I find it unlikely that a company doing any serious 3D development work wouldn't buy thier devs at least half-decent graphics cards.
It seems to me that the main point of this driver is to allow non-gaming DX10 stuff (e.g. aero and whatever it's windows 7 successor is called) to work on machines that don't have hardware support (think virtual machines, remote desktop and so on).
I always thought that drivespace was a usefull tool and in more modern times i've been known to use the compression features in NTFS when i've been short on disk space.
Zips are great for transferring stuff arround but less usefull for resolving shortages of disk space.
are perfectly willing to work in 50/60 Hz lamp flicker. There are a few issues with your statement
1: Your frequency is off by a factor of two. remember when you square a sinewave you get a sinewave at twice the frequence with a DC offset. 2: conventional incandescent lamps only have a fairly shallow flicker due to thier heat capacity 3: Quite a lot of people DID complain about the 100/120Hz flicker from conventional flourescent lighting driven off one phase. In modern installs this is often mitigated by either using high frequency drive circuits or by splitting the lighting between multiple phases.
What were the rules on EU nationals travelling to switzerland and swiss nationals travelling to schengen countries before switzerland joined up?
It seems to me that the treaty is more about reducing delays and beuracracy than actually allowing people to make trips they wouldn't have been allowed to before.
If you are just surfing the web 512kbps is plenty. Afaict most website designers still designining thier sites so they are tolerable on dialup. Assuming the limiting factor is bandwidth at the users end (it often isn't unfortunately, often the limiting factor is badly designed and/or overloaded dynamic content) tolerable on dialup means fast on 512k broadband.
Afaict most if not all of the SSDs that are comparable/better than HDDs in performance are as physically big as HDDs so doing that would mean doubling the space allocated to storage.
That is a pretty big penalty at least for the smaller end of laptops and would also make the laptop in question a pretty niche item.
Then Vista comes out and the consumers try to run Vista Ultimate or Vista Business or whatever, and discover their computer can't. It'll run it just won't enable aero:/
True but XP did run ok with 256MB of ram and all the main features of the OS were availible, it just bogged down a bit if you tried to run too many big apps at once or had too much crapware installed.
Vista on the other hand point blank refuses to give you aero (one of it's most widely marketed features) if you don't have a WDDM graphics chipset/driver. To add insult to injury the vista basic theme is apparently even more of a resource hog than aero is (the classic theme is apparently still a good performer though).
Also ram is easilly upgradable in both laptops and desktops. Graphics is easilly upgradable in desktops but not in laptops.
You'd think writing a brand-new plugin system would be, though. I can't see either sun or adobe wanting to port thier plugins to a managed code system. A vm on a vm is going to get very messy and perform terriblly. Afaict flash and acrobat are pretty huge codebases (and at least flash has a vm of it's own though not anywhere near as optimised as java's).
and a new native code based plugin api isn't going to be significantly better than the existing one.
But they didn't and neither did netscape, both companies developed plugin systems based on the plugin being a native code library that was loaded into the browser and provided certain interfaces following the pattern of pretty much every other application that suppored plugins.
The plugins people depend on are already written and are closed source so breaking them is not really an option for either microsoft or mozilla (which inherited the netscape plugin system).
MS is trying with IE7's safe mode. Firefox seems to be doing nothing about the issue probabblly because any soloution would be either platform specific or require a complete redesign of the plugin system.
Yeah, that is a fundamental design flaw, A users menu customisations can only add stuff to their menu they can't remove stuff from it that is in the all users menu.
Sadly i'm not sure there is much that can be done to fix it without a redesign of the menu system.
Why do Mac users and Linux users manage to avoid most of this shit? I think there are two reasons
1: there is simply less shit availible for thier platform 2: mac and linux users tend to be more experianced and discerning. Nearly all newbies use windows
Who cares which company has the fastest chip at $1000. only those who have money to burn and/or are buying more for penis length reasons than real value
In the $75 - $250 range (the range I personally care about), AMD and Intel are pretty much always trading blows. Here's a good chart for illustration: Crysis CPU Benchmark [tomshardware.com]. Note how, for example, the Intel chip at $187 is slower than the AMD chip at $170. Note how the intel chip at $164 (rounding down to the nearest dollar like you appeared to do) beats every amd chip in the table in that benchmark.
To me that table seems to show one thing: intel THRASHING amd in the upper midrange. One overpriced intel chip (it appears the reason it's price is high is that none of the cheaper retailers stock it) does not change that.
Of course it will depend on your application, most of the AMD chips seem to be quad core so if you have applications that make better use of multiple cores things would look better for AMD.
For in-browser apps that want to be reasonablly cross platform (supporting at least wintel,lintel and mac) you have essentially three options.
Javascript with browser DOM/xmlhttprequest Flash Java applet (which means java with the user interface made with either AWT or swing)
I would guess at actually running code the java applet will be fastest but java's bloated libraries mean it will probablly be slowest to load. Am I correct?
You could say the same about travelling first/buisness class rather than economy or staying in a hotel rather than a motel or getting a taxi to the airport rather than a bus.
If you have high paid productive research staff it doesn't IMO make sense to be too picky about little things which brand of computer they prefer.
$12K does sound like quite a lot though even for a mac pro. Guess he made the mistake of buying the ram from apple (apple really rips it's customers off on build to order options:( )
Worst pay on the planet (or near it) for the risk. Got any figures to back up that claim?
It seems to me that a spaceflight is fairly risky (just under 2% of shuttle flights have resulted in a dead crew afaict) but most astronauts only do a few in thier career and I would be very surprised if astronauts were not paid a decent wage.
If every hardware vendor who does not publish their specs or have open source drivers available decided to pull driver support for WindowsXP, you could whine and complain all day long but there is little you can do about it Practically speaking most people whether using windows or linux are going to be stuck with drivers that work with thier version of thier OS with minimal to no tweaking.
In general in terms of running old versions of the OS on new hardware I would say windows does far better than linux. Yeah there are some laptops on which getting XP to run is a pain but there are plenty of manufacturers still supporting thier machines with XP. Try installing a linux distro of similar vintage on modern hardware sometime;)
If all else fails there is always vmware and ebay;)
teliasonera are huge (according to wikipedia they are transit free but with paid peering, what I tend to reffer to as a wannabe tier 1 ) and afaict they pulled the plug on this as soon as they worked out it was mccolo on the other end. I very much doubt there will be any serious repercussions for them.
I can't escape thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should have been improving their product to the maximum extent possible anyway,I can't escape thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should have been improving their product to the maximum extent possible anyway, It sucks but in the consumer PC market place "improving your product" doesn't really count for much. Afaict what counts are
1: highest headline specs (CPU and ram) possible 2: lowest price possible 3: compliance with the latest MS marketing initiative (IMO theese initiatives are a good thing for customers because they impose reasonable minimum standards on the stuff consumers don't understand)
So being told you have to do expensive stuff to your lineup to participate in "vista capable" only to have your competitors told later that they can have the sticker without doing that expensive stuff is quite a blow.
Whether it was legal for MS to do it I dunno (HP obviously doesn't think so since they are taking the matter to court) but it is certainly another clear example of microsofts abusive behaviour towards thier partners.
Given those prices and the fact that it is widely belived (MS and the OEMS won't release the information publically unfortunately) that the big brand OEMs pay far less than the system builders do I find it unlikely that HP is paying as much as $100 for any edition except ultimate.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there, linux does a lot of things very differently from windows and anyone moving from one to the other is going to have to do quite a lot of re-learning to regain thier previous competance level.
Some geeks enjoy this but most people don't, they have spent time (either voulenterally or more likely forced by an employer or eductional institution) in learning windows/office/whatever specialist windows app thier particular field uses and see no reason to move to anything else.
I dunno near where I live we have an independent game shop and they are even more into the buisness of selling secondhand games than the big chains. I suspect they have similar margins on the secondhand games too (though i've only bought secondhand, I don't sell secondhand)
Afaict they can't prohibit resale of the game CD/DVD/Blueray itself.
What they can do is make users tie thier copy of the game to an online account. Then have the terms and conditions of that account say non-transferable and/or strongly encourage people to tie all thier games from the publisher to the same account (the steam method)
They can also require online activation and limit the number of activations (the spore/ra3 method). This means a secondhand buyer may not be able to activate the game at all and certainly not the full number of times.
They can also limit each CD key to one login at a time to the multiplayer system (the starcraft method). This will mean that anyone buying a secondhand copy risks being unable to play online when they want to since they can't know for sure that the previous owner destroyed all copies of the CD key.
Of course not all theese methods will work for all games. Some games don't have significant multiplayer content. Console games tend not to have CD keys and console players are unlikely to put up with activation.
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I find it unlikely that a company doing any serious 3D development work wouldn't buy thier devs at least half-decent graphics cards.
It seems to me that the main point of this driver is to allow non-gaming DX10 stuff (e.g. aero and whatever it's windows 7 successor is called) to work on machines that don't have hardware support (think virtual machines, remote desktop and so on).
I always thought that drivespace was a usefull tool and in more modern times i've been known to use the compression features in NTFS when i've been short on disk space.
Zips are great for transferring stuff arround but less usefull for resolving shortages of disk space.
are perfectly willing to work in 50/60 Hz lamp flicker.
There are a few issues with your statement
1: Your frequency is off by a factor of two. remember when you square a sinewave you get a sinewave at twice the frequence with a DC offset.
2: conventional incandescent lamps only have a fairly shallow flicker due to thier heat capacity
3: Quite a lot of people DID complain about the 100/120Hz flicker from conventional flourescent lighting driven off one phase. In modern installs this is often mitigated by either using high frequency drive circuits or by splitting the lighting between multiple phases.
What were the rules on EU nationals travelling to switzerland and swiss nationals travelling to schengen countries before switzerland joined up?
It seems to me that the treaty is more about reducing delays and beuracracy than actually allowing people to make trips they wouldn't have been allowed to before.
If you are just surfing the web 512kbps is plenty. Afaict most website designers still designining thier sites so they are tolerable on dialup. Assuming the limiting factor is bandwidth at the users end (it often isn't unfortunately, often the limiting factor is badly designed and/or overloaded dynamic content) tolerable on dialup means fast on 512k broadband.
Afaict most if not all of the SSDs that are comparable/better than HDDs in performance are as physically big as HDDs so doing that would mean doubling the space allocated to storage.
That is a pretty big penalty at least for the smaller end of laptops and would also make the laptop in question a pretty niche item.
Then Vista comes out and the consumers try to run Vista Ultimate or Vista Business or whatever, and discover their computer can't. :/
It'll run it just won't enable aero
True but XP did run ok with 256MB of ram and all the main features of the OS were availible, it just bogged down a bit if you tried to run too many big apps at once or had too much crapware installed.
Vista on the other hand point blank refuses to give you aero (one of it's most widely marketed features) if you don't have a WDDM graphics chipset/driver. To add insult to injury the vista basic theme is apparently even more of a resource hog than aero is (the classic theme is apparently still a good performer though).
Also ram is easilly upgradable in both laptops and desktops. Graphics is easilly upgradable in desktops but not in laptops.
It is not a contradiction for the relative performance of two devices to vary depending on the workload.
You'd think writing a brand-new plugin system would be, though.
I can't see either sun or adobe wanting to port thier plugins to a managed code system. A vm on a vm is going to get very messy and perform terriblly. Afaict flash and acrobat are pretty huge codebases (and at least flash has a vm of it's own though not anywhere near as optimised as java's).
and a new native code based plugin api isn't going to be significantly better than the existing one.
But they didn't and neither did netscape, both companies developed plugin systems based on the plugin being a native code library that was loaded into the browser and provided certain interfaces following the pattern of pretty much every other application that suppored plugins.
The plugins people depend on are already written and are closed source so breaking them is not really an option for either microsoft or mozilla (which inherited the netscape plugin system).
MS is trying with IE7's safe mode. Firefox seems to be doing nothing about the issue probabblly because any soloution would be either platform specific or require a complete redesign of the plugin system.
Yeah, that is a fundamental design flaw, A users menu customisations can only add stuff to their menu they can't remove stuff from it that is in the all users menu.
Sadly i'm not sure there is much that can be done to fix it without a redesign of the menu system.
Why do Mac users and Linux users manage to avoid most of this shit?
I think there are two reasons
1: there is simply less shit availible for thier platform
2: mac and linux users tend to be more experianced and discerning. Nearly all newbies use windows
Who cares which company has the fastest chip at $1000.
only those who have money to burn and/or are buying more for penis length reasons than real value
In the $75 - $250 range (the range I personally care about), AMD and Intel are pretty much always trading blows. Here's a good chart for illustration: Crysis CPU Benchmark [tomshardware.com]. Note how, for example, the Intel chip at $187 is slower than the AMD chip at $170.
Note how the intel chip at $164 (rounding down to the nearest dollar like you appeared to do) beats every amd chip in the table in that benchmark.
To me that table seems to show one thing: intel THRASHING amd in the upper midrange. One overpriced intel chip (it appears the reason it's price is high is that none of the cheaper retailers stock it) does not change that.
Of course it will depend on your application, most of the AMD chips seem to be quad core so if you have applications that make better use of multiple cores things would look better for AMD.
Afaict most of the major media producers carve up thier licensing by region and then sell each regions license to the highest bidder.
That means a site wanting to show them online would most likely have to make seperate arrangements for each region they wanted to show them in.
For in-browser apps that want to be reasonablly cross platform (supporting at least wintel,lintel and mac) you have essentially three options.
Javascript with browser DOM/xmlhttprequest
Flash
Java applet (which means java with the user interface made with either AWT or swing)
I would guess at actually running code the java applet will be fastest but java's bloated libraries mean it will probablly be slowest to load. Am I correct?
You could say the same about travelling first/buisness class rather than economy or staying in a hotel rather than a motel or getting a taxi to the airport rather than a bus.
If you have high paid productive research staff it doesn't IMO make sense to be too picky about little things which brand of computer they prefer.
$12K does sound like quite a lot though even for a mac pro. Guess he made the mistake of buying the ram from apple (apple really rips it's customers off on build to order options :( )
Worst pay on the planet (or near it) for the risk.
Got any figures to back up that claim?
It seems to me that a spaceflight is fairly risky (just under 2% of shuttle flights have resulted in a dead crew afaict) but most astronauts only do a few in thier career and I would be very surprised if astronauts were not paid a decent wage.
If every hardware vendor who does not publish their specs or have open source drivers available decided to pull driver support for WindowsXP, you could whine and complain all day long but there is little you can do about it
Practically speaking most people whether using windows or linux are going to be stuck with drivers that work with thier version of thier OS with minimal to no tweaking.
In general in terms of running old versions of the OS on new hardware I would say windows does far better than linux. Yeah there are some laptops on which getting XP to run is a pain but there are plenty of manufacturers still supporting thier machines with XP. Try installing a linux distro of similar vintage on modern hardware sometime ;)
If all else fails there is always vmware and ebay ;)
teliasonera are huge (according to wikipedia they are transit free but with paid peering, what I tend to reffer to as a wannabe tier 1 ) and afaict they pulled the plug on this as soon as they worked out it was mccolo on the other end. I very much doubt there will be any serious repercussions for them.
I can't escape thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should have been improving their product to the maximum extent possible anyway,I can't escape thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should have been improving their product to the maximum extent possible anyway,
It sucks but in the consumer PC market place "improving your product" doesn't really count for much. Afaict what counts are
1: highest headline specs (CPU and ram) possible
2: lowest price possible
3: compliance with the latest MS marketing initiative (IMO theese initiatives are a good thing for customers because they impose reasonable minimum standards on the stuff consumers don't understand)
So being told you have to do expensive stuff to your lineup to participate in "vista capable" only to have your competitors told later that they can have the sticker without doing that expensive stuff is quite a blow.
Whether it was legal for MS to do it I dunno (HP obviously doesn't think so since they are taking the matter to court) but it is certainly another clear example of microsofts abusive behaviour towards thier partners.
Lets take a look at what vista costs to system builders (those who build a few PCs) who buy from newegg
home basic http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116480 $89.99
home premium http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116485 $99.99
buisness http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116475 $139.99
ultimate http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116213 $169.99
Given those prices and the fact that it is widely belived (MS and the OEMS won't release the information publically unfortunately) that the big brand OEMs pay far less than the system builders do I find it unlikely that HP is paying as much as $100 for any edition except ultimate.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there, linux does a lot of things very differently from windows and anyone moving from one to the other is going to have to do quite a lot of re-learning to regain thier previous competance level.
Some geeks enjoy this but most people don't, they have spent time (either voulenterally or more likely forced by an employer or eductional institution) in learning windows/office/whatever specialist windows app thier particular field uses and see no reason to move to anything else.
I dunno near where I live we have an independent game shop and they are even more into the buisness of selling secondhand games than the big chains. I suspect they have similar margins on the secondhand games too (though i've only bought secondhand, I don't sell secondhand)
Afaict they can't prohibit resale of the game CD/DVD/Blueray itself.
What they can do is make users tie thier copy of the game to an online account. Then have the terms and conditions of that account say non-transferable and/or strongly encourage people to tie all thier games from the publisher to the same account (the steam method)
They can also require online activation and limit the number of activations (the spore/ra3 method). This means a secondhand buyer may not be able to activate the game at all and certainly not the full number of times.
They can also limit each CD key to one login at a time to the multiplayer system (the starcraft method). This will mean that anyone buying a secondhand copy risks being unable to play online when they want to since they can't know for sure that the previous owner destroyed all copies of the CD key.
Of course not all theese methods will work for all games. Some games don't have significant multiplayer content. Console games tend not to have CD keys and console players are unlikely to put up with activation.