Actually, Sony explained that the damage is not unlocked or progressive as one dives deeper into the game. It's just that as one goes further into the game, one is able to FINALLY collect more premium cars which do have the better damage engine.
This is exactly opposite to what I've read and seen in the game.

I really want Lion, for the number one reason being TRIM support. I eagerly want to finally start using an SSD (specifically one from Crucial, since they make the fastest ones on the market), but have avoided doing so since the latest version Snow Leopard does not support TRIM.

It's a shame Apple is waiting so long to finally include TRIM support. Windows 7 already includes it.

I think I'll wait until 10.7.3 comes out before upgrading, though. If there are bugs in the TRIM implementation, I fear it may corrupt data.

Sleep walking a lot lately?

Do you have a kid or someone using your phone while you're asleep?

but is still more productive because it handles more calculations per clock cycle

I'm no processor geek. I have a basic understanding of the terminology and how things work so correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this one of the advantages that the PPC had over Intel chips? Does this mean Intel is moving toward shorter pipes? Are we talking more instructions per clock cycle or what? What does "calculations" mean in this context?

With most processors, especially the Intel/AMD processors, "instructions per cycle" is not a useful number. These processors have both simple instructions (add register number 3 to register number 6) and complex instructions (add register number 3 to the number whose address is in register number 6). A PowerPC has the simple instructions, but not the complex ones. Instead it would need three instructions "load the number whose address is in register number 6, and move it to register 7", "add register 3 to register 7", "store register 7 to the location whose address is in register 6". But the Intel processor doesn't magically do three times as much work. Instead, it splits the complex instruction into three so-called "macro-ops", and does exactly the same work. So in this case, the PowerPC would execute three times as many instructions per cycle (3 instead of 1), but because it doesn't do more actual work, that is pointless. Instead you would count the number of operations, and they are more or less the same.

Intel is indeed moving towards shorter pipelines. They have done that already with the Core Duo chips. Longer pipelines have the advantage that each pipeline step is a bit faster, so you can get higher clockspeed. Shorter pipelines have the advantage that they take much less energy (very important; at some point your chips just melt), they are much faster handling branches, and they are just much much easier to design. Pentium 4 needed absolutely heroic efforts to produce it, and would have needed twice the heroics to improve it. Instead, the Core Duo has a much simpler design, that is just as powerful, and because it was so simple, Core 2 Duo could improve it.

And Core 2 Duo can now execute up to four "micro-ops" per cycle, same as the G5, compared to three for Core Duo, Pentium 4 and G4. It also has some clever features that reduce the number of micro-ops needed up to 10 percent, and some other improvements.

So you honestly think people will fail to notice the giant Samsung printed on the front of the galaxy S (for example?)

Its different in size, has different screen different UI, different buttons,...

As dethmaShine pointed out (correctly in my opinion), it may depend on what phone models you are looking at. Some are extremely close to the iPhone in appearance and design, while others not as much.

I'd also add that it's very possible that a few different companies were working on similar designs at the same time. Many were released or announced within weeks of each other. It's not like you can rip someone off and release a new design in a couple of weeks. It certainly appears that a few phones shifted to more of an iPhone look and design after the iPhone was announced. I'm not saying that it's necessarily grounds to sue perhaps, it just something that I noticed.

Cool, Thanks. You must be pretty far?

A-spec level 19. Haven't played it for a week now, maybe I should play this weekend and get it to 25.

They're not. The proper file is flat. I downloaded and opened the PDF from the White House. Flat in both Illustrator and Photoshop, just one group on one layer... and no security on the PDF. No embedded fonts.

This is a fraud.

Uh huh- thanks again, fivepoint.

Are you calling me a liar? I literally went to WhiteHouse.gov, opened the file in Illustrator, and moved the text around myself. :rolleyes:
Some things never change. Laughably bias.

Anyway, like I said, I'm sure there's an explanation... are there any graphic designers here who can help?

Wirelessly posted (Iphone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Blackberry playbook = The IPad 2 killer - you heard it here first.

Look at the specs, their greater or equal to the iPad 2 with the exception of battery life.

If your still looking at specs on tablets you don't understand the market well enough to call anything. Of the 15 million people who purchased an iPad 1, how many do you think could tell you how much ram was in the system?

Until a company has a viably competitive app store with applications even approaching the quality if GarageBand, this is beyond a ridiculous statement to make.

Like the whole 3ghz thing?

Ahh, but that was a different situation. In that case, Steve said that, but was dependent on IBM to make it come true.

In this Case, steve is only dependent on his own company to make it come true.

And did anyone else laugh today when they showed the top of the line Mac Pro--at 3Ghz?

Obviously you know little about retail and accounting.

I was a manager at Circuit City for several years and I could not disagree any more.

The quicker you move stock, the better.

Obviously, you DON'T know.

I read the link, and it give no mention of the speeds of the notebook chips. It only gives a range for the desktop chips. Maybe you didn't read it.

When did Apple have pentium-era chips in their machines?

They didn't. Where is this Mhz myth you are talking about? They are downplaying the use of Mhz was the point I was making.

Given that this is easily available for the PC world, there's no reason why it can't also be made available for the Mac (aside from someone deciding to write the device driver, of course.)Ok, here's ANOTHER can of worms. Since we're on EFI now and can boot in Windows. It means our video cards, etc. don't have Open Firmware BIOS. Does that mean ANY "Windows" video card will work as long as OS X has drivers for it? Does OS X even have generic VGA drivers?

Man do these stories bring out the ignoranus fanboys. IMO if you have never owned both an Android phone and an iPhone, you shouldn't be allowed to comment because 99% just can't be objective about it.

Now, I'll hop on my pedestal and say I owned the original Moto Droid, and now own an iPhone. The ability to customize your experience on a droid is what I found so attractive, and Google isn't taking that away, so IMO this story is nothing but good for Android. Better control, more polish, yet the same customization capability that the majority of everyday users want. All of the iBoys tooting their horns and patting each other are doing so for absolutely no reason.

With that said, the polish of the iPhone is what I love the most about it, and if I could pair that polish with Androids ability for personalization of my device without jailbreaking and their much superior notification system, it would be the perfect phone. The next device to get it all right gets my money, whether its apple or Google.

I'm kinda glad they didn't release the macbook pro's today. All that means, if they are released next week, it will be more than just a minor update :-D Here's to hoping!

I don't know if that's proof or a reason enough to think they'll have more than a chip drop-in, but I'm certainly hoping that it does get announced, and that you're right. :)

I'm old-fashined I guess because I have no interest in having a smartphone in the first place. I just have a standard flip-phone. By owning a smartphone, you are always going to be faced with privacy issues...

Did you know dumb phones record every call you make? That they record who you call, and how long you talk to them? That when landlines are involved, nubmers are recorded that pinpoint the location? That your phone transmits that information to your phone company? Look at your next phone bill. Your standard flip phone even records who calls YOU and tells THAT to your phone company, too. AND if you lose your phone bill--as is the case if you lose your phone--all that data's available, in unencrypted form, to anyone and everyone!

My take: Yeah, the data should've been encrypted, and prudence would have had it deleted after a short time. They're fixing that now. But it serves a purpose we all value, facilitating calling and optimizing location services when we want them. It's a glitch, nothing more, exaggerated by media attention (and i'm part of the media, so I'm not unfairly finger-pointing) just as happened with antenna-gate and the fuss over Toyotas accelerating out of control (where almost always the conclusion is someone put their foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, by mistake). Ten years from now someone will write an entertaining book about the gap between public hysteria and reality on these issues and many others (birtherism, anyone? or if your political views swing in a different way, government spending way beyond its means?)

I'm not saying the location database is operator error. Clearly not. I'm just trying to keep it in perspective. (It's not time-stamped? It's accurate sometimes only to 50 or 81 miles, as in cases reported in this thread? My phone, using the data that's recorded, consistently puts me five miles from my home, in a different county, across a river, four or five cities away, due to some oddity of cell tower location).

Look, your credit cards not only keep track of where you've been, but how much you spent there, and when, with precise geographic accuracy. Sometimes they even tell what you've bought. Just look at your next bill. Did you know your bank keeps track of every check you write, and to whom, and sends that information to you unencrypted via the mail? Did you know...

I think we should keep this situation in perspective. Too many people here see the privacy sky falling on them, when they're really swimming in it. (Did you know the device you're using to read this doesn't protect you from being victimized by horrible unencrypted metaphors...?)

I've been wanting to say this for a very long time. Google's OS has no advantage over iOS. You could even say it has a disadvantage. Having to create a vanilla code base that needs to function on multiple pieces of hardware is complex, more complexity creates weaker system.

But here's my point. The ONLY ONLY reason why Android market share is anywhere near what it is today is because of the Buy One Get One options at most phone retailers. iOS has NEVER done that and hopefully never will. If you didn't care about the phone or service but needed two "Newer Smart Phones" one for you and one for your wife, why not go with the "Blah Blah" model from Verizon where if I buy one today I get the second for free (two year agreement and activation fees required).

Market share means nothing. This platform is doomed unless Google reins it in and get control over it. If they do, providers will be less willing to work with them, if they don't, by by Android.

My Two Cents.
-LanPhantom

You could say the same thing about Apple though. The Apple fad will go away and the extremely closed ecosystem which seems to not be really developing much in terms of UI or having an actual roadmap could end iOS.

I don't understand why people can't just see the pros and cons of both and accept both are great platforms. Its always a WAR with Apple fans. Apple against EVERYONE!

AnandTech is putting a lot of emphasis on this FB-DIMM issue. Their Conroe vs Xeon comparisons are poor given that they maximize the FB-DIMM latency "problem" by using a Mac Pro with only two RAM slots occupied. Seems as though they have an agenda to exaggerate the importance of this technical issue.

I have noticed this emphasis as well; not being an expert on this issue myself though, would you care to shed light on how their coverage is an exaggeration and why we shouldn't be worried about it?

The comments about separate platforms in the NT era I took to refer to NT3.x/4 vs Win9x.

Yes, this is what I was getting at. ("arse about face"? What is that, Swedish? :rolleyes: ). Noone other than a vintage Windows IT person would know there were further differences between versions of NT itself. Also when making comparisons I never mentioned Server 2003 (about which I know almost nothing); I was talking about XP and 2000 being relatively similar whereas, for example NT and 98 were not.

New micro-arch -- Nehalem is due 2008.

Really, completely new? As in, to Core 2 what the G5 was to G4? In just two years?? I guess they're really ramping things up... Core 3 Hexa Mac Pros, anyone?

John Gruber would eat Steve Job's ***** if he could. His opinion is extremely biased.

not really. he hails them when they do good, he faults them when they dont. google it.

and this -- is the definition of hypocrisy. will Rubin tweet that his first-ever-tweet is now broken and untrue?

I was interested to see that they were unable to max out CPU utilization on all 8 cores in the system. I hope it's due to the software these days not being ready to fully utilize more than one or two cores and not due to OSX's ability to scale to larger core counts. Since that's obviously where we're heading. Does anyone know about the potential for scalability of OSX to large numbers of CPU's/cores? I know some *nix varieties and BSD varieties do this really well, but one wonders if they were thinking this far in the future when they developed OSX. It'll be interesting to see...

Interesting question, but I don't think any of us here will have the answers.

PCs don't use EFI. I don't know if a generic AGP/PCIe card can be initialized by EFI, or if the card will need some EFI code to be on-board.

As for OS X, I think we can be fairly certain that Apple will only bundle drivers for cards that Apple sells. If you install a third-party card, they will probably tell you that you'll need a driver from the card's manufacturer - that's what they've historically told customers.

Generic VGA drivers? I'm sure they were developed - they'd be very useful during that time when OS X/Intel was internal-only. But I wouldn't expect them to be bundled with a shipping copy of the system software.

Now, assuming that the Mac firmware (including whatever EFI drivers they include in it) is capable of initializing a generic video card, then there should be no need for more than a device driver, which the card vendors can probably provide, if they are so inclined. If the cards will require special ROM code for EFI, however, then we're back to the same problem that plagued the PPC systems.

I agree-eg. to add a Crossfire configuration would mean that Apple would need to have a preference pane to configure that, which they don't-they supply a driver only.