Isn't using AI to play in WoW and EVE a violation of the terms of service, besides?
I'd like to see a general human-like AI conquer Portal, Fallout 3, Armed Assault, and two rounds of Mount & Blade together in a single week.
Then perhaps we would let it read Slashdot! Snrk.
Just because you buy, it doesn't guarantee that the DRM won't bite you in the ass. Just ask SPORE users, perhaps?
I recently bought an EA game...oh, the horror. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. On more than one occasion, it would spaz out and refuse to let me merely start the game because the online authorization servers were feeling paranoid, and more than once (separate issue), the game's "DRM service" wouldn't start correctly, kept throwing a braindead error message and refusing to even allow the game to attempt to authenticate online.
There's something inherently perverse about a game that will only allow you to the main menu...if it can verify that your copy is retail valid, and won't allow "internet is disconnected" play at all. Unfortunately (or fortunately for pirates), that's what EA does with virtually everything now. A few games were patched to have a '3 day' grace period. Huzzah.
Mind, that's the first game I dared to buy since Unreal Tournament in 1999. It's not very satisfying to pay $50-60 for a game, only to have constant crashes, graphical issues, NO patches, buggy multiplayer, etc and so on, especially when you might finally have a computer that works better than the minimum requirements (and cost impossibly little).
The game industry seriously needs a wakeup call. Why would anyone spend $60 on a new (even non-AAA) game now, if they can spend $60 and get a nice hardware-accelerated MPEG-2/4/AVC based TV tuner, or a 32GB usb key? Or another 4GB of low-latency DDR2-800 RAM? Or, if you EBay, a high-end video or sound card for half the normal price?
For a triple-A, "I'll BE able to play this for 10 years if I want to", well supported with patches (when does this happen anymore?), utterly life-changing game...$60 is perhaps worth it.
For a crappy half-assed game where they shut down the DRM and multiplay servers after six months... $60 is a grevious offense to the PC gaming public.
Piracy isn't happening in record numbers because they're producing -quality- games, and nor does it eat into their figures even 10% as much as they claim. Most people who would only care about trying it, burning it into the ground, and getting bored with it after 2-3 days...often 2-3 days after they finish the game (that's not a typo).
If the quality of games were higher, they'd see higher returns on investment, less piracy. DRM is like putting up a gaudy neon sign: "steal this game because we KNOW it's so crappy that no one would legitimately buy it".
The more complex or aggressive the DRM, the worse the game is. Anyone remember Starforce? Can anyone name a single _good_ Starforce game? The new versions of SecuROM (anyone else remember when it was JUST a CD check?) are quickly flying straight towards that point of no return.
The article clearly states that they only get five minutes of weightlessness, out of the entire two hour flight. Even if they cap at the flight at the "tourist maximum" of 15 parabolas per flight, you'd still get 6.25 minutes.:) Research flights offer 60-80 parabolas. Tourist prices are roughly $5000 per person (or about $330 per person, per parabola). Even if they charged extra to do a porno, you'd still be saving in the area of $950000, at least?
Four exploding caps, two on a Geforce 4 MX440, two on a Geforce 6800XT. Both smelled like rotting tuna. They exploded, not merely leaked, since they sprayed the "gunk" all over the place. I was lucky that the motherboards being connected to in question didn't exactly care being coated with sickly capacitor goo. ^^;
"Microsoft released a study which found that some 54% of UK file sharers are between 11-16."
That's a very different statement from what the article says.
"UK kids are driving a new wave of digital piracy, and 14yos are the most likely to be file sharers, according to a recent "Real Thing" anti-piracy study conducted by Microsoft.
The "Real Thing" survey involved 270 children and 1,200 adults (16 and older).
Some 54% of children aged 11-16yo use illegal P2P and file-sharing services compared to 15% of adults."
Some 135 children surveyed do not constitute 56% of all illegal pirating activity in the UK (as claimed by the slashdot article?), and this seems like a case of intentional (or merely bad) pruning. Supposedly 145 children (54%) out of those surveyed pirate. A rather equivalent number of the adults, 180 (15%) do.
Studies tend to be up there with lies and benchmarks, but comparing two groups with radially disproportionate sample sizes? And where are the samples from? Are these at specific places? Why such a disparity in the group sizes? Then again, it does admit to be an "anti-piracy" study, so I guess they aren't exactly that interested making it fair or unbiased.
At any rate, the statement in the slashdot version and in the the article linked are very different, regardless of the supposed validity of the study.
Well, just for the record, like you said, rather small city. Prices -appear- fairly uniform across most larger areas, and many smaller. This varies from area to area, as does who is providing the actual service.
Down in Ashland, OR (with some 21,000 residents these days), they have full fiber network built by the city 'loaned out' to small indie ISPs who provide the meaningful to-the-curb service, last I checked, it was universally some 24mbit for $20 there.
Someone from Ashland might proclaim that $60 for 6-8mbit speed (and many ISPs will now burst higher rates as well) would be an absurdly high cost, and they'd be right, but, it's still fairly standard. It's not a rule, it's just what tends to be out there, and even if it were a rule, there are always exceptions.:)
Well, the original question was about 'home usage', heavy, but home, that would generally fall under a general residential rates, coverage, and known problems, including which strong wind could disrupt your.service and it may be a day or a few before your ISP gets around to fixing it if there's an actual problem (and that's pretty regardless of whether in a busy large city or out in the middle of nowhere).
Caveat Emptor. Besides, for roughly the same price, in -many- areas, there's also a satellite/microwave or similar connection available. It's pretty clear, if you're a home user, even a very heavy home user, when you fall into that -class- of user, there are obvious liabilities, including potential downtime without notice. If your needs are beyond that class of service, what's the point of getting more than one residential-tier service provider? I think generally that's the point at which you actually pay for the tier where your needs are met.
If you have a really obsessive compulsive day trader, for instance, an ISP contract which allows you to kidnap the CEO's children if your service is down more than 60 seconds would presumably be worth the cost. ^^
For the proverbial day trader...wouldn't they be able to afford getting some sort of backup wireless internet service on their cell phone or PDA, so that if worse came to worse, they'd be able to change their status/orders when their actual home internet went down, or they got called away on an emergency, etc? Is ping time really a substantial world-ending problem when hitting refresh on any regular web browser every few seconds or minutes? It won't render the actual page any faster.
Frankly, it's almost as silly as suggesting that home internet access wouldn't be good enough if you were operating a nuclear power plant's control panel remotely via average DSL/cable. Of course it's not, but the operative modifiers here being 'home' and 'average'.
Everyone has to buy the service they know they need, and if they're not satisfied, they change it, they work around the problems however they can, or optionally live with it, be reasonably content with what they have. When my comments are rather specific about a specific scenario, it's not "who am I", it's who is someone else for flailing their arms in a panic around a non-issue? If I were advocating that no one should ever get more than one ISP, and that some specific ISP or provider type were ultimate, then yeah, you might have a point -there-, but...hypotheticals aside...
Taxes, death, lies, damned lies, statistics, benchmarks, and downtime, guaranteed.
Honestly, I think that's not understanding how DSL works very well. In virtually all markets, there's one physical DSL provider, and a few dozen 'ISPs' which cost a little bit more to provide potentially 'unique' services on top. One monopoly for phone (and hence DSL), one monopoly for cable.
Er, the cheapest DSL is what, around $25, $30, for 256k? Double that, and you've got a price for very fast (8mbit or more) cable, including 256-512kbit upstream. Even if you have 2x256k, and the equipment to use it in a decently efficient manner, that's still some 512kbit, and two different IPs.
Only in a few situations can you use the bandwidth of both cooperatively for a single task, and the most common failure is based on when the physical link/line conditions deteriorate, in which case having two ports to the same network isn't going to make any difference at all.
Cable/DSL will provide the potential reliability you'd be looking for, I think. But, as a home user, some 98-99% (even if not 99.97%) uptime isn't good enough? For the additional cost, it's not worth the extra -average- hour per month of downtime you gain 'back'.
If your ISPs downtime is any more than that, you have every right to complain, twist their arm to fix whatever might be causing the problem.
The title of the Slashdot article itself is slightly misleading. Since when are 2D games even the exclusive dominion of the PS2? And how do they define 'modern'? Last 2 years? I can name off just oodles of (especially arcade) 2D games over the last 10 years, though, I suppose there are few for the PC or bad modern consoles these days, and few games (though particularly 2D) for any platform that actually try to be original. Many of those listed are just yet more basic rehashes. Even since Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the 2D landscape hasn't been all that barren. I know it's slightly offtopic, but I saw '2D gaming not quite dead?', and thought of one (PC) game that really stands out, and I still think it'd be of interest to Slashdot readers on the topic. In particular since most would theorhetically be viewing Slashdot via a capable PC, and not via PS2.;b
Hammerfall. I'm not even sure how to describe it, aside from "there probably need to be more Russian gamemakers". It's a non-casual physics based game that is an interesting combination of action and adventure. It reminds me of the days when games were actually something to get excited about and actually buy. If I were to buy a game, say, 15 years ago, it was an investment. You were expecting many dozens of ours of entertainment out of the purchase price. There are plenty of games now where there's no reason to keep playing after the first time, and even that's a paltry 10-or-less hours while still being full price. Then again, that (and later) was also back when there were just oodles of sharewhere and freeware games that were decently entertaining and quite a few were a bargain at $5 or $10. But I digress. Hammerfall is just very...unique, innovative, and even if you don't care about the story, the gameplay is just sublime. There's just something satisfying about taking your beat up Flying Contraption and *smacking* an attached hammer into someone at full speed, causing them to crash into the ground, break apart part of the level (yes, really), and catch itself (and other things) on fire. And the current 'demo' is a pretty complete game in and of itself, despite being pre-release.
It's a pipe dream, but a girl can hope that someday notions like "innovation" or "original" or "risky", actually return to the gaming proper, rather than something to be feared worse than death by companies looking to make an extra billion profit this year instead of spending a few lousy dollars taking a chance on the lost artform of games.
Essentially, the difference is how well processor resources are divided up, how evenly, and how big the pieces are each process or task gets. Most anyone who has used Linux has had the dreaded moment where you're trying to multitask a bit, and are compiling a program while listening to music, or waching a video, and then...that's terrific, video frames are dropped, or the audio skips. Even if intermitant, it's quite annoying, at the very least. The 'Completely Fair Scheduler' is an attempt to have more fair, sane, and generally less complex scheduling. This also happens to reduces the worst case latencies, averaging from (at least on the tests with my computer) 120+ms on vanilla 2.6.22 scheduler, to ~2.6ms with CFS.
It's largely a drastic improvement over the old scheduling mechanisms that Linux has relied on, although other OSes have largely worked through such problems some time ago.
While it's not exactly THE most scientific, I had a few rounds of testing over which did better on load vs. things still behaving exactly the way they should. I ran all of them with audio playing through KDE artsd, video player, glxgears, etc, loaded, plus inducing a CPU load via 'stress'. Linux, even with CFS, it's still fairly easy to 'upset' it by just producing a fairly large (2-4) amount of load. Solaris did notably better. While it seemed to have a few quirks with scheduling in general, it could sustain a load of around 8-12 without producing video/audio frame drops. FreeBSD, with the experimental SCHED_ULE 2.0 scheduler (as of March 2007) could sustain a load of over 80 with no problems, frame drops, or even glxgears slowing down to a complete crawl (although you wouldn't want to especially use OpenGL at such, it was still getting the speed of software glxgears), and even at 120+ load, the mouse wouldn't respond, while everything else kept going fine. This seems purely useless, but it really comes in handy if trying to do one or more KDE compiles while watching video, on Linux, this tends to be prevented. For the uninitiated, load averages like that are basically a multiplier vs. how much actual work your computer can do in real time. Eg, a 0.5 load would mean you're doing 50% of what you could in realtime. A 2.0 load means you're trying to handle twice what you can do in realtime, it is weighted against how many processors you have (I have one), but other things like disk access can also contribute to the load average, depending on OS.
So, longer story short, a superior CPU scheduler can make a world of difference in how things behave when your system's something else with the CPU(s) at the same time.
Part of the reason that DDR2 was so much slower at most clockspeeds is because of the added latency. The lower speed DDR2 can have more than twice the tested latency of DDR400. The problem is that apparently both JEDIC, or whoever standardizes memory now, isn't thinking of what is the best direction for DDR to take. They're going in the same direction as the manufacturers, trying to sell higher "Megahertz" and "gigabytes per second" ratings, even when they're effectively meaningless now.
Does it exactly matter if your computer can do 6GB/s, or 12GB/s? 14GB/s? Where does it stop? And even then, that's mostly theorhetical, particularly in the case of DDR2. But a very important distinction is that so many memory accesses are of very small to small size. On basically all of those accesses, the memory request will be served in far less time than the latency will allow the command to return and allow another request.
Way back when, Intel motherboards tried out RDRAM for its 'higher end' boards, and the Nintendo 64 also started using it. Both were fairly large fiascos, in that sense, with more or less all technical reviews noting that the increased latency more than cancelled out the improved bandwidth. Now we're looking at DDR3, with far higher latencies than classic RDRAM for a relatively minor bandwidth improvement that only extremely large memory requests (such as applications that would theorhetically be done in an extremely large-scaled database and scientific research).
It reminds me acutely of the early 'Pentium 4s'. A 600Mhz Pentium 3 could beat up to a 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 in most applications and benchmarks, and the (rare and expensive) 1.4Ghz Pentium 3s were real monsters. But people kept trying to tailor benchmarks to hide that, so people would buy more product.
Overclocking has also generally demonstrated that overclocking regular 'old' DDR1, while a bit pricier (mostly due to the virtual elimination of production nowadays, though), scales better and also has far better numbers than DDR2 and the like. DDR600 equivalent is extraordinarily zippy, and (of course) real-world latency is also absurdly low.
It makes me feel like the 'governing bodies' here have really let people down. Instead of trying to standardize on and promote what's best for general computing, they're trying to push a greater volume of merchandise that has no meaningful improvement, and in fact usually a notable decline, over what we've already had for years. The bottom line for them is money, and that's just wrong to put their own pocketbooks over the long term well-being of computing technology and the needs of the consumer.
This is what I've been saying for quite a while, but people really dont want to hear it. I mean, look, free software is typically pretty decent, an alternative to what most people use, and pay for. Most everyone will like the notion of actually being able to ask for (or implement themselves) a feature or bugfix for applications, games, and utilities they use every day.
The problem with GPL isn't even necessarily that it restricts proprietary software. That is freedom-limiting, yes, but, *most* of the time, someone who's going to make proprietary software already has a lot of money, and is looking to make more. Most of the time, the GPL won't actually stop them, though. They either simply ignore the license, or try to get around it (for instance, using executable wrappers to interface with libraries or programs). For the most part, anyone doing that also has "More Money Than God" and can afford an absurd number of lawyers to, at minimum, drag it out in court for years, all the while making a huge profit.
Where the GPL really steps in and has its weight, is against other, non-GPL licenses. You can simply absorb most other open source code, and say 'screw you' to the original developers (like what Torvalds said he'd do with Solaris code if it had a compatible license). In essence, all it does is prevent BSD, MIT, X11, etc licensed software from incorporating or linking to GPLed software (with the exception of LGPL, for obvious reasons) or even making use of most of it in other ways.
GNU actively encourages the use of GPL for libraries, even though they know what it does to other, free software. In essence, dynamic linking to a library isn't "stealing", but GNU views it as a purely derivate work. That's become particularly nasty once things like MySQL switch from LGPL to GPL, and oh, terrific, or even that Trolltech used GPL (previously without exclusions for other licenses). I doubt many people wishing to write, say, a decent looking BSD-licensed front-end (say, Qt4 frontend for MySQL) have the money to spend thousands of dollars on licenses in the 'alternative', since they don't wish to entangle their users further with GPL.
Isn't that one of the things the GPL claims to product against? The supposed Microsoftian 'Embrace and Extend' broken standards? Even the Linux Kernel has, in the past, and more recently, demonstrated its willingness to take from BSD-licensed code without giving contributing anything back, while there are plenty of more liberally licensed software that continues to make itself compatible for the platform.
Mind, licensing something, such as an application, under BSD, MIT, X11, or anything else, obviously doesn't extend 'down'. So unlike the arguments of many, having a BSD licensed program can't "infect" or diminish the rights of a GPL (or LGPL) library, that'd also be the case regardless of if it's proprietary or not. BSD programs can also cheerily run on proprietary libraries, but since the GPL tries to infect upwards, nope, not allowed. How is that encouraging open source, I have to keep asking?
Freedom isn't about *forcing* someone to do something like that, so at the least, the GPL should provide a cheery exclusion for libraries that happen to the license, to keep it from infecting upwards (which the LGPL already effectively does, but fewer and fewer people use it, and GNU says you should never normally use it for libraries), at least for other open source software with a OSI-approved and otherwise 'GPL compatible' license. That does a bit more of what the supposed intent is, encourage open source, give credit to people, give proprietary software something to think about before stealing willy nilly, while still affecting truly derived entities under the same license.
How many people *wouldn't* be enraged if the, say, standard cross-platform SSL, networking, or X11 library was actually GPL? Why, if you didn't want to use GPL, for both alternative open source or proprietary reasons, you'd be utterly screwed, because at best, you couldn't provide i
The more sensible thing would be...to use PostgreSQL which has a better license, and is more ANSI SQL compliant anyway?
The "everything for free" on MySQL's case is a bit less than truthful, anyway.
You basically only get it for free for use with non-commercial GPLed software. Anything other use is effectively verboten under the 'community' edition, similarly to the way Qt is licensed (though Qt also requires that anything that licenses Qt officially, for several thousand dollars, is also proprietary, for-charge, and closed source).
Personally, it doesn't make sense to me that a 'common library' be licensed under GPL because obviously, that mostly undercuts things that don't have GPL license, such as BSD and CDDL software which isn't allowed to link to it. It's not surprising that MySQL is making it 'more closed'. They did it before when they changed from LGPL to GPL "because people were static linking and stealing the server code", and they thought the LGPL allowed that, or at least that was the excuse given at the time.
PostgreSQL, on the other hand, isn't owned by a faceless corporation that is trying to restrict your use of their software. Why suggest all of the effort of reinventing the wheel via SQLite when there's obviously an already existent, and free, alternative and equivalent to MySQL? The whole point of SQLite, as far as I understand it, is to be able to use SQL without all of the setup or server requirements, so you can dump a single file to store all database data for a single program.
That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late for people to be in shock about it.
Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).
Also, the reason to bother with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).
It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.
I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.
I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.
One thing I've always wondered is, if the GNU is all about 'open source' and 'free as in freedom' software...there are a few really basic incompatibilities with *freedom*, and the GPL, and associated licenses. For instance, I understand that they're trying to promote reciprocal freedom, but *freedom* implies directly that, well, you shouldn't have drastic, overarching restrictions on what people are legally allowed to do with software. The GPL puts a lot of restrictions on what you can't do, and what you're required to do if you even get near it, link to it, or do anything else. Mind, they actually consider dynamic linking to ANY library, to be directly considered a 'derivative work' (it's in the FAQ, and yes, also applies to LGPL). And, for another, if they were so interested in 'freedom', and 'open source', why not provide an exemption towards "you must be GPL too, lol lol", for other verifiably open source licenses? For instance, if there's a common GPLed library out there to reproduce functionality available by standard on other platforms (there are quite a few), and I make a BSD licensed program, it would be a GPL violation. How fun is that?
A practical example is MySQL. You can only use GPLed programs linking against the client libraries (necessary to communicate with the server sanely). This arose over a misunderstanding that the company behind MySQL had about the LGPL. They thought that under the LGPL, it was legitimate for another program to static link against it (including the server parts), and redistribute a modified version with their program, but they wouldn't have to give away any modified source. Of course, that's incorrect for many reasons, and a lot of people are screwed (or have to keep trying to convince stubborn developers and hosting companies to use the more ANSI compliant PostgreSQL anyway).
And I've been finding Torvalds himself (and the Linux community in general) extremely hypocritical about licensing issues. Torvalds and others have been basically flaming Sun for having their own code licensed under CDDL (which many people have misconceptions about nonetheless). They have every right to do that, no? Linux and most 'open source' software designed at all for Linux has been pretty explicitly incompatible with Solaris. What right does the Linux community (and Torvalds in particular) to a double standard where everything Sun and Solaris MUST be explicitly Linux compatible, but nothing at all Linux is even asked to be Solaris compatible?
OpenSolaris and *BSD (and BSD/X11/MIT/etc licensed) projects have contributed a great deal towards the community, but effectively, Linux and GPL-specific projects contribute absolutely nothing back, but then expect everything to be contributed back to them.
In the end, GPL (even GPLv3) hurts open source software much more than it hurts proprietary. There are ways to get around GPL licensing problems, including using a simple binary shim front-end (which you'd have to release the code for) to a library, but then use that binary to interface with a library or other code that's otherwise incompatible (since no linking is done). You simply can't get away with that with an open source project, but proprietary has a free pass. So, if they cared that much about open source, how would it dilute it at all to, for instance, have an exemption that allows open source licensed programs to interface with GPLed libraries (and similar situations)? If someone tried to "embrace" the program and make it proprietary, they wouldn't be privy to the same exemption.
It seems increasingly difficult to accept GNU as a legitimate thing for issues such as that, even if it's intended to exclude other (even 'GPL compatibly licensed', such as BSD) open source as well.
And then, in a few years...Microsoft will buy Barnes and Noble to use with its growing database of marketing info. Some point, shortly thereafter, Tom Cruise will walk in and a smiling employee will appear on a jerky, 3D projector after scanning his eyes. "Hello, Mr. Cruise! Did you enjoy your purchase of 'You're So Damn Effing Glib!', and 'Normal People Are Filthy In The Eyes of Xenu'? We would love to provide you with new books. Might we recommend 'The Greatest Threat of Our Times: The Flying Spaghetti Monster' and 'Desperate Housewives: The Katie Holmes Escape Story'?".
I dunno, somehow I haven't seen many chimps going on TV six times to find out who the father of their baby is, and then accusing 6-12 men who aren't the father, and they dance around like crazy and curse.:b (Though, that seems very ape-like in and of itself.)
In all seriousness, is there really a 'better' in this case? A lot of chimpanzees, I'd imagine, succumb to elements, various fighting, various animals. A lot of humans succumb to other humans with guns, sticking their fingers/genitals/etc into electrical sockets, jumping out of airplanes, sexual disease, rolling around with pigs and contracting the flu, falling asleep while travelling in metal boxes and murdering entire families, drinking alcohol and injecting drugs until they die, poisoning their own environment, etc, and other instruments of sheer boredom and not thinking more than 0.7s in advance. Humans can think, and reason, and remember...but if a pretty significant chunk of the population refuses to exercise that to any degree, then...are humans really so much better than anything else?
It'd be like engineering an airplane that can fly n miles, and then it does very close that for its service life, getting rather good efficiency, compared to building an airplane that can fly n*2 miles at n*5 the price, but only flying it for n/2 miles. You're just wasting most of it, so what's the point of going 'bigger and better', if you're just going to piss it away?
It's obviously cynical, but if anyone wants to brag about how much 'better' they are than any other species, being human, then they need to accomplish those better things, have something to actually be proud of, before being so damn proud of themselves. Since when is existing the only requirement to brag about your technical superiority to a dog, fish, crocodile, whatever? And has people have demonstrated, bragging about technical superiority doesn't alleviate you from being able to be killed by pretty much anything else at any time (even if people are so frequently killed by consequences to their own self-induced and society-induced stupidity).
Previous 'grunts at the company' have stated many different figures, where does the 60GB come from? I scoured through the Comcast TOS (which consists, separately, of the Comcast Service Agreement, Acceptable Use Policy, and Abuse Policy, and does not appear to be available from comcast.com), no mention of 50GB anywhere, or any hard numbers, anywhere.
From the Service Agreement, though: Facilities Allocation. Comcast reserves the right to determine, in its discretion, and on an ongoing basis, the nature and extent of its facilities allocated to support HSI, including, but not limited to, the amount of bandwidth to be utilized and delivered in conjunction with HSI.
Basically, like people have been complaining about for years, it can easily be a moving target, and they can terminate your account without having to tell you either what the hard limits are, OR what generally acceptable numbers are.
Back when I had Comcast, they started sending me nasty letters after I was just using 10GB/month (mind, in a college city, too!), and trust me, there are lots of ways to fill up a *lot* of bandwidth besides BT, particularly with faster, larger, higher capacity games, online video, music, nevermind what percentage of HTTP bandwidth comes back down to advertising.
Comcast doesn't seem like a very good company to begin with, though. In my first-hand experience, they're rotten. I'd been acquired through their buying out AT&T Broadband Internet cable service, it hadn't been so much of a hassle, except that they had given everyone else new cable modems out of it, and even though I was still renting mine, they refused to do anything about mine, which had given consistently low speeds and generated a ton of heat. This wasn't even the biggest problem. When it came time to move, I had tried a half-dozen or more times to cancel the service before moving, but they refused, because I had really been a customer of ATTBI, and so, they told me they had no obligation to allow me to simply discontinue service, since, apparently, I wasn't even really in the system. Despite numerous attempts both over the phone and in-person, they would just not let me discontinue service. I still had to move. Of course, even when I tried to return the modem, they started going on about how that wasn't Comcast equipment, so they couldn't accept a return, a month later, they charge me for several months of supposedly unpaid service (when I had only moved a month before), and the modem, when they refused to handle anything in a remotely sane manner.
So, it doesn't really surprise me in the slightest when people consistently have problems and fears over Comcast discontinuing their service, since they never announce even so much as a safety margin on how much you can use. Though, other people have stated figures quite different from 60gb numeroustimes, too.
I'll suggest why. Men don't like competition, at least, not from anyone that could possibly get away with wearing a skirt. It's rather simple, but overlooked. Personally, I'm self-taught, and I'm really good at what I do. Frick, I'm frequently asked to teach others about technology, programming, and everything else in my time, but whenever I keep applying for jobs in areas related to my best skills (programming, largely anything to do with computers), I either get laughed at, or I'm ignored, while less qualified and far less skilled men easily glide through the process.
It's not that there "is no pool" of skilled women in these fields, it's that it doesn't matter if there is a pool or not. Most of the other women in the field that I've been friends with have similar problems with getting people (it's not just men who believe in such god-awful stereotypes that only men can understand technology to any sufficient degree) to take them seriously. But I've been fired a number of times simply because men (who were obviously less skilled, considering I was told to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren't screwing up the project) would complain that a women would be put in any position of peer or leadership and would threaten to quit if I was allowed to keep working.
There've also been a number of times when (all-male, almost tech-illiterate) management pressured me to completely undermine the already compromised stability and security of a project (I was brought in to correct the apparent incompetence of predecessors), even when I've been ahead of schedule to get things fixed *and* implement new features that users had been requesting for years (for which management had already preapproved). Mind, the pressure was for a feature that only one person had requested, and it was dubious as to why anyone would need such a thing in the next few years. Even when I proposed a revised timetable to include the feature sanely "down the road" by several months, it just didn't matter.;b
Is it much of a wonder why there isn't necessarily overwhemling interest once someone has any experience? It's akin to traversing the Iron Curtain to even get a job in the first place, and even if you get it, there's a huge chance you will be treated with extreme prejudice and hostility, no matter how hard you're expected to work (or how much unpaid overtime you put in just to meet arbitrary irrational demands). It doesn't necessarily matter how many hours I have to work to get something done, but constantly getting flak or fired for no reason doesn't exactly sit well. Though, the hoops I've been expected to jump through for arbitrary reasons often makes others look bad in their own job performance, the double standard gets to be bloody absurd. If any man did that, they'd get the hell promoted out of them. Hell, I've had to watch men who mostly spend around 20-30 minutes a day doing actual work get promoted multiple times in a short period of time, while I had to demolish through mountains of work, plus arbitary demands which aren't even in my job description, to not even be granted a raise or a day off during a serious family emergency. Also, tending to get blamed for lots of things that have nothing to do with me (including things not even related in the slightest to the department I was working in, let alone my work personally).
The so-called "Gender Gap" isn't at all in the possible pool of candidates, it's how women are often treated in the sector. Nevermind that in my experience (though often mirrored by others) sexual harassment is considered about 'the norm', and trying to bring any complaints, even about the most obvious and flagrant violations, gets you fired very quickly. Men and women *are* rather completely different, but being unwilling to give a 'class' of people in a profession much (if any) respect because they don't have a penis is just absolutely insane. It's insult to injury to then claim that there simply ARE no candidates. Supposedly, prejudice is blinding, but this is ridiculous.
Now only if GTK+ decently supported Windows operating system versions, actually used native style/widgets, and weren't so mind-numbingly bad at performance. The native Java 6 Swing GUI stuff is actually faster than GTK+ now, despite still being in beta (try it yourselves and see!). "GTK+ enthusiasts" tend to be rabid about 'everyone should use this!', but it's overwhelmingly lackluster in performance and memory usage. People should make their own analysis and look into alternatives, not just take the GTK+ word for it. Qt is very well performing, very well behaving (it effectively wraps around native platform widget/engine stuff), and looks like a dream. GTK+ is (disclaimer: in my personal opinion) almost as bad as old X11 apps that just use ancient versions of Motif or Athena. GTK+ just doesn't blend in very well, and (again, opinion) leaves everything to be desired over more robust and compatible libraries.
The really silly thing about this is that they claim it's "lower overhead" than TCP/IP because people are having to buy "expensive TCP offloading engines" for iSCSI, when a few seconds of research provided, namely on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI), that plain NICs can outperform the offloading ones, and sure, it's obviously going to be lighter than TCP/IP, however, ATA over Ethernet only has basic authentication (MAC addresses, which can be forged cheerily), can't be routed, and isn't very available. It's -only- usable for Storage Area Network, not really for general remote drive (or part of a drive even) access. At currently, only Linux support is available. iSCSI is supported by Windows, Linux, Solaris, among others. Even FreeBSD is working on a native implementation. Windows Vista will even include a fully built-in/native support for iSCSI. I can't imagine why they complain that iSCSI is 'more expensive' to implement, when their primary product for ATA over Ethernet is a 'special drive enclosure' (according to their documentation, you can't even use AoE with standard networking hardware, interfaces, routers, etc) with special networking hardware which can house up to 15 ATA drives. The enclosure itself (with nothing else) costs about $4000. You could build ten high-end machines dedicated to serving iSCSI requests to multiple drives each for that (five if they use actual SCSI), and still use standard networking hardware, and still have it accessable from a network across the world, with things like actual user authentication.
The whole ATA over Ethernet thing seems like trying to blow smoke up the arses of some very rich and silly people. At the same time, the technologies are rather different, too. If you just want to build a SAN? Sure, go for HyperSCSI or AoE, maybe, but if you actually want remote drive access? Why would you want any of this? They shouldn't be trying to utterly replace iSCSI. It's absurd. As far as I see it, iSCSI is more of a general and free/open replacement for things such the old 'X drive' remote service, and network filesharing like SMB/NFS. Websites can (and are starting to) offer iSCSI targets to offer remote drives for backup. It can also be used for cheap SAN, or more-or-less replacing SMB/NFS over a network. It does all of this rather well.
It seems to me that the company behind ATA over Ethernet is becoming rather desperate to resort to such claims.
Of course, rumors are usually just very silly rumors, but why does everyone seem to want the same sequels for the same series over and over, and why are game developers so comfortable in producing those sequels over and over? The results usually don't turn out that great after a few iterations (cough, Wing Commander Prophecy pretty much was Doom all over again, and then Origin Systems died), and unremarkably, most don't feature all that much 'new', let alone earth-shattering plot and character development. Games are a lot like movies, once it's up to Rocky 3, or (darnit) Rocky 5, if you aren't doing much new and innovative with it, it's usually time to just move on. Take the example of System Shock. Now, there was System Shock, it blew, well, the few people who gave it time away. Capitalizing on that, there was the amazing System Shock 2, but because of the slightly unforgiving interface and unique gameplay, it was never really a huge commercial success. Now, with the 'spiritual successor' BioShock hitting shelves next year, it uses some of the same interesting and different concepts, but is a completely different game. Originality? It sure looks like it. But why don't more developers 'take the plunge' and use their famous name and bankroll to do something more interesting and original? Instead of Half Life 3 and X4 and Civilization 5, why not try producing something actually playable, fun, and interesting, like so many of the 'new and original' games of the early to mid 1990s, not to mention some of the great games of the late 1980s? If studios are so 'concerned' about sequels that they constantly put out, then they just need to be strong-armed by big-name studios into putting up for more original and interesting games. There's a reason why 'indie' game quality, despite being rough around the edges, is starting to casually surpass that of big commercial games. Even if the big commercial games are flashier and have 1GB worth of graphics and 50MB worth of content, it often doesn't make them very playable or intelligent, and why spend $50+ on a boring big-name game when you can spend $0-10 on a fun and remarkably polished indie game? Many, even if in the 'same old' genre, do things that haven't been done in similar games for more than a decade now, and do it very well. Nevermind that they also tend to be maintained and patched for a bit longer. It's pretty infuriating when that 'big game' only gets one or two patches, but they never fix the critical issues that some people or everyone are getting, leaving some games even completely unprogressable after a certain point for many people (cough, Knights of the Old Republic). And that's not to say that all sequels are bad, but...if it's a good continuation of the same story, which actually tells that story, and does a good job of it objectively, before fanboyism? Then sure...by all means (just like Wing Commander and WC2, or even WC: Privateer and the lesser known sequel Righteous Fire), but if the primary goal is just to sell an engine, or otherwise make money? Screw you. As a game developer (though certainly not big name), it's just really not right to completely sell a game out, rather than offering something that's actually meaningful, playable, and a fun and unique experience.
If I could get an Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice Core:D) with 1.5GB of DDR400 RAM, 200GB ATA100 HD, DVD+RW 16X, an insane number of USB ports, etc, for less than $600, and add two serial ports and a good hardware modem for about $14, reuse a Soundblaster Live! or Aureal Vortex 2 (yes, really), into the end of last year, after not being able to have any computer upgrades since 1999 (Yay for Pentium 3), I don't think anyone else would have any excuse for AMD's price point. The only lower-end point is the ATi IGP graphics (which don't have a hardware T&L unit), but that can be upgraded at some point once PCI-E cards are cheap, and it can play most newer games still pretty smoothly, including Half Life 2.
Ironically, it is slower in Freespace 2 (the new open source engine with fancy effects anyway) and SWAT 4, mostly for the lack of hardware T&L. Especially with relatively basic lighting effects in newer games, you can "feel" it slowing down as the CPU has to handle it. But a system amazingly over the top for modern gaming and heavy programming and other usage, that's quite a lot cheaper than how much you could get even a slightly usable system in 2002. I wish they made an AGP to PCI-E or even AGP to PCI adapter so I could use my Geforce 4 Ti4200-8X, which has absurdly reliable performance.
Plus there's the fact that it uses so little power, and runs about 32C stable, while under heavy gaming/compiling prolonged usage, with about 30C when not having to do much, amazingly quiet as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't using AI to play in WoW and EVE a violation of the terms of service, besides? I'd like to see a general human-like AI conquer Portal, Fallout 3, Armed Assault, and two rounds of Mount & Blade together in a single week. Then perhaps we would let it read Slashdot! Snrk.
Well, apparently they haven't advanced beyond the 1990s fad of chatterbots then.
Just because you buy, it doesn't guarantee that the DRM won't bite you in the ass. Just ask SPORE users, perhaps?
I recently bought an EA game...oh, the horror. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. On more than one occasion, it would spaz out and refuse to let me merely start the game because the online authorization servers were feeling paranoid, and more than once (separate issue), the game's "DRM service" wouldn't start correctly, kept throwing a braindead error message and refusing to even allow the game to attempt to authenticate online.
There's something inherently perverse about a game that will only allow you to the main menu...if it can verify that your copy is retail valid, and won't allow "internet is disconnected" play at all. Unfortunately (or fortunately for pirates), that's what EA does with virtually everything now. A few games were patched to have a '3 day' grace period. Huzzah.
Mind, that's the first game I dared to buy since Unreal Tournament in 1999. It's not very satisfying to pay $50-60 for a game, only to have constant crashes, graphical issues, NO patches, buggy multiplayer, etc and so on, especially when you might finally have a computer that works better than the minimum requirements (and cost impossibly little).
The game industry seriously needs a wakeup call.
Why would anyone spend $60 on a new (even non-AAA) game now, if they can spend $60 and get a nice hardware-accelerated MPEG-2/4/AVC based TV tuner, or a 32GB usb key? Or another 4GB of low-latency DDR2-800 RAM? Or, if you EBay, a high-end video or sound card for half the normal price?
For a triple-A, "I'll BE able to play this for 10 years if I want to", well supported with patches (when does this happen anymore?), utterly life-changing game...$60 is perhaps worth it.
For a crappy half-assed game where they shut down the DRM and multiplay servers after six months... $60 is a grevious offense to the PC gaming public.
Piracy isn't happening in record numbers because they're producing -quality- games, and nor does it eat into their figures even 10% as much as they claim. Most people who would only care about trying it, burning it into the ground, and getting bored with it after 2-3 days...often 2-3 days after they finish the game (that's not a typo).
If the quality of games were higher, they'd see higher returns on investment, less piracy. DRM is like putting up a gaudy neon sign: "steal this game because we KNOW it's so crappy that no one would legitimately buy it".
The more complex or aggressive the DRM, the worse the game is. Anyone remember Starforce? Can anyone name a single _good_ Starforce game? The new versions of SecuROM (anyone else remember when it was JUST a CD check?) are quickly flying straight towards that point of no return.
The article clearly states that they only get five minutes of weightlessness, out of the entire two hour flight. Even if they cap at the flight at the "tourist maximum" of 15 parabolas per flight, you'd still get 6.25 minutes. :)
Research flights offer 60-80 parabolas.
Tourist prices are roughly $5000 per person (or about $330 per person, per parabola).
Even if they charged extra to do a porno, you'd still be saving in the area of $950000, at least?
Four exploding caps, two on a Geforce 4 MX440, two on a Geforce 6800XT. Both smelled like rotting tuna. They exploded, not merely leaked, since they sprayed the "gunk" all over the place. I was lucky that the motherboards being connected to in question didn't exactly care being coated with sickly capacitor goo. ^^;
One of the capacitors blew clean off the PCB.
"Microsoft released a study which found that some 54% of UK file sharers are between 11-16."
That's a very different statement from what the article says.
"UK kids are driving a new wave of digital piracy, and 14yos are the most likely to be file sharers, according to a recent "Real Thing" anti-piracy study conducted by Microsoft.
The "Real Thing" survey involved 270 children and 1,200 adults (16 and older).
Some 54% of children aged 11-16yo use illegal P2P and file-sharing services compared to 15% of adults."
Some 135 children surveyed do not constitute 56% of all illegal pirating activity in the UK (as claimed by the slashdot article?), and this seems like a case of intentional (or merely bad) pruning. Supposedly 145 children (54%) out of those surveyed pirate. A rather equivalent number of the adults, 180 (15%) do.
Studies tend to be up there with lies and benchmarks, but comparing two groups with radially disproportionate sample sizes? And where are the samples from? Are these at specific places? Why such a disparity in the group sizes? Then again, it does admit to be an "anti-piracy" study, so I guess they aren't exactly that interested making it fair or unbiased.
At any rate, the statement in the slashdot version and in the the article linked are very different, regardless of the supposed validity of the study.
Well, just for the record, like you said, rather small city. Prices -appear- fairly uniform across most larger areas, and many smaller. This varies from area to area, as does who is providing the actual service.
Down in Ashland, OR (with some 21,000 residents these days), they have full fiber network built by the city 'loaned out' to small indie ISPs who provide the meaningful to-the-curb service, last I checked, it was universally some 24mbit for $20 there.
Someone from Ashland might proclaim that $60 for 6-8mbit speed (and many ISPs will now burst higher rates as well) would be an absurdly high cost, and they'd be right, but, it's still fairly standard. It's not a rule, it's just what tends to be out there, and even if it were a rule, there are always exceptions. :)
Well, the original question was about 'home usage', heavy, but home, that would generally fall under a general residential rates, coverage, and known problems, including which strong wind could disrupt your.service and it may be a day or a few before your ISP gets around to fixing it if there's an actual problem (and that's pretty regardless of whether in a busy large city or out in the middle of nowhere).
Caveat Emptor. Besides, for roughly the same price, in -many- areas, there's also a satellite/microwave or similar connection available. It's pretty clear, if you're a home user, even a very heavy home user, when you fall into that -class- of user, there are obvious liabilities, including potential downtime without notice. If your needs are beyond that class of service, what's the point of getting more than one residential-tier service provider? I think generally that's the point at which you actually pay for the tier where your needs are met.
If you have a really obsessive compulsive day trader, for instance, an ISP contract which allows you to kidnap the CEO's children if your service is down more than 60 seconds would presumably be worth the cost. ^^
For the proverbial day trader...wouldn't they be able to afford getting some sort of backup wireless internet service on their cell phone or PDA, so that if worse came to worse, they'd be able to change their status/orders when their actual home internet went down, or they got called away on an emergency, etc? Is ping time really a substantial world-ending problem when hitting refresh on any regular web browser every few seconds or minutes? It won't render the actual page any faster.
Frankly, it's almost as silly as suggesting that home internet access wouldn't be good enough if you were operating a nuclear power plant's control panel remotely via average DSL/cable. Of course it's not, but the operative modifiers here being 'home' and 'average'.
Everyone has to buy the service they know they need, and if they're not satisfied, they change it, they work around the problems however they can, or optionally live with it, be reasonably content with what they have. When my comments are rather specific about a specific scenario, it's not "who am I", it's who is someone else for flailing their arms in a panic around a non-issue? If I were advocating that no one should ever get more than one ISP, and that some specific ISP or provider type were ultimate, then yeah, you might have a point -there-, but...hypotheticals aside...
Taxes, death, lies, damned lies, statistics, benchmarks, and downtime, guaranteed.
Honestly, I think that's not understanding how DSL works very well. In virtually all markets, there's one physical DSL provider, and a few dozen 'ISPs' which cost a little bit more to provide potentially 'unique' services on top. One monopoly for phone (and hence DSL), one monopoly for cable.
Er, the cheapest DSL is what, around $25, $30, for 256k? Double that, and you've got a price for very fast (8mbit or more) cable, including 256-512kbit upstream. Even if you have 2x256k, and the equipment to use it in a decently efficient manner, that's still some 512kbit, and two different IPs.
Only in a few situations can you use the bandwidth of both cooperatively for a single task, and the most common failure is based on when the physical link/line conditions deteriorate, in which case having two ports to the same network isn't going to make any difference at all.
Cable/DSL will provide the potential reliability you'd be looking for, I think. But, as a home user, some 98-99% (even if not 99.97%) uptime isn't good enough? For the additional cost, it's not worth the extra -average- hour per month of downtime you gain 'back'.
If your ISPs downtime is any more than that, you have every right to complain, twist their arm to fix whatever might be causing the problem.
The title of the Slashdot article itself is slightly misleading. Since when are 2D games even the exclusive dominion of the PS2? And how do they define 'modern'? Last 2 years? I can name off just oodles of (especially arcade) 2D games over the last 10 years, though, I suppose there are few for the PC or bad modern consoles these days, and few games (though particularly 2D) for any platform that actually try to be original. Many of those listed are just yet more basic rehashes. Even since Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the 2D landscape hasn't been all that barren. I know it's slightly offtopic, but I saw '2D gaming not quite dead?', and thought of one (PC) game that really stands out, and I still think it'd be of interest to Slashdot readers on the topic. In particular since most would theorhetically be viewing Slashdot via a capable PC, and not via PS2. ;b
Hammerfall. I'm not even sure how to describe it, aside from "there probably need to be more Russian gamemakers". It's a non-casual physics based game that is an interesting combination of action and adventure. It reminds me of the days when games were actually something to get excited about and actually buy. If I were to buy a game, say, 15 years ago, it was an investment. You were expecting many dozens of ours of entertainment out of the purchase price. There are plenty of games now where there's no reason to keep playing after the first time, and even that's a paltry 10-or-less hours while still being full price. Then again, that (and later) was also back when there were just oodles of sharewhere and freeware games that were decently entertaining and quite a few were a bargain at $5 or $10. But I digress. Hammerfall is just very...unique, innovative, and even if you don't care about the story, the gameplay is just sublime.
There's just something satisfying about taking your beat up Flying Contraption and *smacking* an attached hammer into someone at full speed, causing them to crash into the ground, break apart part of the level (yes, really), and catch itself (and other things) on fire. And the current 'demo' is a pretty complete game in and of itself, despite being pre-release.
It's a pipe dream, but a girl can hope that someday notions like "innovation" or "original" or "risky", actually return to the gaming proper, rather than something to be feared worse than death by companies looking to make an extra billion profit this year instead of spending a few lousy dollars taking a chance on the lost artform of games.
Essentially, the difference is how well processor resources are divided up, how evenly, and how big the pieces are each process or task gets. Most anyone who has used Linux has had the dreaded moment where you're trying to multitask a bit, and are compiling a program while listening to music, or waching a video, and then...that's terrific, video frames are dropped, or the audio skips. Even if intermitant, it's quite annoying, at the very least. The 'Completely Fair Scheduler' is an attempt to have more fair, sane, and generally less complex scheduling. This also happens to reduces the worst case latencies, averaging from (at least on the tests with my computer) 120+ms on vanilla 2.6.22 scheduler, to ~2.6ms with CFS.
It's largely a drastic improvement over the old scheduling mechanisms that Linux has relied on, although other OSes have largely worked through such problems some time ago.
While it's not exactly THE most scientific, I had a few rounds of testing over which did better on load vs. things still behaving exactly the way they should. I ran all of them with audio playing through KDE artsd, video player, glxgears, etc, loaded, plus inducing a CPU load via 'stress'. Linux, even with CFS, it's still fairly easy to 'upset' it by just producing a fairly large (2-4) amount of load. Solaris did notably better. While it seemed to have a few quirks with scheduling in general, it could sustain a load of around 8-12 without producing video/audio frame drops. FreeBSD, with the experimental SCHED_ULE 2.0 scheduler (as of March 2007) could sustain a load of over 80 with no problems, frame drops, or even glxgears slowing down to a complete crawl (although you wouldn't want to especially use OpenGL at such, it was still getting the speed of software glxgears), and even at 120+ load, the mouse wouldn't respond, while everything else kept going fine. This seems purely useless, but it really comes in handy if trying to do one or more KDE compiles while watching video, on Linux, this tends to be prevented. For the uninitiated, load averages like that are basically a multiplier vs. how much actual work your computer can do in real time. Eg, a 0.5 load would mean you're doing 50% of what you could in realtime. A 2.0 load means you're trying to handle twice what you can do in realtime, it is weighted against how many processors you have (I have one), but other things like disk access can also contribute to the load average, depending on OS.
So, longer story short, a superior CPU scheduler can make a world of difference in how things behave when your system's something else with the CPU(s) at the same time.
Part of the reason that DDR2 was so much slower at most clockspeeds is because of the added latency. The lower speed DDR2 can have more than twice the tested latency of DDR400. The problem is that apparently both JEDIC, or whoever standardizes memory now, isn't thinking of what is the best direction for DDR to take. They're going in the same direction as the manufacturers, trying to sell higher "Megahertz" and "gigabytes per second" ratings, even when they're effectively meaningless now.
Does it exactly matter if your computer can do 6GB/s, or 12GB/s? 14GB/s? Where does it stop? And even then, that's mostly theorhetical, particularly in the case of DDR2. But a very important distinction is that so many memory accesses are of very small to small size. On basically all of those accesses, the memory request will be served in far less time than the latency will allow the command to return and allow another request.
Way back when, Intel motherboards tried out RDRAM for its 'higher end' boards, and the Nintendo 64 also started using it. Both were fairly large fiascos, in that sense, with more or less all technical reviews noting that the increased latency more than cancelled out the improved bandwidth. Now we're looking at DDR3, with far higher latencies than classic RDRAM for a relatively minor bandwidth improvement that only extremely large memory requests (such as applications that would theorhetically be done in an extremely large-scaled database and scientific research).
It reminds me acutely of the early 'Pentium 4s'. A 600Mhz Pentium 3 could beat up to a 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 in most applications and benchmarks, and the (rare and expensive) 1.4Ghz Pentium 3s were real monsters. But people kept trying to tailor benchmarks to hide that, so people would buy more product.
Overclocking has also generally demonstrated that overclocking regular 'old' DDR1, while a bit pricier (mostly due to the virtual elimination of production nowadays, though), scales better and also has far better numbers than DDR2 and the like. DDR600 equivalent is extraordinarily zippy, and (of course) real-world latency is also absurdly low.
It makes me feel like the 'governing bodies' here have really let people down. Instead of trying to standardize on and promote what's best for general computing, they're trying to push a greater volume of merchandise that has no meaningful improvement, and in fact usually a notable decline, over what we've already had for years. The bottom line for them is money, and that's just wrong to put their own pocketbooks over the long term well-being of computing technology and the needs of the consumer.
This is what I've been saying for quite a while, but people really dont want to hear it.
I mean, look, free software is typically pretty decent, an alternative to what most people use, and pay for.
Most everyone will like the notion of actually being able to ask for (or implement themselves) a feature or bugfix for applications, games, and utilities they use every day.
The problem with GPL isn't even necessarily that it restricts proprietary software. That is freedom-limiting, yes, but, *most* of the time, someone who's going to make proprietary software already has a lot of money, and is looking to make more. Most of the time, the GPL won't actually stop them, though. They either simply ignore the license, or try to get around it (for instance, using executable wrappers to interface with libraries or programs). For the most part, anyone doing that also has "More Money Than God" and can afford an absurd number of lawyers to, at minimum, drag it out in court for years, all the while making a huge profit.
Where the GPL really steps in and has its weight, is against other, non-GPL licenses. You can simply absorb most other open source code, and say 'screw you' to the original developers (like what Torvalds said he'd do with Solaris code if it had a compatible license). In essence, all it does is prevent BSD, MIT, X11, etc licensed software from incorporating or linking to GPLed software (with the exception of LGPL, for obvious reasons) or even making use of most of it in other ways.
GNU actively encourages the use of GPL for libraries, even though they know what it does to other, free software. In essence, dynamic linking to a library isn't "stealing", but GNU views it as a purely derivate work. That's become particularly nasty once things like MySQL switch from LGPL to GPL, and oh, terrific, or even that Trolltech used GPL (previously without exclusions for other licenses). I doubt many people wishing to write, say, a decent looking BSD-licensed front-end (say, Qt4 frontend for MySQL) have the money to spend thousands of dollars on licenses in the 'alternative', since they don't wish to entangle their users further with GPL.
Isn't that one of the things the GPL claims to product against? The supposed Microsoftian 'Embrace and Extend' broken standards? Even the Linux Kernel has, in the past, and more recently, demonstrated its willingness to take from BSD-licensed code without giving contributing anything back, while there are plenty of more liberally licensed software that continues to make itself compatible for the platform.
Mind, licensing something, such as an application, under BSD, MIT, X11, or anything else, obviously doesn't extend 'down'. So unlike the arguments of many, having a BSD licensed program can't "infect" or diminish the rights of a GPL (or LGPL) library, that'd also be the case regardless of if it's proprietary or not. BSD programs can also cheerily run on proprietary libraries, but since the GPL tries to infect upwards, nope, not allowed. How is that encouraging open source, I have to keep asking?
Freedom isn't about *forcing* someone to do something like that, so at the least, the GPL should provide a cheery exclusion for libraries that happen to the license, to keep it from infecting upwards (which the LGPL already effectively does, but fewer and fewer people use it, and GNU says you should never normally use it for libraries), at least for other open source software with a OSI-approved and otherwise 'GPL compatible' license. That does a bit more of what the supposed intent is, encourage open source, give credit to people, give proprietary software something to think about before stealing willy nilly, while still affecting truly derived entities under the same license.
How many people *wouldn't* be enraged if the, say, standard cross-platform SSL, networking, or X11 library was actually GPL? Why, if you didn't want to use GPL, for both alternative open source or proprietary reasons, you'd be utterly screwed, because at best, you couldn't provide i
The more sensible thing would be...to use PostgreSQL which has a better license, and is more ANSI SQL compliant anyway? The "everything for free" on MySQL's case is a bit less than truthful, anyway.
You basically only get it for free for use with non-commercial GPLed software. Anything other use is effectively verboten under the 'community' edition, similarly to the way Qt is licensed (though Qt also requires that anything that licenses Qt officially, for several thousand dollars, is also proprietary, for-charge, and closed source).
Personally, it doesn't make sense to me that a 'common library' be licensed under GPL because obviously, that mostly undercuts things that don't have GPL license, such as BSD and CDDL software which isn't allowed to link to it. It's not surprising that MySQL is making it 'more closed'. They did it before when they changed from LGPL to GPL "because people were static linking and stealing the server code", and they thought the LGPL allowed that, or at least that was the excuse given at the time.
PostgreSQL, on the other hand, isn't owned by a faceless corporation that is trying to restrict your use of their software. Why suggest all of the effort of reinventing the wheel via SQLite when there's obviously an already existent, and free, alternative and equivalent to MySQL? The whole point of SQLite, as far as I understand it, is to be able to use SQL without all of the setup or server requirements, so you can dump a single file to store all database data for a single program.
That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late for people to be in shock about it.
Slashdot even covered it before.
Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).
Also, the reason to bother with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).
It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.
I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.
I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.
One thing I've always wondered is, if the GNU is all about 'open source' and 'free as in freedom' software...there are a few really basic incompatibilities with *freedom*, and the GPL, and associated licenses.
For instance, I understand that they're trying to promote reciprocal freedom, but *freedom* implies directly that, well, you shouldn't have drastic, overarching restrictions on what people are legally allowed to do with software. The GPL puts a lot of restrictions on what you can't do, and what you're required to do if you even get near it, link to it, or do anything else. Mind, they actually consider dynamic linking to ANY library, to be directly considered a 'derivative work' (it's in the FAQ, and yes, also applies to LGPL).
And, for another, if they were so interested in 'freedom', and 'open source', why not provide an exemption towards "you must be GPL too, lol lol", for other verifiably open source licenses? For instance, if there's a common GPLed library out there to reproduce functionality available by standard on other platforms (there are quite a few), and I make a BSD licensed program, it would be a GPL violation. How fun is that?
A practical example is MySQL. You can only use GPLed programs linking against the client libraries (necessary to communicate with the server sanely). This arose over a misunderstanding that the company behind MySQL had about the LGPL. They thought that under the LGPL, it was legitimate for another program to static link against it (including the server parts), and redistribute a modified version with their program, but they wouldn't have to give away any modified source. Of course, that's incorrect for many reasons, and a lot of people are screwed (or have to keep trying to convince stubborn developers and hosting companies to use the more ANSI compliant PostgreSQL anyway).
And I've been finding Torvalds himself (and the Linux community in general) extremely hypocritical about licensing issues.
Torvalds and others have been basically flaming Sun for having their own code licensed under CDDL (which many people have misconceptions about nonetheless). They have every right to do that, no? Linux and most 'open source' software designed at all for Linux has been pretty explicitly incompatible with Solaris. What right does the Linux community (and Torvalds in particular) to a double standard where everything Sun and Solaris MUST be explicitly Linux compatible, but nothing at all Linux is even asked to be Solaris compatible?
OpenSolaris and *BSD (and BSD/X11/MIT/etc licensed) projects have contributed a great deal towards the community, but effectively, Linux and GPL-specific projects contribute absolutely nothing back, but then expect everything to be contributed back to them.
In the end, GPL (even GPLv3) hurts open source software much more than it hurts proprietary. There are ways to get around GPL licensing problems, including using a simple binary shim front-end (which you'd have to release the code for) to a library, but then use that binary to interface with a library or other code that's otherwise incompatible (since no linking is done). You simply can't get away with that with an open source project, but proprietary has a free pass. So, if they cared that much about open source, how would it dilute it at all to, for instance, have an exemption that allows open source licensed programs to interface with GPLed libraries (and similar situations)? If someone tried to "embrace" the program and make it proprietary, they wouldn't be privy to the same exemption.
It seems increasingly difficult to accept GNU as a legitimate thing for issues such as that, even if it's intended to exclude other (even 'GPL compatibly licensed', such as BSD) open source as well.
And then, in a few years...Microsoft will buy Barnes and Noble to use with its growing database of marketing info. Some point, shortly thereafter, Tom Cruise will walk in and a smiling employee will appear on a jerky, 3D projector after scanning his eyes. "Hello, Mr. Cruise! Did you enjoy your purchase of 'You're So Damn Effing Glib!', and 'Normal People Are Filthy In The Eyes of Xenu'? We would love to provide you with new books. Might we recommend 'The Greatest Threat of Our Times: The Flying Spaghetti Monster' and 'Desperate Housewives: The Katie Holmes Escape Story'?".
Your corporate "tax" dollars at work. >:)
I dunno, somehow I haven't seen many chimps going on TV six times to find out who the father of their baby is, and then accusing 6-12 men who aren't the father, and they dance around like crazy and curse. :b (Though, that seems very ape-like in and of itself.)
In all seriousness, is there really a 'better' in this case? A lot of chimpanzees, I'd imagine, succumb to elements, various fighting, various animals. A lot of humans succumb to other humans with guns, sticking their fingers/genitals/etc into electrical sockets, jumping out of airplanes, sexual disease, rolling around with pigs and contracting the flu, falling asleep while travelling in metal boxes and murdering entire families, drinking alcohol and injecting drugs until they die, poisoning their own environment, etc, and other instruments of sheer boredom and not thinking more than 0.7s in advance. Humans can think, and reason, and remember...but if a pretty significant chunk of the population refuses to exercise that to any degree, then...are humans really so much better than anything else?
It'd be like engineering an airplane that can fly n miles, and then it does very close that for its service life, getting rather good efficiency, compared to building an airplane that can fly n*2 miles at n*5 the price, but only flying it for n/2 miles. You're just wasting most of it, so what's the point of going 'bigger and better', if you're just going to piss it away?
It's obviously cynical, but if anyone wants to brag about how much 'better' they are than any other species, being human, then they need to accomplish those better things, have something to actually be proud of, before being so damn proud of themselves. Since when is existing the only requirement to brag about your technical superiority to a dog, fish, crocodile, whatever? And has people have demonstrated, bragging about technical superiority doesn't alleviate you from being able to be killed by pretty much anything else at any time (even if people are so frequently killed by consequences to their own self-induced and society-induced stupidity).
Previous 'grunts at the company' have stated many different figures, where does the 60GB come from? I scoured through the Comcast TOS (which consists, separately, of the Comcast Service Agreement, Acceptable Use Policy, and Abuse Policy, and does not appear to be available from comcast.com), no mention of 50GB anywhere, or any hard numbers, anywhere.
From the Service Agreement, though: Facilities Allocation. Comcast reserves the right to determine, in its discretion, and on an ongoing basis, the nature and extent of its facilities allocated to support HSI, including, but not limited to, the amount of bandwidth to be utilized and delivered in conjunction with HSI.
Basically, like people have been complaining about for years, it can easily be a moving target, and they can terminate your account without having to tell you either what the hard limits are, OR what generally acceptable numbers are.
Back when I had Comcast, they started sending me nasty letters after I was just using 10GB/month (mind, in a college city, too!), and trust me, there are lots of ways to fill up a *lot* of bandwidth besides BT, particularly with faster, larger, higher capacity games, online video, music, nevermind what percentage of HTTP bandwidth comes back down to advertising.
Comcast doesn't seem like a very good company to begin with, though. In my first-hand experience, they're rotten. I'd been acquired through their buying out AT&T Broadband Internet cable service, it hadn't been so much of a hassle, except that they had given everyone else new cable modems out of it, and even though I was still renting mine, they refused to do anything about mine, which had given consistently low speeds and generated a ton of heat. This wasn't even the biggest problem. When it came time to move, I had tried a half-dozen or more times to cancel the service before moving, but they refused, because I had really been a customer of ATTBI, and so, they told me they had no obligation to allow me to simply discontinue service, since, apparently, I wasn't even really in the system. Despite numerous attempts both over the phone and in-person, they would just not let me discontinue service. I still had to move. Of course, even when I tried to return the modem, they started going on about how that wasn't Comcast equipment, so they couldn't accept a return, a month later, they charge me for several months of supposedly unpaid service (when I had only moved a month before), and the modem, when they refused to handle anything in a remotely sane manner.
So, it doesn't really surprise me in the slightest when people consistently have problems and fears over Comcast discontinuing their service, since they never announce even so much as a safety margin on how much you can use. Though, other people have stated figures quite different from 60gb numerous times, too.
I'll suggest why. Men don't like competition, at least, not from anyone that could possibly get away with wearing a skirt. It's rather simple, but overlooked. Personally, I'm self-taught, and I'm really good at what I do. Frick, I'm frequently asked to teach others about technology, programming, and everything else in my time, but whenever I keep applying for jobs in areas related to my best skills (programming, largely anything to do with computers), I either get laughed at, or I'm ignored, while less qualified and far less skilled men easily glide through the process.
;b
It's not that there "is no pool" of skilled women in these fields, it's that it doesn't matter if there is a pool or not. Most of the other women in the field that I've been friends with have similar problems with getting people (it's not just men who believe in such god-awful stereotypes that only men can understand technology to any sufficient degree) to take them seriously. But I've been fired a number of times simply because men (who were obviously less skilled, considering I was told to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren't screwing up the project) would complain that a women would be put in any position of peer or leadership and would threaten to quit if I was allowed to keep working.
There've also been a number of times when (all-male, almost tech-illiterate) management pressured me to completely undermine the already compromised stability and security of a project (I was brought in to correct the apparent incompetence of predecessors), even when I've been ahead of schedule to get things fixed *and* implement new features that users had been requesting for years (for which management had already preapproved). Mind, the pressure was for a feature that only one person had requested, and it was dubious as to why anyone would need such a thing in the next few years. Even when I proposed a revised timetable to include the feature sanely "down the road" by several months, it just didn't matter.
Is it much of a wonder why there isn't necessarily overwhemling interest once someone has any experience? It's akin to traversing the Iron Curtain to even get a job in the first place, and even if you get it, there's a huge chance you will be treated with extreme prejudice and hostility, no matter how hard you're expected to work (or how much unpaid overtime you put in just to meet arbitrary irrational demands). It doesn't necessarily matter how many hours I have to work to get something done, but constantly getting flak or fired for no reason doesn't exactly sit well. Though, the hoops I've been expected to jump through for arbitrary reasons often makes others look bad in their own job performance, the double standard gets to be bloody absurd. If any man did that, they'd get the hell promoted out of them. Hell, I've had to watch men who mostly spend around 20-30 minutes a day doing actual work get promoted multiple times in a short period of time, while I had to demolish through mountains of work, plus arbitary demands which aren't even in my job description, to not even be granted a raise or a day off during a serious family emergency. Also, tending to get blamed for lots of things that have nothing to do with me (including things not even related in the slightest to the department I was working in, let alone my work personally).
The so-called "Gender Gap" isn't at all in the possible pool of candidates, it's how women are often treated in the sector. Nevermind that in my experience (though often mirrored by others) sexual harassment is considered about 'the norm', and trying to bring any complaints, even about the most obvious and flagrant violations, gets you fired very quickly. Men and women *are* rather completely different, but being unwilling to give a 'class' of people in a profession much (if any) respect because they don't have a penis is just absolutely insane. It's insult to injury to then claim that there simply ARE no candidates. Supposedly, prejudice is blinding, but this is ridiculous.
Now only if GTK+ decently supported Windows operating system versions, actually used native style/widgets, and weren't so mind-numbingly bad at performance. The native Java 6 Swing GUI stuff is actually faster than GTK+ now, despite still being in beta (try it yourselves and see!). "GTK+ enthusiasts" tend to be rabid about 'everyone should use this!', but it's overwhelmingly lackluster in performance and memory usage. People should make their own analysis and look into alternatives, not just take the GTK+ word for it. Qt is very well performing, very well behaving (it effectively wraps around native platform widget/engine stuff), and looks like a dream. GTK+ is (disclaimer: in my personal opinion) almost as bad as old X11 apps that just use ancient versions of Motif or Athena. GTK+ just doesn't blend in very well, and (again, opinion) leaves everything to be desired over more robust and compatible libraries.
The really silly thing about this is that they claim it's "lower overhead" than TCP/IP because people are having to buy "expensive TCP offloading engines" for iSCSI, when a few seconds of research provided, namely on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI), that plain NICs can outperform the offloading ones, and sure, it's obviously going to be lighter than TCP/IP, however, ATA over Ethernet only has basic authentication (MAC addresses, which can be forged cheerily), can't be routed, and isn't very available. It's -only- usable for Storage Area Network, not really for general remote drive (or part of a drive even) access. At currently, only Linux support is available. iSCSI is supported by Windows, Linux, Solaris, among others. Even FreeBSD is working on a native implementation. Windows Vista will even include a fully built-in/native support for iSCSI. I can't imagine why they complain that iSCSI is 'more expensive' to implement, when their primary product for ATA over Ethernet is a 'special drive enclosure' (according to their documentation, you can't even use AoE with standard networking hardware, interfaces, routers, etc) with special networking hardware which can house up to 15 ATA drives. The enclosure itself (with nothing else) costs about $4000. You could build ten high-end machines dedicated to serving iSCSI requests to multiple drives each for that (five if they use actual SCSI), and still use standard networking hardware, and still have it accessable from a network across the world, with things like actual user authentication.
The whole ATA over Ethernet thing seems like trying to blow smoke up the arses of some very rich and silly people. At the same time, the technologies are rather different, too. If you just want to build a SAN? Sure, go for HyperSCSI or AoE, maybe, but if you actually want remote drive access? Why would you want any of this? They shouldn't be trying to utterly replace iSCSI. It's absurd. As far as I see it, iSCSI is more of a general and free/open replacement for things such the old 'X drive' remote service, and network filesharing like SMB/NFS. Websites can (and are starting to) offer iSCSI targets to offer remote drives for backup. It can also be used for cheap SAN, or more-or-less replacing SMB/NFS over a network. It does all of this rather well.
It seems to me that the company behind ATA over Ethernet is becoming rather desperate to resort to such claims.
Don't forget that now with Qemu 0.8.1 and the 1.3.x-pre acceleration module, kernel-mode acceleration of the target is also supported.
Of course, rumors are usually just very silly rumors, but why does everyone seem to want the same sequels for the same series over and over, and why are game developers so comfortable in producing those sequels over and over? The results usually don't turn out that great after a few iterations (cough, Wing Commander Prophecy pretty much was Doom all over again, and then Origin Systems died), and unremarkably, most don't feature all that much 'new', let alone earth-shattering plot and character development. Games are a lot like movies, once it's up to Rocky 3, or (darnit) Rocky 5, if you aren't doing much new and innovative with it, it's usually time to just move on. Take the example of System Shock. Now, there was System Shock, it blew, well, the few people who gave it time away. Capitalizing on that, there was the amazing System Shock 2, but because of the slightly unforgiving interface and unique gameplay, it was never really a huge commercial success. Now, with the 'spiritual successor' BioShock hitting shelves next year, it uses some of the same interesting and different concepts, but is a completely different game. Originality? It sure looks like it. But why don't more developers 'take the plunge' and use their famous name and bankroll to do something more interesting and original? Instead of Half Life 3 and X4 and Civilization 5, why not try producing something actually playable, fun, and interesting, like so many of the 'new and original' games of the early to mid 1990s, not to mention some of the great games of the late 1980s? If studios are so 'concerned' about sequels that they constantly put out, then they just need to be strong-armed by big-name studios into putting up for more original and interesting games. There's a reason why 'indie' game quality, despite being rough around the edges, is starting to casually surpass that of big commercial games. Even if the big commercial games are flashier and have 1GB worth of graphics and 50MB worth of content, it often doesn't make them very playable or intelligent, and why spend $50+ on a boring big-name game when you can spend $0-10 on a fun and remarkably polished indie game? Many, even if in the 'same old' genre, do things that haven't been done in similar games for more than a decade now, and do it very well. Nevermind that they also tend to be maintained and patched for a bit longer. It's pretty infuriating when that 'big game' only gets one or two patches, but they never fix the critical issues that some people or everyone are getting, leaving some games even completely unprogressable after a certain point for many people (cough, Knights of the Old Republic). And that's not to say that all sequels are bad, but...if it's a good continuation of the same story, which actually tells that story, and does a good job of it objectively, before fanboyism? Then sure...by all means (just like Wing Commander and WC2, or even WC: Privateer and the lesser known sequel Righteous Fire), but if the primary goal is just to sell an engine, or otherwise make money? Screw you. As a game developer (though certainly not big name), it's just really not right to completely sell a game out, rather than offering something that's actually meaningful, playable, and a fun and unique experience.
If I could get an Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice Core :D) with 1.5GB of DDR400 RAM, 200GB ATA100 HD, DVD+RW 16X, an insane number of USB ports, etc, for less than $600, and add two serial ports and a good hardware modem for about $14, reuse a Soundblaster Live! or Aureal Vortex 2 (yes, really), into the end of last year, after not being able to have any computer upgrades since 1999 (Yay for Pentium 3), I don't think anyone else would have any excuse for AMD's price point. The only lower-end point is the ATi IGP graphics (which don't have a hardware T&L unit), but that can be upgraded at some point once PCI-E cards are cheap, and it can play most newer games still pretty smoothly, including Half Life 2.
Ironically, it is slower in Freespace 2 (the new open source engine with fancy effects anyway) and SWAT 4, mostly for the lack of hardware T&L. Especially with relatively basic lighting effects in newer games, you can "feel" it slowing down as the CPU has to handle it. But a system amazingly over the top for modern gaming and heavy programming and other usage, that's quite a lot cheaper than how much you could get even a slightly usable system in 2002. I wish they made an AGP to PCI-E or even AGP to PCI adapter so I could use my Geforce 4 Ti4200-8X, which has absurdly reliable performance.
Plus there's the fact that it uses so little power, and runs about 32C stable, while under heavy gaming/compiling prolonged usage, with about 30C when not having to do much, amazingly quiet as well.