CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Three Terafloops

I may have jumped in too early on my new video card.

I got a Radeon 7950 for Shana, my new Windows box.  That's a huge upgrade from the 4850 in Nagi, but it looks as though a better idea would have been to wait for the 7870.

While the 7950 has 40% more shaders (1792 vs. 1280), it runs at a 20% slower clock speed (800MHz vs. 1GHz), leaving it only slightly faster in shader performance.  Both chips have 32 rendering units, but the clock speed on the 7870 gives it the advantage, so the cheaper card has a higher pixel fill rate despite the 7950's greater bandwidth.

My 7950 is factory overclocked to 900MHz, closing half the gap, but there's still probably little advantage to the more expensive card for most games.

Using the 7950 as a double-precision compute engine is a different story; the 7900 cards have full double-precision units giving them about four times the performance of the 7800 models.  But I don't spend that much time on computational fluid dynamics these days.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Fool Me Twice

I just pre-ordered Mass Effect 3.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:22 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You Will Believe A Sheep Can Fly

Downstream Benefits, an ABC* report on the upside of the flooding here in Eastern Oz.  With flying sheep.

* The other one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ow Update

Progress: Once standing, can walk - slowly, but with relatively little pain.

Problem: Standing up in the first place not so good.

As far as motility goes, it's like ageing 40 years in one second.  While I can expect to get better again - I'm improving already - the difficulty right now is that I only had one second to plan for this.  Given 40 years, I could probably have arranged things a little better.

Note to 75-year-old self: Remember to arrange convenient hand-holds in bathroom for use of 85-year-old self.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ow

Ow ow ow ow ow.

Something has gang agley in my spine.  It doesn't actually hurt if I keep my movements limited, but if I tense up or move the wrong way the muscles in my lower back spasm and ow ow ow ow ow.

And now I need make the hazardous trek to my computer and share the Q drive so I can watch TV from bed.  If you never hear from me again, I regret nothing!

Update: R drive.

Update 2: Survived.

Update 3: But the back spasms have diminished in frequency, duration, and severity, so that's good.  It's still an ordeal just getting from the bedroom to the living room, but it's not a nightmare.

Update 4: I have corn thins, X Files, and ibuprofen.  Forgot to get anything to drink though, which means another ow ow ow ow ow before long.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:54 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Andrew Breitbart

He was fearlessly honest and outspoken, and will be missed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:09 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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On The Plus Side

The water levels in Sydney's dam system are at their highest since 1998.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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