Or produce some evidence for your blather. By all accounts, the AMD's don't just run rock stable, they run rock stable while seriously overclocked! You can't do that to Intel, they already are essentially max-overclocked, that's why the processor makes 250 Watts of heat. Yeah, go buy that. Try to keep it cool enough to run stable. I'm an otherwise nice person, but you've pissed me off enough to wish this on you!
Really, it's just mean to benchmark these AMD dual-core chips against those Intel abominations. Yes, we get it. Intel did not really expect you to buy those (except through Dell). More dignified benchmark sites let the naked emperors just sulk off the stage without all the pointing and giggling.
Of course, this might be an AMD strategy: Announce to all hardware sites that they will loan anyone their fanciest processors if they benchmark them against Intel, and if they can get their review posted on slashdot, the loan becomes a gift.
Well, not exactly. Many of the people who download stuff illegally do it because there isn't a convenient legal alternative. The absence of that alternative is a big part of the fuel for the piracy culture.
So this crazy DRM stuff really will have some effect on illegal downloaders: It will increase the number of people who do the same thing, increasing the quality and quantity of the files available, while making it less likely for each given individual that she'll get in trouble. If there is going to be a realistic move to reduce piracy, it will have to involve making it convenient to stay legal and play by the rules. These DRM roadblocks do just the opposite. The more of these stunts I see, the less wrong piracy starts to seem. It's like they try to punish the people that play by the rules. Yeah, what an incentive!
I thought from my first read of the article that they're using the standard codecs, but on second read-through, it appears that you're right. This leaves open the possibility that they have a really pared-down MPEG4 codec which produces really crappy results, quickly. That is not very impressive. What they need is to take an open-source codec like Xvid and "port" it to their hardware. Or better, they need to release the interface so that people can code for it. Yes, this is a lot less cool than I realized at first.
Well, if you can see the difference between 150fps and 200fps, and you don't waiting and don't care about spending an extra $200, you really should wait for the G70.
I don't play the sort of games that need a graphics card over $200 to look good. I never even considered looking at the high end. However, this video encoding improvement will certainly make me do a double take. I was proud of my little CPU overclock that improves my encoding rate by 20%. But the article talks about improvements of over 500%! That's worth a couple of extra bucks.
Of course, by the time the software to do this actually becomes full-featured and useful, the price of the 1800 ATIs will hopefully drop a bit. Still, I have a feeling this will be my next GPU.
Unless nVidia can produce something equally impressive, of course!
You don't get it. ATI is not releasing a new encoder. The test used standard codecs, which do the very same work when assisted by the GPU, only 5X faster.
Does somebody have a value for how much porn is being made in the world, in gigabytes? How many gigabytes of new porn each day? Once we figure this out, I think this would be a very useful unit when discussing data transfer. Forget libraries of congress. I want my 0.03 gpp (global porn production) wire!
If they had been more shoddy they might have been a bit cheaper, but by far the most expensive part of the mission was getting them to Mars. If you're gonna bother doing that, you might as well bring devices that are designed well and built well. I have to say that this is in one thing that Nasa did right (the Hubble is the other). Too bad that the stuff they do right is such a minuscule fraction of their budget!
This metric is crap if all you look at are CPU costs. There should also be data about performance/system_cost. Suppose a 3800+ gets twice the framerate of a 3000+ but costs 3x as much. This test will make it look like a loser. But if the denominator really was the system cost, it would be clear that the 3800+ is worth the extra money, because you get twice the performance with only a 30% increase in system cost. Mind you, that's just a hypothetical example.
Since everyone seems so eager to do benchmarking, what I'd like to see in the price-performance area is:
Cheapest system that can do X tests, where X is some fixed performace metric.
For example, what is the cheapest mobo/CPU/graphics/memory combo that gets me 40fps in 1600x1200 Doom3? Especially for game benchmarks, this would be interesting. And super-cool would be some sort of a vendor site with a benchmarking database where you can input your desired performance on several applications that matter to you, and then the database would spit out the cheapest combination of parts that would meet your performance requirements. AMD (especially) should be pushing for this, because it would make very vivid to people the fact that they are ahead right now on price/performance.
Yeah, and you know what else kills me: you don't actually get any wine from these "bottles" - that just makes me want to complain and complain about all the other things they don't do.
But then some kind person smacks me and I realize that instead of complaining I should take note that what's shaping up here is a system for running Windows apps that's better than Windows itself! There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer. Also, I'll make a bet that Wine will do a better and more consistent job of running old Windows binaries than will Vista when it's finally released. This really is going to make an important difference for the future of consumer Linux and OSX.
I'm saying that there are two different sorts of laws, so two different ways in which precedent ought to be treated. The distinction is between 1. Moral laws designed to bring about rightness or justice, and 2. Pragmatic laws, explicitly designed to bring about good social consequences.
And what I object to is treating laws of the latter kind as though they were like the former.
It's absolutely clear that copyright laws are of the latter sort, written explicitly and only to generate consequences that benefit society. So do we have the obligation to maintain these laws even when social circumstances change and upholding the laws actually harms society? No. And I think this is legally defensible. After all, judges are instructed to obey the letter and spirit of the law. When the explicit letter of the law is silent, as in this indexing case, a judge must follow the spirit. And if you make a ruling which demonstrably harms society based on a law whose sole purpose it was to pragmatically benefit society, you are violating the spirit of that law.
I certainly think that the world would be a better place if Google won its suit against the publishers, for exactly the reasons stated in the editorial. Will they? It's hard to say. We have judges with extremely political agendas, who do not often enough explicitly set out to do good rather than just doing the bidding of the politician who appointed them.
So suppose it's a close call, because there is no precedent in copyright law that exactly anticipates this sort of search capacity. One option for a judge would be to try to bend some precedent to fit the case, but I think that would be wrong to do here. You see, nobody thinks that copyright law is supposed to mirror anything like moral law. This isn't like murder or perjury. Copyright laws exist only for the purpose of their good consequences. We allow people to own copyrights and patents only to encourage them to produce good stuff by making sure they will be financially rewarded for that stuff. The good consequence of this system is (supposed to be) that it provides us with more good stuff. That is its only justification.
Because of this, I think decisions about copyright should not take the original laws as sacred, on the level of moral laws, and instead maintain the pragmatic spirit of the original laws themselves. When we're unsure about precedents, we should ask: Which ruling would have the better consequences? And I think it's clear for reasons outlined by Schmidt that allowing Google to go on will have better consequences for researchers (obviously), but also for publishers, because it's free advertising. This will disproportionately benefit small, specialty presses who don't have the means to get the word out about what's in their books. This should be reason enough to allow Google to continue.
Of course, they might turn evil at some later time, or (gasp) unveil a revenue model to make back all the money they spent on scanning. But this is the sort of this that companies should be encouraged to do for money. They really are improving the lives of people through their work, without taking anything away.
The frequency distribution of this light is so much more natural than the other low-energy alternatives! I wonder if it could be made to match the frequency distribution of sunlight more closely by just rearranging the mixture of the sizes of the quantum dots. Anyway, this is excellent news. It's because of the spectrum distribution of fluorescent bulbs that I refuse to use them. It's not that I like wasting energy, but even without ugly light, winter is depressing enough in upstate New York!
You know, starting about next year, WINE will suddenly find a new big customer base, provided they can abstract the design enough to run on OSX-x86. I'm not sure how much work that would take but it certainly seems worth doing. I imagine that the people on OSX with an urge to run Windows apps will outnumber users of Linux with the same urge. Hell, if I were Codeweavers, I'd be working really hard on CrossoverOSX. There might even be good money in it!
If you look at the first article, there were at least 4 questions about moddability which a +5 from readers. This is by far the most interesting announcement about Civ4. Why are there no questions about it? And why did he get asked such stupid and platitudes? This was not an interview by nerds and produced appropriately lame answers.
Remove tenure? Let me guess. You're not a scientist!
When every other country has a cushy tenure system and you're a top scientist who can work anywhere, why would you refuse tenure? You must think top scientists are stupid. Do you really think they like constantly updating their CV and preparing for, and doing, "productivity reviews"? Fornunately, what good scientists like is doing science, not constantly elbowing for position with their peers. That's a part of the whole point of tenure.
The other part is that tenure insulates the scientist from the political fashions. Scientists research what they like, and whether or not it's popular with the current administration, their position is secure. If it weren't for that security, do you really think they'd work here?
Yes, this does look very impressive. I thought the ideal use for this would be: an extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that installs a web server so you can use this interface to access the email on your home computer when you're not there. Would this sort of thing be at all feasible? Because if it were, it would really be a killer feature!
For a while now I've been using the web server interface on eMule, which is designed very nicely and really adds functionality.
Funny, this is the first thing I thought of when I read about their choice of processors. They really picked the most inefficient chips before (P4 2.8G) and just did it again with P4-based Xeons. For this application, it seems to me that Opterons would be the no-brainer choice. Go figure!
OK, I'll buy it. 80 planets plus a bunch of space stations is a rich enough ecosystem for some proper smuggling, etc. Seems fair enough. Still, I wish the show made clear which moon system they were in. I mean, suppose there were six super-Jovian planets. So what other moons are in the same system as Persephone, for example? I'm only asking rhetorically, I just wish I was able to keep track in the show. It wouldn't have been hard, and Whedon should have seen it coming that there would be a demand among nerdy fans to have these details straightened out.
Re:Firefox + Adblock + Adblock Filterset.G Updater
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you have Adblock + Adblock Filterset.G Updater, Flashblock is redundant. Filterset.G really gets Adblock to kill all the flash you don't want to see and leave the stuff that's worthwhile, all without requiring any input from you. It makes the internet 99.44% less annoying.
I've had great success with Adblock Plus along with Filterset.G, a well-maintained, auto-updating set of filters that are designed to block ads and not content. With Adblock Plus, you can whitelist sites if you choose to view their ads. The point is, you're in control. And if you ask "why do you want to be in control of what you see?" the answer is that it's better than not being in control. Clear?
Allard was basically saying, the whole time, that the won't make nearly enough units and that there will be problems and that the first games will suck and that the press should not descend on them like vultures. Talk about anti-hype! But I think what's important for MS is that they have their marketing machine in gear before PS3 launches (surely with its own set of troubles), and I expect they will.
Slashdot Mirror
Or produce some evidence for your blather. By all accounts, the AMD's don't just run rock stable, they run rock stable while seriously overclocked! You can't do that to Intel, they already are essentially max-overclocked, that's why the processor makes 250 Watts of heat. Yeah, go buy that. Try to keep it cool enough to run stable. I'm an otherwise nice person, but you've pissed me off enough to wish this on you!
Of course, this might be an AMD strategy: Announce to all hardware sites that they will loan anyone their fanciest processors if they benchmark them against Intel, and if they can get their review posted on slashdot, the loan becomes a gift.
So this crazy DRM stuff really will have some effect on illegal downloaders: It will increase the number of people who do the same thing, increasing the quality and quantity of the files available, while making it less likely for each given individual that she'll get in trouble. If there is going to be a realistic move to reduce piracy, it will have to involve making it convenient to stay legal and play by the rules. These DRM roadblocks do just the opposite. The more of these stunts I see, the less wrong piracy starts to seem. It's like they try to punish the people that play by the rules. Yeah, what an incentive!
I thought from my first read of the article that they're using the standard codecs, but on second read-through, it appears that you're right. This leaves open the possibility that they have a really pared-down MPEG4 codec which produces really crappy results, quickly. That is not very impressive. What they need is to take an open-source codec like Xvid and "port" it to their hardware. Or better, they need to release the interface so that people can code for it. Yes, this is a lot less cool than I realized at first.
I don't play the sort of games that need a graphics card over $200 to look good. I never even considered looking at the high end. However, this video encoding improvement will certainly make me do a double take. I was proud of my little CPU overclock that improves my encoding rate by 20%. But the article talks about improvements of over 500%! That's worth a couple of extra bucks.
Of course, by the time the software to do this actually becomes full-featured and useful, the price of the 1800 ATIs will hopefully drop a bit. Still, I have a feeling this will be my next GPU.
Unless nVidia can produce something equally impressive, of course!
You don't get it. ATI is not releasing a new encoder. The test used standard codecs, which do the very same work when assisted by the GPU, only 5X faster.
Does somebody have a value for how much porn is being made in the world, in gigabytes? How many gigabytes of new porn each day? Once we figure this out, I think this would be a very useful unit when discussing data transfer. Forget libraries of congress. I want my 0.03 gpp (global porn production) wire!
0.5 seconds? But I want it now!
If they had been more shoddy they might have been a bit cheaper, but by far the most expensive part of the mission was getting them to Mars. If you're gonna bother doing that, you might as well bring devices that are designed well and built well. I have to say that this is in one thing that Nasa did right (the Hubble is the other). Too bad that the stuff they do right is such a minuscule fraction of their budget!
Since everyone seems so eager to do benchmarking, what I'd like to see in the price-performance area is:
Cheapest system that can do X tests, where X is some fixed performace metric.
For example, what is the cheapest mobo/CPU/graphics/memory combo that gets me 40fps in 1600x1200 Doom3? Especially for game benchmarks, this would be interesting. And super-cool would be some sort of a vendor site with a benchmarking database where you can input your desired performance on several applications that matter to you, and then the database would spit out the cheapest combination of parts that would meet your performance requirements. AMD (especially) should be pushing for this, because it would make very vivid to people the fact that they are ahead right now on price/performance.
But then some kind person smacks me and I realize that instead of complaining I should take note that what's shaping up here is a system for running Windows apps that's better than Windows itself! There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer. Also, I'll make a bet that Wine will do a better and more consistent job of running old Windows binaries than will Vista when it's finally released. This really is going to make an important difference for the future of consumer Linux and OSX.
And what I object to is treating laws of the latter kind as though they were like the former.
It's absolutely clear that copyright laws are of the latter sort, written explicitly and only to generate consequences that benefit society. So do we have the obligation to maintain these laws even when social circumstances change and upholding the laws actually harms society? No. And I think this is legally defensible. After all, judges are instructed to obey the letter and spirit of the law. When the explicit letter of the law is silent, as in this indexing case, a judge must follow the spirit. And if you make a ruling which demonstrably harms society based on a law whose sole purpose it was to pragmatically benefit society, you are violating the spirit of that law.
So suppose it's a close call, because there is no precedent in copyright law that exactly anticipates this sort of search capacity. One option for a judge would be to try to bend some precedent to fit the case, but I think that would be wrong to do here. You see, nobody thinks that copyright law is supposed to mirror anything like moral law. This isn't like murder or perjury. Copyright laws exist only for the purpose of their good consequences. We allow people to own copyrights and patents only to encourage them to produce good stuff by making sure they will be financially rewarded for that stuff. The good consequence of this system is (supposed to be) that it provides us with more good stuff. That is its only justification.
Because of this, I think decisions about copyright should not take the original laws as sacred, on the level of moral laws, and instead maintain the pragmatic spirit of the original laws themselves. When we're unsure about precedents, we should ask: Which ruling would have the better consequences? And I think it's clear for reasons outlined by Schmidt that allowing Google to go on will have better consequences for researchers (obviously), but also for publishers, because it's free advertising. This will disproportionately benefit small, specialty presses who don't have the means to get the word out about what's in their books. This should be reason enough to allow Google to continue.
Of course, they might turn evil at some later time, or (gasp) unveil a revenue model to make back all the money they spent on scanning. But this is the sort of this that companies should be encouraged to do for money. They really are improving the lives of people through their work, without taking anything away.
I never claimed that the idea was original or non-obvious, though I didn't expect something to have already been announced. Thanks for the link.
The frequency distribution of this light is so much more natural than the other low-energy alternatives! I wonder if it could be made to match the frequency distribution of sunlight more closely by just rearranging the mixture of the sizes of the quantum dots. Anyway, this is excellent news. It's because of the spectrum distribution of fluorescent bulbs that I refuse to use them. It's not that I like wasting energy, but even without ugly light, winter is depressing enough in upstate New York!
You know, starting about next year, WINE will suddenly find a new big customer base, provided they can abstract the design enough to run on OSX-x86. I'm not sure how much work that would take but it certainly seems worth doing. I imagine that the people on OSX with an urge to run Windows apps will outnumber users of Linux with the same urge. Hell, if I were Codeweavers, I'd be working really hard on CrossoverOSX. There might even be good money in it!
If you look at the first article, there were at least 4 questions about moddability which a +5 from readers. This is by far the most interesting announcement about Civ4. Why are there no questions about it? And why did he get asked such stupid and platitudes? This was not an interview by nerds and produced appropriately lame answers.
Actually, I think AMD runs so well on recent NVidia chipsets that I wouldn't even want an AMD motherboard.
When every other country has a cushy tenure system and you're a top scientist who can work anywhere, why would you refuse tenure? You must think top scientists are stupid. Do you really think they like constantly updating their CV and preparing for, and doing, "productivity reviews"? Fornunately, what good scientists like is doing science, not constantly elbowing for position with their peers. That's a part of the whole point of tenure.
The other part is that tenure insulates the scientist from the political fashions. Scientists research what they like, and whether or not it's popular with the current administration, their position is secure. If it weren't for that security, do you really think they'd work here?
For a while now I've been using the web server interface on eMule, which is designed very nicely and really adds functionality.
Funny, this is the first thing I thought of when I read about their choice of processors. They really picked the most inefficient chips before (P4 2.8G) and just did it again with P4-based Xeons. For this application, it seems to me that Opterons would be the no-brainer choice. Go figure!
OK, I'll buy it. 80 planets plus a bunch of space stations is a rich enough ecosystem for some proper smuggling, etc. Seems fair enough. Still, I wish the show made clear which moon system they were in. I mean, suppose there were six super-Jovian planets. So what other moons are in the same system as Persephone, for example? I'm only asking rhetorically, I just wish I was able to keep track in the show. It wouldn't have been hard, and Whedon should have seen it coming that there would be a demand among nerdy fans to have these details straightened out.
If you have Adblock + Adblock Filterset.G Updater, Flashblock is redundant. Filterset.G really gets Adblock to kill all the flash you don't want to see and leave the stuff that's worthwhile, all without requiring any input from you. It makes the internet 99.44% less annoying.
I've had great success with Adblock Plus along with Filterset.G, a well-maintained, auto-updating set of filters that are designed to block ads and not content. With Adblock Plus, you can whitelist sites if you choose to view their ads. The point is, you're in control. And if you ask "why do you want to be in control of what you see?" the answer is that it's better than not being in control. Clear?
Allard was basically saying, the whole time, that the won't make nearly enough units and that there will be problems and that the first games will suck and that the press should not descend on them like vultures. Talk about anti-hype! But I think what's important for MS is that they have their marketing machine in gear before PS3 launches (surely with its own set of troubles), and I expect they will.