The ability to make a handful of spectacular attacks does not translate to the ability to wage a sustained war. Especially when your initial strike is against a relatively unsuspecting target during peacetime.
And just how are you defining "modern" and "big war"? The first leg of the Gulf War represented a larger troop deployment than either Korea or Vietnam. Maybe not a big war compared to the two world wars, but that's about it.
There are certainly some potential pitfalls to modern technology, but it's not like they don't test these things. I know someone who worked at a firm that did nothing but test the resiliancy of equipment to electromagnetic interference, both through computer simulations and real world tests. Not to mention that the small military budgets of existing and emerging world powers limits their research into electronic counter-ops.
Oh, and Russia only has about 21M men and 29M women fit for military service. The United States has about 54M men and 54M women. China would have been a much better example.:)
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil.
Um, that's not what he said. Stating that people in a group share an attribute is not saying that everyone with that attribute is part of that group. For example, if someone states that every member of the Nation of Islam is black, they are not saying all black people belong to the nation of Islam.
There is no country on the planet with an average of 12 children per family. Not one.
Just for the record, the highest fertility rate is currently Niger with 7.46 children born to each woman. There are currently fourteen countries with a fertility rate of 6 or more and thirty-one with a rate of 5 or more.
I used to see surveillance and security equipment, and glancing through I didn't many products that weren't available when I quit the business years ago, and certainly nothing that isn't available on any of the "spy" stores on the internet (or from a variety of electronics dealers in south east asia, if you're willing to buy in lots.:)
The Wii has an SD slot to augment the 512mb internal storage. Presumably you can download to that.
(Psst, most non-geeks don't have PCs with TV-out configured, or even joysticks or gamepads on their computer. And your own wife is proof people are willing to spend $5 on old games that are only a few hundred kilobytes.)
If the Wii is indeed a tweeked Gamecube like everyone is reporting
Tweaked? That's not how I've heard it characterized. A progression of the architecture, sure, but if that qualifies, all three consoles are using "tweeked" versions of the PowerPC 601 released back in 1992.
Truth is that noone has nailed down specs, aside from the oft-repeated conjecture of "2-3 times faster". Nintendo has made it clear that their strategy doesn't rest on performance, so I expect they won't hit the same level of the PS3 or 360, but the decision not to support HD this generation eliminates one of the major motivations for a huge jump in power.
Their development cost for the console was minimal, and on a modern 90nm or 65nm process, the whole Gamecube chipset can be put on a single chip with a very small die size.
It's known (and published in Nintendo's site) that they're using a 90nm SOI process. It's also known that they're using a brand new CPU and GPU codenamed Broadway and Hollywood, not the chips from the Gamecube, which were codenamed Gekko and Flipper.
It's got a big CPU and a big GPU, each connected to some expensive RAM and with some fat busses inbetween. You might argue that this hardware is not necessary, but you can't argue that its cheap. Sony is not overcharging for the PS3, by any reasonable conception.
It is by the conception that it's a machine to play games and there are machines to play games which are a hell of a lot cheaper. Processors and ram and chips have absolutely no intrinsic value to the end consumer, it's what they can do with the product that counts.
To some people the PS3 will likely have enough value to offset the price, but to people who don't have televisions capable of HD resolutions (9 out of 10 right now) and don't give a rat's ass about Blu-ray it's a matter of paying for something they don't need or want. You might as well gold-plate excrement and claim it's a good value.
The company he linked to specializes in "on-site consultation, installation and support for small business" not internet services or hosting of any kind. We're talking about an office network, where downstream is going to be the predominant concern. Doesn't take much bandwidth to send out the occasional mail and request web pages. There may be exceptions - VOIP, for example - but given the existing connections those are almost certainly non-issues.
As I said in response to the other gentleman who posted me, reliability needs vary heavily from site to site. As does the relative reliability of business class DSL. I've had an SDSL line in my house running for about seven years now and can count the outages on one hand (and twice it involved hardware failures on my end).
Oh, and upstream depends on what you pay for, just like traditional carrier lines. A frac T1 is typically going to be 768, just like the ASDL line I referenced. If that's not enough, I know locally I can get SDSL at rates well below carrier lines.
Unfortunately there's no objectively Right solution that applies to every situation, and even the Right solution for a specific situation is going to involve a trade-off; it's just another form of the old cliche: fast, cheap, reliable - choose two.
I wouldn't make that kind of determination without evaluating the existing and projected traffic and use patterns. Considering this was supplemental bandwidth, it's almost certainly being used for internet access and not critical services. The upstream requirements are likely well below what a business class ADSL line provides. If the problem isn't upstream and you go for a plain T1, you'll bring it to its knees saturating the downstream.:)
Reliability may be an issue of course. Depends on how much the userbase depends on real-time access to the internet. If most of the users rely on intranet resources, no biggie. They can live without the web for a little while. On the otherhand, if the company relies heavily on externally hosted applications like CRMs or mail, you likely should have redundant connections, period.
Games that can't take advantage of the added features don't need to use them. Use the array of buttons and sticks available in the nunchaku configuration.
Games that can take advantage of it suddenly have a huge value add on the Wii, even if they're not exclusive titles. Imagine a Star Wars game where on XBox and Playstation you're stuck fighting with a conventional controller, but on the Wii you can wield the controller like a light sabre.
And for most folks a SDTV is $0 because they've already got several of them.
Nintendo can hit a much lower price point and therby greatly increase their potential market by not exploiting resolutions most people can't take advantage of anyways.
In 2001 most machines were running 2-2-2 PC133, which had latencies of about 6-8ns. And DDR400 is clocked at 200MHz, not 400MHz. They double the actual clock speed because there's two transfers per cycle; doubles bandwidth but does zip for latency.
With DDR2, it's even more misleading since the external bus is still half the number but the actual memory chips are a quarter. In other words, DDR2-400 runs at 200MHz externally and 100MHz internally. They maintain throughput parity by transfering twice as many bits. This allows the chips to be clocked a lot higher, but also means there's typically an additive latency on top of the CAS latency.
Each successive generation of SDRAM has had to make some latency concessions in pursuit of higher throughput. Thankfully that also means higher clocking, which masks the hit, but initial parts almost always perform worse than the previous generation.
Besides, when it comes to consoles you can't go by mainstream DRAM technologies. Of the previous generation only the X-Box used conventional memory, and that was actually DDR400 (yes, that too was available late in 2001). The Game Cube used a proprietary memory technology called 1T-SRAM and Sony grabbed hopped on the Rambus train.
Actually, the GBA is about three centimeters narrower. And one would presume using mini DVDs wouldn't necessitate the same form factor of a full-size DVD player.
No reason you couldn't have a cartridge the discs sit in, like many of the early CD-ROM drives did (or hell, like UMDs are). And they chose a somewhat unweildly form factor to begin with anyways; not sure another 2cm in one dimension is enough to justify a non-standard format.
That's $300 without wireless networking, without wireless controllers, and without the ability to even save games. Coming out at a $250 with the base feature set of the Wii is still blowing the 360 out of the water.
Slashdot Mirror
... but for a student I'd go with a laptop. Not much more expensive, if you insist on Apple, and less from most x86 vendors.
The ability to make a handful of spectacular attacks does not translate to the ability to wage a sustained war. Especially when your initial strike is against a relatively unsuspecting target during peacetime.
:)
And just how are you defining "modern" and "big war"? The first leg of the Gulf War represented a larger troop deployment than either Korea or Vietnam. Maybe not a big war compared to the two world wars, but that's about it.
There are certainly some potential pitfalls to modern technology, but it's not like they don't test these things. I know someone who worked at a firm that did nothing but test the resiliancy of equipment to electromagnetic interference, both through computer simulations and real world tests. Not to mention that the small military budgets of existing and emerging world powers limits their research into electronic counter-ops.
Oh, and Russia only has about 21M men and 29M women fit for military service. The United States has about 54M men and 54M women. China would have been a much better example.
The only army? No. The only significant military? Yes.
United States military expenditure exceeds the next fourty-two highest (China, France, Japan, United, Germany, Italy, Korea, , India, Saudi, Australia, Turkey, Brazil, Spain, Canada, Israel, Netherlands, Taiwan, Mexico, Greece, Sweden, Korea, , Singapore, Argentina, Iran, Pakistan, Norway, Belgium, Chile, South, Poland, Portugal, Colombia, Denmark, Kuwait, Algeria, Switzerland, Egypt, Morocco, Czech, Angola, Finland, and Thailand) combined.
Forget the Gulf war was in response to Iraq invading and occupying a sovereign nation, did we?
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil.
Um, that's not what he said. Stating that people in a group share an attribute is not saying that everyone with that attribute is part of that group. For example, if someone states that every member of the Nation of Islam is black, they are not saying all black people belong to the nation of Islam.
Funny, I thought we sent people who voluntarily signed up for military service these days. Must have just missed the press gangs.
There is no country on the planet with an average of 12 children per family. Not one.
Just for the record, the highest fertility rate is currently Niger with 7.46 children born to each woman. There are currently fourteen countries with a fertility rate of 6 or more and thirty-one with a rate of 5 or more.
I used to see surveillance and security equipment, and glancing through I didn't many products that weren't available when I quit the business years ago, and certainly nothing that isn't available on any of the "spy" stores on the internet (or from a variety of electronics dealers in south east asia, if you're willing to buy in lots. :)
The Wii has an SD slot to augment the 512mb internal storage. Presumably you can download to that.
(Psst, most non-geeks don't have PCs with TV-out configured, or even joysticks or gamepads on their computer. And your own wife is proof people are willing to spend $5 on old games that are only a few hundred kilobytes.)
If the Wii is indeed a tweeked Gamecube like everyone is reporting
Tweaked? That's not how I've heard it characterized. A progression of the architecture, sure, but if that qualifies, all three consoles are using "tweeked" versions of the PowerPC 601 released back in 1992.
Truth is that noone has nailed down specs, aside from the oft-repeated conjecture of "2-3 times faster". Nintendo has made it clear that their strategy doesn't rest on performance, so I expect they won't hit the same level of the PS3 or 360, but the decision not to support HD this generation eliminates one of the major motivations for a huge jump in power.
Their development cost for the console was minimal, and on a modern 90nm or 65nm process, the whole Gamecube chipset can be put on a single chip with a very small die size.
It's known (and published in Nintendo's site) that they're using a 90nm SOI process. It's also known that they're using a brand new CPU and GPU codenamed Broadway and Hollywood, not the chips from the Gamecube, which were codenamed Gekko and Flipper.
It's got a big CPU and a big GPU, each connected to some expensive RAM and with some fat busses inbetween. You might argue that this hardware is not necessary, but you can't argue that its cheap. Sony is not overcharging for the PS3, by any reasonable conception.
It is by the conception that it's a machine to play games and there are machines to play games which are a hell of a lot cheaper. Processors and ram and chips have absolutely no intrinsic value to the end consumer, it's what they can do with the product that counts.
To some people the PS3 will likely have enough value to offset the price, but to people who don't have televisions capable of HD resolutions (9 out of 10 right now) and don't give a rat's ass about Blu-ray it's a matter of paying for something they don't need or want. You might as well gold-plate excrement and claim it's a good value.
Just a side note - with DDR2, the clock rates you gave are only for the external interface. The DRAM itself is half-clocked; e.g.
PC2-3200: DDR2-SDRAM memory stick specified to run at 100MHz internall, 200 MHz externally using DDR2-400 chips, 3.200 GB/s bandwidth
'Nuff said.
Only if you don't read every word in the senteneces you're responding to. And ignore that most people have never heard of QNX.
The company he linked to specializes in "on-site consultation, installation and support for small business" not internet services or hosting of any kind. We're talking about an office network, where downstream is going to be the predominant concern. Doesn't take much bandwidth to send out the occasional mail and request web pages. There may be exceptions - VOIP, for example - but given the existing connections those are almost certainly non-issues.
As I said in response to the other gentleman who posted me, reliability needs vary heavily from site to site. As does the relative reliability of business class DSL. I've had an SDSL line in my house running for about seven years now and can count the outages on one hand (and twice it involved hardware failures on my end).
Oh, and upstream depends on what you pay for, just like traditional carrier lines. A frac T1 is typically going to be 768, just like the ASDL line I referenced. If that's not enough, I know locally I can get SDSL at rates well below carrier lines.
Unfortunately there's no objectively Right solution that applies to every situation, and even the Right solution for a specific situation is going to involve a trade-off; it's just another form of the old cliche: fast, cheap, reliable - choose two.
I wouldn't make that kind of determination without evaluating the existing and projected traffic and use patterns. Considering this was supplemental bandwidth, it's almost certainly being used for internet access and not critical services. The upstream requirements are likely well below what a business class ADSL line provides. If the problem isn't upstream and you go for a plain T1, you'll bring it to its knees saturating the downstream. :)
Reliability may be an issue of course. Depends on how much the userbase depends on real-time access to the internet. If most of the users rely on intranet resources, no biggie. They can live without the web for a little while. On the otherhand, if the company relies heavily on externally hosted applications like CRMs or mail, you likely should have redundant connections, period.
Eh? Even a full T1 line is only 1.544Mbps. Verizon offers 7.1Mbps/768Kbps DSL lines for about $200/mo. Have been for years.
Games that can't take advantage of the added features don't need to use them. Use the array of buttons and sticks available in the nunchaku configuration.
Games that can take advantage of it suddenly have a huge value add on the Wii, even if they're not exclusive titles. Imagine a Star Wars game where on XBox and Playstation you're stuck fighting with a conventional controller, but on the Wii you can wield the controller like a light sabre.
They're overpriced crap everywhere. :)
And for most folks a SDTV is $0 because they've already got several of them.
Nintendo can hit a much lower price point and therby greatly increase their potential market by not exploiting resolutions most people can't take advantage of anyways.
In 2001 most machines were running 2-2-2 PC133, which had latencies of about 6-8ns. And DDR400 is clocked at 200MHz, not 400MHz. They double the actual clock speed because there's two transfers per cycle; doubles bandwidth but does zip for latency.
With DDR2, it's even more misleading since the external bus is still half the number but the actual memory chips are a quarter. In other words, DDR2-400 runs at 200MHz externally and 100MHz internally. They maintain throughput parity by transfering twice as many bits. This allows the chips to be clocked a lot higher, but also means there's typically an additive latency on top of the CAS latency.
Each successive generation of SDRAM has had to make some latency concessions in pursuit of higher throughput. Thankfully that also means higher clocking, which masks the hit, but initial parts almost always perform worse than the previous generation.
Besides, when it comes to consoles you can't go by mainstream DRAM technologies. Of the previous generation only the X-Box used conventional memory, and that was actually DDR400 (yes, that too was available late in 2001). The Game Cube used a proprietary memory technology called 1T-SRAM and Sony grabbed hopped on the Rambus train.
You can find 150x SD cards for $15 these days. Even the largest N64 game would take 5s to load at that speed.
Actually, the GBA is about three centimeters narrower. And one would presume using mini DVDs wouldn't necessitate the same form factor of a full-size DVD player.
No reason you couldn't have a cartridge the discs sit in, like many of the early CD-ROM drives did (or hell, like UMDs are). And they chose a somewhat unweildly form factor to begin with anyways; not sure another 2cm in one dimension is enough to justify a non-standard format.
It's certainly an interesting experiment, and laudable for an attempt to address the causes of poverty and inequity rather than treating the symptoms.
That's $300 without wireless networking, without wireless controllers, and without the ability to even save games. Coming out at a $250 with the base feature set of the Wii is still blowing the 360 out of the water.
Hell, in some particularly screwed-up societies, it's believed that having sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS.
Kind of illustrates the OP's point that education is the ultimate solution, doesn't it?