Three 90-minute classes every day? When I was in college, a standard full load was 15 hours of class time a week, and if you wanted to do more than 18 hours, you had to get permission from the dean. Which makes a lot of sense, if you assume that you work on the course for 2 hours for every hour you're in class. The absolute maximum was 20. Your hypothetical schedule comes out 67.5 hours of total class/study time, unless you do way less study time per class than I did. Which, as you correctly point out, is totally absurd.
It's been a long time since I left college, but have things changed that much? If so, we're in deep shit.
OK, your argument makes perfect sense. But it doesn't apply here. A business user who goes out and buys a brand-new computer right now will not be able to find a desktop system that is slower than 2 gigahertz! If you're a typical business user (and you don't play computer games at work) you will never saturate such a CPU. In fact, you'll probably never use more than 25% of its cycles.
Of course, the day will come when you won't be able to buy single-core desktops, for the same reason you already can't buy sub-gigahertz desktops. But for now, dual-core systems are a waste of money for anybody who doesn't need a lot of cycles.
Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time.
Except for the first sentence, that makes no sense. These "free alternatives" have been trying to capture the market for years now, with almost no luck. Microsoft's competition isn't Sun or Red Hat or Novell or IBM. It's their own "obsolete" software. If Vista is as bad as it seems to be, than people will simply refrain from upgrading, or insist on using XP on their new hardware. Which will certainly hurt Microsft, but not do anything to cure the appalling monoculture in the end-user software market.
I also agree that 2 processors of 1/2 speed will be better than 1 of full speed since we do tend to run multiple processes. This should allow a smart OS to reduce the amount of thread switching.
The overhead for thread switching for processes already in memory is just not that high. On the other hand, switching to a task that needs to be swapped from virtual to real memory (especially if the swapfile is fragmented) or swapped from main memory to cache is very expensive.
VM swapping used to be a big issue, because business and home systems were typically sold without enough RAM — they'd use the minimum number of the cheapest memory cards in order to keep the base price down. That's changed as low-end memory cards have gotten bigger. But processors in business and home systems still have pretty small chache memories. That's a more likely way to improve processor performance for low-end users than adding an execution core. But not very likely. I say again, the CPU has long ceased to be a bottleneck in typical business applications.
That quote caught my eye too. Only my reaction is stronger: bullshit.
Yes, the typical user nowadays is runs lots of processes. And having does almost double the nuber of processes your system can handle. But so does doubling the clock speed. And most business machines already have processors that are at least twice as fast as they need to be.
As always, people looking for more performance fixate on CPU throughput. One more time folks: PCs are complicated beasts, with many potential bottlenecks.
Except that few of these bottlenecks have any effect on your typical office productivity apps. Word processors, browsers, spreadsheets: none of these require a lot of CPU time, or do heavy disk access, or overload your video card. Running lots of apps used to overload main memory, but nowadays systems all ship with at least 256 meg. So if Word isn't performing fast enough for you, get IT to do a spyware scan and to defragment your disk, and forget about that new expensive toy. It will run faster at first, but if you neglect it like you're neglecting your current box, it'll soon be as slow as your current box.
Donkeys and Bureaucrats
on
Sun Grid DOS'd
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's no excuse for vandalizing somebody's system. But it wouldn't be so bad if Sun weren't so damned bureaucratic. I read in the article that the demo was still available to people who had grid accounts, which you just need a verified PayPal address to open. I have one of those, so I thought I'd sign up just to get a look at the demo. After 5 minutes of answering strange, intrusive questions (who do I work for? what projects do I have in mind? where's the money coming from?) I gave up. Of course, Sun didn't lose anything by failing to satisfy my idle curiousity — but I'm sure that serious potential customers are also being turned off by this.
I've contracted at Sun a couple times, and I'm continually amazed at their bureaucracy. The amount of pointless paperwork (now done through the web, but still tedious and time-consuming) is just mind-boggling. And I'm actually more patient with it than the regular employees, who vent like a volcano whenever the subject comes up.
Also, I have to point out that any freely available web application with high visibility has to be designed with a potential DDOS attack in mind. It's kind of disappoint that nobody though of this when they created that demo.
I don't think the centurions are supposed to have created anything — they're pure warriors. You might recall the conversation where Baltar first discovers that his lover is a Cylon. He asks why she doesn't look like a toaster, and she refers to "old models" that "have their uses". My inference is that there were once mechanical cylons that specialized in intellectual chores, but these have been replaced by the biological cylons. Centurions haven't been upgraded because they're fine for what they are: cannon fodder.
But Moore and his writers don't really say anything about this kind of issue, and I suspect they don't really care about that kind of detail. Which is one reason I consider the show to be a decent adventure story, but not great SF — there's no geeky fascination with How Things Came to Be.
You're right, that change obviously came from budget constraints. As did many others, starting with the decision to have mostly humanoid Cylons. And probably those mothership sets you hate so much: by the time they'd built all the other sets, they probably didn't have much money to spend on a set that they weren't going to use much.
Then again, there's this whole compulsive organic thing going on with the Cylons. For example, they build their Raiders out of organic parts, even though a simple machine would have done just as well. Only the original centurions are still mechanical, and they don't play a big role.
Re:Ron Moore put a lot of thought into this show.
on
GDC - Ron Moore Keynote
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Except are the Cylons really the bad guys? Yeah, they're genocidal, cruel, manipulative, etc. But there are all these morally ambiguous moments. Which might be leading up to something interesting — or it just might be Moore playing silly games with us.
I also wonder where the religious thing is heading. Maybe Moore has something clever planned around it. Or maybe it's just his way of recycling the premise of the original series, that human mythology is just a distorted version of some ancient space opera. Of course the implication of that is that the patriarchs of the Old Testament were Cylons...
This is because the Lords have been traditional conservatives, in regards to the administration of government in Britain.
No, the Lords have traditionally been bozos who have a title because their ancestor was a pal of Henry VIII. Of course now, the HoL consists mostly of Life Peers, but they're still not representative of anything except their own opinions. In a modern democracy, a body like that shouldn't have more than an advisory function.
It's not at all obvious that they mean that it's a sequel. In fact, that makes very little sense to me. It probably has more to do with the weird religious kick the Cylons are on. The fact that Cylons are monotheist zealots in this version still hasn't been fully explained — and it's the biggest departure from the 70s version, where the Cylons had been created by an extinct race of lizards.
Star Trek TOS was a little better in the first two seasons. Farscape was a lot better before they ran out of ideas. Even Stargate often does better with basic storytelling, though the acting isn't nearly as good as on BSG, and you have to blink at the sillier aspects of the premise.
But please notice that I didn't say "show" when I stated that BSG isn't great SF. TV and movies occupy only the tiniest niche in a serious SF fan's imagination. Most of what attracts me to SF just doesn't translate onto the screen. Some details are just too difficult technically (zero gravity, aliens that don't look like humans in latex masks); some changes have to be made to meet the expectations of a scientifically illiterate audience (spaceships make a woosh in a vacuum; physics doesn't account for the work of Newton, never mind Einstein). Most of all, serious SF requires some time and patience on the part of the audience — more than you'll get in an hour or two of screen time.
But why am I trying to explain? I say "SF" and you think "show". Obviously we have nothing to talk about!
Basically, Moore just did what he had to do. The fans of the old show wanted a sequel to the old show, but they would have been the only ones who watched it.
It's an OK show, but not a great work of imagination. Basically, Moore just took everything that was done wrong on Star Trek when he worked for them and did the opposite. The result works fine, but it's not the most memorable piece of SF I've ever seen.
I am very curious what will happen when they get to Earth. I'm guessing that the Cylons got there first, a long time ago....
Never mind the bad writing. The dude lost me when he said "preserved the goodness of the original show". Aside from the dubious quality of the original, there's the fact that Moore has pretty much redone the whole concept from scratch. Yes, a lot of details have been carried over, but that's more for copyright purposes than preservation of anything. Key details, like exactly why the Cylons want to destroy humanity (robots on a religious crusade?!) is completely different. All the stuff that's the same is stuff that doesn't matter, like the fact that Starbuck still smokes cigars and they still call liquor "ambrosia".
Anyway, this is Zonk, they guy who basically accepts every story submitted to him when he's in charge on weekends. He really needs to reconsider his career options.
Not that Piers Anthony would have been any great loss, but it's wrong to throw away anything that somebody else can use. Give your extra books to a thrift store, which will sell them and use the money for good stuff. Or give them to your public library which will either put them on the shelves or sell them and use the money to put more books on the shelves.
Don't burn them. Unless you use accelerants (which is dangerous) books are suprisingly hard to burn.
He didn't say he was going to leave the books in random order. But it doesn't make sense to sort your books until you have a scheme for cataloging them.
Then again, leaving the books in random is a perfectly viable option. There was an online service for keeping track of books that got plugged on Slashdot about 4 years ago. As I recall, you just had to enter the ISBN and location ("third shelf in bedroom"). That would be ideal for this guy, if I could remember the name of the site — and if they're still in business.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a long time since I left college, but have things changed that much? If so, we're in deep shit.
That was perfectly good English. The sentences were just a little longer than the ones you're used to.
This from a soccer fan!
Sure, and not just video encoding. Multimedia work of any kind. But again, we're talking typical business users, not somebody hosting a video blog.
Of course, the day will come when you won't be able to buy single-core desktops, for the same reason you already can't buy sub-gigahertz desktops. But for now, dual-core systems are a waste of money for anybody who doesn't need a lot of cycles.
VM swapping used to be a big issue, because business and home systems were typically sold without enough RAM — they'd use the minimum number of the cheapest memory cards in order to keep the base price down. That's changed as low-end memory cards have gotten bigger. But processors in business and home systems still have pretty small chache memories. That's a more likely way to improve processor performance for low-end users than adding an execution core. But not very likely. I say again, the CPU has long ceased to be a bottleneck in typical business applications.
Yes, the typical user nowadays is runs lots of processes. And having does almost double the nuber of processes your system can handle. But so does doubling the clock speed. And most business machines already have processors that are at least twice as fast as they need to be.
As always, people looking for more performance fixate on CPU throughput. One more time folks: PCs are complicated beasts, with many potential bottlenecks.
Except that few of these bottlenecks have any effect on your typical office productivity apps. Word processors, browsers, spreadsheets: none of these require a lot of CPU time, or do heavy disk access, or overload your video card. Running lots of apps used to overload main memory, but nowadays systems all ship with at least 256 meg. So if Word isn't performing fast enough for you, get IT to do a spyware scan and to defragment your disk, and forget about that new expensive toy. It will run faster at first, but if you neglect it like you're neglecting your current box, it'll soon be as slow as your current box.
I've contracted at Sun a couple times, and I'm continually amazed at their bureaucracy. The amount of pointless paperwork (now done through the web, but still tedious and time-consuming) is just mind-boggling. And I'm actually more patient with it than the regular employees, who vent like a volcano whenever the subject comes up.
Also, I have to point out that any freely available web application with high visibility has to be designed with a potential DDOS attack in mind. It's kind of disappoint that nobody though of this when they created that demo.
But Moore and his writers don't really say anything about this kind of issue, and I suspect they don't really care about that kind of detail. Which is one reason I consider the show to be a decent adventure story, but not great SF — there's no geeky fascination with How Things Came to Be.
Then again, there's this whole compulsive organic thing going on with the Cylons. For example, they build their Raiders out of organic parts, even though a simple machine would have done just as well. Only the original centurions are still mechanical, and they don't play a big role.
I also wonder where the religious thing is heading. Maybe Moore has something clever planned around it. Or maybe it's just his way of recycling the premise of the original series, that human mythology is just a distorted version of some ancient space opera. Of course the implication of that is that the patriarchs of the Old Testament were Cylons...
OK, you're going to have to explain that one.
Aww, did the evil poster hurt your feelings?
Not "grammer", "grammar". Sorry, couldn't resist.
It's not at all obvious that they mean that it's a sequel. In fact, that makes very little sense to me. It probably has more to do with the weird religious kick the Cylons are on. The fact that Cylons are monotheist zealots in this version still hasn't been fully explained — and it's the biggest departure from the 70s version, where the Cylons had been created by an extinct race of lizards.
But please notice that I didn't say "show" when I stated that BSG isn't great SF. TV and movies occupy only the tiniest niche in a serious SF fan's imagination. Most of what attracts me to SF just doesn't translate onto the screen. Some details are just too difficult technically (zero gravity, aliens that don't look like humans in latex masks); some changes have to be made to meet the expectations of a scientifically illiterate audience (spaceships make a woosh in a vacuum; physics doesn't account for the work of Newton, never mind Einstein). Most of all, serious SF requires some time and patience on the part of the audience — more than you'll get in an hour or two of screen time.
But why am I trying to explain? I say "SF" and you think "show". Obviously we have nothing to talk about!
It's an OK show, but not a great work of imagination. Basically, Moore just took everything that was done wrong on Star Trek when he worked for them and did the opposite. The result works fine, but it's not the most memorable piece of SF I've ever seen.
I am very curious what will happen when they get to Earth. I'm guessing that the Cylons got there first, a long time ago ....
Anyway, this is Zonk, they guy who basically accepts every story submitted to him when he's in charge on weekends. He really needs to reconsider his career options.
A spell checker won't tell you that Ron Moore's last name is spelled with two O's.
Firefox has spellchecker plugins — and runs on you-know-what.
Well, you could print out a little sticker ....
Don't burn them. Unless you use accelerants (which is dangerous) books are suprisingly hard to burn.
Then again, leaving the books in random is a perfectly viable option. There was an online service for keeping track of books that got plugged on Slashdot about 4 years ago. As I recall, you just had to enter the ISBN and location ("third shelf in bedroom"). That would be ideal for this guy, if I could remember the name of the site — and if they're still in business.