I was curious so I read the Wiki on DVI. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVI. Apparently, a single link DVI only does over 60Hz at 1280x1024 and below. However, the DVI standard also supports the old VGA connection over the same cable. I suspect that my monitor must be using the analog signal, as I doubt that my Radeon 7000 supports dual link DVI and it would explain why the DVI picture is no different than using the VGA input.
Graphics: The onboard video chipset does *not* make HDTV playback a problem, it was the core SOLO that stuttered during playback. I have a core duo linked up to my plasma, and it works beautifully.
Actually it *is* the graphics chipset. It's basically unloading work onto the CPU. The Core Duo can handle it, but the Coro Solo can't keep up.
All Dell monitors I have dealt with include both cables, for future reference. Though I only deal with their high-end line. (:
At work, we get 17" NEC LCD monitors. They only include the VGA cable, which is extra lame because most of the computers have dual head video cards with a DVI port.
That's because in general, Microsoft has managed to improve the OS to the point where it is pretty stable by the end of it's lifecycle. Windows XP SP2 is far better than vanilla XP. Each of the Windows 2000 service packs generally made things better too, especially in terms of backwards compatibility. Windows 98SE was also a lot better than Windows 98. Even Windows ME was halfway decent by the time Microsoft cut support for it. I'm pretty sure that by the time that Windows 7.0 is ready to come out, Vista will be running pretty stable and relatively bug free.
I've got a massive 21" IBM CRT monitor with both DVI and VGA inputs, and driven with the DVI cable I can run any refresh that the VGA also supports. So maybe something is misconfigured on your computer?
Now that I think about it, the trend has changed. But printers and scanners and such used to not include such cables.
I think it's still the case at places like Best Buy. Best Buy likes to pressure printer and scanner manufacturers to not include cables, so they can sell you a standard USB cable at an insane markup instead. I remember in some cases, it was cheaper to buy something cheap that contained the needed cable (like a $15 USB card reader) than it was to simply buy the cable alone. However, since I no longer shop at Best Buy, I don't remember the last time I bought something USB that didn't include the needed cables.
A more apt comparison might be some of the cheaper computer LCDs that have both DVI and VGA inputs. Most I have seen only include the VGA cable.
A certain segment actually wants an all out war between the west and Islam. Start attacking Muslim targets at random, and you would be playing right into their hands. They figure that with a billion or more pissed off Muslims on their side, that they would win (though I would guess that they wouldn't expect the US to bust out the nukes, which certainly changes the equation).
Sometimes wonder if the best solution to the terrorist attacks would be to just pick up the pieces and move on. At the worst, all the terrorists can do is blow something up every once and a while. On the scale of things, insignificant. The rest - all the living constant fear, taking away freedoms, the economic damage, collateral damage from trying to fix the world - we do it to ourselves.
G5's are extremely picky about ram. Some 3rd party ram is fine, others are constant problems. Simply buying generic ram is a gamble. However, you can usually buy the same type of ram that someone else has had good luck with and be fine.
Windows XP Home is pretty much just crippled when it comes to networking. Off the top of my head, the only other restriction I can remember is that it doesn't support dual CPU either. While for some people, the crippled networking is certainly a show-stopper, remember that for others it won't matter at all.
What if you don't care for the "Macintosh computing experience"? In general, PCs are cheaper, and a whole lot more flexible. That's enough to keep me handing over money to newegg instead of Apple for the forseeable future.
Besides, it's not really true that you have a Mac and a PC all in one. With Boot camp, you either have a Mac or a Windows PC. Dual booting is a pain, and if people find that Windows does everything they need (which includes those particular Windows software), and Mac OSX doesn't - I'm going to guess that a lot of those Macs will end up just being strange looking Dells. Not having to reboot several times a day will trump other spiffy features like a shiny GUI, in my experience.
Windows XP is stable in the sense that if you have a machine with decent hardware, and is taken care of, it will very rarely crash. I can't remember the last time I had Windows XP crash on my machine, and it's been running the same install for 1.5 years now (the last time I reinstalled was because I changed out the motherboard). I also have experience with Windows XP boxes that have been running for considerably longer with no problems. Compare to Windows 9x (or Mac OS Classic) where the computer would crash randomly no matter how well you babied it, and also Windows 9x/Me's ability to randomly trash its registry and require a reinstall, no matter how careful you were. Of course someone can trash Windows XP and make it unstable, I'm sure you can also trash OSX and make unstable too.
HOWEVER, these items in online games have MASSIVE intrinisic value based on labor. If there's only one of such item known in existence, and I've put 400 hours into obtaining said item, I can't simply go and pick up another one at the dollar store. There is no equivalent conversion in the real world, and if someone steals the item, they're essentially stealing 400 hours from my life. Those 400 hours of my life have massive value, both to me, and in the real world, where it could easily translate to $5000 or more dollars.
Which is probably the reason why many MMORPGs state somewhere in the user agreement that all the items, gold, etc. are actually the property of the company that runs the game. That makes things a lot easier for the people running the game, since the items are never really yours. You don't have much recourse when someone steals it from you, or if a server glitch eats the item, or the item gets nerfed in a patch, etc - they can just say "Tough luck." and that's it. Just something you should keep in mind before you invest 400 hours into a super-rare item.
Or else they try to rely on monopolistic practices, cartels, and government regulation to stay afloat. Such as the major record labels, many local utilities, Microsoft, automobile insurance companies, and countless others.
How much do you trust that light? Besides, spposedly I hear that Google is working with very small snippets here - would you notice if the light only blinked on for a split second every few minutes?
I think I'll keep my tower, where I can physically unplug the devices. That way I'll be sure.
Likewise, it would be neat if bittorrent or Gnutella or something like it, would peer with users on earby networks first, instead of just anyone. If a bunch of an ISP's users are all passing lots of packets to each other the the ISP has little reason to throttle. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard of ISPs working on this, because they (moreso than the users) are the ones who would most benefit from it.
Actually, what ISPs should do is throttle your connection to internet at the speed they advertise, rather than throttle your modem at that speed. If you have 3Mbps DSL/cable/whatever, you get 3mbps to the internet, and your modem operates at whatever the fastest speed your line can manage. That way, you would get something like 10Mbps or more to your ISP. If they did that, a lot of the P2P applications would take care of themselves, as they would find that the peers on your ISP's network are considerably faster, and would tend to favor them simply because of that. Problem solved.
I was struck by the high cost of these laptops quoted in the article... $1400 and $1200. Since I can buy a very capable laptop for about $500 these days (in fact, I have bought a few for my daughters in college), why are the schools paying so much?
That's the solution I use right now, but it's somewhat of a pain if you have a lot of files. Copy over a few hundred gigs in a directory over, then on the original drive change some of files, rename some others, add some files, and delete some of them. When I back up again, I would want the system to be smart enough to only copy the changed files over, as well as the new files. No need to copy all the files over again when 95% of them haven't changed. I would also want it to delete the files off of the backup that I have deleted on the computer (or atleast put them in the equilivent of the recycle bin on the backup drive - I want them out of the backup copy of the directory). Simply using copy to copy the whole batch over everytime I want to make a backup takes a long time and is just adding needless wear and tear on both drives.
130W is about right for a bedroom, if you ask me. Keep in mind in the US, for most new homes a bedroom is something like 125-150 square feet. I have 220W in my bedroom (well, 220W equilivent, there are 2 60W CFL and a single 100W CFL). The 2 60W ones above the bed make a nice reading right, and the 100W lights the rest of the room.
As for games to be played? Most people have a smaller table lamp in their bedroom, for more more subdued lighting. Also, dimmer switches are often put into new installations, which while they are nice, make installing CFL bulbs trickier.
Unless you're a hardcore gamer, you can get a pretty nice dual head graphics card for $50 that'll do what you need. Even most gamers can get by on a $100 video card. I've seen WoW run smoothly on less.
If you want a piece of furniture considering value and performance custom built is the way to go, not prebuilt crap. False
How about true? This is actually a good comparison to computers. The best perforance and value when it comes to furniture comes from stores like Ikea, where you buy a kit with the parts you need prefabbed, and you put it together. The same pretty much goes for computers. When most people say they built a computer, they meant they bought a bunch of premade parts and put them together. They don't mean that they started with a pile of ICs and a soldering gun to build the computer, which would be the furniture equilivent of starting out with a bunch of boards and a saw. You aren't going to get the best perforance and value from building your own disk drive or video card, but you do get the best performance by purchasing those parts prebuilt, and using them to create a computer.
Atleast if the GPU is idle, it doesn't need to be accessing that memory. I don't have much experience with the new Apple's, but I have found that the graphics chip pulling data accross the system bus because it uses the system memory is one of the biggest things that kills the performance on lower end Dells and other OEM computers.
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I was curious so I read the Wiki on DVI. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVI. Apparently, a single link DVI only does over 60Hz at 1280x1024 and below. However, the DVI standard also supports the old VGA connection over the same cable. I suspect that my monitor must be using the analog signal, as I doubt that my Radeon 7000 supports dual link DVI and it would explain why the DVI picture is no different than using the VGA input.
Graphics: The onboard video chipset does *not* make HDTV playback a problem, it was the core SOLO that stuttered during playback. I have a core duo linked up to my plasma, and it works beautifully.
Actually it *is* the graphics chipset. It's basically unloading work onto the CPU. The Core Duo can handle it, but the Coro Solo can't keep up.
However, since I no longer shop at Best Buy...
Care to elaborate?
http://www.newegg.com/
All Dell monitors I have dealt with include both cables, for future reference. Though I only deal with their high-end line. (:
At work, we get 17" NEC LCD monitors. They only include the VGA cable, which is extra lame because most of the computers have dual head video cards with a DVI port.
Either that, or the Dells are using the analog VGA connection. DVI provides a much crisper picture.
That's because in general, Microsoft has managed to improve the OS to the point where it is pretty stable by the end of it's lifecycle. Windows XP SP2 is far better than vanilla XP. Each of the Windows 2000 service packs generally made things better too, especially in terms of backwards compatibility. Windows 98SE was also a lot better than Windows 98. Even Windows ME was halfway decent by the time Microsoft cut support for it. I'm pretty sure that by the time that Windows 7.0 is ready to come out, Vista will be running pretty stable and relatively bug free.
I've got a massive 21" IBM CRT monitor with both DVI and VGA inputs, and driven with the DVI cable I can run any refresh that the VGA also supports. So maybe something is misconfigured on your computer?
Now that I think about it, the trend has changed. But printers and scanners and such used to not include such cables.
I think it's still the case at places like Best Buy. Best Buy likes to pressure printer and scanner manufacturers to not include cables, so they can sell you a standard USB cable at an insane markup instead. I remember in some cases, it was cheaper to buy something cheap that contained the needed cable (like a $15 USB card reader) than it was to simply buy the cable alone. However, since I no longer shop at Best Buy, I don't remember the last time I bought something USB that didn't include the needed cables.
A more apt comparison might be some of the cheaper computer LCDs that have both DVI and VGA inputs. Most I have seen only include the VGA cable.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it means they think you're going to try to sneak some snakes onto the plane.
A certain segment actually wants an all out war between the west and Islam. Start attacking Muslim targets at random, and you would be playing right into their hands. They figure that with a billion or more pissed off Muslims on their side, that they would win (though I would guess that they wouldn't expect the US to bust out the nukes, which certainly changes the equation).
Sometimes wonder if the best solution to the terrorist attacks would be to just pick up the pieces and move on. At the worst, all the terrorists can do is blow something up every once and a while. On the scale of things, insignificant. The rest - all the living constant fear, taking away freedoms, the economic damage, collateral damage from trying to fix the world - we do it to ourselves.
G5's are extremely picky about ram. Some 3rd party ram is fine, others are constant problems. Simply buying generic ram is a gamble. However, you can usually buy the same type of ram that someone else has had good luck with and be fine.
Windows XP Home is pretty much just crippled when it comes to networking. Off the top of my head, the only other restriction I can remember is that it doesn't support dual CPU either. While for some people, the crippled networking is certainly a show-stopper, remember that for others it won't matter at all.
What if you don't care for the "Macintosh computing experience"? In general, PCs are cheaper, and a whole lot more flexible. That's enough to keep me handing over money to newegg instead of Apple for the forseeable future.
Besides, it's not really true that you have a Mac and a PC all in one. With Boot camp, you either have a Mac or a Windows PC. Dual booting is a pain, and if people find that Windows does everything they need (which includes those particular Windows software), and Mac OSX doesn't - I'm going to guess that a lot of those Macs will end up just being strange looking Dells. Not having to reboot several times a day will trump other spiffy features like a shiny GUI, in my experience.
Windows XP is stable in the sense that if you have a machine with decent hardware, and is taken care of, it will very rarely crash. I can't remember the last time I had Windows XP crash on my machine, and it's been running the same install for 1.5 years now (the last time I reinstalled was because I changed out the motherboard). I also have experience with Windows XP boxes that have been running for considerably longer with no problems. Compare to Windows 9x (or Mac OS Classic) where the computer would crash randomly no matter how well you babied it, and also Windows 9x/Me's ability to randomly trash its registry and require a reinstall, no matter how careful you were. Of course someone can trash Windows XP and make it unstable, I'm sure you can also trash OSX and make unstable too.
HOWEVER, these items in online games have MASSIVE intrinisic value based on labor. If there's only one of such item known in existence, and I've put 400 hours into obtaining said item, I can't simply go and pick up another one at the dollar store. There is no equivalent conversion in the real world, and if someone steals the item, they're essentially stealing 400 hours from my life. Those 400 hours of my life have massive value, both to me, and in the real world, where it could easily translate to $5000 or more dollars.
Which is probably the reason why many MMORPGs state somewhere in the user agreement that all the items, gold, etc. are actually the property of the company that runs the game. That makes things a lot easier for the people running the game, since the items are never really yours. You don't have much recourse when someone steals it from you, or if a server glitch eats the item, or the item gets nerfed in a patch, etc - they can just say "Tough luck." and that's it. Just something you should keep in mind before you invest 400 hours into a super-rare item.
Or else they try to rely on monopolistic practices, cartels, and government regulation to stay afloat. Such as the major record labels, many local utilities, Microsoft, automobile insurance companies, and countless others.
How much do you trust that light? Besides, spposedly I hear that Google is working with very small snippets here - would you notice if the light only blinked on for a split second every few minutes?
I think I'll keep my tower, where I can physically unplug the devices. That way I'll be sure.
Likewise, it would be neat if bittorrent or Gnutella or something like it, would peer with users on earby networks first, instead of just anyone. If a bunch of an ISP's users are all passing lots of packets to each other the the ISP has little reason to throttle. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard of ISPs working on this, because they (moreso than the users) are the ones who would most benefit from it.
Actually, what ISPs should do is throttle your connection to internet at the speed they advertise, rather than throttle your modem at that speed. If you have 3Mbps DSL/cable/whatever, you get 3mbps to the internet, and your modem operates at whatever the fastest speed your line can manage. That way, you would get something like 10Mbps or more to your ISP. If they did that, a lot of the P2P applications would take care of themselves, as they would find that the peers on your ISP's network are considerably faster, and would tend to favor them simply because of that. Problem solved.
I was struck by the high cost of these laptops quoted in the article... $1400 and $1200.
Since I can buy a very capable laptop for about $500 these days (in fact, I have bought a few for my daughters in college), why are the schools paying so much?
That's probably because they are Apple laptops.
*ducks*
That's the solution I use right now, but it's somewhat of a pain if you have a lot of files. Copy over a few hundred gigs in a directory over, then on the original drive change some of files, rename some others, add some files, and delete some of them. When I back up again, I would want the system to be smart enough to only copy the changed files over, as well as the new files. No need to copy all the files over again when 95% of them haven't changed. I would also want it to delete the files off of the backup that I have deleted on the computer (or atleast put them in the equilivent of the recycle bin on the backup drive - I want them out of the backup copy of the directory). Simply using copy to copy the whole batch over everytime I want to make a backup takes a long time and is just adding needless wear and tear on both drives.
Complain to the executives that mandate DRM on all purchased media. Why do so many people act as though Apple invented DRM?
Maybe because Apple uses the DRM to lock people into the iTunes/iPod combo?
130W is about right for a bedroom, if you ask me. Keep in mind in the US, for most new homes a bedroom is something like 125-150 square feet. I have 220W in my bedroom (well, 220W equilivent, there are 2 60W CFL and a single 100W CFL). The 2 60W ones above the bed make a nice reading right, and the 100W lights the rest of the room.
As for games to be played? Most people have a smaller table lamp in their bedroom, for more more subdued lighting. Also, dimmer switches are often put into new installations, which while they are nice, make installing CFL bulbs trickier.
Unless you're a hardcore gamer, you can get a pretty nice dual head graphics card for $50 that'll do what you need. Even most gamers can get by on a $100 video card. I've seen WoW run smoothly on less.
If you want a piece of furniture considering value and performance custom built is the way to go, not prebuilt crap. False
How about true? This is actually a good comparison to computers. The best perforance and value when it comes to furniture comes from stores like Ikea, where you buy a kit with the parts you need prefabbed, and you put it together. The same pretty much goes for computers. When most people say they built a computer, they meant they bought a bunch of premade parts and put them together. They don't mean that they started with a pile of ICs and a soldering gun to build the computer, which would be the furniture equilivent of starting out with a bunch of boards and a saw. You aren't going to get the best perforance and value from building your own disk drive or video card, but you do get the best performance by purchasing those parts prebuilt, and using them to create a computer.
Most people around here have more time on their hands than money. Why else do we cruise slashdot?
Atleast if the GPU is idle, it doesn't need to be accessing that memory. I don't have much experience with the new Apple's, but I have found that the graphics chip pulling data accross the system bus because it uses the system memory is one of the biggest things that kills the performance on lower end Dells and other OEM computers.