Power consumption and thermal dissipation are two separate problems. You're used to thinking of them as rigidly related, because the thermals for modern CPUs are very rigidly defined, but by conflating the two you're only displaying ignorance.
With lower need for thermal dissipation at any given power draw, the demand on the cooling system is lower. That means smaller, quieter, and lighter components everywhere a high performance IC is present.
Google realized this early, and bought off a great amount of geek awe by using Linux as the basis for its computing grid. This popularity among geeks turned into word of mouth advertising which turned into huge market share (having a great product didn't hurt either). Google still tries to maintain the "we're just a benign bunch of geeks" image (an image which is eroding, as it becomes more apparent that they are more akin to a lovechild of M$ and the NSA than a giant sushi eating LAN party). Has it ever occurred to you that your grasp on reality might be just a little bit loose?
I think you've spent so much time bullshitting customers about weaselly CompUSA practices and dealing with shitty upstream support that you've lost the ability to give sound advice about this.
Just like in the other jurisdictions, in the US the manufacturer is required to address mechanical defects as part of the warranty, and in fact I've had two top manufacturers replace broken lid hinges under warranty, and neither required a hard drive to be sent in or the original OS to be installed. Granted, I haven't dealt with HP (I won't go into what I think about their consumer products) but they are required by most states' consumer rights laws to do this, and a simple reminder (together with an escalation) will most likely make them stop arguing.
Total bullshit. Any laptop which doesn't run properly with the lid closed is defective. Not to mention that the author specifically states that the hinge is broken. The hinge is a metal part.
You are speaking from a very narrow experience. There is a ton of stuff that is better done in latex or a sql database, and conversely there is a massive amount of stuff that is an utter pain in the ass to do in anything other than a word processor, a presentation editor, or a spreadsheet. It's all about using the right tool for the job. There is no denying that MS Office is the right tool for many jobs. Just because you see someone misusing it, and because you're ignorant of its features or workflow, doesn't make it any less powerful.
I trust Apple to eventually surpass Office with their app suite though.
Requirements for storage are growing plenty fast, mostly because of HD video content but also due to a ton of other new applications that were not possible with hundreds of gigabytes but are now within reach with tens of terabytes. Good old bloat has kept up very well: compare the on-disk size of a fresh Windows 2000 install to that of a Vista install. I have no use for Vista, but it's what drives consumer hardware requirements.
Do you have trouble with logical reasoning? Have you been living under a rock?
The iPhone is the first device to work as a cell phone and an mp3 player and not suck at either. That's a lot to say considering that almost all other devices out there that do just one of those things, let alone two, are miserable cripples. Now, I don't know about you, but most people today actually carry a cell phone with them, and many carry an iPod. It's pretty obvious to anyone that being able to carry just one brick that does both things better than the previous two could is a killer feature that people will pay extra money for.
I think the touch screen is awesome - I've been envisioning a device just like that for a few years - but it's nowhere near half as useful to me if it can't do phone things.
Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products. My experience is quite the opposite. The only company whose drives have never failed on me is Maxtor (not a small sample size, either). My Seagate drives have failed more than once.
Every single assignment of drive reliability by manufacturer I've seen has been very anecdotal and not supported by my own experience. So you shouldn't have stated what you did unequivocally.
Wifi drivers. SMAPI drivers. Video drivers (ever looked at the Radeon driver code in both the kernel and xorg? And there are lots more). Any driver that has to rely on poor/incomplete/nonexistent documentation. Stuff that has to write any kind of partially reverse-engineered proprietary file format - and there are a lot more proprietary formats with partially known headers out there than MS Office files. Specialized programs that talk to all kinds of embedded stuff (limited audience but still there). There's lots of specialized glue code out there to talk to undocumented, binary, proprietary stuff. I work in one of the most open scientific fields on the planet and I still run into that kind of crap every now and then.
Right. And that bit of code looks obviously harmless. You'd obviously scroll right by it if you saw it in some package's source, because there's absolutely no chance anything odd would be going on in a piece of code like that. One big problem I see is that lots of code communicating with closed-source stuff like hardware, proprietary file formats, etc. will contain magic strings or binary blobs deemed necessary to work with the closed stuff. It would be much easier to hide malicious code in there and get it past reviewers' eyes...
Party worship in the USSR was fundamentally very different from any form of Christianity and most other religions. One cannot deny its powerful brainwashing effect, but the pivotal difference was that discourse of party policy was at least framed, if not conducted, in an intellectual and scientific/rational manner, not based almost exclusively on faith and spirituality as religions are. (The reason this discourse led to insidious results was that it was conducted based on false information.)
(Specific "Marx worship", on the other hand, never existed. If you think Marx himself was some kind of all-encompassing deity for the Soviets on the order of the Christian God or Allah, you're either misinformed or delusional. Lenin was the only person deified like that, and even he was far less central to the brainwashed Soviet psyche than a Christian God is to a brainwashed Christian.)
if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on What?
Are you aware that you're not making any sense at all? You throw around a bunch of terms which may seem to you to form a logical chain of thought but they really do not. The underlying assumptions that more features in the kernel somehow bloat it significantly, that Moore's law has anything to do with memory, that the kernel is monolithic in any way that is relevant to what you're saying, etc. are blatantly wrong.
The problem is not that Ebert is criticizing video games. The problem is that he is clearly doing so without expending the least effort to acquaint himself with the genre. There are numerous games out there which arguably are masterpieces of art. For any one of them - or even all - you may have good reasons to feel that it doesn't qualify as such. But to dismiss them en masse, based on some meaningless generalizations, without even listing any worthy contenders, then go on to dismiss the whole format, is not an excusable offense for a reviewer.
I used to care about what Ebert said in his movie reviews. His taste in movies aligns easily with mine. After this episode however, I'm very much disillusioned in his work as a reviewer, due to the sheer arrogance and ignorance which he managed to demonstrate.
is there any reason for low-end PCI-e graphics cards to be 16x, rather than 8x or even 4x? Actually, some new low-end graphics cards operate at 4x even though they have a 16x slot interface.
It doesn't really matter: the additional depth on the mobo occupied by the slots is still needed by the CPU and north bridge next to the slots. Perhaps if all the slots became PCIe 4x or lower, they could shave an inch off the back of the mobo, but the biggest space savings come from using low-profile cards, which allow the case to shrink in that dimension.
Another thing that could save a lot of space is if they standardized on slim-height 5.25" drives and bays for them.
Laptop cards are a whole another matter, since modern laptops require such tiny components that to use them in desktops too is usually uneconomical.
International Computer Science Institute (ISCI) It's ICSI. Pronounced Ee-ksee. It's where they exile you if you're not nerdy enough for Berkeley Computer Science proper, or something;)
Do you know how the current system works? Are you aware that they won't be turning radar off?
Can you be bothered to educate yourself at least a tiny bit on the topic and RTFA to answer your own questions, or will you just conform to the stereotype of an idiot slashbot?
If you buy a competitor just to make it go away, you realize no benefit from the purchase. What?
You can realize a huge benefit from buying out a competitor, especially in an industry which bids on government contracts, by decreasing competitive pressure and allowing you to raise bid prices. Please explain your idea, because to me you just sound stupid.
As for this deal, Northrop had already owned half of Scaled, and they were doing extensive UAV work. Had they stopped their cooperation, Scaled could very much be in the business of bidding against Northrop on massive UAV contracts, and undercutting them by a huge margin too.
Actually after reading the article it looks like this drug is only useful for suppressing memories of traumatic conditions, which is very useful for treating PTSD etc. but very nearly useless for combat or any other tactical situation...
I would expect that soldiers without fear would not be, on the whole, as good as soldiers without it. A healthy dose of caution (based on fear) will save lives -- and for the US at least, minimization of loss of soldiers' lives is a prime determinant of strategy. I think in most firefights where well-trained troops are involved, this drug would be very useful. Fear may have been useful in our primeval times when we didn't have much in the way of weapons and the choice was simply between fight and flight, but in modern combat, concentration, awareness and coolness are all crucial for taking proper cover, coordinating with others, and using complex weapons for destroying the enemy, and fear inhibits all that. Elite troops have learned to suppress their fear response, but I'm pretty sure the amount of mental resources they spend on doing so is huge.
Of course, if you have no training, then you're probably just as good fighting on this drug as on any other, giving well-trained troops an advantage. Which makes me think the Pentagon should be very interested in this.
A gruesome case in point... a few days ago I saw a thermal imaging video of some soldier armed with a rifle being chased down by many guerillas. He ran for a long time and sprayed bullets sporadically. Eventually he was chased down and literally ripped apart with knives. Just looking at that is very frightening, and thinking what it's like to die that way is terrifying. Yet the guy had enough bullets to down all the chasers. If he was on this drug, or just had enough composure, he could have planned his retreat and shot them all one by one.
I hate to my bones to say it, but if you didn't do anything wrong, what do you have to be worried about???
(Note: I hate that "if you've done nothing wrong" argument, but in this case it applies since you're already suspected of a crime...) If you hate to say it, then don't say it. If you do, then you don't understand the myriad arguments for privacy.
The issue here is that there is no encryption of user data by default and no privacy mode to turn off or clean the extensive data collection that the system does in the name of convenience.
...and after looking up some more data, the Chernobyl figure is even lower - 10 tons got out of the reactor building, less than 2 dispersed in the air.
The natural occurence of uranium is 300 microgram to 11.7 milligram per kg. So I doubt it will be that harmful. Natural uranium is almost all U-238, which is relatively harmless (2 OOM lower radiation than U-235). Why do you think the link between depleted uranium (all U-238, no U-235) and health problems is not proven? Spent nuclear fuel is far more enriched than natural uranium. Also, natural uranium is locked into the soil. Contaminant uranium will presumably be in the air and on the surface, making it a lot more troublesome. Finally, uranium of any form is by far not the most hazardous radioactive material out there.
How much of this material would leave a 100-200m radius of the blast you think? It's not that easy. Why do you think there's an exclusion zone around Chernobyl? Less than 60 tons of fuel got ejected from that reactor, and the exclusion zone is 30 km in radius. That increases as the square root of the fuel mass, so for a 1 km radius you apparently need less than 100 kg of enriched fuel, though I'm not sure how to estimate that amount in spent fuel. The fuel from Chernobyl wasn't deliberately dispersed, either. Only about 2 tons got ejected into the air and almost all of that settled within the zone, yet the immediate spike in radioactivity in all of Europe anywhere near downwind was massive. All that it needed was some wind. A terrorist detonating a dirty bomb would of course try to use the wind to maximum advantage.
Yes, it would have to be pretty heavy. Blowing up several hundred kg of powdered nuclear waste above a city isn't easy, but it's nothing a Cessna and an equal amount of explosives can't do.
How long would it take some people with a vacuum cleaner to clear up the mess? Try cleaning a forest with a vacuum cleaner sometime. A city is not at all easier. Washing it down helps, but not when there's a lot of it. I agree that there wouldn't be many deaths and the exclusion zone wouldn't be large - several km^2 at most - but that's still massive when it's in the middle of a downtown area.
That's why I think it's very doubtful it would be effective. Neither my analysis nor yours, nor that of anyone less than a team of nuclear engineers and security experts, is adequate. I've never seen an adequate study of the dirty bomb threat. I'm not sure what the DHS is up to, but if they're seriously working on this, they're keeping awfully quiet about it. Given the amount of publicity their other programs receive and the quality of their grants I've seen so far, I'm not hopeful. There's some program to install container scanners in ports, but all we keep hearing is that it inspects a tiny fraction of cargo.
What infuriates me is the useless security measures everywhere and the people who use the T-word to further their agendas. Then people fed up with that start conflating real, actionable threats with the avalanche of fearmongering bullshit. I think that's happening with this topic.
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Power consumption and thermal dissipation are two separate problems. You're used to thinking of them as rigidly related, because the thermals for modern CPUs are very rigidly defined, but by conflating the two you're only displaying ignorance.
With lower need for thermal dissipation at any given power draw, the demand on the cooling system is lower. That means smaller, quieter, and lighter components everywhere a high performance IC is present.
Who's going to attempt to enforce, much less sue in court, in this scenario?
;(
Sorry, that one was hard to catch, next time please make it funnier or something.
I think you've spent so much time bullshitting customers about weaselly CompUSA practices and dealing with shitty upstream support that you've lost the ability to give sound advice about this.
Just like in the other jurisdictions, in the US the manufacturer is required to address mechanical defects as part of the warranty, and in fact I've had two top manufacturers replace broken lid hinges under warranty, and neither required a hard drive to be sent in or the original OS to be installed. Granted, I haven't dealt with HP (I won't go into what I think about their consumer products) but they are required by most states' consumer rights laws to do this, and a simple reminder (together with an escalation) will most likely make them stop arguing.
Total bullshit. Any laptop which doesn't run properly with the lid closed is defective. Not to mention that the author specifically states that the hinge is broken. The hinge is a metal part.
You are speaking from a very narrow experience. There is a ton of stuff that is better done in latex or a sql database, and conversely there is a massive amount of stuff that is an utter pain in the ass to do in anything other than a word processor, a presentation editor, or a spreadsheet. It's all about using the right tool for the job. There is no denying that MS Office is the right tool for many jobs. Just because you see someone misusing it, and because you're ignorant of its features or workflow, doesn't make it any less powerful.
I trust Apple to eventually surpass Office with their app suite though.
Requirements for storage are growing plenty fast, mostly because of HD video content but also due to a ton of other new applications that were not possible with hundreds of gigabytes but are now within reach with tens of terabytes. Good old bloat has kept up very well: compare the on-disk size of a fresh Windows 2000 install to that of a Vista install. I have no use for Vista, but it's what drives consumer hardware requirements.
What?
Do you have trouble with logical reasoning? Have you been living under a rock?
The iPhone is the first device to work as a cell phone and an mp3 player and not suck at either. That's a lot to say considering that almost all other devices out there that do just one of those things, let alone two, are miserable cripples. Now, I don't know about you, but most people today actually carry a cell phone with them, and many carry an iPod. It's pretty obvious to anyone that being able to carry just one brick that does both things better than the previous two could is a killer feature that people will pay extra money for.
I think the touch screen is awesome - I've been envisioning a device just like that for a few years - but it's nowhere near half as useful to me if it can't do phone things.
Every single assignment of drive reliability by manufacturer I've seen has been very anecdotal and not supported by my own experience. So you shouldn't have stated what you did unequivocally.
Wifi drivers. SMAPI drivers. Video drivers (ever looked at the Radeon driver code in both the kernel and xorg? And there are lots more). Any driver that has to rely on poor/incomplete/nonexistent documentation. Stuff that has to write any kind of partially reverse-engineered proprietary file format - and there are a lot more proprietary formats with partially known headers out there than MS Office files. Specialized programs that talk to all kinds of embedded stuff (limited audience but still there). There's lots of specialized glue code out there to talk to undocumented, binary, proprietary stuff. I work in one of the most open scientific fields on the planet and I still run into that kind of crap every now and then.
Party worship in the USSR was fundamentally very different from any form of Christianity and most other religions. One cannot deny its powerful brainwashing effect, but the pivotal difference was that discourse of party policy was at least framed, if not conducted, in an intellectual and scientific/rational manner, not based almost exclusively on faith and spirituality as religions are. (The reason this discourse led to insidious results was that it was conducted based on false information.)
(Specific "Marx worship", on the other hand, never existed. If you think Marx himself was some kind of all-encompassing deity for the Soviets on the order of the Christian God or Allah, you're either misinformed or delusional. Lenin was the only person deified like that, and even he was far less central to the brainwashed Soviet psyche than a Christian God is to a brainwashed Christian.)
Are you aware that you're not making any sense at all? You throw around a bunch of terms which may seem to you to form a logical chain of thought but they really do not. The underlying assumptions that more features in the kernel somehow bloat it significantly, that Moore's law has anything to do with memory, that the kernel is monolithic in any way that is relevant to what you're saying, etc. are blatantly wrong.
Can you clarify what you're saying?
The problem is not that Ebert is criticizing video games. The problem is that he is clearly doing so without expending the least effort to acquaint himself with the genre. There are numerous games out there which arguably are masterpieces of art. For any one of them - or even all - you may have good reasons to feel that it doesn't qualify as such. But to dismiss them en masse, based on some meaningless generalizations, without even listing any worthy contenders, then go on to dismiss the whole format, is not an excusable offense for a reviewer.
I used to care about what Ebert said in his movie reviews. His taste in movies aligns easily with mine. After this episode however, I'm very much disillusioned in his work as a reviewer, due to the sheer arrogance and ignorance which he managed to demonstrate.
It doesn't really matter: the additional depth on the mobo occupied by the slots is still needed by the CPU and north bridge next to the slots. Perhaps if all the slots became PCIe 4x or lower, they could shave an inch off the back of the mobo, but the biggest space savings come from using low-profile cards, which allow the case to shrink in that dimension.
Another thing that could save a lot of space is if they standardized on slim-height 5.25" drives and bays for them.
Laptop cards are a whole another matter, since modern laptops require such tiny components that to use them in desktops too is usually uneconomical.
Do you know how the current system works? Are you aware that they won't be turning radar off?
Can you be bothered to educate yourself at least a tiny bit on the topic and RTFA to answer your own questions, or will you just conform to the stereotype of an idiot slashbot?
You can realize a huge benefit from buying out a competitor, especially in an industry which bids on government contracts, by decreasing competitive pressure and allowing you to raise bid prices. Please explain your idea, because to me you just sound stupid.
As for this deal, Northrop had already owned half of Scaled, and they were doing extensive UAV work. Had they stopped their cooperation, Scaled could very much be in the business of bidding against Northrop on massive UAV contracts, and undercutting them by a huge margin too.
Ball bearings haven't been used in hard drives for a few years now. All new hard drives are made with fluid bearings, as far as I know.
I don't know what exactly the noise comes from, but it isn't bearings wearing out.
Actually after reading the article it looks like this drug is only useful for suppressing memories of traumatic conditions, which is very useful for treating PTSD etc. but very nearly useless for combat or any other tactical situation...
Of course, if you have no training, then you're probably just as good fighting on this drug as on any other, giving well-trained troops an advantage. Which makes me think the Pentagon should be very interested in this.
A gruesome case in point... a few days ago I saw a thermal imaging video of some soldier armed with a rifle being chased down by many guerillas. He ran for a long time and sprayed bullets sporadically. Eventually he was chased down and literally ripped apart with knives. Just looking at that is very frightening, and thinking what it's like to die that way is terrifying. Yet the guy had enough bullets to down all the chasers. If he was on this drug, or just had enough composure, he could have planned his retreat and shot them all one by one.
(Note: I hate that "if you've done nothing wrong" argument, but in this case it applies since you're already suspected of a crime...) If you hate to say it, then don't say it. If you do, then you don't understand the myriad arguments for privacy.
The issue here is that there is no encryption of user data by default and no privacy mode to turn off or clean the extensive data collection that the system does in the name of convenience.
...and after looking up some more data, the Chernobyl figure is even lower - 10 tons got out of the reactor building, less than 2 dispersed in the air.
Yes, it would have to be pretty heavy. Blowing up several hundred kg of powdered nuclear waste above a city isn't easy, but it's nothing a Cessna and an equal amount of explosives can't do. How long would it take some people with a vacuum cleaner to clear up the mess? Try cleaning a forest with a vacuum cleaner sometime. A city is not at all easier. Washing it down helps, but not when there's a lot of it. I agree that there wouldn't be many deaths and the exclusion zone wouldn't be large - several km^2 at most - but that's still massive when it's in the middle of a downtown area. That's why I think it's very doubtful it would be effective. Neither my analysis nor yours, nor that of anyone less than a team of nuclear engineers and security experts, is adequate. I've never seen an adequate study of the dirty bomb threat. I'm not sure what the DHS is up to, but if they're seriously working on this, they're keeping awfully quiet about it. Given the amount of publicity their other programs receive and the quality of their grants I've seen so far, I'm not hopeful. There's some program to install container scanners in ports, but all we keep hearing is that it inspects a tiny fraction of cargo.
What infuriates me is the useless security measures everywhere and the people who use the T-word to further their agendas. Then people fed up with that start conflating real, actionable threats with the avalanche of fearmongering bullshit. I think that's happening with this topic.