Gamers are more likely to want a new PC to play the new hardware-intensive games.
I have a 1070 Ti in my Win 7 system. It's not top of the line but it's no slouch either. I still boot to Linux for several of my games, but frustratingly I have Divinity Original Sin installed on Linux, but the sequel is Windows only. I've not beaten the first one, so I'm not really too mad yet.
I wonder why Mac and Linux tend to stay up to date
It was only this year that I upgraded several of my servers, all on Debian 5.0 "lenny" (2009). I still have a few on Debian 7 "wheezy" (2013), but I'm not really motivated to do anything about it.
Windows 10 64 bit.... 57.03% Windows 7 64 bit..... 32.38% Windows 8.1 64 bit... 4.05% Windows 7............ 1.93%
all other version of Windows are <1% (8 64-bit, 10 32-bit, 8.1 32-bit, XP) all versions of Linux combined are <1% all versions of MacOS X combined is 2.93%
Conclusion: Windows 10 has been a big deal for quite some time, at least in gaming.
This is all unfortunate news for me because long ago (~5 years) I had decided that Win7 is the last version I will use in my home. So convinced of this I bought a 5-pack of builder licenses to cover any future systems I build. It seemed reasonable because for creative work Linux happens to meet my needs. For gaming I had high hopes that Steam OS or Android TV or something would have taken hold. I'm not really a consoles guy, so I may have to adapt to running Spyware-from-Redmond, or limit myself to 10 year old games.
Recent report is that Apple's service revenue go soar to $50B. The market is bullish on Apple's prospects on their service side. They don't need to sell devices alone to make up their revenue. Apple's business has always been a mix of hardware, software, and services.
Apple did not add any differentialtion to its product
Is the product only the hardware. Or is it the services and ecosystem surrounding it? This is why it is difficult to compare a walled garden like Apple to any other OEM.
What is the value to the average Apple user to continuing to have access to purchased app, music, chat contacts, etc?
DISCLAIMER: the lack of freedom I perceived as an Apple user led me away from them. But others still embrace them and I think the brand still draws a significant following.
decNumber as defined by the Unicode standard, IEEE 754, and ANSI C all include Infinity and -Infinity when working with decimal floats.
IEEE 745 decimal is not the same as the previously mentioned DEC64. It's important to remember that IEEE decimals have a really terrible representation and implementation is painful and bug prone.
Special sentinel values that propagate in a well defined way are important in safety designs (and I assume in financial math too). Throwing exceptions, faults, interrupts, and signals is also important. And you can sort out the serious programs from the not serious ones by how they initialize signal handlers.
Java supports decimal too, the support is pretty decent and I think it is slowly replacing COBOL in some areas. C/C++ support of decimal floats is not great. We've been using vendor extensions for years, which is also not a great thing to do.
I'll stick with the DEC64 package instead of the pulling in all of ICU.
Maybe it is subjective but I'm not a voyeur. Watching a vertical video of a baby or kitten doing hilarious things feels a bit like viewing through a key hole.
Reading across the narrow end of a scroll is easier than unrolling the entire scroll to read a line, so some writing systems developed around that.
In Maine, this would meet the criteria for the justification of use of deadly force.
In most of California that's how it would have gone down too. Just not a lot of gun owners in the coastal affluent parts. It's important to remember that California is not a homogeneous region, but a very large state with very different parts.
If a young man entered a home in the Central Valley or Sierra Nevadas, it's like 3-to-1 odds the homeowner would point a gun at him.
If you're bound by memory I/O or limited by cache then something like hyperthreading won't improve throughput and will probably make it worse. But even in that case you can have better fairness between threads and less bursty behavior at high load when doing hyperthreading.
Even in an optimal case total throughput doesn't improve very much with hyperthreading. So results are disappointing if your only performance metric is how many operations you can perform a second or how much memory bandwidth you can blast through. I don't see much value in hyperthreading for a desktop user that has relatively few ready tasks at any given instant (often in single digits and low double digits), especially now that quad core is pretty commonplace. When your ready tasks is many times your number of cores, you will need to context switch often to distribute the work fairly.
On a server where you do have lots of tasks ready to run (sometimes 100+), having 2-way or even 4-way SMT is way cheaper than adding more cores (less silicon area, less power, reduced bus infrastructure, etc). Even if an individual thread runs more slowly because of hyperthreading sharing resources of a CPU, not having to context switch as often is a net gain.
On the short scale that would be 2.8 nonillion gigawatt-hours. World electrical energy production for the year 2017 is estimated to be 25 million gigawatt-hours.
So if you could turn that star crashing into something straight into electrical energy (difficult!), then I guess you'd cover our electrical needs for around 10^23 years. The Universe is about 1.3 * 10^10 years old. So we'd be able to support trillions of Earths (at least at today's electrical usage) for the age of the Universe, or something around that.
Anyone storing private information is liable 100% for its unauthorized release.
I can think of numerous cases where corporations were not held accountable for their actions (or inactions). I think it will persist if they can continue to hire the best lawyers, craft convoluted user agreements, and have the resources to forum shop their cases for the best outcome.
I usually use INT_MAX and INT_MIN as positive and negative infinity with integers. Unfortunately C doesn't offer any conventions for saturation arithmetic and only defines modular arithmetic for unsigned values (and leaves signed overflow/underflow to be undefined).
And the wonderful DEC64 format lacks any infinity representation and only goes so far as to produce NaN.
A dumb terminal talking to an Amazon or Microsoft cloud? Technically, each of those would still be some form of a computer.
If the dumb terminal had a chip & PIN reader, then Americans would reduce credit card fraud dramatically and perhaps get some relief on credit card fees or interest rates.
0: we probably don't strictly "need" computers. 1: we could have one big one that we all time slice. Our current political and economic system wouldn't tolerate single ownership of all computing. (sorry Google!) infinity: really this means (k * N). it's the current model we're following, factor k is probably a small integer. N is number of human beings currently alive.
Is my math right, 2.67% the speed of light? Holy shit!
From the article:
As the star made its closest approach to the black hole, at a distance about 120 times the distance between Earth and the sun, it reached a speed of 8,000km/s, or 2.7% of the speed of light.
I wonder what the mass of that star is. Because the formula for kinetic energy has a square of velocity as one of its factors. It's going to be an insane amount of Joules. Kinetic Energy = (m * v^2) / 2
If someone wishes to criticize, they can either do so carefully and anonymously with cold hard facts. Or they can express their unsupported opinions openly and publicly. There is no middle ground.
I guess I'm trying to say that you don't get to fabricate lies and troll while retaining your anonymity. Or at least nobody is going to have sympathy when you're exposed.
Those two statements overlap, they do not conflict, and I've not walked back my position with the second statement.
If you disagree with the opinions I have expressed, that's fine. If you wish to fling ad hominem and inflammatory comments, that says more about you personally than about your opinions on the topic at hand.
Use your precious time to understand, contribute, and even reject bad ideas. It's a piss poor use of your time to shit on anything that you can't grasp or don't care about.
Slashdot Mirror
Candy Land has been a popular game since 1949. It still beats fancier games in annual sales.
(I'd argue that it's not even a game, because there is no player decisions. but people treat it as if it were a game)
It has been discovered nintendo used the .nes format, and very likely sources their roms from the already pirated versions.
Sure, seems very likely that they did. But it's important to note that it is not illegal to download something you already own the copyright to.
The disposable income of aging Gen-X gamers.
It also helps with impulse buys in that it's a console that is closer to the price of a game (~$70) instead of $300 of a PS4.
Gamers are more likely to want a new PC to play the new hardware-intensive games.
I have a 1070 Ti in my Win 7 system. It's not top of the line but it's no slouch either. I still boot to Linux for several of my games, but frustratingly I have Divinity Original Sin installed on Linux, but the sequel is Windows only. I've not beaten the first one, so I'm not really too mad yet.
I wonder why Mac and Linux tend to stay up to date
It was only this year that I upgraded several of my servers, all on Debian 5.0 "lenny" (2009). I still have a few on Debian 7 "wheezy" (2013), but I'm not really motivated to do anything about it.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey:
Windows 10 64 bit
Windows 7 64 bit
Windows 8.1 64 bit
Windows 7
all other version of Windows are <1% (8 64-bit, 10 32-bit, 8.1 32-bit, XP)
all versions of Linux combined are <1%
all versions of MacOS X combined is 2.93%
Conclusion: Windows 10 has been a big deal for quite some time, at least in gaming.
This is all unfortunate news for me because long ago (~5 years) I had decided that Win7 is the last version I will use in my home. So convinced of this I bought a 5-pack of builder licenses to cover any future systems I build. It seemed reasonable because for creative work Linux happens to meet my needs. For gaming I had high hopes that Steam OS or Android TV or something would have taken hold. I'm not really a consoles guy, so I may have to adapt to running Spyware-from-Redmond, or limit myself to 10 year old games.
Recent report is that Apple's service revenue go soar to $50B. The market is bullish on Apple's prospects on their service side. They don't need to sell devices alone to make up their revenue. Apple's business has always been a mix of hardware, software, and services.
Apple did not add any differentialtion to its product
Is the product only the hardware. Or is it the services and ecosystem surrounding it? This is why it is difficult to compare a walled garden like Apple to any other OEM.
What is the value to the average Apple user to continuing to have access to purchased app, music, chat contacts, etc?
DISCLAIMER: the lack of freedom I perceived as an Apple user led me away from them. But others still embrace them and I think the brand still draws a significant following.
decNumber as defined by the Unicode standard, IEEE 754, and ANSI C all include Infinity and -Infinity when working with decimal floats.
IEEE 745 decimal is not the same as the previously mentioned DEC64. It's important to remember that IEEE decimals have a really terrible representation and implementation is painful and bug prone.
Special sentinel values that propagate in a well defined way are important in safety designs (and I assume in financial math too). Throwing exceptions, faults, interrupts, and signals is also important. And you can sort out the serious programs from the not serious ones by how they initialize signal handlers.
Java supports decimal too, the support is pretty decent and I think it is slowly replacing COBOL in some areas. C/C++ support of decimal floats is not great. We've been using vendor extensions for years, which is also not a great thing to do.
I'll stick with the DEC64 package instead of the pulling in all of ICU.
Trade the army of marketingoids for some coders and accountants that can keep the project running.
Feel free scrawl the marketing-speak on the toilet stalls because that's the only time I'm in the mood to hear it.
Maybe it is subjective but I'm not a voyeur. Watching a vertical video of a baby or kitten doing hilarious things feels a bit like viewing through a key hole.
Reading across the narrow end of a scroll is easier than unrolling the entire scroll to read a line, so some writing systems developed around that.
I hate it when an operating system doesn't charge me thousands of dollars per year to renew licenses
Because we're doomed once society accepts portrait videos as OK.
In Maine, this would meet the criteria for the justification of use of deadly force.
In most of California that's how it would have gone down too. Just not a lot of gun owners in the coastal affluent parts. It's important to remember that California is not a homogeneous region, but a very large state with very different parts.
If a young man entered a home in the Central Valley or Sierra Nevadas, it's like 3-to-1 odds the homeowner would point a gun at him.
I'd almost rather get a fax than a voicemail. It's such a damn hassle to listen to them.
But really, can we please move on from these antiquated technologies, it's the 21st century.
If you're bound by memory I/O or limited by cache then something like hyperthreading won't improve throughput and will probably make it worse. But even in that case you can have better fairness between threads and less bursty behavior at high load when doing hyperthreading.
Even in an optimal case total throughput doesn't improve very much with hyperthreading. So results are disappointing if your only performance metric is how many operations you can perform a second or how much memory bandwidth you can blast through. I don't see much value in hyperthreading for a desktop user that has relatively few ready tasks at any given instant (often in single digits and low double digits), especially now that quad core is pretty commonplace. When your ready tasks is many times your number of cores, you will need to context switch often to distribute the work fairly.
On a server where you do have lots of tasks ready to run (sometimes 100+), having 2-way or even 4-way SMT is way cheaper than adding more cores (less silicon area, less power, reduced bus infrastructure, etc). Even if an individual thread runs more slowly because of hyperthreading sharing resources of a CPU, not having to context switch as often is a net gain.
tl;dr - hyperthreading is not a panacea.
On the short scale that would be 2.8 nonillion gigawatt-hours. World electrical energy production for the year 2017 is estimated to be 25 million gigawatt-hours.
So if you could turn that star crashing into something straight into electrical energy (difficult!), then I guess you'd cover our electrical needs for around 10^23 years. The Universe is about 1.3 * 10^10 years old. So we'd be able to support trillions of Earths (at least at today's electrical usage) for the age of the Universe, or something around that.
Anyone storing private information is liable 100% for its unauthorized release.
I can think of numerous cases where corporations were not held accountable for their actions (or inactions). I think it will persist if they can continue to hire the best lawyers, craft convoluted user agreements, and have the resources to forum shop their cases for the best outcome.
I usually use INT_MAX and INT_MIN as positive and negative infinity with integers. Unfortunately C doesn't offer any conventions for saturation arithmetic and only defines modular arithmetic for unsigned values (and leaves signed overflow/underflow to be undefined).
And the wonderful DEC64 format lacks any infinity representation and only goes so far as to produce NaN.
A dumb terminal talking to an Amazon or Microsoft cloud? Technically, each of those would still be some form of a computer.
If the dumb terminal had a chip & PIN reader, then Americans would reduce credit card fraud dramatically and perhaps get some relief on credit card fees or interest rates.
Software developers already know the answer: Zero, one, or infinity
0: we probably don't strictly "need" computers.
1: we could have one big one that we all time slice. Our current political and economic system wouldn't tolerate single ownership of all computing. (sorry Google!)
infinity: really this means (k * N). it's the current model we're following, factor k is probably a small integer. N is number of human beings currently alive.
I feel like this is a problem that could be solved by an app.
Is my math right, 2.67% the speed of light? Holy shit!
From the article:
As the star made its closest approach to the black hole, at a distance about 120 times the distance between Earth and the sun, it reached a speed of 8,000km/s, or 2.7% of the speed of light.
I wonder what the mass of that star is. Because the formula for kinetic energy has a square of velocity as one of its factors. It's going to be an insane amount of Joules.
Kinetic Energy = (m * v^2) / 2
If someone wishes to criticize, they can either do so carefully and anonymously with cold hard facts. Or they can express their unsupported opinions openly and publicly. There is no middle ground.
I guess I'm trying to say that you don't get to fabricate lies and troll while retaining your anonymity. Or at least nobody is going to have sympathy when you're exposed.
Those two statements overlap, they do not conflict, and I've not walked back my position with the second statement.
If you disagree with the opinions I have expressed, that's fine. If you wish to fling ad hominem and inflammatory comments, that says more about you personally than about your opinions on the topic at hand.
Use your precious time to understand, contribute, and even reject bad ideas. It's a piss poor use of your time to shit on anything that you can't grasp or don't care about.
is anonymity something that should be protected? is it a fundamental part of our society? I draw a distinction between anonymity and privacy.