When the phone is not in use the back light is off; if the battery starts to run low, it gives me regular warnings by beeping and turning the back light on! The phone (and every phone I used as well) does this for the specific reason of getting your attention so you recharge it. This is one of the more useful features in cell phones.
Plasma sucks. LCD sucks. DLP is sort of cool What? Why does plasma suck?
You can say LCD sucks because it's transmissive, which is ostensibly wasteful and limits dynamic range, but modern LCD displays have gotten really pretty damn good with dynamic range, and extremely price effective, so they rock. Plasma used to wash out, but that's been addressed as well, which makes it pretty awesome in my book. The only lame tech is the one you named - DLP - who the hell wants a transmissive projection technology, even with LED bulbs - let alone incandescent, give me a break - when plasma and LCD beat them in pretty much everything?
Hate the interconnect standards, not the display tech - the displays have gotten pretty awesome lately.
Why can't Intel guarantee the same kind of stability ?!?!? You've got to be fucking shitting me. What are you high on? Because I'd like some of that. I can't see a single statement in your post that isn't absurd and that doesn't turn the truth on its head.
There are plenty of reasons to favor AMD over Intel, but sockets are not one of them.
Have you checked the longevity of LGA775, the only desktop and entry-level server socket that matters? And have you compared that to the longevity of AMD's sockets? Have you read the fucking article? Have you looked at Intel's CPU or chipset roadmaps? Do you know how long Intel plans to support LGA775?
AMD may have had its reasons to switch sockets, but it has managed to royally piss off its customers with the way it abandoned s939 and s940 after stating for a long time that it would not do so. AMD motherboard suppliers also had the same compatibility blues when Athlon X2s were coming out. Compare to Intel, which managed a smooth transition to a radically new CPU architecture without socket changes and with many chipsets not even batting an eye, and is now doing the same thing with the DDR3 migration.
I have no time to go through your absurdities one-by-one, so I guess I'll just assume you're one of those terminally brain-damaged fanboys who inhabit hardware forums and spout things that have no connection to reality.
That is all nice and well, and Moore's law as stated by Carver Mead still holds and will hold for a long time, but the main upshot of it no longer holds. Namely, you can no longer expect a single, procedural thread to run twice as fast as it did two years ago. And, for instance, in scientific computing, there are many things that are either not parallelizable or take months of work to parallelize.
Sorry, but just because you can run some tiny games that use a laughably miniscule fraction of modern GPUs' capacity doesn't mean you have decent 3D. X60 rocks, and Intel's CPUs rock, but Intel has yet to produce a decent GPU... and nVidia/ATI do have drivers for their high-end GPUs, even if they're closed source and ATI sucks all around lately.
I manage college computer labs, and those damn U3 drives have been a recurring hassle. They wouldn't be if you managed to set your users' permissions correctly. I've seen dozens of "college computer labs", and not one of them would allow U3 to make any changes to the configuration.
two creepy Japanese guys telling a little girl, "Wii would like to play"? There is so much that is wrong with that Given that this ad has had considerable success and all the reactions to it I've seen so far, I'm pretty sure the only thing that's wrong is your mindset.
I wish the Wii had a better graphics engine - it's not that hard to put in something better than what they have - but to insinuate that Nintendo's success is entirely due to Microsoft and Sony's incompetence, well, let's just say it drops your credibility through the floor.
(For the record, I don't have a bias in the current console war - I dislike Microsoft and Sony about equally, PS3 and XBox360 are way too huge and power hungry, and the only console I own is a $100 PS2 Slim with just a few masterpieces like Katamari, Burnout, and Shadow of the Colossus.)
The rise of the US as a superpower had no impact on peace in Europe Riiight. You keep telling yourself that.
The Cold War and nuclear weapons had everything to do with peace in Europe. There would be no war in Europe whether or not the EU was formed; do you think the US or the Western European countries would be stupid enough to let the Soviet Union past the Iron Curtain, as would inevitably happen if war broke out between Western European states? What do you think NATO was all about? You're delusional.
The problem is not simply insufficient attention by developers, and buffer overflow bugs can sometimes be very non-trivial. The big, ubiquitous lapse in security these days is the lack of sandboxing. Why are applications not sandboxed properly? Why, despite the full availability of the security framework to do it, are desktop applications allowed by default to read and write anywhere in the user's home directory, registry, communicate with everything, display anything they want on the screen, use any peripherals and communicate on the network in any way short of running a server? That's what's not acceptable. An obscure vulnerability in a big application might be excusable if it crashes it and causes it to nuke its config files, but it's very inexcusable if it installs spyware that steals the user's data or craps all over the user's home directory.
Then finish it off with the fact that carbohydrates are by definition sugar. There are many types of sugars. Some are more complex than others, and as such require more time and energy to process into glucose. Fat and proteins require even more time, and if there is an excess of available energy, the body will send fat directly into storage instead of metabolizing it into glucose. It's this amount of time, spent metabolizing the food and outputting a steady stream of glucose into the bloodstream, that plays a big role in modulating hunger. Also, there are many different types of fats as well. Olive oil and lard fat are totally different nutritionally.
Sugar in its basic form (glucose) is the intercellular energy currency of your body, so eating it will give you an immediate energy boost that won't last long. Proper nutrition is not a hard science - don't gorge yourself, eat a diet that will give you a steady output of energy (i.e. a mixture of fuels), and don't be sedentary. However, depending on your metabolism, and very importantly, the level of appeal of various foods available in your store, you may have to try harder and be more disciplined about it, to the point of it being a very serious challenge.
I agree with you that labeling junk food "low fat" is disingenuous, but to say that carbohydrates should be avoided is absurd. Personally, I eat a predominantly carbohydrate diet with no animal fat or protein, and I'm happy with it because it gives me timed bursts of energy that I need, and no weight problems to speak of.
LCDs are worthless for any game that's dependent on fast reaction Yeah, if by "worthless" you mean "possibly incurring a slight disadvantage in a LAN gaming environment when a number of other more important factors is equalized". Most people don't play games professionally, and most play them over a net link that puts in 50-200ms extra latency.
I personally played 120-200% speed deathmatch on DM-Rankin in UT2K4 a lot, and twitch is extremely important there. I played on an average LCD over a very fast net link. I don't have a CRT handy, but I highly suspect the LCD speed didn't make any difference at all. I suppose it's hard to know though, without having played on a fast CRT alongside it.
Quite a few gamers play with radio mice, too. I wonder how much latency that adds on. I know my Bluetooth mouse crapped out and lagged a lot when I used it to play - it was virtually useless for competitive FPS.
The big question is, is this even practical? To me, it seems that running at the higher frame rates is easier than correctly rendering motion blur. It's interesting. I wonder if this is the same kind of trade-off as single-core vs. multicore. Will GPU engineers eventually implement motion blur, given the possible performance gain and lower ROI in other areas? Or does properly computing motion blur require more rendering than the extra frames it saves?
How do you say 'Thank you, Diebold' in French? What does Diebold have to do with the 2007 French presidential election? That's right, it has nothing to do with it. And real disenfranchisement crimes go unpunished because of FUCKING IDIOTS like you who conflate issues that have nothing to do with each other and insinuate fraud where there is none, making people who demand real accountability look stupid.
If standing up for French companies and citizens by supporting their software freedom is not important, I'm not sure what is. Foreign policy? Immigration policy? Policy toward the EU? Scientific research budgets? Any of about a zillion domestic issues?
Make no mistake, France has much bigger fish to fry than software development and patents, and for all the usual talk of the sky falling, the consumer computing industry has been in an excellent condition recently.
members who serve multiple terms often become experts in parts of the legislation and can lend expertise that a short timer might not Then they should advertise themselves as consultants to new members. Hell, all their expertise can probably be utilized with a monthly meeting with their successor.
As someone knowledgeable about political processes in several other countries, I can tell that the US electorate process is one of the most amazingly functional in the world... and that's why it's so scary to see just how ludicrously corrupt (not superficially, mind you; intellectually and morally) and apathetic members of the US Congress can get. If a few bright-eyed idealists (with modern educations that make them actually knowledgeable about things less than a few decades old) make some mistakes in the process of actually doing something useful, I'm all for it.
I bet they'll have less party loyalty, too - look where congressmen with no facility for critical thought and a willingness to toe the party line got us in the past 6 years.
One key difference is that I'm pretty sure ATMs use a very mature client-server protocol on a dedicated link. As such, ATMs remain single-user devices where the database end is not the ATM maker's problem. Also, compartmentalizing of departments may mean little to no technology is shared between the ATM and voting departments at all...
I hear you. Visual Studio is still by far the best IDE out there, one of the few competently made and well-organized products at Microsoft. Meanwhile, I think engineers and scientists have this die-hard attitude that enamors them with Matlab and other, even worse products (you think Matlab is bad? Try using IDL sometime) or at least gives them this notion that it's an OK development environment, whereas it just plain sucks in most respects.
Eclipse however might save things yet. It's a little bloated, but very usable for Java if you have enough RAM, and support for other languages is coming along steadily (if slowly). I wish there was an OSS project for a data programming environment and language that didn't suck. Hmm...
Would you rather be a "power saver" or "upgrade to AMD". Be a power saver.
When Intel came out with Centrino, I bought one almost at launch. When AMD came out with Winchester, the Athlon 64 that made the gigantic leap in price/performance/watt, I bought two. When nVidia started making lower-clocked GPUs that didn't need a fan and wiped the floor with ATI in price/performance/watt, I bought three over 3 years (6200, 7600, and now, 8500) (that was the main reason - the other one being ATI's shitty drivers for Linux). Now, I'm looking at a new ultraportable, and AMD doesn't even offer anything to match Intel's ULV parts.
Do you know why my opinion counts? Because I just helped procure a $180K HPC cluster purchase with 300 cores total. You bet your ass I paid attention to performance/watt.
(Ironically, at our specs, AMD has about 20% less power draw per U... but it also has 50% lower core density.)
That alone suggests that Intel does not have exploitable control of the market. Hardly. AMD worked their ass off and courted systems integrators for the longest time to get a sizable chip out of Intel's market. Check the claims in AMD's lawsuit against Intel - Intel was abusing systems integrators through exclusive deals, which is a textbook example of monopoly abuse (a step up from exploitable control of the market).
However, when it comes to 64bit linux, the AMD chips are arguably better performing than the core2duo. Never mind the price - AMD already wins there - Im saying that AMD64 X2's run 64bit linux better than Intel Core2Duos. People BUY these dual core AMD CPU's because they make great linux boxes.
What?
Can you please elaborate on any of these points or cite something? Are you referring to the fact that Core 2 has less of a performance delta between 32- and 64-bit than Athlon 64? Or AMD's memory architecture advantage in multi-socket boxes? Neither of those factors is Linux-specific. The ISA is identical between the two, the same binaries work, optimization support is roughly equal, there are no software incompatibilities or unsupported hardware, and Core 2 is faster, so I'm having a hard time finding a reason for why you're not talking out of your ass.
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You can say LCD sucks because it's transmissive, which is ostensibly wasteful and limits dynamic range, but modern LCD displays have gotten really pretty damn good with dynamic range, and extremely price effective, so they rock. Plasma used to wash out, but that's been addressed as well, which makes it pretty awesome in my book. The only lame tech is the one you named - DLP - who the hell wants a transmissive projection technology, even with LED bulbs - let alone incandescent, give me a break - when plasma and LCD beat them in pretty much everything?
Hate the interconnect standards, not the display tech - the displays have gotten pretty awesome lately.
There are plenty of reasons to favor AMD over Intel, but sockets are not one of them.
Have you checked the longevity of LGA775, the only desktop and entry-level server socket that matters? And have you compared that to the longevity of AMD's sockets? Have you read the fucking article? Have you looked at Intel's CPU or chipset roadmaps? Do you know how long Intel plans to support LGA775?
AMD may have had its reasons to switch sockets, but it has managed to royally piss off its customers with the way it abandoned s939 and s940 after stating for a long time that it would not do so. AMD motherboard suppliers also had the same compatibility blues when Athlon X2s were coming out. Compare to Intel, which managed a smooth transition to a radically new CPU architecture without socket changes and with many chipsets not even batting an eye, and is now doing the same thing with the DDR3 migration.
I have no time to go through your absurdities one-by-one, so I guess I'll just assume you're one of those terminally brain-damaged fanboys who inhabit hardware forums and spout things that have no connection to reality.
That is all nice and well, and Moore's law as stated by Carver Mead still holds and will hold for a long time, but the main upshot of it no longer holds. Namely, you can no longer expect a single, procedural thread to run twice as fast as it did two years ago. And, for instance, in scientific computing, there are many things that are either not parallelizable or take months of work to parallelize.
Sorry, but just because you can run some tiny games that use a laughably miniscule fraction of modern GPUs' capacity doesn't mean you have decent 3D. X60 rocks, and Intel's CPUs rock, but Intel has yet to produce a decent GPU... and nVidia/ATI do have drivers for their high-end GPUs, even if they're closed source and ATI sucks all around lately.
I wish the Wii had a better graphics engine - it's not that hard to put in something better than what they have - but to insinuate that Nintendo's success is entirely due to Microsoft and Sony's incompetence, well, let's just say it drops your credibility through the floor.
(For the record, I don't have a bias in the current console war - I dislike Microsoft and Sony about equally, PS3 and XBox360 are way too huge and power hungry, and the only console I own is a $100 PS2 Slim with just a few masterpieces like Katamari, Burnout, and Shadow of the Colossus.)
The Cold War and nuclear weapons had everything to do with peace in Europe. There would be no war in Europe whether or not the EU was formed; do you think the US or the Western European countries would be stupid enough to let the Soviet Union past the Iron Curtain, as would inevitably happen if war broke out between Western European states? What do you think NATO was all about? You're delusional.
The problem is not simply insufficient attention by developers, and buffer overflow bugs can sometimes be very non-trivial. The big, ubiquitous lapse in security these days is the lack of sandboxing. Why are applications not sandboxed properly? Why, despite the full availability of the security framework to do it, are desktop applications allowed by default to read and write anywhere in the user's home directory, registry, communicate with everything, display anything they want on the screen, use any peripherals and communicate on the network in any way short of running a server? That's what's not acceptable. An obscure vulnerability in a big application might be excusable if it crashes it and causes it to nuke its config files, but it's very inexcusable if it installs spyware that steals the user's data or craps all over the user's home directory.
Sugar in its basic form (glucose) is the intercellular energy currency of your body, so eating it will give you an immediate energy boost that won't last long. Proper nutrition is not a hard science - don't gorge yourself, eat a diet that will give you a steady output of energy (i.e. a mixture of fuels), and don't be sedentary. However, depending on your metabolism, and very importantly, the level of appeal of various foods available in your store, you may have to try harder and be more disciplined about it, to the point of it being a very serious challenge.
I agree with you that labeling junk food "low fat" is disingenuous, but to say that carbohydrates should be avoided is absurd. Personally, I eat a predominantly carbohydrate diet with no animal fat or protein, and I'm happy with it because it gives me timed bursts of energy that I need, and no weight problems to speak of.
I personally played 120-200% speed deathmatch on DM-Rankin in UT2K4 a lot, and twitch is extremely important there. I played on an average LCD over a very fast net link. I don't have a CRT handy, but I highly suspect the LCD speed didn't make any difference at all. I suppose it's hard to know though, without having played on a fast CRT alongside it.
Quite a few gamers play with radio mice, too. I wonder how much latency that adds on. I know my Bluetooth mouse crapped out and lagged a lot when I used it to play - it was virtually useless for competitive FPS.
Make no mistake, France has much bigger fish to fry than software development and patents, and for all the usual talk of the sky falling, the consumer computing industry has been in an excellent condition recently.
Used Linux lately?
There are a lot of things in Linux that need work on the desktop. None in your list are among them.
As someone knowledgeable about political processes in several other countries, I can tell that the US electorate process is one of the most amazingly functional in the world... and that's why it's so scary to see just how ludicrously corrupt (not superficially, mind you; intellectually and morally) and apathetic members of the US Congress can get. If a few bright-eyed idealists (with modern educations that make them actually knowledgeable about things less than a few decades old) make some mistakes in the process of actually doing something useful, I'm all for it.
I bet they'll have less party loyalty, too - look where congressmen with no facility for critical thought and a willingness to toe the party line got us in the past 6 years.
One key difference is that I'm pretty sure ATMs use a very mature client-server protocol on a dedicated link. As such, ATMs remain single-user devices where the database end is not the ATM maker's problem. Also, compartmentalizing of departments may mean little to no technology is shared between the ATM and voting departments at all...
I hear you. Visual Studio is still by far the best IDE out there, one of the few competently made and well-organized products at Microsoft. Meanwhile, I think engineers and scientists have this die-hard attitude that enamors them with Matlab and other, even worse products (you think Matlab is bad? Try using IDL sometime) or at least gives them this notion that it's an OK development environment, whereas it just plain sucks in most respects.
Eclipse however might save things yet. It's a little bloated, but very usable for Java if you have enough RAM, and support for other languages is coming along steadily (if slowly). I wish there was an OSS project for a data programming environment and language that didn't suck. Hmm...
You fail at analogies.
When Intel came out with Centrino, I bought one almost at launch. When AMD came out with Winchester, the Athlon 64 that made the gigantic leap in price/performance/watt, I bought two. When nVidia started making lower-clocked GPUs that didn't need a fan and wiped the floor with ATI in price/performance/watt, I bought three over 3 years (6200, 7600, and now, 8500) (that was the main reason - the other one being ATI's shitty drivers for Linux). Now, I'm looking at a new ultraportable, and AMD doesn't even offer anything to match Intel's ULV parts.
Do you know why my opinion counts? Because I just helped procure a $180K HPC cluster purchase with 300 cores total. You bet your ass I paid attention to performance/watt.
(Ironically, at our specs, AMD has about 20% less power draw per U... but it also has 50% lower core density.)
However, when it comes to 64bit linux, the AMD chips are arguably better performing than the core2duo. Never mind the price - AMD already wins there - Im saying that AMD64 X2's run 64bit linux better than Intel Core2Duos. People BUY these dual core AMD CPU's because they make great linux boxes.
What?
Can you please elaborate on any of these points or cite something? Are you referring to the fact that Core 2 has less of a performance delta between 32- and 64-bit than Athlon 64? Or AMD's memory architecture advantage in multi-socket boxes? Neither of those factors is Linux-specific. The ISA is identical between the two, the same binaries work, optimization support is roughly equal, there are no software incompatibilities or unsupported hardware, and Core 2 is faster, so I'm having a hard time finding a reason for why you're not talking out of your ass.