Eh, I bought a 6800 about 15-18 months ago (I forget when) and it still does fairly well. It probably helps that I have it hooked up to a 2Ghz Opteron with 2GB of RAM.
Still, most of the games I play are at least 6 months old (CoD:UO is my major passion this year). I rarely buy games when they first come out.
I prefer to buy whatever video card was top of the line 12-18 months ago whenever I upgrade. That's generally just enough behind the bleeding edge that price/performance is at the "sweet spot". For the most part, that means spending about $200 every few years. (My old video card was a Ti4600.)
My 2nd criteria is that the new card needs to at least double the graphical performance according to multiple benchmarks. Otherwise, it's not time yet to upgrade.
One of the big issues with VPN technologies is the NAT routers that protect home offices. The corporate office side is easy, just punch the appropriate holes in the firewall and the remote clients can easily connect to the network.
Where things fall apart is that you have multiple laptop users who are behind their own NAT routers at their homes. You need to use VPN software on the laptops (not on the NAT routers) because you only want their work machines connecting in. That's easy enough, until you run into a situation where you have 2 or 3 users who get together and collaborate frequently behind a single NAT router.
It seems like PPTP (maybe SSL?) was better suited for situations where you might have multiple users VPN'ing in from the same source IP address (hidden behind a NAT router, such as an ad-hoc meeting in someone's house or multiple users meeting in a coffee shop). All of my readings on IPSec indicated that IPSec can't handle that particular usage style.
I'm betting that this will kill XFire within 12-18 months due to mismanagement by Viacom who will want to squeeze profits out of XFire by swamping it with ads.
If you want to talk bloat, let's talk AIM which has become a very large CPU hog over the past 2 years. I used to leave AIM up and running in the background. It used to have a minimal memory footprint and never consumed CPU cycles. But lately, I've disabled it permanently due to all of the RAM/CPU that it was eating up *in the background while hidden*.
It's a real pity, because XFire is very handy for building networks of gaming friends and seeing where they are playing. I've had zero issues with it and it's come in handy.
to everyone who just dropped a ton of cash building a brand new athlon x2 socket 939 systems...my condolences. at least this will bring the price of the higher-end athlon x2s down for the rest of us...yay!
Frankly, it doesn't matter. I can count on one hand the number of people that I know who have upgraded CPUs instead of replacing the entire MB/CPU/RAM as a bundle. And the majority of those had more money then sense and were simply trying to stay on the bleeding edge. Unless you cheap out on the CPU at the very start of a socket's life-cycle, it's very rare that you can get enough of an upgrade out of a CPU to make the CPU-swap worth it.
(However, the dual-core CPUs do upset that calculation a bit. But that's only worthwhile if you're moving from a single-core CPU to a dual-core CPU.)
Plus, newer motherboards typically have better features (USB v2 vs 1.1, Gigabit LAN vs 100Mbit, PCIe vs PCI, SATA vs PATA, FSB speeds, memory bandwidth). So if you really want to get the most performance gain out of a new CPU, it's best to put it in a newer motherboard.
As others have said, the parent is exaggerating, but this is a common response to Japanese. The language requires you to almost rewrite all of the things you've come to expect in English or another Western language.
That there is the primary reason that I study Japanese off and on as a hobby. I'm nowhere near fluent, but I am starting to grasp the underlying concepts and recognizing words in-context. I usually know enough to tell when the subtitles have been "english-ized".
It's extremely interesting to me to study the language and learn how to think in a different way. The culture and mindset seems to be very intricately entwined with the language.
Will I ever get fluent? Meh, maybe... I pick up a new Japanese language book about twice a year and it teaches me a bit more. At some point, I may even sign up for some college classes or take a trip over to Japan.
56K? Son, most people won't read fast enough to keep up with 1,200 baud.
Heh, I remember those days. Downloading messages from CompuServe at 2400baud. If I was paying attention, I could skim most messages as they flashed across the screen, but it wasn't easy.
And to think I was excited when I got my first 14.4 modem.
If you're creating archival disks, always spend the time to create parity data on the disks using QuickPar. Then, burn 2 copies and store them in two widely separated physical locations. (There are trickier methods, but that's the basic one.)
I've recovered data from DVDs that have faded at the outer edges, simply because we took the time to put parity data on them.
Before you could have a script that basically says "target nearest enemy, attack, cast special attack, cast another special attack, heal, repeat" but their scripts can't say "turn the view so the nearest enemy is under the crosshair."
Okay, maybe not with a script, but the first thing that came to my mind was "aimbot" (which is a common cheat type in most FPS games).
Exactly, there's no such thing as a "fair" price. It's a flawed concept.
You see this a lot in MMORPGs with trading bazaars where players exchange goods for coin. There's a lot of whining and crying because uber item X sells for $Z but the whiner wants it for $Z * 0.5. Yet as long as there are other players who are willing to pay $Z, why should the seller drop their price?
Heck, I used the bleeding edge pricing model quite a bit in EQ2. I'd list an item at a semi-high cost, but slowly drop the price by about 10% per week until it sold. Eventually, I would hit a price that a buyer was willing to pay.
Granted, markets in an online game don't entirely reflect reality. But they do provide a glimpse into the mindset of buyers and sellers in a mostly open market.
He meanwhile has a 1GHz PIII notebook that he is thinking of again replacing because Windows runs too slow.
Classic symptom of memory starvation where there's not enough installed RAM for long-term use. Performance starts out okay, but gradually decreases over time as more things get added to the system. That's how it will appear to a non-technical user.
Not that a P3 1Ghz is a speed-demon, but if you could upgrade to 512MB or 1GB of RAM you could probably breath new life into it for a few more years.
The most underrated Microsoft operating system is NT4... Smaller and faster than 98, and every bit as stable as 2000 or XP.
NT4 got lots of bad publicity for being a version behind 95/98 in DirectX versions, and sadly only got up to DirectX 6.0 before being E.O.L.ed. It also got a bad wrap for lacking USB support, even though several companies released NT4 drivers for their USB devices, USB input devices like keyboards and mice don't need OS support, and a third-party company is still selling the USB stack/drivers for NT4 for $30. These were features Microsoft was holding back on, to force an upgrade to 2000.
While I used NT4 as my sole OS for a few years (prior to that I was using OS/2), I was definitely happier when Win2000 came out. It was a real pain to maintain a second OS for running games (which Win2000 did a lot better).
I'd also argue the "smaller and faster" then Win98. You could run Win98 in 32MB or 64MB, but to be productive with WinNT you really needed 64MB or 128MB. I killed at least one hard drive by forcing NT into the swap drive too often.
Still, it was stable and it was nice to have something where I could do a dozen things at once without worrying about the OS crashing. Which is why I was running OS/2 for a few years instead of Win 3.x and Win9x.
Win2000 was almost a perfect corporate desktop. Stable, responsive, and mostly low clutter. WinXP has some additional features which are nice, but also some that get in the way of power-users. I haven't seen a blue-screen / system crash in a long time. And most reboots are done as-needed (or the system gets slow after being up and running for three weeks).
I'm really curious as to what anime you've been watching... because there are at least half a dozen distinct art styles now.
There's the somewhat realistic: Perfect Blue, Boogiepop Phantom, Lain, Gasaraki, Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal.
Miyuzaki has his own style. He bends it a bit in different films.
Even the classic style is pretty elastic. Project A-Ko, Excel Saga, All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, Tenchi Muyo, Dirty Pair are all what I would consider standard-fare where they experiment in over the top animation. The Rurouni Kenshi series probably fits in here as well (as does Sailor Moon and Saber Marionette ).
Then there's traditional stuff like Akira, Gundam Wing, Noir, Madlax.
Not to mention the really weird stuff like Metropolis or Spring and Chaos).
And even within those broad categories you have quite a range of variation. The Project A-Ko stuff looks very different from Excel Saga but also shares some key characteristics.
There's also some experimentation with CGI and doing the cells on the computer vs traditional hand-drawn (which imparts a different look). Sometimes it's done somewhat seamlessly, other times it looks jarring.
Out of the list... if you like Hitchcock style horror, try Perfect Blue. This is not your little neice's anime. I know the story by heart, yet whenever I watch this as a filler I end up getting sucked in to giving it my full attention.
If you want something moving, but with cut-n-slash, try Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. It's a sad tale and hard to believe that it's the same author/artist who came up with the Rurouni Kenshin storyline.
Yeah, I'd be curious whether they can catch the magical quality of the slightly-clunky and campy animation of the original. Or whether they bury it in modern-day CGI effects.
(I also read the book at some point while growing up. Not sure if it was a screeplay-to-book or if it was more of the original story prior to being made into a screenplay.)
Annual would be too much expense. A more reasonable middle ground would be annual testing until you hit 21, then every 3-8 years after that. After the age of 60 or 70, it could scale back down to every 2-3 years.
I'm somewhat surprised that the insurance industry hasn't started offering (even mandating for cheaper rates?) taking a short 10-15 hour Driver's Ed refresher course every few years. Heck, you can hit the high points of defensive driving in an hour or two and most of that would be new information to a lot of drivers. Even 5-10 hours might be overkill.
Sure, you can't *make* people learn, but to teach them via Driver's Ed in their late teens and then never refresh that training is a bit foolhardy.
There's a very OLD bug regarding that.
Bug #115174
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11517 4
It causes issues with any application that can't deal with duplicate page submits. Causing your credit card to get charged twice is a typical result of this bug.
Ether was also popular in Sci-Fi back in the 30s/40s. In particular, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series refers to "ether". Although the idea of the interial neutralizing drive was an even better one (along with the issues that your momentum vector would be the same as before you turned on the drive).
There are plenty of applications that can exploit multiple CPUs or cores. Most video encoding packages will encode a single stream using as many cores as possible (encoding is easily done parallel).
Other apps get an entire core to themselves, while the O/S and background tasks run on the other cores. This makes for a snappier system because the UI threads aren't competing for CPU time on a clogged CPU.
I dunno what you do for a living (or a hobby), but there are those of us for whom quad-core won't get here soon enough. Disk I/O is always going to be an issue, but there are a lot of applications that still need more CPU power.
I keep a dual-CPU Opteron system pretty busy most days and I'll be upgrading to a dual-CPU dual-core system once prices drop a bit more.
Access databases start running into issues at around the 1GB per MDB mark. (Pretty sure the max size is 2GB... I think... I should know this dammit! Meh, we always split into multiple MDBs in those cases.)
Where the Jet database engine (which is what MDBs are the datastore for) runs into trouble is concurrent access. Take a web server, use a MDB... at around 30-50 users you'll start running into severe performance issues. Switch to SQL Server / PostgreSQL and that same web server can now handle 300-500 users.
MDBs are still handy for small, portable, mostly-relational, isolated pockets of data that need to be passed around. I do wish there was something better (OOBase might replace MDB in a few more years).
Or try 'atop'... although the big reason I run a screen session with atop running in addition to regular "top" is because atop shows me which physical devices are busy. Which is more useful when tuning database systems where you're balancing loads between multiple arrays.
"dstat" also works well as a histogram, although I'm not sure how much support it has for tracking individual processes.
It is comical, but also somewhat interesting once you learn a little bit about it. Trying to second-guess whether they'll pass or run on a particular play, whether they'll go for a field-goal or try for the 1st down conversion.
I'm not even a football fan, but I don't mind sitting down and watching a game with friends. Over the years I've learned enough to figure out what's going on to at least appreciated it some.
But I still won't sit down and watch it by myself. (I'd rather play a computer game or watch something else.)
That's the big reason that I'm drooling over the Thinkpad T60s. It's all about responsiveness (well, mostly).
I have a pair of Opteron systems at my desk (in addition to the laptop). The dual Opteron 246 unit almost never has responsiveness issues, the Opteron 148 is constantly waiting.
Just wish the prices on the 265/270s would drop to something reasonable (say $200 each)... I "want" to upgrade my dual 246 to a pair of 270s.
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Eh, I bought a 6800 about 15-18 months ago (I forget when) and it still does fairly well. It probably helps that I have it hooked up to a 2Ghz Opteron with 2GB of RAM.
Still, most of the games I play are at least 6 months old (CoD:UO is my major passion this year). I rarely buy games when they first come out.
I prefer to buy whatever video card was top of the line 12-18 months ago whenever I upgrade. That's generally just enough behind the bleeding edge that price/performance is at the "sweet spot". For the most part, that means spending about $200 every few years. (My old video card was a Ti4600.)
My 2nd criteria is that the new card needs to at least double the graphical performance according to multiple benchmarks. Otherwise, it's not time yet to upgrade.
One of the big issues with VPN technologies is the NAT routers that protect home offices. The corporate office side is easy, just punch the appropriate holes in the firewall and the remote clients can easily connect to the network.
Where things fall apart is that you have multiple laptop users who are behind their own NAT routers at their homes. You need to use VPN software on the laptops (not on the NAT routers) because you only want their work machines connecting in. That's easy enough, until you run into a situation where you have 2 or 3 users who get together and collaborate frequently behind a single NAT router.
It seems like PPTP (maybe SSL?) was better suited for situations where you might have multiple users VPN'ing in from the same source IP address (hidden behind a NAT router, such as an ad-hoc meeting in someone's house or multiple users meeting in a coffee shop). All of my readings on IPSec indicated that IPSec can't handle that particular usage style.
I'm betting that this will kill XFire within 12-18 months due to mismanagement by Viacom who will want to squeeze profits out of XFire by swamping it with ads.
If you want to talk bloat, let's talk AIM which has become a very large CPU hog over the past 2 years. I used to leave AIM up and running in the background. It used to have a minimal memory footprint and never consumed CPU cycles. But lately, I've disabled it permanently due to all of the RAM/CPU that it was eating up *in the background while hidden*.
It's a real pity, because XFire is very handy for building networks of gaming friends and seeing where they are playing. I've had zero issues with it and it's come in handy.
to everyone who just dropped a ton of cash building a brand new athlon x2 socket 939 systems...my condolences. at least this will bring the price of the higher-end athlon x2s down for the rest of us...yay!
Frankly, it doesn't matter. I can count on one hand the number of people that I know who have upgraded CPUs instead of replacing the entire MB/CPU/RAM as a bundle. And the majority of those had more money then sense and were simply trying to stay on the bleeding edge. Unless you cheap out on the CPU at the very start of a socket's life-cycle, it's very rare that you can get enough of an upgrade out of a CPU to make the CPU-swap worth it.
(However, the dual-core CPUs do upset that calculation a bit. But that's only worthwhile if you're moving from a single-core CPU to a dual-core CPU.)
Plus, newer motherboards typically have better features (USB v2 vs 1.1, Gigabit LAN vs 100Mbit, PCIe vs PCI, SATA vs PATA, FSB speeds, memory bandwidth). So if you really want to get the most performance gain out of a new CPU, it's best to put it in a newer motherboard.
As others have said, the parent is exaggerating, but this is a common response to Japanese. The language requires you to almost rewrite all of the things you've come to expect in English or another Western language.
That there is the primary reason that I study Japanese off and on as a hobby. I'm nowhere near fluent, but I am starting to grasp the underlying concepts and recognizing words in-context. I usually know enough to tell when the subtitles have been "english-ized".
It's extremely interesting to me to study the language and learn how to think in a different way. The culture and mindset seems to be very intricately entwined with the language.
Will I ever get fluent? Meh, maybe... I pick up a new Japanese language book about twice a year and it teaches me a bit more. At some point, I may even sign up for some college classes or take a trip over to Japan.
Yep, SA was a sucker's bet. And Microsoft laughed all the way to the bank.
I pity firms who absolutely had to go with SA.
IIRC, it's a 3-year contract that gives you free upgrades. Pricing was about the same as the original software package.
56K? Son, most people won't read fast enough to keep up with 1,200 baud.
Heh, I remember those days. Downloading messages from CompuServe at 2400baud. If I was paying attention, I could skim most messages as they flashed across the screen, but it wasn't easy.
And to think I was excited when I got my first 14.4 modem.
Have you never lost data on those dvds?
Two words - "recovery blocks".
If you're creating archival disks, always spend the time to create parity data on the disks using QuickPar. Then, burn 2 copies and store them in two widely separated physical locations. (There are trickier methods, but that's the basic one.)
I've recovered data from DVDs that have faded at the outer edges, simply because we took the time to put parity data on them.
Before you could have a script that basically says "target nearest enemy, attack, cast special attack, cast another special attack, heal, repeat" but their scripts can't say "turn the view so the nearest enemy is under the crosshair."
Okay, maybe not with a script, but the first thing that came to my mind was "aimbot" (which is a common cheat type in most FPS games).
Exactly, there's no such thing as a "fair" price. It's a flawed concept.
You see this a lot in MMORPGs with trading bazaars where players exchange goods for coin. There's a lot of whining and crying because uber item X sells for $Z but the whiner wants it for $Z * 0.5. Yet as long as there are other players who are willing to pay $Z, why should the seller drop their price?
Heck, I used the bleeding edge pricing model quite a bit in EQ2. I'd list an item at a semi-high cost, but slowly drop the price by about 10% per week until it sold. Eventually, I would hit a price that a buyer was willing to pay.
Granted, markets in an online game don't entirely reflect reality. But they do provide a glimpse into the mindset of buyers and sellers in a mostly open market.
He meanwhile has a 1GHz PIII notebook that he is thinking of again replacing because Windows runs too slow.
Classic symptom of memory starvation where there's not enough installed RAM for long-term use. Performance starts out okay, but gradually decreases over time as more things get added to the system. That's how it will appear to a non-technical user.
Not that a P3 1Ghz is a speed-demon, but if you could upgrade to 512MB or 1GB of RAM you could probably breath new life into it for a few more years.
The most underrated Microsoft operating system is NT4... Smaller and faster than 98, and every bit as stable as 2000 or XP.
NT4 got lots of bad publicity for being a version behind 95/98 in DirectX versions, and sadly only got up to DirectX 6.0 before being E.O.L.ed. It also got a bad wrap for lacking USB support, even though several companies released NT4 drivers for their USB devices, USB input devices like keyboards and mice don't need OS support, and a third-party company is still selling the USB stack/drivers for NT4 for $30. These were features Microsoft was holding back on, to force an upgrade to 2000.
While I used NT4 as my sole OS for a few years (prior to that I was using OS/2), I was definitely happier when Win2000 came out. It was a real pain to maintain a second OS for running games (which Win2000 did a lot better).
I'd also argue the "smaller and faster" then Win98. You could run Win98 in 32MB or 64MB, but to be productive with WinNT you really needed 64MB or 128MB. I killed at least one hard drive by forcing NT into the swap drive too often.
Still, it was stable and it was nice to have something where I could do a dozen things at once without worrying about the OS crashing. Which is why I was running OS/2 for a few years instead of Win 3.x and Win9x.
Win2000 was almost a perfect corporate desktop. Stable, responsive, and mostly low clutter. WinXP has some additional features which are nice, but also some that get in the way of power-users. I haven't seen a blue-screen / system crash in a long time. And most reboots are done as-needed (or the system gets slow after being up and running for three weeks).
I'm really curious as to what anime you've been watching... because there are at least half a dozen distinct art styles now.
There's the somewhat realistic: Perfect Blue, Boogiepop Phantom, Lain, Gasaraki, Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal.
Miyuzaki has his own style. He bends it a bit in different films.
Even the classic style is pretty elastic. Project A-Ko, Excel Saga, All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, Tenchi Muyo, Dirty Pair are all what I would consider standard-fare where they experiment in over the top animation. The Rurouni Kenshi series probably fits in here as well (as does Sailor Moon and Saber Marionette ).
Then there's traditional stuff like Akira, Gundam Wing, Noir, Madlax.
Not to mention the really weird stuff like Metropolis or Spring and Chaos).
And even within those broad categories you have quite a range of variation. The Project A-Ko stuff looks very different from Excel Saga but also shares some key characteristics.
There's also some experimentation with CGI and doing the cells on the computer vs traditional hand-drawn (which imparts a different look). Sometimes it's done somewhat seamlessly, other times it looks jarring.
Out of the list... if you like Hitchcock style horror, try Perfect Blue. This is not your little neice's anime. I know the story by heart, yet whenever I watch this as a filler I end up getting sucked in to giving it my full attention.
If you want something moving, but with cut-n-slash, try Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. It's a sad tale and hard to believe that it's the same author/artist who came up with the Rurouni Kenshin storyline.
Yeah, I'd be curious whether they can catch the magical quality of the slightly-clunky and campy animation of the original. Or whether they bury it in modern-day CGI effects.
(I also read the book at some point while growing up. Not sure if it was a screeplay-to-book or if it was more of the original story prior to being made into a screenplay.)
Annual would be too much expense. A more reasonable middle ground would be annual testing until you hit 21, then every 3-8 years after that. After the age of 60 or 70, it could scale back down to every 2-3 years.
I'm somewhat surprised that the insurance industry hasn't started offering (even mandating for cheaper rates?) taking a short 10-15 hour Driver's Ed refresher course every few years. Heck, you can hit the high points of defensive driving in an hour or two and most of that would be new information to a lot of drivers. Even 5-10 hours might be overkill.
Sure, you can't *make* people learn, but to teach them via Driver's Ed in their late teens and then never refresh that training is a bit foolhardy.
Actually we 'dress for the fall, not the ride'.
Great tag line!
There's a very OLD bug regarding that. Bug #115174 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11517 4
It causes issues with any application that can't deal with duplicate page submits. Causing your credit card to get charged twice is a typical result of this bug.
Ether was also popular in Sci-Fi back in the 30s/40s. In particular, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series refers to "ether". Although the idea of the interial neutralizing drive was an even better one (along with the issues that your momentum vector would be the same as before you turned on the drive).
There are plenty of applications that can exploit multiple CPUs or cores. Most video encoding packages will encode a single stream using as many cores as possible (encoding is easily done parallel).
Other apps get an entire core to themselves, while the O/S and background tasks run on the other cores. This makes for a snappier system because the UI threads aren't competing for CPU time on a clogged CPU.
I dunno what you do for a living (or a hobby), but there are those of us for whom quad-core won't get here soon enough. Disk I/O is always going to be an issue, but there are a lot of applications that still need more CPU power.
I keep a dual-CPU Opteron system pretty busy most days and I'll be upgrading to a dual-CPU dual-core system once prices drop a bit more.
Plus the fact that an object that close to you alters the sound environment. Changing the acoustics lets you know that something is there.
Access databases start running into issues at around the 1GB per MDB mark. (Pretty sure the max size is 2GB... I think... I should know this dammit! Meh, we always split into multiple MDBs in those cases.)
Where the Jet database engine (which is what MDBs are the datastore for) runs into trouble is concurrent access. Take a web server, use a MDB... at around 30-50 users you'll start running into severe performance issues. Switch to SQL Server / PostgreSQL and that same web server can now handle 300-500 users.
MDBs are still handy for small, portable, mostly-relational, isolated pockets of data that need to be passed around. I do wish there was something better (OOBase might replace MDB in a few more years).
Or try 'atop'... although the big reason I run a screen session with atop running in addition to regular "top" is because atop shows me which physical devices are busy. Which is more useful when tuning database systems where you're balancing loads between multiple arrays.
"dstat" also works well as a histogram, although I'm not sure how much support it has for tracking individual processes.
It is comical, but also somewhat interesting once you learn a little bit about it. Trying to second-guess whether they'll pass or run on a particular play, whether they'll go for a field-goal or try for the 1st down conversion.
I'm not even a football fan, but I don't mind sitting down and watching a game with friends. Over the years I've learned enough to figure out what's going on to at least appreciated it some.
But I still won't sit down and watch it by myself. (I'd rather play a computer game or watch something else.)
That's the big reason that I'm drooling over the Thinkpad T60s. It's all about responsiveness (well, mostly).
I have a pair of Opteron systems at my desk (in addition to the laptop). The dual Opteron 246 unit almost never has responsiveness issues, the Opteron 148 is constantly waiting.
Just wish the prices on the 265/270s would drop to something reasonable (say $200 each)... I "want" to upgrade my dual 246 to a pair of 270s.