Your ignorance and complacency is symptomatic of the attitude that brought us 9/11 and the ensuing shitfest.
There's a huge difference between being competent about and aware of the threat, and running the most powerful, proud, and free country in the world into the ground based on fearmongering propaganda capitalizing on one's own failure to prevent the most effective terrorist attack in world history.
Dirty bombs are real. The materials are right there in and near the ex-USSR, and only take some organization to procure. The transport logistics are hard but not impossible. And the fact that this country is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on pointless security measures and a criminal war, and taking advantage of a culture of fear is a favorite pastime of its politicians, while almost no effective technology is deployed to scan for dirty nukes, chemical and biological weapons, boils my blood.
You can bet all you want, but I think you have no idea about the theoretical effectiveness of a dirty bomb.
Do you mean this smoke detector scenario, or the "classic" nuclear/RTG waste dirty bomb scenario in general? I'm very sure that a real dirty bomb made with real spent fuel can be very effective, not in immediate deaths of course, but from making a big chunk of a city uninhabitable due to continued exposure. And the Soviet Union made, spent, stored, and exported so much nuclear fuel in so many places that it will never be possible to track and secure all of it.
that is so wrong... I suppose they did attempt to make SFF attractive for the living room, but again that was nothing new: geeks have been doing that for years to try to appease other halves. Shuttle may not have been innovative, but they positioned themselves in a unique niche that no one before them bothered to specifically target: the high quality SFF barebones market. Shuttle SFF boxes have a combination of advantages that no one else has:
- DIY component selection - you pick everything but the box and the mobo - By far the smallest volume cases for every bay configuration up to 2x internal 3.5/2x external 5.25 - Excellent custom heatsink - Excellent case airflow for its size (there are SFF cases of twice the XPC's volume with worse airflow) - Decent looks - Given the above, you can assemble SFF boxes with full-powered desktop components (well, almost - don't stick a 120W TDP part in there) for a reasonable price
And (to address your living room rant) you don't have to have a workshop full of tools and knowledge of case design to do so.
Most IDEs have that functionality, but it really sucks.
I like my editor to wrap the line when I press "enter" and under no other circumstances. I change my code around so it's more even in length, but I do routinely have lines 150 chars long and more. Those who get pissed off by that and those who want everyone to wrap code like they do would do well to learn the "toggle soft-wrap" shortcut in their editor.
Could you be a little bit more full of shit, please? As it is you're just a little too solid to be flushed down the toilet...
Seriously, have you been living under a rock? Linux is the steamroller that will roll over Microsoft on commodity hardware and leave it to slowly disintegrate. It won't happen this year, because it's a gradual process that's already happening everywhere. DRM matters very little in the big scheme of OS gravity, because what determines that gravity is what people want to develop for. And Microsoft is bleeding developers at a prodigious rate right now.
As illogical, as, say, spelling DOOM without proper capitalization. Doom is not an acronym. There are countless product names with extravagant capitalization and punctuation, which most sane people (read: not you) choose to ignore when mentioning them.
I'm worried too, but AMD is not a startup. It's just as old as Intel, has diversified numerous times in its history, and has been at war with Intel for longer than you think. It's been through much worse times and is very used to playing catch-up. I'm sure its current financial situation is nowhere near the worst in its history, either.
I question their management in the wake of the ATI purchase, but I'm not the one with 35 years of competing against Intel under my belt.
NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. Link, please?
I'm willing to bet this design was never seriously considered because it's not technically possible and the specs you mention are not grounded in reality.
Solar sails won't be very usable until we get pretty good at nanomaterials necessary for an ultra-lightweight self-supporting sail structure.
Any chip, if properly engineered, can turn off parts of itself completely, eliminating all gate leakage in those parts. It can also clock down to the lowest rate necessary to process interrupts, which is millions of times slower than its operating clock speed (though anything below 1/4 the top speed is usually not implemented due to diminishing returns). So there's nothing preventing the CPU from flushing the caches (or not, depending on depth of sleep) and powering down everything except the interrupt scheduler and handler and a few other small modules. Future designs from Intel have the ability to power down lots of their components, and AMD has stated that they can at least turn off individual cores in Barcelona.
Progress in power efficient chip design is slow because often the biggest power wasters are elsewhere, so making the chip super-efficient wouldn't make a huge difference (aka passing the buck) - hard drives are not slowed down, unused memory modules are not powered down, PSUs are inefficient, LCD backlights are inefficient (yay LED backlights), etc. But it is being made, since datacenter operators and laptop consumers are very interested in it.
The article you cited is AMD marketspeak from April 23.
Barcelona's launch prospects are looking grim. If you recall this time last year, Intel had been showing off Conroe for almost half a year before launch. I have no doubt AMD can make it work in the long run (witness the evolution of K8) but they seem to be having serious problems and running out of time.
$113 CPU (with a total system cost of $313) is only 14% more expensive than the $73 CPU (with a total system cost of $273). The only case when lower priced processors matter is when configuring for capability rather than raw performance. I.e. larger cache, 64bit vs 32bit, thermal power dissipation, etc. This notion is a logical fallacy. The CPU speed is by no means the only performance-defining part of the system. Upping the amount of memory, the GPU or the speed of the hard drive may well cost 10% of the system as well, but somehow I don't hear a lot of people say "Oh, but a $200 GPU is only 15% more expensive than a $50 one, because it only costs 15% more in a $1000 system".
Lower priced processors matter a lot to those of us who want cheap, fast, cool systems that kick bigger systems' ass in price/performance, and are happy to let others fund the chip companies' R&D budgets. I, for instance, hold a big grudge against AMD for abandoning Socket 939, and I'm worried about its future because Core 2 kicks Barcelona's ass for any PC from $500 up, but I still bought an Athlon 3900+, which can actually be had for $60 in a combo, with the intent to overclock. It makes perfect sense because I'm assembling a tiny sub-$300 cube PC in which anything with a bigger price/performance/power ratio just doesn't appeal to me.
What I found is that UPS employees seem to treat different parties' boxes very differently. I've received countless shipments from online stores that were pristine - it was obvious that they weren't subject to even the slightest shock in transit. Then there were a few from smaller merchants that were a little beat up, but never seriously. And then there were personal shipments that I or my friends had sent - and those were almost always beat up, corners crushed in, sides bent, and contents damaged.
That shouldn't be hard - last I checked, Beagle really, really sucked. It wouldn't find anything and I had to remove it to stop it thrashing when I was working.
REALLY good crypto and video acceleration Good video acceleration? From VIA?
The problem with VIA's platforms is that for twice the price you can get an Intel mobile-on-desktop mITX/uATX system that pulls less power and has far more than twice the performance, or you can get an AMD system for the same price that pulls a bit more power and still has hugely better performance.
Video is really bad too - there are tons of sub-$40 (even sub-$20) cards and integrated chips from both vendors that kick VIA's ass.
Writing down information does make you memorize and digest it better, but all the whining about how high tech is hurting education is total bullshit. Low standards and technical incompetence hurt education. High technology helps it - a whole lot.
For example, I've taken a whole bunch of classes taught on the blackboard, and I've taken many taught by Powerpoint (with the blackboard occasionally used). Powerpoint kicks the blackboard's ass for sheer power of expressivity and content. There is a ton of things you can do on the computer screen that you can't do on the blackboard, while there is almost nothing in the reverse direction. All the whining about how Powerpoint is terrible comes - again - from lazy and incompetent presentation writers and inept lecturers. No one is stopping you from taking notes from the Powerpoint and getting all the same benefits of writing stuff down.
Take another example, research using online resources as opposed to looking through books in a library. Although there is still a ton of information locked up in books that is not accessible online, Google is working hard to change all that, while the power of properly conducting research online cannot be matched by any library with offline resources only. All the whining, again, comes from people too incompetent to seek out trusted resources online (read: ones that can be academically cited, and there are a lot of those online now) and to use the untrusted ones to their full potential.
Another example: a course content management system used in a freshman class I TAd. Most courses in our university use it, but this class used it to its full potential. Result: the course teaching staff could be reduced by half and administering the class was actually kinda fun instead of being an utter nightmare.
Another: a compiler programming course which used CVS (this was before SVN) and automated online grading for very complex projects. While the grading had to be adjusted constantly, the administrative workload was still a tiny fraction of what it would take to grade everything the old-fashioned way, the students had live feedback at all times, and we could learn a lot more.
I could go on like this. The point is, again, that technology in the classroom is a very powerful tool, and those who bitch and moan about how they or their superiors used it improperly change nothing about that.
I'm an "OS fanboy". I'm not a Linux, *bsd, or Mac fanboy, I'm an OS fanboy. I never used one that I didn't (dis)like. They all suck and they are all great. Oh great. You do realize that you've just kinda discredited the whole ensuing rant?
Considering what a vast improvement security-wise, GUI-wise and feature-wise Vista is over it's predecessors, I don't understand why it's so unpopular with people who've not even used it. Perhaps because it sucks so much, most people who have tried to use it got so pissed off, they now go around recommending against it?
Considering what a vast improvement security-wise, GUI-wise and feature-wise Vista is over it's predecessors, I don't understand why it's so unpopular with people who've not even used it. I've used it, and aside from desktop search (which has been on other OSs for a couple of years), it doesn't improve on anything you claim.
Maybe that's the problem - they go by hearsay. I ran Vista betas for about a year before taking the plunge and upgrading in February. Maybe they do. Maybe they go on the hearsay that Vista is a goddamn trainwreck of an OS, a stunning redefinition of the term "bloat", and a fitting example of corporate software development complacency and failure. I ran Vista betas for a while too, until I realized that an OS that adds about two useful new features out of hundreds by which other OSs have now surpassed it and in the process increases its memory footprint by a factor of 2 and disk footprint by a factor of 5 (!!! compared to XP) is not something that I will use, period. (I did run the final version too. It hasn't improved.)
What don't I like? UAC is annoying, but you get used to it. "You get used to it" is a pathetic excuse for a broken, dysfunctional security mechanism at a time when two other mainstream desktop OSs offer easy and robust security models. God damn, I had no idea you could fuck up a simple flat (no per-app sandboxing!) privilege elevation mechanism as bad as Microsoft has!
And Hardware/Driver/Software issues? There are some, but my problem was really 64-bit related (So, just like in Linux, I gave up and went back to 32-bit). You gave up on Linux because you didn't know what you were doing (64-bit support is completely equal to 32-bit among major Linux distros, because all open apps are obviously maintained for both archs at once, while the few closed-source drivers are released in both versions as well). You gave up on Windows because Microsoft and hardware vendors didn't know what they were doing.
OK, it does have stricter hardware requirements but not that much stricter. Go in to any computer retailer and look at the "cheap" computers they have running Vista. Most of them have hardware approximating what most consumers (who bought a box in the past 2-3 years) have already. Not that much stricter? You've got to be kidding me. XP can run on 8 year old hardware with no trouble. Vista barely runs on a lot of new hardware! I've seen more than one new PC in the past few months which had Vista loaded by the OEM and which was so utterly disgusting that I had to turn it off and nuke Vista off of it. Don't get me started on comparing this to Linux and OS X, which in most cases get faster with every release without getting much bigger, so they can run on older hardware.
You don't get how people could dislike Vista so much? I don't get how people like you (self-described fanboys) can cling to their opinion that Vista is some kind of an adequate improvement.
am I going to look at a version that has MS's blessing, and will work with my stuff, or would I look at a product that has no kind of guarantees that it'll work with my existing systems?... I have little to no reason to even *consider* software that is going to give me extra integration headaches HAHAHAHAHAHA
thanks for the laugh, feel free to stick with your Microsoft-certified headache-free software
What about a system where the Plaintiff pays in full for the defendants legal fees as well as the court fees if the defendant is found not guilty? Have you been living under a rock? This is exactly how the US system has been working for a while (in most cases, the judge forces the plaintiff to pay the court's and defendant's expenses if the plaintiff loses). This hasn't been anywhere near effective in stopping civil lawsuit abuse.
Have you been to Best Buy lately? People are buying HDTVs all the time. Market penetration for HDTVs is accelerating. Many people watch movies on their PC/laptop screens, which have had HD resolution for the past decade. (Think I'm talking out of my ass? Ask the sub-21 age group, and then check the disposable income they get from their parents for buying movies, among other things.) And I for one am sick of watching crappy DVD quality at 1/16 the resolution my monitor is capable of (and 1/4 that of my TV). Well-mastered HD video is jaw-dropping at first, and then you cringe when you have to go back to DVD quality.
As with any new format, HD movies are a lucrative business because they are high-margin items. There's money to be made in this market, if one of the formats finally wins over another.
If BB can't survive with its much lower overhead and cash reserve to get it through rough patches, what makes you think several mom and pop video stores would? Mom and pop stores are often grocery/convenience stores that offer rentals "on the side". As such, they can float the rentals for at least a while. Also, I personally never rent from Blockbuster anymore, while I would consider renting from a small local store, simply because I'm absolutely sick and fed up with chain stores driving local stores with unique personalities out of business. I think there are more than a few people around who feel the same way.
Regular DVD's are fine. For you, maybe. Every computer screen I've worked on for the past 5 years far exceeds DVD resolution, and I prefer to watch movies on my PC, so I'd much rather see an HD disc format I can actually use.
Have you looked at the videos illustrating how safe they are? Or how about the one in the UK where they ran the thing against a wall head on. Yes, I've looked at those videos. The key point to them is that anyone over maybe 150 cm tall will get both their legs amputated at best as a result of any collision with a frontal force delivered.
The roll cage is nice and all. It doesn't help worth shit when your car has no engine compartment to crumple, so it's your legs that serve as a crumple zone instead. I think I'll pass...
Slashdot Mirror
Can you cite a link please?
Thx
Does anyone actually still believe that myth?
Your ignorance and complacency is symptomatic of the attitude that brought us 9/11 and the ensuing shitfest.
There's a huge difference between being competent about and aware of the threat, and running the most powerful, proud, and free country in the world into the ground based on fearmongering propaganda capitalizing on one's own failure to prevent the most effective terrorist attack in world history.
Dirty bombs are real. The materials are right there in and near the ex-USSR, and only take some organization to procure. The transport logistics are hard but not impossible. And the fact that this country is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on pointless security measures and a criminal war, and taking advantage of a culture of fear is a favorite pastime of its politicians, while almost no effective technology is deployed to scan for dirty nukes, chemical and biological weapons, boils my blood.
You can bet all you want, but I think you have no idea about the theoretical effectiveness of a dirty bomb.
Do you mean this smoke detector scenario, or the "classic" nuclear/RTG waste dirty bomb scenario in general? I'm very sure that a real dirty bomb made with real spent fuel can be very effective, not in immediate deaths of course, but from making a big chunk of a city uninhabitable due to continued exposure. And the Soviet Union made, spent, stored, and exported so much nuclear fuel in so many places that it will never be possible to track and secure all of it.
- DIY component selection - you pick everything but the box and the mobo
- By far the smallest volume cases for every bay configuration up to 2x internal 3.5/2x external 5.25
- Excellent custom heatsink
- Excellent case airflow for its size (there are SFF cases of twice the XPC's volume with worse airflow)
- Decent looks
- Given the above, you can assemble SFF boxes with full-powered desktop components (well, almost - don't stick a 120W TDP part in there) for a reasonable price
And (to address your living room rant) you don't have to have a workshop full of tools and knowledge of case design to do so.
Most IDEs have that functionality, but it really sucks.
I like my editor to wrap the line when I press "enter" and under no other circumstances. I change my code around so it's more even in length, but I do routinely have lines 150 chars long and more. Those who get pissed off by that and those who want everyone to wrap code like they do would do well to learn the "toggle soft-wrap" shortcut in their editor.
Could you be a little bit more full of shit, please? As it is you're just a little too solid to be flushed down the toilet...
Seriously, have you been living under a rock? Linux is the steamroller that will roll over Microsoft on commodity hardware and leave it to slowly disintegrate. It won't happen this year, because it's a gradual process that's already happening everywhere. DRM matters very little in the big scheme of OS gravity, because what determines that gravity is what people want to develop for. And Microsoft is bleeding developers at a prodigious rate right now.
I'm worried too, but AMD is not a startup. It's just as old as Intel, has diversified numerous times in its history, and has been at war with Intel for longer than you think. It's been through much worse times and is very used to playing catch-up. I'm sure its current financial situation is nowhere near the worst in its history, either.
I question their management in the wake of the ATI purchase, but I'm not the one with 35 years of competing against Intel under my belt.
I've played it. It sucks.
I'm willing to bet this design was never seriously considered because it's not technically possible and the specs you mention are not grounded in reality.
Solar sails won't be very usable until we get pretty good at nanomaterials necessary for an ultra-lightweight self-supporting sail structure.
Bullshit.
Any chip, if properly engineered, can turn off parts of itself completely, eliminating all gate leakage in those parts. It can also clock down to the lowest rate necessary to process interrupts, which is millions of times slower than its operating clock speed (though anything below 1/4 the top speed is usually not implemented due to diminishing returns). So there's nothing preventing the CPU from flushing the caches (or not, depending on depth of sleep) and powering down everything except the interrupt scheduler and handler and a few other small modules. Future designs from Intel have the ability to power down lots of their components, and AMD has stated that they can at least turn off individual cores in Barcelona.
Progress in power efficient chip design is slow because often the biggest power wasters are elsewhere, so making the chip super-efficient wouldn't make a huge difference (aka passing the buck) - hard drives are not slowed down, unused memory modules are not powered down, PSUs are inefficient, LCD backlights are inefficient (yay LED backlights), etc. But it is being made, since datacenter operators and laptop consumers are very interested in it.
I really don't.
The article you cited is AMD marketspeak from April 23.
Barcelona's launch prospects are looking grim. If you recall this time last year, Intel had been showing off Conroe for almost half a year before launch. I have no doubt AMD can make it work in the long run (witness the evolution of K8) but they seem to be having serious problems and running out of time.
Lower priced processors matter a lot to those of us who want cheap, fast, cool systems that kick bigger systems' ass in price/performance, and are happy to let others fund the chip companies' R&D budgets. I, for instance, hold a big grudge against AMD for abandoning Socket 939, and I'm worried about its future because Core 2 kicks Barcelona's ass for any PC from $500 up, but I still bought an Athlon 3900+, which can actually be had for $60 in a combo, with the intent to overclock. It makes perfect sense because I'm assembling a tiny sub-$300 cube PC in which anything with a bigger price/performance/power ratio just doesn't appeal to me.
What I found is that UPS employees seem to treat different parties' boxes very differently. I've received countless shipments from online stores that were pristine - it was obvious that they weren't subject to even the slightest shock in transit. Then there were a few from smaller merchants that were a little beat up, but never seriously. And then there were personal shipments that I or my friends had sent - and those were almost always beat up, corners crushed in, sides bent, and contents damaged.
That shouldn't be hard - last I checked, Beagle really, really sucked. It wouldn't find anything and I had to remove it to stop it thrashing when I was working.
The problem with VIA's platforms is that for twice the price you can get an Intel mobile-on-desktop mITX/uATX system that pulls less power and has far more than twice the performance, or you can get an AMD system for the same price that pulls a bit more power and still has hugely better performance.
Video is really bad too - there are tons of sub-$40 (even sub-$20) cards and integrated chips from both vendors that kick VIA's ass.
Writing down information does make you memorize and digest it better, but all the whining about how high tech is hurting education is total bullshit. Low standards and technical incompetence hurt education. High technology helps it - a whole lot.
For example, I've taken a whole bunch of classes taught on the blackboard, and I've taken many taught by Powerpoint (with the blackboard occasionally used). Powerpoint kicks the blackboard's ass for sheer power of expressivity and content. There is a ton of things you can do on the computer screen that you can't do on the blackboard, while there is almost nothing in the reverse direction. All the whining about how Powerpoint is terrible comes - again - from lazy and incompetent presentation writers and inept lecturers. No one is stopping you from taking notes from the Powerpoint and getting all the same benefits of writing stuff down.
Take another example, research using online resources as opposed to looking through books in a library. Although there is still a ton of information locked up in books that is not accessible online, Google is working hard to change all that, while the power of properly conducting research online cannot be matched by any library with offline resources only. All the whining, again, comes from people too incompetent to seek out trusted resources online (read: ones that can be academically cited, and there are a lot of those online now) and to use the untrusted ones to their full potential.
Another example: a course content management system used in a freshman class I TAd. Most courses in our university use it, but this class used it to its full potential. Result: the course teaching staff could be reduced by half and administering the class was actually kinda fun instead of being an utter nightmare.
Another: a compiler programming course which used CVS (this was before SVN) and automated online grading for very complex projects. While the grading had to be adjusted constantly, the administrative workload was still a tiny fraction of what it would take to grade everything the old-fashioned way, the students had live feedback at all times, and we could learn a lot more.
I could go on like this. The point is, again, that technology in the classroom is a very powerful tool, and those who bitch and moan about how they or their superiors used it improperly change nothing about that.
You don't get how people could dislike Vista so much? I don't get how people like you (self-described fanboys) can cling to their opinion that Vista is some kind of an adequate improvement.
thanks for the laugh, feel free to stick with your Microsoft-certified headache-free software
Have you been to Best Buy lately? People are buying HDTVs all the time. Market penetration for HDTVs is accelerating. Many people watch movies on their PC/laptop screens, which have had HD resolution for the past decade. (Think I'm talking out of my ass? Ask the sub-21 age group, and then check the disposable income they get from their parents for buying movies, among other things.) And I for one am sick of watching crappy DVD quality at 1/16 the resolution my monitor is capable of (and 1/4 that of my TV). Well-mastered HD video is jaw-dropping at first, and then you cringe when you have to go back to DVD quality.
As with any new format, HD movies are a lucrative business because they are high-margin items. There's money to be made in this market, if one of the formats finally wins over another.
The roll cage is nice and all. It doesn't help worth shit when your car has no engine compartment to crumple, so it's your legs that serve as a crumple zone instead. I think I'll pass...