I feel terrible for those people whose records are actually lost; keeping their domains will be next to impossible. It seems like, with that many contracts in play and the willful destruction of data, that Kevin Medina ought to be liable for at least money, if not jail time...
Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game.
You're off by about 12 years.
Dune 2 was a blatant knock-off of the earlier Sega Genesis game "Herzog Zwei." It is commonly believed that Stonkers, a ZX Spectrum game from 1983, was the first modern RTS; Stonkers has every game feature in Dune 2 other than network play, despite looking like ass. There are, however, good arguments for older games as modern RTSes missing simple features. Some people believe that Stonkers' game balance is closer to a tactical rush game, and that The Ancient Art of War is a better candidate for first RTS.
The earliest networked RTS I'm aware of with all the major features of Dune 2 is a largely forgotten BBS door called Yankee Crossfire!, from 1985.
Dune 2 was primitive because Westwood was underfunded and poorly managed. It was, at the time, basically a bunch of talented developers trying to bootstrap a company by working really really hard. That game gave them enough money to build Westwood into a real company with real management. Pity it didn't last. Basically, contracting Eye of the Beholder to SSI got them enough money to pay for a bunch of artists and musicians.
Dune II was the first PC game (that I'm aware of) that had all the elements of today's strategy genre.
There are quite a few earlier RTSes, going back as far as the Vic 20 and early 1980s BBSes. There is no major game component in Dune 2 that isn't in an old game called Stonkers, but since you can't get Stonkers anymore to verify, please look into a Sega Genesis game called "Herzog Zwei," which Dune 2 might as well be the sequel of, they're so similar.
Don't call people copycats if you don't know where it actually started. You're off by at least 20 years, and arguably quite a bit more.
And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.
I guess you're a little too young for Herzog Zwei, Empire Live, Mega-Lo-Mania, Stonkers, Braden's League, Geist (the commodore 64 game, not the playstation game,) The Ancient Art of War and its three sequels, Utopia, Battle Master, or that damned Megadrive game whose name escapes me. Of course, there were also massive multiplayer online RTSes on AOL, GeNIE, Delphi, Compuserve and Telix as early as 1985. It can be argued that several BBS doors are RTSes too; if you only count graphic games when it starts with the introduction of Avatar by Opus in 1983, but if you're willing to deal with text-mode realtime strategy, BBSes had it as early as Yankee Crossfire! in 1981, and possibly earlier.
There were, in fact, dozens of RTSes before Dune 2. That kids today think Dune 2 invented the genre is pretty amusing, but really, if you can't name a game that doesn't show up on IGN's game list, you're really not qualified to be talking about the origins of gaming.
There are good arguments for RTS starting on the Vic 20, FFS.
Nobody said anything about less important. What grandparent actually said was "if you had been around in that time frame, you would have known." Settle down.
Well, if the question is who made the technology first, which is the way adventure would come before zork, then almost none of these games belong. Please remember how obscenely popular Zork was - for nearly five years after its release, it was the most popular software of all time, including operating systems. There were two TV shows, a movie, 14 sequels, a series of six novels, three comic books, a moderately popular clothing franchise, and the launch of a game engine which eventually hosted almost 80 games. In 1979, the best selling PC game of all time had sold roughly a hundred thousand copies. By 1984, Infocom peaked at 10 million SKU a year, or roughly a 66x increase in 5 years, though thanks to genius accounting, they somehow managed to actually earn only half a million dollars that year.
People thought Infocom was just going to keep growing. Zork was the first real video game franchise, before pac-mania, before super mario. There was a point at which Infocom was offered $70 million to sell (in 1983 dollars, no less.) Two years later, when they realized they were actually undisciplined buffoons with a failed business software division and no more social cachet, they sold their rights to Activision for about 7 million in early 1986.
Infocom may have been the first real gaming business. To suggest that adventure is a better candidate misses a lot of how gaming actually happened.
Think of it from Google's point of view. How does that help them? Google is helped by having the best, fastest, most effective search engine around.
From Google's point of view, YouTube helps them enough to be purchased for $1.6 billion. Obviously, they want to be more than a search engine, and obviously, this lawsuit is a serious problem for them. Me, I think it's about time someone stabbed Google in the eye for screaming "don't be evil" throughout all their lying, cheating, theft and blatant copyright violation.
Fucking with the rankings does nobody any good.
Didn't stop them when China demanded it, and they squash the little guy all the damn time (notice that my blog and my 3qDN have pagerank 5, but the main domain has pr0 and won't show up in the engine.)
It's all well and good to make claims, but the ones you're making are in obvious contrast to facts. I think I smell astroturf.
If one bothers to check, Disney World, Rutgers University, Ohio State, several of the Six Flags and several industrial parks all have larger private transportation systems. What, was he guessing?
Design by contract did, in fact, take off. Almost every language in the list given is older than DbC; it's not in those languages for lack of a time machine, simple as pie. In other news, many languages now include contracts as a fundamental part of the language, and as the article author points out, libraries are available to hack contracts into just about every other major language.
If by "take off" you mean "why isn't every programmer doing it," well, for the same reason that every programmer doesn't do other things they should be doing, like API documentation. Many programmers are lazy, poorly trained, or think it's not worth the time. Some programmers believe in alternatives to contracts, or think contracts are destructive. Some programmers would insist that contracts have been a fundamental part of C/C++ since day one, in the form of ASSERT().
Programmers are (barely) people. There's nothing we all do. Contracts are one of the most popular methods for testing things. Why are unit tests and regression tests more popular? Because it's easier to see what value they provide, if you've never used any testing. They're not better or worse; they're just easier to understand from a position of being a novice.
Contracts are more common than for which you give them credit.
Never attribute to genetics what can be explained by simple stupidity. There was a point at which six or seven out of ten people believed that the world was flat, too. Should we have looked for that in our genes as well?
This technology was originally announced years ago. They're just mentioning it again because it's suddenly on everyone's minds. Is it your imagination that the marketers spoke up when the world's eighth largest economy said "we're thinking about a ban?" No, of course not. But to dust off the tin foil hat... jesus man, overreact much?
You know, it might just be that these magazines have good editors. Bacteria don't evolve; they're naturally selected for. Evolution is a process that applies to weather, to crystals and to political debates. Evolution does not apply to living creatures; it is a simple mathematical process.
Anyone who can't tell the difference between evolution and natural selection is not in a position to complain about the politics of word selection in scientific papers. This is a simple issue of correctness.
Which leaves us with confirmation that 50% of all studies are wrong.
Nah. This is just one of the dangers of referring to studies in descriptive and literate terms, rather than statistical terms. I'll make up data to make the concept easier, but when you see it, it's straightforward. Let's say we have a brand of drives which has a graph representing failure rate from the remaining drive population. There's a 1% over norm at two weeks, which probably represents drives damaged during shipping. There's a 5% over norm at three months, which probably represents drives manufactured with defective or badly attached components, particularly the drive arm or platter spindle assemblies. Then there's a slow growth 15% over normal at the two year line - we'll assume the drives are manufactured for five years - which probably represents disks under near-constant wear and tear, such as those in servers or cluster farms.
The issue here is that if you ask five people, you're going to get five different answers about whether the graph has spikes. One person will say all three are significant spikes. One person will see two, and discard the 1% as an aberration, or come to the same opinion I did about the reason and decide to disclude it on expected damage (there are people that do things like that :(.) One person will only see the big spike. One person will see the 1% as a pre-echo of a 5%, or possibly both as pre-echoes of the 15%. One person will ignore or fail to notice the 15% because it's a slow growth, which makes it look like a bulge instead of an EKG, and they don't understand the significance.
The thing is, only two of those five viewpoints are mistakes. Three of them are quite valid, and it's just a matter of opinion about the importance of the characteristics of the data. If three studies were done, and if all three came up with the same data, you could still get three entirely different descriptions of the situation.
The old phrase "with training you can make statistics say anything you want" may be a bit ascerbic, but there's a grain of truth to it; we all do it, and it's not a destructive thing unless it's intentionally distortional. Indeed, the purpose of citing the statistics in the first place is to get them to say something.
That said, there is a lot to be said for reading the description to get a sense of what the author believes, but reading only the data when trying to form your own beliefs.
Just because there are incompatible interpretations of data doesn't mean that the data is incorrect.
So you're right that MTBF shouldn't be taken for a single drive, since the failure rate at 5 years is going to be much higher than at one.
That's like saying that the inertia of an object shouldn't be taken at standstill, since the inertia at near-light-speed is going to be much higher than at rest. It's reductionist and absurd. There is no reason to discard legitimate and informative statistical measurements based on someone else's inability to apply them correctly.
An MTBF implies exactly the behavior that paper presents. If you saw MTBF 1 million hours and thought that meant for all your million drives, the flaw isn't in the measurement, it's in your comprehension of tenth grade mathematics.
Anyone with a functional understanding of basic statistics knows that the significant MTBF risk increases per non-redundant failure source either exponentially (if failures don't cascade) or combinatorially (if they do.) That means the MTBF goes *down* as you add drives. Two non-redundant drives with an MTBF of X have a mean time of single failure for the group of sqrt(x). Three non redundant drives, and it's cuberoot(x).
Really, there's nothing sadder than someone sitting by the sidelines, claiming that good solid measurements should be discarded because they're too stupid to not be misled by them. You remind me of the jerks who sued because they don't know the difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte.
Another good way to get hung up on is to badger people about something they've told you they can't discuss.
As another (soon to be former) Dell owner, I should point out that they will gladly tell you that they can't discuss simple service issues, and will proceed to tell you that there's nobody that you can actually talk to. When you point out that your laptop was shipped with a defect and that you purchased extended support, they'll tell you that you should be talking to Customer Service, who'll tell you that you made no such purchase. When you offer to send them your credit card bill or to put them on the phone with your bank, that's when they start hanging up.
In most cases I'd applaud you for playing devil's advocate. In the case of Dell Technical Support, it is not appropriate. I paid for a relatively suped up (at the time) Inspiron 9200 that shipped with a moderately serious screen problem: on boot, half a dozen or so vertical lines start as if they were permanently on (think stuck pixels, but they go screen top to screen bottom.)
They dicked me around on support for nine months, so I involved a lawyer. They proceeded to dick him around for the next three. I asked the lawyer what I was paying him for, and he neatly informed me that the price for serious involvement would be about quadruple the original cost of the laptop, and that even if I won, I would not recoup it from Dell. The reason Dell does this - and the reason calling lawyers won't help - is that it's still cheaper to go to another company.
This is the real reason Dell's losing its position. It's not because their product line is faltering. It's because there are a limited number of customers willing to spend extra to get a responsible company who treats us well during service, and we've all learned the hard way about Dell by now.
It's the same reason I won't buy Archos devices anymore (my >$1000 dv4100's battery split it in fucking *half* less than a year after I bought it, and they were never willing to fix it.)
Funny how Erlang programmers are chuckling to themselves right now, isn't it?
Maybe IBM's chief software architect should look into parallelised languages before she declares parallelized architectures to be a roadblock. (And, before you chumps start booing and hissing from the bleachers about she's the chief software architect at one of the world's largest technical firms, well, let's just remember there's about a 1/8 chance globally that your phone call home to ask for money from Mom is running over Erlang.)
In context, they mean real words, not the storage unit "word." They're talking about libraries, books, and text documents. Ten bytes per word is, if anything, generous.
Anyone who says "most dense" when they mean "smallest" isn't going to pick up on the semi-subtlety of "densest."
Maybe you've forgotten, but when you apply the word dense to a single object, it refers to the object's density, not how many of them are packed into a given area. Given that many early ICs were made with lead, and that these are made with silicon, they're not anywhere near the densest ever, and to be clear, they're actually not the most densely packed ever either (thanks to 3d FRAM such as made by Matrix Semiconductor.) Besides, when one says "dense" to refer to things like jungles and populations, it's a descriptive term regarding the feeling of crowdedness, not some ephemeral measurement of the space inbetween circuits.
If you're going to correct someone's language usage, don't reconjugate words if the words were ill chosen; prefer to help them use the right terms, rather than to teach them to correctly use the wrong phrase. If someone says they remember it smelling more purple, you don't tell them it smelled purpler, but rather explain to them that purple doesn't come in through the nose without a hell of a lot of acid.
The words they're looking for are "smallest," "best packed," and so on, but those don't make good advertising copy, so the advertisers came up with densest, which the reviewers happily glommed onto, which spread to the editors (poor excuses that ZD and their ilk have for editors as they may be,) and by now have become common usage. And yes, everyone knows what they mean, and yes, that's usually good enough. That said, when you criticize someone's language use, you open yourself to more of the same.
The only thing sadder than poor grammar is a poor excuse for a grammarian. I don't know that you even rise to the level of grammatist.
You should read the link you posted. It cites quite literally everything I said, simply not going as far as to differentiate the two recipes as separate. For someone who likes to get on his little preachy box about getting facts straight, the least you could do is read the thing you cite.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not common that one reads something on slashdot that really shakes them into looking at things differently.
Thank you for that. Mod parent up.
Uh, yeah, that's kind of the point of the article.
I feel terrible for those people whose records are actually lost; keeping their domains will be next to impossible. It seems like, with that many contracts in play and the willful destruction of data, that Kevin Medina ought to be liable for at least money, if not jail time...
Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game.
You're off by about 12 years.
Dune 2 was a blatant knock-off of the earlier Sega Genesis game "Herzog Zwei." It is commonly believed that Stonkers, a ZX Spectrum game from 1983, was the first modern RTS; Stonkers has every game feature in Dune 2 other than network play, despite looking like ass. There are, however, good arguments for older games as modern RTSes missing simple features. Some people believe that Stonkers' game balance is closer to a tactical rush game, and that The Ancient Art of War is a better candidate for first RTS.
The earliest networked RTS I'm aware of with all the major features of Dune 2 is a largely forgotten BBS door called Yankee Crossfire!, from 1985.
Dune 2 was primitive because Westwood was underfunded and poorly managed. It was, at the time, basically a bunch of talented developers trying to bootstrap a company by working really really hard. That game gave them enough money to build Westwood into a real company with real management. Pity it didn't last. Basically, contracting Eye of the Beholder to SSI got them enough money to pay for a bunch of artists and musicians.
Dune II was the first PC game (that I'm aware of) that had all the elements of today's strategy genre.
There are quite a few earlier RTSes, going back as far as the Vic 20 and early 1980s BBSes. There is no major game component in Dune 2 that isn't in an old game called Stonkers, but since you can't get Stonkers anymore to verify, please look into a Sega Genesis game called "Herzog Zwei," which Dune 2 might as well be the sequel of, they're so similar.
Don't call people copycats if you don't know where it actually started. You're off by at least 20 years, and arguably quite a bit more.
And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.
I guess you're a little too young for Herzog Zwei, Empire Live, Mega-Lo-Mania, Stonkers, Braden's League, Geist (the commodore 64 game, not the playstation game,) The Ancient Art of War and its three sequels, Utopia, Battle Master, or that damned Megadrive game whose name escapes me. Of course, there were also massive multiplayer online RTSes on AOL, GeNIE, Delphi, Compuserve and Telix as early as 1985. It can be argued that several BBS doors are RTSes too; if you only count graphic games when it starts with the introduction of Avatar by Opus in 1983, but if you're willing to deal with text-mode realtime strategy, BBSes had it as early as Yankee Crossfire! in 1981, and possibly earlier.
There were, in fact, dozens of RTSes before Dune 2. That kids today think Dune 2 invented the genre is pretty amusing, but really, if you can't name a game that doesn't show up on IGN's game list, you're really not qualified to be talking about the origins of gaming.
There are good arguments for RTS starting on the Vic 20, FFS.
Nobody said anything about less important. What grandparent actually said was "if you had been around in that time frame, you would have known." Settle down.
Well, if the question is who made the technology first, which is the way adventure would come before zork, then almost none of these games belong. Please remember how obscenely popular Zork was - for nearly five years after its release, it was the most popular software of all time, including operating systems. There were two TV shows, a movie, 14 sequels, a series of six novels, three comic books, a moderately popular clothing franchise, and the launch of a game engine which eventually hosted almost 80 games. In 1979, the best selling PC game of all time had sold roughly a hundred thousand copies. By 1984, Infocom peaked at 10 million SKU a year, or roughly a 66x increase in 5 years, though thanks to genius accounting, they somehow managed to actually earn only half a million dollars that year.
People thought Infocom was just going to keep growing. Zork was the first real video game franchise, before pac-mania, before super mario. There was a point at which Infocom was offered $70 million to sell (in 1983 dollars, no less.) Two years later, when they realized they were actually undisciplined buffoons with a failed business software division and no more social cachet, they sold their rights to Activision for about 7 million in early 1986.
Infocom may have been the first real gaming business. To suggest that adventure is a better candidate misses a lot of how gaming actually happened.
Think of it from Google's point of view. How does that help them? Google is helped by having the best, fastest, most effective search engine around.
From Google's point of view, YouTube helps them enough to be purchased for $1.6 billion. Obviously, they want to be more than a search engine, and obviously, this lawsuit is a serious problem for them. Me, I think it's about time someone stabbed Google in the eye for screaming "don't be evil" throughout all their lying, cheating, theft and blatant copyright violation.
Fucking with the rankings does nobody any good.
Didn't stop them when China demanded it, and they squash the little guy all the damn time (notice that my blog and my 3qDN have pagerank 5, but the main domain has pr0 and won't show up in the engine.)
It's all well and good to make claims, but the ones you're making are in obvious contrast to facts. I think I smell astroturf.
why not copy *ALL* the music
Because theft is wrong. What part of this is difficult?
If one bothers to check, Disney World, Rutgers University, Ohio State, several of the Six Flags and several industrial parks all have larger private transportation systems. What, was he guessing?
Design by contract did, in fact, take off. Almost every language in the list given is older than DbC; it's not in those languages for lack of a time machine, simple as pie. In other news, many languages now include contracts as a fundamental part of the language, and as the article author points out, libraries are available to hack contracts into just about every other major language.
If by "take off" you mean "why isn't every programmer doing it," well, for the same reason that every programmer doesn't do other things they should be doing, like API documentation. Many programmers are lazy, poorly trained, or think it's not worth the time. Some programmers believe in alternatives to contracts, or think contracts are destructive. Some programmers would insist that contracts have been a fundamental part of C/C++ since day one, in the form of ASSERT().
Programmers are (barely) people. There's nothing we all do. Contracts are one of the most popular methods for testing things. Why are unit tests and regression tests more popular? Because it's easier to see what value they provide, if you've never used any testing. They're not better or worse; they're just easier to understand from a position of being a novice.
Contracts are more common than for which you give them credit.
Never attribute to genetics what can be explained by simple stupidity. There was a point at which six or seven out of ten people believed that the world was flat, too. Should we have looked for that in our genes as well?
To "err" on the side of caution.
This technology was originally announced years ago. They're just mentioning it again because it's suddenly on everyone's minds. Is it your imagination that the marketers spoke up when the world's eighth largest economy said "we're thinking about a ban?" No, of course not. But to dust off the tin foil hat... jesus man, overreact much?
You know, it might just be that these magazines have good editors. Bacteria don't evolve; they're naturally selected for. Evolution is a process that applies to weather, to crystals and to political debates. Evolution does not apply to living creatures; it is a simple mathematical process.
Anyone who can't tell the difference between evolution and natural selection is not in a position to complain about the politics of word selection in scientific papers. This is a simple issue of correctness.
Which leaves us with confirmation that 50% of all studies are wrong.
:( .) One person will only see the big spike. One person will see the 1% as a pre-echo of a 5%, or possibly both as pre-echoes of the 15%. One person will ignore or fail to notice the 15% because it's a slow growth, which makes it look like a bulge instead of an EKG, and they don't understand the significance.
Nah. This is just one of the dangers of referring to studies in descriptive and literate terms, rather than statistical terms. I'll make up data to make the concept easier, but when you see it, it's straightforward. Let's say we have a brand of drives which has a graph representing failure rate from the remaining drive population. There's a 1% over norm at two weeks, which probably represents drives damaged during shipping. There's a 5% over norm at three months, which probably represents drives manufactured with defective or badly attached components, particularly the drive arm or platter spindle assemblies. Then there's a slow growth 15% over normal at the two year line - we'll assume the drives are manufactured for five years - which probably represents disks under near-constant wear and tear, such as those in servers or cluster farms.
The issue here is that if you ask five people, you're going to get five different answers about whether the graph has spikes. One person will say all three are significant spikes. One person will see two, and discard the 1% as an aberration, or come to the same opinion I did about the reason and decide to disclude it on expected damage (there are people that do things like that
The thing is, only two of those five viewpoints are mistakes. Three of them are quite valid, and it's just a matter of opinion about the importance of the characteristics of the data. If three studies were done, and if all three came up with the same data, you could still get three entirely different descriptions of the situation.
The old phrase "with training you can make statistics say anything you want" may be a bit ascerbic, but there's a grain of truth to it; we all do it, and it's not a destructive thing unless it's intentionally distortional. Indeed, the purpose of citing the statistics in the first place is to get them to say something.
That said, there is a lot to be said for reading the description to get a sense of what the author believes, but reading only the data when trying to form your own beliefs.
Just because there are incompatible interpretations of data doesn't mean that the data is incorrect.
So you're right that MTBF shouldn't be taken for a single drive, since the failure rate at 5 years is going to be much higher than at one.
That's like saying that the inertia of an object shouldn't be taken at standstill, since the inertia at near-light-speed is going to be much higher than at rest. It's reductionist and absurd. There is no reason to discard legitimate and informative statistical measurements based on someone else's inability to apply them correctly.
An MTBF implies exactly the behavior that paper presents. If you saw MTBF 1 million hours and thought that meant for all your million drives, the flaw isn't in the measurement, it's in your comprehension of tenth grade mathematics.
Anyone with a functional understanding of basic statistics knows that the significant MTBF risk increases per non-redundant failure source either exponentially (if failures don't cascade) or combinatorially (if they do.) That means the MTBF goes *down* as you add drives. Two non-redundant drives with an MTBF of X have a mean time of single failure for the group of sqrt(x). Three non redundant drives, and it's cuberoot(x).
Really, there's nothing sadder than someone sitting by the sidelines, claiming that good solid measurements should be discarded because they're too stupid to not be misled by them. You remind me of the jerks who sued because they don't know the difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte.
Another good way to get hung up on is to badger people about something they've told you they can't discuss.
As another (soon to be former) Dell owner, I should point out that they will gladly tell you that they can't discuss simple service issues, and will proceed to tell you that there's nobody that you can actually talk to. When you point out that your laptop was shipped with a defect and that you purchased extended support, they'll tell you that you should be talking to Customer Service, who'll tell you that you made no such purchase. When you offer to send them your credit card bill or to put them on the phone with your bank, that's when they start hanging up.
In most cases I'd applaud you for playing devil's advocate. In the case of Dell Technical Support, it is not appropriate. I paid for a relatively suped up (at the time) Inspiron 9200 that shipped with a moderately serious screen problem: on boot, half a dozen or so vertical lines start as if they were permanently on (think stuck pixels, but they go screen top to screen bottom.)
They dicked me around on support for nine months, so I involved a lawyer. They proceeded to dick him around for the next three. I asked the lawyer what I was paying him for, and he neatly informed me that the price for serious involvement would be about quadruple the original cost of the laptop, and that even if I won, I would not recoup it from Dell. The reason Dell does this - and the reason calling lawyers won't help - is that it's still cheaper to go to another company.
This is the real reason Dell's losing its position. It's not because their product line is faltering. It's because there are a limited number of customers willing to spend extra to get a responsible company who treats us well during service, and we've all learned the hard way about Dell by now.
It's the same reason I won't buy Archos devices anymore (my >$1000 dv4100's battery split it in fucking *half* less than a year after I bought it, and they were never willing to fix it.)
It took me five days to bother to read my response list. Some of us have better things to do.
Wow, talk about condescending.
You get what you give.
Because I'm having a hard time understanding
Obviously.
Funny how Erlang programmers are chuckling to themselves right now, isn't it?
Maybe IBM's chief software architect should look into parallelised languages before she declares parallelized architectures to be a roadblock. (And, before you chumps start booing and hissing from the bleachers about she's the chief software architect at one of the world's largest technical firms, well, let's just remember there's about a 1/8 chance globally that your phone call home to ask for money from Mom is running over Erlang.)
In context, they mean real words, not the storage unit "word." They're talking about libraries, books, and text documents. Ten bytes per word is, if anything, generous.
Anyone who says "most dense" when they mean "smallest" isn't going to pick up on the semi-subtlety of "densest."
Maybe you've forgotten, but when you apply the word dense to a single object, it refers to the object's density, not how many of them are packed into a given area. Given that many early ICs were made with lead, and that these are made with silicon, they're not anywhere near the densest ever, and to be clear, they're actually not the most densely packed ever either (thanks to 3d FRAM such as made by Matrix Semiconductor.) Besides, when one says "dense" to refer to things like jungles and populations, it's a descriptive term regarding the feeling of crowdedness, not some ephemeral measurement of the space inbetween circuits.
If you're going to correct someone's language usage, don't reconjugate words if the words were ill chosen; prefer to help them use the right terms, rather than to teach them to correctly use the wrong phrase. If someone says they remember it smelling more purple, you don't tell them it smelled purpler, but rather explain to them that purple doesn't come in through the nose without a hell of a lot of acid.
The words they're looking for are "smallest," "best packed," and so on, but those don't make good advertising copy, so the advertisers came up with densest, which the reviewers happily glommed onto, which spread to the editors (poor excuses that ZD and their ilk have for editors as they may be,) and by now have become common usage. And yes, everyone knows what they mean, and yes, that's usually good enough. That said, when you criticize someone's language use, you open yourself to more of the same.
The only thing sadder than poor grammar is a poor excuse for a grammarian. I don't know that you even rise to the level of grammatist.
You should read the link you posted. It cites quite literally everything I said, simply not going as far as to differentiate the two recipes as separate. For someone who likes to get on his little preachy box about getting facts straight, the least you could do is read the thing you cite.