in other news, RIAA has annouced that the prices of CDs will take a general increase of three (3) US dollars. This is to finance the massive array of servers and fat OC pipes that will be employed by the RIAA to do round-the-clock attacks on P2P networks for the benefit of the consumer.
Since we are talking about lasers and LEDs etc, so unless everyone reading here knows *that* much about lasers -- i would recommend the following site for everyone: Sam's Laser FAQs
I have spent days pouring over the mass abundance of information there -- and it has convinced me that building a kilowatt CO2 laser to burn though buildings really is something everyone should consider doing for fun.
there are exactly two types of video card buyers (excluding the workstation and business ppl) --
1) whatever suits the needs. example persoin would, if in need of a card today, probabbly pick up a MX (not overclocked) or a high end GeForce 3, even possibly a radeon (man they are cheap).
2) latest and greatest, argument: future-proof. i have trouble with this argument. really -- how many people you know really buys a card and uses it for 3 years, when the drivers really mature, the games start to support it, whatever? NONE. everyone i know who gets these "future-proof" cards buys another "future-proof" card within a couple monthes ANYWAY. what does "future-proof" protects you against, if you never wait for the future to come around?.
so as for me -- if i was really going to spend 400 bux on a new video card every 6 monthes - 1 year -- i will get the Matrox. Acceptable performance within the expected usage lifetime, better quality, and neat features (3 monitor gaming).
Matrox can never get straight their real "intention", or at least -- that's what it seems like anyhow.
They have been trying to blend the workstation / gamer market together into one card ever since the G200s, and well, guess what, it has never been successful. Businesses think it's too "game based", and gamers think they are too slow.
i digress -- they are not all that slow. frankly i do not understand why people go out and get Ti4600s. i mean -- fine, most arguments comes in the form of "it will last me longer for the future generation of games." my ass. if you buy a Ti4600 today, i will bet a dollar to a donut that you will buy the next high end "gamer" card as soon as it comes out too - again in the same predicaments -- no games supports it. but, unfortunately, that do seem to be the market right now...
getting back -- what should matrox do to gain market share? probabbly separate the two classes -- or, for **'s sake, just do different packaging and put a different skin on the drivers. clocking them a bit different will help too. and then cram that useless "face duplicate" technology into the business model, charge 100bux extra for it, and viola...
yeah, i would get one if it was a bit cheaper too. but right now everything i run is okay on a radeon 7500... but then again i also buy games "late" too -- about a year after they are out, they gets real cheap -- ~10-20 bux or so.
last bit. Hothardware says that the matrox card is "elegant" because it does not have "canned capacitors"? man what a load of crap that is. the "canned caps" are for power regulation, and it's there because chip-caps do not get above a few micro-farads. having or not having "canned capacitors" should absolutely not be a factor upon which you rate a card. if necessary -- i would personally get TONS of capacitors if it means the darn thing runs more stable.
There is something similar -- not CDRW, but still interesting enough that i was surprised to find:
take a PS2 DVD (i am assuming it's on all of them -- i personally was looking at FFX) and look on the bottom: you can see playstation logos burned into the disk.
I suppose this uses a similar technology -- but may not be exactly the same, since DVD has multiple layers -- which means that the image can be visible even when there is data there (or at least, on a different layer at the same physical location) -- how many of us are willing to sacrifice half the capacity for purrty images on the bottom of disks, eventually, when this technology comes around for DVDs and whatnot?
I don't have any viewing film -- but at the mean time, i do not believe info storage magnetic fields gets detected by these means anyway. i mean, waving a stack of credit cards does not mess with compass readings.
i think they started putting the strip at different positions in the money for the new design, $20 is way left, $50 is a bit to the right of half, and not sure about $10...
Excerpt from zzz:
Bank notes of Belorussia: 3 and 10 rubles. Most countries put famous people on their money, Belorussia decided to put animals. There's a very special way to fold two notes...
all currency $5 and beyond are tagged already ANYWAY. see that line about 1/5 way into the bill from the left? if i remember correctly they are magnetically tagged.
actually the Power4 is, i think, even more complicated than that: the chip is not put into a system alone, they are stuck together onto a multi chip module that has 4 chips (while each chip has 2 processor cores.) so each MCM is already 8-way SMP'ed. and *then* they have to cool this thing, 4 massively power-hungry chips in such close proximity? wouldn't want to think about it.
and oh yeah... 32M L3 cache... i remeber back when my PC had only 8M of MAIN MEMORY...
p.s. on the PDF, there are some pages that said "IBM confidential." haha.
I also believe that they don't know if their algorithms are good, just as you said.
one of the purposes they said was "Establishment of simulation technology with 1km resolution."
Probabbly use some old data and see if they can predict a little bit into the future with reasonable accuracy.
as a side note: on the "problem it solves" page, notice how many "seismicity" related items there are (% wise)! i think the true reason they want this thing is to predict earthquakes. i don't blame them; Tokyo is expecting a "big hit", and considering almost 1/2 of the japanese population lives there, probabbly even more than that in terms of $$ in japan -- it's a good idea they are trying to predict these things.
p.s. Japan experiences small quakes almost daily -- most of them cannot be felt; but it means they have tons of data to verify their simulations against.
...compared to what IBM is shipping now (1.3 Ghz Power4)
Wow... -- somebody else who knows about the power4...
I am cuious, do you know how they USE the darn things? i mean, the sucker has over 5,000 pins (!!), i suppose the thermal requirements are tremendous too. any info would be appriciated.
But if I were the IBM sales rep for supercomputing, I'd sure be hyping the fact that when it's not simulating nuclear explosions, you can run Gimp and Mozilla.
don't forget to mention the terrific pr0n potential.
sigh... but anyways -- the answer you seek is not short, but can be summerized: it depends on what you want.
lets have a few scenarios:
1) you want the fastest, most elaborate PC there is for whatever compensatory reasons. build you self all-the-way. pricewatch, pricegrabber, gotApex Deals, techbargains, and dealwalk are all fine sites to look for deals. flamingo world have some stuff too. pricewatch and pricegrabber gets you the goods, and the rest of them get you the "deals", for example Dell is selling a 20" flat panel (very nice, i have one) for ~1600 -- yesterday you could have gotten it ~1100. just have to check those places everyday.
and oh yeah -- go to overclockers.com and find some people to sell you waterblocks, you will need it.
2) average man wanting an averagely fast computer. build can get you more customization and you can "grow into it" more... for the longest time dell would lock the MB so you can't swap processors! and then you can't tweek the MB on ram settings, blah blah either. price is similar if you go and find a good deal. a P4 2GHz can be had at dell for ~600 bux -- no way you can beat that, sorry, especially if you are in CA and have to pay tax+shipping for everybody from pricewatch.
3) your mom/dad. buy one -- in fact, buy one used -- or even better, sell them one of your old, "retired" ones.
4) laptop users -- buy -- because there is no options here. but today unless you are really into water cooling and all that, a laptop gives you the same speed / blah blah anyway. i have a UXGA on my laptop -- sure i have to squint when i look at things, but whatever. p.s. get a good vid.card if you buy a laptop: they are not upgradeable -- however if you are REALLY desperate you can get processors for laptops (micro-PGA) from ebay.
in the end -- for what we want to do (fast system, blah blah) building does not save money. but it's like hotrodding. i have gotten out of the gig a while back (o/c, etc etc) and wont turn back. it's just too much trouble. my laptop has 64M vid.mem and can run most of the games i need it to (and if it really runs bad, it's just a productivity killer anyway). i hope the sites listed in (1) helps -- they are the better ones i can come up with. and have fun -- and last thing. save the reciepts! if you build yourself you WILL, by laws of probabbility, have crap happen and you will know good and well what's an RMA *real* fast.
lastly -- to make everything work out by building -- you will be continously upgrading your hardware. which means
1) you need to recompile the kernel a lot / reinstall windows a lot
2) know ebay like the back of your hand.
this is probabbly the only way you have a system that mostly works, does not cost you TOO bad, and you won't have tons of spare parts lying around.
so is it worth it?... well? what is "having a customized PC" worth to ya?
battery died (really, holds like 20 min of juice) video card craps out *every* time i do a driver update USB keyboard does not have a) BIOS support, b) even with drivers properly installed, holding a key down does not auto-repeat - which sucks for backspace Ultra bay jams (now and then) pointing nipple drifts if i breath on it.
and more
NONE of the above IBM was willing to fix: every time i call with a problem, they say -- sorry pal, nothing i can do for ya.
otherwise a nice machine -- but since this is at least 20% more than a similar machine from, say, dell, i would have expected more out of it.
with a name like that -- no wonder it's going out of your house and risking its neck on the street looking for new owners...
hell i'd too jet the minute i hear that i was named spanky; probabbly skip the "explore unfamiliar" part and go straight to the animal shelter -- or a train track somewhere to get the nametag off.
it's that irresistable urge that you get when primal instincts takes over -- and some people have been know to have conscious conversations between their gut and brain. in most cases, the gut wins out due to its superior reasoning capabilities, example includes Drew Carey, Hom--
Actually any lucky (or not-so-lucky) high school physics student with a crazy professor would have had tried the "bite a electric motor connecting to a radio to hear classic rock through you teech" deal. (i did, anyway)
(you can try this at home too)
it is a horribly creepy feeling though -- hearing music through your jaws.
(if any/. reader do decide to try this -- make sure to disinfect the motor and put something soft on the shaft where you will be biting -- otherwise it will buzz)
with that said -- i would not want to have a cell phone in there.
I am not sure if this information is accurate or not -- but i know i got it from a social science course somewhere --
the tape wasn't just "erased" -- it was recorded with white noise, probabbly 20 times over. they tried to recover it but couldn't at that time. If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar. (and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape.
Slashdot Mirror
in other news, RIAA has annouced that the prices of CDs will take a general increase of three (3) US dollars. This is to finance the massive array of servers and fat OC pipes that will be employed by the RIAA to do round-the-clock attacks on P2P networks for the benefit of the consumer.
yuck.
Sam's Laser FAQs
I have spent days pouring over the mass abundance of information there -- and it has convinced me that building a kilowatt CO2 laser to burn though buildings really is something everyone should consider doing for fun.
that's good, because we all hate those (Nazi-ish) elitist kernels.
with all due respect, i call bullshit.
there are exactly two types of video card buyers (excluding the workstation and business ppl) --
1) whatever suits the needs. example persoin would, if in need of a card today, probabbly pick up a MX (not overclocked) or a high end GeForce 3, even possibly a radeon (man they are cheap).
2) latest and greatest, argument: future-proof. i have trouble with this argument. really -- how many people you know really buys a card and uses it for 3 years, when the drivers really mature, the games start to support it, whatever? NONE. everyone i know who gets these "future-proof" cards buys another "future-proof" card within a couple monthes ANYWAY. what does "future-proof" protects you against, if you never wait for the future to come around?.
so as for me -- if i was really going to spend 400 bux on a new video card every 6 monthes - 1 year -- i will get the Matrox. Acceptable performance within the expected usage lifetime, better quality, and neat features (3 monitor gaming).
Reading this gives a nostalgic feeling of Lain...
kinda like when the wired and the "real world" is being blended together.
which, really, it's true. in a can-be-very-helpful-but-still-somewhat-creepy kind of way.
Heh... you are right:
Matrox can never get straight their real "intention", or at least -- that's what it seems like anyhow.
They have been trying to blend the workstation / gamer market together into one card ever since the G200s, and well, guess what, it has never been successful. Businesses think it's too "game based", and gamers think they are too slow.
i digress -- they are not all that slow. frankly i do not understand why people go out and get Ti4600s. i mean -- fine, most arguments comes in the form of "it will last me longer for the future generation of games." my ass. if you buy a Ti4600 today, i will bet a dollar to a donut that you will buy the next high end "gamer" card as soon as it comes out too - again in the same predicaments -- no games supports it.
but, unfortunately, that do seem to be the market right now...
getting back -- what should matrox do to gain market share? probabbly separate the two classes -- or, for **'s sake, just do different packaging and put a different skin on the drivers. clocking them a bit different will help too. and then cram that useless "face duplicate" technology into the business model, charge 100bux extra for it, and viola...
yeah, i would get one if it was a bit cheaper too. but right now everything i run is okay on a radeon 7500... but then again i also buy games "late" too -- about a year after they are out, they gets real cheap -- ~10-20 bux or so.
last bit. Hothardware says that the matrox card is "elegant" because it does not have "canned capacitors"? man what a load of crap that is. the "canned caps" are for power regulation, and it's there because chip-caps do not get above a few micro-farads. having or not having "canned capacitors" should absolutely not be a factor upon which you rate a card. if necessary -- i would personally get TONS of capacitors if it means the darn thing runs more stable.
There is something similar -- not CDRW, but still interesting enough that i was surprised to find:
take a PS2 DVD (i am assuming it's on all of them -- i personally was looking at FFX) and look on the bottom: you can see playstation logos burned into the disk.
I suppose this uses a similar technology -- but may not be exactly the same, since DVD has multiple layers -- which means that the image can be visible even when there is data there (or at least, on a different layer at the same physical location) -- how many of us are willing to sacrifice half the capacity for purrty images on the bottom of disks, eventually, when this technology comes around for DVDs and whatnot?
I don't have any viewing film -- but at the mean time, i do not believe info storage magnetic fields gets detected by these means anyway. i mean, waving a stack of credit cards does not mess with compass readings.
i think they started putting the strip at different positions in the money for the new design, $20 is way left, $50 is a bit to the right of half, and not sure about $10...
money shot
Excerpt from zzz: Bank notes of Belorussia: 3 and 10 rubles. Most countries put famous people on their money, Belorussia decided to put animals. There's a very special way to fold two notes...
At least there's no mention of RFID tags
all currency $5 and beyond are tagged already ANYWAY. see that line about 1/5 way into the bill from the left? if i remember correctly they are magnetically tagged.
heh... thanks for the link
actually the Power4 is, i think, even more complicated than that: the chip is not put into a system alone, they are stuck together onto a multi chip module that has 4 chips (while each chip has 2 processor cores.) so each MCM is already 8-way SMP'ed. and *then* they have to cool this thing, 4 massively power-hungry chips in such close proximity? wouldn't want to think about it.
and oh yeah... 32M L3 cache... i remeber back when my PC had only 8M of MAIN MEMORY...
p.s. on the PDF, there are some pages that said "IBM confidential." haha.
ES has 700TB storage, ASCI W 160TB;
a small difference... heh
I also believe that they don't know if their algorithms are good, just as you said.
one of the purposes they said was "Establishment of simulation technology with 1km resolution."
Probabbly use some old data and see if they can predict a little bit into the future with reasonable accuracy.
as a side note: on the "problem it solves" page, notice how many "seismicity" related items there are (% wise)! i think the true reason they want this thing is to predict earthquakes. i don't blame them; Tokyo is expecting a "big hit", and considering almost 1/2 of the japanese population lives there, probabbly even more than that in terms of $$ in japan -- it's a good idea they are trying to predict these things.
p.s. Japan experiences small quakes almost daily -- most of them cannot be felt; but it means they have tons of data to verify their simulations against.
...compared to what IBM is shipping now (1.3 Ghz Power4)
Wow... -- somebody else who knows about the power4...
I am cuious, do you know how they USE the darn things? i mean, the sucker has over 5,000 pins (!!), i suppose the thermal requirements are tremendous too. any info would be appriciated.
But if I were the IBM sales rep for supercomputing, I'd sure be hyping the fact that when it's not simulating nuclear explosions, you can run Gimp and Mozilla.
don't forget to mention the terrific pr0n potential.
I think I'll have him killed.
;-)
send him some plutonium; that should do it
sigh... but anyways -- the answer you seek is not short, but can be summerized: it depends on what you want.
lets have a few scenarios:
1) you want the fastest, most elaborate PC there is for whatever compensatory reasons. build you self all-the-way. pricewatch, pricegrabber, gotApex Deals, techbargains, and dealwalk are all fine sites to look for deals. flamingo world have some stuff too. pricewatch and pricegrabber gets you the goods, and the rest of them get you the "deals", for example Dell is selling a 20" flat panel (very nice, i have one) for ~1600 -- yesterday you could have gotten it ~1100. just have to check those places everyday. and oh yeah -- go to overclockers.com and find some people to sell you waterblocks, you will need it.
2) average man wanting an averagely fast computer. build can get you more customization and you can "grow into it" more... for the longest time dell would lock the MB so you can't swap processors! and then you can't tweek the MB on ram settings, blah blah either. price is similar if you go and find a good deal. a P4 2GHz can be had at dell for ~600 bux -- no way you can beat that, sorry, especially if you are in CA and have to pay tax+shipping for everybody from pricewatch.
3) your mom/dad. buy one -- in fact, buy one used -- or even better, sell them one of your old, "retired" ones.
4) laptop users -- buy -- because there is no options here. but today unless you are really into water cooling and all that, a laptop gives you the same speed / blah blah anyway. i have a UXGA on my laptop -- sure i have to squint when i look at things, but whatever. p.s. get a good vid.card if you buy a laptop: they are not upgradeable -- however if you are REALLY desperate you can get processors for laptops (micro-PGA) from ebay.
in the end -- for what we want to do (fast system, blah blah) building does not save money. but it's like hotrodding. i have gotten out of the gig a while back (o/c, etc etc) and wont turn back. it's just too much trouble. my laptop has 64M vid.mem and can run most of the games i need it to (and if it really runs bad, it's just a productivity killer anyway). i hope the sites listed in (1) helps -- they are the better ones i can come up with. and have fun -- and last thing. save the reciepts! if you build yourself you WILL, by laws of probabbility, have crap happen and you will know good and well what's an RMA *real* fast.
lastly -- to make everything work out by building -- you will be continously upgrading your hardware. which means
1) you need to recompile the kernel a lot / reinstall windows a lot
2) know ebay like the back of your hand. this is probabbly the only way you have a system that mostly works, does not cost you TOO bad, and you won't have tons of spare parts lying around.
so is it worth it?... well? what is "having a customized PC" worth to ya?
I have a T21: man has it got problems...
battery died (really, holds like 20 min of juice)
video card craps out *every* time i do a driver update
USB keyboard does not have a) BIOS support, b) even with drivers properly installed, holding a key down does not auto-repeat - which sucks for backspace
Ultra bay jams (now and then)
pointing nipple drifts if i breath on it.
and more
NONE of the above IBM was willing to fix: every time i call with a problem, they say -- sorry pal, nothing i can do for ya.
otherwise a nice machine -- but since this is at least 20% more than a similar machine from, say, dell, i would have expected more out of it.
with a name like that -- no wonder it's going out of your house and risking its neck on the street looking for new owners...
hell i'd too jet the minute i hear that i was named spanky; probabbly skip the "explore unfamiliar" part and go straight to the animal shelter -- or a train track somewhere to get the nametag off.
it's that irresistable urge that you get when primal instincts takes over -- and some people have been know to have conscious conversations between their gut and brain. in most cases, the gut wins out due to its superior reasoning capabilities, example includes Drew Carey, Hom--
"hmmmmm.... forbidden donut..."
forgot to link
sorry
only 2 dollars for 4 G of storage ;)
you will see that there is an update: US DENIES DATA RETENTION PLANS
Actually any lucky (or not-so-lucky) high school physics student with a crazy professor would have had tried the "bite a electric motor connecting to a radio to hear classic rock through you teech" deal. (i did, anyway)
/. reader do decide to try this -- make sure to disinfect the motor and put something soft on the shaft where you will be biting -- otherwise it will buzz)
(you can try this at home too)
it is a horribly creepy feeling though -- hearing music through your jaws.
(if any
with that said -- i would not want to have a cell phone in there.
I am not sure if this information is accurate or not -- but i know i got it from a social science course somewhere --
the tape wasn't just "erased" -- it was recorded with white noise, probabbly 20 times over. they tried to recover it but couldn't at that time. If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar. (and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape.