BINGO! New game idea for "Post-9/11"
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm sure many of you have played "Bullshit Bingo," AKA Buzzword Bingo, where you go to meetings and mark off words and phrases such as "Going Forward," "Core Business," "Changing Paradigms," etc.
How about a new one for playing in the car or reading the paper? Marking off stuff like cars that have fifteen american flags on them. Or reading some off the wall article that has sudden relevence because of the "Post-9/11 Era." Or discussing the way it is impacted by the "War on Terror."
Bonus points for stores that put "God Bless America!" signs up, not only in their windows but on that giant illuminated sign with the two golden arches on it.
Sorry to be overly cynnical; it's a nice thought... but it really seems to ringing hollow now. People have just gone on about their comporate business, even if they have "heightened insecurity" in their personal lives. This book probably has interesting info in it, but now everybody is marketing it with "a sense of urgency due to the new world we live in."
If I hear "In the wake of September 11th..." one more time, I'm gonna punch a broadcaster in the nose.
Now if you'll pardon me, in the wake of my bottled water and NutriGrain bar breakfast, I'm going to get a hot bowl of soup for lunch in downtown Cleveland.
Thank goodness that they found some Hydrogen in the earth's crust! We were almost running out of dihydrogen monoxide and atmospheric sources!
(Yes, I know it's more costly to derive [H] from other molecules than to recover from the earth and store for immediate use. It's called "vain attempt at humor.")
The cards are well priced for home use, and CAT5E cabling is cheap too. The problem with gigabit ethernet is not the cards, it is the lack of switches or even plain hubs at an affordable price point...
I checked out the cards, and yes you can get them cheap, but what about switches? You figure they're still uber-pricey too, right?
Nope... apparently Pricewatch.com has D-Link 8-port 10/100/1000baseT auto-detect switches listed for under $150! (I've been most happy with my D-Link DI-804 Router/firewall/switch for $79.)
Is this the normal "cheaper as tech gets more widespread and easier to manufacture," and do you think maybe Apple making gigabit ethernet a standard feature had something to do with it?:)
Don't you think Brendan Fraser should get a few props? School Ties, Mrs. Winterbourne, With Honors, Gods and Monsters... hell even The Scout! All were what I would consider A-list acting performances. ESPECIALLY his "big break" in School Ties, as the star Jew on a christian Ivy-prep football team? It was awesome; he could have been bigger than Brad Pitt. Lord knows he looks better and is BUILT better.
But what was he thinking when someone talked him into crap like George of the Jungle and Encino Man? Pauly Shore actually passed as entertainment in this country in the dark ages of the early 90s?!? I can almost Forgive The Mummy Returns because the original was a hit and he was doing a follow-up, but he got seriously wronged by an agent several times in his career. *Cough* Dudley Do-Right *Cough*
I am a straight married man, but I don't know of a stright woman or gay man who can look into Brendan's eyes on screen, when he's laying it all out on the line, and not get all gushy inside. One of my co-workers named her son Brendan for this very reason.
With all due respect to Mr. Hawking, idle chit-chat is neither easy for him, nor something he has shown that he is good at... for (one would think) obvious reasons.
I hate integrated components. If they die, or if something faster/cooler/better comes out that doesn't leave me enough slots to upgrade...
Let's say you put in an Audigy in place of on-board sound.
And a PCI gigabit Ethernet NIC instead of the on-board 10/100.
And a GeForce4 in the AGP 4x slot.
You still have 10 USB ports, two firewire ports, 6 IDE headers (for 12 devices). You can put anything you want in that final PCI slot. Unless you're building a server or a videa-editing center with multiple PCI cards, you're going to be hard pressed to find a way to obsolete this board in the next 48 months.
This is pretty much the standard 'slow news day' Internet horror story which CNN|the BBC | Fox | Time |whoever comes out with once or twice a year. Identity thieves use IRC. Film at 11.
In the US, this is typically scripted as:
"And tonight, we have a report that you won't want to miss... it might just save you or a loved one from a financial nightmare. Online hackers stealing YOUR credit card numbers?!? Stay tuned for tonight's report..."
Maybe the problem is that I was 13 when I saw the movie... and I had a crush on Leah Thompson, and the movie took place in Cleveland (where I live)... but I thought Howard the Duck was "entertaining." Who can forget the bachelor duck reading about hot chicks in PlayDuck, or the principal from Ferris Beuller turning into an alien and sticking his tongue in the cigarette lighter socket to "power up?"
Howard: "Where am I?" Leah: "Cleveland." Howard: "What a name for a planet." Leah: "Are you lost?" Howard: "Do you think if I had a choice, I'd be stuck in CLEVE-LAND?"
I never said legal precedent... but they can go to other corps where someone dimes out the company and say "XYZ corp did the same thing, and they were willing to settle for $1 million. Either pay us 1.2 mils or we 'own3rZ j00 in da c0ur7z.'"
It's no wonder he has this behavior; you're at OSU. When I was attending that God Forseaken Hellhole in 1994-95, my roommates routinely terrorized me and my property.. because I had a comp-u-tar and it was on the phone (14.4 to a shell account) and what if their grandad had a heart attack at 1am and I was online? So I moved to another room only to have a physically abusive roommate in addition to two more tech-hating yokels from rural Oh-Hi-Uh. This was on North campus where "all the engineering kids are!" Engineers who hated computers. I wonder where THEY are today.
In the mean time, I started playing Magic: The Gathering with a few Graduate students. (This was my first RPG-ish experience... no D&D, no Final Fantasy or anything before that.) Next thing you know I am scrounging for cheap common cards and playing M:TG about 12 hours a day in the Union and the Grad dorm lobby, with another 5 hours spent in the computer labs. I slept between 9am and 4pm. Class was a freaking joke; 400 kids in a class, none of the TAs speaking english as a native language. I hated it, and I was 18 and knew everything. *GRIN* These "anti-social" behaviors only made my roommates hate me more.
By chance I found a girl online with like interests... at the University of Wyoming. We started ytalk'ing all the time, and emailing. I flunked out of OSU, said "see ya!" to my parents who were "so disappointed because I had so much potential," and moved to Wyoming. Married my Internet sweetie. Spent three years cutting my teeth doing desktop support, PC/printer repair, and data wiring.
I came back to Ohio with my wife and draw a salary that is comparable to the ones my idiot roommates were bragging that they would have someday, only WITHOUT the $50,000 in student debt, and five years in a classroom trying to figure out if the Teaching Assistant said "pigeons" or "business."
The difference between me and this guy is that this guy has given up on his gf, which is just plain WRONG. College age is the best time to get good nookie. This guy has taken an entertaining habit to an extreme that crimps your style.
On the other hand, Lord Ender, you have to ask yoruself... are you really a geek, or a geek-oppressor?:)
Yes, but when do you apply it? Moderations may be ongoing. Yes, the bulk of moderation happens in the first 6 hours, but what if someone comes along three days later and mods you... you've already (at some arbitrary time) applied your "article score" to your Karma. How does this fit?
Can you break this sort of problem down that easily? I would think there is too much interdependency between cells - which would mean a lot of communication needed across the network.
Not only that, but unlike SETI@Home, each calculation is dependent on the data generated by the previous set of calculations. S@H is just crunching blocks looking for data, much like D.net.
The nuclear simulations require an immense amount of data to be continuously generated as you go through each millisecond of the explosion. Or nanosecond? However small you need each time dataframe to be in nuclear physics.
Is the relaxing of moral views really such a good thing? Today we accept cloning. Tomorrow we accept euthanasia of clones who are not healthy. The day after, we accept killing old people who are not healthy. Then we accept killing all people with uncurable diseases. Sure, we have strenuous procedures and laws for all of these, but we're still guilty of clensing the human race. (Rememeber Hitler?)
I'm going to follow my own advice and post a thoughtful (not necessary correct, but thoughtful) response, rather than using my remaining mod points in this thread.
While the "logic" you use in your argument does appear to come off as FUD, I think there might be a kernal of truth in there. The difference between a slow societal acceptance of genetic cleansing technology (a la Gattaca) and Hitler is just that; slow human acceptance. While progressives who dared to argue with The Church that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe may have been put in jail for herecy; today we accept it as fact through technological advancements and observations, and a little bit of free-thought by those not blinded by faith.
Will we also one day accept that fetuses (fetii?) who are imperfect are "disposable?" That those who are no longer capable of caring for themselves are guaranteed the right to death? (Insert Humor: Obligatory Futurama reference to the Suicide Booths that Frye mistakes for phone booths.:)
These are deep questions that we ponder today, where any opinion is criticized for being either immoral (by the right) or Luddism (by the left). I will express no opinion here except this: I promise that if the day comes where society does accept genetic cleansing as the norm, none of us posting here today will be in a physical condition required to argue.
Keep in mind I'm not going into the cloning aspect here, as that is happening today. We're not yet worrying about the rights and wrongs of raising organ farms, or self-determination of clones, etc. That is a messy ball of wax that we probably WILL see play out during the next several lifetimes.
I work at a bank where we still (duh) use big iron. One thing you DO NOT want to do is IPL.
It's very bad, especially if someone tries to do it while people in other timezones are usings those mainframe apps!
(For the uninitiated, IPL = Initial Program Load. It basically means restart the whole group of apps on the machine. In the old days, I'm betting this meant rewind the tape and reboot the room... er, mainframe.)
(Wakka wakka wakka! Don't you just love April Fool's Day? Or Poisson d'Avril, if you prefer. Something about the frenchies sticking fish on peoples' backs just sounds unsettling, though. But all of this is definitely much better than trying to figure out the terrorism in Israel. As Dave Barry said, in fifty million years, when all the humans have died out, there will be cockroaches in the middle east who still hate a different group of cockroaches in the middle east; they're just never going to have peace.)
Intel gives big price breaks to OEMs for large quantities. On the open market, AMD is a much more valuable buy.
And with respect to your overclocking claims... I do overclock video cards, and I used to overclock Celerons. 333 runs at 500; 600 runs at 900, etc. But look at overclocking an Athlon, where you connect the L1 bridges and choose a multiplier (and voltage) in the BIOS.
What do you do with a P4? You typically can't change the multiplier; you have to set the FSB way up. And since you're doing that, you're generally changing your memory clocks, AGP and PCI bus speeds. Oh and you'll probably end up modding your mobo to increase the DDR voltage settings.
How many people are going to do that?
PS _ I stand by my "lousy board," the ECS K7S5A. It may be inexpensive, but everyone's performance and stability tests, it comes out *just* behind the VIA 266A. I've had mine for six months with no issue, and I have on-Board 100baseT.
And I can put a GeForce4 Ti 4600 in it, UNLIKE the Epox board!:P
Thirty percent ? Maybe I'm living in a small, radically different world, but Intel owns more like 98% of the business market, and 2% of the home market (yes, I pulled that out of my ass). Everyone I know runs Athlons and Durons. Nobody's crazy enough to pay 3x the price for an Intel chip that ultimately does the same job, plus or minus 5% in terms of performance. The only people who have Intel cpus, have Celerons, and they bought them at Future Shop or WalMart or some other twit store.
AMD's press release describing sales last quarter showed that they had 28% of the shipped processors for desktop PCs.
This is, of course, because a good majority of store-bought PCs are still Intel, and a good portion of all processors shipped still go into store-bought systems.
You and I may build systems, but most people don't. At least for now.:)
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.
This is true for proprietary benchmarks run by companies against their own products.
But for benchmarking apps developed by third parties and used by fourth parties to compare and review hardware, I don't think this rings true. Things like Q3bench (which checks real-world performance by running timedemos) and MadOnion 3DMark (which tests graphics capabilities and performance in various areas) are very handy for testing video cards by review sites.
I mean, a lot of people have used Prime95 and RC5-64 clients to review processors over the past four years, since they are so CPU-intensive. (Er, they take 100% of available CPU cycles.) Therefore, you can judge how well certain processors can handle certain types of operations by seeing how many blocks they can crunch in an hour.
The problem is that certain apps are going to run better on certain processors because of a harmony between the processor design and the heavily-used commands in the app. Like the fact that a G4 (with Velocity Engine! er, AltiVec unit)will totally spank a P4 twice its clockspeed in RC5.
So the *good* reviewers out there run a battery of tests, including graphics, processor-intensive apps, memory-intesive apps, etc. to get a good, holistic representation of performance. They can then replicate that battery of tests on other hardware to compare performance with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
If a company says, "We used our own IntelMark tests to determine that we are the fastest processor ever," that's marketing crap. If [H]ardOCP says "We ran the P4 and the Athlon XP though 58 tests developed by third parties, and here are the results:"... I think you can use those numbers for educating yourself before making a purchase with some degree of confidence.
Personally, I've been running an Athlon XP 1600+ (1400MHz) since the month the processor was released. It spanks my friend's P4 1.7GHz hands down, both in the "gaming benchmark" department, as well as the "look and feel" of the system during use. One unfair advantage I have, though, is that my system was built with 512 megs of DDR RAM, and he has the same amount in PC133. DDR support for the P4 is a "recent" development compared with the Athlon platform.
I mean, let's face it... if you're building a system (which I'm sure many of us here do), how can you beat a $52 ECS K7S5A from NewEgg, coupled with a $120 Athlon XP 1700+ processor (boxed with heatsink and 3 year warranty), versus $100 for a P4 mobo and $165 for the processor? Even the MHz disparity between the rating and the actual clock is lost in price/performance comparisons.
The only people buying Intel are big OEMs and end users who still haven't given up the idea that AMD is an "incompatible clone processor." (Yes, some of these clueless folks still exist, brainwashed by marketeers during the K5 days.)
Intel is clearly running scared on the news that AMD has taken nearly thirty percent of the desktop x86 processor sales market. Their monopoly is in jeopardy; so quick! let's buy some negative press for the competition.
(Full disclosure: I own stock in neither company, and run both platforms at home: AMD and Intel.)
I think the issue becomes more like what they preach in churches: Hate the sin, love the sinner. Only in reverse here.
We love the technology; we give it oohs! and ahhs! all day because it's cool, and it can provide us much entertainment.
He hate the controllers (or self-appointed "owners" of the technology, becuase they try to enforce stupid, moronic, idiot, fascist, out-of-touch, corporate-greed-induced controls on the technology that we crave.
Does that allow both schools of thought to peacefully co-exist? Good. I'm on my to Jerusalem...
Sad, because as a general rule, despite all of our graphics and sound advances, todays games just don't have the greatness that could be found a decade ago in EGA.
Don't be swallowed by nostalgia here.
*NOBODY* spent more time playing Kings Quest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (I was in college by 6, I think) than I did. And I loved them; I still own the collection that was released on CDs a dew years back.
But I don't think King Graham et al. hold a candle to a good, solid 20-minute round of Quake III Team Arena (Capture The Flag mode).
I know what you're saying; I don't find Return to Wolfenstein (nor CounterStrike) to be as engaging as Q3 for some reason, but I'm not going to let meself believe that it's because Wolfenstein sucks. It just means I have different tastes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure many of you have played "Bullshit Bingo," AKA Buzzword Bingo, where you go to meetings and mark off words and phrases such as "Going Forward," "Core Business," "Changing Paradigms," etc.
How about a new one for playing in the car or reading the paper? Marking off stuff like cars that have fifteen american flags on them. Or reading some off the wall article that has sudden relevence because of the "Post-9/11 Era." Or discussing the way it is impacted by the "War on Terror."
Bonus points for stores that put "God Bless America!" signs up, not only in their windows but on that giant illuminated sign with the two golden arches on it.
Sorry to be overly cynnical; it's a nice thought... but it really seems to ringing hollow now. People have just gone on about their comporate business, even if they have "heightened insecurity" in their personal lives. This book probably has interesting info in it, but now everybody is marketing it with "a sense of urgency due to the new world we live in."
If I hear "In the wake of September 11th..." one more time, I'm gonna punch a broadcaster in the nose.
Now if you'll pardon me, in the wake of my bottled water and NutriGrain bar breakfast, I'm going to get a hot bowl of soup for lunch in downtown Cleveland.
Thank goodness that they found some Hydrogen in the earth's crust! We were almost running out of dihydrogen monoxide and atmospheric sources!
(Yes, I know it's more costly to derive [H] from other molecules than to recover from the earth and store for immediate use. It's called "vain attempt at humor.")
Please disregard the parent post. It is WRONG, the hubs/switches are not cheap, I have been edumacted by my peers. :)
The flogging will happen later, when my karma gets updated.
The cards are well priced for home use, and CAT5E cabling is cheap too. The problem with gigabit ethernet is not the cards, it is the lack of switches or even plain hubs at an affordable price point...
Funny, this gets modded up as Informative, while my earlier post listing inexpensive 8-port gigabit switches languishes unmoderated.
Slashdot moderation, yet another mystery of the universe. Even after reading the guidelines twice, I can't figure out how other people manage to interpret them the way they do.
I checked out the cards, and yes you can get them cheap, but what about switches? You figure they're still uber-pricey too, right?
:)
Nope... apparently Pricewatch.com has D-Link 8-port 10/100/1000baseT auto-detect switches listed for under $150! (I've been most happy with my D-Link DI-804 Router/firewall/switch for $79.)
Is this the normal "cheaper as tech gets more widespread and easier to manufacture," and do you think maybe Apple making gigabit ethernet a standard feature had something to do with it?
Don't you think Brendan Fraser should get a few props? School Ties, Mrs. Winterbourne, With Honors, Gods and Monsters... hell even The Scout! All were what I would consider A-list acting performances. ESPECIALLY his "big break" in School Ties, as the star Jew on a christian Ivy-prep football team? It was awesome; he could have been bigger than Brad Pitt. Lord knows he looks better and is BUILT better.
But what was he thinking when someone talked him into crap like George of the Jungle and Encino Man? Pauly Shore actually passed as entertainment in this country in the dark ages of the early 90s?!? I can almost Forgive The Mummy Returns because the original was a hit and he was doing a follow-up, but he got seriously wronged by an agent several times in his career. *Cough* Dudley Do-Right *Cough*
I am a straight married man, but I don't know of a stright woman or gay man who can look into Brendan's eyes on screen, when he's laying it all out on the line, and not get all gushy inside. One of my co-workers named her son Brendan for this very reason.
Anyways, enough gushing, back to the discussion.
With all due respect to Mr. Hawking, idle chit-chat is neither easy for him, nor something he has shown that he is good at... for (one would think) obvious reasons.
I hate integrated components. If they die, or if something faster/cooler/better comes out that doesn't leave me enough slots to upgrade...
Let's say you put in an Audigy in place of on-board sound.
And a PCI gigabit Ethernet NIC instead of the on-board 10/100.
And a GeForce4 in the AGP 4x slot.
You still have 10 USB ports, two firewire ports, 6 IDE headers (for 12 devices). You can put anything you want in that final PCI slot. Unless you're building a server or a videa-editing center with multiple PCI cards, you're going to be hard pressed to find a way to obsolete this board in the next 48 months.
This is pretty much the standard 'slow news day' Internet horror story which CNN|the BBC | Fox | Time |whoever comes out with once or twice a year. Identity thieves use IRC. Film at 11.
In the US, this is typically scripted as:
"And tonight, we have a report that you won't want to miss... it might just save you or a loved one from a financial nightmare. Online hackers stealing YOUR credit card numbers?!? Stay tuned for tonight's report..."
Maybe the problem is that I was 13 when I saw the movie... and I had a crush on Leah Thompson, and the movie took place in Cleveland (where I live)... but I thought Howard the Duck was "entertaining." Who can forget the bachelor duck reading about hot chicks in PlayDuck, or the principal from Ferris Beuller turning into an alien and sticking his tongue in the cigarette lighter socket to "power up?"
Howard: "Where am I?"
Leah: "Cleveland."
Howard: "What a name for a planet."
Leah: "Are you lost?"
Howard: "Do you think if I had a choice, I'd be stuck in CLEVE-LAND?"
Guess you had to be there.
I never said legal precedent... but they can go to other corps where someone dimes out the company and say "XYZ corp did the same thing, and they were willing to settle for $1 million. Either pay us 1.2 mils or we 'own3rZ j00 in da c0ur7z.'"
I recall a scene with the hobbled Enterpise-D is tilting towards re-entry in "Generations." The emotion-chipped Data says it best:
Oh Shit.
Now these people have means and precedent to do this to any corp where they can pay off someone to squeal.
It's no wonder he has this behavior; you're at OSU. When I was attending that God Forseaken Hellhole in 1994-95, my roommates routinely terrorized me and my property.. because I had a comp-u-tar and it was on the phone (14.4 to a shell account) and what if their grandad had a heart attack at 1am and I was online? So I moved to another room only to have a physically abusive roommate in addition to two more tech-hating yokels from rural Oh-Hi-Uh. This was on North campus where "all the engineering kids are!" Engineers who hated computers. I wonder where THEY are today.
:)
In the mean time, I started playing Magic: The Gathering with a few Graduate students. (This was my first RPG-ish experience... no D&D, no Final Fantasy or anything before that.) Next thing you know I am scrounging for cheap common cards and playing M:TG about 12 hours a day in the Union and the Grad dorm lobby, with another 5 hours spent in the computer labs. I slept between 9am and 4pm. Class was a freaking joke; 400 kids in a class, none of the TAs speaking english as a native language. I hated it, and I was 18 and knew everything. *GRIN* These "anti-social" behaviors only made my roommates hate me more.
By chance I found a girl online with like interests... at the University of Wyoming. We started ytalk'ing all the time, and emailing. I flunked out of OSU, said "see ya!" to my parents who were "so disappointed because I had so much potential," and moved to Wyoming. Married my Internet sweetie. Spent three years cutting my teeth doing desktop support, PC/printer repair, and data wiring.
I came back to Ohio with my wife and draw a salary that is comparable to the ones my idiot roommates were bragging that they would have someday, only WITHOUT the $50,000 in student debt, and five years in a classroom trying to figure out if the Teaching Assistant said "pigeons" or "business."
The difference between me and this guy is that this guy has given up on his gf, which is just plain WRONG. College age is the best time to get good nookie. This guy has taken an entertaining habit to an extreme that crimps your style.
On the other hand, Lord Ender, you have to ask yoruself... are you really a geek, or a geek-oppressor?
Yes, but when do you apply it? Moderations may be ongoing. Yes, the bulk of moderation happens in the first 6 hours, but what if someone comes along three days later and mods you... you've already (at some arbitrary time) applied your "article score" to your Karma. How does this fit?
Can you break this sort of problem down that easily? I would think there is too much interdependency between cells - which would mean a lot of communication needed across the network.
Not only that, but unlike SETI@Home, each calculation is dependent on the data generated by the previous set of calculations. S@H is just crunching blocks looking for data, much like D.net.
The nuclear simulations require an immense amount of data to be continuously generated as you go through each millisecond of the explosion. Or nanosecond? However small you need each time dataframe to be in nuclear physics.
What IS the sound of a 12-teraflop machine crashing with the power of 20 megatons? :)
Oh wait, their massive-parallel (Beowulf cluster, if you will) was probably running AIX, nevermind.
But it would be nice to see the "fallout" of such a huge bluescreen.
(-1, Bad pun.)
Is the relaxing of moral views really such a good thing? Today we accept cloning. Tomorrow we accept euthanasia of clones who are not healthy. The day after, we accept killing old people who are not healthy. Then we accept killing all people with uncurable diseases. Sure, we have strenuous procedures and laws for all of these, but we're still guilty of clensing the human race. (Rememeber Hitler?)
:)
I'm going to follow my own advice and post a thoughtful (not necessary correct, but thoughtful) response, rather than using my remaining mod points in this thread.
While the "logic" you use in your argument does appear to come off as FUD, I think there might be a kernal of truth in there. The difference between a slow societal acceptance of genetic cleansing technology (a la Gattaca) and Hitler is just that; slow human acceptance. While progressives who dared to argue with The Church that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe may have been put in jail for herecy; today we accept it as fact through technological advancements and observations, and a little bit of free-thought by those not blinded by faith.
Will we also one day accept that fetuses (fetii?) who are imperfect are "disposable?" That those who are no longer capable of caring for themselves are guaranteed the right to death? (Insert Humor: Obligatory Futurama reference to the Suicide Booths that Frye mistakes for phone booths.
These are deep questions that we ponder today, where any opinion is criticized for being either immoral (by the right) or Luddism (by the left). I will express no opinion here except this: I promise that if the day comes where society does accept genetic cleansing as the norm, none of us posting here today will be in a physical condition required to argue.
Keep in mind I'm not going into the cloning aspect here, as that is happening today. We're not yet worrying about the rights and wrongs of raising organ farms, or self-determination of clones, etc. That is a messy ball of wax that we probably WILL see play out during the next several lifetimes.
APL BPL CPL DPL EPL FPL GPL HPL IPL...
I work at a bank where we still (duh) use big iron. One thing you DO NOT want to do is IPL.
It's very bad, especially if someone tries to do it while people in other timezones are usings those mainframe apps!
(For the uninitiated, IPL = Initial Program Load. It basically means restart the whole group of apps on the machine. In the old days, I'm betting this meant rewind the tape and reboot the room... er, mainframe.)
Are they able to carry coconuts?
Only two birds at a time, with a good tailwind.
(Wakka wakka wakka! Don't you just love April Fool's Day? Or Poisson d'Avril, if you prefer. Something about the frenchies sticking fish on peoples' backs just sounds unsettling, though. But all of this is definitely much better than trying to figure out the terrorism in Israel. As Dave Barry said, in fifty million years, when all the humans have died out, there will be cockroaches in the middle east who still hate a different group of cockroaches in the middle east; they're just never going to have peace.)
Intel gives big price breaks to OEMs for large quantities. On the open market, AMD is a much more valuable buy.
:P
And with respect to your overclocking claims... I do overclock video cards, and I used to overclock Celerons. 333 runs at 500; 600 runs at 900, etc. But look at overclocking an Athlon, where you connect the L1 bridges and choose a multiplier (and voltage) in the BIOS.
What do you do with a P4? You typically can't change the multiplier; you have to set the FSB way up. And since you're doing that, you're generally changing your memory clocks, AGP and PCI bus speeds. Oh and you'll probably end up modding your mobo to increase the DDR voltage settings.
How many people are going to do that?
PS _ I stand by my "lousy board," the ECS K7S5A. It may be inexpensive, but everyone's performance and stability tests, it comes out *just* behind the
VIA 266A. I've had mine for six months with no issue, and I have on-Board 100baseT.
And I can put a GeForce4 Ti 4600 in it, UNLIKE the Epox board!
Thirty percent ? Maybe I'm living in a small, radically different world, but Intel owns more like 98% of the business market, and 2% of the home market (yes, I pulled that out of my ass). Everyone I know runs Athlons and Durons. Nobody's crazy enough to pay 3x the price for an Intel chip that ultimately does the same job, plus or minus 5% in terms of performance. The only people who have Intel cpus, have Celerons, and they bought them at Future Shop or WalMart or some other twit store.
:)
AMD's press release describing sales last quarter showed that they had 28% of the shipped processors for desktop PCs.
This is, of course, because a good majority of store-bought PCs are still Intel, and a good portion of all processors shipped still go into store-bought systems.
You and I may build systems, but most people don't. At least for now.
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.
... I think you can use those numbers for educating yourself before making a purchase with some degree of confidence.
This is true for proprietary benchmarks run by companies against their own products.
But for benchmarking apps developed by third parties and used by fourth parties to compare and review hardware, I don't think this rings true. Things like Q3bench (which checks real-world performance by running timedemos) and MadOnion 3DMark (which tests graphics capabilities and performance in various areas) are very handy for testing video cards by review sites.
I mean, a lot of people have used Prime95 and RC5-64 clients to review processors over the past four years, since they are so CPU-intensive. (Er, they take 100% of available CPU cycles.) Therefore, you can judge how well certain processors can handle certain types of operations by seeing how many blocks they can crunch in an hour.
The problem is that certain apps are going to run better on certain processors because of a harmony between the processor design and the heavily-used commands in the app. Like the fact that a G4 (with Velocity Engine! er, AltiVec unit)will totally spank a P4 twice its clockspeed in RC5.
So the *good* reviewers out there run a battery of tests, including graphics, processor-intensive apps, memory-intesive apps, etc. to get a good, holistic representation of performance. They can then replicate that battery of tests on other hardware to compare performance with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
If a company says, "We used our own IntelMark tests to determine that we are the fastest processor ever," that's marketing crap. If [H]ardOCP says "We ran the P4 and the Athlon XP though 58 tests developed by third parties, and here are the results:"
Personally, I've been running an Athlon XP 1600+ (1400MHz) since the month the processor was released. It spanks my friend's P4 1.7GHz hands down, both in the "gaming benchmark" department, as well as the "look and feel" of the system during use. One unfair advantage I have, though, is that my system was built with 512 megs of DDR RAM, and he has the same amount in PC133. DDR support for the P4 is a "recent" development compared with the Athlon platform.
I mean, let's face it... if you're building a system (which I'm sure many of us here do), how can you beat a $52 ECS K7S5A from NewEgg, coupled with a $120 Athlon XP 1700+ processor (boxed with heatsink and 3 year warranty), versus $100 for a P4 mobo and $165 for the processor? Even the MHz disparity between the rating and the actual clock is lost in price/performance comparisons.
The only people buying Intel are big OEMs and end users who still haven't given up the idea that AMD is an "incompatible clone processor." (Yes, some of these clueless folks still exist, brainwashed by marketeers during the K5 days.)
Intel is clearly running scared on the news that AMD has taken nearly thirty percent of the desktop x86 processor sales market. Their monopoly is in jeopardy; so quick! let's buy some negative press for the competition.
(Full disclosure: I own stock in neither company, and run both platforms at home: AMD and Intel.)
I think the issue becomes more like what they preach in churches: Hate the sin, love the sinner. Only in reverse here.
We love the technology; we give it oohs! and ahhs! all day because it's cool, and it can provide us much entertainment.
He hate the controllers (or self-appointed "owners" of the technology, becuase they try to enforce stupid, moronic, idiot, fascist, out-of-touch, corporate-greed-induced controls on the technology that we crave.
Does that allow both schools of thought to peacefully co-exist? Good. I'm on my to Jerusalem...
Sad, because as a general rule, despite all of our graphics and sound advances, todays games just don't have the greatness that could be found a decade ago in EGA.
Don't be swallowed by nostalgia here.
*NOBODY* spent more time playing Kings Quest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (I was in college by 6, I think) than I did. And I loved them; I still own the collection that was released on CDs a dew years back.
But I don't think King Graham et al. hold a candle to a good, solid 20-minute round of Quake III Team Arena (Capture The Flag mode).
I know what you're saying; I don't find Return to Wolfenstein (nor CounterStrike) to be as engaging as Q3 for some reason, but I'm not going to let meself believe that it's because Wolfenstein sucks. It just means I have different tastes.