PS1.4 isn't natively supported by *most* nvidia cards. The spec for PS2.0 is such that it's all-encompassing. If you support PS2.0 you support PS 1.4 and PS 1.1. If you support PS1.4 you support PS 1.1, etc.
So this is how it should look, properly: - Game 1: no shaders at all, only static T&L (DX7-class effects, given comparatively little weighting in overall score) - Game 2: vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.4 (natively supported by GFFX, ATI Radeon 8500 and above) - Game 3: vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.4 (natively supported by GFFX, ATI Radeon 8500 and above) - Game 4: vertex shader 2.0 and pixel shader 1.4+2.0 (DX9 cards only, Radeon 9x00 and GFFX)
Nvidia's lack of support for PS1.4 is their own design choice, and now they have to live with it. The GF4 was released after DX8.1 came out, which contained the PS1.4 spec, but they chose not to support it. ATI Radeon 8500 and above have no problem with this because they supported DX8.1 from the getgo, but nvidia did not change and continued their 8.0 support. As was previously mentioned in the article, nvidia was participating in the developer's beta until Dec 2002, well into the development period for 3dm03 and a month after they paper launched the GFFX, so they knew what was going on with the benchmark for a long time beforehand and didn't change their stance for a while. Presumably, as a beta member up until Dec 2002 if they didn't like the choice of PS 1.4 in extensive use, then they could've said something earlier.
The key to regarding 3dm03 is it's goal as a forward-looking benchmark. Both DX8 games and DX9 games are currently in development, and many DX7 games are still in existence (remember, HL2 doesn't require anything above a DX6 card), so in this respect 3DM03 is still fair in its test design.
Hah, and let them find something else to charge me with each month? It's bad enough that I have to pay for phone service when I only use my cell phone, now I'm going to have another charge on my bursar account labeled "University File Sharing Online - REQ'D". Sure, they could roll it into the tuition to hide the fact that the fee's there, but that doesn't hide the fact that it exists. And if I don't like the "convenient" service they provide (much like calling long distance from my room phone)? I suppose ResNet will just give me the finger and tell me to walk.
I'm going to give up mod points here just to chime in, since this is an issue I care about.
Anyone looking to get good wireless card support (802.11b) should buy one with a prism2 chip or an Orinoco. I know many that have had good luck with these cards, and I know for a fact that the Orinoco cards are essentially plug and play in linux. Do NOT buy the TI chipsets (sometimes marketed as 22mbps 802.11b+) or the Broadcom chipsets; word on the street (heh) is that these companies have been less than forthcoming with specs so people can write proper drivers for them.
It's too bad that this is the sad state of wireless support in linux, that we must be at the manufacturer's mercy to get our hardware working properly. I've been waiting for 2 years now to get my USB wireless card (oh yeah, avoid those too if you can) working in linux, and it's all because the company doesn't care.
Because these rendering errors only occur when you go off the timedemo camera track. If you were on the normal track (like you would be if you were just running the standard demo) you would not notice it. Go off the track and the card ceases to render properly. It's an optimization that is too specific and too coincidental for the excuse "driver bug" to work. It's not the first time nvidia has been seen to 'optimize' for 3dmark either (there was a driver set, a 42.xx or 43.xx, can't remember, where it didn't even render things like explosions and smoke in game test 1 for 3DM03)
Uhhh, what are you talking about? When ATI did it EVERYONE ridiculed them for such a bug (it was a genuine driver bug; one driver release later the image quality AND expected performance returned). Not to mention when ATI did it, it was nvidia that was giving the information about it to the websites. No evidence of that in this instance (yet). People still bring it up whenever people talk about optimizations and cheating; even you just did.
Why should you use Cg? At this point, the only benefit one can see is if you're going to be doing crossplatform coding (DX vs. OGL). If you're going to be doing DX-only, you should stick with HLSL. Why?
Cg was developed, designed, and created by nvidia. While one of their claims is that it can be made to run on any card and is multiplatform, don't let that fool you. Cg is, at its worst, a thinly veiled attempt to convince developers to produce optimal code for nvidia cards at the expense of broad hardware support. ATI has already said that they will not be supporting Cg (in order for it to work best on ATI cards, someone needs to create profiles for it) and will instead be supporting HLSL. I doubt S3/Via or SIS have the resources to commit to 2 different projects, so I bet they're going to go with HLSL.
If you don't understand why nvidia might be looking for code that works best only on its cards (it's almost a "duh" question), look at it a different way. Look at the GFFX. In almost every instance, it's a failure. Sure, it can stick to 32-bit precision, but it runs really, really slow when you do (just look at the 3dmark03 scores recently released and john carmack's.plan comments). When it runs at 16-bit precision, it's still damn slow, almost always losing out to the Radeon 9700/9800s, but it's a little more competitive (DX9's minimum spec appears to require 24bit precision, but rumor says the jury's still out on that). It's in nvidia's best interest to make the FX appear to be fast (which it isn't), and so they're relegated to make Cg code that optimizes for nvidia cards their best interest.
Sorry I don't have links, but the beyond3d.com forums have a lot of information on this subject.
I imagine not if you advertised it properly. This is just a hack, nothing more. If you modded it and then sold it as a "AWESOME DEAL ON A 9700! ONLY 2 LEFT!!!1111" that would qualify as false advertising (not to mention a stupid name for your auction =) If you say it's 9500 modded to become a 9700, then you're just telling the truth.
This has been present for as long as I can remember in RealPlayer 8.0, and probably 7 and G2 (the three are all really similar).
Luckily, neither version of RealOne uses this. Even though they ask you to give them an email address/password (this is for their grand "RealOne BlankPass" subscription based service and lets them decide what special features your RealOne player gets), they don't have this stupid little thing now. There is a single checkbox during signup that lets them know you don't want your address shared and I think there's one that says you don't want any email from RealNetworks either.
The latest realone has actually been getting better about letting you turn shit off. Under Tools>Preferences>Automatic Services, a bunch of stuff is turned on by default but it lets you turn off various automatic and annoying things (like the Message Center, for instance...). Once you do this, RealOne Player acts just like that, a player, and not a marketing tool.
What he was talking about was the Block Character feature within PocketPC. It emulates Graffiti (which Xerox claims emulates Unistroke) as another method of entering text (and presumably to make it easier to steal PalmOS users). So, if copying Unistroke is the wrong thing to do, doesn't copying Graffiti, which may or may not copy Unistroke, fall under the same problem?
In other words:
Xerox claims: Unistroke=Graffiti PalmOS What MS does: Block Character=Graffiti So... Unistroke=Graffiti PalmOS=Block Character on PPC
You'll also remember that Carmack said (in a video no less), and I quote:
"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"
"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."
Rumor also has it that the GFFX's performance drops substantially at 128 bit precision compared to 64bit. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen (do you own a GFFX right now?), but whether or not the hype is true is something to keep in mind.
It looks like the GFFX will be better than the 9700pro. Will the price premium (rumor has it at $499) over a 9700pro (street price around $300 now) be worth it? That's up to the consumers, and whether or not nvidia even delivers on time.
When DirectX 9 is out the door, it will not only be faster, but look better. Much better. I suppose I'll catch flack for buying into the hype, but I've been blown away every time.
Directx 9 IS out the door. ATI has released a new driver set designed for DX9 (although the OGL support within that set seems to suck, so stick with the Omega drivers until another Catalyst release) and all those demos they showed off at the 9700pro launch. Don't forget that a 9700pro is designed for DX9 too. GFFX is not unique here (or even the first).
Graphics will not look substantially better on a nv card than on ati. That is marketing hype.
If AOL Communicator is truly everything you say it is, then it is most likely going to set into question the status of the Netscape 7.x series. It will not affect Mozilla. Mozilla is an (mostly) independent organization that can function fine on its own even if AOL cuts all ties, thanks to the fact that it's OSS. Mozilla.org develops the Gecko engine, which is what *powers* AOLComm. Without gecko there is no Compuserve 7, AOL OS X, or AOL Communicator.
Umm, your logic doesn't work. MP3 is the current de facto standard for compressed audio. RealJukebox and RealOne both play MP3. Does *anybody* associate MP3 with Real? No!
If Ogg was the defacto standard, more people than Real would be supporting it. Real's a good step towards further usage of Ogg.
Chimera uses all-aqua native widgets. Best check up on those facts before you post. Mozilla/Netscape do not use native widgets, although they are designed to work more seamlessly with the native OS theme than they have before (classic inherits all of your system look, including aqua), although all of it is XUL.
Also, Netscape 7 and Mozilla use the same basic codebase (1.0.1 to be exact). So you can't think that Mozilla 1.0.x is miles ahead of Netscape 7, because, in reality, they are the same. Mozilla does progress a little faster than Netscape does though, as the latest Mozilla is 1.2, so the speed may have increased a bit since 1.0.
Mozilla and Netscape 7 are slow in OS X every once in a while (particularly on G3s I've seen) but it's still usable. Chimera tends to be better in these cases.
Except the same chart also shows the new palms with ARM processors, which are significantly more powerful than the motorola DB VZs typically used. This includes the new Palm Tungsten T and two of the new Sony Clies. Granted, all 3 are very high end (MSRP $499-$599), but they do have the power necessary for good mp3/ogg decoding, as opposed to all the old OS3/4 machines.
It's possible the original drivers are buggy. It certainly isn't *impossible* (and it won't be impossible for NV either, you might note. GFFX is not a rehashed GF3 core like the GF4 was, and it is likely that NV will run into the occasional driver hiccup with their new series as well). FWIW, the 9700pro driver launch has been ATI's smoothest to date.
In any case, in Windows at least, you could benefit from downloading the latest drivers. Of all the things I own, video cards is the one category where upgrading the drivers can improve things...a lot.
While ATI has been known to have shitty drivers in the past (r128, R100, and early R200 days mostly), they have been working hard to fix this problem. The latest driver set is CATALYST 02.4 (win2k and xpwin9xrequired control panel). ATI's even gone as far as producing a PDF that describes exactly what was fixed in the release.
1st Party support for linux drivers have been new to them (this is only their first official release) so give them some time before they mature.
I'm glad to see the new Tungsten series and Palm OS 5 finally come out. Now, only time will tell whether or not this device becomes successful.
I think Palm OS 5 will be a winner, as long as it does its mainstay well, while adding on some new features and doing those well too. In other words, it does all the organizing you need it to do and it puts that ARM to use.
The only problem I see with the T is the sliding mechanism. Anytime there's physical movement involved with a product like this, you have to wonder how long it'll last. If it's nice and durable, there goes my one complaint about the T. If it's really fragile, users won't like that much at all.
Myself, I hope to get one of these things after they come down in price.
Found on the anandtech review of the same card: "The Cobra engine is the first consumer level video card to offer not only hardware MPEG-2 decode (for watching movies) but also hardware MPEG-2 encode (for encoding video). This allows the All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro to offload some of the MPEG-2 encode functions to the R300 chip (such as discrete cosine transform, DCT), thus saving CPU usage. The Cobra engine makes it possible to shift 10-20% of the MPEG-2 encode process into hardware (according to ATI, the maximum theoretical amount of MPEG-2 encode which can occur in hardware is around 20-25%). As a result, MPEG-2 encoding on the All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro occurs more smoothly and can occur at very low bit rates that were previously very taxing on a CPU. This same engine is present on all R300 based ATI products but only enabled in the All-in-Wonder version."
The AIW 9700 Pro *can* offload MPEG encode/decode from the cpu to itself. It might not have the same results that one expects from a professional level card, but it can do it. Its gaming capabilities will certainly exceed whatever your GF3 can produce, but that might not be a huge concern for your work.
The anandtech review also has some more info on the MPEG capabilities of the card, so you might want to look at that.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1716 &p=4
Uh, well, as far as multimedia graphics cards go, it *is* the only graphics card in the market. The graphics card market as a whole is a lot bigger, but this multifunction category is much smaller. The AIW 8500 pretty much went unchallenged, and now the AIW 9700 Pro just clinches it. NVIDIA has a "Personal Cinema" but I'm pretty sure visiontek was the only company that made any graphics cards for that, and now a) visiontek is bankrupt/gone, and b) it was a gf2mx, which has no comparison to an 8500 OR a 9700.
Now, whether or not a review site basically rehashes the manufacturer's PR sheet is a different problem, but in this case the AIW is a great product that it certainly deserves the acclaim it gets.
Um, that's not quite interoperability. I use AIM+, and pretty much all it adds is ability to chat log, hide all the ads and make your buddy list transparent. No interoperability here, just a neat little add-on for AIM.
Server-to-server interoperability is different from client-to-server interoperability, which is what trillian pulls off. Trillian basically connects to each server just like if it was an individual client, so logging on to MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo on Trillian isn't really any different than if I started MSN, then AIM, then ICQ, and then the Yahoo client individually. Trillian just brings all that connectivity into one app with one interface.
Server-to-server is the "ideal" method of interoperability. Hopefully it could work something like email does now. To chat with your buddy, add him to your list as "joesomebody@msn" and start chatting. He can add you as "bobsomebody@aim" to start talking with you, etc etc. Trillian's method is a bit like cheating in this case:)
Sonicblue licensed the RioVolt design from iRiver for models SP-90, 100, and 250 (Don't believe me? Go to the link and look for the iMP-100 and 250 and look at the pictures. SP-90 is just a stripped down 100)
In theory, all the iRiver and Riovolt players can be upgraded for Ogg support because of the flash firmware available on the players. One thing to note is that iRiver usually releases firmware much more frequently and much earlier than Rio does, so official Rio fw updates containing ogg might take even longer to release. However, rumor has it that iRiver is having trouble implementing Ogg support. Two reasons I've heard on the mp3.com message boards is that there's some floating point calculations involved or that they've run into legal troubles releasing the firmware (look for the reply by CrashWire). The first reason is plausible, although I don't know if that's the real reason. Can someone tell me if Ogg actually does go through some floating point calcs? The second reason sounds really really really doubtful since legal troubles is precisely what Ogg is trying to avoid.
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PS1.4 isn't natively supported by *most* nvidia cards. The spec for PS2.0 is such that it's all-encompassing. If you support PS2.0 you support PS 1.4 and PS 1.1. If you support PS1.4 you support PS 1.1, etc.
So this is how it should look, properly:
- Game 1: no shaders at all, only static T&L (DX7-class effects, given comparatively little weighting in overall score)
- Game 2: vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.4 (natively supported by GFFX, ATI Radeon 8500 and above)
- Game 3: vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.4 (natively supported by GFFX, ATI Radeon 8500 and above)
- Game 4: vertex shader 2.0 and pixel shader 1.4+2.0 (DX9 cards only, Radeon 9x00 and GFFX)
Nvidia's lack of support for PS1.4 is their own design choice, and now they have to live with it. The GF4 was released after DX8.1 came out, which contained the PS1.4 spec, but they chose not to support it. ATI Radeon 8500 and above have no problem with this because they supported DX8.1 from the getgo, but nvidia did not change and continued their 8.0 support. As was previously mentioned in the article, nvidia was participating in the developer's beta until Dec 2002, well into the development period for 3dm03 and a month after they paper launched the GFFX, so they knew what was going on with the benchmark for a long time beforehand and didn't change their stance for a while. Presumably, as a beta member up until Dec 2002 if they didn't like the choice of PS 1.4 in extensive use, then they could've said something earlier.
The key to regarding 3dm03 is it's goal as a forward-looking benchmark. Both DX8 games and DX9 games are currently in development, and many DX7 games are still in existence (remember, HL2 doesn't require anything above a DX6 card), so in this respect 3DM03 is still fair in its test design.
Hah, and let them find something else to charge me with each month? It's bad enough that I have to pay for phone service when I only use my cell phone, now I'm going to have another charge on my bursar account labeled "University File Sharing Online - REQ'D". Sure, they could roll it into the tuition to hide the fact that the fee's there, but that doesn't hide the fact that it exists. And if I don't like the "convenient" service they provide (much like calling long distance from my room phone)? I suppose ResNet will just give me the finger and tell me to walk.
I'm going to give up mod points here just to chime in, since this is an issue I care about.
Anyone looking to get good wireless card support (802.11b) should buy one with a prism2 chip or an Orinoco. I know many that have had good luck with these cards, and I know for a fact that the Orinoco cards are essentially plug and play in linux. Do NOT buy the TI chipsets (sometimes marketed as 22mbps 802.11b+) or the Broadcom chipsets; word on the street (heh) is that these companies have been less than forthcoming with specs so people can write proper drivers for them.
It's too bad that this is the sad state of wireless support in linux, that we must be at the manufacturer's mercy to get our hardware working properly. I've been waiting for 2 years now to get my USB wireless card (oh yeah, avoid those too if you can) working in linux, and it's all because the company doesn't care.
Because these rendering errors only occur when you go off the timedemo camera track. If you were on the normal track (like you would be if you were just running the standard demo) you would not notice it. Go off the track and the card ceases to render properly. It's an optimization that is too specific and too coincidental for the excuse "driver bug" to work. It's not the first time nvidia has been seen to 'optimize' for 3dmark either (there was a driver set, a 42.xx or 43.xx, can't remember, where it didn't even render things like explosions and smoke in game test 1 for 3DM03)
Uhhh, what are you talking about? When ATI did it EVERYONE ridiculed them for such a bug (it was a genuine driver bug; one driver release later the image quality AND expected performance returned). Not to mention when ATI did it, it was nvidia that was giving the information about it to the websites. No evidence of that in this instance (yet). People still bring it up whenever people talk about optimizations and cheating; even you just did.
Cg was developed, designed, and created by nvidia. While one of their claims is that it can be made to run on any card and is multiplatform, don't let that fool you. Cg is, at its worst, a thinly veiled attempt to convince developers to produce optimal code for nvidia cards at the expense of broad hardware support. ATI has already said that they will not be supporting Cg (in order for it to work best on ATI cards, someone needs to create profiles for it) and will instead be supporting HLSL. I doubt S3/Via or SIS have the resources to commit to 2 different projects, so I bet they're going to go with HLSL.
If you don't understand why nvidia might be looking for code that works best only on its cards (it's almost a "duh" question), look at it a different way. Look at the GFFX. In almost every instance, it's a failure. Sure, it can stick to 32-bit precision, but it runs really, really slow when you do (just look at the 3dmark03 scores recently released and john carmack's .plan comments). When it runs at 16-bit precision, it's still damn slow, almost always losing out to the Radeon 9700/9800s, but it's a little more competitive (DX9's minimum spec appears to require 24bit precision, but rumor says the jury's still out on that). It's in nvidia's best interest to make the FX appear to be fast (which it isn't), and so they're relegated to make Cg code that optimizes for nvidia cards their best interest.
Sorry I don't have links, but the beyond3d.com forums have a lot of information on this subject.
Here's the Official Site if you don't believe someone's scanner for this info.
Let's just hope these folks don't start getting any new ideas...
Oh well.
I imagine not if you advertised it properly. This is just a hack, nothing more. If you modded it and then sold it as a "AWESOME DEAL ON A 9700! ONLY 2 LEFT!!!1111" that would qualify as false advertising (not to mention a stupid name for your auction =) If you say it's 9500 modded to become a 9700, then you're just telling the truth.
This has been present for as long as I can remember in RealPlayer 8.0, and probably 7 and G2 (the three are all really similar).
Luckily, neither version of RealOne uses this. Even though they ask you to give them an email address/password (this is for their grand "RealOne BlankPass" subscription based service and lets them decide what special features your RealOne player gets), they don't have this stupid little thing now. There is a single checkbox during signup that lets them know you don't want your address shared and I think there's one that says you don't want any email from RealNetworks either.
The latest realone has actually been getting better about letting you turn shit off. Under Tools>Preferences>Automatic Services, a bunch of stuff is turned on by default but it lets you turn off various automatic and annoying things (like the Message Center, for instance...). Once you do this, RealOne Player acts just like that, a player, and not a marketing tool.
What he was talking about was the Block Character feature within PocketPC. It emulates Graffiti (which Xerox claims emulates Unistroke) as another method of entering text (and presumably to make it easier to steal PalmOS users). So, if copying Unistroke is the wrong thing to do, doesn't copying Graffiti, which may or may not copy Unistroke, fall under the same problem?
In other words:
Xerox claims:
Unistroke=Graffiti PalmOS
What MS does:
Block Character=Graffiti
So...
Unistroke=Graffiti PalmOS=Block Character on PPC
Rumor also has it that the GFFX's performance drops substantially at 128 bit precision compared to 64bit. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen (do you own a GFFX right now?), but whether or not the hype is true is something to keep in mind.
It looks like the GFFX will be better than the 9700pro. Will the price premium (rumor has it at $499) over a 9700pro (street price around $300 now) be worth it? That's up to the consumers, and whether or not nvidia even delivers on time.
Directx 9 IS out the door. ATI has released a new driver set designed for DX9 (although the OGL support within that set seems to suck, so stick with the Omega drivers until another Catalyst release) and all those demos they showed off at the 9700pro launch. Don't forget that a 9700pro is designed for DX9 too. GFFX is not unique here (or even the first).
Graphics will not look substantially better on a nv card than on ati. That is marketing hype.
Say this with me:
Netscape is not Mozilla.
If AOL Communicator is truly everything you say it is, then it is most likely going to set into question the status of the Netscape 7.x series. It will not affect Mozilla. Mozilla is an (mostly) independent organization that can function fine on its own even if AOL cuts all ties, thanks to the fact that it's OSS. Mozilla.org develops the Gecko engine, which is what *powers* AOLComm. Without gecko there is no Compuserve 7, AOL OS X, or AOL Communicator.
If Ogg was the defacto standard, more people than Real would be supporting it. Real's a good step towards further usage of Ogg.
Also, Netscape 7 and Mozilla use the same basic codebase (1.0.1 to be exact). So you can't think that Mozilla 1.0.x is miles ahead of Netscape 7, because, in reality, they are the same. Mozilla does progress a little faster than Netscape does though, as the latest Mozilla is 1.2, so the speed may have increased a bit since 1.0.
Mozilla and Netscape 7 are slow in OS X every once in a while (particularly on G3s I've seen) but it's still usable. Chimera tends to be better in these cases.
Except the same chart also shows the new palms with ARM processors, which are significantly more powerful than the motorola DB VZs typically used. This includes the new Palm Tungsten T and two of the new Sony Clies. Granted, all 3 are very high end (MSRP $499-$599), but they do have the power necessary for good mp3/ogg decoding, as opposed to all the old OS3/4 machines.
In any case, in Windows at least, you could benefit from downloading the latest drivers. Of all the things I own, video cards is the one category where upgrading the drivers can improve things...a lot.
While ATI has been known to have shitty drivers in the past (r128, R100, and early R200 days mostly), they have been working hard to fix this problem. The latest driver set is CATALYST 02.4 (win2k and xp win9x required control panel). ATI's even gone as far as producing a PDF that describes exactly what was fixed in the release.
1st Party support for linux drivers have been new to them (this is only their first official release) so give them some time before they mature.
I'm glad to see the new Tungsten series and Palm OS 5 finally come out. Now, only time will tell whether or not this device becomes successful.
I think Palm OS 5 will be a winner, as long as it does its mainstay well, while adding on some new features and doing those well too. In other words, it does all the organizing you need it to do and it puts that ARM to use.
The only problem I see with the T is the sliding mechanism. Anytime there's physical movement involved with a product like this, you have to wonder how long it'll last. If it's nice and durable, there goes my one complaint about the T. If it's really fragile, users won't like that much at all.
Myself, I hope to get one of these things after they come down in price.
"The Cobra engine is the first consumer level video card to offer not only hardware MPEG-2 decode (for watching movies) but also hardware MPEG-2 encode (for encoding video). This allows the All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro to offload some of the MPEG-2 encode functions to the R300 chip (such as discrete cosine transform, DCT), thus saving CPU usage. The Cobra engine makes it possible to shift 10-20% of the MPEG-2 encode process into hardware (according to ATI, the maximum theoretical amount of MPEG-2 encode which can occur in hardware is around 20-25%). As a result, MPEG-2 encoding on the All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro occurs more smoothly and can occur at very low bit rates that were previously very taxing on a CPU. This same engine is present on all R300 based ATI products but only enabled in the All-in-Wonder version."
The AIW 9700 Pro *can* offload MPEG encode/decode from the cpu to itself. It might not have the same results that one expects from a professional level card, but it can do it. Its gaming capabilities will certainly exceed whatever your GF3 can produce, but that might not be a huge concern for your work.
The anandtech review also has some more info on the MPEG capabilities of the card, so you might want to look at that. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1716 &p=4
Uh, well, as far as multimedia graphics cards go, it *is* the only graphics card in the market. The graphics card market as a whole is a lot bigger, but this multifunction category is much smaller. The AIW 8500 pretty much went unchallenged, and now the AIW 9700 Pro just clinches it. NVIDIA has a "Personal Cinema" but I'm pretty sure visiontek was the only company that made any graphics cards for that, and now a) visiontek is bankrupt/gone, and b) it was a gf2mx, which has no comparison to an 8500 OR a 9700.
Now, whether or not a review site basically rehashes the manufacturer's PR sheet is a different problem, but in this case the AIW is a great product that it certainly deserves the acclaim it gets.
Um, that's not quite interoperability. I use AIM+, and pretty much all it adds is ability to chat log, hide all the ads and make your buddy list transparent. No interoperability here, just a neat little add-on for AIM.
Server-to-server is the "ideal" method of interoperability. Hopefully it could work something like email does now. To chat with your buddy, add him to your list as "joesomebody@msn" and start chatting. He can add you as "bobsomebody@aim" to start talking with you, etc etc. Trillian's method is a bit like cheating in this case :)
In theory, all the iRiver and Riovolt players can be upgraded for Ogg support because of the flash firmware available on the players. One thing to note is that iRiver usually releases firmware much more frequently and much earlier than Rio does, so official Rio fw updates containing ogg might take even longer to release. However, rumor has it that iRiver is having trouble implementing Ogg support. Two reasons I've heard on the mp3.com message boards is that there's some floating point calculations involved or that they've run into legal troubles releasing the firmware (look for the reply by CrashWire). The first reason is plausible, although I don't know if that's the real reason. Can someone tell me if Ogg actually does go through some floating point calcs? The second reason sounds really really really doubtful since legal troubles is precisely what Ogg is trying to avoid.