I purchased Spore ( The Galactic edition ) from Amazon on September 8th, for overnight delivery.
I could not get it installed. After 11 days of going back and forth with EA tech support, EA informed me that they assigned the software key to someone else on September 7th. EA's solution, "return the software to my place of purchase".
Sounds great, but companies such as EA have told vendors not to take returns on software that is no longer in the shrinkwrap.
I have pointed out to EA that the only viable solution is for them to issue me a new key.
I have heard nothing from EA on this since Saturday.
Maybe it is time to fire up the lawyers. EA took my money, and has not given me a product in exchange.
A broad area of knowledge can be tested, and tested quite well. It is called "specialization"... go look at the Medical profession for pointers on how they handle it.
Install accountability, and this will get fixed
on
Zero Day Threat
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Until it costs institutions less to secure this stuff than it does in losses, this will not change.
How do you shift this balance? - Make the C level folks criminally and financially liable for theft of your data (they store it and sell it, they should be on the hook to protect it). - Make the credit agencies financially liable for inaccuracies in their data bases. (they should be held accountable for the accuracy of the information that they are selling).
Today, there is no real recourse for you if institutions sell lies about you, or give your private data away to all takers.
If you read through the ruling, an issue that is brought up is that regarding citizens and a militia, citizens may need to own certain arms that would be useful for a militia. There is also concern that the amendment not rule out any modernization of arms.
It is a long read, but a really interesting one. Well worth a few hours to look through. This one was well thought through.
The courts have found that Tivo invented something. Echostar infringed upon that by making the invention available to the public without properly compensating Tivo. Echostar has to settle with Tivo.
Customers should not be mad at Tivo for exercising their legal right to protect their invention. They should be mad at Echostar for selling a product with a feature that they had no legal right to sell.
The patent system inspires innovation by giving the inventor a time limited monopoly in which to recover their costs. Sounds fair to me.
Go back and read your architecture books... Intel is using faster memory (for now), however, they still have to deal with the MIO, which increases their latency. Dynamic cache does not buy you a whole lot if your application cannot find the data that it needs in the cache. Adds to latency. If you are doing random I/O in RAM, there is not a whole lot that your prediction logic can do to save you.
The benchmarks that I am seeing that show an advantage for Intel are all synthetic tests that rely heavily on cache. Intel knows that they are strong there. The advantage for AMD has ALWAYS been on the cache miss. Most server applications are really good about missing cache.
1) Easy option, make the ads better so that people will WANT to watch them. 2) Advertisers should be paying ME for my time to watch their commercials.
Realistic options: 1) Give me a price for commercial free television that I can pay. Let the consumer see how much money television advertising is really saving them. 2) I pay $90 a month for cable, of which most channels I do not watch. What am I paying for again? Last time I read, part of my subscription fee pays for channels such as ESPN, which charge the cable company to carry them AND run commercials. The home shopping channels pay the cable carriers to deliver their content.
The fact of the matter is that dealing with SPAM mail costs the large mail providers, and costs them a lot. They may have a majority of their mail infrastructure in place just to deal with the extra capacity issues that SPAM creates.
You might not see all that much spam in your box these days, but the big guys do. It costs them millions.
This may be a despiration move on AOL's part, but it is one way to nip at the problem.
Your IT department is no different than any other large IT department. They have to manage maintaining an infrastructure, and scheduling requests to make changes to that infrastructure. It may look inefficient, but I would bet that it is more inefficient to have 100 software developers having a free for all with the network taps and the switches. Who wants to sort that mess out?
Out of this, evolved the bureaucracy.
The sad thing is, your management wants it this way. If they did not, it would get the proper funding to make things faster. Look around, what your management cares about, gets funded, what they do not care about, does not get funded. They are perfectly happy with the way your IT operations function.
Do you really NEED for someone to stand in front of you and read a book to you? If this is the case, then you have no business in technology.
Grab a few old machines. Most IT shops have them laying around somewhere. Set up a network. Teach yourself AD, or whatever it is you need to know. Do it during lunch, stay a couple hours after work and do it.
- It shows your employeer that you have some sort of initiative, and usually helps more than hurts.
- It gives you a new skill. You will use this skill in your day to day job, which equates to experience.
- Once you get this down, find a new job and reap the financial benefits of what you have learned.
- worst case, you stay with your employer, and you know your new task. You can do it quickly, which leaves more time for something else you may want to do/learn.
If all things other things were equal, then I would agree that dual core does not mean double the performance.
However, it is just about that with the new AMD architectures. The core did double, but other things changed improve performance outside the core. Looking forward, it will be more common with other architectures.
The reason for my comment is that doubling the cores is not the only thing going on. Memory architectures, I/O architectures, cache architectures are all changing as well. The end result, almost linear SYSTEM performance (outside of drive I/O) improvement with the newer processors, which happen to have additional cores.
I would still like to see a resolution for Mac users.
On the David Gray Life in Slow Motion CD - Sunncomm software can be installed from the CD - after removing all "visible" files, including the kernel extensions, the system still behaves differently if a CD with SunnComm is put into the system (the setup.app runs automatically) - Sunncomm has NO softwre to uninstall or rectify this problem.
This is on Tiger. Yes, you have to approve the installation.
The main difference you get with HP, IBM, Sun vs the rest is the manageability of the hardware.
A generic box fails, or has intermittant failure, and sometimes you are scratching your head figuring out what is wrong. The better designed gear will tell you that "Dimm 2 has been throwing ECC errors for the past couple of days". Gives you a place to look. In the generic box, you are replacing all the RAM sticks.
I don't see a whole lot of difference between a Dell and a whitebox.
I walked in to my local record store TWO DAYS ago with the Sony/BMG list of XCP titles. I asked the counter clerk if they had pulled the titles yet.
The response was, "Which one do you want".
The clerk knew of the issue. He even helped me confirm that the catalog number for the disk was a match. The titles were still on the shelves for sale. The store was replacing the disks as new disks came in from Sony.
Two out of three record stores that I checked that day had the titles available for purchase.
This is a recall?
Also, it is not as if you can look on the spine of the CD to find out that it is a Sony disk. These disks are sold under other label names. I believe that the one I got was an Electra. Sony/BMG is in the really fine print on the back, as well as the XPC URL.
The way that Apple clamps down on rumor sites, it makes me wonder why they did not step on ZD Net for publishing this. Makes you wonder why Apple would permit it.
... didn't CERN read the EULA that stated, quite clearly I might add, that if they wanted to jack into the network, they were bound to the terms and controls as stated by the U.S.A.; which are likely to change without notice, etc.
If we were smart, free Swiss chocolate for everybody would have been a condition of the EULA as well.
I know that we have already seen the Apple/Intel boxes running Windows.
I think the real story for Apple stock will be to see if the Powerbook-Intel equipment production will keep up with all of those executives that want to run Windows on a Powerbook.
First response: Bios support for AMD CnQ is not quite there yet, but is coming.
2nd reason: If I read the specifications properly, I may not give out enough idle time for CnQ to kick in. Clocking it down would solve the problem, without having to rely on CnQ.
Yes, I am using Opteron processors and not Intel processors.
In tests that I have done on the applications that my site runs, the Opteron processor leaves the Intel processors in the dust.
Heck, one of my installation routines that has taken 40 minutes to do an installation for as long as I can remember, across several different generations of Intel platforms now takes 17 minutes to install on an Opteron platform.
I was memory bandwidth bound on a simple software install!
When the rest of corporate America sees through the Dell and Intel fud that the Opteron is the superior performer, and is just as reliable... Intel will be in a real world of hurt. They are surviving on skepticism towards AMD at the present time.
I am extremely glad to see "underclocking" gaining in popularity.
I design systems that run applications across hundreds or thousands of servers. Many of my applications are bound by items such as connections, long before processor becomes a bottleneck.
As a case example, I will have an application that utilizes 55% of the proc across two processors. I use two processors to keep response time down (multi threads). Intel gives me a new processor. I get to spend more money to power the new processor, but now I get the amazing advantage of the new, faster, more power hungry machine now being 30% utilized.
More money down the drain, but I am not getting much for it. The worst abuse of this is static content web servers. I run into connection issues and network latency issues long before I run out of processor.
With the new HE processors from AMD, I can turn down the processor clock and cut my power consumption by as much as 50% across the board. This translates into real savings on power and cooling infrastructure.
I have been using VoIP for over a year at home, and I enjoy the technology. I run it over my cable modem. Comparing how reliable my cable service is, vs how reliable my POTS line is; I knew that I needed to keep a minimum POTS line active, just in case.
The device that I use is called a Sipura 3000 analog adapter. It allows my cordless phone system to plug into ethernet for VoIP. Another nice feature is that I can plug my POTS line in to it as well.
I have programmed the device to route 411 and 911 calls made from my cordless phones on to the POTS line instead of the VoIP line. That gives me full, reliable 911 service without having to inform my guests that some phones are for dialing, and other phones are for 911. Every phone can reach 911.
Another nice feature of this system is that it also routes all calls to the POTS line in the event of 1) VoIP service outage or 2) general power outage.
There are also programmable features for routing specific calls to specific gateways based on charateristics that you define. Gateway 0 is for POTS, gateways 1-3 (there are more than 2, can't remember the upper limit) are for VoIP services.
If your VoIP provider allows BYOD, it is definitally worth checking out.
btw: the TX case in this mess is interesting. I was in Houston on business when it happened. The customer in question was interviewed on the news. The customer claimed that he had no knowledge that Vonage did not handle 911. Seeing all the warnings that Vonage give you, it would actually take some effort to ignore the warnings. No sympathy.
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I purchased Spore ( The Galactic edition ) from Amazon on September 8th, for overnight delivery.
I could not get it installed. After 11 days of going back and forth with EA tech support, EA informed me that they assigned the software key to someone else on September 7th. EA's solution, "return the software to my place of purchase".
Sounds great, but companies such as EA have told vendors not to take returns on software that is no longer in the shrinkwrap.
I have pointed out to EA that the only viable solution is for them to issue me a new key.
I have heard nothing from EA on this since Saturday.
Maybe it is time to fire up the lawyers. EA took my money, and has not given me a product in exchange.
A broad area of knowledge can be tested, and tested quite well. It is called "specialization"... go look at the Medical profession for pointers on how they handle it.
Until it costs institutions less to secure this stuff than it does in losses, this will not change.
How do you shift this balance?
- Make the C level folks criminally and financially liable for theft of your data (they store it and sell it, they should be on the hook to protect it).
- Make the credit agencies financially liable for inaccuracies in their data bases. (they should be held accountable for the accuracy of the information that they are selling).
Today, there is no real recourse for you if institutions sell lies about you, or give your private data away to all takers.
If you read through the ruling, an issue that is brought up is that regarding citizens and a militia, citizens may need to own certain arms that would be useful for a militia. There is also concern that the amendment not rule out any modernization of arms.
It is a long read, but a really interesting one. Well worth a few hours to look through. This one was well thought through.
The courts have found that Tivo invented something. Echostar infringed upon that by making the invention available to the public without properly compensating Tivo. Echostar has to settle with Tivo.
Customers should not be mad at Tivo for exercising their legal right to protect their invention. They should be mad at Echostar for selling a product with a feature that they had no legal right to sell.
The patent system inspires innovation by giving the inventor a time limited monopoly in which to recover their costs. Sounds fair to me.
Go back and read your architecture books...
Intel is using faster memory (for now), however, they still have to deal with the MIO, which increases their latency.
Dynamic cache does not buy you a whole lot if your application cannot find the data that it needs in the cache. Adds to latency.
If you are doing random I/O in RAM, there is not a whole lot that your prediction logic can do to save you.
The benchmarks that I am seeing that show an advantage for Intel are all synthetic tests that rely heavily on cache. Intel knows that they are strong there. The advantage for AMD has ALWAYS been on the cache miss. Most server applications are really good about missing cache.
AMD has a huge advantage in applications that miss cache, and require memory access with low latency. (i.e.: MANY server applications)
Intel has done little to address this.
1) Easy option, make the ads better so that people will WANT to watch them.
2) Advertisers should be paying ME for my time to watch their commercials.
Realistic options:
1) Give me a price for commercial free television that I can pay. Let the consumer see how much money television advertising is really saving them.
2) I pay $90 a month for cable, of which most channels I do not watch. What am I paying for again? Last time I read, part of my subscription fee pays for channels such as ESPN, which charge the cable company to carry them AND run commercials. The home shopping channels pay the cable carriers to deliver their content.
Several studies have shown that people don't multitask well.
I would believe that the bus driver is better at focusing on the driving task, while tuning the others out.
The fact of the matter is that dealing with SPAM mail costs the large mail providers, and costs them a lot. They may have a majority of their mail infrastructure in place just to deal with the extra capacity issues that SPAM creates.
You might not see all that much spam in your box these days, but the big guys do. It costs them millions.
This may be a despiration move on AOL's part, but it is one way to nip at the problem.
Your IT department is no different than any other large IT department. They have to manage maintaining an infrastructure, and scheduling requests to make changes to that infrastructure.
It may look inefficient, but I would bet that it is more inefficient to have 100 software developers having a free for all with the network taps and the switches. Who wants to sort that mess out?
Out of this, evolved the bureaucracy.
The sad thing is, your management wants it this way. If they did not, it would get the proper funding to make things faster. Look around, what your management cares about, gets funded, what they do not care about, does not get funded. They are perfectly happy with the way your IT operations function.
Do you really NEED for someone to stand in front of you and read a book to you? If this is the case, then you have no business in technology.
Grab a few old machines. Most IT shops have them laying around somewhere. Set up a network. Teach yourself AD, or whatever it is you need to know. Do it during lunch, stay a couple hours after work and do it.
- It shows your employeer that you have some sort of initiative, and usually helps more than hurts.
- It gives you a new skill. You will use this skill in your day to day job, which equates to experience.
- Once you get this down, find a new job and reap the financial benefits of what you have learned.
- worst case, you stay with your employer, and you know your new task. You can do it quickly, which leaves more time for something else you may want to do/learn.
If all things other things were equal, then I would agree that dual core does not mean double the performance.
However, it is just about that with the new AMD architectures. The core did double, but other things changed improve performance outside the core. Looking forward, it will be more common with other architectures.
The reason for my comment is that doubling the cores is not the only thing going on. Memory architectures, I/O architectures, cache architectures are all changing as well. The end result, almost linear SYSTEM performance (outside of drive I/O) improvement with the newer processors, which happen to have additional cores.
I would still like to see a resolution for Mac users.
On the David Gray Life in Slow Motion CD
- Sunncomm software can be installed from the CD
- after removing all "visible" files, including the kernel extensions, the system still behaves differently if a CD with SunnComm is put into the system (the setup.app runs automatically)
- Sunncomm has NO softwre to uninstall or rectify this problem.
This is on Tiger. Yes, you have to approve the installation.
The main difference you get with HP, IBM, Sun vs the rest is the manageability of the hardware.
A generic box fails, or has intermittant failure, and sometimes you are scratching your head figuring out what is wrong. The better designed gear will tell you that "Dimm 2 has been throwing ECC errors for the past couple of days". Gives you a place to look. In the generic box, you are replacing all the RAM sticks.
I don't see a whole lot of difference between a Dell and a whitebox.
I really don't think this will matter. As Sony's own CEO put it, the average person does not know what a root kit is.
Joe Sixpack doesn't know what this is, nor does he care. His daughter just wants her Brittany Spears.
He never listed to a bunch of geeks anyway.
I walked in to my local record store TWO DAYS ago with the Sony/BMG list of XCP titles. I asked the counter clerk if they had pulled the titles yet.
The response was, "Which one do you want".
The clerk knew of the issue. He even helped me confirm that the catalog number for the disk was a match. The titles were still on the shelves for sale. The store was replacing the disks as new disks came in from Sony.
Two out of three record stores that I checked that day had the titles available for purchase.
This is a recall?
Also, it is not as if you can look on the spine of the CD to find out that it is a Sony disk. These disks are sold under other label names. I believe that the one I got was an Electra. Sony/BMG is in the really fine print on the back, as well as the XPC URL.
The way that Apple clamps down on rumor sites, it makes me wonder why they did not step on ZD Net for publishing this. Makes you wonder why Apple would permit it.
... didn't CERN read the EULA that stated, quite clearly I might add, that if they wanted to jack into the network, they were bound to the terms and controls as stated by the U.S.A.; which are likely to change without notice, etc.
If we were smart, free Swiss chocolate for everybody would have been a condition of the EULA as well.
I know that we have already seen the Apple/Intel boxes running Windows.
I think the real story for Apple stock will be to see if the Powerbook-Intel equipment production will keep up with all of those executives that want to run Windows on a Powerbook.
Responded incorrectly earlier
First response: Bios support for AMD CnQ is not quite there yet, but is coming.
2nd reason: If I read the specifications properly, I may not give out enough idle time for CnQ to kick in. Clocking it down would solve the problem, without having to rely on CnQ.
Yes, I am using Opteron processors and not Intel processors.
In tests that I have done on the applications that my site runs, the Opteron processor leaves the Intel processors in the dust.
Heck, one of my installation routines that has taken 40 minutes to do an installation for as long as I can remember, across several different generations of Intel platforms now takes 17 minutes to install on an Opteron platform.
I was memory bandwidth bound on a simple software install!
When the rest of corporate America sees through the Dell and Intel fud that the Opteron is the superior performer, and is just as reliable... Intel will be in a real world of hurt. They are surviving on skepticism towards AMD at the present time.
I am extremely glad to see "underclocking" gaining in popularity.
I design systems that run applications across hundreds or thousands of servers. Many of my applications are bound by items such as connections, long before processor becomes a bottleneck.
As a case example, I will have an application that utilizes 55% of the proc across two processors. I use two processors to keep response time down (multi threads). Intel gives me a new processor. I get to spend more money to power the new processor, but now I get the amazing advantage of the new, faster, more power hungry machine now being 30% utilized.
More money down the drain, but I am not getting much for it. The worst abuse of this is static content web servers. I run into connection issues and network latency issues long before I run out of processor.
With the new HE processors from AMD, I can turn down the processor clock and cut my power consumption by as much as 50% across the board. This translates into real savings on power and cooling infrastructure.
I have been using VoIP for over a year at home, and I enjoy the technology. I run it over my cable modem. Comparing how reliable my cable service is, vs how reliable my POTS line is; I knew that I needed to keep a minimum POTS line active, just in case.
The device that I use is called a Sipura 3000 analog adapter. It allows my cordless phone system to plug into ethernet for VoIP. Another nice feature is that I can plug my POTS line in to it as well.
I have programmed the device to route 411 and 911 calls made from my cordless phones on to the POTS line instead of the VoIP line. That gives me full, reliable 911 service without having to inform my guests that some phones are for dialing, and other phones are for 911. Every phone can reach 911.
Another nice feature of this system is that it also routes all calls to the POTS line in the event of 1) VoIP service outage or 2) general power outage.
There are also programmable features for routing specific calls to specific gateways based on charateristics that you define. Gateway 0 is for POTS, gateways 1-3 (there are more than 2, can't remember the upper limit) are for VoIP services.
If your VoIP provider allows BYOD, it is definitally worth checking out.
btw: the TX case in this mess is interesting. I was in Houston on business when it happened. The customer in question was interviewed on the news. The customer claimed that he had no knowledge that Vonage did not handle 911. Seeing all the warnings that Vonage give you, it would actually take some effort to ignore the warnings. No sympathy.
How do you track an offender when he is not in line of site with the GPS sats?
ie: in a school, or worse....