You may recall the same kind of thing happening back with DVDs. CPUs just weren't powerful enough to decode DVDs in realtime, at least most weren't. So you'd get an MPEG-2 decoder card in the system to do it. If you looked at the card, you discovered it had a pretty simple ASIC that did it all. No heat sink, low clock speed, etc. However because it was designed for that one specific task, it was able to do it at full speed, despite being over all much less powerful than the CPU.
Further, the next step of the dedicated ASIC was to integrate it onto video chipsets. The ATI Rage Pro , Nvidia TNT2 and S3 Savage 3D included motion compensation, and the ATI Rage 128 was the first chipset with full on-chip decode. The full decode-accelerator chips used half the power of pure software decoding, because the video chip was much more efficient. Today, most video chips have a full MPEG2 hardware engine in-silicon.
Today, we have already progressed to full on-chip decode assist. Nvidia 8600-series cards can do full h.264 decoding on-chip (the most demanding codec), and give an assist to VC-1. ATI's range of HD 2600 cards can also do BOTH h.264 and VC-1 decoding in hardware. The result is MUCH lower power consumption:
So, the technology is already here, you just won't see it in low-end notebooks because people are unwilling to pay extra for more powerful GPUs. The good news is that eventually, ALL chipsets will provide good acceleration, and as processes improve, so will the power consumption required by these chips.
Agreed. Long-range radar works because we are usually looking for something much larger than a cellphone; otherwise, your target would be lost in mountains of clutter. Although the antenna gives it a large radar cross-section for it's size, the cell phone is far too small to be easily located out of the noise.
If you ask me, Taliban leaders are asking the cell networks to shut down because the dumber Taliban members can't resist using their cell phones. You know those kind of people: the kind who no matter what you tell them, they do whatever they want? Just like the rest of the world, I'm sure there are plenty of these type in the Taliban.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
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Is AMD Dead Yet?
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All I can see when this is brought up is the MediaGX. It didn't work a decade ago, why will it work now? (I'd actually be interested in any in-depth articles, everything-on-a-chip really appeals to the geek in me)
The idea is that, we have general-purpose CPUs, we have highly-parallel graphics accelrrators that are becoming more and more accessible to non-graphics uses. However, we do not have a standardized processor here: some systems don't have 3D graphics capabilitiees, and those that do lack a standard interface for uses beyond games.
The thinking is, if you stick the CPU and GPU (co-processor) on one package, you'll get a lot more usage of the GPU, and AMD will have an industry standard. AMD expects things will work-out much like when the 486 integrated the FPU - overnight, computer programs and games use more floating-point features. And all the while, AMD is racing the clock, because Intel is threatening to release their own extensible GPU architecture (Larrabee), which is why AMD bought ATI in desparation.
The fact is, AMD won't crate some magical industry standard because Intel isn't going to give AMD a free pass like they did with x86-64. x86-64 only caught-on because Intel was hard-headed, and refused to talk about extending x86 to 64-bits for years. Right now, Intel is working on Larrabee, and is expected to release thie crossover around the same time AMD releases their Fusion, which means it will be open war.
The R500 cards only have crossfire via the external cable.
Not entirely true. The RV570 (x1950 Pro) was the first internal Crossfire-capable GPU. But you're basically right, because every other card in the R500 range had the Crossfire glue logic external to the GPU die, and thus required special "Crossfire Edition" cards.
The RV570 got the internal Crossfire treatment because it was completely redesigned to (1) reduce power consumption and (2) create a cheap midrange card.
I have to agree. Recently, I spotted this informative post on how to get USB gamepads working under Ubuntu, and my jaw dropped. Linux hasn't changed after all these years; plug & play is still messy to use, and usually requires command line work, even for trivial things.
Why the hell can't they make a version of the kernel for home uers that steamlines connecting USB devices? USB security is important on a SERVER, but not on a home user OS.
Something else I discovered back in 2004, in my own attempts to get USB gamepads working under Linux: USB gamepad support requires an entirely different version of joystick from analog, and games that were written for the old version of joystick don't support USB gamepads without a code patch. This means that, if the application you want to use is among the thousands of abandoned projects out there (i.e. virtually every version 0.99 NES emulator), it won't support your USB gamepad even if you configure it properly. The only work-around is hacks that send keyboard presses to X when you press a button on your USB gamepad, and map those to the standard keyboard controls the emulator/game is expecting.
Directions on Windows: plug in gamepad. It doesn't matter if the gamepad is USB or analog, because the software library interface is the same.
If it is a complex gamepad with features outside the standard USB spec, install the driver that shipped with it.
Now go play your game. I've tried Windows, Mac, Linux, but in the end I game exclusively on Windows because it's just that easy.
Where I live (Blacksburg, VA) there isn't a miniature golf place for probably 50 miles in any direction. I know that it is kind of a niche environment, but come on... someone open a puttputt.
Okay, let me lay this out for you:
You live in a college town. This means that a business like miniature golf with an arcade could perform well, assuming they could attract students. The big issue is, can they make enough money to cover the lull in business during the summer (no students) and winter (too cold)?
You really need a nice day in the 70s-80s to go play a leisure outdoor game like mini-golf. If you think differently, well, quit whining and open your own.
Absolutely. And actually, if you want to, you can get the same performance out of an average desktop gaming machine. All you need to do is invest in a $200 video card. While peopople complain about the progammability issues of GPGPU, they have to realize that Cell has many of those same limitations:
* POOR branching performance * POOR 64-bit float performance * Dumb processing threads dependent on being fed by external master.
All-in-all, Cell doesn't offer much you can't get with a modern video card; both Cell and the Nvidia 8800 series boast hundreds of gigaflops with 32-bit accuracy. And this is why concepts like Fusion are becoming popular: while you can justify the existence of a GPU and a DSP, there's really no need to have both in the long-run, because they're quite similar. In terms of acceptance on the PC, GPUs have a HUGE lead over Cell, so I know which one I'm betting on.
Further, from what I've read, leakage power is proportional to Vds. Assuming you use a balanced design in your process, That would mean the leakage current falls in respect to Vdd. So voltage has even greater an impact.
Still, there's nothing quite as effective at reducing power consumption as reducing C with a process shrink. This kind of thing (sub-threshold operation) is only getting major news coverage now because we're hitting the limits on both voltage AND process technology.
The power is proportional to V^2/f, where V is the voltage and f is the frequency, so halving the voltage results in 1/4 of the power or in the case of 0.3^2/1^2 you get.09 or about 10% of the power usage. The amazing thing is that they were able to get the transistors to bias at that voltage.
Not that amazing, really. The zone of operation is called sub-threshold, and there have been tons of papers and academic designs proving the concept. My professor at JHU has been creating sub-threshold ASICs for satellites for years now. The sub-threshold mode is simply ignored by most CMOS digital design classes, so unless you study it in grad school, you probably just assume the transistor is "off." See here for a book on the subject.
The only downside of sub-threshold operation is the incredibly slow switching speed, and the need to use static logic. Thus, the designs were usually large and low-performance compared to above-threshold designs. This is why the concept has only become commercially viable of-late, with the demand for tiny chips in everything with micropower consumption meeting the small processes of today's fabs.
It's not that most Internet users will actually use that bandwidth. The freedom to not have to worry about bandwidth is worth spending extra money every month to most intelligent people. The amount of money you save by cutting corners and getting a cut-rate bandwidth cap gets eaten by the very first month you go over your limit.
The problem is, people have been thinking about this thing from entirely wrong perspective.
When online services were in their infancy, people were limited in how many hours they could use the service, not in the number of KB they could download per month. As time went on, providers realized that MOST users were not using a lot of bandwidth in all these hours online (think about it: browsing newsgroups, sitting on IRC / chatrooms, and reading email do not consume a ton of bandwidth), so they offered unlimited access for one flat fee. Unlimited TIME, because they assumed bandwidth was not a big issue.
So, when they began to offer broadband, the unlimited connect time was again a big selling point. But ISPs did not anticipate the sudden change in bandwidth usage that would come with an always on fat pipe: today you do things that you never would have a decade ago.
Today when you hear a song on the radio or hear of it through a friend, you go online and stream the video from Youtube, and possibly download a copy from a service. Further, once you listen to the song, you have surprisingly good suggestions for other bands you might like. Then before you know it, you've streamed a dozen different songs and found tons of new artists to get into. In 1998, you would have gone to the store to buy the CD, and MAYBE used the internet to look up the lyrics.
Today when you want to find out about the latest video games, you go to a gaming website and read reviews. The review sites have lush high-resolution screenshots and streaming videos of gameplay, game trailers and more. After you're done downloading the official wallpaper, soundtrack samples and themes, you're finally ready to play the game! From there, you can go to many sites to download the demo, or download entire game. In 1998, you got most of your gaming news from dead tree gaming magazines, and you had to make-do with the demos on the promo CD.
So now, bandwidth suddenly becomes a problem, and suddenly you realize why they're considering such a move. Even if you exclude illegal usage, the web has become surprisingly bloated, and bandwidth costs are becoming more and more of a problem.
Not that I think that these media companies aren't making enough money, but at least you can understand where they are coming from.
But Sun doesn't have an x86 processor, and this is the key.
Nvidia needs a an x86 processor to compete. Sure, Nvidia could just adapt their GPU architecture and expand the language to make a general-purpose VLIW processor. They could package it and sell it as an Itanium competitor. But nobody wants to use a non-x86 chip in mainstream markets, and that's where the long-term money is.
This is why Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, and now even OS X run on x86: if your OS has redeeming or unique qualities, more people will buy based on OS features alone if your hardware platform is agnostic.
And herein lies two problems: one, while you can make x86 processors without a license, you are constantly in danger of litigation from Intel's massive patent portfolio. In the last two decades, every x86 chipmaker has eventually negotiated a cross-license agreement with Intel. The other problem is, it is hard to build a new x86 processor from-scratch. Thus, a takeover bid for an x86 processor manufacturer is likely the best way to solve Nvidia's problem; they get a license to keep Intel at-bay, and a solid starting point.
I'm thinking Via, personally. Their sales have slumped in the last year, and they've stopped making Intel chipsets. In fact, Intel has been bullying poor Via for the last year, offering a new Intel chipset license if they just stop manufacturing CPUs. Either Nvidia will buy Via, or Via will spin-off their processor division for some cash. Thanks to the Intel cross-license Via purchased along with IDT, their processor arm is a goldmine in the long-run.
Not to mention its DRMed and may not work on your devices.
Even worse, you can end up like my mom, who thought she was happy with Yahoo Music...until she took a trip to Europe. She didn't sync the player in the week leading up to the trip, and during the long trip, her licenses ran out and she had no music. I told her that this was caused by DRM, and the only sure way to avoid it wasto buy CDs and rip them herself (this was before Amazon mp3). She dropped her Yahoo subscription after that.
I'm sure DRM has bitten more people than just my mom. Any service that requires a license authentication AT THE PC but is also intended to be portable is just a bad idea.
My college didn't get off so easy. IBM sold them on Token Ring in the early 90s, and they had the entire campus installed with 4 Mbits of goodness.
Of course, this meant they had the overhead of installing token ring cards into hundreds of student computers, with numbers increasing every year. They had to rent out the cards, because the cost of purchase would be too high (over $300). And all that time, Ethernet was getting faster and cheaper, while Token Ring was stuck in a rut.
When the days of instant messaging, online gaming and music downloads hit the campus like a rock, things moved swiftly. In 1997, they had 4 Mbit Token Ring with a single T1 connection to the net. In 1998, they upgraded the infarstructure to 16 Mbit Token Ring as a stopgap, and added a second T1. Finally, in 2001, they installed 100Mbit Ethernet with Gigabit backbones, all to feed a fractional T3 internet gateway.
Honestly, it wasn't that much of a waste to go Token Ring. They would have had to rip-out all their thinnet upgrading to 100bT if they had gone with Ethernet at the time.
Hey, sounds pretty good. Rush meets Shostakovitch meets Genesis, just as advertised. I picked up the album on CD Baby, this one is good enough to buy.
I've noticed talk of a new album on your website dating back to 2005 (Prometheus has a 2001 release date on it). Is this going to be released soon? Also, do you play any live shows?
Had they agreed to Qtrax's model, they would have effectively said that the music they provide has no direct value. It's only value would have been as a way to motivate people to view online ads.
As if this is any different from how the rest of the world works.
Radio stations that play your music make their money by - you guessed it - ADVERTISING! So do most television stations. While there are "viewer-supported" TV and radio stations, even these are guilty of weaving limited amounts of ads into their broadcasts.
Ads and music are hardly strangers. Of course, we as consumers get the opportunity to PAY to get to listen to your music whenever we want, without commercials. We currently have only three different tiers for the marketplace:
Tier 0: radio broadcasts, free. Tier 1: pay-per-track via online purchasing, cheap. Tier 2: full album purchases, either online or via CD. More expensive.
Are you telling me there's not room for another tier between 0 and 1, where people get to listen to music all they want in exchange for more invasive advertising and usage stat collection? I would personally like such a service, despite the fact that I buy dozens of CDs a year, because it's an opportunity to sample the album in high quality. To do this right now, you either have to break the law or put up with short clips / poor Youtube recordings.
And finally, if your band is so unique, I don't suppose you'd be proud enough of your work to tell us the damn name? I happen to enjoy prog rock.
Come home from work, hear a song on the radio they tell you what the song was and what the band is, by the time you get around to going to the store where they sell CD's you have forgot, not anymore I come in type it into amazon and now I have it permanently for use on anything I want.
And if they don't tell you what the song name is or the name of the band, or if you don't remember the lyrics, there's always yes.com. Just type in the name of the radio station, and you get a radio playlist for the past several hours. If available, the site ties-in with lyric databases and youtube videos, which makes it even easier to make sure you have the right song.
All you have to remember is the station and the approximate time.
REPEAT AFTER ME: Slashdot doesn't censor your posts. Slashdot is just a liberterian commune, as scary as that sounds.
breasts! tits! boobs! melons!
Shout it from the mountaintops. There's nothing to be ashamed of.
And while we're on the subject, don't be afraid to let loose with a good fuck or shit now and then. Swearing every now and then is good for YOUR mental health, so fuck the people around you.
Yes, you see it more on the eastern seaboard because entire states have simply become massive "drive-thrus" on the way to more important destinations. In most cases, tolls allow those states to force largely interstate traffic to pay-up for road costs that would otherwise have to be shouldered by residents.
Out to the south and west where you tend to have smaller suburban spawl areas and larger states, most traffic on major highways is in-state, so states don't tend to charge tolls.
The best example of tolls is the I-95 corridor between Washington DC and New York, which has an astounding $17.50 in tolls just to drive from downtown DC to Manhatten ($20.50 southbound). The biggest offenders are drive-through states (New Jersey and Delaware) and Manhatten island itself, which just has too much damn traffic.
There are similar tolls on major roads between New York and Chicago, although I-80 now allows you to bypass some of them. But from Ohio to Chicago on I-90 is all tolls.
Windows 2000 SP1: added support for slipstreaming OS updates. This is a wonderfully useful feature. Windows 2000 SP2: added Windows 9x compatibility mode. Windows 2000 SP4: added support for USB 2.0.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm certain there were more new features added.
You are aware that if you're going to compare OSX prices with Vista ones, you can only make a moderately fair comparison (where feature sets are arguably comparable, if not quite the same) starting with Home Premium and up, right?
And you are aware that $130 is the UPGRADE price for OS X, unless of course you do not abide by the license and install it on non-Apple hardware. Every Apple computer comes with OS X preinstalled, and every new OS X purchase is virtually an upgrade.
And what a surprise, you can find Vista Home Premium UPGRADE on Amazon for $130, not exactly a hole-in-the-wall retailer. All you need to qualify for the upgrade is Windows 2000 or newer, which covers %99 of people looking for an upgrade.
Unfortunately, you cannot use this under Linux until someone writes a driver. The monitor installs this driver via an autorun virtual CD drive when you first plug the USB connector in. SEE HERE.
Currently only Windows XP and Vista are supported. Can't say I blame them.
Feasable: an ExpressCard with a low-power GPU designed to add another display to your laptop. Minimal 3D gaming capability, and no way to drive the laptop main display.
The reason why you can't have a powerful gaming GPU in an ExpressCard slot is because the maximum thermal design power for a full-size ExpressCard is 2.1w. Also, a gaming GPU would push the limits of the PCIe x1 interface, which is barely twice as fast as regular PCI. Worse, to get the GPU to display on the laptop screen, you would have to hack a way to route every completed frame back to the built-in video card (it is the only device connected to the LCD).
In reality, if all you want to do is add another display for simple 2D Windows work, you might be better off with a Samsung USB display. And yes, you can buy them right now for around $300.
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You may recall the same kind of thing happening back with DVDs. CPUs just weren't powerful enough to decode DVDs in realtime, at least most weren't. So you'd get an MPEG-2 decoder card in the system to do it. If you looked at the card, you discovered it had a pretty simple ASIC that did it all. No heat sink, low clock speed, etc. However because it was designed for that one specific task, it was able to do it at full speed, despite being over all much less powerful than the CPU.
Further, the next step of the dedicated ASIC was to integrate it onto video chipsets. The ATI Rage Pro , Nvidia TNT2 and S3 Savage 3D included motion compensation, and the ATI Rage 128 was the first chipset with full on-chip decode. The full decode-accelerator chips used half the power of pure software decoding, because the video chip was much more efficient. Today, most video chips have a full MPEG2 hardware engine in-silicon.
Today, we have already progressed to full on-chip decode assist. Nvidia 8600-series cards can do full h.264 decoding on-chip (the most demanding codec), and give an assist to VC-1. ATI's range of HD 2600 cards can also do BOTH h.264 and VC-1 decoding in hardware. The result is MUCH lower power consumption:
See here, the power consumption difference between load and idle is reduced by half by using the video card to decode the movie. While 10w doesn't sound like much on a desktop, on a mobile platform it can mean the difference between 1.5 and 2 hours runtime, which is very important.
So, the technology is already here, you just won't see it in low-end notebooks because people are unwilling to pay extra for more powerful GPUs. The good news is that eventually, ALL chipsets will provide good acceleration, and as processes improve, so will the power consumption required by these chips.
Agreed. Long-range radar works because we are usually looking for something much larger than a cellphone; otherwise, your target would be lost in mountains of clutter. Although the antenna gives it a large radar cross-section for it's size, the cell phone is far too small to be easily located out of the noise.
If you ask me, Taliban leaders are asking the cell networks to shut down because the dumber Taliban members can't resist using their cell phones. You know those kind of people: the kind who no matter what you tell them, they do whatever they want? Just like the rest of the world, I'm sure there are plenty of these type in the Taliban.
All I can see when this is brought up is the MediaGX. It didn't work a decade ago, why will it work now? (I'd actually be interested in any in-depth articles, everything-on-a-chip really appeals to the geek in me)
The idea is that, we have general-purpose CPUs, we have highly-parallel graphics accelrrators that are becoming more and more accessible to non-graphics uses. However, we do not have a standardized processor here: some systems don't have 3D graphics capabilitiees, and those that do lack a standard interface for uses beyond games.
The thinking is, if you stick the CPU and GPU (co-processor) on one package, you'll get a lot more usage of the GPU, and AMD will have an industry standard. AMD expects things will work-out much like when the 486 integrated the FPU - overnight, computer programs and games use more floating-point features. And all the while, AMD is racing the clock, because Intel is threatening to release their own extensible GPU architecture (Larrabee), which is why AMD bought ATI in desparation.
The fact is, AMD won't crate some magical industry standard because Intel isn't going to give AMD a free pass like they did with x86-64. x86-64 only caught-on because Intel was hard-headed, and refused to talk about extending x86 to 64-bits for years. Right now, Intel is working on Larrabee, and is expected to release thie crossover around the same time AMD releases their Fusion, which means it will be open war.
The R500 cards only have crossfire via the external cable.
Not entirely true. The RV570 (x1950 Pro) was the first internal Crossfire-capable GPU. But you're basically right, because every other card in the R500 range had the Crossfire glue logic external to the GPU die, and thus required special "Crossfire Edition" cards.
The RV570 got the internal Crossfire treatment because it was completely redesigned to (1) reduce power consumption and (2) create a cheap midrange card.
I have to agree. Recently, I spotted this informative post on how to get USB gamepads working under Ubuntu, and my jaw dropped. Linux hasn't changed after all these years; plug & play is still messy to use, and usually requires command line work, even for trivial things.
Why the hell can't they make a version of the kernel for home uers that steamlines connecting USB devices? USB security is important on a SERVER, but not on a home user OS.
Something else I discovered back in 2004, in my own attempts to get USB gamepads working under Linux: USB gamepad support requires an entirely different version of joystick from analog, and games that were written for the old version of joystick don't support USB gamepads without a code patch. This means that, if the application you want to use is among the thousands of abandoned projects out there (i.e. virtually every version 0.99 NES emulator), it won't support your USB gamepad even if you configure it properly. The only work-around is hacks that send keyboard presses to X when you press a button on your USB gamepad, and map those to the standard keyboard controls the emulator/game is expecting.
Directions on Windows: plug in gamepad. It doesn't matter if the gamepad is USB or analog, because the software library interface is the same.
If it is a complex gamepad with features outside the standard USB spec, install the driver that shipped with it.
Now go play your game. I've tried Windows, Mac, Linux, but in the end I game exclusively on Windows because it's just that easy.
Where I live (Blacksburg, VA) there isn't a miniature golf place for probably 50 miles in any direction. I know that it is kind of a niche environment, but come on... someone open a puttputt.
Okay, let me lay this out for you:
You live in a college town. This means that a business like miniature golf with an arcade could perform well, assuming they could attract students. The big issue is, can they make enough money to cover the lull in business during the summer (no students) and winter (too cold)?
Unfortunately, you live in the mountains, where the average temperature is under 70 degrees during the months of October to April. The geography makes your summers pleasant and winters only marginally cold, but the downside is the only time of year good for mini-golfing is when all the students are gone.
You really need a nice day in the 70s-80s to go play a leisure outdoor game like mini-golf. If you think differently, well, quit whining and open your own.
Absolutely. And actually, if you want to, you can get the same performance out of an average desktop gaming machine. All you need to do is invest in a $200 video card. While peopople complain about the progammability issues of GPGPU, they have to realize that Cell has many of those same limitations:
* POOR branching performance
* POOR 64-bit float performance
* Dumb processing threads dependent on being fed by external master.
All-in-all, Cell doesn't offer much you can't get with a modern video card; both Cell and the Nvidia 8800 series boast hundreds of gigaflops with 32-bit accuracy. And this is why concepts like Fusion are becoming popular: while you can justify the existence of a GPU and a DSP, there's really no need to have both in the long-run, because they're quite similar. In terms of acceptance on the PC, GPUs have a HUGE lead over Cell, so I know which one I'm betting on.
Further, from what I've read, leakage power is proportional to Vds. Assuming you use a balanced design in your process, That would mean the leakage current falls in respect to Vdd. So voltage has even greater an impact.
Still, there's nothing quite as effective at reducing power consumption as reducing C with a process shrink. This kind of thing (sub-threshold operation) is only getting major news coverage now because we're hitting the limits on both voltage AND process technology.
The power is proportional to V^2/f, where V is the voltage and f is the frequency, so halving the voltage results in 1/4 of the power or in the case of 0.3^2/1^2 you get .09 or about 10% of the power usage. The amazing thing is that they were able to get the transistors to bias at that voltage.
Not that amazing, really. The zone of operation is called sub-threshold, and there have been tons of papers and academic designs proving the concept. My professor at JHU has been creating sub-threshold ASICs for satellites for years now. The sub-threshold mode is simply ignored by most CMOS digital design classes, so unless you study it in grad school, you probably just assume the transistor is "off." See here for a book on the subject.
The only downside of sub-threshold operation is the incredibly slow switching speed, and the need to use static logic. Thus, the designs were usually large and low-performance compared to above-threshold designs. This is why the concept has only become commercially viable of-late, with the demand for tiny chips in everything with micropower consumption meeting the small processes of today's fabs.
It's not that most Internet users will actually use that bandwidth. The freedom to not have to worry about bandwidth is worth spending extra money every month to most intelligent people. The amount of money you save by cutting corners and getting a cut-rate bandwidth cap gets eaten by the very first month you go over your limit.
The problem is, people have been thinking about this thing from entirely wrong perspective.
When online services were in their infancy, people were limited in how many hours they could use the service, not in the number of KB they could download per month. As time went on, providers realized that MOST users were not using a lot of bandwidth in all these hours online (think about it: browsing newsgroups, sitting on IRC / chatrooms, and reading email do not consume a ton of bandwidth), so they offered unlimited access for one flat fee. Unlimited TIME, because they assumed bandwidth was not a big issue.
So, when they began to offer broadband, the unlimited connect time was again a big selling point. But ISPs did not anticipate the sudden change in bandwidth usage that would come with an always on fat pipe: today you do things that you never would have a decade ago.
Today when you hear a song on the radio or hear of it through a friend, you go online and stream the video from Youtube, and possibly download a copy from a service. Further, once you listen to the song, you have surprisingly good suggestions for other bands you might like. Then before you know it, you've streamed a dozen different songs and found tons of new artists to get into. In 1998, you would have gone to the store to buy the CD, and MAYBE used the internet to look up the lyrics.
Today when you want to find out about the latest video games, you go to a gaming website and read reviews. The review sites have lush high-resolution screenshots and streaming videos of gameplay, game trailers and more. After you're done downloading the official wallpaper, soundtrack samples and themes, you're finally ready to play the game! From there, you can go to many sites to download the demo, or download entire game. In 1998, you got most of your gaming news from dead tree gaming magazines, and you had to make-do with the demos on the promo CD.
So now, bandwidth suddenly becomes a problem, and suddenly you realize why they're considering such a move. Even if you exclude illegal usage, the web has become surprisingly bloated, and bandwidth costs are becoming more and more of a problem.
Not that I think that these media companies aren't making enough money, but at least you can understand where they are coming from.
But Sun doesn't have an x86 processor, and this is the key.
Nvidia needs a an x86 processor to compete. Sure, Nvidia could just adapt their GPU architecture and expand the language to make a general-purpose VLIW processor. They could package it and sell it as an Itanium competitor. But nobody wants to use a non-x86 chip in mainstream markets, and that's where the long-term money is.
This is why Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, and now even OS X run on x86: if your OS has redeeming or unique qualities, more people will buy based on OS features alone if your hardware platform is agnostic.
And herein lies two problems: one, while you can make x86 processors without a license, you are constantly in danger of litigation from Intel's massive patent portfolio. In the last two decades, every x86 chipmaker has eventually negotiated a cross-license agreement with Intel. The other problem is, it is hard to build a new x86 processor from-scratch. Thus, a takeover bid for an x86 processor manufacturer is likely the best way to solve Nvidia's problem; they get a license to keep Intel at-bay, and a solid starting point.
I'm thinking Via, personally. Their sales have slumped in the last year, and they've stopped making Intel chipsets. In fact, Intel has been bullying poor Via for the last year, offering a new Intel chipset license if they just stop manufacturing CPUs. Either Nvidia will buy Via, or Via will spin-off their processor division for some cash. Thanks to the Intel cross-license Via purchased along with IDT, their processor arm is a goldmine in the long-run.
Not to mention its DRMed and may not work on your devices.
Even worse, you can end up like my mom, who thought she was happy with Yahoo Music...until she took a trip to Europe. She didn't sync the player in the week leading up to the trip, and during the long trip, her licenses ran out and she had no music. I told her that this was caused by DRM, and the only sure way to avoid it wasto buy CDs and rip them herself (this was before Amazon mp3). She dropped her Yahoo subscription after that.
I'm sure DRM has bitten more people than just my mom. Any service that requires a license authentication AT THE PC but is also intended to be portable is just a bad idea.
My college didn't get off so easy. IBM sold them on Token Ring in the early 90s, and they had the entire campus installed with 4 Mbits of goodness.
Of course, this meant they had the overhead of installing token ring cards into hundreds of student computers, with numbers increasing every year. They had to rent out the cards, because the cost of purchase would be too high (over $300). And all that time, Ethernet was getting faster and cheaper, while Token Ring was stuck in a rut.
When the days of instant messaging, online gaming and music downloads hit the campus like a rock, things moved swiftly. In 1997, they had 4 Mbit Token Ring with a single T1 connection to the net. In 1998, they upgraded the infarstructure to 16 Mbit Token Ring as a stopgap, and added a second T1. Finally, in 2001, they installed 100Mbit Ethernet with Gigabit backbones, all to feed a fractional T3 internet gateway.
Honestly, it wasn't that much of a waste to go Token Ring. They would have had to rip-out all their thinnet upgrading to 100bT if they had gone with Ethernet at the time.
Hey, sounds pretty good. Rush meets Shostakovitch meets Genesis, just as advertised. I picked up the album on CD Baby, this one is good enough to buy.
I've noticed talk of a new album on your website dating back to 2005 (Prometheus has a 2001 release date on it). Is this going to be released soon? Also, do you play any live shows?
Had they agreed to Qtrax's model, they would have effectively said that the music they provide has no direct value. It's only value would have been as a way to motivate people to view online ads.
As if this is any different from how the rest of the world works.
Radio stations that play your music make their money by - you guessed it - ADVERTISING! So do most television stations. While there are "viewer-supported" TV and radio stations, even these are guilty of weaving limited amounts of ads into their broadcasts.
Ads and music are hardly strangers. Of course, we as consumers get the opportunity to PAY to get to listen to your music whenever we want, without commercials. We currently have only three different tiers for the marketplace:
Tier 0: radio broadcasts, free.
Tier 1: pay-per-track via online purchasing, cheap.
Tier 2: full album purchases, either online or via CD. More expensive.
Are you telling me there's not room for another tier between 0 and 1, where people get to listen to music all they want in exchange for more invasive advertising and usage stat collection? I would personally like such a service, despite the fact that I buy dozens of CDs a year, because it's an opportunity to sample the album in high quality. To do this right now, you either have to break the law or put up with short clips / poor Youtube recordings.
And finally, if your band is so unique, I don't suppose you'd be proud enough of your work to tell us the damn name? I happen to enjoy prog rock.
Bjork renuf murhatten ple flucided gunhru lassetr. Me heigt juden operean fuerean glotten furbern ti gent.
For 16bit MSDOS programs Dosbox suffices, but for 16bit Windows programs is does not.
You can run Windows 3.11 on top of DosBox, just like you run Windows 3.11 on top of real DOS. See here.
Come home from work, hear a song on the radio they tell you what the song was and what the band is, by the time you get around to going to the store where they sell CD's you have forgot, not anymore I come in type it into amazon and now I have it permanently for use on anything I want.
And if they don't tell you what the song name is or the name of the band, or if you don't remember the lyrics, there's always yes.com. Just type in the name of the radio station, and you get a radio playlist for the past several hours. If available, the site ties-in with lyric databases and youtube videos, which makes it even easier to make sure you have the right song.
All you have to remember is the station and the approximate time.
br3@st milk
Jesus Christ, what a pansy.
REPEAT AFTER ME: Slashdot doesn't censor your posts. Slashdot is just a liberterian commune, as scary as that sounds.
breasts!
tits!
boobs!
melons!
Shout it from the mountaintops. There's nothing to be ashamed of.
And while we're on the subject, don't be afraid to let loose with a good fuck or shit now and then. Swearing every now and then is good for YOUR mental health, so fuck the people around you.
Holy shit, I recommend everyone read through the 400+ reviews, some of them are incredibly funny.
Yes, you see it more on the eastern seaboard because entire states have simply become massive "drive-thrus" on the way to more important destinations. In most cases, tolls allow those states to force largely interstate traffic to pay-up for road costs that would otherwise have to be shouldered by residents.
Out to the south and west where you tend to have smaller suburban spawl areas and larger states, most traffic on major highways is in-state, so states don't tend to charge tolls.
The best example of tolls is the I-95 corridor between Washington DC and New York, which has an astounding $17.50 in tolls just to drive from downtown DC to Manhatten ($20.50 southbound). The biggest offenders are drive-through states (New Jersey and Delaware) and Manhatten island itself, which just has too much damn traffic.
There are similar tolls on major roads between New York and Chicago, although I-80 now allows you to bypass some of them. But from Ohio to Chicago on I-90 is all tolls.
And before XP, there was Windows 2000:
Windows 2000 SP1: added support for slipstreaming OS updates. This is a wonderfully useful feature.
Windows 2000 SP2: added Windows 9x compatibility mode.
Windows 2000 SP4: added support for USB 2.0.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm certain there were more new features added.
You are aware that if you're going to compare OSX prices with Vista ones, you can only make a moderately fair comparison (where feature sets are arguably comparable, if not quite the same) starting with Home Premium and up, right?
And you are aware that $130 is the UPGRADE price for OS X, unless of course you do not abide by the license and install it on non-Apple hardware. Every Apple computer comes with OS X preinstalled, and every new OS X purchase is virtually an upgrade.
And what a surprise, you can find Vista Home Premium UPGRADE on Amazon for $130, not exactly a hole-in-the-wall retailer. All you need to qualify for the upgrade is Windows 2000 or newer, which covers %99 of people looking for an upgrade.
Unfortunately, you cannot use this under Linux until someone writes a driver. The monitor installs this driver via an autorun virtual CD drive when you first plug the USB connector in. SEE HERE.
Currently only Windows XP and Vista are supported. Can't say I blame them.
Feasable: an ExpressCard with a low-power GPU designed to add another display to your laptop. Minimal 3D gaming capability, and no way to drive the laptop main display.
The reason why you can't have a powerful gaming GPU in an ExpressCard slot is because the maximum thermal design power for a full-size ExpressCard is 2.1w. Also, a gaming GPU would push the limits of the PCIe x1 interface, which is barely twice as fast as regular PCI. Worse, to get the GPU to display on the laptop screen, you would have to hack a way to route every completed frame back to the built-in video card (it is the only device connected to the LCD).
In reality, if all you want to do is add another display for simple 2D Windows work, you might be better off with a Samsung USB display. And yes, you can buy them right now for around $300.