I've always thought that having a "selection" of moderators to choose from would help any public forum.
That way, you'd be able to subscribe to a set of moderators who make sense (rather than some troll who managed to pick up a few mod points.) Eventually, published lists of trusted moderators would allow relative newbies to the topics quick access to the "best of" the forum.
Elitist? Exactly. And it's the lack of a system like this appears to be Larry's point, and why he chose to leave the project.
13) Legislators Move to Restrict Sales of Mature Games--And Fail
Politicians raise a rhetorical maelstrom for the opulence of violence in video games, but ultimately leaves a barely discernable ripple in the industry. Targeting games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Manhunt, legislators from Florida and California sought to more strictly enforce sales of violent games to minors--some even suggested making it a third-degree felony for allowing minors to obtain a copy of an "M" rated game. The wealthy game industry beat out angry moms, the only change being some retailers showing a clearer indication of the ESRB's rating system.
That's not a low. There's no reason for legislation, or for having the ESRB and the retailers act as surrogate parents.
Parents should do their job -- raising a kid, teaching THEIR values, not Congress's, or some Million Mom Marchers. If that means they have to do extra work, and learn that Vice City is a piece of filth on their own, it's their job. Leave me and my kid alone.
Yes, because it's the default format if you use Windows Media Player to rip a CD. And we are all aware how many people out there will never be able to change defaults.
The default behavior is also to implement a DRM license on the WMA file, so you can't share it either. It's amazing how many people that one little checkbox can stymie.
If you get Sophos' tech back on the line someday, argue the point that "uninstallable" software already has the Trojan nature. It's a simple definition. And Sophos already cleans up lots of Trojans.
If there was an install package to deliver it, the same package should clean itself up completely. Anything an uninstaller "leaves behind" should be considered "poopware", and is eligible for cleanup by a security program. That includes registry settings, COM objects, new versions of system DLLs, empty directories, everything.
This would actually have a positive effect on software vendors. If their uninstallers weren't thorough, they'd get on the anti-virus companies' bad list; and no reputable company wants their software to be associated with a virus.
Microsoft could do this automatically if their System Recovery tool took a checkpoint the first time a "new" program added a "new" registry key, tried to add a key in the systems portion of the registry, or tried to add a new file in any of the system directories. It wouldn't be that hard.
If a commercial driver is on the road, he or she is required to be logging his or her time for driver fatigue reasons. A GPS that simply started a clock at the departure from a scheduled point, and stopped it on arrival at a destination (with subtractions if the GPS stops moving for 15 or more minutes) would let drivers squeeze every possible minute of their allowed drive time (it wouldn't count against them if they were unloading, for example) but would still maintain the safety requirements the employers are required to enforce.
Yeah, I don't really want to see them using them as "speeding tickets" (because I like being behind trucks that are flying down the freeway:-) but I doubt it will be much longer before there's a Federal requirement to include such a device in any commercial vehicle. If a fuel truck crashed into an elementary school because of driver fatigue, Congress would pass such a law faster than a troll going for a first post on Slashdot.
By the way, you can buy these devices from Davis Instruments today, if you're interested. They're trying to sell them to parents of teenage drivers.
Just as long as you aren't slacking off reading Slashdot while you're on the road. You might confuse your turn signal for a flamer (I won't judge you on whether you consider it a flame on the left or on the right.)
Then there's a strong argument to find a decent outsourcing firm. The ones we deal with won't touch a project with incomplete specs, and they spend a fair amount of time with our business analysts getting clarifications, etc.
If your outsourcing firm is that incompetent that they can't recognize crap on the way in, you're getting precisely what you pay for. Pretty much the meaning of the word "value".
Part of the Toolbar may contain advertising and sponsorship. Advertisers and sponsors are responsible for ensuring that material submitted for inclusion on the Toolbar complies with relevant laws and codes. We will not be responsible for any error or inaccuracy in advertising and sponsorship material.
So, be warned: it may contain some kind of adware, and it may be the kind you find hard to ignore. I'm not installing it until I know more.
In 1988 I was constantly having this argument with one of our other developers. He insisted on using a char when enumerating 80 or 90 status codes, or a short when conditions were "unlikely" that we'd need a long. We both grew up programming in the '70s (at which point I'd have agreed with you -- back then we only had 16Kwords to play in.) Yes, our 2MB boxes were pretty tight on memory, but even in the 1980s it was obvious that saving a single byte in the executable was a false economy, if it risked stability.
The only place where shaving bits made sense for us was on data records: we had a hash file with 2.1 million records, each 29 bytes long and it they all had to fit on a single 80MB hard drive. We squeezed every single bit out of those records (including developing a 3-byte integer to handle amounts that we told them could never exceed $99,999.99 (among other things, larger amounts would not have printed correctly.) But they were read-only records to us: we never wrote more than a few thousand rows of data, and we had plenty of space for the day's processing. And when they did have the odd line item that exceeded $100,000.00, they figured out to break it up into multiple smaller items.
And we got bit more than once by overflows. It took like three separate f-ups to get this guy to acknowledge that he needed to stop being stingy with the bytes. Even then, he'd still try to sneak in some memory "savings", but at least he stopped arguing when we called him on them.
My point was more that it is much much harder to upgrade a system when it's managed internally.
Only if it's done wrong.
The "value" of outsourcing in that particular example is that it forces the company to completely spec out the system requirements. No changes without documentation. With poorly controlled internal development, changes happens in the hallways or the cafeteria: "Hey, Rick, did you add the code to handle the offline situation?" "Oh, right, I'll just put in a return value for you." This leads to code that doesn't match its spec, making it harder to maintain. Outsourcing tends to enforce a good interface between spec and code, (which is what your claim seems to be.)
Internally developed programs don't necessarily receive the same amount of attention to detail because the programmers typically have an idea about the business domain of the problem, and can work more with less documentation. In some organizations, this leads to "fast and loose" -- great for response time, not so great for maintainability.
I think the "value" of outsourcing in a case like ComAir's is one of liability: ComAir will probably try to play "let's blame the vendor." Or, maybe they'll offer up for sacrifice only the one guy who signed the contract with the vendor, and not an entire division. But, when a failure reaches this magnitude, I don't think they'll get off that easy.
Obviously they have, that was one of the points of their research. Their cameras are capable of taking.205 ms exposures. The trick is that no single camera is ever run faster than 30 fps, meaning the recovery times between frames remain at the same duration as the manufacturer intended.
Yes, taking.205 ms exposures yields pretty poor quality without sufficient light, so the quick answer is "use plenty of light." Since it's pretty much a specialty item (Sony isn't likely going to offer these in a Handycam format any time soon) the light can usually be planned in advance.
I think that simply solving the synchronization issues (without worrying too much about the alignment or positions) would let an independent video producer do matrix-like bullet-time shots on the cheap. Forget the alignment issues -- the synchronization issues are where the value is.
Picture a college basketball game video with a bullet-time slam dunk right in the middle of the live TV coverage! A puck-time view of a hockey slapshot, or a tip-of-the bat view of a baseball hitter. I bet sports is going to take this and run like hell with it, and it's going to start with school-based experimentation.
Yeah, the quality isn't going to be there using today's cheapo web cams, but that will steadily improve as market forces push on it.
The obsession with speed is based on what you're doing with it. I have done three upgrades recently that were strictly speed based.
1. At work, the project we're working on took 45 minutes to perform a full compile on our two-year-old 1500GHz P4s. 12 developers, each chewing up a substantial fraction of the day waiting for compiles, is not a great use of money. Replacing them with dual 3.6GHz P4s dropped compile times to 9 minutes. Even at Dell's price for those machines, the ROI will be taken care of in months.
2. At home, I've been playing America's Army for a couple of years now. It's the only graphics intensive game I play, but I really enjoy it. I had an Athlon 1200 that was just on the cusp of "OK" performance. But then my monitor blew out, and I replaced it with a large LCD flat panel. The change from a 1024x768 to 1280x1024 screen resolution meant that the game was no longer playable, unless I dropped back to 1024x768.
Having my cake without eating it was leaving me hungry. So, I upgraded to an AthlonXP 2400+. The frame rate came up somewhat, but the graphics quality was still quite poor. About this same time, the next version of the game came out with vastly improved graphics (and vastly heightened minimum system requirements.) I stuck a Radeon 9800 on it and it's now able to play at a frame rate that doesn't suck. Now I'm happy, and have no firm plans to upgrade it (until AA 4.0 is released and requires a 4GHz machine.)
3. On the other hand, last year my kid upgraded that old hand-me-down Athlon 1200 to an Athlon 3000+ and added a Radeon 9800. He then proceeded to become a serious gamer. Six months later he wanted to sell or trade his almost-new card to get an ATI X850 because some website published a framerate improvement in Halo from like 24 to 48 FPS. It took a lot of convincing to get him to understand that would be a really poor use of his finite supply of money. It finally sunk in that he should at least wait a year or two to upgrade. In the mean time, he's amusing himself by adding watercooling and overclocking what he's got.
So, most speed-driven upgrades have their basis in some kind of reality. Did I need to upgrade the machines at work? Yes. Did I need to play America's Army at home at a higher resolution? Of course not -- but I wanted to, and I could afford it. Did my son need to up his frame rate from "definitely sweet and playable" to "buttery-smooth and ultra playable?" I obviously didn't think the payback was worth it, and I've convinced him to delay a decision (mostly based on the assumption of future price drops.)
"[overwriting shared system files has] been solved since Windows 2000"?
An OS task that plays "switcheroo games" with the files in the System32 directory is what you consider a "solution"? I can't imagine people putting up with that kind of crap in the Open Source community. Maybe you do, and I just don't know about it. Sure, it keeps DLL hell from taking down my machine now, but a decent installation model that kept applications restricted to a single directory tree (and no "registry" or "system" changes allowed) would have done so years ago.
Yes, there are lots of cheesy third party installers that do awful things. One of the worst offenders is the Setup Wizard that Microsoft shipped with Visual Basic 6.0. "Sure, we'll put your ancient bent version of MFC42.DLL all over the customer's box, what the hell do we care? Wanna downgrade their ADO objects while you're at it?" Wise installers create services at the drop of a mouse button.
I haven't bought a Sierra product since the mid-1990s because they've frelled my system over so many times I lost count. The only installers that haven't actually screwed me over in that regard are Nullsoft's PIMP and InnoSetup, and mostly because they force the developers to stick to simple installations.
Interesting, cuz Adobe sh!ts all over Windows, too, and they ignore many of the Microsoft GUI guidelines as well. Although they've gotten better in recent years, I haven't liked an Adobe product since PostScript. Their software behaves completely backwards from normal Windows expectations, right down to mouse motions. (And I think PDF is a horrible standard, too, but try explaining that to Adobe fanbois.)
And everything Apple on Windows is actually far worse. For some unholy reason QuickTime insists on installing a registry-started task every time it runs. And this qttask.exe doesn't do anything for QuickTime, or for me. I didn't click "install" but it does. It just sits there, watching. It really pisses me off that Apple thinks it's a good idea to fsck over all my file associations, too, just because I wanted to view a stupid frickin'.MOV.
Apple does everything wrong under Windows. They have yet to impress me. For all their vaunted "beautiful interface", they haven't ever learned "do what the user said he wants." I don't want three impossible-colors-to-distinguish shaded balls to click on -- my system settings are "put a big, easy-to-see red X in the 'close window' box." Apparently Apple doesn't care what I want, they only want to "look Appley" on Windows. It's a grating combination. If I wanted a frickin' brushed metal interface, I'd have downloaded a frickin' brushed metal theme. It's the whole 'When in Redmond...' thing that they don't do -- their motto seems to be 'Even when you're not in Cupertino, YOU OUGHT TO BE! IN YOUR FACE, BILL GATES!' Way too arrogant, even for me.
Are you suggesting that an installation process more like Windows Installers would leave easier-to-clean-up-code? Because if so, I've got this real nice bridge to sell you.
The problem I have with an "installer" system is that immediately developers will extend it to do things it shouldn't be doing. "Hey, you know, when we install this program we should have it send gmail invites to six people, FTP a pretty picture of a llama while we construct suitable advertising panels, and create three new users with the authority to start, stop and pause the data subsystem."
Other than the llama thing, people have done all that crap and more with Windows installation tools. They blindly overwrite shared system files (leading to DLL hell,) they muck up the registry, they install hundreds of class IDs for internal-use-only COM interfaces, plop in unrelated browser helper objects, add random directories to the front of the system path, launch odd services that do god-knows-what, wedge in a startup task or two and then demand you reboot your system.
It's taken Microsoft many years to realize they couldn't control the installers, and so with XP they changed the OS to try to defend itself from renegade installations. It would be extremely sad to see a UNIX equivalent.
Probably, but which imagined factoid above are you trying to correct me on? An anonymous coward already pointed out the error in my emulation statement. (I was remembering a discussion from way long ago that mentioned 30% of the chip was devoted to legacy processing and it consumed 30% of the power. I couldn't find the article, but I think I was confusing it with a more recent problem with Pentium 4s mispredicting a supposedly easy-to-catch instruction condition and flushing the pipelines too frequently.)
As I said in my previous apology, "I think Intel will trot out some kind of magical technological revolution that will send AMD scrambling to catch up again."
I don't know what magic that would be. (If I did, I'd probably be covered by an NDA.) I do know that Intel has a reputation for coming out with absolute magic, and that they've always found new ways of improving performance when the traditional speedups failed. Hyperthreading was their most recent example of cool innovations.
According to the article above, they're tooling this plant to 12" wafers. If nothing else, this should mean improved production and possibly lower prices for equivalent chips. They also mention shrinking features down to 65nm, which will make possible a new round of better-smaller-faster improvements. But I'm guessing they'll introduce some other novel magic idea, and not just the "add more cache" or "lengthen existing pipelines" type of improvements.
Um... Intel has been doing something like that since the Pentium Pro, and all out that since the P3. The instruction set you put in and the instruction set it actually runs are totally different beasts. The internal micro-ops even get access to more registers (check out "register renaming")
Thanks for the clarification. I know there is still some kind of issue with legacy support, and I failed completely to research it before posting:-(
But my initial point is still that I think Intel will trot out some kind of magical technological revolution that will send AMD scrambling to catch up again. And that we, the consumers, will be the major beneficiaries.
I'm curious: why do you think an integrated solution is important in the marketplace?
I don't think making chips necessarily qualifies a company to be a mobo maker. AMD is focused only on their core business: producing powerful chips. They've left the mobo market alone (other than to provide reference boards) because there are other manufacturers out there who specialize in motherboards.
I guess I don't see the relative advantage of singlesourcing the system boards. Having an Intel board in my machine doesn't really confer magical properties to it. (Plus, I think integrated video is a non-issue for many desktops, because a lot of purchasers are looking for a customization point. My last purchase was 15 top-end workstations, and cheap video was a concern -- compilers don't benefit from 3D acceleration. However, a lot of people who buy these machines do need them for intensive graphics applications, so they need a decent graphics card.)
I suppose the giant manufacturers like Dell and HP gain some expense reduction benefit by having the chips and boards single sourced. But for a company that's willing to purchase them seperately, I think they can use market pressures to drive down the cost of the motherboards.
Negative, but realistic. I think Intel's response will be a completely new approach, much like AMDs was.
I think they might respond by pulling legacy 16-bit support completely out of their chips (which I'm led to believe is costing them about 30% of their chips' "capacity" (as measured by power consumption and real estate) and replacing it with an emulator. While that might be a hugely controversial step, Microsoft took a similar leap when they jumped to 32 bit operating systems, and it proved to be pretty much a non-issue in the marketplace.
I mean if the original application was designed for 16-bit operations, it was designed for a computer that is far slower than an emulator on a modern processor. So, if Intel chucks that deadwood and goes completely native 32 or 64-bit, they can add more performance enhancements by using that reclaimed power and nanoacreage. They could even put the 16 bit emulator code in ROM on the chip somewhere (that should be a much smaller footprint than logic circuitry.)
I'm pretty sure that once Intel pulls some more magic out of their hat, they'll be on top again. (And Intel is really, really good at finding magic in hats.) What I am sure of is that we (the consumers) will be the victors, 'cuz we'll get some really sweet chips out of the deal.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hobbits ... are a disease ..."
That way, you'd be able to subscribe to a set of moderators who make sense (rather than some troll who managed to pick up a few mod points.) Eventually, published lists of trusted moderators would allow relative newbies to the topics quick access to the "best of" the forum.
Elitist? Exactly. And it's the lack of a system like this appears to be Larry's point, and why he chose to leave the project.
13) Legislators Move to Restrict Sales of Mature Games--And Fail
Politicians raise a rhetorical maelstrom for the opulence of violence in video games, but ultimately leaves a barely discernable ripple in the industry. Targeting games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Manhunt, legislators from Florida and California sought to more strictly enforce sales of violent games to minors--some even suggested making it a third-degree felony for allowing minors to obtain a copy of an "M" rated game. The wealthy game industry beat out angry moms, the only change being some retailers showing a clearer indication of the ESRB's rating system.
That's not a low. There's no reason for legislation, or for having the ESRB and the retailers act as surrogate parents.
Parents should do their job -- raising a kid, teaching THEIR values, not Congress's, or some Million Mom Marchers. If that means they have to do extra work, and learn that Vice City is a piece of filth on their own, it's their job. Leave me and my kid alone.
A girrrlllll robot!
This is going to be the best parade ever!!!
The default behavior is also to implement a DRM license on the WMA file, so you can't share it either. It's amazing how many people that one little checkbox can stymie.
If there was an install package to deliver it, the same package should clean itself up completely. Anything an uninstaller "leaves behind" should be considered "poopware", and is eligible for cleanup by a security program. That includes registry settings, COM objects, new versions of system DLLs, empty directories, everything.
This would actually have a positive effect on software vendors. If their uninstallers weren't thorough, they'd get on the anti-virus companies' bad list; and no reputable company wants their software to be associated with a virus.
Microsoft could do this automatically if their System Recovery tool took a checkpoint the first time a "new" program added a "new" registry key, tried to add a key in the systems portion of the registry, or tried to add a new file in any of the system directories. It wouldn't be that hard.
If a commercial driver is on the road, he or she is required to be logging his or her time for driver fatigue reasons. A GPS that simply started a clock at the departure from a scheduled point, and stopped it on arrival at a destination (with subtractions if the GPS stops moving for 15 or more minutes) would let drivers squeeze every possible minute of their allowed drive time (it wouldn't count against them if they were unloading, for example) but would still maintain the safety requirements the employers are required to enforce.
Yeah, I don't really want to see them using them as "speeding tickets" (because I like being behind trucks that are flying down the freeway :-) but I doubt it will be much longer before there's a Federal requirement to include such a device in any commercial vehicle. If a fuel truck crashed into an elementary school because of driver fatigue, Congress would pass such a law faster than a troll going for a first post on Slashdot.
By the way, you can buy these devices from Davis Instruments today, if you're interested. They're trying to sell them to parents of teenage drivers.
Just as long as you aren't slacking off reading Slashdot while you're on the road. You might confuse your turn signal for a flamer (I won't judge you on whether you consider it a flame on the left or on the right.)
If your outsourcing firm is that incompetent that they can't recognize crap on the way in, you're getting precisely what you pay for. Pretty much the meaning of the word "value".
Not that any director I know has a hard time aiming the blamethrower at whoever's convenient ...
Now, if only I didn't have to spend 4 minutes and 30 seconds hunting for the remote control...
8 Advertising and sponsorship
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So, be warned: it may contain some kind of adware, and it may be the kind you find hard to ignore. I'm not installing it until I know more.
The only place where shaving bits made sense for us was on data records: we had a hash file with 2.1 million records, each 29 bytes long and it they all had to fit on a single 80MB hard drive. We squeezed every single bit out of those records (including developing a 3-byte integer to handle amounts that we told them could never exceed $99,999.99 (among other things, larger amounts would not have printed correctly.) But they were read-only records to us: we never wrote more than a few thousand rows of data, and we had plenty of space for the day's processing. And when they did have the odd line item that exceeded $100,000.00, they figured out to break it up into multiple smaller items.
And we got bit more than once by overflows. It took like three separate f-ups to get this guy to acknowledge that he needed to stop being stingy with the bytes. Even then, he'd still try to sneak in some memory "savings", but at least he stopped arguing when we called him on them.
Only if it's done wrong.
The "value" of outsourcing in that particular example is that it forces the company to completely spec out the system requirements. No changes without documentation. With poorly controlled internal development, changes happens in the hallways or the cafeteria: "Hey, Rick, did you add the code to handle the offline situation?" "Oh, right, I'll just put in a return value for you." This leads to code that doesn't match its spec, making it harder to maintain. Outsourcing tends to enforce a good interface between spec and code, (which is what your claim seems to be.)
Internally developed programs don't necessarily receive the same amount of attention to detail because the programmers typically have an idea about the business domain of the problem, and can work more with less documentation. In some organizations, this leads to "fast and loose" -- great for response time, not so great for maintainability.
I think the "value" of outsourcing in a case like ComAir's is one of liability: ComAir will probably try to play "let's blame the vendor." Or, maybe they'll offer up for sacrifice only the one guy who signed the contract with the vendor, and not an entire division. But, when a failure reaches this magnitude, I don't think they'll get off that easy.
Yes, taking .205 ms exposures yields pretty poor quality without sufficient light, so the quick answer is "use plenty of light." Since it's pretty much a specialty item (Sony isn't likely going to offer these in a Handycam format any time soon) the light can usually be planned in advance.
Picture a college basketball game video with a bullet-time slam dunk right in the middle of the live TV coverage! A puck-time view of a hockey slapshot, or a tip-of-the bat view of a baseball hitter. I bet sports is going to take this and run like hell with it, and it's going to start with school-based experimentation.
Yeah, the quality isn't going to be there using today's cheapo web cams, but that will steadily improve as market forces push on it.
But yeah, this brings "bullet-time" to the masses. Way cool.
1. At work, the project we're working on took 45 minutes to perform a full compile on our two-year-old 1500GHz P4s. 12 developers, each chewing up a substantial fraction of the day waiting for compiles, is not a great use of money. Replacing them with dual 3.6GHz P4s dropped compile times to 9 minutes. Even at Dell's price for those machines, the ROI will be taken care of in months.
2. At home, I've been playing America's Army for a couple of years now. It's the only graphics intensive game I play, but I really enjoy it. I had an Athlon 1200 that was just on the cusp of "OK" performance. But then my monitor blew out, and I replaced it with a large LCD flat panel. The change from a 1024x768 to 1280x1024 screen resolution meant that the game was no longer playable, unless I dropped back to 1024x768.
Having my cake without eating it was leaving me hungry. So, I upgraded to an AthlonXP 2400+. The frame rate came up somewhat, but the graphics quality was still quite poor. About this same time, the next version of the game came out with vastly improved graphics (and vastly heightened minimum system requirements.) I stuck a Radeon 9800 on it and it's now able to play at a frame rate that doesn't suck. Now I'm happy, and have no firm plans to upgrade it (until AA 4.0 is released and requires a 4GHz machine.)
3. On the other hand, last year my kid upgraded that old hand-me-down Athlon 1200 to an Athlon 3000+ and added a Radeon 9800. He then proceeded to become a serious gamer. Six months later he wanted to sell or trade his almost-new card to get an ATI X850 because some website published a framerate improvement in Halo from like 24 to 48 FPS. It took a lot of convincing to get him to understand that would be a really poor use of his finite supply of money. It finally sunk in that he should at least wait a year or two to upgrade. In the mean time, he's amusing himself by adding watercooling and overclocking what he's got.
So, most speed-driven upgrades have their basis in some kind of reality. Did I need to upgrade the machines at work? Yes. Did I need to play America's Army at home at a higher resolution? Of course not -- but I wanted to, and I could afford it. Did my son need to up his frame rate from "definitely sweet and playable" to "buttery-smooth and ultra playable?" I obviously didn't think the payback was worth it, and I've convinced him to delay a decision (mostly based on the assumption of future price drops.)
An OS task that plays "switcheroo games" with the files in the System32 directory is what you consider a "solution"? I can't imagine people putting up with that kind of crap in the Open Source community. Maybe you do, and I just don't know about it. Sure, it keeps DLL hell from taking down my machine now, but a decent installation model that kept applications restricted to a single directory tree (and no "registry" or "system" changes allowed) would have done so years ago.
Yes, there are lots of cheesy third party installers that do awful things. One of the worst offenders is the Setup Wizard that Microsoft shipped with Visual Basic 6.0. "Sure, we'll put your ancient bent version of MFC42.DLL all over the customer's box, what the hell do we care? Wanna downgrade their ADO objects while you're at it?" Wise installers create services at the drop of a mouse button.
I haven't bought a Sierra product since the mid-1990s because they've frelled my system over so many times I lost count. The only installers that haven't actually screwed me over in that regard are Nullsoft's PIMP and InnoSetup, and mostly because they force the developers to stick to simple installations.
And everything Apple on Windows is actually far worse. For some unholy reason QuickTime insists on installing a registry-started task every time it runs. And this qttask.exe doesn't do anything for QuickTime, or for me. I didn't click "install" but it does. It just sits there, watching. It really pisses me off that Apple thinks it's a good idea to fsck over all my file associations, too, just because I wanted to view a stupid frickin' .MOV.
Apple does everything wrong under Windows. They have yet to impress me. For all their vaunted "beautiful interface", they haven't ever learned "do what the user said he wants." I don't want three impossible-colors-to-distinguish shaded balls to click on -- my system settings are "put a big, easy-to-see red X in the 'close window' box." Apparently Apple doesn't care what I want, they only want to "look Appley" on Windows. It's a grating combination. If I wanted a frickin' brushed metal interface, I'd have downloaded a frickin' brushed metal theme. It's the whole 'When in Redmond ...' thing that they don't do -- their motto seems to be 'Even when you're not in Cupertino, YOU OUGHT TO BE! IN YOUR FACE, BILL GATES!' Way too arrogant, even for me.
And no worries, I love the llama too.
The problem I have with an "installer" system is that immediately developers will extend it to do things it shouldn't be doing. "Hey, you know, when we install this program we should have it send gmail invites to six people, FTP a pretty picture of a llama while we construct suitable advertising panels, and create three new users with the authority to start, stop and pause the data subsystem."
Other than the llama thing, people have done all that crap and more with Windows installation tools. They blindly overwrite shared system files (leading to DLL hell,) they muck up the registry, they install hundreds of class IDs for internal-use-only COM interfaces, plop in unrelated browser helper objects, add random directories to the front of the system path, launch odd services that do god-knows-what, wedge in a startup task or two and then demand you reboot your system.
It's taken Microsoft many years to realize they couldn't control the installers, and so with XP they changed the OS to try to defend itself from renegade installations. It would be extremely sad to see a UNIX equivalent.
As I said in my previous apology, "I think Intel will trot out some kind of magical technological revolution that will send AMD scrambling to catch up again."
I don't know what magic that would be. (If I did, I'd probably be covered by an NDA.) I do know that Intel has a reputation for coming out with absolute magic, and that they've always found new ways of improving performance when the traditional speedups failed. Hyperthreading was their most recent example of cool innovations.
According to the article above, they're tooling this plant to 12" wafers. If nothing else, this should mean improved production and possibly lower prices for equivalent chips. They also mention shrinking features down to 65nm, which will make possible a new round of better-smaller-faster improvements. But I'm guessing they'll introduce some other novel magic idea, and not just the "add more cache" or "lengthen existing pipelines" type of improvements.
Thanks for the clarification. I know there is still some kind of issue with legacy support, and I failed completely to research it before posting :-(
But my initial point is still that I think Intel will trot out some kind of magical technological revolution that will send AMD scrambling to catch up again. And that we, the consumers, will be the major beneficiaries.
I don't think making chips necessarily qualifies a company to be a mobo maker. AMD is focused only on their core business: producing powerful chips. They've left the mobo market alone (other than to provide reference boards) because there are other manufacturers out there who specialize in motherboards.
I guess I don't see the relative advantage of singlesourcing the system boards. Having an Intel board in my machine doesn't really confer magical properties to it. (Plus, I think integrated video is a non-issue for many desktops, because a lot of purchasers are looking for a customization point. My last purchase was 15 top-end workstations, and cheap video was a concern -- compilers don't benefit from 3D acceleration. However, a lot of people who buy these machines do need them for intensive graphics applications, so they need a decent graphics card.)
I suppose the giant manufacturers like Dell and HP gain some expense reduction benefit by having the chips and boards single sourced. But for a company that's willing to purchase them seperately, I think they can use market pressures to drive down the cost of the motherboards.
I think they might respond by pulling legacy 16-bit support completely out of their chips (which I'm led to believe is costing them about 30% of their chips' "capacity" (as measured by power consumption and real estate) and replacing it with an emulator. While that might be a hugely controversial step, Microsoft took a similar leap when they jumped to 32 bit operating systems, and it proved to be pretty much a non-issue in the marketplace.
I mean if the original application was designed for 16-bit operations, it was designed for a computer that is far slower than an emulator on a modern processor. So, if Intel chucks that deadwood and goes completely native 32 or 64-bit, they can add more performance enhancements by using that reclaimed power and nanoacreage. They could even put the 16 bit emulator code in ROM on the chip somewhere (that should be a much smaller footprint than logic circuitry.)
I'm pretty sure that once Intel pulls some more magic out of their hat, they'll be on top again. (And Intel is really, really good at finding magic in hats.) What I am sure of is that we (the consumers) will be the victors, 'cuz we'll get some really sweet chips out of the deal.