The lame part about being a Canadian is I have to watch the government throw away money at these circus freaks. We already have an excellent power generation scheme: it's called Hydro! It's clean, it's cheap and we have tons of water up here. The one place they should be sticking solar panels and wind generators is the north pole with its powerful storms and illumination cycle, but the transport losses would be too great to bring all that juice down to civilization.
This OptiSolar outfit is just yet another farmer sucking on the cash cow's tit.
Well yes and no. Most rebates take too long to "process". Sure, you can get $50 back in the mail on that new N-router, but it will take 3 months. If you're money-poor, then you probably don't want to wait 3 months for that money, so you go across the street to the other shop that doesn't have a mail-in rebate, but charges $10 less.
Take for example a nice 24" LCD display that retails for about $769 in small shops. Big Box Inc has it priced at $969 but offers a $300 mail in rebate to clear them out, bringing the final cost down to $669 (plus shady tax tweaks). So you can pay $200 more up front, but save $100 in the end once the rebate check turns up in the mail. I'm just not willing to shell out the extra cash, partly because the delays are deliberately introduced by the company, and partly because there's always a chance they will dismiss your rebate claim on some technicality, or just plain ignore it and hope you forget about it 3 months down the road, at which point you've been lovingly fist-fucked by the company.
If they made it into a coupon discount, then it would probably work better for everyone. Corporate clients won't be clipping coupons for every doodad, but pennywise customers will, and they won't have to "lend" money to the company for months just to get a stupid post-tax discount.
It would have been doubly bad press had MIT not fired her, since it would effectively show that the college degree is worthless and redundant.
Me, I just wish there was a better way to gauge a person's proficiencies than the college diploma. As a document, all it indicates is that the person registered and theoretically attended classes, and the establishment was paid tuition fees (whether the loan is being paid or not). It says nothing about the person's work ethic, mental prowess nor marketability in the real world. You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.
I used to see university students walk in to the shop with their Ba.CS and an A+ cert, looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day, then offer them a 5-minute test: fix that rig on the test bench, and format the primary hard drive from a boot floppy. I always kept a pre-broken test rig for these cocky twits, all with simple "problems" like a reversed floppy cable, incorrect jumpers on the hard drives, nonsense BIOS settings and a disconnected 4-pin ATX plug. Dozens tried, none passed the test. I even had a few "experienced" techs that had been downsized, they couldn't get it either. When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds, and that's when most of them finally demonstrated the skills they learned in college: the art of bullshitting. They'd yap until I kicked them out, sometimes getting hostile or pulling a pity card.
I don't have much faith in the system, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I'm sure MIT's former Dean of Admissions will find success elsewhere, and with the experience she's gained she won't have to lie about her academic accomplishments to get a good job.
For those of you who can't read, what the summary neglects to mention is that the guy was running this kind of reverse-rootkit for 6 months. 6 months is a long time to "test" a vulnerability. In all likelihood he just started yapping to cover his own ass, when in truth he probably never intended to go public with the vulnerability and just wanted to go on being "leet" clandestinely. I agree it's a shame that top-dollar commercial products used by the largest organizations have such glaring holes, but this kid was no Jesus Christ of Cisco, he was yet another ePeen going down the wrong path. Had he wanted to help improve network security, he would have worked with Cisco or his IT department since day one, and probably gotten great kudos for it. Instead he got suspended and will have to look for exploits in a burger joint.
they can hire some people who are able to keep up with the scene and recommend what's hot and what's not
Ummm well that sounds great in theory, but in practice the big box stores employ minimum-wage minimum-IQ staff who really don't want to be there in the first place. When your take-home pay is $200 a week, it's hard to stay up to date on all the latest music purchases. It's also hard to sell the idea to corporate that employing a stereotypical record store geek could possibly improve the bottom line considering the slim profits on CD sales.
It goes like this: if you want smart, personal service, go to a good indie store, pay an extra dollar or two per album for the added value. Most shops will let you audition an album before buying, and will know their merchandise rather well. If you visit them regularly, they might actually learn your favorites and recommend a lesser-known artist you'll enjoy. The kid at Big Box Inc won't even remember your face after you turn around, and he's just trained to sell whatever's popular. He has no interest in getting what you want, his job is about selling what they store wants you to buy.
That's exactly the problem: YouTube is a gallery of ignorance. All the content is posted by uncreative teenagers doing those stupid lip-sync videos, seems like a huge waste of bandwidth and mind share. Perhaps 1% of the content is actually worth watching, for example last night I stumbled upon a new TV show by a French comedian I really like, that he had uploaded himself for self-promotion. Now I can either catch it on TV, or perhaps he'll continue to upload weekly episodes. Either way, had it not been for YouTube, I would never have known since I don't watch TV much anymore, but I will gladly make some time for this brilliant actor's intellectually-charged talk show. The shame is that I found it purely by accident, I was scouring the day's most popular videos in search of trends, looking for ways to virally market my new projects. If YouTube had mods, I might not have had to sift through hundreds of teen videos and my findings might not be such a product of dumb luck.
The problem is the blank CD is one step too far. The digital media exists on your hard drive, you don't need to burn a CD to listen to it. Audio cassettes back in the day, that was your storage medium... you went straight from FM to tape with no temporary storage. You couldn't store an hour of audio in limbo like you can today with computers.
I think what we'll see is a shift in the money pyramid in the world of radio. On the net, content is free, and advertising pays the bills. Maybe the recording industry will have to quit taxing everyone, turn itself into an ad agency and cut out the middlemen. Make advertising income, use some of it to fund studios to produce the content that plays on your radio stations, and have the DJ drop names and air those stupid jingles like they've always been doing. That's how it works in the rest of the civilized world.
I've said it before, and here I say it again: To hell with inkjets! Laser printers have gotten far more affordable than they once were, and a toner cartridge lasts a helluva lot longer than an ink cart. I've been seeing low-end color lasers lately for about $300 brand new, and you can usually expect a 3rd-party toner cart to cost about half as much as the brand-name ones, while still being top quality. It's not like the crappy inkjet refills where you inject new ink into a used cart, you don't have to worry about dried ink when dealing with a laser.
The other good thing going for laser is the 3rd-party toner suppliers don't need to cut corners on toner quality because they're not selling a $12.99 kit, they're selling a $60 kit where the savings come from bypassing the most expensive part of the brand name supply chain.
Nah, just a young geezer who is sick of having to coexist with no-talent consultants who spend weeks writing spaghetti code that isn't in any way more maintainable than my carefully pondered algorithms. I have to say, I laughed my head off this one time when we (the idiots and I) tried to collaborate on a government project. I couldn't make sense of their requirements, and they couldn't make sense of my code, even though both apps were just different takes on the same problem (hence the collaboration). The main difference is their app was client-server, in that they had a truckload of ActiveX objects running on IIS, which occasionally played nice with the client. It required its own dedicated server because any deviation in DLL versions, IP address or alignment of Saturn's seventh moon would make the thing crash hard and hose some data. Meanwhile my app tipped the scales at a measly 3mb, that included the Crystal Reports runtime. It was stable from logon to logoff, installed/updated itself automatically upon launching, and ran off a plain-jane SQL server or any other ODBC-supported database. I was using an old decommissioned 90mhz Pentium as a development server, running Debian and MySql, while the other guys' production server was a brand new 1ghz machine running Win2k and MSSQL.
So of course, when I looked at their app and its zillions of dependencies, I laughed my head off. Likewise, when they saw my app, they immediately declared it incomplete and lacking in functionality, which is understandable. When your team is sucking down $2500/day in wages and you get pwned by a single guy whose job description doesn't even involve coding, your options are either to lose your cash cow, or get the loner fired before he makes you look like an ass. Realize, this app was little more than a GUI editor for Human Resources data; the kind of thing we do with web interfaces today.
You said the magic words in that last part. A good engineer chooses intelligently. We just have a shortage of good engineers in the world, and several truckloads of awful ones!
Recently I was quite proud of the fellow who develops Torrent, weighing in at 173kb, while every other torrent client for Windows is at least 5-6 mb, or even 20mb+ for Azureus (filthy Java). What I find absolutely hilarious (in a sad kind of way) is how Torrent's installer is 680kb compressed (including the 173kb app itself). How pathetic is it when a trivial file-copy script gets blown up to 500+kb ? That's a 4 to 1 increase in file size for one trivial operation. That's the kind of engineers I'd want shot.
There are no monopoly issues if they beat AMD fair and square. It would be bad for the consumers, because Intel would have no reason to be competitive anymore, but they wouldn't be in legal trouble over it. You can't be blamed if your opponents suck.
Sure they will! That's what they were doing before the Athlon... they were a "value" chip supplier. The K6 series was only noteworthy because they fit on ancient Socket-7 boards.
I guess I should rephrase: I don't think a comeback is likely, in the performance race. There will always be a need for affordable value-market chips because not everyone needs blistering speed, but it is pretty sad when I catch myself considering Athlon64 kits for low-cost embedded appliances, when hardly two years ago I was running that same kit in my high-end desktop.
The big problem with it, is like everything else in the world. When you throw tons of shit around, some of it is bound to stick.
Even if they all got thrown out of court without complications, there is still a heavy cost incurred to society as everyone involved has to waste their time listening to this bitter man's empty threats. I don't know about you, but I have more important things to do in life than sit around in court every time some jackass disagrees with my opinions.
Yes.. let's all take a single bite of steak and throw out the rest! That's what we're doing with our computers. Why do we even have these fast things if we're not making use of even half their potential ?
I'm younger than you, but I'm old enough to remember when saving your work every ten minutes was just common sense.
I don't know how you think you might know my age, but I'm not that old. Niggles aside, I'd like to point out for you that most modern apps will auto-save your open documents every 10 minutes by default, probably because the one smart guy in the company knows his lackeys can't code worth shit. Office 2003 and 2007 do it, I can't remember if the older ones did as well. Corel Wordperfect (if that even still exists) has had it since Version 8 if memory serves me right, that's from about a decade ago, before they downsized me and replaced the whole floor with a bunch of chia pets.
learning Latin
You know, I wish people did still learn Latin. Maybe then they'd come to the conclusion that English isn't so great after all, and the damn yankees would finally quit making fun of the French, but I digress.
Today, restraint means being frugal with mental resources, including our own, even when it causes us hardship.
Is that why MySpace is big and my site is not ? MySpace has caused me great hardship as it has attracted the fools of the world like flies to dog shit.
Now imagine learning to feel proud of that decision. That's the new standard of discipline.
The day I feel pride in creating something inefficient that caters solely to my own laziness, I think I'll move to the USA and start slurring my speech.
Same here. I'm grossly disappointed with AMD right now. They haven't done anything significant in the last 18 months, and I'm starting to read the pamphlet about the dark side. I still hate Intel chipsets with a passion, they just can't seem to cater to the power user with their lackluster features and underwhelming bus architecture, and I refuse to blow $300 on the ultra-high end consumer boards (with 2 of everything - including Intel royalties)... at that point I'd be better off getting all Xeon kit. Where is AMD's response to the Core 2 ? I have the option of buying a quad-core Intel right now, or waiting 6 months to see if Barcelona is worth a look. 6 months is a very long time in computer land, lots of stuff will have changed by then, and Intel will be waiting with the Penryn, ready to make AMD's latest offspring obsolete the day they're born.
At this point, I don't think a comeback is likely.
You're absolutely right... Intel hasn't changed the socket design much at all, they've just released a dozen chipsets per year, each one supporting a different subset of the processor line. At least the chips are physically compatible even though any CPU will only work in 1/3rd of the Socket-775 boards on the market. Don't think you can pop out your old 2.0ghz Northwood and replace it with a Core 2 Quad.
AMD was doing the same thing back in the Socket-A days. Newer cpus with older boards wouldn't fly, usually due to incompatible FSB clocks or voltage ranges. They rectified the situation with Socket 754/939/AM2. Pretty much any AMD cpu will work with any board for a given socket, the worst issue involved a BIOS flash on certain cheap boards that barfed on the Athlon X2's CPUIDs. They didn't really have compatibility issues with the dual-cores, they just had stupid BIOSes that refused to boot the unknown processors.
Another reality is that very few people actually upgrade just the processor, because then you're stuck with an old used CPU lying around that nobody wants to buy, unless you're very lucky and some idiot kid just happened to fry his CPU that same week. People far more commonly just sell the whole system, or at least the board, CPU and memory together as a unit, then replace it with all-new gear. What's the point in a chip manufacturer supporting same-socket upgrades if only a handful of people are doing it ? Far better to release a new chipset and socket type to avoid confusion, as long as the new board offers fresh features to justify the replacement. Socket AM2 was a bit of a blunder in that its only major feature was DDR2 memory support, which for AMD64 is rather pointless since it doesn't perform any better than 1st-gen DDR This was probably a very costly mistake for AMD because people who already owned a Socket 939 system had practically no incentive to upgrade to the new platform, which didn't offer any better performance until a full year later with AM2-exclusive high-end processors. Even that was met with derision because there was no reason why the new AM2 chips couldn't exist on 939, it was an artificial segregation.
AMD screwed up, plain and simple, while Intel finally did something right after a decade of disappointments. AMD can recover, they just have to play the leapfrogging game again, that means releasing a true quad-core processor with better performance across the entire price range than Intel's offerings. That won't be easy since Intel is again cutting prices in Q3, with the Q6600 CPU expected to fall below $250. Intel is getting ready to finish AMD off once and for all, and the only thing the crippled AMD can do is hope to pull a magic rabbit out of their ass.
I think this Canuck is abusing his citizenship. See if this were in the USA, a bunch of guys in black suits could "take care of him". Up here in freezerville we have to put up with his ignorance and helplessly watch as he makes our country look just as bad as every other.
Sadly I forget who said this, but in a public debate one politician told another: "If you can't handle the heat, get out of the press room!" Indeed, when one chooses a life that consists of selling your opinions to an entire nation, you'd better have one hell of a spine! This guy clearly doesn't. The good thing is he probably won't be sticking around much longer after this bullshit passes over. Everybody's got dirt, and if there's one thing the press and political parties are good at, it's humiliating people with the (carefully spun) truth.
Improving performance by upgrading hardware... hey that looks great on paper until you realize that today's hardware and software often work slower than 10 years ago. Sure they have a gazillion features, but they can't get the basics right. Word processing, spreadsheets, email... these are things that haven't changed much in a decade. They have prettier icons and drop-shadows and animated talking dogs, but they perform do the same basic tasks they did in the 80's and 90's. Meanwhile, hardware has gotten faster and more plentiful over the years. It is now common to see an office desktop machine with a gig of ram, whereas ten years ago it had only 32mb. We were fully able to typeset documents, balance our checkbooks and order knockoff meds from the russian mob. Todays splash screens take longer to load than the whole app did back in 1994.
It's funny that you mention "safe languages", like Java, you mean ? I remember looking at Java way back in the day, and scratching my head as to why anyone would want to use such a thing. It was so slow due to the code being interpreted/recompiled on-the-fly. Now Java has good sides, 1. it's cross-platform and 2. it's a rather well designed language... but we already had C++ that can do anything Java does, with compilers available for most platforms. Garbage collection is great for prototyping, but I don't think it belongs in a finalized program. If the code is well planned out and abstracted, there is no reason for it to be plagued with memory problems. Yes, it does mean you have to be a bit more diligent about alloc/free, but as a professional software developer, you should be perfectly fine with it. Garbage collection is fairly costly in terms of CPU time and memory bandwidth. If you can't juggle allocs and frees properly, then I don't even want to see how buggy the more complex functions would be. The fact that the hardware hides the software's sloppiness doesn't magically make it all right. The truth is that one could probably find a developer who can write better code and make better use of the existing hardware.
If you were at a car dealership, and you're looking at two cars. The sales guy tells you one is faster, more fuel efficient and handles better, yet costs the same as the other car. Wouldn't you want the better one for the same price ? Software is the same... a good programmer doesn't cost more than a bad one (you'd probably save money in the end), and can get you more bang for the buck out of your existing setup, the nice thing though, is if the code is very well written, it will happile scale when drop in faster CPUs and whatnot. Slow software will be slow everywhere.
Cobol isn't exactly what I would call "great" meticulous coding. It was the RAD tool of the time, before GUIs and mice went mainstream. Those same blind imbeciles are the ones working top-dollar contracts with the government, poking random words into Powerbuilder and VB until it compiles.
How many times will the Anonymous Cocksuckers repost this fake "confession" VERBATIM ? Every single RIAA article on/. gets at least one copy of this made-up filth.
"I grabbed the little shit by his shirt."... and child services shut you down for abusing a minor.
"Why do the other kids laugh at us?"... because your dad's a cheap excuse for a man
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic]"... how can you sic-quote a spoken conversation ?
"I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of."... the only people who'd pirate Christian rock would be Christian believers, how's that for hypocrisy ?
It's sad enough that someone feels the need to publish such bullshit. It's even worse when supposedly wise and literate community members regurgitate the same hogwash week after week. Maybe slashdot should have some kind of high-IQ Captcha... something to weed out the highly-opinionated lowly-educated myspace/facebook weenies. We've always had trolls, but at least the old trolls were funny, like me:)
Slashdot Mirror
The lame part about being a Canadian is I have to watch the government throw away money at these circus freaks. We already have an excellent power generation scheme: it's called Hydro! It's clean, it's cheap and we have tons of water up here. The one place they should be sticking solar panels and wind generators is the north pole with its powerful storms and illumination cycle, but the transport losses would be too great to bring all that juice down to civilization.
This OptiSolar outfit is just yet another farmer sucking on the cash cow's tit.
Well yes and no. Most rebates take too long to "process". Sure, you can get $50 back in the mail on that new N-router, but it will take 3 months. If you're money-poor, then you probably don't want to wait 3 months for that money, so you go across the street to the other shop that doesn't have a mail-in rebate, but charges $10 less.
Take for example a nice 24" LCD display that retails for about $769 in small shops. Big Box Inc has it priced at $969 but offers a $300 mail in rebate to clear them out, bringing the final cost down to $669 (plus shady tax tweaks). So you can pay $200 more up front, but save $100 in the end once the rebate check turns up in the mail. I'm just not willing to shell out the extra cash, partly because the delays are deliberately introduced by the company, and partly because there's always a chance they will dismiss your rebate claim on some technicality, or just plain ignore it and hope you forget about it 3 months down the road, at which point you've been lovingly fist-fucked by the company.
If they made it into a coupon discount, then it would probably work better for everyone. Corporate clients won't be clipping coupons for every doodad, but pennywise customers will, and they won't have to "lend" money to the company for months just to get a stupid post-tax discount.
It would have been doubly bad press had MIT not fired her, since it would effectively show that the college degree is worthless and redundant.
Me, I just wish there was a better way to gauge a person's proficiencies than the college diploma. As a document, all it indicates is that the person registered and theoretically attended classes, and the establishment was paid tuition fees (whether the loan is being paid or not). It says nothing about the person's work ethic, mental prowess nor marketability in the real world. You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.
I used to see university students walk in to the shop with their Ba.CS and an A+ cert, looking for a part-time job in the thankless world of computer retail. I'd laugh, tell them they wouldn't last a day, then offer them a 5-minute test: fix that rig on the test bench, and format the primary hard drive from a boot floppy. I always kept a pre-broken test rig for these cocky twits, all with simple "problems" like a reversed floppy cable, incorrect jumpers on the hard drives, nonsense BIOS settings and a disconnected 4-pin ATX plug. Dozens tried, none passed the test. I even had a few "experienced" techs that had been downsized, they couldn't get it either. When they gave up, I'd jump in and fix the thing in seconds, and that's when most of them finally demonstrated the skills they learned in college: the art of bullshitting. They'd yap until I kicked them out, sometimes getting hostile or pulling a pity card.
I don't have much faith in the system, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I'm sure MIT's former Dean of Admissions will find success elsewhere, and with the experience she's gained she won't have to lie about her academic accomplishments to get a good job.
For those of you who can't read, what the summary neglects to mention is that the guy was running this kind of reverse-rootkit for 6 months. 6 months is a long time to "test" a vulnerability. In all likelihood he just started yapping to cover his own ass, when in truth he probably never intended to go public with the vulnerability and just wanted to go on being "leet" clandestinely. I agree it's a shame that top-dollar commercial products used by the largest organizations have such glaring holes, but this kid was no Jesus Christ of Cisco, he was yet another ePeen going down the wrong path. Had he wanted to help improve network security, he would have worked with Cisco or his IT department since day one, and probably gotten great kudos for it. Instead he got suspended and will have to look for exploits in a burger joint.
That reminds me of a not-so-old saying: Let Grashnak buy her drinks, then Billco comes in for the steal :)
they can hire some people who are able to keep up with the scene and recommend what's hot and what's not
Ummm well that sounds great in theory, but in practice the big box stores employ minimum-wage minimum-IQ staff who really don't want to be there in the first place. When your take-home pay is $200 a week, it's hard to stay up to date on all the latest music purchases. It's also hard to sell the idea to corporate that employing a stereotypical record store geek could possibly improve the bottom line considering the slim profits on CD sales.
It goes like this: if you want smart, personal service, go to a good indie store, pay an extra dollar or two per album for the added value. Most shops will let you audition an album before buying, and will know their merchandise rather well. If you visit them regularly, they might actually learn your favorites and recommend a lesser-known artist you'll enjoy. The kid at Big Box Inc won't even remember your face after you turn around, and he's just trained to sell whatever's popular. He has no interest in getting what you want, his job is about selling what they store wants you to buy.
That's exactly the problem: YouTube is a gallery of ignorance. All the content is posted by uncreative teenagers doing those stupid lip-sync videos, seems like a huge waste of bandwidth and mind share. Perhaps 1% of the content is actually worth watching, for example last night I stumbled upon a new TV show by a French comedian I really like, that he had uploaded himself for self-promotion. Now I can either catch it on TV, or perhaps he'll continue to upload weekly episodes. Either way, had it not been for YouTube, I would never have known since I don't watch TV much anymore, but I will gladly make some time for this brilliant actor's intellectually-charged talk show. The shame is that I found it purely by accident, I was scouring the day's most popular videos in search of trends, looking for ways to virally market my new projects. If YouTube had mods, I might not have had to sift through hundreds of teen videos and my findings might not be such a product of dumb luck.
Cocaine's a hell of a drug !
The problem is the blank CD is one step too far. The digital media exists on your hard drive, you don't need to burn a CD to listen to it. Audio cassettes back in the day, that was your storage medium... you went straight from FM to tape with no temporary storage. You couldn't store an hour of audio in limbo like you can today with computers.
I think what we'll see is a shift in the money pyramid in the world of radio. On the net, content is free, and advertising pays the bills. Maybe the recording industry will have to quit taxing everyone, turn itself into an ad agency and cut out the middlemen. Make advertising income, use some of it to fund studios to produce the content that plays on your radio stations, and have the DJ drop names and air those stupid jingles like they've always been doing. That's how it works in the rest of the civilized world.
I've said it before, and here I say it again: To hell with inkjets! Laser printers have gotten far more affordable than they once were, and a toner cartridge lasts a helluva lot longer than an ink cart. I've been seeing low-end color lasers lately for about $300 brand new, and you can usually expect a 3rd-party toner cart to cost about half as much as the brand-name ones, while still being top quality. It's not like the crappy inkjet refills where you inject new ink into a used cart, you don't have to worry about dried ink when dealing with a laser.
The other good thing going for laser is the 3rd-party toner suppliers don't need to cut corners on toner quality because they're not selling a $12.99 kit, they're selling a $60 kit where the savings come from bypassing the most expensive part of the brand name supply chain.
Nah, just a young geezer who is sick of having to coexist with no-talent consultants who spend weeks writing spaghetti code that isn't in any way more maintainable than my carefully pondered algorithms. I have to say, I laughed my head off this one time when we (the idiots and I) tried to collaborate on a government project. I couldn't make sense of their requirements, and they couldn't make sense of my code, even though both apps were just different takes on the same problem (hence the collaboration). The main difference is their app was client-server, in that they had a truckload of ActiveX objects running on IIS, which occasionally played nice with the client. It required its own dedicated server because any deviation in DLL versions, IP address or alignment of Saturn's seventh moon would make the thing crash hard and hose some data. Meanwhile my app tipped the scales at a measly 3mb, that included the Crystal Reports runtime. It was stable from logon to logoff, installed/updated itself automatically upon launching, and ran off a plain-jane SQL server or any other ODBC-supported database. I was using an old decommissioned 90mhz Pentium as a development server, running Debian and MySql, while the other guys' production server was a brand new 1ghz machine running Win2k and MSSQL.
So of course, when I looked at their app and its zillions of dependencies, I laughed my head off. Likewise, when they saw my app, they immediately declared it incomplete and lacking in functionality, which is understandable. When your team is sucking down $2500/day in wages and you get pwned by a single guy whose job description doesn't even involve coding, your options are either to lose your cash cow, or get the loner fired before he makes you look like an ass. Realize, this app was little more than a GUI editor for Human Resources data; the kind of thing we do with web interfaces today.
You said the magic words in that last part. A good engineer chooses intelligently. We just have a shortage of good engineers in the world, and several truckloads of awful ones!
Recently I was quite proud of the fellow who develops Torrent, weighing in at 173kb, while every other torrent client for Windows is at least 5-6 mb, or even 20mb+ for Azureus (filthy Java). What I find absolutely hilarious (in a sad kind of way) is how Torrent's installer is 680kb compressed (including the 173kb app itself). How pathetic is it when a trivial file-copy script gets blown up to 500+kb ? That's a 4 to 1 increase in file size for one trivial operation. That's the kind of engineers I'd want shot.
There are no monopoly issues if they beat AMD fair and square. It would be bad for the consumers, because Intel would have no reason to be competitive anymore, but they wouldn't be in legal trouble over it. You can't be blamed if your opponents suck.
Sure they will! That's what they were doing before the Athlon... they were a "value" chip supplier. The K6 series was only noteworthy because they fit on ancient Socket-7 boards.
I guess I should rephrase: I don't think a comeback is likely, in the performance race. There will always be a need for affordable value-market chips because not everyone needs blistering speed, but it is pretty sad when I catch myself considering Athlon64 kits for low-cost embedded appliances, when hardly two years ago I was running that same kit in my high-end desktop.
The big problem with it, is like everything else in the world. When you throw tons of shit around, some of it is bound to stick.
Even if they all got thrown out of court without complications, there is still a heavy cost incurred to society as everyone involved has to waste their time listening to this bitter man's empty threats. I don't know about you, but I have more important things to do in life than sit around in court every time some jackass disagrees with my opinions.
Yes.. let's all take a single bite of steak and throw out the rest! That's what we're doing with our computers. Why do we even have these fast things if we're not making use of even half their potential ?
Yeah well, I don't know about Americans, but up here in the great cold we keep politics out of the kitchen. We've got far tastier things to serve :)
I'm younger than you, but I'm old enough to remember when saving your work every ten minutes was just common sense.
I don't know how you think you might know my age, but I'm not that old. Niggles aside, I'd like to point out for you that most modern apps will auto-save your open documents every 10 minutes by default, probably because the one smart guy in the company knows his lackeys can't code worth shit. Office 2003 and 2007 do it, I can't remember if the older ones did as well. Corel Wordperfect (if that even still exists) has had it since Version 8 if memory serves me right, that's from about a decade ago, before they downsized me and replaced the whole floor with a bunch of chia pets.
learning Latin
You know, I wish people did still learn Latin. Maybe then they'd come to the conclusion that English isn't so great after all, and the damn yankees would finally quit making fun of the French, but I digress.
Today, restraint means being frugal with mental resources, including our own, even when it causes us hardship.
Is that why MySpace is big and my site is not ? MySpace has caused me great hardship as it has attracted the fools of the world like flies to dog shit.
Now imagine learning to feel proud of that decision. That's the new standard of discipline.
The day I feel pride in creating something inefficient that caters solely to my own laziness, I think I'll move to the USA and start slurring my speech.
Same here. I'm grossly disappointed with AMD right now. They haven't done anything significant in the last 18 months, and I'm starting to read the pamphlet about the dark side. I still hate Intel chipsets with a passion, they just can't seem to cater to the power user with their lackluster features and underwhelming bus architecture, and I refuse to blow $300 on the ultra-high end consumer boards (with 2 of everything - including Intel royalties)... at that point I'd be better off getting all Xeon kit. Where is AMD's response to the Core 2 ? I have the option of buying a quad-core Intel right now, or waiting 6 months to see if Barcelona is worth a look. 6 months is a very long time in computer land, lots of stuff will have changed by then, and Intel will be waiting with the Penryn, ready to make AMD's latest offspring obsolete the day they're born.
At this point, I don't think a comeback is likely.
You're absolutely right... Intel hasn't changed the socket design much at all, they've just released a dozen chipsets per year, each one supporting a different subset of the processor line. At least the chips are physically compatible even though any CPU will only work in 1/3rd of the Socket-775 boards on the market. Don't think you can pop out your old 2.0ghz Northwood and replace it with a Core 2 Quad.
AMD was doing the same thing back in the Socket-A days. Newer cpus with older boards wouldn't fly, usually due to incompatible FSB clocks or voltage ranges. They rectified the situation with Socket 754/939/AM2. Pretty much any AMD cpu will work with any board for a given socket, the worst issue involved a BIOS flash on certain cheap boards that barfed on the Athlon X2's CPUIDs. They didn't really have compatibility issues with the dual-cores, they just had stupid BIOSes that refused to boot the unknown processors.
Another reality is that very few people actually upgrade just the processor, because then you're stuck with an old used CPU lying around that nobody wants to buy, unless you're very lucky and some idiot kid just happened to fry his CPU that same week. People far more commonly just sell the whole system, or at least the board, CPU and memory together as a unit, then replace it with all-new gear. What's the point in a chip manufacturer supporting same-socket upgrades if only a handful of people are doing it ? Far better to release a new chipset and socket type to avoid confusion, as long as the new board offers fresh features to justify the replacement. Socket AM2 was a bit of a blunder in that its only major feature was DDR2 memory support, which for AMD64 is rather pointless since it doesn't perform any better than 1st-gen DDR This was probably a very costly mistake for AMD because people who already owned a Socket 939 system had practically no incentive to upgrade to the new platform, which didn't offer any better performance until a full year later with AM2-exclusive high-end processors. Even that was met with derision because there was no reason why the new AM2 chips couldn't exist on 939, it was an artificial segregation.
AMD screwed up, plain and simple, while Intel finally did something right after a decade of disappointments. AMD can recover, they just have to play the leapfrogging game again, that means releasing a true quad-core processor with better performance across the entire price range than Intel's offerings. That won't be easy since Intel is again cutting prices in Q3, with the Q6600 CPU expected to fall below $250. Intel is getting ready to finish AMD off once and for all, and the only thing the crippled AMD can do is hope to pull a magic rabbit out of their ass.
I think this Canuck is abusing his citizenship. See if this were in the USA, a bunch of guys in black suits could "take care of him". Up here in freezerville we have to put up with his ignorance and helplessly watch as he makes our country look just as bad as every other.
Sadly I forget who said this, but in a public debate one politician told another: "If you can't handle the heat, get out of the press room!" Indeed, when one chooses a life that consists of selling your opinions to an entire nation, you'd better have one hell of a spine! This guy clearly doesn't. The good thing is he probably won't be sticking around much longer after this bullshit passes over. Everybody's got dirt, and if there's one thing the press and political parties are good at, it's humiliating people with the (carefully spun) truth.
Improving performance by upgrading hardware... hey that looks great on paper until you realize that today's hardware and software often work slower than 10 years ago. Sure they have a gazillion features, but they can't get the basics right. Word processing, spreadsheets, email... these are things that haven't changed much in a decade. They have prettier icons and drop-shadows and animated talking dogs, but they perform do the same basic tasks they did in the 80's and 90's. Meanwhile, hardware has gotten faster and more plentiful over the years. It is now common to see an office desktop machine with a gig of ram, whereas ten years ago it had only 32mb. We were fully able to typeset documents, balance our checkbooks and order knockoff meds from the russian mob. Todays splash screens take longer to load than the whole app did back in 1994.
It's funny that you mention "safe languages", like Java, you mean ? I remember looking at Java way back in the day, and scratching my head as to why anyone would want to use such a thing. It was so slow due to the code being interpreted/recompiled on-the-fly. Now Java has good sides, 1. it's cross-platform and 2. it's a rather well designed language... but we already had C++ that can do anything Java does, with compilers available for most platforms. Garbage collection is great for prototyping, but I don't think it belongs in a finalized program. If the code is well planned out and abstracted, there is no reason for it to be plagued with memory problems. Yes, it does mean you have to be a bit more diligent about alloc/free, but as a professional software developer, you should be perfectly fine with it. Garbage collection is fairly costly in terms of CPU time and memory bandwidth. If you can't juggle allocs and frees properly, then I don't even want to see how buggy the more complex functions would be. The fact that the hardware hides the software's sloppiness doesn't magically make it all right. The truth is that one could probably find a developer who can write better code and make better use of the existing hardware.
If you were at a car dealership, and you're looking at two cars. The sales guy tells you one is faster, more fuel efficient and handles better, yet costs the same as the other car. Wouldn't you want the better one for the same price ? Software is the same... a good programmer doesn't cost more than a bad one (you'd probably save money in the end), and can get you more bang for the buck out of your existing setup, the nice thing though, is if the code is very well written, it will happile scale when drop in faster CPUs and whatnot. Slow software will be slow everywhere.
Cobol isn't exactly what I would call "great" meticulous coding. It was the RAD tool of the time, before GUIs and mice went mainstream. Those same blind imbeciles are the ones working top-dollar contracts with the government, poking random words into Powerbuilder and VB until it compiles.
the news edits you
How many times will the Anonymous Cocksuckers repost this fake "confession" VERBATIM ? Every single RIAA article on /. gets at least one copy of this made-up filth.
... and child services shut you down for abusing a minor.
... because your dad's a cheap excuse for a man
... how can you sic-quote a spoken conversation ?
... the only people who'd pirate Christian rock would be Christian believers, how's that for hypocrisy ?
:)
"I grabbed the little shit by his shirt."
"Why do the other kids laugh at us?"
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic]"
"I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of."
It's sad enough that someone feels the need to publish such bullshit. It's even worse when supposedly wise and literate community members regurgitate the same hogwash week after week. Maybe slashdot should have some kind of high-IQ Captcha... something to weed out the highly-opinionated lowly-educated myspace/facebook weenies. We've always had trolls, but at least the old trolls were funny, like me