If you had a netlist, or even the HDL, you absolutely could do this and be SURE that no matter what elven magic nVidia uses in its drivers, it would work (because you have the same chip).
Now the obvious question is "It's got to be impossible to get someones design files!". No, no it's not. It's easy enough to do here in the US, just hard to get away with. In my first job a chinese national was arrested for emailing the entire design files (hw/sw/mechanical...even marketing!) to our competitor in China. He had a plane ticket and had sold his house, the only thing that caught him was that he was a complete moron (for using the COMPANY EMAIL to do this). A smarter person would have burnt it to a DVD, labelled it Goatse Pr0n and lived happily ever after.
Knowing how many chip companies offshore their integration testing to India and China, and voluntarily send full HDL source and post synthesis netlists, I wouldn't bet the business on it. If, however, you keep your drivers proprietary, you could make a convincing court case that you've been ripped off if someone makes a clone. If the drivers were open source? Your argument gets a lot harder.
The argument isn't quite right. Graphics chips are amongst the more complicated chips to design (at least for the gaming market), someone couldn't just look at your driver code and necessarily know how to design a new chip. Similarly you can bet enough engineers float away from nVidia & ATI (to each other and elsewhere) that their secrets are pretty well known.
The problem is that they could make a card that is FUNCTIONALLY compatible with either ATI or nVidia, such that it could use their drivers. They would then get FREE driver development from ATI/nVIDIA and just sell hardware. That would give them a pretty tremendous competitive advantage, and put ATI/nVIDIA in a bad spot (particularly considering they have invested quite a bit of R&D into this line of products).
If however some 3rd party could do the devleopment for them for a while, then be able to open source the drivers after some period of time expires, that would fix the situation. Unfortunately, neither of those companies see any interest in doing this as they are perfectly happy having proprietary solutions. If they had to compete on costs alone, it'd mean less profit.
It depends on the game. I don't want to watch people play your averge FPS for 30 minutes, that'd put me to sleep. I can't think of anything I'd gain by watching it, and it moves so fast that unless you're working the controls you probably can't follow it. I WOULD be interested in watching the really good high end guilds do some of the more complicated raids from WoW/EQ/etc. Watching that many people move in coordination is usually pretty impressive, and may help us casual types raise the bar a bit. Any idgit can do Molten Core (WoW) or Bastion of Thunder (EQ), but not anyone can do it really well.
We can all go out and play football instead of watching it, but we probably lack the coordination and teamwork the pros have from practice.
My accord hybrid averages 28mpg on my 15 mile commute to work (it has only 938 miles on it). Don't get me wrong, on the highway it's great, I've seen it average >40, but during morning and afternoon rush it's stop and go once I get to the interstate. There are a few cars that will do better (some not hybrids), but not so many.
A prius for example, gets really good mileage all the time, but 0-60 in something like 16 seconds is kind of dangerous considering I turn left from a residential road onto a 4-lane 65mph highway. It's crowded, there's no light, and no one slows down (not in Texas). I've seen two german shepards and a human crammed in to one, but I'm not sure you could put much else in there. I'd have to have my wife drive a bigger car, but then if you do the math on the miles she puts on her car to get to the stores and daily maintenance, that'd be a loser too.
Everything seems easy when it involves changing other people's habits. Some things the US SHOULD change are how we zone new construction. Down here in Austin they dump 3 square miles of residential buildings in burbclaves and stuff shopping and what not >5 miles down aforementioned major highway. There's no concept of "the corner store", you've GOT to drive. The nearest IKEA will be the same distance as grocery shopping...that's probably not the best design. I've seen this similar problem in many states, not just Texas. (California to name one)
Actually you're right twice, they did correct the problem, although the motherboards are clearly not identical. Still shame on Gigabyte, they are definitely in the wrong.
So you got me on the labelling, GeIL does relabel their memory components. That right there is an indicator they're probably dishonest, but not proof. I think there are 5 DRAM mfg's (in order of my experienced trustworthiness): Micron, Infineon, Samsung, Hynix and one other I can't remember. Anyhow there's nothing secret about DRAM, so the only purpose in relabelling is to misinform. Not a problem on the systems I work on lately, but I can see why there is a deserved distrust.
But the rest you're wrong, or at least not proveably right. Page 10 shows that there was a measured discrepancy between the "normal" setting on the Gigabyte provided mobo vs. the storebought one. They set both to "Normal" (which implies 1.8V, but is different from MEASURING 1.8V). It turns out the "normal" setting on one was not 1.8V. The article did not explain when this was discovered, if anything was done to compensate, and if this could have affected the results. What I did notice is GeIL was the only memory actually tested, they hit the panic button before they ran the other results. Experiments with a sample size of 1 are bunk.
Even their clock margining scheme for determining overclockworthiness leaves something to be desired. Silicon speed grade sorting is not precise to any number of decimal points. All it says is a given device fits into a certain speed category. The only GUARANTEE is that a device will run within spec, once you're out of spec, all bets are off. To get an accurate reporting you need to get several devices from several die lots and re-run. The best way to try this is to buy several DIMMs from stores across the US at different times (assuming DIMM vendors who relabel their devices, otherwise you can read the lot code from the chip).
The results about GeIL are inconclusive, but I'd say they have Gigabyte red-handed.
Taking a sample size of 1, not really. Their test leaves something to be desired. They really ought to be testing both memories in both systems, several times before jumping to conclusions. Slight variations in PCBs and silicon can build up to cause appreciable differences. Ultimately overclocking is taking entire designs well outside their specified operating limits. To do this reliably you need to test thoroughly on many samples.
The part of it that convinced me that they're right anyhow is the memory supply voltages. "Normal" on the cherry picked Gigabyte board was ~2.2V, normal on the storebought was ~1.83V (FVI 1.8V is the DDR2 spec supply voltage). You'll have to take my word for it, but THAT variation is huge. People who build computers do not tolerate voltage discrepancies like that, it's out of spec for the devices which usually allow 5% variation (1.71V-1.89V). You can verify this by going to Hynix/Micron/Infineon and pulling down a DDR2 component datasheet.
The headline is beyond wrong though, it's probably actually criminal. GeIL does not control the memory supply voltage (they make the DIMM), Gigabyte does (they make the mobo). GIGABYTE is cheating.
It's very easy to figure out if memory makers are cheating: take the heatsink off, look at the device part numbers and look them up. There's not a whole lot to tweak that doesn't involve a complete redesign of the DIMM. If they cheat it's almost always because they used a DDR2-400 device but branded their DIMM as DDR2-something_higher.
Region coding is easy. A DVD costs $20 in the US, or something like 20RMB in china. Usually it's around 8 RMB to the US dollar. Clearly they're selling DVDs for about $2.50 over there. Same movie, except with subtitles which you can usually turn off.
Since an actual DVD costs almost nothing, and they have control to charge different people different prices, they can peg prices any way they'd like for any market.
No their argument is that by choosing which technologies to include support for, even when the market was not already demanding them, they have made them successful. Apple, for example, may do some R&D and provide technologies standard on its laptops, but since they're usually proprietary, and so little of the market is Apple, they often are of limited success. PC makers often duplicate the useful ones in an open way. Dell would argue it chooses which of the knockoffs to succeed.
It's a lame argument, but to a suit, it makes sense. Choosing which finish product to propogate is not quite as helpful as funding and partipating in the development, but to a suit those are just "expenses".
Most of us are used to buying hardware that we know works with linux. The same concept would apply, to run OS-X I'd limit my hardware choices to known good configurations. Further, it's in their best interest to support more hardware than what they have: it gives them buying power on their own platforms. The more drivers that exist, the more competitors they can use, the lower their costs. They will NOT use the "white-box" PC model for their hardware, much like Dell they'll offer packaged products with limited hardware combinations that they can thoroughly test, but they will be writing more drivers and they may one day be able to offer a standard PC OS-X that satisfies a broad market. It make sense to help fund that investment by offering it to a more elite group of users first.
Apple is going to trial this IntelMac thing for a year or two, to see if they get any converts. Obviously if you're a greedy businessman you want the complete monopoly of hardware and software, it raises the barriers of entry for competitors much higher. If they fail to get as many converts as marketing wants us to believe they're getting, they will release OS-X for open systems. Companies like Dell/HP/Lenovo will partner with them to ensure their hardware is supported, much like they currently do with MS. Apple would probably sell it's hardware business or redirect it to other consumer products. This is the best possible outcome for consumers, but it is going to be hard won.
I don't know what school taught him not to think artistically, but EE is very mathematically oriented only towards ANALYSIS. Design is still, and always will be, a creative excersize. Schools just don't teach that, they can't. All they can do is help you understand how one design is better than another.
The only "old" idea that makes no sense is that Apple is a hardware company. Beyond that hope, they're pretty successful with Jobs. Some would say he breathed new life into a company that was doomed.
I think we do not believe it exists. Every argument that it is a real phenomenon that is out of control, comes packaged with some pseudo-religious viewpoint about how we should live life.
It could be real, but the message isn't getting heard through the bullshit.
Sure, but hte article linked to is horribly biased in the other direction, claiming the bell's are the "little guys". By some stupid metric sure, but we shouldn't forget they're in control of almost every telephone wire.
His point is that the Shannon limit provides a mathematical upper bound for how good a lossless compression algorithm can be for arbitrary data sets. gzip gets 98% of that maximum bound, so any algorithm that claims to be 12x that is either not lossless, or not generic. Gzip etc. are all based on several related algorithms known generally as "entropy coders" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_coding).
Lossy compression and compression of particular data sets do not have to obey this. With lossy compression you can compress down as far as you can tolerate.
Coding particular sets gets some extra compression by coding some of the data in the compress/decompress utility. For example if all your files have a 1MB standard header and 1KB of data, you can omit the 1MB of header because it's always there, and just send the 1KB of data! Truly amazing compression! Of course it only works under those conditions.
Like other guy said, it doesn't matter if I'm booked or not, they schedule the meeting anyway. Anyhow, it shouldn't be assumed that because I do not have a meeting scheduled, I am available, particularly on one hour notice. I COULD book 8-5 every day, for the entire year, but the tool is now totally useless for people who I have approved a meeting for.
The bottom line is that availability is a BAD thing. It's like money and real estate. The more you have to give away, the more people will want. You need to keep quiet about it, dole it out only to the deserving and only in the amount they need. If people don't know your availability, and have to ask you first, you are in control of where the time goes and how much. I think Louis XIV was the one most famous for this technique of dealing with bureacracy.
As it stands I have to play a cat and mouse game with "tentative" responses (because declines are often sent to managers for negative use on performance reviews) and finding the people who really did have an important meeting and making sure they understand tentative is my code for "a meeting I rejected implicitly", without actually telling them that because I may want to decline them some other day. It sucks up a lot of time, and worse, my cell phone (which I download my calendar too) understands tentative as "booked", so I can't rely on it to tell me what meeting i need to be attending, and when I have time to do real work.
Like most of us, management will not approve overtime, I'm "exempt", but I'm not going to work overtime without pay. There is plenty of work to do for an 8 hour day with 0 meetings. The only solution is to manage time carefully, something made extremely difficult by these sorts of "productivity" tools.
Exactly, and if another $*%&# outlook user books me in another $(%^*# meeting without even ASKING me if I'm available, or if it's a good time, I think America is going to hear about epic scale workplace violence.
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Elitism is why it is so expensive to live in the western world.
"I feel like I'm wasting money just by sitting here!" - Homer
Pretty sure I saw a submission by something "Cockmaster" or something like that a few days ago.
If you had a netlist, or even the HDL, you absolutely could do this and be SURE that no matter what elven magic nVidia uses in its drivers, it would work (because you have the same chip).
Now the obvious question is "It's got to be impossible to get someones design files!". No, no it's not. It's easy enough to do here in the US, just hard to get away with. In my first job a chinese national was arrested for emailing the entire design files (hw/sw/mechanical...even marketing!) to our competitor in China. He had a plane ticket and had sold his house, the only thing that caught him was that he was a complete moron (for using the COMPANY EMAIL to do this). A smarter person would have burnt it to a DVD, labelled it Goatse Pr0n and lived happily ever after.
Knowing how many chip companies offshore their integration testing to India and China, and voluntarily send full HDL source and post synthesis netlists, I wouldn't bet the business on it. If, however, you keep your drivers proprietary, you could make a convincing court case that you've been ripped off if someone makes a clone. If the drivers were open source? Your argument gets a lot harder.
The argument isn't quite right. Graphics chips are amongst the more complicated chips to design (at least for the gaming market), someone couldn't just look at your driver code and necessarily know how to design a new chip. Similarly you can bet enough engineers float away from nVidia & ATI (to each other and elsewhere) that their secrets are pretty well known.
The problem is that they could make a card that is FUNCTIONALLY compatible with either ATI or nVidia, such that it could use their drivers. They would then get FREE driver development from ATI/nVIDIA and just sell hardware. That would give them a pretty tremendous competitive advantage, and put ATI/nVIDIA in a bad spot (particularly considering they have invested quite a bit of R&D into this line of products).
If however some 3rd party could do the devleopment for them for a while, then be able to open source the drivers after some period of time expires, that would fix the situation. Unfortunately, neither of those companies see any interest in doing this as they are perfectly happy having proprietary solutions. If they had to compete on costs alone, it'd mean less profit.
It depends on the game. I don't want to watch people play your averge FPS for 30 minutes, that'd put me to sleep. I can't think of anything I'd gain by watching it, and it moves so fast that unless you're working the controls you probably can't follow it. I WOULD be interested in watching the really good high end guilds do some of the more complicated raids from WoW/EQ/etc. Watching that many people move in coordination is usually pretty impressive, and may help us casual types raise the bar a bit. Any idgit can do Molten Core (WoW) or Bastion of Thunder (EQ), but not anyone can do it really well.
We can all go out and play football instead of watching it, but we probably lack the coordination and teamwork the pros have from practice.
Especially if the Zebranky are the star players.
They'll be telling us that Vista's gonna have menus and a pointer next...
Not in Vista Basic, you'll need the upgrades for that...
My accord hybrid averages 28mpg on my 15 mile commute to work (it has only 938 miles on it). Don't get me wrong, on the highway it's great, I've seen it average >40, but during morning and afternoon rush it's stop and go once I get to the interstate. There are a few cars that will do better (some not hybrids), but not so many.
A prius for example, gets really good mileage all the time, but 0-60 in something like 16 seconds is kind of dangerous considering I turn left from a residential road onto a 4-lane 65mph highway. It's crowded, there's no light, and no one slows down (not in Texas). I've seen two german shepards and a human crammed in to one, but I'm not sure you could put much else in there. I'd have to have my wife drive a bigger car, but then if you do the math on the miles she puts on her car to get to the stores and daily maintenance, that'd be a loser too.
Everything seems easy when it involves changing other people's habits. Some things the US SHOULD change are how we zone new construction. Down here in Austin they dump 3 square miles of residential buildings in burbclaves and stuff shopping and what not >5 miles down aforementioned major highway. There's no concept of "the corner store", you've GOT to drive. The nearest IKEA will be the same distance as grocery shopping...that's probably not the best design. I've seen this similar problem in many states, not just Texas. (California to name one)
...out in pain!
Yay for Ubisoft. Getting rid of that horrid copy-protection scheme and the most annoying of all slashdot trolls, in one shot.
Yes, that's all they did in EQ whenever SOE bitchslapped them.
Actually you're right twice, they did correct the problem, although the motherboards are clearly not identical. Still shame on Gigabyte, they are definitely in the wrong.
So you got me on the labelling, GeIL does relabel their memory components. That right there is an indicator they're probably dishonest, but not proof. I think there are 5 DRAM mfg's (in order of my experienced trustworthiness): Micron, Infineon, Samsung, Hynix and one other I can't remember. Anyhow there's nothing secret about DRAM, so the only purpose in relabelling is to misinform. Not a problem on the systems I work on lately, but I can see why there is a deserved distrust.
But the rest you're wrong, or at least not proveably right. Page 10 shows that there was a measured discrepancy between the "normal" setting on the Gigabyte provided mobo vs. the storebought one. They set both to "Normal" (which implies 1.8V, but is different from MEASURING 1.8V). It turns out the "normal" setting on one was not 1.8V. The article did not explain when this was discovered, if anything was done to compensate, and if this could have affected the results. What I did notice is GeIL was the only memory actually tested, they hit the panic button before they ran the other results. Experiments with a sample size of 1 are bunk.
Even their clock margining scheme for determining overclockworthiness leaves something to be desired. Silicon speed grade sorting is not precise to any number of decimal points. All it says is a given device fits into a certain speed category. The only GUARANTEE is that a device will run within spec, once you're out of spec, all bets are off. To get an accurate reporting you need to get several devices from several die lots and re-run. The best way to try this is to buy several DIMMs from stores across the US at different times (assuming DIMM vendors who relabel their devices, otherwise you can read the lot code from the chip).
The results about GeIL are inconclusive, but I'd say they have Gigabyte red-handed.
Taking a sample size of 1, not really. Their test leaves something to be desired. They really ought to be testing both memories in both systems, several times before jumping to conclusions. Slight variations in PCBs and silicon can build up to cause appreciable differences. Ultimately overclocking is taking entire designs well outside their specified operating limits. To do this reliably you need to test thoroughly on many samples.
The part of it that convinced me that they're right anyhow is the memory supply voltages. "Normal" on the cherry picked Gigabyte board was ~2.2V, normal on the storebought was ~1.83V (FVI 1.8V is the DDR2 spec supply voltage). You'll have to take my word for it, but THAT variation is huge. People who build computers do not tolerate voltage discrepancies like that, it's out of spec for the devices which usually allow 5% variation (1.71V-1.89V). You can verify this by going to Hynix/Micron/Infineon and pulling down a DDR2 component datasheet.
The headline is beyond wrong though, it's probably actually criminal. GeIL does not control the memory supply voltage (they make the DIMM), Gigabyte does (they make the mobo). GIGABYTE is cheating.
It's very easy to figure out if memory makers are cheating: take the heatsink off, look at the device part numbers and look them up. There's not a whole lot to tweak that doesn't involve a complete redesign of the DIMM. If they cheat it's almost always because they used a DDR2-400 device but branded their DIMM as DDR2-something_higher.
Region coding is easy. A DVD costs $20 in the US, or something like 20RMB in china. Usually it's around 8 RMB to the US dollar. Clearly they're selling DVDs for about $2.50 over there. Same movie, except with subtitles which you can usually turn off.
Since an actual DVD costs almost nothing, and they have control to charge different people different prices, they can peg prices any way they'd like for any market.
No their argument is that by choosing which technologies to include support for, even when the market was not already demanding them, they have made them successful. Apple, for example, may do some R&D and provide technologies standard on its laptops, but since they're usually proprietary, and so little of the market is Apple, they often are of limited success. PC makers often duplicate the useful ones in an open way. Dell would argue it chooses which of the knockoffs to succeed.
It's a lame argument, but to a suit, it makes sense. Choosing which finish product to propogate is not quite as helpful as funding and partipating in the development, but to a suit those are just "expenses".
Most of us are used to buying hardware that we know works with linux. The same concept would apply, to run OS-X I'd limit my hardware choices to known good configurations. Further, it's in their best interest to support more hardware than what they have: it gives them buying power on their own platforms. The more drivers that exist, the more competitors they can use, the lower their costs. They will NOT use the "white-box" PC model for their hardware, much like Dell they'll offer packaged products with limited hardware combinations that they can thoroughly test, but they will be writing more drivers and they may one day be able to offer a standard PC OS-X that satisfies a broad market. It make sense to help fund that investment by offering it to a more elite group of users first.
Apple is going to trial this IntelMac thing for a year or two, to see if they get any converts. Obviously if you're a greedy businessman you want the complete monopoly of hardware and software, it raises the barriers of entry for competitors much higher. If they fail to get as many converts as marketing wants us to believe they're getting, they will release OS-X for open systems. Companies like Dell/HP/Lenovo will partner with them to ensure their hardware is supported, much like they currently do with MS. Apple would probably sell it's hardware business or redirect it to other consumer products. This is the best possible outcome for consumers, but it is going to be hard won.
I don't know what school taught him not to think artistically, but EE is very mathematically oriented only towards ANALYSIS. Design is still, and always will be, a creative excersize. Schools just don't teach that, they can't. All they can do is help you understand how one design is better than another.
The only "old" idea that makes no sense is that Apple is a hardware company. Beyond that hope, they're pretty successful with Jobs. Some would say he breathed new life into a company that was doomed.
I think we do not believe it exists. Every argument that it is a real phenomenon that is out of control, comes packaged with some pseudo-religious viewpoint about how we should live life.
It could be real, but the message isn't getting heard through the bullshit.
Sure, but hte article linked to is horribly biased in the other direction, claiming the bell's are the "little guys". By some stupid metric sure, but we shouldn't forget they're in control of almost every telephone wire.
You can't compress random data. That's about as pedantic as is worth going in to without getting deep in to math.
His point is that the Shannon limit provides a mathematical upper bound for how good a lossless compression algorithm can be for arbitrary data sets. gzip gets 98% of that maximum bound, so any algorithm that claims to be 12x that is either not lossless, or not generic. Gzip etc. are all based on several related algorithms known generally as "entropy coders" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_coding).
Lossy compression and compression of particular data sets do not have to obey this. With lossy compression you can compress down as far as you can tolerate.
Coding particular sets gets some extra compression by coding some of the data in the compress/decompress utility. For example if all your files have a 1MB standard header and 1KB of data, you can omit the 1MB of header because it's always there, and just send the 1KB of data! Truly amazing compression! Of course it only works under those conditions.
Like other guy said, it doesn't matter if I'm booked or not, they schedule the meeting anyway. Anyhow, it shouldn't be assumed that because I do not have a meeting scheduled, I am available, particularly on one hour notice. I COULD book 8-5 every day, for the entire year, but the tool is now totally useless for people who I have approved a meeting for.
The bottom line is that availability is a BAD thing. It's like money and real estate. The more you have to give away, the more people will want. You need to keep quiet about it, dole it out only to the deserving and only in the amount they need. If people don't know your availability, and have to ask you first, you are in control of where the time goes and how much. I think Louis XIV was the one most famous for this technique of dealing with bureacracy.
As it stands I have to play a cat and mouse game with "tentative" responses (because declines are often sent to managers for negative use on performance reviews) and finding the people who really did have an important meeting and making sure they understand tentative is my code for "a meeting I rejected implicitly", without actually telling them that because I may want to decline them some other day. It sucks up a lot of time, and worse, my cell phone (which I download my calendar too) understands tentative as "booked", so I can't rely on it to tell me what meeting i need to be attending, and when I have time to do real work.
Like most of us, management will not approve overtime, I'm "exempt", but I'm not going to work overtime without pay. There is plenty of work to do for an 8 hour day with 0 meetings. The only solution is to manage time carefully, something made extremely difficult by these sorts of "productivity" tools.
Exactly, and if another $*%&# outlook user books me in another $(%^*# meeting without even ASKING me if I'm available, or if it's a good time, I think America is going to hear about epic scale workplace violence.