Bring it. I claim to be a general video game geek (specialization in FPSes, but decently knowledgeable in golden/silver age JRPGs), Star Wars geek (Expanded Universe up to New Jedi Order), and military history geek. Test me.
That's if it's only a minor story. If we make this a Big Fucking Deal [tm], get the media talking about it on a broad level. "Cancergate"-level.
And the presidential election campaigns are just getting started. If we make this an election issue... oh man. Flawless victory.
Here's the thing - nobody really supports them. Nobody with real power, at least. The only thing keeping them in place is the general apathy of America - we have not, collectively, given a shit about it. It's like the WTC reconstruction - everybody thinks "something ought to be done", but nobody says "I'll do something about it
As for me, I'm writing up an email to my senators, telling them basically this - that everybody hates the machines, and getting rid of them would be a major publicity win for whoever can take credit.
If you can't beat the system from without, beat it from within. We should throw as much support as possible behind this - get some lawyers in there, get some reporters over there, do whatever we can.
QPI is only used on multiprocessor-capable Xeons and a very few "enthusiast" desktop processors. Sandy Bridge uses something called "DMI", which is essentially a PCIe x4 bus. Only the Nehalem i7s, the Westmere and Gulftown Xeons, and the Tukwila Itaniums use QPI. Even some of the Xeons use DMI - the smaller, single-processor-only Xeon E3s.
Interestingly, AMD has a similar bus - UMI, which is used on the new "Fusion" processors. Which are designed for use in tablets and smartphones, not computers, so HyperTransport is overkill.
The way I tend to look at it is "AMD gives you the most bang for your buck; Intel gives you the most bang". AMD CPUs are cheap - I got a Black Edition (unlocked multipier, high-end) Phenom II X3 for about the cost of a low-end Core 2 Duo. It's more than fast enough for most usage, and the cost is great. But AMD can't really compete with the highest-end Intel processors - their hexa-core Phenoms are roughly a match for the quad-core Intels, and they can't beat the hexa-core i7s. Server-side, Intel isn't afraid to just throw cache at a processor - the 8-core (16-thread) Xeons max out at 24MB of cache, over double the most expensive 12-core Opterons.
If you've got money to burn, or if you justifiably need more power than AMD can give you, or even if you're just compensating for something, Intel's a good choice. But I can see why AMD is making progress in supercomputers - huge machines like that, you kind of have to assume that things scale to more processors. So AMD's processors might only provide 75% the performance of Intel's, but they do it at 50% the cost. Scientists like how that math works out.
I've also noticed that AMD is moving into businesses pretty well. A lot of simple work desktops seem to be sporting an "AMD Business Class" sticker lately.
Grab a TI calculator. Learn the slightly weird version of BASIC installed on them. That's where I got my start.
You can write an actually useful program in just a few lines. It's got a few simple data types (floats, strings, lists and matrices), has a few basic functions (Disp, Input), and all the common language constructs (If-Then-Else, For, While, Goto). There's a few oddities (assignment is reversed, instead of "a = 2" you have "2 -> a"), and there's no proper way to declare a function (you can either make another program and call it, or use goto), but you can do a surprising amount with it.
I programmed those for a year or so. Tried learning assembly to get around the limits of Basic (mostly the speed), couldn't do it. But I did get into C++, and later all the other "real" languages, and am now pretty much a real programmer.
I just had to order a new power brick from Asus. They have three models to cover all their laptops: a "standard" 90W, a "notebook" 40W, and a "super" 120W. Which seems reasonable - a power brick that supplies 120W is going to be very inefficient under a 40W load. I can't imagine how inefficient a 240W one would be under 20W of load. Plus, the plug size needed for that much power would possibly be a size concern on a tiny netbook or tablet. And what happens when someone inevitably makes a laptop that draws more than 240W?
I think a better solution would be having a small range of standards, designed for different power needs. Have a standard connector that scales depending on the power it provides - it would be 5mm for 100W, 7mm for 200W, etc. If possible, make the higher-power plugs fit into the lower-power sockets, so you can charge your 70W netbook off your 120W laptop charger. Should be relatively simple.
Game programming is not like most "real" programming - it's designed differently, implemented differently, and fundamentally just differs. Game programming is full of coding in the exceptional cases - run doMainBattleLoop(), unless you're in a boss battle and in a round less than 4, when you should run doBossBanterBattleLoop(), unless you're in a battle with Boss X and it isn't the final one, when you should add a branch to the end to call doBossRunawayScene() instead of doBattleEndScene(), but if it's the actual last battle, jump to doBattleEndSceneFinal(), then call doCreditsMinigameLoop() after expanding backgroundMusicBuffer from 10 minutes to 20 so it doesn't crash while loading that big long ending song the music guy wrote...
Not to mention the language issues. I'm willing to bet the school's using UE3. That engine does a lot of game stuff (weapons code, broad AI coding, etc.) in a proprietary "UnrealScript" - similar in syntax to JavaScript, but with a completely different DOM model, and with a lot of added functions.
All this is going to do is teach students bad coding and bad game design.
1).22 LR is generally considered a pistol round, even though it has "rifle" in the name.
2) HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU THINK THE AK47 USES 7.62mm NATO? DID YOU NOT PAY ATTENTION AT ALL TO THE PAST 65 YEARS OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS? DOES THE TERM "THE COLD WAR" MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?
3) There are two general types of body armor, "soft" and "hard". You were using "hard". Most police forces do not use that - "soft" is much cheaper, much easier to move in, and will still stop 99% of the stuff police have to deal with.
4) You officially fail metric. 5.56mm is.223 inches - 22.3mm is.87 inches, significantly larger than any rifle, pistol, or shotgun shell still in use. If you are ex-military (you seem to be implying you are; I am explicitly doubting so), you're probably familiar with the 20mm shell - used by many small autocannons and the larger miniguns, generally in an anti-tank, anti-vehicle or (sometimes) anti-aircraft role.
5) A bullet with a 9mm diameter has a cross-sectional area of (9/2)^2*pi, or 63 mm^2.
6) What do you call debris being thrown by an artillery shell exploding? "Fragments" sounds like as good a term as any.
Agreed. I was once fired from a lame part-time job. I still smile every time I pass by the now-closed location - they literally couldn't last two months without me, as I was quite often the only one (of a shift of 6) not on a smoke break.
I am aware of the differences between soft armor and hard armor, as well as most of your other info (the 5.45 bit is new to me, though). I was simply trying to avoid needlessly complicating things. But thank you for providing more information for anyone who needs it.
It's... complicated. I believe the general opinion is that, for general penetration (ie. bricks, brush, etc.), 7.62x39mm will match or outperform the newer 5.56mm/5.45mm rounds. But for body armor specifically designed to stop bullets, the newer rounds significantly outperform.
Of course, my info is coming from US DoD information, so it could be biased.
In any case, against common police-type body armor, either one will work just fine.
Had you read more than the first thirteen words on the Wikipedia article, you would have learned that body armor of that type is used almost exclusively by the military. Last I checked, small-town SWAT doesn't normally go out with $1500 in body armor plates.
Correction: Body armor rarely stops rifle rounds. Most body armor will protect against pistol bullets, shotgun pellets, or artillery/grenade fragments. Even most military body armor is relatively useless against rifle rounds - police armor, definitely not. SWAT, perhaps, has armor that can stop an AK47 round (a rather slow-moving round for a rifle), but a common 5.56mm or 5.45mm will go right through it. And you can forget about any of the heavier rounds - there is NOTHING that will save you from a (civilian-legal in the US).50BMG round, save being somewhere else while the shooting is going on.
Body armor's not magic. It can save you from a lot of stuff, the kind of stuff police and armies commonly encounter. Pistols - lightweight bullets, at relatively low velocity, and often designed to fragment on impact - are common and easy to protect from, since they have such low momentum to stop. Artillery kills mainly by fragments, which are also easily stopped. Same for grenades - movies and games massively understate the range on them: a fragmentation grenade can often kill someone half a football field away, if the tiny shards of metal fly in the right direction. But rifles? The most common light rifle round, 5.56x45mm, has 1800 joules of energy. The most common pistol round, 9x19mm, has 570-700 J, depending on make. That's a whole lot more energy to stop, and it's concentrated into a much smaller area (24mm^2 instead of 63mm^2).
He's asking for a tool that will identify downloaded files, which means he only has to sift through those instead of all of them.
Going by my own collection (~20gb, ~7000 files), OP probably has around 20,000 songs. Even if a tool only shows half of them as definitely clean, that's 10,000 songs he doesn't have to check.
I'm sure you blame the poor for having to steal food as well.
Face it - to a significant number of people, piracy isn't an ethical problem or a "real" crime. It's like speeding - sure, it's technically illegal, but last I checked pretty much everyone drove 5-10 mph above the posted limit.
Oddly, I've never seen this happen. Plenty of times, I've been playing online, and some girl comes on the team chat, and... we keep playing. Treat her just like anyone else. I'm not saying that your scenario never happens, but in my own experience, it's the exception, rather than the rule.
Of course, I'm "glorious PC master race". Perhaps it's a different culture on XBox Live?
Now list any games about the Eastern Front. Not many - almost every WW2 game focuses on D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll have a bit of Patton vs. Rommel in North Africa, but even that's uncommon.
Yes, there's a few Eastern Front games. Ostfront 1941, part of Call of Duty 2... and that's all I can think of.
I use DropBox, but I don't trust it to actually be secure. So I use it as a publishing tool and offsite backup for public things. All the stuff I have on there is essentially public - a bunch of images I wanted to share, and a few tarballs of GPL'ed source code to a game I'm writing. I have copies on my local machine, so Dropbox could collapse into a black hole without me losing any data. It's all stuff I want people to see, so the privacy and security of the account aren't of any concern.
Stuff like this have essentially proven that I was correct in not trusting Dropbox. It's a great tool - it's the easiest way to make 50 images publicly-viewable, and it's a good simple way to mirror some big file - but I don't think it's yet secure enough to be as safe as local data storage.
I use sudo on the single-user desktop/server I keep at home. Sure, sudo is configured so that user gman can do anything he wants to do if he puts the word "sudo" in front of it. But 1) it builds good habits for when I eventually work on multi-admin servers, 2) it means that when I wake up with my head on the keyboard, still slightly hung over, and find my system is completely f&$%ed, I can check the logs to see exactly what I did, and exactly what I shouldn't do next time.
It's multiple cores. Usually in the low hundreds, but some have over a thousand - a Radeon HD 6990 has, if my data is correct, 3072 cores running at 830mHz, combined with 4GB of memory optimized for parallel access. Although to be fair, it does so with about triple the power consumption of a high-end desktop processor. So compare it to, say, three i7 CPUs - you'd get 18 cores (that act like 36 because of SMT), clocked at 3466mHz.
Of course, a GPU would fail spectacularly at a lot of things. They'd probably run EMACS worse than a Pentium II - GPU processors are relatively bad at branch or jump instructions, something general-purpose programs use quite a bit.
Or just double the fine every month it's not fixed.
FTFY.. Year is too long - it would take a nearly a decade for it to reach the billions if done by the year. Do it by the month, and the problem is solved by 2012.
Or make the fine relative to the amount crammed - if a company gets $100m by doing it, fine them $200m. If they only cram $10k, fine them $20k.
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Bring it. I claim to be a general video game geek (specialization in FPSes, but decently knowledgeable in golden/silver age JRPGs), Star Wars geek (Expanded Universe up to New Jedi Order), and military history geek. Test me.
That's if it's only a minor story. If we make this a Big Fucking Deal [tm], get the media talking about it on a broad level. "Cancergate"-level.
And the presidential election campaigns are just getting started. If we make this an election issue... oh man. Flawless victory.
Here's the thing - nobody really supports them. Nobody with real power, at least. The only thing keeping them in place is the general apathy of America - we have not, collectively, given a shit about it. It's like the WTC reconstruction - everybody thinks "something ought to be done", but nobody says "I'll do something about it
As for me, I'm writing up an email to my senators, telling them basically this - that everybody hates the machines, and getting rid of them would be a major publicity win for whoever can take credit.
If you can't beat the system from without, beat it from within. We should throw as much support as possible behind this - get some lawyers in there, get some reporters over there, do whatever we can.
QPI is only used on multiprocessor-capable Xeons and a very few "enthusiast" desktop processors. Sandy Bridge uses something called "DMI", which is essentially a PCIe x4 bus. Only the Nehalem i7s, the Westmere and Gulftown Xeons, and the Tukwila Itaniums use QPI. Even some of the Xeons use DMI - the smaller, single-processor-only Xeon E3s.
Interestingly, AMD has a similar bus - UMI, which is used on the new "Fusion" processors. Which are designed for use in tablets and smartphones, not computers, so HyperTransport is overkill.
The way I tend to look at it is "AMD gives you the most bang for your buck; Intel gives you the most bang". AMD CPUs are cheap - I got a Black Edition (unlocked multipier, high-end) Phenom II X3 for about the cost of a low-end Core 2 Duo. It's more than fast enough for most usage, and the cost is great. But AMD can't really compete with the highest-end Intel processors - their hexa-core Phenoms are roughly a match for the quad-core Intels, and they can't beat the hexa-core i7s. Server-side, Intel isn't afraid to just throw cache at a processor - the 8-core (16-thread) Xeons max out at 24MB of cache, over double the most expensive 12-core Opterons.
If you've got money to burn, or if you justifiably need more power than AMD can give you, or even if you're just compensating for something, Intel's a good choice. But I can see why AMD is making progress in supercomputers - huge machines like that, you kind of have to assume that things scale to more processors. So AMD's processors might only provide 75% the performance of Intel's, but they do it at 50% the cost. Scientists like how that math works out.
I've also noticed that AMD is moving into businesses pretty well. A lot of simple work desktops seem to be sporting an "AMD Business Class" sticker lately.
Grab a TI calculator. Learn the slightly weird version of BASIC installed on them. That's where I got my start.
You can write an actually useful program in just a few lines. It's got a few simple data types (floats, strings, lists and matrices), has a few basic functions (Disp, Input), and all the common language constructs (If-Then-Else, For, While, Goto). There's a few oddities (assignment is reversed, instead of "a = 2" you have "2 -> a"), and there's no proper way to declare a function (you can either make another program and call it, or use goto), but you can do a surprising amount with it.
I programmed those for a year or so. Tried learning assembly to get around the limits of Basic (mostly the speed), couldn't do it. But I did get into C++, and later all the other "real" languages, and am now pretty much a real programmer.
I just had to order a new power brick from Asus. They have three models to cover all their laptops: a "standard" 90W, a "notebook" 40W, and a "super" 120W. Which seems reasonable - a power brick that supplies 120W is going to be very inefficient under a 40W load. I can't imagine how inefficient a 240W one would be under 20W of load. Plus, the plug size needed for that much power would possibly be a size concern on a tiny netbook or tablet. And what happens when someone inevitably makes a laptop that draws more than 240W?
I think a better solution would be having a small range of standards, designed for different power needs. Have a standard connector that scales depending on the power it provides - it would be 5mm for 100W, 7mm for 200W, etc. If possible, make the higher-power plugs fit into the lower-power sockets, so you can charge your 70W netbook off your 120W laptop charger. Should be relatively simple.
And this is why the terrorists have won. We're terrorized. Mission accomplished.
Game programming is not like most "real" programming - it's designed differently, implemented differently, and fundamentally just differs. Game programming is full of coding in the exceptional cases - run doMainBattleLoop(), unless you're in a boss battle and in a round less than 4, when you should run doBossBanterBattleLoop(), unless you're in a battle with Boss X and it isn't the final one, when you should add a branch to the end to call doBossRunawayScene() instead of doBattleEndScene(), but if it's the actual last battle, jump to doBattleEndSceneFinal(), then call doCreditsMinigameLoop() after expanding backgroundMusicBuffer from 10 minutes to 20 so it doesn't crash while loading that big long ending song the music guy wrote...
Not to mention the language issues. I'm willing to bet the school's using UE3. That engine does a lot of game stuff (weapons code, broad AI coding, etc.) in a proprietary "UnrealScript" - similar in syntax to JavaScript, but with a completely different DOM model, and with a lot of added functions.
All this is going to do is teach students bad coding and bad game design.
1) .22 LR is generally considered a pistol round, even though it has "rifle" in the name.
.223 inches - 22.3mm is .87 inches, significantly larger than any rifle, pistol, or shotgun shell still in use. If you are ex-military (you seem to be implying you are; I am explicitly doubting so), you're probably familiar with the 20mm shell - used by many small autocannons and the larger miniguns, generally in an anti-tank, anti-vehicle or (sometimes) anti-aircraft role.
2) HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU THINK THE AK47 USES 7.62mm NATO? DID YOU NOT PAY ATTENTION AT ALL TO THE PAST 65 YEARS OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS? DOES THE TERM "THE COLD WAR" MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?
3) There are two general types of body armor, "soft" and "hard". You were using "hard". Most police forces do not use that - "soft" is much cheaper, much easier to move in, and will still stop 99% of the stuff police have to deal with.
4) You officially fail metric. 5.56mm is
5) A bullet with a 9mm diameter has a cross-sectional area of (9/2)^2*pi, or 63 mm^2.
6) What do you call debris being thrown by an artillery shell exploding? "Fragments" sounds like as good a term as any.
Agreed. I was once fired from a lame part-time job. I still smile every time I pass by the now-closed location - they literally couldn't last two months without me, as I was quite often the only one (of a shift of 6) not on a smoke break.
I am aware of the differences between soft armor and hard armor, as well as most of your other info (the 5.45 bit is new to me, though). I was simply trying to avoid needlessly complicating things. But thank you for providing more information for anyone who needs it.
I didn't want to get into the hunting cartridges, mainly because it makes the math more complicated.
.22LR. Because it's dirt-cheap (both the guns and the ammo), and generally easy to conceal.
PS: Most common round used by criminals in the US?
It's... complicated. I believe the general opinion is that, for general penetration (ie. bricks, brush, etc.), 7.62x39mm will match or outperform the newer 5.56mm/5.45mm rounds. But for body armor specifically designed to stop bullets, the newer rounds significantly outperform.
Of course, my info is coming from US DoD information, so it could be biased.
In any case, against common police-type body armor, either one will work just fine.
Had you read more than the first thirteen words on the Wikipedia article, you would have learned that body armor of that type is used almost exclusively by the military. Last I checked, small-town SWAT doesn't normally go out with $1500 in body armor plates.
There's a difference between "hey, there's a cop here, don't break any laws", and "hey, there's a cop over here, start shooting".
Correction: Body armor rarely stops rifle rounds. Most body armor will protect against pistol bullets, shotgun pellets, or artillery/grenade fragments. Even most military body armor is relatively useless against rifle rounds - police armor, definitely not. SWAT, perhaps, has armor that can stop an AK47 round (a rather slow-moving round for a rifle), but a common 5.56mm or 5.45mm will go right through it. And you can forget about any of the heavier rounds - there is NOTHING that will save you from a (civilian-legal in the US) .50BMG round, save being somewhere else while the shooting is going on.
Body armor's not magic. It can save you from a lot of stuff, the kind of stuff police and armies commonly encounter. Pistols - lightweight bullets, at relatively low velocity, and often designed to fragment on impact - are common and easy to protect from, since they have such low momentum to stop. Artillery kills mainly by fragments, which are also easily stopped. Same for grenades - movies and games massively understate the range on them: a fragmentation grenade can often kill someone half a football field away, if the tiny shards of metal fly in the right direction. But rifles? The most common light rifle round, 5.56x45mm, has 1800 joules of energy. The most common pistol round, 9x19mm, has 570-700 J, depending on make. That's a whole lot more energy to stop, and it's concentrated into a much smaller area (24mm^2 instead of 63mm^2).
He's asking for a tool that will identify downloaded files, which means he only has to sift through those instead of all of them.
Going by my own collection (~20gb, ~7000 files), OP probably has around 20,000 songs. Even if a tool only shows half of them as definitely clean, that's 10,000 songs he doesn't have to check.
I'm sure you blame the poor for having to steal food as well.
Face it - to a significant number of people, piracy isn't an ethical problem or a "real" crime. It's like speeding - sure, it's technically illegal, but last I checked pretty much everyone drove 5-10 mph above the posted limit.
Oddly, I've never seen this happen. Plenty of times, I've been playing online, and some girl comes on the team chat, and... we keep playing. Treat her just like anyone else. I'm not saying that your scenario never happens, but in my own experience, it's the exception, rather than the rule.
Of course, I'm "glorious PC master race". Perhaps it's a different culture on XBox Live?
Now list any games about the Eastern Front. Not many - almost every WW2 game focuses on D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll have a bit of Patton vs. Rommel in North Africa, but even that's uncommon.
Yes, there's a few Eastern Front games. Ostfront 1941, part of Call of Duty 2... and that's all I can think of.
I use DropBox, but I don't trust it to actually be secure. So I use it as a publishing tool and offsite backup for public things. All the stuff I have on there is essentially public - a bunch of images I wanted to share, and a few tarballs of GPL'ed source code to a game I'm writing. I have copies on my local machine, so Dropbox could collapse into a black hole without me losing any data. It's all stuff I want people to see, so the privacy and security of the account aren't of any concern.
Stuff like this have essentially proven that I was correct in not trusting Dropbox. It's a great tool - it's the easiest way to make 50 images publicly-viewable, and it's a good simple way to mirror some big file - but I don't think it's yet secure enough to be as safe as local data storage.
I use sudo on the single-user desktop/server I keep at home. Sure, sudo is configured so that user gman can do anything he wants to do if he puts the word "sudo" in front of it. But 1) it builds good habits for when I eventually work on multi-admin servers, 2) it means that when I wake up with my head on the keyboard, still slightly hung over, and find my system is completely f&$%ed, I can check the logs to see exactly what I did, and exactly what I shouldn't do next time.
It's multiple cores. Usually in the low hundreds, but some have over a thousand - a Radeon HD 6990 has, if my data is correct, 3072 cores running at 830mHz, combined with 4GB of memory optimized for parallel access. Although to be fair, it does so with about triple the power consumption of a high-end desktop processor. So compare it to, say, three i7 CPUs - you'd get 18 cores (that act like 36 because of SMT), clocked at 3466mHz.
Of course, a GPU would fail spectacularly at a lot of things. They'd probably run EMACS worse than a Pentium II - GPU processors are relatively bad at branch or jump instructions, something general-purpose programs use quite a bit.
Or just double the fine every month it's not fixed.
FTFY.. Year is too long - it would take a nearly a decade for it to reach the billions if done by the year. Do it by the month, and the problem is solved by 2012.
Or make the fine relative to the amount crammed - if a company gets $100m by doing it, fine them $200m. If they only cram $10k, fine them $20k.