be moot anyway - Intel's Merom will have it all - features (64-bit, etc), speed, IPC, low power. It will be very hard for AMD to compete here until they've got 65nm on the shelves, and that's 6 months off.
Surely this proves that 90 day password expiration policies encourage users to pick weaker passwords they can remember because they are having to change them all the time?
Would it have been so easily cracked if everyone had a 10+ character password that was truly strong, even if it was only changed once a year or never?
Is there an argument for password systems including a dictionary attack test phase for new passwords that if the new password fails, the user has to change it again?
And maybe when data is really important, they might wish to utilise some other form of identification besides passwords. Certainly witness protection details should be far more protected. A biometric system, fingerprints are the easiest to implement these days without much cost, in addition to the password...
Of course the consultant had an 'in', as he was consulting for them. Some minor social engineering and they're all letting him access the systems, bypassing proper procedure.
In the end, there's no excuse for data this important being accessed illegitimately like this. Security measures should be in place, access procedures should be in force, restrictions on data movement from secure to insecure should be enforced. Yet we see it every week - laptop stolen with confidential data on, unencrypted, open, in a file on the desktop probably called "Social Security Database.xls" or "List Of Witnesses On Protection Program, Do Not Show To Criminals Who Will Pay Good Money For This.doc".
Have you ever tried writing anything longer than a few words using a stylus?
Yeah, they're extremely accurate pointing devices for on-screen keyboards - far better than my thumbs trying to hit a tiny key. Also once you have the stylus in hand, you can use it to select the correct word from the 'word suggestions list', saving you time - although maybe this is a Symbian-only feature.
However handwriting recognition is still rather rubbish, I think the system on the original Apple Newtons is better than what Windows Mobile has.
I've found optical mice get confused by wooden tops with regular grain patterns for some reason.
Using a large granite tile as suggested elsewhere seems the most optimal solution, although you won't get mousepad branded case badges with it (although you could buy those 1" micro-tiles for that). Next up, the bathroom themed custom case mod.
The article seemed to be written from the point of view of
"how cheap can we make a rig that is based around the Pentium D 805"
rather than
"what is the best rig we can specify for ~$700"
When a huge amount is spent on exotic cooling (plus a 12" fan on the case, lol) because the processor gets so hot when overclocked and you want to still hear the gameplay, and sucks down nearly half a kiloWatt of juice, you know something isn't right. The video card is the obvious casualty in this situation, nullifying the entire worth and purpose of the article.
It's a typical THG article, written with a certain bent that almost seems as if it is sponsored, rather than having any real use to the reader.
I think that $299 on an XBox360 is a better investment for gaming.
As with most rigs, if you can, reuse components from the previous rig like optical drives, hard drives, case + power supply even. You really want to get the upgrade down to CPU, Motherboard, Memory, Graphics Card.
In a month's time, and AMD X2 3800+ will cost around $170 due to upcoming price cuts. That's far better than any house-cooking Pentium D 805, and will probably overclock nicely as well. Stick that onto a $100 motherboard, with $100 RAM and the best money for the rest of your budget apart from the othe rparts you need to upgrade.
If you're really in the poor house, the Semprons are going down to $60 or so, and can also be overclocked, and as most games are still single threaded you will get great performance still, you just can do that media transcode in the background.
it is VERY much in your interest that this kind of exploitation ceases to exist
But you said they'd starve to death without this work...?
(and not only that, but if female workers are seen as useful in rural China, it might lower the cases of female infant murder over there)
In the end, if every company in China that was doing this raised their wages to western levels, then all that would happen for the workers is nothing, except they could afford to visit the western world, where cheap electronics would be no more. That, or it would be worthwhile for companies automate production of devices, thus cutting these workers out of a job entirely.
Now reducing their work hours on the other hand might be good. I think that's worth campaigning for. 15 hour days (if true) is a lot, although I'm obviously seeing this from the viewpoint of a western person and ignoring that on top of work we also have to travel to and from work, and do housework, and gardening, and cooking, which takes a lot of that 'non-work time' away.
Hmm, so a classic NES game that could give 10 hours of gameplay could cost under $5. That's pretty good value.
Why do people expect free entertainment for nothing? Remember that buying old games could reduce the number of new titles sold as well. Never mind the cost of developing the virtual console, testing compatibility for each game offered, and so on. Bandwidth is not the only cost.
I think a lot of people will pay that price for the games, assuming that the NES games are at the cheap end, and the SNES/N64 are at the upper end of that pricing scheme. You'd have to be especially cheap to think $5 is a lot to pay for even two or three hours of game playing.
And as for songs on iTunes, the vast majority of the money goes to the publisher, not Apple. Apple are probably making 1 or 2 cents profit per song sold.
It's not a new socket, it's two Socket AM2s next to each other which accept standard AM2 processors such as the X2, which have a coherent HT link enabled on them for this use.
It's consumer version of a dual-processor Opteron motherboard, with a specific socket layout and memory system that's more directed at consumers. AMD will support this in 2007 with 4x4+ (2 quad-core processors on AM2) and in 2008 with 4x4++, whatever that may be.
These motherboards will also support two x16 PCIe graphics card slots, which if you configured using quad-SLI gives you the other 4. 4 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores.
It's mostly marketing to keep the high end benchmarks in AMD's hands, and thus the kudos, and then further sales.
Quite clear really, although I'm confused as to why AMD didn't go the MCM route on a single socket, like the Pentium D and the upcoming Kentsfield processors from Intel.
Yeah, but DVD was the sole digital video disc platform of the era, and it had been available for 3 years when the PS2 launched as well, so it wasn't extremely expensive first generation stuff, it was merely a nice worthwhile bonus on a console that didn't really add any cost to the console hardware costs.
BluRay is still not available, and Sony are practically launching BluRay with the PS3 given the delays in other players and media. They're hoping a first generation of a technology will not have problems (although I'm sure they've tested it enough) and that vast manufacturing runs will cut costs to far lower than typical first generation prices. Yet the benefit will only come in year 3 or 4 of the PS3's lifespan, when games start requiring the capacity, and BluRay has reached market acceptance, there's 1000s of movies available and people are desiring HD media to go with their new HDTV. It's an upfront risk that significantly reduces the attractiveness of the PS3 to the PS3's core market.
There's a PCIe attached Marvel GigE controller on the ATI chipset based motherboard. It doesn't take up a PCIe slot, it's connected to the northbridge on-board.
This is also how Intel connect their networking controllers AFAIK. Do all Intel motherboards 'limit flexibility' therefore?
ATI merely doesn't have an ethernet controller embedded into their southbridge, and I don't blame them if they can let the board makers choose a suitable stand-alone controller that will be better in the end than whatever ATI put in.
nVidia went the opposite way, and put two GigE controllers with lots of fancy stuff into their southbridge. Great for the 1% of people who need two Ethernet controllers, but I expect it is a side-effect of nVidia's server chipset line which probably shares the southbridge.
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The 9700 is only 4 years old, and can't handle any modern game at decent resolutions. It can do Doom III at 640x480, if that's what you want from your PC gaming experience. Three and a half years ago I bought a 9500 (not cheap at the time either), and slowly stopped playing PC games as they got jerkier and jerkier.
However you can upgrade to around 4x the power for under $100 now. The problem is that will require a new everything, because of the damned switch from AGP to PCIe. Oh, you can get modern cards in AGP format, at a 50% premium. Argh. And you have to be sure that you don't want to upgrade your PC in the near future, which is always at the back of any geeks mind. I know that a better graphics card + more memory would keep me sorted for a couple more years, but I want that dual-core beast!
Strategy games, with their reams of text and stats, are good on high definition displays - PC monitors for the majority of us. They're probably more playable on consoles now, if you've got a HDTV, but that's a big if.
FPSs could suddenly be better on the Wii, because of the controller. However ignoring that, a mouse and keyboard are much better than a standard console controller unless you are very good with your fingers. In which case I ask why you're playing console games and aren't out there pleasuring some nubile young pretty thing?
Some of his points are good - I don't want to sit down and deal with a PC in the evening if I just want to play a game. I will get a guaranteed quality of game with the console, given a sensible choice in game.
Me? I'm too stingy to buy the latest games, I'll quite happily wait for the price to drop. That also means my PC hardware requirements are a year out of date when it comes to PC games (currently playing Chronicles of Riddick, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Vampire Masquerade, with Quake 4 SE in the post) which saves me more money. Exceptions: Guitar Hero, GTA:SA and GT4, on the PS2 - all games with a long life and ongoing appeal.
So in terms of people buying games because of the graphics or audio, Shadow of the Beast comes to mind, way before Shadow of the Colossus. The late 80s is when people started paying money for games not only because of the gameplay, but because of the graphics, because the systems became adept at graphics.
Not to say that earlier games weren't art, the Freescape games - Driller for example, brought 3D environments to home computers in the mid 80s. The game is ludicrously short, made long because 3D was slow back then. Also Jeff Minter had the original version of his lightsynth out at that time, although I forget the name of the 'game'. Certainly that should qualify as art. Later on, you could say that Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake were all very popular because of the graphics as well as the gameplay.
Of course, we are talking here about the game as an art medium, rather than just the graphics within the game. I.e., the storyline, the music, the graphics, the direction, and more, altogether.
It doesn't look like they're taking cost or popular opinion into account.
Wii: $199, with hopefully revolutionary must-have controller mechanism.
Controller fad might die off, but it will still be fun to use. Lots of games.
Weaker hardware allows cheap cost. Price is at the point where you can pick it up without thinking if theres a game that appeals. Free online play. Ideal christmas present for children too - cheap, and ideal for secondary TVs in the house rather than the main HDTV.
360: $299 - $399
PS£: $499 - $599
Both of these are 'stop and think' purchases for anyone. You really have to justify the purchase.
Of course, the price will come down over time for both of these - the PS3 will drop quite drastically once BluRay drives become cheaper to make, say around 2008. There'll probably be price parity by the end of 2008, Microsoft might have moved to HD-DVD inside the console. The Wii will be cheaper too, and fun games can spread like a fever like Guitar Hero has in my circle of friends. And Nintendo is popular because of the DS.
At a time when people are tightening their purses and wallets because of higher cost of living, a high priced console is not the ideal product. Some games might be so 'must have' that a lot of consoles will sell, but I really do think that it will be 40-30-30 this time around - which wins is in the air right now.
Nevermind that Sony is not popular right now, and can't do anything right.
I wonder which one is better in general use. The 770's large legible crisp 800x480 colour display, or a PDA-esque 320x240 colour display. The former is good for web browsing, the latter is pretty awful. Now if Sony price it significantly lower than the 770 they might have a chance.
Never mind it is Sony that makes it, a company that can do no good these days.
Although I thought they'd avoid the issue of Ceres instead of granting it planetary status of any sort.
What about all the other KB objects that are roughly spherical under their own gravity. Are they all going to be called Plutons?
I'm surprised at Charon too, I understand that the centre of gravity of the two is outside either of their masses, but Charon is more of an orbiting hunk of ice and dust and crap than a planet - on its own it'd be very ignorable.
Formats are likely to be WMA (PlaysForSure or similar DRM if purchased) and MP3.
WMA is a far more proprietary format than AAC, and Fairplay is nicer DRM than PlaysForSure. Also if you choose to buy your music in CD format you won't have to worry about DRM on the music you rip.
Neither are Sony though, let's all laugh at ATRAC and Sony's DRM.
By the time Zune comes out, Apple will have refreshed their iPod line. Comparing future Zune devices to nearly year old iPods is disingenious, unless Apple mess up and don't actually improve the display in their next generation video device.
Don't rely on being able to take any electronic device on flights in the future. Recent events have shown that in the war against terror (i.e., the war of fear upon citizens) that silly levels of restrictions will be imposed upon the slightest whiff of a threat.
iPods run Linux. It'll take some time for a Zune device to run Linux, although the hardware is probably 95% the same as an iPod (ARM based SOC, etc).
No. Bullshit. Fact is, Palm devices were terrible compared to Windows Mobile devices from the same period. Utterly pisspoor.
The hardware of the devices running Windows CE or Windows Mobile 2003 was better than the Palm hardware. Not quite as nice as the Psion 5 series of course.
Everything else the Palm was better at.
Windows Mobile 2005 finally is quite reasonable. Sadly it took 5 years for Microsoft to get there.
I find it heinous that on a PDA such as the Dell X3x series, losing battery power loses everything that isn't in the firmware. That didn't happen on my Palm IIIc back in the day, and that would last a very long time before running out of juice as well, not 3 days.
Fact is, the Palm software was far better targetted at the tasks people wanted a PDA for than the Windows CE software. PocketIE, Word, Excel were jokes of an application, when for a small amount of money you could buy excellent software for the Palm platform that did the same.
Experience has taught me that actual functionality and ease of use is better than pure hardware specifications and looks when it comes to any device that is in essence a computer - PDAs, Phones, MP3 players, etc. This is where Microsoft fail quite consistently. PDAs are items that the user will put effort into learning to use. MP3 players aren't. If Microsoft mess the software up, they've got no hope. However they will sort out the problems within 5 years. In the PDA market this worked because Palm couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery. However Apple could organise a piss up in Saudi Arabia and get good press for it, this won't be easy for Microsoft.
In terms of RGB element arrangement, 640x480 is quite different from 480x640. In terms of subpixels is is 1920x480 vs. 1440x640.
As RGB subpixel arrangements contribute to technologies such as Cleartype, this makes the issue relevant.
In a vertical (PDA) screen, you want to use a 480x640 display. In a monitor type display (e.g., digital camera) you'd want to use a 640x480 display.
The Cell processor can do ~200 GFLOPS - not IEEE quality FLOPS however, however they're 'good enough single precision FLOPs' for it's target uses. This is probably why this new supercomputer won't get into the Top500 list, because it's very specialised and thus probably nowhere near as good at IEEE conformant calculations.
The Cell processor is not running at 200GHz. There's this concept called 'parallelisation', it's how your graphics card can do dozens, if not hundreds, of operations per clock cycle. In Cell's case it can do 8 (number of SPUs) * 4 (128-bit registers, SIMD) * 2 (units) = 64 SP FLOPS per clock cycle, and that's not including the PPU which has VMX128 and an FPU itself.
However make the Cell processor calculate IEEE conformant FLOPS, and it gets a double precision score of around 20GFLOPS. Still good though.
The above was from memory, details may vary, figures are roughly correct, YMMV, etc.
If Apple were to re-release the Newton (hah, yeah right, damn you apple), I'm sure it would be using more modern features.
It could use a very high DPI greyscale OLED display - they're long lasting, lean on power consumption, and compact. Alternatively, and only to keep up with the Jones', it would have a colour TFT display - at the price of battery life. It would use a modern PDA processor that was far faster than the StrongARM previously used, maybe one of TI's OMAP processors, or an Intel (Marvell) XScale. The Newton OS would still run on this.
Integration of necessary technology for a modern device would have to be done - namely bluetooth and wifi. Addition of an SD card reader too.
I'm sure that Apple would also style it nicely - they've come a long way since the 90s! However the aesthetics of a device are an unimportant factor compared to battery life, screen quality and software usability and suitability.
As long as Apple kept the long battery life as the number one priority, they'd have a desirable device that was actually useful for the users. The battery life is a core issue for mobile devices, and this is why UMPC devices are pointless. People still use Newtons. I doubt that people will be using the same UMPC or Windows Mobile PDA in 10 years time however (even if production was stopped).
However I think we'll actually see Apple expand the iPod OS to incorporate further features instead of the Newton OS returning. We might possibly see Mac OS X cut down as well - the one-click interface is very well suited to these tasks.
Anyone else get amused by the screenshots of the UMPC with things like "Press F1 for help" and so on?
The Cell CPU is based upon a PowerPC Processing Element* (PPE), and 8 vector units that have nothing to do with PowerPC at all (SPU).
* this is not based off of PPC4xx or 5xx, but appears to be a new PowerPC core that also has two-thread SMT and VMX128, an extended register set version of Altivec/VMX. XBox360 has three of these cores, and the PS3 has one, but possibly an updated variant that will perform better.
The Gamecube's Gecko processor is based upon the PPC750 core, with added SIMD instructions, custom for Nintendo AFAIK.
Adium beats out all other IM clients I've ever used. It's for Mac OS X, it's free & it's got a stupid icon. http://www.adiumx.com/
Now if you're talking features like VOIP and Video, then you have a point, at least for people who actually use these features. There certainly needs to be some work done on libraries that can also handle these features. Adium uses libgaim, so some concerted effort on getting the required protocols, codecs, etc, in place would be great. Actually, getting gaim's direct connect to work correctly when using NAT would be a good (and probably required) start.
In terms of x86, 64-bit provides 8 more general purpose integer registers, which given the amount of register starvation of x86 is very welcome and does help increase performance. There are also more FP and XMM / SSEx registers. The instruction set is cleaner in 64-bit mode too.
In terms of executable size, the 64-bit opcodes are longer (1 prefix byte IIRC), however due to the increased register count there are fewer loads and stores.
64-bit can benefit some algorithms a lot, especially encryption/decryption related ones which can do 64-bits of work at a time instead of 32. However in this case it is probably better to include hardware encryption facilities such as VIA's Padlock system in their C3/C7 processors.
Note that 64-bit x86 is an outlier here, moving from 32-bits to 64-bits on other platforms doesn't have the same benefits, apart from algorithms like encryption mentioned earlier which are register-size dependent. Also these other platforms (e.g., PPC, Alpha) have a decent number of registers in the first place.
In terms of current offerings, a fair comparison would be, for example, a Turion X2 vs. a Core Duo. That's if you can get the former of course.
The fact that Intel's current laptop offering is 32-bit only shouldn't be an excuse to compare a new 65nm Core Duo with an old 130nm Athlon XP.
Soon it will all be moot anyway - Intel's Merom will have it all - features (64-bit, etc), speed, IPC, low power. It will be very hard for AMD to compete here until they've got 65nm on the shelves, and that's 6 months off.
Surely this proves that 90 day password expiration policies encourage users to pick weaker passwords they can remember because they are having to change them all the time?
Would it have been so easily cracked if everyone had a 10+ character password that was truly strong, even if it was only changed once a year or never?
Is there an argument for password systems including a dictionary attack test phase for new passwords that if the new password fails, the user has to change it again?
And maybe when data is really important, they might wish to utilise some other form of identification besides passwords. Certainly witness protection details should be far more protected. A biometric system, fingerprints are the easiest to implement these days without much cost, in addition to the password...
Of course the consultant had an 'in', as he was consulting for them. Some minor social engineering and they're all letting him access the systems, bypassing proper procedure.
In the end, there's no excuse for data this important being accessed illegitimately like this. Security measures should be in place, access procedures should be in force, restrictions on data movement from secure to insecure should be enforced. Yet we see it every week - laptop stolen with confidential data on, unencrypted, open, in a file on the desktop probably called "Social Security Database.xls" or "List Of Witnesses On Protection Program, Do Not Show To Criminals Who Will Pay Good Money For This.doc".
Have you ever tried writing anything longer than a few words using a stylus?
Yeah, they're extremely accurate pointing devices for on-screen keyboards - far better than my thumbs trying to hit a tiny key. Also once you have the stylus in hand, you can use it to select the correct word from the 'word suggestions list', saving you time - although maybe this is a Symbian-only feature.
However handwriting recognition is still rather rubbish, I think the system on the original Apple Newtons is better than what Windows Mobile has.
I've found optical mice get confused by wooden tops with regular grain patterns for some reason.
Using a large granite tile as suggested elsewhere seems the most optimal solution, although you won't get mousepad branded case badges with it (although you could buy those 1" micro-tiles for that). Next up, the bathroom themed custom case mod.
The article seemed to be written from the point of view of
"how cheap can we make a rig that is based around the Pentium D 805"
rather than
"what is the best rig we can specify for ~$700"
When a huge amount is spent on exotic cooling (plus a 12" fan on the case, lol) because the processor gets so hot when overclocked and you want to still hear the gameplay, and sucks down nearly half a kiloWatt of juice, you know something isn't right. The video card is the obvious casualty in this situation, nullifying the entire worth and purpose of the article.
It's a typical THG article, written with a certain bent that almost seems as if it is sponsored, rather than having any real use to the reader.
I think that $299 on an XBox360 is a better investment for gaming.
As with most rigs, if you can, reuse components from the previous rig like optical drives, hard drives, case + power supply even. You really want to get the upgrade down to CPU, Motherboard, Memory, Graphics Card.
In a month's time, and AMD X2 3800+ will cost around $170 due to upcoming price cuts. That's far better than any house-cooking Pentium D 805, and will probably overclock nicely as well. Stick that onto a $100 motherboard, with $100 RAM and the best money for the rest of your budget apart from the othe rparts you need to upgrade.
If you're really in the poor house, the Semprons are going down to $60 or so, and can also be overclocked, and as most games are still single threaded you will get great performance still, you just can do that media transcode in the background.
still better than starving to death
...?
it is VERY much in your interest that this kind of exploitation ceases to exist
But you said they'd starve to death without this work
(and not only that, but if female workers are seen as useful in rural China, it might lower the cases of female infant murder over there)
In the end, if every company in China that was doing this raised their wages to western levels, then all that would happen for the workers is nothing, except they could afford to visit the western world, where cheap electronics would be no more. That, or it would be worthwhile for companies automate production of devices, thus cutting these workers out of a job entirely.
Now reducing their work hours on the other hand might be good. I think that's worth campaigning for. 15 hour days (if true) is a lot, although I'm obviously seeing this from the viewpoint of a western person and ignoring that on top of work we also have to travel to and from work, and do housework, and gardening, and cooking, which takes a lot of that 'non-work time' away.
Hmm, so a classic NES game that could give 10 hours of gameplay could cost under $5. That's pretty good value.
Why do people expect free entertainment for nothing? Remember that buying old games could reduce the number of new titles sold as well. Never mind the cost of developing the virtual console, testing compatibility for each game offered, and so on. Bandwidth is not the only cost.
I think a lot of people will pay that price for the games, assuming that the NES games are at the cheap end, and the SNES/N64 are at the upper end of that pricing scheme. You'd have to be especially cheap to think $5 is a lot to pay for even two or three hours of game playing.
And as for songs on iTunes, the vast majority of the money goes to the publisher, not Apple. Apple are probably making 1 or 2 cents profit per song sold.
Send a big cheer to Rufus at Aces Hardware for grabbing all of the presentation slides.
i d=120057079&forumid=1
Worth reading IMO.
http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?
http://rufus.hackish.org/~rufus/amd/big.html
It's not a new socket, it's two Socket AM2s next to each other which accept standard AM2 processors such as the X2, which have a coherent HT link enabled on them for this use.
It's consumer version of a dual-processor Opteron motherboard, with a specific socket layout and memory system that's more directed at consumers. AMD will support this in 2007 with 4x4+ (2 quad-core processors on AM2) and in 2008 with 4x4++, whatever that may be.
These motherboards will also support two x16 PCIe graphics card slots, which if you configured using quad-SLI gives you the other 4. 4 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores.
It's mostly marketing to keep the high end benchmarks in AMD's hands, and thus the kudos, and then further sales.
Quite clear really, although I'm confused as to why AMD didn't go the MCM route on a single socket, like the Pentium D and the upcoming Kentsfield processors from Intel.
Yeah, but DVD was the sole digital video disc platform of the era, and it had been available for 3 years when the PS2 launched as well, so it wasn't extremely expensive first generation stuff, it was merely a nice worthwhile bonus on a console that didn't really add any cost to the console hardware costs.
BluRay is still not available, and Sony are practically launching BluRay with the PS3 given the delays in other players and media. They're hoping a first generation of a technology will not have problems (although I'm sure they've tested it enough) and that vast manufacturing runs will cut costs to far lower than typical first generation prices. Yet the benefit will only come in year 3 or 4 of the PS3's lifespan, when games start requiring the capacity, and BluRay has reached market acceptance, there's 1000s of movies available and people are desiring HD media to go with their new HDTV. It's an upfront risk that significantly reduces the attractiveness of the PS3 to the PS3's core market.
Oh, and Zonk in anti-Sony-PS3 post shocker.
There's a PCIe attached Marvel GigE controller on the ATI chipset based motherboard. It doesn't take up a PCIe slot, it's connected to the northbridge on-board.
This is also how Intel connect their networking controllers AFAIK. Do all Intel motherboards 'limit flexibility' therefore?
ATI merely doesn't have an ethernet controller embedded into their southbridge, and I don't blame them if they can let the board makers choose a suitable stand-alone controller that will be better in the end than whatever ATI put in.
nVidia went the opposite way, and put two GigE controllers with lots of fancy stuff into their southbridge. Great for the 1% of people who need two Ethernet controllers, but I expect it is a side-effect of nVidia's server chipset line which probably shares the southbridge.