Seriously, grow up. It's just a CPU. Intel's CPUs offer more bang for the buck than IBM's PowerPC CPUs.
I'm not convinced that's true. PowerPC is used in a lot of embedded systems. The next generation of video games consoles are exclusively PowerPC. I've got PowerPC chips in my household appliances and various comms devices. Even the PowerPC design allows functionality to be optioned out of the fab to save money during printing.
All of this evidence suggests to me that the PowerPC is excellent value for money. Embedded designers will redesign an entire board to save $1 per unit during manufacturing. If the PowerPC wasn't the best "bang for buck" then I'd expect to see it used far less often. Basically this is the same argument for ARM. The ARM is not a fast processor, but ARM is used in lots of systems because it represents exceedingly good "bang for buck".
I don't disagree with you about the sluggish performance of PowerPC. If you can afford it then you will get much better performance from a P4 than from a G5. The Apple fanboys annoy the hell out of me as well. I'm running a G4 here but I've no allegiance to the cult of Apple.
If the story is true, then Apple recognizes this and realizes that they can make more money with Intel CPUs while giving their customer base better performance.
The story is almost certainly false. They don't give any names nor any quotes and even say that IBM and Apple were not available for comments. There are numerous technical hurdles involved in CPU transitioning and although Apple managed it once before, the transition almost kill them. The third party vendors nearly committed mutiny the last time.
Re:Are CRTs on the way out?
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Don't try to convert response time into refresh rate. The response time is how long it takes a pixel to change colors, and the refresh rate is how often the monitor gives instructions to a pixel. The two measurements are not related, and you cannot find one given the other.
Even worse, the response time is the best-case for the smallest transition for the fastest subpixel element. The actual response time varies for the red, green and blue subpixels. It also varies depending on whether the subpixel starts completely off or completely on. It also takes longer to transition from fully off to fully on than it would from fully off to slightly on.
The response time should be given as a range. Instead they give you the best response and people falsely extrapolate refresh times, as the GP did.
Well, the difference is that you clearly like Disney-endings while most people seem to agree that a tragic ending would have been more powerful and enjoyable.
I disagree. The "tragic ending' most critics wanted is that the movie ends with the boy robot frozen at the bottom of the sea. I think that's a hackneyed ending fit only for B-grade movies and Star Trek episodes. The "Disney ending" as you call it was by far the more tragic ending.
The movie begins when a mother loses her real child to cancer and the boy robot is brought home to fill the void. However she finds the robot very difficult to accept. It has odd behaviour and inhuman mannerisms. She's obviously uncomfortable around it, to the extent that she hides from it and is scared when it is around. The mother never learns to love the robot, despite the boy robot's hardwired love for her.
When the aliens discover the frozen boy robot they build a simulacrum of the mother. The mother simulacrum does show affection to the boy robot and finally "he" is happy. However the simulacrum is effectively a robot. The tragedy of the story is that the boy robot was never loved by any real human; he was only ever loved by another robot. Humans tried to use or exploit him in some way, only seeing the robot as a tool to be abused for their own gain. It took another robot to show the boy the unconditional love and affection he desired.
I for one loved AI. It is an excellent movie adaptation of Aldiss' original story.
The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost.
They put the symmetric key that encrypted the BIOS hidden inside the northbridge. There was a pretend key in the TSOP to throw everybody in the wrong direction. Bunnie tapped the high-speed bus (hypertransport) and he saw the key magically "change" when transferred from TSOP to CPU. That was the end of that.
I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
The mistake in the Xbox was using symmetric keys. Once the key was known it was possible to flash the TSOP with an encrypted patched BIOS, or replace the TSOP with a modchip. With asymmetric encryption this wouldn't have been possible. So I fully expect the next Xbox will have asymmetric encryption with the public key stuffed into the northbridge to prevent tampering.
NB: software mods use a buffer overflow on the hard disk to patch the BIOS after it has been decrypted. A similar exploit will be possible even with asymmetric encryption.
Now, instead of thinking you're cool for making that post, please name one game with higher production values than Half Life 2 that was developed by open source people.
Nethack.
Ok. Thought so.
Posing a question and then immediately, without even waiting for an answer, making a snide comment to suggest that no answer will be forthcoming is a strong indication that you suck.
It was published in a Medabiliti press release several years ago. Pamela Jones was listed as the contact person. Google for the number and you'll find it. Presumably that's all O'Gara did; googled for Pamela Jones and found the press release.
I commented on this in the last O'Gara thread. Try this comment.
(Seems fishy to me that the same phone number was used by PJ to call into the SCO press conference a few weeks ago.
So I've been here a while, and I don't remember this "site where intelligent people shared ideas". I'm trying to figure out when Slashdot was supposedly like that, since when I started reading people were already complaining about how it had deteriorated into a cesspool of nonstop idiocy.
Will anyone older than me testify that Slashdot was once a hallowed institution of platonic debate?
It has never been a hallowed institution of platonic debate. If anything, the comments section was much worse before the moderation system was added.
However the quality of stories has definitely declined.
I have to agree with Dvorak on this one. I have been saying this for months on Slashdot and usually get modded to troll or flamebait for it. The fanatic members of the linux community are going to bring it to it's knees. I am an IT professional who has made a living in this fashion for 20 years. Yea, that's a long time for IT. I don't flaunt it, because it actually means nothing. I do however know that to be successful, you HAVE TO be able to weight the pros and cons objectively on every software/hardware decision that is made. Quite frankly, those decisions end up being an MS product much of the time. I am not saying MS's products are great, heck I am not even saying that they work decently sometimes, but it is necessary in many cases, due to the constraints of the software, the job/project needs and so on. It's a fact of life right now, It's not a Linux world out there,... yet.
Amen. I'm in a similar position to you - an IT consultant specialising in UNIX - and it's getting harder and harder to sell Linux to clients thanks to these obnoxious fanatics.
A few years ago I could easily walk into any client site and recommend Linux-based solutions. However recently it has become increasingly difficult to recommend Linux without the client rolling their eyes in disgust. They have been turned off by hordes of astroturfing nitwits in their own organisation. These well-meaning but hopeless Linux cheerleaders approach advocacy in entirely the wrong way. They blather on about freedom over proprietary. They insult Microsoft. They go on about low licensing fees; when in fact the cost of software licensing is so small compared to deployment and maintenance that it honestly doesn't matter. The client learns to stop listening when they hear "Linux" just to get some peace and quiet.
The in-house cheerleaders often exacerbate the problem through well-meaning but hopelessly bumbling deployments of Linux. They will tell the boss they can deploy an XYZ solution for almost $0 while promising the moon. They then proceed to pick the most obscure unsupported distributions possible, deploy them without due process, without consideration of the risks, often without any real UNIX skills under their belt, and months later their projects are going nowhere at high cost due to slipped deadlines. I get called in to resolve these "Linux disasters" as the managers like to call them. Imagine how difficult it is for me to then recommend a Linux-based solution. It can be done but it's an uphill battle.
I'm a huge fan of Linux - I've been running it at home and work since 1992 - and I've always recommended free software where it's appropriate. However my priorities place the client first and my software ideology second. If the client would be better served by Windows then Windows is what I will recommend, no matter how much I personally despise Windows. The worst problems are caused by Linux cheerleaders who recommend Linux no matter what the business actually needs.
Au contraire, and I am constantly amazed at the plethora of 16-bit programs that continue to run on kernels as recent as Windows 2000 - which is a real testament to M$FT & Intel/AMD's devotion to backwards compatibility [and which is also the lesson that FOSS types should take away from this].
Why the snide remark at the end? Linux runs 16-bit DOS programs just fine too; a program called DOSEMU does all the work.
but I don't have Cat5 running through my house, and I'm not going to setting up my Xbox next to my router. Wireless controllers are nice too.
I've spoken to a fellow gamer about wireless controllers and he didn't like them. He's tried various models on his Xbox including Mad Katz and Logitech and found them all quite laggy. Combine that with the need to recharge batteries, and the wireless controllers might well turn out to be a gimmick that people end up hating.
Who cares? If you love your old XBOX games that much, just keep it and play your old XBOX games on it. This feature seems to be just another "tick" for the marketdroids to put in the box.
For people who don't already have an Xbox, backwards compatibility is a big selling point. It means that instead of a mere 20+ games there are potentially 1000s of games at launch.
You don't have to worry about a Maureen O'Gara character coming after you and posting your private address and phone number
Maureen did not post a private phone number. Here's a comment from earlier in this story...
The only phone number in MOG's "story" was one that was published in a Medabiliti press release from 2003. I see no evidence that the number MOG did publish was a relative's number.
The MOG article is getting harder to find; it is effectively being deleted from the Internet. However here is a google cache copy. The only phone number in the article is 914-761-7423. If you google for that number you can find it in another google cache. The second cached copy is a press release submitted by Medabiliti to PR Newswire.
What MOG did was despicable - there's no doubt about that - but let's not start falsifying what she did. The facts condemn MOG enough as it is without having to make things up.
You're right about the private address though. That's irresponsible journalism; something I'd expect of Fox News or 60 Minutes.
you can't put donuts on the table in the break room and then complain when someone eats them.
Complaining about it shows a great lack of grace.
Why is shit like that being moderated up? The KHTML guys aren't upset that Apple ate the donuts. The KHTML guys are upset that Apple fanboys are saying "rah rah Apple, they're contributing donuts too". Apple is contributing inedible crumbs, not donuts.
What I did say is that sometimes I will sense some minor occurence that will happen a few seconds later, and I stand by that.
I'm not calling you a liar. I certainly agree that you believe you sense things before they happen. I've experienced the same thing.
And I don't buy your "incorrect timestamp" thing. It isn't just a vague intuition, a concrete, conscious thought will sometimes appear, and a concrete, visible or audible manifestation of it will appear a few seconds later in my environment. It isn't a period of milliseconds, it is a quatifiable period that is easily 5 or 10 seconds at times.
The point is, the only "proof" you have that it was a quantifiable period of 5 or 10 seconds is your memory. If your memory is mistaken, then what proof do you really have? Perhaps your memory of thinking of the word 10 seconds earlier is false.
I'm not saying there isn't any possible alternative explanation besides the fact that I can predict the future, there may be, but yours is not it IMO.
It's not my explanation. It was in a New Scientist magazine from a few months ago. Some scientists were devising (or had devised?) tests for the hypothesis. There was a lot of backing for the idea from the theoretical scientists.
Or perhaps I only remember reading that New Scientist article:-)
Actually, I do wake up just before the alarm clock goes off. Most times about 2 minutes (it's set for 7:00 and I find myself waking up at 6:58 a lot).
I wake up before the alarm as regular as clockwork (zing!) but I've found the explanation. I used to think that maybe I had a bodyclock that was as accurate as the alarm clock. However my partner tells me that about an hour before the alarm goes off I start to drift into and out of sleep. Apparently I open my eyes and check the time and then grunt and go back to sleep. I don't remember any of that - I only remember waking up at 6:58 with 2 minutes before the alarm - but it makes sense. I'm in a dopey state and although I'm alert enough to check the time and make decisions about going back to sleep, I'm not alert enough to remember doing so.
I have often experienced something like a sense of what would happen 5 or 10 seconds later. Sometimes a word or phrase will suddenly come in to my mind for no particular reason and then several seconds later I will hear someone say that on TV or will read it in whatever I'm reading.
It's a form of deja vu. One explanation I have read is that your brain doesn't have a very good sense of time. You conjure the thought of deja vu after you hear the word being played in a car. However your mind thinks you conjured the thought up 10 seconds ago. Your memory assigns an incorrect timestamp to the thought, so you think it was something you've been pondering for the past 10 seconds when in reality you've only been pondering it for a few milliseconds.
Another reasonable explanation is coincidence. You think and forget 100s of thoughts a minute. It's inevitable that every now and then a second source of information will prod the same thought as one you've just recently had. The more sources of information you have, the more likely you are to hit a match.
but it's definitely there and is real.
If you're alluding to your as-yet unproven psychic powers, I entertain the possibility of psychic ability but I consider it very unlikely.
Is it worth sticking out the few weeks I already told him I worked, or should I just cut my losses and leave early?
You are measured by your own actions, not by your boss's. If you made a promise to stay then you should stay. Only if there is the real and imminent threat of harm should you leave early.
If you do the right thing then you can hold your head high when you leave.
Remember to keep separate the American citizens from the American Government(TM). The citizens are a fun-loving group, who generally like Canadians, Europeans, Asians, and Australians very much. The latter is a sock puppet for the corporation.
The USA is a democratic republic. The citizens are entirely responsible for the (mis)behaviour of their elected government.
This is one of the features I detest in Windows XP. The login screen appears early but the desktop crawls and splutters while loading, due to all the background activity as services start. The taskbar noticeably renders itself; green bar first, then the outline of some buttons, then the systray slowly loads a few icons. Argh. Click on the Start button and the gigantic Start Menu appears, but it randomly DISAPPEARS before I get the chance to pick a program. Even worse is when you're 3 levels deep in the Programs menu and it decides to throw the Start Menu away for some unknown reason. The mere act of starting Outlook has a 10-20 second pause before the interface slowly renders.
I've clocked the machine and it takes 5-6 minutes after logging in with my smartcard before the machine stops paging. This isn't a slouch of a machine either. It's a P3-700 with 512MB RAM.
Recently I noticed that Ubuntu (I run a hybrid of Debian and Ubuntu) has been loading gdm early in the boot sequence. It's similarly painful. I've got autologin turned on and I can now see Gnome Terminal and the Panel rendering while my desktop loads. It used to be *BANG* there it was. If it pisses me off enough I'll change the priority for the init script. In my opinion, it's a regression from the way things used to be.
You're not a totally unbiased foreigner. If you were totally unbiased, you'd not say things like "To the rest of the world they both look right-wing" - after all, that implies a significant bias toward the left...
Unbiassed in the sense that I don't have a preference for either of your two dominant parties. You're a semantic pragmatic. You might want to recognise that and take steps to be careful in your interpretations.
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I'm not convinced that's true. PowerPC is used in a lot of embedded systems. The next generation of video games consoles are exclusively PowerPC. I've got PowerPC chips in my household appliances and various comms devices. Even the PowerPC design allows functionality to be optioned out of the fab to save money during printing.
All of this evidence suggests to me that the PowerPC is excellent value for money. Embedded designers will redesign an entire board to save $1 per unit during manufacturing. If the PowerPC wasn't the best "bang for buck" then I'd expect to see it used far less often. Basically this is the same argument for ARM. The ARM is not a fast processor, but ARM is used in lots of systems because it represents exceedingly good "bang for buck".
I don't disagree with you about the sluggish performance of PowerPC. If you can afford it then you will get much better performance from a P4 than from a G5. The Apple fanboys annoy the hell out of me as well. I'm running a G4 here but I've no allegiance to the cult of Apple.
The story is almost certainly false. They don't give any names nor any quotes and even say that IBM and Apple were not available for comments. There are numerous technical hurdles involved in CPU transitioning and although Apple managed it once before, the transition almost kill them. The third party vendors nearly committed mutiny the last time.
Even worse, the response time is the best-case for the smallest transition for the fastest subpixel element. The actual response time varies for the red, green and blue subpixels. It also varies depending on whether the subpixel starts completely off or completely on. It also takes longer to transition from fully off to fully on than it would from fully off to slightly on.
The response time should be given as a range. Instead they give you the best response and people falsely extrapolate refresh times, as the GP did.
A3. Hockey practise.
What, you mean completely unfunny?
Am I the only /.er who has never laughed at a userfriendly comic.
Because they look like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Yes, I know they're really supermecha. I only call them aliens to annoy you :-)
I disagree. The "tragic ending' most critics wanted is that the movie ends with the boy robot frozen at the bottom of the sea. I think that's a hackneyed ending fit only for B-grade movies and Star Trek episodes. The "Disney ending" as you call it was by far the more tragic ending.
The movie begins when a mother loses her real child to cancer and the boy robot is brought home to fill the void. However she finds the robot very difficult to accept. It has odd behaviour and inhuman mannerisms. She's obviously uncomfortable around it, to the extent that she hides from it and is scared when it is around. The mother never learns to love the robot, despite the boy robot's hardwired love for her.
When the aliens discover the frozen boy robot they build a simulacrum of the mother. The mother simulacrum does show affection to the boy robot and finally "he" is happy. However the simulacrum is effectively a robot. The tragedy of the story is that the boy robot was never loved by any real human; he was only ever loved by another robot. Humans tried to use or exploit him in some way, only seeing the robot as a tool to be abused for their own gain. It took another robot to show the boy the unconditional love and affection he desired.
I for one loved AI. It is an excellent movie adaptation of Aldiss' original story.
And PKZIP was a descendant of ARC. Guess what, ARC was open source. Wikipedia Knows Everything
They put the symmetric key that encrypted the BIOS hidden inside the northbridge. There was a pretend key in the TSOP to throw everybody in the wrong direction. Bunnie tapped the high-speed bus (hypertransport) and he saw the key magically "change" when transferred from TSOP to CPU. That was the end of that.
The mistake in the Xbox was using symmetric keys. Once the key was known it was possible to flash the TSOP with an encrypted patched BIOS, or replace the TSOP with a modchip. With asymmetric encryption this wouldn't have been possible. So I fully expect the next Xbox will have asymmetric encryption with the public key stuffed into the northbridge to prevent tampering.
NB: software mods use a buffer overflow on the hard disk to patch the BIOS after it has been decrypted. A similar exploit will be possible even with asymmetric encryption.
Nethack.
Posing a question and then immediately, without even waiting for an answer, making a snide comment to suggest that no answer will be forthcoming is a strong indication that you suck.
It was published in a Medabiliti press release several years ago. Pamela Jones was listed as the contact person. Google for the number and you'll find it. Presumably that's all O'Gara did; googled for Pamela Jones and found the press release.
I commented on this in the last O'Gara thread. Try this comment.
Take off the tin-foil hat :-)
It has never been a hallowed institution of platonic debate. If anything, the comments section was much worse before the moderation system was added.
However the quality of stories has definitely declined.
Amen. I'm in a similar position to you - an IT consultant specialising in UNIX - and it's getting harder and harder to sell Linux to clients thanks to these obnoxious fanatics.
A few years ago I could easily walk into any client site and recommend Linux-based solutions. However recently it has become increasingly difficult to recommend Linux without the client rolling their eyes in disgust. They have been turned off by hordes of astroturfing nitwits in their own organisation. These well-meaning but hopeless Linux cheerleaders approach advocacy in entirely the wrong way. They blather on about freedom over proprietary. They insult Microsoft. They go on about low licensing fees; when in fact the cost of software licensing is so small compared to deployment and maintenance that it honestly doesn't matter. The client learns to stop listening when they hear "Linux" just to get some peace and quiet.
The in-house cheerleaders often exacerbate the problem through well-meaning but hopelessly bumbling deployments of Linux. They will tell the boss they can deploy an XYZ solution for almost $0 while promising the moon. They then proceed to pick the most obscure unsupported distributions possible, deploy them without due process, without consideration of the risks, often without any real UNIX skills under their belt, and months later their projects are going nowhere at high cost due to slipped deadlines. I get called in to resolve these "Linux disasters" as the managers like to call them. Imagine how difficult it is for me to then recommend a Linux-based solution. It can be done but it's an uphill battle.
I'm a huge fan of Linux - I've been running it at home and work since 1992 - and I've always recommended free software where it's appropriate. However my priorities place the client first and my software ideology second. If the client would be better served by Windows then Windows is what I will recommend, no matter how much I personally despise Windows. The worst problems are caused by Linux cheerleaders who recommend Linux no matter what the business actually needs.
Why the snide remark at the end? Linux runs 16-bit DOS programs just fine too; a program called DOSEMU does all the work.
I've spoken to a fellow gamer about wireless controllers and he didn't like them. He's tried various models on his Xbox including Mad Katz and Logitech and found them all quite laggy. Combine that with the need to recharge batteries, and the wireless controllers might well turn out to be a gimmick that people end up hating.
For people who don't already have an Xbox, backwards compatibility is a big selling point. It means that instead of a mere 20+ games there are potentially 1000s of games at launch.
Maureen did not post a private phone number. Here's a comment from earlier in this story...
You're right about the private address though. That's irresponsible journalism; something I'd expect of Fox News or 60 Minutes.
Why is shit like that being moderated up? The KHTML guys aren't upset that Apple ate the donuts. The KHTML guys are upset that Apple fanboys are saying "rah rah Apple, they're contributing donuts too". Apple is contributing inedible crumbs, not donuts.
I'm not calling you a liar. I certainly agree that you believe you sense things before they happen. I've experienced the same thing.
The point is, the only "proof" you have that it was a quantifiable period of 5 or 10 seconds is your memory. If your memory is mistaken, then what proof do you really have? Perhaps your memory of thinking of the word 10 seconds earlier is false.
It's not my explanation. It was in a New Scientist magazine from a few months ago. Some scientists were devising (or had devised?) tests for the hypothesis. There was a lot of backing for the idea from the theoretical scientists.
Or perhaps I only remember reading that New Scientist article :-)
I wake up before the alarm as regular as clockwork (zing!) but I've found the explanation. I used to think that maybe I had a bodyclock that was as accurate as the alarm clock. However my partner tells me that about an hour before the alarm goes off I start to drift into and out of sleep. Apparently I open my eyes and check the time and then grunt and go back to sleep. I don't remember any of that - I only remember waking up at 6:58 with 2 minutes before the alarm - but it makes sense. I'm in a dopey state and although I'm alert enough to check the time and make decisions about going back to sleep, I'm not alert enough to remember doing so.
It's a form of deja vu. One explanation I have read is that your brain doesn't have a very good sense of time. You conjure the thought of deja vu after you hear the word being played in a car. However your mind thinks you conjured the thought up 10 seconds ago. Your memory assigns an incorrect timestamp to the thought, so you think it was something you've been pondering for the past 10 seconds when in reality you've only been pondering it for a few milliseconds.
Another reasonable explanation is coincidence. You think and forget 100s of thoughts a minute. It's inevitable that every now and then a second source of information will prod the same thought as one you've just recently had. The more sources of information you have, the more likely you are to hit a match.
If you're alluding to your as-yet unproven psychic powers, I entertain the possibility of psychic ability but I consider it very unlikely.
So what? Diesel isn't the same fuel as petrol. Comparing MPG is misleading.
You are measured by your own actions, not by your boss's. If you made a promise to stay then you should stay. Only if there is the real and imminent threat of harm should you leave early.
If you do the right thing then you can hold your head high when you leave.
The USA is a democratic republic. The citizens are entirely responsible for the (mis)behaviour of their elected government.
This is one of the features I detest in Windows XP. The login screen appears early but the desktop crawls and splutters while loading, due to all the background activity as services start. The taskbar noticeably renders itself; green bar first, then the outline of some buttons, then the systray slowly loads a few icons. Argh. Click on the Start button and the gigantic Start Menu appears, but it randomly DISAPPEARS before I get the chance to pick a program. Even worse is when you're 3 levels deep in the Programs menu and it decides to throw the Start Menu away for some unknown reason. The mere act of starting Outlook has a 10-20 second pause before the interface slowly renders.
I've clocked the machine and it takes 5-6 minutes after logging in with my smartcard before the machine stops paging. This isn't a slouch of a machine either. It's a P3-700 with 512MB RAM.
Recently I noticed that Ubuntu (I run a hybrid of Debian and Ubuntu) has been loading gdm early in the boot sequence. It's similarly painful. I've got autologin turned on and I can now see Gnome Terminal and the Panel rendering while my desktop loads. It used to be *BANG* there it was. If it pisses me off enough I'll change the priority for the init script. In my opinion, it's a regression from the way things used to be.
Unbiassed in the sense that I don't have a preference for either of your two dominant parties. You're a semantic pragmatic. You might want to recognise that and take steps to be careful in your interpretations.