Afaict with every big manufacturer the build to order options are a rip-off. Often it is cheaper to replace a part than to take the build to order options.
Of course there is no reason you can't buy a mac pro in near minimum configuration (you would proabblly want to get both CPU sockets filled to make sure you got the coolers for both) and max it out using parts obtained elsewhere (just be carefull to buy ram with mac pro sized heatsinks!)
What is missing from apples lineup is an ordinary desktop machine. Apples desktop lineup consists of a SFF machine, an all-in-one and a high end workstation.
So if you want certain features (expansion slots, support for multiple monitors all of your choice, support for more than two monitors, support for more than one internal hard drive etc) that are either standard issue or low cost options on normal desktop PCs your only choices are the very expensive mac pro or the insanely expensive xserve.
You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions. Last I checked with XP it was slightly more expensive and with vista you had to send off to MS to get the 64 bit CD unless you bought ultimate.
Also i'm not positive but I have a feeling you are supposed to buy two licenses if you want to have both installed simultantiously (with XP you certainly need to as they are totally seperate editions of windows with totally seperate key systems).
There is no reason why the total memory on a card has to match the total address space used by the card. It is one way to design a card but far from the only way.
I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well. Indeed it's all very well having a lot of graphics memory but unless the other aspects (features,graphics processing power, bus bandwidth etc) are equally ahead of thier time it won't be much use.
Plus buying high end PC stuff just for future proofing doesn't make much financial sense IMO. Cheaper to buy enough for what you require now an what you think you will need for the next year or two
What I find interesting is that the list seems to be dominated by nvidia (although given that the list only accounts for about half the users the impression it gives may be very skewed).
I actually quite liked the office assistant (and miss it in newer releases of office), quick access to help and something to amuse yourself with when the writing was getting too tedious.
That is of course assuming that they mapped all 2GB of that video ram directly into system ram. I find this unlikely given how common 32 bit operating systems still are.
I doubt this would work with this card at least not to give the full capacity.
That technique relies on the graphics card ram being directly mapped into the processors address space, then it simply uses a standard linux block device to expose it for storage purposes.
There is no way a 2GB card is going to be mapping it's entire ram into the 32 bit PCI address space, there just wouldn't be the room on most machines. It could map it in the 64 bit address space but then operating systems which don't support addressing memory beyond the 4GB boundry (such as the 32 bit versions of client editions of windows) couldn't access it.
but I believe AA (anti-aliasing) is after processing to a scene There are a number of ways to do anti-aliasing but IIRC the common way is to oversample, that is generate the output in a higher resoloution than will be output and then downsample it.
If you have a 2560x1920 monitor and oversample by 4 times in each direction you would be generating in 10240x7680. That would mean you would need over 300 megs just for the output buffer. I'm not sure if current cards could handle that at a reasonable framerate anyway though.
Afaict the big thing putting pressure on graphics memory is texture detail, if you double the horizontal and vertical resoloution of your texture you quadruple the memory required to store it. Ideally you want enough memory on your graphics card to store all the textures the game uses on the card. Texture detail is something the game developer can fairly easilly allow the user to alter, just design the textures in the highest resoloution and allow those with weaker hardware to select downsampled versions.
Example: You are bidding on an auction. You decide that you are willing to pay exactly $21 for the item right, now lets assume that someone else is bidding against you. They really want to pay about $19 for the item. They also have very little self control. In my experiance this is a reasonable assumption. They place an initial bid of $15 a day before the auction ends.
If you place your real maximum bid a long time in advance they immediately find out thier bid was too low, they keep thinking "just a little more" and before you know it they have pushed the auction price over your maximum.
If you place your maximum bid an hour or so before auction closure they get an email notifying them that you are winning, they keep thinking "just a little more" and before you know it they have beaten your maximum bid.
If you place your maximum bid in the last few seconds then by the time they get the email that ebay sends to sucker them into bidding more the auction is over.
This was a simple example assuming only one competitor lacking in self control but the principle holds that all placing your real maximum bid early does is encourage those lacking self control to drive the price over it (it also gains you an advantage in the case of a dead tie of maximum bids but afaict that is a relatively rare situation).
but they still have to be willing to pay more than I am. No they just have to be suckered in to paying more than you are willing to pay.
It seems that a lot of people care more about winning the auction (like it's some kind of contest) than they do about getting the merchandise for an acceptable price. To me, THEY are the suckers. Indeed, but if you encourage those suckers to drive the price to unreasonable levels then you won't get the item at a reasonable price.
a quick tip, IIRC you can (or at least used to be able to, it's a while since I used ebay) search for items within a specified distance of a city, this filters out places that don't exist (such as "hong kong, united kingdom")
The thing is verification is going to drive up prices a lot. There will be two sets of delivery costs (deliver to the verifier and then to the buyer) and you will have to pay the verifier for thier services.
Personally I think the cost of all that would be a lot higher than the cost of the occasional transaction gone wrong.
I have an XP install disk. I paid a lot of money for it. I don't want to pay for it again if I need to reinstall. So how can I reinstall without being unsafe and getting owned halfway through the process? download the SP3 offline installer and either slipstream it into your windows install CD or if that is too complicated for you just burn it to a CDR and keep it with your windows install CD.
alternatively just connect the machine behind a router/firewall/nat that doesn't allow incoming connections while you install the update.
The real problem with pre-sp2 XP was the default config had no firewall and a lot of services listening for incoming connections. Plus many of those services were running with localsystem (~= root) privilages.
XPSP2 enabled the firewall by default but IIRC there were a lot of exceptions for whatever windows considered to be the "local network"
Afaict most linux distributions are not stupid enough to do this. So the exposure is much reduced.
Of course if you manually install services that listen to the internet without patching first then things change big time.
IIRC (and I could be misremembering) the XP SP2 firewall by default leaves a lot of stuff open to what it considers the "local network". The problem then comes when either it's idea of the local network is overly wide or the local network you are on has infected machines.
24x7 over a week sometimes. Ok so you spend a week playing some kind of military recreation (using whatever weapon substitue). Presumabblly at a predetermined time the activity ends and you go home and back to regular life.
It is the continuous nature of MMOs that I think is the problem, the game world goes on whether you are there or not so taking breaks is problematic and those who spend the most hours per week in game are at the advantage.
It could be interesting to set up a MMO that had fixed playing periods. That way players wouldn't be competing with people who could afford to put in far more time (that is people with no job).
Do you really have people working in shifts (generally without any real world pay) so that a game element (with no real world value) to defend thier paintball/airsoft game targets 24/7.365?
The main issue comes when you want to redistribute. The previous java licenses allowed to you redistribute under certain circumstanses and you could pretty much forget about fixing things and redistributing those fixes.
That and the fact that having software provided by your distro means that a lot of compatibility and updates issues are taken care of centrally.
It's not just the debian guys, many other distros have policies against including non-free software in thier main repositries and thier default installs. This is bad for java because it means that the default java on many linux distros is a relatively slow and highly incomplete clone.
Also there are practical issues. Not so long ago a newer version of one of the X libraries got less tollerant of cerain misbehaviour. This broke sun java, it was possible to hack the binaries so they would run but the license distros got java under forbid them from doing this for thier users.
Eventually sun released an update to java 6 fixing the issue but it took quite a long time. Afaict java 5 is still not fixed.
The trouble is afaict "made in" only represents where the "last significant manufacturing process" was carried out. Not where the bulk of the work was done.
and what is "Game experience may change during online play" supposed to mean any way? Afaict it means that the age rating on the box relates to the content actually included in the box but once you go online with the game there is no gaurantee that things will stay at that rating. (an extreme example is first person shooters that will download custom maps, art and other content from the gameserver. In theese games it is quite possible to find public servers running maps that contain porn or with mods that change the character of the violence.
In some games you hear of people literally working shifts doing nothing but sitting there defending something. I don't think WoW is that bad but I still get the impression that if you are at all competitive the way to get ahead is to sink more hours into the game than your competitors.
Because on a low-powered system, gaming is not going to be an issue As long as you are prepared to live with slightly lower tech games (e.g. starcraft, the 3D rendering ports of duke3D, the orignal zoo tycoon) it is perfectly feasible to play games on an EEEPC.
As for your comment on ODF I'll belive it when I see it, given microsofts inability to ensure consitancy even between different versions of word I highly doubt words ODF support will be any better than openoffices DOC support (that is I belive it will be usable for basic documents but things will start to go wrong as the formatting gets complex).
On a low-powered system, it's not even as though you'll be running some big "must have" Windows application on it anyway. Who says an app has to be resource intensive to be "must have"?
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Afaict with every big manufacturer the build to order options are a rip-off. Often it is cheaper to replace a part than to take the build to order options.
Of course there is no reason you can't buy a mac pro in near minimum configuration (you would proabblly want to get both CPU sockets filled to make sure you got the coolers for both) and max it out using parts obtained elsewhere (just be carefull to buy ram with mac pro sized heatsinks!)
What is missing from apples lineup is an ordinary desktop machine. Apples desktop lineup consists of a SFF machine, an all-in-one and a high end workstation.
So if you want certain features (expansion slots, support for multiple monitors all of your choice, support for more than two monitors, support for more than one internal hard drive etc) that are either standard issue or low cost options on normal desktop PCs your only choices are the very expensive mac pro or the insanely expensive xserve.
You can get a 64-bit CPU and motherboard for under $150 easily, and 64-bit Vista/XP is not any more expensive than the 32-bit versions.
Last I checked with XP it was slightly more expensive and with vista you had to send off to MS to get the 64 bit CD unless you bought ultimate.
Also i'm not positive but I have a feeling you are supposed to buy two licenses if you want to have both installed simultantiously (with XP you certainly need to as they are totally seperate editions of windows with totally seperate key systems).
There is no reason why the total memory on a card has to match the total address space used by the card. It is one way to design a card but far from the only way.
I'm sure he meant from *this generation* but it's what I instantly thought of as well. ,graphics processing power, bus bandwidth etc) are equally ahead of thier time it won't be much use.
Indeed it's all very well having a lot of graphics memory but unless the other aspects (features
Plus buying high end PC stuff just for future proofing doesn't make much financial sense IMO. Cheaper to buy enough for what you require now an what you think you will need for the next year or two
What I find interesting is that the list seems to be dominated by nvidia (although given that the list only accounts for about half the users the impression it gives may be very skewed).
I actually quite liked the office assistant (and miss it in newer releases of office), quick access to help and something to amuse yourself with when the writing was getting too tedious.
Though I did preffer links or rocky to clippy.
That is of course assuming that they mapped all 2GB of that video ram directly into system ram. I find this unlikely given how common 32 bit operating systems still are.
I doubt this would work with this card at least not to give the full capacity.
That technique relies on the graphics card ram being directly mapped into the processors address space, then it simply uses a standard linux block device to expose it for storage purposes.
There is no way a 2GB card is going to be mapping it's entire ram into the 32 bit PCI address space, there just wouldn't be the room on most machines. It could map it in the 64 bit address space but then operating systems which don't support addressing memory beyond the 4GB boundry (such as the 32 bit versions of client editions of windows) couldn't access it.
but I believe AA (anti-aliasing) is after processing to a scene
There are a number of ways to do anti-aliasing but IIRC the common way is to oversample, that is generate the output in a higher resoloution than will be output and then downsample it.
If you have a 2560x1920 monitor and oversample by 4 times in each direction you would be generating in 10240x7680. That would mean you would need over 300 megs just for the output buffer. I'm not sure if current cards could handle that at a reasonable framerate anyway though.
Afaict the big thing putting pressure on graphics memory is texture detail, if you double the horizontal and vertical resoloution of your texture you quadruple the memory required to store it. Ideally you want enough memory on your graphics card to store all the textures the game uses on the card. Texture detail is something the game developer can fairly easilly allow the user to alter, just design the textures in the highest resoloution and allow those with weaker hardware to select downsampled versions.
Example: You are bidding on an auction. You decide that you are willing to pay exactly $21 for the item
right, now lets assume that someone else is bidding against you. They really want to pay about $19 for the item. They also have very little self control. In my experiance this is a reasonable assumption. They place an initial bid of $15 a day before the auction ends.
If you place your real maximum bid a long time in advance they immediately find out thier bid was too low, they keep thinking "just a little more" and before you know it they have pushed the auction price over your maximum.
If you place your maximum bid an hour or so before auction closure they get an email notifying them that you are winning, they keep thinking "just a little more" and before you know it they have beaten your maximum bid.
If you place your maximum bid in the last few seconds then by the time they get the email that ebay sends to sucker them into bidding more the auction is over.
This was a simple example assuming only one competitor lacking in self control but the principle holds that all placing your real maximum bid early does is encourage those lacking self control to drive the price over it (it also gains you an advantage in the case of a dead tie of maximum bids but afaict that is a relatively rare situation).
but they still have to be willing to pay more than I am.
No they just have to be suckered in to paying more than you are willing to pay.
It seems that a lot of people care more about winning the auction (like it's some kind of contest) than they do about getting the merchandise for an acceptable price. To me, THEY are the suckers.
Indeed, but if you encourage those suckers to drive the price to unreasonable levels then you won't get the item at a reasonable price.
I disagree, I find bidding in the last few seconds is the way to avoid driving the item to "trumped up values".
a quick tip, IIRC you can (or at least used to be able to, it's a while since I used ebay) search for items within a specified distance of a city, this filters out places that don't exist (such as "hong kong, united kingdom")
The thing is verification is going to drive up prices a lot. There will be two sets of delivery costs (deliver to the verifier and then to the buyer) and you will have to pay the verifier for thier services.
Personally I think the cost of all that would be a lot higher than the cost of the occasional transaction gone wrong.
I have an XP install disk. I paid a lot of money for it. I don't want to pay for it again if I need to reinstall. So how can I reinstall without being unsafe and getting owned halfway through the process?
download the SP3 offline installer and either slipstream it into your windows install CD or if that is too complicated for you just burn it to a CDR and keep it with your windows install CD.
alternatively just connect the machine behind a router/firewall/nat that doesn't allow incoming connections while you install the update.
The real problem with pre-sp2 XP was the default config had no firewall and a lot of services listening for incoming connections. Plus many of those services were running with localsystem (~= root) privilages.
XPSP2 enabled the firewall by default but IIRC there were a lot of exceptions for whatever windows considered to be the "local network"
Afaict most linux distributions are not stupid enough to do this. So the exposure is much reduced.
Of course if you manually install services that listen to the internet without patching first then things change big time.
IIRC (and I could be misremembering) the XP SP2 firewall by default leaves a lot of stuff open to what it considers the "local network". The problem then comes when either it's idea of the local network is overly wide or the local network you are on has infected machines.
24x7 over a week sometimes.
Ok so you spend a week playing some kind of military recreation (using whatever weapon substitue). Presumabblly at a predetermined time the activity ends and you go home and back to regular life.
It is the continuous nature of MMOs that I think is the problem, the game world goes on whether you are there or not so taking breaks is problematic and those who spend the most hours per week in game are at the advantage.
It could be interesting to set up a MMO that had fixed playing periods. That way players wouldn't be competing with people who could afford to put in far more time (that is people with no job).
Do you really have people working in shifts (generally without any real world pay) so that a game element (with no real world value) to defend thier paintball/airsoft game targets 24/7.365?
The main issue comes when you want to redistribute. The previous java licenses allowed to you redistribute under certain circumstanses and you could pretty much forget about fixing things and redistributing those fixes.
That and the fact that having software provided by your distro means that a lot of compatibility and updates issues are taken care of centrally.
It's not just the debian guys, many other distros have policies against including non-free software in thier main repositries and thier default installs. This is bad for java because it means that the default java on many linux distros is a relatively slow and highly incomplete clone.
Also there are practical issues. Not so long ago a newer version of one of the X libraries got less tollerant of cerain misbehaviour. This broke sun java, it was possible to hack the binaries so they would run but the license distros got java under forbid them from doing this for thier users.
Eventually sun released an update to java 6 fixing the issue but it took quite a long time. Afaict java 5 is still not fixed.
The trouble is afaict "made in" only represents where the "last significant manufacturing process" was carried out. Not where the bulk of the work was done.
and what is "Game experience may change during online play" supposed to mean any way?
Afaict it means that the age rating on the box relates to the content actually included in the box but once you go online with the game there is no gaurantee that things will stay at that rating. (an extreme example is first person shooters that will download custom maps, art and other content from the gameserver. In theese games it is quite possible to find public servers running maps that contain porn or with mods that change the character of the violence.
In some games you hear of people literally working shifts doing nothing but sitting there defending something. I don't think WoW is that bad but I still get the impression that if you are at all competitive the way to get ahead is to sink more hours into the game than your competitors.
Because on a low-powered system, gaming is not going to be an issue
As long as you are prepared to live with slightly lower tech games (e.g. starcraft, the 3D rendering ports of duke3D, the orignal zoo tycoon) it is perfectly feasible to play games on an EEEPC.
As for your comment on ODF I'll belive it when I see it, given microsofts inability to ensure consitancy even between different versions of word I highly doubt words ODF support will be any better than openoffices DOC support (that is I belive it will be usable for basic documents but things will start to go wrong as the formatting gets complex).
On a low-powered system, it's not even as though you'll be running some big "must have" Windows application on it anyway.
Who says an app has to be resource intensive to be "must have"?