No, most people doing serious testing actually measure wall plug power, which takes into account everything in the case. With laptops, that just means total battery life. And last I heard, Intel's mobile chips still beat Turions.
In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.
That just isn't true. There are 4 consumer Core 2 Duo models. For every one, you cannot buy an AMD CPU for the same price or cheaper that won't be beaten in most workloads, and the closest performing AMD CPU will have much lower performance per watt.
Don't get me started on the mobile and 2-8 core server market, Intel has completely decimated AMD's offerings there for now.
I do agree with you about TDP though. I'm not sure about the methodology or the official definition, but the official figures from the two vendors don't match up. That doesn't prevent us from measuring overall power and concluding that at the moment, Intel is kicking AMD's butt.
It looks like AMD is back to underdog mode until their next architecture is out, although Opteron sales will sustain a bunch of inertia.
The Thinkpad division apparently takes serviceability VERY seriously. They sell every single sub-assembly down to individual types of screws. I personally have ordered several tiny parts to replace in my Thinkpads.
I'm not sure what the contact points are for IBM Parts now that it's Lenovo. Previously you could call a number and order nearly anything that had an FRU number.
Good point. But when the god damn vice president of the most powerful country of the world is the biggest fucking walking conflict of interest on the planet, don't you think we're a little past discussing best practices and into the realm of the criminal?
Ah, so the DOJ is perfectly happy with multibillion-dollar competition-free contracts for "rebuilding Iraq" and blatantly monopolistic behavior by telecom providers, they think allowing Microsoft to racketeer OEMs into forcing customers to buy Windows with every machine they sell is absolutely fine, and of course they won't even dare to think about prosecuting other branches of their own government for numerous violations of the Constitution and war crimes, but when two companies, by persistently competing with each other and achieving near-perfect parity for long periods of time, create one of the most staggeringly cutthroat markets on the planet, they must of course be investigated.
Your impression is wrong. GPLv3 will forbid Novell from suing any users of any software it distributes for IP violations present in that software's source, and will force it to act to protect such users in case Microsoft sues them based on patents present in the deal, presumably by breaking the deal (see section 11 of the draft). What isn't clear to me is whether the deal and GPLv3 are immediately incompatible or only are incompatible the moment Microsoft sues someone based on those patents.
The important point being made by the FSF is that software patents are wrong and dangerous. Sufficiently so that they're willing to alienate commercial developers to fight them, as well as restrictive trusted computing architectures. The FSF has been thrust into a position of being a key software supplier by the success of Linux. They are willing to put that popularity at stake to confront software patents. It's been fairly clear from their history that they aren't willing to compromise their ideals to further their popularity. The more I think about GPLv3, the more I respect their position and what they're trying to do.
Countries which censor or curtail Internet usage (with the obvious exception of China, with its staggering size and mobility) are hardly "enemies" of the Internet - they can't attack it and expect any degree of success. Instead they're foolishly short-sighted, unable to comprehend the massive technological disadvantage any such action entails in the long run. The problem is, this usually correlates with general incompetence, which means many of these countries will become (or already are) failed states which require outside assistance.
What makes you think the Diebold voting division is in any way using the security expertise of their other divisions?
The Diebold voting division has been implicated in severe voting irregularities, poor engineering, a repressive and litigous attitude toward their critics, and conflicts of interest. This is on top of the fact that the security architecture and audit practices they follow are beyond ridiculous. Regardless of the performance of Diebold's other divisions, this record is not acceptable.
Most importantly, the people on county and state voting commissions are not informed about these issues and have to deal with both the HAVA and Diebold's monopoly status in many locales. On top of which, Diebold aggressively lobbies for the use of its products, which to me pretty obviously should be forbidden for any voting equipment supplier.
What stupefies me is that hundreds of people have complained about Gimp's UI to the developers, which means a massive silent fraction of its potential users are probably uncomfortable with the UI, and yet for many years the developers did nothing and most tried to argue that the UI is superior and we just don't get it (one suggestion that resurfaces constantly is that I should use a separate virtual desktop for Gimp). This is remarkable hubris.
There's got to be a way to make that article make Wikipedia implode on itself or die in an infinite loop or form a singularity in the fabric of space-time or something like that.
There is not that much to be gained on the CPU front any more anyway. The differences are marginal and irrelevant for nearly all applications except heavy crypto. In the near future it will be IO, crypto and ASICs which will be the selling points on the higher end.
Wow. That's a dumb statement if I've ever read one. In fact, your entire comment is pretty much disconnected from reality.
"We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"
Continuous session saving. KDE already saves session state on logout. Now the API for doing this should be changed so that each application saves its state not only on logout, but on every change (with several seconds' delay so as not to overload I/O).
There is no such game as Unreal Tournament 2005. UT 2004 is the best game in the Unreal series, and UT 2007 is scheduled to kick its ass. I love the old Unreal and UT as much as the next guy, but any attempt to disparage UT 2004 in their favor means you're just set in your ways more than you should be.
Have you seen math and computer science GRE exams?
These are entry-level graduate tests. They are pretty general (they can't cover highly specialized areas). They are not very rushed for time. They are multiple-choice. And they will KICK YOUR ASS. And I could design a multiple choice test for every grad level course I've taken that would be very hard to pass.
That's certainly a matter of opinion. Could you point out a specific Greenpeace study, which is based on hyperbole, bent statistics and lies? I thought not.
Let's see: -Everything they put out related to their anti-GM foods campaign -Most of their anti-WTO rhetoric
There are many environmental crises (rainforest logging, overfishing, other habitat destruction, global warming) which deserve everyone's attention. But because Greenpeace has consistently demonstrated hypocrisy and useless posturing on other issues, its involvement too often threatens the credibility of people who really do care about and understand these problems.
You quite obviously didn't read through the studys criteria (you can download the criteria as a pdf via a link on the page).... As a matter of fact the study (again, pdf link) contains tons of links to the pr fluff of the companies in question. From my understanding the study is either based on data released, or in the case of rodamps and commitments not released by the companies.
Do you realize just how much you discredit your own argument by linking to these? Of course I've read both of these documents. They're almost 100% bullshit. They cite NO SOURCES, scientific or otherwise. They do not define testing methodology. For no measure do they cite whether they conducted in-house tests, independent tests, used third-party data, manufacturer technical data, or manufacturer PR. None of the measures are explained quantitatively in terms of what they mean for the environment. Links from the tables are directly and exclusively to either company PR (not even contractor PR - and contractors are the ones damaging the environment here) or environmental regulations without any context. In short, these documents - the only two available on the website that provide any level of detail for the study - betray an unresearched, uneducated, hackish study made by people unqualified to do anything of the sort and concerned with PR for their organization only. This is NOT OK for an environmental organization.
There are real ways to judge companies for environmental impact, but if you think Greenpeace's study is anywhere close to doing it properly, you're sadly mistaken. It's a lot harder, and probably beyond Greenpeace's dedication, to trace the environmental impact of the full manufacturing chain of a single electronics component, and to differentiate these chains between companies. It's not as hard to evaluate the companies' policies on complete products - like post-consumer recycling, packaging, support, etc. - but I doubt these contribute much.
I won't go into what a proper study would have to do and what kind of evidence they'd have to supply because this would take a few pages, but its executive summary would look very different from the Greenpeace fluff you linked.
You may hate Greenpeace as an organization, but your arguments to debunk the study sound rather hollow.
"I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him." - Booker T. Washington
Greenpeace is an organization staffed by well-meaning people who, through lack of willingness to thoroughly understand the relative importance of environmental issues, or just lack of critical and independent thinking, are engaging in things which do little to help the environment but a lot to antagonize people who are even less educated or rational - or who want to justify their excesses - and whose number is a lot greater. The end effect is a lot of added irrational antipathy toward environmentalism as a whole.
You want to see true environmentalists? Come to any university biology department, or any number of other organizations staffed by people who work directly with nature. These people may have to cut trees, kill primates, poison lab mice, pin hundreds of insects, conduct surveys which may look destructive to you but really aren't, but by and large these are the people who truly know and care for their environment and do what they can to stop the mindless destruction others do to their environment every day without even knowing.
Aside from the fact that Greenpeace is an unreasonable organization to begin with, this study is a measure of how much money the companies on the list put into "green PR", not of how environmentally friendly their manufacturing processes really are. Their measures are really laughable, and most of their information is quite obviously gathered from the manufacturers' and contractors' websites and press materials. Just because a random Chinese company decided to slap a page on their English website about how they comply with RoHS and have an "environmental roadmap" and another one has nothing but spec sheets on their homepage says nothing about their environmental impact. Every single one of their measures is problematic, if not in principle, then in the reality of how they gathered the data and what real-world impact it has.
This study is worthless for the purpose of fairly judging companies on their environmental policies, and I speak this as a committed environmentalist.
This is apples and oranges. Projectors and TVs serve different purposes, and projection TVs are a poor compromise illustrating that. You cannot watch a projector in a brightly lit room, you basically need a theater setup. Projectors can be very nice, but if you have fewer than perhaps five people watching and a small room, the LCD-Plasma competition has created excellent alternatives at a fairly low cost (great 42" HDTVs can be had for under $1.5K now).
it's all there for the clicking
on
Favorite KDE Tricks?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The cool part about KDE is that functionality by and large isn't hidden from the user. You just run the core desktop environment, mess around with the Control Center, open up a few invaluable apps (amarok, kate, kile, konqueror, kaffeine, kopete, kpdf, showimg... the list goes on), bind a few global keyboard shortcuts, and you're good to go. Everything works as expected, and is integrated to the bones.
Just about the only trick I use that isn't in plain view is fish:// for opening directories and files over ssh. Works in editors too (edit files directly over ssh). There's a lot of fancy magic you can do with other kioslaves, but mostly either I don't have a use for them or they're too buggy to rely on.
Also, ~/.kde/Autostart is the equivalent of the Windows Startup folder.
Finally, you can skin GTK2 apps with your KDE theme with a GTK Qt theme engine (gtk-qt-engine).
Google News removes 3 sites from its feed which have demonstrated a completely unprofessional (and sometimes hateful) approach to journalism, sites which they originally added in an effort to increase diversity of their news sources. This is censorship how?
Claiming that Google News practices censorship is utterly ridiculous given the amount, diversity, and accomodated bias of their news sources, and the human-out-of-the-loop (as they claim) algorithm that selects the actual headliner stories. You want to fight censorship? Try starting with the US Federal government and its media practices, or if you feel cosmopolitan, a country like Russia where most mainstream media is bought out by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
No, most people doing serious testing actually measure wall plug power, which takes into account everything in the case. With laptops, that just means total battery life. And last I heard, Intel's mobile chips still beat Turions.
T or X series Thinkpads still rock. My T40 is almost 4 years old, has taken a lot of abuse and I have no intention to replace it.
In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.
That just isn't true. There are 4 consumer Core 2 Duo models. For every one, you cannot buy an AMD CPU for the same price or cheaper that won't be beaten in most workloads, and the closest performing AMD CPU will have much lower performance per watt.
Don't get me started on the mobile and 2-8 core server market, Intel has completely decimated AMD's offerings there for now.
I do agree with you about TDP though. I'm not sure about the methodology or the official definition, but the official figures from the two vendors don't match up. That doesn't prevent us from measuring overall power and concluding that at the moment, Intel is kicking AMD's butt.
It looks like AMD is back to underdog mode until their next architecture is out, although Opteron sales will sustain a bunch of inertia.
IBM.
The Thinkpad division apparently takes serviceability VERY seriously. They sell every single sub-assembly down to individual types of screws. I personally have ordered several tiny parts to replace in my Thinkpads.
I'm not sure what the contact points are for IBM Parts now that it's Lenovo. Previously you could call a number and order nearly anything that had an FRU number.
Good point. But when the god damn vice president of the most powerful country of the world is the biggest fucking walking conflict of interest on the planet, don't you think we're a little past discussing best practices and into the realm of the criminal?
Ah, so the DOJ is perfectly happy with multibillion-dollar competition-free contracts for "rebuilding Iraq" and blatantly monopolistic behavior by telecom providers, they think allowing Microsoft to racketeer OEMs into forcing customers to buy Windows with every machine they sell is absolutely fine, and of course they won't even dare to think about prosecuting other branches of their own government for numerous violations of the Constitution and war crimes, but when two companies, by persistently competing with each other and achieving near-perfect parity for long periods of time, create one of the most staggeringly cutthroat markets on the planet, they must of course be investigated.
Good job, DOJ!
A little less coherence and a little more Intel bashing and you'll sound like "Sharikou Ph.D"!
Yes, L2's main benefit is latency, it should be almost 2 orders of magnitude faster
Your impression is wrong. GPLv3 will forbid Novell from suing any users of any software it distributes for IP violations present in that software's source, and will force it to act to protect such users in case Microsoft sues them based on patents present in the deal, presumably by breaking the deal (see section 11 of the draft). What isn't clear to me is whether the deal and GPLv3 are immediately incompatible or only are incompatible the moment Microsoft sues someone based on those patents.
The important point being made by the FSF is that software patents are wrong and dangerous. Sufficiently so that they're willing to alienate commercial developers to fight them, as well as restrictive trusted computing architectures. The FSF has been thrust into a position of being a key software supplier by the success of Linux. They are willing to put that popularity at stake to confront software patents. It's been fairly clear from their history that they aren't willing to compromise their ideals to further their popularity. The more I think about GPLv3, the more I respect their position and what they're trying to do.
You fail reading comprehension.
Countries which censor or curtail Internet usage (with the obvious exception of China, with its staggering size and mobility) are hardly "enemies" of the Internet - they can't attack it and expect any degree of success. Instead they're foolishly short-sighted, unable to comprehend the massive technological disadvantage any such action entails in the long run. The problem is, this usually correlates with general incompetence, which means many of these countries will become (or already are) failed states which require outside assistance.
What makes you think the Diebold voting division is in any way using the security expertise of their other divisions?
The Diebold voting division has been implicated in severe voting irregularities, poor engineering, a repressive and litigous attitude toward their critics, and conflicts of interest. This is on top of the fact that the security architecture and audit practices they follow are beyond ridiculous. Regardless of the performance of Diebold's other divisions, this record is not acceptable.
Most importantly, the people on county and state voting commissions are not informed about these issues and have to deal with both the HAVA and Diebold's monopoly status in many locales. On top of which, Diebold aggressively lobbies for the use of its products, which to me pretty obviously should be forbidden for any voting equipment supplier.
What stupefies me is that hundreds of people have complained about Gimp's UI to the developers, which means a massive silent fraction of its potential users are probably uncomfortable with the UI, and yet for many years the developers did nothing and most tried to argue that the UI is superior and we just don't get it (one suggestion that resurfaces constantly is that I should use a separate virtual desktop for Gimp). This is remarkable hubris.
How many times do we have to go over the philosophy and benefits of full disclosure?
There's got to be a way to make that article make Wikipedia implode on itself or die in an infinite loop or form a singularity in the fabric of space-time or something like that.
There is not that much to be gained on the CPU front any more anyway. The differences are marginal and irrelevant for nearly all applications except heavy crypto. In the near future it will be IO, crypto and ASICs which will be the selling points on the higher end.
Wow. That's a dumb statement if I've ever read one. In fact, your entire comment is pretty much disconnected from reality.
"We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"
Continuous session saving. KDE already saves session state on logout. Now the API for doing this should be changed so that each application saves its state not only on logout, but on every change (with several seconds' delay so as not to overload I/O).
There is no such game as Unreal Tournament 2005. UT 2004 is the best game in the Unreal series, and UT 2007 is scheduled to kick its ass. I love the old Unreal and UT as much as the next guy, but any attempt to disparage UT 2004 in their favor means you're just set in your ways more than you should be.
Have you seen math and computer science GRE exams?
These are entry-level graduate tests. They are pretty general (they can't cover highly specialized areas). They are not very rushed for time. They are multiple-choice. And they will KICK YOUR ASS. And I could design a multiple choice test for every grad level course I've taken that would be very hard to pass.
That's certainly a matter of opinion. Could you point out a specific Greenpeace study, which is based on hyperbole, bent statistics and lies? I thought not.
... As a matter of fact the study (again, pdf link) contains tons of links to the pr fluff of the companies in question. From my understanding the study is either based on data released, or in the case of rodamps and commitments not released by the companies.
Let's see:
-Everything they put out related to their anti-GM foods campaign
-Most of their anti-WTO rhetoric
There are many environmental crises (rainforest logging, overfishing, other habitat destruction, global warming) which deserve everyone's attention. But because Greenpeace has consistently demonstrated hypocrisy and useless posturing on other issues, its involvement too often threatens the credibility of people who really do care about and understand these problems.
You quite obviously didn't read through the studys criteria (you can download the criteria as a pdf via a link on the page).
Do you realize just how much you discredit your own argument by linking to these? Of course I've read both of these documents. They're almost 100% bullshit. They cite NO SOURCES, scientific or otherwise. They do not define testing methodology. For no measure do they cite whether they conducted in-house tests, independent tests, used third-party data, manufacturer technical data, or manufacturer PR. None of the measures are explained quantitatively in terms of what they mean for the environment. Links from the tables are directly and exclusively to either company PR (not even contractor PR - and contractors are the ones damaging the environment here) or environmental regulations without any context. In short, these documents - the only two available on the website that provide any level of detail for the study - betray an unresearched, uneducated, hackish study made by people unqualified to do anything of the sort and concerned with PR for their organization only. This is NOT OK for an environmental organization.
There are real ways to judge companies for environmental impact, but if you think Greenpeace's study is anywhere close to doing it properly, you're sadly mistaken. It's a lot harder, and probably beyond Greenpeace's dedication, to trace the environmental impact of the full manufacturing chain of a single electronics component, and to differentiate these chains between companies. It's not as hard to evaluate the companies' policies on complete products - like post-consumer recycling, packaging, support, etc. - but I doubt these contribute much.
I won't go into what a proper study would have to do and what kind of evidence they'd have to supply because this would take a few pages, but its executive summary would look very different from the Greenpeace fluff you linked.
You may hate Greenpeace as an organization, but your arguments to debunk the study sound rather hollow.
"I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him." - Booker T. Washington
Greenpeace is an organization staffed by well-meaning people who, through lack of willingness to thoroughly understand the relative importance of environmental issues, or just lack of critical and independent thinking, are engaging in things which do little to help the environment but a lot to antagonize people who are even less educated or rational - or who want to justify their excesses - and whose number is a lot greater. The end effect is a lot of added irrational antipathy toward environmentalism as a whole.
You want to see true environmentalists? Come to any university biology department, or any number of other organizations staffed by people who work directly with nature. These people may have to cut trees, kill primates, poison lab mice, pin hundreds of insects, conduct surveys which may look destructive to you but really aren't, but by and large these are the people who truly know and care for their environment and do what they can to stop the mindless destruction others do to their environment every day without even knowing.
Aside from the fact that Greenpeace is an unreasonable organization to begin with, this study is a measure of how much money the companies on the list put into "green PR", not of how environmentally friendly their manufacturing processes really are. Their measures are really laughable, and most of their information is quite obviously gathered from the manufacturers' and contractors' websites and press materials. Just because a random Chinese company decided to slap a page on their English website about how they comply with RoHS and have an "environmental roadmap" and another one has nothing but spec sheets on their homepage says nothing about their environmental impact. Every single one of their measures is problematic, if not in principle, then in the reality of how they gathered the data and what real-world impact it has.
This study is worthless for the purpose of fairly judging companies on their environmental policies, and I speak this as a committed environmentalist.
This is apples and oranges. Projectors and TVs serve different purposes, and projection TVs are a poor compromise illustrating that. You cannot watch a projector in a brightly lit room, you basically need a theater setup. Projectors can be very nice, but if you have fewer than perhaps five people watching and a small room, the LCD-Plasma competition has created excellent alternatives at a fairly low cost (great 42" HDTVs can be had for under $1.5K now).
The cool part about KDE is that functionality by and large isn't hidden from the user. You just run the core desktop environment, mess around with the Control Center, open up a few invaluable apps (amarok, kate, kile, konqueror, kaffeine, kopete, kpdf, showimg... the list goes on), bind a few global keyboard shortcuts, and you're good to go. Everything works as expected, and is integrated to the bones.
Just about the only trick I use that isn't in plain view is fish:// for opening directories and files over ssh. Works in editors too (edit files directly over ssh). There's a lot of fancy magic you can do with other kioslaves, but mostly either I don't have a use for them or they're too buggy to rely on.
Also, ~/.kde/Autostart is the equivalent of the Windows Startup folder.
Finally, you can skin GTK2 apps with your KDE theme with a GTK Qt theme engine (gtk-qt-engine).
Yep, please do follow up with the stories.
Google News removes 3 sites from its feed which have demonstrated a completely unprofessional (and sometimes hateful) approach to journalism, sites which they originally added in an effort to increase diversity of their news sources. This is censorship how?
Claiming that Google News practices censorship is utterly ridiculous given the amount, diversity, and accomodated bias of their news sources, and the human-out-of-the-loop (as they claim) algorithm that selects the actual headliner stories. You want to fight censorship? Try starting with the US Federal government and its media practices, or if you feel cosmopolitan, a country like Russia where most mainstream media is bought out by the government.