That was kind of an awkward transitional moment in GPU development, where the midrange parts were married to memory that couldn't do the cores justice, but the high-end parts are still half-decent for low-to-middling resolutions and detail settings today. The 8800GT and Radeon 2900XT can still get the job done (though the latter card will heat your house nearly as well as a hot Pentium D...). I had an 8600GTS until recently, and it wasn't half-bad, but also wasn't much more than an incremental step above a fast Geforce 7900 unless you cared deeply about its anisotropic filtering quality.
Hey, I'm free to take a PC and give it new life with an OS that's well-maintained, or retool it into doing something profoundly different than its designers originally intended. With a smartphone I get to look forward to wrestling with hardware and software put into place to keep me from doing what I want with something I paid for, and the limitations on power and utility put into place by the carrier, engineer, and the simple restrictions necessary for a device to fit into a pocket and have a battery life better than a first-generation Gameboy running on zinc-carbon batteries. So what I'm saying is that in many key ways, the Android experience is substantially worse.
Incidentally you can make the window borders one pixel wide. Right-click on the desktop --> Personalize --> Window Color --> Advanced appearance settings... --> and then, find Border Padding and set it to a value of 0. That's clearly a lot of digging to turn it off, but it can be done. Your other cited issues are 100% valid - I can't believe how long some glitchy behaviors have existed in the Explorer. I've no doubt that much of Win8's internals will be superior to Win7's, but every single thing I've heard about the new Explorer sounds like a trainwreck.
Heads up: The x264 project's incorporating OpenCL support for certain parts of the encoder. Take a look over here - initial results are very promising.
But the success of tablets and smartphones and the blurring of the line between netbooks and small laptops has shown that one doesn't need an Extreme Edition CPU to do homework, Facebook, YouTube, and light gaming.
Right, and tablets and phones will be fine for a majority of users going forward. I'm 100% OK with this - conventional workstations are likely to become more expensive, but there will also be fewer "dumb user" concessions made in their design. That doesn't mean tablets and smartphones will be well-suited to ArcGIS, PETRA, or video transcoding. I'm also not fond of the carrier/manufacturer-mandated, inherently boxed-in nature of the experience.
Power constrained? Make it quad core, with two cores turned off while not connected to a charger. The backlight uses a huge chunk of the power anyway, and a docked PDA or phone can run with the screen turned off. This behavior could even be advertised as the return of the turbo button [wikipedia.org]. Space constrained? So are ultrabooks, and the solution is the same: dock to an external hard drive.
Yes, but as admirable as per-watt performance is, ARM's absolute performance offered still hovers somewhere around the Pentium II level in best-case scenarios. Toss in some dedicated-purpose DSPs and that can be mitigated, at the cost of some general flexibility. The focus on miniaturization does result in a hobbling of speed, expandability, and general flexibility, and as some savvy others have pointed out, will probably result in the eventual, painful reinvention or reinterpretation of certain desktop metaphors when a portable device is effectively "docked."
Nor is a tablet. Nor is a PDA such as Apple's iPod touch or Samsung's Galaxy Player. Tablets and PDAs use Wi-Fi, which most often connects to a wired last mile, and no wired ISP that I've heard of has run the sort of subsidy model common in the North American cellular market since the dial-up days of i-Opener, WebTV, and PeoplePC. Nor is an unlocked GSM phone, now that (as I've read) AT&T has given up some spectrum in a more commonly used band to T-Mobile USA as compensation for the failed merger.
But it IS limited by what the manufacturer or designer intends for it to do. There will be a market going forward for an expandable, upgradeable PC, even if it shifts back to a more professional focus. My wife's iPad is a joy to use for lots of casual computing purposes, but for my kit I know where I plan to spend my money.
A separate desktop PC can be leagues more powerful than a cellular phone because it's not hobbled by the same frugal power or space constraints. But at least as importantly, a more conventional PC isn't tied to a carrier, with all the baggage - privacy, monthly billing for service, &c. - that entails.
Just curious - did you happen to try disabling network connections, disabling firewalls, using the full-size network installer from a local volume, rebooting, then re-enabling firewalls before enabling network functionality again?
Don't forget: as of the current preview build of Windows 8, you also can't add tablets to a domain. So they're REALLY shooting themselves in the foot by assuming that tablets are only consumer-level devices that will never find a footing in business.
A refutation followed by an assumption of fault is not a valuable contribution to a discussion. I shouldn't burn karma responding to ACs, but what were you hoping to accomplish by thumping your sad little e-peen here?
XP will be around for a long time in various capacities - probably at least as long as MS-DOS has lingered in point-of-sale terminals and niche industrial roles. Directed I/O in virtualization is a godsend for users of a lot of older lab equipment - now it's possible to run a 64-bit host OS with an XP VM that has unfettered access to, say, an old PCI controller card for a transmission electron microscope which hasn't had driver or software updates since 2003. I've never understood that missionary zeal that people develop vis-a-vis old software - use what works, in whatever combination works best.
Assuming that you're using vanilla Doom 3 content, that may be true. But if the Doom 3 mod community receives a shot in the arm as a result of the source release (and I don't imagine there's any reason it wouldn't), it's likely that maps and content will be released which push modern hardware quite a bit further than the original game ever managed. At that point, every speed optimization available will make a positive difference, especially if map and/or asset complexity increases by some significant factor.
Note that this is probably more academic than many here realize - as long as the offending algorithm is not "officially" released, I'm pretty sure Creative won't care enough to go after individual projects with a legal banhammer to force them to stop using "their" algorithm in non-profit projects. And if worse comes to worse, I'm 100% sure someone will implement shadowmap support within the first year or so, which will render* this issue irrelevant.
...but on the bright side, Carmack's Reverse can always be reimplemented by the open source community, and this may hasten the implementation of shadowmaps in source ports to replace Doom 3's stencil shadows. The visual quality improvement would be non-trivial, and for all but hardware that was *ahem* not exactly groundbreaking when Doom 3 was new, the performance delta shouldn't be too massive. In some scenarios it may even be faster.
Strictly PCI would be restricted to Pentium and pre-Super7 systems. The Pentium IIs were marketed heavily on the back of AGP, but some forever alone lunatic out there is slapping his hands together, crowing that his quad-processor Pentium Pro box will finally get a "worthy" video card. I almost want to see that.
Thanks for proving my point about being cool, by showing me how you can swear on-line, and suggesting I do the same.
I didn't actually prove anything there, save that I was personally irritated by a euphemism for a curse word. Constructive complaints are being created 'round the world by tech journalists paid to express lucid, well-constructed thoughts and opinions. I'm a geologist by profession. The byzantine intricacies of social media, and Facebook's ongoing "bad little boy who acts guilty for being caught stealing a cookie, then goes right back to doing it" routine, are beyond my regular study or interest. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt any more.
I guess you're cool on slashdot as long as you complain about everything Facebook does, regardless of whether it is good or bad. So keep complaining about how it is getting too much like MySpace, or Twitter. Keep complaining about how Facebook is further diminishing your privacy each time a new feature is added. Be sure to include some conspiracy theory. Most importantly, threaten to close your account. Then you'll be really cool.
Complaints can actually be well-founded, and those who dislike the subject of a news story are just as welcome to contribute their opinion. I might suggest that Slashdot's main audience is a little beyond caring about who thinks they're "cool" - didn't you see the tag out front? "News for Nerds"? If you want a hivemind, seek out Reddit or 4chan, though there are plenty of good people in both of those communities too.
Get over yourself. It is no secret that what you put on Facebook is not private. It is not secret that they use your data to drive targeted advertising campaigns.
An open mission or goal can still be objectionable. Dismissing someone's objections doesn't actually mean you've won an argument, or even started one. Doing so simply makes you look arrogant and presumptuous.
You will not cancel your account, so stop threatening to. No one on here gives an ish. Zuckerberg isn't reading your slashdot post either. He doesn't give an ish. So go try your, "I swear I'll walk out of here right now!", on your girlfriend or the guy trying to sell you a used car. You may have better luck.
An "ish"? This is a site for grownups, and you can use four letter words. For example, I don't care one fucking bit for your sneering tone.
Zuckerberg won't read the post, but others will, and ultimately he has investors, employees, and business partners who can be rattled by widespread criticism and rejection of new functionality that's too unpleasant. If nobody talked about things they disliked, or expressed the objections you resent so vociferously, then no one would learn otherwise, and things would simply die off without an apparent cause, or stupidity would be perpetuated. And, for what it's worth, I deleted my Facebook account after reading about the F8 conference.
The timeline is innovative. It allows you to showcase the most memorable or important times of your life. It gives a better idea of who someone is than their most recent status updates. With the current interface, every post is given equal importance. Why would you complain about a new feature that allows you to give prominence to the posts that best define your life? Lastly, this is a feature that sets it apart from the other Twitter style status updates. It fixes a major flaw IMHO. FTFA: "Zuckerberg says the Timeline is “a place that you are proud to call your home.” While the current Facebook profile is completely based on showing all the latest updates, the Timeline is meant to highlight all the important updates of your life."
The timeline sounds time-consuming. I have hobbies, a job, a family, grad school, friends (real ones!). Why would I want to spend more time pondering what's important to the grand scheme of my life every time I want to send out a brief status update? Why would I want to assign a label like "home" to a web page dedicated solely to devouring data about my life to serve up to marketers and advertisers? Why should I bother with a new paradigm that would ultimately make my life more exposed, complicated, and tedious? Every overhaul Facebook rolls out makes the experience more complicated, when all it originally did was serve as a kind of community bulletin board for an inner circle. It's a metastasizing freakshow, and I'm just plain done.
Simple solution: let Windows "fix" the bootloader, then boot from a LiveCD and reinstall Grub. I don't think the behavior is willfully malicious either. Microsoft's installers have always assumed that Windows would be alone on a given system because, in an overwhelming number of use cases, they are. *nix users have long stood by the maxim "install Windows first, THEN $foonix" for that very reason.
I think - in a colossal effort to refuse to acknowledge that they're eating their competitor's dog food - Intel changed from the awkward and ungainly EM64T to Intel 64 for nomenclature. The only differences between the two amount to a tiny number of instructions AMD deprecated, then inexplicably brought back after Intel had implemented the rest.
I don't want to seem like a troll, but the ugly, noisy aspect of your system probably could have been remedied with an attractive case and effective cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
That was kind of an awkward transitional moment in GPU development, where the midrange parts were married to memory that couldn't do the cores justice, but the high-end parts are still half-decent for low-to-middling resolutions and detail settings today. The 8800GT and Radeon 2900XT can still get the job done (though the latter card will heat your house nearly as well as a hot Pentium D...). I had an 8600GTS until recently, and it wasn't half-bad, but also wasn't much more than an incremental step above a fast Geforce 7900 unless you cared deeply about its anisotropic filtering quality.
Hey, I'm free to take a PC and give it new life with an OS that's well-maintained, or retool it into doing something profoundly different than its designers originally intended. With a smartphone I get to look forward to wrestling with hardware and software put into place to keep me from doing what I want with something I paid for, and the limitations on power and utility put into place by the carrier, engineer, and the simple restrictions necessary for a device to fit into a pocket and have a battery life better than a first-generation Gameboy running on zinc-carbon batteries. So what I'm saying is that in many key ways, the Android experience is substantially worse.
Forgive me, but how is Xubuntu underpowered?
So far it looks like it's still hanging in there - no updates one way or the other today.
Incidentally you can make the window borders one pixel wide. Right-click on the desktop --> Personalize --> Window Color --> Advanced appearance settings... --> and then, find Border Padding and set it to a value of 0. That's clearly a lot of digging to turn it off, but it can be done. Your other cited issues are 100% valid - I can't believe how long some glitchy behaviors have existed in the Explorer. I've no doubt that much of Win8's internals will be superior to Win7's, but every single thing I've heard about the new Explorer sounds like a trainwreck.
Turtles, heretic! It's turtles all the way down!
Heads up: The x264 project's incorporating OpenCL support for certain parts of the encoder. Take a look over here - initial results are very promising.
I am terribly sorry for your loss. But the plural of anecdote is not data.
Gah, the "Nor is a tablet..." through to the "...failed merger" part was meant to be italicized; I must have goofed on a formatting tag. Cheers.
But the success of tablets and smartphones and the blurring of the line between netbooks and small laptops has shown that one doesn't need an Extreme Edition CPU to do homework, Facebook, YouTube, and light gaming.
Right, and tablets and phones will be fine for a majority of users going forward. I'm 100% OK with this - conventional workstations are likely to become more expensive, but there will also be fewer "dumb user" concessions made in their design. That doesn't mean tablets and smartphones will be well-suited to ArcGIS, PETRA, or video transcoding. I'm also not fond of the carrier/manufacturer-mandated, inherently boxed-in nature of the experience.
Power constrained? Make it quad core, with two cores turned off while not connected to a charger. The backlight uses a huge chunk of the power anyway, and a docked PDA or phone can run with the screen turned off. This behavior could even be advertised as the return of the turbo button [wikipedia.org]. Space constrained? So are ultrabooks, and the solution is the same: dock to an external hard drive.
Yes, but as admirable as per-watt performance is, ARM's absolute performance offered still hovers somewhere around the Pentium II level in best-case scenarios. Toss in some dedicated-purpose DSPs and that can be mitigated, at the cost of some general flexibility. The focus on miniaturization does result in a hobbling of speed, expandability, and general flexibility, and as some savvy others have pointed out, will probably result in the eventual, painful reinvention or reinterpretation of certain desktop metaphors when a portable device is effectively "docked."
Nor is a tablet. Nor is a PDA such as Apple's iPod touch or Samsung's Galaxy Player. Tablets and PDAs use Wi-Fi, which most often connects to a wired last mile, and no wired ISP that I've heard of has run the sort of subsidy model common in the North American cellular market since the dial-up days of i-Opener, WebTV, and PeoplePC. Nor is an unlocked GSM phone, now that (as I've read) AT&T has given up some spectrum in a more commonly used band to T-Mobile USA as compensation for the failed merger.
But it IS limited by what the manufacturer or designer intends for it to do. There will be a market going forward for an expandable, upgradeable PC, even if it shifts back to a more professional focus. My wife's iPad is a joy to use for lots of casual computing purposes, but for my kit I know where I plan to spend my money.
A separate desktop PC can be leagues more powerful than a cellular phone because it's not hobbled by the same frugal power or space constraints. But at least as importantly, a more conventional PC isn't tied to a carrier, with all the baggage - privacy, monthly billing for service, &c. - that entails.
Just curious - did you happen to try disabling network connections, disabling firewalls, using the full-size network installer from a local volume, rebooting, then re-enabling firewalls before enabling network functionality again?
Don't forget: as of the current preview build of Windows 8, you also can't add tablets to a domain. So they're REALLY shooting themselves in the foot by assuming that tablets are only consumer-level devices that will never find a footing in business.
A refutation followed by an assumption of fault is not a valuable contribution to a discussion. I shouldn't burn karma responding to ACs, but what were you hoping to accomplish by thumping your sad little e-peen here?
XP will be around for a long time in various capacities - probably at least as long as MS-DOS has lingered in point-of-sale terminals and niche industrial roles. Directed I/O in virtualization is a godsend for users of a lot of older lab equipment - now it's possible to run a 64-bit host OS with an XP VM that has unfettered access to, say, an old PCI controller card for a transmission electron microscope which hasn't had driver or software updates since 2003. I've never understood that missionary zeal that people develop vis-a-vis old software - use what works, in whatever combination works best.
Assuming that you're using vanilla Doom 3 content, that may be true. But if the Doom 3 mod community receives a shot in the arm as a result of the source release (and I don't imagine there's any reason it wouldn't), it's likely that maps and content will be released which push modern hardware quite a bit further than the original game ever managed. At that point, every speed optimization available will make a positive difference, especially if map and/or asset complexity increases by some significant factor.
Note that this is probably more academic than many here realize - as long as the offending algorithm is not "officially" released, I'm pretty sure Creative won't care enough to go after individual projects with a legal banhammer to force them to stop using "their" algorithm in non-profit projects. And if worse comes to worse, I'm 100% sure someone will implement shadowmap support within the first year or so, which will render* this issue irrelevant.
* Oh, that's a pun. I'm sorry.
...but on the bright side, Carmack's Reverse can always be reimplemented by the open source community, and this may hasten the implementation of shadowmaps in source ports to replace Doom 3's stencil shadows. The visual quality improvement would be non-trivial, and for all but hardware that was *ahem* not exactly groundbreaking when Doom 3 was new, the performance delta shouldn't be too massive. In some scenarios it may even be faster.
The aptly named SleepResearch_Facility's album Deep Frieze is a great place to start.
And when 8 gigs of DDR3 will set you back somewhere in the neighborhood of $45, slapping in 16 gigs isn't really a bank-breaker.
*suddenly experiences the memory, now an abomination, of spending $100 in 1996 for 16 megs of EDO DRAM*
Strictly PCI would be restricted to Pentium and pre-Super7 systems. The Pentium IIs were marketed heavily on the back of AGP, but some forever alone lunatic out there is slapping his hands together, crowing that his quad-processor Pentium Pro box will finally get a "worthy" video card. I almost want to see that.
Thanks for proving my point about being cool, by showing me how you can swear on-line, and suggesting I do the same.
I didn't actually prove anything there, save that I was personally irritated by a euphemism for a curse word. Constructive complaints are being created 'round the world by tech journalists paid to express lucid, well-constructed thoughts and opinions. I'm a geologist by profession. The byzantine intricacies of social media, and Facebook's ongoing "bad little boy who acts guilty for being caught stealing a cookie, then goes right back to doing it" routine, are beyond my regular study or interest. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt any more.
You're all right. You can stay on my lawn.
I guess you're cool on slashdot as long as you complain about everything Facebook does, regardless of whether it is good or bad. So keep complaining about how it is getting too much like MySpace, or Twitter. Keep complaining about how Facebook is further diminishing your privacy each time a new feature is added. Be sure to include some conspiracy theory. Most importantly, threaten to close your account. Then you'll be really cool.
Complaints can actually be well-founded, and those who dislike the subject of a news story are just as welcome to contribute their opinion. I might suggest that Slashdot's main audience is a little beyond caring about who thinks they're "cool" - didn't you see the tag out front? "News for Nerds"? If you want a hivemind, seek out Reddit or 4chan, though there are plenty of good people in both of those communities too.
Get over yourself. It is no secret that what you put on Facebook is not private. It is not secret that they use your data to drive targeted advertising campaigns.
An open mission or goal can still be objectionable. Dismissing someone's objections doesn't actually mean you've won an argument, or even started one. Doing so simply makes you look arrogant and presumptuous.
You will not cancel your account, so stop threatening to. No one on here gives an ish. Zuckerberg isn't reading your slashdot post either. He doesn't give an ish. So go try your, "I swear I'll walk out of here right now!", on your girlfriend or the guy trying to sell you a used car. You may have better luck.
An "ish"? This is a site for grownups, and you can use four letter words. For example, I don't care one fucking bit for your sneering tone.
Zuckerberg won't read the post, but others will, and ultimately he has investors, employees, and business partners who can be rattled by widespread criticism and rejection of new functionality that's too unpleasant. If nobody talked about things they disliked, or expressed the objections you resent so vociferously, then no one would learn otherwise, and things would simply die off without an apparent cause, or stupidity would be perpetuated. And, for what it's worth, I deleted my Facebook account after reading about the F8 conference.
The timeline is innovative. It allows you to showcase the most memorable or important times of your life. It gives a better idea of who someone is than their most recent status updates. With the current interface, every post is given equal importance. Why would you complain about a new feature that allows you to give prominence to the posts that best define your life? Lastly, this is a feature that sets it apart from the other Twitter style status updates. It fixes a major flaw IMHO. FTFA: "Zuckerberg says the Timeline is “a place that you are proud to call your home.” While the current Facebook profile is completely based on showing all the latest updates, the Timeline is meant to highlight all the important updates of your life."
The timeline sounds time-consuming. I have hobbies, a job, a family, grad school, friends (real ones!). Why would I want to spend more time pondering what's important to the grand scheme of my life every time I want to send out a brief status update? Why would I want to assign a label like "home" to a web page dedicated solely to devouring data about my life to serve up to marketers and advertisers? Why should I bother with a new paradigm that would ultimately make my life more exposed, complicated, and tedious? Every overhaul Facebook rolls out makes the experience more complicated, when all it originally did was serve as a kind of community bulletin board for an inner circle. It's a metastasizing freakshow, and I'm just plain done.
Simple solution: let Windows "fix" the bootloader, then boot from a LiveCD and reinstall Grub. I don't think the behavior is willfully malicious either. Microsoft's installers have always assumed that Windows would be alone on a given system because, in an overwhelming number of use cases, they are. *nix users have long stood by the maxim "install Windows first, THEN $foonix" for that very reason.
I think - in a colossal effort to refuse to acknowledge that they're eating their competitor's dog food - Intel changed from the awkward and ungainly EM64T to Intel 64 for nomenclature. The only differences between the two amount to a tiny number of instructions AMD deprecated, then inexplicably brought back after Intel had implemented the rest.
I don't want to seem like a troll, but the ugly, noisy aspect of your system probably could have been remedied with an attractive case and effective cooling.