Okay I know that I am going to get flamed by this but. . .
It seems like we expect our government to provide us with the infrastructure we need to operate our society: we expect there to be some way to solve disputes(the courts), we expect that we will have someone to protect our interests(police at home, military abroad), and we expect to have streets to drive on, water to drink, and sewers to take things away that we don't want to see anymore. I know that some of these things are privatized in various parts of our nation but it seems to me that we should just come to some agreement as to what society needs to operate and have our government provide those things. There I said it let the flames begin.
Would it be so bad if, like streets, the government made sure that there was an information feed to our homes?
The rampant pirating of Dreamcast games made the system lose money, as with most consol system makers much of their profits were on the games they sold. It was just too easy to copy the games. That said the dreamcast was and is a great consol.
True and yet still the original parent makes no sense. Your corrections would be better listened to if phrased better yourself. no reason for name calling.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I agree with what I am going to say but I have to say it does make some sense.
If internet retailers were required to collect taxes based on the purchaser and return those taxes to the pertinent state it would seem reasonable since: 1) In essence their business has a presensce in every State and thus should follow current laws(the location of a internet server means nothing these days) 2) If I have the abilty to buy things without tax I will stop buying things in my own state and thus not be supporting the infrastructure that I use.
This is already done within California with sales tax on cars. The sales tax you pay is based on where you live NOT where the business is, this was implemented to stop people from all buying their cars in the boondocks to save some money but they go and drive their cars all over the streets their tax dollars were not supporting the maintanece of.
They are completely unrelated one is a STATE tax(internet taxes) the other is a FEDERAL tax(Bush). I don't like Bush but it is unfair to blame this on him.
Oh I fogot we have a Democrat dominated congress, house, and president. . . oh wait no we don't! What are you talking about? This is NEW so you can't blame it on the Democrats.
My friend works at foveon and he has been telling me that they had this technology for some time, he also mentioned that they figured out some way of storing the data such that you could have better than film quality in a small file size(i.e. 1-2 megs).
Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again Dell's $2964 3.06 GHz P4 Trounces Fastest Mac on the Market by Charlie White Page 1 of 4
Dell has just introduced a new workstation featuring the latest Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor with hyperthreading and faster PC1066 RDRAM. Accordingly, we decided it was time for another Mac vs. PC duel, created especially for digital video editors and compositors. So we got our hands on one of those new 3.06GHz Dell boxes and the fastest Mac on the market, fired up our trusty After Effects 5.5 and Photoshop 7.0 benchmarks on both of them, and man oh man, you won't believe what happened this time. It was just downright startling.
We published an extensive and somewhat favorable review of our Mac dual 1.25 GHz G4 box in a recent DMN report, so if you haven't seen that article yet and would like deep background on the Mac side of this duel, click here for the full scoop. That said, here's the lowdown on the PC entry in this Mac vs. PC Duel III.
A few months ago, we reviewed a Dell system that packed the fastest PC processor available at the time, the Pentium 4 2.53GHz. Since then, the chipsters at Intel have topped themselves twice, and this time, the newest chip runs at an unprecedented 3.06 GHz. The big story, though, is the new hyperthreading technology included inside the processor that promises to speed up the festivities even more. Coupled with faster RAM, the new $2,964 Dell Precision Workstation 350 was startlingly fast.
All the things that were great about the last Dell Precision Workstation reviewed here are still present in this newest iteration, and a lot of the features have been enhanced. For example, this unit is even quieter than the last one tested, while its neatly arranged components inside and its sleek, easy-open black case all look the same as before. The computer still uses RDRAM, the same Intel 850e chipset and 533MHz frontside bus as its predecessor. But there's more than meets the eye here, and it's these certain modifications, along with a faster processor with its remarkable new hyperthreading feature, that are the reason for this newfound speed.
So what is this hyperthreading, anyway? Without boring you to tears, I'll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn't double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you're doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking). Hyperthreading comes in handy, for example, if you're watching a DVD and working with documents at the same time. You could drop frames without hyperthreading, but with it switched on, all is smooth. A neat trick is that applications don't even need any special programming to use this new feature, although you will have to be using either Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home to take advantage of the hyperthreading.
We'll talk more about hyperthreading later, but for now, let's get to the benchmarks. Put succinctly, this is the fastest workstation we've tested, too, by a long shot. Wow. We ran our After Effects and Photoshop benchmarks on this machine, nine in all, and saw a speed improvement that was far beyond what we anticipated. Mac users will be disappointed to see that this new Dell machine, while priced $629 less than the Mac Dual G4 1.25 GHz machine, was nearly twice as fast on most of the nine benchmarks we ran.
Page 2 of 4
If you're not familiar with parts 1 and 2 of our Mac vs. PC series, we use nine benchmarks consisting of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop scripts, to get a real-world look at how the fastest machines on each platform compare with each other. In the After Effects tests, we use a variety of effects and source material, including video files, Illustrator files and bitmap graphics. Then we line them all up and render them, uncompressed, using the Best settings on each platform. For the Photoshop benchmarks, we use graphics that would typically be used by a video editor, so this will represent the real world of editing and compositing, not that of pre-press where graphics can often exceed a gigabyte. After all, it's not often a video editor working in standard definition will use a graphic that's bigger than 720x486. For the machines we used, we asked Apple and Dell to send us their fastest machines with one gig of RAM and the fastest graphics card available, without any other specific requests. Both companies responded quickly, with Apple sending its latest Power Mac Dual G4 1.25GHz machine, equipped with a gig of DDR RAM, a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card and a 120GB 7200 RPM IBM Deskstar ATA-100 disk, running Mac OS X 10.2.1, whose system retail price is $3,949.00 [Editor's note: this was the price of the machine when we received it a month ago. Since then, Apple has reduced the price by $100 and offered an additional $260 "promotional savings," for a total retail price of $3,589. We have modified the text within this article to reflect those changes]. Dell, for unknown reasons (maybe they were just showing off) sent another single-processor box, this time with a 3.06GHz Intel P4 processor with its new hyperthreading feature turned on. Also aboard that PC was gig of PC1066 RDRAM and a Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM ATA-100 disk with an 8MB cache running Windows XP Professional, with the whole package coming in at $2964.
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Dell Precision Workstation 340 Intel P4 2.53GHz, 512 MB RDRAM
Alienware 2001DV Intel P4 2.53GHz, 1GB RDRAM Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz with 1GB DDR RAM $3,589
1. After Effects: Simple Animation:10:09:14:07 2. After Effects: Video Composite 1:12 1:21 1:25:54 3. After Effects: Data Project 3:01 4:06 3:47 2:05 4. After Effects: Gambler:32:38:43:29 5. After Effects: Source Shapes 5:54 8:19 7:06 4:14 6. After Effects: Virtual Set 8:42 9:39 8:15 4:24 1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation:06:05.1:07.1:04.5 2. Photoshop: Filter Effects:50:62.1:62 35.1 3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments:04:03.5:04.5:03.4
By the way, looking at these test results, you might want to know why Intel didn't introduce this hyperthreading capability earlier. Unfortunately, there were legal reasons for the delay, where Intel was in a court battle with former workstation maker and current high-tech company Intergraph, where both companies claimed to have invented the technique. Intergraph prevailed in court, Intel settled, and now is allowed to use this innovation.
Another important note: If you would like to replicate these After Effects tests for yourself, pick up the book After Effects 5.5 Magic that includes a CD containing these AE project files (and many more) along with all the media you'll need to exactly reproduce our results. Special thanks to After Effects 5.5 Magic's author Mark Christiansen and the book's editor, Nathan Moody, as well as New Riders Publishing for giving us permission to use materials from this outstanding book. Highly recommended.
So how did this Dell Precision Workstation 350 get to be so fast? There's even more whiz-bang newness under the hood, and all of it contributes to the speed bump we experienced with this new workstation. For instance, the memory consists of a gigabyte of PC1066 RDRAM instead of the PC800 RDRAM used before. Originally, Intel did not officially certify PC1066 memory on the 850e chipset until October 7th (2002), so Intel's good buddy Dell has followed suit and offered it with this latest workstation. That's good news, too, because now the memory's bandwidth matches the bandwidth of that 533MHz frontside bus -- 4.2 GB/sec. instead of the 3.2 GB/sec. it was limited to when using the PC800 memory. As a result, this unit has what's known as balanced architecture, where the increased bandwidth of the frontside bus can actually be used by the memory. If all this sounds like gobbledygook to you, let me just say this -- the thing is a lot faster because of these changes. And I'll tell you something else -- the Mac can't brag about balanced architecture, and that's why it's not able to take full advantage of its new DDR memory.
Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. Also included in our test package is an ATI Fire GL E1 64MB graphics card, an entry-level 3D card that performs similarly to midrange graphics cards of just a few months ago (isn't technology wonderful?). Then there's our favorite disk drive at the moment, the Western Digital 120GB disk with an 8MB cache. It offers plenty of speed with a 40MB/sec. read and 42MB/sec. write speed according to our testing. Also along for the ride is a DVD-R/+RW drive. As icing on this tasty cake, content creators and gamers will like the quick 3D response of the new ATI graphics card while digital video editors will appreciate its dual monitor support. All these factors add up to the most advanced workstation we've tested.
Page 3 of 4
We also ran benchmarks on the system with hyperthreading turned off, to see what performance hit the system took without its new speed enhancer. On all the benchmarks, there was a reduction in speed without the hyperthreading which varied greatly depending on the operation (see table below).
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Hyperthreading ON
Hyperthreading OFF
1. After Effects: Simple Animation:07:08 2. After Effects: Video Composite:54:58 3. After Effects: Data Project 2:05 2:32 4. After Effects: Gambler:29:29 5. After Effects: Source Shapes 4:14 4:59 6. After Effects: Virtual Set 4:24 5:49 1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation 4.5 4.8 2. Photoshop: Filter Effects 35.1 35.9 3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments 3.4 3.6
Digital Media Net talked with Dell Precision Workstation product manager David Methven about this latest box, and some of the decisions that went into its making. First, we wanted to know why Dell didn't go with DDR memory instead of the Rambus variety (RDRAM). "We expect some of our PC competitors to go with a newer, dual-channel DDR chipset, but we still feel that RDRAM, especially in a single-processor workstation, provides better overall performance," Methven said. He also thought the addition of the new PC 1066 memory will result in a significant performance boost, but echoed our findings that it depends on which application you're using, what file sizes you're working with and what else you're doing with your computer at the same time. "If you're doing very large files in Photoshop, you should see an appreciable benefit," Methven said. "You'll see roughly a 30% difference in raw numbers. As the file sizes in Photoshop increase, we pull further and further away from the dual G4 1.25," he added.
There's more than just raw speed boosts with hyperthreading as well. Methven explains that the benefit of the new technology is sometimes "qualitative and not as quantitative. So what we saw with that was you don't drop frames, but it may take a little bit longer for your background task to complete. So there's a tradeoff there." But Methven believes users will be quite happy with the extra "virtual chip" in their systems. "I think most people would prefer the more responsive capability that hyperthreading provides. So there's two primary areas of benefit, multitasking and then multithreading."
Dell engineers showed us how easy it is to toggle on and off the hyperthreading feature in the BIOS setup of the machine. But then that raises the question, if hyperthreading is so nice, why on earth would somebody want to turn it off? "If you're running Windows 2000, it's not recommended," Methven said. "You can turn it on, but generally, you'll get better performance if you're using XP. There is some overhead associated with multiprocessing, and there are some operations in some applications, the current version of Solidworks, for example, where we've see slight performance degradation. There are some Photoshop operations, at least in our internal testing, where we saw some slight degradation. On the whole, it's provided a benefit." Dell intends to show its users just how useful hyperthreading would be for their usage patterns, too. "One of the things that we're also doing in addition to providing the choice to turn it on or not, we have a workstation tool we're modifying that will show a recommendation for hyperthreading -- whether or not the customer should configure their machine with it turned on or not," added Methven.
Multiprocessor support is not the same thing as hyperthreading, but the two concepts are similar. Methven explains it this way: "Certainly you're going to get the best performance from two discrete processors. So we look at it as a good/better/best situation. One processor with hyperthreading is better than a single processor. Two discrete processors are better, and two discrete processors with hyperthreading are best."
Page 4 of 4
Finally, as mentioned earlier in this review, it was again impressive to experience the church-mouse quiet of this Dell workstation. Shedding some light on why Dell seems to be able to consistently offer computers that are quieter than any on the market, Dell's Methven said, "We have our own acoustic lab in-house. It's something we definitely focus on. Part of the drive for noise reduction is being driven out of the Nordic countries, in our relationship, our Optiplex corporate line of products. The Nordic countries are very sensitive to noise in the environment. As we've improved the product in those countries, we've decided to roll that technology worldwide. Yes, there is a slight cost premium for it, but we think it's very worthwhile, and it's something that our customers throughout the world can benefit from and appreciate."
We do appreciate that, and all the other remarkable features of this new Dell PC. It's the quickest single-processor PC we've ever seen at this writing, and for the price of $2964, it's hard to beat. This system is highly recommended for anyone who is tired of staring at that render thermometer when dealing with After Effects composites, or anything else that keeps users waiting around for a computer to catch up with the creative mind. It's especially quick if heavy multitasking is part of your daily routine. But whatever your application, this new Dell unit will make it so you can go home earlier if you want to, or just get more work done while you're on the job.
As for comparing the Dell workstation with the fastest Mac on the market, well, the two machines are apparently in different classes. Take a look at the test results, and you'll have to agree that, using these benchmarks, the Mac was slaughtered again, and this time by an even wider expanse than ever. We were surprised at the huge margin of the defeat of the Mac in these tests. Even though the Mac's dual G4 chips have been sped up to 1.25 GHz and offers faster DDR RAM, apparently this wasn't enough to keep up with the newest and fastest from Dell and Intel. The most amazing part of this is that this Dell PC cost $629 less than the Mac we tested.
Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary. And, according to our benchmarks here, if you have an After Effects composite that needs, say, two hours to render on the Mac, it'll take you about an hour and 10 minutes on this PC. So, in addition to the extra $629 you must pay for the Mac, it will cost you plenty of time as well, especially while using After Effects. Time is money. After looking at these startling benchmark results, we have to gaze over at our beautifully-designed Macs and ask, "Is it worth it?"
Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor, broadcast industry consultant and shot-calling television director with 28 years broadcast experience. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.
Why was Star Trek missing from the short ev in the original post? There are some very young readers of/. who may not remember the reruns from the eighties and may not have cable(hey I don't!) to view current reruns.
Some countries with democratically-elected governments are way down in the index - such as Colombia (114th) and Bangladesh (118th). In these countries, armed rebel movements, militias or political parties constantly endanger the lives of journalists. The state fails to do all it could to protect them and fight the immunity very often enjoyed by those responsible for such violence.
The quote seems to be suggesting that these countries don't have worse problems they should be spending money on. Yes the end result is that reporters lives are jepordized in these countries but it seems like freedom of the press is something that should be determined by the government in power, any other social issues, even those this extreme, are just that: social issues. Similar to the point that someone already brought up: in many European nations that are ranked high, there are many social concerns that make printing certain types of articles virtually impossible, why is this not just a far less extreme case of what is being cited in the quote above?
Just another viewpoint.
What fish are they refering to that we use land to catch? Surely they didn't go out and count all the guys on the coast with a single pole and too much time.
The paper acts like the old school optical mouse pads. Since the pen captures data via an optical sensor it needs some sort of reference. Although I also wonder, as someone in an above post did, exactly why each page needs to be unique, perhaps this could be used to cataloge all users HW if the pen's software uploads its data to a server as well. Probably not though I am just a paranoid freak.
The post say that the bill "states that a person is guilty of an offence if they cause, or intend to cause, 'degradation, failure or other impairment of function of a computerised system." Isn't that a little open ended? What if someone, call him bob, uses a trojan to use someone, call him fred, elses computer to perform a DoS attack? could the person whos computer was used be a criminal? It seems like intent should be part of the crime. Another situation: fred goes to a site that is poorly run and opens a few windows at once but the system is already so messed up he causes a DoS by triping some M$ database error, is fred responsible for that? It seems like there should be a catch to stop fred from getting screwed by a stupid company.
Just my 2 cents
One problem with your above work, you seem to think that noise would add, it doesn't. The noise level will be at the HIGHEST signal at your point so if you have two gas stations with the same light setup but one is closer the only one you would care about is the closer one. Also you use 17W output of a set of lights but you added these up from various sources but that is not how noise works. I also find it hard to believe that a light bulb would be call "energy effiecent" if it is loosing 1W in an frequency far away from its intended output, as you assume.
Anyone know exactly how much power these lights are supposed to give off? If these are supposed to save power better than current technologies(e.g. florecent) they need to put out 12W. But the claim is that it interfers with 2.4GHz so how much power is going out in that band if the whole thing is only using 12W? It seems unreasonable that 12W falling off at 1/r^2(okay I assume a sphereical bulb) would have enough power to interfer with WiFi.5miles away. So does anyone know the power output(or usage) of these lights and exactly what intensity a WiFi will pick up?
They did NOT stop light!
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok this is just a point of fact: they did not stop light! They stored the information contained initially in a light wave in a new medium that they had control over, then were able to stimulate the medium to get it to re-emit.
You have to make assumtions - for example change the path, speed and time when/where the asteroid had to be to hit earth. Where on earth it
hits, depends on those assumtions and because there are millions of possible assumtions that lead to this result, you get millions of possible targets
on earth.
Why would you have to make any assumptions? If you are attempting to predict where an incoming object will impact the Earth one would use observations of that object to determine is velocity and position, if these are measured accuratly enough, which can be done using interferometers, you can calculate exactly where it will start to interact with the Earth at which point you begin to have uncertainty due to atmosphereic interactions.
One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.
While I agree that cryptography CAN be used to hide sensitive information from a corrupt government that is by far not the only use: Encryption of sensitive business information that is sent through email, financial documents you don't want someone who steals your laptop to have access to, or personal notes that you don't want others who may use your workstation to see, that is just to enumerate a few. While the press release says that the German government does not recommend their software in "security sensitive areas" but since the product is open source one could imagine that this is only the first step in createing a heir to the PGP throne, which may be in need as NAI trys to dump that section.
Government conspiracies are nothing new but it seems unlikely that they would create a new program(when one exists), make it open source, and expect people to flock to it like seagulls to food.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay I know that I am going to get flamed by this but. . .
It seems like we expect our government to provide us with the infrastructure we need to operate our society: we expect there to be some way to solve disputes(the courts), we expect that we will have someone to protect our interests(police at home, military abroad), and we expect to have streets to drive on, water to drink, and sewers to take things away that we don't want to see anymore. I know that some of these things are privatized in various parts of our nation but it seems to me that we should just come to some agreement as to what society needs to operate and have our government provide those things. There I said it let the flames begin.
Would it be so bad if, like streets, the government made sure that there was an information feed to our homes?
Just a thought
I hate comercials at the begining of my DVD and find them offensive(I already own the damn movie stop selling me Coke!)
There are some reviews on amazon that may be of interest(one who claims to be a beta tester) and many useless reviews.
The rampant pirating of Dreamcast games made the system lose money, as with most consol system makers much of their profits were on the games they sold. It was just too easy to copy the games. That said the dreamcast was and is a great consol.
True and yet still the original parent makes no sense. Your corrections would be better listened to if phrased better yourself. no reason for name calling.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I agree with what I am going to say but I have to say it does make some sense. If internet retailers were required to collect taxes based on the purchaser and return those taxes to the pertinent state it would seem reasonable since: 1) In essence their business has a presensce in every State and thus should follow current laws(the location of a internet server means nothing these days) 2) If I have the abilty to buy things without tax I will stop buying things in my own state and thus not be supporting the infrastructure that I use. This is already done within California with sales tax on cars. The sales tax you pay is based on where you live NOT where the business is, this was implemented to stop people from all buying their cars in the boondocks to save some money but they go and drive their cars all over the streets their tax dollars were not supporting the maintanece of.
They are completely unrelated one is a STATE tax(internet taxes) the other is a FEDERAL tax(Bush). I don't like Bush but it is unfair to blame this on him.
Oh I fogot we have a Democrat dominated congress, house, and president. . . oh wait no we don't! What are you talking about? This is NEW so you can't blame it on the Democrats.
I think the point is that we don't have three detectors in our eyes to see base colors and then construct the true color.
My friend works at foveon and he has been telling me that they had this technology for some time, he also mentioned that they figured out some way of storing the data such that you could have better than film quality in a small file size(i.e. 1-2 megs).
Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again
:10 :09 :14 :07 :54 :32 :38 :43 :29 :06 :05.1 :07.1 :04.5 :50 :62.1 :62 35.1 :04 :03.5 :04.5 :03.4
:07 :08 :54 :58 :29 :29
Dell's $2964 3.06 GHz P4 Trounces Fastest Mac on the Market
by Charlie White
Page 1 of 4
Dell has just introduced a new workstation featuring the latest Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor with hyperthreading and faster PC1066 RDRAM. Accordingly, we decided it was time for another Mac vs. PC duel, created especially for digital video editors and compositors. So we got our hands on one of those new 3.06GHz Dell boxes and the fastest Mac on the market, fired up our trusty After Effects 5.5 and Photoshop 7.0 benchmarks on both of them, and man oh man, you won't believe what happened this time. It was just downright startling.
We published an extensive and somewhat favorable review of our Mac dual 1.25 GHz G4 box in a recent DMN report, so if you haven't seen that article yet and would like deep background on the Mac side of this duel, click here for the full scoop. That said, here's the lowdown on the PC entry in this Mac vs. PC Duel III.
A few months ago, we reviewed a Dell system that packed the fastest PC processor available at the time, the Pentium 4 2.53GHz. Since then, the chipsters at Intel have topped themselves twice, and this time, the newest chip runs at an unprecedented 3.06 GHz. The big story, though, is the new hyperthreading technology included inside the processor that promises to speed up the festivities even more. Coupled with faster RAM, the new $2,964 Dell Precision Workstation 350 was startlingly fast.
All the things that were great about the last Dell Precision Workstation reviewed here are still present in this newest iteration, and a lot of the features have been enhanced. For example, this unit is even quieter than the last one tested, while its neatly arranged components inside and its sleek, easy-open black case all look the same as before. The computer still uses RDRAM, the same Intel 850e chipset and 533MHz frontside bus as its predecessor. But there's more than meets the eye here, and it's these certain modifications, along with a faster processor with its remarkable new hyperthreading feature, that are the reason for this newfound speed.
So what is this hyperthreading, anyway? Without boring you to tears, I'll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn't double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you're doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking). Hyperthreading comes in handy, for example, if you're watching a DVD and working with documents at the same time. You could drop frames without hyperthreading, but with it switched on, all is smooth. A neat trick is that applications don't even need any special programming to use this new feature, although you will have to be using either Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home to take advantage of the hyperthreading.
We'll talk more about hyperthreading later, but for now, let's get to the benchmarks. Put succinctly, this is the fastest workstation we've tested, too, by a long shot. Wow. We ran our After Effects and Photoshop benchmarks on this machine, nine in all, and saw a speed improvement that was far beyond what we anticipated. Mac users will be disappointed to see that this new Dell machine, while priced $629 less than the Mac Dual G4 1.25 GHz machine, was nearly twice as fast on most of the nine benchmarks we ran.
Page 2 of 4
If you're not familiar with parts 1 and 2 of our Mac vs. PC series, we use nine benchmarks consisting of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop scripts, to get a real-world look at how the fastest machines on each platform compare with each other. In the After Effects tests, we use a variety of effects and source material, including video files, Illustrator files and bitmap graphics. Then we line them all up and render them, uncompressed, using the Best settings on each platform. For the Photoshop benchmarks, we use graphics that would typically be used by a video editor, so this will represent the real world of editing and compositing, not that of pre-press where graphics can often exceed a gigabyte. After all, it's not often a video editor working in standard definition will use a graphic that's bigger than 720x486. For the machines we used, we asked Apple and Dell to send us their fastest machines with one gig of RAM and the fastest graphics card available, without any other specific requests. Both companies responded quickly, with Apple sending its latest Power Mac Dual G4 1.25GHz machine, equipped with a gig of DDR RAM, a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card and a 120GB 7200 RPM IBM Deskstar ATA-100 disk, running Mac OS X 10.2.1, whose system retail price is $3,949.00 [Editor's note: this was the price of the machine when we received it a month ago. Since then, Apple has reduced the price by $100 and offered an additional $260 "promotional savings," for a total retail price of $3,589. We have modified the text within this article to reflect those changes]. Dell, for unknown reasons (maybe they were just showing off) sent another single-processor box, this time with a 3.06GHz Intel P4 processor with its new hyperthreading feature turned on. Also aboard that PC was gig of PC1066 RDRAM and a Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM ATA-100 disk with an 8MB cache running Windows XP Professional, with the whole package coming in at $2964.
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Dell Precision Workstation 340
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
512 MB RDRAM
Alienware 2001DV
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
1GB RDRAM Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz with 1GB DDR RAM
$3,589
Dell Precision Workstation 350
Intel P4 3.06 GHz,
1GB PC1066 RDRAM
$2964
1. After Effects: Simple Animation
2. After Effects: Video Composite 1:12 1:21 1:25
3. After Effects: Data Project 3:01 4:06 3:47 2:05
4. After Effects: Gambler
5. After Effects: Source Shapes 5:54 8:19 7:06 4:14
6. After Effects: Virtual Set 8:42 9:39 8:15 4:24
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments
By the way, looking at these test results, you might want to know why Intel didn't introduce this hyperthreading capability earlier. Unfortunately, there were legal reasons for the delay, where Intel was in a court battle with former workstation maker and current high-tech company Intergraph, where both companies claimed to have invented the technique. Intergraph prevailed in court, Intel settled, and now is allowed to use this innovation.
Another important note: If you would like to replicate these After Effects tests for yourself, pick up the book After Effects 5.5 Magic that includes a CD containing these AE project files (and many more) along with all the media you'll need to exactly reproduce our results. Special thanks to After Effects 5.5 Magic's author Mark Christiansen and the book's editor, Nathan Moody, as well as New Riders Publishing for giving us permission to use materials from this outstanding book. Highly recommended.
So how did this Dell Precision Workstation 350 get to be so fast? There's even more whiz-bang newness under the hood, and all of it contributes to the speed bump we experienced with this new workstation. For instance, the memory consists of a gigabyte of PC1066 RDRAM instead of the PC800 RDRAM used before. Originally, Intel did not officially certify PC1066 memory on the 850e chipset until October 7th (2002), so Intel's good buddy Dell has followed suit and offered it with this latest workstation. That's good news, too, because now the memory's bandwidth matches the bandwidth of that 533MHz frontside bus -- 4.2 GB/sec. instead of the 3.2 GB/sec. it was limited to when using the PC800 memory. As a result, this unit has what's known as balanced architecture, where the increased bandwidth of the frontside bus can actually be used by the memory. If all this sounds like gobbledygook to you, let me just say this -- the thing is a lot faster because of these changes. And I'll tell you something else -- the Mac can't brag about balanced architecture, and that's why it's not able to take full advantage of its new DDR memory.
Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. Also included in our test package is an ATI Fire GL E1 64MB graphics card, an entry-level 3D card that performs similarly to midrange graphics cards of just a few months ago (isn't technology wonderful?). Then there's our favorite disk drive at the moment, the Western Digital 120GB disk with an 8MB cache. It offers plenty of speed with a 40MB/sec. read and 42MB/sec. write speed according to our testing. Also along for the ride is a DVD-R/+RW drive. As icing on this tasty cake, content creators and gamers will like the quick 3D response of the new ATI graphics card while digital video editors will appreciate its dual monitor support. All these factors add up to the most advanced workstation we've tested.
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We also ran benchmarks on the system with hyperthreading turned off, to see what performance hit the system took without its new speed enhancer. On all the benchmarks, there was a reduction in speed without the hyperthreading which varied greatly depending on the operation (see table below).
Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type Hyperthreading ON
Hyperthreading OFF
1. After Effects: Simple Animation
2. After Effects: Video Composite
3. After Effects: Data Project 2:05 2:32
4. After Effects: Gambler
5. After Effects: Source Shapes 4:14 4:59
6. After Effects: Virtual Set 4:24 5:49
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation 4.5 4.8
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects 35.1 35.9
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments 3.4 3.6
Digital Media Net talked with Dell Precision Workstation product manager David Methven about this latest box, and some of the decisions that went into its making. First, we wanted to know why Dell didn't go with DDR memory instead of the Rambus variety (RDRAM). "We expect some of our PC competitors to go with a newer, dual-channel DDR chipset, but we still feel that RDRAM, especially in a single-processor workstation, provides better overall performance," Methven said. He also thought the addition of the new PC 1066 memory will result in a significant performance boost, but echoed our findings that it depends on which application you're using, what file sizes you're working with and what else you're doing with your computer at the same time. "If you're doing very large files in Photoshop, you should see an appreciable benefit," Methven said. "You'll see roughly a 30% difference in raw numbers. As the file sizes in Photoshop increase, we pull further and further away from the dual G4 1.25," he added.
There's more than just raw speed boosts with hyperthreading as well. Methven explains that the benefit of the new technology is sometimes "qualitative and not as quantitative. So what we saw with that was you don't drop frames, but it may take a little bit longer for your background task to complete. So there's a tradeoff there." But Methven believes users will be quite happy with the extra "virtual chip" in their systems. "I think most people would prefer the more responsive capability that hyperthreading provides. So there's two primary areas of benefit, multitasking and then multithreading."
Dell engineers showed us how easy it is to toggle on and off the hyperthreading feature in the BIOS setup of the machine. But then that raises the question, if hyperthreading is so nice, why on earth would somebody want to turn it off? "If you're running Windows 2000, it's not recommended," Methven said. "You can turn it on, but generally, you'll get better performance if you're using XP. There is some overhead associated with multiprocessing, and there are some operations in some applications, the current version of Solidworks, for example, where we've see slight performance degradation. There are some Photoshop operations, at least in our internal testing, where we saw some slight degradation. On the whole, it's provided a benefit." Dell intends to show its users just how useful hyperthreading would be for their usage patterns, too. "One of the things that we're also doing in addition to providing the choice to turn it on or not, we have a workstation tool we're modifying that will show a recommendation for hyperthreading -- whether or not the customer should configure their machine with it turned on or not," added Methven.
Multiprocessor support is not the same thing as hyperthreading, but the two concepts are similar. Methven explains it this way: "Certainly you're going to get the best performance from two discrete processors. So we look at it as a good/better/best situation. One processor with hyperthreading is better than a single processor. Two discrete processors are better, and two discrete processors with hyperthreading are best."
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Finally, as mentioned earlier in this review, it was again impressive to experience the church-mouse quiet of this Dell workstation. Shedding some light on why Dell seems to be able to consistently offer computers that are quieter than any on the market, Dell's Methven said, "We have our own acoustic lab in-house. It's something we definitely focus on. Part of the drive for noise reduction is being driven out of the Nordic countries, in our relationship, our Optiplex corporate line of products. The Nordic countries are very sensitive to noise in the environment. As we've improved the product in those countries, we've decided to roll that technology worldwide. Yes, there is a slight cost premium for it, but we think it's very worthwhile, and it's something that our customers throughout the world can benefit from and appreciate."
We do appreciate that, and all the other remarkable features of this new Dell PC. It's the quickest single-processor PC we've ever seen at this writing, and for the price of $2964, it's hard to beat. This system is highly recommended for anyone who is tired of staring at that render thermometer when dealing with After Effects composites, or anything else that keeps users waiting around for a computer to catch up with the creative mind. It's especially quick if heavy multitasking is part of your daily routine. But whatever your application, this new Dell unit will make it so you can go home earlier if you want to, or just get more work done while you're on the job.
As for comparing the Dell workstation with the fastest Mac on the market, well, the two machines are apparently in different classes. Take a look at the test results, and you'll have to agree that, using these benchmarks, the Mac was slaughtered again, and this time by an even wider expanse than ever. We were surprised at the huge margin of the defeat of the Mac in these tests. Even though the Mac's dual G4 chips have been sped up to 1.25 GHz and offers faster DDR RAM, apparently this wasn't enough to keep up with the newest and fastest from Dell and Intel. The most amazing part of this is that this Dell PC cost $629 less than the Mac we tested.
Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary. And, according to our benchmarks here, if you have an After Effects composite that needs, say, two hours to render on the Mac, it'll take you about an hour and 10 minutes on this PC. So, in addition to the extra $629 you must pay for the Mac, it will cost you plenty of time as well, especially while using After Effects. Time is money. After looking at these startling benchmark results, we have to gaze over at our beautifully-designed Macs and ask, "Is it worth it?"
Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor, broadcast industry consultant and shot-calling television director with 28 years broadcast experience. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.
Why was Star Trek missing from the short ev in the original post? There are some very young readers of /. who may not remember the reruns from the eighties and may not have cable(hey I don't!) to view current reruns.
There will be a more scientific article released by the APS soon, assuming the government does not try to classify it.
What fish are they refering to that we use land to catch? Surely they didn't go out and count all the guys on the coast with a single pole and too much time.
The paper acts like the old school optical mouse pads. Since the pen captures data via an optical sensor it needs some sort of reference. Although I also wonder, as someone in an above post did, exactly why each page needs to be unique, perhaps this could be used to cataloge all users HW if the pen's software uploads its data to a server as well. Probably not though I am just a paranoid freak.
Similar, although not as well written, article here at bbc new.
The post say that the bill "states that a person is guilty of an offence if they cause, or intend to cause, 'degradation, failure or other impairment of function of a computerised system." Isn't that a little open ended? What if someone, call him bob, uses a trojan to use someone, call him fred, elses computer to perform a DoS attack? could the person whos computer was used be a criminal? It seems like intent should be part of the crime. Another situation: fred goes to a site that is poorly run and opens a few windows at once but the system is already so messed up he causes a DoS by triping some M$ database error, is fred responsible for that? It seems like there should be a catch to stop fred from getting screwed by a stupid company. Just my 2 cents
One problem with your above work, you seem to think that noise would add, it doesn't. The noise level will be at the HIGHEST signal at your point so if you have two gas stations with the same light setup but one is closer the only one you would care about is the closer one. Also you use 17W output of a set of lights but you added these up from various sources but that is not how noise works. I also find it hard to believe that a light bulb would be call "energy effiecent" if it is loosing 1W in an frequency far away from its intended output, as you assume.
Anyone know exactly how much power these lights are supposed to give off? If these are supposed to save power better than current technologies(e.g. florecent) they need to put out 12W. But the claim is that it interfers with 2.4GHz so how much power is going out in that band if the whole thing is only using 12W? It seems unreasonable that 12W falling off at 1/r^2(okay I assume a sphereical bulb) would have enough power to interfer with WiFi .5miles away. So does anyone know the power output(or usage) of these lights and exactly what intensity a WiFi will pick up?
Ok this is just a point of fact: they did not stop light! They stored the information contained initially in a light wave in a new medium that they had control over, then were able to stimulate the medium to get it to re-emit.
One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.
While I agree that cryptography CAN be used to hide sensitive information from a corrupt government that is by far not the only use: Encryption of sensitive business information that is sent through email, financial documents you don't want someone who steals your laptop to have access to, or personal notes that you don't want others who may use your workstation to see, that is just to enumerate a few. While the press release says that the German government does not recommend their software in "security sensitive areas" but since the product is open source one could imagine that this is only the first step in createing a heir to the PGP throne, which may be in need as NAI trys to dump that section. Government conspiracies are nothing new but it seems unlikely that they would create a new program(when one exists), make it open source, and expect people to flock to it like seagulls to food.