Microsoft Works, the company's suite of productivity and consumer software often found on bargain PCs, has been refreshed for 2004. Billed as an outstanding value by Microsoft, Works lashes together several popular products for $100 USD. Works Suite 2004 will ship with a combination of Microsoft Word 2002 and its custom database software, as well as Money Standard 2004 and Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard 2004.
View: MS Works site
View: Take the tour
News source: BetaNews
Pending detailed information from Valve, we are only aware one bug with Rel. 50 and the version of Half Life 2 that we currently have - this is the fog issue that Gabe referred to in his presentation. It is not a cheat or an over optimization. Our current drop of Half Life 2 is more than 2 weeks old. NVIDIA's Rel. 50 driver will be public before the game is available. Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers. Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit. Sometimes this involves converting 32-bit floating point precision shader operations into 16-bit floating point precision shaders in order to obtain the performance benefit of this mode with no image quality degradation. Our goal is to provide our consumers the best experience possible, and that means games must both look and run great.
The optimal code path for ATI and NVIDIA GPUs is different - so trying to test them with the same code path will always disadvantage one or the other. The default settings for each game have been chosen by both the developers and NVIDIA in order to produce the best results for our consumers.
In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2.
We are committed to working with Gabe to fully understand his concerns and with Valve to ensure that 100+ million NVIDIA consumers get the best possible experience with Half Life 2 on NVIDIA hardware.

office = £300
it has it's advantages
Works is not compatible with Word, though. So it's useless if you want to view a Works doc in Word and vice-versa.
barely? Does everything I want it to do.
Stop releasing this ****
Also I think having Money, Encarta, Word, etc. is more than worth the cost of Works Suite (think about the cost of Word alone).
COS ITS FREE!!!!!!
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