Another reason the z10 sells well is native BCD calculations, meaning that in some tasks coupled with their massive I/O, they are so much faster than Intel/AMD offerings that you'd need AT LEAST 10-15 times more Intel/AMD hardware, with the requisite floorspace, networking, power cabling, cooling and UPS's for all that to compare merely on the theoretical side. In practice, it can get even worse, since the tasks don't parallellize well.
Not quite true. It was true for some real-world workloads, while Intel won at some other real-world workloads. Then came Sandy Bridge and kicked AMD's ass all over. I went from being a 9 year long user of AMD over to Sandy Bridge when it was time to replace my old, aging Athlon 64 3500+, mobo and RAM, because for what I do, the i5-2500 beat the shit out of the X6 1055T(which was more expensive than the i5-2500 at the time too...)
And Sandy Bridge is low and mid end for Intel. High-end desktop/consumer performance comes with Ivy Bridge.
So the fact that AMD's high-end competes with the mid-end from Intel that's been on the market for 9 months now is rather worrying.
"Okay excluding the L33T gamers, super heavy CAD users, HD video producers, Movie F/X houses, and research labs no one needs the power of Intel's high end desktop chips. Frankly some of those users like the video and science users do most of their stuff on the server CPUs anyway."
Bull fucking shit.
Many non-geek amateurs/home users definitely want as much CPU performance as possible. In fact, as someone else wrote in a comment on this site a few months back, many software dev geeks need less CPU/RAM/disk than many home users plugging away at their hobbies these days. Many home users do video editing, music production, heavy duty graphics work, just as a hobby. There are people who don't give a fuck about computers other than as a tool, but it helps them do their other hobbies more efficiently.
As for the price of the CPU? When I upgraded my gaming/hobby rig, I went from Athlon 64 to Intel Sandy Bridge i5-2500... Because for the games and hobbies I do, it outperformed the at the time more expensive AMD X6 1055T, and I needed a new mobo+new RAM anyway. And Sandy Bridge is Intel's low/mid end. Ivy Bridge will be the top end. Bulldozer is competing with the now 9 months on the market mid end from Intel.....
Ah, back to the good old days of 3D graphics, when output was measured in polygons per second, and all the jiggling about, until the big boys all standardized on 50 pixel polygons, gouraud-shaded, at a resolution of 1280x1024, with a colour depth of 24 bits... And then more stuff was tacked on... Well, ok, almost all the big boys... Intergraph kept trying to pass 25 pixel polygon performance numbers as a valid comparison to 50 pixel polygons....
Akamai is a waste of space, especially when they appear to throttle access in certain regions, such as the nordic countries(And then they report low download speeds... go figure...), while other CDN's, like for example LimeLight Networks run full-speed here. On a good day against an Akamai server, I might get 1.5MiB/s peak on an 8GiB file.... Average day against LimeLight Networks, 10-11MB/s sustained on a 10GiB file.
The thing is, most of those knew NOTHING about TCP/IP, so my standard reply when people asked for my IP addy was to reply with 127.0.0.1 (and yes, that worked for PoD vs Windows...)
In school, we used it to knock the Quake players offline, so people could do their homework etc on the school computers.
"Perhaps assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works. But understanding exactly how a processor works is not necessary for development of most applications. Heck, understanding the underlying frameworks/libraries you are utilizing often isn't."
And then we are stuck with the endless bloat, endless patchwork with messy kludges that are in constant need of fixing....
Strong is equal to good in this case. And I see many who style themselves good, but can't understand when a program of theirs works well on one processor, but not on another. Sure, they may be "good" inside their specific niche, but they have no versatility in their problem solving.
As for Knuth, he's showing that he is indeed a good programmer. Just because something is modular does not explicitly make it good code, nor does it being non-modular make it explicitly bad code. IKEA furniture is modular. Masterwork furniture is less modular. But which is made by the more skilled craftsman?
Modular is a crutch, that works well in some general fields, but are unwieldy or even a waste of resources and a roadblock in other fields.
How about working on some specific real world fields, such as writing interconnect drivers and such for HPC, or extremely tight requirements in some fields of embedded stuff, such as telemetry gear, both networked and autonomous? Or just proving in fact that something is deterministic, instead of just in theory. Or verifying that the compiler is indeed doing what it should.
And as for architectural details being dwarfed, then you haven't been working with porting things between different architectures. An algorithm that yields excellent performance on one can be 2 orders of magnitude slower on another. Which should be right up your alley, namely of developing and selecting the right algorithms etc.
Assembler is useful for solving some problems, for example establishing whether an approach is in fact deterministic, and not just in theory. It's also useful for debugging, proofing compilers, embedded stuff with tight requirements etc.
Then you are not a very strong programmer at all. Assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works, and how well any given algorithm will work on that architecture.
Which is why a certain CS professor, you may have heard of him, he's called Knuth, uses Assembler in his somewhat reasonably well-known(some would call them the bible of CS) books.
Major parts of the worlds telecom networks, for example the software in any of Ericssons equipment made in the last 15 years is written in Erlang. Nokia also uses a fair chunk of Erlang IIRC.
Software upgrades for some equipment used by the Swedish Defense Force, to accomodate the Network-Centric Warfare model used functional programming to.
I've used Erlang myself for semi-embedded networks that need to work in parallell.
A 70 year old woman can carry quite a lot. Old people are tougher than you think.
At age 85, my grandfather on my mothers side still did 40 pushups and 40 situps every day. He became senile 1½ year ago, at age 89, with frontal lobe complications(Meaning he became very aggressive), and became a threat to my grandmother. I actually had trouble holding him back.
My grandmother will be 90 this year. We have constant troubles with her, she's dragging furniture around, climbing around to wash windows, change window drapes, she goes shopping in the middle of winter in a northern town here in Sweden, alone, without telling anyone.... And she has heart problems, requiring strong meds!
So, a woman of 70, unless she's in exceptionally bad health? She can carry quite a bit of water, and might even be insulted if you become pushy about carrying it for her:p
It's how chefs truly compete. Any skilled chef can cook well, but the master chefs can successfully come up with entirely new courses on a whim, and combining them in new menus, without having a culinary catastrophy on their hands. And that competition is what keeps the world of culinary delights from stagnating.
I myself brew beer. And unlike many Free Software/Open Source adherents, I don't want the exact recepies for Guiness or Innis&Gunn Rum Cask ale or anything. There is nothing creative about that. The real joy of brewing is to come up with my own recepies, to actually be CREATIVE.
Yes, you can have an estimated number of people missing. You have two population centers, with combined populations of 40000 according to population census/inhabitant registry. You have 7500 people accounted for in shelters, checked against those lists. Hypothetically, 2500 bodies dead, of which 250 have been identified. That means you have 32250 missing, 2250 of those missing known dead but not yet identified.
And this is the standard in large-scale catrastrophy management. Your definition is purely your own.
(Disclaimer: While I do have the training necessary for doing competent C3 work for crisis/catastrophy management, I've not yet been involved in such a situation. I was deployed elsewhere during the tsunami crisis that hit Thailand, Indonesia etc)
Parachuting, both normal and HALO? Check. Bit of rock climbing? Check. Trying to jump from the 3m platform into a pool? That takes a while to work up the nerve.... Doing it from 10m? No way.....
Look up Minamisanriku in the Miyagi prefecture. Rikuzentakata in the Iwate prefecture.
That's just two examples of towns that were demolished. Rescue crews are slowly establishing contact with survivors there, reducing the number of missing people, but it's still towns that were demolished.
In an area as densely populated such as Japan, it is not impossible for 88000 people to go missing in a major catastrophic event like a major earthquake and a following tsunami, which can literally sweep buildings away, especially when you factor in when the earthquake occured, and the tsunami swept in. Missing means status unknown, and the earthquake and tsunami have damaged enough infrastructure that any chance of a proper headcount will be weeks or even months away. The current reported Missing People figure is from families/relatives etc that have reported them as missing.
As it was, it hit during the afternoon, so there were a lot of people out in traffic etc also, which causes further problems, but several small towns have been completely demolished by the tsunami, and they are VERY hard to reach due to the damage that has been caused, with roads severely damaged, fields turned to thick layers of watery mud etc
Before you write another post like that, engage your brain, and actually think things through. And keep in mind what I said: Missing means Status Unknown. It can be as simple as simply not being able to communicate, due to any communications infrastructure being swept away.
It's not the same thing, since you aren't taking notes of what the instructor is saying or drawing on the blackboard or showing on slides/PP presentation etc etc.
Depends on how you take notes. But empirical studies show that taking notes on paper actually improves recall and understanding. Tablets are not quite as good, because the feedback from the writing process is worse, and the movements are less fluid. Typing on a keyboard was found to be worthless, ironically the worst among geeks who swore up and down that it was the best way. The latter people were also overall afflicted with below average memory recall, since they had gotten used to having a computer store everything, rather than develop their human capabilities, something that also affected their daily lives beyond just work or studies.
As mentioned, the above has been empirically studied all over the world, not just in academia, but also in business and the military. One example is negotiations in business and diplomacy, or briefings in the military. Taking notes on paper is less intrusive, and better for recall. The problem is that the exact neurochemical reason for it hasn't been found yet, but one prevalent theory is that the act of writing out the symbols help create a "connection" with the material, reinforcing the memory structure.
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason the z10 sells well is native BCD calculations, meaning that in some tasks coupled with their massive I/O, they are so much faster than Intel/AMD offerings that you'd need AT LEAST 10-15 times more Intel/AMD hardware, with the requisite floorspace, networking, power cabling, cooling and UPS's for all that to compare merely on the theoretical side. In practice, it can get even worse, since the tasks don't parallellize well.
I'd define that more as malign parasite pricing.
IBM is happy to price it high enough to make you feel it in your budget, but not high enough to negate the value of their products to your business.
IBM... IBM.... Oh and IBM....
Too bad that their top-end equipment is rather nice....
Not quite true. It was true for some real-world workloads, while Intel won at some other real-world workloads. Then came Sandy Bridge and kicked AMD's ass all over. I went from being a 9 year long user of AMD over to Sandy Bridge when it was time to replace my old, aging Athlon 64 3500+, mobo and RAM, because for what I do, the i5-2500 beat the shit out of the X6 1055T(which was more expensive than the i5-2500 at the time too...)
And Sandy Bridge is low and mid end for Intel. High-end desktop/consumer performance comes with Ivy Bridge.
So the fact that AMD's high-end competes with the mid-end from Intel that's been on the market for 9 months now is rather worrying.
"Okay excluding the L33T gamers, super heavy CAD users, HD video producers, Movie F/X houses, and research labs no one needs the power of Intel's high end desktop chips. Frankly some of those users like the video and science users do most of their stuff on the server CPUs anyway."
Bull fucking shit.
Many non-geek amateurs/home users definitely want as much CPU performance as possible. In fact, as someone else wrote in a comment on this site a few months back, many software dev geeks need less CPU/RAM/disk than many home users plugging away at their hobbies these days. Many home users do video editing, music production, heavy duty graphics work, just as a hobby. There are people who don't give a fuck about computers other than as a tool, but it helps them do their other hobbies more efficiently.
As for the price of the CPU? When I upgraded my gaming/hobby rig, I went from Athlon 64 to Intel Sandy Bridge i5-2500... Because for the games and hobbies I do, it outperformed the at the time more expensive AMD X6 1055T, and I needed a new mobo+new RAM anyway. And Sandy Bridge is Intel's low/mid end. Ivy Bridge will be the top end. Bulldozer is competing with the now 9 months on the market mid end from Intel.....
Ah, back to the good old days of 3D graphics, when output was measured in polygons per second, and all the jiggling about, until the big boys all standardized on 50 pixel polygons, gouraud-shaded, at a resolution of 1280x1024, with a colour depth of 24 bits... And then more stuff was tacked on...
Well, ok, almost all the big boys... Intergraph kept trying to pass 25 pixel polygon performance numbers as a valid comparison to 50 pixel polygons....
Akamai is a waste of space, especially when they appear to throttle access in certain regions, such as the nordic countries(And then they report low download speeds... go figure...), while other CDN's, like for example LimeLight Networks run full-speed here. On a good day against an Akamai server, I might get 1.5MiB/s peak on an 8GiB file.... Average day against LimeLight Networks, 10-11MB/s sustained on a 10GiB file.
Here in Sweden, we actually use the ISO standard to date things, other than in some very informal things.
The last contract I signed, for example, I put down the date 2011-06-13, as did the person who hired me.
The thing is, most of those knew NOTHING about TCP/IP, so my standard reply when people asked for my IP addy was to reply with 127.0.0.1 (and yes, that worked for PoD vs Windows...)
In school, we used it to knock the Quake players offline, so people could do their homework etc on the school computers.
I was there for that, "borrowing" my school's connection.
And yes, I used this nick in the channel.
"Perhaps assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works. But understanding exactly how a processor works is not necessary for development of most applications. Heck, understanding the underlying frameworks/libraries you are utilizing often isn't."
And then we are stuck with the endless bloat, endless patchwork with messy kludges that are in constant need of fixing....
Strong is equal to good in this case. And I see many who style themselves good, but can't understand when a program of theirs works well on one processor, but not on another. Sure, they may be "good" inside their specific niche, but they have no versatility in their problem solving.
As for Knuth, he's showing that he is indeed a good programmer. Just because something is modular does not explicitly make it good code, nor does it being non-modular make it explicitly bad code. IKEA furniture is modular. Masterwork furniture is less modular. But which is made by the more skilled craftsman?
Modular is a crutch, that works well in some general fields, but are unwieldy or even a waste of resources and a roadblock in other fields.
How about working on some specific real world fields, such as writing interconnect drivers and such for HPC, or extremely tight requirements in some fields of embedded stuff, such as telemetry gear, both networked and autonomous? Or just proving in fact that something is deterministic, instead of just in theory. Or verifying that the compiler is indeed doing what it should.
And as for architectural details being dwarfed, then you haven't been working with porting things between different architectures. An algorithm that yields excellent performance on one can be 2 orders of magnitude slower on another. Which should be right up your alley, namely of developing and selecting the right algorithms etc.
Assembler is useful for solving some problems, for example establishing whether an approach is in fact deterministic, and not just in theory. It's also useful for debugging, proofing compilers, embedded stuff with tight requirements etc.
Then you are not a very strong programmer at all. Assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works, and how well any given algorithm will work on that architecture.
Which is why a certain CS professor, you may have heard of him, he's called Knuth, uses Assembler in his somewhat reasonably well-known(some would call them the bible of CS) books.
Major parts of the worlds telecom networks, for example the software in any of Ericssons equipment made in the last 15 years is written in Erlang. Nokia also uses a fair chunk of Erlang IIRC.
Software upgrades for some equipment used by the Swedish Defense Force, to accomodate the Network-Centric Warfare model used functional programming to.
I've used Erlang myself for semi-embedded networks that need to work in parallell.
A 70 year old woman can carry quite a lot. Old people are tougher than you think.
At age 85, my grandfather on my mothers side still did 40 pushups and 40 situps every day. He became senile 1½ year ago, at age 89, with frontal lobe complications(Meaning he became very aggressive), and became a threat to my grandmother. I actually had trouble holding him back.
My grandmother will be 90 this year. We have constant troubles with her, she's dragging furniture around, climbing around to wash windows, change window drapes, she goes shopping in the middle of winter in a northern town here in Sweden, alone, without telling anyone.... And she has heart problems, requiring strong meds!
So, a woman of 70, unless she's in exceptionally bad health? She can carry quite a bit of water, and might even be insulted if you become pushy about carrying it for her :p
Which is just another thing in which Blizzard plagiarizes Games Workshop :p
GW HQ
Statue and the very WH40k-esque building front has been there since mid-90's at least.
It's how chefs truly compete. Any skilled chef can cook well, but the master chefs can successfully come up with entirely new courses on a whim, and combining them in new menus, without having a culinary catastrophy on their hands. And that competition is what keeps the world of culinary delights from stagnating.
I myself brew beer. And unlike many Free Software/Open Source adherents, I don't want the exact recepies for Guiness or Innis&Gunn Rum Cask ale or anything. There is nothing creative about that. The real joy of brewing is to come up with my own recepies, to actually be CREATIVE.
Yes, you can have an estimated number of people missing. You have two population centers, with combined populations of 40000 according to population census/inhabitant registry. You have 7500 people accounted for in shelters, checked against those lists. Hypothetically, 2500 bodies dead, of which 250 have been identified. That means you have 32250 missing, 2250 of those missing known dead but not yet identified.
And this is the standard in large-scale catrastrophy management. Your definition is purely your own.
(Disclaimer: While I do have the training necessary for doing competent C3 work for crisis/catastrophy management, I've not yet been involved in such a situation. I was deployed elsewhere during the tsunami crisis that hit Thailand, Indonesia etc)
I have a problem with jumping into water....
Parachuting, both normal and HALO? Check.
Bit of rock climbing? Check.
Trying to jump from the 3m platform into a pool? That takes a while to work up the nerve....
Doing it from 10m? No way.....
You are wrong
Look up Minamisanriku in the Miyagi prefecture.
Rikuzentakata in the Iwate prefecture.
That's just two examples of towns that were demolished. Rescue crews are slowly establishing contact with survivors there, reducing the number of missing people, but it's still towns that were demolished.
In an area as densely populated such as Japan, it is not impossible for 88000 people to go missing in a major catastrophic event like a major earthquake and a following tsunami, which can literally sweep buildings away, especially when you factor in when the earthquake occured, and the tsunami swept in. Missing means status unknown, and the earthquake and tsunami have damaged enough infrastructure that any chance of a proper headcount will be weeks or even months away. The current reported Missing People figure is from families/relatives etc that have reported them as missing.
As it was, it hit during the afternoon, so there were a lot of people out in traffic etc also, which causes further problems, but several small towns have been completely demolished by the tsunami, and they are VERY hard to reach due to the damage that has been caused, with roads severely damaged, fields turned to thick layers of watery mud etc
Before you write another post like that, engage your brain, and actually think things through. And keep in mind what I said: Missing means Status Unknown. It can be as simple as simply not being able to communicate, due to any communications infrastructure being swept away.
It's not the same thing, since you aren't taking notes of what the instructor is saying or drawing on the blackboard or showing on slides/PP presentation etc etc.
Depends on how you take notes. But empirical studies show that taking notes on paper actually improves recall and understanding. Tablets are not quite as good, because the feedback from the writing process is worse, and the movements are less fluid. Typing on a keyboard was found to be worthless, ironically the worst among geeks who swore up and down that it was the best way. The latter people were also overall afflicted with below average memory recall, since they had gotten used to having a computer store everything, rather than develop their human capabilities, something that also affected their daily lives beyond just work or studies.
As mentioned, the above has been empirically studied all over the world, not just in academia, but also in business and the military. One example is negotiations in business and diplomacy, or briefings in the military. Taking notes on paper is less intrusive, and better for recall. The problem is that the exact neurochemical reason for it hasn't been found yet, but one prevalent theory is that the act of writing out the symbols help create a "connection" with the material, reinforcing the memory structure.