I would never use any GeForce 4 *but* the 4600 Ti when I refer to them. The MX's are just warmed over GeForce 2's with some more RAM.
The 9700 was a lot faster card than the 4600 Ti. I'll even say "crushed," because I think a 30% performance differential is a crush. Here's a head to head comparo:
And note, most of these tests are at 1024x768, which underestimates the difference in the cards. Fill rate and GPU performance spread the difference when you go to higher resolutions... benchmarks are almost always CPU bound at lower resolutions (heck, a 3.4 GHz Pentium will benchmark a 9700 Pro and a 6800 Ultra at the same speed... something is wrong here:-/)
At any rate... Nvidia ruled the roost for a couple years, starting with the intro of the original GeForce. No question there. But ATI started kicking some SERIOUS ass with the 9700. Brought them out of nowhere (the Rage wasn't anything to write home about). Nvidia had a dark couple years between the GeForce 3 and the 5950... improvements weren't colossal. The 6800 Ultra brings them back to the for, though ATI's X800 XT PE is at least competitive (a little behind on Doom, a lot ahead on Half Life 2, due to the 24-bit fandango).
But back to the original point... crushed is crushed. The GF4 4600 was in no way close to the 9700, if you play at high frame rates or (gasp!) use FSAA.
ATI held the lead in cards for 2 FULL YEARS, performance wise. I don't know about units wise, but if you were running Windows, and you wanted the fastest card, you had an ATI card. The 9700 absolutely CRUSHED Nvidia's GeForce 4 cards, and the next 2 generations of Nvidia cards (5700 through 5950) just didn't compare to ATI's 9800 XT.
Maybe if you only use Linux you're unaware of things, but come on.
The 6800/GT/Ultra brings Nvidia back up to competitive status, but ATI's X800XT is just as good (though it may not have sufficient headroom).
But to suggest ATI isn't VERY competitive on product *and* volume these days strikes me as odd... as if you're unaware of the actual options out there.
Well, my PowerBook takes about 2 seconds to "boot" because it just sleeps when I close it. So that argument is out. A PowerBook is a great DVD watcher, and it's just about as fast as this thing, and it can do 4000 other things the Archos cannot.
I have no need for the Archos. Others may, but the "boots a lot faster than a laptop" just means you're using a laptop with crappy power management.
Wow, that's a lot of words with not a lot of line breaks;-)
At any rate, I can't comment on your problems with white balance with your camera, though I can say that "prosumer" digital SLRs like the Nikon D70 or Canon 300D or 20D have no such problems. In fact in this case software is a tremendous HELP, because these cameras all include a RAW mode where the white balance isn't even actually APPLIED when the photo is taken. When you want to edit the photo, you open it in photo shop and set the white balance at that point. It's a tremendous help -- imagine shooting a wedding on film and having the white balance on "tungsten" -- sure no pro would make that mistake but you would be fu**ed. With digital and RAW, it's no problem at all -- in fact I was monkeying with my camera a couple weeks ago and had set a custom white balance that was unprogrammed -- the pics looked like CRAP color-wise but I fixed it in about 2 seconds by selecting "shade" for the evening shots. These sorts of features are available on digital SLRs today that go for about $800.
As for auto race shots, it's true that film autowinders beat digital if you want to bust off a roll really quickly. The fastest digital right now is the Canon 1D mark II and it can do 8 fps. Of course, it can do 8 FPS and fill an entire 2 GB compact flash card, so we're talking 8 FPS for 150 shots. With film you're SOL after 34 shots... you're either switching to that second camera (fumble fumble fumble), or you're switching film, which is 30-60 seconds for even a nimble pair of hands.
Digital still has a few areas where it's not AS good as film, but those areas are few and far between. A $800 SLR is "as good" for 99% of use cases. An $8000 SLR is "as good" for 99.9% of use cases. If you're the.1% edge case, then digital will probably be sufficient there as well, within 5 years.
I have a D60 now, and love it. I'll be upgrading in the future, though probably I'll wait until the next round of cameras come out -- I want something in the 1Ds Mark II range of features, but I want it for less than the price of the 1D mark II. I can wait;-)
Who spent 10 grand? The 20D can handle 5 stops (just like color film) and is about $1300.
If you're specific to black & white photography ONLY, and you want something that's the BEST for black and white photography, then film still has the edge. I don't believe that color film is markedly superior to the good DSLRs these days... perhaps in some of the most extreme cases you can notice a difference, but it's very tough these days.
You have to define the case to demonstrate your point, which is really just anti-technology bias.
Digital photography is FAR clearer with uses than digital audio. It is FAR more convenient from a workflow perspective than is film -- You can take a photo, edit it, send it to an editor, have them slap it in a proof layout page, and be half way through a story before you can even get your film DEVELOPED, and that's ASSUMING you're sitting at the lab when you take a photo. For magazines and newspapers, film makes no sense whatsoever anymore.
Well, sure. But a good digital camera (1Ds certainly qualifies) does a GREAT job with noise at ISO 100. And there's some noise reduction built in. In a studio, you completely control the lighting, so there's NO reason you shouldn't be shooting at ISO 100 (you could even enable ISO 50 on the camera, though I don't know much about it).
Furthermore, you can get software like Noise Ninja:
http://www.picturecode.com/
For some further reduction of noise. But really, the cameras can do most of this already -- they take 2 (maybe 3?) exposures... 1 or 2 with the shutter closed (before and after?) and one of the actual picture, and use it to drastically reduce noise.
Now, keep in mind these are all higher-end DSLR features, but a high-end DSLR can compete quite well for picture quality with a 35 mm camera, and at 16x20 it's probably not THAT far behind medium format. For the most discerning eye maybe, but that's the same person who can tell a 360 Mbps MP3 from the original CD (or hell, can tell a solid state amp from a tube amp), but with light instead of sound;-)
Actually, I don't think the one micron resolution is as much of a "differentiator" of B&W over color. It's that with B&W you can get 10 full stops of range in your photos, where color gives you 5 (the Canon DSLRs give you 7 zones on the in-camera sensor, but I doubt that's because the camera's capable;-)
You'll be able to get a GREAT 16x20 photo, even "portrait," with a 1Ds Mark II. 16.7 megapixels is PLENTY to get a 100% sharp image at 16x20. Medium format not required.
If you're talking about 30x40 images, maybe. But that's pretty rate.
Hell, even pictures from my D60 look outstanding at 14x19. I haven't compared them "side by side" with pictures from 4x5 negatives, but for a good dSLR that size isn't all that challenging, and ESPECIALLY for a 1Ds. It's going to CRUSH the $40,000 digital back market. It's even marketed as a studio camera.
In general, the larger the pixel the better on a sensor (CMOS or CCD). That's because they're just "photon collectors" and the larger the cells, the more accurately they can "count." If you shrink the cells down a lot, you must boost the gain on the sensor to get enough "light" for an image, which results in noise.
This is why, given a fixed number of megapixels, a bigger sensor is always better than a smaller one. It doesn't need to be run at as high of gain.
As an example, the Canon 1D mark II and the Canon 20D both have 8 MP sensors. Absent significant image processing and noise cancellation (which both actually can employ), the 1D mark II will take "cleaner" pictures as its sensor is significantly larger (well, about 30% larger in terms of area) than the 20D's. And your 8 megapixel "pocket" digital camera? Look at the images compared to a 20D or 1D mark II... they're CRAP.
But I wanted to use a SATA drive for booting XP, and there weren't any real good alternatives to the old "hit F5 at boot..." issue, because my XP install CDs didn't have hardware for SATA drives.
Since then, I haven't touched the floppy drive at all, I just get to enjoy its honking when XP decides it needs to poll the device.
So, money pretty much wasted. Good thing it was only $9 or so.
Microsoft bought/licensed the rights to the Sybase product called SQL Server (wow, heard of that?). Way back in 1994 or 1995. When PostgreSQL was probably still the commercial Postgres database (gasp, not open source!?!?).
They had the rights to develop/sell it on Windows (not on other platforms). And they've done a very good job on Windows. Pretty much kicked the sh!t out of Sybase in that market.
There's definitely SOMETHING up. I have a Philips unit, and if I hit "record" for a show, I often get "please wait" for 15-60 seconds while it thinks about recording the show.
No idea what it's doing, but sometimes I'll hit fast forward, think it didn't recognize it, so hit it 15 more times. Then 20 seconds later I get 15 hits in a row "medium fast superfast normal medium fast superfast..." pretty funny.
But really, my DirecTivo is REALLLY slow. Painfully so. Not sure it was always this bad... maybe worse since the 3.x series updates? Mine is about 3 years old now.
Not sure about the "king of planned obsolescence...." The latest OS, 10.3, runs on hardware up to 6 years old (and it's supported hardware). It seems the "phase out window" is about 6 years or so, because 10.3 eliminated support for "beige G3s," which are models that don't have built-in USB.
If you think back to computers that were pre-USB, you'll see that fairly old hardware is supported. And you can still run 10.2 on 8-year-old hardware.
Hardly "planned obsolescence."
As for more expensive, yes, but not that much, if you look at the eMac, for example ($799, plus $100 for enough RAM to be realistic).
How ready is it of mom/dad wants to play a DVD on their computer?
Keeping in mind 2 caveats:
1) You can't install the software for them. You have to point them to DVD John's software yourself.
2) You can NEVER EVER mention "check the howto." Because howtos are freaking ridiculous for home users.
I remember once when I was using Linux with Gnome 0.16-3. The goddamn window manager kept crashing, and I was hosed. This was as good as the kernel crashing to me -- I had to power cycle the machine. Later I was admonished -- "dumbass, you need to remember it's control-alt-escape, and it was just the window manager that crashed, not the OS!" but mom and dad will have a helluva time with that.
And little things like the fact that switching display resolutions is different on every single distro (last I used one, about 1.5 years ago, I had to dump to a shell and run 'Xconfigurator" from the command line), is pretty bad. It's no Mac OS.
One of the lead engineers accepted an offer from a competitor (BEA).
Former employer exercised the right to block him from taking this job -- basically the prohibition was he couldn't go to BEA for a year. As part of the clause, former employer also paid the employee a year's salary to NOT work for the competitor.
I wished I could have worked out the same sort of deal... a year's salary to NOT work;-)
Whether this can be enforced is probably a grey area. Certainly this sort of stuff should be clearly spelled out in the documents you sign when you start the job.
But I have quite a few calls with customers, and I need to take notes. It sure is easy to be able to keep up by typing at conversational pace, and to not have to stare at the keyboard and really concentrate while I type.
I took the included typing tests, and did about 90 wpm on a cheezy laptop keyboard, so I guess I'd be in the vaunted "100" range on a normal keyboard... the smaller laptop keyboards are teh suck.
I really think it's a useful skill, and the fact that kids have plenty of extra classes to take in middle or high school makes it seem worth a semester to me. Lots of typing in my day was crap about form letter spacing, and formal rules... so I think 9 or 18 weeks of fundamentals with a few guidelines would be sufficient. And for that, I really do think it's very very important.
Slashdot Mirror
select play select 3 0 select
;-)
there it is
The "token amount" was like $150 million dollars.
;-)
That's not even a "token" amount, even to Bill Gates
2.7 billion from dealtime.net, 5 billion from slickdeals.net, and 250 million from blogs, and 50 million from real web sites?
Guess 50 million ain't bad.
I would never use any GeForce 4 *but* the 4600 Ti when I refer to them. The MX's are just warmed over GeForce 2's with some more RAM.
6 6, 00.asp
:-/)
The 9700 was a lot faster card than the 4600 Ti. I'll even say "crushed," because I think a 30% performance differential is a crush. Here's a head to head comparo:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,4759
And note, most of these tests are at 1024x768, which underestimates the difference in the cards. Fill rate and GPU performance spread the difference when you go to higher resolutions... benchmarks are almost always CPU bound at lower resolutions (heck, a 3.4 GHz Pentium will benchmark a 9700 Pro and a 6800 Ultra at the same speed... something is wrong here
At any rate... Nvidia ruled the roost for a couple years, starting with the intro of the original GeForce. No question there. But ATI started kicking some SERIOUS ass with the 9700. Brought them out of nowhere (the Rage wasn't anything to write home about). Nvidia had a dark couple years between the GeForce 3 and the 5950... improvements weren't colossal. The 6800 Ultra brings them back to the for, though ATI's X800 XT PE is at least competitive (a little behind on Doom, a lot ahead on Half Life 2, due to the 24-bit fandango).
But back to the original point... crushed is crushed. The GF4 4600 was in no way close to the 9700, if you play at high frame rates or (gasp!) use FSAA.
ATI held the lead in cards for 2 FULL YEARS, performance wise. I don't know about units wise, but if you were running Windows, and you wanted the fastest card, you had an ATI card. The 9700 absolutely CRUSHED Nvidia's GeForce 4 cards, and the next 2 generations of Nvidia cards (5700 through 5950) just didn't compare to ATI's 9800 XT.
Maybe if you only use Linux you're unaware of things, but come on.
The 6800/GT/Ultra brings Nvidia back up to competitive status, but ATI's X800XT is just as good (though it may not have sufficient headroom).
But to suggest ATI isn't VERY competitive on product *and* volume these days strikes me as odd... as if you're unaware of the actual options out there.
They're supposed to do a source code diff for a press release?
Ummm... no.
Well, my PowerBook takes about 2 seconds to "boot" because it just sleeps when I close it. So that argument is out. A PowerBook is a great DVD watcher, and it's just about as fast as this thing, and it can do 4000 other things the Archos cannot.
I have no need for the Archos. Others may, but the "boots a lot faster than a laptop" just means you're using a laptop with crappy power management.
Wow, that's a lot of words with not a lot of line breaks ;-)
.1% edge case, then digital will probably be sufficient there as well, within 5 years.
;-)
At any rate, I can't comment on your problems with white balance with your camera, though I can say that "prosumer" digital SLRs like the Nikon D70 or Canon 300D or 20D have no such problems. In fact in this case software is a tremendous HELP, because these cameras all include a RAW mode where the white balance isn't even actually APPLIED when the photo is taken. When you want to edit the photo, you open it in photo shop and set the white balance at that point. It's a tremendous help -- imagine shooting a wedding on film and having the white balance on "tungsten" -- sure no pro would make that mistake but you would be fu**ed. With digital and RAW, it's no problem at all -- in fact I was monkeying with my camera a couple weeks ago and had set a custom white balance that was unprogrammed -- the pics looked like CRAP color-wise but I fixed it in about 2 seconds by selecting "shade" for the evening shots. These sorts of features are available on digital SLRs today that go for about $800.
As for auto race shots, it's true that film autowinders beat digital if you want to bust off a roll really quickly. The fastest digital right now is the Canon 1D mark II and it can do 8 fps. Of course, it can do 8 FPS and fill an entire 2 GB compact flash card, so we're talking 8 FPS for 150 shots. With film you're SOL after 34 shots... you're either switching to that second camera (fumble fumble fumble), or you're switching film, which is 30-60 seconds for even a nimble pair of hands.
Digital still has a few areas where it's not AS good as film, but those areas are few and far between. A $800 SLR is "as good" for 99% of use cases. An $8000 SLR is "as good" for 99.9% of use cases. If you're the
I have a D60 now, and love it. I'll be upgrading in the future, though probably I'll wait until the next round of cameras come out -- I want something in the 1Ds Mark II range of features, but I want it for less than the price of the 1D mark II. I can wait
Who spent 10 grand? The 20D can handle 5 stops (just like color film) and is about $1300.
If you're specific to black & white photography ONLY, and you want something that's the BEST for black and white photography, then film still has the edge. I don't believe that color film is markedly superior to the good DSLRs these days... perhaps in some of the most extreme cases you can notice a difference, but it's very tough these days.
You have to define the case to demonstrate your point, which is really just anti-technology bias.
Digital photography is FAR clearer with uses than digital audio. It is FAR more convenient from a workflow perspective than is film -- You can take a photo, edit it, send it to an editor, have them slap it in a proof layout page, and be half way through a story before you can even get your film DEVELOPED, and that's ASSUMING you're sitting at the lab when you take a photo. For magazines and newspapers, film makes no sense whatsoever anymore.
Well, sure. But a good digital camera (1Ds certainly qualifies) does a GREAT job with noise at ISO 100. And there's some noise reduction built in. In a studio, you completely control the lighting, so there's NO reason you shouldn't be shooting at ISO 100 (you could even enable ISO 50 on the camera, though I don't know much about it).
;-)
Furthermore, you can get software like Noise Ninja:
http://www.picturecode.com/
For some further reduction of noise. But really, the cameras can do most of this already -- they take 2 (maybe 3?) exposures... 1 or 2 with the shutter closed (before and after?) and one of the actual picture, and use it to drastically reduce noise.
Now, keep in mind these are all higher-end DSLR features, but a high-end DSLR can compete quite well for picture quality with a 35 mm camera, and at 16x20 it's probably not THAT far behind medium format. For the most discerning eye maybe, but that's the same person who can tell a 360 Mbps MP3 from the original CD (or hell, can tell a solid state amp from a tube amp), but with light instead of sound
Actually, I don't think the one micron resolution is as much of a "differentiator" of B&W over color. It's that with B&W you can get 10 full stops of range in your photos, where color gives you 5 (the Canon DSLRs give you 7 zones on the in-camera sensor, but I doubt that's because the camera's capable ;-)
You'll be able to get a GREAT 16x20 photo, even "portrait," with a 1Ds Mark II. 16.7 megapixels is PLENTY to get a 100% sharp image at 16x20. Medium format not required.
If you're talking about 30x40 images, maybe. But that's pretty rate.
Hell, even pictures from my D60 look outstanding at 14x19. I haven't compared them "side by side" with pictures from 4x5 negatives, but for a good dSLR that size isn't all that challenging, and ESPECIALLY for a 1Ds. It's going to CRUSH the $40,000 digital back market. It's even marketed as a studio camera.
It has a ton to do with image quality.
In general, the larger the pixel the better on a sensor (CMOS or CCD). That's because they're just "photon collectors" and the larger the cells, the more accurately they can "count." If you shrink the cells down a lot, you must boost the gain on the sensor to get enough "light" for an image, which results in noise.
This is why, given a fixed number of megapixels, a bigger sensor is always better than a smaller one. It doesn't need to be run at as high of gain.
As an example, the Canon 1D mark II and the Canon 20D both have 8 MP sensors. Absent significant image processing and noise cancellation (which both actually can employ), the 1D mark II will take "cleaner" pictures as its sensor is significantly larger (well, about 30% larger in terms of area) than the 20D's. And your 8 megapixel "pocket" digital camera? Look at the images compared to a 20D or 1D mark II... they're CRAP.
Does the MSCE require people to know undocumented (or "not present by default" registry settings or just click on dialogs that have simple options? ;-)
You're seriously transferring files TO an OS/2 system? I could see transferring them FROM the system. Come on.
drive 1.5 years ago. Almost 0 need for it.
But I wanted to use a SATA drive for booting XP, and there weren't any real good alternatives to the old "hit F5 at boot..." issue, because my XP install CDs didn't have hardware for SATA drives.
Since then, I haven't touched the floppy drive at all, I just get to enjoy its honking when XP decides it needs to poll the device.
So, money pretty much wasted. Good thing it was only $9 or so.
Pfft.
Microsoft bought/licensed the rights to the Sybase product called SQL Server (wow, heard of that?). Way back in 1994 or 1995. When PostgreSQL was probably still the commercial Postgres database (gasp, not open source!?!?).
They had the rights to develop/sell it on Windows (not on other platforms). And they've done a very good job on Windows. Pretty much kicked the sh!t out of Sybase in that market.
There's definitely SOMETHING up. I have a Philips unit, and if I hit "record" for a show, I often get "please wait" for 15-60 seconds while it thinks about recording the show.
No idea what it's doing, but sometimes I'll hit fast forward, think it didn't recognize it, so hit it 15 more times. Then 20 seconds later I get 15 hits in a row "medium fast superfast normal medium fast superfast..." pretty funny.
But really, my DirecTivo is REALLLY slow. Painfully so. Not sure it was always this bad... maybe worse since the 3.x series updates? Mine is about 3 years old now.
Not sure about the "king of planned obsolescence...." The latest OS, 10.3, runs on hardware up to 6 years old (and it's supported hardware). It seems the "phase out window" is about 6 years or so, because 10.3 eliminated support for "beige G3s," which are models that don't have built-in USB.
If you think back to computers that were pre-USB, you'll see that fairly old hardware is supported. And you can still run 10.2 on 8-year-old hardware.
Hardly "planned obsolescence."
As for more expensive, yes, but not that much, if you look at the eMac, for example ($799, plus $100 for enough RAM to be realistic).
LOL. First page I cocked my head and furrowed my brow. Second page I started snickering.
;-)
Not bad
How preciously naieve of you!
How ready is it of mom/dad wants to play a DVD on their computer?
Keeping in mind 2 caveats:
1) You can't install the software for them. You have to point them to DVD John's software yourself.
2) You can NEVER EVER mention "check the howto." Because howtos are freaking ridiculous for home users.
I remember once when I was using Linux with Gnome 0.16-3. The goddamn window manager kept crashing, and I was hosed. This was as good as the kernel crashing to me -- I had to power cycle the machine. Later I was admonished -- "dumbass, you need to remember it's control-alt-escape, and it was just the window manager that crashed, not the OS!" but mom and dad will have a helluva time with that.
And little things like the fact that switching display resolutions is different on every single distro (last I used one, about 1.5 years ago, I had to dump to a shell and run 'Xconfigurator" from the command line), is pretty bad. It's no Mac OS.
Do double-click installers exist yet?
One of the lead engineers accepted an offer from a competitor (BEA).
;-)
Former employer exercised the right to block him from taking this job -- basically the prohibition was he couldn't go to BEA for a year. As part of the clause, former employer also paid the employee a year's salary to NOT work for the competitor.
I wished I could have worked out the same sort of deal... a year's salary to NOT work
Whether this can be enforced is probably a grey area. Certainly this sort of stuff should be clearly spelled out in the documents you sign when you start the job.
But I have quite a few calls with customers, and I need to take notes. It sure is easy to be able to keep up by typing at conversational pace, and to not have to stare at the keyboard and really concentrate while I type.
I took the included typing tests, and did about 90 wpm on a cheezy laptop keyboard, so I guess I'd be in the vaunted "100" range on a normal keyboard... the smaller laptop keyboards are teh suck.
I really think it's a useful skill, and the fact that kids have plenty of extra classes to take in middle or high school makes it seem worth a semester to me. Lots of typing in my day was crap about form letter spacing, and formal rules... so I think 9 or 18 weeks of fundamentals with a few guidelines would be sufficient. And for that, I really do think it's very very important.
Okay, I actually did laugh out loud there.