Actually in cellular anything that favors customer mobility is a bad thing with the current model. Notice how you normally have to sign a one or two year contract when signing up for those good deals? That's because a lot of the costs are frontloaded for the vendor, from processing to advertising to phone subsidizing, etc. My dad had received some horrible service from frontline people and had tons of billing mistakes over the almost two decades he has had cellphones, but once he reaches a certain level he always gets his way and usually more because he is a high volume user (two cellphones with large plans right now) and getting new customers like him is an expensive operation for the vendor so fixing his problem and giving him a small bone is a cheap way to "win" a customer. That and like many around here with computers he has always been a kind of driver of cellular use, from his first car install to the early bagphones all the way to current gwiz bluetooth-picturephone-3G models he has been an early adopter and a tech evangelist. Companies that piss him off get noted as such to many aquantices and those that have done well by him get promoted.
Although this problem is somewhat mitigated by the national do not call register.... cellular numbers are given from blocks owned by the cellphone providers and because numbers are not portable between landlines and portables it is easy for telemarketers to filter out the cellular banks from their call lists due to laws forbiding calls to cellular phones due to the reveiver pays nature of US cellular. This FCC ruling makes it so that this will no longer be possible and so telemarketers will be able to call cellphones and claim that they were not aware that it was a cellular number. But I do like the idea of moving my home number to an unlimited use local cellphone, north coast PCS has a 39.99 all you can eat local plan that will fit me nicely, 99.9% of my calls from my home number are local anyways. The amazing thing is the plan will be about as cheap as my local+long distance package cost on my landline.
Carmack and ID have been supporting moders for a long time, including adding a C like language to Quake 3 for modding. Then there's the fact that they release the code for older games, you can't get much more mod friendly than that "here have our code and do with it as you wish".
wrong penetration, I meant of HDTV sets. And the FCC has repeatedly pushed the date back for the bandwidth transfer, it was origionally scheduled to have occoured by this point.
You can get satelite service anywhere in the lower 48 and most of the populated parts of Alaska. Besides the VHF and UHF bands are already scheduled for eventual obsolesence when the digital bands become the standard.
It is dead eventually, current FCC rules dictate that the current broadcast spectrum goes back to the FCC for re-use after HDTV is officially the standard (2006 or a certain % penetration, probably 2010+ in reality) this is just talk about accelerating the deprecation to not wait for HDTV.
The most ubiqutous and cheapest wireless gear has been for the unliscensed ISM bands. The large chunk of bandwidth that the tv spectrum uses would allow all sorts of high speed devices to coexist because there could be a number of non-overlapping yet wide channels.
sorry to hear it, I had a spat where the dets weren't allowing my pc to resume from sleep correctly. But the latest WHQL drivers fix that again AND gave me an ~20% performance gain in NWN to boot. Try the 43.51's and see if they don't work well for you.
Well when I bought my latest card it was because the new game I was about to buy did not work with my video card (NWN doesn't like 3dfx cards so I had to upgrade from my v3 3k). I looked at what would run NWN well for around $100, most of the cards in that pricerange would run it fine, but then I looked at the benchmarks and noticed that the geforce3 Ti200 was running much better than the Geforce4 MX cards that were around the same pricepoint, did some research and found out about the lack of a shader unit in the MX cards and decided on the Ti200. It turns out that the difference in those cards which would have had little difference in performance for my game at the time (NWN) means that I may not have to buy a new card this fall because Carmack has said that my card is kind of the baseline he is using for Doom3. So by spending a couple dollars more and looking at a benchmark ~18 months before Doom3 came out I was able to save another generation of videocard upgrades.
Well since they give average framerate a number higher than 60fps CAN be usefull. The reason is is that at a higher average framerate the worst case is likely to be better than a card that can barely maintain the 60+fps needed for completely flicker free gameplay. If more games and reviewers gave minimum framerates then we wouldn't have to rely so much on the rediculously high average FPS to know we are going to get decent worst case fps. As an example I get around 42fps in NWN at my lcd's native resolution and with most effects on and max details, but when a bunch of spells are being cast and other things are going on onscreen (translucent clipped textures mostly) I can get down well below 20fps which is noticably choppy.
Fixes disks are dirt cheap for huge capacities and are orders of magnitude faster than optical, especially for seek time. Even if a game came on DVD I would still do the full install if for nothing other than faster area transitions and the lower noise level of not having my optical drive spinning all the time (my cdrw in particular is the loadest thing in my PC by about 20X (it's quite a few Db louder than the case fans).
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can look at some of my servers right now and see uptimes which are pushing a year.
So you are behind on how many critical patches which require a reboot?? MS patches which affect SQL server or IIS etc and are labeled critical and have admin level exploitation potential come out every couple of months. It's people who try to run MS boxes like they are UNIX machines that end up getting hit by slammer or worms like this. You NEED to apply patches and reboot every couple of months at a minimum, uptimes of over 3 months ususally mean there is some critical patch you missed which leaves you vulnerable. You can have fine availability with a cluster most of the time, but some patches have to be applied to the whole cluster simultaneously because of the way they change things, the different parts of the cluster can not be on differing patch levels or data corruption can occour. Like I said I have no problem with windows for non-critical roles, and with server 2003 maybe even for web serving (IIS 6 finally has a sane default install), but for things that are typically labeled enterprise applications (large DB, CRM, ERP, financials etc) there is no way I would build them on the MS platforms, the alternatives are too stable to really even consider it.
Boy are you ignorant, you think you can test a programmable shaders performance using DX7 style shader calls???? No way, DX7 fixed functions are a small subset of the capabilities of a DX9 card, and depending on how the DX7 level features are implemented (fixed paths vs translation to programmable shader code) may not in any way tell you anything about the programmable shader unit. What Nvidia did was not simply reordering instructions, they took a shader that was meant to run at a minimum of FP24 and replaced it with one running at INT12, a huge decrease in quality and a huge illicit gain in performance from a benchmarking perspective.
But some people like to look ahead a few months to what will be coming out. Doom3 and some other titles that will be out by the end of the summer or by xmas shopping season WILL use DX9 (or in the case of Doom3 OpenGL 2.0) features. So if you are building a box now or looking for an upgrade you might very well want to know who has the best DX9 performance so that you won't be underpowered by the fall.
actually in the context of benchmarking the only thing that can be seen as an optimization and not a cheat is a tweak that results in identical but faster output, such as the change that ATI made which reordered some of the instruction for the shader program to better fit the way their card did things. Changing the visual output from what the benchmark calls for is flat out cheating, sorry no other way around it. You can claim that things aren't fair for NVidia because their card does FP32 or FP16 and that ATI only does FP24, but the DX9 spec calls for FP24 as a minimum, the fact that NVidia only has modes that fall above or below this is their own problem, it was a design decision. Besides they didn't even use the FP16 mode, they used int12 which looks much worse then even the fast but somewhat passable FP16 (which still would have been technically cheating but would have been a little more consideration when bring up their architecture argument).
yep and just as well anyone who is running outlook on a production server and who has a two year old vulnerability unpatched needs to be terminated with prejudice.
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry but enterprise level and MS do not belong anywhere near each other despite what MS wants you to believe. I'm an MCSE and I can't imagine running critical services on the MS platform, user authentications, file sharing, and printing sure, but as an application platform windows server is just too bug ridden.
I hope they get as much blood as they can from MS and a crapload from Orange as well if Orange knew that the stuff they were getting from MS was sendo's property. This was dirty business at its worst.
The problem is controller failure is probably about 1% of disk failures. The much more common problems are motor failure and bearing failure, for these you have to physically remove the platters and place them in a drive with working mechanicals, not a simple task! The best way to avoid using drivesavers is regular backups, our biggest problems was convincing the marketing types to make sure they ran a backup if they never left the pc in the office overnight, two $5K charges to the departments budget in one quarter got the manager to force them to =)
Actually it's even more important than that, because they are not willing to give a royalty free liscense to the derivitive work of a GPL program that they are modifying and distributing they have no liscense to the origional GPL code. Essentially if they take patent action their settlement means nothing and they will be back in court. That would be an interesting court case, which wins, their patent protection or the copyright protection of the origional author(s)? Most probably anyone who violated their patents could be sued for patent infringement and the origional authors would have to come after them for the copyright violations.
Here's another vote for the 4550, though it is not the fastest color laser on the market because it uses a 4 pass process to make color, the faster ones have a single pass color process. The tradeoff from what I've seen is reliability, Cisco has a bunch of 4500 and 4550's and I don't think I heard of any of them needing major service in 2.5 years there.
Winamp 2.9+ are backporting of the best parts of 3 (wasabi mostly) without the horrible code bloat and convoluted ever changing plugin API. Basically take the best of winamp 2 and winamp 3 and make a great hybrid, this will eventually lead to winamp 5 which will be esentially winamp 2.9+ with the addition of the ability to run winamp 3 plugins.
I hope he takes Geiss with him, that man is as much a genious with visuals as Carmack is with FPS engines. I personally use mildrop to perform as a VJ at a bunch of underground parties and everyone is always blown away by it.
Obviously not from Ohio. Ohio courts suck horribly if you are the worker, we are all about big business when it comes to contract disputes, medical malpractice, and bankruptcy law. Almost anything less than 5 years can be enforced in a noncompete here. Justin is in California which means any non-compete is probably null and void from the courts perspective. California law is so extreme in that regard that G.E.'s standard noncompete clause has some small script that essentially says ignore all this if you live in California.
From dictionary.com: Carelessly discarded refuse, such as wastepaper I don't think that geocaching qualifies as littering, as the geocaches are neither carelessly placed nore refuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually in cellular anything that favors customer mobility is a bad thing with the current model. Notice how you normally have to sign a one or two year contract when signing up for those good deals? That's because a lot of the costs are frontloaded for the vendor, from processing to advertising to phone subsidizing, etc. My dad had received some horrible service from frontline people and had tons of billing mistakes over the almost two decades he has had cellphones, but once he reaches a certain level he always gets his way and usually more because he is a high volume user (two cellphones with large plans right now) and getting new customers like him is an expensive operation for the vendor so fixing his problem and giving him a small bone is a cheap way to "win" a customer. That and like many around here with computers he has always been a kind of driver of cellular use, from his first car install to the early bagphones all the way to current gwiz bluetooth-picturephone-3G models he has been an early adopter and a tech evangelist. Companies that piss him off get noted as such to many aquantices and those that have done well by him get promoted.
Although this problem is somewhat mitigated by the national do not call register.... cellular numbers are given from blocks owned by the cellphone providers and because numbers are not portable between landlines and portables it is easy for telemarketers to filter out the cellular banks from their call lists due to laws forbiding calls to cellular phones due to the reveiver pays nature of US cellular. This FCC ruling makes it so that this will no longer be possible and so telemarketers will be able to call cellphones and claim that they were not aware that it was a cellular number. But I do like the idea of moving my home number to an unlimited use local cellphone, north coast PCS has a 39.99 all you can eat local plan that will fit me nicely, 99.9% of my calls from my home number are local anyways. The amazing thing is the plan will be about as cheap as my local+long distance package cost on my landline.
Carmack and ID have been supporting moders for a long time, including adding a C like language to Quake 3 for modding. Then there's the fact that they release the code for older games, you can't get much more mod friendly than that "here have our code and do with it as you wish".
wrong penetration, I meant of HDTV sets. And the FCC has repeatedly pushed the date back for the bandwidth transfer, it was origionally scheduled to have occoured by this point.
You can get satelite service anywhere in the lower 48 and most of the populated parts of Alaska. Besides the VHF and UHF bands are already scheduled for eventual obsolesence when the digital bands become the standard.
It is dead eventually, current FCC rules dictate that the current broadcast spectrum goes back to the FCC for re-use after HDTV is officially the standard (2006 or a certain % penetration, probably 2010+ in reality) this is just talk about accelerating the deprecation to not wait for HDTV.
The most ubiqutous and cheapest wireless gear has been for the unliscensed ISM bands. The large chunk of bandwidth that the tv spectrum uses would allow all sorts of high speed devices to coexist because there could be a number of non-overlapping yet wide channels.
sorry to hear it, I had a spat where the dets weren't allowing my pc to resume from sleep correctly. But the latest WHQL drivers fix that again AND gave me an ~20% performance gain in NWN to boot. Try the 43.51's and see if they don't work well for you.
Well when I bought my latest card it was because the new game I was about to buy did not work with my video card (NWN doesn't like 3dfx cards so I had to upgrade from my v3 3k). I looked at what would run NWN well for around $100, most of the cards in that pricerange would run it fine, but then I looked at the benchmarks and noticed that the geforce3 Ti200 was running much better than the Geforce4 MX cards that were around the same pricepoint, did some research and found out about the lack of a shader unit in the MX cards and decided on the Ti200. It turns out that the difference in those cards which would have had little difference in performance for my game at the time (NWN) means that I may not have to buy a new card this fall because Carmack has said that my card is kind of the baseline he is using for Doom3. So by spending a couple dollars more and looking at a benchmark ~18 months before Doom3 came out I was able to save another generation of videocard upgrades.
Well since they give average framerate a number higher than 60fps CAN be usefull. The reason is is that at a higher average framerate the worst case is likely to be better than a card that can barely maintain the 60+fps needed for completely flicker free gameplay. If more games and reviewers gave minimum framerates then we wouldn't have to rely so much on the rediculously high average FPS to know we are going to get decent worst case fps. As an example I get around 42fps in NWN at my lcd's native resolution and with most effects on and max details, but when a bunch of spells are being cast and other things are going on onscreen (translucent clipped textures mostly) I can get down well below 20fps which is noticably choppy.
Fixes disks are dirt cheap for huge capacities and are orders of magnitude faster than optical, especially for seek time. Even if a game came on DVD I would still do the full install if for nothing other than faster area transitions and the lower noise level of not having my optical drive spinning all the time (my cdrw in particular is the loadest thing in my PC by about 20X (it's quite a few Db louder than the case fans).
I can look at some of my servers right now and see uptimes which are pushing a year.
So you are behind on how many critical patches which require a reboot?? MS patches which affect SQL server or IIS etc and are labeled critical and have admin level exploitation potential come out every couple of months. It's people who try to run MS boxes like they are UNIX machines that end up getting hit by slammer or worms like this. You NEED to apply patches and reboot every couple of months at a minimum, uptimes of over 3 months ususally mean there is some critical patch you missed which leaves you vulnerable. You can have fine availability with a cluster most of the time, but some patches have to be applied to the whole cluster simultaneously because of the way they change things, the different parts of the cluster can not be on differing patch levels or data corruption can occour. Like I said I have no problem with windows for non-critical roles, and with server 2003 maybe even for web serving (IIS 6 finally has a sane default install), but for things that are typically labeled enterprise applications (large DB, CRM, ERP, financials etc) there is no way I would build them on the MS platforms, the alternatives are too stable to really even consider it.
Boy are you ignorant, you think you can test a programmable shaders performance using DX7 style shader calls???? No way, DX7 fixed functions are a small subset of the capabilities of a DX9 card, and depending on how the DX7 level features are implemented (fixed paths vs translation to programmable shader code) may not in any way tell you anything about the programmable shader unit. What Nvidia did was not simply reordering instructions, they took a shader that was meant to run at a minimum of FP24 and replaced it with one running at INT12, a huge decrease in quality and a huge illicit gain in performance from a benchmarking perspective.
But some people like to look ahead a few months to what will be coming out. Doom3 and some other titles that will be out by the end of the summer or by xmas shopping season WILL use DX9 (or in the case of Doom3 OpenGL 2.0) features. So if you are building a box now or looking for an upgrade you might very well want to know who has the best DX9 performance so that you won't be underpowered by the fall.
actually in the context of benchmarking the only thing that can be seen as an optimization and not a cheat is a tweak that results in identical but faster output, such as the change that ATI made which reordered some of the instruction for the shader program to better fit the way their card did things. Changing the visual output from what the benchmark calls for is flat out cheating, sorry no other way around it. You can claim that things aren't fair for NVidia because their card does FP32 or FP16 and that ATI only does FP24, but the DX9 spec calls for FP24 as a minimum, the fact that NVidia only has modes that fall above or below this is their own problem, it was a design decision. Besides they didn't even use the FP16 mode, they used int12 which looks much worse then even the fast but somewhat passable FP16 (which still would have been technically cheating but would have been a little more consideration when bring up their architecture argument).
yep and just as well anyone who is running outlook on a production server and who has a two year old vulnerability unpatched needs to be terminated with prejudice.
Sorry but enterprise level and MS do not belong anywhere near each other despite what MS wants you to believe. I'm an MCSE and I can't imagine running critical services on the MS platform, user authentications, file sharing, and printing sure, but as an application platform windows server is just too bug ridden.
I hope they get as much blood as they can from MS and a crapload from Orange as well if Orange knew that the stuff they were getting from MS was sendo's property. This was dirty business at its worst.
The problem is controller failure is probably about 1% of disk failures. The much more common problems are motor failure and bearing failure, for these you have to physically remove the platters and place them in a drive with working mechanicals, not a simple task! The best way to avoid using drivesavers is regular backups, our biggest problems was convincing the marketing types to make sure they ran a backup if they never left the pc in the office overnight, two $5K charges to the departments budget in one quarter got the manager to force them to =)
Actually it's even more important than that, because they are not willing to give a royalty free liscense to the derivitive work of a GPL program that they are modifying and distributing they have no liscense to the origional GPL code. Essentially if they take patent action their settlement means nothing and they will be back in court. That would be an interesting court case, which wins, their patent protection or the copyright protection of the origional author(s)? Most probably anyone who violated their patents could be sued for patent infringement and the origional authors would have to come after them for the copyright violations.
Here's another vote for the 4550, though it is not the fastest color laser on the market because it uses a 4 pass process to make color, the faster ones have a single pass color process. The tradeoff from what I've seen is reliability, Cisco has a bunch of 4500 and 4550's and I don't think I heard of any of them needing major service in 2.5 years there.
Winamp 2.9+ are backporting of the best parts of 3 (wasabi mostly) without the horrible code bloat and convoluted ever changing plugin API. Basically take the best of winamp 2 and winamp 3 and make a great hybrid, this will eventually lead to winamp 5 which will be esentially winamp 2.9+ with the addition of the ability to run winamp 3 plugins.
I hope he takes Geiss with him, that man is as much a genious with visuals as Carmack is with FPS engines. I personally use mildrop to perform as a VJ at a bunch of underground parties and everyone is always blown away by it.
Obviously not from Ohio. Ohio courts suck horribly if you are the worker, we are all about big business when it comes to contract disputes, medical malpractice, and bankruptcy law. Almost anything less than 5 years can be enforced in a noncompete here. Justin is in California which means any non-compete is probably null and void from the courts perspective. California law is so extreme in that regard that G.E.'s standard noncompete clause has some small script that essentially says ignore all this if you live in California.
From dictionary.com:
Carelessly discarded refuse, such as wastepaper
I don't think that geocaching qualifies as littering, as the geocaches are neither carelessly placed nore refuse.