So, where's your logic? Who was the champion of the war?
Furthermore I believe John Kerry said he was wrong.
In contrast Bush keeps refusing to admit that he was wrong. He may just say it once in a while, but his actions indicate otherwise. See the recent debate - Bush keeps equating Saddam with the 9/11 attacks - despite his 9/11 commission saying otherwise.
So where's the evidence that Bush is the best choice? So far there's plenty of evidence that Bush is an inferior choice. If Bush keeps making such big mistakes, and people keep supporting Bush then they're pretty stupid.
So, fine don't vote Kerry. But don't vote Bush either. There are other alternatives.
"In practice, this is the same as approval voting. Realize that it does not make sense to ever assign a zero. By assigning a -1 to candidates you don't approve of, you maximize the chance of electing the candidates you do approve of."
There may be voters who don't approve of any of the candidates (and probably many of these don't normally bother voting- why vote if you don't want any of them?). Having a -1 and zero gives them voice. They may actually have a very disliked candidate, and the others are just not approved.
Also are _most_ voters that rational and smart to do what you suggest? Maybe I underestimate voter intelligence, but so far there are many indications that they aren't too bright esp the US ones. Bush keeps getting away with justifying the Iraq invasion by saying "we were attacked". And there are many US people who think that way (I just checked). Even though the US was never attacked by Iraq, and this was the official verdict of the 9/11 commission.
The other main advantage of having a "-1" is: candidates actually risk getting negative scores.
That's a very big plus to me:). I'm willing to bet that the prospect of that would make many previously apathetic voters actually vote.
"But then all savvy voters will vote either +1 or -1 for each candidate. A zero would be a (partial) wasted vote."
There don't seem to be that many savvy voters around. For instance: the Diebold election machines are scandalously bad and most people aren't kicking up a big fuss.
So the rest will probably just treat zeroes as don't cares - especially if you label zeroes as such. And so the system should work well enough to reflect voter opinion.
It isn't the same effect. Say a bunch of voters don't like all of the candidates. Do you think they are going to get off their butts, spend time going to the polling/voting booth, just to NOT check any of the boxes?
Also at the end of the day none of the candidates risk ending up with negative totals.
If most of the voters dislike a particular candidate but a few still like that candidate, the candidate ends up with a positive total. However this could be confused with a scenario where voters don't care about that candidate and not dislike that candidate. The signal to the candidates and everyone else won't be clear.
So the approval voting method you mention cannot give an accurate representation of voter negativity.
If you have a -1, 0 and +1 it gives you a much better representation of voter desires.
Probably it risks too good a representation for the politicians to ever willingly allow;).
Most approval voting systems allow you to only vote 0 or +1.
You can't leave out -1. Having -1 (No) as well as 0 (Don't care and +1 (Yes) gives you a FAR better idea of what the voters think.
This way voters can say "I don't care about the rest but I really don't want this person in".
If people are feeling negative about the candidates why should they go and vote _for_ anybody? In contrast they might actually go vote _against_ particularly disliked candidates.
Even if those candidates win, their votes still count! Coz if a candidate wins with a net negative total, he/she can't go brag about it - think of the field day the media will have. And the negative voter will certainly be satisfied that his/her vote made a difference!
Just think how many people are feeling negative about the candidates in the upcoming US elections? Shouldn't their voices be heard with less distortion?
"Most voting methods are preoccupied with voting strategy and how it best reflects the will of the voters."
Really? I think most people have missed a very significant thing about most election systems.
In all the popular systems mentioned there is no way to say "No". To me that's a huge oversight. I propose modifying various voting systems so that they allow voters to vote "No" if they want to ("None of the above" isn't as specific as a "No" against a particular candidate - you can't say "anyone but this person").
The votes are totalled up according to whatever voting system is chosen - No = -1. Yes = +1. The candidate with the most positive or least negative total wins (or the equivalent for the voting system used).
Whilst people may not feel like going to a polling station to vote _FOR_ any of the candidates, they might actually get off their butts and vote _AGAINST_ a particularly unwanted candidate (or more than one - depends on what voting system you choose, adapted to allow negative votes).
Sure this is quite a "negative" thing. But if some people are feeling negative perhaps they should still be given a voice.
And it will at least stop some politicians from bragging that they have been given "Mandate", esp if they win with negative totals!
There isn't very much added complexity, and you have a better idea of what the voters think, you get to find out things like whether a candidate is controversial (near zero total, but lots of negative and positive votes), or just unknown (few votes), or really disliked.
Who knows, maybe there'll be a lot more voters participating if they were allowed to vote "No".
One of which runs FreeBSD and is set up as a firewall. Since FreeBSD is already "dying" perhaps the hackers won't bother to get too familiar with it;).
I use AVG, but it's more to prevent accidents (e.g. oops slipped and clicked the wrong thing) than anything.
"but I think they are actually answering a different question:"
Nah.
Where I live (in the tropics), the odds of my PC getting damaged by lightning is higher than my PC getting infected by a virus/worm. I run a reasonably secured system (I even test/view suspect/untrusted stuff/sites using vmware virtual machines).
Here, thunderstorms are very very common (probably Florida is something like that).
I have a UPS, lightning protection devices etc, but these are usually protection against lightning _induced_ surges. If there's a direct hit, it's probably "buy new hardware and restore from backups" time.
There was a customer who sent in a modem and accessories for repair (back in the days where modems were expensive and worth repairing).
When we looked at the lightning protection device sent along with the modem - the wires weren't there any more - there was just a black coating on the inside of the device's plastic box.
Then I looked at the modem. The PCB had a bulge/bubble or two near the phone line input point. Colleague said - that's what happens when the PCB layers separate when getting zapped by lightning.
Looking at the underside of the PCB, I noticed that some of the copper tracks weren't there any more. Looked at the modem casing and found where the copper tracks went - they were deposited on the inside of the casing as small little balls/droplets of copper!
So I called the customer up and asked if everyone was OK. They said everyone was fine - the zap happened at night when nobody was around. But the PC the modem was attached to was dead, even the _mouse_ was dead, and the person jokingly (I think) said that they should sue us, coz our protection device didn't work.
Thing is while the lightning protection device used was supplied by us, it was a lower end model for city/urban use. We supplied higher grade ones to the customer for use in the plantations where the modem was (and told them to use those in the plantations).
Still not sure if things would have been much different if they had correctly used the higher grade (and more expensive) device. Maybe. These stuff need a good ground too though - no ground = no alternative place for the lightning surge to go but through the equipment. --
But if the PC users aren't living in the tropics then they're probably those stupid/ignorant ones helping to spread spam and worms.
Speech recognition has its uses but it's often overrated.
Thought-macro recognition has greater promise of revolutionizing things. Already animals are able to control devices and play games just with sensors hooked up to their brains.
Scenario: you're looking at something e.g. noticeboard or something, your SuperPDA's camera sees the image as well (in fact it's continuously recording so you can choose to permanently record stuff that has occured X seconds of buffer time ago (e.g. what happened?) ).
You then mentally mark the top left and bottom right corners of the area you want to capture, and then mentally think "Capture". All using predefined "thought macros".
The captured image is immediately processed - text content converted to text, keywords weighted by context (with tweaks done mentally) and stored in an object database for future reference/retrieval.
Same for audio - you'll have a continuous recording going on all buffered. So you can capture at anytime. That's where the speech recognition could come in. But it has to recognize different voices etc. Maybe you need to record in stereo to make it easier.
"You break the rules, you don't get to play. Not to go all Locke/Rousue Social Contract on you."
That's still not a convincing argument for/against felons getting to vote or not. "get to play" is ambiguous.
What is the official reason in the US why felons don't get to vote. In other countries convicted felons get to vote. They have their reasons. In the US, convicted felons are no longer regarded as citizens?
Are convicted felons still eligible to pay taxes, do they still have to bear the burdens of Government, laws etc (other than what's due to them due to the crimes they were convicted of)?
If they do, then I feel it's only fair that they still get a say in who gets to be in Government.
Worst of all, is it seems in some US states, felons who have served their sentence don't automatically get their voting rights reinstated!
To use your analogy: don't you get to play after you've served your time in the "sin bin"?
If you really want HA maybe you shouldn't be getting Solaris (or Linux). You should be looking at offerings from HP or IBM. e.g. OpenVMS, Tandem NonStop, mainframes etc.
Despite what Sun/Solaris fanatics say, Sun systems aren't really that much more reliable or HA than decent x86 systems.
AFAIK if a SPARC CPU dies it still kills stuff that's running on it right? Whereas if a CPU running in lockstep goes belly up, the other CPU can still manage. In fact, Fujitsu SPARC has hardware instruction retry, whereas Sun SPARC doesn't. Sun really is behind in this HA stuff.
So what kind of HA does Sun really provide? Clustering? x86 does clustering.
It was just fortunate for Sun that the people who were so used to Windows availability+reliability found Sun to be such a vast improvement. However it is unfortunate for Sun that nearly the same people are now finding Linux/*BSD on x86 a vast improvement in availability+reliability compared to Windows as well. For a lower price too.
If something has even the faintest smell, it's almost certain that dogs can smell it. I think the main trouble is describing to the dogs exactly what you want the dogs to find and getting good ways of letting the dogs tell you.
There are dogs who can tell when people are about to have an epileptic fit or seizure, sometimes even 15 minutes before. They'll give a signal so that the people can go find a nice safe place to lie down or whatever, and prepare themselves for the seizure. Dogs can also find land mines based from air samples taken from various zones and put into test tubes. Dogs can also find bodies under many feet of _flowing_ river water. They have been trained to find skin, lung and other cancers.
I think it's mainly a communication problem (plus some dogs also do get bored, and a relationship thingy - you're not dealing with machines).
It's like having someone born without a sense of smell trying to get someone with a sense of smell to say whether a food is prepared using wine or not. And both don't speak the same language. All you can say to the person is "yes" you got it right. And "no" you don't. And this is based on the results of a machine (made by people without a sense of smell) which is not necessarily 100% reliable either. There's plenty of scope for misunderstanding. For example: the person could think you're trying to identify food with _alcohol_. Or food with grape juice. Or maybe it turns out that the samples have some other correlation (e.g. most of the positive test samples had people who ate/drank something the same within 24 hours before they peed).
Note also that the dogs found someone with kidney cancer. So the dogs could also be right that it does smell like cancer - the people may indeed have cancers or precursors to cancers _elsewhere_ in the body. If the samples are from older folk, that might be true. Many people probably have cancers somewhere, it's just their immune systems keep them suppressed or had a lapse and are now busy getting rid of them.
And not all the dogs have similar skills nor have similar understanding of what you want. So a star performer who gets it, would probably do orders of magnitudes better.
They're trying to make a machine that does it. Maybe it won't be that difficult. But it could be hard if it's like detecting something _qualitative_ and not _quantitative_. Example: you're trying to find a sample that smells _mainly_ like a particular person but has traces of something that smells like that person just slightly different in a "bad" way. e.g. a sample that smells like Bob plus a faint smell like Bob going bad (whatever "bad" means).
e.g. it's like detecting which sheets of paper have one or two off-colour spots on them. And all the sheets are differently coloured. If you only have a machine that only detects the average colours you don't have a chance.
"I once spent hours trying to setup a _firewire_ on a linux box, but in retrospect, I probably would have save a great deal of agony just purchasing a hardware router/_firewall_."
Another thing the Intel compiler does work well for AMD too. But you may have to force it to recognize it as AMD to turn on even more optimizations. Apparently you get a boost as a nonIntel CPU, but if you disable the "intel-only" detection you can get even more of a boost.
Do you have evidence to show that the current single core AMD64 chips use more than 45W at peak at specifications (not overclocked)?
If it's from the TDP spec, I think those specs just mean you're supposed to design stuff to cope with that amount of heat coming out (whether or not the chips actually do generate that much heat or not). If you check, the TDP is 89W for ALL frequencies, which doesn't make sense if it's for actual ratings.
I think the idea is if the system builders make stuff for 90W, when the dual core AMD64s come out, you can just drop them in and those will run 90W peak (45W x 2 = 90W) without major issues - same heat sink, same case fans, same power supplies (maybe just need to update your BIOS). The evidence seems to be that way based on what AMD has been saying. I think they planned it that way right from the start.
I'm not sure you'd be able to say the same for Intel's dual core offerings if they still keep to the P4/Prescott style CPUs. As far as I know, the evidence is the Prescott CPUs actually do use 100W. If that's true, 2 x 100W is kinda scary for home PCs.
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So, where's your logic? Who was the champion of the war?
Furthermore I believe John Kerry said he was wrong.
In contrast Bush keeps refusing to admit that he was wrong. He may just say it once in a while, but his actions indicate otherwise. See the recent debate - Bush keeps equating Saddam with the 9/11 attacks - despite his 9/11 commission saying otherwise.
So where's the evidence that Bush is the best choice? So far there's plenty of evidence that Bush is an inferior choice. If Bush keeps making such big mistakes, and people keep supporting Bush then they're pretty stupid.
So, fine don't vote Kerry. But don't vote Bush either. There are other alternatives.
"In practice, this is the same as approval voting. Realize that it does not make sense to ever assign a zero. By assigning a -1 to candidates you don't approve of, you maximize the chance of electing the candidates you do approve of."
:). I'm willing to bet that the prospect of that would make many previously apathetic voters actually vote.
There may be voters who don't approve of any of the candidates (and probably many of these don't normally bother voting- why vote if you don't want any of them?). Having a -1 and zero gives them voice. They may actually have a very disliked candidate, and the others are just not approved.
Also are _most_ voters that rational and smart to do what you suggest? Maybe I underestimate voter intelligence, but so far there are many indications that they aren't too bright esp the US ones. Bush keeps getting away with justifying the Iraq invasion by saying "we were attacked". And there are many US people who think that way (I just checked). Even though the US was never attacked by Iraq, and this was the official verdict of the 9/11 commission.
The other main advantage of having a "-1" is: candidates actually risk getting negative scores.
That's a very big plus to me
"But then all savvy voters will vote either +1 or -1 for each candidate. A zero would be a (partial) wasted vote."
There don't seem to be that many savvy voters around. For instance: the Diebold election machines are scandalously bad and most people aren't kicking up a big fuss.
So the rest will probably just treat zeroes as don't cares - especially if you label zeroes as such. And so the system should work well enough to reflect voter opinion.
Magician going to audience showing a hand of cards saying:
Pick a card any card.
Sure it still does matter which card you pick. But the bulk of the picking has already been done.
I disagree. It's more like having a 0 and a +1.
;).
It isn't the same effect. Say a bunch of voters don't like all of the candidates. Do you think they are going to get off their butts, spend time going to the polling/voting booth, just to NOT check any of the boxes?
Also at the end of the day none of the candidates risk ending up with negative totals.
If most of the voters dislike a particular candidate but a few still like that candidate, the candidate ends up with a positive total. However this could be confused with a scenario where voters don't care about that candidate and not dislike that candidate. The signal to the candidates and everyone else won't be clear.
So the approval voting method you mention cannot give an accurate representation of voter negativity.
If you have a -1, 0 and +1 it gives you a much better representation of voter desires.
Probably it risks too good a representation for the politicians to ever willingly allow
Most approval voting systems allow you to only vote 0 or +1.
You can't leave out -1. Having -1 (No) as well as 0 (Don't care and +1 (Yes) gives you a FAR better idea of what the voters think.
This way voters can say "I don't care about the rest but I really don't want this person in".
If people are feeling negative about the candidates why should they go and vote _for_ anybody? In contrast they might actually go vote _against_ particularly disliked candidates.
Even if those candidates win, their votes still count! Coz if a candidate wins with a net negative total, he/she can't go brag about it - think of the field day the media will have. And the negative voter will certainly be satisfied that his/her vote made a difference!
Just think how many people are feeling negative about the candidates in the upcoming US elections? Shouldn't their voices be heard with less distortion?
"Most voting methods are preoccupied with voting strategy and how it best reflects the will of the voters."
Really? I think most people have missed a very significant thing about most election systems.
In all the popular systems mentioned there is no way to say "No". To me that's a huge oversight. I propose modifying various voting systems so that they allow voters to vote "No" if they want to ("None of the above" isn't as specific as a "No" against a particular candidate - you can't say "anyone but this person").
The votes are totalled up according to whatever voting system is chosen - No = -1. Yes = +1. The candidate with the most positive or least negative total wins (or the equivalent for the voting system used).
Whilst people may not feel like going to a polling station to vote _FOR_ any of the candidates, they might actually get off their butts and vote _AGAINST_ a particularly unwanted candidate (or more than one - depends on what voting system you choose, adapted to allow negative votes).
Sure this is quite a "negative" thing. But if some people are feeling negative perhaps they should still be given a voice.
And it will at least stop some politicians from bragging that they have been given "Mandate", esp if they win with negative totals!
There isn't very much added complexity, and you have a better idea of what the voters think, you get to find out things like whether a candidate is controversial (near zero total, but lots of negative and positive votes), or just unknown (few votes), or really disliked.
Who knows, maybe there'll be a lot more voters participating if they were allowed to vote "No".
The only hope for the system to be change if you actually get altruistic people in, or really stupid ones.
I use a UPS to protect my computers + network.
;).
One of which runs FreeBSD and is set up as a firewall. Since FreeBSD is already "dying" perhaps the hackers won't bother to get too familiar with it
I use AVG, but it's more to prevent accidents (e.g. oops slipped and clicked the wrong thing) than anything.
"but I think they are actually answering a different question:"
Nah.
Where I live (in the tropics), the odds of my PC getting damaged by lightning is higher than my PC getting infected by a virus/worm. I run a reasonably secured system (I even test/view suspect/untrusted stuff/sites using vmware virtual machines).
Here, thunderstorms are very very common (probably Florida is something like that).
I have a UPS, lightning protection devices etc, but these are usually protection against lightning _induced_ surges. If there's a direct hit, it's probably "buy new hardware and restore from backups" time.
There was a customer who sent in a modem and accessories for repair (back in the days where modems were expensive and worth repairing).
When we looked at the lightning protection device sent along with the modem - the wires weren't there any more - there was just a black coating on the inside of the device's plastic box.
Then I looked at the modem. The PCB had a bulge/bubble or two near the phone line input point. Colleague said - that's what happens when the PCB layers separate when getting zapped by lightning.
Looking at the underside of the PCB, I noticed that some of the copper tracks weren't there any more. Looked at the modem casing and found where the copper tracks went - they were deposited on the inside of the casing as small little balls/droplets of copper!
So I called the customer up and asked if everyone was OK. They said everyone was fine - the zap happened at night when nobody was around. But the PC the modem was attached to was dead, even the _mouse_ was dead, and the person jokingly (I think) said that they should sue us, coz our protection device didn't work.
Thing is while the lightning protection device used was supplied by us, it was a lower end model for city/urban use. We supplied higher grade ones to the customer for use in the plantations where the modem was (and told them to use those in the plantations).
Still not sure if things would have been much different if they had correctly used the higher grade (and more expensive) device. Maybe. These stuff need a good ground too though - no ground = no alternative place for the lightning surge to go but through the equipment.
--
But if the PC users aren't living in the tropics then they're probably those stupid/ignorant ones helping to spread spam and worms.
People like Carly are in it for the bonuses, perks and the golden handshake when everything goes sour. One of those "Professional CEOs".
Customers remember bad stuff for years. In contrast, shareholders can't seem to remember past the last quarter or two.
Whereas the odds are better for a "long term view" if the leader is one of the Founders, or has worked his/her way up.
Speech recognition has its uses but it's often overrated.
Thought-macro recognition has greater promise of revolutionizing things. Already animals are able to control devices and play games just with sensors hooked up to their brains.
Scenario: you're looking at something e.g. noticeboard or something, your SuperPDA's camera sees the image as well (in fact it's continuously recording so you can choose to permanently record stuff that has occured X seconds of buffer time ago (e.g. what happened?) ).
You then mentally mark the top left and bottom right corners of the area you want to capture, and then mentally think "Capture". All using predefined "thought macros".
The captured image is immediately processed - text content converted to text, keywords weighted by context (with tweaks done mentally) and stored in an object database for future reference/retrieval.
Same for audio - you'll have a continuous recording going on all buffered. So you can capture at anytime. That's where the speech recognition could come in. But it has to recognize different voices etc. Maybe you need to record in stereo to make it easier.
"You break the rules, you don't get to play. Not to go all Locke/Rousue Social Contract on you."
That's still not a convincing argument for/against felons getting to vote or not. "get to play" is ambiguous.
What is the official reason in the US why felons don't get to vote. In other countries convicted felons get to vote. They have their reasons. In the US, convicted felons are no longer regarded as citizens?
Are convicted felons still eligible to pay taxes, do they still have to bear the burdens of Government, laws etc (other than what's due to them due to the crimes they were convicted of)?
If they do, then I feel it's only fair that they still get a say in who gets to be in Government.
Worst of all, is it seems in some US states, felons who have served their sentence don't automatically get their voting rights reinstated!
To use your analogy: don't you get to play after you've served your time in the "sin bin"?
That's a distraction from the main issue:
Why can't convicted felons vote? If they are still citizens they should get to vote.
Maybe someone should ask Bush and Kerry what they think.
Why should alleged felons be disqualified? What next - people with p2p software on their computers not being allowed to vote?
I think the US should stop claiming superlatives for its brand of democracy.
If you really want HA maybe you shouldn't be getting Solaris (or Linux). You should be looking at offerings from HP or IBM. e.g. OpenVMS, Tandem NonStop, mainframes etc.
Despite what Sun/Solaris fanatics say, Sun systems aren't really that much more reliable or HA than decent x86 systems.
AFAIK if a SPARC CPU dies it still kills stuff that's running on it right? Whereas if a CPU running in lockstep goes belly up, the other CPU can still manage. In fact, Fujitsu SPARC has hardware instruction retry, whereas Sun SPARC doesn't. Sun really is behind in this HA stuff.
So what kind of HA does Sun really provide? Clustering? x86 does clustering.
It was just fortunate for Sun that the people who were so used to Windows availability+reliability found Sun to be such a vast improvement. However it is unfortunate for Sun that nearly the same people are now finding Linux/*BSD on x86 a vast improvement in availability+reliability compared to Windows as well. For a lower price too.
If something has even the faintest smell, it's almost certain that dogs can smell it. I think the main trouble is describing to the dogs exactly what you want the dogs to find and getting good ways of letting the dogs tell you.
There are dogs who can tell when people are about to have an epileptic fit or seizure, sometimes even 15 minutes before. They'll give a signal so that the people can go find a nice safe place to lie down or whatever, and prepare themselves for the seizure. Dogs can also find land mines based from air samples taken from various zones and put into test tubes. Dogs can also find bodies under many feet of _flowing_ river water. They have been trained to find skin, lung and other cancers.
I think it's mainly a communication problem (plus some dogs also do get bored, and a relationship thingy - you're not dealing with machines).
It's like having someone born without a sense of smell trying to get someone with a sense of smell to say whether a food is prepared using wine or not. And both don't speak the same language. All you can say to the person is "yes" you got it right. And "no" you don't. And this is based on the results of a machine (made by people without a sense of smell) which is not necessarily 100% reliable either. There's plenty of scope for misunderstanding. For example: the person could think you're trying to identify food with _alcohol_. Or food with grape juice. Or maybe it turns out that the samples have some other correlation (e.g. most of the positive test samples had people who ate/drank something the same within 24 hours before they peed).
Note also that the dogs found someone with kidney cancer. So the dogs could also be right that it does smell like cancer - the people may indeed have cancers or precursors to cancers _elsewhere_ in the body. If the samples are from older folk, that might be true. Many people probably have cancers somewhere, it's just their immune systems keep them suppressed or had a lapse and are now busy getting rid of them.
And not all the dogs have similar skills nor have similar understanding of what you want. So a star performer who gets it, would probably do orders of magnitudes better.
They're trying to make a machine that does it. Maybe it won't be that difficult. But it could be hard if it's like detecting something _qualitative_ and not _quantitative_. Example: you're trying to find a sample that smells _mainly_ like a particular person but has traces of something that smells like that person just slightly different in a "bad" way. e.g. a sample that smells like Bob plus a faint smell like Bob going bad (whatever "bad" means).
e.g. it's like detecting which sheets of paper have one or two off-colour spots on them. And all the sheets are differently coloured. If you only have a machine that only detects the average colours you don't have a chance.
"I once spent hours trying to setup a _firewire_ on a linux box, but in retrospect, I probably would have save a great deal of agony just purchasing a hardware router/_firewall_."
:)
(emphasis mine).
Perhaps you were looking up the wrong docs?
Uh why not just use all the free ones at the same time? :)
Uh, those very people are unlikely to be doing the stuff he's complaining about.
Those people have better things to do than read slashdot and say "they have way too much time on their hands". He's not talking about them.
Got it?
Coz using LN2 is safer than opening a few windows in Finland?
;).
We're talking about real cold y'know
Exactly what math do you want to do?
Go see:
SPEC FPU results
Look at the details, you'll see that different processors have different strengths depending on the tasks. To see what tasks they are you can look at:
SPEC FPU
Another thing the Intel compiler does work well for AMD too. But you may have to force it to recognize it as AMD to turn on even more optimizations. Apparently you get a boost as a nonIntel CPU, but if you disable the "intel-only" detection you can get even more of a boost.
Doh, I think that's what they did ($2000 laptop remember?), but that's what some people call inefficient.
"They are single core licences."
The OEM licenses on the IBM PCs at my office say Windows XP 1-2 processor. Similar for the Dells. So that's ok.
Not sure if they've changed things recently.
But these license things are ridiculous sometimes. Next thing you know we'd have to howl at the moon in order to use the software.
Where did you get the 90W peak figures from?
Do you have evidence to show that the current single core AMD64 chips use more than 45W at peak at specifications (not overclocked)?
If it's from the TDP spec, I think those specs just mean you're supposed to design stuff to cope with that amount of heat coming out (whether or not the chips actually do generate that much heat or not). If you check, the TDP is 89W for ALL frequencies, which doesn't make sense if it's for actual ratings.
I think the idea is if the system builders make stuff for 90W, when the dual core AMD64s come out, you can just drop them in and those will run 90W peak (45W x 2 = 90W) without major issues - same heat sink, same case fans, same power supplies (maybe just need to update your BIOS). The evidence seems to be that way based on what AMD has been saying. I think they planned it that way right from the start.
I'm not sure you'd be able to say the same for Intel's dual core offerings if they still keep to the P4/Prescott style CPUs. As far as I know, the evidence is the Prescott CPUs actually do use 100W. If that's true, 2 x 100W is kinda scary for home PCs.
How much did you charge her?