it costs about $1,400. my CRT 22" was about $290 and i am glad i stuck with that not only b/c of the price but b/c when play COunterstrike, need for speed, UT2004, Halo 2 the ghosting is there with the LCD(i have a 17" LCD). its non existant with the CRT. yeah its a hoss.. a monster.. i almost need someones help when i need to move it any kind of distance but i guess to each his own..
what i mean is, what happened to their first games? does this whole thing come down to one thing??..that is greed? i tell you this weekend i played Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit. the whole game is still fun, especially the hot pursuit mode. yes IMO its more fun than NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and NFS Underground. these are the games that made EA great. hell, the whole NFS franchise brought EA into existence. its sad when you have people like me who like games such as NFS 3 and think of it more than newer game titles..graphics arent everything, fun-ness and playability are a big part of the game experience.
anyway before i start rambling i wonder how many hours the programmers were turning in when NFS 3 was released? you think it was 80+?
yeah GTA got to me. i would come out of walmart and all of a sudden get this urge to go over to someone putting groceries in their car, kick them, punch them then throw them to the ground then steal their car.. yeah GTA is defintely clouding my mind...
i get great service with Comcast. like i said my average is about 4 mbps. i peak out at 5 sometimes and rarely if not at all below 3.5. a while back they doubled everyones speed. but i wont be spending any more money with them. $55 for digital cable + $42 for cable internet + taxes is about $104 a month. sorry thats enough for me.
with my average connection being 4+ Mbps i wont be switching to Vonage anytime soon. i am one of those many that dumped my home phone -- about 4 years ago and just have a cell phone. if you have any stock in At&t, BellSouth i might would reconsider trading or selling. its gonna start to get ugly.
i would say thats a good reply. i would like to add to that as is to say that most people on here are saying, if God was love then why let 150,000 people die from a Tsunami? if you read the Bible and read more than a few verses scattered about you could learn more about how God works, his Son Jesus, why he was sent and what is to come. God is love, loves Christians, Jews, sinners(we all are) but cannot stand sin. hate the sin, love the sinner. in the Bible many times, Soddam and Gomorrah for example God "cleaned house" because of the wicked ways of this place. fornication, worshipping of idols, and everything else you can think of. God casts down the city with fire and brimestone and it was totally demolished.
my more important point is do you really think we are here by random chance? we are some people derived from the smallest cells from billions of years ago? we are just here to live, work our butts off to survive and for what.. just to die off at some point in the end. do you really want to believe that this is all to your life? if that is all that we are here for we might as well just get it over with right now so we can end all of our misery and when we draw our final breath we will be no more.
I believe that God created the universe, sent His Son to die on the cross to save us from eternal damnation b/c of our nature to sin against God, and that one day Jesus will return so that we may be caught up in the air with Him, for those that love Him and have accepted Jesus as their Savior and asked Him into their hearts.
so...
where do you think you will be when you die?
one final thought for those of disbelief...if i am wrong(which i know i am not) then i lose nothing. if you are wrong then you lose everything. the latter doesnt seem to be a very good choice IMO.
b/c you could give that money to the humane society for one. one of the main reasons for the humane society putting animals down is b/c they do not have the funds to keep tons of animals -- namely older animals and in turn many animals with health problems that could be cured but not in the humane society's budget. some people might not want to adopt sick pets, having the funds to treat the animals increases their chances of survival, a better chance of being adopted -- staying alive longer. this is what the $50,000 could be used for as i was trying to say. this is a lot of money to the humane society being that they are non-profit, outside the fees to adopters for the adoption fee and spading and neutering.
didnt the lady say that everything about this cat is exactly alike? i imagine as time goes on and as the kitten grows to an adult(assuming the kitten lives that long) then some things will start happening that didnt happen before. i agree with one of the comments that for $50,000 she could have saved a lot of cats from being put to death, but rather found loving caring homes.
#1. In the recent weeks they have become the center of news for the gaming community. specifically the uproar over them making their employees work ungodly hours in crunch time, with no comp time, no bonuses, no special leave, all in good fortune for the higher ups and game sales. the ea_spouse was the one who started it. anyway so what does EA do? what are they thinking? "hey why dont we just buy out every other gaming company or get a good stock out of it then we will be the only game in town. then we can really shove it to our employees and they will no choice but to stay with us"
#2. because of #1 they are afraid of sales dropping and increasing fierce competition. dont be surprised if we dont see some gaming company mergers in the next year or two.
anyway thats my take on it..
i received my degree in computer science and cobol was a mere little elective.. tucked away deep at the bottom after all the C++/OOP/misc data structures/VB/Java coursework. no one that i graduated with took cobol. it was offered as a mere elective if you didnt have anything else to take and as a supplement elective for non-computer science majors. doesnt it stand to reason that after a certain period of time there will be next to non-existant cobol and other legacy programmers out there? i have checked other universities..most of them either offer C++ or Java as the first language and 95% of them or thereabouts offered C++ as the main language(the language that will take you through your degree, i.e. data structures, AI, programming languages, etc etc).
the $80,000 was overpriced -- this would be about 16 nodes not 5(i was quickly trying to type in an example) but with Terabytes of storage on board, with shared memory for all the nodes, Infiniband connections, 2 Geforce 6800 CPU's per node which would be about 32 GPU's, then really $80K isnt all that bad. our 8 node was around $50K. when you factor in some really neat software just out of the market specifically made for the cluster environment then the price is really worth it. and guess what? how do you upgrade if you have an altix or sun? do you get a new system completely? do you have to get an SGI/SUN techie down to do it for you? with a cluster if you need a new GPU you add it.. yourself, if you need some more nodes.. then guess what.. its easy to do and doesnt take up hardly any time, when you need some more disk space, you go out and get some.. piece of cake.
well.. i do work in the scientific arena.. you spoke of exactly the type of environment i am in -- we have swapped out all of our SGI's for high end LInux and windows PC's with the latest and greatest GPU's etc etc. we have 1 SGI available and that is it. the other reason is is that a lot of the software on our IRIX no longer is written for the SGI or that the costs for this software is so expensive that its not worth it. i know that they won that NASA contract, the only thing that saved them in the long term IMO.
well i didnt mean to say that clusters are the answer to everything b/c clusters are even now in their infant stages. i do have some experience and am not biased. i have found that a LOT of shops that once used to be an SGI only shop are the ones that do intense state of the art graphics programming, such as supercomputing centers doing openGL applications, this included gov't and private sectors and businesses. they have , most of them swapped to an only Linux/Windows shop b/c its cheaper, in most cases faster, easier to maintain(who graduates from college these days in computer science with a knowledge of and SGI or SUN computer?) and their systems are always up to date using the latest technologies. cluster technology will continue to grow and mature -- i dare say faster than SGI can keep up with. yes there are still needs for SGI but like a post below said -- theres really nothing about SGI that blows away the competition anymore.
theres clusters out there with 64-bit technology right now. both 32bit and 64 bit. 64-bit with DUAL PCI Express so you can stick in a SLI 6800 GPU setup and not blink an eye -- and multiply that with XXX linux/windows PC's for your cluster and you have all the power in your hands. especially when the system is set up for shared memory. i use Maya and we were having the same problems here with on 2GB of RAM. 4GB Ram helped a great deal but shared memory systems are awesome.
sure there might be some marriages out there like Sun & IBM but the numbers are growing smaller. a 5 PC cluster was just an example. what about a 100 PC Cluster with linux? an SGI would fall to its kneees compared to this machine and cost 1/10th as much. as soon as the powers that be realize the cost/effectivness/flexiblility of the cluster environment SGI would have lost its ability to hang on to whatever they have left. if SGI could keep up with the rest of the world then i would say they would make it. but they wont be able to keep up. like one of the parent posts -- the market is moving way too fast.
#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks. which brings us to #2.
#2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in.
#3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that.
i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
"In its third quarter, AOL lost 646,000 subscribers, most of whom were dial-up customers."
huh?? what do you mean most of whom were dial-up? they only have dial-up. they dont offer broadband, as they would like all the newbies to think. they just have their fancy dancy crappy bloated interface to interact with your already broadband connection
this is a real GREY area i guess for me. if someone tries to pirate HL2 , they got caught, so their account was disabled. its hard to say where the line here crosses the grey area into the black or the white. i think eventually there should be some sort of implementation to allow the valid games with the valid keys to be played but disable the other games that you pirated, copied, etc etc. on the other hand they want to crack down on the people who pirate period, so disable them all together. perhaps this is the way to go to send a message that pirating software will not be tolerated. i agree with this but when i talked about the grey area, i was talking about possible hearings in the court. of course with Valve i am sure it would take a something like a class action to get the ball rolling in the courts.
and also i am proud to let you know that Mississippi is ranked #3 overall for supercomputing power, behind California and New Mexico. pretty cool stuff.
i have watched college sports through the internet media solution and to tell you the truth it isnt too bad. the resolution is only 640X480 but its still 'ok' considering. so far no glitches or hiccups, let's hope they can continue to offer such great service and eventually make it even better. if you get ESPN GAMEPLAN that have the most offerings for internet sports games if you are into that.
Re:only through extensions...
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
those cards have been able to do fragment and pixel shaders etc through openGL extensions, hence the xxx_ARB_EXT calls. this i assume is the release of all those extensions into the core of the OPENGL pipeline and thus will eventually be without the ARB into the call..
and i do mean NEVER. i have cable internet so my machine is up for a month or more at a time. the only time i reboot is when my firewall has updates and prompts for a restart or when i go out of town and then i turn the machine off. i have had it for 1 year now. i do heavy C++ work, openGL custom apps, play the latest video games, run photoshop, dreamweaver etc etc. i guess this comes back to some of the past posts....
windows as easy to maintain and use in general it still requires someone using it the know how to keep it up and running, spam free, spyware free and virus free. probably half of the windows owners dont really know what spyware is much less how to get rid of it or that they can prompt themselves to allow or block cookies(some of them can be spyware) when visiting a website that tries to store cookies on their machine. for me i know how to keep my machine up and it has never failed.
Slashdot Mirror
it costs about $1,400. my CRT 22" was about $290 and i am glad i stuck with that not only b/c of the price but b/c when play COunterstrike, need for speed, UT2004, Halo 2 the ghosting is there with the LCD(i have a 17" LCD). its non existant with the CRT. yeah its a hoss.. a monster.. i almost need someones help when i need to move it any kind of distance but i guess to each his own..
ok then Need for Speed and Madden made EA. NFS 3 was like 1999-2000 so what makes you think i would be 12? that was only 4 years ago or maybe 5.
what i mean is, what happened to their first games? does this whole thing come down to one thing??..that is greed? i tell you this weekend i played Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit. the whole game is still fun, especially the hot pursuit mode. yes IMO its more fun than NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and NFS Underground. these are the games that made EA great. hell, the whole NFS franchise brought EA into existence. its sad when you have people like me who like games such as NFS 3 and think of it more than newer game titles..graphics arent everything, fun-ness and playability are a big part of the game experience. anyway before i start rambling i wonder how many hours the programmers were turning in when NFS 3 was released? you think it was 80+?
yeah GTA got to me. i would come out of walmart and all of a sudden get this urge to go over to someone putting groceries in their car, kick them, punch them then throw them to the ground then steal their car.. yeah GTA is defintely clouding my mind...
i get great service with Comcast. like i said my average is about 4 mbps. i peak out at 5 sometimes and rarely if not at all below 3.5. a while back they doubled everyones speed. but i wont be spending any more money with them. $55 for digital cable + $42 for cable internet + taxes is about $104 a month. sorry thats enough for me.
with my average connection being 4+ Mbps i wont be switching to Vonage anytime soon. i am one of those many that dumped my home phone -- about 4 years ago and just have a cell phone. if you have any stock in At&t, BellSouth i might would reconsider trading or selling. its gonna start to get ugly.
no other "god" offers eternal salvation -- there is only one God who does.
i would say thats a good reply. i would like to add to that as is to say that most people on here are saying, if God was love then why let 150,000 people die from a Tsunami? if you read the Bible and read more than a few verses scattered about you could learn more about how God works, his Son Jesus, why he was sent and what is to come. God is love, loves Christians, Jews, sinners(we all are) but cannot stand sin. hate the sin, love the sinner. in the Bible many times, Soddam and Gomorrah for example God "cleaned house" because of the wicked ways of this place. fornication, worshipping of idols, and everything else you can think of. God casts down the city with fire and brimestone and it was totally demolished. my more important point is do you really think we are here by random chance? we are some people derived from the smallest cells from billions of years ago? we are just here to live, work our butts off to survive and for what.. just to die off at some point in the end. do you really want to believe that this is all to your life? if that is all that we are here for we might as well just get it over with right now so we can end all of our misery and when we draw our final breath we will be no more. I believe that God created the universe, sent His Son to die on the cross to save us from eternal damnation b/c of our nature to sin against God, and that one day Jesus will return so that we may be caught up in the air with Him, for those that love Him and have accepted Jesus as their Savior and asked Him into their hearts. so... where do you think you will be when you die? one final thought for those of disbelief...if i am wrong(which i know i am not) then i lose nothing. if you are wrong then you lose everything. the latter doesnt seem to be a very good choice IMO.
b/c you could give that money to the humane society for one. one of the main reasons for the humane society putting animals down is b/c they do not have the funds to keep tons of animals -- namely older animals and in turn many animals with health problems that could be cured but not in the humane society's budget. some people might not want to adopt sick pets, having the funds to treat the animals increases their chances of survival, a better chance of being adopted -- staying alive longer. this is what the $50,000 could be used for as i was trying to say. this is a lot of money to the humane society being that they are non-profit, outside the fees to adopters for the adoption fee and spading and neutering.
didnt the lady say that everything about this cat is exactly alike? i imagine as time goes on and as the kitten grows to an adult(assuming the kitten lives that long) then some things will start happening that didnt happen before. i agree with one of the comments that for $50,000 she could have saved a lot of cats from being put to death, but rather found loving caring homes.
#1. In the recent weeks they have become the center of news for the gaming community. specifically the uproar over them making their employees work ungodly hours in crunch time, with no comp time, no bonuses, no special leave, all in good fortune for the higher ups and game sales. the ea_spouse was the one who started it. anyway so what does EA do? what are they thinking? "hey why dont we just buy out every other gaming company or get a good stock out of it then we will be the only game in town. then we can really shove it to our employees and they will no choice but to stay with us" #2. because of #1 they are afraid of sales dropping and increasing fierce competition. dont be surprised if we dont see some gaming company mergers in the next year or two. anyway thats my take on it..
i received my degree in computer science and cobol was a mere little elective.. tucked away deep at the bottom after all the C++/OOP/misc data structures/VB/Java coursework. no one that i graduated with took cobol. it was offered as a mere elective if you didnt have anything else to take and as a supplement elective for non-computer science majors. doesnt it stand to reason that after a certain period of time there will be next to non-existant cobol and other legacy programmers out there? i have checked other universities..most of them either offer C++ or Java as the first language and 95% of them or thereabouts offered C++ as the main language(the language that will take you through your degree, i.e. data structures, AI, programming languages, etc etc).
the $80,000 was overpriced -- this would be about 16 nodes not 5(i was quickly trying to type in an example) but with Terabytes of storage on board, with shared memory for all the nodes, Infiniband connections, 2 Geforce 6800 CPU's per node which would be about 32 GPU's, then really $80K isnt all that bad. our 8 node was around $50K. when you factor in some really neat software just out of the market specifically made for the cluster environment then the price is really worth it. and guess what? how do you upgrade if you have an altix or sun? do you get a new system completely? do you have to get an SGI/SUN techie down to do it for you? with a cluster if you need a new GPU you add it.. yourself, if you need some more nodes.. then guess what .. its easy to do and doesnt take up hardly any time, when you need some more disk space, you go out and get some.. piece of cake.
well.. i do work in the scientific arena.. you spoke of exactly the type of environment i am in -- we have swapped out all of our SGI's for high end LInux and windows PC's with the latest and greatest GPU's etc etc. we have 1 SGI available and that is it. the other reason is is that a lot of the software on our IRIX no longer is written for the SGI or that the costs for this software is so expensive that its not worth it. i know that they won that NASA contract, the only thing that saved them in the long term IMO.
well i didnt mean to say that clusters are the answer to everything b/c clusters are even now in their infant stages. i do have some experience and am not biased. i have found that a LOT of shops that once used to be an SGI only shop are the ones that do intense state of the art graphics programming, such as supercomputing centers doing openGL applications, this included gov't and private sectors and businesses. they have , most of them swapped to an only Linux/Windows shop b/c its cheaper, in most cases faster, easier to maintain(who graduates from college these days in computer science with a knowledge of and SGI or SUN computer?) and their systems are always up to date using the latest technologies. cluster technology will continue to grow and mature -- i dare say faster than SGI can keep up with. yes there are still needs for SGI but like a post below said -- theres really nothing about SGI that blows away the competition anymore.
theres clusters out there with 64-bit technology right now. both 32bit and 64 bit. 64-bit with DUAL PCI Express so you can stick in a SLI 6800 GPU setup and not blink an eye -- and multiply that with XXX linux/windows PC's for your cluster and you have all the power in your hands. especially when the system is set up for shared memory. i use Maya and we were having the same problems here with on 2GB of RAM. 4GB Ram helped a great deal but shared memory systems are awesome.
sure there might be some marriages out there like Sun & IBM but the numbers are growing smaller. a 5 PC cluster was just an example. what about a 100 PC Cluster with linux? an SGI would fall to its kneees compared to this machine and cost 1/10th as much. as soon as the powers that be realize the cost/effectivness/flexiblility of the cluster environment SGI would have lost its ability to hang on to whatever they have left. if SGI could keep up with the rest of the world then i would say they would make it. but they wont be able to keep up. like one of the parent posts -- the market is moving way too fast.
#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks. which brings us to #2. #2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in. #3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that. i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
"In its third quarter, AOL lost 646,000 subscribers, most of whom were dial-up customers." huh?? what do you mean most of whom were dial-up? they only have dial-up. they dont offer broadband, as they would like all the newbies to think. they just have their fancy dancy crappy bloated interface to interact with your already broadband connection
this is a real GREY area i guess for me. if someone tries to pirate HL2 , they got caught, so their account was disabled. its hard to say where the line here crosses the grey area into the black or the white. i think eventually there should be some sort of implementation to allow the valid games with the valid keys to be played but disable the other games that you pirated, copied, etc etc. on the other hand they want to crack down on the people who pirate period, so disable them all together. perhaps this is the way to go to send a message that pirating software will not be tolerated. i agree with this but when i talked about the grey area, i was talking about possible hearings in the court. of course with Valve i am sure it would take a something like a class action to get the ball rolling in the courts.
and also i am proud to let you know that Mississippi is ranked #3 overall for supercomputing power, behind California and New Mexico. pretty cool stuff.
i would make BILLIONS! is there a patent on thinking yet?
i have watched college sports through the internet media solution and to tell you the truth it isnt too bad. the resolution is only 640X480 but its still 'ok' considering. so far no glitches or hiccups, let's hope they can continue to offer such great service and eventually make it even better. if you get ESPN GAMEPLAN that have the most offerings for internet sports games if you are into that.
those cards have been able to do fragment and pixel shaders etc through openGL extensions, hence the xxx_ARB_EXT calls. this i assume is the release of all those extensions into the core of the OPENGL pipeline and thus will eventually be without the ARB into the call..
and i do mean NEVER. i have cable internet so my machine is up for a month or more at a time. the only time i reboot is when my firewall has updates and prompts for a restart or when i go out of town and then i turn the machine off. i have had it for 1 year now. i do heavy C++ work, openGL custom apps, play the latest video games, run photoshop, dreamweaver etc etc. i guess this comes back to some of the past posts.... windows as easy to maintain and use in general it still requires someone using it the know how to keep it up and running, spam free, spyware free and virus free. probably half of the windows owners dont really know what spyware is much less how to get rid of it or that they can prompt themselves to allow or block cookies(some of them can be spyware) when visiting a website that tries to store cookies on their machine. for me i know how to keep my machine up and it has never failed.