So far, I've seen no mention of the size of L1, L2, or L3 caches, or the bandwidth of channels for memory, or anything else.
That is one of the key issues: the system buses. Great, you have more cores. How much data can you move and how quickly between the CPUs, various caches, main memory, hard drive, video card, network card, etc?
I remember the good old days when a Pentium 66 could outperform a Pentium 75 on some tasks because it had a 33 MHz bus compared to a 25 MHz bus. Anymore nobody would notice, because on either machine a sane person would get up to make a sammich or a cup of coffee anyway.
To this day, I still remember the huge landmark of the 100 MHz desktop CPU. Computer Shopper had a cover with the words "towers of power" on it and close-up pictures making them look like skyscrapers. As a geek teenager, I was awestruck.
The 6 core system is slower in non-parallel tasks because the OS has per-core overhead. So all single-threaded tasks get slower as the number of cores rises.
Imagine a task running on an otherwise idle core. It is running as fast as possible, with only OS overhead getting in the way of using 100% of that cpu. Now add more OS overhead to that cpu for core management. There's also cpu (hardware)-level overhead to consider, and the possibility that caches aren't ramped to the same level, so now more cores may be sharing a same-sized cache... etc.
Imagine a single-threaded game with a high CPU demand that consumes all time on a single CPU, while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.
Yes, each core has overhead, but in general, more cores does increase the system's potential performance even if it maintains or decreases an application's performance.
Honestly, this is not always a big deal. I have a quad core, but often have to wait for the hard drive to do anything.
People have the right to be complete assholes as long as they do not harm me.
The first amendment guarantees that the government will not infringe on anyone's right to be an asshole. Blizzard Entertainment are not the government, they are a private entity and if one chooses to use their paid services, one must abide by their rules or face consequences to which one agrees in the Terms of Service.
There are quite a few women who play WoW, and around a third of the people I know through guilds/real life/friending random people I quested with are female.
You'd like to believe that, wouldn't you?
Yeah, I believe that people I hear on vent with female-sounding voices are women, as are females I know in real life.
It may be against their ToS to pay for someone else's account. I've never played World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard game, so it's just a speculation, although I know that Jagex (the company behind RuneScape) does this.
This is not against their TOS. However, unless at least the last name on the card matches the billing contact (used to derive your RealID name), the charge may fail to go through. I used to pay for my ex wife's account when we were married and never had any problems.
However, I think the most likely course of action will be people driving to the nearest Best Buy, purchasing game time cards, and using those to pay for their subscriptions. I may go this route once my current subscription charged to my credit card expires.
My thought: Internet Detectives are going to have a field day with this. Got ganked by a Rogue last night? Search the forums for his character name, find his real name, figure out where he lives, and get him right back with harassing phone calls, pizzas, etc...
Step 1: find the person's name.
Step 2: figure out which "John Doe" it is out of 300,000,000 people in the U.S.
Step 3: buy plane ticket to fly the 1,000 miles to harass said John Doe.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: get "ganked" by a big dude in prison who hasn't seen a woman in years.
Blizzard is going to expose the identities of millions of people, including children and adolescents publicly on the internet. They can then be exploited by anyone, including the "wonderful" guys over at 4chan, and worse.
Thankfully it is just a name, though. For most people, first and last name is not enough information to narrow a post down to a single person. For example, there are three people I know of in my city of around 120k with the same name as me, probably more. Even if I told you the name of the city, or the metropolitan area of which my city is a suburb, you still would not be able to identify me absolutely. You might have a short list of candidates and could drive by a few houses, but you could not say who I am.
The real issue here is often it doesn't matter, because that is one piece of the puzzle. Google my name, dig up usenet posts, domain registrations, etc. and you can figure out who I am.
As far as children go, I still don't see it as a problem. Criminals who prey on children would be better off molesting the neighbor's kids than going on some crazy Internet hunt for random children who probably are hundreds of miles away anyway. Not only is one method easier, it also fails to leave any kind of audit trail that stupid criminals tend to leave on the Internet.
what has me worried is that I rarely disclose that I'm female in WoW except to my guild... when other people find out they tend to be less than mature. I would rather not face a barrage of/tells and real_id friend requests from the "plz cyber?" crowd.
There are quite a few women who play WoW, and around a third of the people I know through guilds/real life/friending random people I quested with are female. They don't seem to have this issue. Maybe such aberrant behavior was more common ten years ago, but it seems to be more rare today based on second-hand accounts I receive.
You can be utterly 100% certain that a non-trivial application will require re-work to run in a different environment other than what is was coded for.
At work, I develop a large Java application with approximately 14,000 class files encompassing over 100 MB worth of compiled code and other resources. This code touches every area of a system: UI, database, specialized hardware devices, networking, logging, financial system integration, etc. It does run flawlessly on multiple platforms.
The only changes for running on different platforms have to do with configurations, and even that is one or two system properties. For a remotely managed kiosk-style system that is set up once and managed remotely in aggregate, that is extremely simple.
For every outsourced project I've worked on, the cost has been $X to develop the software in some foreign shithole, plus another $Y to have a bunch of Westerners fix it up. The sum of $X and $Y always far exceeds the cost of getting the software written fully in a Western nation.
I agree with this assessment, and your post in general: however, it appears that the GP was talking about wages, not the cost of software development to the company.
I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.
I like Oracle too, as long as someone else is the DBA. Installing Oracle, setting up a database, and getting it to a usable state is almost impossible without six months of training.
PostgreSQL, MySQL, even SQL Server are all much easier to get up and running in a usable configuration than Oracle. I don't mean slightly easier, either. If other databases are like putting a band-aid on a cut, Oracle is like brain surgery.
Even the person that hit her is unlikely to be responsible, simply because it's illegal to walk on or across highways (at least in the US that is)...
In Ohio, every interstate highway, state route, or other divided highway has a sign on every on-ramp stating it is illegal for pedestrians, bicycles, or powered vehicles under a certain amount of HP (catches mopeds and scooters but not motorcycles) to enter the highway.
I don't know about Utah, but in Ohio, the judge would throw the case out because she was breaking the fucking law to begin with. Then the Ohio State Highway Patrol would sue her, since she admitted in a court document to breaking the law, and would win. I don't think they would do much to her since she was already hit and publicly humiliated, but they might suspend her license if she has one (she was walking on a highway, so who knows?).
You lost me. First you state that the government doesn't really know how much you owe them (read: they are probably low-balling the figure) then you go on to say that they will charge you more than you're due; "government wants all your money".
The IRS knows most of what you owe, but probably not everything. They could do the work for you, or have you do it and possibly report more. Plus, if you screw it up, they can hit you with penalties and interest, for even more money.
It can't be both ways.
The government wants as much of your paycheck as possible. The game here is that they can't just do that, they need to pass laws that are overly complex and halfway reasonable. This encourages people both to over report and to screw things up so they can get extra money, yet not be so pissed off they vote the scumbags out of Congress.
When the bulk of your country's military actions since its conception have been for purely economic reasons, and you join that country's military, you're signing up to be a corporate soldier, a tool of capitalism. And frankly, you are as much to blame for signing up to follow illegal orders (any order in support of an illegal action is itself illegal) and then following them as those who give them.
I disagree that the bulk of the military's actions are economically motivated, but certainly the bulk of the actions since World War 2.
Incidentally, the opinion you mention here is very similar to my own, and the driving factor to my separation from the Air Force. I don't see how fighting in Iraq is "defending our country," so I got out. That is a simplification: there is more to it than that, but that was the core of my belief.
One thing I don't like is blind nationalism, especially in our military. Look around at all the "support our troops" stickers on cars. What does anyone do to support them? Do people stop and think what they are doing and why? Do people realize that Congress voted to allow the President to send real, living people to the other side of the planet to kill people? Do people understand those are real bullets, people are dying every day, and that every known reason for doing this has been proven to be a lie?
When you earn income from a job or investments, that income is normally reported to the IRS. But then you have to report that same income yourself. Why is the data not just sent straight to the IRS, which could automatically calculate your tax bill?
Two reasons.
First, you don't know exactly what the IRS knows, so you are more likely to report everything, even stuff the IRS doesn't know -- the government makes more money. Second, and this follows from the first, it keeps people more honest and less likely to cheat.
Besides, do you really want to trust the government to calculate your taxes? The government wants all of your money -- it is in your best interest to prevent them from taking it, by any means legally possible.
Considering that so many young Americans are obese that it's affected our military's ability to recruit
[Citation needed]
Seriously, where are you hearing this? Furthermore, the ability to recruit might have a lot to do with being sent to Iraq the second you're out of basic.
Also, it is highly unlikely that a recruit from any branch will see combat directly out of basic training. New members need technical or advanced training. This is the link for Air Force training, since that is the branch in which I served.
Governments will always expand to consume any additional revenue they acquire, and invariably will commit to long-term spending obligations when faced with temporary windfalls.
I really, really hate these libertarian "laws". No basis in reality -- just Ayn Rand-inspired nonsense.
Yeah, it is nonsense. Governments expand beyond their revenue, and make long-term spending obligations regards of income. There are no limits, so why pretend that there are?
It seems silly to limit the study to 13,000 when the test pool is potentially in the millions.
Not really. Sampling can give accurate results even when sampling a small percentage of the total population. If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3% error, it sounds reasonable that 13,000 would be a good sample size of a population 20 times that, giving the same margin of error.
Also remember that, assuming the sample is chosen well (it is a good cross-section of the population and not confined to one specific subgroup), the benefits of adding additional samples drops off. It is essentially logarithmic: at first, adding samples is a huge benefit: after a certain point, the incremental gain from one additional sample is only a tiny fraction of the first samples.
One of the most widely used methods of putting out oil well fires is to detonate dynamite in the well fire. The explosion has the effect of both consuming oxygen as well as blowing oxygen away from the fire.
Not only is this well not on fire, it is underwater. Last time I checked, water not only doesn't burn, it actually puts out fires.
There are no good guys here and there are no victims. There's an asshole and the asshole who beat the crap out of him for being an asshole.
The real problem here is that media (and by extension the people that pay attention to it) will focus on the physical crime of beating up the asshole. We have a real problem here in the U.S. with bullying, be it children on the playground or adults giving each other hell. We are always putting each other down so we feel better, and that is a sick part of human nature. Unfortunately, we have been doing this for thousands of years, and I don't see it stopping any time soon.
The one who was made fun of, or the one who was on the receiving end of armed assault and battery?
That's not a victim, that's a bully. If you feel sorry for him or think he didn't deserve to get his ass kicked, you're part of what's wrong with America.
Bullying is wrong, even when it is adults doing it. That does not change the fact that there are two crimes here, committed by two people: the supervisor sexually harassed his subordinate, and the subordinate commit assault and battery on the supervisor. If the allegations are true, then both deserve jail time.
I also don't think the supervisor deserved to get his ass kicked: I don't think that has anything to do with being an American or what is wrong with this place (I think this country is full of pussies, for proof, look at our laws regarding alcohol and nudity as compared to Europe). No, the reason why I think that is because I am a Christian, and I believe it is better to forgive and move on with life. If we all did that we would have a lot fewer problems. I am also a realist, and know that is a pipe dream.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this in past tense?
Correct. It normally takes either harming children, or something of this magnitude to get the government to prosecute itself.
That is one of the key issues: the system buses. Great, you have more cores. How much data can you move and how quickly between the CPUs, various caches, main memory, hard drive, video card, network card, etc?
I remember the good old days when a Pentium 66 could outperform a Pentium 75 on some tasks because it had a 33 MHz bus compared to a 25 MHz bus. Anymore nobody would notice, because on either machine a sane person would get up to make a sammich or a cup of coffee anyway.
To this day, I still remember the huge landmark of the 100 MHz desktop CPU. Computer Shopper had a cover with the words "towers of power" on it and close-up pictures making them look like skyscrapers. As a geek teenager, I was awestruck.
Imagine a single-threaded game with a high CPU demand that consumes all time on a single CPU, while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.
Yes, each core has overhead, but in general, more cores does increase the system's potential performance even if it maintains or decreases an application's performance.
Honestly, this is not always a big deal. I have a quad core, but often have to wait for the hard drive to do anything.
The first amendment guarantees that the government will not infringe on anyone's right to be an asshole. Blizzard Entertainment are not the government, they are a private entity and if one chooses to use their paid services, one must abide by their rules or face consequences to which one agrees in the Terms of Service.
Yeah, I believe that people I hear on vent with female-sounding voices are women, as are females I know in real life.
This is not against their TOS. However, unless at least the last name on the card matches the billing contact (used to derive your RealID name), the charge may fail to go through. I used to pay for my ex wife's account when we were married and never had any problems.
However, I think the most likely course of action will be people driving to the nearest Best Buy, purchasing game time cards, and using those to pay for their subscriptions. I may go this route once my current subscription charged to my credit card expires.
Step 1: find the person's name.
Step 2: figure out which "John Doe" it is out of 300,000,000 people in the U.S.
Step 3: buy plane ticket to fly the 1,000 miles to harass said John Doe.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: get "ganked" by a big dude in prison who hasn't seen a woman in years.
Thankfully it is just a name, though. For most people, first and last name is not enough information to narrow a post down to a single person. For example, there are three people I know of in my city of around 120k with the same name as me, probably more. Even if I told you the name of the city, or the metropolitan area of which my city is a suburb, you still would not be able to identify me absolutely. You might have a short list of candidates and could drive by a few houses, but you could not say who I am.
The real issue here is often it doesn't matter, because that is one piece of the puzzle. Google my name, dig up usenet posts, domain registrations, etc. and you can figure out who I am.
As far as children go, I still don't see it as a problem. Criminals who prey on children would be better off molesting the neighbor's kids than going on some crazy Internet hunt for random children who probably are hundreds of miles away anyway. Not only is one method easier, it also fails to leave any kind of audit trail that stupid criminals tend to leave on the Internet.
There are quite a few women who play WoW, and around a third of the people I know through guilds/real life/friending random people I quested with are female. They don't seem to have this issue. Maybe such aberrant behavior was more common ten years ago, but it seems to be more rare today based on second-hand accounts I receive.
At work, I develop a large Java application with approximately 14,000 class files encompassing over 100 MB worth of compiled code and other resources. This code touches every area of a system: UI, database, specialized hardware devices, networking, logging, financial system integration, etc. It does run flawlessly on multiple platforms.
The only changes for running on different platforms have to do with configurations, and even that is one or two system properties. For a remotely managed kiosk-style system that is set up once and managed remotely in aggregate, that is extremely simple.
I agree with this assessment, and your post in general: however, it appears that the GP was talking about wages, not the cost of software development to the company.
I like Oracle too, as long as someone else is the DBA. Installing Oracle, setting up a database, and getting it to a usable state is almost impossible without six months of training.
PostgreSQL, MySQL, even SQL Server are all much easier to get up and running in a usable configuration than Oracle. I don't mean slightly easier, either. If other databases are like putting a band-aid on a cut, Oracle is like brain surgery.
In Ohio, every interstate highway, state route, or other divided highway has a sign on every on-ramp stating it is illegal for pedestrians, bicycles, or powered vehicles under a certain amount of HP (catches mopeds and scooters but not motorcycles) to enter the highway.
I don't know about Utah, but in Ohio, the judge would throw the case out because she was breaking the fucking law to begin with. Then the Ohio State Highway Patrol would sue her, since she admitted in a court document to breaking the law, and would win. I don't think they would do much to her since she was already hit and publicly humiliated, but they might suspend her license if she has one (she was walking on a highway, so who knows?).
That would be in Ohio. No idea about Utah.
The IRS knows most of what you owe, but probably not everything. They could do the work for you, or have you do it and possibly report more. Plus, if you screw it up, they can hit you with penalties and interest, for even more money.
The government wants as much of your paycheck as possible. The game here is that they can't just do that, they need to pass laws that are overly complex and halfway reasonable. This encourages people both to over report and to screw things up so they can get extra money, yet not be so pissed off they vote the scumbags out of Congress.
I disagree that the bulk of the military's actions are economically motivated, but certainly the bulk of the actions since World War 2.
Incidentally, the opinion you mention here is very similar to my own, and the driving factor to my separation from the Air Force. I don't see how fighting in Iraq is "defending our country," so I got out. That is a simplification: there is more to it than that, but that was the core of my belief.
One thing I don't like is blind nationalism, especially in our military. Look around at all the "support our troops" stickers on cars. What does anyone do to support them? Do people stop and think what they are doing and why? Do people realize that Congress voted to allow the President to send real, living people to the other side of the planet to kill people? Do people understand those are real bullets, people are dying every day, and that every known reason for doing this has been proven to be a lie?
Two reasons.
First, you don't know exactly what the IRS knows, so you are more likely to report everything, even stuff the IRS doesn't know -- the government makes more money. Second, and this follows from the first, it keeps people more honest and less likely to cheat.
Besides, do you really want to trust the government to calculate your taxes? The government wants all of your money -- it is in your best interest to prevent them from taking it, by any means legally possible.
Citation here, at cnn.com.
Also, it is highly unlikely that a recruit from any branch will see combat directly out of basic training. New members need technical or advanced training. This is the link for Air Force training, since that is the branch in which I served.
Yeah, it is nonsense. Governments expand beyond their revenue, and make long-term spending obligations regards of income. There are no limits, so why pretend that there are?
Not really. Sampling can give accurate results even when sampling a small percentage of the total population. If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3% error, it sounds reasonable that 13,000 would be a good sample size of a population 20 times that, giving the same margin of error.
Also remember that, assuming the sample is chosen well (it is a good cross-section of the population and not confined to one specific subgroup), the benefits of adding additional samples drops off. It is essentially logarithmic: at first, adding samples is a huge benefit: after a certain point, the incremental gain from one additional sample is only a tiny fraction of the first samples.
Not only is this well not on fire, it is underwater. Last time I checked, water not only doesn't burn, it actually puts out fires.
The real problem here is that media (and by extension the people that pay attention to it) will focus on the physical crime of beating up the asshole. We have a real problem here in the U.S. with bullying, be it children on the playground or adults giving each other hell. We are always putting each other down so we feel better, and that is a sick part of human nature. Unfortunately, we have been doing this for thousands of years, and I don't see it stopping any time soon.
Bullying is wrong, even when it is adults doing it. That does not change the fact that there are two crimes here, committed by two people: the supervisor sexually harassed his subordinate, and the subordinate commit assault and battery on the supervisor. If the allegations are true, then both deserve jail time.
I also don't think the supervisor deserved to get his ass kicked: I don't think that has anything to do with being an American or what is wrong with this place (I think this country is full of pussies, for proof, look at our laws regarding alcohol and nudity as compared to Europe). No, the reason why I think that is because I am a Christian, and I believe it is better to forgive and move on with life. If we all did that we would have a lot fewer problems. I am also a realist, and know that is a pipe dream.
Which victim? The one who was made fun of, or the one who was on the receiving end of armed assault and battery?
Is Blizzard's site a fake?
I think I can safely say that Blizzard said it will be released on July 27, 2010.
For completeness, here is the press release on blizzard.com.