Buy a different monitor or buy two or turn one sideways.
IF YOU READ THE ARTICLE you will notice he is complaining about the drop in vertical resolution on laptops where it is not very convenient to carry along an extra monitor and its near impossible to type or use a trackpad holding a laptop sideways.
Well, even scaling 480p content (DVD quality) to 720p with your box and then having your TV scale it to 1080p isn't going to look as good as a box that can scale 480p directly to 1080p and the TV doing no scaling. But there is *A LOT* of 1080p content out there if you know where to look... cough... cough... just none that you can buy from Apple.
FWIW, various web and video sites are beginning to offer 1080p -- supposedly 1080p is in the works for YouTube for example. I'm sure eventually even Apple will offer 1080p content the same way they now offer higher quality audio files and if you want a box that's more future proof, it's better if it handles this format.
Foxconn NT-330I with NVIDIA ION. NewEgg has them fairly regularly on "shell shocker" or "daily deal" for significantly less than the $199 current price (I paid $159) if you are willing to hunt for a bargain. I got the white but there was also a black one. I got a 1GB SODIMM for free -- people literally throw out older RAM they can't use:). I use the Dane-Elec 80 GB Intel SSD X18M I picked up for $125 @ NewEgg (again a "deal" price and then flashed to 8820 so it has no speed degradation). But really, any of the Atom 330's (dual core) with ION will work. An Atom 230 will work as well but it's only single core and most multimedia code scales very well with dual cores. Right now, I'm just deciding on a USB cpature / tuenr card and the setup will be complete.
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC.
720p video seems like a limit to me considering the big "Full HD" 1080p push. I know that Boxee Box is going to use 1080p FullHD as a distinguishing factor between the two pre-boxed solutions.
If you are buying a nettop that you want to use for 3D gaming as well, the only current solution is something with ION. I specifically purchased an ION-based nettop because the ones with Intel GPU's can not handle video decodes well even for non-flash formats. The Intel graphics completely suck right now and their isn't anything from AMD in nettops that is currently competitive.
In the near future AMD will have Zecate (Bobcat + GPU). Also, Intel is about to release cores on-chip GPU in Sandy Bridge - this will be the first decent Intel GPU in a very long time and will offer ION-like performance. However, neither of those is currently on the market and shipping in a nettop / htpc form.
The simple answer is noise. Many of the nettops (such as the Foxconn Netbox, which I suspect is what you bought on Newegg) are annoyingly loud.
There is a single very small exhaust fan in my nettop. I think some earlier nettops had both a loud CPU and a loud GPU/Chipset fan but this is not the case for my box. I can't hear it run if I am more than 2-3 feet away from the box. I use an SSD so the system runs quite cool.
FWIW, there are videos on the net where the Intel guys run the Atom without a heatsink at all so I'm pretty sure you can get away with passive cooling on that. I think the fan is actually on the NVidia ION chipset.
Most of the on-demand video services use it, and for Flash, CPU power is very important.
There is GPU hardware acceleration for the NVidia ION in the latest 10.1 version of Flash. You get flawless low-CPU-usage decodes of 1080p Flash video. Also, I recently saw a video of a dual core Atom with NVidia ION that was decoding two simultaneous 1080p streams and only using about 60% CPU. The Apple TV is limited to a single 720P stream for output. The little box I bought has a couple orders of magnitude more CPU and GPU / Video Decode Power than the Apple TV.
The ION is fast enough for all 3D casual gaming and even gets some decent frame rates on hard-core games if you don't have quality set on ultra-high and you are running at 720P rather than 1080P resolution. It's a decent 3D chip that kicks the crap out of all the other "integrated" GPU's out there right now.
Plus I put in a cheap 80 GB Intel SSD I picked up at NewEgg for $125 so it has lots of storage and very fast boot times (under 15 seconds including BIOS POST) -- although it would work fine with any cheap notebook drive as well.
If you really want full control and open source, why not just get a cheap NetTop ? I just got a barebones dual core Atom 330 (looks like 4 threads) with NVidia ION GPU for $159 at NewEgg. It have DVI out, HDMI out, SATA, expandable memory, USB2.0, 802.11n (miniPCIe), etc. Fully configurable and very compact. If you get an AppleTV, you aren't going to get storage or tune / record capability (which you can do with a cheap USB tuner on a nettop).
Please feel free to post if you've found a source for reliable (as in 20 year life span) major appliances.
I've only had it for about 10 years now but my Samsung refrigerator works better (quieter / lower cost of operation / more consistent temperatures / less spoilage / no food smells) after 10 years than any other refrigerators I've had including new or newer ones.
Well, the priority is based on people you e-mail most often. So the only way for that to happen is for someone to hack into your Google contacts and impersonate them (or use your contacts and impersonate you when sending spam to your friends). Of course, given the variety of viruses, trojans, worms and bots on the average computers nowdays, I'm willing to bet that already happens quite often in today's world even before this change with g-mail.
Well, none of the Windows PC's I've used with eSATA (about 6 of them) have ever supported hot-swapping on the eSATA. Perhaps AHCI is not enabled by default or turned off in many BIOSes. Also, just some controllers/drivers just don't work with eSATA swapping. On USB, hot-swapping just generally works without any issues and for eSATA, it generally doesn't work most of the time in my experience.
USB 2.0-based hard drives are a bit slow, as are USB 2.0-based flash drives. With the bandwith of USB 3.0 far exceeding the max throughput of today's (and tomorrow's) storage, it ensures that the standard has a longer life.
Yup, I have a Intel SSD in a USB2.0 / eSATA case. Reads max at about 30MB/s on USB 2.0 and are about 6X faster on eSATA. Writes are a lot faster on eSATA too not to mention that there seems to be less system overhead for eSATA than USB.
Yes, power and hot swapping because windoze doesn't recognize the drive as removeable.
D'oh!! The two major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and overly short cables that are very expensive.
D'oh!! The three major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and short expensive cables and connectors that tend to break off easily.
D'oh!! The four major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and short expensive cables and fragile connectors.
What about the fact that you only get one eSATA port if you're lucky and that's on the back of your computer sandwiched between other ports and nearly impossible to get to without pulling out your entire computer box?
Also for what it's worth, the whole idea of a DLL is that it can be updated independently from an app and other DLL's. Keeping a DLL checksum in the app to bind to only a specific instance of that DLL defeats the purpose. At that point, you might as well be just statically link the code to your app.
The interesting thing about wine and random tasting is that how your taste buds (and sense of smell) work have a bit of hysteresis so the current inputs are affected by previous inputs. If you taste a group of wines in one particular order, you may make different judgements about the wine than if you taste the same group of wines in a different order. There are particular wines that are noticably better than others and for the most part, the professional ratings are a simple way let you know whether a wine is good or not.
That said, I try not to be a wine-snob. I always tell my friends that the way to tell if a wine is "good" is if you like it. It doesn't matter how little you spend on a bottle as long as you and your friends enjoy it for whatever occasion it is shared.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
It was also missing useful features for serious document sharing and collaboration.
Wave completely lacks user specified protection levels (making a wave read-only or editable only by a group of people) which made it impossible for practical public publishing -- you couldn't turn a wave into a blog-like post for anyone to comment on because anyone could rewrite the original "blog" or alter other people's comments, etc.
It was definitely a prototype tool useful for sharing only within a small completely trusted group of individuals.
There is a reason that the industry have been trending towards serial and away from parallel buses.
It's still possible to combine multiple high-speed serial buses in parallel as long as you handle skew independently per transmission line. That is what happens with PCIe - you can have x1, x4, x8, x16 lanes where effectively the x16 lanes are just 16 x1 lanes in parallel.
I've been working 20+ years in the game industry too. I agree with most of your points. However, I'm actually exactly where I want to be on a cool team and enjoying my job. I'm extremely lucky and I know it!
I work in the games industry. I've been on death marches and unbelievable project crunches (100 hours a week for four months on one project that actually left with a weakened immune system and a liver infection).
Not every studio is like this. Even studios where there are crunches and issues can change and get better.
I currently work at Netherrealm Studios (WB Games Chicago) on the Mortal Kombat team and I am honestly extremely happy with my job. I work with smart, energetic, bright and talented people who are for the most part also very happy. The tech team enjoys hanging out with each other and the members often stay late to hangout with coworkers by playing video games, sports (basketball court in back), or board / card games. A bunch of folks from the studio (from a variety of depts) go out for a couple drinks regularly at a local bar one night a week and occasionally get together for other personal events. We even treat interns as valued potential future members of the team.
We are going to head into a crunch for our game but due to careful management the crunch shouldn't kill anyone. We have the design idea of limiting to the scope and features of the game to something we can do on time and that we can do well and make fun. If we have to cut unneccessary and untried features to hit ship dates -- that is usually the preferred option on our team over continually deathmarching and blowing past ship dates. We do add new features and ideas fairly continuously until we get close to alpha but all of them go through a sanity check. In short, we have pretty darn good management on the team.
We have some simple (and extremely controversial) ideas that reduce crunch and make working on the game easier. First, the game should always build and run on all platforms -- this sounds obvious, but I have experienced first hand many teams that either let a platform lag or break regularly or even teams where it was nearly impossible to sync and build the game. Second, we always run without our limits of performance and memory. This one is very controversial because everyone assumes you can optimize at the end and decries "early optimization". The truth is -- at the end you need time to work on bugs and to add polish to make sure your game is fun and doesn't suck. In order to have this time, you can not be spending it fighting memory and performance issues. Furthermore, if you keep adding stuff when you are over budget, you only make your job harder. If you can find ways to do the same thing faster or with less memory up front, you can add more stuff in the long run. Also, if we run into bugs or crashes, we fix them up front. If things appear generally unstable, we tend to focus on restabilizing over adding new features. Especially if a technical bug persists (crash vs game-play idiosyncracy), we throw more people at it including top tech guys until the bug is quashed before moving on.
We will definitely have a crunch later on in the game but hopefully, it's just going to be people fixing issues and fine tuning the heck out of things rather than trying to fight enormous disasters. I've seen games deal with memory and performance and buggy code by taking one guy with a pail and asking them to bail out the Titanic.
It hasn't always been like this, especially when we were Midway and before WB purchased us - but things were getting better even during the Midway years. A lot of the battle for getting to a good working environment is fighting bad management and bad design (both game and code) that makes working harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a different monitor or buy two or turn one sideways.
IF YOU READ THE ARTICLE you will notice he is complaining about the drop in vertical resolution on laptops where it is not very convenient to carry along an extra monitor and its near impossible to type or use a trackpad holding a laptop sideways.
Well, even scaling 480p content (DVD quality) to 720p with your box and then having your TV scale it to 1080p isn't going to look as good as a box that can scale 480p directly to 1080p and the TV doing no scaling. But there is *A LOT* of 1080p content out there if you know where to look... cough... cough... just none that you can buy from Apple.
FWIW, various web and video sites are beginning to offer 1080p -- supposedly 1080p is in the works for YouTube for example. I'm sure eventually even Apple will offer 1080p content the same way they now offer higher quality audio files and if you want a box that's more future proof, it's better if it handles this format.
Foxconn NT-330I with NVIDIA ION. NewEgg has them fairly regularly on "shell shocker" or "daily deal" for significantly less than the $199 current price (I paid $159) if you are willing to hunt for a bargain. I got the white but there was also a black one. I got a 1GB SODIMM for free -- people literally throw out older RAM they can't use :). I use the Dane-Elec 80 GB Intel SSD X18M I picked up for $125 @ NewEgg (again a "deal" price and then flashed to 8820 so it has no speed degradation). But really, any of the Atom 330's (dual core) with ION will work. An Atom 230 will work as well but it's only single core and most multimedia code scales very well with dual cores. Right now, I'm just deciding on a USB cpature / tuenr card and the setup will be complete.
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC.
720p video seems like a limit to me considering the big "Full HD" 1080p push. I know that Boxee Box is going to use 1080p FullHD as a distinguishing factor between the two pre-boxed solutions.
If you are buying a nettop that you want to use for 3D gaming as well, the only current solution is something with ION. I specifically purchased an ION-based nettop because the ones with Intel GPU's can not handle video decodes well even for non-flash formats. The Intel graphics completely suck right now and their isn't anything from AMD in nettops that is currently competitive.
In the near future AMD will have Zecate (Bobcat + GPU). Also, Intel is about to release cores on-chip GPU in Sandy Bridge - this will be the first decent Intel GPU in a very long time and will offer ION-like performance. However, neither of those is currently on the market and shipping in a nettop / htpc form.
What about people who want 1080p decode capability ? Apple TV hardware can only handle 720p.
The simple answer is noise. Many of the nettops (such as the Foxconn Netbox, which I suspect is what you bought on Newegg) are annoyingly loud.
There is a single very small exhaust fan in my nettop. I think some earlier nettops had both a loud CPU and a loud GPU/Chipset fan but this is not the case for my box. I can't hear it run if I am more than 2-3 feet away from the box. I use an SSD so the system runs quite cool.
FWIW, there are videos on the net where the Intel guys run the Atom without a heatsink at all so I'm pretty sure you can get away with passive cooling on that. I think the fan is actually on the NVidia ION chipset.
How is its performance with Flash videos?
Most of the on-demand video services use it, and for Flash, CPU power is very important.
There is GPU hardware acceleration for the NVidia ION in the latest 10.1 version of Flash. You get flawless low-CPU-usage decodes of 1080p Flash video. Also, I recently saw a video of a dual core Atom with NVidia ION that was decoding two simultaneous 1080p streams and only using about 60% CPU. The Apple TV is limited to a single 720P stream for output. The little box I bought has a couple orders of magnitude more CPU and GPU / Video Decode Power than the Apple TV.
The ION is fast enough for all 3D casual gaming and even gets some decent frame rates on hard-core games if you don't have quality set on ultra-high and you are running at 720P rather than 1080P resolution. It's a decent 3D chip that kicks the crap out of all the other "integrated" GPU's out there right now.
Plus I put in a cheap 80 GB Intel SSD I picked up at NewEgg for $125 so it has lots of storage and very fast boot times (under 15 seconds including BIOS POST) -- although it would work fine with any cheap notebook drive as well.
If you really want full control and open source, why not just get a cheap NetTop ? I just got a barebones dual core Atom 330 (looks like 4 threads) with NVidia ION GPU for $159 at NewEgg. It have DVI out, HDMI out, SATA, expandable memory, USB2.0, 802.11n (miniPCIe), etc. Fully configurable and very compact. If you get an AppleTV, you aren't going to get storage or tune / record capability (which you can do with a cheap USB tuner on a nettop).
"fix the TV, your PC, and the sprinkler system" along with other magical items far too complex for the poor female brain to comprehend.'
In other news, Apple is suing AMD for calling devices other than the iPad magical.
Ironically Bacon Salt is vegetarian and Kosher.
Please feel free to post if you've found a source for reliable (as in 20 year life span) major appliances.
I've only had it for about 10 years now but my Samsung refrigerator works better (quieter / lower cost of operation / more consistent temperatures / less spoilage / no food smells) after 10 years than any other refrigerators I've had including new or newer ones.
I Reboot As Much As I Get Laid
Man, that would be great for Windows users - not to mention they would *REALLY* look forward to Patch Tuesday.
Well, the priority is based on people you e-mail most often. So the only way for that to happen is for someone to hack into your Google contacts and impersonate them (or use your contacts and impersonate you when sending spam to your friends). Of course, given the variety of viruses, trojans, worms and bots on the average computers nowdays, I'm willing to bet that already happens quite often in today's world even before this change with g-mail.
FWIW, searching "esata hot swap windows problems" on google.com yields about 70,000 hits of people having problems with eSATA and hot swapping.
Well, none of the Windows PC's I've used with eSATA (about 6 of them) have ever supported hot-swapping on the eSATA. Perhaps AHCI is not enabled by default or turned off in many BIOSes. Also, just some controllers/drivers just don't work with eSATA swapping. On USB, hot-swapping just generally works without any issues and for eSATA, it generally doesn't work most of the time in my experience.
USB 2.0-based hard drives are a bit slow, as are USB 2.0-based flash drives. With the bandwith of USB 3.0 far exceeding the max throughput of today's (and tomorrow's) storage, it ensures that the standard has a longer life.
Yup, I have a Intel SSD in a USB2.0 / eSATA case. Reads max at about 30MB/s on USB 2.0 and are about 6X faster on eSATA. Writes are a lot faster on eSATA too not to mention that there seems to be less system overhead for eSATA than USB.
The one major eSATA issue is power.
Yes, power and hot swapping because windoze doesn't recognize the drive as removeable.
D'oh!! The two major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and overly short cables that are very expensive.
D'oh!! The three major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and short expensive cables and connectors that tend to break off easily.
D'oh!! The four major eSATA issues are power and hot swapping and short expensive cables and fragile connectors.
What about the fact that you only get one eSATA port if you're lucky and that's on the back of your computer sandwiched between other ports and nearly impossible to get to without pulling out your entire computer box?
Fuck it! Let's got to USB 3.0.
Also for what it's worth, the whole idea of a DLL is that it can be updated independently from an app and other DLL's. Keeping a DLL checksum in the app to bind to only a specific instance of that DLL defeats the purpose. At that point, you might as well be just statically link the code to your app.
The interesting thing about wine and random tasting is that how your taste buds (and sense of smell) work have a bit of hysteresis so the current inputs are affected by previous inputs. If you taste a group of wines in one particular order, you may make different judgements about the wine than if you taste the same group of wines in a different order. There are particular wines that are noticably better than others and for the most part, the professional ratings are a simple way let you know whether a wine is good or not.
That said, I try not to be a wine-snob. I always tell my friends that the way to tell if a wine is "good" is if you like it. It doesn't matter how little you spend on a bottle as long as you and your friends enjoy it for whatever occasion it is shared.
It was also missing useful features for serious document sharing and collaboration.
Wave completely lacks user specified protection levels (making a wave read-only or editable only by a group of people) which made it impossible for practical public publishing -- you couldn't turn a wave into a blog-like post for anyone to comment on because anyone could rewrite the original "blog" or alter other people's comments, etc.
It was definitely a prototype tool useful for sharing only within a small completely trusted group of individuals.
There is a reason that the industry have been trending towards serial and away from parallel buses.
It's still possible to combine multiple high-speed serial buses in parallel as long as you handle skew independently per transmission line. That is what happens with PCIe - you can have x1, x4, x8, x16 lanes where effectively the x16 lanes are just 16 x1 lanes in parallel.
I've been working 20+ years in the game industry too. I agree with most of your points. However, I'm actually exactly where I want to be on a cool team and enjoying my job. I'm extremely lucky and I know it!
I work in the games industry. I've been on death marches and unbelievable project crunches (100 hours a week for four months on one project that actually left with a weakened immune system and a liver infection).
Not every studio is like this. Even studios where there are crunches and issues can change and get better.
I currently work at Netherrealm Studios (WB Games Chicago) on the Mortal Kombat team and I am honestly extremely happy with my job. I work with smart, energetic, bright and talented people who are for the most part also very happy. The tech team enjoys hanging out with each other and the members often stay late to hangout with coworkers by playing video games, sports (basketball court in back), or board / card games. A bunch of folks from the studio (from a variety of depts) go out for a couple drinks regularly at a local bar one night a week and occasionally get together for other personal events. We even treat interns as valued potential future members of the team.
We are going to head into a crunch for our game but due to careful management the crunch shouldn't kill anyone. We have the design idea of limiting to the scope and features of the game to something we can do on time and that we can do well and make fun. If we have to cut unneccessary and untried features to hit ship dates -- that is usually the preferred option on our team over continually deathmarching and blowing past ship dates. We do add new features and ideas fairly continuously until we get close to alpha but all of them go through a sanity check. In short, we have pretty darn good management on the team.
We have some simple (and extremely controversial) ideas that reduce crunch and make working on the game easier. First, the game should always build and run on all platforms -- this sounds obvious, but I have experienced first hand many teams that either let a platform lag or break regularly or even teams where it was nearly impossible to sync and build the game. Second, we always run without our limits of performance and memory. This one is very controversial because everyone assumes you can optimize at the end and decries "early optimization". The truth is -- at the end you need time to work on bugs and to add polish to make sure your game is fun and doesn't suck. In order to have this time, you can not be spending it fighting memory and performance issues. Furthermore, if you keep adding stuff when you are over budget, you only make your job harder. If you can find ways to do the same thing faster or with less memory up front, you can add more stuff in the long run. Also, if we run into bugs or crashes, we fix them up front. If things appear generally unstable, we tend to focus on restabilizing over adding new features. Especially if a technical bug persists (crash vs game-play idiosyncracy), we throw more people at it including top tech guys until the bug is quashed before moving on.
We will definitely have a crunch later on in the game but hopefully, it's just going to be people fixing issues and fine tuning the heck out of things rather than trying to fight enormous disasters. I've seen games deal with memory and performance and buggy code by taking one guy with a pail and asking them to bail out the Titanic.
It hasn't always been like this, especially when we were Midway and before WB purchased us - but things were getting better even during the Midway years. A lot of the battle for getting to a good working environment is fighting bad management and bad design (both game and code) that makes working harder.
I have a quad core, but often have to wait for the hard drive to do anything.
If that's the case, your next best upgrade would be to get a fast SSD for your system drive. It would do you more good than going to 6 cores.