In the end, the internet is a messy place for sensitive secrets. We have reached the point where it is best not to document anything provocative (or potentially twisted by a warped mind wearing jack boots into appearing provocative) on the internet. Big brother is in full force. Love him, or else.
There is a chicken and egg argument as well. Many games plateau at 4 cores, but that is no surprise. With 90+% of the installed base being =4 core machines, that is where game studios are going to target. Hopefully with a heap of 6 and 8 real core CPU's in the field there will be a push to take advantage of them.
In my day job I am a EE. I run a lot of SPICE, FEM, and other scientific apps. We have seen some surprising results with more cores. CST EMS (an electromagnetic simulation tool) claimed it scaled well, and we were hurting big time. We went from running locally on 6 core work stations to a server with a total of 16 cores, and it got SLOWER. WTF? We dug in, and the idiots who wrote the thing had put a tone of effort into making just 1 step of the solving process scalable. So 20% of the time went ~2x faster. The clock speed was about 25% less, so the other 80% of the time it was slower, netting a 15% slower speed. Similarly our headquarters had setup a compute farm to expedite faster solves, but the damn program transferred so much data back and forth (BIG meshes and such, that I could live without, easily) that it was SLOWER to solve on 8 machines than to just run it locally. We eventually ditched them and went to a competitor that was less of a flaming pile of garbage and we've been happy since.
Federal student loans are non-dischargeable. Also, many places run your credit to get an apartment, get a job, get a security clearance, dealers run your credit to get a car loan, etc. So while totally dropping out of the "system" is an option (i.e. becoming homeless), it is hard to have much of a life withing the "system" while not paying your bills.
If you do manage to get an apartment, find a way to commute, and get a job with blighted credit you still face having your wages garnished, or your bank accounts emptied to pay back those federal loans. No money in the bank means you then stand a good chance of not making rent, having your car repossessed, and then losing your job.
Dandy "system" we have, don't you think?
You can get income based repayment options, or get forbearance for a time, but you can't just walk away.
Clearly we need to mock and make fun of millennials more, previous disrespect has been inadequate to make them flourish just like the good ol' days.
In a slightly more serious note, this was predicted. A fair number of reputable economists warned us of our own lost generation after the 2008 crash. The bottom of the ladder got pulled and the replacement jobs available to low experience young folk are not as relatively good as what was available for other generations. So you have low wage earners with stacks of debt from surviving (how dare they!), and from getting a college degree like they were told was the only good path thousands of times (suckers!).
But it is easier to make fun of how they dress different, and use funny new words (like EVERY generation of young folks before them) than to fix the lack of good entry level jobs, low wages, expensive healthcare, and over priced tuition. It looks to me like society has failed a generation and they have made rational choices to live within their means to the extent possible.
+1 Stagnant hardware is a death sentence in the PC industry. Frankly I am shocked they haven't dropped more. Too much of their desktop hardware is not only stagnant, but has mobile grade stuff on the inside, making the extra Apple tax that much harder to stomach.
Seriously! Not sure why a company that big and rich can't roll out updated hardware every year or so. The lineup of desktop stuff is quite sad and embarrassing.
Today things max out at about 100 Mbps (some carrier aggregation allows 2-3x this, but whatever). 100/8=12.5 MBps 1G/0.0125=8s/GB, burn through a 10 GB data plan in just over a minute today
5G is aiming for 10x faster, 1 Gbps max throughput, so burn through a data cap in 8s
Sensors everywhere will not make you happier, probably not even healthier. I am sure we will see a "smart" hammer that evaluates your swing and trains you soon.
I want less and less of this stuff.
I want my books printed not "e" these days.
I am tired of cloud crap, stop deleting my tunes and PDFs off my tablet without asking me.
We are in a bubble of "because we can" thinking, rather than products and services that are actually helpful, efficient, and life improving. Gadgets are lucky to have a 1 year lifespan, why would we want billions of them, mostly abandoned by the vendor and the owner alike, sitting on the web waiting to be exploited into botnets and such?
This same service was used for my Nissan Leaf. I can no longer pre-heat or check the charge status remotely without paying for a modem swap.
Dumb that cars that should be targeting a 15-20 year life span are larded up with the current flavor of the month that will be obsolete in a fraction of that. Wish it had WIFI so I could maintain the remote pre-heat functionality at home at least.
I'd argue that at least half of what most cube dwellers do all day doesn't need to be done at all. Large corps build of thick layers of corporate sludge over the years, layers to bureaucracy and reporting that is put into place and never re-questioned. Finding a way to clear out that crap would do more for happiness and profit than automation.
Marketing: We have an amazingly fast network capable of moving TBs of data a second!!! Download a movie in super-ultra-HD while boarding your plane in seconds!!! Buy now!!!
Contracts: We will charge you 1 kidney per movie you download, and shame you in the public square. It is horrible to everyone else if you actually use the network.
Me: F U. Worrying about getting reamed for data sucks the fun out of it all. Buys a pay-as-you-go phone and doesn't try to do anything "cool".
In our house my wife is a Mac/Apple gal, while I grew up mac and switched to PC about 20 years ago because for engineering that was where the tools were. My wife has been getting frustrated with how things have stagnated, and how a lot of little things have gotten rougher around the edges after each update.
I keep wanting to go back to Mac's, but time and again it is outrageous mark-up for low end and outdated hardware. I don't want an all-in one. I started to get sucked into the halo by owning ipods and ipads and was starting to hope for something better than a mini, but not all-in-one to fit my desires, but recently they have mangled a lot of what I liked about the iOS devices.
Playing an album and finding "shuffle" in itunes on my ipad got hard, requiring a google search to figure out what the hell they did. WTF? Itunes on my PC similarly went from poorly designed mess to mangled unusable mess I no longer open. I've wasted too much time weeding out ever recurring duplicates that have popped up randomly in old playlists, only to have them re-appear at random. What happened to "it just works". So now I see them as having taken their eye off the ball. For such a huge company it should be pretty trivial to do an annual motherboard spin whenever intel updates their CPU's (they used to have first dibs and beat the market by a month). RAM should not be marked up 3-4x. I don't mind a fair markup, but they have taken to soldering it down in some cases and made it very difficult to do yourself on others.
Basically I have stopped looking at their machines with any lust, and just have to realize that my lack of fashion makes me not part of their target demographic.
Workstation GPU's are garbage. Only speaking from what I see Dell stick into the machines we have in my design center, they are crap. I got a brand new workstation when I joined 3 years ago, and the GPU was listed for about $500, and did have 4 mini displayport outputs, but could not drive 4k screens, and had major issues driving 4 1920x1080 screens. My GTX750TI at home was more powerful and drove 4k no problem, and got about 1/3 as much. The only saving grace for my workstation is that it can take up to 64GB of RAM, something consumer machines at the time could not. In my cases I needed every bit of that.
Much of the workstation market is like that, the same CPU performance can be had for 2-3x the price. Alternatively you can get even more cores for the price of a good used car that are not available at the consumer grade. I've heard of ZERO processors wearing out, and I seriously doubt there is anything actually better about the fabrication of a Xeon compared to a consumer CPU. Wanna bet if the workstation SSD's are actually any more reliable?
Big bucks and still 4 lousy cores. Huge amount of R&D went into 10% overall performance increase compared to Skylake (or really anything semi-recent). I want more damn cores, and drop the useless GPU that is wasting silicon area. 6-8 kickass cores should be the norm these days, but intel wants a massive premium for that.
Yes, I know that most software only uses up to 4 cores today. But I don't care. More cores being common will be a big incentive for software developers to find ways to use that untapped power. Build it and they will come.
Food critics will pan KFC, but if it is exactly what you are aching for RIGHT now it will be hard to believe people wouldn't eat it everyday. It doesn't make the critics wrong, but rather that tastes vary.
Similar here. I have a good job, but am not independently wealthy or any of that horse pucky (though saving like mad to get there). I rarely set an alarm, and mostly wake up before it goes off when I do.
I prioritize going to bed at a reasonable time, and avoid alcohol and especially sugar for at least 2-3 hours before bedtime. We do a crossword before lights out to give a guaranteed 15-30 minutes of non-screen time before lights out and tend to sleep much better than when I did ipad time up to lights out.
I have a smart phone, but choose to avoid getting hooked on it. My work would let me get email on it but they then have the right to wipe it at will if I get terminated, which is a deal breaker for me. If I REALLY am expecting something important I have a work laptop I can fire up. Mainly I use to to double check our German colleagues have not canceled a 7AM meeting before I ride my bike in.
The 2nd level parent comment is a complainy pants and needs to start taking control of his effing life. Get a better job, go to bed earlier, or similar adjustments.
TV's should be supported for at least 10 years, and should be in as much of a walled sandbox as possible. We have a TV that is now almost 9 years old, and thankfully it is not "smart". I actively avoid "smart" stuff, I just don't see any real upside for a "smart" toaster, fridge, oven thermometers, etc. Instead I see tons of downside.
Companies churn through new stuff on a yearly basis and rarely support any older stuff, so that "smart" stuff quickly stops shipping apps to support it, and it is only a matter of a phone OS update before you risk bricking the damn thing.
Connected cars are complete BS too. They should last 20 years minimum, so why put in the latest technology fad?! My used Nissan Leaf is days away from the 2G connection being shut off, meaning I have to spend $200 to upgrade it, or I will lose the pre-heat and remote charge start features (won't actually miss them much). Try buying a new car today without a stupid touch screen in it. A quick knob turn for changing the radio now requires wading through menus while driving. WTF?!
Snopes actually doesn't conclude one way or the other. We have a real video of an Uber car with autonomous tech running a red light. Without time stamped logs being made public (and somehow proved to be tamper proof) there is no way to say whether the Uber vehicle was under human control or not. I for one don't see Uber as a paragon of truthfulness, so I don't take their statements at face value.
So why wouldn't their car be driving itself ALL the time? I thought these were safe and the wave of the future. What awful and dangerous flaws is the human having to cover for?
While you may be right, I bet that the exact same actions in the exact same situation, but with Obama instead, would results in immediate calls for impeachement. The double standards between how much BS Bush got away with without any repercussions, and the completely overblown fake controversies created to de-legitimize Obama at every turn are a complete disgrace for this country. Several of those outright BS conspiracy theories were heavily driven by Trump no less.
Maybe with the full might of the CIA/FBI at his beck and call he can finally get to the bottom of that whole birth certificate (eye roll).
Well, they hate it when people enjoy themselves in way they don't PUBLICALLY admit to doing personally. Mistresses, rent boys, airport bathroom male-on-male trists, etc. are all horrible for the other party or when done openly, but are utterly forgivable for one of your one who merely "made a mistake", "had a wide stance", or other hypocritical explanations.
It also cannot be ignored that 2 years into Obama's presidency congress turned red, and rather vocally announced they would put the prevention of any Obama successes ahead of the best interest of the country. Having one whole branch of the government not operating in good faith is a very strong headwind, and despite that we have had very large job growth and historically low unemployment over the last 8 years.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot Comcast. Check and Mate.
In the end, the internet is a messy place for sensitive secrets. We have reached the point where it is best not to document anything provocative (or potentially twisted by a warped mind wearing jack boots into appearing provocative) on the internet. Big brother is in full force. Love him, or else.
8 cores vs 4 cores. You gotta compare the equivalent number of cores, then kvetch over different clock rates and other details to really compare.
Ryzen 1800X (8 cores) = $500
Intel's consumer grade i7-6900K 8 cores (latest available) = $1000 (i.e. Ryzen is 50% lower than $1000)
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4809 v4 (8 core) = $1600 (highway rape...)
To compare 4 core vs 4 core:
Ryzen 1400X (4 core with hyperthreading) = $200
Intel 7700K (4 core with hyperthreading, though higher clock rate) = $340
Aren't you a special little princess.
There is a chicken and egg argument as well. Many games plateau at 4 cores, but that is no surprise. With 90+% of the installed base being =4 core machines, that is where game studios are going to target. Hopefully with a heap of 6 and 8 real core CPU's in the field there will be a push to take advantage of them.
In my day job I am a EE. I run a lot of SPICE, FEM, and other scientific apps. We have seen some surprising results with more cores. CST EMS (an electromagnetic simulation tool) claimed it scaled well, and we were hurting big time. We went from running locally on 6 core work stations to a server with a total of 16 cores, and it got SLOWER. WTF? We dug in, and the idiots who wrote the thing had put a tone of effort into making just 1 step of the solving process scalable. So 20% of the time went ~2x faster. The clock speed was about 25% less, so the other 80% of the time it was slower, netting a 15% slower speed. Similarly our headquarters had setup a compute farm to expedite faster solves, but the damn program transferred so much data back and forth (BIG meshes and such, that I could live without, easily) that it was SLOWER to solve on 8 machines than to just run it locally. We eventually ditched them and went to a competitor that was less of a flaming pile of garbage and we've been happy since.
Federal student loans are non-dischargeable. Also, many places run your credit to get an apartment, get a job, get a security clearance, dealers run your credit to get a car loan, etc. So while totally dropping out of the "system" is an option (i.e. becoming homeless), it is hard to have much of a life withing the "system" while not paying your bills.
If you do manage to get an apartment, find a way to commute, and get a job with blighted credit you still face having your wages garnished, or your bank accounts emptied to pay back those federal loans. No money in the bank means you then stand a good chance of not making rent, having your car repossessed, and then losing your job.
Dandy "system" we have, don't you think?
You can get income based repayment options, or get forbearance for a time, but you can't just walk away.
Clearly we need to mock and make fun of millennials more, previous disrespect has been inadequate to make them flourish just like the good ol' days.
In a slightly more serious note, this was predicted. A fair number of reputable economists warned us of our own lost generation after the 2008 crash. The bottom of the ladder got pulled and the replacement jobs available to low experience young folk are not as relatively good as what was available for other generations. So you have low wage earners with stacks of debt from surviving (how dare they!), and from getting a college degree like they were told was the only good path thousands of times (suckers!).
But it is easier to make fun of how they dress different, and use funny new words (like EVERY generation of young folks before them) than to fix the lack of good entry level jobs, low wages, expensive healthcare, and over priced tuition. It looks to me like society has failed a generation and they have made rational choices to live within their means to the extent possible.
+1 Stagnant hardware is a death sentence in the PC industry. Frankly I am shocked they haven't dropped more. Too much of their desktop hardware is not only stagnant, but has mobile grade stuff on the inside, making the extra Apple tax that much harder to stomach.
Seriously! Not sure why a company that big and rich can't roll out updated hardware every year or so. The lineup of desktop stuff is quite sad and embarrassing.
Today things max out at about 100 Mbps (some carrier aggregation allows 2-3x this, but whatever).
100/8=12.5 MBps
1G/0.0125=8s/GB, burn through a 10 GB data plan in just over a minute today
5G is aiming for 10x faster, 1 Gbps max throughput, so burn through a data cap in 8s
Sensors everywhere will not make you happier, probably not even healthier. I am sure we will see a "smart" hammer that evaluates your swing and trains you soon.
I want less and less of this stuff.
I want my books printed not "e" these days.
I am tired of cloud crap, stop deleting my tunes and PDFs off my tablet without asking me.
We are in a bubble of "because we can" thinking, rather than products and services that are actually helpful, efficient, and life improving. Gadgets are lucky to have a 1 year lifespan, why would we want billions of them, mostly abandoned by the vendor and the owner alike, sitting on the web waiting to be exploited into botnets and such?
This same service was used for my Nissan Leaf. I can no longer pre-heat or check the charge status remotely without paying for a modem swap.
Dumb that cars that should be targeting a 15-20 year life span are larded up with the current flavor of the month that will be obsolete in a fraction of that. Wish it had WIFI so I could maintain the remote pre-heat functionality at home at least.
I'd argue that at least half of what most cube dwellers do all day doesn't need to be done at all. Large corps build of thick layers of corporate sludge over the years, layers to bureaucracy and reporting that is put into place and never re-questioned. Finding a way to clear out that crap would do more for happiness and profit than automation.
Marketing:
We have an amazingly fast network capable of moving TBs of data a second!!! Download a movie in super-ultra-HD while boarding your plane in seconds!!! Buy now!!!
Contracts:
We will charge you 1 kidney per movie you download, and shame you in the public square. It is horrible to everyone else if you actually use the network.
Me:
F U. Worrying about getting reamed for data sucks the fun out of it all. Buys a pay-as-you-go phone and doesn't try to do anything "cool".
All very good points.
In our house my wife is a Mac/Apple gal, while I grew up mac and switched to PC about 20 years ago because for engineering that was where the tools were. My wife has been getting frustrated with how things have stagnated, and how a lot of little things have gotten rougher around the edges after each update.
I keep wanting to go back to Mac's, but time and again it is outrageous mark-up for low end and outdated hardware. I don't want an all-in one. I started to get sucked into the halo by owning ipods and ipads and was starting to hope for something better than a mini, but not all-in-one to fit my desires, but recently they have mangled a lot of what I liked about the iOS devices.
Playing an album and finding "shuffle" in itunes on my ipad got hard, requiring a google search to figure out what the hell they did. WTF? Itunes on my PC similarly went from poorly designed mess to mangled unusable mess I no longer open. I've wasted too much time weeding out ever recurring duplicates that have popped up randomly in old playlists, only to have them re-appear at random. What happened to "it just works". So now I see them as having taken their eye off the ball. For such a huge company it should be pretty trivial to do an annual motherboard spin whenever intel updates their CPU's (they used to have first dibs and beat the market by a month). RAM should not be marked up 3-4x. I don't mind a fair markup, but they have taken to soldering it down in some cases and made it very difficult to do yourself on others.
Basically I have stopped looking at their machines with any lust, and just have to realize that my lack of fashion makes me not part of their target demographic.
Workstation GPU's are garbage. Only speaking from what I see Dell stick into the machines we have in my design center, they are crap. I got a brand new workstation when I joined 3 years ago, and the GPU was listed for about $500, and did have 4 mini displayport outputs, but could not drive 4k screens, and had major issues driving 4 1920x1080 screens. My GTX750TI at home was more powerful and drove 4k no problem, and got about 1/3 as much. The only saving grace for my workstation is that it can take up to 64GB of RAM, something consumer machines at the time could not. In my cases I needed every bit of that.
Much of the workstation market is like that, the same CPU performance can be had for 2-3x the price. Alternatively you can get even more cores for the price of a good used car that are not available at the consumer grade. I've heard of ZERO processors wearing out, and I seriously doubt there is anything actually better about the fabrication of a Xeon compared to a consumer CPU. Wanna bet if the workstation SSD's are actually any more reliable?
Big bucks and still 4 lousy cores. Huge amount of R&D went into 10% overall performance increase compared to Skylake (or really anything semi-recent). I want more damn cores, and drop the useless GPU that is wasting silicon area. 6-8 kickass cores should be the norm these days, but intel wants a massive premium for that.
Yes, I know that most software only uses up to 4 cores today. But I don't care. More cores being common will be a big incentive for software developers to find ways to use that untapped power. Build it and they will come.
Food critics will pan KFC, but if it is exactly what you are aching for RIGHT now it will be hard to believe people wouldn't eat it everyday. It doesn't make the critics wrong, but rather that tastes vary.
Similar here. I have a good job, but am not independently wealthy or any of that horse pucky (though saving like mad to get there). I rarely set an alarm, and mostly wake up before it goes off when I do.
I prioritize going to bed at a reasonable time, and avoid alcohol and especially sugar for at least 2-3 hours before bedtime. We do a crossword before lights out to give a guaranteed 15-30 minutes of non-screen time before lights out and tend to sleep much better than when I did ipad time up to lights out.
I have a smart phone, but choose to avoid getting hooked on it. My work would let me get email on it but they then have the right to wipe it at will if I get terminated, which is a deal breaker for me. If I REALLY am expecting something important I have a work laptop I can fire up. Mainly I use to to double check our German colleagues have not canceled a 7AM meeting before I ride my bike in.
The 2nd level parent comment is a complainy pants and needs to start taking control of his effing life. Get a better job, go to bed earlier, or similar adjustments.
TV's should be supported for at least 10 years, and should be in as much of a walled sandbox as possible. We have a TV that is now almost 9 years old, and thankfully it is not "smart". I actively avoid "smart" stuff, I just don't see any real upside for a "smart" toaster, fridge, oven thermometers, etc. Instead I see tons of downside.
Companies churn through new stuff on a yearly basis and rarely support any older stuff, so that "smart" stuff quickly stops shipping apps to support it, and it is only a matter of a phone OS update before you risk bricking the damn thing.
Connected cars are complete BS too. They should last 20 years minimum, so why put in the latest technology fad?! My used Nissan Leaf is days away from the 2G connection being shut off, meaning I have to spend $200 to upgrade it, or I will lose the pre-heat and remote charge start features (won't actually miss them much). Try buying a new car today without a stupid touch screen in it. A quick knob turn for changing the radio now requires wading through menus while driving. WTF?!
Snopes actually doesn't conclude one way or the other. We have a real video of an Uber car with autonomous tech running a red light. Without time stamped logs being made public (and somehow proved to be tamper proof) there is no way to say whether the Uber vehicle was under human control or not. I for one don't see Uber as a paragon of truthfulness, so I don't take their statements at face value.
So why wouldn't their car be driving itself ALL the time? I thought these were safe and the wave of the future. What awful and dangerous flaws is the human having to cover for?
So when an Uber runs a red we can send tickets to all the software schmucks? Is every line written by an engineer with a DL in California?
You really want to use this line of reasoning?
While you may be right, I bet that the exact same actions in the exact same situation, but with Obama instead, would results in immediate calls for impeachement. The double standards between how much BS Bush got away with without any repercussions, and the completely overblown fake controversies created to de-legitimize Obama at every turn are a complete disgrace for this country. Several of those outright BS conspiracy theories were heavily driven by Trump no less.
Maybe with the full might of the CIA/FBI at his beck and call he can finally get to the bottom of that whole birth certificate (eye roll).
Well, they hate it when people enjoy themselves in way they don't PUBLICALLY admit to doing personally. Mistresses, rent boys, airport bathroom male-on-male trists, etc. are all horrible for the other party or when done openly, but are utterly forgivable for one of your one who merely "made a mistake", "had a wide stance", or other hypocritical explanations.
It also cannot be ignored that 2 years into Obama's presidency congress turned red, and rather vocally announced they would put the prevention of any Obama successes ahead of the best interest of the country. Having one whole branch of the government not operating in good faith is a very strong headwind, and despite that we have had very large job growth and historically low unemployment over the last 8 years.