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Gestures on external (not on screen) tablet/slate/surfaces has been around for almost ever now.
http://portal.acm.org/citation...
http://users.erols.com/rwservi...
It is nothing new, nor revolutionary. Yes it has been improved a lt since the early days, but it is still the same concept.
If you can't improve something with 30 years or more of technological advance you need to take up echo-farming where no progress is acceptable and using a paperclip for a novel use is still revolutionary.

"more than war, slavery, government brutality: drugs have destroyed more human lives in the history of homo sapiens. understand that, or understand nothing about the subject"

You made some good points, but with this BS, you sound just like any other anti drug zealots. For wars and political conflicts, various estimates for the 20th century are around 200 million or more.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm.

And for every war dead there several who were seriously injured, lost limbs, lost an organ, or crippled, etc. And there are many times as many refugees as dead, people whose home were destroyed, etc. Your probably looking at a billion people or more whose lives were destroyed by war. And you think drug use is worse? You need to put down the crack pipe, or maybe do a few drugs to get over your anti drug paranoia.

No, Microsoft has been flogging the pen computer game for a _long_ while:

1992 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

while Apple only formally got in the game later:

1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad

(and then bailed when Steve Jobs came back on board)

Though both were inspired by Go Corp.'s PenPoint:

1991 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS

but one should look farther back still:

1914--1990 http://users.erols.com/rwservices/pens/penhist.html

Microsoft crashed the initial party (read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_), partied in a room which quickly emptied, tried to re-start the party many times (sort-of-successfully w/ their Tablet PC in 2002), then was surprised when Apple started a rave (the iPad) somewhere else in town.

If it's possible to install Mac OS X on the Surface, I may buy one.

William

Jean Ward has a compilation of historical references of pen computing. If you're interested in a overview of the past ~100 years of pen computing, check it out.

Ack!!

Sorry, I must have screwed up the html.

As far as your comparison of deaths caused by religion to those of atheism, I would simply point you to Communism & Socialism http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM with more here http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm which also includes other interesting categories to compare against.

What. What. WHAT.

No, they really haven't done the job admirably. WWI and WWII were almost entirely European wars.

WWI maybe, but those "European" powers controlled a vast amount of the world. Go look at the map of the world circa 1914 sometime. And yes, units from those colonies fought and died both in Europe and the colonial areas.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/1907powr.htm

It wasn't until Japan attacked the U.S. that WWII became global by an stretch. Until then, it was just a regional conflict in Europe and a second one between Japan and China.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUU
So it was a global war that became global? Jesus Christ man. The Chinese front was just as brutal as anything in Europe or the southern Pacific. The Japanese, Germans and Italians were allied well before the start of hostilities, they simply did not coordinate as well as the western allies because of geography.

And the rest of your post simply ignores the whole goddamn Soviet Union and the Cold War, you are looking only at the small 'hot' wars that happened at the periphery of the greater east-west conflict.

What was the total duration of both, and number of people killed?

There's a wide range of estimates, so I'll use one reference that is simple and looks well researched:

First World War (1914-18): 15 000 000
Second World War (1937-45): 55 000 000

Compare that to people dying of hunger and poverty thanks to US policies after WWII ended.

I'll wait for your numbers and citations to back them up.

Not only I remember it, I was on the opposite side of it.

You lived in the USSR?

Contrary to what your friendly propaganda workers told you

Just remember that propaganda is used by all parties. Why is it that the communists countries were the ones with state controlled media? Was there a single paper in the Soviet Union criticizing Stalin?

USSR, at most, occasionally jumped across its border reacting to what it perceived as a direct threat to its territory -- granted, often in a mildly assholish (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) or unsuccessful (Afghanistan) way.

I wouldn't call Cuba "across the border" from USSR. The USSR had direct influence in a large number of countries after World War II. They were also involved in conflicts like Vietnam and Korea. You seem to give the USSR a free pass for their interference "perceived as a direct threat to its territory". Anti-communist revolutions in bordering communists countries is not a direct threat. Indirect, yes, but that's the same reason why the US was fighting communism.

From Notes on the (relatively unknown) History of Pen-based Computing:

"The Early Commercial History of Pen-based computing"

        * 1973 Applicon Corporation / Ledeen recognizer
            Gesture-based command input, with hot-points, in a widely-praised GUI for a commercial CAD system
        * 1974 SRI / Xebec Systems Incorporated
            Text input to computer with a pen
        * 1976 S-I Hanaki, NEC handwriting kana/romanji
            billing machine product
        * 1981 Several commercial vendors, small units, some portable
            MicroPad ImageData Telepad WriteAway many Japanese (Application areas: data-capture, data-entry)

"The Modern History of Pen-based computing"

        * 1983 PC-based or -oriented commercial products
            PenPad CIC Handwriter NestorWriter
            Included "front-end" interfaces to word-processing systems, CAD/Paint systems, spread-sheet input
            (Note: these companies are still around)
            Special note: even perfect recognition does not solve the problem!
            Gould et al, "Composing Letters with a Simulated Listening Typewriter", CACM April 1983.
        * 1985 "Experimental" systems
            AEG (Germany) Word-processing
            IBM (Tappert)
        * 1986 Linus Technologies
            Application areas: walking data capture (nurses), financing from Baxter Medical
        * 1986/7 MAC-based products: Personal Writer / Anatex

See this item from 2004:

He started with the fact that electrical and magnetic forces between objects are mediated by photons that flit between them. So an object placed in strong electric and magnetic fields can be considered to be immersed in a sea of these transitory, virtual photons.

Feigel then showed that the momentum of the virtual photons that pop up inside a vacuum can depend upon the direction in which they are travelling. He concludes that if the electric field points up and the magnetic field points north, for example, then east-heading photons will have a different momentum from west-heading photons.

So the vacuum acquires a net momentum in one direction — it’s as though the empty space is ‘moving’ in that direction, even though it is empty.

It is a general principle of physics that momentum is ‘conserved’ — if something moves one way, another thing must move the other way, as a gun recoils when it shoots a bullet. So when the vacuum acquires some momentum from these virtual photons, the object placed within it itself starts to move in the opposite direction.

Feigel estimates that in an electric field of 100,000 volts per metre and a magnetic field of 17 tesla — both big values, but attainable with current technology — an object as dense as water would move at around 18 centimetres per hour.

This site had pretty much already done it... http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm . A bit too much data for every singly conflict to relocate find the exact page and location at the moment, but his total for the 20th century clocks in at around 190-200 million. Sure WW2 has the highest per year number. But what's really worse, killing 10 million a year for 5 years, or 1.5 million a year for the remaining 95 years? (He also calculates that about 4.5% of all deaths during the 20th century was "man-made")

Gotta call BS. I think I know what you mean but you have to agree they capitulated early-on?

http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordsos2.htm

WORDS - Version 1.97 for OS/2 (i386)
Ported to OS/2 by Fr. Mike Thompson (mbt@gator.net) The latest version, 1.97, was released on August 30, 2001.

And the FAQ actually says 286 or better... http://www.faqs.org/faqs/Team-OS2-FAQ/

4(a) - History of OS/2

In 1987, IBM and Microsoft released OS/2 version 1.0 as the successor to MS
DOS, the PC operating system shipped with the original IBM PC. OS/2 ran on a
286 or better processor, and required a minimum of 2MB of RAM.

BCPL
B
We all know about the C programming language.
So shouldn't C's successor be called P?

So how come so many people foam from the mouth when faced with anything related to "communism"?

Because communists killed tens of millions of people pretty much everywhere they ruled.

Not to invoke Godwin, but Communism should be seen as Nazism is.

yes it is true, the US constitution first and foremost assumes that the Christian God exists, and secondly that our rights and personal sovereignty are assigned by that God, and then we assign a small piece of that sovereignty to elected officials to keep things running smoothly.

as far as Christianity being a net source of evil, BS. Stalin, Hitler, Pol pot, Mao, have collectively killed more people (several times over) than the entire world population during the time of the spanish inquisition. also, considering that the brand of socialism practiced by these leaders is diametrically opposed to having religion, i'd say that secularism has caused far more evil than religion.

Stalin outright banned religion in the USSR because the peoples belief in a God challenged Stalin's need to make the government the sole repository of power and the only entity that could assign rights to it's citizens. he later reinstated it because he needed something for people to hold onto when WWII started getting too hairy, in short he needed an opiate for his masses.

both the practice of religion and political power can substitute a persons innate need to act and be moral, when it's substituted by political power is when the absolute worst in humanity comes out, far worse than anything a christian could bring themselves to do.

stats:

the total world population in 1850 is estimated at 1,262,000

the spanish inquisition started in 1478 but ran until 1830 so lets use that 1.26 million people figure.

the holocaust is estimated to have killed between 9 and 11 million people. so lets call it 9 million just to be safe.

stalin's regime is estimated to have killed about 20 million, and i don't think that counts people who just got sent to gulags and later were freed.

Pol Pot and the khmer rouge are estimated to have killed 1.6 million people

China, under Mao Tse Tung, lost 40 million people due to starvation

the highest death toll i can find for the spanish inquisition is 31,912, that's *almost* 32 thousand people.

lets add it up, 20+40+1.6+9=70.6 million people dead from secular causes, and just the big name ones too.

compared to 32,000 for the inquisition secularity has killed 2,200 times MORE people than religion, all during more modern, supposedly more enlightened, times as well. now were not adding in the salem witch trials or the burning of witches in england but even if both of those witch hunts had killed off the entire world population in their time it wouldn't make much difference to the ratio.

religion has a lot of people to kill to catch up with secular causes, christianity alone has no hope of filling the gap. the things you say dont' even stand up to a little bit of critical analysis. people do heinous things in the name of religion, i'm not defending that. but when people are fighting in the name of their beleifs they at least have beliefs that they keep themselves to. when they fight in the name of political power they put no limits on themselves at all.

yes it is true, the US constitution first and foremost assumes that the Christian God exists, and secondly that our rights and personal sovereignty are assigned by that God, and then we assign a small piece of that sovereignty to elected officials to keep things running smoothly.

as far as Christianity being a net source of evil, BS. Stalin, Hitler, Pol pot, Mao, have collectively killed more people (several times over) than the entire world population during the time of the spanish inquisition. also, considering that the brand of socialism practiced by these leaders is diametrically opposed to having religion, i'd say that secularism has caused far more evil than religion.

Stalin outright banned religion in the USSR because the peoples belief in a God challenged Stalin's need to make the government the sole repository of power and the only entity that could assign rights to it's citizens. he later reinstated it because he needed something for people to hold onto when WWII started getting too hairy, in short he needed an opiate for his masses.

both the practice of religion and political power can substitute a persons innate need to act and be moral, when it's substituted by political power is when the absolute worst in humanity comes out, far worse than anything a christian could bring themselves to do.

stats:

the total world population in 1850 is estimated at 1,262,000

the spanish inquisition started in 1478 but ran until 1830 so lets use that 1.26 million people figure.

the holocaust is estimated to have killed between 9 and 11 million people. so lets call it 9 million just to be safe.

stalin's regime is estimated to have killed about 20 million, and i don't think that counts people who just got sent to gulags and later were freed.

Pol Pot and the khmer rouge are estimated to have killed 1.6 million people

China, under Mao Tse Tung, lost 40 million people due to starvation

the highest death toll i can find for the spanish inquisition is 31,912, that's *almost* 32 thousand people.

lets add it up, 20+40+1.6+9=70.6 million people dead from secular causes, and just the big name ones too.

compared to 32,000 for the inquisition secularity has killed 2,200 times MORE people than religion, all during more modern, supposedly more enlightened, times as well. now were not adding in the salem witch trials or the burning of witches in england but even if both of those witch hunts had killed off the entire world population in their time it wouldn't make much difference to the ratio.

religion has a lot of people to kill to catch up with secular causes, christianity alone has no hope of filling the gap. the things you say dont' even stand up to a little bit of critical analysis. people do heinous things in the name of religion, i'm not defending that. but when people are fighting in the name of their beleifs they at least have beliefs that they keep themselves to. when they fight in the name of political power they put no limits on themselves at all.

yes it is true, the US constitution first and foremost assumes that the Christian God exists, and secondly that our rights and personal sovereignty are assigned by that God, and then we assign a small piece of that sovereignty to elected officials to keep things running smoothly.

as far as Christianity being a net source of evil, BS. Stalin, Hitler, Pol pot, Mao, have collectively killed more people (several times over) than the entire world population during the time of the spanish inquisition. also, considering that the brand of socialism practiced by these leaders is diametrically opposed to having religion, i'd say that secularism has caused far more evil than religion.

Stalin outright banned religion in the USSR because the peoples belief in a God challenged Stalin's need to make the government the sole repository of power and the only entity that could assign rights to it's citizens. he later reinstated it because he needed something for people to hold onto when WWII started getting too hairy, in short he needed an opiate for his masses.

both the practice of religion and political power can substitute a persons innate need to act and be moral, when it's substituted by political power is when the absolute worst in humanity comes out, far worse than anything a christian could bring themselves to do.

stats:

the total world population in 1850 is estimated at 1,262,000

the spanish inquisition started in 1478 but ran until 1830 so lets use that 1.26 million people figure.

the holocaust is estimated to have killed between 9 and 11 million people. so lets call it 9 million just to be safe.

stalin's regime is estimated to have killed about 20 million, and i don't think that counts people who just got sent to gulags and later were freed.

Pol Pot and the khmer rouge are estimated to have killed 1.6 million people

China, under Mao Tse Tung, lost 40 million people due to starvation

the highest death toll i can find for the spanish inquisition is 31,912, that's *almost* 32 thousand people.

lets add it up, 20+40+1.6+9=70.6 million people dead from secular causes, and just the big name ones too.

compared to 32,000 for the inquisition secularity has killed 2,200 times MORE people than religion, all during more modern, supposedly more enlightened, times as well. now were not adding in the salem witch trials or the burning of witches in england but even if both of those witch hunts had killed off the entire world population in their time it wouldn't make much difference to the ratio.

religion has a lot of people to kill to catch up with secular causes, christianity alone has no hope of filling the gap. the things you say dont' even stand up to a little bit of critical analysis. people do heinous things in the name of religion, i'm not defending that. but when people are fighting in the name of their beleifs they at least have beliefs that they keep themselves to. when they fight in the name of political power they put no limits on themselves at all.

It was more like 3 or 4 million. Asymmetric warfare is like that; ask the Gazans.

...why the largest slaughters of humans have been in the names of religious deities.

Not according to this.

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

...Nazis you shall have!

Check out these "specialised" sets:

Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!

Enjoy!

You do know a government is in place for the benefit of the people

Lets go down the list of the biggest socialist regimes in history. The Soviet Union...check. Their nationalization of all private property and gov't distribution of everything from jobs, to schools, to health care, to cars places them at the leftest of the leftists. And the communist party was for the benefit of the people? Ok.

North Korea....oh, check. Kim Jung-Ill gives a fuck about his people? Or does he just like being in charge? His collective farm system works SO WELL that NK needs regular shipments of...everything?

Communist China (before they moved to the more profitable fascism). Mao "benefitted" over 45 million Chinese into the ground.

We can keep going. The truth is: In capitalism, man exploits man, and in communism it is the exact opposite. The difference is I have some choices and property in capitalism and a chance to change my station in life with enough hard work.

I agree with you that corporate welfare is a problem. I dislike government-owned corporations as much as i dislike corporation-owned governments. If Jefferson where here he'd probably mention a "wall of separation" between corp and state.

And yes, the world IS organized pretty well. You can choose from every form of government you can think of. You can even join a hippy commune and have your own. But you leftists seek to homogenize the world into 1 class, the poor. And that my friend is an absurd attempt to remake the world.

Most of those deaths occured in the Russian Gulags. Approximately 600,000 Axis POWs died in Russia (Source from http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm with the estimate being largely based on Richard Overy's "Russia's War"). I'm not saying that the Brits and the GIs were perfect. Most deaths under them though likely occured due to succuming to battle injury or being killed before making it to POW camps by stressed soldiers.

Well, I can't really vouch for the accuracy of this reference (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm#Total), but according to a chart on that web page the overall worldwide death rate per capita (due to all causes, old age, disease, war, famine, etc) has been steadily (roughly linearly) falling, and is at its lowest level ever. Now, as I pointed out, the number of deaths resulting from individual acts of terrorism (not the aggregate) has been increasing geometrically over the past 3 decades. This is not rocket science, and it is not debatable. The 3 major terrorist incidents I cited demonstrate this phenomenon. And only a fool would "pretend" that those responsible for these terrorist acts would not use a nuke or chemical weapon in a large Western city if they had the chance. And I think we all know that would kill 10s or 100s of thousands. It amazes me that people on \. are so limited in their mathematical skills that they cannot recognize a simple geometric progression when they see one. Or they simply refuse to extrapolate it to its logical next data-point. Regardless, I stand by my original comment and await someone with a clue to refute it.

• 10, 718 - total of deaths from the terrorist attacks bit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_and_other_violent_events_by_death_toll (a run down of some of the better known terrorist attacks in the last century
• 300, 000 to "over 1 million" - estimates of death toll under 25 years of Saddam's rule in Iraq (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm)
• 3815 - American war dead in Iraq
• 1, 080, 923 - estimated Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 (http://justforeignpolicy.org/

>Religion is responsible for more wars and killing than anything else in history.

Nobody would ever accuse me of being religious, but this statement is simply false on its face.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatz.htm

Notice how the 'religious conflicts' section is only a small subset?

Hitler killed 34 million people, and Stalin 20 million. So you are wrong. These numbers are open to debate (Stalin may for instance have killed "just" 11 million, Hitler 55 million if he is made responsible for all WWII dead), but no serious historian argues that Hitler killed less people than Stalin.

A major reason that Russia -- and China -- make it to the top of any mass atrocities list is that they have many potential victims to begin with. By this reckoning killing one in ten of the national population to consolidate your position (Stalin) makes you a worse mass murderer than killing, let's say, one in five (Pol Pot), simply because you are a Russian dictator instead of a Cambodian dictator. I don't think Pol Pot is a better person than Stalin, and as for instance this list (see the proportionality table) shows, Hitler's activities in Poland (specifically) do rank higher than Stalin's activities in Russia as a horror scenario for the people involved. When you limit the subjected population to jews only, Hitler obviously jumps solidly to the number one position. And when you consider the more limited time frame in which the Nazis made their victims, you will appreciate that some populations victimized by Hitler are entitled to a greater national trauma than the Russians.

Note: when you look at the proportionality table you will also see another interesting thing, as the author puts it:

If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

Google was no real help?

The first response to the search 'war between democracies' gives this lengthy page

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

AMD chips run hotter, slower, and require more power.

Not a correct statement as phrased.

AMD chips fabbed with a 90nm process run hotter, slower, etc. compared to Intel chips fabbed with a 65nm process. AMD is just now ramping up 65nm production; their earliest 65nm chips are basically the same as the 90nm chips, only less expensive.

Also, don't forget that AMD's power consumption numbers are worst-case numbers while Intel's numbers are typical numbers; or that AMD has an integrated memory controller on the CPU, while Intel's architecture has the memory controller elsewhere (north bridge chip, I believe), so the memory controller's heat is charged against the CPU with AMD, and not, for Intel.

Checking heat specs, we find that the Core 2 Duo is rated for a typical dissipation of 65W, while AMD's "Brisbane" core is rated for a maximum dissipation of: 65W. That's for the fastest core for each part, 2.66 GHz for the Core 2 Duo and 2.6 GHz for the Brisbane. AMD does have some parts rated for 35W max

Intel, meanwhile, has used the 65nm as an opportunity to add more cache; it's the extra cache that makes the Core chips really win benchmark tests. AMD needs to come out with new CPU chips that are fabbed at 65nm and have a ton of cache; they would probably beat the current Core chips. (Then Intel would ship something even faster, and so on.)

Intel's true strength is their awesome fab capabilities. They beat AMD to 65nm and they will beat AMD to the next shrink.

Their current designs are reaching their limits, and no feasible new ones are on the horizon.

Huh?

In the market for server chips, AMD chips outperform Intel chips, because AMD's architecture is actually better. Even Dell is shipping AMD chips for servers now. The more cores in a system, the more AMD's architecture wins against Intel's architecture. As far as I can tell, AMD is well-positioned for the future.

It's not the future but the present that sucks for AMD. They need to get everything over to 65nm ASAP. And it doesn't help that Intel has finally stopped screwing up (Pentium 4 was bad and so was Itanic).

Intel, meanwhile, already in the lead with the Core 2 Duo, is going to jump still further forward with Penryn.

I concur. Penryn will be Core all over again: Intel will crank out large numbers, and AMD will be one process generation behind which means they will be hotter, slower, etc.

:D

> Where can I download a respected dictionary for no more than the current cost of bandwidth without infringing copyright?
> Or are you talking about Wiktionary, which was nowhere near as complete as Wikipedia last time I looked?

I disagree that the question is the cost of a dictionary vs. the cost of bandwidth. Disaster recovery tools are rarely as cheap as the electricity to run a system for one day. My proposed disaster recovery system does cost money.

As for a few free dictionaries, try searching the downloads at zdnet.com, try looking through a few archives of Linux programs, or even Googling for them.

Here are a few I found in 3 minutes of searching:
http://wordweb.info/free/
http://users.erols.com/whitaker/words.htm
http://www.newfreedownloads.com/Home-Education/Lan guage/TheSage-English-Dictionary-and-Thesaurus.htm l
http://www.newfreedownloads.com/Home-Education/Lan guage/Simple-dictionary-applications.html
http://www.writeexpress.com/d/dictionary-software. htm
http://www.myzips.com/software/XTerm-Medical-Dicti onary.phtml
http://www.myzips.com/software/Rhymesaurus.phtml

Andy Out!

Careful with the "power usage" statement. While Intel certainly has lower power consumption in their Core2Duo processors, that's only in relation to the power-hungry Prescott-based processors. Intel's PR department has made a lot of hay out of their decreased power consumption. The fact of the matter, however, is that Core 2 Duo processors at 65nm now have about the same power consumption as their Athlon 64 X2 counterparts at 90nm--about 65W.

I highly recommend taking a look at processor electrical specifications. And keep in mind that Intel's power figures are more optimistic ("typical") than AMD's ("max").

What's the lesson here? I think it's just that countries sometimes support bad guys in order to go after worse guys. It's as true in office politics as in geopolitics.

In terms of killing, Stalin was way worse than Hitler. So, we teamed up with a really bad guy to go after a really bad guy. It was convenient.

Oh come on now, there were more people killed by athiestic regimes than by theistic ones. Look at Pol Pot, or Stalin at http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm and you'll see the millions of people who were killed under atheistic and/or communistic regimes. There have been far more people killed by atheist leaders than theistic leaders, do a little research and you'll see for youself. And by the way, true Christianity preaches grace and mercy, not coercion and revenge. The only thing a Christian is supposed to do is tell his/her story, the rest is up to God.

A powered-on CPU is never stopped... HLT just tells it there's no work to do for this cycle, and so it uses slightly less power.

AMD's Athlon(TM) 64 Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet would seem to disagree with you. See the table starting at page 30, where the Halt/Stop Grant power usage is less than 10% of TDP even at Pmin. (It seems that dual-core CPUs don't support Halt/Stop Grant, so that's admittedly not relevant to my case.) The HLT instruction description in the instruction reference also explicitly says that

Entering the HALT state puts the processor in low-power mode. Execution resumes when an unmasked hardware interrupt (INTR), non-maskable interrupt (NMI), system management interrupt (SMI), RESET, or INIT occurs.

which seems pretty clear to me that it's not just "idling for a cycle"--it's stopped completely. (Again, I don't know how relevant this is to dual-core CPUs, but in my case, idle power usage with everything back in the system--including a 3.5" HD I forgot was still in there--is around 68W. Not a trivial change from 75W, certainly, but not the kind of massive drop your comments had suggested to me, especially given that Windows eats 140W on the same machine.)

They're getting a bit behind the times, but looking through the CPUs on this site will give you a better understanding of my point: http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

Interesting, I hadn't been aware of that site. Thanks for the pointer. It does seem that AMD's own documentation may be a little out of date, as it doesn't list the dual-core Socket AM2 processors, only the Socket 939 89/110W versions.

And in any case, the OP's point about VIA chips still holds, even if his numbers are somewhat skewed.

I'm not entirely convinced that the numbers still come out against VIA, but it certainly would be interesting to run a comparison with a CPU that does support a low-power halt state. (It would also be nice to see some mini-ITX motherboards for such; I've grown quite fond of my 26x21x6cm box.)

I'm pretty sure that's wrong--why would a CPU use more power stopped than when processing at any speed?

and idle power usage still bottomed out at 55W.

(did you know that an SBLive PCI card pulls 3W even when you're not using it?),

but I think it's pretty clear you're not going to get a dual-core Athlon system into the 20-30W range.

Here is a long-standing (and excellent) example of prior art: http://users.erols.com/whitaker/words.htm.

Sovereign states may have whatever weapons they wish, but when their leadership pronounces that their goal is to wipe out a neighbor state (Israel), it no longer becomes acceptable to the international community to allow such weapons programs to go forth. If Iran does develop a nuclear bomb and uses it against Israel, the retaliatory strike from Israel would result in casualties that are simply beyond anything any previous war has shown us.

The past 100 years have seen governments kill 100,000,000 people. Even in times of war (heh, especially in times of war!), it's far more likely you'll get killed by your own government than an enemy soldier.

I agree that the current regime isn't going to bust down anyone's doors for making fun of the Prez.

But given the track record of the past century, what gives you such faith in the regimes that will win the elections of 2008? 2012? 2016? 2020? 2024? 2028? 2032? 2036?

I'd ask what you're smoking, but warn you that answering could get you in big trouble in 2015, when civil war breaks out between the tobacco-producers of the Old Virginia Coalition and the pot-farmers of the Neo-Cascadian Alliance, and the winners of the 2016 election ("Let the OVC/NCA wars never happen again!") trawl the database to purge society of the losers.

Communism has been responsible for more pain and suffering than any other form of government in the history of men.

Top 25 of highest percentages of national populations killed during periods of mass brutality:

1. SW Africa, by an empire
2. Cambodia, by communists
3. Congo, by a business consortium

Note that China's Great Leap Forward is not in this list. The involved numbers are of course very large in China.

The business of separating and counting national populations is very subjective, of course. I can think of at least one genocide, the Banda massacre, by a company from my country (the Netherlands) on march 11, 1621 that killed over 90% of an island population, and should be in first place in this list if you accept it as a national population, but there are obviously many more. There are no English sources on this one.

You have said "Communism has been responsible for more pain and suffering than any other form of government in the history of men" and "The mere mathematics of the number of people living and affected by Communism in the 20th century makes it true"

I've heard this last arguement about population (growth) before, and I used to believe it. Nowadays, I am skeptical, and would like to know more; Ancient Rome had a huge population over the course of at least 2 centuries: The Mongol horde took over the known world by outright brutality: Imperialism and Colonialism from Western Europe has meant the invasion and conquest huge land masses & populations - so I think we need a more accurate handle on this.

Doing a quick and admittedly 'snapshot' estimate of the deaths involved in the Chinese and Russian civil wars, Stalins regime, post-war expulsions from the East, and deaths under Mao Tsedung, I arrive at an estimate of 73 million deaths (see this website on major 20th century death tolls) and injuries. This does not account for the suffering in general at the time, this moment or in other countries.

Unfortunately, I dont have the figures to do an estimate of the communist (miltary dictatorships') populations over time, but I found some and estimated the Ancient Roman (Era) population in just Rome over time (from your favourite source, wikipedia, using a trapezium rule ) at 330,000,000.
Since this rose from 2 to at least 1.6 million at it's height, by occupation, war, slavery and military rule I would reckon it is reasonable to say that the Ancient Roman Empire, in its various forms, has caused more pain and suffering than the combined Communist dictatorships up until present day.

It now really comes down to:
a) Can you estime the communist population from say, Stalin's rise to present day?
b) Can you do the same for the Ancient Roman Empire's dominion?
c) Are you going to argue over Republic, Monarchy etc.., or accept the Ancient Roman Empire as an entity in the same way I did Communist dictatorships?
d) How do you rate 'suffering' of large masses of people? (ie by population, a percentage of population, deathtolls (per capita), war, working hours, life expectancy.. etc?

"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

You are probably right. I'll bet a lot of Jews said the same thing just before Hitler took over.

Come to think of it, I'll bet a lot of Russians said that right after Stalin took over too. Conservative estimates say at least 20,000,000 were doing something very wrong.

[quote]
No, communism is the single greatest murderer of innocents the world has ever seen.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm [erols.com]

Educate yourself... please. Learn to think for yourself. For the sake of everyone on this planet. People willing to lightly dismiss the largest mass murderer the world has ever seen are not just deluded, but scarily so.
[/quote]


Ooooooo! Whitey wants to enlighten me now is it? Big White man wants to convert me to western capitalism, the schizophrenic twin brother of christian savagery.

So the redneck finally reveals himself from the veneer of intelligence. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think we don't see beyond your half-truths, outright lies and propaganda? Do you think that, like you, our perceptions of an entire way of life are determined byreruns of Rambo? Do you think we buy into whatever garbage spouted by Fox News and the lie-machines of Hollywood?

Do you westerners think we are so inferior that we don't know the truth, that your hatred for socialism is the product of your mania towards a nonexistent god and your irrational hatred for slavic people as an "Impure Aryan Race" because they have some Asian blood in them? Please, don't waste your time trying to "educate" me. I'd rather just be shot than listen to your mind-numbing drivel.

No, communism is the single greatest murderer of innocents the world has ever seen.

You said...
"Murdered few million under misguided regime of Stalin."

WTF? Please tell me this was said in some sort of morbid tongue and cheek manner. Or do you actually believe this?? Are you like a holocaust denier, but for communists? Try 20,000,000 innocents killed by Stalin, mainly by his own hand. He beat Hitler hands down. (Does one get gold medals in genocide?) The Communist Revolution in China has killed 65,000,000 since the revolution started. It depends on if you count starving your own people to death because you believe in a retarded philosophy like communism as better than, or worse than, sending them to death camps to be executed, in Siberia.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm

Educate yourself... please. Learn to think for yourself. For the sake of everyone on this planet. People willing to lightly dismiss the largest mass murderer the world has ever seen are not just deluded, but scarily so.

No, communism is the single greatest murderer of innocents the world has ever seen.

You said...
"Murdered few million under misguided regime of Stalin."

WTF? Please tell me this was said in some sort of morbid tongue and cheek manner. Or do you actually believe this?? Are you like a holocaust denier, but for communists? Try 20,000,000 innocents killed by Stalin, mainly by his own hand. He beat Hitler hands down. (Does one get gold medals in genocide?) The Communist Revolution in China has killed 65,000,000 since the revolution started. It depends on if you count starving your own people to death because you believe in a retarded philosophy like communism as better than, or worse than, sending them to death camps to be executed, in Siberia.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm

Educate yourself... please. Learn to think for yourself. For the sake of everyone on this planet. People willing to lightly dismiss the largest mass murderer the world has ever seen are not just deluded, but scarily so.

Well, if you had provided that information in the first place, I wouldn't continue to question the existance of a low power processor and video H/W from other than Via.

In particular, your mention of (AMD) Athlon processors as low-power left me scratching my head -- I was not aware that AMD had low power processors to support fanless designs until you provided that reference. Also, mention of Intel CPUs (likely mobile ones) that you think would be adequate means nothing to me without some convincing that they are capable of rendering 1080i in real time with or without spcialised MEPG2 accelleration hardware (other formats would be nice to support, but not essential for my purposes, not even MPEG4).

But even that processor list (which I could have googled myself) is not what I was looking for when designing a system. I was not interested in having to design and build a mobo around a processor. I wanted to purchase a fairly well integrated mobo, convincingly capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video in real time, convection cooled, in as small a form factor as possible with a strong preference for open source software.

The nanoITX fit the bill, even as it took forever to become available (heck, mine doesn't even have an integrated coldLuke processor/northbridge -- it has separate Eden CPU and CN400 northbridge) and dissapointingly requires (very modest) active cooling for the 1.0 GHz version.

There was a Commell mini-ITX board that employed the CN400, and X CLE266 driver extention development for it to support HD resolutions, which led me down this path (waiting for the supposedly fanless Eden processor in a nanoITX form factor). The only trouble was that the Commell board required noisy active cooling (I was not about to engineer a heatpipe/enclosure solution from scratch, either).

The alternative was a HushPC or Serener enclosure, using heatpipe technology with a conventional processor, but those would have been even more expensive than what I eneded up building (Eden C3 with CN400, 512 MB RAM in a Silverstone Lascala LC08 with slimline DVD/RW drive and 500 GB hard drive) at a cost of around $1000.

Perhaps I erred in thinking that S/W decoding of HD MPEG2 video required a 2.4 GHx P4 (and the associated cooling and noise), but there was nothing I found that convinced me otherwise. H/W MPEG2 accellerators on common graphics cards (which already started to break the requirement of a small form factor) generally didn't have open source drivers.

The only item that showed promise, after a process of elimination, was the Via Eden C3 with CN400 northbridge in a nice nanoITX form factor.

Frankly, I really like the small form factor, and the existing problems strike me as possible to overcome, particularly since Via has their own xine and mplayer for this platform that leverage the CN400 (albeit without completely open software).

And the $1000 drops way down to around $600 if I eliminate the DVD/RW drive and hard disk, and simply use it as a MythTV frontend (which would fit in an even smaller Silverstone Lascala LC07 case). It's just that I like to occasionally pop in a DVD into the playback device in the media room and not have to go to the server rack, and having local content (not to mention support native development if I care to hack) is nice as well.