From the reviews, it seems that for anyone buying an OEM computer (where these cards are targetted initially) at least they'll be able to play the latest games reasonably using this configuration, and it is a decent brand of graphics. And Doom3 and HL2 are playable with these cards, and they are the current high-end of DX9 gaming, negating your latter point.
Sadly it won't hit retail until February. Which isn't good for us casual gamers and silent-PC (passive heatsink graphics card) people who would be interested in this card for being cheap and good-enough. ATI's X300SE and X300, the performance and price competitors to the 6200TC 16/32 respectively are available now. Of course, when the 6200TC hits retail, expect it to be available for $69/$89 online.
Wait, so in this game, you have to work to earn money "in the game". This gets you virtual money you can exchange for real money at some point, but probably not at a great exchange rate.
Why not just go out and get a real damn job in the real world and earn real money straight out. Instead, you'll be pumping your unemployment into this game, trying to buy a hovel in some doss-pit of a virtual town and getting a virtual job shovelling shit.
I wonder if you can put virtual work on your real world CV...
It would be more useful to have a list of bugs per OS level, i.e., kernel level, driver level, and so on.
This compared the Linux kernel to something a lot bigger. Perhaps the core of the Windows code tested (i.e., the kernel) is a lot more bugfree than the other stuff around it?
And just because the Linux kernel is relatively bug free, it doesn't mean that anything developed by other people is as well! Maybe it is just a sign of having a high quality control level at the kernel submission stage, and that certainly won't translate to other projects.
Re:Actually, it's an ARM7
on
A .Net CPU
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· Score: 1
I expect that is.NET instructions per second, not ARM instructions per second.
So yes, 60 clocks to perform one.NET instruction.
Part of me thinks "Sod.NET, write in native ARM assembly and get something that is up to 60 times faster".
0.45 MIPS is about as fast as a 4MHz 68000, or a 16MHz Z80 variant. And there are a lot more embedded programmers who knows these, and ARM, than.NET. And they are perfectly happy not using Visual Studio. All this hardware will do is bring Visual Studio weenie programming to the embedded space. Hurrah for your.NET washing machine boiling your delicate wool wash, and your.NET freezer defrosting every 2 days.
But in the UK, we do use miles for road signs, for some unknown reason - maybe it is just common sense, but I don't know why they can't put kilometres on roadsigns in a different colour alongside the miles, and then 25 years down the line when the sign is replaced, just have it in kilometres.
You have to realise that in England, we don't say "COL-OR", we say something more like "culler", which is closer to "colour" than "color". Just because you pronounce it differently doesn't mean our spelling isn't more correct for us.
Same with flavour, you might say "flav-or", we say "flay-vour". Again, closer to flavour than flavor.
And the word biscuit. We say "biskit" and dip them in tea and coffee. You say "biskit" and pour gravy over them....
You've definitely got your Nerd and Geek definition the wrong way around, although your Dork definition is correct.
Nerd: Often unwashed, can't dress, can't interact with girls, love star trek and babylon 5 and know alien languages. Like techy stuff, but don't actually understand it.
Geek: Likes and understands techy stuff, educated in their field of geekery, can get girls (usually geek girls, but that's a bonus to them). Enjoy 'nerdy' shows but don't obsess over them apart from dissecting the techy stuff in the show ('ha! that's bollocks'). Has an idea about hygiene.
I'm a geek, I lean more towards being a hardware geek. My porn is hi-res pictures of new motherboards, chipsets, processors and the like.
On topic, queuing in the cold is a stupid thing that obsessives do. Dammit, just wait a bit longer and get it in comfort.
And the rest of the trucks are filled with the orchestras and guitarists and DJs and singers and stuff required to play the box of printed music!
When my 120GB media drive died ...
on
Digital Packrats
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· Score: 1
... I was upset for a bit.
Then I realised that in the end, it was only music or videos. I was sad I hadn't burnt some of it to CD, but in the end I had lost nothing apart from a hard drive from Maxtor that crapped out after 10 months. That, and the time I had spent ripping my music, but maybe I was bored of having them in MP3 format anyway!
There are only so many things that are truly important - the things that you've created yourself, for whatever reason. Images, websites, code, music, documents, etc. These are the only things worth being anal about backing up regularly, storing in a different location, and so on.
I expect that packaging a standard DVD and a Bluray Disc will be how Sony will reply to this DVD/HD-DVD hybrid disc - if it looks like it will take off of course!
I don't want more two-disc movies. Especially if they aren't that long, unlike the LOTR parts which are understandably two disc. And if you are going to have to split up onto two discs, then why not just have a DVD and a HD-DVD next to each other in the package, instead of... this hybrid variant?
Sadly Buffy and Angel are dead series, hence price dropoff.
Farscape was dead, the prices did drop for seasons 1 and 2, then back up again because of the miniseries and launch of season 3 on dvd. they're milking the captive farscape fan market at the moment.
In two years time, they'll be cheaper. Unless there is a bi-yearly Farscape mini-series, grrr.
Well, if Sony is making 10 to 50 million of these processors a year, the cost will be lower. Especially if the PS3 does have four of them, as has been previously rumoured. By putting the processor (or multiples thereof) into other devices, the cost of the processor goes down even more, as more are made (assuming that enough of the things can be made!). At some point it is probably cheaper to use a Cell processor for all decode/encode operations (TV with built-in PVR?) than whatever else is on the market.
Well, maybe the XP update when pushed to a machine that it isn't suited to shouldn't do its stuff anyway?
It is a software issue, if the software was written correctly to handle the assumption that there are a lot of incompetant sysadmins out there, this wouldn't have happened! Sanity checks are a standard feature of software design.
Maybe it was the update software that EDS use that caused the problem. It clearly doesn't have a dumbuser compliant interface. In that case, it is the TCO of that software that has gone up horribly!
A day without your desktop computer - fine. A week isn't. This smells like EDS fucking up, and I think us UK geeks should write to our MPs and ask them why EDS keep getting contracts with their track record of fuck-ups and cost overruns. That doesn't mean I don't think that an update that is meant for a different version of the OS should be able to run on non-suitable systems.
I have a wireless keyboard and mouse, it was only £17, albeit PS2 (which was good in the end, as Linux didn't like it when I tried a USB keyboard/mouse recently). It wasn't the mouse reviewed, and the keyboard has a strange ergonomic layout (angled keys, and numberpad on the left so right hand is closer to the mouse) but it is pretty good.
One thing I liked though, is that the wireless PS2 receiver also integrated a battery charger, so you never had to go around and hunt for the recharger, it was straight in front of you. It also came with 6 batteries, so there is always a spare set.
Sadly the mouse isn't the best, and does get through the batteries at a fair rate, although I do use the computer a lot.
So... 5 working days, 60,000 PCs (= 60,000 employees?)
Assume £8/hr employee. 40 hours of work a week. 60,000 unusable systems.
=> TCO increased by £19.2m for the 8 PCs they upgraded (before costs incurred fixing the problem)! £2m TCO per system for Windows XP eh? A clear example that Windows TCO can increase rather horribly if something goes wrong, and this was a standard upgrade. It's £320 per PC if you count all 60,000 systems - that's still horrendous.
Sadly the UK does have a Chelsea Tank* problem as well, bloody horrible cars that block visibility for following cars (especially those fuckin' ugly black Chryslers with tinted windows).
Still, it can't be as bad as it is in the US.
* SUV - Chelsea is an affluent area of London, and you know what a Tank is:)
Wait for the price to drop... if it does (it should drop by a third at some point, it is a recent release). Also the recent release of the mini-series has provided a temporary increase in interest, hence higher prices. Still, 22 episodes for $112.49 is $5 an episode, and I think that is pretty damn high. $2/£1 an episode is much more like it in my book - it is only a TV series after all.
The whole market is driven by demand, which sets the prices.
I waited until Family Guy was £8.99 a season before buying it though!:) I shelled out £17.99 a series for Alias 1 and 2 as well. Otherwise the prices are too high.
I decided to do the lower-income much-lower-stress option in life as well. I'm happier for it overall. As long as I make enough to pay off my mortgage and other costs anyway. Might have to do a bit more work over the coming months though to cover Christmas costs... maybe 30 hours a week! argh.
Re:Why not have DVD floppy disks?
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 1
That's what the protective coating on the Bluray discs will do, stop standard scratches.
And I know that they will use that feature to make people upgrade, rather than also apply it to standard DVDs as well:(
OTOH I do take care of my DVDs. Sadly other people might not do the same. I'm quite tempted to start making decrypted 'straight to the film' backup DVDs of my films in the near future though.
Yeah, but analogue TV signals will be dead soon, and the main channels in any country aren't that good anyway.
OTOH a Freeview digital terrestrial receiver in the UK costs under £50 new, which would make a smaller and neater 'TV Tuner' for a video card with a Video In jack. And 30 free channels is better than 5. Even if they still all suck:)
I've only watched a couple of hours of TV in the past week though, apart from the news channels. I have no need for a VCR, DVD Recorder or TiVo. So my opinion probably isn't worth much compared to someone who has a need to catch up on the daily made-up lives in soap operas.
So you'd also need to built a transport route between the northerly moon base and the equatorial lunar elevator. I suppose that would be a lot less effort than building a bloody lunar elevator though, given that we haven't even been to the place in around 30 years.
There's a good reason to build a terran elevator. For a start, we live on this damn planet! I think that the logistical problems of building an elevator on the moon will outweigh the material problems of building one on earth.
Of course, it could be that it becomes cheaper and easier to simply launch ships from Earth in the future, making an elevator redundant.
Well, I think that 4.5 Gigs isn't that bad for a backup medium. Considering that most data will be media files, most people will only have to backup the files once, and then incrementally backup the new data they get. Just be sure to verify each disc you burn, and to store them somewhere safe.
If you want to save time, then buy a large hard drive, format it with a cross-platform readable file system and copy all the data over. Remove the HD and store somewhere safe. With a removable SATA HD caddy thingy, you can do this quite easily, and it is a lot less hassle than burning DVDs.
And yes, DVD isn't a brilliant level of quality, but you forget that it is good enough for a lot of people. Compared to VHS is it pretty damn amazing, and people still watch their old video collections.
Personally I think a format should be around for a lot longer. DVD has been out for around 8 years now, if that, which isn't that long before being replaced. I expect that DVDs will be produced for a good few more years still, especially with players being so cheap. Hopefully the new formats will be completely backwardly compatible (it would be suicide to not be).
Oh, and has anybody made a DVD player yet that also doubles as a DVD-Audio player and is of reasonable quality? Hell, add in SACD support too. And DivX of course!
Well it has got 25% more storage space than the iPod mini.
OTOH the iPod mini was released aeons ago in comparison. You'd hope that in the 10 or so months since it was released that capacities would go up and competitors would be able to catch up.
What's more interesting is what Apple's next update to the iPod mini will bring.
I think that Apple still have style on their side, and ease of use. The Zen Micro will have a few more features however (radio and stuff). Unfortunately for them, it won't have the name, and 4GB vs 5GB isn't an amazing difference.
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From the reviews, it seems that for anyone buying an OEM computer (where these cards are targetted initially) at least they'll be able to play the latest games reasonably using this configuration, and it is a decent brand of graphics. And Doom3 and HL2 are playable with these cards, and they are the current high-end of DX9 gaming, negating your latter point.
Sadly it won't hit retail until February. Which isn't good for us casual gamers and silent-PC (passive heatsink graphics card) people who would be interested in this card for being cheap and good-enough. ATI's X300SE and X300, the performance and price competitors to the 6200TC 16/32 respectively are available now. Of course, when the 6200TC hits retail, expect it to be available for $69/$89 online.
USB controller is in the nVidia southbridge, then there is a 4 port USB hub chip connecting to the USB ports that are gameports.
Wait, so in this game, you have to work to earn money "in the game". This gets you virtual money you can exchange for real money at some point, but probably not at a great exchange rate.
Why not just go out and get a real damn job in the real world and earn real money straight out. Instead, you'll be pumping your unemployment into this game, trying to buy a hovel in some doss-pit of a virtual town and getting a virtual job shovelling shit.
I wonder if you can put virtual work on your real world CV...
It would be more useful to have a list of bugs per OS level, i.e., kernel level, driver level, and so on.
This compared the Linux kernel to something a lot bigger. Perhaps the core of the Windows code tested (i.e., the kernel) is a lot more bugfree than the other stuff around it?
And just because the Linux kernel is relatively bug free, it doesn't mean that anything developed by other people is as well! Maybe it is just a sign of having a high quality control level at the kernel submission stage, and that certainly won't translate to other projects.
I expect that is .NET instructions per second, not ARM instructions per second.
.NET instruction.
.NET, write in native ARM assembly and get something that is up to 60 times faster".
.NET. And they are perfectly happy not using Visual Studio. All this hardware will do is bring Visual Studio weenie programming to the embedded space. Hurrah for your .NET washing machine boiling your delicate wool wash, and your .NET freezer defrosting every 2 days.
So yes, 60 clocks to perform one
Part of me thinks "Sod
0.45 MIPS is about as fast as a 4MHz 68000, or a 16MHz Z80 variant. And there are a lot more embedded programmers who knows these, and ARM, than
It's not "kilometers", it's "kilometres".
But in the UK, we do use miles for road signs, for some unknown reason - maybe it is just common sense, but I don't know why they can't put kilometres on roadsigns in a different colour alongside the miles, and then 25 years down the line when the sign is replaced, just have it in kilometres.
Oh, it is 'arse' as well.
You have to realise that in England, we don't say "COL-OR", we say something more like "culler", which is closer to "colour" than "color". Just because you pronounce it differently doesn't mean our spelling isn't more correct for us.
...
Same with flavour, you might say "flav-or", we say "flay-vour". Again, closer to flavour than flavor.
And the word biscuit. We say "biskit" and dip them in tea and coffee. You say "biskit" and pour gravy over them.
You've definitely got your Nerd and Geek definition the wrong way around, although your Dork definition is correct.
Nerd: Often unwashed, can't dress, can't interact with girls, love star trek and babylon 5 and know alien languages. Like techy stuff, but don't actually understand it.
Geek: Likes and understands techy stuff, educated in their field of geekery, can get girls (usually geek girls, but that's a bonus to them). Enjoy 'nerdy' shows but don't obsess over them apart from dissecting the techy stuff in the show ('ha! that's bollocks'). Has an idea about hygiene.
I'm a geek, I lean more towards being a hardware geek. My porn is hi-res pictures of new motherboards, chipsets, processors and the like.
On topic, queuing in the cold is a stupid thing that obsessives do. Dammit, just wait a bit longer and get it in comfort.
And the rest of the trucks are filled with the orchestras and guitarists and DJs and singers and stuff required to play the box of printed music!
... I was upset for a bit.
Then I realised that in the end, it was only music or videos. I was sad I hadn't burnt some of it to CD, but in the end I had lost nothing apart from a hard drive from Maxtor that crapped out after 10 months. That, and the time I had spent ripping my music, but maybe I was bored of having them in MP3 format anyway!
There are only so many things that are truly important - the things that you've created yourself, for whatever reason. Images, websites, code, music, documents, etc. These are the only things worth being anal about backing up regularly, storing in a different location, and so on.
I expect that packaging a standard DVD and a Bluray Disc will be how Sony will reply to this DVD/HD-DVD hybrid disc - if it looks like it will take off of course!
... this hybrid variant?
I don't want more two-disc movies. Especially if they aren't that long, unlike the LOTR parts which are understandably two disc. And if you are going to have to split up onto two discs, then why not just have a DVD and a HD-DVD next to each other in the package, instead of
Sadly Buffy and Angel are dead series, hence price dropoff.
Farscape was dead, the prices did drop for seasons 1 and 2, then back up again because of the miniseries and launch of season 3 on dvd. they're milking the captive farscape fan market at the moment.
In two years time, they'll be cheaper. Unless there is a bi-yearly Farscape mini-series, grrr.
Well, if Sony is making 10 to 50 million of these processors a year, the cost will be lower. Especially if the PS3 does have four of them, as has been previously rumoured. By putting the processor (or multiples thereof) into other devices, the cost of the processor goes down even more, as more are made (assuming that enough of the things can be made!). At some point it is probably cheaper to use a Cell processor for all decode/encode operations (TV with built-in PVR?) than whatever else is on the market.
Well, maybe the XP update when pushed to a machine that it isn't suited to shouldn't do its stuff anyway?
It is a software issue, if the software was written correctly to handle the assumption that there are a lot of incompetant sysadmins out there, this wouldn't have happened! Sanity checks are a standard feature of software design.
Maybe it was the update software that EDS use that caused the problem. It clearly doesn't have a dumbuser compliant interface. In that case, it is the TCO of that software that has gone up horribly!
A day without your desktop computer - fine. A week isn't. This smells like EDS fucking up, and I think us UK geeks should write to our MPs and ask them why EDS keep getting contracts with their track record of fuck-ups and cost overruns. That doesn't mean I don't think that an update that is meant for a different version of the OS should be able to run on non-suitable systems.
I have a wireless keyboard and mouse, it was only £17, albeit PS2 (which was good in the end, as Linux didn't like it when I tried a USB keyboard/mouse recently). It wasn't the mouse reviewed, and the keyboard has a strange ergonomic layout (angled keys, and numberpad on the left so right hand is closer to the mouse) but it is pretty good.
One thing I liked though, is that the wireless PS2 receiver also integrated a battery charger, so you never had to go around and hunt for the recharger, it was straight in front of you. It also came with 6 batteries, so there is always a spare set.
Sadly the mouse isn't the best, and does get through the batteries at a fair rate, although I do use the computer a lot.
So ... 5 working days, 60,000 PCs (= 60,000 employees?)
Assume £8/hr employee. 40 hours of work a week. 60,000 unusable systems.
=> TCO increased by £19.2m for the 8 PCs they upgraded (before costs incurred fixing the problem)! £2m TCO per system for Windows XP eh? A clear example that Windows TCO can increase rather horribly if something goes wrong, and this was a standard upgrade. It's £320 per PC if you count all 60,000 systems - that's still horrendous.
Sadly the UK does have a Chelsea Tank* problem as well, bloody horrible cars that block visibility for following cars (especially those fuckin' ugly black Chryslers with tinted windows).
:)
Still, it can't be as bad as it is in the US.
* SUV - Chelsea is an affluent area of London, and you know what a Tank is
Wait for the price to drop ... if it does (it should drop by a third at some point, it is a recent release). Also the recent release of the mini-series has provided a temporary increase in interest, hence higher prices. Still, 22 episodes for $112.49 is $5 an episode, and I think that is pretty damn high. $2/£1 an episode is much more like it in my book - it is only a TV series after all.
:)
:)
The whole market is driven by demand, which sets the prices.
I waited until Family Guy was £8.99 a season before buying it though!
I shelled out £17.99 a series for Alias 1 and 2 as well. Otherwise the prices are too high.
Patience rewards the buyer of TV DVD boxsets
I decided to do the lower-income much-lower-stress option in life as well. I'm happier for it overall. As long as I make enough to pay off my mortgage and other costs anyway. Might have to do a bit more work over the coming months though to cover Christmas costs ... maybe 30 hours a week! argh.
That's what the protective coating on the Bluray discs will do, stop standard scratches.
:(
And I know that they will use that feature to make people upgrade, rather than also apply it to standard DVDs as well
OTOH I do take care of my DVDs. Sadly other people might not do the same. I'm quite tempted to start making decrypted 'straight to the film' backup DVDs of my films in the near future though.
Yeah, but analogue TV signals will be dead soon, and the main channels in any country aren't that good anyway.
:)
OTOH a Freeview digital terrestrial receiver in the UK costs under £50 new, which would make a smaller and neater 'TV Tuner' for a video card with a Video In jack. And 30 free channels is better than 5. Even if they still all suck
I've only watched a couple of hours of TV in the past week though, apart from the news channels. I have no need for a VCR, DVD Recorder or TiVo. So my opinion probably isn't worth much compared to someone who has a need to catch up on the daily made-up lives in soap operas.
So you'd also need to built a transport route between the northerly moon base and the equatorial lunar elevator. I suppose that would be a lot less effort than building a bloody lunar elevator though, given that we haven't even been to the place in around 30 years.
There's a good reason to build a terran elevator. For a start, we live on this damn planet! I think that the logistical problems of building an elevator on the moon will outweigh the material problems of building one on earth.
Of course, it could be that it becomes cheaper and easier to simply launch ships from Earth in the future, making an elevator redundant.
Well, I think that 4.5 Gigs isn't that bad for a backup medium. Considering that most data will be media files, most people will only have to backup the files once, and then incrementally backup the new data they get. Just be sure to verify each disc you burn, and to store them somewhere safe.
If you want to save time, then buy a large hard drive, format it with a cross-platform readable file system and copy all the data over. Remove the HD and store somewhere safe. With a removable SATA HD caddy thingy, you can do this quite easily, and it is a lot less hassle than burning DVDs.
And yes, DVD isn't a brilliant level of quality, but you forget that it is good enough for a lot of people. Compared to VHS is it pretty damn amazing, and people still watch their old video collections.
Personally I think a format should be around for a lot longer. DVD has been out for around 8 years now, if that, which isn't that long before being replaced. I expect that DVDs will be produced for a good few more years still, especially with players being so cheap. Hopefully the new formats will be completely backwardly compatible (it would be suicide to not be).
Oh, and has anybody made a DVD player yet that also doubles as a DVD-Audio player and is of reasonable quality? Hell, add in SACD support too. And DivX of course!
Well it has got 25% more storage space than the iPod mini.
OTOH the iPod mini was released aeons ago in comparison. You'd hope that in the 10 or so months since it was released that capacities would go up and competitors would be able to catch up.
What's more interesting is what Apple's next update to the iPod mini will bring.
I think that Apple still have style on their side, and ease of use. The Zen Micro will have a few more features however (radio and stuff). Unfortunately for them, it won't have the name, and 4GB vs 5GB isn't an amazing difference.
Well even if the store warranty wasn't a year long, surely Microsoft's is?