Public transportation does not necessarily mean mass-transit pre-defined routes or anything of the sort, it would be enough for a bus to travel out to where you are, and pick up a few other people on the way toward the destination. It can mean they send a special truck out. Obviously you would have a lower level of service, and less rapid access to transportation living so far out.
Also, it would be up to the authorities to decide what areas they provide the service to.
Mandating would imply: if available than mandatory, for example, for business reasons (deliver drivers/repairmen can't carry all their gear on the bus).
If not available, special paperwork excepting you required.
The vast majority of the population lives in a city, not a completely rural environment, where public transport could be too expensive or uneconomical to provide.
Getting 1kg of mass up to near light speed requires more than 1kg of energy, so even for a civilization with direct mass-energy conversion, it's not economical to ship things interstellar distances in reasonable time.
Who said anything about accelerating a mass up to near the speed of light using conventional methods? There might be other ways of reducing the distance of the path the object must travel, to reach the other object, to a small distance, at a reasonable velocity nowhere near the speed of light.
If you are accelerating the object, its velocity must exceed the normal speed of light, to cross galaxies in a sane amount of time.
E.g. 1,000,000x the speed of light.
And it could travel between galaxies in one year.
I think SF has made us completely forget how far away other stars are. Everything we know about physics says that interstellar distances are fundamental barriers, not just technological ones.
'Fundamental barriers' are a construct created by humans.
Our understanding of physics is susceptible to error, and we make a lot of assumptions that can be wrong.
Fundamental in this case, just means, that a larger body of human study of physics was originally built on that, and invalidating it means a great deal of laws will need revision, for our theories and laws to be consistent.
Extraterrestrials could have an entirely different understanding of physics than we do, and an entirely different body of physical laws.
That are just as consistent and true as ours on observation.
Just because of the fact that many of our laws in physics are approximations that are usually close enough to true, and aliens could have different concepts.
Anyways, entire notions we have not conceived of, may be possible, and may only be possible with extraterrestrials' body of physics.
No... there's no method of FTL travel that we know about.
There's also no time travel, no cold fusion, smashing the atom, etc. It used to be a fundamental law of physics that neither energy nor matter could ever be created or destroyed.
That got proved wrong too.
Some of the things that are possible, we have not created yet, or discovered how to create yet.
We cannot be sure against discovering counterexamples to any laws. Even the laws of thermodynamics can be found to have exceptions.
Some of the things that are possible, our currented limited understanding of physics suggests they might be impossible or nearly impossible.
That doesn't mean extraterrestrials won't have the technology.
There are already theories such as how 'bending space' in suitable ways might lead to long-distance travel.
As far as the Earth having massive resources, what could we possibly have that couldn't be obtained more easily from one of the (thousands/millions) of other mostly uninhabited other planets in the galaxy?
Biologically-created resources such as Oil which do not exist on uninhabited worlds.
Notcrammed together, no.. Yes.. you might have to wait a little longer to get your ride, in some areas.
But the fact everyone's forced to use it should make it more economical. I also assume you can pay a higher fee if you need faster transportation, depending on the Quality of service you require.
The trouble with the moon or mars, is they don't have a breathable atmosphere: it would be dangerous to live there (due to no electromagnetic field or protections against cosmic rays, rocks hitting the planet, etc), and they are not very habitable worlds.
It's conceivable people could try to live there, but there would almost certainly be more volunteers to go live in a slightly less-hostile environment.
I wouldn't assume (so readily) that extraterrestrials are necessarily outside the solar system. Even the solar system is a big place, and there may be some habitable moon unaccounted for.
I also wouldn't assume their navigational capabilities or ease of travelling from another system are as poor as ours.
They may have some mode of transporation that enables them to accomplish with ease, what would be impossible for current human tech.
I have my doubts that technology is able to negate overcrowding issues.
When you run out of space on your planet, you run out of space.
It's unlikely that even advanced technology would allow extraterrestrials to construct new planets or make worlds with no usable atmosphere habitable.
Underground living might be possible, but even that has certain feasibility limits.
It reduces the probability that earth could be quickly located.
We gotta consider the possibility, that any extraterrestrials close enough to hear our signals in any reasonable amount of time, and with the sophistication to pinpoint us....
Might have the technology and desire to invade earth.
E.g. Consider earth itself... fast forward a few dozen generations...... massive overpopulation, lack of resources, land, severe overcrowding.
Extreme desire for another habitable place to live.
And then you detect an alien signal.. a foreign world.
You step foot there, and you're greeted by basically an aboriginal species (compared to your civilization).
Habitable world, massive resources, very primitive 21st-century level technology, nothing compared to your 23rd century tech.
Oh.... so some colonists start travelling from earth to 'the new world' for a better life.
Settlers VS the Natives all over again.
It's happened before, it could happen again.
Except us earth inhabitants could be the primitive natives / "Indians" / etc.
How do you feel about being the person to pay the funeral bills, when someone dies in their car and causes an accident on the road due to freezing to death / frostbite while driving?
The human body isn't meant for extreme cold.
An adverse environment in the car (or outside) is more distracting.
Also, leaving the kids at school to avoid distracted driving is a similarly unacceptable scenario.
Accidents happen, and you can only do so much to prevent clear abuses, while not creating bigger problems.
What really happens is much much simpler: Someone proposes a measure that they claim is to "stop child porn", and everyone supports it because otherwise their political opponents could claim they support child porn.
Right.. Someone just needs to propose the measure to expand it to include violence.
I'm not suggesting anyone planned it, but that it's a series of steps that may happen over some period of time.
Political opponents can claim they support violence against children if they refuse.
Expanding the age group is also easy, by finding a few examples of people who are abused but over the legal age limit, and then trumpeting them out to the media.
As for step 3, that's also easy to achieve.
Someone proposes a crack down on drug-related imagery, makes up some bogus statistics about increased drug usage by children exposed to the images.
Opponents have to include ban on drug usage imagery, or appear soft on drugs.
Again, same tactic for age increase...
drug usage among young adults. show age 21-25.
As for expanding scope to anything offensive.. this may be done by lax wording of the anti-drug law.
After a generation or so, the public will get used to that ban, and ready to accept the next steps.
If the government can block drug usage imagery, why not other immoral visual imagery? someone will think
Someone will propose a law against allowing kids to see porn
Political opponents cannot oppose it, without getting mocked for not thinking of the children.
Then that escalates the same way in later generations.
As for expanding to crimes aganist a person... this gets called a "Victims Protection Act"
Probably the official motivation is to point to some abuse by the media (for sensationalism) that hurts the victim of a crime.
Political opponents can be mocked as not in favor of protecting children who are victim of a crime, from media abuse.
Interesting... a cartoon character rises to the level of person now. Whoever knew..
I suppose it is the next logical step.
How do you measure the 'age' of a cartoon character, I wonder.
Is it whatever age the author says it is....
or does the jury have to make some sort of subjective determination based on carefully examining the imagery to make a judgement on the appearance of the images filed as evidence?
With careful consideration as to not be prejudicial against midgets and people who appear much younger than their actual age.
Next step is to extend the law to include imagery depicting violence as well.
And then expand the age a little bit... age under 21 instead of 18.
And then extend the law to include images depicting not just porn and violent acts, but drug usage also
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under age 25 instead of 21.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting any crimes or hostile activities at all against such persons.
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under 30 instead of age 25.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting or showing anything the least bit offensive to community values to persons depicted.
Then remove the age limit entirely.
Then expand the scope a bit to include anything disruptive to the civil order, government business, or disparaging to authority.
Next make it retroactive, include text, writings, blog posts, opinion columns, as well as images. And anything offensive to even dead people or non-governmental highly-regarded entities.
Increase the penalty for some years of confinement to permanent imprisonment, and eventual execution.
Machines or processes (such as circuit designs) that efficiently implement CPU instructions are patentable.
So if Intel took AMD's instruction set, it is possible they could find a different way of implementing it (possibly as or more efficiently).
In other words, AMD couldn't patent the "x86_64 instruction set" to prevent Intel from making a CPU that 64-bit software would interoperate with, even if they wanted to.
But as for AMD's proprietary designs for their processors, of course, the actual CPU designs, and the AMD's specific processes and methods of implementing those instruction sets (to the extent they are novel, non-obvious) can be patented.
This is an aside from the fact there is a cross-licensing deal between Intel and AMD, and there have been Intellectual property disputes between the two companies in the past, that got settled out of court.
There exists a cross-licensing deal between AMD and Intel whose exact terms are secret and unknown to the public.
AMD uses some Intel technologies (such as the X86 instruction set), and Intel uses some AMD technologies, such as X86_64.
Without these deals, PC microprocessor performance and capabilities of both AMD and Intel would probably not be nearly what it is today.
Also, the alternative is for the two companies to have sued each other into oblivion over patent infringement/IP cases, as in thermonuclear war --
each has a big enough patent arsenal against the other to provide assured destruction.
Well, Intel could probably design a new old-generation chip without using any AMD technologies.
But there'd be no buyers...
The public might go back to using PowerPC/MIPs.
(e.g. death of the X86 platform)
So yeah, it is banned in the Apple store, but probably due to AT&T rather than Apple.
Any chance Apple will expand the app store then, to allow more apps to run on other carriers who aren't so restrictive?
Eg. "This app is approved for use on all networks, except AT&T"
So when trying to install an app (as an AT&T user) you'll be informed your network doesn't allow the app, and get suggested a list of alternative carriers to switch to.
Something can be poor without there being a high quality alternative in existence (yet).
Just because everyone in a class got an "F", doesn't mean it's a good grade (even though almost everyone else got the same, except one student got a C and another got an B.. the one who got the C gets to be president, the one who gets the B never gets told about their grade, while their employer patents the invention and sells it for billions as uber-expensive product for "Enterprises" only).
I am comparing as in having 4 computers, each with 1 CPU and their own OS image and 16gb of RAM, assigned 25 ip addresses, each serving web page requests (received from a load balancer); versus 1 computer with 4 cores and 64gb of RAM, assigned 100 ip addresses, say having a single Dell PowerEdge R510.
versus Multi-proc setup clusters, HTPC, etc.
Compared to other Unices... Solaris, FreeBSD, z/OS, compared to running multiple OS instances on the same hardware, each in its own Xen VM.
It's surprising, but scaling out several Linux virtual machines on the same piece of metal, oddly, seems to get more than triple throughput (server-wide) for serving large static web pages, particularly with maximal numbers of simultaneous connections.
If you equally divide the physical server into 4 virtual machines, each would have only 15.3gb of memory to work with (after subtracting ~3gb overhead due to virtualization), intuitively one would expect less total http throughput from the server, but it's not what happens.
Instead each instance gets pretty close to full performance..
Windows requires excessive tuning and IIS still a little bit slower.
Plenty of RAM and aggressive read caching, so there should no I/O bottleneck.
My only conclusion at this point (which might be wrong), is that it's a great advdantage to have 2 cores, but the third and fourth cores go underused, for some reason, my best guess is some sort of kernel-related lock contention or issue in the network stack that impacts web performance benchmarks with large number of clients.
Redhat's page on KVM performance seems to confirm this too: LAMP: For Apache webserver workloads, up to 139 percent of bare metal performance with great scalability.
I never said the OP was such a person.
I'm leaving it to the OP to clarify the details, if he cares to post more; the OP could probably add a lot of useful info for readers, like 'details of the slowness', observations, etc, which would increase the usefulness of the anecdotal info.
As it stands the OP hasn't chosen to provide better details that could be useful, but instead made a vague remark about trying AMD64 procs once (or twice).
To be clear: trying two AMD64 processors twice or once is _NOT_ significantly different from trying just one AMD64 processor once, the sample size is still very low, especially if the two procs were of the same generation, stepping, or batch of CPUs.
Or if the CPU was not fully singled out...
Trying one AMD64 proc in a system, deciding it's too slow, then getting another AMD64 proc, doesn't identify the proc itself as an issue, if the choice of cooling, PSU/bus/MB/dip switch settings/etc was at issue.
Another observation would be that it's unfair to compare a 1st gen AMD64 proc vs a 2nd gen or later Intel EM64T proc. Even if the GHz happen to be the same.
There were also some times when the most comparable CPU (at the high end) was not brought to market by both vendors at the same time.
Many procs of even the same Ghz and cores have different performance characteristics.
Many purchasers of CPUs forget things other than GHz that are important, such as L1, L2, L3 cache sizes, FSB, and certain features such as Hyperthreading.
So say you, but can you prove it was an issue with the processor, and that it was a design issue, do you have information backing this up?
I think slashdot readers might be interested in the remarks of someone more experienced with both AMD and Intel processors, rather than someone who tried an AMD CPU once, didn't do due their due dilligence, and just assumed all AMD procs were broken because their system was.
It's happened too many times to count that I got a defective Intel processor that had the thermal monitor "broken" in some way that caused the proc to always throttle its clock down.
Chips were replaced under warranty, and then all was well. Every manufacturer had bad batches, that's why you do burn-in testing on CPUs, memory, and motherboards, before deployment.
I've dealt with different systems totalling a few hundred different AMD CPUs, and not run into any defective ones yet, or caveats to 32-bit or 64-bit AMD procs.
I'm not saying Intels are unreliable or anything, and I hope i'm not jinxing myself: but so far, all (perhaps) 10 DoA or otherwise defective CPUs i've seen in my life were Intel processors.
What are you talking about?
AMD64, also known as x86_64 or EMT64T was invented by AMD.
The performance is absolutely stellar.
AMD did this so well, Intel decided to try to copy them, and came up with Intel 64T.
As a whole, there is barely a noticeable performance difference between the two platforms.
Of course there are some low-performing 64-bit procs for budget users, just like there are slow Intel procs for budget users.
But overall, Intel 64-bit procs are no better than AMD 64-bit procs.
Also, when it comes to hardware virtualization and IOMMU, AMD has a very significant edge.
Don't blame AMD because you bought the wrong proc model for your system, or misconfig'ed it.
Processor is definitely not the only thing that impacts performance.
There are many other ways you can screw your system's performance in picking hardware components -- not all procs are ideal for all configurations.
Hell, i'm very often getting better performance with Linux and Windows (dual boot) out of my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz than with my Intel Core2 Quad Core Q9400 2.66Ghz, and much better benchmarks for certain types of workloads.
Even though the Quad Core machine has 8gb of RAM, and my dual-core machine only has 4gb...
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
So we should throw the whole basis of appeals by wrongfully sentenced prisoners out the window?
I'm not talking about appeals of their case.
I'm talking about legal actions against prison officials, prison rules, etc.
Mismangement of the prison system isn't for the courts to sort out.
who should these "outsiders" be? How do you decide whether they are being impartial? What are you paying them?
I'm not paying them. The prisoner's paying them, as a prior condition to be able to file the action.
I would suggest aggregating all complaints from prisoners once every 3 months, and convening a jury for that purpose.
And only actual constitutional challenges, or claims of torture, physical abuse, wreckless endangerment, or other claims of grave threats to prisoner welfare get priority treatment, a determination that can be made by the clerk who enters the paperwork into the computer, when they specify the "category".
The jury would not be provided info about the individual who filed the complaint, only the summary of the complaint, where the prisoner is asked to provide exactly the law broken, and the objective circumstances of the complaint.
Containing a summary written by the prisoner's attorney.
In case the summary contained anything other than a complaint identifying specifically only circumstances of the complaint, jurors would be instructed to discard it, sanctions could be levied against the attorney who filed it.
Only matters the jury voted 51% in favor of being heard, would be allowed to be considered by the courts.
What's stupid is prisoners can make a legal challenge, on the basis of rules set by their institution...
Wasting taxpayer money and the courts time on such a trivial issue.
Sure they're unhappy about D&D being banned.
But it's certainly not cruel and unusual, or any violation of human rights.
Prisoner legal challenges should have to get reviewed by outsiders on "worthiness" before the courts can even be bothered with making a decision based on the law.
The prisoner who brought the challenge should be bitchslapped by the court as punishment for wasting their time, ordered to pay restitution, and get additional years added to their sentence on that basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Public transportation does not necessarily mean mass-transit pre-defined routes or anything of the sort, it would be enough for a bus to travel out to where you are, and pick up a few other people on the way toward the destination. It can mean they send a special truck out. Obviously you would have a lower level of service, and less rapid access to transportation living so far out.
Also, it would be up to the authorities to decide what areas they provide the service to.
Mandating would imply: if available than mandatory, for example, for business reasons (deliver drivers/repairmen can't carry all their gear on the bus). If not available, special paperwork excepting you required.
The vast majority of the population lives in a city, not a completely rural environment, where public transport could be too expensive or uneconomical to provide.
Getting 1kg of mass up to near light speed requires more than 1kg of energy, so even for a civilization with direct mass-energy conversion, it's not economical to ship things interstellar distances in reasonable time.
Who said anything about accelerating a mass up to near the speed of light using conventional methods? There might be other ways of reducing the distance of the path the object must travel, to reach the other object, to a small distance, at a reasonable velocity nowhere near the speed of light. If you are accelerating the object, its velocity must exceed the normal speed of light, to cross galaxies in a sane amount of time. E.g. 1,000,000x the speed of light. And it could travel between galaxies in one year.
I think SF has made us completely forget how far away other stars are. Everything we know about physics says that interstellar distances are fundamental barriers, not just technological ones.
'Fundamental barriers' are a construct created by humans.
Our understanding of physics is susceptible to error, and we make a lot of assumptions that can be wrong.
Fundamental in this case, just means, that a larger body of human study of physics was originally built on that, and invalidating it means a great deal of laws will need revision, for our theories and laws to be consistent.
Extraterrestrials could have an entirely different understanding of physics than we do, and an entirely different body of physical laws.
That are just as consistent and true as ours on observation.
Just because of the fact that many of our laws in physics are approximations that are usually close enough to true, and aliens could have different concepts.
Anyways, entire notions we have not conceived of, may be possible, and may only be possible with extraterrestrials' body of physics.
No... there's no method of FTL travel that we know about.
There's also no time travel, no cold fusion, smashing the atom, etc. It used to be a fundamental law of physics that neither energy nor matter could ever be created or destroyed. That got proved wrong too.
Some of the things that are possible, we have not created yet, or discovered how to create yet. We cannot be sure against discovering counterexamples to any laws. Even the laws of thermodynamics can be found to have exceptions.
Some of the things that are possible, our currented limited understanding of physics suggests they might be impossible or nearly impossible.
That doesn't mean extraterrestrials won't have the technology.
There are already theories such as how 'bending space' in suitable ways might lead to long-distance travel.
As far as the Earth having massive resources, what could we possibly have that couldn't be obtained more easily from one of the (thousands/millions) of other mostly uninhabited other planets in the galaxy?
Biologically-created resources such as Oil which do not exist on uninhabited worlds.
Notcrammed together, no.. Yes.. you might have to wait a little longer to get your ride, in some areas.
But the fact everyone's forced to use it should make it more economical. I also assume you can pay a higher fee if you need faster transportation, depending on the Quality of service you require.
I'm presuming the extraterrestrials have developed technology to travel between galaxies in a few months or less.
I wouldn't expect a space ship to be usable as a comfortable living environment for extended periods of time.
The trouble with the moon or mars, is they don't have a breathable atmosphere: it would be dangerous to live there (due to no electromagnetic field or protections against cosmic rays, rocks hitting the planet, etc), and they are not very habitable worlds.
It's conceivable people could try to live there, but there would almost certainly be more volunteers to go live in a slightly less-hostile environment.
I wouldn't assume (so readily) that extraterrestrials are necessarily outside the solar system. Even the solar system is a big place, and there may be some habitable moon unaccounted for.
I also wouldn't assume their navigational capabilities or ease of travelling from another system are as poor as ours.
They may have some mode of transporation that enables them to accomplish with ease, what would be impossible for current human tech.
I have my doubts that technology is able to negate overcrowding issues.
When you run out of space on your planet, you run out of space. It's unlikely that even advanced technology would allow extraterrestrials to construct new planets or make worlds with no usable atmosphere habitable.
Underground living might be possible, but even that has certain feasibility limits.
It reduces the probability that earth could be quickly located.
We gotta consider the possibility, that any extraterrestrials close enough to hear our signals in any reasonable amount of time, and with the sophistication to pinpoint us....
Might have the technology and desire to invade earth.
E.g. Consider earth itself... fast forward a few dozen generations...... massive overpopulation, lack of resources, land, severe overcrowding.
Extreme desire for another habitable place to live.
And then you detect an alien signal.. a foreign world. You step foot there, and you're greeted by basically an aboriginal species (compared to your civilization).
Habitable world, massive resources, very primitive 21st-century level technology, nothing compared to your 23rd century tech.
Oh.... so some colonists start travelling from earth to 'the new world' for a better life.
Settlers VS the Natives all over again.
It's happened before, it could happen again. Except us earth inhabitants could be the primitive natives / "Indians" / etc.
Scary, huh? :)
Why not save some carbon in the process, and mandate the use of public transportation?
When you want to get from point A to point B, you launch the "Take me there App" on your iPhone, computer, or other device.
Select your destination, click OK, you get a "pick up time".
Eventually some bus which has its route automatically computed for it, based on the destinations of people in your area, comes and picks you up.
Then eventually (at some point along its computed route) arrives at your destination, you get off.
etc...
like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
How do you feel about being the person to pay the funeral bills, when someone dies in their car and causes an accident on the road due to freezing to death / frostbite while driving?
The human body isn't meant for extreme cold. An adverse environment in the car (or outside) is more distracting.
Also, leaving the kids at school to avoid distracted driving is a similarly unacceptable scenario.
Accidents happen, and you can only do so much to prevent clear abuses, while not creating bigger problems.
Surprise, big corporate suing little Nanny "Apple Pie" Buttons is not profitable.
It is profitable if you're the lawyer doing the suing, and not you are not one of the RIAA's members :)
What really happens is much much simpler: Someone proposes a measure that they claim is to "stop child porn", and everyone supports it because otherwise their political opponents could claim they support child porn.
Right.. Someone just needs to propose the measure to expand it to include violence. I'm not suggesting anyone planned it, but that it's a series of steps that may happen over some period of time.
Political opponents can claim they support violence against children if they refuse.
Expanding the age group is also easy, by finding a few examples of people who are abused but over the legal age limit, and then trumpeting them out to the media.
As for step 3, that's also easy to achieve. Someone proposes a crack down on drug-related imagery, makes up some bogus statistics about increased drug usage by children exposed to the images.
Opponents have to include ban on drug usage imagery, or appear soft on drugs.
Again, same tactic for age increase... drug usage among young adults. show age 21-25.
As for expanding scope to anything offensive.. this may be done by lax wording of the anti-drug law.
After a generation or so, the public will get used to that ban, and ready to accept the next steps.
If the government can block drug usage imagery, why not other immoral visual imagery? someone will think
Someone will propose a law against allowing kids to see porn
Political opponents cannot oppose it, without getting mocked for not thinking of the children.
Then that escalates the same way in later generations.
As for expanding to crimes aganist a person... this gets called a "Victims Protection Act"
Probably the official motivation is to point to some abuse by the media (for sensationalism) that hurts the victim of a crime. Political opponents can be mocked as not in favor of protecting children who are victim of a crime, from media abuse.
et.c..
Or a picture of a half-naked 40-year-old, with an undergarment featuring the teletubbies or barney?
Interesting... a cartoon character rises to the level of person now. Whoever knew.. I suppose it is the next logical step.
How do you measure the 'age' of a cartoon character, I wonder.
Is it whatever age the author says it is.... or does the jury have to make some sort of subjective determination based on carefully examining the imagery to make a judgement on the appearance of the images filed as evidence?
With careful consideration as to not be prejudicial against midgets and people who appear much younger than their actual age.
Next step is to extend the law to include imagery depicting violence as well.
And then expand the age a little bit... age under 21 instead of 18.
And then extend the law to include images depicting not just porn and violent acts, but drug usage also
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under age 25 instead of 21.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting any crimes or hostile activities at all against such persons.
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under 30 instead of age 25.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting or showing anything the least bit offensive to community values to persons depicted.
Then remove the age limit entirely.
Then expand the scope a bit to include anything disruptive to the civil order, government business, or disparaging to authority.
Next make it retroactive, include text, writings, blog posts, opinion columns, as well as images. And anything offensive to even dead people or non-governmental highly-regarded entities. Increase the penalty for some years of confinement to permanent imprisonment, and eventual execution.
Wow, instant censorship (in 10 steps)
Instruction sets themselves aren't patentable.
Machines or processes (such as circuit designs) that efficiently implement CPU instructions are patentable.
So if Intel took AMD's instruction set, it is possible they could find a different way of implementing it (possibly as or more efficiently).
In other words, AMD couldn't patent the "x86_64 instruction set" to prevent Intel from making a CPU that 64-bit software would interoperate with, even if they wanted to.
But as for AMD's proprietary designs for their processors, of course, the actual CPU designs, and the AMD's specific processes and methods of implementing those instruction sets (to the extent they are novel, non-obvious) can be patented.
This is an aside from the fact there is a cross-licensing deal between Intel and AMD, and there have been Intellectual property disputes between the two companies in the past, that got settled out of court.
There exists a cross-licensing deal between AMD and Intel whose exact terms are secret and unknown to the public.
AMD uses some Intel technologies (such as the X86 instruction set), and Intel uses some AMD technologies, such as X86_64.
Without these deals, PC microprocessor performance and capabilities of both AMD and Intel would probably not be nearly what it is today.
Also, the alternative is for the two companies to have sued each other into oblivion over patent infringement/IP cases, as in thermonuclear war -- each has a big enough patent arsenal against the other to provide assured destruction.
Well, Intel could probably design a new old-generation chip without using any AMD technologies.
But there'd be no buyers... The public might go back to using PowerPC/MIPs. (e.g. death of the X86 platform)
So yeah, it is banned in the Apple store, but probably due to AT&T rather than Apple.
Any chance Apple will expand the app store then, to allow more apps to run on other carriers who aren't so restrictive?
Eg. "This app is approved for use on all networks, except AT&T"
So when trying to install an app (as an AT&T user) you'll be informed your network doesn't allow the app, and get suggested a list of alternative carriers to switch to.
Something can be poor without there being a high quality alternative in existence (yet). Just because everyone in a class got an "F", doesn't mean it's a good grade (even though almost everyone else got the same, except one student got a C and another got an B.. the one who got the C gets to be president, the one who gets the B never gets told about their grade, while their employer patents the invention and sells it for billions as uber-expensive product for "Enterprises" only).
I am comparing as in having 4 computers, each with 1 CPU and their own OS image and 16gb of RAM, assigned 25 ip addresses, each serving web page requests (received from a load balancer); versus 1 computer with 4 cores and 64gb of RAM, assigned 100 ip addresses, say having a single Dell PowerEdge R510. versus Multi-proc setup clusters, HTPC, etc.
Compared to other Unices... Solaris, FreeBSD, z/OS, compared to running multiple OS instances on the same hardware, each in its own Xen VM.
It's surprising, but scaling out several Linux virtual machines on the same piece of metal, oddly, seems to get more than triple throughput (server-wide) for serving large static web pages, particularly with maximal numbers of simultaneous connections.
If you equally divide the physical server into 4 virtual machines, each would have only 15.3gb of memory to work with (after subtracting ~3gb overhead due to virtualization), intuitively one would expect less total http throughput from the server, but it's not what happens. Instead each instance gets pretty close to full performance..
Windows requires excessive tuning and IIS still a little bit slower.
Plenty of RAM and aggressive read caching, so there should no I/O bottleneck.
My only conclusion at this point (which might be wrong), is that it's a great advdantage to have 2 cores, but the third and fourth cores go underused, for some reason, my best guess is some sort of kernel-related lock contention or issue in the network stack that impacts web performance benchmarks with large number of clients.
Redhat's page on KVM performance seems to confirm this too: LAMP: For Apache webserver workloads, up to 139 percent of bare metal performance with great scalability.
I never said the OP was such a person. I'm leaving it to the OP to clarify the details, if he cares to post more; the OP could probably add a lot of useful info for readers, like 'details of the slowness', observations, etc, which would increase the usefulness of the anecdotal info.
As it stands the OP hasn't chosen to provide better details that could be useful, but instead made a vague remark about trying AMD64 procs once (or twice).
To be clear: trying two AMD64 processors twice or once is _NOT_ significantly different from trying just one AMD64 processor once, the sample size is still very low, especially if the two procs were of the same generation, stepping, or batch of CPUs.
Or if the CPU was not fully singled out... Trying one AMD64 proc in a system, deciding it's too slow, then getting another AMD64 proc, doesn't identify the proc itself as an issue, if the choice of cooling, PSU/bus/MB/dip switch settings/etc was at issue.
Another observation would be that it's unfair to compare a 1st gen AMD64 proc vs a 2nd gen or later Intel EM64T proc. Even if the GHz happen to be the same. There were also some times when the most comparable CPU (at the high end) was not brought to market by both vendors at the same time.
Many procs of even the same Ghz and cores have different performance characteristics. Many purchasers of CPUs forget things other than GHz that are important, such as L1, L2, L3 cache sizes, FSB, and certain features such as Hyperthreading.
So say you, but can you prove it was an issue with the processor, and that it was a design issue, do you have information backing this up?
I think slashdot readers might be interested in the remarks of someone more experienced with both AMD and Intel processors, rather than someone who tried an AMD CPU once, didn't do due their due dilligence, and just assumed all AMD procs were broken because their system was.
It's happened too many times to count that I got a defective Intel processor that had the thermal monitor "broken" in some way that caused the proc to always throttle its clock down.
Chips were replaced under warranty, and then all was well. Every manufacturer had bad batches, that's why you do burn-in testing on CPUs, memory, and motherboards, before deployment.
I've dealt with different systems totalling a few hundred different AMD CPUs, and not run into any defective ones yet, or caveats to 32-bit or 64-bit AMD procs.
I'm not saying Intels are unreliable or anything, and I hope i'm not jinxing myself: but so far, all (perhaps) 10 DoA or otherwise defective CPUs i've seen in my life were Intel processors.
What are you talking about? AMD64, also known as x86_64 or EMT64T was invented by AMD.
The performance is absolutely stellar.
AMD did this so well, Intel decided to try to copy them, and came up with Intel 64T.
As a whole, there is barely a noticeable performance difference between the two platforms.
Of course there are some low-performing 64-bit procs for budget users, just like there are slow Intel procs for budget users.
But overall, Intel 64-bit procs are no better than AMD 64-bit procs.
Also, when it comes to hardware virtualization and IOMMU, AMD has a very significant edge.
Don't blame AMD because you bought the wrong proc model for your system, or misconfig'ed it. Processor is definitely not the only thing that impacts performance. There are many other ways you can screw your system's performance in picking hardware components -- not all procs are ideal for all configurations.
Hell, i'm very often getting better performance with Linux and Windows (dual boot) out of my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz than with my Intel Core2 Quad Core Q9400 2.66Ghz, and much better benchmarks for certain types of workloads.
Even though the Quad Core machine has 8gb of RAM, and my dual-core machine only has 4gb...
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
Last I checked, there was no such thing as a right to play DnD, or a human right to sue.
These are luxuries afforded certain members of certain societies: they are not human rights.
So we should throw the whole basis of appeals by wrongfully sentenced prisoners out the window?
I'm not talking about appeals of their case. I'm talking about legal actions against prison officials, prison rules, etc.
Mismangement of the prison system isn't for the courts to sort out.
who should these "outsiders" be? How do you decide whether they are being impartial? What are you paying them?
I'm not paying them. The prisoner's paying them, as a prior condition to be able to file the action. I would suggest aggregating all complaints from prisoners once every 3 months, and convening a jury for that purpose.
And only actual constitutional challenges, or claims of torture, physical abuse, wreckless endangerment, or other claims of grave threats to prisoner welfare get priority treatment, a determination that can be made by the clerk who enters the paperwork into the computer, when they specify the "category".
The jury would not be provided info about the individual who filed the complaint, only the summary of the complaint, where the prisoner is asked to provide exactly the law broken, and the objective circumstances of the complaint.
Containing a summary written by the prisoner's attorney.
In case the summary contained anything other than a complaint identifying specifically only circumstances of the complaint, jurors would be instructed to discard it, sanctions could be levied against the attorney who filed it.
Only matters the jury voted 51% in favor of being heard, would be allowed to be considered by the courts.
What's stupid is prisoners can make a legal challenge, on the basis of rules set by their institution...
Wasting taxpayer money and the courts time on such a trivial issue.
Sure they're unhappy about D&D being banned. But it's certainly not cruel and unusual, or any violation of human rights.
Prisoner legal challenges should have to get reviewed by outsiders on "worthiness" before the courts can even be bothered with making a decision based on the law.
The prisoner who brought the challenge should be bitchslapped by the court as punishment for wasting their time, ordered to pay restitution, and get additional years added to their sentence on that basis.
The game has The banker.
Who has a role similar to loan sharks.
Also, some non-inmates who have played monopoly in the past were found to have embezzled money.
The game directly encouraged that, since the Banker is the one player allowed to sneak themselves as much cash as needed from the vault...