Motherboard chipsets and video cards seem to be well-supported with drivers. You should double-check and make sure you'll have support for your network and sound hardware. Win64 supports 32-bit apps, but not 32-bit drivers.
The nVidia video card driver that came with the OS install was buggy. 2D support worked just fine but 3D errors made games unplayable until I updated to the latest driver. Updating the driver fixed the problems and games now look identical, whether I'm running XP or XP-64.
The XP-64 installer will issue a warning against installing it beside a regular XP install, but it will offer to upgrade. I chose to do a side-by-side install and haven't had any problems. XP-64 uses spearate "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" directories. It puts 64-bit apps in the former and 32-bit ones in the latter. It's a bit annoying but is manageable. My Program Files directory now has a combination of my 32-bit apps installed there originally on XP, plus the few 64-bit ones that come with XP-64.
Hardware-wise, you'll also find that installing the CPU and heat sink/fan is much better than with older Athlons. With the Socket 754 setup, the entire top of the CPU unit is metallic, creating a much larger area of contact between it and the heat sink, and the heat sink has a much larger patch of thermal paste preapplied. The new mounting bracket can be operated with fingers only and even if the heat sink could be put on backwards it would no longer make a difference. My Athlon64 3200+ runs at about 35 degrees Centigrade when idle, much cooler than the old Athlon 3200+..
I use an nVidia card and mobo chipset, and nVidia has been excellent for providing 64-bit drivers for their hardware. The WinXP-64 install had a driver for my graphics card (though I did go and download a newer one from nVidia after install). I'm not so hard core that I run my own benchmarks and tweak to get every last frame out of my system. For Doom 3 and for World of Warcraft, there hasn't been a noticeable drop in frame rate. If it is slower, it's not enough for my flesh-and-blood eyes to notice.
For reference, my old hardware was an Athlon 3200+. My new hardware is an Athlon64 3200+. The mobos are different. I'm using the same video card, RAM, sound card, etc..
I downloaded the x64 Mandrake distro. When it boots from DVD, it freezes when starting up the USB ports. To their credit, the installer is quite navigable with just the keyboard, so if I disconnect my mouse I can actually get the install started. Then, about 30% of the way through the install, the installer locks up.
I hear SUSE's x64 distribution is pretty good. Maybe when the x64 distro is no longer a version behind I'll give that a shot.
I recently upgraded to an Athlon64 3200+ and downloaded the Win64 eval/beta. There's practically no difference between it an Windows XP. I hvaen't had a single weird application incompatibility -- it's running all my 32-bit stuff just fine. I'm a gamer, so "32-bit apps" includes some hefty 3D-accellerated, DirectX-using stuff. I don't have any 64-bit apps to test with.
Hardware support required some initial digging to get drivers, but everything works fine.
In other words, if it weren't for the "64-Bit Edition" on the bootup screen and the Task Manager identifying 32-bit apps as such, I wouldn't really notice a difference between this and regular old WinXP.
[Note: for those not in the know... in Texas, a "Ranch Road" can be anything from two-lanes and gravel... to an 8-lane freeway. Luckily, mine is closer to the latter.]
Also for those not in the know: In much of Texas the "feeder" or "frontage" roads parallel the freeways and have frequent on and off ramps; in cities the freeways tend to be built up on overpasses. You can exit the freeway and take a left without having to turn 270 degrees. Texas frontage roads are really designed well to work with the freeway; they're not at all like frontage roads found elsewhere. It's rare to see a cloverleaf interchange there except between major freeways.
The rest of the country could learn from the example. Especially Northern California; I'm surprised their cloverleaf-and-"zipper" interchanges don't ding more fenders.
I found out last weekend that WoW will run pretty well on my two year old laptop with rather unspectacular video hardware. The integrated video hardware has some 3D accelleration and 32 MB of memory on it. That machine can't run Star Wars Galaxies, and no way will it run EQ2.
Tuesday's pornography ruling is more nuanced, but still a blow to the government.
Ok, let me explain some fifth grade Social Studies. This shit should be obvious to grade-schoolers. This ruling is an effect of our government regulating itself according to the rules set forth in the Constitution. This is not a "blow" to the government. It is a blow to the court case of a particularly overreaching couple branches of our government, but don't even start to think that somehow the Supreme Court is not part of the government and therefore capable of delivering a blow to the government.
roulette with just picking the color gives your 50% odds of winning. That's pretty damn good
Except when the ball lands in the green slot. That means your odds are worse than 1:1. If you do insist on playing Roulette, at least find a wheel with just a single 0 and not a 00, so you cut the house advantage in half.
I wonder if this period will be remembered as the biggest soft tissue experiment in human history. Heck, I don't even sit next to people using cell phones or near micowave ovens.
Apparently you do sit near a computer monitor. Cell phones transmit RF at under one watt. You probably get more RF energy through your skull from all the nearby radio and TV stations. Do you really think microwave ovens could be sold anywhere, if they leaked even remotely dangerous levels of radiation? Radio waves and microwaves aren't even ionizing radiation (like X-rays and Gamma rays). Visible light is radiation as well. You should just wrap a towel around your head to avoid all this potential harm in the form of electromagnetic energy.
I used to use TiVo, and now I use a homebrew system built around SageTV. The thing continuously records TV from my cable box. Whenever possible it grabs shows off my "favorites" list. Over time it builds up a library, because not only does it go after first runs of my preferred shows, but it gets reruns as well.
Because you can fast-forward through commercials, over time I've gotten in the habit of never bothering to watch TV "live". Instead, I just let it record and whenever I feel in the mood I go catch up on some of my TV watching. While this is not TV "on demand" is is definitely the next best thing. I always have a huge selection of things in the library to watch. It's more like "on demand with limited selection based on configurable preferences".
All that being said, I can place a dollar value on on-demand television, based on what I pay per month for my cable service and how many shows I watch per month. I would happily pay $1 per hour of standard network/cable network TV if I could have it on demand and commerical-free, $2 per episode of premium-channel series shows (like Dead Like Me or Deadwood or Carnivale), $3 for a movie, and $4 for a new release movie.
The DirecTiVo has no value other than as a DirecTV receiver with TiVo. The hardware is subsidized by the one or two year contract with DirecTV you were required to sign. You know, the one that makes you owe them extra money if you drop their service. The only upgrades possible are to the TiVo's hard drive, and all you can do is add a second drive ONCE. And doing that requires you to void your warranty and accomplish feats of hackery.
My system, on the other hand, is a fully functional computer. A standard TV makes for a crappy computer monitor, but it's much better with an HDTV. Being a full computer system allows it to act as a file server, a media server, a WebTV, a video editing station, a photo viewer/printer, a game console, and whatever else I can find to do with it. It is upgradeable, meaning I can drop in additional components to keep up with changing technology or add new features. I can replace SageTV with another software solution, or replace my cable provider with a satellite, without penalty. There are also no monthly fees.
I'm not bashing TiVo. Hell, I've owned two DirecTiVo boxes, one of which died to a lightning strike and led to me purchasing the other. I like TiVo enough to give my retired TiVo box to a family member who uses DirecTV and likes what TiVo does.
I'm just happy I have the means to explore the future of home communication and media delivery. Twenty years ago a setup like mine was science fiction. Yeah, I shelled out a few hundred for some new hardware and recycled some spare computer parts to build this system. Let's pretend it all cost me $1000. That's still less than a decent wide-screen HDTV, and provides a hell of a lot of value for the investment.
I just got through building a really nice home media system with WiFi.
The centerpiece is a PC running SageTV [www.sage.tv]. It uses a hardware mpeg encoder to capture video from my digital cable box and save it on a 250 GB hard drive. Encoding at the "DVD Standard Play" quality uses about 3 GB per hour of video and the quality is definitely acceptable. Also stored on the monster hard drive is my entire CD collection ripped to very high bitrate MP3. The hardware media card also includes a built-in radio tuner. The machine has a DVD burner in it as well, and SageTV glues it all together.
Now, the really cool part of it is, I can access the mpeg video files and MP3s over my home network. With an mpeg video codec, I can use any of a variety of players to play my recorded television anywhere in my house on a laptop. SageTV also offers a separate piece of client software that allows you to remote-control the PVR from any networked computer and play any of its recorded media -- so, if I'm in the garage with my laptop, I can call up the current TV guide and select a program to record right there without having to directly interact with the media PC.
TiVo runs Linux and is hackable, but still uses a proprietary filesystem for video storage. Plus, the folks at TiVo don't want you accessing the video externally anyway...
I just got through building a really nice home media system with WiFi.
The centerpiece is a PC running SageTV. It uses a hardware mpeg encoder to capture video from my digital cable box and save it on a 250 GB hard drive. Encoding at the "DVD Standard Play" quality uses about 3 GB per hour of video and the quality is definitely acceptable. Also stored on the monster hard drive is my entire CD collection ripped to very high bitrate MP3. The hardware media card also includes a built-in radio tuner. The machine has a DVD burner in it as well, and SageTV glues it all together.
Now, the really cool part of it is, I can access the mpeg video files and MP3s over my home network. With an mpeg video codec, I can use any of a variety of players to play my recorded television anywhere in my house on a laptop. SageTV also offers a separate piece of client software that allows you to remote-control the PVR from any networked computer and play any of its recorded media -- so, if I'm in the garage with my laptop, I can call up the current TV guide and select a program to record right there without having to directly interact with the media PC.
The only thing I haven't messed around with yet is the radio part of it. Mainly, because radio sucks, and because I do have access to all of the music-only channels through the cable TV (and therefore the PVR) anyway.
I've either had really bad luck in buying Kingston RAM, or Kingston's product is crap. I've built close to a dozen new systems in the last five years, and I used to be in the habit of buying the least expensive RAM that met the requirements for the architecture. That usually meant Kingston. Over a third of these systems had instability issues that I was able to directly attribute to bad RAM.
I never had a problem exchanging the bad module for a new one, and the new one always worked perfectly. But, it's always a pain in the butt isolating the bad memory module and then taking it back to the store for an exchange. For my last two systems I bought premium RAM, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
Penn and Teller did something similar in an episode of Bullshit. To demonstrate how the tree hugging hippies will sign any petition to ban anything if phrased properly, they told people how dihydrogen monoxide was a powerful solvent used in manufacturing and about how it can damage the environment and cause various health problems like excessive urination.
That wasn't Engrish. Rather, it was automated translation, mapping words to words instead of re-framing the concepts being communicated natively in the destination language.
1> Cook up some grits. Don't go for that instant stuff. Go for the kind that actually take time on the stove to make. Flavor 'em with a little salt and butter. 2> Fry up some bacon. Get it good and crispy. 3> Fry two eggs in the bacon grease, over easy. Really over easy -- you want the yolk just barely warm and some of the egg white still gooey. 4> Obtain two slices of Kraft American Cheese. The processed kind, that comes individually wrapped in cellophane. 5> Chop up the bacon into small bits. 6> Serve up a helping of grits onto your plate. Mix bacon into grits. Place fried eggs on top of grits, and cheese on top of fried eggs (unwrap cheese from cellophane first). 7> Using edge of fork, cut up cheese and eggs while stirring into grits. For good measure, stir in a little bit of that extra pork fat. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Now, eat and enjoy! And before you ask, I'm dead serious. This is not a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
The nVidia video card driver that came with the OS install was buggy. 2D support worked just fine but 3D errors made games unplayable until I updated to the latest driver. Updating the driver fixed the problems and games now look identical, whether I'm running XP or XP-64.
The XP-64 installer will issue a warning against installing it beside a regular XP install, but it will offer to upgrade. I chose to do a side-by-side install and haven't had any problems. XP-64 uses spearate "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" directories. It puts 64-bit apps in the former and 32-bit ones in the latter. It's a bit annoying but is manageable. My Program Files directory now has a combination of my 32-bit apps installed there originally on XP, plus the few 64-bit ones that come with XP-64.
Hardware-wise, you'll also find that installing the CPU and heat sink/fan is much better than with older Athlons. With the Socket 754 setup, the entire top of the CPU unit is metallic, creating a much larger area of contact between it and the heat sink, and the heat sink has a much larger patch of thermal paste preapplied. The new mounting bracket can be operated with fingers only and even if the heat sink could be put on backwards it would no longer make a difference. My Athlon64 3200+ runs at about 35 degrees Centigrade when idle, much cooler than the old Athlon 3200+..
For reference, my old hardware was an Athlon 3200+. My new hardware is an Athlon64 3200+. The mobos are different. I'm using the same video card, RAM, sound card, etc..
I downloaded the x64 Mandrake distro. When it boots from DVD, it freezes when starting up the USB ports. To their credit, the installer is quite navigable with just the keyboard, so if I disconnect my mouse I can actually get the install started. Then, about 30% of the way through the install, the installer locks up.
I hear SUSE's x64 distribution is pretty good. Maybe when the x64 distro is no longer a version behind I'll give that a shot.
I recently upgraded to an Athlon64 3200+ and downloaded the Win64 eval/beta. There's practically no difference between it an Windows XP. I hvaen't had a single weird application incompatibility -- it's running all my 32-bit stuff just fine. I'm a gamer, so "32-bit apps" includes some hefty 3D-accellerated, DirectX-using stuff. I don't have any 64-bit apps to test with.
Hardware support required some initial digging to get drivers, but everything works fine.
In other words, if it weren't for the "64-Bit Edition" on the bootup screen and the Task Manager identifying 32-bit apps as such, I wouldn't really notice a difference between this and regular old WinXP.
The mall nearest my house has a Lego store. It stocks nothing but Legos.
I'm puzzled as to why Legos hold such fascination for slashdotters, in light of that.
Yeah, I never could convince my calc prof it meant "multiplication" too. But that was back in '92...
[Note: for those not in the know... in Texas, a "Ranch Road" can be anything from two-lanes and gravel... to an 8-lane freeway. Luckily, mine is closer to the latter.] Also for those not in the know: In much of Texas the "feeder" or "frontage" roads parallel the freeways and have frequent on and off ramps; in cities the freeways tend to be built up on overpasses. You can exit the freeway and take a left without having to turn 270 degrees. Texas frontage roads are really designed well to work with the freeway; they're not at all like frontage roads found elsewhere. It's rare to see a cloverleaf interchange there except between major freeways. The rest of the country could learn from the example. Especially Northern California; I'm surprised their cloverleaf-and-"zipper" interchanges don't ding more fenders.
I found out last weekend that WoW will run pretty well on my two year old laptop with rather unspectacular video hardware. The integrated video hardware has some 3D accelleration and 32 MB of memory on it. That machine can't run Star Wars Galaxies, and no way will it run EQ2.
I used to use TiVo, and now I use a homebrew system built around SageTV. The thing continuously records TV from my cable box. Whenever possible it grabs shows off my "favorites" list. Over time it builds up a library, because not only does it go after first runs of my preferred shows, but it gets reruns as well.
Because you can fast-forward through commercials, over time I've gotten in the habit of never bothering to watch TV "live". Instead, I just let it record and whenever I feel in the mood I go catch up on some of my TV watching. While this is not TV "on demand" is is definitely the next best thing. I always have a huge selection of things in the library to watch. It's more like "on demand with limited selection based on configurable preferences".
All that being said, I can place a dollar value on on-demand television, based on what I pay per month for my cable service and how many shows I watch per month. I would happily pay $1 per hour of standard network/cable network TV if I could have it on demand and commerical-free, $2 per episode of premium-channel series shows (like Dead Like Me or Deadwood or Carnivale), $3 for a movie, and $4 for a new release movie.
Today I get to be Mr. Relevant. Might as well rake in as much karma as I can... :)
The two are fundamentally incomparable.
The DirecTiVo has no value other than as a DirecTV receiver with TiVo. The hardware is subsidized by the one or two year contract with DirecTV you were required to sign. You know, the one that makes you owe them extra money if you drop their service. The only upgrades possible are to the TiVo's hard drive, and all you can do is add a second drive ONCE. And doing that requires you to void your warranty and accomplish feats of hackery.
My system, on the other hand, is a fully functional computer. A standard TV makes for a crappy computer monitor, but it's much better with an HDTV. Being a full computer system allows it to act as a file server, a media server, a WebTV, a video editing station, a photo viewer/printer, a game console, and whatever else I can find to do with it. It is upgradeable, meaning I can drop in additional components to keep up with changing technology or add new features. I can replace SageTV with another software solution, or replace my cable provider with a satellite, without penalty. There are also no monthly fees.
I'm not bashing TiVo. Hell, I've owned two DirecTiVo boxes, one of which died to a lightning strike and led to me purchasing the other. I like TiVo enough to give my retired TiVo box to a family member who uses DirecTV and likes what TiVo does.
I'm just happy I have the means to explore the future of home communication and media delivery. Twenty years ago a setup like mine was science fiction. Yeah, I shelled out a few hundred for some new hardware and recycled some spare computer parts to build this system. Let's pretend it all cost me $1000. That's still less than a decent wide-screen HDTV, and provides a hell of a lot of value for the investment.
I just got through building a really nice home media system with WiFi.
The centerpiece is a PC running SageTV [www.sage.tv]. It uses a hardware mpeg encoder to capture video from my digital cable box and save it on a 250 GB hard drive. Encoding at the "DVD Standard Play" quality uses about 3 GB per hour of video and the quality is definitely acceptable. Also stored on the monster hard drive is my entire CD collection ripped to very high bitrate MP3. The hardware media card also includes a built-in radio tuner. The machine has a DVD burner in it as well, and SageTV glues it all together.
Now, the really cool part of it is, I can access the mpeg video files and MP3s over my home network. With an mpeg video codec, I can use any of a variety of players to play my recorded television anywhere in my house on a laptop. SageTV also offers a separate piece of client software that allows you to remote-control the PVR from any networked computer and play any of its recorded media -- so, if I'm in the garage with my laptop, I can call up the current TV guide and select a program to record right there without having to directly interact with the media PC.
TiVo runs Linux and is hackable, but still uses a proprietary filesystem for video storage. Plus, the folks at TiVo don't want you accessing the video externally anyway...
I just got through building a really nice home media system with WiFi.
The centerpiece is a PC running SageTV. It uses a hardware mpeg encoder to capture video from my digital cable box and save it on a 250 GB hard drive. Encoding at the "DVD Standard Play" quality uses about 3 GB per hour of video and the quality is definitely acceptable. Also stored on the monster hard drive is my entire CD collection ripped to very high bitrate MP3. The hardware media card also includes a built-in radio tuner. The machine has a DVD burner in it as well, and SageTV glues it all together.
Now, the really cool part of it is, I can access the mpeg video files and MP3s over my home network. With an mpeg video codec, I can use any of a variety of players to play my recorded television anywhere in my house on a laptop. SageTV also offers a separate piece of client software that allows you to remote-control the PVR from any networked computer and play any of its recorded media -- so, if I'm in the garage with my laptop, I can call up the current TV guide and select a program to record right there without having to directly interact with the media PC.
The only thing I haven't messed around with yet is the radio part of it. Mainly, because radio sucks, and because I do have access to all of the music-only channels through the cable TV (and therefore the PVR) anyway.
I've either had really bad luck in buying Kingston RAM, or Kingston's product is crap. I've built close to a dozen new systems in the last five years, and I used to be in the habit of buying the least expensive RAM that met the requirements for the architecture. That usually meant Kingston. Over a third of these systems had instability issues that I was able to directly attribute to bad RAM.
I never had a problem exchanging the bad module for a new one, and the new one always worked perfectly. But, it's always a pain in the butt isolating the bad memory module and then taking it back to the store for an exchange. For my last two systems I bought premium RAM, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
Penn and Teller did something similar in an episode of Bullshit. To demonstrate how the tree hugging hippies will sign any petition to ban anything if phrased properly, they told people how dihydrogen monoxide was a powerful solvent used in manufacturing and about how it can damage the environment and cause various health problems like excessive urination.
Very funny.
That wasn't Engrish. Rather, it was automated translation, mapping words to words instead of re-framing the concepts being communicated natively in the destination language.
The best way to eat grits in my humble opinion:
1> Cook up some grits. Don't go for that instant stuff. Go for the kind that actually take time on the stove to make. Flavor 'em with a little salt and butter.
2> Fry up some bacon. Get it good and crispy.
3> Fry two eggs in the bacon grease, over easy. Really over easy -- you want the yolk just barely warm and some of the egg white still gooey.
4> Obtain two slices of Kraft American Cheese. The processed kind, that comes individually wrapped in cellophane.
5> Chop up the bacon into small bits.
6> Serve up a helping of grits onto your plate. Mix bacon into grits. Place fried eggs on top of grits, and cheese on top of fried eggs (unwrap cheese from cellophane first).
7> Using edge of fork, cut up cheese and eggs while stirring into grits. For good measure, stir in a little bit of that extra pork fat. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Now, eat and enjoy! And before you ask, I'm dead serious. This is not a joke.
Here's a joke:
8> ?
9> Profit!
That wasn't the reviewer's premise.
I hear that you can split the beer atom and get unlimited energy!