That's what Intel wants people to believe.:) In truth, they do seem to have the upperhand at this point, but not all their claims are straightforward. For example, Intel publishes TDP (thermal design power) ratings for "typical" draw while AMD publishes peak draw. Intel also requires an external memory controller, which adds to the power footprint of the system. Not to mention that AMD hasn't started releasing 65nm chips or integrated the new fab technoligies they've developed with IBM yet.
In some benchmarks Intel also has a somewhat misleading lead. For example, they still have higher raw latency to system memory but they mask it quite nicely with more intelligent pre-fetch algorithms. There are likely workloads this doesn't work well on (e.g. anything highly random access) and it doesn't preclude AMD including similar logic in a future rev of their memory logic.
I expect we'll continue to see each company pulling ahead of the other regularly, and different applications that work better on one chip and others that work better on the other.
My running prediction is that you'll see a move toward 2.5" drives. In the business desktop market, large drives are typically just wasted space anyways, and a power saving of ~ 10W per seat is a big win. On the server side, blade servers are hot, and typically use 2.5" drives (unless you're booting from a network or a SAN) and 1U servers are hitting the market using them now too.
In the consumer market 2.5" drives are already "winning" since notebook sales are outpacing desktops. I suspect that unobstrusive, quiet and efficient would sell well into the remaining desktop market. Especially since USB 2.0, eSATA, and Express Card offer compelling expansion options that don't require cracking open a case.
Do you have any good datum suggesting that the electrical interface on the drive was at fault, because that's hardly the likely candidate in that scenario. Especially considering you can find plenty of people running hundreds of SCSI drives without issue.
Well the weird thing is that he/she/it was only a transvestite in the english version of the manual. In the japanese release she was always just a she.
There's also Princess Daisy, Zelda, and Sheik. And I suppose Kammy Koopa, Toadette, Samus, and Birdo... assuming someone out there is turned on by pink dinosaurs. Judging by some of the erotic anthropomorphic galleries on the web, I'm sure there is.
Even with the recent "logng term support" release of Ubuntu, the support cycle is only five years on the server, and nowhere on their website (unless I missed it) do they define what they mean by "support"; i.e. are they going to add support for new hardware during the lifecycle, or is it strictly security updates. Red Hat has a well-defined seven year product lifecycle.
Nothing against Ubuntu. I'm typing on a machine running it now, but I don't forsee switching allegiance from Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS for my servers anytime soon.
You can install all the competitive software you want on Windows or MacOS or Linux rather than use what's bundled. And bundling has the same stifling effect on competetion in all three cases - third part vendors of CD burning software, for example, are going to have an uphill battle on all three platforms. Likewise with mail clients, video players, et cetera, et cetera.
And yes, on Linux you can replace whatever the default GUI for your distribution is. You know what? On Windows you can install Litestep or LDE or Talisman or any of a half dozen others to replace Explorer. There have even been proof of concept ports of KDE and Gnome to Windows.
Of course, they may not get a lot of traction since most people who don't want to run Windows... don't run Windows. Funny that.
And while you can technically remove every trace of some components from a Linux distribution, try removing the Gecko engine from Gnome or KHTML from KDE or WebCore from MacOS/X. Like it or not, HTML rendering is a core feature of a desktop environment. I suppose we could always go back to the good old days where everyone reimplemented basic functionality themselves or people dealt with running applications linked against a variety of slightly incompatible third-party libraries which may or may not get any active maintainance.
(For the record, I don't particularly like Windows myself. The only reason I have a Windows partition available at all is for access to specific applications I need professionally.)
So Apple should be allowed to bundle voice recognition (not to mention handwriting recognition, calendering, mail, chat, photo management, video authoring, web development, and audio editing) but Microsoft shouldn't?
Linux distributions are even more aggressive in the application bundling (though there's a conspicuous lack of decent voice recognition).
A company with a market cap of $6B and revenue of $500M last quarter buying a company with a market cap of $100B and revenue of $8B last quarter "isn't too far out there"?
After all, who can you trust to know a laptop better than the company itself?
The actual manufacturer, Asus, who lists 3.3lb as the base wieght on their spec sheet.
As for the batter life, 2-2.5 hours is for the three cell 24Whr battery. The "up to 7.9" hours is with an optional (and significantly heavier) nine cell battery.
I'm not sure how they can list sub-3lb on their website, considering they also say it's a Z33A, which Asus lists as 3.3lb. Taking that into account, compare it to the D420 instead;. Similar price but newer technology - Core instead of Pentium M, DDR2-533 instead of DDR2-400, Intel GMA950 instead of the 915, gigabit ethernet instead of fast, WXGA display (1280x800) instead of XGA (1024x768) and you get a Cardbus slot and docking connector with the Dell. Oh, and a three year warranty standard instead of a one year.
I've installed Fedora, Ubuntu, and CentOS on the last three generations of Lattitudes without any major issues either. The biggest pain was Fedora Core 4 on a Lattitude D600, since the wireless card wasn't natively supported at the time.
Not everyone buying computers gives a flying fig about graphics performance. There are some damn nice boards available on the cheap with integrated graphics that are perfectly adequate for desktop use.
XGI is the spun-off graphics division of SIS which bought the assets of Trident, and sold off their assets to ATI a couple months ago.
The original corporate entity S3 ended up changing it's name to SonicBlue, filing bankrupty, and selling most of their assets to Denon and Best Data. The graphics division, however, was acquired by Via and is now operated as S3 Graphics and used as the basis for Via's IGP solutions. So they're still around, sort of.
What is the difference between soviet union and russia ?
About two million square miles and a hundred and fifty million people?
Soviet union was something that was created en force by russia's own revolution, by its red army. And it was maintained as such. Same goes for today. If conditions turn around, or need/opportunity arises, it is just matter of some small time that russia will overrun all its old confederates and create anoter 'union'. They are already in some sort of loose union with russia in military matters still.
The Soviet Union was just the lion's share of the fallen Russian Empire with a different ruling body. Most of the territory hadn't been independent for generations and had no independent army or political structure.
There's quite a few post-Soviet alliances out there. I'm guessing you're talking about the Commonwealth of Independent States, which has defense aspects but doesn't focus on them.
Alternately, there's GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) and the Community of Democratic Choice, both of which aim in part to curb Russian dominance in the region. The Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) which have aligned themselves with the European community. Turkmenistan, which has remained largely free of entanglements. In other words, these are now actual independent states instead of a power vacuum.
As for advantage in numbers for germany at the start of war against soviets, well actually i didnt imply such a thing, however it indeed still can be said to be so, as the russian hordes were extremely green and low in morale, and surrendered en masse.
I was refering to where you said "they started with great disadvantage, both in experience, technology and numbers". The size of the Soviet army was significantly larger than the German forces deployed on the Eastern front, the size of the Soviet population was drastically larger than Germany (and they were readily available for drafting), they had more tanks, more planes, more artillery, larger industrial capacity, and fewer fronts to worry about.
Yes, they were at a disadvantage from a leadership standpoint, largely because of the Great Purge, but they still were a lot more than "the one with the numbers".
Budgets, money, finances - these are just nothing when a nation is self sufficient and state of war declared - remember that soviet union was a closed economy, and it built its military while being as such. They dont need money if they declare martial law, and tell people to work in factories, just like they almost lived for 60-70 years.
They don't have anywhere near the industrial capacity they one had, or the manpower. And their military was struggling to maintain itself even when they were ostensibly still a world power.
If it was great britain we were talking about, dependant on foreign imports for some important resources, id agree. But this is russia, and apart from itself being self sufficient, it has a number of neighbors that it can occupy in an instant if they feel the need, to increase their resources.
I don't buy that they could occupy anyone "in an instant", and I don't think that the populations of now sovereign nations would be subservient to a foreign power. Especially not with the alliances that their neighbors have made both with each other and neighboring countries.
China is using foreign technology for its military. Around 70% of its military technology is of old soviet union tech, and not only the technology, but a considerable amount of the items were manufactured in soviet union.
You know that bit above where you say in an all out war Russia could declare marshall law and such? Same goes for China, and they have more people, a stronger economy, a more controlled populace, and a massive massive industrial base.
Personally, if I find myself having to schedule time around entertainment, I look for a more flexible source of entertainment. Matter of taste, but if feel like I'm being compelled to watch something, I'm unlikely to enjoy it.
To quote one of my other replies: "As of 2004, average cost of attendance at public universities was a bit over $11k and private about $27.5K.":)
All that strays from the points I was trying to make - 1) the tuition range cited by the original is high and 2) just because college is expensive doesn't mean a lot of college students aren't digging under their couch cushions for change to eat or do their laundry, much less blow almost a grand on a computer (once you factor in tax and probably shipping).
I didn't comment at all on whether Russia was a military power. I was replying to your assertion that "the winner might be the one with the numbers, like russia."
Russia doesn't have numbers, period. The Soviet Union did.
And just where are you getting the idea that they were at a disadvantage in numbers during World War II. At that point in time the Soviet Union was intact with and had almost 197M people to Germany's 80M.
Sure, they managed to launch a successful offensive against the German army, but not until after losing ~ 750K square miles of territory, and not until after the Germans had proven to be overextended and undersupplied. The Soviets had more four times as many tanks and twice as many planes, and in the end they lost over three times the total German losses for the war. Winning one battle is nice, but the overall losses don't paint a pretty picture of their military.
And that's all history. The current Russia is a fragment of a fallen empire. They've gone from being the third most populous nation to the eighth and most of their current military ranks are short-lived conscripts (two year compulsary service, with the term set to drop to one year). Military spending is more than a full order of magnitude less than the United States. Their main claim to military power is a significant nuclear arsenal. In that regard, they might be considered a power yet, but they'd be spanked in a ground war.
China, on the other hand, has about one-fifth of the world's total population fueling the world's largest active military and largest paramilitary with the world's second largest budget.
Looks like my figures were a few years out of date, but the $46-48K includes estimated unbilled costs (travel and personal expense). Drop that, since the post I was replying to only mentioned tuition and housing and you're back down to $43-44K. In theory he didn't mention fees either, so you could drop it to $40-41 instead.
Number quibbling aside, the majority of students aren't going to be attending schools which cost $10K or more a semester, which was my real point. As of 2004, average cost of attendance at public universities was a bit over $11k and private about $27.5K. And by a wide margin, most students (~ 70% from the last figure I saw) can only afford even that with loans.
Dell includes Word Perfect for free, Hewlett Packard includes Works, Gateway includes Office, etc. If your building yourself, you can get Microsoft Works for about $18, or Works Suite (which includes a full version of word) for about $70 or just download OpenOffice.
And of course, since we're talking the educational market, you can also snag a full academic version of office for $120 (or less, since a lot of campuses negotiated larger discounts).
How much is tuition these days? 20K-35K? not to mention living expenses are probably another 10-20k.
Harvard costs about $38k including tuition, fees, room and board. Most people aren't going to ivy league schools.
Cost is going to depend heavily on area, but the local univeristy here (University at Buffalo) you looking at more like $6K for tuition and fees and housing starts at about $4K. And there are colleges you can go to with tuition and fees well under $4K for the year.
And this all ignores the fact that most people don't for college while they're going. It's typically going to be some combination of grants, loans, scholarships, and money from parents or trustfunds.
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That's what Intel wants people to believe. :) In truth, they do seem to have the upperhand at this point, but not all their claims are straightforward. For example, Intel publishes TDP (thermal design power) ratings for "typical" draw while AMD publishes peak draw. Intel also requires an external memory controller, which adds to the power footprint of the system. Not to mention that AMD hasn't started releasing 65nm chips or integrated the new fab technoligies they've developed with IBM yet.
In some benchmarks Intel also has a somewhat misleading lead. For example, they still have higher raw latency to system memory but they mask it quite nicely with more intelligent pre-fetch algorithms. There are likely workloads this doesn't work well on (e.g. anything highly random access) and it doesn't preclude AMD including similar logic in a future rev of their memory logic.
I expect we'll continue to see each company pulling ahead of the other regularly, and different applications that work better on one chip and others that work better on the other.
SATA doesn't have any sort of standardized external cabling standard for that use.
eSATA.
But for the disks themselces, it's stupid to buy SCSI or SAS disks and pay 3 times more just for a name.
Less stupid to pay 3 times more for speed and reliability.
My running prediction is that you'll see a move toward 2.5" drives. In the business desktop market, large drives are typically just wasted space anyways, and a power saving of ~ 10W per seat is a big win. On the server side, blade servers are hot, and typically use 2.5" drives (unless you're booting from a network or a SAN) and 1U servers are hitting the market using them now too.
In the consumer market 2.5" drives are already "winning" since notebook sales are outpacing desktops. I suspect that unobstrusive, quiet and efficient would sell well into the remaining desktop market. Especially since USB 2.0, eSATA, and Express Card offer compelling expansion options that don't require cracking open a case.
Do you have any good datum suggesting that the electrical interface on the drive was at fault, because that's hardly the likely candidate in that scenario. Especially considering you can find plenty of people running hundreds of SCSI drives without issue.
Well the weird thing is that he/she/it was only a transvestite in the english version of the manual. In the japanese release she was always just a she.
There's also Princess Daisy, Zelda, and Sheik. And I suppose Kammy Koopa, Toadette, Samus, and Birdo... assuming someone out there is turned on by pink dinosaurs. Judging by some of the erotic anthropomorphic galleries on the web, I'm sure there is.
Even with the recent "logng term support" release of Ubuntu, the support cycle is only five years on the server, and nowhere on their website (unless I missed it) do they define what they mean by "support"; i.e. are they going to add support for new hardware during the lifecycle, or is it strictly security updates. Red Hat has a well-defined seven year product lifecycle.
Nothing against Ubuntu. I'm typing on a machine running it now, but I don't forsee switching allegiance from Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS for my servers anytime soon.
You can install all the competitive software you want on Windows or MacOS or Linux rather than use what's bundled. And bundling has the same stifling effect on competetion in all three cases - third part vendors of CD burning software, for example, are going to have an uphill battle on all three platforms. Likewise with mail clients, video players, et cetera, et cetera.
And yes, on Linux you can replace whatever the default GUI for your distribution is. You know what? On Windows you can install Litestep or LDE or Talisman or any of a half dozen others to replace Explorer. There have even been proof of concept ports of KDE and Gnome to Windows.
Of course, they may not get a lot of traction since most people who don't want to run Windows... don't run Windows. Funny that.
And while you can technically remove every trace of some components from a Linux distribution, try removing the Gecko engine from Gnome or KHTML from KDE or WebCore from MacOS/X. Like it or not, HTML rendering is a core feature of a desktop environment. I suppose we could always go back to the good old days where everyone reimplemented basic functionality themselves or people dealt with running applications linked against a variety of slightly incompatible third-party libraries which may or may not get any active maintainance.
(For the record, I don't particularly like Windows myself. The only reason I have a Windows partition available at all is for access to specific applications I need professionally.)
So Apple should be allowed to bundle voice recognition (not to mention handwriting recognition, calendering, mail, chat, photo management, video authoring, web development, and audio editing) but Microsoft shouldn't?
Linux distributions are even more aggressive in the application bundling (though there's a conspicuous lack of decent voice recognition).
A company with a market cap of $6B and revenue of $500M last quarter buying a company with a market cap of $100B and revenue of $8B last quarter "isn't too far out there"?
Via manages it with a TDP of 6-10W, depending on clockspeed.
After all, who can you trust to know a laptop better than the company itself?
The actual manufacturer, Asus, who lists 3.3lb as the base wieght on their spec sheet.
As for the batter life, 2-2.5 hours is for the three cell 24Whr battery. The "up to 7.9" hours is with an optional (and significantly heavier) nine cell battery.
The 4318 should be natively supported now by the bcm43xx driver. Not sure which kernel version that crept into, but it's definitely there in 2.6.17.
I'm not sure how they can list sub-3lb on their website, considering they also say it's a Z33A, which Asus lists as 3.3lb. Taking that into account, compare it to the D420 instead;. Similar price but newer technology - Core instead of Pentium M, DDR2-533 instead of DDR2-400, Intel GMA950 instead of the 915, gigabit ethernet instead of fast, WXGA display (1280x800) instead of XGA (1024x768) and you get a Cardbus slot and docking connector with the Dell. Oh, and a three year warranty standard instead of a one year.
I've installed Fedora, Ubuntu, and CentOS on the last three generations of Lattitudes without any major issues either. The biggest pain was Fedora Core 4 on a Lattitude D600, since the wireless card wasn't natively supported at the time.
Not everyone buying computers gives a flying fig about graphics performance. There are some damn nice boards available on the cheap with integrated graphics that are perfectly adequate for desktop use.
Via bought S3. And, yeah, SiS and AMD (i.e. Geode GX) don't really count, since they're exclusively in the IGP market.
Trident was sold to XGI, which has since exited the graphics business.
XGI is the spun-off graphics division of SIS which bought the assets of Trident, and sold off their assets to ATI a couple months ago.
The original corporate entity S3 ended up changing it's name to SonicBlue, filing bankrupty, and selling most of their assets to Denon and Best Data. The graphics division, however, was acquired by Via and is now operated as S3 Graphics and used as the basis for Via's IGP solutions. So they're still around, sort of.
What is the difference between soviet union and russia ?
About two million square miles and a hundred and fifty million people?
Soviet union was something that was created en force by russia's own revolution, by its red army. And it was maintained as such. Same goes for today. If conditions turn around, or need/opportunity arises, it is just matter of some small time that russia will overrun all its old confederates and create anoter 'union'. They are already in some sort of loose union with russia in military matters still.
The Soviet Union was just the lion's share of the fallen Russian Empire with a different ruling body. Most of the territory hadn't been independent for generations and had no independent army or political structure.
There's quite a few post-Soviet alliances out there. I'm guessing you're talking about the Commonwealth of Independent States, which has defense aspects but doesn't focus on them.
Alternately, there's GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) and the Community of Democratic Choice, both of which aim in part to curb Russian dominance in the region. The Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) which have aligned themselves with the European community. Turkmenistan, which has remained largely free of entanglements. In other words, these are now actual independent states instead of a power vacuum.
As for advantage in numbers for germany at the start of war against soviets, well actually i didnt imply such a thing, however it indeed still can be said to be so, as the russian hordes were extremely green and low in morale, and surrendered en masse.
I was refering to where you said "they started with great disadvantage, both in experience, technology and numbers". The size of the Soviet army was significantly larger than the German forces deployed on the Eastern front, the size of the Soviet population was drastically larger than Germany (and they were readily available for drafting), they had more tanks, more planes, more artillery, larger industrial capacity, and fewer fronts to worry about.
Yes, they were at a disadvantage from a leadership standpoint, largely because of the Great Purge, but they still were a lot more than "the one with the numbers".
Budgets, money, finances - these are just nothing when a nation is self sufficient and state of war declared - remember that soviet union was a closed economy, and it built its military while being as such. They dont need money if they declare martial law, and tell people to work in factories, just like they almost lived for 60-70 years.
They don't have anywhere near the industrial capacity they one had, or the manpower. And their military was struggling to maintain itself even when they were ostensibly still a world power.
If it was great britain we were talking about, dependant on foreign imports for some important resources, id agree. But this is russia, and apart from itself being self sufficient, it has a number of neighbors that it can occupy in an instant if they feel the need, to increase their resources.
I don't buy that they could occupy anyone "in an instant", and I don't think that the populations of now sovereign nations would be subservient to a foreign power. Especially not with the alliances that their neighbors have made both with each other and neighboring countries.
China is using foreign technology for its military. Around 70% of its military technology is of old soviet union tech, and not only the technology, but a considerable amount of the items were manufactured in soviet union.
You know that bit above where you say in an all out war Russia could declare marshall law and such? Same goes for China, and they have more people, a stronger economy, a more controlled populace, and a massive massive industrial base.
Personally, if I find myself having to schedule time around entertainment, I look for a more flexible source of entertainment. Matter of taste, but if feel like I'm being compelled to watch something, I'm unlikely to enjoy it.
To quote one of my other replies: "As of 2004, average cost of attendance at public universities was a bit over $11k and private about $27.5K." :)
All that strays from the points I was trying to make - 1) the tuition range cited by the original is high and 2) just because college is expensive doesn't mean a lot of college students aren't digging under their couch cushions for change to eat or do their laundry, much less blow almost a grand on a computer (once you factor in tax and probably shipping).
I didn't comment at all on whether Russia was a military power. I was replying to your assertion that "the winner might be the one with the numbers, like russia."
Russia doesn't have numbers, period. The Soviet Union did.
And just where are you getting the idea that they were at a disadvantage in numbers during World War II. At that point in time the Soviet Union was intact with and had almost 197M people to Germany's 80M.
Sure, they managed to launch a successful offensive against the German army, but not until after losing ~ 750K square miles of territory, and not until after the Germans had proven to be overextended and undersupplied. The Soviets had more four times as many tanks and twice as many planes, and in the end they lost over three times the total German losses for the war. Winning one battle is nice, but the overall losses don't paint a pretty picture of their military.
And that's all history. The current Russia is a fragment of a fallen empire. They've gone from being the third most populous nation to the eighth and most of their current military ranks are short-lived conscripts (two year compulsary service, with the term set to drop to one year). Military spending is more than a full order of magnitude less than the United States. Their main claim to military power is a significant nuclear arsenal. In that regard, they might be considered a power yet, but they'd be spanked in a ground war.
China, on the other hand, has about one-fifth of the world's total population fueling the world's largest active military and largest paramilitary with the world's second largest budget.
Looks like my figures were a few years out of date, but the $46-48K includes estimated unbilled costs (travel and personal expense). Drop that, since the post I was replying to only mentioned tuition and housing and you're back down to $43-44K. In theory he didn't mention fees either, so you could drop it to $40-41 instead.
Number quibbling aside, the majority of students aren't going to be attending schools which cost $10K or more a semester, which was my real point. As of 2004, average cost of attendance at public universities was a bit over $11k and private about $27.5K. And by a wide margin, most students (~ 70% from the last figure I saw) can only afford even that with loans.
Dell includes Word Perfect for free, Hewlett Packard includes Works, Gateway includes Office, etc. If your building yourself, you can get Microsoft Works for about $18, or Works Suite (which includes a full version of word) for about $70 or just download OpenOffice.
And of course, since we're talking the educational market, you can also snag a full academic version of office for $120 (or less, since a lot of campuses negotiated larger discounts).
How much is tuition these days? 20K-35K? not to mention living expenses are probably another 10-20k.
Harvard costs about $38k including tuition, fees, room and board. Most people aren't going to ivy league schools.
Cost is going to depend heavily on area, but the local univeristy here (University at Buffalo) you looking at more like $6K for tuition and fees and housing starts at about $4K. And there are colleges you can go to with tuition and fees well under $4K for the year.
And this all ignores the fact that most people don't for college while they're going. It's typically going to be some combination of grants, loans, scholarships, and money from parents or trustfunds.