Know anyone selling 15K rpm SATA drives? I know a lot of companies selling 15K rpm SCSI drives. If you're serious about RAID performance, and you can afford the really high end gear, why settle for an onboard controller anyway, when you could be running a serious controller with onboard cache?
I don't think we're doing any service to Australia by recognising that... company... as a legitimate business entity. They certainly don't behave like one.
I won't even go into the politics of the government selling to us a company which the government built using our own taxes. It's too depressing.
Re:PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable fro
on
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But haven't you read the marketing blurb from Sony about the Cell? It *is* 1000 times faster!
Re:Finally, on the same level as the PC, for now.
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Except that nVidia is already doing graphics for PS/3. Someone should call ATI and tell them to stop making all those PS/3 GPUs!
Actually if you look at real-time rendering on some graphics demos, the quality really isn't so far off. I believe there's more truth to that statement than hype, although you would definately only see such rendering in a very specific, optimised scenario.
Having said that, there is certainly a great deal of hype happening in the Sony camp. 4 Cells in a PS3, huh? Each Cell more powerful than the CPU in a PC? So what they're saying is the PS3 is more powerful than a 4-way Opteron. If that was the truth, I would expect the cost to be the same as well. It won't be, so the Cell isn't really going to be everything it's meant to be, unless Sony likes spending vast amounts of money making expensive CPUs and selling them at a loss.
iiNet will be announcing 2Mb+ plans within the next week or so as well. GB allowances will be better than they have been, but for Australia, 500GB is preposterous. The biggest plans I have seen have been in the region of 72GB total for 1.5MB plans, with a hefty price tag attached.
The reason prices are so high is above my head but I understand it has to do with the USA charging us for both incoming and outgoing traffic, whilst expecting our traffic to them to be free. Perhaps the FTA will help (not likely!). Someone please comment on this and provide some more info.
For foreign readers, telecommunications in Australia are monopolised by "Telstra", a formerly government owned body with a legal monopoly over the copper wiring throughout the country. Telstra, who see broadband (and hence, VoIP) as a threat to the vast revenue they obtain from local telephone calls, are deliberating holding back broadband within Australia, by preventing speeds over 1.5Mbit and by onselling DSL to third party providers at a port-only cost greater than Telstras retail plans. This of course makes it impossible for anyone to offer DSL at the same price as Telstra without making a loss. Great business model for Telstra, though.
Dell printers are unfortunately quite rare here in Australia, however Calidad do have some information. They can be contacted by email as well, links are in their website.
Thinking along the lines of the broader picture - Nalleys trying to change human behaviour in europe does nothing to clean the environment, develop more sustainable human technologies, improve lifespans, decrease human suffering... or anything useful for that matter. If anything it would increase the burden on society, creating a snack culture creates a fat culture, and a fat culture becomes a hospitalised culture.
It wouldn't even be good for the local potato farmers, because undoubtedly potato production would be outsourced to the lowest bidder.
So, no, the Louvre would be fine, the USA doesn't really operate exactly like it did in "Team America", American corporations are far more subtle and deeper reaching.
Use ink refills or third party cartridges, which will cost you a tiny fraction of what HP will be gouging you for. Don't let them tell you what to do or how much to pay, make your own decisions.
In Australia we are lucky to have a company called "Calidad" that sells a bunch of ink refills in various sizes and very low prices, and for printers with sealed/chipped cartridges, they sell replacement cartridges again at a fraction of the price. I'm not sure if Calidad has branches in other countries but I find it amazing how often people just put up with what corporations push onto them.
Whatever happened to good honest competition? The last 20 years or so it's been the consumers vs. the corporations, and the corps are winning.
You can hide the full application and make Firefox the only "visible" browser, but yes. IE stays forever. It's unfortunate because I'm very happy with Firefox. It's probably one of the best articles of software I have ever seen. Can't say the same for MSIE, though. Sorry Bill.
Windows update should stay in - All OS's must contain a self-updating system (user controlled and not dubious spyware of course). This will ensure that systems are patched up to date and reduce the hideous flow of worms and spam-zombie PC's we have to contend with.
There should be some text editor, as a text editor is a vital component of any OS.
As strange as it sounds, I can't imagine going back to a time when an OS couldn't have you browsing the internet immediately after installation. Most Linux distros do, Macs do, why shouldn't Windows? I do object to not being able to uninstall it... and why can't Dell or HP sell me a Windows PC with MSIE uninstalled, and Firefox on the desktop? Compaq, many years ago, shipped PCs with Netscape on them. Then MS stepped in and instructed them not to. Sigh, MS is a bad MS.
Yes, sanctions will be dropped if MS wins that appeal.
Yes, MS is being shifty, because they claim they have "already provided data to competitors" regarding their API's and so on (part of the immediate remedy), but I'm not sure if the samba guys are getting any benefit, and assuredly they are the ones who stand to gain the most. The full disclosure of windows APIs would be incredibly useful for someone writing interoperability code. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please!
That's the real issue here. What's moral? What's legal?
The crux is whether you consider MS to be a monopoly with no alternatives.
If you say "Yes, there is no alternative", then morally, and legally, Microsoft can't behave the way that they do. Their OS is also the people's OS, and by making the OS unfair, it harms the people, so laws apply for the protection of the people.
If you say, "No, there is no alternative", then morally, and legally, MS can do whatever they want. It's their OS, if they install software that sends every URL you click on straight to Bill Gate's inbox, that's completely fair, after all, you agreed to the EULA, and you have alternatives.
What's interesting in this case is that the EU has decided on the "Yes" option. Microsoft in turn have said "Well we don't care what you might do if you say Yes, but we do think you're wrong about that Yes, and we'll contest that."
The reason MS is going along so easily? They aren't. It's easier to say yes to the judge and keep on breaking laws behind the scenes, which is typical of MS. I would not expect them to comply with any of the remedy, not properly anyway.
This game will be just like C&C renegade. Cute for a few minutes, because you see all the buildings you built in the first game but from first person perspective! And they're huge and they look really cool! Then you play the game a bit and it's pedestrian and there's nothing new. Some players might dig out an old copy of Starcraft and play that.
What they really need to do is make the Starcraft 2 we're all waiting for. How big was Starcraft? It was *huge* for its time. How much does the games biz like to rehash old popular titles to scrape a bit more cash out of the general public? Loads! (See DooM3, HL2).
I feel like a need a tinfoil hat. Why isn't there a Starcraft sequel in an age of sequels? Something is not right.
Macs have run on proprietary OS's until very very recently, but now they run proprietary extensions to a reasonably open OS. I am sure you couldn't just give away OS/X the same way you can give away Knoppix on a CD to someone.
Average - When Apple don't produce their own components, they buy middle to high end components and rebadge them. Average is a very adequate description.
Underpowered - Reviewing the link provided zealously by the parent, one can see that, as per typical Apple philosophy, no hard facts or trustworthy benchmarks are provided, aside from a slightly amusing "10% faster than.. an older mac". Realisticly, in terms of IPC the G3 in the article was a better performer, it's just a shame that the intel gear of the time was orders of magnitude faster. Great link for proving my point, though.
Three times the price - This is an exaggeration on my part. Usually it's more like 150%-200% the price of an equivalently performing Dell/HP. A quick look around will show you can get a better laptop than the iBook in terms of performance for a few hundred dollars cheaper than the prices on that website - again confirming my general gist, thankyou.
It's not easy to, although alcohol also happens to have that whole addiction thing going on with it. Not to mention the cost in human lives from drink driving - not directly the fault of alcohol I must admit, but regrettably darwinism does not apply because often perfectly fit healthy people die as victims of DUI.
It's more likely certain side effects of the alcohol, reducing blood pressure and so on.
Some wines contain tanins (acids) that are considered reasonably healthy, although I know some people have allergies to the tanins, and become itchy and red from drinking red wine.
Antioxidants are also present in some alcoholic beverages.
Alcohol, from a chemical sense, is a poison. So before you quaff a nice stiff poisonous drink and damage your stomach, liver and organs, blur your eyesight and reduce your chances of driving home successfully, what do we say to our friends?
The guy was a bit of a tool. For instance, flight sims - he completely missed the Forgotten Battles game that was released. Based on the IL2 engine, this flight sim according to all the flight sim addicts I know is the best commercial combat flight sim - ever.
When mentioning that this year we've seen Far Cry, DooM3 *and* HL2 all in the same year, he says this year was a disappointment? Hardly! Those were all fantastic games. Far Cry and DooM3 will have the largest outstanding influence, because the Crytek engine and the DooM3 engine are amazing technical masterpieces. With Quake 4 coming out this year based on the DooM3 engine, and the development being done by the legendary Raven software, it can only be a winner.
Dawn of War and BFME are excellent RTS games, although we could have used more than just those. Westwood have been extremely closed up about this genre and it's a big shame. I think next year, a new Red Alert game may be released based on the Generals engine.
RPGs were definately the worst hit, I can't think of any single shining example of how RPGs should be from this year. Having said that, we can look forward to Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in 2006. The lure of MMORPG subscription cash has sucked all of the development efforts in RPGs away from classic RPGs that anyone can enjoy, marginalising RPGs to the evercrack addicts who are happy to treadmill their lives away.
There is only one impressive thing about the Shuffle and the Mini-mac that highlights a new marketing move by Apple that might finally allow me to stop hating them - the price.
Apple has always dressed up average, underpowered personal computer components, slapped a white case around them, dropped a proprietary OS on them and sold them at three times the price to people who'll gladly pay three times the price for a computer because it's from Apple and it's "Blueberry" or whatever fruit flavour is popular.
I'd consider buying one of these newer, cheaper products because of the price and functionality. For a desktop PC I'd never own a Mac, simply because I'm a gamer, I need computational power and flexibility with my desktop (I want the choice between *nix and Windows, something an Apple can't provide). Not to mention the range of games available.
Having said that, I think Apple has screwed up with the Mac mini. All they had to do was add a TOSLINK/spdif audio out + s-video for the hi-fi enthusiasts and they would *KILL* the home theatre market. Modded X-box? No. Shuttle IPC? No. Micro-ATX? Nowhere near. It's so small it would run perfectly in a hifi stack, and with the CPU apple put in it, it's only good for video playback or web browsing or little functions like that. Unfortunately, there might not be enough CPU for on the fly video encoding, and it could use an imbedded HDTV tuner.
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Know anyone selling 15K rpm SATA drives? I know a lot of companies selling 15K rpm SCSI drives. If you're serious about RAID performance, and you can afford the really high end gear, why settle for an onboard controller anyway, when you could be running a serious controller with onboard cache?
I don't think we're doing any service to Australia by recognising that... company... as a legitimate business entity. They certainly don't behave like one.
I won't even go into the politics of the government selling to us a company which the government built using our own taxes. It's too depressing.
But haven't you read the marketing blurb from Sony about the Cell? It *is* 1000 times faster!
Except that nVidia is already doing graphics for PS/3. Someone should call ATI and tell them to stop making all those PS/3 GPUs!
Actually if you look at real-time rendering on some graphics demos, the quality really isn't so far off. I believe there's more truth to that statement than hype, although you would definately only see such rendering in a very specific, optimised scenario.
Having said that, there is certainly a great deal of hype happening in the Sony camp. 4 Cells in a PS3, huh? Each Cell more powerful than the CPU in a PC? So what they're saying is the PS3 is more powerful than a 4-way Opteron. If that was the truth, I would expect the cost to be the same as well. It won't be, so the Cell isn't really going to be everything it's meant to be, unless Sony likes spending vast amounts of money making expensive CPUs and selling them at a loss.
So if you're not sure which hotel you want to stay in when you go to the US, they'll throw you out?
iiNet will be announcing 2Mb+ plans within the next week or so as well. GB allowances will be better than they have been, but for Australia, 500GB is preposterous. The biggest plans I have seen have been in the region of 72GB total for 1.5MB plans, with a hefty price tag attached.
The reason prices are so high is above my head but I understand it has to do with the USA charging us for both incoming and outgoing traffic, whilst expecting our traffic to them to be free. Perhaps the FTA will help (not likely!). Someone please comment on this and provide some more info.
For foreign readers, telecommunications in Australia are monopolised by "Telstra", a formerly government owned body with a legal monopoly over the copper wiring throughout the country. Telstra, who see broadband (and hence, VoIP) as a threat to the vast revenue they obtain from local telephone calls, are deliberating holding back broadband within Australia, by preventing speeds over 1.5Mbit and by onselling DSL to third party providers at a port-only cost greater than Telstras retail plans. This of course makes it impossible for anyone to offer DSL at the same price as Telstra without making a loss. Great business model for Telstra, though.
Dell printers are unfortunately quite rare here in Australia, however Calidad do have some information. They can be contacted by email as well, links are in their website.
Thinking along the lines of the broader picture - Nalleys trying to change human behaviour in europe does nothing to clean the environment, develop more sustainable human technologies, improve lifespans, decrease human suffering... or anything useful for that matter. If anything it would increase the burden on society, creating a snack culture creates a fat culture, and a fat culture becomes a hospitalised culture.
It wouldn't even be good for the local potato farmers, because undoubtedly potato production would be outsourced to the lowest bidder.
So, no, the Louvre would be fine, the USA doesn't really operate exactly like it did in "Team America", American corporations are far more subtle and deeper reaching.
Use ink refills or third party cartridges, which will cost you a tiny fraction of what HP will be gouging you for. Don't let them tell you what to do or how much to pay, make your own decisions.
In Australia we are lucky to have a company called "Calidad" that sells a bunch of ink refills in various sizes and very low prices, and for printers with sealed/chipped cartridges, they sell replacement cartridges again at a fraction of the price. I'm not sure if Calidad has branches in other countries but I find it amazing how often people just put up with what corporations push onto them.
Whatever happened to good honest competition? The last 20 years or so it's been the consumers vs. the corporations, and the corps are winning.
You can hide the full application and make Firefox the only "visible" browser, but yes. IE stays forever. It's unfortunate because I'm very happy with Firefox. It's probably one of the best articles of software I have ever seen. Can't say the same for MSIE, though. Sorry Bill.
Windows update should stay in - All OS's must contain a self-updating system (user controlled and not dubious spyware of course). This will ensure that systems are patched up to date and reduce the hideous flow of worms and spam-zombie PC's we have to contend with.
There should be some text editor, as a text editor is a vital component of any OS.
As strange as it sounds, I can't imagine going back to a time when an OS couldn't have you browsing the internet immediately after installation. Most Linux distros do, Macs do, why shouldn't Windows? I do object to not being able to uninstall it... and why can't Dell or HP sell me a Windows PC with MSIE uninstalled, and Firefox on the desktop? Compaq, many years ago, shipped PCs with Netscape on them. Then MS stepped in and instructed them not to. Sigh, MS is a bad MS.
Yes, sanctions will be dropped if MS wins that appeal.
Yes, MS is being shifty, because they claim they have "already provided data to competitors" regarding their API's and so on (part of the immediate remedy), but I'm not sure if the samba guys are getting any benefit, and assuredly they are the ones who stand to gain the most. The full disclosure of windows APIs would be incredibly useful for someone writing interoperability code. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please!
That's completely fair. WMV is a proprietary codec, and MS is restricting playback to ensure there is no challenge to their DRM regime.
Of course, nobody said using WMV to encode *anything* was a good idea in the first place, because there are more portable DRM free formats.
That's the real issue here. What's moral? What's legal?
The crux is whether you consider MS to be a monopoly with no alternatives.
If you say "Yes, there is no alternative", then morally, and legally, Microsoft can't behave the way that they do. Their OS is also the people's OS, and by making the OS unfair, it harms the people, so laws apply for the protection of the people.
If you say, "No, there is no alternative", then morally, and legally, MS can do whatever they want. It's their OS, if they install software that sends every URL you click on straight to Bill Gate's inbox, that's completely fair, after all, you agreed to the EULA, and you have alternatives.
What's interesting in this case is that the EU has decided on the "Yes" option. Microsoft in turn have said "Well we don't care what you might do if you say Yes, but we do think you're wrong about that Yes, and we'll contest that."
The reason MS is going along so easily? They aren't. It's easier to say yes to the judge and keep on breaking laws behind the scenes, which is typical of MS. I would not expect them to comply with any of the remedy, not properly anyway.
This game will be just like C&C renegade. Cute for a few minutes, because you see all the buildings you built in the first game but from first person perspective! And they're huge and they look really cool! Then you play the game a bit and it's pedestrian and there's nothing new. Some players might dig out an old copy of Starcraft and play that.
What they really need to do is make the Starcraft 2 we're all waiting for. How big was Starcraft? It was *huge* for its time. How much does the games biz like to rehash old popular titles to scrape a bit more cash out of the general public? Loads! (See DooM3, HL2).
I feel like a need a tinfoil hat. Why isn't there a Starcraft sequel in an age of sequels? Something is not right.
Macs have run on proprietary OS's until very very recently, but now they run proprietary extensions to a reasonably open OS. I am sure you couldn't just give away OS/X the same way you can give away Knoppix on a CD to someone.
Average - When Apple don't produce their own components, they buy middle to high end components and rebadge them. Average is a very adequate description.
Underpowered - Reviewing the link provided zealously by the parent, one can see that, as per typical Apple philosophy, no hard facts or trustworthy benchmarks are provided, aside from a slightly amusing "10% faster than.. an older mac". Realisticly, in terms of IPC the G3 in the article was a better performer, it's just a shame that the intel gear of the time was orders of magnitude faster. Great link for proving my point, though.
Three times the price - This is an exaggeration on my part. Usually it's more like 150%-200% the price of an equivalently performing Dell/HP. A quick look around will show you can get a better laptop than the iBook in terms of performance for a few hundred dollars cheaper than the prices on that website - again confirming my general gist, thankyou.
It's not easy to, although alcohol also happens to have that whole addiction thing going on with it. Not to mention the cost in human lives from drink driving - not directly the fault of alcohol I must admit, but regrettably darwinism does not apply because often perfectly fit healthy people die as victims of DUI.
It's more likely certain side effects of the alcohol, reducing blood pressure and so on.
Some wines contain tanins (acids) that are considered reasonably healthy, although I know some people have allergies to the tanins, and become itchy and red from drinking red wine.
Antioxidants are also present in some alcoholic beverages.
Moderation is incredibly important however.
Sorry, contributing factor to diabetes.
Alcohol, from a chemical sense, is a poison. So before you quaff a nice stiff poisonous drink and damage your stomach, liver and organs, blur your eyesight and reduce your chances of driving home successfully, what do we say to our friends?
Good health!
It damages your stomach lining, damages your liver and can cause diabetes, increases your weight, and increases your risk of bowel cancer.
Moderation is a very good idea.
The guy was a bit of a tool. For instance, flight sims - he completely missed the Forgotten Battles game that was released. Based on the IL2 engine, this flight sim according to all the flight sim addicts I know is the best commercial combat flight sim - ever.
When mentioning that this year we've seen Far Cry, DooM3 *and* HL2 all in the same year, he says this year was a disappointment? Hardly! Those were all fantastic games. Far Cry and DooM3 will have the largest outstanding influence, because the Crytek engine and the DooM3 engine are amazing technical masterpieces. With Quake 4 coming out this year based on the DooM3 engine, and the development being done by the legendary Raven software, it can only be a winner.
Dawn of War and BFME are excellent RTS games, although we could have used more than just those. Westwood have been extremely closed up about this genre and it's a big shame. I think next year, a new Red Alert game may be released based on the Generals engine.
RPGs were definately the worst hit, I can't think of any single shining example of how RPGs should be from this year. Having said that, we can look forward to Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in 2006. The lure of MMORPG subscription cash has sucked all of the development efforts in RPGs away from classic RPGs that anyone can enjoy, marginalising RPGs to the evercrack addicts who are happy to treadmill their lives away.
An impressive move by Apple.
There is only one impressive thing about the Shuffle and the Mini-mac that highlights a new marketing move by Apple that might finally allow me to stop hating them - the price.
Apple has always dressed up average, underpowered personal computer components, slapped a white case around them, dropped a proprietary OS on them and sold them at three times the price to people who'll gladly pay three times the price for a computer because it's from Apple and it's "Blueberry" or whatever fruit flavour is popular.
I'd consider buying one of these newer, cheaper products because of the price and functionality. For a desktop PC I'd never own a Mac, simply because I'm a gamer, I need computational power and flexibility with my desktop (I want the choice between *nix and Windows, something an Apple can't provide). Not to mention the range of games available.
Having said that, I think Apple has screwed up with the Mac mini. All they had to do was add a TOSLINK/spdif audio out + s-video for the hi-fi enthusiasts and they would *KILL* the home theatre market. Modded X-box? No. Shuttle IPC? No. Micro-ATX? Nowhere near. It's so small it would run perfectly in a hifi stack, and with the CPU apple put in it, it's only good for video playback or web browsing or little functions like that. Unfortunately, there might not be enough CPU for on the fly video encoding, and it could use an imbedded HDTV tuner.
I'll be staying with George W Bush. He has some fancy white house in Washington.
But seriously I'd probably just tell them I didn't know. I might go find a hotel I liked and stay in that. What are they going to say?