While that sounds great in theory, there are too many factors that go into the performance of a card to really roll it all into one number. Differences in Direct X and OpenGL performance alone would confuse things, not to mention the differences in feature support.
Even if they were to do that, in a few generations you would have incredibly unweildy product numbers. Just looking at the performance difference between a Geforce 256 and a Geforce 8800GTX should show how crazy large the numbers would get. Plus, it would encourage AMD and other rivals to adopt a similar looking naming scheme, but use a different way to calculate it that gives them bigger numbers, which would encourage nVidia to cheat on their own numbers, and in the end you have stuff that's no better than the fairly arbitrary numbers they use now. At least with the current numbers you know what generation of the chip is on the board and know what it will support. So if you know you need Shader Model 2.0 support you should stay away from GeForce 5xxx series cards for instance.
Assuming your CPU is around the same vintage as your graphics card, upgrading to a (mythical at this point) AGP version of an 8600 may not be the best idea. Chances are the card would starve waiting for the processor and you'd basically be wasting money. You'd probably be better off upgrading the CPU, Memory, and Motherboard while you're at it to switch to PCI-Express before you upgrade to a modern video card. This isn't as expensive as it sounds, you could easily get a decent performer for $600 or so (Intel Core2 type processor, $100 motherboard, 2GB of memory or so) by reusing most of the components (HDD, Optical Drives, Power supply (unless you skimped originally), case, monitor, keyboard, mouse) from your old system. Of all of that the Power Supply is the most iffy, but if you bought something decent you'll probably be fine.
Maybe you could try looking at the benchmarks? The answer is yes BTW, but the question you should be asking is "How much faster are these than my current card?".
I went to college between 1995 and 2000 (co-oped for a couple of semesters) and this was already a big issue with our local administrators, especially the only female professor on the staff. She was always going on trips to high schools around the area trying to get women interested in computer science. She organized (with the help of the ACM) computer science events that were marketed towards girls (especially in high school) to try to convince them to enter the field. They most certainly did not reduce the math, programming, and other "nerdy" parts of the curriculum to try to attract more girls.
On the other hand, all of that work was apparently for naught because my graduating class of around 50 students had exactly 1 female graduate (who was already married). While our year was especially bad, the numbers for the other years weren't much better. We did start with considerably more girls freshman year, but almost all of them dropped out when they realized that the large amount of homework and projects would cut into their evenings and weekends a lot, and when they realized they were literally one class away from a Math minor.
Man, I can't have been the only person who had issues with SATA optical drives right? I mean I guess they must be getting better by now, but this seems like a rather sudden transition that has caught the optical drive manufacturers a little off guard.
It didn't help that most of the commonly used SATA chipsets were horribly buggy when SATA first started to get popular. That had to discourage ATAPI device manufacturers (who have a tendency to bring out bugs in whatever they're attached to) from adopting the standard quickly.
Am I the only one who thinks that the speed gains one might experience from learning how to type on a Dvorak layout (and the studies are all over the place on how much speed you actually gain), is not as useful as having the same standard layout everywhere you go?
The last thing I want is to walk up to a kiosk somewhere and discover the keyboard is in some unfamiliar layout.
I love the part where it is "approved by the French intelligence service". Of course it is, since it's so easy to break. Of course it's not approved for their own use, they just want everybody else to use it.
I suspect these things don't self destruct on the first incorrect password. That would be a horrific UI blunder. Rather, I suspect after 5-10 or so incorrect passwords in a row they will self destruct. It's hard to tell because the original site is down.
A vertical list where each link is on it's own line followed by a description is confusing?? You need some sort of extra help to discern that those are separate links?!? My webpage is certainly no paragon of modern design, but I think it's easy to navigate. It does look pretty dated these days and I guess I should update it at some point, but I don't have a lot of motivation to fix something that works just fine.
This is of course assuming the Semantic web is a realistic (or even good) idea. I'm still not convinced it won't require some sort of hyperadvanced AI to deliver on the promises that the Semantic Web advocates have been talking about for years. We all know how fast AI research has been moving for the past 30 years...
That's not necessary if you make your links look like links though. The only time you really need:hover is when you have some element that is not normally a link that you want to turn into a link. Links are immediately obvious in regular HTML pages because they're a different color and usually underlined. Your mouse cursor also changes when it is pointing at them. There is no need to have it jump out or change color again unless you're doing strange things with your page. If you have a bunch of links back to back in such a way that it is difficult to tell where one stops and another ends, then you probably need to redesign your webpage anyway.
I'd be happy if we just had a way to layout the page such that it would size with the browser window. I _hate_ hardcoded sizes, but it's a pain in the rear to get good layout without using it (good as in: not having everything on top of each other or in a single big column). It's one thing I miss about tables, they by default behaved sanely when people resized their browser windows.
I don't know if it's any good, but I saw one in Bestbuy that came with a steering wheel in the package. You slip the wiimote into the center of the steering wheel and use that to drive. It seemed like a pretty good use of the technology and IIRC unlike most driving games that come with a wheel, this one wasn't more than $10 over the normal price of a game.
Trackmenot did seem a bit rude. Sending random queries to search engines constantly (if the article is correct) sounds more like a DDOS than anything else.
Yeah, the only reason I upgraded around 2001 or so was because I wanted component and s-video in on the TV instead of just composite (which was the norm back in the 90s). The biggest killer with those older TVs is that they often only support Coax input, which is terrible for anything that is not a TV antenna or a cable from your cable/satellite company.
Yeah, but physics says that if your airflow is being redirected it's not only losing power from changing the direction of the flow, but also from friction between the airflow and your surface.
That's because it isn't new. The Avrocar was using a very similar system in the early 60s. While I'm sure the scale model pictured in the article has no trouble going up or down, I bet it has a lot of difficulty building up linear velocity while maintaining stability. That has always been the trouble with these aircraft. They're great if you only want to go up or down, but most people want lateral movement as well.
As an aside, I'm not sure why using the Coanada effect is better than just building a ducted fan with internal control surfaces. Putting that big blockage in your airflow just seems like it's going to sap power from your engine.
In fact for games like WoW that is the only way I can see that you would be able to tax it, since there is no generally agreed upon standard for converting WoW Gold into US dollars. Third party out of country gold farmers do not make for a nationally recognizable conversion rate.
Secondlife however has a money market and maintains an up-to-date exchange rate of Lindon Dollars to US Dollars. It would be entirely possible to tax earnings in Secondlife in real dollars, although 99% of the time the tax would come out to pennies per month (effectively not worth the government's time), some of the larger Land Barons however could easily make enough to have to pay taxes on it.
A big part of this is that the government over there tightly controls the normal media. For instance, all of the press releases talk about the "much beloved king" and how everybody loves their new government. Reporters without Borders has a better article on this IMHO.
Well, third parties trade Lindon Dollars for US Dollars, but they do it on the Lindon designed and operated trading system. A big part of SL is that if you make enough in-game money, you can convert it to real money and actually make a living off of it. There is an in-game auction system where people put their Lindon Dollars up for sale and other people use real money to buy them. That real money (minus a percentage) gets transferred to the person who put the Lindon Dollars up. Outside of the fees, LL will sometimes create a big wad of Lindon dollars to put on the auction site for a quick cash infusion and to keep the price of the Lindon Dollar from spiking relative to the US dollar.
Virtually every MUD and MUSH I ever played with had a way for players to create their own rooms and decorate them however they like (which was easy since it was all ASCII). These were one of the biggest draws of MUSHes in fact, since there often wasn't much else to do there. People would create elaborate recreations of college campuses or spaceships or whatever else they felt like. The quality varied a lot, but you can't discount the power of one obsessed fanboy with far too much time on his hands.
Slashdot Mirror
While that sounds great in theory, there are too many factors that go into the performance of a card to really roll it all into one number. Differences in Direct X and OpenGL performance alone would confuse things, not to mention the differences in feature support. Even if they were to do that, in a few generations you would have incredibly unweildy product numbers. Just looking at the performance difference between a Geforce 256 and a Geforce 8800GTX should show how crazy large the numbers would get. Plus, it would encourage AMD and other rivals to adopt a similar looking naming scheme, but use a different way to calculate it that gives them bigger numbers, which would encourage nVidia to cheat on their own numbers, and in the end you have stuff that's no better than the fairly arbitrary numbers they use now. At least with the current numbers you know what generation of the chip is on the board and know what it will support. So if you know you need Shader Model 2.0 support you should stay away from GeForce 5xxx series cards for instance.
Assuming your CPU is around the same vintage as your graphics card, upgrading to a (mythical at this point) AGP version of an 8600 may not be the best idea. Chances are the card would starve waiting for the processor and you'd basically be wasting money. You'd probably be better off upgrading the CPU, Memory, and Motherboard while you're at it to switch to PCI-Express before you upgrade to a modern video card. This isn't as expensive as it sounds, you could easily get a decent performer for $600 or so (Intel Core2 type processor, $100 motherboard, 2GB of memory or so) by reusing most of the components (HDD, Optical Drives, Power supply (unless you skimped originally), case, monitor, keyboard, mouse) from your old system. Of all of that the Power Supply is the most iffy, but if you bought something decent you'll probably be fine.
Maybe you could try looking at the benchmarks? The answer is yes BTW, but the question you should be asking is "How much faster are these than my current card?".
I went to college between 1995 and 2000 (co-oped for a couple of semesters) and this was already a big issue with our local administrators, especially the only female professor on the staff. She was always going on trips to high schools around the area trying to get women interested in computer science. She organized (with the help of the ACM) computer science events that were marketed towards girls (especially in high school) to try to convince them to enter the field. They most certainly did not reduce the math, programming, and other "nerdy" parts of the curriculum to try to attract more girls.
On the other hand, all of that work was apparently for naught because my graduating class of around 50 students had exactly 1 female graduate (who was already married). While our year was especially bad, the numbers for the other years weren't much better. We did start with considerably more girls freshman year, but almost all of them dropped out when they realized that the large amount of homework and projects would cut into their evenings and weekends a lot, and when they realized they were literally one class away from a Math minor.
Man, I can't have been the only person who had issues with SATA optical drives right? I mean I guess they must be getting better by now, but this seems like a rather sudden transition that has caught the optical drive manufacturers a little off guard.
It didn't help that most of the commonly used SATA chipsets were horribly buggy when SATA first started to get popular. That had to discourage ATAPI device manufacturers (who have a tendency to bring out bugs in whatever they're attached to) from adopting the standard quickly.
Am I the only one who thinks that the speed gains one might experience from learning how to type on a Dvorak layout (and the studies are all over the place on how much speed you actually gain), is not as useful as having the same standard layout everywhere you go?
The last thing I want is to walk up to a kiosk somewhere and discover the keyboard is in some unfamiliar layout.
I love the part where it is "approved by the French intelligence service". Of course it is, since it's so easy to break. Of course it's not approved for their own use, they just want everybody else to use it.
I suspect these things don't self destruct on the first incorrect password. That would be a horrific UI blunder. Rather, I suspect after 5-10 or so incorrect passwords in a row they will self destruct. It's hard to tell because the original site is down.
A vertical list where each link is on it's own line followed by a description is confusing?? You need some sort of extra help to discern that those are separate links?!? My webpage is certainly no paragon of modern design, but I think it's easy to navigate. It does look pretty dated these days and I guess I should update it at some point, but I don't have a lot of motivation to fix something that works just fine.
This is of course assuming the Semantic web is a realistic (or even good) idea. I'm still not convinced it won't require some sort of hyperadvanced AI to deliver on the promises that the Semantic Web advocates have been talking about for years. We all know how fast AI research has been moving for the past 30 years...
That's not necessary if you make your links look like links though. The only time you really need :hover is when you have some element that is not normally a link that you want to turn into a link. Links are immediately obvious in regular HTML pages because they're a different color and usually underlined. Your mouse cursor also changes when it is pointing at them. There is no need to have it jump out or change color again unless you're doing strange things with your page. If you have a bunch of links back to back in such a way that it is difficult to tell where one stops and another ends, then you probably need to redesign your webpage anyway.
I'd be happy if we just had a way to layout the page such that it would size with the browser window. I _hate_ hardcoded sizes, but it's a pain in the rear to get good layout without using it (good as in: not having everything on top of each other or in a single big column). It's one thing I miss about tables, they by default behaved sanely when people resized their browser windows.
You might want to lay off of the Arab media there. I think it's damaging your brain.
I don't know if it's any good, but I saw one in Bestbuy that came with a steering wheel in the package. You slip the wiimote into the center of the steering wheel and use that to drive. It seemed like a pretty good use of the technology and IIRC unlike most driving games that come with a wheel, this one wasn't more than $10 over the normal price of a game.
OMG, that could be true. I'm pretty sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has brown walls too!
Trackmenot did seem a bit rude. Sending random queries to search engines constantly (if the article is correct) sounds more like a DDOS than anything else.
Yeah, the only reason I upgraded around 2001 or so was because I wanted component and s-video in on the TV instead of just composite (which was the norm back in the 90s). The biggest killer with those older TVs is that they often only support Coax input, which is terrible for anything that is not a TV antenna or a cable from your cable/satellite company.
Yeah, but physics says that if your airflow is being redirected it's not only losing power from changing the direction of the flow, but also from friction between the airflow and your surface.
That's because it isn't new. The Avrocar was using a very similar system in the early 60s. While I'm sure the scale model pictured in the article has no trouble going up or down, I bet it has a lot of difficulty building up linear velocity while maintaining stability. That has always been the trouble with these aircraft. They're great if you only want to go up or down, but most people want lateral movement as well.
As an aside, I'm not sure why using the Coanada effect is better than just building a ducted fan with internal control surfaces. Putting that big blockage in your airflow just seems like it's going to sap power from your engine.
The only problem is that the IRS operates in the real world. You can't pay your taxes with WoW Gold.
In fact for games like WoW that is the only way I can see that you would be able to tax it, since there is no generally agreed upon standard for converting WoW Gold into US dollars. Third party out of country gold farmers do not make for a nationally recognizable conversion rate.
Secondlife however has a money market and maintains an up-to-date exchange rate of Lindon Dollars to US Dollars. It would be entirely possible to tax earnings in Secondlife in real dollars, although 99% of the time the tax would come out to pennies per month (effectively not worth the government's time), some of the larger Land Barons however could easily make enough to have to pay taxes on it.
Yeah, their website is atrocious and they don't seem to care. That's unfortunately not uncommon among motherboard manufacturers.
A big part of this is that the government over there tightly controls the normal media. For instance, all of the press releases talk about the "much beloved king" and how everybody loves their new government. Reporters without Borders has a better article on this IMHO.
Well, third parties trade Lindon Dollars for US Dollars, but they do it on the Lindon designed and operated trading system. A big part of SL is that if you make enough in-game money, you can convert it to real money and actually make a living off of it. There is an in-game auction system where people put their Lindon Dollars up for sale and other people use real money to buy them. That real money (minus a percentage) gets transferred to the person who put the Lindon Dollars up. Outside of the fees, LL will sometimes create a big wad of Lindon dollars to put on the auction site for a quick cash infusion and to keep the price of the Lindon Dollar from spiking relative to the US dollar.
Virtually every MUD and MUSH I ever played with had a way for players to create their own rooms and decorate them however they like (which was easy since it was all ASCII). These were one of the biggest draws of MUSHes in fact, since there often wasn't much else to do there. People would create elaborate recreations of college campuses or spaceships or whatever else they felt like. The quality varied a lot, but you can't discount the power of one obsessed fanboy with far too much time on his hands.