Some time ago, the stations found out that you can watch TV on your computer even if you don't have a TV set. That's why this fee is being introduced. It won't affect many people, as their household is most likely to have a TV already. The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many. I don't have a TV, for example, but my flatmate has one, and therefore I don't have to pay extra. (We'll split the fee, however.)
This really makes no sense. I could see charging a fee for computers with TV tuners because, at that point, you have a device which is clearly designed with TV reception in mind. It's a big jump from "You have a TV - you must pay a tax to the TV stations" to "You have a computer, on the internet. You might potentially download something of ours, so you're paying the tax". Considering that the only people who would be paying this are ones that don't have a TV already, probably because they don't want to watch the tripe in the first place.
It gets even more ridiculous when they start charging businesses this fee. I'd suspect that most business PCs exist in an environment where there is a strong policy against downloading copyrighted media & watching it; not to mention that users generally shouldn't have the access required to install the P2P software and codecs required to get & watch most video.
If you're primarily concerned with being employable, there's not much point in spending the extra 2yr as a PhD. For 98% of positions, there's very little practical difference between a PhD and an MS (the only place it makes a difference is if you want somebody with very specialized knowlege of a specific area of the discipline) and for most of those jobs, there's not much of a pay difference between the two. Don't get a PhD for the money - you'll be disappointed.
There are plenty of schools that require an MS to get a PhD - most of those that don't require you to do coursework 'equivalent' to the MS (followed by a compentancy test) before you can officially move on to the actual PhD work.
It's not really a hack if you take off the shelf hardware (XBox) and put an off the shelf OS (Linux) on it (a very well documented procedure) and then run an off the shelf emulator on top of that (PearPC) which is widely known to allow running of OSX. At best, it's a joke.
What is it? I look at the website & don't see a description of what it really is or any screenshots - just a torrent of an EXE. There's some mention of a 'genre of game' - perhaps a little blurb on what this is might be useful...
Call me paranoid, but I'm not about to run random EXE files from people I don't know without even being given a simple explaination of what they're supposed to be.
I just recently had to RMA a burned 2500+ and they shipped back a 3000.
I'm not sure what I'll do when the market runs out of 2500+s; Unless prices drop on the 3000s, it'll be hard to find such a good CPU at a sub-$100 pricepoint to recomend to people. Celerons and Semprons are out of the running for engineers - they need the cache.
meh. If you got a decent case with a decent quality PSU you wouldn't have a noise problem. If you want to save $20 and not get a decent case/PSU you're going to end up with a noisy POS.
An Antec SLK3700 that makes a negligible amount of noise is only about $70. The current generation of stock CPU coolers from both AMD and Intel are pretty quiet but for about $10-15 you can get something with a big slow fan that makes even less noise. You can get decent video cards fanless (Radeon 9600 and GeForce 5700s) in the $100-150 range.
The only excuse for a noisy computer is that you chose poor parts.
This, percentage-wise, isn't all that impressive of an overclock; we're only looking at 170% of the stock speeds. The top-end Opteron/Athlon64 would only have to hit 4GHZ to match the same percentage. Hitting half this speed is only a 25% overclock for the top-of-the-line chips - easily doable with normal air cooling.
Granted, with the onboard memory controller, you'd probably have to use a multiplier-unlocked chip like the Athlon 64 FX series, but since the new chips are shipping on the same process that this P4 was made on, I wouldn't be suprised if some dedicated OCers would be able to put the AMD part to an even higher percentage of it's stock speed.
I wish I hadn't blown my modpoints. Nobody should get modpoints for a post in which they use the phrase 'preppies'. Most of the world's not highschool. I just hope that you're still in HS and not some 30yr old that still hasn't gotten over it.
That's the biggest misconceptions I ever had about computers and it wasn't dispelled in my first year computation theory class. On the first day the professor proved that there must be infinitely more uncomputable functions than there are computable functions. After you take the tiny few computable problems there are & throw away the intractable ones, there's not much left...
Any article that bases its conclusions on price/performance ratios that leaves out AMD's socket 754 Athlon64s is overlooking a major contender. Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds and with the current generation of chips the dual-channel memory that s939 offers doesn't provide that much of a performance boost.
Some might say that the s754 chips are an upgradability dead end but most people aren't upgrading CPUs without replacing the motherboard & RAM anyways. A s939 chip doesn't really get you much more upgrade headroom since there are no 939 boards with PCI-Express and DDR2 on them anyways...
While, if you look at the price of a top performing part and one half that speed (Call them the $300 3.4GHz P4 and the $100 1.7GHz P4, based on pricewatch.com's listings), you might say that there's a 3x price differential when, in fact, the margin's much lower.
Using a single system, you're not requiring a pair of motherboards, cases and video cards (assuming you're sanely using a dual-head card), which more than makes up the hardware cost difference. Add in the fact that you can share HDD space (OS + apps only need to be installed once & a 160GB drive is less than 2x80GBs) memory requirements aren't going to double (since many shared libraries & program logic only need to be loaded once).
Then there's the fact that, in most situations, a majority of the time the CPU is either idle or only using a small percentage of available cycles, the net result will be a generally faster more responsive system (assuming it's done properly) that will meet or beat the cost of 2 comparable half-powered systems.
This doesn't even touch on how having half the machines cuts down on admin/support workload.
Granted, this wouldn't work so well for applications that are pushing the limits of hardware but for those cases even a high-end system isn't quite enough for a single user so trying to get them sharing hardware would be silly.
You forget that there's a premium on SMPable hardware; I like to think of it as the 'enterprise tax'. The motherboards cost more, the chips cost more, and they often require more expensive types of memory.
Then you have to realize that if SMP systems become common, affordable and usable for gaming, you're still going to have some boutique computer maker push out ridiculously overpriced, slightly overclocked systems and there'll be suckers that buy them.
For a while eMachines was doing this; not to produce high performance gaming machines but to get away with using lower-spec parts labeled as higher performance ones. Just one of the many reasons they developed a bad reputation for poor stability.
print (lambda A,D,B,C,E,F,G,H,Q:"\n".join(["".join([(Q[int( __i mport__( "math").log((reduce(lambda x,y:abs(x[1])=D and (x[0]+1,x[1]**2+y[1]) or x,[(0,complex(r/B,i/B))]*A))[0]+1) )%len(Q)]) for i in range(F*B,G*B,H)]) for r in range(C*B, E*B,H)]))(1500,4,100.0,-2.25,1.5,-1.25 ,1.25,4,".^:/I&@*%$#")
I know there's no way this is getting past the lameness filter.
I can't say for sure if it was one the models in question but a few weeks ago, I was eating dinner at a Mexican restraunt and some lady had her phone start making a really loud high-pitched constant tone. A rough guess is that it was in the 4-8KHz range and loud enough that it was unpleasant from 20-30 ft away.
The worst part is that she wasn't smart enough to remove the battery from the device, so this went on for a good 5 minutes.
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This really makes no sense. I could see charging a fee for computers with TV tuners because, at that point, you have a device which is clearly designed with TV reception in mind. It's a big jump from "You have a TV - you must pay a tax to the TV stations" to "You have a computer, on the internet. You might potentially download something of ours, so you're paying the tax". Considering that the only people who would be paying this are ones that don't have a TV already, probably because they don't want to watch the tripe in the first place.
It gets even more ridiculous when they start charging businesses this fee. I'd suspect that most business PCs exist in an environment where there is a strong policy against downloading copyrighted media & watching it; not to mention that users generally shouldn't have the access required to install the P2P software and codecs required to get & watch most video.
They already own Netscape (besides which , Mozilla's free) and have for years. Why do they need to go with IE and its inferior standards compliance?
If you're primarily concerned with being employable, there's not much point in spending the extra 2yr as a PhD. For 98% of positions, there's very little practical difference between a PhD and an MS (the only place it makes a difference is if you want somebody with very specialized knowlege of a specific area of the discipline) and for most of those jobs, there's not much of a pay difference between the two. Don't get a PhD for the money - you'll be disappointed.
There are plenty of schools that require an MS to get a PhD - most of those that don't require you to do coursework 'equivalent' to the MS (followed by a compentancy test) before you can officially move on to the actual PhD work.
erp.
Worst. Post. Ever.
Forgot about the faster 845s - I haven't really paid them much attention since the 865/875s came out.
Misread the bit about the CPU - thought you were saying that the slowest CPU you could find had the 800MHz FSB.
What world do you live in where you can't find slower CPUS?
What kind of world do you live in where an 845-based board runs at an 800MHz FSB?
Considering that the 845 only runs at 400 & 533MHz FSBs, you're only pushing that CPU to about 1.7GHz (without overclocking the mobo).
It's not really a hack if you take off the shelf hardware (XBox) and put an off the shelf OS (Linux) on it (a very well documented procedure) and then run an off the shelf emulator on top of that (PearPC) which is widely known to allow running of OSX. At best, it's a joke.
What is it? I look at the website & don't see a description of what it really is or any screenshots - just a torrent of an EXE. There's some mention of a 'genre of game' - perhaps a little blurb on what this is might be useful...
Call me paranoid, but I'm not about to run random EXE files from people I don't know without even being given a simple explaination of what they're supposed to be.
I just recently had to RMA a burned 2500+ and they shipped back a 3000.
I'm not sure what I'll do when the market runs out of 2500+s; Unless prices drop on the 3000s, it'll be hard to find such a good CPU at a sub-$100 pricepoint to recomend to people. Celerons and Semprons are out of the running for engineers - they need the cache.
meh. If you got a decent case with a decent quality PSU you wouldn't have a noise problem. If you want to save $20 and not get a decent case/PSU you're going to end up with a noisy POS.
An Antec SLK3700 that makes a negligible amount of noise is only about $70. The current generation of stock CPU coolers from both AMD and Intel are pretty quiet but for about $10-15 you can get something with a big slow fan that makes even less noise. You can get decent video cards fanless (Radeon 9600 and GeForce 5700s) in the $100-150 range.
The only excuse for a noisy computer is that you chose poor parts.
This, percentage-wise, isn't all that impressive of an overclock; we're only looking at 170% of the stock speeds. The top-end Opteron/Athlon64 would only have to hit 4GHZ to match the same percentage. Hitting half this speed is only a 25% overclock for the top-of-the-line chips - easily doable with normal air cooling.
Granted, with the onboard memory controller, you'd probably have to use a multiplier-unlocked chip like the Athlon 64 FX series, but since the new chips are shipping on the same process that this P4 was made on, I wouldn't be suprised if some dedicated OCers would be able to put the AMD part to an even higher percentage of it's stock speed.
I wish I hadn't blown my modpoints. Nobody should get modpoints for a post in which they use the phrase 'preppies'. Most of the world's not highschool. I just hope that you're still in HS and not some 30yr old that still hasn't gotten over it.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
That's the biggest misconceptions I ever had about computers and it wasn't dispelled in my first year computation theory class. On the first day the professor proved that there must be infinitely more uncomputable functions than there are computable functions. After you take the tiny few computable problems there are & throw away the intractable ones, there's not much left...
Any article that bases its conclusions on price/performance ratios that leaves out AMD's socket 754 Athlon64s is overlooking a major contender. Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds and with the current generation of chips the dual-channel memory that s939 offers doesn't provide that much of a performance boost.
Some might say that the s754 chips are an upgradability dead end but most people aren't upgrading CPUs without replacing the motherboard & RAM anyways. A s939 chip doesn't really get you much more upgrade headroom since there are no 939 boards with PCI-Express and DDR2 on them anyways...
That doesn't seem right; I know that Gentoo is able to adapt itself to your hardware, but this is a bit much for me to swallow.
While, if you look at the price of a top performing part and one half that speed (Call them the $300 3.4GHz P4 and the $100 1.7GHz P4, based on pricewatch.com's listings), you might say that there's a 3x price differential when, in fact, the margin's much lower.
Using a single system, you're not requiring a pair of motherboards, cases and video cards (assuming you're sanely using a dual-head card), which more than makes up the hardware cost difference. Add in the fact that you can share HDD space (OS + apps only need to be installed once & a 160GB drive is less than 2x80GBs) memory requirements aren't going to double (since many shared libraries & program logic only need to be loaded once).
Then there's the fact that, in most situations, a majority of the time the CPU is either idle or only using a small percentage of available cycles, the net result will be a generally faster more responsive system (assuming it's done properly) that will meet or beat the cost of 2 comparable half-powered systems.
This doesn't even touch on how having half the machines cuts down on admin/support workload.
Granted, this wouldn't work so well for applications that are pushing the limits of hardware but for those cases even a high-end system isn't quite enough for a single user so trying to get them sharing hardware would be silly.
But you can still manage to get posts on Slashdot within the first 5min of a story being posted...
You forget that there's a premium on SMPable hardware; I like to think of it as the 'enterprise tax'. The motherboards cost more, the chips cost more, and they often require more expensive types of memory.
Then you have to realize that if SMP systems become common, affordable and usable for gaming, you're still going to have some boutique computer maker push out ridiculously overpriced, slightly overclocked systems and there'll be suckers that buy them.
For a while eMachines was doing this; not to produce high performance gaming machines but to get away with using lower-spec parts labeled as higher performance ones. Just one of the many reasons they developed a bad reputation for poor stability.
1) You're using Perl.
2) You're using a regex.
I can't really compete with that.
Here's a bit of python obfuscation for you...
i mport__( "math").log((reduce(lambda x,y:abs(x[1])=D and5 ,1.25,4,".^: /I&@*%$#")
print (lambda A,D,B,C,E,F,G,H,Q:"\n".join(["".join([(Q[int(
__
(x[0]+1,x[1]**2+y[1]) or x,[(0,complex(r/B,i/B))]*A))[0]+1)
)%len(Q)]) for i in range(F*B,G*B,H)]) for r in range(C*B,
E*B,H)]))(1500,4,100.0,-2.25,1.5,-1.2
I know there's no way this is getting past the lameness filter.
Fortunately, this is computer hardware we're talking about - most of it becomes obsolete or suffers a catastrophic failure before it simply wears out.
I'll be extrememly disappointed if we get fast, reliable, affordable solid-state storage devices and people insist on calling them "hard drives".
I can't say for sure if it was one the models in question but a few weeks ago, I was eating dinner at a Mexican restraunt and some lady had her phone start making a really loud high-pitched constant tone. A rough guess is that it was in the 4-8KHz range and loud enough that it was unpleasant from 20-30 ft away.
The worst part is that she wasn't smart enough to remove the battery from the device, so this went on for a good 5 minutes.