Was ID foolish to release the Quake 3 engine under GPL too?
The money was made on the game, the engine was too old to have much value to any commercial but unscrupulous developer and if there was any copy protection to begin with i'm sure it was long cracked by the time the source was released. In other words they had basically nothing to lose by releasing the source.
You can still find Q3A being sold in many places.
I'm sure you can still find new old stock copies for sale and you can still buy it from steam (I was somewhat surprised that neither D2D or GOG had it, maybe ID is cosy with steam or something). It doesn't look like they are still making and selling copies through the regular channels though (for example amazon.com list it but only from third party sellers). It certainly isn't something they are pushing anymore.
Actually if you plan to use any cards you need to chose your motherboard carefully. The relatively small number of PCIe lanes combined with the large number of things that people want (or at least the motherboard vendors thing people want) but that aren't in the chipset means you need to really pay attention to the PCIe configuration and see if it matches you needs. Looking at what slots are physically there is NOT sufficiant due to the use of lane switches (motherboard vendors use the misleading term "share bandwidth" for this) . Worse very few manufacturers supply block diagrams for desktop boards (gigabyte is the only one i'm aware of that does so).
The thing is most people don't have the time to thouroughly research everything they buy, so in a market a buyer is unfamiliar with price wins because it's the easiest thing to compare.
Further it is very easy for a company that has hit financial problems or is just under stock market pressure to get better figures to decide to trade their reputation for short term profits. It's a much harder descision for a company to trade away their short term profits in the hope a gain in reputation down the road.
there are an additional 8 PCIe lanes in the P67 chipset which is plenty to deal w/ any Sata cards, etc. Which sounds like a lot and it would be if intel was including all the stuff a typical board has in the chipset.
But once the motherboard manufacturer adds on USB3, eSATA, extra SATA 6G, firewire, PCI etc there aren't many PCIe lanes left for cards. . For example on the ASUS P8P67 pro if you want to use an x4 card at full bandwidth you lose the front USB3, the esata and both of your two x1 slots. Some manufacturers use bridge chips for the onboard stuff to ease this but afaict only on the higher end boards.
Generally the only stuff that is through hole these days is stuff that needs to be mechanically sturdy and has relatively few pins, connectors, large electrolytic capacitors etc.
The vast majority of capacitors on a modern board will be surface mount, it's just those huge electrolytics in the power circuits that aren't.
What kind of chip is it? Some sort of BGA with a huge number of balls;). It's the only way for chips with this many connections.
You have fun desoldering a BGA in the middle of a bunch of other SMD/SMT components. Preheat the board to 150C or so to reduce the the temperature gradiants. Then heat the chip you want to remove with hot air and lift it off, doesn't seem a big deal to me. Especially as if they are doing it en-masse they will almost certainly build special jigs to apply just the right ammount of heat and lift it straight off. Solder has quite a bit of surface tension so as long as you don't touch the other components nearby they should stay in place fine.
The trickier bit is going to be cleaning things up and soldering on the new chip but even that shouldn't be too hard.
sometimes called re-balling Reballing is more than just reflowing the solder, it is the complete removal of the chip, replacement of the solder balls and resoldering of the chip. Reballing is likely to be a much longer term fix than attempting to reflow the existing solder, especially if done with leaded solder but it's also far more effort.
I find it really worrying that in many places private entities are allowed to collude to punish people without going through the justice system. This applies whether it is bar security or the credit rating agencies. The larger those collusions get the more they get the power to ruin peoples lives.
IMO colluding to punish people should be banned just as we ban colluding to fix prices. Colluding to protect public safety should probablly be allowed but shuold be subject to a court based appeal mechanism.
XP kinda supports IPv6, afaict it only supports sateless autoconfiguration or manual configuration from the command line (no dhcpv6 and no GUI based manual configuration) and it has no support for IPv6 based dns servers. So even in the scenario that all important services are availiable on IPv6 XP users will still need some kind of v4 connectivity to resolve names.
But that is a relatively minor issue. The real problem is that desktop/server OS support is only part of the puzzle of deploying IPv6 and in many ways is the easiest part. It also requires application support (which is in the big name apps but not nessacerally smaller ones), infrastructure support (kinda shaky, a lot of older equipment is still in use and afaict many home routers still don't support IPv6) and administrative support (many admins simply don't care and won't care until they have a strong reason to).
What's your point?
The point is that the OP implied that the ISPs have a choice between deploying IPv6 and deploying ISP level v4 NAT. Maybe they would have had that choice if they had got their act together and applied sufficiant pressure to get IPv6 deployed years ago but there is no time for that now. They will have to deploy ISP level v4 NAT regardless of whether they deploy IPv6.
Unfortunately it isn't, afaict the only widely supported autoconfiguration system for IPv6 is stateless autoconfiguration and that by design depends on a/64 subnet mask.
This makes life dificult if you want to run more than one subnet but your ISP will only give you a/64. ARP proxying may be a soloution but is likely to be quite painful to set up. Afaict the linux kernel guys are refusing to implement v6 nat on principle which rules out that option for those of us who use linux boxes for routing.
Afaict the original idea with ipv6 was to go from public v4-->ubuiquitous dual stack with public v4-->phaseout of public v4.
However there is a chicken and egg situation, ISPs won't want to put users on v6 only until the majority of websites are available on v6 and a substatial proportion of website owners won't see any point in offering v6 while all their clients can still access v4. Especially as a lot of people who do have v6 have it via tunnels that add latency and reduce reliability. The result is a smooth and speedy transition of the internet to dual stack is unlikely.
So in a world of scarce IPs the ISPs will have little option but to give some customers natted v4. They may or may not give those customers v6 as well.
Comcast has a slightly unusual situation. They are so massive that their "control plane" network has exhausted 10.0.0.0/8. That means afaict they are now using public IPs not just for customers but for internal use as well. The space that most ISPs would use to put their customers on ISP level NAT is ALREADY TAKEN for their "control plane" network.
Given that they have little choice but to go IPv6 for thier internal networks (or "federate" the network but that is a large management headache) before IPV4 addresses run out it is not that surprising that they are proposing to offer it to customers as well.
Even if they can't change the existing verification system there shouldn't be anything stopping them adding a new one on top either explicitly for this new system or even for anything received over the net.
For disks it's harder because they would have to white-list all existing disks.
So if ports 80 and 443 have less than 100% of the allocation, the firewall should pass the other ports on the remainder allocation without a hiccup.
A traffic shaper/firewall can only prioritise packets it sees. It can't do anything about packets that were already lost before they reached it.
In a typical setup you would have an external link coming in to your traffic shaper. In order for the traffic shaper to effectively shape incoming traffic it must be the bottleneck, You acheive that by deliberately setting the bandwidth out o your traffic shaper marginally lower than the bandwidth of the incoming link. You waste a little bandwidth that way but it's worth it to be able to control the prioritisation. However that only works IF those sending you traffic are playing nice (by playing nice I mean using protocols like TCP that backoff when they see congestion). If your ISP receives traffic for you at say 10 times the rate of your link and the senders don't back off then your ISP will have to drop nine tenths of it. The only way to fight such an attack is from the ISP side either by buying a bigger link or by getting the ISP to filter/shape the traffic before it hits the bottleneck. Your traffic shaper/firewall is powerless because nine tenths of your legitimate traffic is gone before it hits your shaper/firewall..
It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982
About the same time as the 3.5 inch floppy.
so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies.
Remember that in the days of 8 inch floppies and even 5.25 inch ones the computer industry was still very specialised with new and incompatible computers coming out all the time. Even if the disks were physically the same between two different computer systems they probablly weren't compatible. Afiact it was teh later 80s before PCs really started dominating the computer industry.
CDs OTOH were a product of the music industry which moves much slower their use for computers came later (apparently it was created in 1985 but afaict it didn't become popular until the early 90s).
Actually i'd say the "shoe fitting flouroscope" fits into a slightly different category from those you described."tools deemed too dangerous to use" the role itself isn't gone, we still need to fit shoes but we went back to doing it the old fassioned way. It was determined that the benifits of being able to see inside the shoes did not outweigh the dangers of using x-rays.
Most of them were but some of them but a couple were legitimately useful.
Paints that glow in the dark without external power are useful. Indeed I belive radioactive paints are still used today though they use tritium rather than radium. The shoe fitting flouroscope also did what it said on the tin though how useful that was is debatable.
Afaict radioactive glow in the dark paints are still used in some products though these days they use tritium rather than radium (tritium is much safer than radium for a couple of reasons, firstly it's not a toxic heavy metal, secondly it decays in a single step to a safe decay product producing a relatively weak beta particle which is enough to power the phosphor but not strong enough to be a singificant danger).
The context here though was gaming, if you want to play the "big hit" games then on any platform they are going to be closed source and likely subject to some kind of copy protection schemes. Indeed many PC games now are requiring online activation and forced updates even to play singleplayer.
Steam for example has updates that are both forced and automatic. So they can push down new code to your machine at any time.
They are but not hugely so. I wouldn't call being slightly cheaper than your much larger competitor to be a "feirce headlock".
And that only applies to the OP's "lower teir" and the lower end of his "middle tier". Move up to the $750-$1000 systems where the CPU budget is $300 or so and you can get chips that are better for desktop use than any AMD chip especially before the recall but even now afaict a 950 will smoke any quad core AMD has to offer (the AMD hex cores have their uses but I wouldn't choose one for a general purpose desktop).
I'd also cite your claim that AMD is more flexible
Which is somewhat useful in special cases but not too important for "ordinary" computers.
P.S. I noted performance per clock in case the OP was comparing prices on similarlly clocked AMD and intel chips and assuming they were equivilent in performance.
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Was ID foolish to release the Quake 3 engine under GPL too?
The money was made on the game, the engine was too old to have much value to any commercial but unscrupulous developer and if there was any copy protection to begin with i'm sure it was long cracked by the time the source was released. In other words they had basically nothing to lose by releasing the source.
You can still find Q3A being sold in many places.
I'm sure you can still find new old stock copies for sale and you can still buy it from steam (I was somewhat surprised that neither D2D or GOG had it, maybe ID is cosy with steam or something). It doesn't look like they are still making and selling copies through the regular channels though (for example amazon.com list it but only from third party sellers). It certainly isn't something they are pushing anymore.
Actually if you plan to use any cards you need to chose your motherboard carefully. The relatively small number of PCIe lanes combined with the large number of things that people want (or at least the motherboard vendors thing people want) but that aren't in the chipset means you need to really pay attention to the PCIe configuration and see if it matches you needs. Looking at what slots are physically there is NOT sufficiant due to the use of lane switches (motherboard vendors use the misleading term "share bandwidth" for this) . Worse very few manufacturers supply block diagrams for desktop boards (gigabyte is the only one i'm aware of that does so).
The thing is most people don't have the time to thouroughly research everything they buy, so in a market a buyer is unfamiliar with price wins because it's the easiest thing to compare.
Further it is very easy for a company that has hit financial problems or is just under stock market pressure to get better figures to decide to trade their reputation for short term profits. It's a much harder descision for a company to trade away their short term profits in the hope a gain in reputation down the road.
The amusing thing is from what I can gather most of those chips were never returned and the whole thing turned out to be largely a storm in a teacup.
there are an additional 8 PCIe lanes in the P67 chipset which is plenty to deal w/ any Sata cards, etc.
Which sounds like a lot and it would be if intel was including all the stuff a typical board has in the chipset.
But once the motherboard manufacturer adds on USB3, eSATA, extra SATA 6G, firewire, PCI etc there aren't many PCIe lanes left for cards. . For example on the ASUS P8P67 pro if you want to use an x4 card at full bandwidth you lose the front USB3, the esata and both of your two x1 slots. Some manufacturers use bridge chips for the onboard stuff to ease this but afaict only on the higher end boards.
Generally the only stuff that is through hole these days is stuff that needs to be mechanically sturdy and has relatively few pins, connectors, large electrolytic capacitors etc.
The vast majority of capacitors on a modern board will be surface mount, it's just those huge electrolytics in the power circuits that aren't.
What kind of chip is it? ;). It's the only way for chips with this many connections.
Some sort of BGA with a huge number of balls
You have fun desoldering a BGA in the middle of a bunch of other SMD/SMT components.
Preheat the board to 150C or so to reduce the the temperature gradiants. Then heat the chip you want to remove with hot air and lift it off, doesn't seem a big deal to me. Especially as if they are doing it en-masse they will almost certainly build special jigs to apply just the right ammount of heat and lift it straight off. Solder has quite a bit of surface tension so as long as you don't touch the other components nearby they should stay in place fine.
The trickier bit is going to be cleaning things up and soldering on the new chip but even that shouldn't be too hard.
Afaict it was just over 2 years from the release of the first LGA1156 processors to the release of the first LGA1155 processors.
sometimes called re-balling
Reballing is more than just reflowing the solder, it is the complete removal of the chip, replacement of the solder balls and resoldering of the chip. Reballing is likely to be a much longer term fix than attempting to reflow the existing solder, especially if done with leaded solder but it's also far more effort.
Who administers the scheme?
I find it really worrying that in many places private entities are allowed to collude to punish people without going through the justice system. This applies whether it is bar security or the credit rating agencies. The larger those collusions get the more they get the power to ruin peoples lives.
IMO colluding to punish people should be banned just as we ban colluding to fix prices. Colluding to protect public safety should probablly be allowed but shuold be subject to a court based appeal mechanism.
XP and 7 support ipv6
XP kinda supports IPv6, afaict it only supports sateless autoconfiguration or manual configuration from the command line (no dhcpv6 and no GUI based manual configuration) and it has no support for IPv6 based dns servers. So even in the scenario that all important services are availiable on IPv6 XP users will still need some kind of v4 connectivity to resolve names.
But that is a relatively minor issue. The real problem is that desktop/server OS support is only part of the puzzle of deploying IPv6 and in many ways is the easiest part. It also requires application support (which is in the big name apps but not nessacerally smaller ones), infrastructure support (kinda shaky, a lot of older equipment is still in use and afaict many home routers still don't support IPv6) and administrative support (many admins simply don't care and won't care until they have a strong reason to).
What's your point?
The point is that the OP implied that the ISPs have a choice between deploying IPv6 and deploying ISP level v4 NAT. Maybe they would have had that choice if they had got their act together and applied sufficiant pressure to get IPv6 deployed years ago but there is no time for that now. They will have to deploy ISP level v4 NAT regardless of whether they deploy IPv6.
Unfortunately it isn't, afaict the only widely supported autoconfiguration system for IPv6 is stateless autoconfiguration and that by design depends on a /64 subnet mask.
This makes life dificult if you want to run more than one subnet but your ISP will only give you a /64. ARP proxying may be a soloution but is likely to be quite painful to set up. Afaict the linux kernel guys are refusing to implement v6 nat on principle which rules out that option for those of us who use linux boxes for routing.
Afaict the original idea with ipv6 was to go from public v4-->ubuiquitous dual stack with public v4-->phaseout of public v4.
However there is a chicken and egg situation, ISPs won't want to put users on v6 only until the majority of websites are available on v6 and a substatial proportion of website owners won't see any point in offering v6 while all their clients can still access v4. Especially as a lot of people who do have v6 have it via tunnels that add latency and reduce reliability. The result is a smooth and speedy transition of the internet to dual stack is unlikely.
So in a world of scarce IPs the ISPs will have little option but to give some customers natted v4. They may or may not give those customers v6 as well.
Comcast has a slightly unusual situation. They are so massive that their "control plane" network has exhausted 10.0.0.0/8. That means afaict they are now using public IPs not just for customers but for internal use as well. The space that most ISPs would use to put their customers on ISP level NAT is ALREADY TAKEN for their "control plane" network.
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/alain-durand.pdf
Given that they have little choice but to go IPv6 for thier internal networks (or "federate" the network but that is a large management headache) before IPV4 addresses run out it is not that surprising that they are proposing to offer it to customers as well.
Even if they can't change the existing verification system there shouldn't be anything stopping them adding a new one on top either explicitly for this new system or even for anything received over the net.
For disks it's harder because they would have to white-list all existing disks.
So if ports 80 and 443 have less than 100% of the allocation, the firewall should pass the other ports on the remainder allocation without a hiccup.
A traffic shaper/firewall can only prioritise packets it sees. It can't do anything about packets that were already lost before they reached it.
In a typical setup you would have an external link coming in to your traffic shaper. In order for the traffic shaper to effectively shape incoming traffic it must be the bottleneck, You acheive that by deliberately setting the bandwidth out o your traffic shaper marginally lower than the bandwidth of the incoming link. You waste a little bandwidth that way but it's worth it to be able to control the prioritisation. However that only works IF those sending you traffic are playing nice (by playing nice I mean using protocols like TCP that backoff when they see congestion). If your ISP receives traffic for you at say 10 times the rate of your link and the senders don't back off then your ISP will have to drop nine tenths of it. The only way to fight such an attack is from the ISP side either by buying a bigger link or by getting the ISP to filter/shape the traffic before it hits the bottleneck. Your traffic shaper/firewall is powerless because nine tenths of your legitimate traffic is gone before it hits your shaper/firewall..
It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982
About the same time as the 3.5 inch floppy.
so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies.
Remember that in the days of 8 inch floppies and even 5.25 inch ones the computer industry was still very specialised with new and incompatible computers coming out all the time. Even if the disks were physically the same between two different computer systems they probablly weren't compatible. Afiact it was teh later 80s before PCs really started dominating the computer industry.
CDs OTOH were a product of the music industry which moves much slower their use for computers came later (apparently it was created in 1985 but afaict it didn't become popular until the early 90s).
I remember an article in EPE that reckoned you could get a valve like sound from a FET based amplifier amp by desinging it like a valve amp.
I'd think with good quality optical encoders driving into a FPGA you could make a digital scratch play system with extremely low lag.
Actually i'd say the "shoe fitting flouroscope" fits into a slightly different category from those you described."tools deemed too dangerous to use" the role itself isn't gone, we still need to fit shoes but we went back to doing it the old fassioned way. It was determined that the benifits of being able to see inside the shoes did not outweigh the dangers of using x-rays.
Most of them were but some of them but a couple were legitimately useful.
Paints that glow in the dark without external power are useful. Indeed I belive radioactive paints are still used today though they use tritium rather than radium.
The shoe fitting flouroscope also did what it said on the tin though how useful that was is debatable.
Afaict radioactive glow in the dark paints are still used in some products though these days they use tritium rather than radium (tritium is much safer than radium for a couple of reasons, firstly it's not a toxic heavy metal, secondly it decays in a single step to a safe decay product producing a relatively weak beta particle which is enough to power the phosphor but not strong enough to be a singificant danger).
Do you think they would be stupid enough to use a known broken signining system for a new mechanism?
The context here though was gaming, if you want to play the "big hit" games then on any platform they are going to be closed source and likely subject to some kind of copy protection schemes. Indeed many PC games now are requiring online activation and forced updates even to play singleplayer.
Steam for example has updates that are both forced and automatic. So they can push down new code to your machine at any time.
as you just said Intel is more expensive.
They are but not hugely so. I wouldn't call being slightly cheaper than your much larger competitor to be a "feirce headlock".
And that only applies to the OP's "lower teir" and the lower end of his "middle tier". Move up to the $750-$1000 systems where the CPU budget is $300 or so and you can get chips that are better for desktop use than any AMD chip especially before the recall but even now afaict a 950 will smoke any quad core AMD has to offer (the AMD hex cores have their uses but I wouldn't choose one for a general purpose desktop).
I'd also cite your claim that AMD is more flexible
Which is somewhat useful in special cases but not too important for "ordinary" computers.
P.S. I noted performance per clock in case the OP was comparing prices on similarlly clocked AMD and intel chips and assuming they were equivilent in performance.