Drugs, crime and poverty are social issues (and IMHO not problems - they're balancing factors). Running a network is not so much a social issue as it is a technical issue. Plug in, pay sysadmin, download pr0n. It's simple enough that even a half-brained equal-opportunity-abusing office drone can follow the pre-written procedures and make it work most of the time.
Perhaps the most important part is that if one drone gets delusions of grandeur, like Cogent's PHB here, we can get them fired. We can't get Cogent's idiot PHB fired, because we don't own Cogent. We do own the Government.
You're looking at the wrong bad guy. Apple can sell this music buffet, that's cool. The important thing is that if the RIAA allows Apple to do it, they must allow ANYONE to do it, incl. Zunes, RCA shiteboxes, Creative, etc.
How does that work ? I thought they were required by law to grant CLECs access to the lines. I obviously don't know the details in your case, but if they're not giving you good excuses, I'd verbally tear them several new assholes until you get what you want. From what friends have told me, TekSavvy is da bomb.
I can see the appeal of the EEE PC, because it's small, cheap, and PC compatible. You can even load Windows on there if you're so motivated. From design to application, it's a mini-laptop.
Redfly is small-ish, but it's not cheap, and it runs Windows Mobile. That makes it a bastard PDA, and the industry has proven time and time again that PDAs suck, and PDA phones are just bulky overpriced phones with crap features. No love.
At $500, it's within kicking distance of many cheap full-featured laptops from ECS and Acer, even Dell! If you really want to be a road warrior and get some work done on the bus, you don't want an oversized Blackberry, you want a real laptop! With a real keyboard, real apps and 100% compatibility with your existing software investment and infrastructure. The hardware is peanuts these days, it's all about the software.
It's far more complex than what you suggest. I'll quote from the FCC:
(b)The maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator shall not exceed the following: (1) For frequency hopping systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz or 5725-5850 MHz band and for all direct sequence systems: 1 watt.
(2) For frequency hopping systems operating in the 902-928 MHz band: 1 watt for systems employing at least 50 hopping channels; and, 0.25 watts for systems employing less than 50 hopping channels, but at least 25 hopping channels, as permitted under paragraph (a)(1)(i) of this section.
(3) Except as shown in paragraphs (b)(3) (i), (ii) and (iii) of this section, if transmitting antennas of directional gain greater than 6 dBi are used the peak output power from the intentional radiator shall be reduced below the stated values in paragraphs (b)(1) or (b)(2) of this section, as appropriate, by the amount in dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi.
(i) Systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz band that are used exclusively for fixed, point-to-point operations may employ transmitting antennas with directional gain greater than 6 dBi provided the maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator is reduced by 1 dB for every 3 dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi."
Now, is the FCC going to troll around your neighborhood with a scanner ? Probably not, unless you screw up someone else's wireless equipment. Done properly, a high-power point-to-point system shouldn't affect anyone else, so you can probably go nuts. I can't say, I don't even live in the US, but my guess is the intent of the FCC regulation is to prevent, or at least document, people from stomping all over the spectrum with uber amplifiers. If it weren't for such rules, inevitably someone would create a 20-watt cordless phone that fries small birds but gets killer range - and also clobbers everyone else's phones.
I used to do assembler, and I can't think of any one time I actually used STD. I often issued CLD when writing interrupt handlers, because that was the safe practice, but is it really that useful to reverse string scans at the opcode level ? I can't think of that many places where it would be useful, easily replaced with a manually decremented loop that's not much slower. It always seemed like a risky thing to do in the first place, and I was never fond of issuing CLD all the time "just in case".
My rant doesn't solve the kernel issue, we'll have to deal with legacy code forever:/
Kudos for the comment, but you completely missed the reference.
In the movie "2010: The Year We Make Contact", which merely whored the characters and the most convenient aspects of 2001, the film ends on the line "All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.".
2010 was an average B-movie SciFi, cheesy yet enjoyable if considered on its own. Last year's Sunshine reminded me of 2010 in many ways, but to call it a 2001 sequel is patently ridiculous and insulting. Indeed, should anyone try to pass off another direct-to-video slop bucket as a 2001 sequel, I will personally hunt them down, shackle them to a chair, eyelids pinned open, and make them watch Will Smith music videos until they scratch out their own eyes!
What ? You think peer-reviewed journals are immune to bias ? By their very nature they are biased, because you have a group of like-minded individuals reviewing each other's work. If they weren't like-minded, they wouldn't be collaborating on the project in the first place.
It's quite possible that the test itself was slanted in favor of the desired outcome, if that's the general sentiment within the group. Nothing in this world is purely objective, nothing but math!
I'm with you, but the think to remember here is these products are targeted to a very specific market. The kind of wacko who spends $400 on a motherboard for the "privilege" of SLI, is the same wacko who will spend another $400 every year to get the latest and greatest. In total, that individual is spending up to $1500 per year just to stay on top. Not everyone has the luxury of being value-conscious.
Me, I have what I consider a high-end gaming system. Overclocked quad, 8800GTS, tons of ram and a 27" LCD. I run it all on a ~$150 P35 board, so I get no SLI lovin, but I'm still running above 1600 FSB (485mhz "quad-pumped"). I have RAID-0 on non-Raptor drives, and it's plenty fast. I run any game (except Crysis) turned up to 11 in native resolution. Excluding the display, my system is worth around $2k.
I've seen people drop 5-6 grand on a brand new gaming rig, and I really can't see them getting that much more punch out of it. I can't fault them, because after all, I was the guy selling the goods;) but aside from a 10% jump in benchmark scores and fps, what's the point ? In a year, NVidia or ATI will release a card that's just as powerful as the 9800X2, on a single board with better compatibility for a third of the price.
Despite all this, I can somewhat respect the appeal of a high-end video card as it does yield tangible performance gains even if the price/performance ratio is unfavorable, but I cannot justify the cost of "high-end" motherboards. I actually considered my $150 P5K-E a little pricey, but it had all the bells and whistles including built-in WiFi, so that's a $40 add-on card I didn't need to buy. What does the $450 Striker Extreme offers that I don't have ? I've got fanless cooling via heatpipes, that actually sustains my high clock speeds unlike the NForce which needs the fan. I have 6 SATA ports with fakeraid, and eSATAs and 10 USBs and the whole nine yards. What I don't have is SLI - I'm stuck with Crossfire which I won't ever use. Is that lone feature worth $300 to me ? Hell no! Not for a feature that's software-locked to a specific vendor's chipset for no good reason other than to drive up price and demand for a lackluster chipset.
If they want to sell the NForce as a high-end chipset, they need to make it better than the cheap average. NForce1 and 2 were pretty sweet thanks to Soundstorm and a few other media-centric niceties, but it was all downhill from there. Today's NForce is just a poorly supported knockoff of Intel's solid standards.
It almost feels like this is precisely what Sony wanted in killing HD-DVD. Not only do they get to sell PS3 consoles, but they get software sales as a bonus for twisting the customer's arm, sales that would not happen if there were affordable BluRay players in the marketplace. It completely undermines the consumption process.
Can you get 300M/sec on RAID5? Also, what's the system load? Hell no! The fastest Raid-5 I've seen on the ICH9R is around 175mb/sec writes, which seemed to be the upper limit for that controller (more drives didn't help). It's still pretty damned decent, considering most "affordable" SATA Raid controllers are stuck in the slow PCI lane at 8mb/sec or less.
I used to have high hopes for PCI-Express Raid controllers, but it wasn't long ago that I read reviews of Areca, Raidcore and LSI PCI-E 4x controllers that were just as slow as their 32bit/33mhz PCI grandfathers. I stopped looking. Clearly the storage industry doesn't get it. I already have a monster PC, I would gladly pay a nice chunk of change for a storage controller that's worthy of its CPU and Ram neighbors. I'll load it up with 16 SATA/SAS drives if it can saturate the bus!
I've been saying (and doing) this for years. China, South Korea, Malaysia, some parts of Russia... It sucks for them, but until their Governments/ISPs clean up the network, banning entire IP blocks is one of the better defenses against these malware floods. I figured it out while studying IDS logs a while ago, and noticed 98-99% of all exploit scans were coming from those countries. I do feel sorry for the good people who are getting blacklisted on behalf of their shit-flinging neighbours, but part of me wants them to get pissed off and do something about it, whether it's complaining to their ISP / political figure, or even just spontaneously beating the shit out of that sketchy kid selling burnt movies on the corner.
Raising awareness is the first step toward solving a social problem like this. I used to drop packets at the router, but now I redirect them to an informational page explaining precisely why they're being blocked, with links to virus and spyware cleaners. That's if they weren't trying to find phpMyAdmin vulnerabilities, those guys I give a big colorful F.U. page, and if they ever invent the remote boxing glove, I'll add a trigger for that too!
See that's precisely why the high end keeps getting lower. Those 3Ware cards look good on paper but they don't deliver the throughput. I get more speed out of my freebie onboard Intel Matrix Raid than I did out of any 3Ware or Promise card. I literally push 300mb/sec sustained on my current system, and it's just a semi-high-end gaming rig. Maybe I'm being too logical, but if I can get 300mb/sec with fake raid and a handful of cheap drives, I would expect at least double that from server-class gear, like it used to be in SCSI's glory days.
As for the K10-based Opterons, they're just too weak! The original single and dual core Opterons were awesome because they beat the Xeon across the board: better performance per clock, lower power draw, better pricing and mass availability. It was a no-brainer! The new quad core AMDs just can't keep up, they're not all that much cheaper than quad core Xeons but most importantly: they're clocked too low. In all likelihood, a 16-core K10 system wouldn't be much faster could be slower than my old 16-core K8 system - from four years ago! It's been widely reported that K10 is on average 15% faster than the K8, clock for clock. That means my old 2.2ghz rig from 2003 is roughly equivalent to a 1.9ghz rig from today, and the fastest quad core Opteron you can buy today is 2.0ghz. I have no interest in dropping $10k on a workstation that's hardly 5% faster than the $10k workstation from 2003. If they could wind it up to 2.8ghz like they were supposed to, I'd actually get things done quicker on new hardware, which then justifies the investment. The Opteron isn't a bragging toy, it's a work tool. If it doesn't let me work faster and cheaper, then it is not worth a penny.
Actually, my main reason for the DIY habit is that nobody can cripple my PVR but me. There's no feature lockout, no HDCP bullshit, no planned obsolescence or "unsupported codecs". I make the rules, and sure enough after running my current media center system for over 6 years, it's still going strong and being used daily with fresh content. It just works.
If I had bought a Tivo, I would probably have spent thousands on upgrades and replacements. It's not like they make a 2-terabyte Tivo anyway.
If a crappy entry-level BD player costs $400, might as well buy a stupid Playstation 3.
Problem is, this will drive the numbers up for Sony to pimp dev houses into releasing more PS3 titles, even though a significant number of PS3 buyers are only interested in its movie capabilities. It's the PS2 all over again!
I would love to see Wikipedia become the poster-child for peer-to-peer webhosting, but that would require installing a ton of crap software on Norton-loving imbeciles' machines. It opens the whole system up for massive abuses and corruption, intentional or not.
Go for Google ads, I say! Just one block across the top, where their donation banner usually sits. I see no harm in it.
Well that's just, like, your opinion, man!
Meanwhile, I've got an Intel quad, down from a 16-way Opteron (that was getting old). What I would like is a quad-quad Core 2, aka 16 cores and that lovely NUMA memory split, along with a very very wide SAS/SATA controller to feed in the data. Average Joe may not have a use for parallelism and sky-high clocks, but I most certainly do. I whine because my current rig only supports 8gb Ram, I want 32 or even 64!
The simple explanation is that there are some things that become so ridiculously fast and trivial on a beastly machine, they make you wonder why you ever tried to solve them on a limited box in the first place. There are numerous tasks that work with huge datasets, trying to shove them into 4gb on a single processor means you have to swap things in/out all the time and you spend more time optimizing the caching algo than actually solving the original problem.
Sure. I've also heard of Intel selling off XScale to Marvell. If they sold off their line of ARM chips, maybe it's because they can do better with a new product like the Atom. There would be little sense in holding on to XScale if it were made obsolete by an in-house competitor.
So Apple paid the Beatles 400 mil just for the privilege of having their catalog on iTunes ? I don't get it... I know retail, and this doesn't make sense to me.
Does this mean they won't be paying per-song royalties to the artist ? Even then, Apple would need to sell quite a bit more than 400 million songs to recoup their investment. I sure as hell don't charge vendors for the "privilege" of selling my product, I sell them the actual product and they mark it up, or from the reverse perspective the vendor sells my product for a set price and I get a piece of that action.
I realize this is the music industry, where everything is crooked, but where's the logic ? Where's the business justification for this sort of thing ? iTunes was fine without the Beatles, it's not like the addition of that catalog is going to add much value to the service. Everyone who ever cared about that band already owns multiple copies of their favorites, on vinyl, tape and CD.
It's been almost 40 years since the Beatles disbanded, die already!
First and foremost, Epic has not released anything revolutionary since the first Unreal. My hunch is Tim's pissed off at the PC because it exposes many flaws in their software, whereas the consoles are an obscure, isolated environment that doesn't lend itself to such easy criticism.
I'll be blunt, when Gears and UT3 were released, I was disappointed by both. Here's a company that supposedly makes game engines, you know, like id Software. Their latest and greatest engine can't even give my PC a decent workout, in my book that means it's already obsolete. It looks and feels dated, compared to other current games. Contrast with the original Quake, Doom 3 and Crysis, which all pushed the hardware beyond its limits and defined the upper crust of 3D engines, a benchmark against which all others would be compared.
I'm sure UT3 looks great on an HDTV, when compared to other console games, but the fact that it can't even saturate a year-old gaming rig on its maximum settings is simply pathetic. What does the UT3 engine offer that's better than the competition ?
There's a huge shortage of skilled I.T. labor. Big difference!
If I needed a bunch of whipping slaves to answer phones, no problem. If I need someone who can actually compile an app, or debug a SOAP transaction, or provision and deploy a new server top-to-bottom, that's where things get tricky. Everyone and their mother has a résumé ten miles long, with a supposed skillset covering every language and api ever hatched in the last 30 years. 99% of them are obviously full of shit, but how do you pick out the few good apples ? Interviews only work if you're both tech-smart and people-smart, otherwise you can get taken for a ride by a good liar (of which there are tons).
It's a difficult hiring situation, so in our case we cull it down to what we feel are the least worst of the pack, give them one little contract as a test, and hope for the best. In most cases we end up redoing the work ourselves because the potential hire was a complete imbecile, but the more desperate we get, the more we try to adapt our workflow to safely incorporate n00bs.
If we were a large company, we could afford to hire a bunch of morons and train them into compliance like the big boys, but we're small and we just don't have the resources to do that sort of thing. We have to pick out the best candidate we can find and hope they figure things out quickly enough to keep up.
Being conscious of our environment is a good thing. Throwing around random buzzwords is not.
I'm all for conserving energy, and I abuse my Kill-A-Watt meter on a daily basis. What irritates me, and this also applies to health fads, is the use of pseudo-science in marketing. Gadgets are being branded as "low power" when they were never high power in the first place, and sold at a premium. Other things are remade into low power variants, sold at a premium but consume more power during fabrication than the savings incurred by the user.
Let's face it: it's common sense that using less of a limited resource will result in that resource lasting longer and/or serving more people. The fact that this conservation fad has become a daily brainwash is no accident. Just like the health food fads of the 90's, it is now profitable to market "green" products, thanks to some very lax regulations on advertising. Whether these products actually result in net savings is dubious, but they do result in net profits for the manufacturers.
Yep, that's because GH3 wasn't made by Harmonix. I'm not at all implying that Aspyr isn't a decent game house, they've got quite a few massive hits to their credit, but Harmonix are the people who made the music game genre popular in North America. DDR already existed, but its uber-cheesy eurodance and J-pop soundtrack was too lame for the 3-chord jock tards of the USA and Canada. Harmonix released Frequency and Amplitude, which featured popular acts known to average suburban white kids like The Crystal Method, BT, No Doubt and Run DMC. Then of course, they threw in a few catchy indie tunes from their musician friends. I also found out about Freezepop through Frequency, and immediately fell in love with their sound. If I ever make another musically-inclined piece of software, you can bet your spleen it's going to feature some local talent. It's a no-brainer: little or no royalties to pay, tons of exposure for your friend's music, and of course lots of extra tracks for your game.
Then Guitar Mania came along, with the same weak-ass euro-J-dance and even weaker Bon Jovi tracks:P Harmonix took the concept, gave it some real rock'n'roll tunage and the star power bonus just like they had done for Frequency/Amplitude, and history was made. Come on, it took some serious awesomeness to include the Trogdor song from Homestar Runner:)
To most people, Rock Band is the true sequel to Guitar Hero 2. GH3 is okay, and has a decent track list, but it is inevitably inferior than the first two, simply because its creators are obviously not music lovers of the same caliber.
If Atom is cheaper than the AMD's lowest offering, then yes, they should feel threatened. We've reached a point where even the most basic processor has more power than the common person needs. Combine that with the mindless eco-babble that has tainted every aspect of North American life in the last few years, and you've got a market that's perfect for a power-miser medium-performance processor that will be at the heart of numerous little PC-like gadgets.
Via's line doesn't get much traction outside of the tinkerer circles, because they're still tied to clumsy legacy chipsets and the costs are ridiculous, considering their extremely limited performance. If Intel can release a slightly better processor for less money, that can be paired with an inexpensive chipset and tiny power supply, they could take a bite out of the microcontroller segment and ARM's small but tenacious market share.
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Troll!
Drugs, crime and poverty are social issues (and IMHO not problems - they're balancing factors). Running a network is not so much a social issue as it is a technical issue. Plug in, pay sysadmin, download pr0n. It's simple enough that even a half-brained equal-opportunity-abusing office drone can follow the pre-written procedures and make it work most of the time.
Perhaps the most important part is that if one drone gets delusions of grandeur, like Cogent's PHB here, we can get them fired. We can't get Cogent's idiot PHB fired, because we don't own Cogent. We do own the Government.
You're looking at the wrong bad guy. Apple can sell this music buffet, that's cool. The important thing is that if the RIAA allows Apple to do it, they must allow ANYONE to do it, incl. Zunes, RCA shiteboxes, Creative, etc.
The problem, of course, is when P2P starts prioritizing same-network peers, ISPs will start throttling inside and piss on everyone's parade.
It's never been about bandwidth, there's tons of bandwidth. It's about control.
How does that work ? I thought they were required by law to grant CLECs access to the lines. I obviously don't know the details in your case, but if they're not giving you good excuses, I'd verbally tear them several new assholes until you get what you want. From what friends have told me, TekSavvy is da bomb.
I can see the appeal of the EEE PC, because it's small, cheap, and PC compatible. You can even load Windows on there if you're so motivated. From design to application, it's a mini-laptop.
Redfly is small-ish, but it's not cheap, and it runs Windows Mobile. That makes it a bastard PDA, and the industry has proven time and time again that PDAs suck, and PDA phones are just bulky overpriced phones with crap features. No love.
At $500, it's within kicking distance of many cheap full-featured laptops from ECS and Acer, even Dell! If you really want to be a road warrior and get some work done on the bus, you don't want an oversized Blackberry, you want a real laptop! With a real keyboard, real apps and 100% compatibility with your existing software investment and infrastructure. The hardware is peanuts these days, it's all about the software.
Now, is the FCC going to troll around your neighborhood with a scanner ? Probably not, unless you screw up someone else's wireless equipment. Done properly, a high-power point-to-point system shouldn't affect anyone else, so you can probably go nuts. I can't say, I don't even live in the US, but my guess is the intent of the FCC regulation is to prevent, or at least document, people from stomping all over the spectrum with uber amplifiers. If it weren't for such rules, inevitably someone would create a 20-watt cordless phone that fries small birds but gets killer range - and also clobbers everyone else's phones.
I used to do assembler, and I can't think of any one time I actually used STD. I often issued CLD when writing interrupt handlers, because that was the safe practice, but is it really that useful to reverse string scans at the opcode level ? I can't think of that many places where it would be useful, easily replaced with a manually decremented loop that's not much slower. It always seemed like a risky thing to do in the first place, and I was never fond of issuing CLD all the time "just in case".
:/
My rant doesn't solve the kernel issue, we'll have to deal with legacy code forever
Kudos for the comment, but you completely missed the reference.
In the movie "2010: The Year We Make Contact", which merely whored the characters and the most convenient aspects of 2001, the film ends on the line "All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.".
2010 was an average B-movie SciFi, cheesy yet enjoyable if considered on its own. Last year's Sunshine reminded me of 2010 in many ways, but to call it a 2001 sequel is patently ridiculous and insulting. Indeed, should anyone try to pass off another direct-to-video slop bucket as a 2001 sequel, I will personally hunt them down, shackle them to a chair, eyelids pinned open, and make them watch Will Smith music videos until they scratch out their own eyes!
What ? You think peer-reviewed journals are immune to bias ? By their very nature they are biased, because you have a group of like-minded individuals reviewing each other's work. If they weren't like-minded, they wouldn't be collaborating on the project in the first place.
It's quite possible that the test itself was slanted in favor of the desired outcome, if that's the general sentiment within the group. Nothing in this world is purely objective, nothing but math!
I'm with you, but the think to remember here is these products are targeted to a very specific market. The kind of wacko who spends $400 on a motherboard for the "privilege" of SLI, is the same wacko who will spend another $400 every year to get the latest and greatest. In total, that individual is spending up to $1500 per year just to stay on top. Not everyone has the luxury of being value-conscious.
;) but aside from a 10% jump in benchmark scores and fps, what's the point ? In a year, NVidia or ATI will release a card that's just as powerful as the 9800X2, on a single board with better compatibility for a third of the price.
Me, I have what I consider a high-end gaming system. Overclocked quad, 8800GTS, tons of ram and a 27" LCD. I run it all on a ~$150 P35 board, so I get no SLI lovin, but I'm still running above 1600 FSB (485mhz "quad-pumped"). I have RAID-0 on non-Raptor drives, and it's plenty fast. I run any game (except Crysis) turned up to 11 in native resolution. Excluding the display, my system is worth around $2k.
I've seen people drop 5-6 grand on a brand new gaming rig, and I really can't see them getting that much more punch out of it. I can't fault them, because after all, I was the guy selling the goods
Despite all this, I can somewhat respect the appeal of a high-end video card as it does yield tangible performance gains even if the price/performance ratio is unfavorable, but I cannot justify the cost of "high-end" motherboards. I actually considered my $150 P5K-E a little pricey, but it had all the bells and whistles including built-in WiFi, so that's a $40 add-on card I didn't need to buy. What does the $450 Striker Extreme offers that I don't have ? I've got fanless cooling via heatpipes, that actually sustains my high clock speeds unlike the NForce which needs the fan. I have 6 SATA ports with fakeraid, and eSATAs and 10 USBs and the whole nine yards. What I don't have is SLI - I'm stuck with Crossfire which I won't ever use. Is that lone feature worth $300 to me ? Hell no! Not for a feature that's software-locked to a specific vendor's chipset for no good reason other than to drive up price and demand for a lackluster chipset.
If they want to sell the NForce as a high-end chipset, they need to make it better than the cheap average. NForce1 and 2 were pretty sweet thanks to Soundstorm and a few other media-centric niceties, but it was all downhill from there. Today's NForce is just a poorly supported knockoff of Intel's solid standards.
It almost feels like this is precisely what Sony wanted in killing HD-DVD. Not only do they get to sell PS3 consoles, but they get software sales as a bonus for twisting the customer's arm, sales that would not happen if there were affordable BluRay players in the marketplace. It completely undermines the consumption process.
Can you get 300M/sec on RAID5? Also, what's the system load?
Hell no! The fastest Raid-5 I've seen on the ICH9R is around 175mb/sec writes, which seemed to be the upper limit for that controller (more drives didn't help). It's still pretty damned decent, considering most "affordable" SATA Raid controllers are stuck in the slow PCI lane at 8mb/sec or less.
I used to have high hopes for PCI-Express Raid controllers, but it wasn't long ago that I read reviews of Areca, Raidcore and LSI PCI-E 4x controllers that were just as slow as their 32bit/33mhz PCI grandfathers. I stopped looking. Clearly the storage industry doesn't get it. I already have a monster PC, I would gladly pay a nice chunk of change for a storage controller that's worthy of its CPU and Ram neighbors. I'll load it up with 16 SATA/SAS drives if it can saturate the bus!
I've been saying (and doing) this for years. China, South Korea, Malaysia, some parts of Russia... It sucks for them, but until their Governments/ISPs clean up the network, banning entire IP blocks is one of the better defenses against these malware floods. I figured it out while studying IDS logs a while ago, and noticed 98-99% of all exploit scans were coming from those countries. I do feel sorry for the good people who are getting blacklisted on behalf of their shit-flinging neighbours, but part of me wants them to get pissed off and do something about it, whether it's complaining to their ISP / political figure, or even just spontaneously beating the shit out of that sketchy kid selling burnt movies on the corner.
Raising awareness is the first step toward solving a social problem like this. I used to drop packets at the router, but now I redirect them to an informational page explaining precisely why they're being blocked, with links to virus and spyware cleaners. That's if they weren't trying to find phpMyAdmin vulnerabilities, those guys I give a big colorful F.U. page, and if they ever invent the remote boxing glove, I'll add a trigger for that too!
See that's precisely why the high end keeps getting lower. Those 3Ware cards look good on paper but they don't deliver the throughput. I get more speed out of my freebie onboard Intel Matrix Raid than I did out of any 3Ware or Promise card. I literally push 300mb/sec sustained on my current system, and it's just a semi-high-end gaming rig. Maybe I'm being too logical, but if I can get 300mb/sec with fake raid and a handful of cheap drives, I would expect at least double that from server-class gear, like it used to be in SCSI's glory days.
As for the K10-based Opterons, they're just too weak! The original single and dual core Opterons were awesome because they beat the Xeon across the board: better performance per clock, lower power draw, better pricing and mass availability. It was a no-brainer! The new quad core AMDs just can't keep up, they're not all that much cheaper than quad core Xeons but most importantly: they're clocked too low. In all likelihood, a 16-core K10 system wouldn't be much faster could be slower than my old 16-core K8 system - from four years ago! It's been widely reported that K10 is on average 15% faster than the K8, clock for clock. That means my old 2.2ghz rig from 2003 is roughly equivalent to a 1.9ghz rig from today, and the fastest quad core Opteron you can buy today is 2.0ghz. I have no interest in dropping $10k on a workstation that's hardly 5% faster than the $10k workstation from 2003. If they could wind it up to 2.8ghz like they were supposed to, I'd actually get things done quicker on new hardware, which then justifies the investment. The Opteron isn't a bragging toy, it's a work tool. If it doesn't let me work faster and cheaper, then it is not worth a penny.
Actually, my main reason for the DIY habit is that nobody can cripple my PVR but me. There's no feature lockout, no HDCP bullshit, no planned obsolescence or "unsupported codecs". I make the rules, and sure enough after running my current media center system for over 6 years, it's still going strong and being used daily with fresh content. It just works.
If I had bought a Tivo, I would probably have spent thousands on upgrades and replacements. It's not like they make a 2-terabyte Tivo anyway.
If a crappy entry-level BD player costs $400, might as well buy a stupid Playstation 3.
Problem is, this will drive the numbers up for Sony to pimp dev houses into releasing more PS3 titles, even though a significant number of PS3 buyers are only interested in its movie capabilities. It's the PS2 all over again!
I would love to see Wikipedia become the poster-child for peer-to-peer webhosting, but that would require installing a ton of crap software on Norton-loving imbeciles' machines. It opens the whole system up for massive abuses and corruption, intentional or not.
Go for Google ads, I say! Just one block across the top, where their donation banner usually sits. I see no harm in it.
Well that's just, like, your opinion, man! Meanwhile, I've got an Intel quad, down from a 16-way Opteron (that was getting old). What I would like is a quad-quad Core 2, aka 16 cores and that lovely NUMA memory split, along with a very very wide SAS/SATA controller to feed in the data. Average Joe may not have a use for parallelism and sky-high clocks, but I most certainly do. I whine because my current rig only supports 8gb Ram, I want 32 or even 64! The simple explanation is that there are some things that become so ridiculously fast and trivial on a beastly machine, they make you wonder why you ever tried to solve them on a limited box in the first place. There are numerous tasks that work with huge datasets, trying to shove them into 4gb on a single processor means you have to swap things in/out all the time and you spend more time optimizing the caching algo than actually solving the original problem.
Sure. I've also heard of Intel selling off XScale to Marvell. If they sold off their line of ARM chips, maybe it's because they can do better with a new product like the Atom. There would be little sense in holding on to XScale if it were made obsolete by an in-house competitor.
So Apple paid the Beatles 400 mil just for the privilege of having their catalog on iTunes ? I don't get it... I know retail, and this doesn't make sense to me.
Does this mean they won't be paying per-song royalties to the artist ? Even then, Apple would need to sell quite a bit more than 400 million songs to recoup their investment. I sure as hell don't charge vendors for the "privilege" of selling my product, I sell them the actual product and they mark it up, or from the reverse perspective the vendor sells my product for a set price and I get a piece of that action.
I realize this is the music industry, where everything is crooked, but where's the logic ? Where's the business justification for this sort of thing ? iTunes was fine without the Beatles, it's not like the addition of that catalog is going to add much value to the service. Everyone who ever cared about that band already owns multiple copies of their favorites, on vinyl, tape and CD.
It's been almost 40 years since the Beatles disbanded, die already!
Tim Sweeney is waaayyyyyyy off his rocker.
First and foremost, Epic has not released anything revolutionary since the first Unreal. My hunch is Tim's pissed off at the PC because it exposes many flaws in their software, whereas the consoles are an obscure, isolated environment that doesn't lend itself to such easy criticism.
I'll be blunt, when Gears and UT3 were released, I was disappointed by both. Here's a company that supposedly makes game engines, you know, like id Software. Their latest and greatest engine can't even give my PC a decent workout, in my book that means it's already obsolete. It looks and feels dated, compared to other current games. Contrast with the original Quake, Doom 3 and Crysis, which all pushed the hardware beyond its limits and defined the upper crust of 3D engines, a benchmark against which all others would be compared.
I'm sure UT3 looks great on an HDTV, when compared to other console games, but the fact that it can't even saturate a year-old gaming rig on its maximum settings is simply pathetic. What does the UT3 engine offer that's better than the competition ?
My money's on Carmack.
There's absolutely no shortage of I.T. labor.
There's a huge shortage of skilled I.T. labor. Big difference!
If I needed a bunch of whipping slaves to answer phones, no problem. If I need someone who can actually compile an app, or debug a SOAP transaction, or provision and deploy a new server top-to-bottom, that's where things get tricky. Everyone and their mother has a résumé ten miles long, with a supposed skillset covering every language and api ever hatched in the last 30 years. 99% of them are obviously full of shit, but how do you pick out the few good apples ? Interviews only work if you're both tech-smart and people-smart, otherwise you can get taken for a ride by a good liar (of which there are tons).
It's a difficult hiring situation, so in our case we cull it down to what we feel are the least worst of the pack, give them one little contract as a test, and hope for the best. In most cases we end up redoing the work ourselves because the potential hire was a complete imbecile, but the more desperate we get, the more we try to adapt our workflow to safely incorporate n00bs.
If we were a large company, we could afford to hire a bunch of morons and train them into compliance like the big boys, but we're small and we just don't have the resources to do that sort of thing. We have to pick out the best candidate we can find and hope they figure things out quickly enough to keep up.
Being conscious of our environment is a good thing. Throwing around random buzzwords is not.
I'm all for conserving energy, and I abuse my Kill-A-Watt meter on a daily basis. What irritates me, and this also applies to health fads, is the use of pseudo-science in marketing. Gadgets are being branded as "low power" when they were never high power in the first place, and sold at a premium. Other things are remade into low power variants, sold at a premium but consume more power during fabrication than the savings incurred by the user.
Let's face it: it's common sense that using less of a limited resource will result in that resource lasting longer and/or serving more people. The fact that this conservation fad has become a daily brainwash is no accident. Just like the health food fads of the 90's, it is now profitable to market "green" products, thanks to some very lax regulations on advertising. Whether these products actually result in net savings is dubious, but they do result in net profits for the manufacturers.
Yep, that's because GH3 wasn't made by Harmonix. I'm not at all implying that Aspyr isn't a decent game house, they've got quite a few massive hits to their credit, but Harmonix are the people who made the music game genre popular in North America. DDR already existed, but its uber-cheesy eurodance and J-pop soundtrack was too lame for the 3-chord jock tards of the USA and Canada. Harmonix released Frequency and Amplitude, which featured popular acts known to average suburban white kids like The Crystal Method, BT, No Doubt and Run DMC. Then of course, they threw in a few catchy indie tunes from their musician friends. I also found out about Freezepop through Frequency, and immediately fell in love with their sound. If I ever make another musically-inclined piece of software, you can bet your spleen it's going to feature some local talent. It's a no-brainer: little or no royalties to pay, tons of exposure for your friend's music, and of course lots of extra tracks for your game.
:P Harmonix took the concept, gave it some real rock'n'roll tunage and the star power bonus just like they had done for Frequency/Amplitude, and history was made. Come on, it took some serious awesomeness to include the Trogdor song from Homestar Runner :)
Then Guitar Mania came along, with the same weak-ass euro-J-dance and even weaker Bon Jovi tracks
To most people, Rock Band is the true sequel to Guitar Hero 2. GH3 is okay, and has a decent track list, but it is inevitably inferior than the first two, simply because its creators are obviously not music lovers of the same caliber.
If Atom is cheaper than the AMD's lowest offering, then yes, they should feel threatened. We've reached a point where even the most basic processor has more power than the common person needs. Combine that with the mindless eco-babble that has tainted every aspect of North American life in the last few years, and you've got a market that's perfect for a power-miser medium-performance processor that will be at the heart of numerous little PC-like gadgets.
Via's line doesn't get much traction outside of the tinkerer circles, because they're still tied to clumsy legacy chipsets and the costs are ridiculous, considering their extremely limited performance. If Intel can release a slightly better processor for less money, that can be paired with an inexpensive chipset and tiny power supply, they could take a bite out of the microcontroller segment and ARM's small but tenacious market share.