No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why , because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
s/can/will/g because that would compromise the inputs and the scoring algorithm. If you generate enough fuss then perhaps you'll get yourself whitelisted (and put on another list of people to watch anyway) but you probably have to reveal twice as much personal information to do it.
Things that are clearly props don't look good any more than obvious CGI does, unless you're going for a "Who framed Roger Rabbit?" style movie. Toy scale models don't act like the real thing would either. Early CGI often looked too clean, too perfect, too cartoonish but recently they look more real than you can manage with rubber masks.
Of course "realism" in sci-fi is relative to the context. If there's a shot of the Enterprise I want to think that's a real space ship, not a cardboard prop or a computer animation. I want to think it's a "real" spaceship. Same with various monsters, I want to think that's a real monster, not a guy wearing a monster suit nor a badly painted in CGI monster.
Take something like Gollum, I don't really consider that he's a CGI character and the hobbits are real actors. Both do a good job of looking very different compared to the humans, they don't look like humanoids with pointy ears like series who had to rely on human actors had to. The actors in Avator too, even though the world is a bit of an acid trip in colors.
If it is a public service, it designed to be fair irrespective of service location.
Just because a private service wouldn't offer an acceptable service doesn't make a completely flat fee a necessity. Many public services are zoned so you do carry part of the cost yourself. Other variations leaves it up to supply and demand but with a maximum cap so everyone gets service at a reasonable price. Generally you shouldn't apply subsidies just to do it, they must have meaning.
You as a customer, no. For the people interested in the technology or in trying to get any market insight out of it, yes. For example, customers doesn't care if something is on 45nm or 32nm but we know it has a huge impact on chips/wafer and so cost. I'd speculate but since you want the customer view, move along these are not the news you are looking for.
This. Normal users have lived with the crapware infested mess that is "general PCs" for years, and they HATE IT. They want something better, and walled gardens are that thing. That's why the PC is on the road to becoming a niche platform. PC sales are *declining* in the US, Canada, and Western Europe.
How about the decline is because there's almost 100% coverage? I checked the figures here in Norway, 91% of all households and 98% of all households with children have one or more desktops/laptops. I know plenty people that have bought tablets lately, but I don't know anyone who say they've given up their laptop. Of course if you use consoles for gaming you don't need a very powerful PC. If your phone and tablet covers for some of your other uses, it'll take much less wear and tear. I'd take this more as a "my laptop still works fine, I'd rather get a tablet as a complement rather than upgrade my laptop". If you're claiming they're actually giving up the laptop, I'd love to see some statistics that actually say so, not just a decline in sales figures.
my only bit of advice: please be a little compassionate and understanding when 'older guys' show up at interviews. we all know that you young hot-shots have all the classic algorithms stored *recently* and freshly in your minds. for us, well, we have had 30+ years of stuff to save and sort thru; and its harder pulling specifics (during interviews) out on-demand and at seconds and minute-level expectations. to you it may seem a disadvantage that we are not 'walking ROMs' but maybe give us the benefit of the doubt; and if our resume is filled with coding jobs, please don't assume that we can't code *now* because we aren't up to 'live performances' and coding-on-the-spot challenges that are more and more common in interviews.
Don't get me wrong here, but this is a general problem with interviews not by being old. It doesn't matter if you've really been a miracle worker, the only skills that matter are those you can convince your interviewer that you have. That can be through your education, work experience, certifications, references, interview answers, tests or whatever but if all you end up with is an unfounded claim it's worth exactly zero. I know I've been turned down for consulting jobs and for employment opportunities that I'd be perfectly capable of handling, I just haven't had the means to prove it. No matter what your agreement is the value of wasted time training you, messed up code bases, decisions based on invalid data, damaged business relationships and so on makes mishires a really expensive proposal. If you want to be attractive on the job market, you have to work on your visible skills. Your invisible skills might help you in salary negotiations a year or three down the line, but not in an interview situation.
At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
Now, granted I haven't started a family of my own yet but I'm starting to see what it means to work to live rather than to live to work. That simply time is an important factor in having a social circle and how quickly you get estranged from it when you can never participate. No doubt friendships are very much built on shared experiences, good or bad. You can say what you want about email and phone and video conferences but they don't come close to sharing a beer down at the pub face to face. In that sense I've already taken a big step off the career ladder towards a job that lets me combine work and friends. I don't regret it yet and I doubt I will, the more I understand of the "big picture" the more right it seems.
Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
Any place I save money they just go back to my general slush fund, they're not earmarked for anything in particular. If something costs less I might do it more, but it has been considered against all other things I might spend that money on. If you like the price buy or if you don't download basically means you pay as much as you like, and I'm pretty sure over time people like to pay less...
Funny (giving up mod points to reply...) When I saw that 0.05%, I thought of it just the other way - to me it meant that we could launch a probe now that would arrive at the nearest star in ONLY 200 * 33 = 6600 years
Try 66000 years.
And that made me think that with a bit of thought and effort, maybe we could reduce that by an order of magnitude.
Most of the speed Voyager has comes from slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Saturn, not propulsion. You'd have to improve propulsion systems far, far more than that.
Just checking the back of my envelope, an an RTG-powered ion propelled probe with a reasonable fuel load for a 500 year journey under constant acceleration, could be feasible. Constant acceleration, even 0.001% G adds up over time.
My prediction is that your back of the envelope calculations forgot that you have to accelerate the fuel. Each year of the journey have to accelerate the fuel of all future years, which makes the weight grow exponentially.
So the difficulty is to arrange those strips to reproduce the original DNA sequence. It is a NP-hard problem, no wonder Moore's law doesn't outrun that!
What does that even mean? The length of a human genome is for all practical purposes fixed, so scaling is utterly irrelevant. And even so, whether a problem is NP-hard has little relevance for whether we have a practical solution for any given n. n^1000000 is polynominal, 2^0.00000001n is not. If you're trying to analyze n genomes then that should be a simple O(n) scaling. Now it's possibly that sequence technology means n is increasing really, really fast but that doesn't mean the complexity of sequencing a genome changes at all.
The move is not as nefarious as your headline suggests. This bill is to fix a problem... if you pick up your smartphone and reply to an IT question after business hours, did you work overtime? Of course not.
If someone was expecting you to answer that outside business hours, then yes otherwise no. I don't know your work, but most places don't allow unsolicited overtime meaning I can't just sit 12 hours at the office and demand overtime pay. Nor can I start answering email and demand overtime pay so I find your interpretation very hard to believe. I might do it without approval in an emergency, but if they refused to pay me then the next emergency I'd demand approval of overtime in writing before lifting a finger.
In the executive suite Intel's focused on exactly the wrong things: improving what they're doing, not cannibalizing their current markets. That was a good strategy for a while, but it's not going to weather the current changes - as I tried to tell them seven years ago.
If this was supposed to be a "I told you so", it's pretty damn weak. Intel keeps growing and posting record profits, they've kicked AMD to the curb on the performance market and their processing tech is lowering power consumption considerably. For all the hype on tablets there'll be plenty of laptops, desktops and servers that will continue being most of the market and they'll run x86 processors to run their x86 software. Just because Win8 will work on ARM doesn't mean all the other software you have will or that the ports will be good even if they exist.
As for the tablet and mobile market, Intel is not stupid about what's happening nor are they poor at making processors. Granted, the iPad and the resulting tablet market has probably been a much bigger success than Intel could anticipate closing the gap between netbooks and cell phones much faster than expected. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Intel from firing a solid volley back, they have top notch processing tech and a huge staff when they want something badly. It's easy to say "other companies will have 22nm too" when both TSMC and GloFo have had huge process problems in the past.
For example compare with the graphics market, which is still on 40nm because both AMD and nVidia is waiting for TSMC to get their act together. If you're going head to head with Intel with a handicap like that, well it's not going to be pretty. That Intel got 22nm working is actually a pretty damn big thing. Having a lead on process technology is what's made them able to brush off the PIV, the Itanium and several other expensive fiascoes. I'd be suprised if the ARM producers don't soon feel the same pounding.
Not just the summary, but the article is probably horribly wrong. The new measurements are almost certainly related to the probes approaching the edge of the heliosphere, but the journalist didn't have a clue and confused it with the distance to Pluto - which is about 40 AU.
The distance at which the Voyagers are still collecting and transmitting useful data back to Earth, is mind boggling. Over a light day away!
Uh? 120 AU is only 0.7 light days. And if that's far depends on perspective, it's 0.05% of the way to the closest star. Somehow the Mars rovers have been a lot more visual in saying that yes, we can do interplanetary with their cameras. The Voyager probes are more of a reminder that interstellar is a completely different ballgame. Thirty three years and 18 billion kilometers out yet it's still gotten nowhere in interstellar terms. Though it's fun to see them still operational and still doing science...
Software design techniques, if anything, have gone rapidly backwards for this sort of application since the late 70s/early 80s.
I'd say the Mars rovers are a good counterexample of that, they're "new" and have been operating for many, many years now. Particularly when it comes to data compression the current probes have a huge leg up on the old ones. That said, yeah computers can't rewrite physics and launching anything into space is still quite expensive and they don't really go faster from it either.
More like that relative to ARM, everything has a rep for being powerful.... The Atom was good a few years ago, but right now the E-350 is a better deal in pretty much every way. Intel's Cedar Trail should have been out in September, then November and right now it looks like January. AMD isn't the only one with delays.
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
And that actually improves boot time quite considerably. I suspect a XKCD link with "Does it run flash full-screen?" "No, but who needs that?!" would be relevant here. Rebooting a server is going to boot a bunch of users and is a big no-no outside scheduled maintenance windows, which are rather generous compared to the boot time. On a desktop there's just one user and cold boot -> working desktop or restart -> working desktop are two important measures. Throw up all the "yes, but you shouldn't reboot you should do $whatever" rhetoric that you like but rebooting is not a big deal to the user. He doesn't care that maybe with a bunch of commands you can unbork what you just borked if a reboot will do it.
How hard can it possibly be to offer some kind of ordered/staggered/synchronized/single threaded toggle anyway? Yes, a multi-threaded boot is complex because you have all the fun of multi-threaded software. If you don't want to deal with it, you shouldn't have to. But at least realize it does provide value to some people even if it doesn't provide any value to you. I'm not going to blame slow boot time on Linux desktop share being <1%, but there are many, many such things that all together say "Great in the server room, but let's leave it there..."
Because of that, and because of everyone else being totally obsessed with TV, it is very hard not to point out that I have no fucking clue what they're talking about when they tell me about "New Show 131". If you just nod your head and pretend they catch on quickly and ask "WTF?". You're an idiot either way for not watching the "idiot box.":(
Heh, I used to be the other way around... "Saw the first episode of $show last night, was really good." "Oh, what channel does that run on?" "Humm... it aired in the US last week, not sure if anyone here sends it." or "Damn, season 3 of $show rocks/sucks!" "Umm, aren't we on season 2?" "Maybe you are..." Fortunately "I couldn't wait" is a socially accepted excuse among fans everywhere. Not to mention it seems to become more and more common, I find there's more and more people I can talk to about episodes I know hasn't aired here yet. Funny, that.
The average tax rate is 32% on taxable income, after deductions and a flat rate discount.
28% here in Norway but for every 100 NOK my employer pays me, he must pay 7,8% in social security tax and 14,1% (mostly) in employment tax. Also of most things I buy there's 25% VAT, there are some exceptions and lower rates but also many goods that have other taxes on top like alcohol, gas and such.
So in reality if my employer has 100 NOK, he'll pay 18 NOK to the government and 82 NOK to me. Of that I will pay 23 NOK in taxes, so 59 NOK paid out. If I buy at 25% VAT, 12 NOK will go to the government so the business only gets 47 NOK. So the effective total taxes is like 53%, give or take a little. Of course if you want to compare it to the US you have to include sales/use tax and anything the employer pays there, I don't know it well enough but I'm fairly sure the total is less.
If everything has to go all the way to the court system, how can the society function?
Quite well, actually. It doesn't mean that every instance of something has to go to court, you have big decisions like Sony vs Betamax and then most variations are considered settled case law. There'll always be borderline cases but the contested areas get smaller and smaller. Both in common law and civil law systems you look to higher courts, past cases and similar cases in other jurisdictions and try to be consistent, even if you have different concepts of precedent. Editorial responsibility for comments posted online is typically such a discussion, it'll probably end up in some superior court somewhere and be settled, unless the politicians pass specific laws to make it perfectly clear.
Even at the worst of times, the x86 decoder was a few percent of the chips. Today it's more like 0.01% of the chip. The "cruft" instructions have generally been moved to microcode, essentially a software implementation inside the processor and take up no hardware at all. Keep repeating it but nobody who knows what you're talking about will take you seriously.
From another article the whole equipment setup cost 45 MSEK or about 6.65 million dollars, but that includes the infrastructure to supply 20.000 users. Note that this would be $330/person if they were to actually make this a permanent solution. Bandwidth charges on top of that, since this is pretty much a show-off and experiment, I doubt they pay much. Nor are they normally able to saturate that pipe. Here in Norway at The Gathering we had 100Gbps for 5000 users, the most the users managed to hit was 13 Gbit/s even when they were organizing a stress test. Unless you have some serious hardware then 1 Gbps is as fast as your machine could take anyway. And that I think I could get here in Norway for about $3000/month since 400/400 Mbit is listed as about $1000 while 1000/1000 Mbit just says "call us" so it's possible.
That said, past a certain point you just don't care. I got 60/60 Mbit now, I used to have 25/5 and the 12x upgrade in upload speed was noticeable, going from 25 to 60 down not that much really. Say I had 1000/1000, okay a 10GB download would go from ten to fifteen minutes to less than one. But spend a few minutes browsing or clearing some clutter in my apartment and that's over, it's not like I decide to watch a movie at 7 PM and have it at 8PM. And uTorrent lets you watch as you download now if you're that impatient. On top of that I usually have a big backlog of things I just haven't had the time to watch. Practically, you just can't consume that fast. I suppose if such a thing as a BluRay-quality streaming service existed my bandwidth would be on the edge of choking since it's about 50Mbit/s, but there isn't. And if it was, 100/100 Mbps would be a call away.
Intel can't gouge us until AMD is on its knees and that's what we're heading for. Producing CPUs with existing designs on existing process technology is cheap, so AMD has been selling low to mid-range systems at competitive prices but it's obvious they haven't had the necessary money to design neither process technology nor new micro-architectures. That works for a while but it's obvious the gap between Intel and AMD is increasing, they're tick-tocking away and eventually the old technology AMD is working with will become unsellable. Too slow, too hot, too expensive to make. Remember that Bulldozer is about 50% larger than a Sandy Bridge. That's not something the consumer will notice but Intel is making far more money per processor. And can distribute the R&D over many more processors. If the last generation left too little money for R&D, I'm afraid this one will leave practically none.
Unfortunately the 2nd gen Bulldozer chips promise no more performance improvements than Ivy Bridge does. Intel's internal documents are leaking, expect 10-15% performance gain, 20% lower power consumption (95W -> 77W) and HD4000 will be about 50% faster than HD3000 which will take another chunk of the discrete graphics market. Their 22nm 3D transistors are a real kick in the nuts for AMD, looks like the Core equivalent of die shrinks. Not exactly the competition they needed right now.
It's half and half, obviously quite a few are binned because of real defects. This I suspect is also why Intel got so many confusing variations with various virtualization features. But it also happens that the mix isn't what the market demands, for example say they're producing too many fully functional 2600Ks while the market wants 2500Ks. Those who do the math say those customers can't be sold up to the 2600K because they're cash limited and slashing the 2600K prices would reduce total revenue from all the other sales, making it unprofitable. Basically you need more of a limited chip to fill a certain price point. Then it happens that they fuse off fully functional parts to do it, and in the past there have been hacks for some products to unlock these parts. Sometimes it's been ignored because so few do it, sometimes they've resorted to more drastic means to make sure it's physically impossible to activate them again.
Some people get annoyed when they learn that their hardware has been intentionally crippled like that, but you got what you paid for. That it's actually cheaper to make one product and sell multiple variations is more of an internal matter, just like most of the time the different versions of software is just a few #ifdefs in the code. If you bought Photoshop Express, you got that and it's a bit odd to complain that you only got a crippled Photoshop CS to that price. Also it's not like they instantly must bin everything to a current product, sometimes they save particularly good or bad chips to introduce a low volume better/worse model. It's complicated, but at the end of the generation they like to have sold as many of the chips as possible for the most they could. A thrown away chip is after all a wasted chip you got nothing for.
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No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why , because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
s/can/will/g because that would compromise the inputs and the scoring algorithm. If you generate enough fuss then perhaps you'll get yourself whitelisted (and put on another list of people to watch anyway) but you probably have to reveal twice as much personal information to do it.
Things that are clearly props don't look good any more than obvious CGI does, unless you're going for a "Who framed Roger Rabbit?" style movie. Toy scale models don't act like the real thing would either. Early CGI often looked too clean, too perfect, too cartoonish but recently they look more real than you can manage with rubber masks.
Of course "realism" in sci-fi is relative to the context. If there's a shot of the Enterprise I want to think that's a real space ship, not a cardboard prop or a computer animation. I want to think it's a "real" spaceship. Same with various monsters, I want to think that's a real monster, not a guy wearing a monster suit nor a badly painted in CGI monster.
Take something like Gollum, I don't really consider that he's a CGI character and the hobbits are real actors. Both do a good job of looking very different compared to the humans, they don't look like humanoids with pointy ears like series who had to rely on human actors had to. The actors in Avator too, even though the world is a bit of an acid trip in colors.
If it is a public service, it designed to be fair irrespective of service location.
Just because a private service wouldn't offer an acceptable service doesn't make a completely flat fee a necessity. Many public services are zoned so you do carry part of the cost yourself. Other variations leaves it up to supply and demand but with a maximum cap so everyone gets service at a reasonable price. Generally you shouldn't apply subsidies just to do it, they must have meaning.
You as a customer, no. For the people interested in the technology or in trying to get any market insight out of it, yes. For example, customers doesn't care if something is on 45nm or 32nm but we know it has a huge impact on chips/wafer and so cost. I'd speculate but since you want the customer view, move along these are not the news you are looking for.
This. Normal users have lived with the crapware infested mess that is "general PCs" for years, and they HATE IT. They want something better, and walled gardens are that thing. That's why the PC is on the road to becoming a niche platform. PC sales are *declining* in the US, Canada, and Western Europe.
How about the decline is because there's almost 100% coverage? I checked the figures here in Norway, 91% of all households and 98% of all households with children have one or more desktops/laptops. I know plenty people that have bought tablets lately, but I don't know anyone who say they've given up their laptop. Of course if you use consoles for gaming you don't need a very powerful PC. If your phone and tablet covers for some of your other uses, it'll take much less wear and tear. I'd take this more as a "my laptop still works fine, I'd rather get a tablet as a complement rather than upgrade my laptop". If you're claiming they're actually giving up the laptop, I'd love to see some statistics that actually say so, not just a decline in sales figures.
my only bit of advice: please be a little compassionate and understanding when 'older guys' show up at interviews. we all know that you young hot-shots have all the classic algorithms stored *recently* and freshly in your minds. for us, well, we have had 30+ years of stuff to save and sort thru; and its harder pulling specifics (during interviews) out on-demand and at seconds and minute-level expectations. to you it may seem a disadvantage that we are not 'walking ROMs' but maybe give us the benefit of the doubt; and if our resume is filled with coding jobs, please don't assume that we can't code *now* because we aren't up to 'live performances' and coding-on-the-spot challenges that are more and more common in interviews.
Don't get me wrong here, but this is a general problem with interviews not by being old. It doesn't matter if you've really been a miracle worker, the only skills that matter are those you can convince your interviewer that you have. That can be through your education, work experience, certifications, references, interview answers, tests or whatever but if all you end up with is an unfounded claim it's worth exactly zero. I know I've been turned down for consulting jobs and for employment opportunities that I'd be perfectly capable of handling, I just haven't had the means to prove it. No matter what your agreement is the value of wasted time training you, messed up code bases, decisions based on invalid data, damaged business relationships and so on makes mishires a really expensive proposal. If you want to be attractive on the job market, you have to work on your visible skills. Your invisible skills might help you in salary negotiations a year or three down the line, but not in an interview situation.
At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
Now, granted I haven't started a family of my own yet but I'm starting to see what it means to work to live rather than to live to work. That simply time is an important factor in having a social circle and how quickly you get estranged from it when you can never participate. No doubt friendships are very much built on shared experiences, good or bad. You can say what you want about email and phone and video conferences but they don't come close to sharing a beer down at the pub face to face. In that sense I've already taken a big step off the career ladder towards a job that lets me combine work and friends. I don't regret it yet and I doubt I will, the more I understand of the "big picture" the more right it seems.
Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
Any place I save money they just go back to my general slush fund, they're not earmarked for anything in particular. If something costs less I might do it more, but it has been considered against all other things I might spend that money on. If you like the price buy or if you don't download basically means you pay as much as you like, and I'm pretty sure over time people like to pay less...
Funny (giving up mod points to reply...) When I saw that 0.05%, I thought of it just the other way - to me it meant that we could launch a probe now that would arrive at the nearest star in ONLY 200 * 33 = 6600 years
Try 66000 years.
And that made me think that with a bit of thought and effort, maybe we could reduce that by an order of magnitude.
Most of the speed Voyager has comes from slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Saturn, not propulsion. You'd have to improve propulsion systems far, far more than that.
Just checking the back of my envelope, an an RTG-powered ion propelled probe with a reasonable fuel load for a 500 year journey under constant acceleration, could be feasible. Constant acceleration, even 0.001% G adds up over time.
My prediction is that your back of the envelope calculations forgot that you have to accelerate the fuel. Each year of the journey have to accelerate the fuel of all future years, which makes the weight grow exponentially.
So the difficulty is to arrange those strips to reproduce the original DNA sequence. It is a NP-hard problem, no wonder Moore's law doesn't outrun that!
What does that even mean? The length of a human genome is for all practical purposes fixed, so scaling is utterly irrelevant. And even so, whether a problem is NP-hard has little relevance for whether we have a practical solution for any given n. n^1000000 is polynominal, 2^0.00000001n is not. If you're trying to analyze n genomes then that should be a simple O(n) scaling. Now it's possibly that sequence technology means n is increasing really, really fast but that doesn't mean the complexity of sequencing a genome changes at all.
The move is not as nefarious as your headline suggests. This bill is to fix a problem... if you pick up your smartphone and reply to an IT question after business hours, did you work overtime? Of course not.
If someone was expecting you to answer that outside business hours, then yes otherwise no. I don't know your work, but most places don't allow unsolicited overtime meaning I can't just sit 12 hours at the office and demand overtime pay. Nor can I start answering email and demand overtime pay so I find your interpretation very hard to believe. I might do it without approval in an emergency, but if they refused to pay me then the next emergency I'd demand approval of overtime in writing before lifting a finger.
In the executive suite Intel's focused on exactly the wrong things: improving what they're doing, not cannibalizing their current markets. That was a good strategy for a while, but it's not going to weather the current changes - as I tried to tell them seven years ago.
If this was supposed to be a "I told you so", it's pretty damn weak. Intel keeps growing and posting record profits, they've kicked AMD to the curb on the performance market and their processing tech is lowering power consumption considerably. For all the hype on tablets there'll be plenty of laptops, desktops and servers that will continue being most of the market and they'll run x86 processors to run their x86 software. Just because Win8 will work on ARM doesn't mean all the other software you have will or that the ports will be good even if they exist.
As for the tablet and mobile market, Intel is not stupid about what's happening nor are they poor at making processors. Granted, the iPad and the resulting tablet market has probably been a much bigger success than Intel could anticipate closing the gap between netbooks and cell phones much faster than expected. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Intel from firing a solid volley back, they have top notch processing tech and a huge staff when they want something badly. It's easy to say "other companies will have 22nm too" when both TSMC and GloFo have had huge process problems in the past.
For example compare with the graphics market, which is still on 40nm because both AMD and nVidia is waiting for TSMC to get their act together. If you're going head to head with Intel with a handicap like that, well it's not going to be pretty. That Intel got 22nm working is actually a pretty damn big thing. Having a lead on process technology is what's made them able to brush off the PIV, the Itanium and several other expensive fiascoes. I'd be suprised if the ARM producers don't soon feel the same pounding.
Not just the summary, but the article is probably horribly wrong. The new measurements are almost certainly related to the probes approaching the edge of the heliosphere, but the journalist didn't have a clue and confused it with the distance to Pluto - which is about 40 AU.
The distance at which the Voyagers are still collecting and transmitting useful data back to Earth, is mind boggling. Over a light day away!
Uh? 120 AU is only 0.7 light days. And if that's far depends on perspective, it's 0.05% of the way to the closest star. Somehow the Mars rovers have been a lot more visual in saying that yes, we can do interplanetary with their cameras. The Voyager probes are more of a reminder that interstellar is a completely different ballgame. Thirty three years and 18 billion kilometers out yet it's still gotten nowhere in interstellar terms. Though it's fun to see them still operational and still doing science...
Software design techniques, if anything, have gone rapidly backwards for this sort of application since the late 70s/early 80s.
I'd say the Mars rovers are a good counterexample of that, they're "new" and have been operating for many, many years now. Particularly when it comes to data compression the current probes have a huge leg up on the old ones. That said, yeah computers can't rewrite physics and launching anything into space is still quite expensive and they don't really go faster from it either.
More like that relative to ARM, everything has a rep for being powerful.... The Atom was good a few years ago, but right now the E-350 is a better deal in pretty much every way. Intel's Cedar Trail should have been out in September, then November and right now it looks like January. AMD isn't the only one with delays.
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
And that actually improves boot time quite considerably. I suspect a XKCD link with "Does it run flash full-screen?" "No, but who needs that?!" would be relevant here. Rebooting a server is going to boot a bunch of users and is a big no-no outside scheduled maintenance windows, which are rather generous compared to the boot time. On a desktop there's just one user and cold boot -> working desktop or restart -> working desktop are two important measures. Throw up all the "yes, but you shouldn't reboot you should do $whatever" rhetoric that you like but rebooting is not a big deal to the user. He doesn't care that maybe with a bunch of commands you can unbork what you just borked if a reboot will do it.
How hard can it possibly be to offer some kind of ordered/staggered/synchronized/single threaded toggle anyway? Yes, a multi-threaded boot is complex because you have all the fun of multi-threaded software. If you don't want to deal with it, you shouldn't have to. But at least realize it does provide value to some people even if it doesn't provide any value to you. I'm not going to blame slow boot time on Linux desktop share being <1%, but there are many, many such things that all together say "Great in the server room, but let's leave it there..."
Because of that, and because of everyone else being totally obsessed with TV, it is very hard not to point out that I have no fucking clue what they're talking about when they tell me about "New Show 131". If you just nod your head and pretend they catch on quickly and ask "WTF?". You're an idiot either way for not watching the "idiot box." :(
Heh, I used to be the other way around... "Saw the first episode of $show last night, was really good." "Oh, what channel does that run on?" "Humm... it aired in the US last week, not sure if anyone here sends it." or "Damn, season 3 of $show rocks/sucks!" "Umm, aren't we on season 2?" "Maybe you are..." Fortunately "I couldn't wait" is a socially accepted excuse among fans everywhere. Not to mention it seems to become more and more common, I find there's more and more people I can talk to about episodes I know hasn't aired here yet. Funny, that.
The average tax rate is 32% on taxable income, after deductions and a flat rate discount.
28% here in Norway but for every 100 NOK my employer pays me, he must pay 7,8% in social security tax and 14,1% (mostly) in employment tax. Also of most things I buy there's 25% VAT, there are some exceptions and lower rates but also many goods that have other taxes on top like alcohol, gas and such.
So in reality if my employer has 100 NOK, he'll pay 18 NOK to the government and 82 NOK to me. Of that I will pay 23 NOK in taxes, so 59 NOK paid out. If I buy at 25% VAT, 12 NOK will go to the government so the business only gets 47 NOK. So the effective total taxes is like 53%, give or take a little. Of course if you want to compare it to the US you have to include sales/use tax and anything the employer pays there, I don't know it well enough but I'm fairly sure the total is less.
If everything has to go all the way to the court system, how can the society function?
Quite well, actually. It doesn't mean that every instance of something has to go to court, you have big decisions like Sony vs Betamax and then most variations are considered settled case law. There'll always be borderline cases but the contested areas get smaller and smaller. Both in common law and civil law systems you look to higher courts, past cases and similar cases in other jurisdictions and try to be consistent, even if you have different concepts of precedent. Editorial responsibility for comments posted online is typically such a discussion, it'll probably end up in some superior court somewhere and be settled, unless the politicians pass specific laws to make it perfectly clear.
Even at the worst of times, the x86 decoder was a few percent of the chips. Today it's more like 0.01% of the chip. The "cruft" instructions have generally been moved to microcode, essentially a software implementation inside the processor and take up no hardware at all. Keep repeating it but nobody who knows what you're talking about will take you seriously.
From another article the whole equipment setup cost 45 MSEK or about 6.65 million dollars, but that includes the infrastructure to supply 20.000 users. Note that this would be $330/person if they were to actually make this a permanent solution. Bandwidth charges on top of that, since this is pretty much a show-off and experiment, I doubt they pay much. Nor are they normally able to saturate that pipe. Here in Norway at The Gathering we had 100Gbps for 5000 users, the most the users managed to hit was 13 Gbit/s even when they were organizing a stress test. Unless you have some serious hardware then 1 Gbps is as fast as your machine could take anyway. And that I think I could get here in Norway for about $3000/month since 400/400 Mbit is listed as about $1000 while 1000/1000 Mbit just says "call us" so it's possible.
That said, past a certain point you just don't care. I got 60/60 Mbit now, I used to have 25/5 and the 12x upgrade in upload speed was noticeable, going from 25 to 60 down not that much really. Say I had 1000/1000, okay a 10GB download would go from ten to fifteen minutes to less than one. But spend a few minutes browsing or clearing some clutter in my apartment and that's over, it's not like I decide to watch a movie at 7 PM and have it at 8PM. And uTorrent lets you watch as you download now if you're that impatient. On top of that I usually have a big backlog of things I just haven't had the time to watch. Practically, you just can't consume that fast. I suppose if such a thing as a BluRay-quality streaming service existed my bandwidth would be on the edge of choking since it's about 50Mbit/s, but there isn't. And if it was, 100/100 Mbps would be a call away.
Intel can't gouge us until AMD is on its knees and that's what we're heading for. Producing CPUs with existing designs on existing process technology is cheap, so AMD has been selling low to mid-range systems at competitive prices but it's obvious they haven't had the necessary money to design neither process technology nor new micro-architectures. That works for a while but it's obvious the gap between Intel and AMD is increasing, they're tick-tocking away and eventually the old technology AMD is working with will become unsellable. Too slow, too hot, too expensive to make. Remember that Bulldozer is about 50% larger than a Sandy Bridge. That's not something the consumer will notice but Intel is making far more money per processor. And can distribute the R&D over many more processors. If the last generation left too little money for R&D, I'm afraid this one will leave practically none.
Unfortunately the 2nd gen Bulldozer chips promise no more performance improvements than Ivy Bridge does. Intel's internal documents are leaking, expect 10-15% performance gain, 20% lower power consumption (95W -> 77W) and HD4000 will be about 50% faster than HD3000 which will take another chunk of the discrete graphics market. Their 22nm 3D transistors are a real kick in the nuts for AMD, looks like the Core equivalent of die shrinks. Not exactly the competition they needed right now.
It's half and half, obviously quite a few are binned because of real defects. This I suspect is also why Intel got so many confusing variations with various virtualization features. But it also happens that the mix isn't what the market demands, for example say they're producing too many fully functional 2600Ks while the market wants 2500Ks. Those who do the math say those customers can't be sold up to the 2600K because they're cash limited and slashing the 2600K prices would reduce total revenue from all the other sales, making it unprofitable. Basically you need more of a limited chip to fill a certain price point. Then it happens that they fuse off fully functional parts to do it, and in the past there have been hacks for some products to unlock these parts. Sometimes it's been ignored because so few do it, sometimes they've resorted to more drastic means to make sure it's physically impossible to activate them again.
Some people get annoyed when they learn that their hardware has been intentionally crippled like that, but you got what you paid for. That it's actually cheaper to make one product and sell multiple variations is more of an internal matter, just like most of the time the different versions of software is just a few #ifdefs in the code. If you bought Photoshop Express, you got that and it's a bit odd to complain that you only got a crippled Photoshop CS to that price. Also it's not like they instantly must bin everything to a current product, sometimes they save particularly good or bad chips to introduce a low volume better/worse model. It's complicated, but at the end of the generation they like to have sold as many of the chips as possible for the most they could. A thrown away chip is after all a wasted chip you got nothing for.