Agreed. I even held out on it for quite some time, but it really just completely lost its way. The plot split into dozens of unconnected threads, the writing went to shit, the update schedule made Valve look timely, and even the art went downhill (too pencil-y and ill-defined, lacking detail or clarity).
And honestly, even during its prime, it was never that great. The humor relied too much on "lolrandom", and the characters always suffered from "same person with different hair" syndrome. And somehow it went downhill from there.
Fortunately, it seems like all the *good* webcomics I read are also becoming Kickstarter successes. Schlock Mercenary already shipped, Dresden Codak is going to the printers, Girl Genius succeeded, and I'm pretty sure I've missed several dozen more. Most of them are being much more modest than "make a video game, even one so barely deserving of the label 'game' as a visual novel", but given how new Kickstarter is, in relative terms, I think it's good that they're not immediately trying to go from a relatively-small online comic to a major project.
Seriously, this is just about perfect proof that Oracle isn't even paying attention to the MySQL community. If they were paying even the smallest iota of attention, they would have realized that changing the license terms on *anything* would be a big deal to the users, who are already a bit hesitant. At the very least, they would have messaged it better - told everyone up-front what they were doing, and *why*. Hell, maybe they actually have a good reason.
But now, they've lost spin control on their own action, to their #1 competitor. And the saddest part is, Oracle probably doesn't even care.
This is different. I listen in on the mainstream game chatter (ie. Kotaku et al), and this is big. The last thing to be so universally despised was what, "The War Z"? Duke Nukem Forever? I've *never* seen a console get outright hated like this - indifference, yes, or "it would be cool if it didn't cost so damn much", but never "I wouldn't take one if they were free".
It started with the announcement conference - they spent virtually no time talking about actual games. There was maybe 50 frames of actual gameplay in the entire hour-long announcement. They spent longer talking about the dog in the next Call of Duty.
The Microsoft fanboys defended with "they're saving all the gaming news for E3". Now? I haven't heard anything. Microsoft has gotten their own fanboys to shut up - that has got to be some sort of new record.
I know more people planning to buy the new Xb360 model than the Xb1. Hell, I know more people planning to buy an Ouya than the Xb1. Or who want a Surface. This is a failure beyond even the Zune.
Now, I still don't think the Xb1 is dead on arrival. It'll sell, to some. Maybe even become a decent seller, if they rebrand it as a set-top box that plays games, rather than a game console that's also a DVR/TV thing.
I question first why the program is hidden at all. Those who spy on people to catch "terrorists" are quite fond of saying "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", implying that if you want to "hide" things, you are doing something wrong.
So why, then, is the surveillance program so secret?
Life is changing. I realize that our standards are going to have to change, to tolerate increase recording and scrutiny simply because there is no way to stop it. But it should be a two-way street - we need, and deserve, more transparency from the government now than ever before.
Civilization is built upon balances of power - revolution, war, even most crime, are all caused by imbalances of power. Balances between nations brought us through the Cold War relatively undamaged. Balances between branches of government prevent coups. And, most importantly, a balance between the citizens and the government is essential - on one hand, a government with too much power will oppress its people, on the other, a government with no power cannot maintain order.
Power takes many forms. Military power. Economic power. Media power. And one that is only now being recognized - information power. That is where we have a new imbalance of power. It used to be that we had relatively little insight to what the government was doing, but they had relatively little information on us, and what they had was disconnected and incomplete. Now, they have comprehensive, connected databases, and are pushing towards even more surveillance of us. But, perversely, we are granted less and less insight into what they're doing.
You want to spy on us, record every email and phone call we make? Fine - but in return, I want every email sent to or from an elected official's or a government employee's account, I want cameras placed on every police officer broadcasting in the open 24/7 with felony penalties for tampering with it or disabling it, and I want a complete report of every cent spent by any city, county, state or federal agency.
After all, if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, now, do you?
Or, I could see a patent on genes being issued to either "God" or "The Universe", depending upon religous beliefs (or lack thereof).
Once again, I see people would rather ignore Pastafarianism than accept the objective evidence of its correctness.
I will note that DNA was obviously made by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in his image. Why else would the foundation of life be so noodley? Yet more evidence we are correct!
Still cheaper than a full employee. "Not free" does not imply "same cost as a regular employee".
My company hires a lot of interns, usually at $10/hr. If they're good, we usually hire them when they graduate, at a full salary. So we're "good" when it comes to internships. But still very cost-effective, and it's a good way to see which new graduates are worth hiring, and which aren't.
Ah, but for any overclock worth speaking of, you'll also need to overvolt. So while you are absolutely correct in theory, in practice is a different matter.
Perhaps "wall" isn't the best term - it's more of rapidly diminishing gains for rapidly increasing costs. People have hit 8GHz, but through liquid nitrogen cooling, which isn't exactly practical for consumer use.
Intel has actually been doing well at maintaining steady performance increases, except with Haswell. But instead of doing it with clock speed hikes, they've been working on IPC and ISA extensions. They've added AVX, to do 256-bit SIMD operations instead of 128-bit SSE. They've done a lot of work on making sure they do as much work per clock cycle as possible - I've seen real-world benchmarks where they exceed 1 instruction per clock. They've been growing the dispatch unit, to let a core have more operations in flight at once. They've optimized instructions, bringing some that took tens of clock cycles to complete into the single digits. They have not been sitting idly by. They may not have focused 100% on raw speed, but performance has been steadily rising by 5-15% per year, even with Haswell.
AMD's problem on the desktop isn't that they use too much power. Their problem is that they're no faster than Intel, often *slower*, while also using more power. You want an efficient computer, you go Intel. You want a powerful computer, you also go Intel, just with a larger checkbook - AMD has nothing that can compete with the higher-end i7s. You only go AMD if you want a cheap computer, or if you want good integrated graphics (which Intel actually is taking a shot at, now, in places).
However, if you are interested in massive clock speeds, you should look into RSFQ computers. Based on superconductors and some weird quantum effects (although it is not a quantum computer), they've had "transistors" oscillate in the 500GHz range. An old NSA study I read expected a first-generation computer based on the technology could reach 50GHz, eventually rising to 100GHz before speed-of-light problems become difficult to solve (at these speeds, a signal would travel only a few millimeters per clock cycle). And it's even power-efficient, running at under a millivolt. Shame they didn't follow up on the tech, as far as we know. I bet that stuff comes back into the spotlight the minute someone finds a room-temperature superconductor, though.
Tell me, did Intel deepen the pipeline when they released the Pentium 4 HT 570J, as compared to the Pentium 4 HT 560 launched a few months before? No, they didn't, but they did increase the clock speed. Same story then as now - AMD didn't deepen the pipeline, but they are pushing the clock speeds to inadvisable levels because that's the quickest way to improve performance, and they *desperately* need to improve performance.
Look, I'm not an Intel fanboy. Even with all its problems, I'm actually still planning to use an A10 in a build. But pretending AMD doesn't have a problem with IPC or power efficiency only makes you look uninformed.
No, this particular story is analogous to a 2004-era story about Intel releasing a new Pentium IV at yet-higher clocks. The current story is about a clock ramp, but the overarching narrative is the same.
The Bulldozer architecture is fundamentally broken, this time due to simple negligence (mainly in management) rather than a faulty assumption. The only way to get reasonable performance from it is to clock it to high speeds, which gives very diminishing returns. Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall. They clocked the early ones pretty aggressively already, but at the cost of power and heat (and thus, noise). But it's the same story as the Pentium IV - the smart people are on something else.
AMD seems to be trying to put itself back together. Hopefully the PS4/Xb1 wins will give them enough of a cash flow to keep them solvent until they can get a new architecture out, or at least hammer out the IPC problems with Bulldozer. On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.
Actually, to this day PCI is pretty common for sound cards. Newegg has more PCI than PCIe models listed. This isn't particularly pressing on the Mac Pro, which has pretty good integrated audio, but given how many audio professionals use a Mac, I'm surprised they didn't include one on at least the earlier models (mine is first-gen, from 2006, and has no PCI slots).
PS: Why yes, I do still have floppy drives. And a null modem cable. And I think I still have that 10BASE5 thick Ethernet card somewhere...
To be fair, there are plenty of Americans like that too. There are people I went to college with that I wouldn't take on as an unpaid intern, since their knowledge is limited exclusively to which "magic button sequences" to push in MSSQL, IIS, Cisco IOS or, if they were really lucky, one distro of Linux. Actually, some of the *teachers* I've known only taught because they couldn't get hired at any company (that would survive long enough to give them a paycheck).
And it's not just new people - I've been on conference calls with people my application is integrating with, and I end up telling *them* how to use *their* software properly because they don't *understand* it, they just have step-by-step checklists for how to do certain tasks and any deviation from that drops them down to the level of my grandmother, pecking away at random options.
I could practically hear one guy's eyes glaze over when I said "that's a bug in your program, the first time you try to duplicate an interface you get locked out of it, the only way I've found to work around it is to edit the SQLite database your programs stores its config settings in manually". They still haven't fixed that bug, by the way.
Such people are probably fine for first-level tech support, maybe even second-level at more consumer-oriented companies, but I'm finding these people in highly technical positions. Hell, I've been sitting on my ass twiddling my thumbs for the past three workdays waiting for a team of them to get their system to work.
As a guy currently dragging his old Mac Pro into the modern computer era, let me say this: Apple would have found a way to make it incompatible anyways. There are so many just-slightly-nonstandard things they have, that any significant upgrade is made a hundred times more difficult.
First are the obvious ones. Nonstandard motherboard layout. The whole case layout in general, which requires a lot of stuff be removed just to access anything beyond the drives, video card and RAM. No legacy PCI ports.
Then come the subtle incompatibilities. Only certain video cards have OS X drivers, and only an elite, overpriced few have firmware that lets them work in the BIOS/EFI stage. I have to keep the original card around just in case I ever need it. Then the hard drive caddies only work with full 3.5" drives, or with 3.5" -> 2.5" adapters that perfectly mimic a 3.5" drive (I believe a Velociraptor IcePak will work; I use a cheaper plastic one since heat isn't an issue for SSDs). There's also a custom "mini-PCIe power" port, used to provide power to PCIe cards.
Then come the dangerous ones. Apple seems fond of using standard connectors in non-standard ways. For instance, the front USB panel? That's connected to the mainboard using a SATA connector. Just don't try to plug a hard drive into it. Same for the case fans - they're four-pin, but they don't use PWM for speed control (I believe they use analog voltage instead). Which also means that Windows (should you boot into it) does not get any control over the fan speeds, or even visibility.
Finally are the downright confusing ones. On mine, there are two unused SATA ports on the motherboard, hidden behind the front fans. They're labeled "ODD_SATA", hinting that they were planning to use SATA-based optical drives instead of IDE. I thought I could just use them for additional hard drives, but nope - they somehow only work in OS X. Don't ask me how, but they managed to make it happen. I've given up and just ordered a RAID card.
So yeah, don't think for a moment that the only thing standing between the new Mac Pro and any non-trivial upgrades is the form factor. The thing standing in the way is Apple.
First, try using Metro on a multi-monitor setup. Hitting those corners is a lot harder when your mouse wants to keep rolling onto the next monitor. You also can't evenly split a monitor (as far as I've been able to tell) - you can give one app a small slice on the side, but you can't balance two windows together, which is honestly a lot more productive.
Second, all of the Metro apps I've tried so far have a massive decrease in functionality compared to their desktop equivalents. None of them are really "usable", they're just barely functional. Try accessing a remote library using the music app, for example. Can't be done, as far as I can tell. I'd actually like a Metro version of WMP, but it needs to have everything WMP has, not just the bare minimum for a music player.
I use basically every operating system at least semi-regularly. My laptop runs Windows 7, with a partition set aside for me to install Linux on one of these days. I use it both for moderate gaming and for work, regularly connecting (via PuTTY) to numerous Linux servers.
My desktop runs Windows (in the process of upgrading from Win7 to Win8, although the real benefit for me is going from x86-32 to x86-64) and OS X (it's an old Mac Pro I've been upgrading). It's been spending a good chunk of time in Windows lately (again, gaming), but OS X is there for the few Mac-specific apps I have.
My backup desktop slash home test server even runs OpenBSD. I don't know why OpenBSD in particular - just a weird personal preference. But it works perfectly for what I need: a server I can use to mess around with any weird new tech, and a light desktop for those times when both my main desktop and laptop are out of commission (which has, in fact, happened).
So what keeps me on Windows? 1) Gaming. Linux and OS X gaming is a joke, and console gaming seems to be headed the way of the arcade. If you're a serious gamer, you're on Windows. 2) Cross-platform apps tend to be best on Windows. Chrome and Firefox generally work better on Windows than on any other OS. GIMP works better on Windows than on OS X. Blender. Komodo. LibreOffice. Code::Blocks. All work just slightly better on Windows, in my experience. 3) A handful of other apps make it more attractive. Notepad++ is the best light text editor I've ever found. Paint.NET is a great lightweight image editor - good for scaling, cropping and rotating images, while being far faster than the feature-filled GIMP. And hell, Windows Media Player is the best music player I've ever found, as far as "show me my music and let me listen to it" goes. Every other OS I use (except OpenBSD) has some similar set of exclusive programs, but Windows has these. 4) Designated Windows Guy. At work, I'm one of three people who uses Windows on their work computer (we've got two Linux desktop users and a majority number of Mac users). So whenever someone finds an IE-only CSS issue, or a Javascript problem that only happens on Chrome on Windows, or so on, there's a pretty good chance they'll call on me to help test it. And if we ever get into Windows mobile development, I guess I'll be called on for that as well.
An interesting comparison is what keeps me using other systems as well: OS X I keep around for a few exclusive programs, mainly GarageBand. It's also pretty responsive on limited hardware (OS X on a fast hard drive feels about as snappy as Win7 on a slow SSD), and it runs a surprising number of programs, even games. Linux is the only logical choice for servers, since it can be trivially virtualized and can be stripped down and secured properly. It also tends to get experimental stuff far before other OSes get the same, which is one reason to try it on the desktop. It can also run on much worse hardware than any recent Windows or OS X, or on much more exotic hardware. It's a bit hard to justify on the desktop (main reason I haven't done anything with that reserved-for-linux partition is that there's no *need* for it), but it absolutely owns the server space.
Sorry, must be spending too much time reading comments on other sites. Thought you were trying to "prove" how "PC gaming" "sucks", just like 80% of the guys on most gaming sites. Apologies.
Here, have some more facts: Radeon 7870GE GPU Cores: 1280 Radeon 7950 GPU Cores: 1792 Radeon 7970GE GPU Cores: 2048 Radeon 7990 GPU Cores: 4096
Oh, and don't forget the clock speeds. The A10 and PS4 (and probably the Xb1) run at 800MHz, while many of the discrete cards run at 1GHz (only the 7950 runs at less, at 850MHz).
128bit GDDR5 is still twice the bandwidth of 128bit DDR3 (quad-pumped, not double-pumped). And won't they have banked memory, so you can have more DIMMs than channels (just like you can have four DIMMs in a dual-channel DDR3 system)?
Intel's been focusing on single-thread performance and power efficiency - Haswell basically did nothing for performance, giving a few percentage points of improvement, but dropped the power consumption down to the point that putting it in a tablet actually makes sense. Idle power was a particular focus.
AMD's been focused more on multi-threaded performance, cramming a ton of cores onto one chip. In some cases that works well, but in others they suffer heavily. They also focused on integer, not floating-point, performance. Sadly, even when playing to AMD's strengths, Intel's process node advantage (and compiler advantage, oftentimes) lets them at least keep pace.
I will agree that AMD has been much better at socket compatibility. My 2006 Intel motherboard is now three sockets out of date, while my similar-age AMD board would probably work with a current Bulldozer. And AMD's pricing, thankfully, reflects their performance. I might be getting one of the Richland chips for a low-cost SFF build I'm planning.
Unfortunately, people aren't recording for the sake of having a complete and accurate record of events. They're recording something spectacular to put on YouTube or Facebook later, and it's a safe bet that the editing will depict the police negatively, regardless of any other circumstances.
The counter to partial truths is the whole truth. If every cop camera is posting video 24/7, it's easy to find the full context. And the truth will go at least as viral as the half-truth.
I can't really think of a *portable* monitor that would work. A mini-projector, and maybe a little screen to project on, would probably be your best bet.
Alternately, there's this. Someone's figured out how to drive an iPad display using DisplayPort. You'd need to do some difficult soldering, and you wouldn't end up with a very professional-looking product (no casing), but it would be portable, high-def and somewhat cheap.
I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've been gaming recently on a 1440p monitor, which isn't exactly something people design for. And yet I haven't really noticed major issues with texture resolution - unless I'm rubbing my face in 512x512 textures, they're usually still over one texel per pixel, meaning they're being downscaled. Yes, certain console ports have problems (Call of Duty being the most prominent), but even many console games look fine at quadruple the resolution they were designed for. A bigger problem is simply UI scaling - it looks fine, but it's less than optimal for gameplay.
I'll also add that you're wrong about the bandwidth. HDMI 2.0 is still in drafts, and even 1.4 (which barely supports 2160p, at only 24FPS) is not very widespread (my brand-new monitor *and* my year-old video card only support 1.3, as far as I can tell). For 2160p content, the only real option is DisplayPort - even dual-link DVI falters in framerate at that resolution. And DisplayPort is unfortunately not too common, particularly outside the PC world.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I even held out on it for quite some time, but it really just completely lost its way. The plot split into dozens of unconnected threads, the writing went to shit, the update schedule made Valve look timely, and even the art went downhill (too pencil-y and ill-defined, lacking detail or clarity).
And honestly, even during its prime, it was never that great. The humor relied too much on "lolrandom", and the characters always suffered from "same person with different hair" syndrome. And somehow it went downhill from there.
Fortunately, it seems like all the *good* webcomics I read are also becoming Kickstarter successes. Schlock Mercenary already shipped, Dresden Codak is going to the printers, Girl Genius succeeded, and I'm pretty sure I've missed several dozen more. Most of them are being much more modest than "make a video game, even one so barely deserving of the label 'game' as a visual novel", but given how new Kickstarter is, in relative terms, I think it's good that they're not immediately trying to go from a relatively-small online comic to a major project.
Seriously, this is just about perfect proof that Oracle isn't even paying attention to the MySQL community. If they were paying even the smallest iota of attention, they would have realized that changing the license terms on *anything* would be a big deal to the users, who are already a bit hesitant. At the very least, they would have messaged it better - told everyone up-front what they were doing, and *why*. Hell, maybe they actually have a good reason.
But now, they've lost spin control on their own action, to their #1 competitor. And the saddest part is, Oracle probably doesn't even care.
This is different. I listen in on the mainstream game chatter (ie. Kotaku et al), and this is big. The last thing to be so universally despised was what, "The War Z"? Duke Nukem Forever? I've *never* seen a console get outright hated like this - indifference, yes, or "it would be cool if it didn't cost so damn much", but never "I wouldn't take one if they were free".
It started with the announcement conference - they spent virtually no time talking about actual games. There was maybe 50 frames of actual gameplay in the entire hour-long announcement. They spent longer talking about the dog in the next Call of Duty.
The Microsoft fanboys defended with "they're saving all the gaming news for E3". Now? I haven't heard anything. Microsoft has gotten their own fanboys to shut up - that has got to be some sort of new record.
I know more people planning to buy the new Xb360 model than the Xb1. Hell, I know more people planning to buy an Ouya than the Xb1. Or who want a Surface. This is a failure beyond even the Zune.
Now, I still don't think the Xb1 is dead on arrival. It'll sell, to some. Maybe even become a decent seller, if they rebrand it as a set-top box that plays games, rather than a game console that's also a DVR/TV thing.
I question first why the program is hidden at all. Those who spy on people to catch "terrorists" are quite fond of saying "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", implying that if you want to "hide" things, you are doing something wrong.
So why, then, is the surveillance program so secret?
Life is changing. I realize that our standards are going to have to change, to tolerate increase recording and scrutiny simply because there is no way to stop it. But it should be a two-way street - we need, and deserve, more transparency from the government now than ever before.
Civilization is built upon balances of power - revolution, war, even most crime, are all caused by imbalances of power. Balances between nations brought us through the Cold War relatively undamaged. Balances between branches of government prevent coups. And, most importantly, a balance between the citizens and the government is essential - on one hand, a government with too much power will oppress its people, on the other, a government with no power cannot maintain order.
Power takes many forms. Military power. Economic power. Media power. And one that is only now being recognized - information power. That is where we have a new imbalance of power. It used to be that we had relatively little insight to what the government was doing, but they had relatively little information on us, and what they had was disconnected and incomplete. Now, they have comprehensive, connected databases, and are pushing towards even more surveillance of us. But, perversely, we are granted less and less insight into what they're doing.
You want to spy on us, record every email and phone call we make? Fine - but in return, I want every email sent to or from an elected official's or a government employee's account, I want cameras placed on every police officer broadcasting in the open 24/7 with felony penalties for tampering with it or disabling it, and I want a complete report of every cent spent by any city, county, state or federal agency.
After all, if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, now, do you?
Or, I could see a patent on genes being issued to either "God" or "The Universe", depending upon religous beliefs (or lack thereof).
Once again, I see people would rather ignore Pastafarianism than accept the objective evidence of its correctness.
I will note that DNA was obviously made by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in his image. Why else would the foundation of life be so noodley? Yet more evidence we are correct!
I think step 2 is kind of unnecessary once you've developed time travel.
Still cheaper than a full employee. "Not free" does not imply "same cost as a regular employee".
My company hires a lot of interns, usually at $10/hr. If they're good, we usually hire them when they graduate, at a full salary. So we're "good" when it comes to internships. But still very cost-effective, and it's a good way to see which new graduates are worth hiring, and which aren't.
Ah, but for any overclock worth speaking of, you'll also need to overvolt. So while you are absolutely correct in theory, in practice is a different matter.
Perhaps "wall" isn't the best term - it's more of rapidly diminishing gains for rapidly increasing costs. People have hit 8GHz, but through liquid nitrogen cooling, which isn't exactly practical for consumer use.
Intel has actually been doing well at maintaining steady performance increases, except with Haswell. But instead of doing it with clock speed hikes, they've been working on IPC and ISA extensions. They've added AVX, to do 256-bit SIMD operations instead of 128-bit SSE. They've done a lot of work on making sure they do as much work per clock cycle as possible - I've seen real-world benchmarks where they exceed 1 instruction per clock. They've been growing the dispatch unit, to let a core have more operations in flight at once. They've optimized instructions, bringing some that took tens of clock cycles to complete into the single digits. They have not been sitting idly by. They may not have focused 100% on raw speed, but performance has been steadily rising by 5-15% per year, even with Haswell.
AMD's problem on the desktop isn't that they use too much power. Their problem is that they're no faster than Intel, often *slower*, while also using more power. You want an efficient computer, you go Intel. You want a powerful computer, you also go Intel, just with a larger checkbook - AMD has nothing that can compete with the higher-end i7s. You only go AMD if you want a cheap computer, or if you want good integrated graphics (which Intel actually is taking a shot at, now, in places).
However, if you are interested in massive clock speeds, you should look into RSFQ computers. Based on superconductors and some weird quantum effects (although it is not a quantum computer), they've had "transistors" oscillate in the 500GHz range. An old NSA study I read expected a first-generation computer based on the technology could reach 50GHz, eventually rising to 100GHz before speed-of-light problems become difficult to solve (at these speeds, a signal would travel only a few millimeters per clock cycle). And it's even power-efficient, running at under a millivolt. Shame they didn't follow up on the tech, as far as we know. I bet that stuff comes back into the spotlight the minute someone finds a room-temperature superconductor, though.
Tell me, did Intel deepen the pipeline when they released the Pentium 4 HT 570J, as compared to the Pentium 4 HT 560 launched a few months before? No, they didn't, but they did increase the clock speed. Same story then as now - AMD didn't deepen the pipeline, but they are pushing the clock speeds to inadvisable levels because that's the quickest way to improve performance, and they *desperately* need to improve performance.
Look, I'm not an Intel fanboy. Even with all its problems, I'm actually still planning to use an A10 in a build. But pretending AMD doesn't have a problem with IPC or power efficiency only makes you look uninformed.
No, this particular story is analogous to a 2004-era story about Intel releasing a new Pentium IV at yet-higher clocks. The current story is about a clock ramp, but the overarching narrative is the same.
The Bulldozer architecture is fundamentally broken, this time due to simple negligence (mainly in management) rather than a faulty assumption. The only way to get reasonable performance from it is to clock it to high speeds, which gives very diminishing returns. Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall. They clocked the early ones pretty aggressively already, but at the cost of power and heat (and thus, noise). But it's the same story as the Pentium IV - the smart people are on something else.
AMD seems to be trying to put itself back together. Hopefully the PS4/Xb1 wins will give them enough of a cash flow to keep them solvent until they can get a new architecture out, or at least hammer out the IPC problems with Bulldozer. On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.
Actually, to this day PCI is pretty common for sound cards. Newegg has more PCI than PCIe models listed. This isn't particularly pressing on the Mac Pro, which has pretty good integrated audio, but given how many audio professionals use a Mac, I'm surprised they didn't include one on at least the earlier models (mine is first-gen, from 2006, and has no PCI slots).
PS: Why yes, I do still have floppy drives. And a null modem cable. And I think I still have that 10BASE5 thick Ethernet card somewhere...
It wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if jailbreaking wasn't the only way to install software of your choosing, not Apple's.
To be fair, there are plenty of Americans like that too. There are people I went to college with that I wouldn't take on as an unpaid intern, since their knowledge is limited exclusively to which "magic button sequences" to push in MSSQL, IIS, Cisco IOS or, if they were really lucky, one distro of Linux. Actually, some of the *teachers* I've known only taught because they couldn't get hired at any company (that would survive long enough to give them a paycheck).
And it's not just new people - I've been on conference calls with people my application is integrating with, and I end up telling *them* how to use *their* software properly because they don't *understand* it, they just have step-by-step checklists for how to do certain tasks and any deviation from that drops them down to the level of my grandmother, pecking away at random options.
I could practically hear one guy's eyes glaze over when I said "that's a bug in your program, the first time you try to duplicate an interface you get locked out of it, the only way I've found to work around it is to edit the SQLite database your programs stores its config settings in manually". They still haven't fixed that bug, by the way.
Such people are probably fine for first-level tech support, maybe even second-level at more consumer-oriented companies, but I'm finding these people in highly technical positions. Hell, I've been sitting on my ass twiddling my thumbs for the past three workdays waiting for a team of them to get their system to work.
As a guy currently dragging his old Mac Pro into the modern computer era, let me say this: Apple would have found a way to make it incompatible anyways. There are so many just-slightly-nonstandard things they have, that any significant upgrade is made a hundred times more difficult.
First are the obvious ones. Nonstandard motherboard layout. The whole case layout in general, which requires a lot of stuff be removed just to access anything beyond the drives, video card and RAM. No legacy PCI ports.
Then come the subtle incompatibilities. Only certain video cards have OS X drivers, and only an elite, overpriced few have firmware that lets them work in the BIOS/EFI stage. I have to keep the original card around just in case I ever need it. Then the hard drive caddies only work with full 3.5" drives, or with 3.5" -> 2.5" adapters that perfectly mimic a 3.5" drive (I believe a Velociraptor IcePak will work; I use a cheaper plastic one since heat isn't an issue for SSDs). There's also a custom "mini-PCIe power" port, used to provide power to PCIe cards.
Then come the dangerous ones. Apple seems fond of using standard connectors in non-standard ways. For instance, the front USB panel? That's connected to the mainboard using a SATA connector. Just don't try to plug a hard drive into it. Same for the case fans - they're four-pin, but they don't use PWM for speed control (I believe they use analog voltage instead). Which also means that Windows (should you boot into it) does not get any control over the fan speeds, or even visibility.
Finally are the downright confusing ones. On mine, there are two unused SATA ports on the motherboard, hidden behind the front fans. They're labeled "ODD_SATA", hinting that they were planning to use SATA-based optical drives instead of IDE. I thought I could just use them for additional hard drives, but nope - they somehow only work in OS X. Don't ask me how, but they managed to make it happen. I've given up and just ordered a RAID card.
So yeah, don't think for a moment that the only thing standing between the new Mac Pro and any non-trivial upgrades is the form factor. The thing standing in the way is Apple.
There's a few problems with that.
First, try using Metro on a multi-monitor setup. Hitting those corners is a lot harder when your mouse wants to keep rolling onto the next monitor. You also can't evenly split a monitor (as far as I've been able to tell) - you can give one app a small slice on the side, but you can't balance two windows together, which is honestly a lot more productive.
Second, all of the Metro apps I've tried so far have a massive decrease in functionality compared to their desktop equivalents. None of them are really "usable", they're just barely functional. Try accessing a remote library using the music app, for example. Can't be done, as far as I can tell. I'd actually like a Metro version of WMP, but it needs to have everything WMP has, not just the bare minimum for a music player.
I use basically every operating system at least semi-regularly. My laptop runs Windows 7, with a partition set aside for me to install Linux on one of these days. I use it both for moderate gaming and for work, regularly connecting (via PuTTY) to numerous Linux servers.
My desktop runs Windows (in the process of upgrading from Win7 to Win8, although the real benefit for me is going from x86-32 to x86-64) and OS X (it's an old Mac Pro I've been upgrading). It's been spending a good chunk of time in Windows lately (again, gaming), but OS X is there for the few Mac-specific apps I have.
My backup desktop slash home test server even runs OpenBSD. I don't know why OpenBSD in particular - just a weird personal preference. But it works perfectly for what I need: a server I can use to mess around with any weird new tech, and a light desktop for those times when both my main desktop and laptop are out of commission (which has, in fact, happened).
So what keeps me on Windows?
1) Gaming. Linux and OS X gaming is a joke, and console gaming seems to be headed the way of the arcade. If you're a serious gamer, you're on Windows.
2) Cross-platform apps tend to be best on Windows. Chrome and Firefox generally work better on Windows than on any other OS. GIMP works better on Windows than on OS X. Blender. Komodo. LibreOffice. Code::Blocks. All work just slightly better on Windows, in my experience.
3) A handful of other apps make it more attractive. Notepad++ is the best light text editor I've ever found. Paint.NET is a great lightweight image editor - good for scaling, cropping and rotating images, while being far faster than the feature-filled GIMP. And hell, Windows Media Player is the best music player I've ever found, as far as "show me my music and let me listen to it" goes. Every other OS I use (except OpenBSD) has some similar set of exclusive programs, but Windows has these.
4) Designated Windows Guy. At work, I'm one of three people who uses Windows on their work computer (we've got two Linux desktop users and a majority number of Mac users). So whenever someone finds an IE-only CSS issue, or a Javascript problem that only happens on Chrome on Windows, or so on, there's a pretty good chance they'll call on me to help test it. And if we ever get into Windows mobile development, I guess I'll be called on for that as well.
An interesting comparison is what keeps me using other systems as well:
OS X I keep around for a few exclusive programs, mainly GarageBand. It's also pretty responsive on limited hardware (OS X on a fast hard drive feels about as snappy as Win7 on a slow SSD), and it runs a surprising number of programs, even games.
Linux is the only logical choice for servers, since it can be trivially virtualized and can be stripped down and secured properly. It also tends to get experimental stuff far before other OSes get the same, which is one reason to try it on the desktop. It can also run on much worse hardware than any recent Windows or OS X, or on much more exotic hardware. It's a bit hard to justify on the desktop (main reason I haven't done anything with that reserved-for-linux partition is that there's no *need* for it), but it absolutely owns the server space.
Sorry, must be spending too much time reading comments on other sites. Thought you were trying to "prove" how "PC gaming" "sucks", just like 80% of the guys on most gaming sites. Apologies.
Here, have some more facts:
Radeon 7870GE GPU Cores: 1280
Radeon 7950 GPU Cores: 1792
Radeon 7970GE GPU Cores: 2048
Radeon 7990 GPU Cores: 4096
Oh, and don't forget the clock speeds. The A10 and PS4 (and probably the Xb1) run at 800MHz, while many of the discrete cards run at 1GHz (only the 7950 runs at less, at 850MHz).
Considering the ARM Cortex-A15 has better performance than the Atom, that's not saying much. Intel's been pretty neglectful of the Atom line.
128bit GDDR5 is still twice the bandwidth of 128bit DDR3 (quad-pumped, not double-pumped). And won't they have banked memory, so you can have more DIMMs than channels (just like you can have four DIMMs in a dual-channel DDR3 system)?
Depends heavily on use, though.
Intel's been focusing on single-thread performance and power efficiency - Haswell basically did nothing for performance, giving a few percentage points of improvement, but dropped the power consumption down to the point that putting it in a tablet actually makes sense. Idle power was a particular focus.
AMD's been focused more on multi-threaded performance, cramming a ton of cores onto one chip. In some cases that works well, but in others they suffer heavily. They also focused on integer, not floating-point, performance. Sadly, even when playing to AMD's strengths, Intel's process node advantage (and compiler advantage, oftentimes) lets them at least keep pace.
I will agree that AMD has been much better at socket compatibility. My 2006 Intel motherboard is now three sockets out of date, while my similar-age AMD board would probably work with a current Bulldozer. And AMD's pricing, thankfully, reflects their performance. I might be getting one of the Richland chips for a low-cost SFF build I'm planning.
Unfortunately, people aren't recording for the sake of having a complete and accurate record of events. They're recording something spectacular to put on YouTube or Facebook later, and it's a safe bet that the editing will depict the police negatively, regardless of any other circumstances.
The counter to partial truths is the whole truth. If every cop camera is posting video 24/7, it's easy to find the full context. And the truth will go at least as viral as the half-truth.
I can't really think of a *portable* monitor that would work. A mini-projector, and maybe a little screen to project on, would probably be your best bet.
Alternately, there's this. Someone's figured out how to drive an iPad display using DisplayPort. You'd need to do some difficult soldering, and you wouldn't end up with a very professional-looking product (no casing), but it would be portable, high-def and somewhat cheap.
I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've been gaming recently on a 1440p monitor, which isn't exactly something people design for. And yet I haven't really noticed major issues with texture resolution - unless I'm rubbing my face in 512x512 textures, they're usually still over one texel per pixel, meaning they're being downscaled. Yes, certain console ports have problems (Call of Duty being the most prominent), but even many console games look fine at quadruple the resolution they were designed for. A bigger problem is simply UI scaling - it looks fine, but it's less than optimal for gameplay.
I'll also add that you're wrong about the bandwidth. HDMI 2.0 is still in drafts, and even 1.4 (which barely supports 2160p, at only 24FPS) is not very widespread (my brand-new monitor *and* my year-old video card only support 1.3, as far as I can tell). For 2160p content, the only real option is DisplayPort - even dual-link DVI falters in framerate at that resolution. And DisplayPort is unfortunately not too common, particularly outside the PC world.