I'm not a fan of Groupon. It's a flashy fad that's bringing mass-marketing to the everyman, and launching lots of small businesses head-first into ruin. The people who would conceptually stand to benefit most from Groupon's reach are also those who can't actually afford the costs of unbounded promotion. My greatest beef is that Groupon keeps half of what you pay, so if a shop is offering a 50% discount, well the owner is actually getting only 25%. Groupon is printing giant piles of money for essentially running the most basic web advertising.
Cheapskates flock to the ridiculous bargains. Owners flock to the millions of eyeballs. Both get fleeced in the end, because you always get what you pay for. I've actually come to think less of businesses that advertise via Groupon, it is almost always a desperate plea for attention for a product or service that cannot stand on its own.
Can we really call Bulldozer an 8-core processor ? It seems its real-world benchmarks would suggest otherwise. I guess the question should be: is modern computing still so integer-dependent that it would benefit from Bulldozer's twinned integer units ? I thought we all switched to full-fat floating-point operations over 15 years ago when the Pentium hit the mainstream and everyone finally had an on-die FPU in their PC.
On a server, I would expect bus throughput to be a deciding factor. I'm not crunching fancy scientific data, mostly ferrying bits from disk to network and back. Having extra cores allows more simultaneous transfers by handling more handshakes and thus connections, but beyond that it's all DMA copies from memory to I/O.
But yeah, I know what you mean. It's like they're untouchable. At least, if an American contractor fucks you over, you can sue them over unsatisfied contract terms. If an outsourcer takes your money and leaves you with an unfinished product, you're screwed. Union guys are a bit worse though, they not only keep the wages collected for the unfinished work, they will also extort you for 12 months of paid stress leave, under threat of an unlawful dismissal suit... but I digress!
Okay, but what if I don't need the best person, just a "good enough" coder to do grunt work ? I could pay a college student $12 an hour, or I could give that same money to someone in Asia, where it might be equivalent to mid-grade pay, in terms of relative wages and cost of living. I would expect to get mid-grade output from the guy.
Flip it around. Suppose a client hires me at my going rate of $95/hr, expecting a decent developer with reasonable experience and skills. They're not getting a veteran specialist who can architect your entire supply-chain automation suite on a paper napkin before you even take your second sip of coffee. They're getting a diversified coder with a good background in network admin, and paying the going rate for that sort of work. If they needed the rockstar architect, they'd pay rockstar rates.
If good outsourced labour isn't cheap, then what's the point ? The work we're farming out isn't rocket science, it's basic web development: PHP, Java, MySQL - stuff even the greenest junior coder can handle. If, then, the outsourcer costs more than a fresh-out-of-DeVry code monkey, fuck outsourcing!
Along that same vein, if I'm shopping for a veteran developer to lead a team, I won't be hiring some random stranger on the other side of the globe who doesn't even speak my language. There are 7 billion people in the world, surely I can find a qualified worker closer to home, that will be easier to communicate with and manage.
A "newsletter subscription form" would be expected to subscribe its submitted to some newsletter. If I asked the same developer to build a "newsletter admin panel" a week ago, with supporting database fixtures, I expect him to put 2 and 2 together and figure that this "newsletter form" will tie into the other module he just built for me. I don't think that's unreasonable. Same site, same feature group, it's pretty DUH to me.
Let's turn it around. Suppose one of my existing clients asked me to do the same job, adding a subscription form to their site, that's all the information I need from them. It is literally a 1-line email, assuming I already have access to their files and database: "Hey Bill, please add a subscription form to the footer". I'll log in to the DB, find the subscription table I created last week, and write the two dozen lines of HTML and PHP/Perl/Java/C to feed into said table. I'll even take a quick glance at the site design and probably figure out exactly where they want it (bottom right). Then I reply back with a test URL for them to vet. The entire process takes, oh, 15 minutes if I'm sleepy. I could ask the same of any of our North American staff, even the graphic artists, and get similar results.
With the outsourcers, it takes 15 minutes to write the request with such extreme verbosity that my grandmother could probably figure out how to add the damn semicolons to each line. Then it takes their guy 15 minutes to do it, if we're lucky. Usually it takes a few round-trip emails to finally get what we want. I would much rather pay the outsourcer twice as much to figure it all out on his own, freeing up my time. I'm giving him work, because I'm too busy to deal with it myself. I'm not his manager, I'm a client. Clients shouldn't be telling contractors how to do their job.
Now, I know what you're thinking: it's a 15 minute job, of course the overhead will be disproportionate... but no, on larger jobs, they just have more opportunities to screw up. The local guys, even if it's a brand new hire, will usually get it 90% right the first time, with little tweaks in a subsequent email - cosmetic stuff, for the most part. There is one project in particular that looks like it will break the outsourcing routine for us, because it is so far off schedule and so frustrating that I could have built this thing ten times over, in one tenth of the time, for the same money we've spent on the cheap guys. The difference, of course, is that the client is furious, and the project manager can't commit, because he has no faith in the contractors' ability to deliver.
If I hire someone to repaint my car, I drop off the car, pick a colour, and I expect them to take it from there. I shouldn't have to tell the painter dude that he needs to mask over the chrome and windows, buy paint and tape, and dress in overalls and a facemask. If it takes him an extra hour to do those things, fine, bill me an extra hour. That's why I hired the guy in the first place. What these outsourcers do is equivalent to waving an unplugged airbrush in front of the car, not even asking themselves why the colour isn't changing...
How is that any different from pre-protest Oakland, DC, New York ? These are big cities with big crime problems, regardless of any protest going on.
A press release from the NYPD blamed OWS for tying up police resources, which resulted in more crimes committed ELSEWHERE. That's right, the cops can't keep tabs on the real criminals, because they're too busy harassing teenagers with pepper spray and tear gas. The cops know that a murderer will probably shoot back... a protester won't!
The real message to be read from that press release is: "We'd rather oppress you than protect you. A protester is more threatening than murderers and rapists."
The question becomes: how long can the cops keep up this aberrant behaviour ? This protest isn't going away... what will the establishment do, kill everyone ? Throw them all in jail ? If our democracy is no better than the dictatorships of Africa and the middle east, then we already know where it leads: revolt, civil war, anarchy.
Offshoring, in my experience over the past 3-4 years, has been more trouble than it is worth. The time you spend babysitting these novice developers eats up whatever you "saved" by paying them 1/4 of your local wage, and it drives that project manager absolutely batshit insane. And then it takes them at least twice as long to do anything.
I often get the impression most of these guys can't be bothered to think for themselves. If you tell them "Add a newsletter subscription form", they will add the form, sure, a form that does nothing when you click Submit. It doesn't matter that the same guy has been working on your site for over a year, he's still not going to realize you didn't just want an inert form on your website. If you then say "make it insert into the database", hey great, now it's inserting into the database - in some random table that isn't the subscriptions table! So the net result is you practically write p-code, which they then thinly translate into Java or PHP or whatever.
Some shops can apparently tolerate this level of mediocrity. We've tried offshoring a few times, thinking maybe we had bad luck the first few times... nope, always the same bullshit, so that's why I now know how to configure and script Asterisk IVRs. We wanted to pay someone to just get it done since it was well outside our expertise, but in the end we had to do it over from scratch because all the offshore contractors we hired were complete imbeciles - so much for calling themselves Asterisk experts!
They helped to advanced the industry by patenting once-public ideas ? I cannot agree with that statement on any level.
If anyone should be accused of articially maintaining high RAM prices, it's Rambus. Their trolling and subsequent royalty racket has cost the world far more than 4 billion, not to mention the costly and frustrating period where Intel boards exclusively supported Rambus. That move alone set the SDRAM industry back a few years.
Rambus is the perfect example of how NOT to run a tech company. Leave IP theft to the Chinese, at least they don't patent the stuff they steal.
It's true that a bunch of pseudo-hippies are crashing the protests, for douche points or whatever scorekeeping is used in the rapacious subculture, but that does not invalidate the handful of actual protestors that started the movement and continue to stand vigil, nor the effect the moment has had in sensitizing the public to some of the more serious issues plaguing North America.
What's particularly ironic is that the NYPD is imposing censorship and using arguably anti-terrorist techniques and tools to squelch a peaceful protest. As if the NYPD needed any more bad press... The power of the Occupy movement is not so much in its stated message, but in the way the corporations and authorities respond to it. It is bringing much needed attention to these crooked organisations and reminding the everyman that the government and its corporate masters are conspiring against him.
Here in Ottawa, we've had cameras in taxis for a while. I have no idea if anything has come of it, other than the added expense for each taxi owner of a possibly useless camera. Seems to me like the camera supplier is in bed with the city councillor...
1. cheaper 2. faster 3. properly supported by the manufacturer
My first and immediate thought upon reading the title was "why would VIA even bother in a post-Atom world ?". If I want a cheap build, I go with a standard Intel Atom board. If I want rich features, I spring an extra $50 for an ION board. VIA's offering probably sits somewhere in-between, but given the company's history, they would practically have to give them away for me to even look twice.
Sure, that's the common sense approach which works for most normal users, but there are some of us who directly benefit from having a faster machine NOW, typically because we have a real business need for it. I could do my work on a "mediocre" system, but it would slow me down significantly, and after a month or two, the time (=money) lost waiting for the slower PC exceeds the cost delta of the faster machine.
The problem with Intel's latest processor is it isn't that big of an improvement over last year's 6-core line-up, putting the 3960X in a strange niche that only interests a small pocket of wealthy e-peeners. Those who want more cores would go for a dual Xeon, and those who want gaming performance would overclock the tits out of a 2600K. Four-slot SLI has never caught on, it's just an experimental curiosity. Even 2x dual-GPU rigs are notoriously unreliable thanks to crappy driver support, so you stand to gain very little from this X79 platform at this point in time.
You're right. No one in their right mind will buy this $1000 model when the $500 one is only 100mhz slower. Last year, when the 980X was launched, it was the only 6-core consumer CPU available, which made it worth $1000 to some people (*blink blink*). Had the 3960X been an 8-core bin, it might have made some waves, but at 6 cores it doesn't really stand out from its older siblings.
As a result, those of us who want/need heavy parallelism have already switched to affordable dual Xeons like the E5645. Those who want the best single/dual thread performance simply overclock the 2500K/2600K. So right now, the 3960X is a chip without a real niche. It almost feels like a throwaway platofrm, much like the old Skulltrail.
Given that the NDA was lifted just a few hours ago, I'm sure we'll see a proper 3930K review soon enough. Intel probably wants to give the Veblen types time to rush out and buy the X, before the K reviews start calling them suckers for paying $500 more for 100mhz.
Myself, I'm waiting for the 8-core Xeon SKUs, so I can go dual-socket 16-core. You know, so I can do "make -j16" while multiboxing Crysis or something...
You got those backwards. 775 and 771 were the old sockets, spanning from late P4 all the way up to Core 2. Socket 1156 was for first-gen i3/i5, ans Socket 1366 was Nehalem (i7-9xx and extreme). They have never reduced the pin count, because each successive platform has introduced wider memory controllers and/or QPI/DMI/PCIe lanes. Sandy Bridge-E is no different, moving up to 4-channel DDR3, up from X58's 3 channels. That right there is an extra couple-hundred pins just for the memory.
read Markov-chain generated pseudorandom rants based on mashups of obscure punk that you wouldn't have heard of and the lesser known speeches of 19th century radicals
More than likely it'll make for even worse blood shed in the near term as cartels fight over the decreased business and focus on harder drugs and other activities for revenue.
If I dare misquote my own quote, Thug on Thug crime is the solution to its own problem.
If they're willing to have a mutually destructive war with each other, I say let it happen. Then you only have the scraps to pick off...
An ISP contract is more than just a number of potential megabits, it's caps, and prices, and reliability, and QoS, and for some people it's also about customer service. Just quoting their marketing numbers doesn't mean much. They also don't indicate who the target demographic is for these service tiers. If I could upgrade to a 50 or 100mbit service for, say, $50 more, I probably would, but I'm a heavy data consumer - I work from home, we stream or torrent just about everything we watch, and I buy quite a few games on Steam every month, so we'd greatly benefit greatly from a faster pipe. My mother, on the other hand, has no need for more than 15-20mbit, and could probably find a better use for that $50. I suspect there are a lot users like my mother, than supergeeks like me.
In my area, I have two big bads; Bell (DSL) and Rogers (cable). Both of them suck: low caps, heavy throttling 24/7, high prices, and forced bundling. Even if I were willing to blow $100 / mo on the 50mbit service, I have absolutely zero confidence in their ability to deliver those promised bits. Their throttling actually resets connections, ruining any online gaming, torrents, and video streaming. It's like buying a full-price Lamborghini, slashing the tires and installing a dick-punch device in the driver's seat, and as a prerequisite for even buying the Lambo, you need to pay twice the sticker price for a Jetta you don't even need nor want. Any one of these negatives would be a solid reason to not want to give more money to the telco or cableco.
Corporations are fine. Hell, I'm incorporated:P My beef is with the ones whose sole contribution to society is more litigation - like patent trolls, high-level bankers, pharmaceutical holding companies... Businesses whose sole purpose is to make money on money. People who wield information as a weapon against their fellow man. People who have collectively destroyed the value of money. That is my definition of hypercapitalist swine. To me, they are addicts, acquiring more of that green intangible gank by any means necessary. They are those who stand to benefit from a xenophobic patent system that rewards not the inventors, but the lawyers.
I don't find it funny, just common sense. It sounds like ASPM is very poorly documented, so if Windows is doing a decent job of implementing the functionality, then reverse-engineering, or at least guessing at how Windows does it, seems like a valid approach.
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I'm not a fan of Groupon. It's a flashy fad that's bringing mass-marketing to the everyman, and launching lots of small businesses head-first into ruin. The people who would conceptually stand to benefit most from Groupon's reach are also those who can't actually afford the costs of unbounded promotion. My greatest beef is that Groupon keeps half of what you pay, so if a shop is offering a 50% discount, well the owner is actually getting only 25%. Groupon is printing giant piles of money for essentially running the most basic web advertising.
Cheapskates flock to the ridiculous bargains. Owners flock to the millions of eyeballs. Both get fleeced in the end, because you always get what you pay for. I've actually come to think less of businesses that advertise via Groupon, it is almost always a desperate plea for attention for a product or service that cannot stand on its own.
Can we really call Bulldozer an 8-core processor ? It seems its real-world benchmarks would suggest otherwise. I guess the question should be: is modern computing still so integer-dependent that it would benefit from Bulldozer's twinned integer units ? I thought we all switched to full-fat floating-point operations over 15 years ago when the Pentium hit the mainstream and everyone finally had an on-die FPU in their PC.
On a server, I would expect bus throughput to be a deciding factor. I'm not crunching fancy scientific data, mostly ferrying bits from disk to network and back. Having extra cores allows more simultaneous transfers by handling more handshakes and thus connections, but beyond that it's all DMA copies from memory to I/O.
I LOLed. Also, cool UID :)
But yeah, I know what you mean. It's like they're untouchable. At least, if an American contractor fucks you over, you can sue them over unsatisfied contract terms. If an outsourcer takes your money and leaves you with an unfinished product, you're screwed. Union guys are a bit worse though, they not only keep the wages collected for the unfinished work, they will also extort you for 12 months of paid stress leave, under threat of an unlawful dismissal suit... but I digress!
Okay, but what if I don't need the best person, just a "good enough" coder to do grunt work ? I could pay a college student $12 an hour, or I could give that same money to someone in Asia, where it might be equivalent to mid-grade pay, in terms of relative wages and cost of living. I would expect to get mid-grade output from the guy.
Flip it around. Suppose a client hires me at my going rate of $95/hr, expecting a decent developer with reasonable experience and skills. They're not getting a veteran specialist who can architect your entire supply-chain automation suite on a paper napkin before you even take your second sip of coffee. They're getting a diversified coder with a good background in network admin, and paying the going rate for that sort of work. If they needed the rockstar architect, they'd pay rockstar rates.
If good outsourced labour isn't cheap, then what's the point ? The work we're farming out isn't rocket science, it's basic web development: PHP, Java, MySQL - stuff even the greenest junior coder can handle. If, then, the outsourcer costs more than a fresh-out-of-DeVry code monkey, fuck outsourcing!
Along that same vein, if I'm shopping for a veteran developer to lead a team, I won't be hiring some random stranger on the other side of the globe who doesn't even speak my language. There are 7 billion people in the world, surely I can find a qualified worker closer to home, that will be easier to communicate with and manage.
A "newsletter subscription form" would be expected to subscribe its submitted to some newsletter. If I asked the same developer to build a "newsletter admin panel" a week ago, with supporting database fixtures, I expect him to put 2 and 2 together and figure that this "newsletter form" will tie into the other module he just built for me. I don't think that's unreasonable. Same site, same feature group, it's pretty DUH to me.
Let's turn it around. Suppose one of my existing clients asked me to do the same job, adding a subscription form to their site, that's all the information I need from them. It is literally a 1-line email, assuming I already have access to their files and database: "Hey Bill, please add a subscription form to the footer". I'll log in to the DB, find the subscription table I created last week, and write the two dozen lines of HTML and PHP/Perl/Java/C to feed into said table. I'll even take a quick glance at the site design and probably figure out exactly where they want it (bottom right). Then I reply back with a test URL for them to vet. The entire process takes, oh, 15 minutes if I'm sleepy. I could ask the same of any of our North American staff, even the graphic artists, and get similar results.
With the outsourcers, it takes 15 minutes to write the request with such extreme verbosity that my grandmother could probably figure out how to add the damn semicolons to each line. Then it takes their guy 15 minutes to do it, if we're lucky. Usually it takes a few round-trip emails to finally get what we want. I would much rather pay the outsourcer twice as much to figure it all out on his own, freeing up my time. I'm giving him work, because I'm too busy to deal with it myself. I'm not his manager, I'm a client. Clients shouldn't be telling contractors how to do their job.
Now, I know what you're thinking: it's a 15 minute job, of course the overhead will be disproportionate... but no, on larger jobs, they just have more opportunities to screw up. The local guys, even if it's a brand new hire, will usually get it 90% right the first time, with little tweaks in a subsequent email - cosmetic stuff, for the most part. There is one project in particular that looks like it will break the outsourcing routine for us, because it is so far off schedule and so frustrating that I could have built this thing ten times over, in one tenth of the time, for the same money we've spent on the cheap guys. The difference, of course, is that the client is furious, and the project manager can't commit, because he has no faith in the contractors' ability to deliver.
If I hire someone to repaint my car, I drop off the car, pick a colour, and I expect them to take it from there. I shouldn't have to tell the painter dude that he needs to mask over the chrome and windows, buy paint and tape, and dress in overalls and a facemask. If it takes him an extra hour to do those things, fine, bill me an extra hour. That's why I hired the guy in the first place. What these outsourcers do is equivalent to waving an unplugged airbrush in front of the car, not even asking themselves why the colour isn't changing...
Ahh yes, now that you mention it, you're exactly right. I got fuzzy on the timelines after all these years.
How is that any different from pre-protest Oakland, DC, New York ? These are big cities with big crime problems, regardless of any protest going on.
A press release from the NYPD blamed OWS for tying up police resources, which resulted in more crimes committed ELSEWHERE. That's right, the cops can't keep tabs on the real criminals, because they're too busy harassing teenagers with pepper spray and tear gas. The cops know that a murderer will probably shoot back... a protester won't!
The real message to be read from that press release is: "We'd rather oppress you than protect you. A protester is more threatening than murderers and rapists."
The question becomes: how long can the cops keep up this aberrant behaviour ? This protest isn't going away... what will the establishment do, kill everyone ? Throw them all in jail ? If our democracy is no better than the dictatorships of Africa and the middle east, then we already know where it leads: revolt, civil war, anarchy.
This.
Offshoring, in my experience over the past 3-4 years, has been more trouble than it is worth. The time you spend babysitting these novice developers eats up whatever you "saved" by paying them 1/4 of your local wage, and it drives that project manager absolutely batshit insane. And then it takes them at least twice as long to do anything.
I often get the impression most of these guys can't be bothered to think for themselves. If you tell them "Add a newsletter subscription form", they will add the form, sure, a form that does nothing when you click Submit. It doesn't matter that the same guy has been working on your site for over a year, he's still not going to realize you didn't just want an inert form on your website. If you then say "make it insert into the database", hey great, now it's inserting into the database - in some random table that isn't the subscriptions table! So the net result is you practically write p-code, which they then thinly translate into Java or PHP or whatever.
Some shops can apparently tolerate this level of mediocrity. We've tried offshoring a few times, thinking maybe we had bad luck the first few times... nope, always the same bullshit, so that's why I now know how to configure and script Asterisk IVRs. We wanted to pay someone to just get it done since it was well outside our expertise, but in the end we had to do it over from scratch because all the offshore contractors we hired were complete imbeciles - so much for calling themselves Asterisk experts!
They helped to advanced the industry by patenting once-public ideas ? I cannot agree with that statement on any level.
If anyone should be accused of articially maintaining high RAM prices, it's Rambus. Their trolling and subsequent royalty racket has cost the world far more than 4 billion, not to mention the costly and frustrating period where Intel boards exclusively supported Rambus. That move alone set the SDRAM industry back a few years.
Rambus is the perfect example of how NOT to run a tech company. Leave IP theft to the Chinese, at least they don't patent the stuff they steal.
It's true that a bunch of pseudo-hippies are crashing the protests, for douche points or whatever scorekeeping is used in the rapacious subculture, but that does not invalidate the handful of actual protestors that started the movement and continue to stand vigil, nor the effect the moment has had in sensitizing the public to some of the more serious issues plaguing North America.
What's particularly ironic is that the NYPD is imposing censorship and using arguably anti-terrorist techniques and tools to squelch a peaceful protest. As if the NYPD needed any more bad press... The power of the Occupy movement is not so much in its stated message, but in the way the corporations and authorities respond to it. It is bringing much needed attention to these crooked organisations and reminding the everyman that the government and its corporate masters are conspiring against him.
Here in Ottawa, we've had cameras in taxis for a while. I have no idea if anything has come of it, other than the added expense for each taxi owner of a possibly useless camera. Seems to me like the camera supplier is in bed with the city councillor...
Atom trashed EPIA because it was:
1. cheaper
2. faster
3. properly supported by the manufacturer
My first and immediate thought upon reading the title was "why would VIA even bother in a post-Atom world ?". If I want a cheap build, I go with a standard Intel Atom board. If I want rich features, I spring an extra $50 for an ION board. VIA's offering probably sits somewhere in-between, but given the company's history, they would practically have to give them away for me to even look twice.
It's probably a case where there is room on the die, but they haven't nailed the yields yet.
Fancy algorithms and moore's law mean nothing to Chinese factory workers and the cut-rate designers that keep them busy.
Sure, that's the common sense approach which works for most normal users, but there are some of us who directly benefit from having a faster machine NOW, typically because we have a real business need for it. I could do my work on a "mediocre" system, but it would slow me down significantly, and after a month or two, the time (=money) lost waiting for the slower PC exceeds the cost delta of the faster machine.
The problem with Intel's latest processor is it isn't that big of an improvement over last year's 6-core line-up, putting the 3960X in a strange niche that only interests a small pocket of wealthy e-peeners. Those who want more cores would go for a dual Xeon, and those who want gaming performance would overclock the tits out of a 2600K. Four-slot SLI has never caught on, it's just an experimental curiosity. Even 2x dual-GPU rigs are notoriously unreliable thanks to crappy driver support, so you stand to gain very little from this X79 platform at this point in time.
You're right. No one in their right mind will buy this $1000 model when the $500 one is only 100mhz slower. Last year, when the 980X was launched, it was the only 6-core consumer CPU available, which made it worth $1000 to some people (*blink blink*). Had the 3960X been an 8-core bin, it might have made some waves, but at 6 cores it doesn't really stand out from its older siblings.
As a result, those of us who want/need heavy parallelism have already switched to affordable dual Xeons like the E5645. Those who want the best single/dual thread performance simply overclock the 2500K/2600K. So right now, the 3960X is a chip without a real niche. It almost feels like a throwaway platofrm, much like the old Skulltrail.
Given that the NDA was lifted just a few hours ago, I'm sure we'll see a proper 3930K review soon enough. Intel probably wants to give the Veblen types time to rush out and buy the X, before the K reviews start calling them suckers for paying $500 more for 100mhz.
Myself, I'm waiting for the 8-core Xeon SKUs, so I can go dual-socket 16-core. You know, so I can do "make -j16" while multiboxing Crysis or something...
1156 and 1366 to 775 and 771
You got those backwards. 775 and 771 were the old sockets, spanning from late P4 all the way up to Core 2. Socket 1156 was for first-gen i3/i5, ans Socket 1366 was Nehalem (i7-9xx and extreme). They have never reduced the pin count, because each successive platform has introduced wider memory controllers and/or QPI/DMI/PCIe lanes. Sandy Bridge-E is no different, moving up to 4-channel DDR3, up from X58's 3 channels. That right there is an extra couple-hundred pins just for the memory.
read Markov-chain generated pseudorandom rants based on mashups of obscure punk that you wouldn't have heard of and the lesser known speeches of 19th century radicals
Don't you mean Markoff chains ?
(come on, throw me a frickin' bone here)
More than likely it'll make for even worse blood shed in the near term as cartels fight over the decreased business and focus on harder drugs and other activities for revenue.
If I dare misquote my own quote, Thug on Thug crime is the solution to its own problem.
If they're willing to have a mutually destructive war with each other, I say let it happen. Then you only have the scraps to pick off...
An ISP contract is more than just a number of potential megabits, it's caps, and prices, and reliability, and QoS, and for some people it's also about customer service. Just quoting their marketing numbers doesn't mean much. They also don't indicate who the target demographic is for these service tiers. If I could upgrade to a 50 or 100mbit service for, say, $50 more, I probably would, but I'm a heavy data consumer - I work from home, we stream or torrent just about everything we watch, and I buy quite a few games on Steam every month, so we'd greatly benefit greatly from a faster pipe. My mother, on the other hand, has no need for more than 15-20mbit, and could probably find a better use for that $50. I suspect there are a lot users like my mother, than supergeeks like me.
In my area, I have two big bads; Bell (DSL) and Rogers (cable). Both of them suck: low caps, heavy throttling 24/7, high prices, and forced bundling. Even if I were willing to blow $100 / mo on the 50mbit service, I have absolutely zero confidence in their ability to deliver those promised bits. Their throttling actually resets connections, ruining any online gaming, torrents, and video streaming. It's like buying a full-price Lamborghini, slashing the tires and installing a dick-punch device in the driver's seat, and as a prerequisite for even buying the Lambo, you need to pay twice the sticker price for a Jetta you don't even need nor want. Any one of these negatives would be a solid reason to not want to give more money to the telco or cableco.
Corporations are fine. Hell, I'm incorporated :P My beef is with the ones whose sole contribution to society is more litigation - like patent trolls, high-level bankers, pharmaceutical holding companies... Businesses whose sole purpose is to make money on money. People who wield information as a weapon against their fellow man. People who have collectively destroyed the value of money. That is my definition of hypercapitalist swine. To me, they are addicts, acquiring more of that green intangible gank by any means necessary. They are those who stand to benefit from a xenophobic patent system that rewards not the inventors, but the lawyers.
You're absolutely right, I was thinking Delaware not Washington. Glad you caught the error :)
I don't find it funny, just common sense. It sounds like ASPM is very poorly documented, so if Windows is doing a decent job of implementing the functionality, then reverse-engineering, or at least guessing at how Windows does it, seems like a valid approach.