I used to work as a sysadmin for one of the big 401k companies, and it was actually our departmental policy to have a large, 23 page form/mini-book that needed to be completed in its entirely prior to any server work being performed. This was intentional, to help minimize the bullshit requests from the important ones. We stayed busy enough trying to keep the infrastructure running, and to be constantly approached with new requests for new server builds, "minor upgrades", etc., while certainly justified in many instances, was just overwhelming. Management would not put more money in to hiring more resources, so we were left to come up with our own solution. If you truly had a server that needed an additional 4gigs of RAM, then you would spend the time to fill this form out, have various managers sign off, and then this would demonstrate to us that this truly was important, and that proper people had authorized it and were aware of what was going on. This was also a CYA tactic, as in any large organization, much of the time left hand does not know what right is doing. This process truly did help, and the CYA aspect actually helped as well in a few situations where one VP was bitching about a server being down for 20 minutes at 2am and wanting heads to roll, only to show him that another of his peers specifically requested the server be down for an upgrade/build out.
Don't mistake this for me trying to justify the type of hell people might go through to get this sort of thing done, but just trying to add a bit of perspective on it.
I agree with you that focusing on putting out a high end product "with meticulous attention to detail and care" will certainly be of high benefit to them, and I couldn't agree more that I would love to be able to trust knowing that when I buy a Sony product, I am getting that legendary Sony quality that seems to have gone noticably missing over the past several years.
The way the market forces work, I think this happens to a lot of companies. Lets continue with Sony - they create a great, well made, well thought out product. People come to find that these products from Sony are highly reliable, and last quite a long time. They also find they pay more money for the product. This is a reasonable tradeoff for quality for many people who can afford to make such a decision. Eventually, everyone owns said product, and so the consumer does not need to buy another one. Being as the company is highly successful and wants to continue to grow and prosper, they see the market starting to slow since everyone now owns there product. How can they possibly grow further? Start to produce lower end, more affordable lines of product and market them to the next segment down (Best Buy or Circuit City). More products sold which helps the bottom line and continues to demonstrate growth. Soon they find that you can add even more customers if you come out with a "Walmart line". The typical market segment that shops at Walmart are excited at the prospect of owning a quality Sony product for such a cheap competitive price compared to say, Daewoo or whatever offbrand they have.
I guess what I'm saying is companies often loose focus of what made them great in an effort to continue to grow and prosper. I can make the same argument for the way I am seeing Toyota start to go with some vehicles (obviously people would argue against me on this), and I'm sure there are numerous other examples.
Is the reasonable answer that a company should just focus on creating a quality, competitive product that is well thought out and stay with this philisophy? Certainly, but enormous forces are going against most companies to continue to grow the market and, in particular, raise the stock value. A publicly traded company must grow to attract investors. Stay private, and the company only needs to follow the philosphies of its owners.
I would be curious to see the legal foundation for which they would base this. IANAL, but I would tend to think in criminal law, this would start to fall over more into strict liablity crimes in that simply sharing the file out is in and of itself a crime, and that your intent does not matter (i.e. sex with a minor does not require intent, just the fact you slept with them makes you guilty, sale to underage person of liquor makes you guilty regardless of knowledge age, etc).
From a civil point of view, they would still be required to demonstrate an actual monetary loss. This does not actually occur until someone downloads the content from the share or whatever. No judge is going to accept that hypothetically 10,000 people could have copied the file because the share was open, because it simply did not factually happen. Even if I deliberately share a copyrighted material for all the world to access, until someone actually accesses it, I have not deprived the owner of the material of any monetary value or harmed their copyright.
But just my opinion...
"Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine."
Why is this surprising? You figure out exactly what you want to do, and you find the best tool towards accomplishing that goal. I am the head sysadmin for a legal consulting firm, and whenever I need a new server, I first lay out a clear list of what needs to be done, and then weigh that against the software available. Then, we factor in what makes the most sense against the budget. Increasingly, as Linux matures and both more software and drivers become available, I am finding less reason NOT to use it when going down the comparison list. If I were to try and ram it through specifically because of my own personal views of Microsoft, I would be doing my employer a great disservice and probably be considered bad at my job. For example, my employer still loves Microsoft SQL, it meets there needs quite well, so that comparison is easy, and Windows wins on that comparison. However, as the open source SQL flavors continue to mature on Linux, I (as well as our developers) will find less reason not to consider their usage in business critical applications.
I read the article, and am a sysadmin, and really, what purpose would such a position serve? Is there a specific job description of responsibilities for the position? The article indicates that the individual would "coordinate the response" to an Internet attack, but at what level do they start to become involved, and really, with as dynamic as the Internet is and companies continually coming and going, being bought out, etc., how would they constantly maintain communications with all the players? As soon as any company receives a denial of service, do they contact the individual in this position so they can see if its important enough to warrant a coordinated response? If so, does the person in the position receive thousands of emails daily from concerned sysadmin's and filter through this? And even if they warrant my situation critical, what are they going to do for me? I already have the contact info for my upstream provider, and certainly they will be one of the first people I will be calling and working with on my own. If it is a major issue, I would expect they would be working with their upstream provider, etc. And back to coordinating with specific companies - our company had an international corporate VPN solution through AT&T, and getting support on this was a stellar effort for all involved, as within AT&T itself they were often confused about what "group" owned the VPN solution, and it was a consistently major undertaking to find the group to get us any help.
It sounds like a position with little purpose. Not that this would be surprising...
Whoever flagged you as insightful should be ashamed of themselves. A standard provides a common goal for whomever is interested to work towards. Whether or not the majority work towards the goal does not make it any less of a standard. The short lived DIVX player from Circuit City was a standard, as there exists many different standards for DVDs. Whether or not the majority of devices embrace such a standard does not refute the fact that it exists. Many different types of standards start out in the minority, and many remain so, but they still serve a purpose.
Anything that promotes some form of application commonality amongst the various Linux distributions certainly cannot be a bad thing.
You are not far from the truth. It appears that our economy is driven more towards large companies now simply churning out product at the most competitive rate possible, probably because of increasing global pressures on the bottom line. Historically, American companies would churn out product, but also budget departments to come out with many great new innovative ideas in-house. R&D will affect this bottom line. When you spent $50 million dollars to research a new idea, and then bring it to market, shortly afterwards a Chinese knockoff shows up that costs 1/3 the price, and they never even had to put any money into R&D. To compete against this notion, there is the desire to eliminate the R&D from the budget to make your pricing more competitive. For example, Dell does not innovate, it simply churns out product. Compaq at one time would innovate and come out with new ideas, yet Dell has continually been taking away marketshare from them. Another example, Toyota and Honda market their own internally designed hybrid vehicles. Ford has not kept up on this with their own R&D, and so instead is licensing the hybrid technology from Toyota.
Innovation these days instead comes from small companies, whom are promptly snapped up at the sight of a great new design. The modern economy where large companies dominate most factions of the corporate landscape prevent these small companies from ever competing on a level playing field, so for many of them, the ultimate success/goal is to get bought out. It can be argued either way whether this is better or worse. For example, the found of Amgen, a drug company, founded his company after becoming frustrated with trying to perform some cutting edge R&D work at another large corporate drug company. Many of that particular company's processes and procedures inhibited the ability for many scientists to freely think. He seized the opportunity to instead start a small company in a less desirable area, and created an atmosphere that was very open and really promoted new developments as its core purpose. Surely this is a more efficient use of money towards R&D. Instead of these same scientists needing to jump through various corporate hoops to meet strict company requirements, they had an open lab atmosphere and were able to do some pretty amazing things.
I guess I don't understand who would really work on this? I am a horrible programmer these days, so I admittedly have little to contribute to open source development, but if I were a participant, why would I want to dedicate my own personal free time to helping build a DRM product for Hollywood and all the music companies to use? I can see the incentive for the media companies or computer companies to put money up to come up with something like this to profit. I can only imagine someone would be interested in working on this with their own time and resources only under the condition that it became a viable standard that was actually being actively used, in which case there would be interest in seeing Linux or the likes capable of handling it.
That being said, it would be nice to have a documented standard openly available for anyone to understand and code against.
So the main reasoning this group is forwarding this new "interface standard" is not to improve your video quality, nor to make the cable smaller or easier to manage. Sure, those certainly are nice features, but it is not why they developed this new standard. From VESA:
"The promoter group based their development efforts on the premise that the PC industry requires a ubiquitous digital interface with optional content protection that can be deployed widely at minimum cost to enable broad access to premium content, according to Miller. "
In this day and age of everyone trying to patent this, litigate that, and everything in between, it's refreshing to see a company, that really doesn't have any motive to make any money off of this, AND in an industry where this concept seems somewhat unusual, release its source code, instead of letting this go off into some useless void. Actions like can only help the industry as a whole, as some burgeoning programmer will have many sleepless nights ahead spending his/her own time learning the tips and tricks employed in this source code.
Thank you.
Understood, but the facts in the article state that this seems like no accident (by the consistent adding of 2Mhz when scaling the speed), which is noteworthy. I am not a motherboard designer, so I admittedly don't understand what the acceptable threshholds of errors are in these sorts of scenarios, so at what point is the deviation acceptable? If ABit comes out with a motherboard that "accidently" is 4Mhz faster, and the processor then ends up running 66Mhz faster, is that then unacceptable, or still acceptable as a general standard? Does such a standard exist?
But when I purchase this motheboard from newegg, designed as a package with all those components together, and it is advertised as an 800Mhz FSB, I certainly understand there is a certain margin of error. A 2Mhz deviation may fall within expected safe parameters, but this deviation also affect other components - i.e. from the article, the processor runs 33Mhz faster, and memory is running at roughly 3Mhz faster. Further, manually scaling the speed up on this mobo, the article states it consistently is 2Mhz above the supplied number. If I want those components to run faster/hotter, then let me be the one choosing to do so, or advertise your motherboard for what it is - an 802Mhz FSB. This just opens up a whole pandoras box, so least they could be honest - and let ABit come out with an 804Mhz FSB next.
For those who don't bother to read TFA and complain that 2Mhz is not a big deal - "An increase of 2MHz may not sound like much, but it's reflected in both processor and memory clock speeds as well. For example, in our Pentium 4 630 testbed, that meant an increase in processor clock speed of about 33MHz as well as a boost in memory speed of about 3.3MHz."
I laughed when I read your post, as I was thinking the same thing.
For years there has been this certain drive to turn the web browser into more of an "application" platform, and most attempts I have seen were a failure in one way or another (poor execution speed, strict browser requirements, buggy interface, random crashing, inconsistent experience with different browsers or even different versions of same browser, etc.). And for the countless billions of web pages out there, and the very limited scope of those that I have seen myself, I have only seen two web-based "applications" that impressed me with a certain wow factor - Outlook Web Access, and Google Maps.
This just seems like something new for the guys who keep pushing the web browser as a viable application platform to grab onto to sell books and libraries until the next acronym comes flying by. Meanwhile, I am still both impressed and amazed at the amount of information available now, compared to 10 years ago, simply by just using my browser as the information tool it was originally intended. In fact, I have no idea how I would have even accomplished my job 10 years ago without it.
In weighing what would be cheaper for me after my recent move, I had one option of DSL service combined with a Verizon "Freedom" package with unlimited local and LD calling for $50, plus $30 a month for DSL ($80 a month combined). The other option I had to add these same features to my Comcast digital cable (which I would get regardless, and I believe most people do these days), which would be $43 a month for high speed Internet, as well as $25 a month for Vonage to add unlimited phone capabilities, for a total of $68. On top of the Internet speed from Comcast being faster, this comes out to $12 a month cheaper.
So while cheap broadband might not necessarily be here, the savings are there for many people.
On a side note, non-technical friends are mildly interested in how this works, and my cost savings, and never discount word of mouth.
The history of Hollywood and gaming has really been a mixed blessing. We have Lucasfilm Games Ltd, which came out with such imaginative, original games as Sam & Max, Monkey Island (the first 2 anyhow), then even branched into cross-licensing an Indiana Jones adventure-RPG game that was very decent for its time, and even a few early Star Wars games that were entertaining.
With exception to those few rare early gems, I find that most games that stem from a movie just plain, well, suck. This seems to be related my desire to find a game that is both creative AND fun, and the majority of the time they lack the former, and its a 30/70 shot if they get anywhere near the later. Rather, most games of this genre stick with a tried and tested formula in order to try and cash in maximum revenue from the accompying movie franchise.
Is it possible for some great games to come from movie franchises? You bet - but as long as Hollywood keeps sticking with the cookie-cutter mentality with their movies (i.e. more special effects! more horror movies this year, then comedies next!), why should we expect anything better from their influence on games?
Warren adds the interesting perspective of having been a member of a number of studios that were once successful, and eventually ended up closing.
The days of Lord British and Chuckles sitting around and making Autoduel together are no more, and eventually grew into Roberts Williams, husband Ken, and a few artists bringing us some wonderful games at a small company called Sierra. This then grew into a small team including a few programmers, a few graphics artists, a seperate sound tech, and maybe a director of development at a company called Lucasfilm, Access Software, or you name it. Then a producer came in, special 3d effects artist, etc. and Lucasfilm became LucasArts, Sierra was bought out, etc. etc. The money to compete in the game market these days may only be available from Hollywood studios (unless you sign your soul to EA).
I own a Sony CD burner, and decide to burn a VideoCD home movie to a blank Sony CD. I run over to put my newly minted VideoCD into my Sony DVD player, which supports VideoCD along with a host of other formats, only to be told that it will not play the disc. I test it at a friends house and it works in his el'cheapo import player. I call Sony and ask, and they basically say it won't play burned discs of any sort, even made in there own drives on their own materials. They have left me to go find a DVD player made in a third world country for pennies that is hackable just so I can play some home movies recorded on a modern technology. I might as well just put the shit back on VHS tape.
Massachusetts has a similar law already, and so some retailers try and skirt it by indicating its actually an ATM-like card, and not an actual "gift card".
Labelled funny, but at one point the firm I work for was contracted out by a law firm (one of many) representing a certain large company defending itself from SCO. The law firm had an idea similar to this - print out the source code to a particular SCO distribution, including all accompying applications, box it up, and bring it to court. Your point is not lost beyond the geek community. We roughly estimated roughly 70 legal boxes, each filled with printouts. We had a U-Haul ready for this rush job, but at the last second it was decided against.
"eventually will replace what is today only a Usenet archive."
While Usenet is filled with a lot of wonderful porn and crap these days, since its not really controlled by a single corporate entity, its gives you more freedom of expression. While the google forums might have less crap, google doesn't always play nice - such as with the dinosaur drawing site gewgle (http://www.chillingeffects.org/domain/notice.cgi? NoticeID=575). Usenet will always truly have its place.
Being early in the morning and only on my second cup of coffee, I threw my slashdot goggles on and in my quick skimming thought it said "sponsored by the National Gestapo-Intelligence Agency". I saw the.mil link, and began pondering a DHS conspiracy.
They advertise extensive file support, and taking a quick peak at a few songs, DRM only seems to be predominant for AAC and WMA files (big surprise there).
They claim support for:
Napster WMA
Musicmatch WMA
Audible AA
MusicRebellion WMA
RealRhapsody WMA
eMusic MP3
iTunes AAC
Live Downloads MP3
RealPlayer RAX
Wal-Mart WMA
Bleep MP3
Streamwaves WMA
Audio Lunchbox MP3, OGG and
BuyMusic WMA
What, no Sony?:)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work as a sysadmin for one of the big 401k companies, and it was actually our departmental policy to have a large, 23 page form/mini-book that needed to be completed in its entirely prior to any server work being performed. This was intentional, to help minimize the bullshit requests from the important ones. We stayed busy enough trying to keep the infrastructure running, and to be constantly approached with new requests for new server builds, "minor upgrades", etc., while certainly justified in many instances, was just overwhelming. Management would not put more money in to hiring more resources, so we were left to come up with our own solution. If you truly had a server that needed an additional 4gigs of RAM, then you would spend the time to fill this form out, have various managers sign off, and then this would demonstrate to us that this truly was important, and that proper people had authorized it and were aware of what was going on. This was also a CYA tactic, as in any large organization, much of the time left hand does not know what right is doing. This process truly did help, and the CYA aspect actually helped as well in a few situations where one VP was bitching about a server being down for 20 minutes at 2am and wanting heads to roll, only to show him that another of his peers specifically requested the server be down for an upgrade/build out.
Don't mistake this for me trying to justify the type of hell people might go through to get this sort of thing done, but just trying to add a bit of perspective on it.
I agree with you that focusing on putting out a high end product "with meticulous attention to detail and care" will certainly be of high benefit to them, and I couldn't agree more that I would love to be able to trust knowing that when I buy a Sony product, I am getting that legendary Sony quality that seems to have gone noticably missing over the past several years.
The way the market forces work, I think this happens to a lot of companies. Lets continue with Sony - they create a great, well made, well thought out product. People come to find that these products from Sony are highly reliable, and last quite a long time. They also find they pay more money for the product. This is a reasonable tradeoff for quality for many people who can afford to make such a decision. Eventually, everyone owns said product, and so the consumer does not need to buy another one. Being as the company is highly successful and wants to continue to grow and prosper, they see the market starting to slow since everyone now owns there product. How can they possibly grow further? Start to produce lower end, more affordable lines of product and market them to the next segment down (Best Buy or Circuit City). More products sold which helps the bottom line and continues to demonstrate growth. Soon they find that you can add even more customers if you come out with a "Walmart line". The typical market segment that shops at Walmart are excited at the prospect of owning a quality Sony product for such a cheap competitive price compared to say, Daewoo or whatever offbrand they have.
I guess what I'm saying is companies often loose focus of what made them great in an effort to continue to grow and prosper. I can make the same argument for the way I am seeing Toyota start to go with some vehicles (obviously people would argue against me on this), and I'm sure there are numerous other examples.
Is the reasonable answer that a company should just focus on creating a quality, competitive product that is well thought out and stay with this philisophy? Certainly, but enormous forces are going against most companies to continue to grow the market and, in particular, raise the stock value. A publicly traded company must grow to attract investors. Stay private, and the company only needs to follow the philosphies of its owners.
I would be curious to see the legal foundation for which they would base this. IANAL, but I would tend to think in criminal law, this would start to fall over more into strict liablity crimes in that simply sharing the file out is in and of itself a crime, and that your intent does not matter (i.e. sex with a minor does not require intent, just the fact you slept with them makes you guilty, sale to underage person of liquor makes you guilty regardless of knowledge age, etc). ...
From a civil point of view, they would still be required to demonstrate an actual monetary loss. This does not actually occur until someone downloads the content from the share or whatever. No judge is going to accept that hypothetically 10,000 people could have copied the file because the share was open, because it simply did not factually happen. Even if I deliberately share a copyrighted material for all the world to access, until someone actually accesses it, I have not deprived the owner of the material of any monetary value or harmed their copyright. But just my opinion
"Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine."
Why is this surprising? You figure out exactly what you want to do, and you find the best tool towards accomplishing that goal. I am the head sysadmin for a legal consulting firm, and whenever I need a new server, I first lay out a clear list of what needs to be done, and then weigh that against the software available. Then, we factor in what makes the most sense against the budget. Increasingly, as Linux matures and both more software and drivers become available, I am finding less reason NOT to use it when going down the comparison list. If I were to try and ram it through specifically because of my own personal views of Microsoft, I would be doing my employer a great disservice and probably be considered bad at my job. For example, my employer still loves Microsoft SQL, it meets there needs quite well, so that comparison is easy, and Windows wins on that comparison. However, as the open source SQL flavors continue to mature on Linux, I (as well as our developers) will find less reason not to consider their usage in business critical applications.
I read the article, and am a sysadmin, and really, what purpose would such a position serve? Is there a specific job description of responsibilities for the position? The article indicates that the individual would "coordinate the response" to an Internet attack, but at what level do they start to become involved, and really, with as dynamic as the Internet is and companies continually coming and going, being bought out, etc., how would they constantly maintain communications with all the players? As soon as any company receives a denial of service, do they contact the individual in this position so they can see if its important enough to warrant a coordinated response? If so, does the person in the position receive thousands of emails daily from concerned sysadmin's and filter through this? And even if they warrant my situation critical, what are they going to do for me? I already have the contact info for my upstream provider, and certainly they will be one of the first people I will be calling and working with on my own. If it is a major issue, I would expect they would be working with their upstream provider, etc. And back to coordinating with specific companies - our company had an international corporate VPN solution through AT&T, and getting support on this was a stellar effort for all involved, as within AT&T itself they were often confused about what "group" owned the VPN solution, and it was a consistently major undertaking to find the group to get us any help. It sounds like a position with little purpose. Not that this would be surprising...
Whoever flagged you as insightful should be ashamed of themselves. A standard provides a common goal for whomever is interested to work towards. Whether or not the majority work towards the goal does not make it any less of a standard. The short lived DIVX player from Circuit City was a standard, as there exists many different standards for DVDs. Whether or not the majority of devices embrace such a standard does not refute the fact that it exists. Many different types of standards start out in the minority, and many remain so, but they still serve a purpose.
Anything that promotes some form of application commonality amongst the various Linux distributions certainly cannot be a bad thing.
You are not far from the truth. It appears that our economy is driven more towards large companies now simply churning out product at the most competitive rate possible, probably because of increasing global pressures on the bottom line. Historically, American companies would churn out product, but also budget departments to come out with many great new innovative ideas in-house. R&D will affect this bottom line. When you spent $50 million dollars to research a new idea, and then bring it to market, shortly afterwards a Chinese knockoff shows up that costs 1/3 the price, and they never even had to put any money into R&D. To compete against this notion, there is the desire to eliminate the R&D from the budget to make your pricing more competitive. For example, Dell does not innovate, it simply churns out product. Compaq at one time would innovate and come out with new ideas, yet Dell has continually been taking away marketshare from them. Another example, Toyota and Honda market their own internally designed hybrid vehicles. Ford has not kept up on this with their own R&D, and so instead is licensing the hybrid technology from Toyota.
Innovation these days instead comes from small companies, whom are promptly snapped up at the sight of a great new design. The modern economy where large companies dominate most factions of the corporate landscape prevent these small companies from ever competing on a level playing field, so for many of them, the ultimate success/goal is to get bought out. It can be argued either way whether this is better or worse. For example, the found of Amgen, a drug company, founded his company after becoming frustrated with trying to perform some cutting edge R&D work at another large corporate drug company. Many of that particular company's processes and procedures inhibited the ability for many scientists to freely think. He seized the opportunity to instead start a small company in a less desirable area, and created an atmosphere that was very open and really promoted new developments as its core purpose. Surely this is a more efficient use of money towards R&D. Instead of these same scientists needing to jump through various corporate hoops to meet strict company requirements, they had an open lab atmosphere and were able to do some pretty amazing things.
I guess I don't understand who would really work on this? I am a horrible programmer these days, so I admittedly have little to contribute to open source development, but if I were a participant, why would I want to dedicate my own personal free time to helping build a DRM product for Hollywood and all the music companies to use? I can see the incentive for the media companies or computer companies to put money up to come up with something like this to profit. I can only imagine someone would be interested in working on this with their own time and resources only under the condition that it became a viable standard that was actually being actively used, in which case there would be interest in seeing Linux or the likes capable of handling it.
That being said, it would be nice to have a documented standard openly available for anyone to understand and code against.
So the main reasoning this group is forwarding this new "interface standard" is not to improve your video quality, nor to make the cable smaller or easier to manage. Sure, those certainly are nice features, but it is not why they developed this new standard. From VESA:
"The promoter group based their development efforts on the premise that the PC industry requires a ubiquitous digital interface with optional content protection that can be deployed widely at minimum cost to enable broad access to premium content, according to Miller. "
In this day and age of everyone trying to patent this, litigate that, and everything in between, it's refreshing to see a company, that really doesn't have any motive to make any money off of this, AND in an industry where this concept seems somewhat unusual, release its source code, instead of letting this go off into some useless void. Actions like can only help the industry as a whole, as some burgeoning programmer will have many sleepless nights ahead spending his/her own time learning the tips and tricks employed in this source code. Thank you.
Understood, but the facts in the article state that this seems like no accident (by the consistent adding of 2Mhz when scaling the speed), which is noteworthy. I am not a motherboard designer, so I admittedly don't understand what the acceptable threshholds of errors are in these sorts of scenarios, so at what point is the deviation acceptable? If ABit comes out with a motherboard that "accidently" is 4Mhz faster, and the processor then ends up running 66Mhz faster, is that then unacceptable, or still acceptable as a general standard? Does such a standard exist?
But when I purchase this motheboard from newegg, designed as a package with all those components together, and it is advertised as an 800Mhz FSB, I certainly understand there is a certain margin of error. A 2Mhz deviation may fall within expected safe parameters, but this deviation also affect other components - i.e. from the article, the processor runs 33Mhz faster, and memory is running at roughly 3Mhz faster. Further, manually scaling the speed up on this mobo, the article states it consistently is 2Mhz above the supplied number. If I want those components to run faster/hotter, then let me be the one choosing to do so, or advertise your motherboard for what it is - an 802Mhz FSB. This just opens up a whole pandoras box, so least they could be honest - and let ABit come out with an 804Mhz FSB next.
For those who don't bother to read TFA and complain that 2Mhz is not a big deal - "An increase of 2MHz may not sound like much, but it's reflected in both processor and memory clock speeds as well. For example, in our Pentium 4 630 testbed, that meant an increase in processor clock speed of about 33MHz as well as a boost in memory speed of about 3.3MHz."
I laughed when I read your post, as I was thinking the same thing.
For years there has been this certain drive to turn the web browser into more of an "application" platform, and most attempts I have seen were a failure in one way or another (poor execution speed, strict browser requirements, buggy interface, random crashing, inconsistent experience with different browsers or even different versions of same browser, etc.). And for the countless billions of web pages out there, and the very limited scope of those that I have seen myself, I have only seen two web-based "applications" that impressed me with a certain wow factor - Outlook Web Access, and Google Maps.
This just seems like something new for the guys who keep pushing the web browser as a viable application platform to grab onto to sell books and libraries until the next acronym comes flying by. Meanwhile, I am still both impressed and amazed at the amount of information available now, compared to 10 years ago, simply by just using my browser as the information tool it was originally intended. In fact, I have no idea how I would have even accomplished my job 10 years ago without it.
In weighing what would be cheaper for me after my recent move, I had one option of DSL service combined with a Verizon "Freedom" package with unlimited local and LD calling for $50, plus $30 a month for DSL ($80 a month combined). The other option I had to add these same features to my Comcast digital cable (which I would get regardless, and I believe most people do these days), which would be $43 a month for high speed Internet, as well as $25 a month for Vonage to add unlimited phone capabilities, for a total of $68. On top of the Internet speed from Comcast being faster, this comes out to $12 a month cheaper. So while cheap broadband might not necessarily be here, the savings are there for many people.
On a side note, non-technical friends are mildly interested in how this works, and my cost savings, and never discount word of mouth.
The history of Hollywood and gaming has really been a mixed blessing. We have Lucasfilm Games Ltd, which came out with such imaginative, original games as Sam & Max, Monkey Island (the first 2 anyhow), then even branched into cross-licensing an Indiana Jones adventure-RPG game that was very decent for its time, and even a few early Star Wars games that were entertaining.
With exception to those few rare early gems, I find that most games that stem from a movie just plain, well, suck. This seems to be related my desire to find a game that is both creative AND fun, and the majority of the time they lack the former, and its a 30/70 shot if they get anywhere near the later. Rather, most games of this genre stick with a tried and tested formula in order to try and cash in maximum revenue from the accompying movie franchise. Is it possible for some great games to come from movie franchises? You bet - but as long as Hollywood keeps sticking with the cookie-cutter mentality with their movies (i.e. more special effects! more horror movies this year, then comedies next!), why should we expect anything better from their influence on games?
Warren adds the interesting perspective of having been a member of a number of studios that were once successful, and eventually ended up closing. The days of Lord British and Chuckles sitting around and making Autoduel together are no more, and eventually grew into Roberts Williams, husband Ken, and a few artists bringing us some wonderful games at a small company called Sierra. This then grew into a small team including a few programmers, a few graphics artists, a seperate sound tech, and maybe a director of development at a company called Lucasfilm, Access Software, or you name it. Then a producer came in, special 3d effects artist, etc. and Lucasfilm became LucasArts, Sierra was bought out, etc. etc. The money to compete in the game market these days may only be available from Hollywood studios (unless you sign your soul to EA).
I own a Sony CD burner, and decide to burn a VideoCD home movie to a blank Sony CD. I run over to put my newly minted VideoCD into my Sony DVD player, which supports VideoCD along with a host of other formats, only to be told that it will not play the disc. I test it at a friends house and it works in his el'cheapo import player. I call Sony and ask, and they basically say it won't play burned discs of any sort, even made in there own drives on their own materials. They have left me to go find a DVD player made in a third world country for pennies that is hackable just so I can play some home movies recorded on a modern technology. I might as well just put the shit back on VHS tape.
Massachusetts has a similar law already, and so some retailers try and skirt it by indicating its actually an ATM-like card, and not an actual "gift card".
This is excellent news. For those who want to download the source: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/3 /en/RHGFS/i386/SRPMS/
-Ass
Labelled funny, but at one point the firm I work for was contracted out by a law firm (one of many) representing a certain large company defending itself from SCO. The law firm had an idea similar to this - print out the source code to a particular SCO distribution, including all accompying applications, box it up, and bring it to court. Your point is not lost beyond the geek community. We roughly estimated roughly 70 legal boxes, each filled with printouts. We had a U-Haul ready for this rush job, but at the last second it was decided against.
"eventually will replace what is today only a Usenet archive."
? NoticeID=575). Usenet will always truly have its place.
While Usenet is filled with a lot of wonderful porn and crap these days, since its not really controlled by a single corporate entity, its gives you more freedom of expression. While the google forums might have less crap, google doesn't always play nice - such as with the dinosaur drawing site gewgle (http://www.chillingeffects.org/domain/notice.cgi
Being early in the morning and only on my second cup of coffee, I threw my slashdot goggles on and in my quick skimming thought it said "sponsored by the National Gestapo-Intelligence Agency". I saw the .mil link, and began pondering a DHS conspiracy.
They advertise extensive file support, and taking a quick peak at a few songs, DRM only seems to be predominant for AAC and WMA files (big surprise there). They claim support for: Napster WMA Musicmatch WMA Audible AA MusicRebellion WMA RealRhapsody WMA eMusic MP3 iTunes AAC Live Downloads MP3 RealPlayer RAX Wal-Mart WMA Bleep MP3 Streamwaves WMA Audio Lunchbox MP3, OGG and BuyMusic WMA What, no Sony? :)
No shit.