I myself will probably never take ATI seriously when considering a high-end gaming card. Why? Nearly all of their products in the past have been quite substandard in the quality department. If the hardware was good, then the drivers and software suffered badly and vice versa.
I know of no serious gamer that owns an ATI card. My friend bought one once (Rage 128, I think) based on a good review in PC Gamer, and has regretted it ever since. (He doesn't read PC Gamer anymore, either.)
A few people mentioned that ATI has the majority market share on the 3D card racket. This is true, but misleading when you look at the big picture. The reason for this is that ATI ships a lot of cards and graphic chipsets to OEMs like Dell and Gateway for use in lower budget machines ($500-$1500). In the last couple of years, this price range has dominated any others due to the huge amount of people buying a PC for the first time. These people do not even know what a video card is, therefore Gateway & Co can get away with putting anything in their machines that is barely capable of generating graphics.
Need I go on?
Of course, it is completely feasible that ATI could turn themselves around. AMD rose up from the ashes to compete directly against Intel. (Yeah, apples and oranges, but I think the principle is the same.) And 3Dfx, once the 3D king has fallen to almost last position because they were awful good on getting chips out the door, but simply sat around while companies like nVidia started to innovate and add features to their products.
Could write more, but I'm about to go home right now and play Q3 on my GeForce.:)
While everything you say is truthful, you're missing a few key ideas here.
If you have a *really* fast processor, it does you no good at all to have a shitty motherboard, IDE hard drive, slow memory, etc. I personally have an Athlon 750 system, with SCSI hard discs, PC100 memory (Irongate 750, blegh), and a GeForce video card. This is one butt-fast system, but I had to pay out the ass for it. But the components do exist.
Now, look over at Intel. As I understand it, to get top performance out of a CuMine CPU, you need an i820 chipset (buggy), and a stick or two of RAMBUS. RAMBUS, for crying out loud, is like $600 on pricewatch right now for a 128MB SIMM. Compare that to SDRAM, which is around $90 once you add in shipping.
RDRAM is supposed to be technically superior to SDRAM, which I don't doubt. But it just reeks of conspiracy. I mean look at the prices. Yet Athlon benchmarks continue to edge out P3 ones in all the reviews.
Ahem. CPUs are not cheap.:P My Athlon 750 cost me $550 when I bought it (would have paid $650 if I didn't have to wait for the next paycheck). Okay, I have to back up a little bit. High-performance CPUs are not cheap. The Athlon 650 actually costs less than the 600.
As I understand it, AMD stopped making 600's and 650's sometime late last year, and to keep up with the demand that was still in place for the lower-clocked Athlons, they actually underclocked 700's and 750's to keep up.
My very same CPU now costs about half as much as I paid for it with not even a month passed.
And to the guy that said Athlons are hard difficult to overclock? That is shenanegans. AMD made a little connector on the top of their PCB that lets you slip on a little (tiny) overclocking device and go to town. You can use it with the cartrige installed, but what the hey. You need to take off the cartridge anyway if you want to use a "decent" heat sink. (I bought an Arctic Cirlce cooler)
Nah, I won't throw anymore recursiveness into the mix.:P
I hope you mean recently Intel hasn't been able to mass produce or leapfrog AMD cause if you don't then you need to read about what has happened in these two companies for the last 10 years.
Well we're not really talking about the last 10 years here. What's been happening with AMD started just recently, within a year ago.
but like all others who Cry "Love AMD" you are forgetting AMD has pulled the same crap Intel is right now.
AMD has had problems in the past, yes. And they were even on the brink of bankruptcy or selling out not too long ago. Right up until the very day the first Athlon was released, AMDs business plan was to produce processors for the low- to mid-perfermance PC market. 586+ and K6's, you know the stuff. Now they want to be a performance player, and I must say, they are kicking ass.
If Intel and AMD put together can't meet CPU demands, maybe that tells us something about the computer market right now. It looks like there's room for yet another player or two. That would make things *real* interesting.:)
Tom's Hardware is very pro-AMD
I can't really dispute this. You mention that it's American tradition to root for the underdog, this is true to a point, but it's *especially* true when the underdog suddenly starts kicking ass after being shit on by the overdog. Tom is constantly being accused of being biased toward certain manufacturers and brands, etc. I've spent a lot of time reading his site, and I don't really see that as true. Tom's mission seems to be to promote the best hardware and shit on anything else that isn't the best (ie- most powerful). I liked the Athlon and GeForce articles, and I thought they were informative. I ended up buying an Athlon and GeForce and minus about a week of bug-working-out, I have a rock-solid system and no complaints. And I know it's got to be one of the fastest computers on the planet. For awhile, at least.:)
Okay. I think I understand what's going on. I've read about half of the threads, and it seems to me that the situation is thus:
There is a new implementation of USB, and naturally, us free *NIX users want to write drivers for it. But this organization wants to keep specifications and details closed, except to those with $2500 to blow. It's not security through obscurity, because the encryption is strong.
The point of all of this (though I'm not quite sure how...) seems to be "content protection." Oh yes, we remember that phrase, don't we? And as a result of that huge fiasco, some of us are boycotting DVD or otherwise fighing the CCA.
My question to the./ masses is what in the world do we want with this? Isn't this just another way for corporations and manufacturers to keep us away from data on our own systems? Someone brought up an example listed in the USB docs of a speaker system that encrypted all data right up to the point that it hits the voice coil.
I don't know about you guys, but MY computer system will never EVER have ANY components that are designed to hide the data moving across hardware that I payed for. This is why I don't, and will not, own a DVD drive or player.
And the Linux/*BSD/other community is actually interested in writing drivers for (effectively, supporting) this scheme? Doesn't sound very open to me if I have to hack open my speakers and start soldering resistors to copy a bit of analog to casette tape. [Which I do routinely to listen to MODs in my car. Good techo, that.]
First: The Athlon (.25 micron version, anyway) and GeForce were never designed consume small amounts of power. They were designed to be powerhouses, to push the envelope and put to shame anything that is currently considered fast. Since raw, bleeding edge power does not come from milliamperes, these two products practically suck the capacitors right out of your power supply. Mmm, electrolyte...
Second: You would be correct that the Athlon and GeForce aren't mainstream. But how long before they are? For crying out loud, they've practically just appeared on the market. I'm buying BOTH an Athlon and GeForce for the system I'm currently building, but not because they aren't "mainstream," but because they simply roll over the competition in performance/price value. Once the Athlon gets some decent motherboards under it's belt, I find it hard to believe most people are going to pay MORE for a Pentium III that does less.
As for laptops, well... I've seen quite a few AMD based laptops in Computer Shopper, although with AMD beginning to cut back on it's K6 production, that number is slowly falling.
For some reason, I don't think it'll be too long before AMD announces an.18 micron 500 or 550 mhz mobile Ahtlon. On the other hand, I can't really imagine anyone who would absolutely need a bitch-fast Athlon in their laptop.:P
Yes, but I would tend to believe that this "fit for purpose" clause isn't really a viable excuse.
The store or record company would simply say "We intended for it to be played on standard home audio CD players. And we purposely engineered it so that you couldn't rip the data onto your computer. That is the new format's purpose and there is nothing you can do about it, ha ha."
I think the very most you might get BMG to do is put a label on the outside of the disc that says something along the lines of "This CD is not compatible with CD-ROM drives."
I tried giving the local baby bell (Qwest) hell for wanting to actually charge me to have my number unlisted. I personally think numbers should be unlisted by default.
Then again, this is the same company that sells your brand-new number to telemarketers and has the balls to launch a telemarketer-blocking service for like $10/month.
No, you aren't the only person who hates Jim Carrey.
But I'm not one of them. I think the vast majority of those who say his style of humor is "stupid," have grown up too much. Too busy making careers, planning things, watching L.A. Law, and so forth. You don't really sit back and think to yourselves, "What if I were a kid again?" or "What if I ignored all commonly accepted rules of society for a day?"
There are many movies and TV shows that I absolutely love, but what many people would call "stupid."
South Park
All of Carrey's "comedy" movies
Tom Green
Ren and Stimpy
Kids in the Hall
In Living Color
Space Ghost
I could go on.
The thing that makes these shows magical is that the actors and writers try deliberately to make the characters range from a bit insane to outright mad. (With the execption of Tom Green, who already obviously is.) I challenge all of you to sit down and watch at least one of the aforementioned movies or one of the episodes. But don't just watch as your normally would. Put yourself inside that character and imagine yourself in their place. Maybe I'm just weird, but I'm addicted to "stupid" humor. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have acted out certain scenes of The Mask in my bathroom mirror.
If there is one phrase that has seemed to hold very true as I grew up into adulthood and watched carefully those around me: There is a fine line between genius and insanity. Whoever isn't at least a little bit mad is probably doomed to a life of contentment, never bliss.
For the very same reason that different distributions exist to begin with: people have different tastes and different needs. The linux kernel and it's core utilities are flexible enough to be deployed in pretty much any environment with minimal repackaging.
On one end of the spectrum you have OpenLinux. It is supposedly the easiest Linux distro to setup and use, and according to Caldera, it is selling quite well. If it's selling well then why do we rarely ever hear of anyone on here on slashdot using it?
Because most of us on slashdot here "grew up" with Slackware, Red Hat, or Debian and learned most of the Tricks of the Linux trade already. We are, for the most part, the geeks and power users.
Most of the people here have little use for a new distro just because it's easier to setup, but less familiar. The reverse is also true. The average person who has been using Windows for 10 years will most likely get nowhere quick trying to install and configure Debian.
One of the most difficult things in building a distribution is making the different programs all work together. From what I've seen, no distro has ever gotten this process entirely right. Five CDs of software is more than a lifetime of compatibility headaches. This naturally dribbles into both of the quality and stability categories.
They have yet to invent a swiss army knife that can do absolutely everything.
"On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers?"
I have to disagree here. I got into computers because... well, I didn't have a choice. I was 8. My mom bought a Tandy 1000. I saw something technological and mysterious and dove in head first. Most people are not like this. They don't care about what they don't understand (sometimes fear it), and many that do care are too lazy to begin their quest. Most kids don't care how Toy Story was rendered, but how they can get more flashy graphics. This is where the web comes in and tries to appeal with shockwave animations and then these kids think "Oh, now I'm a geek, I'm on the internet."
Going back more to the context of the quote, the only kids that are going to want to know how Toy Story was rendered are those that are similar to how I was as a child. Only the geeky kids are going to stop and ask themselves how Disney did it and what's involved in creating this kind of movie. Everyone else is content to believe that "it was done with computers."
Should be: Barbecuing small animals for fun, profit, and personal gain without artificial preservatives or additives on your backyard grill in three seconds or less FOR DUMMIES.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I just caught a couple of mistakes in my own message.
One, everything you said *wasn't* truthful, according the to guy above. (However, my post didn't pertain to technical speficics.)
Two, I understand now that there are motherboards for the CuMine that use SDRAM that aren't really too shabby.
Three, I said SIMM when I meant RIMM. And PC100 comes in a DIMM package, usually.
I myself will probably never take ATI seriously when considering a high-end gaming card. Why? Nearly all of their products in the past have been quite substandard in the quality department. If the hardware was good, then the drivers and software suffered badly and vice versa.
I know of no serious gamer that owns an ATI card. My friend bought one once (Rage 128, I think) based on a good review in PC Gamer, and has regretted it ever since. (He doesn't read PC Gamer anymore, either.)
A few people mentioned that ATI has the majority market share on the 3D card racket. This is true, but misleading when you look at the big picture. The reason for this is that ATI ships a lot of cards and graphic chipsets to OEMs like Dell and Gateway for use in lower budget machines ($500-$1500). In the last couple of years, this price range has dominated any others due to the huge amount of people buying a PC for the first time. These people do not even know what a video card is, therefore Gateway & Co can get away with putting anything in their machines that is barely capable of generating graphics.
Need I go on?
Of course, it is completely feasible that ATI could turn themselves around. AMD rose up from the ashes to compete directly against Intel. (Yeah, apples and oranges, but I think the principle is the same.) And 3Dfx, once the 3D king has fallen to almost last position because they were awful good on getting chips out the door, but simply sat around while companies like nVidia started to innovate and add features to their products.
Could write more, but I'm about to go home right now and play Q3 on my GeForce.
While everything you say is truthful, you're missing a few key ideas here.
If you have a *really* fast processor, it does you no good at all to have a shitty motherboard, IDE hard drive, slow memory, etc. I personally have an Athlon 750 system, with SCSI hard discs, PC100 memory (Irongate 750, blegh), and a GeForce video card. This is one butt-fast system, but I had to pay out the ass for it. But the components do exist.
Now, look over at Intel. As I understand it, to get top performance out of a CuMine CPU, you need an i820 chipset (buggy), and a stick or two of RAMBUS. RAMBUS, for crying out loud, is like $600 on pricewatch right now for a 128MB SIMM. Compare that to SDRAM, which is around $90 once you add in shipping.
RDRAM is supposed to be technically superior to SDRAM, which I don't doubt. But it just reeks of conspiracy. I mean look at the prices. Yet Athlon benchmarks continue to edge out P3 ones in all the reviews.
What, OpenSSH.cc was taken too?
Ahem. CPUs are not cheap. :P My Athlon 750 cost me $550 when I bought it (would have paid $650 if I didn't have to wait for the next paycheck). Okay, I have to back up a little bit. High-performance CPUs are not cheap. The Athlon 650 actually costs less than the 600.
As I understand it, AMD stopped making 600's and 650's sometime late last year, and to keep up with the demand that was still in place for the lower-clocked Athlons, they actually underclocked 700's and 750's to keep up.
My very same CPU now costs about half as much as I paid for it with not even a month passed.
And to the guy that said Athlons are hard difficult to overclock? That is shenanegans. AMD made a little connector on the top of their PCB that lets you slip on a little (tiny) overclocking device and go to town. You can use it with the cartrige installed, but what the hey. You need to take off the cartridge anyway if you want to use a "decent" heat sink. (I bought an Arctic Cirlce cooler)
Like anyone who buys a pIII just to email and surf the web and play quake.
:P
:P
Hey, I bought an Athlon + GeForce to play Quake!
Only about 253fps in 640x480x32.
Actually, I got it partially because my only computer at the time was a PII laptop and I wanted something to play Q3 on. So sue me!
Let me comment on your comment if you don't mind:
:P
:)
:)
Nah, I won't throw anymore recursiveness into the mix.
I hope you mean recently Intel hasn't been able to mass produce or leapfrog AMD cause if you don't then you need to read about what has happened in these two companies for the last 10 years.
Well we're not really talking about the last 10 years here. What's been happening with AMD started just recently, within a year ago.
but like all others who Cry "Love AMD" you are forgetting AMD has pulled the same crap Intel is right now.
AMD has had problems in the past, yes. And they were even on the brink of bankruptcy or selling out not too long ago. Right up until the very day the first Athlon was released, AMDs business plan was to produce processors for the low- to mid-perfermance PC market. 586+ and K6's, you know the stuff. Now they want to be a performance player, and I must say, they are kicking ass.
If Intel and AMD put together can't meet CPU demands, maybe that tells us something about the computer market right now. It looks like there's room for yet another player or two. That would make things *real* interesting.
Tom's Hardware is very pro-AMD
I can't really dispute this. You mention that it's American tradition to root for the underdog, this is true to a point, but it's *especially* true when the underdog suddenly starts kicking ass after being shit on by the overdog. Tom is constantly being accused of being biased toward certain manufacturers and brands, etc. I've spent a lot of time reading his site, and I don't really see that as true. Tom's mission seems to be to promote the best hardware and shit on anything else that isn't the best (ie- most powerful). I liked the Athlon and GeForce articles, and I thought they were informative. I ended up buying an Athlon and GeForce and minus about a week of bug-working-out, I have a rock-solid system and no complaints. And I know it's got to be one of the fastest computers on the planet. For awhile, at least.
Okay. I think I understand what's going on. I've read about half of the threads, and it seems to me that the situation is thus:
./ masses is what in the world do we want with this? Isn't this just another way for corporations and manufacturers to keep us away from data on our own systems? Someone brought up an example listed in the USB docs of a speaker system that encrypted all data right up to the point that it hits the voice coil.
There is a new implementation of USB, and naturally, us free *NIX users want to write drivers for it. But this organization wants to keep specifications and details closed, except to those with $2500 to blow. It's not security through obscurity, because the encryption is strong.
The point of all of this (though I'm not quite sure how...) seems to be "content protection." Oh yes, we remember that phrase, don't we? And as a result of that huge fiasco, some of us are boycotting DVD or otherwise fighing the CCA.
My question to the
I don't know about you guys, but MY computer system will never EVER have ANY components that are designed to hide the data moving across hardware that I payed for. This is why I don't, and will not, own a DVD drive or player.
And the Linux/*BSD/other community is actually interested in writing drivers for (effectively, supporting) this scheme? Doesn't sound very open to me if I have to hack open my speakers and start soldering resistors to copy a bit of analog to casette tape. [Which I do routinely to listen to MODs in my car. Good techo, that.]
First: The Athlon (.25 micron version, anyway) and GeForce were never designed consume small amounts of power. They were designed to be powerhouses, to push the envelope and put to shame anything that is currently considered fast. Since raw, bleeding edge power does not come from milliamperes, these two products practically suck the capacitors right out of your power supply. Mmm, electrolyte...
.18 micron 500 or 550 mhz mobile Ahtlon. On the other hand, I can't really imagine anyone who would absolutely need a bitch-fast Athlon in their laptop. :P
Second: You would be correct that the Athlon and GeForce aren't mainstream. But how long before they are? For crying out loud, they've practically just appeared on the market. I'm buying BOTH an Athlon and GeForce for the system I'm currently building, but not because they aren't "mainstream," but because they simply roll over the competition in performance/price value. Once the Athlon gets some decent motherboards under it's belt, I find it hard to believe most people are going to pay MORE for a Pentium III that does less.
As for laptops, well... I've seen quite a few AMD based laptops in Computer Shopper, although with AMD beginning to cut back on it's K6 production, that number is slowly falling.
For some reason, I don't think it'll be too long before AMD announces an
Yes, but I would tend to believe that this "fit for purpose" clause isn't really a viable excuse.
The store or record company would simply say "We intended for it to be played on standard home audio CD players. And we purposely engineered it so that you couldn't rip the data onto your computer. That is the new format's purpose and there is nothing you can do about it, ha ha."
I think the very most you might get BMG to do is put a label on the outside of the disc that says something along the lines of "This CD is not compatible with CD-ROM drives."
I tried giving the local baby bell (Qwest) hell for wanting to actually charge me to have my number unlisted. I personally think numbers should be unlisted by default.
Then again, this is the same company that sells your brand-new number to telemarketers and has the balls to launch a telemarketer-blocking service for like $10/month.
But I'm not one of them. I think the vast majority of those who say his style of humor is "stupid," have grown up too much. Too busy making careers, planning things, watching L.A. Law, and so forth. You don't really sit back and think to yourselves, "What if I were a kid again?" or "What if I ignored all commonly accepted rules of society for a day?"
There are many movies and TV shows that I absolutely love, but what many people would call "stupid."
I could go on.
The thing that makes these shows magical is that the actors and writers try deliberately to make the characters range from a bit insane to outright mad. (With the execption of Tom Green, who already obviously is.) I challenge all of you to sit down and watch at least one of the aforementioned movies or one of the episodes. But don't just watch as your normally would. Put yourself inside that character and imagine yourself in their place. Maybe I'm just weird, but I'm addicted to "stupid" humor. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have acted out certain scenes of The Mask in my bathroom mirror.
If there is one phrase that has seemed to hold very true as I grew up into adulthood and watched carefully those around me: There is a fine line between genius and insanity. Whoever isn't at least a little bit mad is probably doomed to a life of contentment, never bliss.
For the very same reason that different distributions exist to begin with: people have different tastes and different needs. The linux kernel and it's core utilities are flexible enough to be deployed in pretty much any environment with minimal repackaging.
On one end of the spectrum you have OpenLinux. It is supposedly the easiest Linux distro to setup and use, and according to Caldera, it is selling quite well. If it's selling well then why do we rarely ever hear of anyone on here on slashdot using it?
Because most of us on slashdot here "grew up" with Slackware, Red Hat, or Debian and learned most of the Tricks of the Linux trade already. We are, for the most part, the geeks and power users.
Most of the people here have little use for a new distro just because it's easier to setup, but less familiar. The reverse is also true. The average person who has been using Windows for 10 years will most likely get nowhere quick trying to install and configure Debian.
One of the most difficult things in building a distribution is making the different programs all work together. From what I've seen, no distro has ever gotten this process entirely right. Five CDs of software is more than a lifetime of compatibility headaches. This naturally dribbles into both of the quality and stability categories.
They have yet to invent a swiss army knife that can do absolutely everything.
Ahh, you just need to do a bit of scrolling, my boy, they're there.
I'll offer my own critique later on tonight when I get a chance to read the whole thing.
"On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers?"
I have to disagree here. I got into computers because... well, I didn't have a choice. I was 8. My mom bought a Tandy 1000. I saw something technological and mysterious and dove in head first. Most people are not like this. They don't care about what they don't understand (sometimes fear it), and many that do care are too lazy to begin their quest. Most kids don't care how Toy Story was rendered, but how they can get more flashy graphics. This is where the web comes in and tries to appeal with shockwave animations and then these kids think "Oh, now I'm a geek, I'm on the internet."
Going back more to the context of the quote, the only kids that are going to want to know how Toy Story was rendered are those that are similar to how I was as a child. Only the geeky kids are going to stop and ask themselves how Disney did it and what's involved in creating this kind of movie. Everyone else is content to believe that "it was done with computers."
Damn subject line is too short. :P
Should be: Barbecuing small animals for fun, profit, and personal gain without artificial preservatives or additives on your backyard grill in three seconds or less FOR DUMMIES.