What drugs are you on? Show me a drive that can do 3200Mbps transfers that's not a RAM drive. Heck, show me something that can do 480Mbps transfers and I'll be surprised. Even then though, Firewire does have better transfer rates because I believe there's more logic on the controller than on USB.
Hmm, that's probably true. I'm not sure if it was actually bad sectors because I had been fiddling around with some tool that purported to fix Windows Update problems and after running it and trying to reboot it failed to reboot. I then used RIPLinux to save what data I could, which was most of the data except for a few megabytes worth. I probably should replace the hard drive but it'd be kind of annoying and I think I'm going to just build them a new computer anyway sometime in the near future.
Well, the hard drive had bad sectors for no apparent reason. I'm not entirely sure what happened though, because it's still working, but I make regular backups in case it fails again. The nice thing was that after reinstalling Windows was noticeably faster. In any case, my point still stands, Linux LiveCDs are immensely useful for people even if they don't use Linux much.
Actually, I realize that was tongue in cheek but this is pretty useful even if you don't use Linux primarily. I still use Windows 90% of the time, but when the hard drive failed on my parents computer I used a LiveCD to back up the data and reinstall Windows.
Uh... DSPs are specialized for that kind of stuff, whereas the Atom is just a cut down x86 processor, and a pretty crappy one at that. But I do agree with the rest of your post.
Don't underestimate the complexity of DotA though. I'm almost certain it would take far longer than a week or two, especially since people would need to learn the new language in the SCII map editor. And Icefrog has said before that he's not sure when/whether he'll move to SCII, so I doubt he would change his mind right after SCII came out, and I don't think there are many people who know the intricacies of DotA as well as Icefrog, although I don't know what happened to the original mapmakers (Eul, Guinsoo, etc.)
I tried playing Starcraft on my tablet PC and it was not very playable. I think it would probably be a bit better with multitouch and perhaps a bigger screen, but I think it won't get practical for some time. But it is always a cool thing to try, the problem is that a mouse is easier to move than your hands.
It's way slower than a 1.2ghz Celeron, which makes it seem like you're full of BS. Also, there's been a tremendous amount of positive hype behind the Atom, and I'm sure Intel makes a pretty decent margin on these chips since they aren't very expensive to make.
Well, Atom chips are in-order and it's been shown that the 1.6ghz one in all the netbooks these days is actually slower than the Celeron 900mhz in the original EeePC. And I'm pretty sure you weren't editing at a very high resolution on a 650mhz CPU, which is the main problem with video editing.
Reading comprehension please. Apple has nowhere near the market share of Windows, and one of the main selling points of Windows is that it's familiar and compatible. If the new version of Windows was just as alien and incompatible as OS X, the logic would probably be why not use OS X? I think that's actually kind of what's happening with Vista, although the incompatibility and foreignness are greatly exaggerated by the media. I personally have other reasons for not using OS X, but I can see why people are switching to OS X in fairly significant numbers.
Hah. They did remove a bit of legacy cruft, at least 16 bit compatibility in 64 bit editions. But the problem with that is that the main reason companies/people/organizations use Windows is that it's familiar to them and compatible with all their stuff, so making it not backwards compatible would be stupid. I think they are slowly weeding out useless stuff but it's not like everything will suddenly disappear, because you never know what archaic stuff people are running on their machines. For example, I believe some antiviruses used undocumented kernel hooks or something like that, and Vista disabled those because they are a security risk and the antivirus authors got pissed because it broke their stuff, which shouldn't have been doing stuff like that in the first place.
Uh... what? A complete rewrite of something the size of Windows would probably take a ridiculously long time. The amount of legacy crap in there is probably enough to drive anyone insane, but I guess unless Microsft decides to do a complete 180 and open source it we'll never know. I think the original Longhorn codebase was different from what became Vista, but I'm pretty sure it was still based on Windows XP.
Yeah, that's what I said. Vista and 2008 share the same codebase, which was based off of the 2003 codebase. Originally Vista was separate though, in the Longhorn days, but then they needed to rush it out so they dropped what they were working on and switched to the 2003 codebase.
And Vista was based off Server 2003, and now shares the same codebase with Server 2008. Completely new codebase would be impossible to do. I think what they mean is that they're trying to remove the cruft from the codebase, but expecting any organization to completely rewrite their code for the next version of a major product is ridiculous.
Yeah, I have to agree that this is really cool and innovative from all accounts. Kind of like that one HTC giant brick of a PDA that also ran Windows Vista, but actually practical. I would love to be able to plug something like this into an expresscard slot or something, although I doubt it's possible. And I am again reminded of why I hate laptops overall, upgradability is crap.
I don't know if Vista improved standby or what, because I've never really used it on a laptop before, but on my new laptop sleep mode works perfectly. I used to always use hibernate in XP but it seems like with 3GB of RAM hibernate takes forever. Ugh, 3GB of ram is annoying too, stupid HP for not having 64 bit windows in their retail laptops (at least when I bought mine).
I don't know why all the Mac users are so excited over working suspsend all of a sudden. I've never had problems with Windows suspend either. Usually if I'm running Windows on my laptop I just sleep it and when you open the lid again it goes straight to the login screen. Unfortunately, with Linux if I leave it alone for a while the screen goes blank and refuses to respond, but usually a ctrl-alt-backspace is enough to fix that. I haven't bothered with setting up ACPI stuff though, although I have seen guides for getting everything working on my laptop. ACPI is something that should really work out of the box, and I don't particularly care how stupid the ACPI standard is, and I suspect most users don't either. I enjoy tweaking a lot but unfortunately most of the time I end up borking something with binary blob video drivers and so I haven't tried this time.
AMD has something called the Avivo video encoder which supposedly makes encoding videos really fast and uses very little CPU. Unfortunately, I have an AMD card that is just the wrong type and doesn't have the UVD chip so I can't test it out myself, but the Radeon HD 2600 and all 3x00 and 4x00 GPUs have it. Not sure why they left it out on the 2900s, ugh. I guess the 2900s already generate more heat than almost anything else, so one more chip might be too much.
Yeah, I do see your point. Hardware wise it's not much different but software wise there is a lot of new stuff going on. I'm guessing there's more capable firmware now since it has the ability to run downloaded games, and that same firmware probably blocks homebrew devices from booting. I'm not entirely sure how they work but I believe they did something with fooling the DS into thinking it's a retail cart but they might have figured out a way to detect that now. Nintendo's been making a pretty big fuss over piracy lately, and both this and the upcoming Wii update for loading games from SD seems like a vector for further anti-piracy efforts.
On second thought, if they intend to use the hinge camera for video chat, they probably made the wifi a lot stronger. The current wifi is ridiculously slow, at least gauged through homebrew software downloads which maxed out around 30kbps for me.
Really? I can't find any indication that the specs have improved. I was really hoping for a boost in horesepower and higher resolution screens, as well as stronger wifi (802.11g) with WPA support. All of these haven't been clearly mentioned, so I'm not really sure whether I'll upgrade, but the annoying thing is that my DS Lite has a somewhat common shoulder button issue, and it might be worth it to trade it in for this new iteration since it's out of warranty. The problem is that I already have a web browser and MP3 player on my DS through homebrew, and I bet the DSi will lock out homebrew carts since it seems like this iteration actually has a somewhat advanced firmware, and is probably upgradable since it has onboard storage. The downloadable games do seem nice though.
I see it on the sourceforge project page. I've been doing this for a while because they usually update their Windows links a bit later than the others. But they're usually up fairly promptly.
Haven't tried this myself, but I've heard on the interwebs that you can log in to one account multiple times as long as it's behind one IP address, or something like that. I haven't actually played any multiplayer games on Steam yet, although I intend to buy the Orange Box this week.
That comment makes no sense. The reason they ditched the Game Boy name is because they weren't sure if the DS would be a flop, and insisted for a long time that the DS was a "third pillar" to their home console (Gamecube at the time) and GBA. Now that it's a runaway success they have no qualms about killing off the GameBoy brand.
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What drugs are you on? Show me a drive that can do 3200Mbps transfers that's not a RAM drive. Heck, show me something that can do 480Mbps transfers and I'll be surprised. Even then though, Firewire does have better transfer rates because I believe there's more logic on the controller than on USB.
And Firefox 3.1 nightlies score better than that, around 93/94 if I recall correctly. Fennec is running nightly versions of Gecko.
Hmm, that's probably true. I'm not sure if it was actually bad sectors because I had been fiddling around with some tool that purported to fix Windows Update problems and after running it and trying to reboot it failed to reboot. I then used RIPLinux to save what data I could, which was most of the data except for a few megabytes worth. I probably should replace the hard drive but it'd be kind of annoying and I think I'm going to just build them a new computer anyway sometime in the near future.
Well, the hard drive had bad sectors for no apparent reason. I'm not entirely sure what happened though, because it's still working, but I make regular backups in case it fails again. The nice thing was that after reinstalling Windows was noticeably faster. In any case, my point still stands, Linux LiveCDs are immensely useful for people even if they don't use Linux much.
Actually, I realize that was tongue in cheek but this is pretty useful even if you don't use Linux primarily. I still use Windows 90% of the time, but when the hard drive failed on my parents computer I used a LiveCD to back up the data and reinstall Windows.
Uh... DSPs are specialized for that kind of stuff, whereas the Atom is just a cut down x86 processor, and a pretty crappy one at that. But I do agree with the rest of your post.
Don't underestimate the complexity of DotA though. I'm almost certain it would take far longer than a week or two, especially since people would need to learn the new language in the SCII map editor. And Icefrog has said before that he's not sure when/whether he'll move to SCII, so I doubt he would change his mind right after SCII came out, and I don't think there are many people who know the intricacies of DotA as well as Icefrog, although I don't know what happened to the original mapmakers (Eul, Guinsoo, etc.)
I tried playing Starcraft on my tablet PC and it was not very playable. I think it would probably be a bit better with multitouch and perhaps a bigger screen, but I think it won't get practical for some time. But it is always a cool thing to try, the problem is that a mouse is easier to move than your hands.
What? Benchmarks don't lie. I can't find the ones for the 900mhz Celeron, but look at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Atom-Efficient,1981-15.html
It's way slower than a 1.2ghz Celeron, which makes it seem like you're full of BS. Also, there's been a tremendous amount of positive hype behind the Atom, and I'm sure Intel makes a pretty decent margin on these chips since they aren't very expensive to make.
Well, Atom chips are in-order and it's been shown that the 1.6ghz one in all the netbooks these days is actually slower than the Celeron 900mhz in the original EeePC. And I'm pretty sure you weren't editing at a very high resolution on a 650mhz CPU, which is the main problem with video editing.
Reading comprehension please. Apple has nowhere near the market share of Windows, and one of the main selling points of Windows is that it's familiar and compatible. If the new version of Windows was just as alien and incompatible as OS X, the logic would probably be why not use OS X? I think that's actually kind of what's happening with Vista, although the incompatibility and foreignness are greatly exaggerated by the media. I personally have other reasons for not using OS X, but I can see why people are switching to OS X in fairly significant numbers.
Hah. They did remove a bit of legacy cruft, at least 16 bit compatibility in 64 bit editions. But the problem with that is that the main reason companies/people/organizations use Windows is that it's familiar to them and compatible with all their stuff, so making it not backwards compatible would be stupid. I think they are slowly weeding out useless stuff but it's not like everything will suddenly disappear, because you never know what archaic stuff people are running on their machines. For example, I believe some antiviruses used undocumented kernel hooks or something like that, and Vista disabled those because they are a security risk and the antivirus authors got pissed because it broke their stuff, which shouldn't have been doing stuff like that in the first place.
Uh... what? A complete rewrite of something the size of Windows would probably take a ridiculously long time. The amount of legacy crap in there is probably enough to drive anyone insane, but I guess unless Microsft decides to do a complete 180 and open source it we'll never know. I think the original Longhorn codebase was different from what became Vista, but I'm pretty sure it was still based on Windows XP.
Yeah, that's what I said. Vista and 2008 share the same codebase, which was based off of the 2003 codebase. Originally Vista was separate though, in the Longhorn days, but then they needed to rush it out so they dropped what they were working on and switched to the 2003 codebase.
And Vista was based off Server 2003, and now shares the same codebase with Server 2008. Completely new codebase would be impossible to do. I think what they mean is that they're trying to remove the cruft from the codebase, but expecting any organization to completely rewrite their code for the next version of a major product is ridiculous.
Yeah, I have to agree that this is really cool and innovative from all accounts. Kind of like that one HTC giant brick of a PDA that also ran Windows Vista, but actually practical. I would love to be able to plug something like this into an expresscard slot or something, although I doubt it's possible. And I am again reminded of why I hate laptops overall, upgradability is crap.
I don't know if Vista improved standby or what, because I've never really used it on a laptop before, but on my new laptop sleep mode works perfectly. I used to always use hibernate in XP but it seems like with 3GB of RAM hibernate takes forever. Ugh, 3GB of ram is annoying too, stupid HP for not having 64 bit windows in their retail laptops (at least when I bought mine).
I don't know why all the Mac users are so excited over working suspsend all of a sudden. I've never had problems with Windows suspend either. Usually if I'm running Windows on my laptop I just sleep it and when you open the lid again it goes straight to the login screen. Unfortunately, with Linux if I leave it alone for a while the screen goes blank and refuses to respond, but usually a ctrl-alt-backspace is enough to fix that. I haven't bothered with setting up ACPI stuff though, although I have seen guides for getting everything working on my laptop. ACPI is something that should really work out of the box, and I don't particularly care how stupid the ACPI standard is, and I suspect most users don't either. I enjoy tweaking a lot but unfortunately most of the time I end up borking something with binary blob video drivers and so I haven't tried this time.
AMD has something called the Avivo video encoder which supposedly makes encoding videos really fast and uses very little CPU. Unfortunately, I have an AMD card that is just the wrong type and doesn't have the UVD chip so I can't test it out myself, but the Radeon HD 2600 and all 3x00 and 4x00 GPUs have it. Not sure why they left it out on the 2900s, ugh. I guess the 2900s already generate more heat than almost anything else, so one more chip might be too much.
Yeah, I do see your point. Hardware wise it's not much different but software wise there is a lot of new stuff going on. I'm guessing there's more capable firmware now since it has the ability to run downloaded games, and that same firmware probably blocks homebrew devices from booting. I'm not entirely sure how they work but I believe they did something with fooling the DS into thinking it's a retail cart but they might have figured out a way to detect that now. Nintendo's been making a pretty big fuss over piracy lately, and both this and the upcoming Wii update for loading games from SD seems like a vector for further anti-piracy efforts.
On second thought, if they intend to use the hinge camera for video chat, they probably made the wifi a lot stronger. The current wifi is ridiculously slow, at least gauged through homebrew software downloads which maxed out around 30kbps for me.
Really? I can't find any indication that the specs have improved. I was really hoping for a boost in horesepower and higher resolution screens, as well as stronger wifi (802.11g) with WPA support. All of these haven't been clearly mentioned, so I'm not really sure whether I'll upgrade, but the annoying thing is that my DS Lite has a somewhat common shoulder button issue, and it might be worth it to trade it in for this new iteration since it's out of warranty. The problem is that I already have a web browser and MP3 player on my DS through homebrew, and I bet the DSi will lock out homebrew carts since it seems like this iteration actually has a somewhat advanced firmware, and is probably upgradable since it has onboard storage. The downloadable games do seem nice though.
I see it on the sourceforge project page. I've been doing this for a while because they usually update their Windows links a bit later than the others. But they're usually up fairly promptly.
Haven't tried this myself, but I've heard on the interwebs that you can log in to one account multiple times as long as it's behind one IP address, or something like that. I haven't actually played any multiplayer games on Steam yet, although I intend to buy the Orange Box this week.
That comment makes no sense. The reason they ditched the Game Boy name is because they weren't sure if the DS would be a flop, and insisted for a long time that the DS was a "third pillar" to their home console (Gamecube at the time) and GBA. Now that it's a runaway success they have no qualms about killing off the GameBoy brand.