Right, I mean who cares about the environmental implications of trashing lakes for our fickle cooling purposes, after all!
Completely wrong.
The question is the environmental impact of slightly warming the lake...
vs....the (much, much larger) impact of burning tons and tons of coal to power the expensive AC units.
Which do you think is going to have the biggest impact, and end up costing far, far more in both the short and long-terms?
And that's assuming year-round cooling. Once you have such a system in-place, you are also extracting some of that same heat from the lake to power all your water heaters, and could (potentially) do the same for building heating in the winter, cooking on stoves, ovens, etc., instead of burning fossil fuels for those purposes.
If you actually look at the facts and figures, people that complain about "heating the lake" look really, really moronic. Far moreso than even those idiots that complain about windmills killing a few birds.
For example, in California, we've been trying to build new power plants for ages. Too bad coal/natural gas generate CO2, wind power kills birds, solar panels generate more waste being manufactured than they can ever make back in their lifetime, and nuclear energy is OOOOH SO EVIL.
Coal is an absolute no-go, but natural gas is a big green-light. Private companies all around the state have put up their own private natural-gas power plants to get off of the ridiculously expensive grid electricity, and related problems.
The power companies (like Edison), however, are happy making lots of money on the inflated electricity costs, and building new power plants is like cutting open the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Actually, the only power generation facility I've heard of being built in the past 20 years was SoCal Ed's new parabolic-reflector-stirling-engine solar plant,
That says a lot about you, and the sources you read, and very little about the facilities themselves. The location for the Stirling-SCE solar facility (which is scheduled to start construction in 2008) happens to be dammed-near to a brand-new 30 Megawatt (IIRC) natural gas facility.
which I think is the only kind of power all the hippies here can agree on.
Lots of coyotes, jackrabbits, lizards, tortises, hawks, ravens, doves, etc., will be harmed by 6 square miles of open desert land being bulldozed. There are a lot of Joshua Trees (protected species) on 6 square miles, so I have to wonder what their plans are for relocating them.
No, I really don't care, but the point remains, this solar facility will have just as many serious environmental consequences as windmills, and other solar. This time, though, it looks like it will be profitable enough for Edison that they actually want to build it, instead of continuing to scapegoat a tiny minority of "environmentalists".
What greater technology? Guns, religion, butter churners? It didn't take long for the Indians to get guns.
Guns, lots of guns, the ability to make guns, etc. Indians, at best, had fewer, more primitive guns than their European counterparts.
Besides that, there was technology like forts, ships, wagons, custom-bred animals, the practice of medicine (primitive, but worked much better than chanting to spirits), steel tools (saws, hammers), food preservation and preperation, etc.
Modern military strategies, the skills to organize people into a common army, etc.
The diseases you mention didn't just come along and kill off the Indians (like in War of the Worlds), the Europeans specifically used biological warfare, specifically targeting the Indians with diseases neither Europeans nor Indians had immunity to. That lack of (technical/biological) knowledge of disease is what killed them, more than the diseases themselves.
No one wants to admit life started out there somewhere.
Quite the opposite, actually. Nobody wants to admit we may be all alone in the whole Universe.
Most everyone (you included) is looking for the Deus ex machina to come along and solve all our problems for us.
Why is it so hard for people to believe life exists beyond earth?
It is equally as hard to believe life exists beyond earth, as it is to believe it does not.
The probabilities and facts dictate the earth is not the center of the universe.
The Earth is not the (literal) center of the Universe, of course. However, we have no other reference points to say whether life is common, or uncommon. With only one positive sample (Earth), you can't make any educated guess, one way or the other. You have an infinite margin of error.
I for one think it would be good for mankind to have a significant first contact with a superior race.
Proving my point, exactly. Most people want something better to come along and solve our problems. The whole "life on other planets" argument is always about more-advanced-than-us sentient life.
Let us assume there is life all over the universe. What is to say it will be: A) More advanced than bacteria. B) As advanced as plants? C) As advanced as animals? D) As advanced as early humans? E) As advanced as modern humans? F) Significantly more advanced than humans?
Even if there were microbes on Mars, you still have an infinitely long way to go to reach the deus ex machina that will come along and save us from ourselves. Even if you're right up through "D" above, that still means we'll be the ones that have to go out and find them, and solve THEIR problems, not have them solve ours.
That's not the image of the universe most people want to have. It's much easier to let the aliens do the hard work for us.
Therefore if there is life HERE, there is and has been life all over the damned place. One little rock doesn't change the statistical likelihood of that.
You cannot give any statistical analysis with only one (positive) sample. That is a statistic with an infinite margin of error.
If you ask 100 people a yes/no question, and only one person says "yes", does that mean 60 million people in the world would also say "yes", or does that mean in a freak of chance, you just happen to get the one single person of all 6 billion? Until you get at least one more positive, you can't even begin to GUESS what the statics really are.
Dean Kamen's stirling generator is more interesting.
No mention of efficiency in that article at all. That's the very reason why stirling engines failed to catch-on against the dangerous steam boilers it was meant to replace.
It produces potable water, unlike the DoD monstrosity,
The water-filtering feature of the Kamen stirling generator is interesting, but electricity = water filtering, so it's not a big deal.
[...] with all the cooling devoted to the turbine, it will be 5 percent to 8 percent more efficient than traditional turbines. With some cooling siphoned for other purposes, it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient than the turbines. Gee, I'm just going to hazard a guess that, in that second senario, they've "siphoned" off 2 percent to 3 percent of that energy.
They're trying to make it sound like you get water and cooling for free with this design. Really, it's just BS marketing. Water/cooling is convenient, since recent wars have been primarily in hot, arid countries.
5-8% improvement in effeciency is a very good thing, but you might as well say "You can siphon off some of that for powering iPods, and 'it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient.'"
Also, the "cooling" aspect of it sounds like this might only be an efficiency improvement in hot areas, during the summer months. It is entirely possible the limited efficiency improvement may be outstripped by the added purchase and maintenance costs.
I've no problem booting the OS, doing the task, then back to my OSS environment. Running an AD supported version would not have impacted me one bit.
Latest 180-day trial versions of Windows are available for free download. No ads, no nothing.
I recomend combining that with BartPE and UBCD4WIN, then you have a full Windows desktop environment bootable from CD, wherever you happen to need it. Put your apps on a USB Flash drive, or just download them once BartsPE has started, run them, and reboot.
Not to mention numerous MPEG-4/MOV samples exist in the wild.
And the only reason Quicktime uses a standard conatiner format now is that MP4 was based on the Quicktime MOV format.
It's a subset, yes, but that doesn't change the point at all. It is completely open, documented, and a fully standard format, which has been implimented by many other open source and commercial players, both hardware and software.
And the FFMpeg implementation (and hence the implementation in MPlayer, Xine, VLC, etc) isn't complete yet. It's improving at a rapid pace, but it's not there yet.
But I'm still surprised at how many +5 postings here support Colbert and what essentially was an attack on wikipedia.
An attack? Is that an attack in The War On Christmas or in The War On Terrorism?
If you really wanted to, you could translate that to dollars the same way companies do after receiving website defacements.
No, you couldn't. Nobody broke-in. Nobody did real damage. Everyone is using Wikipedia the way it was designed to be used. The design just happens to have ridiculous inherent flaws, which he suggested everyone make use-of.
If someone you didn't idolize did the same thing (even if just to make a point or a joke), you'd be burning them in effigy.
Not at all. Many/.ers, myself included, are outspoken critics of the lowsy design of Wikipedia. It has no sanity-checking at all. The million monkeys on a typewritter method just doesn't hold up. It's an encylopedia on the honor system. It works for a few subjects, but fails miserably as a whole. I'm glad we have someone pointing at the problems people don't want to confront.
If it wasn't for the fact that Colbert was so widely seen, his ploy would have worked perfectly, and gone unnoticed for long periods of time. And, we're still early on. Sooner or later, that article is going to be unprotected, and people will repeated deface it.
And to stop the flames before they start, I've personally written several whole articles for Wikipedia, and seen them get twisted to the whims, opinions, and misconceptions of whomever edited them last. The Wikipedia requires eternal vigilance, and an army of volunteers, which just can't possibly work in the long term.
Last year, Richard Dawkins, of The Selfish Gene fame, made a documentary about religion called "Root of All Evil?", where he defines faith as "the process of non-thinking" that can lead to even the worst human condition, like murderous thinking when the fundamentalism make people hate and kill each other. Just like what's happening in Israel right now.
In any group, whether religous or not, you will find nutjobs trying to usurp the group for their own purposes.
The issues with Jews and Arabs would exist even if both groups were the same religon. Anti-arab and anti-semetic feelings exist among just as many non-religous groups.
Groups like the KKK didn't claim Blacks and other non-whites followed the wrong God. They made-up their own secular reasons to justify what they already wanted to do.
Religon is just another scapegoat for bad people that want to do bad things.
One of the most interesting things about it is that he tries to talk with several religious leaders about evolution, and they sistematically avoid any rational discussion and undeniable evidence with the same stupid arguments, equivalent to "my book says this and therefore, it must be true".
The Catholic Church recognizes and supports "The Theory of Evolution", and has repeated condemed "The Hypothesis of Intelligent Design".
Of the "big three" (Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real), Real is closest to actually having an open, Free Software, system (Helix.) It's not perfect, they're still insisting on "binary blobs" for supporting some codecs, but it's far closer to what's wanted than the other two.
Quicktime used MPEG-4 video for years. Now it uses h.264 and AAC audio in an MP4 container, which can be played-back by many different programs, including many fully open source. They use standard RTSP for streaming, and even provide the Darwin Streaming Server as free and open source for anyone to use.
Windows Media has submitted their latest video codec as as SMPTE standard (VC-1) which is now being used by HD-DVD and Blue-ray players.
Real has a propritary format, propritary audio codecs, propritary video codecs, require their propritary software for encoding, propritary software for decoding, propritary software that supports their propritary streaming protocols, and sued Streambox out-of-business for creating an application that could read (and save) propritary RealNetwork streams.
How does this make Real anything but (by-far) the worst of the worst? Sure, they have the Helix player, which in open source, but only under a rather restrictive license ensuring that it can't be used by anyone else for anything. The Helix player only supports already open video/audio codecs and containers, which have been supported by many other more open players for years, unless you agree to their ridiculously restrictive license to get the Real codecs.
On top of that, Real's the only one of the three that officially supports GNU/Linux. Windows Media and Quicktime survive under GNU/Linux because of reverse engineering efforts and DLL-wrapping, not thanks to support from the multimedia system's inventor.
Real was the first, of the three to play on Linux, yes. However, Quicktime (now) uses standard codecs and formats that ANY player can use. Windows Media has a SMPTE standardized video codec which any player can impliment (and native implimentations for VLC/ffmpeg are available), etc. With real, you still, to this day, have no choice but to load the binary codecs (as MPlayer/Xine do).
Real has a poor reputation only because their Windows client was once a hotbed of malware and kludges. It isn't today, hasn't been for years,
Completely untrue. Real pulled back just a little bit. Their software still installs lots of other crap and system services, makes it difficult to disable sending information back to their servers, etc. It's just nominally less horrible than it used-to be. It's still very, very bad software, which I go out of my way to be rid of.
Real is certainly a better citizen today than Apple.
Utterly wrong. Apple is the BEST of the big 3 by FAR, and has been for several years.
Yes..there was a time when Real was an EVIL company. BUT..they have done many things since then
They got only marginally less evil. They started the Helix Player, thinking they could cash-in on open source developers to do some of their work for them, but they never open-sourced their own codecs, nor has the "free" RealPlayer gotten any less obtrusive. It still installs itself everywhere, makes it very difficult to opt-out of sending usage information to their servers, etc.
Real has been trying to change their image by advertising how much better they've gotten, but unfortunately, they haven't really gotten any better. They've just been less of an annoyance, since fewer and fewer people feel the need to install the RealPlayer now that Quicktime and WMP have become (slightly) better alternatives.
I'm afraid "cost of living" isn't a very good measure.
First off, there are a LOT of things which aren't going to be price-adjusted, no matter where you live. Computer ports will cost the same ammount, whether you're earning $200,000 a year in California, or $50,000 a year in Alabama. Some things like car dealerships may charge you a bit less, since their employee and rent costs are cheaper, but that'll only be a few percent overall.
And, cost of living doesn't really take into account the QUALITY of living. Where land costs more, you'll find that all the houses are better quality, since $20,000 in better designs, workmanship, and materials, is a minor detail in the $200,000 sticker price. In places where land is dirt cheap, and people don't make as much, they have to build the houses as cheaply as they can to be competitive. The point is, you can get a house cheaper than elsewhere (so cost-of-living is lower), but you'll have just that: a cheaper, junkier house.
Though, the truth of the matter is, I'd personally be happy to take a pay-cut to get the hell away from big cities.
FP is a big important part of our world these days, it's used even in audio processing, all our games are all FP...
The thing about FP, though, is that it can be equally-well substituted by integer-only operations. On x86, converting floats to their integer-only equivalents make for a huge speed-up.
I don't have an Itanium to benchmark, but I expect (even with FP operations being faster) converting your code to use INTs would make it run nearly as fast on far, far cheaper CPUs.
1) Why do you believe AMD can do something Intel cannot?
Umm, because AMD has the better architecture, and Intel isn't going to just throw theirs out overnight.
[...] because Intel currently has the faster CPU
The only comparisons I've seen have been for 32-bit software. When it comes to 64-bit, Intel is lagging behind. And still there, they're only winning on the float. In a few months you can expect AMD to leapfrog Intel, and then Intel to leapfrog AMD again, etc. If AMD can just continue to maintain parity with Intel, they'll continue to gain marketshare. Both price and architecture are in AMD's favor.
3) The time it takes AMD to match Intel gives Intel the same amount of time to stay ahead.
You're assuming everyone at AMD was just sitting around on their ass, doing nothing, until Intel came out with the Core 2.
If AMD were really ahead of Intel, why didn't AMD create an Opteron/Athlon killer in the time it took Intel to create their C2D?
I assuming they were just raking in as much profit as they could on their current lines. There wasn't any competition until now, and little benefit for them to spend money just to obsolete their own chips.
There is no reason to believe AMD will become the king of server processors if [...]
That's a very big "if", and it's certainly not going to happen overnight. As you said about Intel; AMD isn't going to just sit around doing nothing, while Intel is working on that.
I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor.
I can imagine it with a $100 PCI hardware crypto card as well...
Slashdot Mirror
Completely wrong.
The question is the environmental impact of slightly warming the lake...
vs.
Which do you think is going to have the biggest impact, and end up costing far, far more in both the short and long-terms?
And that's assuming year-round cooling. Once you have such a system in-place, you are also extracting some of that same heat from the lake to power all your water heaters, and could (potentially) do the same for building heating in the winter, cooking on stoves, ovens, etc., instead of burning fossil fuels for those purposes.
If you actually look at the facts and figures, people that complain about "heating the lake" look really, really moronic. Far moreso than even those idiots that complain about windmills killing a few birds.
He didn't say solar, he said solar panels, which are very toxic and expensive to produce.
Coal is an absolute no-go, but natural gas is a big green-light. Private companies all around the state have put up their own private natural-gas power plants to get off of the ridiculously expensive grid electricity, and related problems.
The power companies (like Edison), however, are happy making lots of money on the inflated electricity costs, and building new power plants is like cutting open the goose that lays the golden eggs.
That says a lot about you, and the sources you read, and very little about the facilities themselves. The location for the Stirling-SCE solar facility (which is scheduled to start construction in 2008) happens to be dammed-near to a brand-new 30 Megawatt (IIRC) natural gas facility.
Lots of coyotes, jackrabbits, lizards, tortises, hawks, ravens, doves, etc., will be harmed by 6 square miles of open desert land being bulldozed. There are a lot of Joshua Trees (protected species) on 6 square miles, so I have to wonder what their plans are for relocating them.
No, I really don't care, but the point remains, this solar facility will have just as many serious environmental consequences as windmills, and other solar. This time, though, it looks like it will be profitable enough for Edison that they actually want to build it, instead of continuing to scapegoat a tiny minority of "environmentalists".
Guns, lots of guns, the ability to make guns, etc. Indians, at best, had fewer, more primitive guns than their European counterparts.
Besides that, there was technology like forts, ships, wagons, custom-bred animals, the practice of medicine (primitive, but worked much better than chanting to spirits), steel tools (saws, hammers), food preservation and preperation, etc.
Modern military strategies, the skills to organize people into a common army, etc.
The diseases you mention didn't just come along and kill off the Indians (like in War of the Worlds), the Europeans specifically used biological warfare, specifically targeting the Indians with diseases neither Europeans nor Indians had immunity to. That lack of (technical/biological) knowledge of disease is what killed them, more than the diseases themselves.
Quite the opposite, actually. Nobody wants to admit we may be all alone in the whole Universe.
Most everyone (you included) is looking for the Deus ex machina to come along and solve all our problems for us.
It is equally as hard to believe life exists beyond earth, as it is to believe it does not.
The Earth is not the (literal) center of the Universe, of course. However, we have no other reference points to say whether life is common, or uncommon. With only one positive sample (Earth), you can't make any educated guess, one way or the other. You have an infinite margin of error.
Proving my point, exactly. Most people want something better to come along and solve our problems. The whole "life on other planets" argument is always about more-advanced-than-us sentient life.
Let us assume there is life all over the universe. What is to say it will be:
A) More advanced than bacteria.
B) As advanced as plants?
C) As advanced as animals?
D) As advanced as early humans?
E) As advanced as modern humans?
F) Significantly more advanced than humans?
Even if there were microbes on Mars, you still have an infinitely long way to go to reach the deus ex machina that will come along and save us from ourselves. Even if you're right up through "D" above, that still means we'll be the ones that have to go out and find them, and solve THEIR problems, not have them solve ours.
That's not the image of the universe most people want to have. It's much easier to let the aliens do the hard work for us.
Yes, it would be very sad if we all found out we aren't actually alive.
You cannot give any statistical analysis with only one (positive) sample. That is a statistic with an infinite margin of error.
If you ask 100 people a yes/no question, and only one person says "yes", does that mean 60 million people in the world would also say "yes", or does that mean in a freak of chance, you just happen to get the one single person of all 6 billion? Until you get at least one more positive, you can't even begin to GUESS what the statics really are.
No mention of efficiency in that article at all. That's the very reason why stirling engines failed to catch-on against the dangerous steam boilers it was meant to replace.
The water-filtering feature of the Kamen stirling generator is interesting, but electricity = water filtering, so it's not a big deal.
[...] with all the cooling devoted to the turbine, it will be 5 percent to 8 percent more efficient than traditional turbines. With some cooling siphoned for other purposes, it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient than the turbines.
Gee, I'm just going to hazard a guess that, in that second senario, they've "siphoned" off 2 percent to 3 percent of that energy.
They're trying to make it sound like you get water and cooling for free with this design. Really, it's just BS marketing. Water/cooling is convenient, since recent wars have been primarily in hot, arid countries.
5-8% improvement in effeciency is a very good thing, but you might as well say "You can siphon off some of that for powering iPods, and 'it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient.'"
Also, the "cooling" aspect of it sounds like this might only be an efficiency improvement in hot areas, during the summer months. It is entirely possible the limited efficiency improvement may be outstripped by the added purchase and maintenance costs.
Music is easy to distribute over broadband connections, and tolerable over dial-up.
DVD-quality video is slow over broadband lines, and ridiculous over dial-up.
HighDef video is ridiculous over broadband lines, and will be for the next decade for the majority of people. Never mind dial-up.
I don't think CDs will die soon, and I know HD-DVD/Blu-ray will be the only real options for the next decade.
Latest 180-day trial versions of Windows are available for free download. No ads, no nothing.
I recomend combining that with BartPE and UBCD4WIN, then you have a full Windows desktop environment bootable from CD, wherever you happen to need it. Put your apps on a USB Flash drive, or just download them once BartsPE has started, run them, and reboot.
Trains. Ships. etc.
Most countries don't have the same love affair Americans do, with cars.
And in some places, like the Australian outback, the huge truck-trains go over primitive dirt roads constantly.
The interstate system was important in the US because cars were primitive at the time. Their skinny wooden wheels couldn't handle soft dirt or mud.
The problems of other countries can't be solved by just blindly duplicating the development of the USA.
One more link for anyone who cares...
f aq.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/
Scroll down to: "How does H.264 compare with MPEG-4 in QuickTime 6?"
Try again. After SVQ3 got too old (quite a while ago), but before h.264 (just recently) Quicktime was using MPEG-4.
I'm not finding any very *good* sources, but at least see the bottom of this page: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/mpeg4
Not to mention numerous MPEG-4/MOV samples exist in the wild.
It's a subset, yes, but that doesn't change the point at all. It is completely open, documented, and a fully standard format, which has been implimented by many other open source and commercial players, both hardware and software.
The libavcodec WMV9 decoder wasn't the one I was talking about. See: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/?p=129
It's quite sad that bad information gets modded up just as quickly (if not moreso) than correct information.
Fair enough, it's been a while since I looked into it.
That's good to hear, but what they may potentially do in the future is completely irrelevant. What they are doing now is the issue.
Fuunny thaat aa speelliing naazii liikee yoouurseelf caan't eeveen tyypee proopeerly.
In general, it's true. There may be specific exceptions.
Both Texas and California are large states, with highly varying land prices. Can you be more specific?
An attack? Is that an attack in The War On Christmas or in The War On Terrorism?
No, you couldn't. Nobody broke-in. Nobody did real damage. Everyone is using Wikipedia the way it was designed to be used. The design just happens to have ridiculous inherent flaws, which he suggested everyone make use-of.
Not at all. Many
If it wasn't for the fact that Colbert was so widely seen, his ploy would have worked perfectly, and gone unnoticed for long periods of time. And, we're still early on. Sooner or later, that article is going to be unprotected, and people will repeated deface it.
And to stop the flames before they start, I've personally written several whole articles for Wikipedia, and seen them get twisted to the whims, opinions, and misconceptions of whomever edited them last. The Wikipedia requires eternal vigilance, and an army of volunteers, which just can't possibly work in the long term.
In any group, whether religous or not, you will find nutjobs trying to usurp the group for their own purposes.
The issues with Jews and Arabs would exist even if both groups were the same religon. Anti-arab and anti-semetic feelings exist among just as many non-religous groups.
Groups like the KKK didn't claim Blacks and other non-whites followed the wrong God. They made-up their own secular reasons to justify what they already wanted to do.
Religon is just another scapegoat for bad people that want to do bad things.
The Catholic Church recognizes and supports "The Theory of Evolution", and has repeated condemed "The Hypothesis of Intelligent Design".
Quicktime used MPEG-4 video for years. Now it uses h.264 and AAC audio in an MP4 container, which can be played-back by many different programs, including many fully open source. They use standard RTSP for streaming, and even provide the Darwin Streaming Server as free and open source for anyone to use.
Windows Media has submitted their latest video codec as as SMPTE standard (VC-1) which is now being used by HD-DVD and Blue-ray players.
Real has a propritary format, propritary audio codecs, propritary video codecs, require their propritary software for encoding, propritary software for decoding, propritary software that supports their propritary streaming protocols, and sued Streambox out-of-business for creating an application that could read (and save) propritary RealNetwork streams.
How does this make Real anything but (by-far) the worst of the worst? Sure, they have the Helix player, which in open source, but only under a rather restrictive license ensuring that it can't be used by anyone else for anything. The Helix player only supports already open video/audio codecs and containers, which have been supported by many other more open players for years, unless you agree to their ridiculously restrictive license to get the Real codecs.
Real was the first, of the three to play on Linux, yes. However, Quicktime (now) uses standard codecs and formats that ANY player can use. Windows Media has a SMPTE standardized video codec which any player can impliment (and native implimentations for VLC/ffmpeg are available), etc. With real, you still, to this day, have no choice but to load the binary codecs (as MPlayer/Xine do).
Completely untrue. Real pulled back just a little bit. Their software still installs lots of other crap and system services, makes it difficult to disable sending information back to their servers, etc. It's just nominally less horrible than it used-to be. It's still very, very bad software, which I go out of my way to be rid of.
Utterly wrong. Apple is the BEST of the big 3 by FAR, and has been for several years.
They got only marginally less evil. They started the Helix Player, thinking they could cash-in on open source developers to do some of their work for them, but they never open-sourced their own codecs, nor has the "free" RealPlayer gotten any less obtrusive. It still installs itself everywhere, makes it very difficult to opt-out of sending usage information to their servers, etc.
Real has been trying to change their image by advertising how much better they've gotten, but unfortunately, they haven't really gotten any better. They've just been less of an annoyance, since fewer and fewer people feel the need to install the RealPlayer now that Quicktime and WMP have become (slightly) better alternatives.
I'm afraid "cost of living" isn't a very good measure.
First off, there are a LOT of things which aren't going to be price-adjusted, no matter where you live. Computer ports will cost the same ammount, whether you're earning $200,000 a year in California, or $50,000 a year in Alabama. Some things like car dealerships may charge you a bit less, since their employee and rent costs are cheaper, but that'll only be a few percent overall.
And, cost of living doesn't really take into account the QUALITY of living. Where land costs more, you'll find that all the houses are better quality, since $20,000 in better designs, workmanship, and materials, is a minor detail in the $200,000 sticker price. In places where land is dirt cheap, and people don't make as much, they have to build the houses as cheaply as they can to be competitive. The point is, you can get a house cheaper than elsewhere (so cost-of-living is lower), but you'll have just that: a cheaper, junkier house.
Though, the truth of the matter is, I'd personally be happy to take a pay-cut to get the hell away from big cities.
WMV3 (aka. WMV9, VC-1) playback has been supported by MPlayer/Xine, since the end of 2002, and WMV2 (aka WMV8) was working long before that.
The thing about FP, though, is that it can be equally-well substituted by integer-only operations. On x86, converting floats to their integer-only equivalents make for a huge speed-up.
I don't have an Itanium to benchmark, but I expect (even with FP operations being faster) converting your code to use INTs would make it run nearly as fast on far, far cheaper CPUs.
Umm, because AMD has the better architecture, and Intel isn't going to just throw theirs out overnight.
The only comparisons I've seen have been for 32-bit software. When it comes to 64-bit, Intel is lagging behind. And still there, they're only winning on the float. In a few months you can expect AMD to leapfrog Intel, and then Intel to leapfrog AMD again, etc. If AMD can just continue to maintain parity with Intel, they'll continue to gain marketshare. Both price and architecture are in AMD's favor.
You're assuming everyone at AMD was just sitting around on their ass, doing nothing, until Intel came out with the Core 2.
I assuming they were just raking in as much profit as they could on their current lines. There wasn't any competition until now, and little benefit for them to spend money just to obsolete their own chips.
That's a very big "if", and it's certainly not going to happen overnight. As you said about Intel; AMD isn't going to just sit around doing nothing, while Intel is working on that.
I can imagine it with a $100 PCI hardware crypto card as well...