I'm, er, not exactly an expert either, but I think this is wrong. A faster processor would only help if the bottleneck is actually the processing speed. Currently, the bottleneck is the transmission speed. If that were to grow exponentially, it would eventually move the bottleneck over to the speed of the drive being written to; and only if that, in turn, were to grow exponentially as well, would the bottleneck possibly be the processor (if things like memory, PCI bus, and whatnot don't come before that, which they easily might). Currently, downloading a file even at pretty high broadband speeds only uses up around a fraction of a percent of the total speed of modern CPUs (or at *most* a few percent), so making the processor faster would only lower that percentage, and not actually speed the download up.
And again, if you were to apply some sort of heavy-duty encryption when sending stuff, a faster processor could help, but most people don't. (And I believe - but correct me if I'm wrong - that decrypting doesn't need nearly as much as encrypting does.)
Caveat #N, it would make rendering webpages faster, but that's pretty negligible as well (seeing as I didn't notice much difference moving from my old 350MHz K6-2 to my current Athlon XP 2400+).
Passive, that's the entire point. Their 1GHz CPU consumes 7W. (Yes. Seven. Which happens to be the same as Transmeta's Efficeon.) By comparison, Intel's current ~3GHz P4s consume around 70-80W, and their new (Prescott core) P4s over 100W.
Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close.
By default, Opera has a startup window that lets you choose between starting with your home page, no pages, at the same place you left off last time, or opening a session you've saved (and yes, you can do that). You can easily turn this behaviour off by clicking a check box at the bottom, and it won't ask you. If the browser crashes, however (which it does rarely), it will show the startup window with continuing your last session as the default option, which is exactly what I want it to do. If you're paranoid about it showing your private data, then just make sure to re-open and close the browser normally if it crashes.
For those wanting an *exhaustive* (and yet likely incomplete) description of what it has to offer, look here.
Oh, and the trolls whining about bloat should get a clue. It's only 3-4MB, browser, mail, and everything else included. It's one of the least bloated apps I've ever seen (possible exception of windows/total commander). When your browser alone is twice that (firebird/fox/?), I don't see what grounds you have to complain.
And while I'm at it, although Opera *is* ad-or-payware, might I mention that it does its advertising in the best way possible: a context sensitive Google text ad in the toolbar. Not annoying at *all*, and it can even be useful occasionally.
And I could go on, and on, and on. But I'll just mention that the default configuration (both UI and otherwise) is halfway braindead (popup blocking *off* by default, when it's one of the main selling points? wtf?), so just make sure to customize it (which is rather simple, and takes only a few minutes).
And since this is a Mac forum, some good OSX-esque skins are Safrad (which I use myself, not because I want to emulate a mac, but because it actually looks good), Sofa King, and Lars Kleinschmidt's various OSX and iMac skins. They're available here. (Oh, and by the way, this is a preview release, and there is supposedly a new default skin in the works, just so you know.)
Er, I may be missing something here, as it seems fairly obvious and no one's suggested it yet (or are you thinking of the same thing, but merely haven't stated it plainly?), but the great gift of the Internet is you can distribute your work practically for free (not as in you give it away, as in you don't have to pay to have it put on CD, sent to stores, etc.). I mean, an artist could make a website, and let people pay to download it using PayPal (of course, probably while giving a sample or two away (or the entire album for a one-time listen only, assuming that DRM thing works out), as no one pays for something they don't know anything about), and effectively cut the RIAA and all other middlemen out of the process. Or just put it up on iTunes, if Apple is open to that sort of thing. If the music is good, word will spread, and money will be made, which can the be used for advertising or distribution via physical media, if the artist so desires. A new 'Artist's Union' could then be formed (once some money was made), which would basically do the same thing the RIAA is now - attempt to stop people from filetrading copyrighted materials, except without denying the artists of their rightful revenue in the process, as it would essentially be 'by the artists, for the artists'. (I'm assuming the RIAA wouldn't be too willing to take on such a role by itself, and would - eventually - be obsoleted. And with the iTunes route, perhaps Apple, but I wouldn't trust them solely based on their being a corporation.) Is there anything fundamentally wrong with this strategy? The only thing that seems to be missing is for the artists to actually start doing it. The RIAA isn't going to go away just because we ask it to.
(On the Artist's Union thing, one thing that seems like it may be a problem is, how could it be solved for the artists to all give money evenly for the cause? I don't think this would become an issue, as the successful artists' work would be pirated the most, and those artists would have money, which they'd gladly give to fight the piracy - whereas for relatively unknown artists without money, they need all the exposure they can get, in the beginning even moreso than money itself, and file trading could act as a sort of free advertising.)
The author numerous times describes M2 as being for those who "want to take advantage of advanced features, but without the hassle of configuration". However, he fails to mention two words, which seem to have a special magic here at Slashdot:
Note: "Geforce FX is recommended for Doom III" does not equal "Doom III will not run on Radeons". It'll be perfectly playable on both cards (it would be business suicide if it weren't), possibly/probably being a small bit faster on nVidia cards. id and nVidia probably just wanted to endorse each others products a bit, as a counter to Valve and ATi doing the same. That is all.
IIRC, it's actually going to be three PowerPC 976 CPUs at 65nm, which will be dual core making it effectively six. See here. I imagine it will be quite a female dog programming to take full advantage of all of them.
is that you don't entrust the machines with things like that. You don't apply brand new, unproven technologies to critical systems. That's just elementary. And once you do, the technology will hopefully be ironed out enough that there won't be (too) many issues with it (for example, you'd have to think "get a robot here to kill me" for it to happen and not just about committing suicide, and most likely (hopefully) it would deny the request even then).
However, where it doesn't really place anything in danger, this could have some incredible uses. You know how you can think much faster than you can talk or type? You could think the words and have them on the screen automatically. Taking it a level further: telepathy. Musicians (or hell, anyone) could create music without actually needing any instruments to do it. You could create music which would be physically impossible otherwise, sounds that simply don't exist. Playing games with it would also be quite an experience.
Speaking of which. Once LCD technology is advanced enough to embed a high-resolution display in a pair of glasses (preferably in the glass itself), WiFi is ubiquitous, and this becomes viable as well, what do you get?
Portable Snow Crash. :D
Personally, I think in this case MS is actually, honestly trying to do the Right Thing. And it's easy to see why. What is one of the three biggest reasons the average user would even consider moving away from MS and Windows? Exactly. (The other two are spyware and virii. Popups don't get a seperate category, as they're just another form of spam.)
Microsoft realizes this, and are trying to fix it, in their own very good interest. See also: SP2 contains antivirus, an upgraded firewall, a popup blocker integrated into IE, buffer overflow protection for processors that support it (Athlon 64 and Opteron currently), and I assume there's more.
So you can safely expect for it to be That Much Harder convincing people to move to *nix, once SP2 is released. Do it while you still can. (Note again that I am not saying *nix will lose any advantage it has/had over Windows. Merely that in the eyes of the average user, it will.)
"He might be surprised to find that Hollywood closes it ranks to rebels," said Kay, the IDC analyst. "By aspiring too high, too quickly, that could be his downfall. But that story's not told yet.''
Well, from what I've seen/heard of Jobs, I don't think he's the type of guy who wants to get into Hollywood. More like beat them at their own game.
The point is that he didn't even try to fix their Windows installation, by running Ad-Aware, installing a decent antivirus, a browser that can block popups, etc., but he *did* completely set up and tweak Linux. That is not a fair grounds for comparison.
This is not the best idea
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Dan has a thing or two to say about these. He tends to be right an awful lot, too. Since/.ers are too lazy to click on a link, here's what he says:
EPROM power!
I have a question about your page on chip upgrades to improve car performance.
Mainly, my question is why what you say, when the Powerchip site pretty much says the exact opposite on all counts.
Would Powerchip lie outright, and provide a three year warranty with possibility for an extension for the drivetrain?
In searching through the Web I only come across your opinion of a chip swap being a bad choice to upgrade. If you can refer me to your references I can make a better judgment on whether or not it really is not good to upgrade my ECU.
Tom
Answer:
First up: I didn't say that drop-in Electronic Control Unit (ECU) upgrades for otherwise stock vehicles were outright fraud, though some companies in that market have certainly been snake oil merchants. I just said that a drop in chip isn't likely to be good value compared with various actual mechanical upgrades. Powerchip, like various other chip vendors, will charge you several hundred Australian bucks for a new chip.
Now that I've said that, dig this.
A while after I put my piece on ECU chips up on the Web, one Wayne Besanko of Powerchip contacted me.
He did not offer any independent evidence to support Powerchip's claims. Nor did he point out anything I'd said that was wrong.
Instead, he offered me money, plane tickets and accommodation if I'd travel to Powerchip's HQ and write a "white paper" on Powerchip's products.
He didn't say "here's a bucket of cash, if you write what we say", but our correspondence led me to the firm belief that, um, only one viewpoint on their products would be acceptable, were I to take up the offer.
So there's that.
And, again, as I write this, I remain unaware of any proper independent testing that indicates that these pricey drop-in ECU chips are good value, compared with a variety of actual mechanical modifications.
Sure, you can get a bit more juice from a stock engine by goosing up the ECU programming; drop-in chips from reputable companies like Powerchip don't generally do nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few cars, particularly turbo diesels, that have sub-optimal stock ECU programming, leaning further towards the "green" end of the scale and away from the "performance" end than their owners would choose, given the option.
The particular oddities of individual engines (in high performance cars, at least) may also benefit significantly from custom-tuned ECU maps, even if you aren't going for new cams, an after-market turbo, blah blah blah.
But drop-in chips aren't tuned for individual engines. They're one-size-fits-all. If you want a chip that fits your car's engine in particular, you have to go to a speed shop that'll test your engine and blow an EPROM to suit.
In the vast majority of cars, I think it's quite sensible to say that if you aren't making significant mechanical modifications to your engine, then the money you'd spend on a "hot chip" would be better put towards those modifications (or, you know, spent on the rent or something, but we're not talking about sensible life choices here). I think that even something as simple as a less restrictive air filter is likely to give you more horsepower per dollar than a hot chip.
Even Powerchip themselves admit (or, at least, did admit at the time I corresponded with Wayne; I
haven't groveled through their specs lately) that a 15% power and torque gain from a plain chip swap is unusually high. Figures closer to, or below, 10% are common. Some people would question even that - but even if you get a whole
While I'm not one to defend Windows just for the sake of defending Windows, it might be useful to know that Windows can do most of those as well, and no one else seems to be posting about it atm. So I will. Popups are the easiest thing to get of if you have the slightest intention of doing so; Mozilla, The-lite-version-of-Mozilla-whose-current-name-I'm -not-keeping-track-of, and Opera are all available on Windows. Or you can just download the Google Toolbar. Ever heard of it? Seperate bookmarks, backgrounds, etc., graphical logon, and fast user switching are all available on XP as well, and are quite easy to find/enable (hell, it sets up the multi-user + logon for you automatically during the install). Have you looked at all?
Your method is a somewhat novel way of getting people to use Linux, but not the most honest or helpful.
Gamers have some miniaturized holy wars over MX700 vs Razer Boomslang occasionally, indeed, but the original post mentioned a geek, and not a gamer (though they do overlap occasionally).
get him a super-elite keyboard and mouse. Better yet, you don't even have to have any expertise on the subject, because it's common consensus that the Logitech MX700 is the Best Mouse Ever. Ask anyone, or search Google if you want. The Logitech Elite keyboard is nothing to sneeze at either, though it's supremacy is arguable (it's probably about tied with whatever is the highest-end keyboard from Microsoft). Conveniently, Logitech has a Cordless MX Duo including both, and you can get it for around $70-80.
(in conjunction with Zalman) for their [url=http://voodoopc.com/systems/f50.aspx]Rage F-50[/url]. Read somewhere on their forums that they collaborated with "another company" on the case; apparently, it turns out that company was Zalman. Odd how no one seems to have noticed or mentioned it yet, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm, er, not exactly an expert either, but I think this is wrong. A faster processor would only help if the bottleneck is actually the processing speed. Currently, the bottleneck is the transmission speed. If that were to grow exponentially, it would eventually move the bottleneck over to the speed of the drive being written to; and only if that, in turn, were to grow exponentially as well, would the bottleneck possibly be the processor (if things like memory, PCI bus, and whatnot don't come before that, which they easily might). Currently, downloading a file even at pretty high broadband speeds only uses up around a fraction of a percent of the total speed of modern CPUs (or at *most* a few percent), so making the processor faster would only lower that percentage, and not actually speed the download up.
And again, if you were to apply some sort of heavy-duty encryption when sending stuff, a faster processor could help, but most people don't. (And I believe - but correct me if I'm wrong - that decrypting doesn't need nearly as much as encrypting does.)
Caveat #N, it would make rendering webpages faster, but that's pretty negligible as well (seeing as I didn't notice much difference moving from my old 350MHz K6-2 to my current Athlon XP 2400+).
Passive, that's the entire point. Their 1GHz CPU consumes 7W. (Yes. Seven. Which happens to be the same as Transmeta's Efficeon.) By comparison, Intel's current ~3GHz P4s consume around 70-80W, and their new (Prescott core) P4s over 100W.
Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close. By default, Opera has a startup window that lets you choose between starting with your home page, no pages, at the same place you left off last time, or opening a session you've saved (and yes, you can do that). You can easily turn this behaviour off by clicking a check box at the bottom, and it won't ask you. If the browser crashes, however (which it does rarely), it will show the startup window with continuing your last session as the default option, which is exactly what I want it to do. If you're paranoid about it showing your private data, then just make sure to re-open and close the browser normally if it crashes.
For those wanting an *exhaustive* (and yet likely incomplete) description of what it has to offer, look here.
Oh, and the trolls whining about bloat should get a clue. It's only 3-4MB, browser, mail, and everything else included. It's one of the least bloated apps I've ever seen (possible exception of windows/total commander). When your browser alone is twice that (firebird/fox/?), I don't see what grounds you have to complain.
And while I'm at it, although Opera *is* ad-or-payware, might I mention that it does its advertising in the best way possible: a context sensitive Google text ad in the toolbar. Not annoying at *all*, and it can even be useful occasionally.
And I could go on, and on, and on. But I'll just mention that the default configuration (both UI and otherwise) is halfway braindead (popup blocking *off* by default, when it's one of the main selling points? wtf?), so just make sure to customize it (which is rather simple, and takes only a few minutes).
And since this is a Mac forum, some good OSX-esque skins are Safrad (which I use myself, not because I want to emulate a mac, but because it actually looks good), Sofa King, and Lars Kleinschmidt's various OSX and iMac skins. They're available here. (Oh, and by the way, this is a preview release, and there is supposedly a new default skin in the works, just so you know.)
You're actually right about the first part. Whatever happened to the idea of government serving the people?
Er, I may be missing something here, as it seems fairly obvious and no one's suggested it yet (or are you thinking of the same thing, but merely haven't stated it plainly?), but the great gift of the Internet is you can distribute your work practically for free (not as in you give it away, as in you don't have to pay to have it put on CD, sent to stores, etc.). I mean, an artist could make a website, and let people pay to download it using PayPal (of course, probably while giving a sample or two away (or the entire album for a one-time listen only, assuming that DRM thing works out), as no one pays for something they don't know anything about), and effectively cut the RIAA and all other middlemen out of the process. Or just put it up on iTunes, if Apple is open to that sort of thing. If the music is good, word will spread, and money will be made, which can the be used for advertising or distribution via physical media, if the artist so desires. A new 'Artist's Union' could then be formed (once some money was made), which would basically do the same thing the RIAA is now - attempt to stop people from filetrading copyrighted materials, except without denying the artists of their rightful revenue in the process, as it would essentially be 'by the artists, for the artists'. (I'm assuming the RIAA wouldn't be too willing to take on such a role by itself, and would - eventually - be obsoleted. And with the iTunes route, perhaps Apple, but I wouldn't trust them solely based on their being a corporation.) Is there anything fundamentally wrong with this strategy? The only thing that seems to be missing is for the artists to actually start doing it. The RIAA isn't going to go away just because we ask it to.
(On the Artist's Union thing, one thing that seems like it may be a problem is, how could it be solved for the artists to all give money evenly for the cause? I don't think this would become an issue, as the successful artists' work would be pirated the most, and those artists would have money, which they'd gladly give to fight the piracy - whereas for relatively unknown artists without money, they need all the exposure they can get, in the beginning even moreso than money itself, and file trading could act as a sort of free advertising.)
The author numerous times describes M2 as being for those who "want to take advantage of advanced features, but without the hassle of configuration". However, he fails to mention two words, which seem to have a special magic here at Slashdot:
it Just Works.
Note: "Geforce FX is recommended for Doom III" does not equal "Doom III will not run on Radeons". It'll be perfectly playable on both cards (it would be business suicide if it weren't), possibly/probably being a small bit faster on nVidia cards. id and nVidia probably just wanted to endorse each others products a bit, as a counter to Valve and ATi doing the same. That is all.
IIRC, it's actually going to be three PowerPC 976 CPUs at 65nm, which will be dual core making it effectively six. See here. I imagine it will be quite a female dog programming to take full advantage of all of them.
is that you don't entrust the machines with things like that. You don't apply brand new, unproven technologies to critical systems. That's just elementary. And once you do, the technology will hopefully be ironed out enough that there won't be (too) many issues with it (for example, you'd have to think "get a robot here to kill me" for it to happen and not just about committing suicide, and most likely (hopefully) it would deny the request even then).
:D
However, where it doesn't really place anything in danger, this could have some incredible uses. You know how you can think much faster than you can talk or type? You could think the words and have them on the screen automatically. Taking it a level further: telepathy. Musicians (or hell, anyone) could create music without actually needing any instruments to do it. You could create music which would be physically impossible otherwise, sounds that simply don't exist. Playing games with it would also be quite an experience.
Speaking of which. Once LCD technology is advanced enough to embed a high-resolution display in a pair of glasses (preferably in the glass itself), WiFi is ubiquitous, and this becomes viable as well, what do you get?
Portable Snow Crash.
Note: "More" does not mean "lots". 10 games is still more than two of them.
Personally, I think in this case MS is actually, honestly trying to do the Right Thing. And it's easy to see why. What is one of the three biggest reasons the average user would even consider moving away from MS and Windows? Exactly. (The other two are spyware and virii. Popups don't get a seperate category, as they're just another form of spam.)
Microsoft realizes this, and are trying to fix it, in their own very good interest. See also: SP2 contains antivirus, an upgraded firewall, a popup blocker integrated into IE, buffer overflow protection for processors that support it (Athlon 64 and Opteron currently), and I assume there's more.
So you can safely expect for it to be That Much Harder convincing people to move to *nix, once SP2 is released. Do it while you still can. (Note again that I am not saying *nix will lose any advantage it has/had over Windows. Merely that in the eyes of the average user, it will.)
If all they want to do is get reelected, and you give them a 10 year term, then they will spend 10 years trying to get reelected.
Well, from what I've seen/heard of Jobs, I don't think he's the type of guy who wants to get into Hollywood. More like beat them at their own game.
The point is that he didn't even try to fix their Windows installation, by running Ad-Aware, installing a decent antivirus, a browser that can block popups, etc., but he *did* completely set up and tweak Linux. That is not a fair grounds for comparison.
(1) It's not free. It's bundled. (2) Microsoft? Bankrupt?
Answer:
First up: I didn't say that drop-in Electronic Control Unit (ECU) upgrades for otherwise stock vehicles were outright fraud, though some companies in that market have certainly been snake oil merchants. I just said that a drop in chip isn't likely to be good value compared with various actual mechanical upgrades. Powerchip, like various other chip vendors, will charge you several hundred Australian bucks for a new chip.
Now that I've said that, dig this.
A while after I put my piece on ECU chips up on the Web, one Wayne Besanko of Powerchip contacted me.
He did not offer any independent evidence to support Powerchip's claims. Nor did he point out anything I'd said that was wrong.
Instead, he offered me money, plane tickets and accommodation if I'd travel to Powerchip's HQ and write a "white paper" on Powerchip's products.
He didn't say "here's a bucket of cash, if you write what we say", but our correspondence led me to the firm belief that, um, only one viewpoint on their products would be acceptable, were I to take up the offer.
So there's that.
And, again, as I write this, I remain unaware of any proper independent testing that indicates that these pricey drop-in ECU chips are good value, compared with a variety of actual mechanical modifications.
Sure, you can get a bit more juice from a stock engine by goosing up the ECU programming; drop-in chips from reputable companies like Powerchip don't generally do nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few cars, particularly turbo diesels, that have sub-optimal stock ECU programming, leaning further towards the "green" end of the scale and away from the "performance" end than their owners would choose, given the option.
The particular oddities of individual engines (in high performance cars, at least) may also benefit significantly from custom-tuned ECU maps, even if you aren't going for new cams, an after-market turbo, blah blah blah.
But drop-in chips aren't tuned for individual engines. They're one-size-fits-all. If you want a chip that fits your car's engine in particular, you have to go to a speed shop that'll test your engine and blow an EPROM to suit.
In the vast majority of cars, I think it's quite sensible to say that if you aren't making significant mechanical modifications to your engine, then the money you'd spend on a "hot chip" would be better put towards those modifications (or, you know, spent on the rent or something, but we're not talking about sensible life choices here). I think that even something as simple as a less restrictive air filter is likely to give you more horsepower per dollar than a hot chip.
Even Powerchip themselves admit (or, at least, did admit at the time I corresponded with Wayne; I haven't groveled through their specs lately) that a 15% power and torque gain from a plain chip swap is unusually high. Figures closer to, or below, 10% are common. Some people would question even that - but even if you get a whole
While I'm not one to defend Windows just for the sake of defending Windows, it might be useful to know that Windows can do most of those as well, and no one else seems to be posting about it atm. So I will.m -not-keeping-track-of, and Opera are all available on Windows. Or you can just download the Google Toolbar. Ever heard of it?
Popups are the easiest thing to get of if you have the slightest intention of doing so; Mozilla, The-lite-version-of-Mozilla-whose-current-name-I'
Seperate bookmarks, backgrounds, etc., graphical logon, and fast user switching are all available on XP as well, and are quite easy to find/enable (hell, it sets up the multi-user + logon for you automatically during the install). Have you looked at all?
Your method is a somewhat novel way of getting people to use Linux, but not the most honest or helpful.
Breathe easy, addicts. A new study says there's no harm in extended Internet use,
Well, not asides from sleep deprivation and self starvation, that is. Those aren't very harmless, last I heard.
Gamers have some miniaturized holy wars over MX700 vs Razer Boomslang occasionally, indeed, but the original post mentioned a geek, and not a gamer (though they do overlap occasionally).
get him a super-elite keyboard and mouse. Better yet, you don't even have to have any expertise on the subject, because it's common consensus that the Logitech MX700 is the Best Mouse Ever. Ask anyone, or search Google if you want. The Logitech Elite keyboard is nothing to sneeze at either, though it's supremacy is arguable (it's probably about tied with whatever is the highest-end keyboard from Microsoft). Conveniently, Logitech has a Cordless MX Duo including both, and you can get it for around $70-80.
Halo alone cannot sustain a console.
It can't? Evidence is to the contrary...
Sorry about the [] tags, other forums I go to use them >_<
Here's the proper link: Voodoo Rage F-50
(in conjunction with Zalman) for their [url=http://voodoopc.com/systems/f50.aspx]Rage F-50[/url]. Read somewhere on their forums that they collaborated with "another company" on the case; apparently, it turns out that company was Zalman. Odd how no one seems to have noticed or mentioned it yet, though.