I'm just curious--how many countries is iTunes available in? I especially want to know if there's an iTunes in Japan, and if so, how can an American sign up there?
I have no interest in most American music, so the American version of iTunes is pretty useless to me, but I would be very interested in buying songs from iTunes if there was a Japanese version.
As much as I find the concept of IDs repugnant, having IDs controlled by the national government is no different than having IDs controlled by the states.
I don't like it, but it's really no worse than the current situation. I've also read the part of the act that refers to the national IDs, and I didn't see anything about people being required to have them.
When has/. ever claimed to have high editorial standards? It's a site where potentially interesting stuff get's posted, not some professional journalism outlet.
If anything's hurting Slashdot, it's the posters, especially all the annoying morons who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork for this article.
How many times do I have to explain this to you, you stupid animal?
THESE ARE NOT RIGHTS. EVEN IF YOUR RIGHTS ARE BEING VIOLATED, YOU STILL HAVE THEM. People in China have the Right to freedom of speech, the government is simply violating that Right.
It's morons like you who shouldn't be allowed to breed.
I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but it's probably at least two years old. He had that machine when I first met him in August 2003, and I don't know how long he had it before that.
Only nForce x20(-D) nForce2 IGP has integrated video. There are no versions of nForce3 or nForce4 that have integrated video, although IIRC, nVidia has said that an nForce4 IGP is coming soon.
FYI, nForce2 IGP has integrated GeForce4 MX-like video, and the original nForce x20(-D) models have integrated GeForce2 MX-like video. I say "-like", as the integrated solutions perform much worse than the discrete ones largely due to the lack of a dedicated memory bus.
There aren't many widely-available alternatives to PCI right now. AFAIK, there's PCI-X and PCI-Express. PCI-X is only viable in the server market, and PCI-Express cards that aren't video cards are practically nonexistant.
PCI-Express will replace PCI one day, but it will be a long time before PCI-Express is even a viable alternative for anything except video cards. Even in the mid-late 90s, when ISA was still around, there were plenty of PCI cards. Now, no one uses Serial and Parallel ports, and USB devices are all oer the place, but you still see Serial and Parallel ports on most boards. PCI Express is still in its infancy--PCI ain't gonna be obsolete for a long time. AGP, on the other hand, will die very soon, as the only area in which PCI Express has made progress is video cards.
As much as I hate HP, I have to admit that they've done one thing right: many of their desktop PCs use Asus motherboards.
I have one HP machine (no, I'm not stupid enough to pay money for one--my parents gave it to me when they got a new one), that has an Asus P4B266 motherboard inside it. It's currently in my closet being used as a server, and I have to say that the board's not bad...
Another old HP machine that used to belong to my parents (which is currently sitting half-dismantled on my bed) also has an Asus board--specifically, a P2B-VE (hey, I said it was an old machine).
Contrast this with Dell. Dell not only makes their own boards, but they use all sorts of proprietary form factors. A friend of mine, who has a shitty Dell PC, wanted to install a new hard drive. His machine has only one internal 3.5" bay and one external 3.5" bay (taken up by the original hard drive and floppy drive, respectively), so he decided to remove the floppy drive to put the new hard drive in. It turns out that Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement. Yes, I said proprietary screw arrangement of all things. No storebought drive will fit into that machine's drive bays because of that. To hell with Dell. Also, we found out that Dell uses some kind of oddball heatsink/fan--it actually attaches to the case and funnels air through holes in the case. It's like a CPU fan and case fan in one device. Freaky.
As I said above, I hate HP, but I at least have some respect for them. I have no respect for Dell whatsoever.
There's nothing wrong with onboard sound. I use my motherboard's VIA AC'97 audio all the time, and the quality is perfectly fine. There's no hiss or buzz coming out of the speakers in the background.
In reality, there's almost always no difference between onboard sound and a discrete sound card.
Here's another suggestion: use a browser, such as Opera, that supports disabling the referrer field. Granted, the last time I really used Opera was in the 6.x days, so I don't know if it still has that feature. Worst comes to worst, find an old copy of 6.x.
- Back/Forward Cache: Yes! Yes! Yes! This brings Firefox one step closer to the way I feel caching should be done. Back/forward should always pull pages from the cache (ignoring meta expire), and clicking links should always load the page from the server.
- Interface speedups: Great news. I love Firefox's rendering power, but the UI is slow as hell. This should help.
- Rendering errors fixed: More good news. While I can count the amount the number of times I've seen the Slashdot bug on my hands, better rendering is always a good thing.
- Focus follows mouse: One of the best changes. I've had so many issues with the focus not being where it's supposed to be. For example, I'll switch to another window or tab, but the focus is usually still in the old one. If this gets fixed, I'll jump for joy.
- Sanitise: More privacy == A Good Thing.
The Bad:
- Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom (the sole reason I installed TabBrowser Extensions was to get the browser tabs to appear on the bottom), but I don't mind them on the left side. But having them on top is just horrible. It looks prettier on the left too, especially with my theme, which places an image of a gecko in the background of the left pane. I'm also worried that my theme won't work with 1.1--I've been using an old version of the theme, as the author made a change a while back that uglified the icons, defeating the purpose of the theme (the version I use only uses two colours in the icons...). Officially, my theme only supports up to 0.9, but I've hacked it to allow 1.0 to install it--if 1.1 has any major UI changes like this one, it may cause my theme to choke.
- Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion. I like to be able to dick around in the preferences and not have to worry about screwing something up. It pissed me off to no end back when I used Galeon, and it'll piss me off in Firefox too. But, hey, I can tell that the Firefox devs have an agenda to screw up the preferences dialog as much as possible. They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?), they already flipped the OK and Cancel buttons, and now they're adding these shitty changes too. If I wanted to use a browser with Gnome's horrible HIG, I'd use Epiphany.
As someone who has been reading comics regularly since 1996, I can safely say that you are talking out of your ass.
Furthermore, I would advise you to seek professional help, as delusions of persecution are the major symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.
Also, as I've read that entire Thor story (and loved all of it except for the rushed ending, which wasn't the writer's fault, as he was pulled off the book when he was halfway finished writing the issue that ended up becoming the final part), I can safely say that the entire point of the story was that Thor was going down a very slippery slope. First his acts were beneficial, then he started becoming more arrogant, and then he started completely losing it...
Let's see...someone who's been using Morse Code for a large part of his long life vs. a teenager.
Of course the old man would win--he's got sheer experience on his side. Assuming SMS will still be around in the future, by the time the teenager is that old, she'll probably be just as fast.
Those are not rights. Those are government fiats. Rights are inalienable, can't be granted or taken away by any government, and only people can have rights.
Your comparisons are inherently wrong. It is impossible to have dual 152s. No one in their right mind would buy a single 275 or 875, nor would anyone in their right mind buy dual 852s. A 175 would give the exact same performance as a single 275 or 875. Two 852s would give the exact same performance as two 252s. The only difference between families is the maximum number of processors supported (and by "processors", I mean sockets, not cores).
Furthermore, I have serious doubts about the competence of any reviewer who would suggest that there is an equivalent of 400MHz difference between two-way SMP on a single-chip and two-way SMP on two chips. The only real difference is that dual-core gives slightly lower latencies when it comes to inter-core communication, and the HyperTransport bus is so fast that the difference is practically negligible.
The only valid comparisons here are:
2x Opteron 248 vs. 1x Opteron 175
4x Opteron 848 vs. 2x Opteron 275
There's also 8x Opteron 848 vs. 4x Opteron 875, which is impossible, and makes a very compelling argument in favour of dual-core, as while the Opteron 8xx can support 8 processors, no 8-socket boards exist. But 4-socket boards exist, and they may be able to take dual-core processors...
Oh, and it is all about the GHz. A dual-core 175 is effectively two single-core 148s on the same die, with some communications bridges added. Same goes for 275/248 and 875/848. They're the same processor. GHz is a perfectly valid measurement when you're comparing the same sub-architecture.
Or buy a GeForce FX 5200. They can do DX9, they can do hardware decoding, and some cards come without fans. Even the models that do come with fans don't have powerful ones.
And unlike the Radeon, it will actually have decent drivers.
You probably won't be seeing Venice for laptops. Venice will most likely be a Socket 939-only part, and laptops currently use Socket 754.
Rather, you should look for laptops with the Turion 64 processor, codenamed Lancaster. One site has a list of Turion 64 notebooks.
BTW, I was strongly considering an Athlon 64 laptop for a long time, but eventually decided against it. There was only one model that really matched the specs I wanted (a variant of the Acer Aspire 1520 that was sold everywhere except in the US), and it was a massive DTR brick. I eventually stopped chasing that pipe dream, and bought a thin-and-light Pentium M notebook: a Toshiba Tecra M3 to be exact. It works beautifully. It's my fastest machine (beating out my aging Athlon XP desktop), it had over 2 hours of battery life before I enabled Speedstep, and I'm sure it will get more now that it scales the frequency down when it's on battery.
It depends on where you're buying it from. Newegg, for example, lists core names with their CPUs: right now, they're selling two venice CPUs.
IIRC, Venice also refers to the E3 stepping (then again, I just woke up, so take that number with a grain of salt...), so you could look for that at other places.
Slashdot Mirror
Iie, Nihon ni iTunes Music Store wa nai.
Shimatta.
(Dammit...oh well, thanks anyway.)
I'm just curious--how many countries is iTunes available in? I especially want to know if there's an iTunes in Japan, and if so, how can an American sign up there?
I have no interest in most American music, so the American version of iTunes is pretty useless to me, but I would be very interested in buying songs from iTunes if there was a Japanese version.
As much as I find the concept of IDs repugnant, having IDs controlled by the national government is no different than having IDs controlled by the states.
I don't like it, but it's really no worse than the current situation. I've also read the part of the act that refers to the national IDs, and I didn't see anything about people being required to have them.
When has /. ever claimed to have high editorial standards? It's a site where potentially interesting stuff get's posted, not some professional journalism outlet.
If anything's hurting Slashdot, it's the posters, especially all the annoying morons who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork for this article.
Get a life.
Please leave Slashdot, little troll.
Go back to anti-slash, asshat.
How many times do I have to explain this to you, you stupid animal?
THESE ARE NOT RIGHTS. EVEN IF YOUR RIGHTS ARE BEING VIOLATED, YOU STILL HAVE THEM. People in China have the Right to freedom of speech, the government is simply violating that Right.
It's morons like you who shouldn't be allowed to breed.
They're using an old X-Men villain to fight RIM?
I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but it's probably at least two years old. He had that machine when I first met him in August 2003, and I don't know how long he had it before that.
Only nForce x20(-D) nForce2 IGP has integrated video. There are no versions of nForce3 or nForce4 that have integrated video, although IIRC, nVidia has said that an nForce4 IGP is coming soon.
FYI, nForce2 IGP has integrated GeForce4 MX-like video, and the original nForce x20(-D) models have integrated GeForce2 MX-like video. I say "-like", as the integrated solutions perform much worse than the discrete ones largely due to the lack of a dedicated memory bus.
There aren't many widely-available alternatives to PCI right now. AFAIK, there's PCI-X and PCI-Express. PCI-X is only viable in the server market, and PCI-Express cards that aren't video cards are practically nonexistant.
PCI-Express will replace PCI one day, but it will be a long time before PCI-Express is even a viable alternative for anything except video cards. Even in the mid-late 90s, when ISA was still around, there were plenty of PCI cards. Now, no one uses Serial and Parallel ports, and USB devices are all oer the place, but you still see Serial and Parallel ports on most boards. PCI Express is still in its infancy--PCI ain't gonna be obsolete for a long time. AGP, on the other hand, will die very soon, as the only area in which PCI Express has made progress is video cards.
Thank you. You worded that post a much better way then I'd ever be able to come up with myself.
As much as I hate HP, I have to admit that they've done one thing right: many of their desktop PCs use Asus motherboards.
I have one HP machine (no, I'm not stupid enough to pay money for one--my parents gave it to me when they got a new one), that has an Asus P4B266 motherboard inside it. It's currently in my closet being used as a server, and I have to say that the board's not bad...
Another old HP machine that used to belong to my parents (which is currently sitting half-dismantled on my bed) also has an Asus board--specifically, a P2B-VE (hey, I said it was an old machine).
There's one site that has a list of what motherboards come with what HP machines. A very large amount of them have Asus boards, and there are also quite a few machines that have MSI boards.
Contrast this with Dell. Dell not only makes their own boards, but they use all sorts of proprietary form factors. A friend of mine, who has a shitty Dell PC, wanted to install a new hard drive. His machine has only one internal 3.5" bay and one external 3.5" bay (taken up by the original hard drive and floppy drive, respectively), so he decided to remove the floppy drive to put the new hard drive in. It turns out that Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement. Yes, I said proprietary screw arrangement of all things. No storebought drive will fit into that machine's drive bays because of that. To hell with Dell. Also, we found out that Dell uses some kind of oddball heatsink/fan--it actually attaches to the case and funnels air through holes in the case. It's like a CPU fan and case fan in one device. Freaky.
As I said above, I hate HP, but I at least have some respect for them. I have no respect for Dell whatsoever.
There's nothing wrong with onboard sound. I use my motherboard's VIA AC'97 audio all the time, and the quality is perfectly fine. There's no hiss or buzz coming out of the speakers in the background.
In reality, there's almost always no difference between onboard sound and a discrete sound card.
Now, onboard video, on the other hand, is crap...
Awesome. Thanks for the tip.
Here's another suggestion: use a browser, such as Opera, that supports disabling the referrer field. Granted, the last time I really used Opera was in the 6.x days, so I don't know if it still has that feature. Worst comes to worst, find an old copy of 6.x.
The Good:
- Back/Forward Cache: Yes! Yes! Yes! This brings Firefox one step closer to the way I feel caching should be done. Back/forward should always pull pages from the cache (ignoring meta expire), and clicking links should always load the page from the server.
- Interface speedups: Great news. I love Firefox's rendering power, but the UI is slow as hell. This should help.
- Rendering errors fixed: More good news. While I can count the amount the number of times I've seen the Slashdot bug on my hands, better rendering is always a good thing.
- Focus follows mouse: One of the best changes. I've had so many issues with the focus not being where it's supposed to be. For example, I'll switch to another window or tab, but the focus is usually still in the old one. If this gets fixed, I'll jump for joy.
- Sanitise: More privacy == A Good Thing.
The Bad:
- Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom (the sole reason I installed TabBrowser Extensions was to get the browser tabs to appear on the bottom), but I don't mind them on the left side. But having them on top is just horrible. It looks prettier on the left too, especially with my theme, which places an image of a gecko in the background of the left pane. I'm also worried that my theme won't work with 1.1--I've been using an old version of the theme, as the author made a change a while back that uglified the icons, defeating the purpose of the theme (the version I use only uses two colours in the icons...). Officially, my theme only supports up to 0.9, but I've hacked it to allow 1.0 to install it--if 1.1 has any major UI changes like this one, it may cause my theme to choke.
- Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion. I like to be able to dick around in the preferences and not have to worry about screwing something up. It pissed me off to no end back when I used Galeon, and it'll piss me off in Firefox too. But, hey, I can tell that the Firefox devs have an agenda to screw up the preferences dialog as much as possible. They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?), they already flipped the OK and Cancel buttons, and now they're adding these shitty changes too. If I wanted to use a browser with Gnome's horrible HIG, I'd use Epiphany.
As someone who has been reading comics regularly since 1996, I can safely say that you are talking out of your ass.
Furthermore, I would advise you to seek professional help, as delusions of persecution are the major symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.
Also, as I've read that entire Thor story (and loved all of it except for the rushed ending, which wasn't the writer's fault, as he was pulled off the book when he was halfway finished writing the issue that ended up becoming the final part), I can safely say that the entire point of the story was that Thor was going down a very slippery slope. First his acts were beneficial, then he started becoming more arrogant, and then he started completely losing it...
Let's see...someone who's been using Morse Code for a large part of his long life vs. a teenager.
Of course the old man would win--he's got sheer experience on his side. Assuming SMS will still be around in the future, by the time the teenager is that old, she'll probably be just as fast.
You don't understand what the word "right" means. Rights cannot be granted or taken away by the whim of the people either.
Those are not rights. Those are government fiats. Rights are inalienable, can't be granted or taken away by any government, and only people can have rights.
Your comparisons are inherently wrong. It is impossible to have dual 152s. No one in their right mind would buy a single 275 or 875, nor would anyone in their right mind buy dual 852s. A 175 would give the exact same performance as a single 275 or 875. Two 852s would give the exact same performance as two 252s. The only difference between families is the maximum number of processors supported (and by "processors", I mean sockets, not cores).
Furthermore, I have serious doubts about the competence of any reviewer who would suggest that there is an equivalent of 400MHz difference between two-way SMP on a single-chip and two-way SMP on two chips. The only real difference is that dual-core gives slightly lower latencies when it comes to inter-core communication, and the HyperTransport bus is so fast that the difference is practically negligible.
The only valid comparisons here are:
2x Opteron 248 vs. 1x Opteron 175
4x Opteron 848 vs. 2x Opteron 275
There's also 8x Opteron 848 vs. 4x Opteron 875, which is impossible, and makes a very compelling argument in favour of dual-core, as while the Opteron 8xx can support 8 processors, no 8-socket boards exist. But 4-socket boards exist, and they may be able to take dual-core processors...
Oh, and it is all about the GHz. A dual-core 175 is effectively two single-core 148s on the same die, with some communications bridges added. Same goes for 275/248 and 875/848. They're the same processor. GHz is a perfectly valid measurement when you're comparing the same sub-architecture.
Or buy a GeForce FX 5200. They can do DX9, they can do hardware decoding, and some cards come without fans. Even the models that do come with fans don't have powerful ones.
And unlike the Radeon, it will actually have decent drivers.
You probably won't be seeing Venice for laptops. Venice will most likely be a Socket 939-only part, and laptops currently use Socket 754.
Rather, you should look for laptops with the Turion 64 processor, codenamed Lancaster. One site has a list of Turion 64 notebooks.
BTW, I was strongly considering an Athlon 64 laptop for a long time, but eventually decided against it. There was only one model that really matched the specs I wanted (a variant of the Acer Aspire 1520 that was sold everywhere except in the US), and it was a massive DTR brick. I eventually stopped chasing that pipe dream, and bought a thin-and-light Pentium M notebook: a Toshiba Tecra M3 to be exact. It works beautifully. It's my fastest machine (beating out my aging Athlon XP desktop), it had over 2 hours of battery life before I enabled Speedstep, and I'm sure it will get more now that it scales the frequency down when it's on battery.
It depends on where you're buying it from. Newegg, for example, lists core names with their CPUs: right now, they're selling two venice CPUs.
IIRC, Venice also refers to the E3 stepping (then again, I just woke up, so take that number with a grain of salt...), so you could look for that at other places.