Also, while not quite in the same era as the Beatles, how many of today's teens would care for "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith"? They created that anyway. I would argue the Beatles may be more universally accepted by different age groups.
You'd be surprised to hear it, but Aerosmith was not a very popular band until the late 1980s. "Dream On" was their top single of the 1970s, and it only peaked at #6 - hardly what you'd expect from the band today. They had a couple platinum albums, and then followed that with a half-dozen crappy albums spanning a decade.
Then, they released "Permanant Vacation" in 1987, which had three singles that still see regular radio play ("Dude (Looks Like A Lady)," "Rag Doll" and "Angel"). About the same time they released the Run DMC remake of "Walk This Way," of course, featuring Aerosmith. They followed that up with the multi-platinum selling "Pump" and "Get a Grip", both which had fancy videos on MTV.
Who was buying these albums, you ask? Sure as hell wasn't the old people. They were marketing Aerosmith like crazy to kids like me when I was in junior high school. They managed to gain an entirely new base of fans from these three hyped albums, and they've been able to ride that wave for the last fifteen years. Now, there are lots of gamers and Aerosmith fans in their late twenties / early thirties, and they'll eat-up a Guitar Hero release with Aerosmith.
Moreover, I see, and would feel, the direct, *negative* effect that Obama's proposed tax plan would have. The owner of the small business I work for will sometime in the next year or two cross that $250,000 threshold. If he does, even by few dollars, his taxes go up.
Only on the portion of his income above $250,000. In progressive taxation, when you enter a new tax bracket, you only pay the higher rate on the dollars IN THE BRACKET.
If your boss jumps up to $260,000 income this year, he will only be taxed on the higher rate for $10,000. This means the higher tax has only a gradual effect on his business growth, and will not kill growth outright.
The original DOS Tie Fighter most definitely did not support 640x480.
I bought the Collector's Edition CD version to replace my DOS version because I wanted the 640x480 support and the two add-ons bundled with it ("Defender of the Empire" and "Enemies of the Empire"). You actually couldn't buy "Enemies of the Empire" unless you bought the Collector's Edition CD.
The CD actually works well in Windows or DOS, but both versions suffer the loss of the iMuse MIDI music. The iMuse driver was removed because they couldn't easily port it to Windows, and I guess the DOS version just got screwed because it was easier to have both versions use the same music engine.
CPU intensive tasks like LAME should be affected that much by the OS. It's all CPU driven. So it's obvious there are architectural differences that actually hinder regular application performance. I don't consider that an improvement in any way.
Absolutely agreed. LAME is actually pretty memory-dependent, because your typical WAV file is several dozen MB in size. The shocking drop in memory bandwidth benchmarks mirrors the huge drop in LAME performance.
What the hell did they change that hit the usable memory bandwidth so hard? Is this just a motherboard driver issue, or is this deeper? Unfortunately, since they did not try another motherboard (preferably non-Intel), we cannot begin to fathom what piece of the code is responsible.
That's a really poor anecdote. If they made DST mandatory, do you really think that lazy-assed hotel owner will actually check the real time? Ah, hell no: they'll just slash/add an hour off whatever the clock reads.
But I like spamming:). My ping is > 300ms. Grenades help with area of effect damage.
Fact is, most people have much better connections today than they did when QWTF was released (myself included) - thus the shift from spamming to guns. But hey, you can still play Soldier or Demo. Both have area-effect weapons.
The engineer already had a dispenser back in quakeworld TF.
I know, but from what I recall, the damn thing never created ammo. You had to fill it MANUALLY...or am I remembering incorrectly here? All I used it for was to block passageways and blow people up who grabbed the flag.
The dispenser in TF2 creates ammo so quickly that heavies can fire continuously while standing beside one. Engineers can also place them behind sentry guns and continuously repair the gun, creating a strong point.
The reason why I stopped playing custom TF years ago was the rampant cheating.
Oh, well that's one major improvement in TF2: I have yet to encounter a single cheater. Sure, they're out there, but most people don't want to risk losing their Steam account and their Orange Box investment, so they don't cheat.
But also heard they did away with the per class grens.
As a QWTF player, I was worried about this very thing.
But it turns out my worries were misplaced. Getting rid of grenades means no more spamming, and every class gets something special in exchange.
Engineer - in exchange for losing the incredible power of the EMP, the engineer gets a dispenser that actually creates ammo, and a teleporter that changes the entire flow of a map.
Scout - no concs, but he gets a snazzy double-jump, a scattergun that's quite powerful at short range, and the second-strongest melee weapon in the game.
Soldier - loses out on the wonderful nail gren, and what he gains is not obvious at first glance. Fact is, the rocket launcher gets a real upgrade because it's a critical hit factory. Your chance of a critical goes up with every kill in a certain span of time, and you can imagine how critical rockets might feed this "kill engine." Further, because there are no grenades, the Soldier and Demo are the only two that still have jump assist, and makes it more useful.
Demo - two words: sticky bombs.
Spy - really sucks that he loses the gas grenade, but in exchange he gets limited stealth, can get shot at and not automatically lose his cover, and can sap buildings. The spies are actually more annoying than they ever were in QWTF.
Pyro - not a good class on release, but the updates with the deflection cannon, Backburner and the Axtinguisher make up for it. This class has also emerged as the king of killing spies.
Heavy - Not much changed, except for a button to keep the gun primed so it has zero spinup time. But the Medic's changes give the class a new life.
Medic - MUCH better support player than the QWTF counterpart, because they can heal constantly and can supply short periods of invulnerability or all attacks critical.
Sniper - This is the one class that I don't like playing in TF2. And the sad part is, I used to play Sniper all the time in QWTF - just something missing that I can't pit my finger on.
All in all, most of the classes really benefit from the upgrade, and the removal of grenades. I say take the plunge, and buy the game.
the distilled water will not lead to oxidation, tap water will though, as there's way less ions in distilled water, the likelihood of oxidation is very small.
Are you serious?
The only difference between distilled water and tap water is in distilled water, the ions have been removed. As soon as the distilled water comes in contact with ions (metal traces on the board and components, all sorts of protectant chemicals), the distilled water will be the same as tap. So no, I don't think you've got it right here.
Check out the Pico PSU. It is tiny and efficient, and it takes 12v DC as input. Sure, it's limited to 120w, but that's enough for a dual-core 45nm Core2 with an on-board GPU, plus the usual hard drive and DVD.
The control circuits for balancing power dynamically between the grid and solar cells are a little more complicated...but that too is a solved problem.
"Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard."
But yeah, that movie was excellent. Catch Me If You Can is also excellent work.
The reason Chrome has no users is because it can't compete with IE 7 in the eyes of lazy users. You need look no further than Firefox to see this: despite several high-profile ad campaigns, including a full-page ad in the NY Times, the browser is stuck at around %20.
Obviously, 3/4 of the internet doesn't give a damn about security, stability or extensibility of Firefox. Why would they care to install ANY browser, let alone one with less features, and an unproven seurity record?
The other problem is corpoate momentum. Most corporations are glued to IE, and if they use anything else then they JUST RECENTLY upgraded to Firefox. Neither of those groups is about to jump on a beta browser.
So, that means Google's marketshare is restricted to tech-heads on Windows, and unfortunately they already have several browers to choose from (including Safari if they're Webkit fans). In the end, Google has preactically zero marketshare because they've given users practically zero reason to jump ship. Chrome may have made an impact five years ago, but today it's just redundant.
All cable companies can, and do, inject advertising into the streams of its channels. This is not a new thing, in fact you probably never noticed it before
I seriously doubt that. You'd have to be blind not to notice the huge difference in production values between the national ads and the local ads they sandwich-in. It doesn't help that most of the local ads are still delivered to the affiliates on VHS.
Or do you really think that these Chilltrol commercials have the look and feel of a national ad campaign? At least the local commercials are so bad, they're funny!
The "Celermine" Celeron 533A based on the Coppermine Pentium III would do 800+ MHz out of the box. I actually used this to upgrade my Celeron 300A @ 450 without buying a new motherboard.
The sad fact is, Intel actually released an 800 MHz Celermine chip with a 100 MHz bus, but it was over a year after the 533A was released!
Entry-level Durons were also extremely popular because they would yield similar %50 overclocks (600 MHz -> 900 MHz).
And yes, I used to get a whole lot more out of overclocking. For example, back in 1999 my Matrox G400 was much more processor-dependent than modern GPUs. My upgrade from a 450 MHz Celeron to 800 MHz made Quake III playable and smooth, something I couldn't say for the previous system.
These days, of course, you get a lot less out of overclocking than ever. My Core2 Duo chip is actually stock at 2.67 GHz, and so is my Radeon HD 4850. This system plays anything I throw at it, and didn't cost me that much.
So for the Corsair Dominator RAM to be worth it...you'd need to be running an FSB of 1.0665GHz. Meaning you'd need to have your CPU running at 4.266GHz FSB for it to be better than a slower RAM with better timings. Unless you're lowering your multiplier considerably, I don't see that as hugely attainable. And the loss of performance in timings is just too great.
This is not quite true. If all you're doing is WRITING data to the memory, you will be limited by the processor bus.
But the fact is, there is overhead in memory accesses; unless you're streaming data uninterrupted, your memory bus is going to have a lot of overhead. You can make up for this overhead by clocking the memory higher, or reducing the timing delays.
Further, a number of memory operations are performed via DMA that don't even go to the CPU. For example, anything going between the ram and hard disk / optical drive goes through DMA, and not the processor. Another example: loading triangle data and textures into the video card goes through DMA. Both of the above operations only require the CPU to send a simple message to the DMA controller to copy a block of data.
See this article for a detailed breakdown in how faster memory helps a processor. Please note that the processor in question is on a 1333 MHz FSB, so by your calculations no ram faster than dual-channel DDR-2 667 (the closest thing they have is DDR-3 800) should provide a benefit. But as you can see, most applications show a %5-10 benefit between lowest and highest.
Yes, it's true that the benefit is small, but for people with monster SLI setups, or people who do video work (lots of DMA-driven I/O), fast ram and an overclocked system are not out of the question. But I do agree that these ungodly speeds are taking it to extremes, and I consider their disappearance no loss.
Absolutely. For those who don't know, the Crusoe uses a VLIW architecture with 128-bit words, and x86 instructions have to be decoded and RE-ORDERED in real-time into those 128-bit words. This is the same brick wall Intel ran into with optimizing compilers for the Itanium, but unlike Intel the Crusoe has to do it in REAL TIME.
Sure, the software translation layer meant that they could run Crusoe any architecture, but in the end it cost them precious performance. The chip itself wasn't much to sneeze at (two integer units and an anemic FPU), so it really didn't have the performance to spare. Then they hobbled the chip by integrating a nortbridge; this meant that ALL Crusoe-based systems would have the same video and I/O performance limitations, all in exchange for saving a buck or two on parts.
Absolutely. The pint in Dublin was just better than anything I've found here on the US.
That, and they didn't carry ANY of the brewhouse releases here in the states. When I visited Dublin, I got totally hooked on Toucan Brew, and couldn't find it anywhere here. Guess I need to go back soon.
I believe the confusion stems from ATI's AVIVO Video Encoder.
Yes, it is a fast video encoder. No, it does not use the GPU; instead, it uses optimizations that sacrifice quality for performance.
I personally find it really sad that ATI made the claim in 2005 that the converter would eventually be hardware-accelerated, and failed to deliver on that promise.
This card is supposed to do HD Encoding. Not just decoding
That may be true, but that significantlty limits the potential market for this chip. I'd say just off the cuff that MUCH less than %1 of the total video market has a need to encode HD in real-time, or is encoding HD often enough to notice the improvement.
For the less than %5 of the video market who have EVER encoded their own HD video, most of them don't do it often enough to notice an improvement. And without noticeable improvement, they cannot justify the cost.
The rest of the world either encodes movies in low definition, which CPUs can handle (think webcasts, which are already bandwidth-limited), or simply watches those movies (already a solved problem with ATI's 790G integrated graphics).
Makes sense. I blame my impeccable driving record (10 years no accidents) on my years playing first-person shooters. Twitch gaming prowess translates into a parinoid driving style, where I trust no one, and constantly keep watch on every car.
And believe me, I've had quite a few near-misses, mostly the fault of other drivers. Only my quick reactions helped avoid an accident.
I've also seen this "speed enhancement" in other people: I had a buddy who never played twitch games, and never drove above the speed limit. Then I hooked him on Quake II, and taught him to use the mouse. Once he got the hang of it, he told me after gaming sessions he found himself driving home on the highway at 10 over the limit, and everything around him STILL felt too slow. That was how much faster his mind was working.
I'm not sure this made him a safer driver, but you can definitely see the potential, as it improves your mental vigilance.
Your search - lolcats - did not match any document
on
Google, Circa 2001
·
· Score: 5, Funny
PLEASE TAKE ME BACK TO TEH FUTURE!!!!111
A world without LOLCATS is a world I don't want to live in!
The redistubution of highway funds means you can drive across this country from coast-to-coast without encountering dozens of shithole states with mud roads. The simple fact is, they had this very problem during World War II when they were forced to move troops and goods from coast-to-coast over state and local roads. It didn't work so well, and the end results were federal highway funding and the interstate highway system.
The total apportions for 2005-2009 are over 180 billion dollars. That's hundreds of millions yearly for every state to pay for transportation projects. Hell, the federal highway funds are so important, they are the reason our "national" drinking age is 21 (every state capitualted, rather than risk those funds). It may not be "right" in your mind, but the fact is states can't survive today without federal highway funds.
How about a format that plays automatically when you plug it into ANY Sandisk mp3 player with a MicroSD slot?
You did know that this is all about increasing Sandisk's mindshare, right? They're leveraging a feature that already works in the majority of their players on the market, and doesn't work in any iPod. If you remove the compatibility, you instantly erase the existing list of "plug-in compatible" players, and the format dies instantly.
That is, of course, unless you expect Sandisk to crate new firmware for all their players to handle FLAC. Considering how poor their firmware support was on the popular e200 series, I highly doubt that.
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Also, while not quite in the same era as the Beatles, how many of today's teens would care for "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith"? They created that anyway. I would argue the Beatles may be more universally accepted by different age groups.
You'd be surprised to hear it, but Aerosmith was not a very popular band until the late 1980s. "Dream On" was their top single of the 1970s, and it only peaked at #6 - hardly what you'd expect from the band today. They had a couple platinum albums, and then followed that with a half-dozen crappy albums spanning a decade.
Then, they released "Permanant Vacation" in 1987, which had three singles that still see regular radio play ("Dude (Looks Like A Lady)," "Rag Doll" and "Angel"). About the same time they released the Run DMC remake of "Walk This Way," of course, featuring Aerosmith. They followed that up with the multi-platinum selling "Pump" and "Get a Grip", both which had fancy videos on MTV.
Who was buying these albums, you ask? Sure as hell wasn't the old people. They were marketing Aerosmith like crazy to kids like me when I was in junior high school. They managed to gain an entirely new base of fans from these three hyped albums, and they've been able to ride that wave for the last fifteen years. Now, there are lots of gamers and Aerosmith fans in their late twenties / early thirties, and they'll eat-up a Guitar Hero release with Aerosmith.
Moreover, I see, and would feel, the direct, *negative* effect that Obama's proposed tax plan would have. The owner of the small business I work for will sometime in the next year or two cross that $250,000 threshold. If he does, even by few dollars, his taxes go up.
Only on the portion of his income above $250,000. In progressive taxation, when you enter a new tax bracket, you only pay the higher rate on the dollars IN THE BRACKET.
If your boss jumps up to $260,000 income this year, he will only be taxed on the higher rate for $10,000. This means the higher tax has only a gradual effect on his business growth, and will not kill growth outright.
The original DOS Tie Fighter most definitely did not support 640x480.
I bought the Collector's Edition CD version to replace my DOS version because I wanted the 640x480 support and the two add-ons bundled with it ("Defender of the Empire" and "Enemies of the Empire"). You actually couldn't buy "Enemies of the Empire" unless you bought the Collector's Edition CD.
The CD actually works well in Windows or DOS, but both versions suffer the loss of the iMuse MIDI music. The iMuse driver was removed because they couldn't easily port it to Windows, and I guess the DOS version just got screwed because it was easier to have both versions use the same music engine.
CPU intensive tasks like LAME should be affected that much by the OS. It's all CPU driven. So it's obvious there are architectural differences that actually hinder regular application performance. I don't consider that an improvement in any way.
Absolutely agreed. LAME is actually pretty memory-dependent, because your typical WAV file is several dozen MB in size. The shocking drop in memory bandwidth benchmarks mirrors the huge drop in LAME performance.
What the hell did they change that hit the usable memory bandwidth so hard? Is this just a motherboard driver issue, or is this deeper? Unfortunately, since they did not try another motherboard (preferably non-Intel), we cannot begin to fathom what piece of the code is responsible.
That's a really poor anecdote. If they made DST mandatory, do you really think that lazy-assed hotel owner will actually check the real time? Ah, hell no: they'll just slash/add an hour off whatever the clock reads.
But I like spamming :). My ping is > 300ms. Grenades help with area of effect damage.
Fact is, most people have much better connections today than they did when QWTF was released (myself included) - thus the shift from spamming to guns. But hey, you can still play Soldier or Demo. Both have area-effect weapons.
The engineer already had a dispenser back in quakeworld TF.
I know, but from what I recall, the damn thing never created ammo. You had to fill it MANUALLY...or am I remembering incorrectly here? All I used it for was to block passageways and blow people up who grabbed the flag.
The dispenser in TF2 creates ammo so quickly that heavies can fire continuously while standing beside one. Engineers can also place them behind sentry guns and continuously repair the gun, creating a strong point.
The reason why I stopped playing custom TF years ago was the rampant cheating.
Oh, well that's one major improvement in TF2: I have yet to encounter a single cheater. Sure, they're out there, but most people don't want to risk losing their Steam account and their Orange Box investment, so they don't cheat.
But also heard they did away with the per class grens.
As a QWTF player, I was worried about this very thing.
But it turns out my worries were misplaced. Getting rid of grenades means no more spamming, and every class gets something special in exchange.
Engineer - in exchange for losing the incredible power of the EMP, the engineer gets a dispenser that actually creates ammo, and a teleporter that changes the entire flow of a map.
Scout - no concs, but he gets a snazzy double-jump, a scattergun that's quite powerful at short range, and the second-strongest melee weapon in the game.
Soldier - loses out on the wonderful nail gren, and what he gains is not obvious at first glance. Fact is, the rocket launcher gets a real upgrade because it's a critical hit factory. Your chance of a critical goes up with every kill in a certain span of time, and you can imagine how critical rockets might feed this "kill engine." Further, because there are no grenades, the Soldier and Demo are the only two that still have jump assist, and makes it more useful.
Demo - two words: sticky bombs.
Spy - really sucks that he loses the gas grenade, but in exchange he gets limited stealth, can get shot at and not automatically lose his cover, and can sap buildings. The spies are actually more annoying than they ever were in QWTF.
Pyro - not a good class on release, but the updates with the deflection cannon, Backburner and the Axtinguisher make up for it. This class has also emerged as the king of killing spies.
Heavy - Not much changed, except for a button to keep the gun primed so it has zero spinup time. But the Medic's changes give the class a new life.
Medic - MUCH better support player than the QWTF counterpart, because they can heal constantly and can supply short periods of invulnerability or all attacks critical.
Sniper - This is the one class that I don't like playing in TF2. And the sad part is, I used to play Sniper all the time in QWTF - just something missing that I can't pit my finger on.
All in all, most of the classes really benefit from the upgrade, and the removal of grenades. I say take the plunge, and buy the game.
Anyone else read that as "Magic Levitating Trains" ?
I was thinking Magic Bus myself.
I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I WANT IT!
I was going to say, that's a helluva way to waste a good India Pale Ale.
the distilled water will not lead to oxidation, tap water will though, as there's way less ions in distilled water, the likelihood of oxidation is very small.
Are you serious?
The only difference between distilled water and tap water is in distilled water, the ions have been removed. As soon as the distilled water comes in contact with ions (metal traces on the board and components, all sorts of protectant chemicals), the distilled water will be the same as tap. So no, I don't think you've got it right here.
Check out the Pico PSU. It is tiny and efficient, and it takes 12v DC as input. Sure, it's limited to 120w, but that's enough for a dual-core 45nm Core2 with an on-board GPU, plus the usual hard drive and DVD.
The control circuits for balancing power dynamically between the grid and solar cells are a little more complicated...but that too is a solved problem.
"Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard."
But yeah, that movie was excellent. Catch Me If You Can is also excellent work.
The reason Chrome has no users is because it can't compete with IE 7 in the eyes of lazy users. You need look no further than Firefox to see this: despite several high-profile ad campaigns, including a full-page ad in the NY Times, the browser is stuck at around %20.
Obviously, 3/4 of the internet doesn't give a damn about security, stability or extensibility of Firefox. Why would they care to install ANY browser, let alone one with less features, and an unproven seurity record?
The other problem is corpoate momentum. Most corporations are glued to IE, and if they use anything else then they JUST RECENTLY upgraded to Firefox. Neither of those groups is about to jump on a beta browser.
So, that means Google's marketshare is restricted to tech-heads on Windows, and unfortunately they already have several browers to choose from (including Safari if they're Webkit fans). In the end, Google has preactically zero marketshare because they've given users practically zero reason to jump ship. Chrome may have made an impact five years ago, but today it's just redundant.
All cable companies can, and do, inject advertising into the streams of its channels. This is not a new thing, in fact you probably never noticed it before
I seriously doubt that. You'd have to be blind not to notice the huge difference in production values between the national ads and the local ads they sandwich-in. It doesn't help that most of the local ads are still delivered to the affiliates on VHS.
Or do you really think that these Chilltrol commercials have the look and feel of a national ad campaign? At least the local commercials are so bad, they're funny!
You missed a few:
The "Celermine" Celeron 533A based on the Coppermine Pentium III would do 800+ MHz out of the box. I actually used this to upgrade my Celeron 300A @ 450 without buying a new motherboard.
The sad fact is, Intel actually released an 800 MHz Celermine chip with a 100 MHz bus, but it was over a year after the 533A was released!
Entry-level Durons were also extremely popular because they would yield similar %50 overclocks (600 MHz -> 900 MHz).
And yes, I used to get a whole lot more out of overclocking. For example, back in 1999 my Matrox G400 was much more processor-dependent than modern GPUs. My upgrade from a 450 MHz Celeron to 800 MHz made Quake III playable and smooth, something I couldn't say for the previous system.
These days, of course, you get a lot less out of overclocking than ever. My Core2 Duo chip is actually stock at 2.67 GHz, and so is my Radeon HD 4850. This system plays anything I throw at it, and didn't cost me that much.
So for the Corsair Dominator RAM to be worth it...you'd need to be running an FSB of 1.0665GHz. Meaning you'd need to have your CPU running at 4.266GHz FSB for it to be better than a slower RAM with better timings. Unless you're lowering your multiplier considerably, I don't see that as hugely attainable. And the loss of performance in timings is just too great.
This is not quite true. If all you're doing is WRITING data to the memory, you will be limited by the processor bus.
But the fact is, there is overhead in memory accesses; unless you're streaming data uninterrupted, your memory bus is going to have a lot of overhead. You can make up for this overhead by clocking the memory higher, or reducing the timing delays.
Further, a number of memory operations are performed via DMA that don't even go to the CPU. For example, anything going between the ram and hard disk / optical drive goes through DMA, and not the processor. Another example: loading triangle data and textures into the video card goes through DMA. Both of the above operations only require the CPU to send a simple message to the DMA controller to copy a block of data.
See this article for a detailed breakdown in how faster memory helps a processor. Please note that the processor in question is on a 1333 MHz FSB, so by your calculations no ram faster than dual-channel DDR-2 667 (the closest thing they have is DDR-3 800) should provide a benefit. But as you can see, most applications show a %5-10 benefit between lowest and highest.
Yes, it's true that the benefit is small, but for people with monster SLI setups, or people who do video work (lots of DMA-driven I/O), fast ram and an overclocked system are not out of the question. But I do agree that these ungodly speeds are taking it to extremes, and I consider their disappearance no loss.
Transmeta failed because its product sucked.
Absolutely. For those who don't know, the Crusoe uses a VLIW architecture with 128-bit words, and x86 instructions have to be decoded and RE-ORDERED in real-time into those 128-bit words. This is the same brick wall Intel ran into with optimizing compilers for the Itanium, but unlike Intel the Crusoe has to do it in REAL TIME.
Sure, the software translation layer meant that they could run Crusoe any architecture, but in the end it cost them precious performance. The chip itself wasn't much to sneeze at (two integer units and an anemic FPU), so it really didn't have the performance to spare. Then they hobbled the chip by integrating a nortbridge; this meant that ALL Crusoe-based systems would have the same video and I/O performance limitations, all in exchange for saving a buck or two on parts.
It didn't help that they hyped the successor, the Efficion, and then it didn't deliver in clock speeds or promised performance increases.
Absolutely. The pint in Dublin was just better than anything I've found here on the US.
That, and they didn't carry ANY of the brewhouse releases here in the states. When I visited Dublin, I got totally hooked on Toucan Brew, and couldn't find it anywhere here. Guess I need to go back soon.
I believe the confusion stems from ATI's AVIVO Video Encoder.
Yes, it is a fast video encoder. No, it does not use the GPU; instead, it uses optimizations that sacrifice quality for performance.
I personally find it really sad that ATI made the claim in 2005 that the converter would eventually be hardware-accelerated, and failed to deliver on that promise.
This card is supposed to do HD Encoding. Not just decoding
That may be true, but that significantlty limits the potential market for this chip. I'd say just off the cuff that MUCH less than %1 of the total video market has a need to encode HD in real-time, or is encoding HD often enough to notice the improvement.
For the less than %5 of the video market who have EVER encoded their own HD video, most of them don't do it often enough to notice an improvement. And without noticeable improvement, they cannot justify the cost.
The rest of the world either encodes movies in low definition, which CPUs can handle (think webcasts, which are already bandwidth-limited), or simply watches those movies (already a solved problem with ATI's 790G integrated graphics).
Makes sense. I blame my impeccable driving record (10 years no accidents) on my years playing first-person shooters. Twitch gaming prowess translates into a parinoid driving style, where I trust no one, and constantly keep watch on every car.
And believe me, I've had quite a few near-misses, mostly the fault of other drivers. Only my quick reactions helped avoid an accident.
I've also seen this "speed enhancement" in other people: I had a buddy who never played twitch games, and never drove above the speed limit. Then I hooked him on Quake II, and taught him to use the mouse. Once he got the hang of it, he told me after gaming sessions he found himself driving home on the highway at 10 over the limit, and everything around him STILL felt too slow. That was how much faster his mind was working.
I'm not sure this made him a safer driver, but you can definitely see the potential, as it improves your mental vigilance.
PLEASE TAKE ME BACK TO TEH FUTURE!!!!111
A world without LOLCATS is a world I don't want to live in!
Well, that PIC uses next to nothing in terms of power (around 10-100mW), but the Ethernet PHY is guaranteed to leech hundreds of mW, if not more.
That's just how it goes. Powering a tiny chip takes nothing, but powering a wire over serious distance takes quite a bit of charge.
Oh, and for the most part, roads...are actually paid for by LOCAL and STATE governments, not the feds. Why do I pay federal income taxes again?
Because some states really can't afford their infarstructure without federal highway dollars. Just see how badly the current 8 billion highway fund shortfall is affecting states with low population densities like Arkansas.
The redistubution of highway funds means you can drive across this country from coast-to-coast without encountering dozens of shithole states with mud roads. The simple fact is, they had this very problem during World War II when they were forced to move troops and goods from coast-to-coast over state and local roads. It didn't work so well, and the end results were federal highway funding and the interstate highway system.
The total apportions for 2005-2009 are over 180 billion dollars. That's hundreds of millions yearly for every state to pay for transportation projects. Hell, the federal highway funds are so important, they are the reason our "national" drinking age is 21 (every state capitualted, rather than risk those funds). It may not be "right" in your mind, but the fact is states can't survive today without federal highway funds.
FLAC.
It's FREE (as in beer) to use, and it's LOSSLESS.
WHAT MORE DO THEY WANT?
How about a format that plays automatically when you plug it into ANY Sandisk mp3 player with a MicroSD slot?
You did know that this is all about increasing Sandisk's mindshare, right? They're leveraging a feature that already works in the majority of their players on the market, and doesn't work in any iPod. If you remove the compatibility, you instantly erase the existing list of "plug-in compatible" players, and the format dies instantly.
That is, of course, unless you expect Sandisk to crate new firmware for all their players to handle FLAC. Considering how poor their firmware support was on the popular e200 series, I highly doubt that.