Intel are not claiming this is ready for the mainstream, but merely demonstrating they are getting closer!
What you have to remember is this was done entirely on the CPU. Try running a game with simililar visual quality and resolution on a standard software renderer and you'd be lucky to get 1fps, probably much lower (and that's with no fancy filtering or reflections).
Raytracing has the ability to produce stunning images on a future generation of CPUs alone, or in the closer future on custom hardware and it will be exactly this kind of research that will get us there - I for one am glad someone is doing it.
I'll bet on it that expensive graphics cards that are soon out of date will become a smaller and smaller niche just like the sound card, and I personally can't wait:)
If you can't supply 10mbit speeds to your customers then stop offering them.....
Exactly, I'd much rather have the ISP sell me a fixed amount of bandwidth and that's what I get to use before paying extra.
I'm sick of all this Unlimited!!!* (*Until we decide you've had to much and stick you with extra charges or disconnection) or 20mbps!!!* (*Unless you transfer a few GBs, then it's 6mbps until tomorrow! Oh, and BitTorrent is always 512kbps!)
I think it should be illegal to advertise packages in such a confusing and downright misleading way.
My old ISP used to clearly state you get 500GBs a month else you get throttled, right there next to the price, and newhere did is say unlimited, because it's not! That's how it should be!
Surely that money could be better spent improving their capacity by purchasing new equipment with better signaling methods or even extra lines rather than on equipment to inspect and shape (i.e. selectively throttle) traffic?
Even if improving the capacity costs a fair bit extra the space for more customers at higher speeds and more consistent service for existing customers will surely increase their profits by offering more than their competition right?
Where I used to work got some dome cameras installed along with a HDD recording system...
Being bored at work most days (I was the only guy on site) I did a bit of research and found out how to remotely log in and control the cameras, I could zoom in so far I could clearly make out peoples faces crossing a bridge half a mile away!
If you can get that much detail out of a simple dome camera you can't even see from there, it makes you wonder just how powerful the much bigger government ones are!
Pre-pay is fairly common in some markets, at least in the Seeboard region (South East) they are very popular in council & some rented properties.
The control the supplier has is passive... the meter writes the readings onto the key itself, the retailers terminal reads it off and uploads it, and writes any control data back to it when you top up.
They are commonly only contained in a standard meter box (triangular key) because the only person who'd financially gain from tampering with it would be the customer, and that would be picked up quickly as prepaid meters with no activity for extended periods are flagged for investigation...
The keys are coded with the customers MPAN (Identifies the point of supply the meter is attached to and therefore the physical connection for that property) and the meters serial number so if the wrong key was inserted it would be rejected.
The salesman was likely using that as means of starting conversation (and an attempt to trick the customer) and then ask them to 'sign for the new key' (complete the contract)
If successful, the change of supplier is done at the offices of the suppliers not at the meter, and a new key programmed for that account would be sent to the customer.
I used to work for EDF in their Change of Supplier department.
The amount of new customers I had to return to their original suppliers was ridiculous!
Admittedly a lot of them were because of meter numbers being incorrect so the wrong supply was applied for, but about a third of the time I'd find a completed contract where the customer had been tricked into completing or even completed by the salesman himself hungry for extra commissions...
Tighter restrictions on field sales would be welcome, a large proportion of customers aren't as vigilant as yourself!
Seriously, however... Sure it's an interesting product, but I highly doubt it's accurate enough to be of much use and it certainly won't be replacing the keyboard and mouse any time soon!
It'll be interesting to watch this technology mature though...
Wow, I don't know which ISP you use but that is just terrible value!
Before I moved into student accommodation (10mb both ways!) I was with UK Online paying £25 a month for 16mb download 1mb upload and their AUP was 500GB a month. I sometimes hit 1TB with no complaints!
Now your average home user doesn't need anywhere near that much bandwidth, so their £15 2mb service would suffice...
As long as I'm logged in it looks pretty much identical, all messages displayed as nested, they way it should be:)
(If I'm not I only get an annoying 25 messages and I have to keep clicking more before I can start reading else it's an imcomplete discussion, is that what the parent is referring to?)
Some already have upgradeable hard drives, memory, graphics cards via MXM modules, socketed processors and expansion cards via mini PCI express or expresscard.
That's pretty much everything, not bad! The trouble is all these sockets and expansion slots and connectors add to the size and weight so smaller laptops are unlikely to use them.
It was £25 / month with 600 minutes, 1000 texts and o2 long weekends which means all calls are free saturday, sunday and monday. Minutes would roll-over and even though I used more than 600 a month I still ended up collecting them because of the long weekends offer.
Don't forget our minutes and texts only count down if we make the call. Received are free so these minutes last longer compared to a US plan, and with SMS. 30 day contract too, because it was SIM only.
That's not a problem, plug in an external! You can also modify the plist on the DVD to allow for systems that are not even supposed to support Leopard.
I used an external DVD drive and modified Leopard DVD to install on a 1st gen eMac with 800Mhz G4 (Required is 866) It runs great for what it's being used for (my Mothers first computer).
Even if you don't have an external DVD drive, there are other ways.
I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of the 'symptoms' people claim they are suffering from wireless signals (I've even had someone moan that my WiFi signal was giving them a headache!) are entirely psychological.
I put the router where nobody could see it, the complaints stopped:)
I really don't think this is going to make a huge impact. Companies will always want to sell their latest, greatest hardware, and there will always be plenty of people ready to spend their money on the next best thing, that's how the technology industry works!
It's a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.4, don't get me wrong performance is good (Incredible for CPU intensive tasks) however I often do some pretty heavy multi-tasking, especially when engaged in some web development work needing a good set of CS3 apps running as well as a few browsers for testing...
I also make pretty heavy use of Virtual Machines for Windows/Linux installations... (It's particularly useful to boot the native Windows installation as a Virtual Machine, since I can choose to either stay in OS X or boot it natively when required)
Obviously my needs are fairly substantial, I wouldn't have purchased a workstation like the Mac Pro if they were not...
I still wouldn't mind better HDD performance though, it definitely is thrashing while the rest sits idle, seems like a waste.
Sure Vista use is increasing, but that's to be expected. Just remember most users switching to Vista are probably coming from another version of windows and are therefore only upgrading. I'm sure a significant portion of new Mac OS X users are also coming from previous windows versions however, so this article doesn't seem all that significant to me...
Sure, I could go to 4GB or higher (It'll take 16 but there's little chance of me being able to afford that for a long time!) however I don't think much more is going to be all that useful for me, most of the time when I glance down at the RAM meter approx 1GB is being used by applications and the remaining 1GB is cache.
I've got quad (Dual Dual-Core) Xeons, so there is no CPU bottleneck either.
The hard drive is still the weakest link in my system!
Sure, it's not exactly worth it yet unless you've got the money anyway or specifically require a small, lightweight machine with a Solid State drive, however this is still good news regardless.
This is progress and it means the cheaper SSD notebooks are just around the corner once this technology becomes mainstream.
It's good we're finally starting to see SSDs starting to ship as an option in notebooks. Mechanical hard drives have served us well but I for one can't wait for the speed and reliability increases we're going to see in the future with Solid State.
How much time do you spend each day waiting for your drive to stop churning? The hard drive is certainly the weakest link in my system when it comes to performance!
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all....
Booting is handled by the EFI, and any operating system booted under the legacy BIOS emulation wouldn't be able to do a thing about it!
Credit Card payment only wouldn't work at all.
CC companies are so desperate to hand out cards I had a platinum visa when I was 15!
The best bit is since you have to be 18 years of age for the contract to be valid, I could max out the limit with no repercussions!!
As far as this article is concerned, I used to use it as ID at the Bar.. "I couldn't possibly be underage Sir, I'm paying on my Visa!!!"
Intel are not claiming this is ready for the mainstream, but merely demonstrating they are getting closer!
:)
What you have to remember is this was done entirely on the CPU. Try running a game with simililar visual quality and resolution on a standard software renderer and you'd be lucky to get 1fps, probably much lower (and that's with no fancy filtering or reflections).
Raytracing has the ability to produce stunning images on a future generation of CPUs alone, or in the closer future on custom hardware and it will be exactly this kind of research that will get us there - I for one am glad someone is doing it.
I'll bet on it that expensive graphics cards that are soon out of date will become a smaller and smaller niche just like the sound card, and I personally can't wait
I think it should be illegal to advertise packages in such a confusing and downright misleading way.
My old ISP used to clearly state you get 500GBs a month else you get throttled, right there next to the price, and newhere did is say unlimited, because it's not! That's how it should be!
Surely that money could be better spent improving their capacity by purchasing new equipment with better signaling methods or even extra lines rather than on equipment to inspect and shape (i.e. selectively throttle) traffic?
Even if improving the capacity costs a fair bit extra the space for more customers at higher speeds and more consistent service for existing customers will surely increase their profits by offering more than their competition right?
Where I used to work got some dome cameras installed along with a HDD recording system...
Being bored at work most days (I was the only guy on site) I did a bit of research and found out how to remotely log in and control the cameras, I could zoom in so far I could clearly make out peoples faces crossing a bridge half a mile away!
If you can get that much detail out of a simple dome camera you can't even see from there, it makes you wonder just how powerful the much bigger government ones are!
Pre-pay is fairly common in some markets, at least in the Seeboard region (South East) they are very popular in council & some rented properties.
The control the supplier has is passive... the meter writes the readings onto the key itself, the retailers terminal reads it off and uploads it, and writes any control data back to it when you top up.
They are commonly only contained in a standard meter box (triangular key) because the only person who'd financially gain from tampering with it would be the customer, and that would be picked up quickly as prepaid meters with no activity for extended periods are flagged for investigation...
One really really really long one.
The keys are coded with the customers MPAN (Identifies the point of supply the meter is attached to and therefore the physical connection for that property) and the meters serial number so if the wrong key was inserted it would be rejected.
The salesman was likely using that as means of starting conversation (and an attempt to trick the customer) and then ask them to 'sign for the new key' (complete the contract)
If successful, the change of supplier is done at the offices of the suppliers not at the meter, and a new key programmed for that account would be sent to the customer.
I used to work for EDF in their Change of Supplier department. The amount of new customers I had to return to their original suppliers was ridiculous!
Admittedly a lot of them were because of meter numbers being incorrect so the wrong supply was applied for, but about a third of the time I'd find a completed contract where the customer had been tricked into completing or even completed by the salesman himself hungry for extra commissions...
Tighter restrictions on field sales would be welcome, a large proportion of customers aren't as vigilant as yourself!
Sorry for the team-kill, I sneezed :)
Seriously, however... Sure it's an interesting product, but I highly doubt it's accurate enough to be of much use and it certainly won't be replacing the keyboard and mouse any time soon!
It'll be interesting to watch this technology mature though...
Wow, I don't know which ISP you use but that is just terrible value!
Before I moved into student accommodation (10mb both ways!) I was with UK Online paying £25 a month for 16mb download 1mb upload and their AUP was 500GB a month. I sometimes hit 1TB with no complaints!
Now your average home user doesn't need anywhere near that much bandwidth, so their £15 2mb service would suffice...
Couldn't have said it any better myself :)
As long as I'm logged in it looks pretty much identical, all messages displayed as nested, they way it should be :)
(If I'm not I only get an annoying 25 messages and I have to keep clicking more before I can start reading else it's an imcomplete discussion, is that what the parent is referring to?)
We already have a cure for that :)
:)
Unfortunately when you're old and wrinkly, no amount of Viagra is going to get girls to sleep with you so it doesn't matter anyway
Some already have upgradeable hard drives, memory, graphics cards via MXM modules, socketed processors and expansion cards via mini PCI express or expresscard.
That's pretty much everything, not bad! The trouble is all these sockets and expansion slots and connectors add to the size and weight so smaller laptops are unlikely to use them.
Yes, my last o2 UK plan was fairly similar.
It was £25 / month with 600 minutes, 1000 texts and o2 long weekends which means all calls are free saturday, sunday and monday. Minutes would roll-over and even though I used more than 600 a month I still ended up collecting them because of the long weekends offer.
Don't forget our minutes and texts only count down if we make the call. Received are free so these minutes last longer compared to a US plan, and with SMS.
30 day contract too, because it was SIM only.
That's not a problem, plug in an external!
You can also modify the plist on the DVD to allow for systems that are not even supposed to support Leopard.
I used an external DVD drive and modified Leopard DVD to install on a 1st gen eMac with 800Mhz G4 (Required is 866)
It runs great for what it's being used for (my Mothers first computer).
Even if you don't have an external DVD drive, there are other ways.
I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of the 'symptoms' people claim they are suffering from wireless signals (I've even had someone moan that my WiFi signal was giving them a headache!) are entirely psychological. I put the router where nobody could see it, the complaints stopped :)
I really don't think this is going to make a huge impact. Companies will always want to sell their latest, greatest hardware, and there will always be plenty of people ready to spend their money on the next best thing, that's how the technology industry works!
It's a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.4, don't get me wrong performance is good (Incredible for CPU intensive tasks) however I often do some pretty heavy multi-tasking, especially when engaged in some web development work needing a good set of CS3 apps running as well as a few browsers for testing...
I also make pretty heavy use of Virtual Machines for Windows/Linux installations... (It's particularly useful to boot the native Windows installation as a Virtual Machine, since I can choose to either stay in OS X or boot it natively when required)
Obviously my needs are fairly substantial, I wouldn't have purchased a workstation like the Mac Pro if they were not...
I still wouldn't mind better HDD performance though, it definitely is thrashing while the rest sits idle, seems like a waste.
Sure Vista use is increasing, but that's to be expected.
Just remember most users switching to Vista are probably coming from another version of windows and are therefore only upgrading.
I'm sure a significant portion of new Mac OS X users are also coming from previous windows versions however, so this article doesn't seem all that significant to me...
I'm currently running at 2GB!
Sure, I could go to 4GB or higher (It'll take 16 but there's little chance of me being able to afford that for a long time!) however I don't think much more is going to be all that useful for me, most of the time when I glance down at the RAM meter approx 1GB is being used by applications and the remaining 1GB is cache.
I've got quad (Dual Dual-Core) Xeons, so there is no CPU bottleneck either.
The hard drive is still the weakest link in my system!
Sure, it's not exactly worth it yet unless you've got the money anyway or specifically require a small, lightweight machine with a Solid State drive, however this is still good news regardless.
This is progress and it means the cheaper SSD notebooks are just around the corner once this technology becomes mainstream.
It's good we're finally starting to see SSDs starting to ship as an option in notebooks. Mechanical hard drives have served us well but I for one can't wait for the speed and reliability increases we're going to see in the future with Solid State.
How much time do you spend each day waiting for your drive to stop churning? The hard drive is certainly the weakest link in my system when it comes to performance!