Personally given the choice I'd rather have a higher per core performance than more cores.
I wouldn't. Most of what I do is very multi-tasking heavy. The fact that one program can't use more than one core doesn't bother me nearly as much as that 3 or 4 programs must share the same core. Especially when you consider that I typically run more than 1 VM at a time along side my regular programs, I think (for my use case at least) the more cores, the better the computer will perform. I very rarely use a single program (I don't play games on my computers), so the whole a faster core is better than n slower cores doesn't play as much of a factor in my computing. But to each their own (That's why they produce more than 1 line of processors)...
i bet you that if they could charge $1000 for their top end, they would
Well, if by "could" you mean with a better product, then no. That was proven in the days of the Athlon (When AMD owned almost every benchmark). They were number 1, but still the least expensive of the two by a fair margin.
If by "could" you mean with market position, then yes. Intel can charge $1k, because they have two things that AMD doesn't. First, brand recognition (I'd be willing to bet the "common" person knows Intel a lot more often than they know AMD). Second is manufacturer agreements. Intel in the past has held exclusivity agreements with a number of major computer manufacturers (And was one of the reasons for the big Anti-Trust lawsuits they faced in recent times). Intel could charge whatever they wanted not because they had the better product, but because they had the major distribution channels locked up. AMD was forced to undercut their prices just to be able to remain competitive...
AMD also has some halo models, but because they cant beat Intel in performance, they cant afford to charge $1000 for their high end chips.
FUD, pure FUD. AMD has always been cheaper than Intel. Even back before Intel introduced the Core2 series, when the AMD K2 and Athlon series spanked everything that Intel had to offer. Heck, even back to the days when AMD first entered the mass market (80386 days IIRC), they were the less expensive product. And to date, AMD has arguably always held the performance/$$$ award. Sure, Intel has started gaining a lead (Marginal with C2 series, but significant with the i7 series) in recent times, but AMD isn't THAT far behind. And if you consider that most of the true innovations in CPU design have come from AMD (true multi-core (I mean where there are 4 physical cores on die, not 2 dual core cpus on the die), 64bit, shared L3 cache, on-die memory controller, elimination of the north bridge and hence the system bus, etc), I find it VERY funny that "It is the price you pay for getting the bleeding edge" is applied to the more expensive Intel as opposed to the innovator AMD. Now, I'm not saying that Intel hasn't innovated at all. I'm just saying that the major innovations that the i7 used to surpass the C2 series (Namely the elimination of the system bus, on-die memory controller and the tiered cache architecture) were done first by AMD...
Well, my question is this. What's the point of a college level course? To learn? No. It's to prove an adequate level of knowledge in a particular area. If you don't have the adequate level of knowledge, then it's up to the teacher to attempt to, well, teach you... If you have that level up front --aside from proving it-- why should you have to attend class yet alone participate (Yes, I know you can argue that others will learn from you, but that's the teacher's job, at least in undergraduate work)? Now, some subjects are trickier than others to test for knowledge. Some examples would be a public speaking course, or a laboratory class... But the large portion --including subjective subjects such as interpretive courses, reading courses, writing courses and even political courses-- can be tested without a course work. I agree that not participating during a discussion could be harmful to the rest of the class, but in those cases, why is attendance mandatory? If I can prove my abilities (via written test, or oral exam, etc), why should I have to show up and listen to a professor blabber? That's one reason why I can't stand the concept of graded homework. Give out homework for two reasons. One, to let the students practice and better grasp the material. Two, to get a general understanding of how the class as a whole is grasping the material (so you can adjust your teaching). It shouldn't count for your grade. Now sure, some people don't test well. But if they don't test well (where there's no opportunity to cheat), and do well on homework (which ultimately doesn't prove anything) why should you be able to pass?
The reason I am so adement about the whole homework issue, is because of what happened to me freshman year. In my senior year of high school, I took AP calculus (Advanced Placement, basically if you took the course, and passed a test you'd get college credit). We went further into the material than we were supposed to (We got through the rest faster than expected). So we went through the entirety of Calculus 2 before the end of senior year. But because the test that we signed up for was only valid for Calc 1, I had to take Calc 2 freshman year. The teacher that I had thought it would be a good idea to give around 10+ hours of homework per week (And when I say 10 hours, I mean 10 hours for those who know the material. Not 10 hours for everyone in the class). And count it for 25% of our grade at the end. So I should have spent around 80 hours of wasted time that semester doing work that I didn't have to do, because the teacher felt that homework was necessary. Now sure, you can argue that I got a lot of practice during that time, but I stopped doing the homework after the first week. I got a 5% on the homework part of the grade, but a 100% on the rest. So I finished the course with a 80% (B- at that school). Not because I didn't know the material (I was one of 2 people in the course to get 100% on the final exam), but because I felt that my time outside of the class was better suited to working on subjects that I didn't have a strong grasp on rather than the one that I felt I really knew well.
The education system (In America at least) is WAY to focused on going through the motions (making it look like their teaching) as opposed to identifying and stimulating education. Even the lower schools focus on standardized tests. If you can pass them, great, sit back and just be quiet. If you can't, we need to do something about that. What about accepting the fact that different people have different mental abilities, and adjusting teaching patterns for each. Some people simply aren't smart enough to pass a standardized test. That's not a failure of the education system (it is a failure if they had the capability, but weren't taught correctly). What is a failure of the education system is when you have someone that goes through school just "coasting" because they were never challenged and given an opportunity to excel. It makes me wonder how many "Einsteins" slipped through the education system because they just got too bored with it...
I don't consider that "Goofing Off". I consider that "Creating a Disturbance". If you're on your laptop chatting (Text, not voice) with a friend (as long as sound is off), what is the harm to others? If you're talking during the class (off topic), you deserve to be kicked out. Equate goofing off on a laptop to doing a crossword puzzle during class. Aside from your distraction, who else is harmed? If others are bothered by what you're doing (and they are free to complain), then you should be asked to stop and kicked out of class if you don't...
Actually, I wonder if you're on to something there. Is this ban a "I don't want to see it ever", or a "If you're disruptive, I'll kick you out"... I mean seriously, we're talking about college. It's not up to the professor if you learn anything, it's your job. If you're off screwing around on your laptop instead of taking notes, then it's your own dam fault. And a teacher that cares that you're not paying attention is one that I'd argue isn't doing his/her job. The reason I say it that way, is that at the end of the course, the teacher is responsible for verifying that you know the material. Not that you learned it in his class.
I had that happen to me in an intro to C course. I'd been programming in C for some years by that point but the school wouldn't let me skip the course (even though I demonstrated advanced knowledge). So after 3 classes, the teacher noticed that I was constantly surfing the net during the time when we were supposed to be working on his problems (He counted attendance). After the third class, he asked me to see him after. When he did, he told me I'd need to do the work if I expected to pass the class. I showed him every problem that he'd given us to do (that I completed in a few minutes). I then explained that I first ventured into C years ago, and felt comfortable with the material. So what did he do? The next class, he gave me a rather hard problem from the end of the course. He said if I can finish it by the end of class, I'd get an A and not have to show up any more. So I got my A, and had one less class to attend.
The moral of the story? Just because someone's goofing off doesn't mean that they don't know the material or that they should be punished. Learn WHY a student is goofing off before punishing them (After all, it could be because you fail at teaching). But then again, that's asking teachers to do their jobs...
It's an untrusted device relative to the computer. The computer doesn't know where it has been (That's why newer versions of Win and all versions of Linux ask you what to do)... YOU may trust it, but a competent programmer will not. A competent programmer will not trust ANYTHING not directly in the control of the program at all times (Don't trust anything that the user could possibly tamper with)...
I call bias. Not only did they take some of the cheapest Intel motherboards on the market for their comparison, they took one of the most expensive AMD motherboards as well. Go to newegg. Nearly 75% of all socket AM3 AMD motherboards are available for under $100. Less than 40% of Intel motherboards are under $100... I did a quick search on NewEgg (The exact mobo they specify for AMD isn't there, but a comparable is), and there are 10 motherboards with at least the same base specifications as the AMD they chose that are less than the price of the motherboard they used. Some as cheap as $79... Yet the Intel motherboards are the cheapest available with the respective feature set (USB3, 2xPCIe16, etc). And not the cheapest by a small margin... The next step up from their $120 CPU is $180... So compare one of the most expensive consumer AMD mobo against one of the cheapest consumer Intel mobo, and act surprised when the AMD has a higher cost per unit of performance? BS...
Well, on the scale of the tube, we're not talking about that much thermal energy. Sure, it's a high temperature, but something the size of a nanotube (around 1/50,000 the width of a human hair) won't have a significant amount of energy. It really depends on the density of these tubes that's needed to achieve a usable amount of energy. And don't forget, we're talking about localized heating here... It's not that the tubes and structure need to get to 3000*k, that's just the temperature of the flame front.. A good example of the difference is the internal combustion engine... The flame front can reach around 2300*K, but the parts its made of would begin to weaken long before that: Iron's melting point is 1800*K (the material commonly used as a cylinder lying), Aluminum's melting point is only 900*K (the material commonly used for the engine block). But engines rarely melt... Steel (commonly used for the valves in the combustion chamber) loses about 50% of its strength at only 800*K... Yet these parts --aside from mechanical failure-- survive...
It just goes to show you that you can't trust anything that you plug into a computer...
I mean seriously, drivers? For a battery charger? Unless they wanted to display a nifty "charge progress indicator" in the OS... But even then, do they not have a code review before it gets flashed onto the chip?
The thing you're missing, is the level of those defects. The problems that GM had with quality were almost never safety related (And when they were, they weren't major and were fixed rapidly). Say what you want that their cars sucked, but in the 100 years they have been selling cars in the USA, they have never had as major of an issue such as this. Ford has (Remember the exploding gas tanks?). Chrysler has (They had an issue with cruise control that caused some accidents). I'm not saying that GM is good (I got rid of my last GM car 2 years ago, and I don't know if I will buy another one). What I am saying is that comparing quality by shear number of defects (As consumer reports does) is ignoring the much more important bigger picture...
Well, it's not BS. It's incomplete. It should be: If you're not growing or giving your customers a reason to stay, you're dieing... The caveat is that "giving your customers a reason to stay" in MS lingo is "Let's lock them into something so hard, that once they are a customer, they can never go somewhere else without a HUGE migrating expense"...
In contrast, the magnetic solder can be pulled up through silicon by using a relatively weak magnet
So it depends on their definition of relatively... Is that a household kitchen magnet (which would do little damage to most magnetic sensitive components once removed from the chip)? Or is it a 0.5T magnet (that's relatively weak compared to most MRI magnets and would likely saturate most magnetic sensitive components to the point of failure)?
I don't. They openly ignore standards, because they don't see it as necessary. I was at an event where the IE team lead (this was a month or two before IE8's release) gave a talk and was answering questions. He said that IE8 will support "most" of CSS 3. Someone asked why not all of it, he replied to the effect that they don't think the parts they left out "mattered". When asked how it did on the ACID test, they said that it didn't matter, because that test doesn't test anything that's necessary (and it requires things that they didn't see a reason for)... Keep in mind, this was a developer, not a manager. So unless management has it so ingrained in their heads that "This IS the only way", these decisions are being made at the development team level... And you wonder why IE sucks so hard in comparison (and is a thorn in the side of every web developer). It's not that they don't follow standards. It's that they purposely don't follow them... They know better, but make the rational choice to be different. I have no pity for someone who thinks like that...
Azure is definitely interesting... It's distributed programing model does look to have some advantages. But I think it won't take off like Amazon's has for a few reasons...
First off, there are no computing containers. What I mean by that is you can only run applications on Azure, not whole operating systems. This does have some efficiency gains (in that you don't have an added OS layer in the middle, but it VASTLY increases the tie-in to the system, and prevents you from doing simple things like adding a server template to turn on if your site gets a lot of load.
Second, It requires applications to be custom written for the environment. You can't trivially port a ready-made application from a single server to Azure... While this is good on the efficiency side, it's not good for the weekend warrior or small businesses who want to remain portable and flexible...
Third, it's only on their cloud. You have to trust MS's infrastructure. And you need to trust MS with YOUR data... It's not like amazon's offerings where clones have popped up that are compatible (so you could recreate your own cloud if you wanted to, or use a competitors)... So that locks you in to their system. My guess, is that most sizable companies won't like this at all...
I'm not saying people won't use it. I'm not saying people won't like it. What I am saying is that it is not playing in the same field as the other "Cloud" computing platforms. IF MS opens up Azure (at least in a binary form) where you can install it on your own infrastructure, then it may have a shot. If they allow guest operating systems, then it may have a shot. But without both, I think there's just too much tie-in to be comfortable (and base your business around)...
Disclaimer: This is based on a presentation which I attended by the lead engineer for Azure back in December of 08. Things may have changed since then, but I haven't kept up with it specifically...
Remove that test from the results, and Chrome still wins. But look at the results of that test. Chrome wins, yes. But not by a HUGE margin (the difference between second and third is larger than 1st and 2nd). At least it's not as bad as the Dromaeo test (Where Opera is out in front by so far, it seems more like a bug in the test than a win for Opera)...
What's weird, is looking at their page load time benchmarks, it's only first for Tom's Hardware... IE takes 2 out of the 5 sites, followed by FF, Chrome and IE at 1 each. What interests me, is the only load time that Chrome is slower than the average is YouTube. Couple that with its shoddy flash performance, and to me it indicates some kind of a bug or regression either with Flash itself, or with the plugin system inside Chrome. I use Chrome as a primary browser on Kubuntu, and I must say it is slow, but definitely faster than FF...
What's interesting, is that it shows Chrome losing on the memory front for all but 1 tab... This has more to do with the 1 process per tab model than it does with "inefficiencies", and paints a false picture (considering each of the rest use a single process for all tabs). If people understand the benefits of 1 process per tab, I think it justifies the added memory usage. I mean we're only talking about 146mb for 10 tabs. It's not like we're talking gigabytes...
Something I would like to see a lot more than this kind of benchmark is interface speed testing. How long does it take to switch between tabs? How long does it take to scroll to the bottom of a 1mb page. Etc... That's why I like Chrome better than the rest. Not because it's page load is faster, but because everything is faster (at least based on my non-scientific tests)... I'd also like to see some cross-platform testing. Sure, Chrome may win out on Windows. But what about on Ubuntu? What about on Mac? What about on Fedora? etc... This comes to an even harder point when you look at the shoddy flash implementation on Linux. The difference between 1st and 2nd may be a lot bigger than it is on Windows...
I assure you, I owned more powerful phones before hand
Yes, I agree. However, the common person wasn't able to take advantage of that power. Installing an application on a WinMo phone required technical expertese. It was no where near as simple as clicking on the app and selecting install. You had to go into active sync, select the app, push the sync and verify that the install worked. It was a sour enough experience that I only did it for applications that I really wanted...
From start to finish its all fluid. If you say that about Android, the only response I can give you is to come back and talk to me after you've actually owned one.
I have owned 3 android phones. I have also used an iPhone for a non-trivial amount of time (I borrowed one for a month). While I agree that the first 2 (a G1, and a hacked HTC Tyan II) were no where near the experience of the iPhone, the Droid that I have now is to the point that I'd say it's better. It's every bit as fluid (in some cases more so) as the iPhone. Sure, the settings screens and music app leave something to be desired, but the whole UI is definitely ahead of the iPhone. Not because of ease of use (I don't think it's easier). Not because of the sexy factor (The iPhone is more sexy). But because of the extensibility factor. You can change just about every UI element on Android to tailor it to your liking (Home screens, app dock, keyboard, etc)... Rather than telling you how it should fuction, it lets you chose (and the choice is trivial to make)... And I know a number of non-geeks that now own Droids (some of which came from iPhones), and all of them LOVE it. Actually, I've never met someone face to face that's had a Droid and not loved it... That's just my $0.02...
That's not true. ONE reason for the iPhone's dominance is that there was no competition with a similar hardware class for quite some time. And when I say similar hardware class, I mean large screen, powerful processor and all the sensors. Sure, there was the G1 and others since, but none have had a strong CPU. Until the Droid and the Nexus One. Both have been flying off the shelves (The droid has been around for what, 5 months? And after 2 months the "droid light" app which turns the backlight on the camera into a flashlight was already on the top 10 downloaded apps list... Last year saw a good jump in the number of android based devices sold. I'd be very surprised if Android didn't have at least 10% of the smartphone SALES by the end of this year... At least some of the reasons to buy the iPhone are now shared among a mass of devices (the caliber of hardware, supporting of 3pd apps and "all in one" functionality through a sexy touch screen device)... I'm not saying the iPhone is dead (I'd be REALLY surprised if it went down without a fight), but I am saying that its lead from the rest of the pack of smartphones (in non-business use anyway) is in serious jepardy...
Correct. Based on my assumption previously that the site was at less than peak load during testing (let's call that initial load: x) here's how I calculated my figures...
x + 77k = testpercentage * peakload
Two things become apparent here. First is the assumption that x 1 (or in otherwords x + 77k > peakload). Why this assumption? Now, I assumed that they were doing capacity tests (they could be doing functionality tests, but I got the impression from the summary and TFA that it was capacity testing)... Next, let's look at normal operation x = peakload, x MUST BE LESS THAN 231k hits/sec. If x is 50% of peak load, then x must be less than 77k hits/sec... Sure, there are a lot of assumptions about these numbers, but it still serves as a rough estimation (so long as you realize what's assumed)...
(77000 hits/second) / 1 million users = 4.6 hits/minute per user (That's a little bit higher than the figures from my experience, but still well within reason)...
The real news (to me at least) is that they use 77k hits per second to TEST. Normally, when I test at least, I try to go for at least 150% to 200% expected peak load. Assuming that they aren't doing this during peak hours, that puts their expected PEAK load somewhere around 100k hits per second or so... Large, yes. Large for that size of site? No way... Using RMS, I'd say that they are averaging around 25k to 35k hits per second IF they are testing for a 100k peak... That puts MYSPACE (once one of the largest sites on the internet at one time) around an Alexa rank of about 600 (based on a few other sites I know with that load level)... Since Alexa currently rates them at 14, that implies two possibilities. Either Alexa's rank information is demographically biased, or my figures are completely out of the blue... You decide...
So basically duplicate the functionality of APT (at least for updates), and let the ISV's run their own repo? So then when you install their product (irregardless of distribution method) it would add their update repo to the list of sources. Then updating windows and all its packages would be as simple as iterating through the repos looking for packages...
Well, it doesn't matter where the key is stored. The key must be read in order to be processed. So at some point in time the appropriate parts of the key must be in the CPU (since it needs to do math against the bits of the key to produce the signature), hence why the attack vector exists...
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I wouldn't. Most of what I do is very multi-tasking heavy. The fact that one program can't use more than one core doesn't bother me nearly as much as that 3 or 4 programs must share the same core. Especially when you consider that I typically run more than 1 VM at a time along side my regular programs, I think (for my use case at least) the more cores, the better the computer will perform. I very rarely use a single program (I don't play games on my computers), so the whole a faster core is better than n slower cores doesn't play as much of a factor in my computing. But to each their own (That's why they produce more than 1 line of processors)...
Well, if by "could" you mean with a better product, then no. That was proven in the days of the Athlon (When AMD owned almost every benchmark). They were number 1, but still the least expensive of the two by a fair margin.
If by "could" you mean with market position, then yes. Intel can charge $1k, because they have two things that AMD doesn't. First, brand recognition (I'd be willing to bet the "common" person knows Intel a lot more often than they know AMD). Second is manufacturer agreements. Intel in the past has held exclusivity agreements with a number of major computer manufacturers (And was one of the reasons for the big Anti-Trust lawsuits they faced in recent times). Intel could charge whatever they wanted not because they had the better product, but because they had the major distribution channels locked up. AMD was forced to undercut their prices just to be able to remain competitive...
FUD, pure FUD. AMD has always been cheaper than Intel. Even back before Intel introduced the Core2 series, when the AMD K2 and Athlon series spanked everything that Intel had to offer. Heck, even back to the days when AMD first entered the mass market (80386 days IIRC), they were the less expensive product. And to date, AMD has arguably always held the performance/$$$ award. Sure, Intel has started gaining a lead (Marginal with C2 series, but significant with the i7 series) in recent times, but AMD isn't THAT far behind. And if you consider that most of the true innovations in CPU design have come from AMD (true multi-core (I mean where there are 4 physical cores on die, not 2 dual core cpus on the die), 64bit, shared L3 cache, on-die memory controller, elimination of the north bridge and hence the system bus, etc), I find it VERY funny that "It is the price you pay for getting the bleeding edge" is applied to the more expensive Intel as opposed to the innovator AMD. Now, I'm not saying that Intel hasn't innovated at all. I'm just saying that the major innovations that the i7 used to surpass the C2 series (Namely the elimination of the system bus, on-die memory controller and the tiered cache architecture) were done first by AMD...
Well, my question is this. What's the point of a college level course? To learn? No. It's to prove an adequate level of knowledge in a particular area. If you don't have the adequate level of knowledge, then it's up to the teacher to attempt to, well, teach you... If you have that level up front --aside from proving it-- why should you have to attend class yet alone participate (Yes, I know you can argue that others will learn from you, but that's the teacher's job, at least in undergraduate work)? Now, some subjects are trickier than others to test for knowledge. Some examples would be a public speaking course, or a laboratory class... But the large portion --including subjective subjects such as interpretive courses, reading courses, writing courses and even political courses-- can be tested without a course work. I agree that not participating during a discussion could be harmful to the rest of the class, but in those cases, why is attendance mandatory? If I can prove my abilities (via written test, or oral exam, etc), why should I have to show up and listen to a professor blabber? That's one reason why I can't stand the concept of graded homework. Give out homework for two reasons. One, to let the students practice and better grasp the material. Two, to get a general understanding of how the class as a whole is grasping the material (so you can adjust your teaching). It shouldn't count for your grade. Now sure, some people don't test well. But if they don't test well (where there's no opportunity to cheat), and do well on homework (which ultimately doesn't prove anything) why should you be able to pass?
The reason I am so adement about the whole homework issue, is because of what happened to me freshman year. In my senior year of high school, I took AP calculus (Advanced Placement, basically if you took the course, and passed a test you'd get college credit). We went further into the material than we were supposed to (We got through the rest faster than expected). So we went through the entirety of Calculus 2 before the end of senior year. But because the test that we signed up for was only valid for Calc 1, I had to take Calc 2 freshman year. The teacher that I had thought it would be a good idea to give around 10+ hours of homework per week (And when I say 10 hours, I mean 10 hours for those who know the material. Not 10 hours for everyone in the class). And count it for 25% of our grade at the end. So I should have spent around 80 hours of wasted time that semester doing work that I didn't have to do, because the teacher felt that homework was necessary. Now sure, you can argue that I got a lot of practice during that time, but I stopped doing the homework after the first week. I got a 5% on the homework part of the grade, but a 100% on the rest. So I finished the course with a 80% (B- at that school). Not because I didn't know the material (I was one of 2 people in the course to get 100% on the final exam), but because I felt that my time outside of the class was better suited to working on subjects that I didn't have a strong grasp on rather than the one that I felt I really knew well.
The education system (In America at least) is WAY to focused on going through the motions (making it look like their teaching) as opposed to identifying and stimulating education. Even the lower schools focus on standardized tests. If you can pass them, great, sit back and just be quiet. If you can't, we need to do something about that. What about accepting the fact that different people have different mental abilities, and adjusting teaching patterns for each. Some people simply aren't smart enough to pass a standardized test. That's not a failure of the education system (it is a failure if they had the capability, but weren't taught correctly). What is a failure of the education system is when you have someone that goes through school just "coasting" because they were never challenged and given an opportunity to excel. It makes me wonder how many "Einsteins" slipped through the education system because they just got too bored with it...
I don't consider that "Goofing Off". I consider that "Creating a Disturbance". If you're on your laptop chatting (Text, not voice) with a friend (as long as sound is off), what is the harm to others? If you're talking during the class (off topic), you deserve to be kicked out. Equate goofing off on a laptop to doing a crossword puzzle during class. Aside from your distraction, who else is harmed? If others are bothered by what you're doing (and they are free to complain), then you should be asked to stop and kicked out of class if you don't...
Well, there's an open letter to the Higgs Boson... http://abstrusegoose.com/118
Actually, I wonder if you're on to something there. Is this ban a "I don't want to see it ever", or a "If you're disruptive, I'll kick you out"... I mean seriously, we're talking about college. It's not up to the professor if you learn anything, it's your job. If you're off screwing around on your laptop instead of taking notes, then it's your own dam fault. And a teacher that cares that you're not paying attention is one that I'd argue isn't doing his/her job. The reason I say it that way, is that at the end of the course, the teacher is responsible for verifying that you know the material. Not that you learned it in his class.
I had that happen to me in an intro to C course. I'd been programming in C for some years by that point but the school wouldn't let me skip the course (even though I demonstrated advanced knowledge). So after 3 classes, the teacher noticed that I was constantly surfing the net during the time when we were supposed to be working on his problems (He counted attendance). After the third class, he asked me to see him after. When he did, he told me I'd need to do the work if I expected to pass the class. I showed him every problem that he'd given us to do (that I completed in a few minutes). I then explained that I first ventured into C years ago, and felt comfortable with the material. So what did he do? The next class, he gave me a rather hard problem from the end of the course. He said if I can finish it by the end of class, I'd get an A and not have to show up any more. So I got my A, and had one less class to attend.
The moral of the story? Just because someone's goofing off doesn't mean that they don't know the material or that they should be punished. Learn WHY a student is goofing off before punishing them (After all, it could be because you fail at teaching). But then again, that's asking teachers to do their jobs...
It's an untrusted device relative to the computer. The computer doesn't know where it has been (That's why newer versions of Win and all versions of Linux ask you what to do)... YOU may trust it, but a competent programmer will not. A competent programmer will not trust ANYTHING not directly in the control of the program at all times (Don't trust anything that the user could possibly tamper with)...
I call bias. Not only did they take some of the cheapest Intel motherboards on the market for their comparison, they took one of the most expensive AMD motherboards as well. Go to newegg. Nearly 75% of all socket AM3 AMD motherboards are available for under $100. Less than 40% of Intel motherboards are under $100... I did a quick search on NewEgg (The exact mobo they specify for AMD isn't there, but a comparable is), and there are 10 motherboards with at least the same base specifications as the AMD they chose that are less than the price of the motherboard they used. Some as cheap as $79... Yet the Intel motherboards are the cheapest available with the respective feature set (USB3, 2xPCIe16, etc). And not the cheapest by a small margin... The next step up from their $120 CPU is $180... So compare one of the most expensive consumer AMD mobo against one of the cheapest consumer Intel mobo, and act surprised when the AMD has a higher cost per unit of performance? BS...
Well, on the scale of the tube, we're not talking about that much thermal energy. Sure, it's a high temperature, but something the size of a nanotube (around 1/50,000 the width of a human hair) won't have a significant amount of energy. It really depends on the density of these tubes that's needed to achieve a usable amount of energy. And don't forget, we're talking about localized heating here... It's not that the tubes and structure need to get to 3000*k, that's just the temperature of the flame front.. A good example of the difference is the internal combustion engine... The flame front can reach around 2300*K, but the parts its made of would begin to weaken long before that: Iron's melting point is 1800*K (the material commonly used as a cylinder lying), Aluminum's melting point is only 900*K (the material commonly used for the engine block). But engines rarely melt... Steel (commonly used for the valves in the combustion chamber) loses about 50% of its strength at only 800*K... Yet these parts --aside from mechanical failure-- survive...
It just goes to show you that you can't trust anything that you plug into a computer...
I mean seriously, drivers? For a battery charger? Unless they wanted to display a nifty "charge progress indicator" in the OS... But even then, do they not have a code review before it gets flashed onto the chip?
The thing you're missing, is the level of those defects. The problems that GM had with quality were almost never safety related (And when they were, they weren't major and were fixed rapidly). Say what you want that their cars sucked, but in the 100 years they have been selling cars in the USA, they have never had as major of an issue such as this. Ford has (Remember the exploding gas tanks?). Chrysler has (They had an issue with cruise control that caused some accidents). I'm not saying that GM is good (I got rid of my last GM car 2 years ago, and I don't know if I will buy another one). What I am saying is that comparing quality by shear number of defects (As consumer reports does) is ignoring the much more important bigger picture...
Well, it's not BS. It's incomplete. It should be: If you're not growing or giving your customers a reason to stay, you're dieing... The caveat is that "giving your customers a reason to stay" in MS lingo is "Let's lock them into something so hard, that once they are a customer, they can never go somewhere else without a HUGE migrating expense"...
So it depends on their definition of relatively... Is that a household kitchen magnet (which would do little damage to most magnetic sensitive components once removed from the chip)? Or is it a 0.5T magnet (that's relatively weak compared to most MRI magnets and would likely saturate most magnetic sensitive components to the point of failure)?
I don't. They openly ignore standards, because they don't see it as necessary. I was at an event where the IE team lead (this was a month or two before IE8's release) gave a talk and was answering questions. He said that IE8 will support "most" of CSS 3. Someone asked why not all of it, he replied to the effect that they don't think the parts they left out "mattered". When asked how it did on the ACID test, they said that it didn't matter, because that test doesn't test anything that's necessary (and it requires things that they didn't see a reason for)... Keep in mind, this was a developer, not a manager. So unless management has it so ingrained in their heads that "This IS the only way", these decisions are being made at the development team level... And you wonder why IE sucks so hard in comparison (and is a thorn in the side of every web developer). It's not that they don't follow standards. It's that they purposely don't follow them... They know better, but make the rational choice to be different. I have no pity for someone who thinks like that...
Azure is definitely interesting... It's distributed programing model does look to have some advantages. But I think it won't take off like Amazon's has for a few reasons...
First off, there are no computing containers. What I mean by that is you can only run applications on Azure, not whole operating systems. This does have some efficiency gains (in that you don't have an added OS layer in the middle, but it VASTLY increases the tie-in to the system, and prevents you from doing simple things like adding a server template to turn on if your site gets a lot of load.
Second, It requires applications to be custom written for the environment. You can't trivially port a ready-made application from a single server to Azure... While this is good on the efficiency side, it's not good for the weekend warrior or small businesses who want to remain portable and flexible...
Third, it's only on their cloud. You have to trust MS's infrastructure. And you need to trust MS with YOUR data... It's not like amazon's offerings where clones have popped up that are compatible (so you could recreate your own cloud if you wanted to, or use a competitors)... So that locks you in to their system. My guess, is that most sizable companies won't like this at all...
I'm not saying people won't use it. I'm not saying people won't like it. What I am saying is that it is not playing in the same field as the other "Cloud" computing platforms. IF MS opens up Azure (at least in a binary form) where you can install it on your own infrastructure, then it may have a shot. If they allow guest operating systems, then it may have a shot. But without both, I think there's just too much tie-in to be comfortable (and base your business around)...
Disclaimer: This is based on a presentation which I attended by the lead engineer for Azure back in December of 08. Things may have changed since then, but I haven't kept up with it specifically...
Remove that test from the results, and Chrome still wins. But look at the results of that test. Chrome wins, yes. But not by a HUGE margin (the difference between second and third is larger than 1st and 2nd). At least it's not as bad as the Dromaeo test (Where Opera is out in front by so far, it seems more like a bug in the test than a win for Opera)...
What's weird, is looking at their page load time benchmarks, it's only first for Tom's Hardware... IE takes 2 out of the 5 sites, followed by FF, Chrome and IE at 1 each. What interests me, is the only load time that Chrome is slower than the average is YouTube. Couple that with its shoddy flash performance, and to me it indicates some kind of a bug or regression either with Flash itself, or with the plugin system inside Chrome. I use Chrome as a primary browser on Kubuntu, and I must say it is slow, but definitely faster than FF...
What's interesting, is that it shows Chrome losing on the memory front for all but 1 tab... This has more to do with the 1 process per tab model than it does with "inefficiencies", and paints a false picture (considering each of the rest use a single process for all tabs). If people understand the benefits of 1 process per tab, I think it justifies the added memory usage. I mean we're only talking about 146mb for 10 tabs. It's not like we're talking gigabytes...
Something I would like to see a lot more than this kind of benchmark is interface speed testing. How long does it take to switch between tabs? How long does it take to scroll to the bottom of a 1mb page. Etc... That's why I like Chrome better than the rest. Not because it's page load is faster, but because everything is faster (at least based on my non-scientific tests)... I'd also like to see some cross-platform testing. Sure, Chrome may win out on Windows. But what about on Ubuntu? What about on Mac? What about on Fedora? etc... This comes to an even harder point when you look at the shoddy flash implementation on Linux. The difference between 1st and 2nd may be a lot bigger than it is on Windows...
Yes, I agree. However, the common person wasn't able to take advantage of that power. Installing an application on a WinMo phone required technical expertese. It was no where near as simple as clicking on the app and selecting install. You had to go into active sync, select the app, push the sync and verify that the install worked. It was a sour enough experience that I only did it for applications that I really wanted...
I have owned 3 android phones. I have also used an iPhone for a non-trivial amount of time (I borrowed one for a month). While I agree that the first 2 (a G1, and a hacked HTC Tyan II) were no where near the experience of the iPhone, the Droid that I have now is to the point that I'd say it's better. It's every bit as fluid (in some cases more so) as the iPhone. Sure, the settings screens and music app leave something to be desired, but the whole UI is definitely ahead of the iPhone. Not because of ease of use (I don't think it's easier). Not because of the sexy factor (The iPhone is more sexy). But because of the extensibility factor. You can change just about every UI element on Android to tailor it to your liking (Home screens, app dock, keyboard, etc)... Rather than telling you how it should fuction, it lets you chose (and the choice is trivial to make)... And I know a number of non-geeks that now own Droids (some of which came from iPhones), and all of them LOVE it. Actually, I've never met someone face to face that's had a Droid and not loved it... That's just my $0.02...
That's not true. ONE reason for the iPhone's dominance is that there was no competition with a similar hardware class for quite some time. And when I say similar hardware class, I mean large screen, powerful processor and all the sensors. Sure, there was the G1 and others since, but none have had a strong CPU. Until the Droid and the Nexus One. Both have been flying off the shelves (The droid has been around for what, 5 months? And after 2 months the "droid light" app which turns the backlight on the camera into a flashlight was already on the top 10 downloaded apps list... Last year saw a good jump in the number of android based devices sold. I'd be very surprised if Android didn't have at least 10% of the smartphone SALES by the end of this year... At least some of the reasons to buy the iPhone are now shared among a mass of devices (the caliber of hardware, supporting of 3pd apps and "all in one" functionality through a sexy touch screen device)... I'm not saying the iPhone is dead (I'd be REALLY surprised if it went down without a fight), but I am saying that its lead from the rest of the pack of smartphones (in non-business use anyway) is in serious jepardy...
Two things become apparent here. First is the assumption that x 1 (or in otherwords x + 77k > peakload). Why this assumption? Now, I assumed that they were doing capacity tests (they could be doing functionality tests, but I got the impression from the summary and TFA that it was capacity testing)... Next, let's look at normal operation x = peakload, x MUST BE LESS THAN 231k hits/sec. If x is 50% of peak load, then x must be less than 77k hits/sec... Sure, there are a lot of assumptions about these numbers, but it still serves as a rough estimation (so long as you realize what's assumed)...
(77000 hits/second) / 1 million users = 4.6 hits/minute per user (That's a little bit higher than the figures from my experience, but still well within reason)...
The real news (to me at least) is that they use 77k hits per second to TEST. Normally, when I test at least, I try to go for at least 150% to 200% expected peak load. Assuming that they aren't doing this during peak hours, that puts their expected PEAK load somewhere around 100k hits per second or so... Large, yes. Large for that size of site? No way... Using RMS, I'd say that they are averaging around 25k to 35k hits per second IF they are testing for a 100k peak... That puts MYSPACE (once one of the largest sites on the internet at one time) around an Alexa rank of about 600 (based on a few other sites I know with that load level)... Since Alexa currently rates them at 14, that implies two possibilities. Either Alexa's rank information is demographically biased, or my figures are completely out of the blue... You decide...
So basically duplicate the functionality of APT (at least for updates), and let the ISV's run their own repo? So then when you install their product (irregardless of distribution method) it would add their update repo to the list of sources. Then updating windows and all its packages would be as simple as iterating through the repos looking for packages...
Well, it doesn't matter where the key is stored. The key must be read in order to be processed. So at some point in time the appropriate parts of the key must be in the CPU (since it needs to do math against the bits of the key to produce the signature), hence why the attack vector exists...