about pc hardware, and after reading people's responses to this article it just enforces my belief that PC hardware is really bad because the standards are not strict enough. I've had problems with so maney systems and you never know where to begin debugging a computer that doesn't work correctly. Sometimes a problem that seems like it was a 'video card issue' turns out to be a problem with your main memory. Even when useing the 'high quality' components, one low quality component or slightly defective card can bring a whole system down. Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't. The point of this diatribe is that people seem very polarized on the subject of video cards, mostly due to the other guys card not working for them. When probably in many cases it wasn't the video card causing the problem at all, but rather an incompatibility in their system that was brought out by the video card. Guess it's the price we pay for getting such cheap, bleeding edge systems.
Just for kicks, try using a laptop with 512 megs of ram vs a desktop with a killer HD and 512 megs of ram. You will notice that the desktop is faster, and I don't mean in games. I mean in just using the computer, using word, opening your mail, even surfing through your gigabytes of mp3s.
BTW, games are always CPU/graphics limited. Unless a game is badly written, it will shrink to use as little ram as it can, in order to reduce the chance of swaping. (But in the case it doesn't shrink, swapping with a fast hard drive is almost bareable)
Fast hard drives are underrated imo. Once you get your program loaded, sure it's doesn't matter, but until then you are waiting, doing nothing. And also, if you've already got 256 megs of ram, then doubling or tripling it does nothing to your speed for 99% of desktop use. However, being able to startup your computer at twice the speed, or being able to close and open programs without having to wait for them to load is very nice.
With the advent of digital cameras that are 4+ megapixels, generating a megabyte picture or larger is more and more common. Opening and surfing through your picture collection is totatly dependent on your HD speed. A 'couple of seconds' as you say may not be a great deal when you know which picture you wantor when loading Winword, but my collection of pictures is hundreds of megabytes, I don't want to wait for the HD to load.
I wondered if multicast could help the d/l of large files. For a real example I'll use the newest tarball of the linux kernel. Say Linus blesses a tarball as the newest greatest source, then 100 million/. readers go and try to get it from kernel.org, well then 100 million connections are opened and the whole thing crashes.
The problem is that kernel.org only has so much bandwidth (and ports), but if everyone wants to get the same file, then why can't the server just broadcast it to all the people who want it?
Say you use multicast to send the file, people just request to the server to be added to the list of computers that are being multicast to. Also, say the protocol allows you to pick up anywhere in the stream, so the server sends out the bytes of the file, packet by packet and when the end of the file is reached, it starts over from the beginning. So if you want to get the file you just have to wait for all the packets to be sent. Eventuatly you will get them all.
This type of system could be built, it's just that the routers will have to support it. Right now, there is that crazy d/l system where you can download a file from other people who are also downloading the same file at the same time. I don't know the link.
From the article, both sides say that the artists get 50% and that 50% is sliced by an amount TBD by the company that is checking and distributing the music. So basically, the artist might get some money from these fees that we the consumer will have to pay for in some fashion. IMO, the artist will never see any money because it will be easy to claim that the cost of checking to see who played which song and who should get the proper reimbursment and who should get a bill and for how much will be larger then the cost that the artist would get in the first place.
The transaction fee is still too high. Micropayments are a pipe dream, and this too me seems like a form of micropayments. The cost of the protocol is greater then the benefit gained by using the service, and this will be true for awhile. This seems like a way for the RIAA to say that they are doing the 'right thing' when in fact they are just killing all the internet radio stations.
I totatly agree that the next bottleneck will be the network. The network is already a bottleneck in many places ( like where I work ). 100mbps is just not enough bandwidth for remote file systems (since we all have to share). I hope that someone figures out how to multicast information better, because in many cases, we are transmitting the same data to many people over and over. If there was a way to multicast a web site, or locally cache parts of it, the whole internet could be sped up.
But your employer doesn't have to pay you for hours you don't work, even if you can convince them that you must be playing. The system wins again!!! muhahahahha
For the past few years, about 4-6 by my estimation, the real bottleneck in all PC systems has been the HD. Most speed problems can easily be solved by getting a HD that spins @ double the speed. Of course this won't make your quake game faster, or encode mp3s faster, but most of the time, the percieved slowness in a computer is due the HD being slow. RAM can help, in fact I place ram as being the second thing that you should upgrade after a HD. Mostly because you don't gain much after you double your ram capacity in a PC. After about 400 megs of ram, you really won't see too much improvment in normal usage. (No, editing 100 meg TIFFs in Photoshop/GIMP is not NORMAL, sorry if your camera generates those)
Of course you can throw all these reccomnendations away if you don't use the PC in a 'normal' enviroment. Servers, crazy mp3 machines and video toasters won't benefit from the same upgrades as a normal PC.
If he worked out in a gym he wouldn't have time to play the game 12+ hours a day! The pizza restraunt thing I agree with, I think they were just trying to say that he was not a go-getter. As he was too adicted to the game.
Personally, I don't know how people get addicted to these online games, cause I can't stand the lag.
That's what all certifications are though. At some level, all degrees, diplomas and certifications are just bribes. That's how it is. How else am I going to earn your trust quickly? We have boards of people who are 'experts' that only qualify the best of something. If they qualify anything as 'unix' (or whatever the board qualifies) then we lose trust in the board. The accounting firms that certified Enron's books have taken a major hit in credibility because they said that their books were ok when they were compeletly fradulant.
I usually do that too, when I'm not feeling too lazy or angry.
One other OT thing, some people complain about the lack of FLASH integration with mozilla, well I say to them that flash sucks anyway, you shouldn't be using it. In fact, I don't even have flash installed on my machine at home, and I don't think that I'm missing out on anything too great.
The only encryption that is unbreakable is one that cannot be decrypted. You can just do a brute force attack, applying every type of decryption technique with every key to the data until it is decrypted. Hard to break encrpytion is what we are really looking for, but as computer power increases, so must the level and sophisitication of our encryption.
bring back web surfing, since it seems to have 'lost it's luster'!!!! But bad jokes aside, I'm really glad that this finally happened. I've submitted my share of bug reports, and even seen a few get fixed. It's a great project and the thing about it is that everyone can help. There really isn't another browser with the power that mozilla has. I use it all the time now, there are only a handful of sites that don't support it that I goto. If a site doesn't support another browser besides IE then I just don't use it.
This is not true anymore. The only reason that was true was at that point in time Intel was able to make the top speed procs in large quantity. However, the demand for low speed procs was still high, so they just sold procs that could run much faster at a lower speed. However, you never knew which procs could be overclocked safely. Why did they do this? Money. They could make more money selling 'slower' chips to people at a slightly reduced cost because of volume.
Without a heatsink an old athlon will cook itself. However, if you've got an XP or newer then they will not cook themselves. End of story. All Athlons have a really good chance of surviving without a fan, just a heatsink. (This has happened to me many times)
But paper has more usages then reading. Which is why paper is much, much better then a computer is today. What's easier, having 2 people work on one piece of paper, or 2 people work on 1 computer?
If you look at where I went to school (RPI), MS has been doing this for at least 5-7 years. RPI has replaced many of their older (better, but slower) unix computers ( aix, irix, solaris) with newer faster windows machines. Companies like IBM and MS came in and switched them from desktops, now every student has to buy a laptop. In some ways it's very cool, as you can borrow a 802.11 card and use the internet in the middle of the student union, but at the same time the quality (at least when I was there) of the network degraded because windows doesn't have many of the features that makes unix good. Also, if you look at MS, they are making sure that they are in the middle/high schools as much as possible. One high school I know of is Cart. All their software is MS, and the impression I got is that they teach that software like it's the only choice. They also teach a class on getting your Cisco network engineer certification.
---snip I really wish people would try to educate consumers on the fact that 16:9 HDTV becomes the standard in 4 more years, you will likely own a widescreen set at that point, and so you will have to replace all your DVD's that you get cropped at this point with the widescreen versions in the future. Oh well, I'll take my 2.35:1 widescreen version on my 27" TV and be happy. --end snip Actually, everyone was already supposed to have new TVS, and no old style broadcast are supposed to be taking place. This should to have happened b4 the turn of the century according to the FCCs original plan. It didn't happen, most likley it will never happen. Replacing a good machine that does it's job well is really hard. The only way you'll get people to switch is to outlaw the sale of old style tvs. Then in like 5-10 years when most tvs have broken and people have bought new ones will people switch to the new standard.
BTW, you'll have to buy a new DVD player when HDTV becomes popular because the resolution of DVDs are not a high as a HDTV, only slightly higher then a normal TV.
Should word do that for you? I mean with all the options it has, isn't there one to help you reduce the size of your documents from 75 meg? That is a key feature of Pagemaker, being able to use outside files and links to other documents, so that you can actually move the file around instead of having one huge monolith of a file.
And the only reason that 90 percent of the people who use office do is because they want to communicate with the 10 percent of people that will not switch to another program.
Re:Leads to decrease in iMac sales
on
iPod on Windows
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· Score: 1
So what, it suck that a superior product is not being sold just because Apple is too lazy or pigheaded to not develop the software that will increase their sales. I guess it's just revenge against all the companies that released mp3 players that only had windows software. To me that just seems stupid though. (esp. because I would like to buy one)
Someone should write a calculator program for the gameboy, then you could play better games in class while still being able to claim that you are doing work. [sigh]
I agree, the problem is that design of game systems has not reached a level where we can design a stable system. Every gaming world has these rules, and the rules are designed to increase the amount of power in the world through the accumulation of experience by players. Of course all this experience comes from the infinite supply of bad guys to kill. Thus the system is by design, unstable. The only system like this is UO, but uo has a problem with overcrowding, so UO is stable by artificial limits, not by natural design.
Real life may or may not be stable by design, but it much better then the gaming worlds that we have created. Unlike in UO, AO, or EQ, god doesn't have to intervene on a daily basis and reset the world, resusrect players, or nerf items/abilitys . (At least not to my knowledge, maybe god did, which is why the bible is so interesting):)
I think that as we become more and more online, games will be the first to switch from a product like it is today to a totally service based system. You may goto a store and buy a cd that starts you off, but eventutally the game will be totatlly downloaded off the internet. It's already happening today in small amounts with EQ, UO, AC, and AO. Valve just realeased that technology that allows you to download a game completly from the internet. If content providers hooked up with cable and DSL providers, and provided caching servers closer to the customer, there would be almost no wait for your games. That's something I can see people paying for. Old school distribution is definatatly going to dissapear in the long run. Maybe not until the X-Box 3 or the PS5, but there will be a console released that you just plug into the internet, monitor/TV and wall. No CDROM/DVD drive, just games. The only thing that is stopping it today is bandwidth and the fact that Sony makes an amazing amount of money for those silver disks. It really makes sense because right now they are almost doing it right now. Think about how many times you have had to buy the same game but slightly updated for the new system. Is Civ III really 50 dollars better then Civ II? Most sequels are just the same game, better graphics. The only difference is that you can NOT buy the new game, but if they charged a monthly fee then you have no choice, it's pay to play. Though I hope that they will charge less since they will be able to get much better market data from the consumer if the consumer has to download the game to play it.
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about pc hardware, and after reading people's responses to this article it just enforces my belief that PC hardware is really bad because the standards are not strict enough. I've had problems with so maney systems and you never know where to begin debugging a computer that doesn't work correctly. Sometimes a problem that seems like it was a 'video card issue' turns out to be a problem with your main memory. Even when useing the 'high quality' components, one low quality component or slightly defective card can bring a whole system down.
Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.
The point of this diatribe is that people seem very polarized on the subject of video cards, mostly due to the other guys card not working for them. When probably in many cases it wasn't the video card causing the problem at all, but rather an incompatibility in their system that was brought out by the video card.
Guess it's the price we pay for getting such cheap, bleeding edge systems.
Just for kicks, try using a laptop with 512 megs of ram vs a desktop with a killer HD and 512 megs of ram. You will notice that the desktop is faster, and I don't mean in games. I mean in just using the computer, using word, opening your mail, even surfing through your gigabytes of mp3s.
BTW, games are always CPU/graphics limited. Unless a game is badly written, it will shrink to use as little ram as it can, in order to reduce the chance of swaping. (But in the case it doesn't shrink, swapping with a fast hard drive is almost bareable)
Fast hard drives are underrated imo. Once you get your program loaded, sure it's doesn't matter, but until then you are waiting, doing nothing. And also, if you've already got 256 megs of ram, then doubling or tripling it does nothing to your speed for 99% of desktop use. However, being able to startup your computer at twice the speed, or being able to close and open programs without having to wait for them to load is very nice.
With the advent of digital cameras that are 4+ megapixels, generating a megabyte picture or larger is more and more common. Opening and surfing through your picture collection is totatly dependent on your HD speed. A 'couple of seconds' as you say may not be a great deal when you know which picture you wantor when loading Winword, but my collection of pictures is hundreds of megabytes, I don't want to wait for the HD to load.
I wondered if multicast could help the d/l of large files. For a real example I'll use the newest tarball of the linux kernel. Say Linus blesses a tarball as the newest greatest source, then 100 million /. readers go and try to get it from kernel.org, well then 100 million connections are opened and the whole thing crashes.
The problem is that kernel.org only has so much bandwidth (and ports), but if everyone wants to get the same file, then why can't the server just broadcast it to all the people who want it?
Say you use multicast to send the file, people just request to the server to be added to the list of computers that are being multicast to. Also, say the protocol allows you to pick up anywhere in the stream, so the server sends out the bytes of the file, packet by packet and when the end of the file is reached, it starts over from the beginning. So if you want to get the file you just have to wait for all the packets to be sent. Eventuatly you will get them all.
This type of system could be built, it's just that the routers will have to support it. Right now, there is that crazy d/l system where you can download a file from other people who are also downloading the same file at the same time. I don't know the link.
Food for thought.
From the article, both sides say that the artists get 50% and that 50% is sliced by an amount TBD by the company that is checking and distributing the music. So basically, the artist might get some money from these fees that we the consumer will have to pay for in some fashion. IMO, the artist will never see any money because it will be easy to claim that the cost of checking to see who played which song and who should get the proper reimbursment and who should get a bill and for how much will be larger then the cost that the artist would get in the first place.
The transaction fee is still too high. Micropayments are a pipe dream, and this too me seems like a form of micropayments. The cost of the protocol is greater then the benefit gained by using the service, and this will be true for awhile. This seems like a way for the RIAA to say that they are doing the 'right thing' when in fact they are just killing all the internet radio stations.
I totatly agree that the next bottleneck will be the network. The network is already a bottleneck in many places ( like where I work ). 100mbps is just not enough bandwidth for remote file systems (since we all have to share). I hope that someone figures out how to multicast information better, because in many cases, we are transmitting the same data to many people over and over. If there was a way to multicast a web site, or locally cache parts of it, the whole internet could be sped up.
But your employer doesn't have to pay you for hours you don't work, even if you can convince them that you must be playing. The system wins again!!! muhahahahha
For the past few years, about 4-6 by my estimation, the real bottleneck in all PC systems has been the HD. Most speed problems can easily be solved by getting a HD that spins @ double the speed. Of course this won't make your quake game faster, or encode mp3s faster, but most of the time, the percieved slowness in a computer is due the HD being slow.
RAM can help, in fact I place ram as being the second thing that you should upgrade after a HD. Mostly because you don't gain much after you double your ram capacity in a PC. After about 400 megs of ram, you really won't see too much improvment in normal usage. (No, editing 100 meg TIFFs in Photoshop/GIMP is not NORMAL, sorry if your camera generates those)
Of course you can throw all these reccomnendations away if you don't use the PC in a 'normal' enviroment. Servers, crazy mp3 machines and video toasters won't benefit from the same upgrades as a normal PC.
If he worked out in a gym he wouldn't have time to play the game 12+ hours a day!
The pizza restraunt thing I agree with, I think they were just trying to say that he was not a go-getter. As he was too adicted to the game.
Personally, I don't know how people get addicted to these online games, cause I can't stand the lag.
That's what all certifications are though.
At some level, all degrees, diplomas and certifications are just bribes. That's how it is. How else am I going to earn your trust quickly? We have boards of people who are 'experts' that only qualify the best of something. If they qualify anything as 'unix' (or whatever the board qualifies) then we lose trust in the board. The accounting firms that certified Enron's books have taken a major hit in credibility because they said that their books were ok when they were compeletly fradulant.
I usually do that too, when I'm not feeling too lazy or angry.
One other OT thing, some people complain about the lack of FLASH integration with mozilla, well I say to them that flash sucks anyway, you shouldn't be using it. In fact, I don't even have flash installed on my machine at home, and I don't think that I'm missing out on anything too great.
The only encryption that is unbreakable is one that cannot be decrypted. You can just do a brute force attack, applying every type of decryption technique with every key to the data until it is decrypted.
Hard to break encrpytion is what we are really looking for, but as computer power increases, so must the level and sophisitication of our encryption.
bring back web surfing, since it seems to have 'lost it's luster'!!!!
But bad jokes aside, I'm really glad that this finally happened. I've submitted my share of bug reports, and even seen a few get fixed. It's a great project and the thing about it is that everyone can help. There really isn't another browser with the power that mozilla has.
I use it all the time now, there are only a handful of sites that don't support it that I goto. If a site doesn't support another browser besides IE then I just don't use it.
This is not true anymore. The only reason that was true was at that point in time Intel was able to make the top speed procs in large quantity. However, the demand for low speed procs was still high, so they just sold procs that could run much faster at a lower speed. However, you never knew which procs could be overclocked safely.
Why did they do this? Money. They could make more money selling 'slower' chips to people at a slightly reduced cost because of volume.
Without a heatsink an old athlon will cook itself. However, if you've got an XP or newer then they will not cook themselves. End of story.
All Athlons have a really good chance of surviving without a fan, just a heatsink. (This has happened to me many times)
1 out of three processors in use is not AMD, but for recent quarters, of the new processors shipped, 30% of desktop PC procs were amd.
But paper has more usages then reading. Which is why paper is much, much better then a computer is today. What's easier, having 2 people work on one piece of paper, or 2 people work on 1 computer?
Dude, it's very easy to fix all the bugs of win2k, just don't use it.
If you look at where I went to school (RPI), MS has been doing this for at least 5-7 years. RPI has replaced many of their older (better, but slower) unix computers ( aix, irix, solaris) with newer faster windows machines. Companies like IBM and MS came in and switched them from desktops, now every student has to buy a laptop. In some ways it's very cool, as you can borrow a 802.11 card and use the internet in the middle of the student union, but at the same time the quality (at least when I was there) of the network degraded because windows doesn't have many of the features that makes unix good.
Also, if you look at MS, they are making sure that they are in the middle/high schools as much as possible. One high school I know of is Cart. All their software is MS, and the impression I got is that they teach that software like it's the only choice. They also teach a class on getting your Cisco network engineer certification.
---snip
I really wish people would try to educate consumers on the fact that 16:9 HDTV becomes the standard in 4 more years, you will likely own a widescreen set at that point, and so you will have to replace all your DVD's that you get cropped at this point with the widescreen versions in the future. Oh well, I'll take my 2.35:1 widescreen version on my 27" TV and be happy.
--end snip
Actually, everyone was already supposed to have new TVS, and no old style broadcast are supposed to be taking place. This should to have happened b4 the turn of the century according to the FCCs original plan. It didn't happen, most likley it will never happen. Replacing a good machine that does it's job well is really hard. The only way you'll get people to switch is to outlaw the sale of old style tvs. Then in like 5-10 years when most tvs have broken and people have bought new ones will people switch to the new standard.
BTW, you'll have to buy a new DVD player when HDTV becomes popular because the resolution of DVDs are not a high as a HDTV, only slightly higher then a normal TV.
Should word do that for you? I mean with all the options it has, isn't there one to help you reduce the size of your documents from 75 meg? That is a key feature of Pagemaker, being able to use outside files and links to other documents, so that you can actually move the file around instead of having one huge monolith of a file.
And the only reason that 90 percent of the people who use office do is because they want to communicate with the 10 percent of people that will not switch to another program.
So what, it suck that a superior product is not being sold just because Apple is too lazy or pigheaded to not develop the software that will increase their sales. I guess it's just revenge against all the companies that released mp3 players that only had windows software. To me that just seems stupid though. (esp. because I would like to buy one)
Someone should write a calculator program for the gameboy, then you could play better games in class while still being able to claim that you are doing work. [sigh]
I agree, the problem is that design of game systems has not reached a level where we can design a stable system. Every gaming world has these rules, and the rules are designed to increase the amount of power in the world through the accumulation of experience by players. Of course all this experience comes from the infinite supply of bad guys to kill. Thus the system is by design, unstable. The only system like this is UO, but uo has a problem with overcrowding, so UO is stable by artificial limits, not by natural design.
:)
Real life may or may not be stable by design, but it much better then the gaming worlds that we have created. Unlike in UO, AO, or EQ, god doesn't have to intervene on a daily basis and reset the world, resusrect players, or nerf items/abilitys . (At least not to my knowledge, maybe god did, which is why the bible is so interesting)
I think that as we become more and more online, games will be the first to switch from a product like it is today to a totally service based system. You may goto a store and buy a cd that starts you off, but eventutally the game will be totatlly downloaded off the internet. It's already happening today in small amounts with EQ, UO, AC, and AO. Valve just realeased that technology that allows you to download a game completly from the internet.
If content providers hooked up with cable and DSL providers, and provided caching servers closer to the customer, there would be almost no wait for your games. That's something I can see people paying for.
Old school distribution is definatatly going to dissapear in the long run. Maybe not until the X-Box 3 or the PS5, but there will be a console released that you just plug into the internet, monitor/TV and wall. No CDROM/DVD drive, just games. The only thing that is stopping it today is bandwidth and the fact that Sony makes an amazing amount of money for those silver disks.
It really makes sense because right now they are almost doing it right now. Think about how many times you have had to buy the same game but slightly updated for the new system. Is Civ III really 50 dollars better then Civ II? Most sequels are just the same game, better graphics. The only difference is that you can NOT buy the new game, but if they charged a monthly fee then you have no choice, it's pay to play. Though I hope that they will charge less since they will be able to get much better market data from the consumer if the consumer has to download the game to play it.