Absolutely. Flashblock is a no-nonsense tool that is dead-simple to configure. I had everyone I know install it after a number of flash vulnerabilities started cropping up, and I've heard no complaints.
I consider Flashblock + Firefox my "compromise" with the advertisers: I will submit to viewing ads to help them pay for content, so long as they are not Flash, and so long as they are not pop-up/under. Really, I do not find static images and text annoying at all, and if an advertiser makes an animated GIF that is too annoying, I can just press ESC.
But if the advertisers insist on using this crap evervwhere and pushing an arms race, I won't hesitate to upgrade to noscript (and everyone I know) and shut the door entirely. I hope they won't force me to do that, because then they would get zero money from my page views.
Nobody in their right mind is going to put a desktop chipset in a netbook. So yes, the 25w consumed by this test platform (4w for CPU + 20w for chipset) IS significantly more than most netbooks (4w for CPU + 7w for chipset), and raises the question of whether this is a viable solution for HD playback.
Nope. Just watch Southpark's second episode. Cartman cheats, badly. When the cheating is uncovered, nobody cares, because the media spotlight is upon them.
Of course, the more songs you have, the more that miniscule amount of disk space adds up. Now you're not just saving a couple megs, you're saving a few hundred megs. If anything, that makes Vorbis even more attractive.
Have you seen the size of flash players these days?
You can get a 32GB flash player today for $200. In fact, the Sansa View 32GB has an SDHC expansion port, which can upgrade the player to 48GB capacity.
Now, I consider myself a music NUT, and own hundreds of CDs. I have them all encoded at alt preset standard, which means they're all high-bitrate. But even with all this, my entire music collection is SMALLER than the latest 32GB music players (as-of today, it's 27GB). It grows at a rate of about 2GB per year, so I could get two years out of a 32GB player, and 10 years out of a 48GB player, all without changing my codec.
Why do I care about putting *more* songs on a player when current players on the market have all the capacity I will need for the next decade (note that I don't like watching videos on a tiny screen, so I only use my player for music)?
So yeah, mp3 sucks at 64k, but do does every other codec. You might be able to get the same quality as mp3 at 96k, or as low as 80k, but you won't get any amazing storage leaps over 128k mp3. Add in the fact that Vorbis uses more power to decode than mp3 (even using the pure integer decoder), and it's not all that enticing.
What, you shove thousands of dollars worth of I/O into a system, and run it through the paces with a CPU that sucked in 2005? I'm not surprised at all that most tests showed very little improvement with the RAID.
Yes, but this is precisely the reason why AMD should drop the Geode. They haven't improved the microarchitecture much since it was purchased from NatSemi, and NatSemi just kept bolting-on crap to the MediaGX chip they bought from Cyrix.
In other words, the Geode today is the same-old architecture from 1997 (with a few tweaks and node shrinks). The problem is, this old microarchitecture targets the same market as ARM, but can't beat ARM's power consumption. In order to cash-in on the netbook craze, AMD would need a beter microarchitecture.
Take a look at the new chips from Via and Intel: the Atom isn't a speed demon, but it kicks the crap out of a Geode without using much more power. The Nano can't match the power consumption of the Atom, but it fills the gap between Atom and beefy desktop cores. What both chips bring to the table is REAL Windows on an ultraportable platform (Geode can't do this).
Intel and Via figured it out: the embedded processor cores from the 1990s were not going to cut-it. With the lessons learned from the last decade, both designed new processors for the netbook market, using two different methodologies. Unfortunately, if AMD wants to compete, they need an entirely new architecture, and they simply can't afford to make one. They can't afford two architectures like Intel, and they've decided that the server/desktop design path is more important than the netbook path.
I personally think it's the right choice - netbooks are a growing market, but there's very little money to be made, as the margins are tiny. The server market will always be growing, and will always be worth more money.
What you're referring to is IPC (Instructions Per Clock). CPUs of yesterday increased IPC by pipelining instruction execution (prest ICP for that is one per clock), and CPUs of today do so by re-ordering x86 instructions so they can be executed in-parallel. Increasing the IPC has been the holy grail for CPUs.
Compare a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with a 3Ghz X2 6000+. The X2 is dramatically faster.
This is not because architecturers had major efficiency gains at the time, it's because Intel took a huge step backwards in IPC with the Pentium 4. They did this because their engineers assumed they could continue clocking CPUs faster and faster. Their proposed goal was to have the Pentium 4 at 10 GHz by the end of the decade, and in hindsight it wasn't a good idea.
A 3Ghz Core 2 is faster than that again by a significant margin. A 3Ghz Core i7 is even faster again by a big margin.
The Core2 was a major leap, which is a rare thing to see. Core2 was great because it not-only produced impressive improvements on pure processing-limited code, it also improved I/O-limited processing with a slew of new caching systems and the new out-of-order memory accesses.
i7 is not a major leap - it sees performance improvements on some tasks, but for most it keeps parity with Core2 Quad.
Why is i7 not the amazing leap that we saw in Core2? It's because every improvement in architecture does less and less to improve performance, because every "improvement" adds more overhead than the last, and pushes the edges of architectural limits.
You can only go so far for two major reasons: one, adding another pipeline inside of a chip adds an exponentially increasing number of routing wires and support circuitry, so each improvement costs you more-and-more. Also, there is a finite limit to how "parallelizeable" common x86 code is; as you approach this limit, the pipelines youi add-on will sit there unused.
The Core2 is already approaching said limits, so I wouldn't expect anything amazing to come out anytime soon. Really, x86 IPC has only seen TWO major jumps in the last 15 years, and those have been the Pentium Pro, and the Core2. You can only do so much to parallellize x86 code.
Yes, you're right. What he probably meant was the overclocking of Coppermine cores, which only required a bus increase from 100 to 133 MHz. A 600 or 650 MHz core was almost a guaranteed overclock to 133 Mhz bus, and hence they werre always sold-out.
Actually another thing that always bothered me is that Zune uses it's own media player/library program. Hello? Windows Media Player? Why not use and extend that to meet your needs instead of making another almost identical piece of software. Now you have two programs that almost kinda work instead of one really good one.
Oh yeah, Microsoft burned that bridge completely, making sure they killed-off PlaysForSure along the way. The Zune neither used WMP as the media manager, nor did it use PlaysForSure DRM, two "standards" at the time. It was doomed from the beginning for these reasons. Even my sister who works for MS couldn't figure out why they were releasing it.
I was talking about 1280x720 being todays resolution for gaming, and I bet realtime raytracers rendering 1280x720 would win the hearts of ANY gamer over todays or tomorrows GPU assisted games running at 1920x1080 or even double that.
And I was saying that you cannot get real-time 1280x720 raytracing today for a reasonable price. You can run the game rastered at 1280x720+ for under $1,000 from a major manufacturer (even with their video card mark-up), or you can spend $10,000 or more on the 4-socket, 16-core server system they used for this test.
And there are other factors that nobody will discuss: their test uses almost entirely static geometry. From what I can see of the photos, there is nothing moving around the playfield except the player's helicopter - this means performance would fall like a rock if you used this tech to play a real game.
I think I know which one I would choose. Yeah, the reflections in the demo look good, but they don't look THAT good.
QW:ET is one of the best made, best balanced team FPS games I have EVER played. If it draws from anything, it draws from the previous Enemy Territory game. I'm sure we've all played a lot of the original ET, being that it was free. QW is like a much refined version of this, with a modern graphics overhaul, and more interesting setting.
I also thought the game was a poor BF2 clone with serious balance issues, and poor hit detection. It also has a HUGE learning curve in comparison to most games in it's class.
This is why the game is collecting dust on my shelf (why the game is collecting dust on MANY shelves). It's not FLAMEBAIT if it's the TRUTH.
Sure, but I believe the point is this: if you paid retail for the render farm this project used, you would be VERY disappointed with 1280x720 resolution at 20fps.
When you can get 1920x1080 @ 60fps playing ETQW on a $100 video card, you start to see the raytracing results in a different light.
Just look at the backwoods of Tennessee in the 1930s: they were four decades behind the rest of the world so-far as electrification and other utilities go, because they didn't want to pay market-rate for building and maintining the infarstructure.
So, along comes the gubment with a wad-o-cash, and creates the TVA. Now, Tennessee is still full of country bumpkins, but they like their cheap electricity. And since they have plenty of electricity to run their cheap PC from Walmart, there's no reason besides cost stopping the internet from getting the same wide usage.
Let the gubment solve this problem once-again during a downturn! We federally subsidize the building of roads, phone and electrical networks in the middle of nowhere, so why not data networks too?
You'd be surprised how accurate I am on the move. It's the major reason why I never play Sniper - I have better twitch aim than sedentary aim. That's an advantage that plays well with the Scout's weapons (even the scattergun has a tiny fire arc).
But yeah, if the other team has a Sniper advantage, on 2Fort I'll switch to Soldier. All the Soldier has to do is keep firing rockets, and the Snipers have no time to aim. Once I close distance, I can rocket-jump up and fire my last one in his face.
That's one thing that amazes me about TF2: hardly anyone knows how to rocket-jump, or they just don't bother. Everyone used to do it in QWTF, along with grenade jumping, so I've been surprised to see so many Soldiers take "the long way" on several maps. When you consider that only two classes can get into the air in TF2, you'd think they would do it more often. I've seen more pipe-jumping from Demomen than I've seen jumping from Soldiers.
Yeah, I absolutely loathed the article's layout, because the benchmarks were littered carelessly all through the text. If they're going to bother posting an analylitical article with benchmark numbers, the least they could do is post a summary table.
The pistol is surprisingly accurate firing at Snipers from the other side of the map. Since I can move and fire, and he can't, it's that much easier. The speed of the Scout plus double-jump means Snipers never have a clear shot at me, and once I close distance, they are easy prey for the scattergun.
Still not low enough for the DS, which has a maximum of 2048 triangles per-frame. You'd blow that budget with just four of these character models on-screen, let-alone the map!
The real question that is not being answered here is why does a 32 GB SD card cost $25 but a 64 GB SATA hard drive cost $800?
A 32GB SDHC card right now on Newegg (in-stock) is a minimum of $72. I don't know where you got the $25 number (sure, in another year it will be that cheap). As another poster mentioned, Newegg has 32GB SSDs available for the same price range.
Why can't the technology that makes SD cards so cheap make cheap SATA hard drives as well?
It already has. The first SSDs on the market used single-level cell (SLC) flash, while the inexpensive SD cards and mp3 players you see everywhere use multi-level cell (MLC) flash. The difference is how densely you can pack the data, and it makes a huge difference in price.
To put it simply: SLC flash is faster, lower-power, and more reliable than MLC flash, but also more expensive (at same capacity) than MLC flash.
The reason the first SSDs used SLC flash is because new technologies have to convince people to take the plunge: people/companies are usually willing to pay significantly more for something that is much faster and more reliable. Early adpoters might have given SSDs the cold shoulder if the first wave of drives reduced capacity and performance in-order to be more cost-competitive with existing storage.
Now that SSDs are firmly off-the-ground, manufacturers are offering all sorts of devices, including cut-rate drives using MLC flash, so the prices at the low-end have dropped like a rock.
I started out a Seagate fan - my first purchased and built computer had a Seagate drive, and every one one I bought lasted me for years. Then I decided to switch to IBM, because Seagate was falling behind in terms of performance.
I bought a 30GB 75GXP (the ORIGINAL deathstar). It lasted fourteen months, which was actually a long time for that drive.
So, I went back to Seagate, happy for a little while. But in the last few years, build quality has gone downhill - the drives have gotten less reliable, and louder, and the performance gap has never been bridged.
After I bought the 7200.10 and had several die on me, I decided to ditch Seagate. My last two drives purchased were from Western Digital, their GreenPower 750GB drives, and I've had zero issues. Although these drives are only 5400 RPM (and are about %10-20 slower than modern 7200RPM drives), the sad fact is they are FASTER than my old 7200.10s - that is how bad Seagate's performance gap is.
With this news, it's onvious I made the right choice.
5: unused RAM is wasted RAM. So long as it frees up the RAM when a high priority application needs it, using spare RAM for caching can have huge benefits. Don't trot out the power usage argument. The difference in power between half full ram and full ram is miniscule
Why exactly does Vista need to allocate a separate memory space for video when Aero is already disabled (full-screen gaming)? I hope to hell they fix this stupidity before Windows 7 ships. It's already causing a lot of confusion, as recent game releases have had MUCH higher memory requirements for Vista than XP.
Well, yeah. I own the orange box, and can't bring myself to play TF 2 because I have to be a member of a team and don't want to be "that guy" who screws up and lets everyone on his team down.
You can't be "that guy" because TF2 doesn't allow you to be "that guy."
Allow me to explain:
The "that guy" syndrome doesn't happen in TF2 because everyone respawns indefinitely in a round, few servers have friendly fire on (it doesn't work well in the game), and the action is fast-paced when something major is happening. The last point is important: if you're part of a co-ordinated assault on a strongpoint, usually it's not solely your fault if the attack fails: often, you just didn't bring enough forces, or other people screwed-up too. In any case, not many people will notice if you screw-up.
Let me give you a counter-example: in a game like Counterstrike, you most definitely can be "that guy": most servers have friendly fire on, so you can kill half your team with a badly-aimed grenade. You don't respawn during the round, so at the end of each round you get a bunch of dead spectators watching YOUR every move, and complaining when you do something dumb. There is no real downtime for this in TF2, even on servers with default respawn rates.
Scout requires impressive reflexes, now that they took his grenades away, and gave him the scattergun. Contrary to what the name implies, the scattergun does not have a wide fire arc; it simply does no damage if you're not right next to your target.
But I will agree that TF2 largely slowed the game down versus QWTF. Taking grenades out, improving the spy and turning the engineer's crappy dispenser into a gushing fountain of ammo changed the pace of the game.
They are blaming her for not using OO for general papers and they are blaming her for not doing any kind of troubleshooting, like going to verizon.com and looking up how to do a non windows install (which is clearly documented).
The average Slashdotter assumes far too much.
Did you ever consider that this might be her first computer purchase? Did you ever consider that she might not HAVE another configured machine to connect to the internet and do said research? I know everyone on Slashdot has seventeen computers hooked to their IPSec-protected WAN, but most people who buy from Dell have ONE computer, and have no clue how to configure it (the very reason Verizon created their Windows setup CD).
Further: the woman is taking a course to figure out how to use office. OFFICE! If that doesn't scream computer novice, I don't know what does. And a computer novicewill have no idea what his/her options are as far as office applications go, because they have no idea what they want from their office app to begin with! And even when you know what you want in an office program, it's still hard to get over that initial fear: my mother worked for years as an office manager, using Word Perfect 5.1, and later Microsoft Word, and I STILL had to reassure her that Open Office was just as capable when she needed a new word processor program last year.
The problem is, this information is not made clear by anyone in the process: Dell or the Ubuntu designers should provide tutorials that AUTOMATICALLLY RUN unless you tell them not to, and those tutorials should lay-out the basic steps to create an office document, and the steps required to connect to the internet. No more confusion!
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Absolutely. Flashblock is a no-nonsense tool that is dead-simple to configure. I had everyone I know install it after a number of flash vulnerabilities started cropping up, and I've heard no complaints.
I consider Flashblock + Firefox my "compromise" with the advertisers: I will submit to viewing ads to help them pay for content, so long as they are not Flash, and so long as they are not pop-up/under. Really, I do not find static images and text annoying at all, and if an advertiser makes an animated GIF that is too annoying, I can just press ESC.
But if the advertisers insist on using this crap evervwhere and pushing an arms race, I won't hesitate to upgrade to noscript (and everyone I know) and shut the door entirely. I hope they won't force me to do that, because then they would get zero money from my page views.
For the last time, the chipset your are referencing is the DESKTOP variant, not the MOBILE variant.
Mobile 945: 7w TDP.
945 Desktop: 22w TDP.
Nobody in their right mind is going to put a desktop chipset in a netbook. So yes, the 25w consumed by this test platform (4w for CPU + 20w for chipset) IS significantly more than most netbooks (4w for CPU + 7w for chipset), and raises the question of whether this is a viable solution for HD playback.
Does the Atom processor make the Internet faster? Because if not, I'm going back to a P4!
You're thinking of the Pentium !!!, which made the interwebs your bitch.
Doesn't anyone do any fact checking?
Nope. Just watch Southpark's second episode. Cartman cheats, badly. When the cheating is uncovered, nobody cares, because the media spotlight is upon them.
It's as true today as it was ten years ago.
Of course, the more songs you have, the more that miniscule amount of disk space adds up. Now you're not just saving a couple megs, you're saving a few hundred megs. If anything, that makes Vorbis even more attractive.
Have you seen the size of flash players these days?
You can get a 32GB flash player today for $200. In fact, the Sansa View 32GB has an SDHC expansion port, which can upgrade the player to 48GB capacity.
Now, I consider myself a music NUT, and own hundreds of CDs. I have them all encoded at alt preset standard, which means they're all high-bitrate. But even with all this, my entire music collection is SMALLER than the latest 32GB music players (as-of today, it's 27GB). It grows at a rate of about 2GB per year, so I could get two years out of a 32GB player, and 10 years out of a 48GB player, all without changing my codec.
Why do I care about putting *more* songs on a player when current players on the market have all the capacity I will need for the next decade (note that I don't like watching videos on a tiny screen, so I only use my player for music)?
Here's another side to the problem: WMA, Vorbis and AAC do not offer the same quality at 64k that mp3 can already acheive at 128k (this is a lie long-perpetuated by the makers of newer codecs). This task is made harder because mp3 has improved so much via LAME, to the point that 128k VBR is almost transparent.
So yeah, mp3 sucks at 64k, but do does every other codec. You might be able to get the same quality as mp3 at 96k, or as low as 80k, but you won't get any amazing storage leaps over 128k mp3. Add in the fact that Vorbis uses more power to decode than mp3 (even using the pure integer decoder), and it's not all that enticing.
Actually, I felt that the limiting factor was probably the craptastic single-core Pentium 4 EE they used to run all these benchmarks.
What, you shove thousands of dollars worth of I/O into a system, and run it through the paces with a CPU that sucked in 2005? I'm not surprised at all that most tests showed very little improvement with the RAID.
Yes, but this is precisely the reason why AMD should drop the Geode. They haven't improved the microarchitecture much since it was purchased from NatSemi, and NatSemi just kept bolting-on crap to the MediaGX chip they bought from Cyrix.
In other words, the Geode today is the same-old architecture from 1997 (with a few tweaks and node shrinks). The problem is, this old microarchitecture targets the same market as ARM, but can't beat ARM's power consumption. In order to cash-in on the netbook craze, AMD would need a beter microarchitecture.
Take a look at the new chips from Via and Intel: the Atom isn't a speed demon, but it kicks the crap out of a Geode without using much more power. The Nano can't match the power consumption of the Atom, but it fills the gap between Atom and beefy desktop cores. What both chips bring to the table is REAL Windows on an ultraportable platform (Geode can't do this).
Intel and Via figured it out: the embedded processor cores from the 1990s were not going to cut-it. With the lessons learned from the last decade, both designed new processors for the netbook market, using two different methodologies. Unfortunately, if AMD wants to compete, they need an entirely new architecture, and they simply can't afford to make one. They can't afford two architectures like Intel, and they've decided that the server/desktop design path is more important than the netbook path.
I personally think it's the right choice - netbooks are a growing market, but there's very little money to be made, as the margins are tiny. The server market will always be growing, and will always be worth more money.
What you're referring to is IPC (Instructions Per Clock). CPUs of yesterday increased IPC by pipelining instruction execution (prest ICP for that is one per clock), and CPUs of today do so by re-ordering x86 instructions so they can be executed in-parallel. Increasing the IPC has been the holy grail for CPUs.
Compare a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with a 3Ghz X2 6000+. The X2 is dramatically faster.
This is not because architecturers had major efficiency gains at the time, it's because Intel took a huge step backwards in IPC with the Pentium 4. They did this because their engineers assumed they could continue clocking CPUs faster and faster. Their proposed goal was to have the Pentium 4 at 10 GHz by the end of the decade, and in hindsight it wasn't a good idea.
A 3Ghz Core 2 is faster than that again by a significant margin. A 3Ghz Core i7 is even faster again by a big margin.
The Core2 was a major leap, which is a rare thing to see. Core2 was great because it not-only produced impressive improvements on pure processing-limited code, it also improved I/O-limited processing with a slew of new caching systems and the new out-of-order memory accesses.
i7 is not a major leap - it sees performance improvements on some tasks, but for most it keeps parity with Core2 Quad.
Why is i7 not the amazing leap that we saw in Core2? It's because every improvement in architecture does less and less to improve performance, because every "improvement" adds more overhead than the last, and pushes the edges of architectural limits.
You can only go so far for two major reasons: one, adding another pipeline inside of a chip adds an exponentially increasing number of routing wires and support circuitry, so each improvement costs you more-and-more. Also, there is a finite limit to how "parallelizeable" common x86 code is; as you approach this limit, the pipelines youi add-on will sit there unused.
The Core2 is already approaching said limits, so I wouldn't expect anything amazing to come out anytime soon. Really, x86 IPC has only seen TWO major jumps in the last 15 years, and those have been the Pentium Pro, and the Core2. You can only do so much to parallellize x86 code.
Yes, you're right. What he probably meant was the overclocking of Coppermine cores, which only required a bus increase from 100 to 133 MHz. A 600 or 650 MHz core was almost a guaranteed overclock to 133 Mhz bus, and hence they werre always sold-out.
Other great Intel overclockers of the time:
Deschutes core (.25 micron) Pentium II at 300 MHz. Since the first "official" Deschutes core release was at 333 MHz, it was a surprise when 300 Mhz versions of the core started appearing. Apparently, a lot of the new Deschutes 300 Mhz cores were marked-down 450 Mhz cores, and evev had the same 225 MHz L2 cache chips!
Celermine 533 or 566 overclocked to 800 or 850 Mhz. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Pentium III at the same clock speed, but with the chip costing just $100, how could you say no?
Actually another thing that always bothered me is that Zune uses it's own media player/library program. Hello? Windows Media Player? Why not use and extend that to meet your needs instead of making another almost identical piece of software. Now you have two programs that almost kinda work instead of one really good one.
Oh yeah, Microsoft burned that bridge completely, making sure they killed-off PlaysForSure along the way. The Zune neither used WMP as the media manager, nor did it use PlaysForSure DRM, two "standards" at the time. It was doomed from the beginning for these reasons. Even my sister who works for MS couldn't figure out why they were releasing it.
I was talking about 1280x720 being todays resolution for gaming, and I bet realtime raytracers rendering 1280x720 would win the hearts of ANY gamer over todays or tomorrows GPU assisted games running at 1920x1080 or even double that.
And I was saying that you cannot get real-time 1280x720 raytracing today for a reasonable price. You can run the game rastered at 1280x720+ for under $1,000 from a major manufacturer (even with their video card mark-up), or you can spend $10,000 or more on the 4-socket, 16-core server system they used for this test.
And there are other factors that nobody will discuss: their test uses almost entirely static geometry. From what I can see of the photos, there is nothing moving around the playfield except the player's helicopter - this means performance would fall like a rock if you used this tech to play a real game.
I think I know which one I would choose. Yeah, the reflections in the demo look good, but they don't look THAT good.
QW:ET is one of the best made, best balanced team FPS games I have EVER played. If it draws from anything, it draws from the previous Enemy Territory game. I'm sure we've all played a lot of the original ET, being that it was free. QW is like a much refined version of this, with a modern graphics overhaul, and more interesting setting.
I also thought the game was a poor BF2 clone with serious balance issues, and poor hit detection. It also has a HUGE learning curve in comparison to most games in it's class.
This is why the game is collecting dust on my shelf (why the game is collecting dust on MANY shelves). It's not FLAMEBAIT if it's the TRUTH.
Sure, but I believe the point is this: if you paid retail for the render farm this project used, you would be VERY disappointed with 1280x720 resolution at 20fps.
When you can get 1920x1080 @ 60fps playing ETQW on a $100 video card, you start to see the raytracing results in a different light.
Just look at the backwoods of Tennessee in the 1930s: they were four decades behind the rest of the world so-far as electrification and other utilities go, because they didn't want to pay market-rate for building and maintining the infarstructure.
So, along comes the gubment with a wad-o-cash, and creates the TVA. Now, Tennessee is still full of country bumpkins, but they like their cheap electricity. And since they have plenty of electricity to run their cheap PC from Walmart, there's no reason besides cost stopping the internet from getting the same wide usage.
Let the gubment solve this problem once-again during a downturn! We federally subsidize the building of roads, phone and electrical networks in the middle of nowhere, so why not data networks too?
You'd be surprised how accurate I am on the move. It's the major reason why I never play Sniper - I have better twitch aim than sedentary aim. That's an advantage that plays well with the Scout's weapons (even the scattergun has a tiny fire arc).
But yeah, if the other team has a Sniper advantage, on 2Fort I'll switch to Soldier. All the Soldier has to do is keep firing rockets, and the Snipers have no time to aim. Once I close distance, I can rocket-jump up and fire my last one in his face.
That's one thing that amazes me about TF2: hardly anyone knows how to rocket-jump, or they just don't bother. Everyone used to do it in QWTF, along with grenade jumping, so I've been surprised to see so many Soldiers take "the long way" on several maps. When you consider that only two classes can get into the air in TF2, you'd think they would do it more often. I've seen more pipe-jumping from Demomen than I've seen jumping from Soldiers.
Yeah, I absolutely loathed the article's layout, because the benchmarks were littered carelessly all through the text. If they're going to bother posting an analylitical article with benchmark numbers, the least they could do is post a summary table.
Agreed.
Perspective from a frequent Scout player:
The pistol is surprisingly accurate firing at Snipers from the other side of the map. Since I can move and fire, and he can't, it's that much easier. The speed of the Scout plus double-jump means Snipers never have a clear shot at me, and once I close distance, they are easy prey for the scattergun.
Still not low enough for the DS, which has a maximum of 2048 triangles per-frame. You'd blow that budget with just four of these character models on-screen, let-alone the map!
The real question that is not being answered here is why does a 32 GB SD card cost $25 but a 64 GB SATA hard drive cost $800?
A 32GB SDHC card right now on Newegg (in-stock) is a minimum of $72. I don't know where you got the $25 number (sure, in another year it will be that cheap). As another poster mentioned, Newegg has 32GB SSDs available for the same price range.
Why can't the technology that makes SD cards so cheap make cheap SATA hard drives as well?
It already has. The first SSDs on the market used single-level cell (SLC) flash, while the inexpensive SD cards and mp3 players you see everywhere use multi-level cell (MLC) flash. The difference is how densely you can pack the data, and it makes a huge difference in price.
To put it simply: SLC flash is faster, lower-power, and more reliable than MLC flash, but also more expensive (at same capacity) than MLC flash.
The reason the first SSDs used SLC flash is because new technologies have to convince people to take the plunge: people/companies are usually willing to pay significantly more for something that is much faster and more reliable. Early adpoters might have given SSDs the cold shoulder if the first wave of drives reduced capacity and performance in-order to be more cost-competitive with existing storage.
Now that SSDs are firmly off-the-ground, manufacturers are offering all sorts of devices, including cut-rate drives using MLC flash, so the prices at the low-end have dropped like a rock.
I started out a Seagate fan - my first purchased and built computer had a Seagate drive, and every one one I bought lasted me for years. Then I decided to switch to IBM, because Seagate was falling behind in terms of performance.
I bought a 30GB 75GXP (the ORIGINAL deathstar). It lasted fourteen months, which was actually a long time for that drive.
So, I went back to Seagate, happy for a little while. But in the last few years, build quality has gone downhill - the drives have gotten less reliable, and louder, and the performance gap has never been bridged.
After I bought the 7200.10 and had several die on me, I decided to ditch Seagate. My last two drives purchased were from Western Digital, their GreenPower 750GB drives, and I've had zero issues. Although these drives are only 5400 RPM (and are about %10-20 slower than modern 7200RPM drives), the sad fact is they are FASTER than my old 7200.10s - that is how bad Seagate's performance gap is.
With this news, it's onvious I made the right choice.
5: unused RAM is wasted RAM. So long as it frees up the RAM when a high priority application needs it, using spare RAM for caching can have huge benefits. Don't trot out the power usage argument. The difference in power between half full ram and full ram is miniscule
The only problem with this is, the OS isn't freeing-up ram that other applications could use. This is because Vista reserves a memory space proportional to the size of your video ram. This is in-addition to the normal PCIe memory window, and wastes much more memory than XP.
Why exactly does Vista need to allocate a separate memory space for video when Aero is already disabled (full-screen gaming)? I hope to hell they fix this stupidity before Windows 7 ships. It's already causing a lot of confusion, as recent game releases have had MUCH higher memory requirements for Vista than XP.
Well, yeah. I own the orange box, and can't bring myself to play TF 2 because I have to be a member of a team and don't want to be "that guy" who screws up and lets everyone on his team down.
You can't be "that guy" because TF2 doesn't allow you to be "that guy."
Allow me to explain:
The "that guy" syndrome doesn't happen in TF2 because everyone respawns indefinitely in a round, few servers have friendly fire on (it doesn't work well in the game), and the action is fast-paced when something major is happening. The last point is important: if you're part of a co-ordinated assault on a strongpoint, usually it's not solely your fault if the attack fails: often, you just didn't bring enough forces, or other people screwed-up too. In any case, not many people will notice if you screw-up.
Let me give you a counter-example: in a game like Counterstrike, you most definitely can be "that guy": most servers have friendly fire on, so you can kill half your team with a badly-aimed grenade. You don't respawn during the round, so at the end of each round you get a bunch of dead spectators watching YOUR every move, and complaining when you do something dumb. There is no real downtime for this in TF2, even on servers with default respawn rates.
Scout requires impressive reflexes, now that they took his grenades away, and gave him the scattergun. Contrary to what the name implies, the scattergun does not have a wide fire arc; it simply does no damage if you're not right next to your target.
But I will agree that TF2 largely slowed the game down versus QWTF. Taking grenades out, improving the spy and turning the engineer's crappy dispenser into a gushing fountain of ammo changed the pace of the game.
They are blaming her for not using OO for general papers and they are blaming her for not doing any kind of troubleshooting, like going to verizon.com and looking up how to do a non windows install (which is clearly documented).
The average Slashdotter assumes far too much.
Did you ever consider that this might be her first computer purchase? Did you ever consider that she might not HAVE another configured machine to connect to the internet and do said research? I know everyone on Slashdot has seventeen computers hooked to their IPSec-protected WAN, but most people who buy from Dell have ONE computer, and have no clue how to configure it (the very reason Verizon created their Windows setup CD).
Further: the woman is taking a course to figure out how to use office. OFFICE! If that doesn't scream computer novice, I don't know what does. And a computer novicewill have no idea what his/her options are as far as office applications go, because they have no idea what they want from their office app to begin with! And even when you know what you want in an office program, it's still hard to get over that initial fear: my mother worked for years as an office manager, using Word Perfect 5.1, and later Microsoft Word, and I STILL had to reassure her that Open Office was just as capable when she needed a new word processor program last year.
The problem is, this information is not made clear by anyone in the process: Dell or the Ubuntu designers should provide tutorials that AUTOMATICALLLY RUN unless you tell them not to, and those tutorials should lay-out the basic steps to create an office document, and the steps required to connect to the internet. No more confusion!