is the lack of rules. Or rather, even a moderately skilled GM can run the game with a bare minimum of the annoying formalisms needed for most other RPG's. The group I played with cut even the minimal 2nd ed. rules down to just the bare nub--6 clones, you have a security clearance, and treason is treasonous. Is the new addition going to be just as unencumbered?
(eg., the home desktop user still has to get around to installing a working DVD player for movies)
I got DVD playback working well in Linux before I got it working well in Windows. The software that came with my drive didn't handle subtitle/language changes properly, nor did it deal with the menus completely correctly. Both Xine and mplayer just worked.
The Windows DVD player software that is out there is overratted, as is a lot of the media playing software. Right now I have a slightly higher success rate with mplayer than I do with WMP--WMP only demuxes the AVI stream to the proper decompressor if the 3CC code is a unique identifier, which it isn't always. And then you get funny playback artifacts, or perhaps it just complains that it can't find the proper codec at all (not for lack of having them installed). mplayer seems to manage regardless.
Some areas in the states are serviced by two companies, but not many. I read a study (which I cannot find again) which showed that said areas tended to have bother lower prices and better service than the rest of the country.
But there are certian older models of Cisco gigabit switches that catch fire if you run them full load for long enough. Perhaps you can find one of them and let out the magic smoke...
The only two entities I have ever heard claim a CMM 5 are NASA and Lockheed Martin. CMM 3 is a sign of a very mature development process, and only rarely reached. 5 is almost unattainable. The vast majority of software, even corporate produced commercial software, is written in a CMM 2 or lower environment. Basically, you are profering that there is a viewpoint that essencially all computer programming is shady, immoral, and illegal.
On the other hand, from empirical evidence, none of Microsoft's products are developed at a CMM of 5. Does that mean we can assume their stuff is shady, immoral, and illegal?
I'm TA'ing a senior level networking class, and didn't have the books used here. After the first meeting with the prof, I walked out with over $400 in free textbooks. Didn't cost her anything, because they were publisher freebies. She has stacks of Tanenbaum, Stallings, and Rosen sitting in her office, and was glad to be rid of a few. Last semester I was TA for a theory class, and the prof got tired of storing his free copies of CLRS--each of the TAs got one, and about ten lucky students who picked them up from the pile in front of his office.
I view it as partial payback for the semester I bought over $600 in books--this coming from me buying used, shopping online, and even buying internationally.
Technically it isn't legal to import a copywrited work in such a manner. Or, more often, it is illegal for the exporter. See the recent Reg article (http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/35022.html) for a recent case about this. I know some of the textbooks I've gotten from afar (India, Sri Lanka, and United Arab Emirates) have had imprints related to the illegality of exporting them.
Specifically, my copy of "Compilers, Principles, Techniques and Tools" (the Dragon book) says "This edition is manufactured in India and is authorized for sale only in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Napal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives." Not that this kept me from buying it. The list price in India was 395 rupees, or $8.71. Add in international express shipping (much more than the book--~$30 minimum) and the seller's profit (another $10), and I got a $85 new book for $50. Still in English, page for page identical to the US version.
The cost of long-haul bandwidth, especially in the US, is insanely cheap. There are thousands upon thousands of miles of unlit fibre strung across the continent, available for purchase at fire-sale prices. Of course, nobody's buying because there is long-haul capacity to spare and then some. The cost to light it (end-point equipment) are fixed based on the endpoints, not on the length (although it is expensive). The cost to run it, while proportional to the length, is nothing compared to the cost of laying it in the first place, or lighting it once laid.
Most of the trouble with WorldCom was that they were lying about their network growth. In response, every other carrier was sinking vast sums of money into their networks, and every Tom, Dick, and Jane with VC and a backhoe was laying new long-haul fibre. At the same time, advances in technology was pushing the amount of data you could push through a strand throught the roof. All existing routes could be (and many were ) upgraded for just the cost of new end equipment--no new fibre necessary.
In the end, it became clear that this capacity wasn't being used. Most of the fibre laid was left unlit, because there were no buyers for the potential capacity. Much of it has been sold at bankruptcy auctions. If you find you need more network capacity from New York to Chicago, say, you have multiple cheap options. You can buy new endpoint equipment, thereby increasing how much you can shove through your existing fibre. You can buy already lit fibre cheap from small-time networks that are going under. You can buy unlit fibre from failed startups, and plug your endpoint equipment into it there. Finally, you can just ask Sprint or MCI their rates, which are insane for short distances, but if you can bring a connection to their point of presence, they'll dump your traffic in whatever city you like, cheap.
The density argument only works when you talk about the density of a city. Given the fibre is already a sunk cost, there is no technological reason for the cost/bandwidth disparity the US is observing.
There are some technical reasons why + is better. It uses a much more robust scheme to record the timing information that a drive needs to properly burn. It isn't really a bastard offshoot--the original - format has a fairly direct lineage from CDR, and didn't really improve on the spec any. + did, and will probably end up dominant in the long run. Of course right now - is still ahead, so a dual format burner is probably the best bet.
My local Best Buys are so wonderfully kind to never stock anything, so I had to pay $10 more for my 411S at Circuit City. Still a real bargain.
Not only does it do 40x CD-R, it also does DVD+RW at 4x, which is faster than most of the other writers out there (they usually only handle 2x for +RW).
This review is what convinced me to finally go out and buy it. The 411S, with the original firmware, had serious issues recognizing the cheaper - media. The new firmware, "FS0F", mostly fixes this. - is more difficult to write properly, so the drive does slow down and produces not-perfect (but still few to no errors) output on some cheap - media, and other - media isn't supported. OTOH, it loves + media of all sorts, and doesn't give a crap about how cheap your CD-R/RW media is.
LiteOn is not some off brand. For a long time, they've been an OEM supplier for Dell. Indeed, my first LiteOn drive was a CD-ROM in a Dell, and it has been and still is rock solid. They've since made quite the name for themselves with their excellent CD-RW drives--among the first to support buffer-underrun protection technology, among the first to do DAO-RAW96, and among the first to correctly deal with the EMF encoding of regular bit patterns. They certainly don't have the brand recognition of Plextor, or even of any of the large electronics manufacturers, but their products are as good as Plextor, and better than the others.
Also, I believe there is the general requirement that it must have been accuratly surveyed. Comes from some nasty confusion as to who owned what during the earlier western expansion land grabs. More or less the reasoning is that if you can't describe the land that you own, you can't really be sure that you own it, and that a surveying is necessary before it can be described.
It (obviously) doesn't come up often when talking about totally unexplored land, but occasionally people have trouble transferring ownership if the deed's description isn't up to modern standards of precision. Usually the result is that somebody has to pay a surveying crew to clear up any confusion.
Ahh, good ol' Shakey. I don't know if he'll get in--the younger folk at CMU don't seem too familiar with Nilsson's work.
At IJCAI this year, I was on the WUSTL team competing in the Robot Challenge. In homage to Shakey, we had our robot, Lewis, play "Take Five" for background music, as this is the background music in the Shakey video*. CMU also sent a large contingent to participate in the Robot Challenge. Not a one of their students got the joke. Even after being told it was a reference to Shakey, I don't think anybody from CMU gave us anything other than blank looks. Some of the other people on the Grace team got it, but none of the CMU'ers. Well, at least not anybody getting their hands dirty--I believe Dani Goldberg got it.
But yes, Shakey is certainly deserving to be in the hall of fame. A lot of great achievements in robotics were realized in Shakey--he was fully autonomous, capable of rather complicated planning, and did navigation by visual landmarks. Of course, he had to think for 15 to 20 minutes between actions, hence "Take Five", but this was the late 60's. No fancy on-board computers, laser rangefinders, or probabilistic methods, but duplicating Shakey's performance from scratch is a signifigent piece of work even today.
* I believe this is the same video. My internet connection is too slow to verify, but I've never heard of another Shakey video
Not particularly. I can think of a tenured full professor who kept knocking on my office door for help with such difficult and complex programs as "tar" and "winzip". Another who thought it was the greatest thing in the world to read his email by running netscape on the departmental web-server (can you say memory leak?). It's only the CS labs that will let you install software--all the non-CS labs were locked down too tight for that. So no Napster for them, but plenty of DC for the CS majors. And if the non-CS users are so tech-dumb, why would they even think of stealing RAM from a lab computer--they don't know what RAM is. Only in engineering labs have I seen computes locked shut for the sole purpose of preventing RAM shrinkage (although the other labs have better wise up quick).
When I wrote that phrase, "punishing use", I was specifically thinking of Dr. Michael Brent at Wash U. His work is in bioinformatics. Last time I talked to the support staff there, they were bitching about how they were going to have to swipe spare drives from another system, as his students have been hitting the datasets on his RAID array so hard the drives haven't had a break. Ever. And that the delivery of replacements was delayed, so they'd already installed all of the cold spares they keep on hand for him.
I was specifically thinking about students in the operating systems classes, learning about fork() for the first time. When I TA'd it (and now still, since the sysadmins don't realize I've moved on), I would regularly get angry emails from the sysadmins, telling me to chew my students out over forkbombing various systems. No matter how nastily I'd warn them about running their labs on multi systems (stupid anyway--the other users add noise to any data you collect), at least one of the big systems would be taken down every semester.
Well, CS and EE undergrads do use EWS, but I'm a CS grad student, so I only log into EWS once in a blue moon. Yes, EWS is relatively high-quality, however, EWS is co-maintained by CRL and CITES, as far as I understand things. So, they're 50% run by the CS department.
The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.
I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.
Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).
Let's summarize the interesting facts:
CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.
So, even though they have all of the disadvantages (at least as Mr. Strauss would list them), CS/EE departments get the better end of the computing deal.
If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.
What's there to argue about? Emacs is obviously sooo much better than vi, that even the/. editors would recognize an article claiming otherwise as garbage.
although I think the only level up from Federal would be the Supreme Court
There is a Federal Appeals Circuit between the usual federal courts and the Supremes. If Verisign is so inclined, the appeals court would probably take their complaint under consideration, but would (probably) get back within a day or so saying "no". In general, appeals courts don't like to deal with temporary things. Verisign can still use such a strategy to buy a little time, but it's really only enough for them to figure out a way to buy yet more time.
FYI, CDRs contain cyanide. Don't release it by destroying them.
While cyanide is toxic, and I wouldn't recommend giving a CDR to a teething baby, it isn't that big of a deal. In a CDR it is bound up in a fairly stable form, and only in very minute quantities. Snapping the CDR into pieces doesn't "release" it from any encapsulated state--the top layer of a CDR is laughably thin, and all but water soluable. Snap it in two, or just throw it away, the end result will be the same: a trivial amount of cyanaide will be released into the environment.
P4 Emergency Edition looks like from past centruy in light of this. Ok, probably one can overclock that chip too.
Except that the P4's overall performance is more dependant on the memory subsystem than other chips. The L3 cache of the P4EE may help it scale well at higher clock speeds, but I doubt it. It's only 2MB, and it is still being fed off of the same speed memory bus with equally poor latancies no matter how much you overclock it.
It is interesting to see how much the improved memory subsystem of the FX version lets it beat the 3200+ version hands down. High clockspeed helps, but I think that the memory improvements represent a performance boost which will scale for quite some time.
The test was the Athlon 64 running a 32 bit version they compiled of the MP3 encoder vs running a 64 bit version of the same program. The "bitness" was the ONLY thing that was changed.
Not really. While the "bitness" changes, what also changes is the number of registers visible to the compiler. The x86 ISA has been dealing with internal register rename as a nasty hack to deal with a sever shortage of programmer visible registers for a long time. This goes to show that the compiler is much smarter about register allocation than a hardware renamer can ever be. I'm interested in seeing the performance of common multimedia applications once hand-written core loops are available.
And a note to those who are pointing to improved SSE2 support as the reason for the performance gain: they are comparing an AMD64 in 32 bit mode vs one in 64 bit mode. Unless GCC is being bass-ackwards, the SSE2 support should be benefiting the 32 bit mode as well. It appears that the only variables in this benchmark are the 64 bit math and the additional registers.
Slashdot Mirror
is the lack of rules. Or rather, even a moderately skilled GM can run the game with a bare minimum of the annoying formalisms needed for most other RPG's. The group I played with cut even the minimal 2nd ed. rules down to just the bare nub--6 clones, you have a security clearance, and treason is treasonous. Is the new addition going to be just as unencumbered?
(eg., the home desktop user still has to get around to installing a working DVD player for movies)
I got DVD playback working well in Linux before I got it working well in Windows. The software that came with my drive didn't handle subtitle/language changes properly, nor did it deal with the menus completely correctly. Both Xine and mplayer just worked.
The Windows DVD player software that is out there is overratted, as is a lot of the media playing software. Right now I have a slightly higher success rate with mplayer than I do with WMP--WMP only demuxes the AVI stream to the proper decompressor if the 3CC code is a unique identifier, which it isn't always. And then you get funny playback artifacts, or perhaps it just complains that it can't find the proper codec at all (not for lack of having them installed). mplayer seems to manage regardless.
Some areas in the states are serviced by two companies, but not many. I read a study (which I cannot find again) which showed that said areas tended to have bother lower prices and better service than the rest of the country.
But there are certian older models of Cisco gigabit switches that catch fire if you run them full load for long enough. Perhaps you can find one of them and let out the magic smoke...
CMM Level 5 Corporation or Government
The only two entities I have ever heard claim a CMM 5 are NASA and Lockheed Martin. CMM 3 is a sign of a very mature development process, and only rarely reached. 5 is almost unattainable. The vast majority of software, even corporate produced commercial software, is written in a CMM 2 or lower environment. Basically, you are profering that there is a viewpoint that essencially all computer programming is shady, immoral, and illegal.
On the other hand, from empirical evidence, none of Microsoft's products are developed at a CMM of 5. Does that mean we can assume their stuff is shady, immoral, and illegal?
I'm TA'ing a senior level networking class, and didn't have the books used here. After the first meeting with the prof, I walked out with over $400 in free textbooks. Didn't cost her anything, because they were publisher freebies. She has stacks of Tanenbaum, Stallings, and Rosen sitting in her office, and was glad to be rid of a few. Last semester I was TA for a theory class, and the prof got tired of storing his free copies of CLRS--each of the TAs got one, and about ten lucky students who picked them up from the pile in front of his office.
I view it as partial payback for the semester I bought over $600 in books--this coming from me buying used, shopping online, and even buying internationally.
Technically it isn't legal to import a copywrited work in such a manner. Or, more often, it is illegal for the exporter. See the recent Reg article (http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/35022.html) for a recent case about this. I know some of the textbooks I've gotten from afar (India, Sri Lanka, and United Arab Emirates) have had imprints related to the illegality of exporting them.
Specifically, my copy of "Compilers, Principles, Techniques and Tools" (the Dragon book) says "This edition is manufactured in India and is authorized for sale only in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Napal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives." Not that this kept me from buying it. The list price in India was 395 rupees, or $8.71. Add in international express shipping (much more than the book--~$30 minimum) and the seller's profit (another $10), and I got a $85 new book for $50. Still in English, page for page identical to the US version.
The cost of long-haul bandwidth, especially in the US, is insanely cheap. There are thousands upon thousands of miles of unlit fibre strung across the continent, available for purchase at fire-sale prices. Of course, nobody's buying because there is long-haul capacity to spare and then some. The cost to light it (end-point equipment) are fixed based on the endpoints, not on the length (although it is expensive). The cost to run it, while proportional to the length, is nothing compared to the cost of laying it in the first place, or lighting it once laid.
Most of the trouble with WorldCom was that they were lying about their network growth. In response, every other carrier was sinking vast sums of money into their networks, and every Tom, Dick, and Jane with VC and a backhoe was laying new long-haul fibre. At the same time, advances in technology was pushing the amount of data you could push through a strand throught the roof. All existing routes could be (and many were ) upgraded for just the cost of new end equipment--no new fibre necessary.
In the end, it became clear that this capacity wasn't being used. Most of the fibre laid was left unlit, because there were no buyers for the potential capacity. Much of it has been sold at bankruptcy auctions. If you find you need more network capacity from New York to Chicago, say, you have multiple cheap options. You can buy new endpoint equipment, thereby increasing how much you can shove through your existing fibre. You can buy already lit fibre cheap from small-time networks that are going under. You can buy unlit fibre from failed startups, and plug your endpoint equipment into it there. Finally, you can just ask Sprint or MCI their rates, which are insane for short distances, but if you can bring a connection to their point of presence, they'll dump your traffic in whatever city you like, cheap.
The density argument only works when you talk about the density of a city. Given the fibre is already a sunk cost, there is no technological reason for the cost/bandwidth disparity the US is observing.
Buy cheap gold bands.
Remember, Froogle is your friend.
I've not yet had need to run the DVD burner under linux, so it's not set up. My old LiteOn CDRW drive, however, works fine.
I wouldn't think that the brand of drive would matter much, though, given a modern IDE device. Just set the burner to be IDE/SCSI and it ought work.
There are some technical reasons why + is better. It uses a much more robust scheme to record the timing information that a drive needs to properly burn. It isn't really a bastard offshoot--the original - format has a fairly direct lineage from CDR, and didn't really improve on the spec any. + did, and will probably end up dominant in the long run. Of course right now - is still ahead, so a dual format burner is probably the best bet.
My local Best Buys are so wonderfully kind to never stock anything, so I had to pay $10 more for my 411S at Circuit City. Still a real bargain.
Not only does it do 40x CD-R, it also does DVD+RW at 4x, which is faster than most of the other writers out there (they usually only handle 2x for +RW). This review is what convinced me to finally go out and buy it. The 411S, with the original firmware, had serious issues recognizing the cheaper - media. The new firmware, "FS0F", mostly fixes this. - is more difficult to write properly, so the drive does slow down and produces not-perfect (but still few to no errors) output on some cheap - media, and other - media isn't supported. OTOH, it loves + media of all sorts, and doesn't give a crap about how cheap your CD-R/RW media is.
LiteOn is not some off brand. For a long time, they've been an OEM supplier for Dell. Indeed, my first LiteOn drive was a CD-ROM in a Dell, and it has been and still is rock solid. They've since made quite the name for themselves with their excellent CD-RW drives--among the first to support buffer-underrun protection technology, among the first to do DAO-RAW96, and among the first to correctly deal with the EMF encoding of regular bit patterns. They certainly don't have the brand recognition of Plextor, or even of any of the large electronics manufacturers, but their products are as good as Plextor, and better than the others.
Unfortunatly, my dog is still running on EDO SIMMS.
Also, I believe there is the general requirement that it must have been accuratly surveyed. Comes from some nasty confusion as to who owned what during the earlier western expansion land grabs. More or less the reasoning is that if you can't describe the land that you own, you can't really be sure that you own it, and that a surveying is necessary before it can be described.
It (obviously) doesn't come up often when talking about totally unexplored land, but occasionally people have trouble transferring ownership if the deed's description isn't up to modern standards of precision. Usually the result is that somebody has to pay a surveying crew to clear up any confusion.
Ahh, good ol' Shakey. I don't know if he'll get in--the younger folk at CMU don't seem too familiar with Nilsson's work.
At IJCAI this year, I was on the WUSTL team competing in the Robot Challenge. In homage to Shakey, we had our robot, Lewis, play "Take Five" for background music, as this is the background music in the Shakey video*. CMU also sent a large contingent to participate in the Robot Challenge. Not a one of their students got the joke. Even after being told it was a reference to Shakey, I don't think anybody from CMU gave us anything other than blank looks. Some of the other people on the Grace team got it, but none of the CMU'ers. Well, at least not anybody getting their hands dirty--I believe Dani Goldberg got it.
But yes, Shakey is certainly deserving to be in the hall of fame. A lot of great achievements in robotics were realized in Shakey--he was fully autonomous, capable of rather complicated planning, and did navigation by visual landmarks. Of course, he had to think for 15 to 20 minutes between actions, hence "Take Five", but this was the late 60's. No fancy on-board computers, laser rangefinders, or probabilistic methods, but duplicating Shakey's performance from scratch is a signifigent piece of work even today.
* I believe this is the same video. My internet connection is too slow to verify, but I've never heard of another Shakey video
Not particularly. I can think of a tenured full professor who kept knocking on my office door for help with such difficult and complex programs as "tar" and "winzip". Another who thought it was the greatest thing in the world to read his email by running netscape on the departmental web-server (can you say memory leak?). It's only the CS labs that will let you install software--all the non-CS labs were locked down too tight for that. So no Napster for them, but plenty of DC for the CS majors. And if the non-CS users are so tech-dumb, why would they even think of stealing RAM from a lab computer--they don't know what RAM is. Only in engineering labs have I seen computes locked shut for the sole purpose of preventing RAM shrinkage (although the other labs have better wise up quick).
When I wrote that phrase, "punishing use", I was specifically thinking of Dr. Michael Brent at Wash U. His work is in bioinformatics. Last time I talked to the support staff there, they were bitching about how they were going to have to swipe spare drives from another system, as his students have been hitting the datasets on his RAID array so hard the drives haven't had a break. Ever. And that the delivery of replacements was delayed, so they'd already installed all of the cold spares they keep on hand for him.
I was specifically thinking about students in the operating systems classes, learning about fork() for the first time. When I TA'd it (and now still, since the sysadmins don't realize I've moved on), I would regularly get angry emails from the sysadmins, telling me to chew my students out over forkbombing various systems. No matter how nastily I'd warn them about running their labs on multi systems (stupid anyway--the other users add noise to any data you collect), at least one of the big systems would be taken down every semester.
Well, CS and EE undergrads do use EWS, but I'm a CS grad student, so I only log into EWS once in a blue moon. Yes, EWS is relatively high-quality, however, EWS is co-maintained by CRL and CITES, as far as I understand things. So, they're 50% run by the CS department.
The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.
I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.
Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).
Let's summarize the interesting facts:
- CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
- CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
- As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
- As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
- Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
- In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.
So, even though they have all of the disadvantages (at least as Mr. Strauss would list them), CS/EE departments get the better end of the computing deal.If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.
What's there to argue about? Emacs is obviously sooo much better than vi, that even the /. editors would recognize an article claiming otherwise as garbage.
although I think the only level up from Federal would be the Supreme Court
There is a Federal Appeals Circuit between the usual federal courts and the Supremes. If Verisign is so inclined, the appeals court would probably take their complaint under consideration, but would (probably) get back within a day or so saying "no". In general, appeals courts don't like to deal with temporary things. Verisign can still use such a strategy to buy a little time, but it's really only enough for them to figure out a way to buy yet more time.
Being gainfully employed (or at least not hemmoraging too much employed) as a graduate student, the one thing I feel is necesary to add is this:
If you don't like popcorn, ramen noodles are almost as cheap, and come in a variety of fun flavours.
FYI, CDRs contain cyanide. Don't release it by destroying them.
While cyanide is toxic, and I wouldn't recommend giving a CDR to a teething baby, it isn't that big of a deal. In a CDR it is bound up in a fairly stable form, and only in very minute quantities. Snapping the CDR into pieces doesn't "release" it from any encapsulated state--the top layer of a CDR is laughably thin, and all but water soluable. Snap it in two, or just throw it away, the end result will be the same: a trivial amount of cyanaide will be released into the environment.
P4 Emergency Edition looks like from past centruy in light of this. Ok, probably one can overclock that chip too.
Except that the P4's overall performance is more dependant on the memory subsystem than other chips. The L3 cache of the P4EE may help it scale well at higher clock speeds, but I doubt it. It's only 2MB, and it is still being fed off of the same speed memory bus with equally poor latancies no matter how much you overclock it.
It is interesting to see how much the improved memory subsystem of the FX version lets it beat the 3200+ version hands down. High clockspeed helps, but I think that the memory improvements represent a performance boost which will scale for quite some time.
The test was the Athlon 64 running a 32 bit version they compiled of the MP3 encoder vs running a 64 bit version of the same program. The "bitness" was the ONLY thing that was changed.
Not really. While the "bitness" changes, what also changes is the number of registers visible to the compiler. The x86 ISA has been dealing with internal register rename as a nasty hack to deal with a sever shortage of programmer visible registers for a long time. This goes to show that the compiler is much smarter about register allocation than a hardware renamer can ever be. I'm interested in seeing the performance of common multimedia applications once hand-written core loops are available.And a note to those who are pointing to improved SSE2 support as the reason for the performance gain: they are comparing an AMD64 in 32 bit mode vs one in 64 bit mode. Unless GCC is being bass-ackwards, the SSE2 support should be benefiting the 32 bit mode as well. It appears that the only variables in this benchmark are the 64 bit math and the additional registers.
You forgot VM. They may not push it anymore, but it was an IBM product.