Rarely. Usually they're more concerned with a $1000 body kit. And half the time they fuck that up to. It's not unheard of for ricers to buy cheap CF hoods that actually end up weighing MORE than the stock hood did in the first place. Ricers talk big, but half of the time, their "sweet ass mods" have actually worked to slow their cars down. The people actually willing to put the money into a turbo (you're talking $3000 just for the parts on most cars) generally aren't going to go out of their way just to make the car "look cool." Sure, they want it to look nice, but they're not the ones putting a 3 foot tall spoiler on their rear decklid. (With it leaning back so it actually causes lift, the opposite of what a spoiler is SUPPOSED to do. And yes, I have seen this. With my own eyes. Multiple times.)
You know, I was sitting here wondering why the hell this thing was on Slashdot, and it occurred to me that the automotive and PC worlds are much more alike than you'd think. There are the technical ubergeeks - the ones who know every detail of how the machine runs and works. There are the every day users, who couldn't care less as long as the darn thing works and only have to get it fixed very occassionally. You have the speed fanatics, who are only interested in one thing - going faster at any cost, even if it means reducing the life and reliability of the machine. And finally, of course you have the wannabes. The ones who are convinced that doing XYZ will be better/faster/cooler when the opposite is often true, and end up simply looking like morons to the rest of us.
I, for one, enjoyed the article. I thought it was hilarious, and showed good engineering concepts about what you can and can't do to a vehicle and keep it running. I saw parallels between the story and things I run into everyday in the computer world. You get people who think they know what they are talking about who demand impossible things for free. Well, these guys showed that. so what if it was on a car instead of a computer program.
Heh, the article is actually making fun of the people who "mod" their car in rediculous ways because they think it makes them faster when it actually slows them down. This article is originally from Sport Compact Car magazine, who is VERY much into the technical side of automotive tuning - it's written for car geeks. You know, the people who actually KNOW what they're doing. The people the article's making fun of are essentially the script kiddies of the automotive world.:)
Luckily, my home county is completely emissions-crap-free.
Eh, they're really not that bad a thing. It keeps the SUV driving morons of the world from fucking up the environment any more than they already are with their 10 mpg "vehicles." It's annoying, yeah, but it just forces people to be a little more creative in their tuning. Now, the people I really feel sorry for are the Californians with their crappy 91 octane gas.
It's a different scene entirely. The people who like to "trick out" their cars with rediculously expensive custom paint jobs and electronics are into the show car side of things. They're the ones you're most likely to see at the auto shows showing off their "sweet rides." The lower class of this group are the idiots you see on the street that inspire the coffee can muffler parodies. Check out this site if you want a good laugh.
Then you have the people that are into the technical side of things. This is definitely the point of view of SCC (the magazine this story was originally from). It's usually not hard to find their disdain for the latter group somewhere in any given issue of one of their magazines. Imagine a publication kind of like Autoweek or Motortrend, but that doesn't really give a shit about "luxury" or "amenities" and only really care about one thing - speed. Then you'll have an idea of what audience this article was aimed at.
Really, if you know about cars, the reason the article is so funny is because the things they're doing are basically exagerated versions of what real life morons do because they think it'll make their cars faster. The fact that they basically destroyed the car to gain 2.1 seconds on the 1/4 mile is the punch line.:)
I pulled the back seat out of a 2 door compact I had a couple of years ago - nobody ever rode in the back and it was extra weight, so why not?:)
But more to the point for the on-the-track drag racing scene, it's a VERY common thing. More weight != fast. People that are into this heavily and can afford to have a car "just for the track" usually strip the entire interior down to just bare metal and a driver's seat. Peope who are less into it cut weight by pulling out whatever they don't consider "needed." So yeah, it's not unusual.
As others have said, it was a joke and the only reason it was done was because the magazines agreement with the manufacturers says they have to dispose of the car afterwards... I guess they did:)
More recently it was true with their Matrix, which they had to give back without really finishing since they screwed up the engine and wouldn't have had time to fix it before their time with it was up:)
Cg is a high level language that outputs to DX and OGL code. Render Monkey is a high level language that outputs to DX and OGL code.
The only REAL difference is ATI packages their downloadable toolkit with a rather nifty IDE that has a built in previewer so you can see what you're doing as you're coding it. Maybe you're mistaking the fact that this IDE has a "Variable Editor" that lets you easily modify an existing shader for it simply being "Render monkey is a program where you create effects graphically and it outputs them to DX HLSL language or OGL language." At it's core, it's simply a high level, graphics oriented language. I mean, logically, does the fact that that there are built-in tools in Visual C++ that make working with C++ easier than with notepad and a compiler mean that "C++ is just a program where you create software and output it to bytecode?" Cg and Render Monkey are just competing languages for doing the exact same thing.
After all, it's not any different from developing for the Gamecube
How do you figure? The XBox pretty much runs DirectX on a hacked Win2K, while the GCN uses a custom version of OpenGL. The rendering languages may be simliar to what you see on a PC with both, but it's easier to port to the XBox from PC and vice versa simply because like it or not, the XBox IS a PC at heart.
Well, in the case of OGL, you have the core API and then each manufacturer can add various extensions to the language to suit their particular cards. They have to be approved by the ARB, but that's really only a superficial concern. So it's not uncommon to have a general ARB approved method of doing something, and then also have proprietary nVidia and ATI calls optimized for their general chipsets. Read Carmack's.plan if you want to get a bit more in-depth with this than my puny/. post:)
Not really. They've supposedly been busy working on their own competiting technology called "Render Monkey." I just did a search of ATI's site to give you a link, but every mention of it has disappeared. Anyone know if Render Monkey's been dropped or if it was just an attempt by ATI to distract some of the fanfare from Cg (it was announced not long after Cg, so I could see this being a possiblity). Or maybe ATI just sucks at keeping people informed of what they're up to?:)
. I for one will never buy a card from ATI due to their extremely poor track record
Agreed. I still can't get images of that god awful Rage chipset and its refusal to texture ANYTHING properly out of my nightmares. Yeah, judging a company off a crappy product from years ago may seem shallow, but if you had any idea of how much gaming that card ruined for me, you'd understand. Really. You would.
The difference is nVidia hasn't made the key, stupid management mistakes 3DFX did. They haven't tried to turn themselves into a card manufacturor like 3DFX did with the Voodoo3 and later. They haven't pissed off all their allies. They haven't focused SOLELY on the performance market. As it stand, nVidia has the GF Ti4600 and FX lines as a flagship model, but the majority of their sales are made to the mid-level market with cards like the GF4 MX.
They've also expanded into being a fairly standard OEM item - something 3DFX never really did (which was ATIs bread and butter at the time). Sure some gateways came with Voodoo3's , etc. but 3DFX never really made a push for that market. Throw the fairly popular nForce2 motherboard chipset into the mix, and I honestly don't see nVidia in any danger of becoming another 3DFX at all. They're making money - lots of it. 3DFX wasn't. It's that simple.
Yeah, and if you recall, Ashcroft and Co. were pushing hard a while back for the power to strip anyone who was an accused terrorist of their citizenship. If you're not a citizen, you're an alien. How convenient.
Just as a note of extension to your post; if there are any people out there who are fans of the great monitors Nokia made and are in the market for a new one, Nokia dropped out of the display business a year or two ago and sold off that division to View Sonic, so their higher end monitors are probably what you'd want to be looking at.
Sounds like something in the high voltage is going screwy. It can definitely be fixed, it's just a matter of whether you can find a shop in your area willing to do it for a reasonable price. If they're saying $100 bucks just to find the problem, they don't know what they're doing in the first place. I don't personally handle the monitor repairs in the shop I work at, but I know enough just from being around those who do for what you're saying to give me at least *some* idea of what's going on.
But all that aside, if you can get away for under $250 parts and labor (which you SHOULD be able to), I'd get it fixed without a second thought. Nokia made some GREAT monitors (I'm typing this in front of a 17" 447Za) with great pictures and I seriously doubt you could replace it with anything near as nice for what it'd cost to fix it.
And as an interesting aside, your post made me notice that Nokia's numbering scheme for their monitors is a bit "backwards" from what you'd expect - 17" = 447 19" = 446 21" = 445 (I've got one of these too. Total bliss:)
Yay for Geek 1337ism. By far the most reliable monitor I've ever is a 14" CTX that was dirt cheap around 96-97 and it still runs perfect. I've got a cheapo Compaq monitor I acquired from someone who didn't need it any more about the same vintage that occassionally has a little trouble, but the problem's in the cable, not the monitor. My point? Occassionally the cheap stuff lasts as well. And now that I've said all that, let me make a hypocrite of myself in saying the monitor I'm typing this on is a 97 vintage Nokia 17" that was around $1000 new, and god, it rocks.:)
Oh, I've never doubted that the fact that people find him more "likeable" as person than most politicians. However, I think he's proven himself to be just another politician through his actions. Maybe it's just me, but I've found it disturbing that so many people support Bush because "well, he's a nice guy" rather than because of his policies.
I've never really seen it enumerated in this way, but I think that you're pretty much right on these points looking over them.
I think Bush actually means it when he says he wants to take him out to stabilize the mid-easy and protect the US in the future.
The scary part being that he honestly believes that introducing a power vaccuum into the middle of the most volatile region of the world and doing something that will basically enrage radicals will make the US "safer."
3. Put pressure on other oil producing nations and put the squeeze on the Euro by being able to threaten those nations with a glut in oil.
I agree again. As much as conservatives will argue that this war has nothing to do with oil, I don't see how that's possible. A number of people (most notably one Donald Rumsfield) were quite friendly with Saddam under Reagan until Saddam turned down a deal to run an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan. This is while he was gassing Iranians, but he didn't become a "bad guy" until after the pipeline was a dead issue.
FYI, during the election Bush said those things about military intervention to secure his base amoung conservatives who were tip-toeing to other candidates.
Which is why it's so frustrating when conservatives tout Bush as a bastion of honesty. He's a politician, just like all the others and he'll say whatever it takes to get in office. I've never understood why so many people find him so easy to trust when at every turn it seems like he's engaged in some form of blatant hypocrisy.
I find it interesting that you bring up Serbia as an example of when we "did good." I agree whole heartedly. Milosevic was actively engaged in a campaign of genocide and needed to be stopped. Now, why do I find the fact that you bring up Serbia interesting? Because during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush stated numerous times that he would NOT have sent US troops into Kosovo. Most people have forgotten about this, or never even realized he said it, but for me personally, it destroys any credibility Bush might have had in saying we were doing this "for the Iraqi people."
He's willing to spend billions of dollars and take thousands of lives to remove a leader who is undoubtedly unsavory, but, as has been shown by the general collapse of the Iraqi military in the past 3 weeks, barely in control, but he wouldn't have done anything to stop a Hitler-wannabe in the Baltic? Something doesn't add up there, and it most definitely does not sit well with me. I don't know what Bush's underlying motivation for this war is, but it is most definitely NOT about the well-being of the Iraqi people - that's just an easy excuse.
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Rarely. Usually they're more concerned with a $1000 body kit. And half the time they fuck that up to. It's not unheard of for ricers to buy cheap CF hoods that actually end up weighing MORE than the stock hood did in the first place. Ricers talk big, but half of the time, their "sweet ass mods" have actually worked to slow their cars down. The people actually willing to put the money into a turbo (you're talking $3000 just for the parts on most cars) generally aren't going to go out of their way just to make the car "look cool." Sure, they want it to look nice, but they're not the ones putting a 3 foot tall spoiler on their rear decklid. (With it leaning back so it actually causes lift, the opposite of what a spoiler is SUPPOSED to do. And yes, I have seen this. With my own eyes. Multiple times.)
You know, I was sitting here wondering why the hell this thing was on Slashdot, and it occurred to me that the automotive and PC worlds are much more alike than you'd think. There are the technical ubergeeks - the ones who know every detail of how the machine runs and works. There are the every day users, who couldn't care less as long as the darn thing works and only have to get it fixed very occassionally. You have the speed fanatics, who are only interested in one thing - going faster at any cost, even if it means reducing the life and reliability of the machine. And finally, of course you have the wannabes. The ones who are convinced that doing XYZ will be better/faster/cooler when the opposite is often true, and end up simply looking like morons to the rest of us.
It's a different scene entirely. The people who like to "trick out" their cars with rediculously expensive custom paint jobs and electronics are into the show car side of things. They're the ones you're most likely to see at the auto shows showing off their "sweet rides." The lower class of this group are the idiots you see on the street that inspire the coffee can muffler parodies. Check out this site if you want a good laugh.
:)
Then you have the people that are into the technical side of things. This is definitely the point of view of SCC (the magazine this story was originally from). It's usually not hard to find their disdain for the latter group somewhere in any given issue of one of their magazines. Imagine a publication kind of like Autoweek or Motortrend, but that doesn't really give a shit about "luxury" or "amenities" and only really care about one thing - speed. Then you'll have an idea of what audience this article was aimed at.
Really, if you know about cars, the reason the article is so funny is because the things they're doing are basically exagerated versions of what real life morons do because they think it'll make their cars faster. The fact that they basically destroyed the car to gain 2.1 seconds on the 1/4 mile is the punch line.
I pulled the back seat out of a 2 door compact I had a couple of years ago - nobody ever rode in the back and it was extra weight, so why not? :)
But more to the point for the on-the-track drag racing scene, it's a VERY common thing. More weight != fast. People that are into this heavily and can afford to have a car "just for the track" usually strip the entire interior down to just bare metal and a driver's seat. Peope who are less into it cut weight by pulling out whatever they don't consider "needed." So yeah, it's not unusual.
As others have said, it was a joke and the only reason it was done was because the magazines agreement with the manufacturers says they have to dispose of the car afterwards... I guess they did :)
More recently it was true with their Matrix, which they had to give back without really finishing since they screwed up the engine and wouldn't have had time to fix it before their time with it was up :)
Cg is a high level language that outputs to DX and OGL code. Render Monkey is a high level language that outputs to DX and OGL code.
The only REAL difference is ATI packages their downloadable toolkit with a rather nifty IDE that has a built in previewer so you can see what you're doing as you're coding it. Maybe you're mistaking the fact that this IDE has a "Variable Editor" that lets you easily modify an existing shader for it simply being "Render monkey is a program where you create effects graphically and it outputs them to DX HLSL language or OGL language." At it's core, it's simply a high level, graphics oriented language. I mean, logically, does the fact that that there are built-in tools in Visual C++ that make working with C++ easier than with notepad and a compiler mean that "C++ is just a program where you create software and output it to bytecode?" Cg and Render Monkey are just competing languages for doing the exact same thing.
How the hell is this a troll? I was trying to be helpful. The thanks I get. *sigh*
Well, in the case of OGL, you have the core API and then each manufacturer can add various extensions to the language to suit their particular cards. They have to be approved by the ARB, but that's really only a superficial concern. So it's not uncommon to have a general ARB approved method of doing something, and then also have proprietary nVidia and ATI calls optimized for their general chipsets. Read Carmack's .plan if you want to get a bit more in-depth with this than my puny /. post :)
Not really. They've supposedly been busy working on their own competiting technology called "Render Monkey." I just did a search of ATI's site to give you a link, but every mention of it has disappeared. Anyone know if Render Monkey's been dropped or if it was just an attempt by ATI to distract some of the fanfare from Cg (it was announced not long after Cg, so I could see this being a possiblity). Or maybe ATI just sucks at keeping people informed of what they're up to? :)
The difference is nVidia hasn't made the key, stupid management mistakes 3DFX did. They haven't tried to turn themselves into a card manufacturor like 3DFX did with the Voodoo3 and later. They haven't pissed off all their allies. They haven't focused SOLELY on the performance market. As it stand, nVidia has the GF Ti4600 and FX lines as a flagship model, but the majority of their sales are made to the mid-level market with cards like the GF4 MX.
They've also expanded into being a fairly standard OEM item - something 3DFX never really did (which was ATIs bread and butter at the time). Sure some gateways came with Voodoo3's , etc. but 3DFX never really made a push for that market. Throw the fairly popular nForce2 motherboard chipset into the mix, and I honestly don't see nVidia in any danger of becoming another 3DFX at all. They're making money - lots of it. 3DFX wasn't. It's that simple.
And to think, teachers and parents and counselours keep telling you that "The Real World(TM)" outside of high school is sooooo much different. Laff.
Yeah, and if you recall, Ashcroft and Co. were pushing hard a while back for the power to strip anyone who was an accused terrorist of their citizenship. If you're not a citizen, you're an alien. How convenient.
Just as a note of extension to your post; if there are any people out there who are fans of the great monitors Nokia made and are in the market for a new one, Nokia dropped out of the display business a year or two ago and sold off that division to View Sonic, so their higher end monitors are probably what you'd want to be looking at.
Sounds like something in the high voltage is going screwy. It can definitely be fixed, it's just a matter of whether you can find a shop in your area willing to do it for a reasonable price. If they're saying $100 bucks just to find the problem, they don't know what they're doing in the first place. I don't personally handle the monitor repairs in the shop I work at, but I know enough just from being around those who do for what you're saying to give me at least *some* idea of what's going on.
:)
But all that aside, if you can get away for under $250 parts and labor (which you SHOULD be able to), I'd get it fixed without a second thought. Nokia made some GREAT monitors (I'm typing this in front of a 17" 447Za) with great pictures and I seriously doubt you could replace it with anything near as nice for what it'd cost to fix it.
And as an interesting aside, your post made me notice that Nokia's numbering scheme for their monitors is a bit "backwards" from what you'd expect -
17" = 447
19" = 446
21" = 445 (I've got one of these too. Total bliss
Yay for Geek 1337ism. By far the most reliable monitor I've ever is a 14" CTX that was dirt cheap around 96-97 and it still runs perfect. I've got a cheapo Compaq monitor I acquired from someone who didn't need it any more about the same vintage that occassionally has a little trouble, but the problem's in the cable, not the monitor. My point? Occassionally the cheap stuff lasts as well. And now that I've said all that, let me make a hypocrite of myself in saying the monitor I'm typing this on is a 97 vintage Nokia 17" that was around $1000 new, and god, it rocks. :)
You can afford to keep a flatscreen monitor on your *last* generation computer? I envy you. :)
Oh, I've never doubted that the fact that people find him more "likeable" as person than most politicians. However, I think he's proven himself to be just another politician through his actions. Maybe it's just me, but I've found it disturbing that so many people support Bush because "well, he's a nice guy" rather than because of his policies.
I find it interesting that you bring up Serbia as an example of when we "did good." I agree whole heartedly. Milosevic was actively engaged in a campaign of genocide and needed to be stopped. Now, why do I find the fact that you bring up Serbia interesting? Because during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush stated numerous times that he would NOT have sent US troops into Kosovo. Most people have forgotten about this, or never even realized he said it, but for me personally, it destroys any credibility Bush might have had in saying we were doing this "for the Iraqi people."
He's willing to spend billions of dollars and take thousands of lives to remove a leader who is undoubtedly unsavory, but, as has been shown by the general collapse of the Iraqi military in the past 3 weeks, barely in control, but he wouldn't have done anything to stop a Hitler-wannabe in the Baltic? Something doesn't add up there, and it most definitely does not sit well with me. I don't know what Bush's underlying motivation for this war is, but it is most definitely NOT about the well-being of the Iraqi people - that's just an easy excuse.