where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry))
...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Even when 3DFX finally got out their Voodoo Rush card (1997,) GPU's were still extremely uncommon. Games used real 3D by that point, but were still software rendered using the polygon rasterization and texturing algorithms detailed in a series of articles in Dr. Dobbs magazine by Michael Abrash. (Hell, the first 2 versions of Direct3D used software rendering exclusively so the first 3D accelerated games were DOS-based.)
So Germany's economic capacity is crippled by their energy costs
Yes.
and Germany pays their workers twice as much as America does - and Germany still produces twice as many cars as the U.S. does [forbes.com]??
I get it. You want to measure the whole package without examining any one policy. America is inefficient in many ways. Germany is efficient in many ways. That doesnt mean that all of Americas ways are inefficient nor does it mean that all of Germanys ways are efficient.
You should be ashamed of yourself for your completely atrocious grasp of logic, because you just argued that Germanys energy policy is efficient because they have a strong auto industry. What a fucking retard.
The gaming market is only rudimentaly separating the workload into X number of threads -- anything else is a complexity nightmare for them -- sure many are now separating the physics stuff into one thread and the A.I. stuff in another, but they are not breaking up the A.I. into multiple threads nor are they breaking up the physics stuff into multiple threads.
Instead they are relying on the middleware frameworks ability to be more granular without their intervention, and the middleware just isnt designed for a specific number of cores. For example, PhysX doesnt care how many shaders your GPU has (or that you even have a GPU!) -- it just uses everything it can find -- the end metric isnt the number of cores available... its the number of gflops and the amount of bandwidth available.
..and now that things like OpenCL are near-universal (both AMD and Intel have multi-core SSE/AVX CPU drivers, and AMD, Intel, and nVidia all have GPU drivers) the entire concept of threading is going to go the way of the dodo. The specifics are abstracted away so that all that is left is a data-parallelism requirement on the design end and a glops and bandwidth requirement on the execution end.
The field is becoming mature, and the point of assembling your own computer, and getting it to work is just not what it used to be.
Yes it is. The only difference is that now the prefabbed computers are a lot closer in price (frequently cheaper!) to what it would cost for you to build it yourself with equal components.
You still get to mix and match components that cannot be found in mainstream prefabbed computers, and in those cases you are still significantly better off money-wise building it yourself. As an example any sort of silent PC setup isnt mainstream, so you pay a significant premium having someone else build it for you.
Most of the time we pay people to do meaningless busywork is because no, they couldn't be doing something productive since there were no jobs to be had due to economy having gone belly-up once again.
Ah, I get it.. the government shouldn't create productive "busywork" jobs.. they should only create unproductive ones! You can't think of any service that someone might find useful? Really?
The measure of an economy is goods and services. Inefficiency may not always mean less goods or less services, but it never ever means more goods or more services. This, like the next thing, isnt up for debate.
You are making the assumption that their energy strategy is, in fact, inefficient. This remains to be seen.
This isnt up for debate. Germany has one of the highest electricity rates in the E.U, and even compared to America with its archaic system Germans pay twice as much for electricity, and thats AFTER Germany's quite generous green-energy subsidies.
It is not "This remain to be seen" -- its "This is so inefficient that there is no way to spin these numbers into making this shit look efficient."
Just to play devil's advocate, solar may be more expensive, but where does that money go? It doesn't just evaporate, it goes back into the economy somewhere providing more jobs and more demand.
Ah, the broken window fallacy again.
This is real simple folks:
If you think that because the money "goes back into the economy" that its a good thing, then imagine if the same money "went back into the economy" because it was spent on more economically efficient methods. A smaller amount could go "back into the economy" to produce the same amount of electricity and the leftover could "go back into the economy" providing an entirely different service that people could enjoy.
We could pay one group of people to dig holes and another group of people to fill up holes. That money also goes "back into the economy." The problem of course is that we then have two groups of people doing nothing productive when they could have been doing something productive.
The economy is goods and services, not fucking currency. Understand? The German economies capacity for goods and services is less because of their inefficient energy strategy than it otherwise would be. It diminishes them.
Yes, but is time 'effectively' different or 'actually' different from the other dimensions?
The up direction is 'effectively' different to the skydiver than the down direction, and more properly the up/down axis is 'effectively' different from left/right and forward/back.
Thats 'effectively'.. however, 'actually' they are the same. There are places in the universe where space has the same unidirectional property that time seems to have.
Yes. My guess is that most people with multiple monitors have multiple different monitors. Thats at least true in my case, where I ran a 17" 1280x1024 LCD at home for many years on my primary system before finally picking up a 22" 1920x1080 and now run both.
Multiple different monitors doesnt make for a good multi-display gaming setup.
The only thing that will stop kids from being horrible to one another is if it's taken seriously when it happens. This is a first step towards that.
Really? This is the first step towards that?
This is the problem with the progressive mindset right here. All of the other steps dont count. With this sort of philosophy you no longer have the justify the step you want to implement itself because its the first step and we should do something otherwise we are doing nothing and how could you support doing nothing? You must be evil to want to do nothing about it!
The problem with cancer studies is that so many disagree with each other, and there are so many studies that nobody in the field has a good grasp of things in general. Because of this, there isnt even a theory of cancer yet.
The U.S. National Cancer Institutes has resorted to hiring physicists such as Paul Davies to try to get a better grasp of cancer, because the medical folk just arent getting anywhere. The video is in fact of Paul Davies giving a talk about the state of cancer research.
This is not quite right: according to the Penrose singularity theorem, the existence of an event horizon implies that spacetime is singular (more precisely: geodesically incomplete).
You have overstepped the theorem. The theorem states that a singularity must eventually form if there is an event horizon, not that a singularity must exist at all points in time that the event horizon exists.
Remember than in a hollow sphere of any mass, gravity is neutral at all points that arent edge points. The sphere can be massive enough that the schwarzschild radius (aka the event horizon) can be outside the sphere, yet inside gravity is neutral and space-time remains flat. Entropy will eventually collapse the sphere, but thats eventually... not immediately.
What will really cook your noodle is if you calculate the mass of a black hole whos event horizon the size of the visible universe, its within an order of magnitude of the suspected mass of the visible universe (including dark matter.)
A common misconception is that black holes require singularities. Simple thought experiments show it differently.. for example, imagine living in a universe with a mass about that of a black hole that would have an event horizon that is just a little bit smaller than the universe. Now imagine that universe contracting. You can see that as it contracts it will eventually become small enough to form an event horizon without a singularity.
The study is based on warranty claims, which do not happen outside their length. Its important to note the differences in warranty lengths precisely because of that fact.
You seem to think that warranty lengths are not important to the study and the 5% and 1.5% figures... what a fucking retard you must be. The devices with the lower claims rate have longer warranties... you seem to want to insinuate with hand waving that somehow the opposite is true. Dipshit.
Realize that the study examines warranty claims, so there isnt such a thing as putting too much weight on warranties.
The thing with OCZ is that they have absolutely put out inferior hardware compared to their competitors. They also have, until recently, offered cheaper SSD's than all equal-performing competitor products.
Its no surprise that the cheapest item on the market is also significantly below the quality curve (the opposite would be a surprise.)
I would only trust the quality of a company that aggressively undercuts its competitors if there is an obvious reason why they should be able to. Companies in the SSD world that would have obvious advantages on margins would be Intel, Samsung, and SanDisk - each because a portion of the product is entirely produced in-house (the flash chips themselves.) Note that none of these companies are aggressively undercutting the market. SanDisk has put out some very nice deals from time to time, but they clearly would rather sell their flash chips to other manufacturers. since there is no way in hell that they could saturate their production lines without outside buyers.
Thats a silly thing to do. Lets examine this, shall we?
A 5% chance to lose 2TB vs a 1.5% chance to lose 250GB.
You argue that since it requires 8 of these 250GB SSD's to equal the capacity of the 2TB HDD that we should multiply 1.5% by 8, so a 12% chance... a 12% chance of what, tho? In actuality, there isnt a 12% chance of anything...
The chance of losing at least 1 of those 8 SSD's (that is specifically 1 or more) over the period is (1 - (1 - 0.015)) = 0.114, but the chance of losing all of those 8 drives over the period is 0.015^8 = 0.0000000000000025628906. In other words, losing all 2TB in the SSD scenario is effectively never going to happen while it remains 5% for the HDD scenario.
The actual breakdown of all possibilities of drive failings (0 drives, 1 drive, 2 drives, etc..) rounded to thousands of a percent is:
So we see that you would be twice as likely to lose some data than in the HDD scenario, but invariably it will only be 250GB of data instead of 2TB of data (only 1 in 173 of these 8 drive experiments will witness more than 1 drive fail, and the majority of those will be exactly 2 drives failed)
So no, you do not need to multiply the failure rate of the SSD's by the number of SSD's that you would need to equal the HDD. What you need to do is define the problem better because as it stands SSD's look a hell of a lot better when you suppose that you need a pile of them.
Slashdot Mirror
where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry))
...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Even when 3DFX finally got out their Voodoo Rush card (1997,) GPU's were still extremely uncommon. Games used real 3D by that point, but were still software rendered using the polygon rasterization and texturing algorithms detailed in a series of articles in Dr. Dobbs magazine by Michael Abrash. (Hell, the first 2 versions of Direct3D used software rendering exclusively so the first 3D accelerated games were DOS-based.)
Its the same half that the iTunes folks got with their "season pass"
IE used to be the most standards compliant browser out there too...
..then Netscape usage share dropped to single-digit percentages
..then IE stagnated
So Germany's economic capacity is crippled by their energy costs
Yes.
and Germany pays their workers twice as much as America does - and Germany still produces twice as many cars as the U.S. does [forbes.com]??
I get it. You want to measure the whole package without examining any one policy. America is inefficient in many ways. Germany is efficient in many ways. That doesnt mean that all of Americas ways are inefficient nor does it mean that all of Germanys ways are efficient.
You should be ashamed of yourself for your completely atrocious grasp of logic, because you just argued that Germanys energy policy is efficient because they have a strong auto industry. What a fucking retard.
The gaming market is only rudimentaly separating the workload into X number of threads -- anything else is a complexity nightmare for them -- sure many are now separating the physics stuff into one thread and the A.I. stuff in another, but they are not breaking up the A.I. into multiple threads nor are they breaking up the physics stuff into multiple threads.
..and now that things like OpenCL are near-universal (both AMD and Intel have multi-core SSE/AVX CPU drivers, and AMD, Intel, and nVidia all have GPU drivers) the entire concept of threading is going to go the way of the dodo. The specifics are abstracted away so that all that is left is a data-parallelism requirement on the design end and a glops and bandwidth requirement on the execution end.
Instead they are relying on the middleware frameworks ability to be more granular without their intervention, and the middleware just isnt designed for a specific number of cores. For example, PhysX doesnt care how many shaders your GPU has (or that you even have a GPU!) -- it just uses everything it can find -- the end metric isnt the number of cores available... its the number of gflops and the amount of bandwidth available.
The field is becoming mature, and the point of assembling your own computer, and getting it to work is just not what it used to be.
Yes it is. The only difference is that now the prefabbed computers are a lot closer in price (frequently cheaper!) to what it would cost for you to build it yourself with equal components.
You still get to mix and match components that cannot be found in mainstream prefabbed computers, and in those cases you are still significantly better off money-wise building it yourself. As an example any sort of silent PC setup isnt mainstream, so you pay a significant premium having someone else build it for you.
Most of the time we pay people to do meaningless busywork is because no, they couldn't be doing something productive since there were no jobs to be had due to economy having gone belly-up once again.
Ah, I get it.. the government shouldn't create productive "busywork" jobs.. they should only create unproductive ones! You can't think of any service that someone might find useful? Really?
The measure of an economy is goods and services. Inefficiency may not always mean less goods or less services, but it never ever means more goods or more services. This, like the next thing, isnt up for debate.
You are making the assumption that their energy strategy is, in fact, inefficient. This remains to be seen.
This isnt up for debate. Germany has one of the highest electricity rates in the E.U, and even compared to America with its archaic system Germans pay twice as much for electricity, and thats AFTER Germany's quite generous green-energy subsidies.
It is not "This remain to be seen" -- its "This is so inefficient that there is no way to spin these numbers into making this shit look efficient."
Just to play devil's advocate, solar may be more expensive, but where does that money go? It doesn't just evaporate, it goes back into the economy somewhere providing more jobs and more demand.
Ah, the broken window fallacy again.
This is real simple folks:
If you think that because the money "goes back into the economy" that its a good thing, then imagine if the same money "went back into the economy" because it was spent on more economically efficient methods. A smaller amount could go "back into the economy" to produce the same amount of electricity and the leftover could "go back into the economy" providing an entirely different service that people could enjoy.
We could pay one group of people to dig holes and another group of people to fill up holes. That money also goes "back into the economy." The problem of course is that we then have two groups of people doing nothing productive when they could have been doing something productive.
The economy is goods and services, not fucking currency. Understand? The German economies capacity for goods and services is less because of their inefficient energy strategy than it otherwise would be. It diminishes them.
Translation: It's the money, stupid!
Always follow the money.
In case you haven't been paying attention the last 13 years..... the entire world is under the authority of the united states.
..which is irrelevant.
Yes, but is time 'effectively' different or 'actually' different from the other dimensions?
.. however, 'actually' they are the same. There are places in the universe where space has the same unidirectional property that time seems to have.
The up direction is 'effectively' different to the skydiver than the down direction, and more properly the up/down axis is 'effectively' different from left/right and forward/back.
Thats 'effectively'
While skydiving, do you consider the plane that you just jumped out of just as accessible as the ground?
Yes. My guess is that most people with multiple monitors have multiple different monitors. Thats at least true in my case, where I ran a 17" 1280x1024 LCD at home for many years on my primary system before finally picking up a 22" 1920x1080 and now run both.
Multiple different monitors doesnt make for a good multi-display gaming setup.
The only thing that will stop kids from being horrible to one another is if it's taken seriously when it happens. This is a first step towards that.
Really? This is the first step towards that?
This is the problem with the progressive mindset right here. All of the other steps dont count. With this sort of philosophy you no longer have the justify the step you want to implement itself because its the first step and we should do something otherwise we are doing nothing and how could you support doing nothing? You must be evil to want to do nothing about it!
I got a good chuckle from your comment but maybe the point of the demo is how little juice is required to power the computer.
It wasn't juice... it was wine.
The problem with cancer studies is that so many disagree with each other, and there are so many studies that nobody in the field has a good grasp of things in general. Because of this, there isnt even a theory of cancer yet.
The U.S. National Cancer Institutes has resorted to hiring physicists such as Paul Davies to try to get a better grasp of cancer, because the medical folk just arent getting anywhere. The video is in fact of Paul Davies giving a talk about the state of cancer research.
This is not quite right: according to the Penrose singularity theorem, the existence of an event horizon implies that spacetime is singular (more precisely: geodesically incomplete).
You have overstepped the theorem. The theorem states that a singularity must eventually form if there is an event horizon, not that a singularity must exist at all points in time that the event horizon exists.
Remember than in a hollow sphere of any mass, gravity is neutral at all points that arent edge points. The sphere can be massive enough that the schwarzschild radius (aka the event horizon) can be outside the sphere, yet inside gravity is neutral and space-time remains flat. Entropy will eventually collapse the sphere, but thats eventually... not immediately.
I thought the definition of an event horizon was the point where not even light can escape.
Yes.
Your definition does not match that
I didn't define event horizon, but my usage does match that.
What will really cook your noodle is if you calculate the mass of a black hole whos event horizon the size of the visible universe, its within an order of magnitude of the suspected mass of the visible universe (including dark matter.)
A common misconception is that black holes require singularities. Simple thought experiments show it differently.. for example, imagine living in a universe with a mass about that of a black hole that would have an event horizon that is just a little bit smaller than the universe. Now imagine that universe contracting. You can see that as it contracts it will eventually become small enough to form an event horizon without a singularity.
sigh...
The study is based on warranty claims, which do not happen outside their length. Its important to note the differences in warranty lengths precisely because of that fact.
You seem to think that warranty lengths are not important to the study and the 5% and 1.5% figures... what a fucking retard you must be. The devices with the lower claims rate have longer warranties... you seem to want to insinuate with hand waving that somehow the opposite is true. Dipshit.
It also doesn't say if he was actually charged in the article, just that he was arrested.
Being arrested requires being charged. Thats how it works.
Realize that the study examines warranty claims, so there isnt such a thing as putting too much weight on warranties.
The thing with OCZ is that they have absolutely put out inferior hardware compared to their competitors. They also have, until recently, offered cheaper SSD's than all equal-performing competitor products.
Its no surprise that the cheapest item on the market is also significantly below the quality curve (the opposite would be a surprise.)
I would only trust the quality of a company that aggressively undercuts its competitors if there is an obvious reason why they should be able to. Companies in the SSD world that would have obvious advantages on margins would be Intel, Samsung, and SanDisk - each because a portion of the product is entirely produced in-house (the flash chips themselves.) Note that none of these companies are aggressively undercutting the market. SanDisk has put out some very nice deals from time to time, but they clearly would rather sell their flash chips to other manufacturers. since there is no way in hell that they could saturate their production lines without outside buyers.
Woops. Missed an exponent when typing that out. The first equation is supposed to be (1 - (1 - 0.015)^8) = 0.114.
Thats a silly thing to do. Lets examine this, shall we?
A 5% chance to lose 2TB vs a 1.5% chance to lose 250GB.
You argue that since it requires 8 of these 250GB SSD's to equal the capacity of the 2TB HDD that we should multiply 1.5% by 8, so a 12% chance... a 12% chance of what, tho? In actuality, there isnt a 12% chance of anything...
The chance of losing at least 1 of those 8 SSD's (that is specifically 1 or more) over the period is (1 - (1 - 0.015)) = 0.114, but the chance of losing all of those 8 drives over the period is 0.015^8 = 0.0000000000000025628906. In other words, losing all 2TB in the SSD scenario is effectively never going to happen while it remains 5% for the HDD scenario.
The actual breakdown of all possibilities of drive failings (0 drives, 1 drive, 2 drives, etc..) rounded to thousands of a percent is:
0 drives: 88.611%
1 drives: 10.795%
2 drives: 0.575%
3 drives: 0.000%
4 drives: 0.000%
5 drives: 0.000%
6 drives: 0.000%
7 drives: 0.000%
8 drives: 0.000%
So we see that you would be twice as likely to lose some data than in the HDD scenario, but invariably it will only be 250GB of data instead of 2TB of data (only 1 in 173 of these 8 drive experiments will witness more than 1 drive fail, and the majority of those will be exactly 2 drives failed)
So no, you do not need to multiply the failure rate of the SSD's by the number of SSD's that you would need to equal the HDD. What you need to do is define the problem better because as it stands SSD's look a hell of a lot better when you suppose that you need a pile of them.