Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
Sure, the lower binned CPUs of almost any generation tend to overclock quite well. That's not the point though. The point is, your $60 overclocked budget processor still gets bested by the other brand's $60 non-overclocked budget processor.
If AMD were the king of the budget segment, I'd give them deserved props because 3/4 of all my system builds involve cheap light systems. Problem is, I can build a cheaper Intel-based system that runs faster and smoother. I cannot identify any price point where AMD makes more sense to me, as a system builder.
If AMD had managed to launch the Phenom two years ago like it was supposed to, things might be different. As it is today, AMD's been playing catch-up, and their R&D budgets have been limited accordingly. It's hard to reclaim the lead from the back of the pack, in the processor race.
So if I understand correctly, there is public information available on Wikipedia, that is neutral and objective. This factual information would lead most sane people to believe there is something fishy going on, without directly or indirectly suggesting it.
I CLEARLY am not a lawyer, but I fail to see where this case is anchored. By threatening legal action, it is almost confirming people's doubts. After all, honest politicians (*cough*) wouldn't be afraid of public information, would they ?
I dare to differ. They make high PRICED tech products. They know how to drive consumers, but they don't know how to build a gadget that lasts longer than a year without expensive shop service.
Just because Sony builds everything bigger and brighter than the rest, doesn't mean they know what they're doing. They know how to sell, which is the only thing that has kept that bastard company alive all these years.
Funny that you mention the PS2, I bought one the first year they were out, back when they still cost about $600. I rolled my eyes at the design specs, with the ridiculous parallelism and obscure chipset that no one could aptly program. It took YEARS for PS2 titles to even approach the elegance and fluidity of the Dreamcast, a much cheaper and developer-friendly machine with "less power".
Minidisc ? Wow what a mess that was. Why someone would want to buy $5.00 blank MDs to burn a handful of MP3-like files when flash players were both cheaper and more practical (and compatible), or a plain old CD-MP3 player ?
Sony loves to invent ridiculous expensive things with good old Taiwanese build quality:P, and they're very good at forcing them onto consumers. They are deceptive, greedy and deaf to their customers.
I think VMware Shared Folders have a valid purpose, and the implementation isn't all bad. Having them as a virtual network share, I like. The problem with any feature, useful or not, is that some half-breed is going to misuse it to the extreme. That imbecile will get owned and blame the software because there's no possible way he could have made a stupid mistake.
I think such fools should be put on display. The idiot who used Shared Folders in a production environment, needs to be hung out to dry and hopefully fired from his job because clearly he does not understand the finer intricacies of operating a networked computer.
Me, I like Shared Folders. They're handy on the few occasions when actually use them. I would rather see people quit screaming over this exploit, wait a day for a fix to be released (VMware's pretty decent on important updates), then carry on with their lives. Let's be honest here: Shared Folders are not something every user needs on a constant basis. There are a bunch of people who use VMware on servers, where these folders matter not. There's another bunch like myself who run a ton of virtualized OS'es for compatibility testing. Lastly, there's a handful of idiots who don't really know what they're doing, they just know their title and salary and are extremely good at putting the blame on others to protect that title and salary.
Things would be much simpler if relations between nations were symmetric.
If Europe wants to punish China for their censorship efforts, I support them. I also support China calling the EU on their own censorship blunders, and punishing them equally.
In the end, people mostly want to get along. That can't happen as long as there is a power struggle. Balance it all out and we just might find stability before we all kill each other.
Obviously this isn't going to happen anytime soon, but hypothetically speaking, if I were a paying member of an association whose responsibilities include paying me a share of the profits, and they blatantly failed to do so, I would sue them for monies owed, PLUS I would file a motion to have the crooked association dissolved as they are clearly unable to fulfill their contractual duties. That's what a class-action suit is for.
Kill them hard, and let the artists found a new association from scratch, one that represents them fairly. Their old friends (distributors, producers, marketers, venue operators) will follow.
First of all, they do need to concentrate on providing bandwidth, because right now they really suck at that primary role.
Second, I don't want any of these skeevy telcos acquiring popular web sites, because it is inevitable that they will ruin them. Here's why:
A hypothetical company XYZCom, who provides my residential broadband connection, buys out and operates Slashdot. They now control both ends of my internet experience. What's can stop them from automatically charging me a nickel every time I hit "Reply" ? Nothing, it's incredibly easy for them and they can trivially word something in their contract to that effect. Then XYZCom decides it is unprofitable to serve outside users, restricts Slashdot to telco members only. I get burned, everyone leaves Slashdot and go post mindless drivel on Kuro5hin, world collapses under the sheer weight of inflated art-school dropout egos. Then the best part is when the telcos whine to the guv't about being so poor since Slashdot died, and get some new bill passed to defraud the general population even harder. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Besides, it just feels wrong to give the telcos even more power. That's like getting mugged by some wigger, and handing the little suburban faux-thug a bigger knife with which to threaten you. We already have few defenses against these corporate sellout behemoths, we don't need to be giving away our beloved internet.
You've got it backwards. You don't find the great programmers, they find you. If your company and your projects are interesting, and you respect your staff, your reputation will spread and attract smart masses. Likewise, if you suck balls, the incompetent fools will rush to you while the good guys will avoid you like the plague, and name low-level half-orcs after your product lines.
You simply can't advertise "Now hiring geniuses".. well technically you can, but all you'll get is a bunch of posers and art-school dropouts. See the magic thing about us geeks is despite our anti-social nature, we hang out online, in forums not unlike Slashdot. We IM each other, we read blogs and we play MUDs and MMOs together. Inevitably with all those venues, we'll talk about life, work and money, and that's your chance to shine.
Are you sure it's actually swapping to disk, or is it merely reserving swap space in the map ?
Example: I have 8 gb in this system. Right now I only have FF and Thunderbird running (+ a few background processes). Current "commit charge" is 475mb, of which Firefox is using 150mb. The system says I'm using 280mb of swap, but it's not actually thrashing the swap disk at all. That swap space is reserved, presumably because it represents 280mb of idle memory that is eligible to swap out, should another process need it.
Windows allocates virtual memory quite aggressively (when properly coded). If a process requests 500mb, but only really uses 100mb of it, the remaining 400mb will be "allocated" to swap while the real memory remains available to other processes. The moment a memory page is accessed, it is marked "dirty" and moved to real memory.
It's very much like sparse files, where unused or 0-filled pages don't take up any physical space (except for the map entry). That's how virtual memory is supposed to work, and it lets developers simplify their code by not having to worry too much about the physical arrangement of memory. It's also partly why you should never run a system without a swap file, even if it has tons of memory. I've probably never used all 8 gb in my system, but I still keep a (small) swap file. If I didn't, and that process allocates 500mb, Windows needs to dedicate 500mb whether or not it is actually in use. It reminds me of real-estate players, who can "buy" million-dollar buildings with a relatively small amount of capital, the rest on credit. Swap is like a line of credit for the OS.
Linux probably does the same thing, but I'm not as knowledgeable about its inner workings.
Sure, I have tons of memory and I'm not overly concerned if FF eats up 250mb... On the other hand, my office PC has only 1 gig of Ram and I'd very much like for FF to stay under 50mb, so that my other, more lucrative apps don't spend their time thrashing the swap file.
The caching done in Firefox is a great feature and works well, but it needs to be more mindful of other running processes. A cache should never take memory away from an active process. If Photoshop wants 100mb and FF's cache is using 100mb, I would expect FF to yield its memory rather than forcing swap usage.
As a complete ignorant with regards to political affairs, I never did quite understand why people must be either X or Y, Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservative, Left or Right...
Why do they all have to be pigeonholed into a big bucket that half the country inevitably hates ? Why can't one smart individual campaign on the basis of their own views rather than the regurgitated habits of either large faction, none of which have proven much success since the creation of government centuries ago ?
Let's face it, whichever one's in office, we wind up disliking and swapping them out after one or two terms. Bouncing back and forth between the same 2-3 big outfits, never being really happy with any of them, why even bother ?
Worse still, is that when this heinous company eventually fails and vanishes, some half-bred law firm will snap up the patents and continue terrorizing the industry with spastic threats and baseless royalty fees.
Software patents and those who thrive upon them must be exterminated from society, progress is infinitely more important than money.
Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
Dual ? How about quad ?
The cheap $250 Q6600 knocks the Phenom's teeth out, then you can start overclocking it to 3.2, 3.6 or higher. Try doing that with an AMD... The last AMD that was a decent overclocker was the T-bird, which is how AMD made their name a decade ago. Now all that gamer love has been squandered and everyone's jumped on over to the Intel camp.
Selling to Dell was a good (and lucky) move, but Dell won't hesitate to drop AMD the moment it ceases to make business sense. With the tremendous flop that is Phenom, AMD doesn't seem to have anything more to show, first with the TLB errors, and now they're having frequency issues. Meanwhile, in Intel land, they're cranking out their 45nm duals and quads faster than people can keep up.
The astronauts will thank us
on
Kimchi in Space
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· Score: 1
Science may never get Thorramatur in orbit.
Sign me up for that volunteer astronaut program. I thought scottish food was nasty, but Iceland wins hands-down.
Well now, have _YOU_ ever found yourself homeless, running around harassing everyone who happens to have a pulse ?
I wouldn't have such a big problem with "career bums" if they didn't instigate so much shit in the first place. Bumming change at the intersection isn't going to turn their life around.
If Microsoft gave the tools away for free, then maybe we should also be working for free. After all, the software we create is merely a tool to help the non-techies do their work, and we all know the users hate us programmers for giving them cryptic interfaces that don't make sense to them.
UI design isn't rocket science, it's just design. The fact that most programmers are allergic to design simply means we need to team up with actual designers if we want to end up with something usable. The whole point of having an interface is so people can be spared from the technical details under the hood.
Not too long ago, I decided to install MacOS 10.4 on a crappy little test machine at work, an old 400mhz G4. I was expecting very cut-down graphics and little-to-no effects, but the ancient thing actually picked up my widescreen LCD's native resolution (something Windows still struggles with), and all the smooth eye-candy was intact. Windows slide and fade in and out of view, transparency works like a charm, even the dashboard runs pretty smoothly (slight stuttering during the fade, but nothing terrible).
So why is it that a stinky old 400mhz dinosaur running MacOS can run smoother than a bleeding-edge quad-core dual-graphics beast running Vista ? My graphics cards' pixel shaders could probably emulate that 400mhz Mac faster than real-time.
Microsoft really screwed up with Aero Glass. Vista itself might eventually become a decent shell, just like XP did after SP1/2, but Aero Glass will always suck.
Teenagers in the 90's were writing slicker graphics demos on 486'es than what Vista does on a C2Quad.
Just because you find someone to wear the blame, doesn't mean you found the right person. Jury trials have less to do with proof than they do with persuasion.
Solving a crime means finding out who did it, how, and why. In some cases that's easy, but a lot of the time it's a big confusing gamble. If fighting crimes were as easy as you seem to imply, we wouldn't need lengthy trials and word-wriggling lawyers, factual evidence would be all that's necessary to identify and incriminate the perp.
The fact that unsolved crimes go largely unadvertised is just a safety measure. You don't want every thug in the world to know which states suck most at protecting their citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the lower binned CPUs of almost any generation tend to overclock quite well. That's not the point though. The point is, your $60 overclocked budget processor still gets bested by the other brand's $60 non-overclocked budget processor.
If AMD were the king of the budget segment, I'd give them deserved props because 3/4 of all my system builds involve cheap light systems. Problem is, I can build a cheaper Intel-based system that runs faster and smoother. I cannot identify any price point where AMD makes more sense to me, as a system builder.
If AMD had managed to launch the Phenom two years ago like it was supposed to, things might be different. As it is today, AMD's been playing catch-up, and their R&D budgets have been limited accordingly. It's hard to reclaim the lead from the back of the pack, in the processor race.
And why do you need such an amendment ? Why did someone feel the need to implement such a failsafe ? Because the system is doomed to fail.
You know what I find hilarious ? A designer running a $4000 software suite on an underpowered $400 laptop.
So if I understand correctly, there is public information available on Wikipedia, that is neutral and objective. This factual information would lead most sane people to believe there is something fishy going on, without directly or indirectly suggesting it.
I CLEARLY am not a lawyer, but I fail to see where this case is anchored. By threatening legal action, it is almost confirming people's doubts. After all, honest politicians (*cough*) wouldn't be afraid of public information, would they ?
It's called an Xbox.
Actually, you do need to give examples of great things Sony has invented since the Walkman.
MD sucked. Trinitron was a cop-out with those stupid visible tensioners (superior quality MY ASS!). Blu-Ray won solely because they paid to win.
Sony's only claim to fame is they still manage to convince the average Joe that his overpriced Sony TV is worth the money.
High quality tech products ?
:P, and they're very good at forcing them onto consumers. They are deceptive, greedy and deaf to their customers.
I dare to differ. They make high PRICED tech products. They know how to drive consumers, but they don't know how to build a gadget that lasts longer than a year without expensive shop service.
Just because Sony builds everything bigger and brighter than the rest, doesn't mean they know what they're doing. They know how to sell, which is the only thing that has kept that bastard company alive all these years.
Funny that you mention the PS2, I bought one the first year they were out, back when they still cost about $600. I rolled my eyes at the design specs, with the ridiculous parallelism and obscure chipset that no one could aptly program. It took YEARS for PS2 titles to even approach the elegance and fluidity of the Dreamcast, a much cheaper and developer-friendly machine with "less power".
Minidisc ? Wow what a mess that was. Why someone would want to buy $5.00 blank MDs to burn a handful of MP3-like files when flash players were both cheaper and more practical (and compatible), or a plain old CD-MP3 player ?
Sony loves to invent ridiculous expensive things with good old Taiwanese build quality
Small buyers, governments, colleges... anyone who doesn't have skilled purchasing managers.
They don't exactly answer the phone with "Thanks for calling Cisco, here's our best price $xxx. What's your name again?"
Actually, I have a differing opinion.
I think VMware Shared Folders have a valid purpose, and the implementation isn't all bad. Having them as a virtual network share, I like. The problem with any feature, useful or not, is that some half-breed is going to misuse it to the extreme. That imbecile will get owned and blame the software because there's no possible way he could have made a stupid mistake.
I think such fools should be put on display. The idiot who used Shared Folders in a production environment, needs to be hung out to dry and hopefully fired from his job because clearly he does not understand the finer intricacies of operating a networked computer.
Me, I like Shared Folders. They're handy on the few occasions when actually use them. I would rather see people quit screaming over this exploit, wait a day for a fix to be released (VMware's pretty decent on important updates), then carry on with their lives. Let's be honest here: Shared Folders are not something every user needs on a constant basis. There are a bunch of people who use VMware on servers, where these folders matter not. There's another bunch like myself who run a ton of virtualized OS'es for compatibility testing. Lastly, there's a handful of idiots who don't really know what they're doing, they just know their title and salary and are extremely good at putting the blame on others to protect that title and salary.
Things would be much simpler if relations between nations were symmetric.
If Europe wants to punish China for their censorship efforts, I support them. I also support China calling the EU on their own censorship blunders, and punishing them equally.
In the end, people mostly want to get along. That can't happen as long as there is a power struggle. Balance it all out and we just might find stability before we all kill each other.
Obviously this isn't going to happen anytime soon, but hypothetically speaking, if I were a paying member of an association whose responsibilities include paying me a share of the profits, and they blatantly failed to do so, I would sue them for monies owed, PLUS I would file a motion to have the crooked association dissolved as they are clearly unable to fulfill their contractual duties. That's what a class-action suit is for.
Kill them hard, and let the artists found a new association from scratch, one that represents them fairly. Their old friends (distributors, producers, marketers, venue operators) will follow.
First of all, they do need to concentrate on providing bandwidth, because right now they really suck at that primary role.
Second, I don't want any of these skeevy telcos acquiring popular web sites, because it is inevitable that they will ruin them. Here's why:
A hypothetical company XYZCom, who provides my residential broadband connection, buys out and operates Slashdot. They now control both ends of my internet experience. What's can stop them from automatically charging me a nickel every time I hit "Reply" ? Nothing, it's incredibly easy for them and they can trivially word something in their contract to that effect. Then XYZCom decides it is unprofitable to serve outside users, restricts Slashdot to telco members only. I get burned, everyone leaves Slashdot and go post mindless drivel on Kuro5hin, world collapses under the sheer weight of inflated art-school dropout egos. Then the best part is when the telcos whine to the guv't about being so poor since Slashdot died, and get some new bill passed to defraud the general population even harder. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Besides, it just feels wrong to give the telcos even more power. That's like getting mugged by some wigger, and handing the little suburban faux-thug a bigger knife with which to threaten you. We already have few defenses against these corporate sellout behemoths, we don't need to be giving away our beloved internet.
You've got it backwards. You don't find the great programmers, they find you. If your company and your projects are interesting, and you respect your staff, your reputation will spread and attract smart masses. Likewise, if you suck balls, the incompetent fools will rush to you while the good guys will avoid you like the plague, and name low-level half-orcs after your product lines.
You simply can't advertise "Now hiring geniuses".. well technically you can, but all you'll get is a bunch of posers and art-school dropouts. See the magic thing about us geeks is despite our anti-social nature, we hang out online, in forums not unlike Slashdot. We IM each other, we read blogs and we play MUDs and MMOs together. Inevitably with all those venues, we'll talk about life, work and money, and that's your chance to shine.
Are you sure it's actually swapping to disk, or is it merely reserving swap space in the map ?
Example: I have 8 gb in this system. Right now I only have FF and Thunderbird running (+ a few background processes). Current "commit charge" is 475mb, of which Firefox is using 150mb. The system says I'm using 280mb of swap, but it's not actually thrashing the swap disk at all. That swap space is reserved, presumably because it represents 280mb of idle memory that is eligible to swap out, should another process need it.
Windows allocates virtual memory quite aggressively (when properly coded). If a process requests 500mb, but only really uses 100mb of it, the remaining 400mb will be "allocated" to swap while the real memory remains available to other processes. The moment a memory page is accessed, it is marked "dirty" and moved to real memory.
It's very much like sparse files, where unused or 0-filled pages don't take up any physical space (except for the map entry). That's how virtual memory is supposed to work, and it lets developers simplify their code by not having to worry too much about the physical arrangement of memory. It's also partly why you should never run a system without a swap file, even if it has tons of memory. I've probably never used all 8 gb in my system, but I still keep a (small) swap file. If I didn't, and that process allocates 500mb, Windows needs to dedicate 500mb whether or not it is actually in use. It reminds me of real-estate players, who can "buy" million-dollar buildings with a relatively small amount of capital, the rest on credit. Swap is like a line of credit for the OS.
Linux probably does the same thing, but I'm not as knowledgeable about its inner workings.
Yes and no.
Sure, I have tons of memory and I'm not overly concerned if FF eats up 250mb... On the other hand, my office PC has only 1 gig of Ram and I'd very much like for FF to stay under 50mb, so that my other, more lucrative apps don't spend their time thrashing the swap file.
The caching done in Firefox is a great feature and works well, but it needs to be more mindful of other running processes. A cache should never take memory away from an active process. If Photoshop wants 100mb and FF's cache is using 100mb, I would expect FF to yield its memory rather than forcing swap usage.
Did someone say "Monolith" ?
As a complete ignorant with regards to political affairs, I never did quite understand why people must be either X or Y, Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservative, Left or Right...
Why do they all have to be pigeonholed into a big bucket that half the country inevitably hates ? Why can't one smart individual campaign on the basis of their own views rather than the regurgitated habits of either large faction, none of which have proven much success since the creation of government centuries ago ?
Let's face it, whichever one's in office, we wind up disliking and swapping them out after one or two terms. Bouncing back and forth between the same 2-3 big outfits, never being really happy with any of them, why even bother ?
Worse still, is that when this heinous company eventually fails and vanishes, some half-bred law firm will snap up the patents and continue terrorizing the industry with spastic threats and baseless royalty fees.
Software patents and those who thrive upon them must be exterminated from society, progress is infinitely more important than money.
Dual ? How about quad ?
The cheap $250 Q6600 knocks the Phenom's teeth out, then you can start overclocking it to 3.2, 3.6 or higher. Try doing that with an AMD... The last AMD that was a decent overclocker was the T-bird, which is how AMD made their name a decade ago. Now all that gamer love has been squandered and everyone's jumped on over to the Intel camp.
Selling to Dell was a good (and lucky) move, but Dell won't hesitate to drop AMD the moment it ceases to make business sense. With the tremendous flop that is Phenom, AMD doesn't seem to have anything more to show, first with the TLB errors, and now they're having frequency issues. Meanwhile, in Intel land, they're cranking out their 45nm duals and quads faster than people can keep up.
Science may never get Thorramatur in orbit.
Sign me up for that volunteer astronaut program. I thought scottish food was nasty, but Iceland wins hands-down.
Well now, have _YOU_ ever found yourself homeless, running around harassing everyone who happens to have a pulse ?
I wouldn't have such a big problem with "career bums" if they didn't instigate so much shit in the first place. Bumming change at the intersection isn't going to turn their life around.
If Microsoft gave the tools away for free, then maybe we should also be working for free. After all, the software we create is merely a tool to help the non-techies do their work, and we all know the users hate us programmers for giving them cryptic interfaces that don't make sense to them.
UI design isn't rocket science, it's just design. The fact that most programmers are allergic to design simply means we need to team up with actual designers if we want to end up with something usable. The whole point of having an interface is so people can be spared from the technical details under the hood.
Now if only there were freely available references online to silence the naysayers...
The legal system doesn't work, it just puts on a good enough show to keep the ignorant masses in check.
Not too long ago, I decided to install MacOS 10.4 on a crappy little test machine at work, an old 400mhz G4. I was expecting very cut-down graphics and little-to-no effects, but the ancient thing actually picked up my widescreen LCD's native resolution (something Windows still struggles with), and all the smooth eye-candy was intact. Windows slide and fade in and out of view, transparency works like a charm, even the dashboard runs pretty smoothly (slight stuttering during the fade, but nothing terrible).
So why is it that a stinky old 400mhz dinosaur running MacOS can run smoother than a bleeding-edge quad-core dual-graphics beast running Vista ? My graphics cards' pixel shaders could probably emulate that 400mhz Mac faster than real-time.
Microsoft really screwed up with Aero Glass. Vista itself might eventually become a decent shell, just like XP did after SP1/2, but Aero Glass will always suck.
Teenagers in the 90's were writing slicker graphics demos on 486'es than what Vista does on a C2Quad.
Semantics.
Just because you find someone to wear the blame, doesn't mean you found the right person. Jury trials have less to do with proof than they do with persuasion.
Solving a crime means finding out who did it, how, and why. In some cases that's easy, but a lot of the time it's a big confusing gamble. If fighting crimes were as easy as you seem to imply, we wouldn't need lengthy trials and word-wriggling lawyers, factual evidence would be all that's necessary to identify and incriminate the perp.
The fact that unsolved crimes go largely unadvertised is just a safety measure. You don't want every thug in the world to know which states suck most at protecting their citizens.