ATI's 4870 and 4850 cards are coming up at $450 and $200 respectively, and I think they'll eat these for lunch, at least in the value angle.
People buying $400 video cards aren't looking for value. Around $200, I could see the price being a factor. However, once you've decided to spend $400 on a video card, price isn't even something you are considering.
This is how graphics cards used to work. You would plug a VGA cable from your standard 2D graphics card to your, for example, Voodoo II card, and the Voodoo II card would go out to the monitor. You could just have the 3D card working in passthrough mode when not doing 3D stuff. Something like this could work on a single board though. There's no reason you couldn't power down entire sections of the graphics card that you aren't using. Most video cards support changing the clock speed on the card. I'm wondering if this is a problem at all, with any real effects, or whether it's just speculation based on the poster assuming what might happen. Anybody have any real numbers for wattage drained based on idle/full workload for these large cards?
The fact that anybody could build a 9-pin serial, parallel port, or midi/gaming device was exactly the reason for it's downfall. There were no standards for how to communicate with these devices. You had to install a special driver just to get your external drive working. Remember Zip drives? Sure they worked over parallel. But they required special drivers, so if you wanted to bring data to a friend's house, you would have to install the drivers on his computer. The situation was really bad for joysticks and such. Where certain games would only work with certain joysticks. The higher barrier of entry has actually made things much better for the end users.
Even as a pasty-faced 110 pound wimp, I could easily carry 30 kgs of gear on my back with the right kind of backpack. I imagine that larger person would have no trouble at all carrying 70 kgs, at least for a short distance. It's amazing how easily you can carry a lot of weight, for hiking etc, when you have the right backpack.
Online distribution has a long way to go before it is viable for most people. With most ISPs talking about cutting back on the amount of bandwidth they dish out, a lot of changes will have to be made before you can offer HD video as a replacement to disc based formats. I can get an 18 Mbit connection for $100 a month. That would be fast enough to stream HD content. The problem is the 90GB transfer cap. One HD movie a week would eat though almost the entire allotment. Not only that. The content producers are very weary about online content distribution. Which means that they don't want us to be able to play it on any device we want, and they definitely don't want us to be able to burn copies. This is almost a requirement, as 10 or so HD movies would up most people's entire hard drive. And most people would want to play the movies on their home theatre system. And running a line out from the computer to their TV isn't an option most people want to entertain. I think it will be at least 10 years before we see online distribution be a serious contender for any disc based format.
I agree that USB should have been left for low speed devices like keyboards and mice. It did wonders for things like joysticks/gamepads. Do you remember what it was like trying to get a joystick with more than 4 buttons working before the advent of USB? USB has done some really great things. The problem is, is that once everybody had USB on their computer, why wouldn't the Manufacturers start to make hard drives and such that work with it? It was way faster than 9-pin serial, or parallel ports. So if you wanted to make an external hard drive, you could either make it fast, and use firewire, and sell it to the 1% (higher now, but still absent on a lot of systems) of people who have firewire, or you could make it USB, and market it to just about everyone.
I eat a lot of tofu, soy, and even a lot of those veggie meat products. The veggie meat products like salami and pepperoni don't taste the same as the meat based ones, but they are pretty good, and considering the nutritional differences, I'd much rather eat veggie pepperoni and be healthier, than eat the meat based ones and be unhealthy. I'm not vegetarian by any means. However, in my kitchen, we only do meat about 2-3 times a week, at dinner, and otherwise meat is almost non-existent in my diet. People would be a lot healthier in general if we just got the idea out of our heads that we have to have large portions of meat at every meal.
It's a bit like comparing veggie soy "meat" to the real thing It's something like it, but not really, just a "cheap trick".
I try not to think of veggie meat and tofu as a replacement for meat, but rather a whole different food that stands completely on it's own. It's quite different from meat, and not a replacement. But if you throw away the whole idea of a meat substitute away, it actually tastes pretty good. Not only that, it's a good source of protein, and extremely low fat compared to other sources of protein. Once you get over the fact that it's tofu, and obviously doesn't taste like meat, and isn't supposed to be meat, then you shouldn't have a problem eating it. If you don't like the taste/texture of tofu, you aren't preparing it right.
Can you even tell what the game looks like from the shots on the back? 1.5 inch square photos don't give you much of an idea of the graphics quality of a game. Especially when you don't know if the screenshot is from a cutscene or from actual gameplay.
They use images for the entire email, because Outlook 2007, to name just one of many email clients, is completely incapable of rendering anything outside of extremely basic HTML. Using a bunch of images arranged in a table is the best way to assure your nicely designed email newsletter/adleter won't be mangled by the email client.
How much money do you have, and how spoiled are your kids? From the first link I saw, the MSI Wind is supposed to be priced between $458 to $1072 depending on options. Even at $458, that's quite an expensive device. Not expensive for a portable computer, but expensive none the less. If my kid lost or broke a $500 thing, I would be quite annoyed, and I would not be playing to replace it. Especially considering that a portable computer is nowhere near necessary for kids to have.
I agree. I bought a laptop. Although I certainly don't use it as a portable computer. I use it because it's nice to use on the couch, or is easily transported to the kitchen so I don't have to print recipes. It's almost always plugged in. The amount of battery power in laptops is dispicable. 7 hours should the the minimum for basic laptops. Not something to be happy about. A laptop should at least be able to work all day without worrying about the battery.
There's quite a difference in the binaries between a compiled executable, and that of full DVD or BluRay Rip. One is a couple hundred K, the other can be as large as 20 GB. It was no problem to host a new compiled binary every month or so. It's a different matter entirely to host the 2 TB of data currently posted to Usenet everyday.
My ISP Roger's Ottawa, dumped UseNet years ago. You can still access it if you've payed (or found a free) news service, but they no longer host their own servers.
Not likely. They've been talking about it since last christmas, when it was originally supposed to be tabled. Seeing the actual bill will just bring new interest. The Canadian media doesn't just forget about stuff like this.
I found the kneeling chair. It looks like it would be really uncomfortable, and with no back support you would get tired, but something about it just puts your entire body in the right position.
$200 is nothing. Most decent office chair costs $200 minimum. It's not hard to find a chair that costs upwards of $500. Some of them are really worth it though.
I personally suspect (although I have no proof) that is must have to do with some specific extension that a lot of people use. I've ran Firefox for weeks at a time, and only had the memory go up to about 200MB, but that's with about 15 tabs open, spread between various windows. Since so many people experience it, it must be a popular plugin. But there's enough people who experience no problems at all, that it can't be something built into the browser by default.
Opera is faster, but my computer is so fast that you really can't tell the difference much, especially when you take into account internet connection speed. Firefox has extensions. Which is where the real advantage is.
If not, I'm still voting for him--third party candidates are worthless and Obama is scary.
It's amazing, that in the US, the land of freedom and a model for democracy (or that's what they want everyone to believe), that in the last 3 elections (including this november), there hasn't been a single candidate worth voting for. At least in some people's opinions. It's a sad state of affairs when your voting for the lesser of two evils, and not somebody that you actually support. Obviously some people have liked one candidate or another in recent elections, but it seems like a large percentage of the people support nobody.
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This is how graphics cards used to work. You would plug a VGA cable from your standard 2D graphics card to your, for example, Voodoo II card, and the Voodoo II card would go out to the monitor. You could just have the 3D card working in passthrough mode when not doing 3D stuff. Something like this could work on a single board though. There's no reason you couldn't power down entire sections of the graphics card that you aren't using. Most video cards support changing the clock speed on the card. I'm wondering if this is a problem at all, with any real effects, or whether it's just speculation based on the poster assuming what might happen. Anybody have any real numbers for wattage drained based on idle/full workload for these large cards?
The fact that anybody could build a 9-pin serial, parallel port, or midi/gaming device was exactly the reason for it's downfall. There were no standards for how to communicate with these devices. You had to install a special driver just to get your external drive working. Remember Zip drives? Sure they worked over parallel. But they required special drivers, so if you wanted to bring data to a friend's house, you would have to install the drivers on his computer. The situation was really bad for joysticks and such. Where certain games would only work with certain joysticks. The higher barrier of entry has actually made things much better for the end users.
Even as a pasty-faced 110 pound wimp, I could easily carry 30 kgs of gear on my back with the right kind of backpack. I imagine that larger person would have no trouble at all carrying 70 kgs, at least for a short distance. It's amazing how easily you can carry a lot of weight, for hiking etc, when you have the right backpack.
Online distribution has a long way to go before it is viable for most people. With most ISPs talking about cutting back on the amount of bandwidth they dish out, a lot of changes will have to be made before you can offer HD video as a replacement to disc based formats. I can get an 18 Mbit connection for $100 a month. That would be fast enough to stream HD content. The problem is the 90GB transfer cap. One HD movie a week would eat though almost the entire allotment. Not only that. The content producers are very weary about online content distribution. Which means that they don't want us to be able to play it on any device we want, and they definitely don't want us to be able to burn copies. This is almost a requirement, as 10 or so HD movies would up most people's entire hard drive. And most people would want to play the movies on their home theatre system. And running a line out from the computer to their TV isn't an option most people want to entertain. I think it will be at least 10 years before we see online distribution be a serious contender for any disc based format.
I agree that USB should have been left for low speed devices like keyboards and mice. It did wonders for things like joysticks/gamepads. Do you remember what it was like trying to get a joystick with more than 4 buttons working before the advent of USB? USB has done some really great things. The problem is, is that once everybody had USB on their computer, why wouldn't the Manufacturers start to make hard drives and such that work with it? It was way faster than 9-pin serial, or parallel ports. So if you wanted to make an external hard drive, you could either make it fast, and use firewire, and sell it to the 1% (higher now, but still absent on a lot of systems) of people who have firewire, or you could make it USB, and market it to just about everyone.
I eat a lot of tofu, soy, and even a lot of those veggie meat products. The veggie meat products like salami and pepperoni don't taste the same as the meat based ones, but they are pretty good, and considering the nutritional differences, I'd much rather eat veggie pepperoni and be healthier, than eat the meat based ones and be unhealthy. I'm not vegetarian by any means. However, in my kitchen, we only do meat about 2-3 times a week, at dinner, and otherwise meat is almost non-existent in my diet. People would be a lot healthier in general if we just got the idea out of our heads that we have to have large portions of meat at every meal.
Can you even tell what the game looks like from the shots on the back? 1.5 inch square photos don't give you much of an idea of the graphics quality of a game. Especially when you don't know if the screenshot is from a cutscene or from actual gameplay.
They use images for the entire email, because Outlook 2007, to name just one of many email clients, is completely incapable of rendering anything outside of extremely basic HTML. Using a bunch of images arranged in a table is the best way to assure your nicely designed email newsletter/adleter won't be mangled by the email client.
How much money do you have, and how spoiled are your kids? From the first link I saw, the MSI Wind is supposed to be priced between $458 to $1072 depending on options. Even at $458, that's quite an expensive device. Not expensive for a portable computer, but expensive none the less. If my kid lost or broke a $500 thing, I would be quite annoyed, and I would not be playing to replace it. Especially considering that a portable computer is nowhere near necessary for kids to have.
I agree. I bought a laptop. Although I certainly don't use it as a portable computer. I use it because it's nice to use on the couch, or is easily transported to the kitchen so I don't have to print recipes. It's almost always plugged in. The amount of battery power in laptops is dispicable. 7 hours should the the minimum for basic laptops. Not something to be happy about. A laptop should at least be able to work all day without worrying about the battery.
You do know that you can close tabs right? Use the little X on the side of the tab. Or you can type CTRL+w.
There's quite a difference in the binaries between a compiled executable, and that of full DVD or BluRay Rip. One is a couple hundred K, the other can be as large as 20 GB. It was no problem to host a new compiled binary every month or so. It's a different matter entirely to host the 2 TB of data currently posted to Usenet everyday.
My ISP Roger's Ottawa, dumped UseNet years ago. You can still access it if you've payed (or found a free) news service, but they no longer host their own servers.
At least we still have the CBC
Not likely. They've been talking about it since last christmas, when it was originally supposed to be tabled. Seeing the actual bill will just bring new interest. The Canadian media doesn't just forget about stuff like this.
Wouldn't holding down the shift key, and disabling autorun also count as circumventing their DRM?
I found the kneeling chair. It looks like it would be really uncomfortable, and with no back support you would get tired, but something about it just puts your entire body in the right position.
$200 is nothing. Most decent office chair costs $200 minimum. It's not hard to find a chair that costs upwards of $500. Some of them are really worth it though.
Flakes is often used to describe tuna. You can get "chunk" tuna, or "flake" tuna.
I personally suspect (although I have no proof) that is must have to do with some specific extension that a lot of people use. I've ran Firefox for weeks at a time, and only had the memory go up to about 200MB, but that's with about 15 tabs open, spread between various windows. Since so many people experience it, it must be a popular plugin. But there's enough people who experience no problems at all, that it can't be something built into the browser by default.
I vote for Klik. As a bonus, it's an onomatopoeia for the sound of hanging up the phone.
Opera is faster, but my computer is so fast that you really can't tell the difference much, especially when you take into account internet connection speed. Firefox has extensions. Which is where the real advantage is.
If not, I'm still voting for him--third party candidates are worthless and Obama is scary. It's amazing, that in the US, the land of freedom and a model for democracy (or that's what they want everyone to believe), that in the last 3 elections (including this november), there hasn't been a single candidate worth voting for. At least in some people's opinions. It's a sad state of affairs when your voting for the lesser of two evils, and not somebody that you actually support. Obviously some people have liked one candidate or another in recent elections, but it seems like a large percentage of the people support nobody.