I learned about different belief systems back in public high school in my world history class.
There's a big difference between learning about various religions in a historical perspective (or even a modern cultural one) in a history or social studies class compared to having a particular religion's beliefs taught as a science class without any credible scientific basis.
I don't mind my children learning that the Aztecs used to tear out their enemies hearts in human sacrifices. Now I would have a problem with the same school teaching my children that it was a scientific fact that they absolutely had to perform human sacrifices in order to not remain in darkness forever next time there was an eclipse.
Or do you want your children to learn that it's turtles all the way down ?
Here in Chicago we have Federal Income Tax = average 28% (but can be considerably more), State Income Tax = 3%, FICA = 15.3% (Social Security tax 12.4% and the total Medicare tax 2.9% of wages). Right there is 45-50% of your wages in direct income taxes. Add use taxes, license stickers and fees (multiple annual fees to local and state per vehicle), city parking permits, property taxes (which in Chicago are typically $500-$1000 a month depending on your neighborhood). Plus when we drive on our TOLL-ROADS we pay additional toll fees.
It would be very easy for an average Chicagoan to be paying 50-60% of their wages on taxes before you could spend a penny that would be sales taxed and we even got the nation's highest rate for that too.
I will continue to whine buddy. We pay extra taxes above and beyond the ones I stated for booze and cigaretts as well as you Canards. These are additional taxes politicians love because "sin" taxes are easy to pass. Here in Chicago, we pay an extra $2.53 per pack of cigarettes for "sin" tax which nearly doubles the pre-tax cost of cigarettes. And of course we pay more for taxes on alcohol.
Chicago has extra sales tax charges of up to 20% for a variety of items like car rentals, hotels, soft drinks, etc as well. The rates and applications of sales tax are so complex in Chicago that without computers, no human being would be able to compute them. I can't even list all the categories they have extra taxes.
Not to mention that our sales tax is in addition to state income taxes and federal income taxes. Oh, and don't you Canadians actually get something for your taxes.... like free health care?
You should try living in Chicago were we have the highest sales tax in the nation. Try dining out in one of our nice downtown restaurants and you'll get a shock on the taxes when the bill arrives. The cheapest sales tax in city limits in over 10% but when you get downtown or go out to eat you get special extra taxes added.
State Sales Tax 6.25%
Chicago Sales Tax 1.25%
Cook County Sales Tax 1.75%
RTA Tax 1.00%
MPEA Pier Tax 1.00%
TOTAL SALES TAX 11.25%
Plus
Restaurant Tax.25% TOTAL TAX 11.50%
Why should you expect them to work out of the box? They don't work out of the box on XP or Vista? Both OS's require plug-ins for most browsers such as Firefox and IE and are definite add-ons, not part of the base standard. It drives me crazy when websites *require* flash and java (or other less well-trusted plugins) -- half the time it's for the annoying video ads on the site that blare audio and video when you're surfing. I want your front page at least and most of your site to work well without them - or at least to degrade gracefully.
We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
If you need to slipstream Drivers, the Driver Packs are the easiest way to do it.
Also, if you slipstream SP1/2/3 into XP, make sure you build your image on an XP machine. If you build it on a Vista machine, you'll get disks that no longer BSOD but they will give you problems when you try to enter your XP license key. Vista will replace the PIDGEN files with VISTA ones so you can't use XP keys anymore. If you slipstream on an XP machine, it will work just fine though. Either that or manually copy the PIDGEN.DLL and DPCDLL.DL_ files from you SP3 install directory after slipstreaming on Vista.
I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing software that would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers.
This may be true. However, that's not what I said. Change your wording to "I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing OPEN SOURCE software FOR FREE IN THE HOPE that IT would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers" and the number of EXCITED developers becomes much smaller. In fact, I'm willing to venture that the value asymptotically approaches zero.
Furthermore, I wouldn't assume the person is "excited about writing software" as much as interested in "sell[ing] support contracts to rich lawyers". Programmers who are truly excited about their OSS projects would be working on them whether or not they got paid -- in this case, the "excitement" only comes with the pay.
And if making money is your goal when you write this theoretical small custom app for rich lawyers, I don't think the best business plan is to give the software away to lawyers for free, distribute it as open source, and hope to make money off support.
That's probably fine for you but not an answer for businesses that need features of VMWare that VirtualBox doesn't offer.... like the ability to migrate VM's or even the ability to make simple branched snapshots. I've actually played with VirtualBox quite a bit in the past week or two and I've found that it lacks many features compared to my old VMWare 5.5.
I've been evalutating whether to upgrade to VMWare 6.0 (well 6.5 beta now) and whether or not VirtualBox will serve my needs as just a power user. Basically, I'm not unhappy with the what I get for free with VirtualBox but I definitely am beginning to see more and more value in the $99 upgrade to the latest VMWare.
And no, I don't have the time (and probably not the expertise) to personally add the dozen or so features that I've noticed in casual use are missing from VirtualBox compared to VMWare to the OSS code. If you're doing anything other than the simplest use of VM's, you'll eventually run into limitations with VirtualBox. This might change in the future, but VirtualBox is way far behind the pack feature-wise of the for-pay VM's.
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
No there aren't any. Question answered, no need for an "Ask Slashdot"
Slashdot geeks get excited about writing OSS to be used by first of all themselves, then other geeks, then artistic or creative types.
Writing free software primarily to be used by what the original poster said is (scum-sucking implied) lawyers at his multimillion-dollar lawfirm is probably near the bottom of their charitable use of their free time in OSS development.
And when they do they wander into Direct/Input/Sound/Video/Play/etc. OpenGL does 3D rendering. The rest? Cobble it together from whatever other obsolete scraps are available.
We're already writing cross-platform to hit the 360 and PS3. With DX10 on the 360, it should be fairly minor to port the 360 to the PC. However, for the PC, most developers are targeting DX9 since DX10 requires Vista and Vista doesn't have the highest adoption rate among gamers (since XP SP3 is quite a bit faster in most current gaming benchmarks).
But not too many folks are working on OpenGL although with Macs approaching 10% of the PC market, maybe that will begin to change if the Mac game market ever opens up.
Even when I buy a game, I'll frequently use the pirate cracks on it because of the stupid copy protection schemes. Who ever thought that the "put the disc in the drive" scheme was a good idea? Sheesh.
I bought "Baku Baku" a long time ago for the PC and it had CD protection. I just ran it in the debugger and saw where the disc check call was and then overwrote those bytes with a return true. Then it ran without the disc. I was a valid customer but the copy protection annoyed me so I removed it.
If the copy protection is to the PC (network card / processor ID/etc) and doesn't interfere with me running the app, I don't mind as long as there is also a path to move it to another PC. Of course, even with such a path (i.e. contact the company and get a new key), you might be screwed if the company goes out of business.
I find it very believable that a small but vocal bunch of amazingly stupid people think the earth is flat. If they do, they will certainly have other foolish opinions as well.
They probably believe in Intelligent Design as well.
Oh, and one of the linked articles mentions a similar point:
The price of TV computers (~$10) is far more accessible to the middle classes of developing countries than traditional PCs (>$300). India, for instance, has a burgeoning middle class but a per capita income of less than $1000 USD. Nevertheless, TV penetration in India has now reached 50% of all households.
It's not true everywhere (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa) but TV penetration is pretty high even in poor areas in Southern Asia (India, Thailand, etc) and Central / South America.
This IS an impressive feat. We may take for granted that there is a tv in every house but many of the countries that are being targeted have issues providing clean WATER. So the cheaper and more self contained these become, the better.
You might be surprised. When I visited Thailand a couple years ago, I went to a poor rural village in the north. They basically had hand-built huts / shacks with dirt floors and the whole village shared a single point for clean water (no inside running water or plumbing) so they had to carry clean water to their houses and use basically an outhouse for their restroom. However, they did have TV's in most of their homes -- although the bare electrical wires strung from hut to hut looked frighteningly dangerous.
Except with unified shaders and earlier variations the GPU isn't that "special purpose" anymore. It's basicly an array of very small processors that individually are fairly general.
Even with all the advances in shaders GPU's are not quite generalized due to several reasons. Hardcoded data fetch logic (yes there is some support for more arbitrary memory reados but those are limited and take a fairly big performance hit). GPUs also have poor performance for dynamic branching -- sure they support it, but if all the pixels for a subset (i.e. the whole bank of little GPU cores processing a fragment) don't take the same branches, your performance is hosed. The bank size is usually 8 or 16 cores working on a rectilinear fragment of adjacent pixels.
Intel's approach is not very GPU-like at all. Indeed, it's more similar to the CELL SPU's (internal ringbuffer included) but instead of using DMA to access memory and individual memory work areas, it has direct access to memory (with hardware prefetching) and a large shared L2.
VMWare Workstation allows you to create quite advanced snapshot trees. You can move back and forward between snapshots, delete snaphots, start new branches at arbitrary snaphots, etc. Think of it as source control + branching for your VM.
I'm curious as to how your experiences have been with 3d in other virtualization software. As of yesterday, I couldn't even get Counter-strike:Source to open in VMWare (which is hardly resource-intensive by today's standards), let alone play
In VMWare 6.0, you need to go to the Virtual Machine Menu and select Settings -> Display -> Accelerate 3D Graphics. You only get DX8.1 graphics right now but supposedly support for DX9 is coming. Also, I've heard VMWare 6.5 Beta has better 3D support.
VMWare's 3D runs at about 1/2 the speed of native DX on a real (non-VM) machine but that's still about 20X faster than software rendered 3D which is what you're stuck with on other VM's.
If you need snapshots, wait a few months/years until it works solidly
I don't absolutely need an advanced snapshot manager (i.e. multiple trees / go-back & forward / branch at any point) like VMWare has. I mainly just need simple snapshotting to save a particular state for reversion. I actually was about to buy VMWare 6.0 (I currently own 5.5 and it's a $99 upgrade). I've been happy with 5.5 under XP but my new machine has Vista and VMWare 5.5 doesn't run under Vista. I guess I should give VirtualBox a shot since it's free and see if it does what I need before paying to upgrade VMWare.
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
Go recursive / self-hosted build. You could always set up a VirtualBox VM with the appropriate development environment to build VirtualBox:-)
In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware
VMWare supports multiple CPUs (2 cores visible on Guest OS) and also supports hardware accelerated 3D. Have you tried running any 3D or multithreaded apps under VMWare and VirtualBox? I find that VMWare is quite fast if you install the VMTools in the guest OS and the integration (cross VM copy/past / drag and drop, seamless mouse pointer, etc) is quite nice.
One of the main things I like about VMWare is the "Snapshot" capability which lets you create multiple "restore" points (in an easy to use visual "tree" manager) that you can instantly return to. In fact you can have a VM automatically revert to a snapshot. Does VirtualBox have any sort of advanced snapshot management?
Bling factor! It looks and feels more "expensive" not to mention the glass is harder so it won't scratch with use. Most trackpads kinda feel like a cheap vinyl / plastic sheet and get "wear" marks in the pad from finger friction after a couple months use..
Wouldn't your finger stick to it?
I'd think that getting fingerprints all over a shiny glossy surface that you are meant to touch all the time would be a bigger issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned about different belief systems back in public high school in my world history class.
There's a big difference between learning about various religions in a historical perspective (or even a modern cultural one) in a history or social studies class compared to having a particular religion's beliefs taught as a science class without any credible scientific basis.
I don't mind my children learning that the Aztecs used to tear out their enemies hearts in human sacrifices. Now I would have a problem with the same school teaching my children that it was a scientific fact that they absolutely had to perform human sacrifices in order to not remain in darkness forever next time there was an eclipse.
Or do you want your children to learn that it's turtles all the way down ?
Here in Chicago we have Federal Income Tax = average 28% (but can be considerably more), State Income Tax = 3%, FICA = 15.3% (Social Security tax 12.4% and the total Medicare tax 2.9% of wages). Right there is 45-50% of your wages in direct income taxes. Add use taxes, license stickers and fees (multiple annual fees to local and state per vehicle), city parking permits, property taxes (which in Chicago are typically $500-$1000 a month depending on your neighborhood). Plus when we drive on our TOLL-ROADS we pay additional toll fees.
It would be very easy for an average Chicagoan to be paying 50-60% of their wages on taxes before you could spend a penny that would be sales taxed and we even got the nation's highest rate for that too.
I will continue to whine buddy. We pay extra taxes above and beyond the ones I stated for booze and cigaretts as well as you Canards. These are additional taxes politicians love because "sin" taxes are easy to pass. Here in Chicago, we pay an extra $2.53 per pack of cigarettes for "sin" tax which nearly doubles the pre-tax cost of cigarettes. And of course we pay more for taxes on alcohol.
Chicago has extra sales tax charges of up to 20% for a variety of items like car rentals, hotels, soft drinks, etc as well. The rates and applications of sales tax are so complex in Chicago that without computers, no human being would be able to compute them. I can't even list all the categories they have extra taxes.
Hell, in Chicago we even pay additional taxes for DRINKING WATER !!!
Can you beat that Canada ?!?
Not to mention that our sales tax is in addition to state income taxes and federal income taxes. Oh, and don't you Canadians actually get something for your taxes.... like free health care?
You should try living in Chicago were we have the highest sales tax in the nation. Try dining out in one of our nice downtown restaurants and you'll get a shock on the taxes when the bill arrives. The cheapest sales tax in city limits in over 10% but when you get downtown or go out to eat you get special extra taxes added.
.25%
State Sales Tax 6.25%
Chicago Sales Tax 1.25%
Cook County Sales Tax 1.75%
RTA Tax 1.00%
MPEA Pier Tax 1.00%
TOTAL SALES TAX 11.25%
Plus
Restaurant Tax
TOTAL TAX 11.50%
expecting java or flash to work isn't asking much
Why should you expect them to work out of the box? They don't work out of the box on XP or Vista? Both OS's require plug-ins for most browsers such as Firefox and IE and are definite add-ons, not part of the base standard. It drives me crazy when websites *require* flash and java (or other less well-trusted plugins) -- half the time it's for the annoying video ads on the site that blare audio and video when you're surfing. I want your front page at least and most of your site to work well without them - or at least to degrade gracefully.
We have known for a long time that Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern human and a sophisticated culture, including burial rites. There was no scientific consensus that Neandethal was stupid.
It's quite possible the Neanderthal's were of equal or greater intelligence than Homo Sapiens and were merely less aggressive (or had less advanced weapons) or had lower birthrates. There's no reason the more intelligent species has to survive if there is an evolutionary conflict.
A troll's silicon brain (i.e. bunch of rocks) just overclocks better when cooled properly.
If you need to slipstream Drivers, the Driver Packs are the easiest way to do it.
Also, if you slipstream SP1/2/3 into XP, make sure you build your image on an XP machine. If you build it on a Vista machine, you'll get disks that no longer BSOD but they will give you problems when you try to enter your XP license key. Vista will replace the PIDGEN files with VISTA ones so you can't use XP keys anymore. If you slipstream on an XP machine, it will work just fine though. Either that or manually copy the PIDGEN.DLL and DPCDLL.DL_ files from you SP3 install directory after slipstreaming on Vista.
I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing software that would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers.
This may be true. However, that's not what I said. Change your wording to "I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing OPEN SOURCE software FOR FREE IN THE HOPE that IT would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers" and the number of EXCITED developers becomes much smaller. In fact, I'm willing to venture that the value asymptotically approaches zero.
Furthermore, I wouldn't assume the person is "excited about writing software" as much as interested in "sell[ing] support contracts to rich lawyers". Programmers who are truly excited about their OSS projects would be working on them whether or not they got paid -- in this case, the "excitement" only comes with the pay.
And if making money is your goal when you write this theoretical small custom app for rich lawyers, I don't think the best business plan is to give the software away to lawyers for free, distribute it as open source, and hope to make money off support.
I stick to virtualbox.
That's probably fine for you but not an answer for businesses that need features of VMWare that VirtualBox doesn't offer.... like the ability to migrate VM's or even the ability to make simple branched snapshots. I've actually played with VirtualBox quite a bit in the past week or two and I've found that it lacks many features compared to my old VMWare 5.5.
I've been evalutating whether to upgrade to VMWare 6.0 (well 6.5 beta now) and whether or not VirtualBox will serve my needs as just a power user. Basically, I'm not unhappy with the what I get for free with VirtualBox but I definitely am beginning to see more and more value in the $99 upgrade to the latest VMWare.
And no, I don't have the time (and probably not the expertise) to personally add the dozen or so features that I've noticed in casual use are missing from VirtualBox compared to VMWare to the OSS code. If you're doing anything other than the simplest use of VM's, you'll eventually run into limitations with VirtualBox. This might change in the future, but VirtualBox is way far behind the pack feature-wise of the for-pay VM's.
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
No there aren't any. Question answered, no need for an "Ask Slashdot"
Slashdot geeks get excited about writing OSS to be used by first of all themselves, then other geeks, then artistic or creative types.
Writing free software primarily to be used by what the original poster said is (scum-sucking implied) lawyers at his multimillion-dollar lawfirm is probably near the bottom of their charitable use of their free time in OSS development.
The non-Microsoft "stacks" suck. Bottom line.
FWIW, OpenAL for audio is available on the following platforms:
FMOD is also available on most game and PC platforms and has very reasonable licensing fees.
Neither of these audio solutions (or "stacks" as you prefer to call them) are obsolete or "suck".
Jumping ship to DX10 would be nice, if it were cross-platform. (No, Xbox + PC does not count as "cross-platform".)
Right now, as far as the market is concerned for developers, the two biggest money making consoles are the XBOX 360 which uses a DX10 variant and the PS3 which can either use LibGCM (a low-level graphics library) or PSGL (which is a simplified OpenGL-like library but is a bit slower performance than the low-level approach). The Wii has it's own low-level library as well (but Nintendo seems to make more $$$ off Wii software than most third party developers).
We're already writing cross-platform to hit the 360 and PS3. With DX10 on the 360, it should be fairly minor to port the 360 to the PC. However, for the PC, most developers are targeting DX9 since DX10 requires Vista and Vista doesn't have the highest adoption rate among gamers (since XP SP3 is quite a bit faster in most current gaming benchmarks).
But not too many folks are working on OpenGL although with Macs approaching 10% of the PC market, maybe that will begin to change if the Mac game market ever opens up.
Even when I buy a game, I'll frequently use the pirate cracks on it because of the stupid copy protection schemes. Who ever thought that the "put the disc in the drive" scheme was a good idea? Sheesh.
/etc) and doesn't interfere with me running the app, I don't mind as long as there is also a path to move it to another PC. Of course, even with such a path (i.e. contact the company and get a new key), you might be screwed if the company goes out of business.
I bought "Baku Baku" a long time ago for the PC and it had CD protection. I just ran it in the debugger and saw where the disc check call was and then overwrote those bytes with a return true. Then it ran without the disc. I was a valid customer but the copy protection annoyed me so I removed it.
If the copy protection is to the PC (network card / processor ID
I find it very believable that a small but vocal bunch of amazingly stupid people think the earth is flat. If they do, they will certainly have other foolish opinions as well.
They probably believe in Intelligent Design as well.
Oh, and one of the linked articles mentions a similar point:
The price of TV computers (~$10) is far more accessible to the middle classes of developing countries than traditional PCs (>$300). India, for instance, has a burgeoning middle class but a per capita income of less than $1000 USD. Nevertheless, TV penetration in India has now reached 50% of all households.
It's not true everywhere (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa) but TV penetration is pretty high even in poor areas in Southern Asia (India, Thailand, etc) and Central / South America.
This IS an impressive feat. We may take for granted that there is a tv in every house but many of the countries that are being targeted have issues providing clean WATER. So the cheaper and more self contained these become, the better.
You might be surprised. When I visited Thailand a couple years ago, I went to a poor rural village in the north. They basically had hand-built huts / shacks with dirt floors and the whole village shared a single point for clean water (no inside running water or plumbing) so they had to carry clean water to their houses and use basically an outhouse for their restroom. However, they did have TV's in most of their homes -- although the bare electrical wires strung from hut to hut looked frighteningly dangerous.
Except with unified shaders and earlier variations the GPU isn't that "special purpose" anymore. It's basicly an array of very small processors that individually are fairly general.
Even with all the advances in shaders GPU's are not quite generalized due to several reasons. Hardcoded data fetch logic (yes there is some support for more arbitrary memory reados but those are limited and take a fairly big performance hit). GPUs also have poor performance for dynamic branching -- sure they support it, but if all the pixels for a subset (i.e. the whole bank of little GPU cores processing a fragment) don't take the same branches, your performance is hosed. The bank size is usually 8 or 16 cores working on a rectilinear fragment of adjacent pixels.
Intel's approach is not very GPU-like at all. Indeed, it's more similar to the CELL SPU's (internal ringbuffer included) but instead of using DMA to access memory and individual memory work areas, it has direct access to memory (with hardware prefetching) and a large shared L2.
VMWare Workstation allows you to create quite advanced snapshot trees. You can move back and forward between snapshots, delete snaphots, start new branches at arbitrary snaphots, etc. Think of it as source control + branching for your VM.
VMWare 6.0 is supposed to allow you to record, then replay and debug the state of a VM as well.
I'm curious as to how your experiences have been with 3d in other virtualization software. As of yesterday, I couldn't even get Counter-strike:Source to open in VMWare (which is hardly resource-intensive by today's standards), let alone play
If you're running in VMWare 5.5 Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:
mks.enable3d = TRUE
In VMWare 6.0, you need to go to the Virtual Machine Menu and select Settings -> Display -> Accelerate 3D Graphics. You only get DX8.1 graphics right now but supposedly support for DX9 is coming. Also, I've heard VMWare 6.5 Beta has better 3D support.
VMWare's 3D runs at about 1/2 the speed of native DX on a real (non-VM) machine but that's still about 20X faster than software rendered 3D which is what you're stuck with on other VM's.
If you need snapshots, wait a few months/years until it works solidly
I don't absolutely need an advanced snapshot manager (i.e. multiple trees / go-back & forward / branch at any point) like VMWare has. I mainly just need simple snapshotting to save a particular state for reversion. I actually was about to buy VMWare 6.0 (I currently own 5.5 and it's a $99 upgrade). I've been happy with 5.5 under XP but my new machine has Vista and VMWare 5.5 doesn't run under Vista. I guess I should give VirtualBox a shot since it's free and see if it does what I need before paying to upgrade VMWare.
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
:-)
Go recursive / self-hosted build. You could always set up a VirtualBox VM with the appropriate development environment to build VirtualBox
In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware
VMWare supports multiple CPUs (2 cores visible on Guest OS) and also supports hardware accelerated 3D. Have you tried running any 3D or multithreaded apps under VMWare and VirtualBox? I find that VMWare is quite fast if you install the VMTools in the guest OS and the integration (cross VM copy/past / drag and drop, seamless mouse pointer, etc) is quite nice.
One of the main things I like about VMWare is the "Snapshot" capability which lets you create multiple "restore" points (in an easy to use visual "tree" manager) that you can instantly return to. In fact you can have a VM automatically revert to a snapshot. Does VirtualBox have any sort of advanced snapshot management?
What are the advantages of a glass trackpad?
Bling factor! It looks and feels more "expensive" not to mention the glass is harder so it won't scratch with use. Most trackpads kinda feel like a cheap vinyl / plastic sheet and get "wear" marks in the pad from finger friction after a couple months use..
Wouldn't your finger stick to it?
I'd think that getting fingerprints all over a shiny glossy surface that you are meant to touch all the time would be a bigger issue.
The article doesn't mention a VGA port but at that price I'd be amazed if it has one.
Be amazed!!! There's a picture of the ports on the pruchase site (linked to from the artcle) and the specs and yes, one of the ports is external VGA.