Why is it we still have silly piracy protection like starforce and securom? Just the other day I was fighting with Crysis, it suddenly would hang when launched. What was worse was that damn securom CD icon that hijacks your mouse cursor wouldn't go away until a reboot. So what did I have to do? Go to game copy world and download a patched "no DVD" exe for a game I BOUGHT WITH MY MONEY! Now what is sad. The execs should pull their heads out of their asses and see that they are wasting dev time and money with buggy and possibly destructive DRM. Piracy cant be defeated with silly cd check mechanisms, cd keys, phone homes, or dongles. It just doesn't work and will be cracked within days. Please stop screwing us after we already paid for the software.
Fuck EA and all their studios that bow under pressure to "protect" their IP. Spore sounds like an amazing game but that will be marred for many who have to fight with suckrom constantly crashing. Looks like another legit game that will have to be cracked to work. And ONLY 5 installs? What happens after 5 years if I want to play again? Will there be someone at an EA support desk to give me a new key? What if EA goes under? Unbelievable.
Please mod parent up. Shielfw0lf gets two +5 and one +3 for spewing nothing more than hateful rhetoric.
Just once, I'd like to read about a young person losing the plot and shooting white collar criminals, or people who manufacture weapons of mass destruction, or corrupt political figures instead of shooting up their classmates.
Are you serious? Your saying we should use violence against people who manufacture weapons of mass destruction and everyone with an office job? I like how you can comfortably sit back and say this. I bet if it came to a revolution you would most likely shit yourself and hide. Have you ever been in a combat situation? I admittedly have not but have many friends and relatives who have. And it isn't the glorious bullshit you see in the movies, its sickening. You need a serious reality check.
Right... put myself in debt to a corrupt banking system, so I can waste a few years abasing myself to people I don't respect, so I can be specialized further away from the capacity to care for myself and indoctrinated into a system that thinks of me as a cross between a cog and a steer. That will really fix things.
So where do you live? I would love to move to your corruption free utopia.
It does seem redundant. But the law states that once you go over dimension you need that sign. Most likely he is doing only 3-5 MPH (5-8 km/h). Even if he is running on a private road the trucking company probably leaves the sign on that tractor.
Sometimes they just steal the whole car for a crime. Case in point a neighbor once had his car stolen before christmas. It was full of the kids presents he was hiding and it was believed to have been stolen for that reason. The cops found the car three weeks late burnt out with the presents still inside. When asked why would they steal a car and just burn it the cops replied it was most likely used in a serious crime like transporting a body or moving large amounts of drugs.
At that point with the plates intact on the right vehicle even a curious cop who punches in the plate number will see it matches the vehicle.
You also have to take into consideration that a phone electronics are optimized for low power consumption and very small form factor. Its apples to oranges. A micro SD card has a painfully slow data transfer rate of about ~900kB/sec read and about 600-700kB/sec write due to its low speed serial data interface. You cant expect wide and/or a fast data bus in such a small and low power storage device. USB thumb drives can afford the nearly 10MB/sec thanks to 100-200mA@5V power and 480Mb/sec data interface. Compact flash uses a 16 bit wide ATA bus that enables 10+ MB sec in CF cards.
Now imagine an array of flash chips optimized for high speed transfer and a few chips all making up a wider data bus that ties into a SATA interface. Thats along the lines of a SSD. You can get high speed, it just needs to be engineered to do so.
But one thing that concerns me as well is not just speed but read/write life span. An SSD with a busy swap file on it can be beaten to death pretty fast regardless of wear algorithms.
First thing I would do is sort them by their capacity. Anything under 100gb isn't really worth using as their capacity versus power consumption is poor. Either throw them out, give them away or sell them in bulk lots on ebay. Next thing to do is either buy multi port ata cards which are increasingly harder to find/expensive or get ata-to-sata converters and use multi port sata cards. Multi port sata cards can be had in 16 or even 24 ports and three or four cards in a single system could give you a serious storage platform. Plus sata equipment is cheap and esata enclosures, cables and adapters can easily be had for a few dollars.
Also consider ata-sata adapters will enable you to use a port multiplier that will split one sata port into five. On newegg you can buy a Supermicro eight port sata card for about $100. So with eight fan out bridges you have the ability to host forty drives on one card. Eighty with two cards in a single machine. It wont be a fast server thats for sure but it will do the job.
As for software I like MDADM on Linux but you want to scale up with iata or iscsi. I haven't used iata/iscsi but assemble your drives into arrays and get them up and online. Then install your iata/iscsi packages and get them talking to your servers.
Pressure has nothing to do with explosive power. Gasoline vapor burns not the actual liquid gasoline. Ever try to light motor oil on fire? You need to put it in a metal container and heat it up until it starts to evaporate and then it burns on its own. Its the free vapor/air mixture that gets dangerously explosive. When you have a very flammable vapor mixed with air, a flame can rapidly propagate through the cloud very quickly producing a shock wave.
Propane is even more dangerous because its a cryogenic liquid that rapidly boils off and quickly mixes with air producing an explosive cloud.
Gunpowder isn't a very good explosive but when confined in a pipe or gun barrel it quickly builds up an enormous pressure. Once the pressure reaches the containers critical limit, it will burst with a powerful shock wave.
Ammonia is not an oxidizer but it burns in the presence of oxygen. Ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer along with ammonium perchlorate and sodium hypochlorite (bleach). When those are mixed with a fuel like diesel, gasoline or hell even charcoal it can form an extremely explosive mixture. It can be simply explained as mixing super oxygen right into the fuel. Ammonium perchlorate is the worst of the three turning almost anything it touches into a bomb. When mixed with hydrazine it forms the most powerful non military explosive called Astrolite G. Go on youtube and look up the pepcon disaster. That shows you what happens when thousands of tons of ammonium perchlorate catches fire.
Oh and if you think the gubberment is gonna get me for disseminating this information guess what? I found it all on Wikipedia.
Oh christ. I should have realised this is Slash Dot. I have to spell everything out so it isn't taken literally.
Ok By 100% aluminum I mean that the trailers frame, cross members and decking are all aluminum alloy. The axles, king pin and kingpin skid plate are the only steel parts on the trailer. There happy now? They are called all aluminum trailers or 100% aluminum construction in the industry.
Re:fuel costs still not high enough priority
on
Big Rigs Go High Tech
·
· Score: 5, Informative
We'd see a lot more aerodynamics.
Aero? Peterbilt 378, Kenworth T2000, International Prostar, Freightliner Century/Colombia/Cascadia, Mack Vision. And more are to follow.
It'd be so easy to make a few small aerodynamic changes to the trailers. That's seriously low hanging fruit, and it's been almost entirely ignored.
Aero Trailers are not always feasible in the eyes of the trucking industry for one simple reason: weight. Most tractors today have proper wind deflectors on top to allow to the air to deflect around the trailer reducing drag. Side skirts have been tried since the 70's but did not yield enough of an increase in fuel savings to warrant their cost or added weight.
We'd also see lighter trailers with more aluminum and composite carbon fiber in them
Trailers are already as light as possible and are full of composite materials and aluminum, you just haven't bothered to look. Aluminum is popular in flatbed trailers that can be upward of 100% aluminum and many trailers are of a mixed construction of both aluminum and steel. Aluminum frames used to be popular in trucks of the 70's. But after a few years of running on roads that are salted in the winter, everyone learned real fast that aluminum was a poor material for frames. Carbon fiber isn't a material your going to find on a truck as it has no desirable properties other then low weight.
more efficient engines
Diesel engines have for years been very efficient. The average today is about 6-6.5 MPG for tractor trailers. Older diesels that were mechanical could also yield similar numbers but were very dirty (but fun and simple to maintain and work on). EPA 2007 and the looming EPA 2010 has created a whole new school of diesel design and many companies are about to or are going to release some real seriously high tech engines. Compacted graphite iron, turbo compounding, ingenious heat management, acoustic tuning, over head cams and integrated engine brakes is whats in the mix. International's MaXXForce, Detroit Diesel's DD15, and Paccar's MX engine are some of the most technologically advanced engines out there. They are ready to be deployed soon here in the USA and will meet EPA 2010 emissions which will make gasoline engine look filthy.
and better tires.
Ever hear of super singles? They are wide base tires that replace the dual tires found on both drive and trailer axles. They have less friction than a set of dual tires and can bring about a noticeable and beneficial savings in fuel economy. They are also lighter which allows the truck to carry more fright which increases efficiency. Adoption has been pretty good but safety is a bit of a concern as with duals if one tire blows the other can support the weight of the axle so the truck can be safely stopped. Cost is also an issue and they aren't useful outside of LTL, long haul and bulk haul. Vocational work still demands dual tires for the high weights and abuse involved.
They have been emissions laws in place for Diesel engines for a long time already. The EPA 2007 emissions were a huge step forward from the EPA 2002 emissions in using a diesel particulate filter DPF to filter out the soot and aggressive exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) to reduce NOx emissions.
My beef with the EPA and the government is how they handled the enforcement of the 2007 emissions law. In Europe they have the Euro emissions standard for diesel engines and they are currently at Euro 5. But that does not mean that truck makers must only offer Euro 5 engines to its customers. See the EU was smart and rather then force everyone to switch they said you can still buy Euro 4 and 3 engines but you pay higher registration fees and I believe even higher road usage taxes (can anyone clarify?) for the Euro 3 and 4 engines.
In the USA the EPA forced all the engine makers and truck makers to only offer 2007 emissions rated engines in all trucks made after October 2007. Now the 2007 rated engines add another six to eight thousand dollars to a truck so guess what happened? Thats right, in 2006 trucking companies scrambled to purchase pre-2007 trucks not only because they were cheaper but the reliability of 2007 engines was unknown and untrusted. So now you have plenty of 2006 sales but sales were dead in 2007 threatening truck makers here in the states. If the EPA did what the EU did they would have eased the pain in transitioning and we would have more cleaner trucks on the road.
Now just wait till EPA 2010 when we will most likely combine the 2007 DPF and EGR systems with a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Also Europe will combine a DPF system with their Euro 5 SCR/EGR system for Euro 6 emissions. At that point diesel engines will be cleaner than gasoline engines.
Because the vendors don't get their fat contracts with the state to supply more new systems. That's why allot of equipment regardless of what it might be is destroyed by various government agencies. A sudden influx of cheap equipment cuts into the sales of new equipment. Many companies have a "destroy after end of life" clause in their government contracts.
Its a terrible waste but it ensures vendors get to sell lots of new stuff down the line without competition from liquidation auctions.
"Entire cities and even states in some countries are being run on renewable technologies. It's proven, it works, it's emission free...... very expensive and does not have a continuous output. We could substitute allot of out energy needs with solar or wind but certain parts of the world don't always get allot of wind and sun. Burning fuel and nuclear can output their rated capacity 24/7/365 if necessary. "Proven" and "works" don't always mean its going to gain market share. Believe me I would love to go solar for my home but spending upward of 15 grand just for the solar panels is ludicrous. I can easily install it myself but imagine that the installation cost of a "pro" would add at least another 5 grand. For 20 thousand bucks I can light my house for the next 15 years at the same rate I am using power now.
Hyper transport won't help with rendering as much as faster GPU's would. Remember GPU's have their own memory on very wide buses that can move data at over 20GB per second. The integrated CPU/GPU stuff is most likely targeted at low end users like cheap PC's, media centers and embedded systems.
Me personally, would like to see SLI/Cross-Fire like setups actually give you a near 100% boost in rendering speeds. From all the benchmarks I have seen you barely get 20-30% speed increase for a 100% price increase. And some benchmarks are lower for SLI setups and require fine tuning for better performance. Screw that. If I spend twice the money I expect nearly twice the performance just like the good old Voodoo 2 days.
I remember hearing the same kind of dooms day predictions about RHIC at Brookhaven national labs. Also it was said that some scientists predicted the first atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere destroying the planet. At any rate none of those doomsday predictions occurred and RHIC has been operating since 2000.
Gaming cards try to keep the framerate up by degrading image (not showing every single texture, e.g.), if need be
Thats called culling and it is implemented in software, not hardware.
If I remember correctly there was a simple hack posted on Toms Hardware a while back for converting a Radeon to a FireGL. You simply solder an SMT resistor to a certain trace on the chip package and it pulls a line low. That line actually signals the BIOS to report the card as a Radeon or a FireGL. So in essence the Radeon and FireGL are the EXACT SAME CARD! The only difference is the FireGL drivers look for a Radeon reporting itself as a FireGL. This keeps production simple and even the video card BIOS versions the same.
The FireGL and Quattro cards come with optimized drivers for specific 3D programs like AutoCAD, Maya, 3DSMax, Light Wave etc. There is a drop down box that lets you select the program your using and it loads the finely tuned driver for that program.
"The government is paying for the majority of the costs for fiber to the home, which isn't really to the home, its to the curb."
If you are speaking of FIOS you are most certainly wrong. There is indeed a fiber pair that is ran to your home and terminated at an ONT. The location on the ONT is either inside or outside your home. Inside the ONT there is an Ethernet port for internet, an F connector for "cable" TV and four RJ-11 for POTS. Unless my home is considered a curb, FIOS is true fiber to the home.
Thats the best thing , go to local or small bars. I only go to three bars and all the owners and bar tenders know me. And since I am a regular they give me and my friends special treatment, plenty of buy backs/freebies and special prices. We don't have to wait ten minutes to get a drink and we get to stay after hours. And the best part about after hours is that selling booze is illegal. So its all free after 4am here in NY if you get to know people. None of the bars I have gone to have that scanner and I doubt they ever will.
Consider this: I was such good friends with a former bar owner that my tab was rarely above 30 bucks. And that was for two of us that have had about 4-5 drinks each. I always tipped good so it was 45-50 total and thats still a bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it we still have silly piracy protection like starforce and securom? Just the other day I was fighting with Crysis, it suddenly would hang when launched. What was worse was that damn securom CD icon that hijacks your mouse cursor wouldn't go away until a reboot. So what did I have to do? Go to game copy world and download a patched "no DVD" exe for a game I BOUGHT WITH MY MONEY! Now what is sad. The execs should pull their heads out of their asses and see that they are wasting dev time and money with buggy and possibly destructive DRM. Piracy cant be defeated with silly cd check mechanisms, cd keys, phone homes, or dongles. It just doesn't work and will be cracked within days. Please stop screwing us after we already paid for the software.
Fuck EA and all their studios that bow under pressure to "protect" their IP. Spore sounds like an amazing game but that will be marred for many who have to fight with suckrom constantly crashing. Looks like another legit game that will have to be cracked to work. And ONLY 5 installs? What happens after 5 years if I want to play again? Will there be someone at an EA support desk to give me a new key? What if EA goes under? Unbelievable.
Please mod parent up. Shielfw0lf gets two +5 and one +3 for spewing nothing more than hateful rhetoric.
Just once, I'd like to read about a young person losing the plot and shooting white collar criminals, or people who manufacture weapons of mass destruction, or corrupt political figures instead of shooting up their classmates.
Are you serious? Your saying we should use violence against people who manufacture weapons of mass destruction and everyone with an office job? I like how you can comfortably sit back and say this. I bet if it came to a revolution you would most likely shit yourself and hide. Have you ever been in a combat situation? I admittedly have not but have many friends and relatives who have. And it isn't the glorious bullshit you see in the movies, its sickening. You need a serious reality check.
Right... put myself in debt to a corrupt banking system, so I can waste a few years abasing myself to people I don't respect, so I can be specialized further away from the capacity to care for myself and indoctrinated into a system that thinks of me as a cross between a cog and a steer. That will really fix things.
So where do you live? I would love to move to your corruption free utopia.
It does seem redundant. But the law states that once you go over dimension you need that sign. Most likely he is doing only 3-5 MPH (5-8 km/h). Even if he is running on a private road the trucking company probably leaves the sign on that tractor.
His team of scientists will take years to distinguish the woosh from background noise generated by other posts. So, no.
Is that anything like pirate eye?
Sometimes they just steal the whole car for a crime. Case in point a neighbor once had his car stolen before christmas. It was full of the kids presents he was hiding and it was believed to have been stolen for that reason. The cops found the car three weeks late burnt out with the presents still inside. When asked why would they steal a car and just burn it the cops replied it was most likely used in a serious crime like transporting a body or moving large amounts of drugs.
At that point with the plates intact on the right vehicle even a curious cop who punches in the plate number will see it matches the vehicle.
"Hitting on the Russians seems to be in real fashion these days, you'd almost think there was a political motive behind it."
Nah. We just miss the good ol days of the cold war.
Depends on how many chip-shops there are.
You also have to take into consideration that a phone electronics are optimized for low power consumption and very small form factor. Its apples to oranges. A micro SD card has a painfully slow data transfer rate of about ~900kB/sec read and about 600-700kB/sec write due to its low speed serial data interface. You cant expect wide and/or a fast data bus in such a small and low power storage device. USB thumb drives can afford the nearly 10MB/sec thanks to 100-200mA@5V power and 480Mb/sec data interface. Compact flash uses a 16 bit wide ATA bus that enables 10+ MB sec in CF cards.
Now imagine an array of flash chips optimized for high speed transfer and a few chips all making up a wider data bus that ties into a SATA interface. Thats along the lines of a SSD. You can get high speed, it just needs to be engineered to do so.
But one thing that concerns me as well is not just speed but read/write life span. An SSD with a busy swap file on it can be beaten to death pretty fast regardless of wear algorithms.
First thing I would do is sort them by their capacity. Anything under 100gb isn't really worth using as their capacity versus power consumption is poor. Either throw them out, give them away or sell them in bulk lots on ebay. Next thing to do is either buy multi port ata cards which are increasingly harder to find/expensive or get ata-to-sata converters and use multi port sata cards. Multi port sata cards can be had in 16 or even 24 ports and three or four cards in a single system could give you a serious storage platform. Plus sata equipment is cheap and esata enclosures, cables and adapters can easily be had for a few dollars.
Also consider ata-sata adapters will enable you to use a port multiplier that will split one sata port into five. On newegg you can buy a Supermicro eight port sata card for about $100. So with eight fan out bridges you have the ability to host forty drives on one card. Eighty with two cards in a single machine. It wont be a fast server thats for sure but it will do the job.
As for software I like MDADM on Linux but you want to scale up with iata or iscsi. I haven't used iata/iscsi but assemble your drives into arrays and get them up and online. Then install your iata/iscsi packages and get them talking to your servers.
Pressure has nothing to do with explosive power. Gasoline vapor burns not the actual liquid gasoline. Ever try to light motor oil on fire? You need to put it in a metal container and heat it up until it starts to evaporate and then it burns on its own. Its the free vapor/air mixture that gets dangerously explosive. When you have a very flammable vapor mixed with air, a flame can rapidly propagate through the cloud very quickly producing a shock wave.
Propane is even more dangerous because its a cryogenic liquid that rapidly boils off and quickly mixes with air producing an explosive cloud.
Gunpowder isn't a very good explosive but when confined in a pipe or gun barrel it quickly builds up an enormous pressure. Once the pressure reaches the containers critical limit, it will burst with a powerful shock wave.
Ammonia is not an oxidizer but it burns in the presence of oxygen. Ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer along with ammonium perchlorate and sodium hypochlorite (bleach). When those are mixed with a fuel like diesel, gasoline or hell even charcoal it can form an extremely explosive mixture. It can be simply explained as mixing super oxygen right into the fuel. Ammonium perchlorate is the worst of the three turning almost anything it touches into a bomb. When mixed with hydrazine it forms the most powerful non military explosive called Astrolite G. Go on youtube and look up the pepcon disaster. That shows you what happens when thousands of tons of ammonium perchlorate catches fire.
Oh and if you think the gubberment is gonna get me for disseminating this information guess what? I found it all on Wikipedia.
Oh christ. I should have realised this is Slash Dot. I have to spell everything out so it isn't taken literally.
Ok By 100% aluminum I mean that the trailers frame, cross members and decking are all aluminum alloy. The axles, king pin and kingpin skid plate are the only steel parts on the trailer. There happy now? They are called all aluminum trailers or 100% aluminum construction in the industry.
We'd see a lot more aerodynamics.
Aero? Peterbilt 378, Kenworth T2000, International Prostar, Freightliner Century/Colombia/Cascadia, Mack Vision. And more are to follow.
It'd be so easy to make a few small aerodynamic changes to the trailers. That's seriously low hanging fruit, and it's been almost entirely ignored.
Aero Trailers are not always feasible in the eyes of the trucking industry for one simple reason: weight. Most tractors today have proper wind deflectors on top to allow to the air to deflect around the trailer reducing drag. Side skirts have been tried since the 70's but did not yield enough of an increase in fuel savings to warrant their cost or added weight.
We'd also see lighter trailers with more aluminum and composite carbon fiber in them
Trailers are already as light as possible and are full of composite materials and aluminum, you just haven't bothered to look. Aluminum is popular in flatbed trailers that can be upward of 100% aluminum and many trailers are of a mixed construction of both aluminum and steel. Aluminum frames used to be popular in trucks of the 70's. But after a few years of running on roads that are salted in the winter, everyone learned real fast that aluminum was a poor material for frames. Carbon fiber isn't a material your going to find on a truck as it has no desirable properties other then low weight.
more efficient engines
Diesel engines have for years been very efficient. The average today is about 6-6.5 MPG for tractor trailers. Older diesels that were mechanical could also yield similar numbers but were very dirty (but fun and simple to maintain and work on). EPA 2007 and the looming EPA 2010 has created a whole new school of diesel design and many companies are about to or are going to release some real seriously high tech engines. Compacted graphite iron, turbo compounding, ingenious heat management, acoustic tuning, over head cams and integrated engine brakes is whats in the mix. International's MaXXForce, Detroit Diesel's DD15, and Paccar's MX engine are some of the most technologically advanced engines out there. They are ready to be deployed soon here in the USA and will meet EPA 2010 emissions which will make gasoline engine look filthy.
and better tires.
Ever hear of super singles? They are wide base tires that replace the dual tires found on both drive and trailer axles. They have less friction than a set of dual tires and can bring about a noticeable and beneficial savings in fuel economy. They are also lighter which allows the truck to carry more fright which increases efficiency. Adoption has been pretty good but safety is a bit of a concern as with duals if one tire blows the other can support the weight of the axle so the truck can be safely stopped. Cost is also an issue and they aren't useful outside of LTL, long haul and bulk haul. Vocational work still demands dual tires for the high weights and abuse involved.
They have been emissions laws in place for Diesel engines for a long time already. The EPA 2007 emissions were a huge step forward from the EPA 2002 emissions in using a diesel particulate filter DPF to filter out the soot and aggressive exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) to reduce NOx emissions.
My beef with the EPA and the government is how they handled the enforcement of the 2007 emissions law. In Europe they have the Euro emissions standard for diesel engines and they are currently at Euro 5. But that does not mean that truck makers must only offer Euro 5 engines to its customers. See the EU was smart and rather then force everyone to switch they said you can still buy Euro 4 and 3 engines but you pay higher registration fees and I believe even higher road usage taxes (can anyone clarify?) for the Euro 3 and 4 engines.
In the USA the EPA forced all the engine makers and truck makers to only offer 2007 emissions rated engines in all trucks made after October 2007. Now the 2007 rated engines add another six to eight thousand dollars to a truck so guess what happened? Thats right, in 2006 trucking companies scrambled to purchase pre-2007 trucks not only because they were cheaper but the reliability of 2007 engines was unknown and untrusted. So now you have plenty of 2006 sales but sales were dead in 2007 threatening truck makers here in the states. If the EPA did what the EU did they would have eased the pain in transitioning and we would have more cleaner trucks on the road.
Now just wait till EPA 2010 when we will most likely combine the 2007 DPF and EGR systems with a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Also Europe will combine a DPF system with their Euro 5 SCR/EGR system for Euro 6 emissions. At that point diesel engines will be cleaner than gasoline engines.
Because the vendors don't get their fat contracts with the state to supply more new systems. That's why allot of equipment regardless of what it might be is destroyed by various government agencies. A sudden influx of cheap equipment cuts into the sales of new equipment. Many companies have a "destroy after end of life" clause in their government contracts.
Its a terrible waste but it ensures vendors get to sell lots of new stuff down the line without competition from liquidation auctions.
"Entire cities and even states in some countries are being run on renewable technologies. It's proven, it works, it's emission free... ... very expensive and does not have a continuous output. We could substitute allot of out energy needs with solar or wind but certain parts of the world don't always get allot of wind and sun. Burning fuel and nuclear can output their rated capacity 24/7/365 if necessary. "Proven" and "works" don't always mean its going to gain market share. Believe me I would love to go solar for my home but spending upward of 15 grand just for the solar panels is ludicrous. I can easily install it myself but imagine that the installation cost of a "pro" would add at least another 5 grand. For 20 thousand bucks I can light my house for the next 15 years at the same rate I am using power now.
He seriously needs to lay off the coke.
Hyper transport won't help with rendering as much as faster GPU's would. Remember GPU's have their own memory on very wide buses that can move data at over 20GB per second. The integrated CPU/GPU stuff is most likely targeted at low end users like cheap PC's, media centers and embedded systems.
Me personally, would like to see SLI/Cross-Fire like setups actually give you a near 100% boost in rendering speeds. From all the benchmarks I have seen you barely get 20-30% speed increase for a 100% price increase. And some benchmarks are lower for SLI setups and require fine tuning for better performance. Screw that. If I spend twice the money I expect nearly twice the performance just like the good old Voodoo 2 days.
Wasn't there a lame movie about this starring Robin Williams... oh yea it was called The Final Cut
You also forgot the solar powered flashlight.
I remember hearing the same kind of dooms day predictions about RHIC at Brookhaven national labs. Also it was said that some scientists predicted the first atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere destroying the planet. At any rate none of those doomsday predictions occurred and RHIC has been operating since 2000.
Gaming cards try to keep the framerate up by degrading image (not showing every single texture, e.g.), if need be
Thats called culling and it is implemented in software, not hardware.
If I remember correctly there was a simple hack posted on Toms Hardware a while back for converting a Radeon to a FireGL. You simply solder an SMT resistor to a certain trace on the chip package and it pulls a line low. That line actually signals the BIOS to report the card as a Radeon or a FireGL. So in essence the Radeon and FireGL are the EXACT SAME CARD! The only difference is the FireGL drivers look for a Radeon reporting itself as a FireGL. This keeps production simple and even the video card BIOS versions the same.
The FireGL and Quattro cards come with optimized drivers for specific 3D programs like AutoCAD, Maya, 3DSMax, Light Wave etc. There is a drop down box that lets you select the program your using and it loads the finely tuned driver for that program.
Cant sleep, clowns will sue me ...
Cant sleep, clowns will sue me
Cant sleep, clowns will sue me
Cant sleep, clowns will sue me
"The government is paying for the majority of the costs for fiber to the home, which isn't really to the home, its to the curb."
If you are speaking of FIOS you are most certainly wrong. There is indeed a fiber pair that is ran to your home and terminated at an ONT. The location on the ONT is either inside or outside your home. Inside the ONT there is an Ethernet port for internet, an F connector for "cable" TV and four RJ-11 for POTS. Unless my home is considered a curb, FIOS is true fiber to the home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS
Thats the best thing , go to local or small bars. I only go to three bars and all the owners and bar tenders know me. And since I am a regular they give me and my friends special treatment, plenty of buy backs/freebies and special prices. We don't have to wait ten minutes to get a drink and we get to stay after hours. And the best part about after hours is that selling booze is illegal. So its all free after 4am here in NY if you get to know people. None of the bars I have gone to have that scanner and I doubt they ever will.
Consider this: I was such good friends with a former bar owner that my tab was rarely above 30 bucks. And that was for two of us that have had about 4-5 drinks each. I always tipped good so it was 45-50 total and thats still a bargain.