Now THAT is DAMN interesting; many thanks on the info. Do you know of a board with a firewire header perchance (attempting to save myself some research)?
Indeed, there are in fact Core 2 Quad supporting Mini-itx boards out there...I'm reasonably sure I also came across a core I7 option recently (industrial spec boards). You can pack an awful lot of ooomph into the small packages.
You're looking to build a media PC but I couldnt help but be disappointed by the use of a micro-atx rather than mini-itx motherboard. While we may have to wait for Nvidia's Ion platform before mini-itx can do HD playback the current batch of boards are quite nice for SD playback.
Boxee looks interesting...are there any comparisons out there between it, Freevo and MythTV?
Like a few posters above me I started with Slackware in...94..Maybe 95. I remember that install actually being quite smooth since my hardware was well supported (a somewhat antiquated 486SX-25). Ahhhhh having a dual boot machine back then really was something to geek out about.
I've done maybe..30 installs since then, moved between Redhat, SuSE and Ubuntu and STILL the totally smooth installs are more to do with having experience with the hardware though. 8.10 on my home media PC? INCREDIBLY smooth; even managed to get my wireless card running full speed. My latest install on a core i7? Incredibly smooth once I worked out (4 hours later) that having ANYTHING hanging off the Gigabyte sata-2 controller would crash out the install into a BusyBox:/
Point being that Linux is still very dependent on having just the right combination of hardware to get a smooth install. The wrong MB, the wrong wireless card (especially), and you will be p**** around searching forums (damn I miss Usenet and Dejanews...Google really have done that an injustice), searching for drivers, applying patches etc etc.
But still, yup youre right; the last few years with MS having totally dropped the ball with Vista has given Linux and the X/Gnome/KDE desktop some real time to catch up and its almost a different ballgame. Almost....
Anyway - I think it will be hard for someone else to measure up to Tennant!
They say this every regeneration. I remember when they were saying no-one would be able to measure upto Tom Baker; then Peter Davidson; then....oh yeah:(
Sadly, Vanguard is dead and has been running on life support since a few weeks after launch. Due to the low subscriber base I strongly doubt it will EVER see an expansion, which would be the only way it can ever hope to GROW its subscriber base! But maybe it would have been worth going back except......
Age of Conan! Its actually GOOD and has delivered on many of the promises Vanguard was making. I'm not saying there aren't problems (only a few of which are major) but I've not had this much fun in an MMO since EQ.
That was a damn *major* upgrade from 7.04 to 8.04 now wasn't it?
I know, I'm being facetious here (sorry) but I had a very good transition on my laptop, but a much worse experience on my HTPC due to wireless card issues (this is beta though) so at leasts ONE of those upgrade transitions has the *potential* to be simple. And if we're fair when comparing it so XP; SP1 and SP2 could be viewed as equivalent to the 6.04 to 7.04 upgrade and SP3 is on the horizon, so it is hardly as if XP remained static.
I know what you're saying but I DONT think your comparison is entirely fair.
"The newest machines and their software have networking, security features, full color, real-time spell check, disk-wide indexing, real-time spreadsheet recalculation, and a host of other features missing from the oldest models and present in reduced form in the middle-aged models."
There is a point though where features become cruft and then generally have a negative impact on performance, security or user experience. Different applications reach this point at various times in their lives and Windows seems to have hit this point with Vista.
To be honest, Id probably still be using Windows 95 and WordPerfect office for most of my general office needs if I hadn't been compelled to "upgrade" by MS and driver obsolescence. Both gave me a very "clean" user experience and there are few features that I actually use today that were not present then (of course there are many improvements to the OS/Software that are not visible within the "user experience" that would not have been feasible without an upgrade e.g. Multi core support, security etc).
The problem with the above is it shows just how short a distance we have traveled in the last 10 years. Wheres my AI assistant? Agent technology? RT Voice transcription? What did I get? RT Spell checking; hell I feel cheated.
I couldnt help but find this comment funny (stupid not haha).
The PC has THE biggest back catalogue of games in existance, to the extent that by far the largest portion of that catalogue is no longer in circulation. Then lets add to this emulation, where the PC is the only machine on which you can play most of the last generation and older console AND arcade releases. Oh and lets not forgot the absolutely MASSIVE number of flash games out there.
In short, the PC is probably approaching having a hundred THOUSAND games available to play, whereas many consoles wont even SEE a thousand games over its lifespan.
Or did you actually fail to think about what there being "more to gaming than good graphics" actually means?
"but, as CPU power is currently reaching its limits (or so it seems) multicore seems to be the only way to go"
I find something strange in the way we're going wide rather than high especially with Intel CPUs. Most of the Core2 range overclock VERY nicely on air with the new e8400+ hitting the 4Ghz mark often with ease. With a GOOD motherboard, RAM and cooling 5Ghz is possible and even 6Ghz in the *extreme* (read liquid nitrogen) cases. I cant help but wonder if we wouldn't be seeing higher speeds if there was even a single company dedicated towards a fast single (possibly cooler) core and better cooling than standard air.... Anyways, so perhaps wide ISN'T the *only* way to go....of course though with heterogeneous cores we will probably one day see the situation where 1 core is tweaked to offer the maximum speed to none parallelisable tasks so maybe by that point this would be moot anyways.
Being British I had similar thoughts. However I have some slight inclining of the separation of power between president and government so had assumed that many might have differing opinions on whom they would elect as president vs those they would elect to govern.
For those who would vote to elect a Republican government though, well..... I guess someone has to still program in Visual Basic.
Perhaps because he/she/(it?) lives in a country with different copyright laws to those which you seem to approve of?
Realistically its time for the big media companies to stop this stupidity and starting to make money where it is available to be made e.g. premium collectors versions with HIGH QUALITY re-encodings into various formats so that the VALUE in the product is actually realized by the IP owner; rather than the MEDIA owners having to add that value for themselves by investing their time to do the re-encoding (or having to obtain it from non legitimate sources).
It's sad to admit but that will probably only come about after this thing has been adapted for the mass market as a transportation devise for overweight Americans. Until then it will just be too damn expensive for the majority of people who would really benefit to afford to buy. So how long before we start calling people "mojo" ya think?
Unless the dollar has tanked in the last few days your numbers ARE way off. MB $70-80 (e.g ASUS P5N-MX), CPU $70 (e.g e2160 just overclock the hell out of it), cooler $30, RAM 2GB $70 (e.g. OCZ 6400). That should be quite a nicely performing system for @ $250 sans graphics card although I might bump up the MB to the $100 range in order to be able to get a higher stable overclock out of the e2160.
Trust me when I say I know what you mean. I'm in the same boat with several AGP systems that it seems stupid to upgrade just so that I can pop a new video card in there but eventually one has to bite the bullet. I'm personally doing it a piece per month with the graphics card last on the list. At the end of the day I'm going to be paying LESS for a 9600GT that a 7900GS so it *almost* makes sense...:)
I was 4 or 5 and this thing had actual handle bars and a throttle - I can still picture it in my mind but had totally forgotten it was possible to do wheelies on it (I'm not sure I realized, at that age, that you could). I can still remember concentrating incredibly hard trying to get the speed just right for the longer jumps....*sigh* Nostalgia.
If something works and works well (which I had understood that until now Live was doing) why break a winning formula? Since we can reasonably guess that most of the Live dashboard contents is served by IIS pumping XML with XSLT transformations on the client side under modified IE rendering engine; its a reasonably safe assumption that the vast majority of the back-end is IIS/.Net based - one nice thing about MS is they do at least eat their own dog-food.
Oh, total Live n00b here BTW and was amazed by how bad it has been after the praise Id heard for the Live service - simple pages on the demo listings fail to render while demo downloads (once I det to them( come over blisteringly fast suggesting that it is a scalability problem rather than bandwidth.
Thanks for those links - I hadn't realized how much players had dropped in price. £117 for a combi-drive puts it into the sensible region for a HTPC....except I assume one would need vista and a HDCP equiped graphics card and TV?
Ahhh well, the graphics card and TV I could live with, Vista? No way.
"A related issue about slow file copy: there's a curious discrepancy I found with Linux copying files over a network with windows PCs. Copying from XP to Vista took less than 1/4 the time to copy files from XP to Ubuntu or Vista to Ubuntu (which was even slower). Ubuntu also became incredibly slow and unresponsive during the copying, so much so that I gave up trying to do anything with the machine during the time it took (some 3 hours). I can't figure out why it would take over four times longer to do with Linux than with windows. Has anyone noticed a similar problem and found a way to correct it?"
Yup, uninstall Vista.:)
In all seriousness I did notice this (along with the fact that Vista natively would take roughly 1000x longer to uncompress a zip than was necessary) and the above WAS my response.
Ive done something similar, however I've stuck with using Linux as my main OS and just boot into Vista for games. If it wasn't for gaming I would delete my Vista partition.....
If ATI only came through with the goods that they hyped, such a accelerated video encoding using the cards, then there would be those of us with these on 24/7. I invested in 2xX1800 (while these things where expensive) and I'm still waiting to see a realistic return on that investment.
DUE SOLELY TO THAT, when my video encoding system gets an upgrade its going Intel+NVidia+Linux....a complete swing from its current AMD+ATI+Windows deployment.
"I think this attempt is doomed to failure, at least in terms of growing their readership and fan base. Charging a monthy access fee? Who do they think will pay this? You want to hook new readers on to your stuff, but tell them "hey, it's great, trust me. Pay up and you'll see how great it is!"? That's not going to fly."
$4.99*12/2 = £30. Sounds good to me.
I'll bite if they can quickly build up their portfolio so that I can catch up on the last 20 years of comics that Ive missed. And if the format is convenient and quality/speed up to scratch. And if I find a good enough series I'll probably pop to the local comic book store and read the print version. You see I just had a look at the dcp stuff and yes, I can grab the last 200 days and then keep checking on the torrents that will take 231 hours to complete but...thats quite a lot of hassle to go through. Too much hassle. Whereas £30 to have all the stuff organized and in one place...well you know what? THAT sounds like its worth paying for.
So I think you're wrong. I think there are a lot of older comics fans who will jump all over this when they find out about it AND its going to grow their printed sales. If there is going to be any damage from this its going to be in the back-issues market (and thats going to hurt a lot of smaller shops) but overall I think consumers/fans are going to be big winners.
I'm going to give a nod to this since its also my major problem in 7.10 (G1S laptop). Things are flawless after a reboot but once Ive hibernated things head downhill fast. The most annoying thing? Wireless worked flawlessly most of August and September:/
Add on the amount of time 7.10 takes to resume from hibernation (slower than Vista for me, contrary to TFA authors experience) and introduction of the "SLEEP OR DIE" mode (50/50 which it will do) and sadly I STILL havnt been able to wipe Vista off the machine. Roll on, Hardon!
Slashdot Mirror
Now THAT is DAMN interesting; many thanks on the info. Do you know of a board with a firewire header perchance (attempting to save myself some research)?
Indeed, there are in fact Core 2 Quad supporting Mini-itx boards out there...I'm reasonably sure I also came across a core I7 option recently (industrial spec boards). You can pack an awful lot of ooomph into the small packages.
You're looking to build a media PC but I couldnt help but be disappointed by the use of a micro-atx rather than mini-itx motherboard. While we may have to wait for Nvidia's Ion platform before mini-itx can do HD playback the current batch of boards are quite nice for SD playback.
Boxee looks interesting...are there any comparisons out there between it, Freevo and MythTV?
Like a few posters above me I started with Slackware in...94..Maybe 95. I remember that install actually being quite smooth since my hardware was well supported (a somewhat antiquated 486SX-25). Ahhhhh having a dual boot machine back then really was something to geek out about.
I've done maybe..30 installs since then, moved between Redhat, SuSE and Ubuntu and STILL the totally smooth installs are more to do with having experience with the hardware though. 8.10 on my home media PC? INCREDIBLY smooth; even managed to get my wireless card running full speed. My latest install on a core i7? Incredibly smooth once I worked out (4 hours later) that having ANYTHING hanging off the Gigabyte sata-2 controller would crash out the install into a BusyBox :/
Point being that Linux is still very dependent on having just the right combination of hardware to get a smooth install. The wrong MB, the wrong wireless card (especially), and you will be p**** around searching forums (damn I miss Usenet and Dejanews...Google really have done that an injustice), searching for drivers, applying patches etc etc.
But still, yup youre right; the last few years with MS having totally dropped the ball with Vista has given Linux and the X/Gnome/KDE desktop some real time to catch up and its almost a different ballgame. Almost....
Anyway - I think it will be hard for someone else to measure up to Tennant!
:(
They say this every regeneration. I remember when they were saying no-one would be able to measure upto Tom Baker; then Peter Davidson; then....oh yeah
Sadly, Vanguard is dead and has been running on life support since a few weeks after launch. Due to the low subscriber base I strongly doubt it will EVER see an expansion, which would be the only way it can ever hope to GROW its subscriber base! But maybe it would have been worth going back except......
Age of Conan! Its actually GOOD and has delivered on many of the promises Vanguard was making. I'm not saying there aren't problems (only a few of which are major) but I've not had this much fun in an MMO since EQ.
sudo update-manager -D * password * click * click *
That was a damn *major* upgrade from 7.04 to 8.04 now wasn't it?
I know, I'm being facetious here (sorry) but I had a very good transition on my laptop, but a much worse experience on my HTPC due to wireless card issues (this is beta though) so at leasts ONE of those upgrade transitions has the *potential* to be simple. And if we're fair when comparing it so XP; SP1 and SP2 could be viewed as equivalent to the 6.04 to 7.04 upgrade and SP3 is on the horizon, so it is hardly as if XP remained static.
I know what you're saying but I DONT think your comparison is entirely fair.
"The newest machines and their software have networking, security features, full color, real-time spell check, disk-wide indexing, real-time spreadsheet recalculation, and a host of other features missing from the oldest models and present in reduced form in the middle-aged models."
There is a point though where features become cruft and then generally have a negative impact on performance, security or user experience. Different applications reach this point at various times in their lives and Windows seems to have hit this point with Vista.
To be honest, Id probably still be using Windows 95 and WordPerfect office for most of my general office needs if I hadn't been compelled to "upgrade" by MS and driver obsolescence. Both gave me a very "clean" user experience and there are few features that I actually use today that were not present then (of course there are many improvements to the OS/Software that are not visible within the "user experience" that would not have been feasible without an upgrade e.g. Multi core support, security etc).
The problem with the above is it shows just how short a distance we have traveled in the last 10 years. Wheres my AI assistant? Agent technology? RT Voice transcription? What did I get? RT Spell checking; hell I feel cheated.
-1 TROLL || -5 LUSER.
Ubuntu was the only OS *UNHACKED* at the end of the conference http://news.sky.com/skynews/xml/article/tech/0,,91221-13702,00.html
I couldnt help but find this comment funny (stupid not haha).
The PC has THE biggest back catalogue of games in existance, to the extent that by far the largest portion of that catalogue is no longer in circulation. Then lets add to this emulation, where the PC is the only machine on which you can play most of the last generation and older console AND arcade releases. Oh and lets not forgot the absolutely MASSIVE number of flash games out there.
In short, the PC is probably approaching having a hundred THOUSAND games available to play, whereas many consoles wont even SEE a thousand games over its lifespan.
Or did you actually fail to think about what there being "more to gaming than good graphics" actually means?
"but, as CPU power is currently reaching its limits (or so it seems) multicore seems to be the only way to go"
I find something strange in the way we're going wide rather than high especially with Intel CPUs. Most of the Core2 range overclock VERY nicely on air with the new e8400+ hitting the 4Ghz mark often with ease. With a GOOD motherboard, RAM and cooling 5Ghz is possible and even 6Ghz in the *extreme* (read liquid nitrogen) cases. I cant help but wonder if we wouldn't be seeing higher speeds if there was even a single company dedicated towards a fast single (possibly cooler) core and better cooling than standard air.... Anyways, so perhaps wide ISN'T the *only* way to go....of course though with heterogeneous cores we will probably one day see the situation where 1 core is tweaked to offer the maximum speed to none parallelisable tasks so maybe by that point this would be moot anyways.
Being British I had similar thoughts. However I have some slight inclining of the separation of power between president and government so had assumed that many might have differing opinions on whom they would elect as president vs those they would elect to govern.
For those who would vote to elect a Republican government though, well..... I guess someone has to still program in Visual Basic.
Perhaps because he/she/(it?) lives in a country with different copyright laws to those which you seem to approve of?
Realistically its time for the big media companies to stop this stupidity and starting to make money where it is available to be made e.g. premium collectors versions with HIGH QUALITY re-encodings into various formats so that the VALUE in the product is actually realized by the IP owner; rather than the MEDIA owners having to add that value for themselves by investing their time to do the re-encoding (or having to obtain it from non legitimate sources).
It's sad to admit but that will probably only come about after this thing has been adapted for the mass market as a transportation devise for overweight Americans. Until then it will just be too damn expensive for the majority of people who would really benefit to afford to buy. So how long before we start calling people "mojo" ya think?
Unless the dollar has tanked in the last few days your numbers ARE way off. MB $70-80 (e.g ASUS P5N-MX), CPU $70 (e.g e2160 just overclock the hell out of it), cooler $30, RAM 2GB $70 (e.g. OCZ 6400). That should be quite a nicely performing system for @ $250 sans graphics card although I might bump up the MB to the $100 range in order to be able to get a higher stable overclock out of the e2160.
:)
Trust me when I say I know what you mean. I'm in the same boat with several AGP systems that it seems stupid to upgrade just so that I can pop a new video card in there but eventually one has to bite the bullet. I'm personally doing it a piece per month with the graphics card last on the list. At the end of the day I'm going to be paying LESS for a 9600GT that a 7900GS so it *almost* makes sense...
Are you the Lead developer for Vista perchance?
I was 4 or 5 and this thing had actual handle bars and a throttle - I can still picture it in my mind but had totally forgotten it was possible to do wheelies on it (I'm not sure I realized, at that age, that you could). I can still remember concentrating incredibly hard trying to get the speed just right for the longer jumps....*sigh* Nostalgia.
If something works and works well (which I had understood that until now Live was doing) why break a winning formula? Since we can reasonably guess that most of the Live dashboard contents is served by IIS pumping XML with XSLT transformations on the client side under modified IE rendering engine; its a reasonably safe assumption that the vast majority of the back-end is IIS/.Net based - one nice thing about MS is they do at least eat their own dog-food.
Oh, total Live n00b here BTW and was amazed by how bad it has been after the praise Id heard for the Live service - simple pages on the demo listings fail to render while demo downloads (once I det to them( come over blisteringly fast suggesting that it is a scalability problem rather than bandwidth.
Thanks for those links - I hadn't realized how much players had dropped in price. £117 for a combi-drive puts it into the sensible region for a HTPC....except I assume one would need vista and a HDCP equiped graphics card and TV?
Ahhh well, the graphics card and TV I could live with, Vista? No way.
"A related issue about slow file copy: there's a curious discrepancy I found with Linux copying files over a network with windows PCs. Copying from XP to Vista took less than 1/4 the time to copy files from XP to Ubuntu or Vista to Ubuntu (which was even slower). Ubuntu also became incredibly slow and unresponsive during the copying, so much so that I gave up trying to do anything with the machine during the time it took (some 3 hours). I can't figure out why it would take over four times longer to do with Linux than with windows. Has anyone noticed a similar problem and found a way to correct it?"
:)
Yup, uninstall Vista.
In all seriousness I did notice this (along with the fact that Vista natively would take roughly 1000x longer to uncompress a zip than was necessary) and the above WAS my response.
Ive done something similar, however I've stuck with using Linux as my main OS and just boot into Vista for games. If it wasn't for gaming I would delete my Vista partition.....
If ATI only came through with the goods that they hyped, such a accelerated video encoding using the cards, then there would be those of us with these on 24/7. I invested in 2xX1800 (while these things where expensive) and I'm still waiting to see a realistic return on that investment.
DUE SOLELY TO THAT, when my video encoding system gets an upgrade its going Intel+NVidia+Linux....a complete swing from its current AMD+ATI+Windows deployment.
"I think this attempt is doomed to failure, at least in terms of growing their readership and fan base. Charging a monthy access fee? Who do they think will pay this? You want to hook new readers on to your stuff, but tell them "hey, it's great, trust me. Pay up and you'll see how great it is!"? That's not going to fly."
:)
$4.99*12/2 = £30. Sounds good to me.
I'll bite if they can quickly build up their portfolio so that I can catch up on the last 20 years of comics that Ive missed. And if the format is convenient and quality/speed up to scratch. And if I find a good enough series I'll probably pop to the local comic book store and read the print version. You see I just had a look at the dcp stuff and yes, I can grab the last 200 days and then keep checking on the torrents that will take 231 hours to complete but...thats quite a lot of hassle to go through. Too much hassle. Whereas £30 to have all the stuff organized and in one place...well you know what? THAT sounds like its worth paying for.
So I think you're wrong. I think there are a lot of older comics fans who will jump all over this when they find out about it AND its going to grow their printed sales. If there is going to be any damage from this its going to be in the back-issues market (and thats going to hurt a lot of smaller shops) but overall I think consumers/fans are going to be big winners.
Now wheres the DC/Independent stuff?
I'm going to give a nod to this since its also my major problem in 7.10 (G1S laptop). Things are flawless after a reboot but once Ive hibernated things head downhill fast. The most annoying thing? Wireless worked flawlessly most of August and September :/
Add on the amount of time 7.10 takes to resume from hibernation (slower than Vista for me, contrary to TFA authors experience) and introduction of the "SLEEP OR DIE" mode (50/50 which it will do) and sadly I STILL havnt been able to wipe Vista off the machine. Roll on, Hardon!
Whoever designed the front end UI needs SLAPPING. Hard. Very hard. And often.