To put it simply and mathematically, the number of guns in the hands of crazy people is directly proportional to the number of guns, multiplied by the number of crazy people.
If everyone were completely, 100% logical, I would have no problem with making portable nuclear munitions street-legal. Similarly, if everyone were 100% batshit crazy, I would want anything more powerful than a Nerf gun to be banned.
Right now, the public and the media are demanding some way to reduce the number of gun-toting crazed nutjobs. For political reasons, the Republicans don't want to reduce the number of guns. And the Democrats are on a push for improved healthcare. Logical solution, then, is to turn the dialog towards improving our mental health system. Satisfies both political parties, ameliorates the problem it was intended to solve, and is an overall good thing to do.
Actually, I played Rage all the way through - I think it's the best game id has made since Quake ][, or maybe Q3. The shooting is fun, the driving is fun, and the game looks amazing. The story was even tolerable, with the exception of the ending.
I did. I quit before the end of the first level. An absolutely horrid game. Doom 3 I at least lasted about 30% of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. It was mostly the repetition, the constant stuff jumping at you. It's a very fatiguing game - I could probably make it through it if I took breaks to play other games every so often.
And how many of those are primarily because America is one of the largest countries in the world?
I mean, we're no China, but we're #3 for population, and the two above us are still not fully industrialized. I'm not going to argue some of the points (#19 in particular), but a lot of it is because there's just a lot of us.
And neither are purely technical solutions to a social problem.
Vaccines are a solution to a biological problem - plague and disease. The closest it gets to being a "social problem" is the people who refuse to take them, and until we get a vaccine for stupid, no technological solutions are forthcoming.
Birth control is the solution to the biological component of a complex problem (ie. overpopulation). It is used because of a social *desire* to avoid childbirth but still keep fucking, and is complemented by measures to safely support a higher population. If we tried to find a comparable solution to mass shootings, it would be finding a way to make everyone bulletproof so we can fulfill the two desires of "not having people be randomly killed by psycho nutjobs" and "not have to do anything about all the psycho nutjobs".
Everyone, repeat after me: "Technological solutions to social problems are doomed to failure."
You want to stop school shootings, here's what you do: 1) Vastly improve the mental health system. The number of deranged gunmen slaughtering kids is directly proportional to the number of deranged psychopaths. 2) Fix the media's obsession with violent tragedies. Half of them are only doing it because they'll get fame (or at least infamy) for doing so. I'm not advocating a total Herostratus solution, but do we really need to have weeks of constant news coverage for every single one of these? 3) Fix the school system. A lot of the things that would improve education overall (less focus on rote learning, stop keeping everyone generalists until college, smaller schools with a lower teacher/student ratio, etc) would also reduce student stress immensely. 4) And yeah, we could probably stand to lower gun proliferation a bit. It wouldn't have affected any of the school shootings I can recall, but it would reduce general gun violence, which isn't a bad thing. I think the laws we have right now are fine, or even too restrictive, but certain cultural biases towards prolific gun ownership could stand a change.
Er, I never said that the PS2 wasn't the cheapest, or that the Gamecube won. Because it was, and it didn't, respectively.
The PS1 was more expensive at launch, and never dropped to absolute-cheapest levels, but TCO was lower. That's the most I stretched the "cheapest wins" rule, and it's not too much of a stretch.
The "winner" of at least the last three console wars was the cheapest console.
The Wii outsold the Xbox 360 and the PS3. At some points it was outselling them *combined*, until Microsoft and Sony dropped their prices.
The PS2 outsold the Gamecube, Xbox and Dreamcast, which is generally credited to a) it being a cheaper DVD player than many dedicated DVD players, b) massive third-party support, itself caused by c) its low price.
The PS1 outsold the N64 and Saturn. Even though the N64 was slightly cheaper, it was also two years late, and had lower TCO since the games were CD-based, not cartridge-based. And don't even bring up the 3DO.
Ouya, Gamestick, Piston, Shield, and all the other microconsoles... I'm not worried that the graphics will hold them back (well, maybe Gamestick). The thing that's more likely to keep them from succeeding is a small game library. Ouya is close enough to many common Android tablets that it should be fine. Shield seems almost like a fancy demo for Nvidia's new hardware, so I doubt they'd panic if it flops. Piston (and the other Steamboxen) have one publisher behind them, which is at least enough to survive in the marketplace (ain't that right, Nintendo?).
What the hell? Full classroom price for an online course? Are they serious? Who do they think they are? The RIAA?
Of course not! The RIAA would charge double for the privilege of online classes. Then go cry to the government when they got only four students, who they would sue for copyright infringement (they're obviously uploading all their valuable knowledge to the limetorrentz or pirate bays), before finally deciding that on-the-job training should be made illegal because it horns in on their monopoly.
1) 8GB isn't much RAM. My laptop is packing 12GB and a slot to spare, and I know of several gamers who rock 64GB so they can put games on a ramdisk for instant loading.
2) Games are too big to install to any reasonably-priced SSD, and are often optimized for sequential access due to consoles still running off optical disks. So installing games to a spinning rust disk makes more sense than installing them to an oversized thumb drive. Thus it follows that your options are either a somewhat-tricky, more-expensive hybrid setup (as I did) or sticking to just hard drive (as he did).
Intel has always been about Value Add... There are "crippled" products on the market, sold by others as well as Intel. Sometimes it's so they can build one part in their fab, cripple the mainstream part with a fuse, and then charge a premium for the un-crippled part. Sometimes it's so a crippled system can be sold, and then for an upgrade fee, be "enhanced" in the field. But in any case, it's all about revenue. The annoying thing about this is that they've gone to extra expense and effort to produce the crippled part - the premium part would actually cost less without the extra crippling capability.
While you're correct that Intel relies heavily on testing chips, disabling whatever doesn't work/lowering the clock speed until it works, and selling it as a cheaper product, that's really a cost-saving measure, not a revenue-boosting one. When a chip rolls out with half the cores broken, they'd much rather sell it as a cheap processor than throw it away. AMD does the same thing - even more, actually. As does Nvidia, and pretty much any company that produces enough chips.
These chips are likely a high bin, not a low bin. They're testing for stability at low clock speeds and low voltages, and these are probably the best they have. As you said, there's also a chance that the low power parts may be a deep sort out of the distribution, and there aren't many.
As a different perspective, Intel has also evolved into a performance-oriented company. I don't think that as a company they're very comfortable with this whole "power thing", and I think a limited production like this is probably the way to sell it to management and marketing.
That was the Intel of the early- to mid-2000s. Surprisingly enough, when they got their ass kicked in the Athlon XP/64 vs. Pentium IV wars, they learned from it. They obsess over instructions-per-clock now, not clock speed (old Intel) or core count (current AMD). They've actually been designing their microarchitectures for the laptop, not desktop, for years now, ever since Core 2. They build a 25W laptop chip, then scale it up to meet the 50W-130W desktop and server market (and scale it down to 10W for the even more power-conscious computers). And they've been maintaining a separate microarchitecture, Atom, for the sub-10W range for years now. It's worked pretty well for them.
I wish I could say the same for AMD - they bet pretty heavily on high core counts, disregarding power consumption, and they seem to be faltering on the desktop and laptop because of it. Servers seem to be holding up better, since 130W processors aren't unusual and server applications scale better to more cores, but for the consumer market, the *only* thing they have going for them right now is Fusion, having a powerful GPU on the same die as a half-decent CPU.
Which is, of course, why Apple is keeping Samsung as a manufacturer for the time being. TSMC could literally explode and Apple could still get all the chips it needs from Samsung.
As much as we may hate them, Apple isn't stupid. They've thought about this.
Man, I'm barely two decades old and I've lived through dozens of predicted doomsdays. September 6, 1994 - the world did not end. July 1999 - the world did not end. All of the 2000 predictions, from apocalyptic Y2K bugs to Jerry Falwell, were wrong. Nibiru did not hit the Earth in 2003, probably because it doesn't exist. 6/6/2006 was unremarkable except for an abnormal number of heavy metal album releases. The Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the planet, although it did find the Higgs Boson. May 21 2011 was quiet. And the 14th b'ak'tun began with no real damage.
And those are just the ones I remember. According to Wikipedia, the "Mayan Apocalypse" was the 52nd doomsday prediction in the past two decades. And there are already five more specific predictions. There's a variant on a theory that predicted the Second Coming to occur in 1980, then 1988, then 2000, and now it's predicted for 2018-2028. Another nutjob is predicting the same for sometime in 2020-2037 (after his 1962 prediction failed). But don't worry, it's not just Christians making stupid predictions - a certain bit of the Talmud schedules the Messiah to arrive around 2240, and certain Muslims are claiming either 2129 or 2280 as the end date. And I am sure, given a few more years, the non-religious armageddon nutjobs will catch up - perhaps they'll twist the 2038 Problem into an apocalypse prediction, just like they did to Y2K.
Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software
on
Blender 2.65 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Or in fewer words, Blender is to Maya what GIMP is to Photoshop.
But you're completely ignoring the variety of special strengths and weaknesses demons have. You can't just treat them like a subtype of zombie.
For instance, zombies are generally flammable, and can be dispatched en masse with a flamethrower. Demonic hellbeasts, however, regularly withstand immense temperatures (theologians agree that Hell normally maintains a temperature of 666 degrees, although there is disagreement as to whether this is Celsius or Fahrenheit). Likewise, you should avoid incendiary ammunition, WP grenades, napalm, etc. for similar reasons.
However, they also have certain vulnerabilities. Like vampires, they are vulnerable to religious symbols and holy water (although contrary to popular belief, demons have a non-denominational hatred of religion - even your Pastafarian symbols should work). And like lawyers, they can be bound by contracts, although (like lawyers) they generally get the better end of the deal.
I'm not arguing that 16:10 monitors are some natural ideal. I'm just saying that they work well given the things we have.
It's important that movies look good on a monitor. Most movies now are 16:9, so it's important that a monitor be able to display 16:9 content well.
It's important that word-proc documents look good on a monitor. I used what is by far the most common size for paper in the country I live in, 8.5"x11" "letter size", which it matches extremely closely. I will note, on further examination, that it matches the ISO A-series well enough (1:1.2941 instead of 1:1.4142).
16:10 is a somewhat-common resolution that is very close to the golden ratio. I had one on my previous laptop, and it was the best aspect ratio I've ever used.
It's close enough to 16:9 that watching movies isn't problematic. Particularly since most are made by taking a 16:9 resolution and adding some height. Mine was 1280x800, which fit all the horizontal pixels of 720p, with small 40px black bars.
Games also worked well. It's close enough to 16:9 that you don't *really* need to change your UI, which you definitely do coming from 4:3.
It's good as-is for many tasks. Code editing worked particularly well, because you get enough width for your code and a vertical toolbar or file-browse menu. I do the same on my current 16:9 laptop, and it has more horizontal space than I really need. Stuff like Photoshop/GIMP or Blender also work well in this kind of screen.
But you can also treat it as two 4:5 monitors. Good for side-by-side tasks, like web browsing and email. Or a terminal window and a file browser. Really, 4:5 works better for regular text-editing than 4:3 or even 3:4, as it's close to the 17:22 of standard paper.
So yeah, if I could spec out whatever monitor I wanted, I'd ask for 2560x1600. 120hz and near-zero latency while we're at it. And gimme three of them. Per computer, so I'll take nine.
Imagine running static-content webservers on these. Your main bottlenecks are going to be disk and network (and maybe memory), not CPU. Or maybe running an NFS share, or anything else where the spinning disc is the biggest obstacle.
Also, do some idle-power comparisons between the Atom and the Opteron*. Maybe they use the same power under peak load, but what happens when half your processors are idling? I would imagine the Atoms do much better about dropping to very low power for this.
* Actually, it might make more sense to compare it to Xeons. Intel is trying to cover all possible server chip markets. They don't care if an AMD chip covers this niche, they just need an Intel chip to be down there.
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To put it simply and mathematically, the number of guns in the hands of crazy people is directly proportional to the number of guns, multiplied by the number of crazy people.
If everyone were completely, 100% logical, I would have no problem with making portable nuclear munitions street-legal. Similarly, if everyone were 100% batshit crazy, I would want anything more powerful than a Nerf gun to be banned.
Right now, the public and the media are demanding some way to reduce the number of gun-toting crazed nutjobs. For political reasons, the Republicans don't want to reduce the number of guns. And the Democrats are on a push for improved healthcare. Logical solution, then, is to turn the dialog towards improving our mental health system. Satisfies both political parties, ameliorates the problem it was intended to solve, and is an overall good thing to do.
Actually, I played Rage all the way through - I think it's the best game id has made since Quake ][, or maybe Q3. The shooting is fun, the driving is fun, and the game looks amazing. The story was even tolerable, with the exception of the ending.
Did you actually play Daikatana?
I did. I quit before the end of the first level. An absolutely horrid game. Doom 3 I at least lasted about 30% of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. It was mostly the repetition, the constant stuff jumping at you. It's a very fatiguing game - I could probably make it through it if I took breaks to play other games every so often.
DRM free
Not so fast.
And how many of those are primarily because America is one of the largest countries in the world?
I mean, we're no China, but we're #3 for population, and the two above us are still not fully industrialized. I'm not going to argue some of the points (#19 in particular), but a lot of it is because there's just a lot of us.
And neither are purely technical solutions to a social problem.
Vaccines are a solution to a biological problem - plague and disease. The closest it gets to being a "social problem" is the people who refuse to take them, and until we get a vaccine for stupid, no technological solutions are forthcoming.
Birth control is the solution to the biological component of a complex problem (ie. overpopulation). It is used because of a social *desire* to avoid childbirth but still keep fucking, and is complemented by measures to safely support a higher population. If we tried to find a comparable solution to mass shootings, it would be finding a way to make everyone bulletproof so we can fulfill the two desires of "not having people be randomly killed by psycho nutjobs" and "not have to do anything about all the psycho nutjobs".
Everyone, repeat after me: "Technological solutions to social problems are doomed to failure."
You want to stop school shootings, here's what you do:
1) Vastly improve the mental health system. The number of deranged gunmen slaughtering kids is directly proportional to the number of deranged psychopaths.
2) Fix the media's obsession with violent tragedies. Half of them are only doing it because they'll get fame (or at least infamy) for doing so. I'm not advocating a total Herostratus solution, but do we really need to have weeks of constant news coverage for every single one of these?
3) Fix the school system. A lot of the things that would improve education overall (less focus on rote learning, stop keeping everyone generalists until college, smaller schools with a lower teacher/student ratio, etc) would also reduce student stress immensely.
4) And yeah, we could probably stand to lower gun proliferation a bit. It wouldn't have affected any of the school shootings I can recall, but it would reduce general gun violence, which isn't a bad thing. I think the laws we have right now are fine, or even too restrictive, but certain cultural biases towards prolific gun ownership could stand a change.
Er, I never said that the PS2 wasn't the cheapest, or that the Gamecube won. Because it was, and it didn't, respectively.
The PS1 was more expensive at launch, and never dropped to absolute-cheapest levels, but TCO was lower. That's the most I stretched the "cheapest wins" rule, and it's not too much of a stretch.
Fact:
The "winner" of at least the last three console wars was the cheapest console.
The Wii outsold the Xbox 360 and the PS3. At some points it was outselling them *combined*, until Microsoft and Sony dropped their prices.
The PS2 outsold the Gamecube, Xbox and Dreamcast, which is generally credited to a) it being a cheaper DVD player than many dedicated DVD players, b) massive third-party support, itself caused by c) its low price.
The PS1 outsold the N64 and Saturn. Even though the N64 was slightly cheaper, it was also two years late, and had lower TCO since the games were CD-based, not cartridge-based. And don't even bring up the 3DO.
Ouya, Gamestick, Piston, Shield, and all the other microconsoles... I'm not worried that the graphics will hold them back (well, maybe Gamestick). The thing that's more likely to keep them from succeeding is a small game library. Ouya is close enough to many common Android tablets that it should be fine. Shield seems almost like a fancy demo for Nvidia's new hardware, so I doubt they'd panic if it flops. Piston (and the other Steamboxen) have one publisher behind them, which is at least enough to survive in the marketplace (ain't that right, Nintendo?).
What the hell? Full classroom price for an online course? Are they serious? Who do they think they are? The RIAA?
Of course not! The RIAA would charge double for the privilege of online classes. Then go cry to the government when they got only four students, who they would sue for copyright infringement (they're obviously uploading all their valuable knowledge to the limetorrentz or pirate bays), before finally deciding that on-the-job training should be made illegal because it horns in on their monopoly.
1) 8GB isn't much RAM. My laptop is packing 12GB and a slot to spare, and I know of several gamers who rock 64GB so they can put games on a ramdisk for instant loading.
2) Games are too big to install to any reasonably-priced SSD, and are often optimized for sequential access due to consoles still running off optical disks. So installing games to a spinning rust disk makes more sense than installing them to an oversized thumb drive. Thus it follows that your options are either a somewhat-tricky, more-expensive hybrid setup (as I did) or sticking to just hard drive (as he did).
Intel has always been about Value Add... There are "crippled" products on the market, sold by others as well as Intel. Sometimes it's so they can build one part in their fab, cripple the mainstream part with a fuse, and then charge a premium for the un-crippled part. Sometimes it's so a crippled system can be sold, and then for an upgrade fee, be "enhanced" in the field. But in any case, it's all about revenue. The annoying thing about this is that they've gone to extra expense and effort to produce the crippled part - the premium part would actually cost less without the extra crippling capability.
While you're correct that Intel relies heavily on testing chips, disabling whatever doesn't work/lowering the clock speed until it works, and selling it as a cheaper product, that's really a cost-saving measure, not a revenue-boosting one. When a chip rolls out with half the cores broken, they'd much rather sell it as a cheap processor than throw it away. AMD does the same thing - even more, actually. As does Nvidia, and pretty much any company that produces enough chips.
These chips are likely a high bin, not a low bin. They're testing for stability at low clock speeds and low voltages, and these are probably the best they have. As you said, there's also a chance that the low power parts may be a deep sort out of the distribution, and there aren't many.
As a different perspective, Intel has also evolved into a performance-oriented company. I don't think that as a company they're very comfortable with this whole "power thing", and I think a limited production like this is probably the way to sell it to management and marketing.
That was the Intel of the early- to mid-2000s. Surprisingly enough, when they got their ass kicked in the Athlon XP/64 vs. Pentium IV wars, they learned from it. They obsess over instructions-per-clock now, not clock speed (old Intel) or core count (current AMD). They've actually been designing their microarchitectures for the laptop, not desktop, for years now, ever since Core 2. They build a 25W laptop chip, then scale it up to meet the 50W-130W desktop and server market (and scale it down to 10W for the even more power-conscious computers). And they've been maintaining a separate microarchitecture, Atom, for the sub-10W range for years now. It's worked pretty well for them.
I wish I could say the same for AMD - they bet pretty heavily on high core counts, disregarding power consumption, and they seem to be faltering on the desktop and laptop because of it. Servers seem to be holding up better, since 130W processors aren't unusual and server applications scale better to more cores, but for the consumer market, the *only* thing they have going for them right now is Fusion, having a powerful GPU on the same die as a half-decent CPU.
Maybe you have to include the odometer reading when you file your car's property tax or registration or something?
I suppose "constantly fucking each other up the ass" counts as "cozy"...
Which is, of course, why Apple is keeping Samsung as a manufacturer for the time being. TSMC could literally explode and Apple could still get all the chips it needs from Samsung.
As much as we may hate them, Apple isn't stupid. They've thought about this.
I believe the proper unit, then, would be 100 Megapedestrians. I would suggest abbreviating to 100 MPd, except that looks like Megapalladium.
MS-DOS.
You kind of need "privileges" in order to have privilege escalation.
Man, I'm barely two decades old and I've lived through dozens of predicted doomsdays. September 6, 1994 - the world did not end. July 1999 - the world did not end. All of the 2000 predictions, from apocalyptic Y2K bugs to Jerry Falwell, were wrong. Nibiru did not hit the Earth in 2003, probably because it doesn't exist. 6/6/2006 was unremarkable except for an abnormal number of heavy metal album releases. The Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the planet, although it did find the Higgs Boson. May 21 2011 was quiet. And the 14th b'ak'tun began with no real damage.
And those are just the ones I remember. According to Wikipedia, the "Mayan Apocalypse" was the 52nd doomsday prediction in the past two decades. And there are already five more specific predictions. There's a variant on a theory that predicted the Second Coming to occur in 1980, then 1988, then 2000, and now it's predicted for 2018-2028. Another nutjob is predicting the same for sometime in 2020-2037 (after his 1962 prediction failed). But don't worry, it's not just Christians making stupid predictions - a certain bit of the Talmud schedules the Messiah to arrive around 2240, and certain Muslims are claiming either 2129 or 2280 as the end date. And I am sure, given a few more years, the non-religious armageddon nutjobs will catch up - perhaps they'll twist the 2038 Problem into an apocalypse prediction, just like they did to Y2K.
Or in fewer words, Blender is to Maya what GIMP is to Photoshop.
I was fiddling around all last week to try to get a decent fire in Blender using particle systems.
This should make it a snap.
Meh. Call me when they're PCI Express certified.
But you're completely ignoring the variety of special strengths and weaknesses demons have. You can't just treat them like a subtype of zombie.
For instance, zombies are generally flammable, and can be dispatched en masse with a flamethrower. Demonic hellbeasts, however, regularly withstand immense temperatures (theologians agree that Hell normally maintains a temperature of 666 degrees, although there is disagreement as to whether this is Celsius or Fahrenheit). Likewise, you should avoid incendiary ammunition, WP grenades, napalm, etc. for similar reasons.
However, they also have certain vulnerabilities. Like vampires, they are vulnerable to religious symbols and holy water (although contrary to popular belief, demons have a non-denominational hatred of religion - even your Pastafarian symbols should work). And like lawyers, they can be bound by contracts, although (like lawyers) they generally get the better end of the deal.
I'm not arguing that 16:10 monitors are some natural ideal. I'm just saying that they work well given the things we have.
It's important that movies look good on a monitor. Most movies now are 16:9, so it's important that a monitor be able to display 16:9 content well.
It's important that word-proc documents look good on a monitor. I used what is by far the most common size for paper in the country I live in, 8.5"x11" "letter size", which it matches extremely closely. I will note, on further examination, that it matches the ISO A-series well enough (1:1.2941 instead of 1:1.4142).
Because it actually does work better.
16:10 is a somewhat-common resolution that is very close to the golden ratio. I had one on my previous laptop, and it was the best aspect ratio I've ever used.
It's close enough to 16:9 that watching movies isn't problematic. Particularly since most are made by taking a 16:9 resolution and adding some height. Mine was 1280x800, which fit all the horizontal pixels of 720p, with small 40px black bars.
Games also worked well. It's close enough to 16:9 that you don't *really* need to change your UI, which you definitely do coming from 4:3.
It's good as-is for many tasks. Code editing worked particularly well, because you get enough width for your code and a vertical toolbar or file-browse menu. I do the same on my current 16:9 laptop, and it has more horizontal space than I really need. Stuff like Photoshop/GIMP or Blender also work well in this kind of screen.
But you can also treat it as two 4:5 monitors. Good for side-by-side tasks, like web browsing and email. Or a terminal window and a file browser. Really, 4:5 works better for regular text-editing than 4:3 or even 3:4, as it's close to the 17:22 of standard paper.
So yeah, if I could spec out whatever monitor I wanted, I'd ask for 2560x1600. 120hz and near-zero latency while we're at it. And gimme three of them. Per computer, so I'll take nine.
The use case for these isn't compute-intensive.
Imagine running static-content webservers on these. Your main bottlenecks are going to be disk and network (and maybe memory), not CPU. Or maybe running an NFS share, or anything else where the spinning disc is the biggest obstacle.
Also, do some idle-power comparisons between the Atom and the Opteron*. Maybe they use the same power under peak load, but what happens when half your processors are idling? I would imagine the Atoms do much better about dropping to very low power for this.
* Actually, it might make more sense to compare it to Xeons. Intel is trying to cover all possible server chip markets. They don't care if an AMD chip covers this niche, they just need an Intel chip to be down there.