Yes, but there was about a three month interval before eVGA issued the statement. And even after that, people were/are still reporting problems with their replacement cards, suggesting that there's more here than just flaky RAM.
My own card behaves itself 99.999% of the time. But every so often I notice a wayward triangle (which disappears quickly). My machine is stock; nothing is overclocked beyond how it arrived from the factory. This suggests to me that the card is still flirting with a hairy edge somewhere, and that makes me uncomfortable.
eVGA indeed has been very responsive and forthright; I'm pleased I selected them.
The 7900GT and 7900GTX were one of the most problematic graphics products NVidia ever released. There were hundreds of reports of cards that would display a garbage desktop, lock up or, most commonly, display "exploding triangles", all of which would seem to point to RAM data corruption somewhere. These failures even happened to people who were not overclocking their cards at all. The issue was so bad that one card vendor apparently shut down its customer comment fora to forestall any further reports of problems (I won't say who since I didn't independently confirm it).
There has been tons of speculation on what the cause might be (excessive heat, bad batch of RAMs, signal integrity problems, bad/weak power supplies, too-close-to-the-edge memory timings), but no concrete explanations from anyone.
I personally bumped into this. I built a brand new rig for myself about four months ago, and gave it an NVidia 7900GT made by eVGA. It wasn't long before stuttering graphics and exploding triangles showed up. Happily, eVGA were very committed to their product, and cross-shipped a replacement which, so far, has worked almost entirely without incident. It's my understanding that customers of competing board vendors have not been so lucky.
So whenever I see a review of the latest NVidia product, I'm afraid my first question is no longer, "How fast is it?" but, "How reliable is it?" I think burn-in tests should become a standard part of a reviewer's benchmark suite.
When governments do it, it is EVIL and AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS. When corporations do it, it is survival of the fittest, and tough shit to you.
While Libertarians do appear to tend toward social Darwinism, they are quick to point out that holds only so long as fraud isn't involved.
The essence of fraud is misrepresentation. The investigators misrepresented themselves to obtain crucial, privileged information. Thus, a Libertarian would almost certainly decry the CEO's actions here.
How would you suggest they go about doing that 'block image copy'? Should they use the 1541 drive?
No, they should use a 1541 drive. You can snag them off eBay, or find a local enthusiast who still has one.
Also, I know that some Commodore drives would adjust the spindle speed to get more bits packed into outer tracks - I don't know if the 1541 drive did this, though.
The spindle speed was constant; the bitrate was variable. Outer tracks contained more sectors than inner tracks. (This is one reason why I thought the variable-speed spindle in the original Mac floppy drives was completely stupid -- yet another opportunity for mechanical failure.)
Honestly. The Commodore-64 was the biggest selling computer in the world, even well after the IBM-PC came along. Expertise in this system still exists. Hell, I probably even remember enough about the C-64 filesystem format to poke around for hidden files.
Seriously: Do a block image copy of every floppy disk. Unless he mechanically modified his 1541 floppy drive (and it'll be flipping obvious if he did), a block copy will get you all possible data off the floppies. Then perform forensic analysis on the disk images. Hire a collection of old C-64 wizards to perform the analysis. Give them all identical copies of the data and have them work in isolation. Compare the results. Trust duplicated results, suspect (or re-test) single-source results.
Outside of the US, Germany/Austria was one of the largest bastions of Commodore expertise (Braunschweig, anyone?). Germany's absolutely lousy with C64-heads. It won't be hard finding them. Hell, if you're stuck, fly me out there. Mein Deutsch ist nicht so schlecht...
Rember all those great Chinese language martial arts movies? Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan? That entire kind of film making ended because of piracy. The movies would be copied before they were shown. All those studios (Golden Harvest, if I remeber one name) are gone.
So Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle were all figments of my imagination, then?
Why do folks still buy copies of Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies? They aren't even protected by copyright let alone by DRM.
Actually, this is not precisely correct.
One of the most highly convoluted pieces of copyright law surrounds the production and use of phonorecordings. In some ways, phonorecording rights are more strict than "simple" copyrights. In your example, the musical score of Beethoven's symphonies is public domain -- you may freely perform them yourself without having to pay anyone. But the recorded performances of said symphonies are covered by copyright.
To get a good idea of what junk bonds and leveraged buy-outs are all about, and the effects they can have, go to your library and check out a copy of Storming the Magic Kingdom, by John Taylor, which details the attempted LBO of the Walt Disney Company in the early 1980's. An absolutely riveting and illuminating story into the excesses of "corporate raiders" of the time and how Disney managed, just barely, to fight them off.
With the kind of captial investment -- not to mention criminal activity -- required to generate that level of spam, you're better off taking the same investment and throwing it in a CD or Money Market account. 6% is fairly pathetic.
...plans for a complete project redesign, a focus on adult users and a newly awarded patent for social networking. [emphasis mine]
That reminds me -- I need to delete my Friendster account.
I shouldn't be hesitant about it; after all, Friendster has done exactly zilch for me. But I worry that my dropping out might negatively impact, even a little bit, the social networks of my friends, particularly those who joined at my invitation. Still, I cannot abide that my social network is being used to further an unconscionable power grab via an illicit "patent." So the account's going to have to get killed sooner or later...
"I refuse to participate in your shared hallucination." -- Dilbert
Fortunately I don't travel by air very often. And, as has been pointed out by others, the laptop ban has been lifted (wealthier, more powerful people than I have likely already informed the appropriate scaremongers what a losing proposition this was). Even so, there's no way I'm putting a laptop through checked baggage. Luggage gets lost. Luggage gets tossed around very roughly. And items are known to go "missing" from luggage.
No. Not my laptop. It stays with me, or it stays home.
From TFA: The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby" to "foods to eat when pregnant" to "abortion clinics charlotte nc" to "can christians be forgiven for abortion."
That, right there, tells you why we need to worry about "Uncle Sam" having access to *everyone's* search logs - [... ]
Write to your elected official and ask them these questions, and what safeguards they are putting in place to prevent any such abuse - and tell them you will be voting this fall. Then call your local news channel, and ask them to run a story on it, and ask the candidates for comment. [emphasis mine]
Uh, no.
If you push the "mainstream media" (which is a profit-seeking sensationalism machine) to run with this, the story will not be, "The Government can spy on the most intimate details of your life." Rather, it will be, "Searching for The Searcher: Hunt for Abortion-Seeker Grips Nation." Unholy amounts of money and media resources will be devoted, not to checking Government excesses and lawlessness and preserving the integrity of the Republic, but instead to trying to determine the identity of this mysterious woman, abandoned by a lothario, and left to agonize over the moral quandary of leading an exemplary Christian life (whatever that might mean) and terminating a pregnancy she knows she can't handle. The media circus around this story would make the stories surrounding Terri Schiavo look like a 30-second Public Service Announcement.
Face it: It's the perfect American "news" soap opera. And it also has the beauty of urgency: "Can she be found before she has the abortion?" (Never mind the fact these search queries are fairly old.)
So, no. You don't want to push this in front of CNN. They will spin it completely the wrong way. Why? Because that's what'll make them the most money. And the poor unfortunate woman in the middle of all this will be totally fucked. Again.
According to many sources, including former Microsoft employees, the bugs IBM took out were forced to remain in Microsoft's version of the OS, MS-DOS. Microsoft took advantage of these bugs to put companies such as Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus and others out of business by not disclosing the bugs to its competitors.
Actually, had PC clones not emerged, Microsoft would have been relegated to the scrapheap of history as just another vendor of a BASIC interpreter. And a fairly crappy BASIC at that.
However, once the clones emerged, MS had it made. IBM was certainly not prepared to put in the engineering work to make PC-DOS run on non-IBM hardware. Microsoft, however, was willing to do that work (or at least let PC OEMs pay Microsoft to teach them how to do it themselves), and offer pack-in deals. As such, IBM PCs came bundled with PC-DOS, and every other machine came bundled with MS-DOS.
Back then, just about everyone in the engineering community knew MS-DOS was shit, and would steer anyone who would listen toward PC-DOS, or Digital Research's CP/M-86 or Concurrent CP/M. However, most end-users considered MS-DOS to be "good enough," and it was "free," and they wanted to be able to run the same software they used on the real IBM PC at work on their cheap(er) clone at home. And besides any bugs were the application's fault.
Oh, and you're also forgetting what the gold standard of PC compatibility was at the time:
Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Amazing foresight? Maybe, to some degree. But in large measure Gates fell flat on his face into a pile of amazingly good luck.
Second, Thank You Intel, so very much.... BECAUSE Even the laziest of our part-time hobbyist programmers will be able to improve your driver performance.
Erm... I doubt it.
For the past few years, off and on, I've been porting the XFree/Xorg Intel 8xx graphics drivers to BeOS, so I have a fairly close relationship with that code, and unusually detailed knowledge of the chip series. Unless this represents a completely different codebase (which I doubt), it's really not that bad. Unless you're planning on turning it into a full kernel-mode driver, taking advantage of native interrupts and so forth, there's not a lot that could be improved.
The most annoying part with this driver release is that it still needs the BIOS to set display modes. BeOS can't access/execute the BIOS, so the driver has to be full native. I'll probably still have to do some fairly icky things to make it work...
Anyone who could design a VIC 20 has to either be criminally insane or paid off.
I dunno about that; I suspect the VIC-20 was designed so that they could make as many mistakes as possible so that they could learn from them when putting together the C-64:-). I held no love for Atari, but it was clear even at the time that the VIC-20 was way, way below the required standard for power, RAM, and graphics. I think perhaps they thought they were designing a game console with a built-in keyboard.
And why DID the Commodore 64 disk drives work at about a tenth the speed of the 4040 and 8080 drives they were selling 5-7 years earlier?
The explanation I heard from a CBM engineer is that prototypes of the 1541 drive did transfer data quite quickly, and continued to do so right up to the point that some doorknob in management ordered that the 1541 also be compatible with the VIC-20 (presumably so they could maintain only one SKU). Evidently there was no way the drive could be compatible with the VIC-20 and still remain fast for the C-64 (DMA contention? Limited ROM space in the drive?). So the 1541 got lobotomized, thereby creating a market for 1541 accelerators, like "1541 Flash!" (hi, Bryce!).
Like CBM before them, Microsoft placed a "mole" in an executive position to wreak havoc, and SGI never really recovered from that period of moronic rebranding and windows NT workstations. [emphasis mine]
Evidence, please. Especially for CBM -- Irving and Medhi were selfish gits, but I never heard a suggestion that they were secretly working for Redmond.
This decision has already been made on the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) network. The decision was two-fold: Subscribers got to choose their long distance service provider, and subscribers got to connect any equipment they wanted to the network as long as it met the electrical and signalling standards.
The result was a competetive landscape for long distance service, and an explosion in the variety of subscriber equipment.
Right now, in the US market, the cell phone service provider gets to decide what handsets you can and can't have, and what features they can and can't have. That means new stuff like the Motorola A1200/MING is unavailable to you, period. Does that sound fair to you?
So far, no one has been able to come up with a valid reason for the US market to be so completely out of whack and anti-competetive, other than it being a naked power-grab.
Microsoft would buy it for the express purpose of killing it. It's been a thorn in their side for over ten years.
Since SGI needs money more than it needs OpenGL to survive, I expect SGI would acquiesce to such a deal even if Microsoft were up-front about their intentions.
It's a Radeon Mobility 9200 (M9+) 5C61 (X.org 7.0, kernel 2.6.15). Not long after I bought the machine, Sony switched the S-series to use NVidia chips. sigh...
I think there may be a BIOS upgrade available, but I long since blew Windows completely off the machine. I might be able to re-flash the BIOS under BartPE, but that's a research project...
Slashdot Mirror
More often than not, crashes the machine.
Schwab
Why torpedo three years of someone else's work when it's no skin off your nose to just leave them alone?
Schwab
My own card behaves itself 99.999% of the time. But every so often I notice a wayward triangle (which disappears quickly). My machine is stock; nothing is overclocked beyond how it arrived from the factory. This suggests to me that the card is still flirting with a hairy edge somewhere, and that makes me uncomfortable.
eVGA indeed has been very responsive and forthright; I'm pleased I selected them.
Schwab
There has been tons of speculation on what the cause might be (excessive heat, bad batch of RAMs, signal integrity problems, bad/weak power supplies, too-close-to-the-edge memory timings), but no concrete explanations from anyone.
I personally bumped into this. I built a brand new rig for myself about four months ago, and gave it an NVidia 7900GT made by eVGA. It wasn't long before stuttering graphics and exploding triangles showed up. Happily, eVGA were very committed to their product, and cross-shipped a replacement which, so far, has worked almost entirely without incident. It's my understanding that customers of competing board vendors have not been so lucky.
So whenever I see a review of the latest NVidia product, I'm afraid my first question is no longer, "How fast is it?" but, "How reliable is it?" I think burn-in tests should become a standard part of a reviewer's benchmark suite.
Schwab
While Libertarians do appear to tend toward social Darwinism, they are quick to point out that holds only so long as fraud isn't involved.
The essence of fraud is misrepresentation. The investigators misrepresented themselves to obtain crucial, privileged information. Thus, a Libertarian would almost certainly decry the CEO's actions here.
Schwab
No, they should use a 1541 drive. You can snag them off eBay, or find a local enthusiast who still has one.
The spindle speed was constant; the bitrate was variable. Outer tracks contained more sectors than inner tracks. (This is one reason why I thought the variable-speed spindle in the original Mac floppy drives was completely stupid -- yet another opportunity for mechanical failure.)
Schwab
Seriously: Do a block image copy of every floppy disk. Unless he mechanically modified his 1541 floppy drive (and it'll be flipping obvious if he did), a block copy will get you all possible data off the floppies. Then perform forensic analysis on the disk images. Hire a collection of old C-64 wizards to perform the analysis. Give them all identical copies of the data and have them work in isolation. Compare the results. Trust duplicated results, suspect (or re-test) single-source results.
Outside of the US, Germany/Austria was one of the largest bastions of Commodore expertise (Braunschweig, anyone?). Germany's absolutely lousy with C64-heads. It won't be hard finding them. Hell, if you're stuck, fly me out there. Mein Deutsch ist nicht so schlecht...
Schwab
Defective Read-only Media
So Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle were all figments of my imagination, then?
Schwab
Actually, this is not precisely correct.
One of the most highly convoluted pieces of copyright law surrounds the production and use of phonorecordings. In some ways, phonorecording rights are more strict than "simple" copyrights. In your example, the musical score of Beethoven's symphonies is public domain -- you may freely perform them yourself without having to pay anyone. But the recorded performances of said symphonies are covered by copyright.
Schwab
Schwab
The 1980's are over, and good riddance. Get over it.
Schwab
Schwab
That reminds me -- I need to delete my Friendster account.
I shouldn't be hesitant about it; after all, Friendster has done exactly zilch for me. But I worry that my dropping out might negatively impact, even a little bit, the social networks of my friends, particularly those who joined at my invitation. Still, I cannot abide that my social network is being used to further an unconscionable power grab via an illicit "patent." So the account's going to have to get killed sooner or later...
Schwab
Fortunately I don't travel by air very often. And, as has been pointed out by others, the laptop ban has been lifted (wealthier, more powerful people than I have likely already informed the appropriate scaremongers what a losing proposition this was). Even so, there's no way I'm putting a laptop through checked baggage. Luggage gets lost. Luggage gets tossed around very roughly. And items are known to go "missing" from luggage.
No. Not my laptop. It stays with me, or it stays home.
Schwab
Uh, no.
If you push the "mainstream media" (which is a profit-seeking sensationalism machine) to run with this, the story will not be, "The Government can spy on the most intimate details of your life." Rather, it will be, "Searching for The Searcher: Hunt for Abortion-Seeker Grips Nation." Unholy amounts of money and media resources will be devoted, not to checking Government excesses and lawlessness and preserving the integrity of the Republic, but instead to trying to determine the identity of this mysterious woman, abandoned by a lothario, and left to agonize over the moral quandary of leading an exemplary Christian life (whatever that might mean) and terminating a pregnancy she knows she can't handle. The media circus around this story would make the stories surrounding Terri Schiavo look like a 30-second Public Service Announcement.
Face it: It's the perfect American "news" soap opera. And it also has the beauty of urgency: "Can she be found before she has the abortion?" (Never mind the fact these search queries are fairly old.)
So, no. You don't want to push this in front of CNN. They will spin it completely the wrong way. Why? Because that's what'll make them the most money. And the poor unfortunate woman in the middle of all this will be totally fucked. Again.
Schwab
Actually, had PC clones not emerged, Microsoft would have been relegated to the scrapheap of history as just another vendor of a BASIC interpreter. And a fairly crappy BASIC at that.
However, once the clones emerged, MS had it made. IBM was certainly not prepared to put in the engineering work to make PC-DOS run on non-IBM hardware. Microsoft, however, was willing to do that work (or at least let PC OEMs pay Microsoft to teach them how to do it themselves), and offer pack-in deals. As such, IBM PCs came bundled with PC-DOS, and every other machine came bundled with MS-DOS.
Back then, just about everyone in the engineering community knew MS-DOS was shit, and would steer anyone who would listen toward PC-DOS, or Digital Research's CP/M-86 or Concurrent CP/M. However, most end-users considered MS-DOS to be "good enough," and it was "free," and they wanted to be able to run the same software they used on the real IBM PC at work on their cheap(er) clone at home. And besides any bugs were the application's fault.
Oh, and you're also forgetting what the gold standard of PC compatibility was at the time:
Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Amazing foresight? Maybe, to some degree. But in large measure Gates fell flat on his face into a pile of amazingly good luck.
Schwab
Now write that 399 more times, do a funny little dance, and faint.
Erm... I doubt it.
For the past few years, off and on, I've been porting the XFree/Xorg Intel 8xx graphics drivers to BeOS, so I have a fairly close relationship with that code, and unusually detailed knowledge of the chip series. Unless this represents a completely different codebase (which I doubt), it's really not that bad. Unless you're planning on turning it into a full kernel-mode driver, taking advantage of native interrupts and so forth, there's not a lot that could be improved.
The most annoying part with this driver release is that it still needs the BIOS to set display modes. BeOS can't access/execute the BIOS, so the driver has to be full native. I'll probably still have to do some fairly icky things to make it work...
Schwab
I dunno about that; I suspect the VIC-20 was designed so that they could make as many mistakes as possible so that they could learn from them when putting together the C-64 :-). I held no love for Atari, but it was clear even at the time that the VIC-20 was way, way below the required standard for power, RAM, and graphics. I think perhaps they thought they were designing a game console with a built-in keyboard.
The explanation I heard from a CBM engineer is that prototypes of the 1541 drive did transfer data quite quickly, and continued to do so right up to the point that some doorknob in management ordered that the 1541 also be compatible with the VIC-20 (presumably so they could maintain only one SKU). Evidently there was no way the drive could be compatible with the VIC-20 and still remain fast for the C-64 (DMA contention? Limited ROM space in the drive?). So the 1541 got lobotomized, thereby creating a market for 1541 accelerators, like "1541 Flash!" (hi, Bryce!).
Schwab
Evidence, please. Especially for CBM -- Irving and Medhi were selfish gits, but I never heard a suggestion that they were secretly working for Redmond.
Schwab
Schwab
This decision has already been made on the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) network. The decision was two-fold: Subscribers got to choose their long distance service provider, and subscribers got to connect any equipment they wanted to the network as long as it met the electrical and signalling standards.
The result was a competetive landscape for long distance service, and an explosion in the variety of subscriber equipment.
Right now, in the US market, the cell phone service provider gets to decide what handsets you can and can't have, and what features they can and can't have. That means new stuff like the Motorola A1200/MING is unavailable to you, period. Does that sound fair to you?
So far, no one has been able to come up with a valid reason for the US market to be so completely out of whack and anti-competetive, other than it being a naked power-grab.
Schwab
Since SGI needs money more than it needs OpenGL to survive, I expect SGI would acquiesce to such a deal even if Microsoft were up-front about their intentions.
Schwab
I think there may be a BIOS upgrade available, but I long since blew Windows completely off the machine. I might be able to re-flash the BIOS under BartPE, but that's a research project...
Schwab