For NES, The Guardian Legend (Winter 1988), created by Compile. Innovative mixture of gameplay, extremely fast scrolling, an endearing soundtrack, dozens of enemies on the screen at once, HUGE bosses...lots of fun.
For Genesis, Shining Force 2 (Summer 1994). An excellent sequel, it included the best cartoon-style graphics ever seen on the Genesis' limited color pallette, and the instrumental soundtrack, with fake reverb and rich sounds, was way beyond anything else ever attempted on the platform (remember, most Genesis games went with a techno or electronica-inspired soundtrack because the FM sound synth was pretty poor).
That's about it. The article was pretty complete considering how many systems it coverd.
Yes, the most important difference between the Turion and the Sonoma platform is the optimized chipset. The most important optimization Intel made was dropping DDR for DDR2 on these mobile platforms.
Why is it such an improvement? Because DDR2 offers two obvious power improvements over DDR1:
1. The voltage is lower (1.8v versus 2.5v). Since power consumption is proportional to the voltage squared in CMOS devices, this should reduce power consumption by almost 50% (ignoring leakage).
2. The internal design of DDR2 adds more buffers (4 versus 2 for DDR1), so the memory inside runs at half the speed of an equivilantly-clocked DDR1 chip. This means that, with the exception of external control logic, DDR2 667 chips are running as fast as DDR1 333 chips. Thus, you can get higher throughput (at the expense of increased latency) with very little operating frequency, which means little increase in power consumption due to frequency. The Pentium M hides that high latency well with that huge low-latency L2 cache.
Personally, I'm looking forward to this year, because AMD knows they need a low-power dual-core solution for the mobile platform, and they know they need to reduce power consumption even further on the desktop to stay one step ahead of Conroe. DDR2 will help them deliver that.
Why has no one developed an external fire-wire graphics card for laptops?
The only reason that I can think of is that even fire-wire is not fast enough?
Assuming you're referring to an external 3D card that renders on the laptop's screen, you'd be correct. The video would have to be fed to the notebook's existing graphics framebuffer, because this is usually the only thing capable of driving the screen. This may seem strange, but the PowerVR PCX1 / PCX2 used to render this way to avoid wasting memory on a framebuffer...albiet at much lower resolutions (640x480x16, ~20MB/s), on a much faster PCI bus .
1024x768x32 @30fps with no compression requires ~ 100 MB per second. You could add lossless compression, but unless both the sending card and receiving card supported it in hardware, you'd take a noticeable performance hit. When you add in the additional overhead of triangle data and texturing, even Firewire 800 can't hope to provide enough bandwidth.
When you consider that MXM slots allow you to seamlessly upgrade your laptop, external video cards suddenly don't sound like such a great idea.
Well, look at it this way: early superscalar x86 processors went through the same issues. When parallell execution pipes were added, the effects weren't really noticed overnight.
The original Pentium was a superscalar, in-order core with two integer pipelines. To put it simply, the design was like two 486 integer pipelines slapped together. But the real-world performance of the Pentium was about the same as the 486 when it came out, because the Pentium's pipeline scheduler was simple and picky. The scheduler would only let two instructions down the pipe if:
* Both were simple instructions * No read-after-write or write-after-read register/flag dependencies existed between them. * Neither can had a displacement and an immediate * Instructions with prefixes can only occurr in the U-pipe
(except for branches on condition jz,jc, etc.etc.)
Basically, it was a pain in the ass to get more than one integer instrution per clock out of the Pentium. Eventually, compilers caught up, and the Pentium's performance improved. Also, hardware caught up, and the Pentium Pro introduced out-of-order execution with a robust scheduler to handle these issues even in unoptimized code.
The multi-core situation actually has a better initial handle on the situation than superscalar processors did when they were released. Modern operating systems are already optimized for multiple processing threads, and lots of professional applications have been multithreaded for years, so right out the door we have solid multitasking performance advantages over single-core processors. Even games have begun to catch up, with the release of multithreaded titles like Quake 4 and Serious Sam 2.
But there is a limit. Unfortunately, most "multi-processor" workstations have been dual-processor workstations, and thus most applications are optimized for two threads only. So, unless you go nuts with the multitasking, quad cores are going to hit a perfoemance wall. And unlike superscalar processors, which simply required a smart compiler, optimizing programs for lots of execution threads is going to be time-consuming for almost every application.
Did you read a word I said? I'm BOYCOTTING DRM, not the OS it is attached to.
You don't magically feed the DRM machine by buying the OS. You feed the DRM machine by purchasing DRM-infested videos and music and playing them on the OS in question. Since I don't plan on feeding the DRM machine, I feel good about the upgrade.
Look at it this way: if nobody BUYS HD-DVD movies, and therefore nobody PLAYS HD-DVD movies on Vista, then nobody will experience the DRM.
Be reasonable: you can have the OS without partaking in the DRM. And be realistic: it's not like yours or my stance is going to help anyway, the sheeple are still going to eat DRM up...Apple anti-DRM folks already know this first-hand.
And you will jump right into the DRM box of your dreams. Enjoy.
Why is everyone so up-in-arms about the DRM in Vista? I havn't been impressed with the DRM-protected offerings in 2000/XP, so it's not like I'll be missing out on much.
I don't plan on watching HD-DVDs on my PC, or for-pay HD movies, so the requirement of HDMI for full-resolution doesn't affect me. I've seen what HD looks like on my 19" monitor, and it is not that impressive. I did play DVDs on my computer back in the 90s, but this was back when standalone players cost much more than DVD-ROM drives. I have no desire to reprchase my entire DVD collection just to get a marginal quality improvement.
Please keep in mind, NON-DRM VIDEO WILL NOT BE AFFECTED BY THIS REQUIREMENT. I can still look forward to downloading all the free xvid HD rips I want, and play them back on VLC at full resolution...should I be so inclined.
I don't plan on watching HDTV on this box. I don't plan on listening to DRM-encumbered formats like DVD Audio or SACD on this PC. I don't plan on doing anything remotely attached to DRM.
So, pray tell, could you point out where the DRM in Windows Vista actually affects me?
Or who upgraded their computers specifically to play Quake? In this illustrious circle if you reach back in time many many of us will have installed Windows95 specifically to play?
I bought a Hercules Thriller 3D card to play GL Quake. I alreay had Windows 95.
That said, you could play the original Quake under DOS. People upgraded to Windows 95 and a 3D accelerator because they could SEE how crappy the DOS version looked.
There won't be as many of those spur-of-the-moment upgraders because the price is much higher, and the only alternative (Xbox + Halo 2) doesn't involve a PC or Windows at all. When you either buy Vista and the game, or you get nothing, a lot more people are going to settle for nothing.
According to this page, not unless you were using Windows 95. EQ II supports 98/2000/ME/XP. And if you were running Windows 95 in 2004, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
And I laugh at some of these new games that "require" Windows XP...funny, they run on Windows 2000 fine. I'm playing Battlefield 2 (XP only), and Fable: the Lost Chapters (XP only) with no more issues than any of the XP users are experiencing.
Me, I just swore to avoid Windows XP because it doesn't offer much over Windows 2000, and so far I've had no issues with that. Now, Vista I will probably buy, but not because it supports Halo 2 (couldn't care less). I'll buy it because its an excellent upgrade for Windows 2000. When you skip an entire release, Microsoft's OS products are a lot more enticing:D
That's easy. Joe Schmo's fast ethernet NIC maxes out at 90Mb/s with TCP/IP overhead. Jow Schmo's new hard drive maxes out at 500Mb/s sustained read speed.
THATS A 5.5x INCREASE IN PERFORMANCE just going gigabit over fast ethernet. Sure, you're not saturating the gig pipe, but you're certainly getting your money's worth.
Visualize it this way: you COULD wait about 15 minutes to transfer a DVD9 over fast ethernet, or you could max out your hard drive over gig ethernet and take only 3 minutes.
And when you consider that you could be maxing out your hard drive transfer rate while simultaneously browsing the net, and listening to streaming audio, all without maxing out gigabit, you can see the real-world benefits. Given that most motherboards come with gigabit onboard these days, it's most definitely worthwhile.
The company I work for is a Fortune 500 defense shop. Standardization would be a terrible thing. If you can think of a language, we probably use it.
C / C++ / Ada / Fortran / Java / C# / Tcl / VB / Pascal / Matlab are just the languages I've seen in use PERSONALLY in the last 5 years here. I'm sure there are more that I havn't encountered. And no, having all these different languages hasn't caused a problem, because it's fairly easy to retrain people on new languages.
Standardizing on one language not only kills your flexibility, but it artificially stunts your room for growth. If you standardize on one language, then how do you decide when it's best to jump to the next language?
In my company, some projects are at the fore-front of new languages, while others use older, more established languages. It depends a lot on what the customer wants, and how much you can reuse previous projects. Now, that's not to say we havn't "standardized" in a way...we've naturally gravitated toward C++, because we are an embedded house. This gives us most of the benefits of an organization that has totally standardized on C++: lots of experienced C++ coders, and lots of reusable code, without being locked-in.
Well, just like the grandparent indicated, this is a standard being developed solely for the datacenter, and most likely only for trunk lines between datacenters.
Companies like ethernet because it is scalable. The same 10Gb trunk lines can, through a simple switch, talk to 1Gb data closets, which can talk to 100Mb clients. The scalability is key because copper is cheap, but doesn't run well at long distances above 1Gb. Faster ethernet standards such as 10Gb ethernet are limited to 15m for copper (10GBASE-CX4), so 10Gb ethernet is usually run over fiber for long distances, and over copper only inside the datacenter itself.
I would expect 100Gb ethernet to have similar limitations...in fact, I would be amazed if it had a copper standard at all. But it will mean 10x faster data per trunk line, and when you're a fortune 500 company with 200 thousand employees spread out over 20 states and 10 countries, the idea of increasing your bandwidth 10-fold is music to your ears.
Yes, but you know damn good and well Fraunhofer won't waste their time prosecuting an open-source hobbyist project. Lame is doing so much for the mp3 standard, there are even for-pay ripping / encoding programs that pay Fraunhofer for a license, but then use the Lame encoder.
If game makers decide to use mp3 for all their audio tracks in a particular game, they still have to negotiate and pay Fraunhofer for a license regardless of how they encoded those mp3 files.
Lame is not on completely solid ground, but it's not exactly sinking into the mud.
You're reading the results how you like.
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's on top in your mind, but let's look at the truth. Even against mp3, Ogg is not impressive. Between lame -v5 and Vorbis -q 4.25, the lame files came out significantly smaller on all but a handful of cases...in fact, it averaged significantly larger filesizes than all other codecs tested.
So, significantly larger files, and in raw numbers it does slightly better, but statisically it ties with all other codecs worth mentioning. That's hardly a codec that's "on top".
THIS IS WHY Vorbis has already lost. Other vendors stepped up to produce the next-generation of codecs well before Vorbis became polished, and they made them very much free (as in beer). Most people don't care that Vorbis is also free (as in speech).
Me, I just stick with mp3, works everywhere, and Lame just keeps getting better. Who knew mp3 had this much room for growth? It's running strong with the next-gen codecs at similar bitrates!
That sucks, man. Too bad it didn't work for you, I was just sharing my experience.
If caffiene isn't the real culprit, quitting it alone won't fix your problem. Sounds to me like you might have some form of sleep disorder. There are drugs and therapies out there that can help you get more real sleep. In fact, I recall a thread some time back dealing with sleep disorders, and many slashdotters had experience with them. You might try searching for it.
Me, I don't use anything fancy at work, just a set of Sennheiser MX500 earbuds. Decent sound quality for the price, little noise leakage to piss off your cubemates, VERY light (a huge plus when you spend the whole day craning your neck, staring at a monitor), and a tiny inline volume control. Plus, you can actually hear those around you. About 15 bucks online.
I love quality headphones, but unless you work alone, buying them for work is about as smart as buying audiophile-level speakers for your car. There's just too much background noise for you to notice the difference. At home, I like to break out my Allesandro MS1s, of if it's noisy, my HD 280 Pros, but at work I don't need anything special.
Yeah, I'm torn about this new video card. I like the performance increase, but in perspective its really nothing special. In some games, you can raise it a resolution or two, but others see much less improvement.
Anyway, even though I was tempted to buy this card when I first read about it, after some perspective I realized that I should tough it out a year and buy a proper upgrade. I mean, my AGP 6600 GT isn't a performance powerhouse, but it DOES still play games like Fable and Quake 4 acceptably at 1024x768x2xaa with reasonable settings.
The perspective is this:
With my last card, a Radeon 8500, I had to drop the resolution down to 800x600 in some later games like Desert Combat before I finally replaced it. The card before that, a G400 MAX, I had to drop down to 640x480 with minimal settings just to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The card before that, My Riva TNT, could barely play Quake 3 at 640x480x16. The card before that, my Rendition v2200, choked on Half-Life (1!) at 512x384.
Given that perspective, my 6600 GT is still just fine.
Wow, for some reason Slashdot ate an entire paragraph from my post. Guess I should have previewed.
What I mean to say was this (insert after paragraph 3):
Now, there's still an easy rule to follow: cheaper cards mean worse 2D quality. I find it funny that people on here complain about crappy 2D quality when they bought a $50 OEM Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 TC... of course the image quality is going to suck! I'm sure later revs of my XFX 6600 GT have cut down on the component count and price of components to match the lower sale price, and probably have reduced image quality. Most low-priced cards have sucky analog out.
Hell, Matrox is not immune to this effect either. Their entry-level card, the G450, SUCKS. I'm looking at it right now on a Mitsubishi 930 SB (one step down from my Iiyama at home, but still excellent), and it looks terrible at anything above 1152x864 @ 85Hz. This is as-compared to the G400 I had on my last work computer, which could drive the same monitor quite comfortably at 1280x960 @ 85Hz with better image quality than I'm seeing at 1152 on the G450.
I'm still interested in good reports about 2D signal quality (from the videocard to the monitor), then about video quality playback, and THEN 3d quality and performance.
So I still rely on my own eyes: Matrox still in the game. ATI is next. Nvidia out of my yard.
I used to think like you, about Nvidia. I have seen the crappy 2D output of older Nvidia cards, I know how bad it was I OWNED a TNT, it was terrible.
But then, I bought my XFX 6600 GT a little over a year ago. It came with 2D image quality to rival my old G400 MAX, even at higher resolutions like 1280x960 and 1600x1200 @ 85Hz.
For refrence, I am using an Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454, and I can usually tell the difference between the G400 MAX and everything else. Even at 1600x1200 @85Hz, there is only a slight difference between the two.
Now, there's still an easy rule to follow: cheaper cards (SUCKS. I'm looking at it right now on a Mitsubishi 930 SB (one step down from my Iiyama at home, but still excellent), and it looks terrible at anything above 1152x864 @ 85Hz. This is as-compared to the G400 I had on my last work computer, which could drive the same monitor quite comfortably at 1280x960 @ 85Hz with better image quality than I'm seeing at 1152 on the G450.
Face it, entry-level SUCKS no matter who you buy from. The components for proper filtering are too damn expensive. And now that I think about it, their high-end cards aren't that impressive considering the price you pay.
Side note: back when I was a strong Matrox backer, and frequented the (now defunct) Matrox Users Resource Center forums, I read a story from a Matrox insider. Apparently, after the G400 was released, there were some internal disagreements, and a number of engineers left, incluing their head analog guru. This is the reason Matrox released nothing but the G450 for two years: replacing that talent, and a lack of consistent product direction.
Yup, I quit caffeine a little over two years ago. Best decision I ever made.
At the time, I was popping caffeine pills...I figure at around half a gram of caffeine a day just to keep the withdrawl headaches away, and to keep from falling asleep in the afternoons. I was looking from the inside-out, so I thought those headaches were migraines, and the only thing holding them off was the caffeine.
I had high blood pressure even though I ate extremely healthy, and worked out occasionally. I had to cut the caffeine every night so I could sleep, so I'd fall asleep after todssing and turning for an hour or two, with a raging migraine every evening.
Then I read a study about caffeine's withdrawl effects, and I realized caffeine withdrawl had similar symptoms to a migraine, and I decided to quit.
I took advantage of the long weekend over July 4th, and went cold turkey. It was three days of torture, sleeping little, drinking tons of water and popping regular asprin, but by the fourth day I was feeling much better.
These days I rarely consume caffeine, and when I do have a caffenated soda, you can really feel the boost. I wake up with plenty of energy, and I no longer feel burnt-out by midday.
I don't consume energy drinks, and I think they are overkill. If you find you are drinking something as potent as an energy drink often just to keep going, you're caught up in the cycle, and that's a bad place to be.
I'm not talking about playing the game, I'm talking about that annoying copy protection.
Every time I play MOO with DOSBox, you get a half hour to an hour into the game, and it just ends like you failed the copy protection check. I believe this has to do with the wonderfully clever copy protection in the game, which could detect hacks and patches.
It doesn't even get to the screen where you have to find a ship in the manual, it just goes to the usual "you lose" screen you get when you fail the copy protection test.
I don't know of any copy protection hacks for this game, and as long as it does this while playing on DOSBox, it is literally unplayable.
Right, and there are even better solutions than something very techy, like a hardware jumper.
Take my Asus A8V for instance. They have a feature called CrashFree that basically says this: even if the BIOS gets totally destroyed or hijacked, you can still pop a floppy disk (or the original driver CD) into the computer, press Alt-F2 on boot, and a flash writer stored in another ROM restores your BIOS image. This is a feature of all recent Asus motherboards.
No having to boot into Windows, no muking with DOS, and no need for crypic hardware. Unfortunately, reaching the CrashFree utility (pressing Alt-F2 on boot) is still pretty cryptic. Considering that you're not likely to break anything, they should make getting into this mode easier.
The good thing is, if enough of these viruses start to make the rounds, recovery utilities like therse will become easier to use.
Caught up to what? SSE-1 + SSE-2, which are the comparable techonologies to Altivec, both shipped *BEFORE* Altivec.
Not really. Altivec and SSE were released in the same timeframe in 1999. If you want to talk about "copycat", AMD beat both technologies to market with their 3D-Now! extensions in 1998.
We will ignore MMX because it was clumsy and limited due to the implementation taking over floating-point registers.
Altivec on the G4 was unique in that it had two vector processing pipelines, but the poor bus performance meant it was just dick waving. In addition, SSE2 and SSE3 have left Altivec firmly behind, incorporating old MMX instructions and extending support for 64-bit types.
Furthermore, anyone who has watched the x86 world to any degree has seen Intel and AMD actually *SLOWING DOWN* lately.
All chip makers are "slowing down" in terms of maximum single-threaded processing speed. They're reaching unexpected barriers.
Intel has been wallowing with the Pentium 4, but they still have some potential they've been keeping under wraps with Conroe. If overclocks of Dothan / Yonah are any indication, Conroe could push 3 GHz with reasonable power consumption.
IBM and AMD have been keeping decent pace in terms of single-core processing speed improvements, but AMD has managed to stay in the lead with dual-core, and has managed to up the single-thread speed without massive power increases.
This is a perfect time for Apple to go "Intel". IBM is behind both Intel and AMD on the desktop, and has almost nothing to offer the mobile market. Now that Apple is on x86, if they don't like Intel, there's always AMD.
As a closing note, do keep in mind that Moore's Law has only to do with the complexity (number of transistors) doubling every 18 months. It has NOTHING to do with raw single-threaded speed.
I see it...it's SQUARE, plastic with a conducting metal insert...with...with two pinholes.
They call it...a jumper...to turn on HARDWARE WRITE PROTECT.
I mean, Sun has been shipping systems with a simple hardware write protect jumper for firmware for years, FOR THIS VERY REASON. We've had flash-killing viruses since the god damned CIH back in the 90s...are you telling me that motherboard makers havn't gotten the clue to provide a simple write-protect jumper?
From The Guardian Legend, an excellent top-down platformer plus vertical shooter. I spent months playing that game, gave up, then picked it up again and finally beat it. Too bad the ending sucked, the game is great.
Then there's the ending from Wizards & Warriors. FUN, FUN game, but after you beat the final boss...you save yet another maiden, and that's it. Yay, you get to put in your high score, which will be reset when you turn off the NES! I'm so excited!
Intel has been first on the introduction of new process moastly because they have the money and resources to push the very limits. Retooling , especially when the new process equipment is just becoming avilable, is extremely expensive, and retooling requires shutting down production lines.
Intel can do this because, assuming yields are high enough, they make their money back on their short-term production-per-wafer lead. AMD, on the other hand, only has 3 fabs, and shutting down lines when your distributors are already crying for more chips is a hard sell.
There are some benefits to being second in process land. While Intel has been foolhardy, jumping from one process to the next, AMD has been more patient and methodical.
* AMD was the first of the two to incorporate a copper process (.18u). Intel waited until their.13u process to use copper, because they claimed they would not need it until that point. AMD arguably got much better speeds from their.13u Cu process than Intel managed, thanks to their decision to integrate copper earlier.
* AMD elected to integrate SOI into their.13 micron process, in anticipation of huge increases in leakage current in the upcoming 90nm process. Intel decided to wait until their 90nm process to implement strained silicon to reduce leakage current, and that was a horrible mistake. Only now with Intel's 65nm process are we seeing results from strained silicon competitive with SOI (for example, Cedar Mill is lower-power, both from reduced voltage and reduced leakage).
In addition to process leads, Intel is forced to be wasteful trying to stay one step ahead of their competitors. Back in 2002, even though Intel was backing Itanium full-throttle, and even though AMD had yet to publically announce x86-64, Intel was already working on an x86-64 part to counter AMD. Thus, it was no surprise when it was discovered Prescott shipped with x86-64 capabilities already built-in, but disabled. Once Intel realized the momentum behind x86-64, the extensions were enabled in later Prescott revisions.
Of course, once Intel enabled the extensions, they basically threw away the Itanium and their future total control of the 64-bit market. All this hopping and skipping about costs Intel tons of money. Eventually, it will catch up with them.
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I'd also nominate:
For NES, The Guardian Legend (Winter 1988), created by Compile. Innovative mixture of gameplay, extremely fast scrolling, an endearing soundtrack, dozens of enemies on the screen at once, HUGE bosses...lots of fun.
For Genesis, Shining Force 2 (Summer 1994). An excellent sequel, it included the best cartoon-style graphics ever seen on the Genesis' limited color pallette, and the instrumental soundtrack, with fake reverb and rich sounds, was way beyond anything else ever attempted on the platform (remember, most Genesis games went with a techno or electronica-inspired soundtrack because the FM sound synth was pretty poor).
That's about it. The article was pretty complete considering how many systems it coverd.
Yes, the most important difference between the Turion and the Sonoma platform is the optimized chipset. The most important optimization Intel made was dropping DDR for DDR2 on these mobile platforms.
Why is it such an improvement? Because DDR2 offers two obvious power improvements over DDR1:
1. The voltage is lower (1.8v versus 2.5v). Since power consumption is proportional to the voltage squared in CMOS devices, this should reduce power consumption by almost 50% (ignoring leakage).
2. The internal design of DDR2 adds more buffers (4 versus 2 for DDR1), so the memory inside runs at half the speed of an equivilantly-clocked DDR1 chip. This means that, with the exception of external control logic, DDR2 667 chips are running as fast as DDR1 333 chips. Thus, you can get higher throughput (at the expense of increased latency) with very little operating frequency, which means little increase in power consumption due to frequency. The Pentium M hides that high latency well with that huge low-latency L2 cache.
Here is a link discussing the two technologies in detail.
Personally, I'm looking forward to this year, because AMD knows they need a low-power dual-core solution for the mobile platform, and they know they need to reduce power consumption even further on the desktop to stay one step ahead of Conroe. DDR2 will help them deliver that.
Why has no one developed an external fire-wire graphics card for laptops?
The only reason that I can think of is that even fire-wire is not fast enough?
Assuming you're referring to an external 3D card that renders on the laptop's screen, you'd be correct. The video would have to be fed to the notebook's existing graphics framebuffer, because this is usually the only thing capable of driving the screen. This may seem strange, but the PowerVR PCX1 / PCX2 used to render this way to avoid wasting memory on a framebuffer...albiet at much lower resolutions (640x480x16, ~20MB/s), on a much faster PCI bus .
1024x768x32 @30fps with no compression requires ~ 100 MB per second. You could add lossless compression, but unless both the sending card and receiving card supported it in hardware, you'd take a noticeable performance hit. When you add in the additional overhead of triangle data and texturing, even Firewire 800 can't hope to provide enough bandwidth.
When you consider that MXM slots allow you to seamlessly upgrade your laptop, external video cards suddenly don't sound like such a great idea.
Well, look at it this way: early superscalar x86 processors went through the same issues. When parallell execution pipes were added, the effects weren't really noticed overnight.
The original Pentium was a superscalar, in-order core with two integer pipelines. To put it simply, the design was like two 486 integer pipelines slapped together. But the real-world performance of the Pentium was about the same as the 486 when it came out, because the Pentium's pipeline scheduler was simple and picky. The scheduler would only let two instructions down the pipe if:
* Both were simple instructions
* No read-after-write or write-after-read register/flag dependencies existed between them.
* Neither can had a displacement and an immediate
* Instructions with prefixes can only occurr in the U-pipe
(except for branches on condition jz,jc, etc.etc.)
Basically, it was a pain in the ass to get more than one integer instrution per clock out of the Pentium. Eventually, compilers caught up, and the Pentium's performance improved. Also, hardware caught up, and the Pentium Pro introduced out-of-order execution with a robust scheduler to handle these issues even in unoptimized code.
The multi-core situation actually has a better initial handle on the situation than superscalar processors did when they were released. Modern operating systems are already optimized for multiple processing threads, and lots of professional applications have been multithreaded for years, so right out the door we have solid multitasking performance advantages over single-core processors. Even games have begun to catch up, with the release of multithreaded titles like Quake 4 and Serious Sam 2.
But there is a limit. Unfortunately, most "multi-processor" workstations have been dual-processor workstations, and thus most applications are optimized for two threads only. So, unless you go nuts with the multitasking, quad cores are going to hit a perfoemance wall. And unlike superscalar processors, which simply required a smart compiler, optimizing programs for lots of execution threads is going to be time-consuming for almost every application.
I AM boycotting it.
Did you read a word I said? I'm BOYCOTTING DRM, not the OS it is attached to.
You don't magically feed the DRM machine by buying the OS. You feed the DRM machine by purchasing DRM-infested videos and music and playing them on the OS in question. Since I don't plan on feeding the DRM machine, I feel good about the upgrade.
Look at it this way: if nobody BUYS HD-DVD movies, and therefore nobody PLAYS HD-DVD movies on Vista, then nobody will experience the DRM.
Be reasonable: you can have the OS without partaking in the DRM. And be realistic: it's not like yours or my stance is going to help anyway, the sheeple are still going to eat DRM up...Apple anti-DRM folks already know this first-hand.
And you will jump right into the DRM box of your dreams. Enjoy.
Why is everyone so up-in-arms about the DRM in Vista? I havn't been impressed with the DRM-protected offerings in 2000/XP, so it's not like I'll be missing out on much.
I don't plan on watching HD-DVDs on my PC, or for-pay HD movies, so the requirement of HDMI for full-resolution doesn't affect me. I've seen what HD looks like on my 19" monitor, and it is not that impressive. I did play DVDs on my computer back in the 90s, but this was back when standalone players cost much more than DVD-ROM drives. I have no desire to reprchase my entire DVD collection just to get a marginal quality improvement.
Please keep in mind, NON-DRM VIDEO WILL NOT BE AFFECTED BY THIS REQUIREMENT. I can still look forward to downloading all the free xvid HD rips I want, and play them back on VLC at full resolution...should I be so inclined.
I don't plan on watching HDTV on this box. I don't plan on listening to DRM-encumbered formats like DVD Audio or SACD on this PC. I don't plan on doing anything remotely attached to DRM.
So, pray tell, could you point out where the DRM in Windows Vista actually affects me?
Or who upgraded their computers specifically to play Quake? In this illustrious circle if you reach back in time many many of us will have installed Windows95 specifically to play?
I bought a Hercules Thriller 3D card to play GL Quake. I alreay had Windows 95.
That said, you could play the original Quake under DOS. People upgraded to Windows 95 and a 3D accelerator because they could SEE how crappy the DOS version looked.
There won't be as many of those spur-of-the-moment upgraders because the price is much higher, and the only alternative (Xbox + Halo 2) doesn't involve a PC or Windows at all. When you either buy Vista and the game, or you get nothing, a lot more people are going to settle for nothing.
Not true, I had to up to XP to play EQ2
:D
According to this page, not unless you were using Windows 95. EQ II supports 98/2000/ME/XP. And if you were running Windows 95 in 2004, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
And I laugh at some of these new games that "require" Windows XP...funny, they run on Windows 2000 fine. I'm playing Battlefield 2 (XP only), and Fable: the Lost Chapters (XP only) with no more issues than any of the XP users are experiencing.
Me, I just swore to avoid Windows XP because it doesn't offer much over Windows 2000, and so far I've had no issues with that. Now, Vista I will probably buy, but not because it supports Halo 2 (couldn't care less). I'll buy it because its an excellent upgrade for Windows 2000. When you skip an entire release, Microsoft's OS products are a lot more enticing
That's easy. Joe Schmo's fast ethernet NIC maxes out at 90Mb/s with TCP/IP overhead. Jow Schmo's new hard drive maxes out at 500Mb/s sustained read speed.
THATS A 5.5x INCREASE IN PERFORMANCE just going gigabit over fast ethernet. Sure, you're not saturating the gig pipe, but you're certainly getting your money's worth.
Visualize it this way: you COULD wait about 15 minutes to transfer a DVD9 over fast ethernet, or you could max out your hard drive over gig ethernet and take only 3 minutes.
And when you consider that you could be maxing out your hard drive transfer rate while simultaneously browsing the net, and listening to streaming audio, all without maxing out gigabit, you can see the real-world benefits. Given that most motherboards come with gigabit onboard these days, it's most definitely worthwhile.
The company I work for is a Fortune 500 defense shop. Standardization would be a terrible thing. If you can think of a language, we probably use it.
C / C++ / Ada / Fortran / Java / C# / Tcl / VB / Pascal / Matlab are just the languages I've seen in use PERSONALLY in the last 5 years here. I'm sure there are more that I havn't encountered. And no, having all these different languages hasn't caused a problem, because it's fairly easy to retrain people on new languages.
Standardizing on one language not only kills your flexibility, but it artificially stunts your room for growth. If you standardize on one language, then how do you decide when it's best to jump to the next language?
In my company, some projects are at the fore-front of new languages, while others use older, more established languages. It depends a lot on what the customer wants, and how much you can reuse previous projects. Now, that's not to say we havn't "standardized" in a way...we've naturally gravitated toward C++, because we are an embedded house. This gives us most of the benefits of an organization that has totally standardized on C++: lots of experienced C++ coders, and lots of reusable code, without being locked-in.
Well, just like the grandparent indicated, this is a standard being developed solely for the datacenter, and most likely only for trunk lines between datacenters.
Companies like ethernet because it is scalable. The same 10Gb trunk lines can, through a simple switch, talk to 1Gb data closets, which can talk to 100Mb clients. The scalability is key because copper is cheap, but doesn't run well at long distances above 1Gb. Faster ethernet standards such as 10Gb ethernet are limited to 15m for copper (10GBASE-CX4), so 10Gb ethernet is usually run over fiber for long distances, and over copper only inside the datacenter itself.
I would expect 100Gb ethernet to have similar limitations...in fact, I would be amazed if it had a copper standard at all. But it will mean 10x faster data per trunk line, and when you're a fortune 500 company with 200 thousand employees spread out over 20 states and 10 countries, the idea of increasing your bandwidth 10-fold is music to your ears.
Yes, but you know damn good and well Fraunhofer won't waste their time prosecuting an open-source hobbyist project. Lame is doing so much for the mp3 standard, there are even for-pay ripping / encoding programs that pay Fraunhofer for a license, but then use the Lame encoder.
If game makers decide to use mp3 for all their audio tracks in a particular game, they still have to negotiate and pay Fraunhofer for a license regardless of how they encoded those mp3 files.
Lame is not on completely solid ground, but it's not exactly sinking into the mud.
It's on top in your mind, but let's look at the truth. Even against mp3, Ogg is not impressive. Between lame -v5 and Vorbis -q 4.25, the lame files came out significantly smaller on all but a handful of cases...in fact, it averaged significantly larger filesizes than all other codecs tested.
So, significantly larger files, and in raw numbers it does slightly better, but statisically it ties with all other codecs worth mentioning. That's hardly a codec that's "on top".
THIS IS WHY Vorbis has already lost. Other vendors stepped up to produce the next-generation of codecs well before Vorbis became polished, and they made them very much free (as in beer). Most people don't care that Vorbis is also free (as in speech).
Me, I just stick with mp3, works everywhere, and Lame just keeps getting better. Who knew mp3 had this much room for growth? It's running strong with the next-gen codecs at similar bitrates!
That sucks, man. Too bad it didn't work for you, I was just sharing my experience.
If caffiene isn't the real culprit, quitting it alone won't fix your problem. Sounds to me like you might have some form of sleep disorder. There are drugs and therapies out there that can help you get more real sleep. In fact, I recall a thread some time back dealing with sleep disorders, and many slashdotters had experience with them. You might try searching for it.
That's just what I was saying after reading this.
Me, I don't use anything fancy at work, just a set of Sennheiser MX500 earbuds. Decent sound quality for the price, little noise leakage to piss off your cubemates, VERY light (a huge plus when you spend the whole day craning your neck, staring at a monitor), and a tiny inline volume control. Plus, you can actually hear those around you. About 15 bucks online.
I love quality headphones, but unless you work alone, buying them for work is about as smart as buying audiophile-level speakers for your car. There's just too much background noise for you to notice the difference. At home, I like to break out my Allesandro MS1s, of if it's noisy, my HD 280 Pros, but at work I don't need anything special.
Yeah, I'm torn about this new video card. I like the performance increase, but in perspective its really nothing special. In some games, you can raise it a resolution or two, but others see much less improvement.
Anyway, even though I was tempted to buy this card when I first read about it, after some perspective I realized that I should tough it out a year and buy a proper upgrade. I mean, my AGP 6600 GT isn't a performance powerhouse, but it DOES still play games like Fable and Quake 4 acceptably at 1024x768x2xaa with reasonable settings.
The perspective is this:
With my last card, a Radeon 8500, I had to drop the resolution down to 800x600 in some later games like Desert Combat before I finally replaced it. The card before that, a G400 MAX, I had to drop down to 640x480 with minimal settings just to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The card before that, My Riva TNT, could barely play Quake 3 at 640x480x16. The card before that, my Rendition v2200, choked on Half-Life (1!) at 512x384.
Given that perspective, my 6600 GT is still just fine.
Wow, for some reason Slashdot ate an entire paragraph from my post. Guess I should have previewed.
What I mean to say was this (insert after paragraph 3):
Now, there's still an easy rule to follow: cheaper cards mean worse 2D quality. I find it funny that people on here complain about crappy 2D quality when they bought a $50 OEM Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 TC... of course the image quality is going to suck! I'm sure later revs of my XFX 6600 GT have cut down on the component count and price of components to match the lower sale price, and probably have reduced image quality. Most low-priced cards have sucky analog out.
Hell, Matrox is not immune to this effect either. Their entry-level card, the G450, SUCKS. I'm looking at it right now on a Mitsubishi 930 SB (one step down from my Iiyama at home, but still excellent), and it looks terrible at anything above 1152x864 @ 85Hz. This is as-compared to the G400 I had on my last work computer, which could drive the same monitor quite comfortably at 1280x960 @ 85Hz with better image quality than I'm seeing at 1152 on the G450.
I'm still interested in good reports about 2D signal quality (from the videocard to the monitor), then about video quality playback, and THEN 3d quality and performance.
So I still rely on my own eyes: Matrox still in the game. ATI is next. Nvidia out of my yard.
I used to think like you, about Nvidia. I have seen the crappy 2D output of older Nvidia cards, I know how bad it was I OWNED a TNT, it was terrible.
But then, I bought my XFX 6600 GT a little over a year ago. It came with 2D image quality to rival my old G400 MAX, even at higher resolutions like 1280x960 and 1600x1200 @ 85Hz.
For refrence, I am using an Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454, and I can usually tell the difference between the G400 MAX and everything else. Even at 1600x1200 @85Hz, there is only a slight difference between the two.
Now, there's still an easy rule to follow: cheaper cards (SUCKS. I'm looking at it right now on a Mitsubishi 930 SB (one step down from my Iiyama at home, but still excellent), and it looks terrible at anything above 1152x864 @ 85Hz. This is as-compared to the G400 I had on my last work computer, which could drive the same monitor quite comfortably at 1280x960 @ 85Hz with better image quality than I'm seeing at 1152 on the G450.
Face it, entry-level SUCKS no matter who you buy from. The components for proper filtering are too damn expensive. And now that I think about it, their high-end cards aren't that impressive considering the price you pay.
Side note: back when I was a strong Matrox backer, and frequented the (now defunct) Matrox Users Resource Center forums, I read a story from a Matrox insider. Apparently, after the G400 was released, there were some internal disagreements, and a number of engineers left, incluing their head analog guru. This is the reason Matrox released nothing but the G450 for two years: replacing that talent, and a lack of consistent product direction.
Yup, I quit caffeine a little over two years ago. Best decision I ever made.
At the time, I was popping caffeine pills...I figure at around half a gram of caffeine a day just to keep the withdrawl headaches away, and to keep from falling asleep in the afternoons. I was looking from the inside-out, so I thought those headaches were migraines, and the only thing holding them off was the caffeine.
I had high blood pressure even though I ate extremely healthy, and worked out occasionally. I had to cut the caffeine every night so I could sleep, so I'd fall asleep after todssing and turning for an hour or two, with a raging migraine every evening.
Then I read a study about caffeine's withdrawl effects, and I realized caffeine withdrawl had similar symptoms to a migraine, and I decided to quit.
I took advantage of the long weekend over July 4th, and went cold turkey. It was three days of torture, sleeping little, drinking tons of water and popping regular asprin, but by the fourth day I was feeling much better.
These days I rarely consume caffeine, and when I do have a caffenated soda, you can really feel the boost. I wake up with plenty of energy, and I no longer feel burnt-out by midday.
I don't consume energy drinks, and I think they are overkill. If you find you are drinking something as potent as an energy drink often just to keep going, you're caught up in the cycle, and that's a bad place to be.
How do you get MOO to work with DOSBox?
I'm not talking about playing the game, I'm talking about that annoying copy protection.
Every time I play MOO with DOSBox, you get a half hour to an hour into the game, and it just ends like you failed the copy protection check. I believe this has to do with the wonderfully clever copy protection in the game, which could detect hacks and patches.
It doesn't even get to the screen where you have to find a ship in the manual, it just goes to the usual "you lose" screen you get when you fail the copy protection test.
I don't know of any copy protection hacks for this game, and as long as it does this while playing on DOSBox, it is literally unplayable.
Right, and there are even better solutions than something very techy, like a hardware jumper.
Take my Asus A8V for instance. They have a feature called CrashFree that basically says this: even if the BIOS gets totally destroyed or hijacked, you can still pop a floppy disk (or the original driver CD) into the computer, press Alt-F2 on boot, and a flash writer stored in another ROM restores your BIOS image. This is a feature of all recent Asus motherboards.
No having to boot into Windows, no muking with DOS, and no need for crypic hardware. Unfortunately, reaching the CrashFree utility (pressing Alt-F2 on boot) is still pretty cryptic. Considering that you're not likely to break anything, they should make getting into this mode easier.
The good thing is, if enough of these viruses start to make the rounds, recovery utilities like therse will become easier to use.
Caught up to what? SSE-1 + SSE-2, which are the comparable techonologies to Altivec, both shipped *BEFORE* Altivec.
Not really. Altivec and SSE were released in the same timeframe in 1999. If you want to talk about "copycat", AMD beat both technologies to market with their 3D-Now! extensions in 1998.
We will ignore MMX because it was clumsy and limited due to the implementation taking over floating-point registers.
Altivec on the G4 was unique in that it had two vector processing pipelines, but the poor bus performance meant it was just dick waving. In addition, SSE2 and SSE3 have left Altivec firmly behind, incorporating old MMX instructions and extending support for 64-bit types.
Furthermore, anyone who has watched the x86 world to any degree has seen Intel and AMD actually *SLOWING DOWN* lately.
All chip makers are "slowing down" in terms of maximum single-threaded processing speed. They're reaching unexpected barriers.
Intel has been wallowing with the Pentium 4, but they still have some potential they've been keeping under wraps with Conroe. If overclocks of Dothan / Yonah are any indication, Conroe could push 3 GHz with reasonable power consumption.
IBM and AMD have been keeping decent pace in terms of single-core processing speed improvements, but AMD has managed to stay in the lead with dual-core, and has managed to up the single-thread speed without massive power increases.
This is a perfect time for Apple to go "Intel". IBM is behind both Intel and AMD on the desktop, and has almost nothing to offer the mobile market. Now that Apple is on x86, if they don't like Intel, there's always AMD.
As a closing note, do keep in mind that Moore's Law has only to do with the complexity (number of transistors) doubling every 18 months. It has NOTHING to do with raw single-threaded speed.
Wait, I'm having a vision.... ...
I see it...it's SQUARE, plastic with a conducting metal insert...with...with two pinholes.
They call it...a jumper...to turn on HARDWARE WRITE PROTECT.
I mean, Sun has been shipping systems with a simple hardware write protect jumper for firmware for years, FOR THIS VERY REASON. We've had flash-killing viruses since the god damned CIH back in the 90s...are you telling me that motherboard makers havn't gotten the clue to provide a simple write-protect jumper?
"Mission Complete"
"You are the greatest player"
"Password: TGL"
From The Guardian Legend, an excellent top-down platformer plus vertical shooter. I spent months playing that game, gave up, then picked it up again and finally beat it. Too bad the ending sucked, the game is great.
Then there's the ending from Wizards & Warriors. FUN, FUN game, but after you beat the final boss...you save yet another maiden, and that's it. Yay, you get to put in your high score, which will be reset when you turn off the NES! I'm so excited!
Ikari Warriors also had a cheesy ending.
Intel has been first on the introduction of new process moastly because they have the money and resources to push the very limits. Retooling , especially when the new process equipment is just becoming avilable, is extremely expensive, and retooling requires shutting down production lines.
.13u process to use copper, because they claimed they would not need it until that point. AMD arguably got much better speeds from their .13u Cu process than Intel managed, thanks to their decision to integrate copper earlier.
.13 micron process, in anticipation of huge increases in leakage current in the upcoming 90nm process. Intel decided to wait until their 90nm process to implement strained silicon to reduce leakage current, and that was a horrible mistake. Only now with Intel's 65nm process are we seeing results from strained silicon competitive with SOI (for example, Cedar Mill is lower-power, both from reduced voltage and reduced leakage).
Intel can do this because, assuming yields are high enough, they make their money back on their short-term production-per-wafer lead. AMD, on the other hand, only has 3 fabs, and shutting down lines when your distributors are already crying for more chips is a hard sell.
There are some benefits to being second in process land. While Intel has been foolhardy, jumping from one process to the next, AMD has been more patient and methodical.
* AMD was the first of the two to incorporate a copper process (.18u). Intel waited until their
* AMD elected to integrate SOI into their
In addition to process leads, Intel is forced to be wasteful trying to stay one step ahead of their competitors. Back in 2002, even though Intel was backing Itanium full-throttle, and even though AMD had yet to publically announce x86-64, Intel was already working on an x86-64 part to counter AMD. Thus, it was no surprise when it was discovered Prescott shipped with x86-64 capabilities already built-in, but disabled. Once Intel realized the momentum behind x86-64, the extensions were enabled in later Prescott revisions.
Of course, once Intel enabled the extensions, they basically threw away the Itanium and their future total control of the 64-bit market. All this hopping and skipping about costs Intel tons of money. Eventually, it will catch up with them.