I hope this gets Zynga sued into oblivion. I always despised that skeevy company and am offended that they've become so large by peddling garbage games via Facebook. Simply clicking on one of their icons feels like the digital equivalent of sticking your dick in broken glass covered in hot sauce.
Do we really need to repeat Eurogamer's uninformative gush piece ?
Don't get me wrong, I bought the damn game at midnight (though I didn't line up 3 hours early like the 100 or so twits at my local Best Buy). I like it. It's MW2 with new, busier maps and just a tiny infusion of the stupid UI stuff Treyarch did in Black Ops, but it plays almost exactly like MW2. That's a good thing.
I do think that everyone who's interested in that kind of shooter either already owns the game, or is getting it as a gift for their birthday or the holidays or "9 months since I fucked my cousin" day if you're from Alberta. Nerds don't need to be reminded of this product's existence, we've known for a long time.
What I would love to read about is stats about the game. How many copies sold in the first 24 hours, which desperate attention whore first reached level 70 or 80 or whatever the cap is this time, and how many people were mugged/killed/injured on launch night. I'm know there's at least one, because I one excited dweeb drive into a light pole, right in the parking lot - he way too busy heckling the line and flashing his limited edition package to watch where he was going.
Another thing that would be relevant is what West and Zampella's new company are up to, after the nasty tiff between then and Activision. Now that all eyes are on MW3, this would be a great time for those guys to come out of the woodwork and promote a new game, especially since MW3 is the same old game with a new set of tires, it's a great opportunity for blood rivals to come out with something fresh.
That's funny, because from Ontario my impression is that Alberta is undertaxed. Calgary and Edmonton are the D.C. of Canada, where countless corporations and wealthy individuals establish themselves to avoid taxes.
Quebec's tax rate is actually quite favorable to the poor, compared to Ontario, and extremely punitive to practically anyone above minimum wage. If I were to move about 2 miles north of here, back to Quebec, I'd be paying nearly $10k more in income tax... for nothing. The buildings are older, there's no significant customer base for my professional services, the roads are poorly maintained, and there's exponentially more riff-raff just dying to break into my home and steal my shit. Pretty much the only business worth establishing in Quebec is a freakin' payday loan and pawn shop. Crabs in a bucket.
I am French Canadian, and I hate the French! Well, not quite, but I hate the idiocracy of Quebec, with its high taxes, low education, and glut of unemployed teen mothers. They're not unemployed from a lack of available jobs, they're unemployed because it's better to stay on welfare, collecting that baby bonus on top of their welfare cheque while popping babies with that cockroach of a boyfriend in mom's subsidized apartment.
There is a pervasive culture in Quebec of doing as little as needed to barely get by. It's so sloppy that if I'm dealing with a Quebec company, I immediately assume they're chumps, because any entrepreneur with even half a brain would move his business to a place where taxes are lower and the talent pool is deeper - but that would mean competition, so the lazy stay in Quebec where the contracts are easy and the clients are blood-related:P Every society will have its share of inbred bottom-feeding swine, but the government of Quebec actively encourages it with excessive welfare provisions while sticking everyone else with the bill.
Myself, I did the opposite of you, I moved to Ottawa from Quebec. Sure, the rent is a bit steep, and people think paying $8 for a beer is somehow normal outside of a strip club, but then I pay nearly $10k less income tax, presumably because this province doesn't spend anywhere near as much on parasitic neanderthal turbo-breeders. I can't think of any good reason to invest in the people who won't even invest in themselves. If rampant welfare is the answer, then Quebec must have asked a really stupid question.
That's right. Some of us have evolved beyond such primitive territorial quarrels. We tend to get annoyed at the societies that are still shedding blood over imaginary lines on a piece of paper.
Israel, on the other hand, is still living in the past, fighting a tired old war where the only way it could ever end is by having one side completely genocide the other. Winner gets a mound of dirt covered in the rotting dead flesh of their vanquished enemies. Israel vs Palestine, Iran vs Iraq, Sudan vs South Sudan... Brother vs brother. If they can't put in the effort to bury their grandparents' feuds for the greater good, then why should we be putting any effort into helping them ?
If I were Sarkozy, well I'd probably kill myself for being such a turd. But if I were any other UN member leader, I'd tell the Israeli PM to go fuck himself. We have enough irresponsible leaders in the developed world, we don't need to recruit the morally bankrupt ones.
Funny, my laptop is plenty reliable and I carry it every day as I walk/pub/cab to and from pubs and the occasional client site. In 12 years of laptops I have had exactly zero hard drive failures. Luck ? Maybe... but even if I'd had one or two failures in 12 years, it's still not enough to call them "unreliable". I could tolerate a failure every few years, it won't ruin my life. That's what backups are for.
In contrast, I've had to RMA quite a few SSDs that had died prematurely. Thankfully, OCZ's RMA service is quick and painless, but they are still ironing out the kinks in this relatively new tech. Again, backups for the win.
You are correct on most points, though in Windows, updating part of a compressed file does not require reprocessing the entire file. It works on 64kb chunks, so only affected chunks need to be updated. Despite that, there are other considerations such as fragmentation that do hurt performance, as compressing a 64kb chunk down to, say 20kb, still leaves a 44kb "gap" which must either be seeked over, or read through and discarded.
Compression works well in some special cases, but not at the OS level. For example, backup tapes greatly benefit from compression, because they have relatively slow transfer rates to begin with, might as well maximize capacity and throughput. Modern SSDs also benefit from block-level compression because it helps squeeze more out of each memory cell, in terms of both throughput and longevity by decreasing the number of erase/write cycles needed - in this case, compression is handled in the SSD's controller chip at full speed (~6.0gbps in current models).
Compression made sense for the Linux kernel "bzImage", back when we were booting from floppies and slow hard drives, where it often saved 30 seconds in loading times and allowed to fit the kernel onto small removable media. Today I think we just do it out of habit, because the difference between loading a 3mb file vs a 10mb file is negligible on modern hard drives - roughly 1/10th of a second.
Don't blame FUSE - well, not entirely at least. Blame the slow kerneluserspace linkage that requires lots of memcpy-on-memcpy action to get anything done. It is too tightly coupled to allow good performance unless you implement your own fancy async bufferingon the userspace side. The idea of FUSE is great, but the current implementation is half-assed and no one seems to be motivated to fix it - myself included - because none of the hardcore devs have any use for it.
I'm not a hardcore kernel guy, but I do tend to build idealized environments for myself. If I need to store 40gb of files, I get 40gb of space, screw compression. Even with today's processors, compression is still a big resource hog and I have better uses for that CPU time. If we had hardware-accelerated compression, my stance would be different - someone call Jen-Hsun Huang!
That is the fundamental problem. To the average human, a patent is total gibberish. To an expert, it is still gibberish. The only people who can "read" patents are lawyers, and they lack the subject matter expertise to make any real sense of it.
I say patent writers need to "sell" the patent examiner on the merit of their patent. You want an exclusive license to extort the world with an idea ? Ok, prove to me that you've actually created something new. If it's a tech patent, it needs to be reviewed by an examiner with at least 5-10 years of experience in the field. That way they will be better equipped to tell if the patent covers something trivial.
If the greedy hypercapitalist swine who support the patent system aren't willing to abolish it, then we should at least require that the patents be written in such a way that a novice can understand it. It's like usability testing. I don't expect my 80-year-old grandparents to understand (for example) FTP, but even a first-year CS student should be able to figure out from the first paragraph that it is a file transfer protocol that copies bits from one networked computer to another. By extension, an examiner with 5-10 years of applied experience should be able to identify which parts of a proposed file transfer protocol are painfully obvious, and which parts are innovative and potentially patent-worthy.
I personally can't think of any such innovations over existing protocols, but that's why I don't hold any patents. To a one-trick tech wizard like me, everything is obvious, as it should be. Just like my father thinks I'm a retard for not knowing that light flutter in my car's hum is caused by a bad fuel line pump, because he's a freakin' mechanic - it's obvious to him. We need to ditch obvious patents once and for all so the lawyers can find something better to do, and leave us experts in peace so we can start innovating again.
Because sometimes the criminals are the ones on our payroll.
If I set up a fake tower to sniff people's cell packets, I go directly to jail. That's practically indefensible.
If the government does it "to catch a criminal", they need to request permission via the proper channels, i.e. warrants. It is a special privilege that must be diligently controlled and protected from abuse. If we start giving law enforcement officials (and their subcontractors) carte-blanche to effectively commit criminal acts, without oversight nor disclosure, in the name of crime-fighting, then democracy is effectively abolished.
How important is that, really ? The only times I've used NTFS compression were for freeing up temp space on ancient servers, back when 9gb and 18gb SCSI drives were the norm. Seems like a throwaway feature to me.
For portable usage like CD/DVD and USB flash, a full-disk compressor like squashfs is just fine.
I think the beef is that even importing that simple String clas results in a whole mess of dependencies tagging along for the ride, when all you wanted was a goddamned String. Compilers can only discard code that's not actually referenced, but the tendency is to have everything depend on everything, for the sake of some marginally useful feature that you may or may not use.
Desqview... thank you for bringing up such awful memories. I remember lusting after that stupid thing for so long, only to discard it about 20 minutes after installation.
Yes, actually, it is worth the time to shave 20% off the memory usage, because now that app can scale 25% larger [ 1 / ( 1 - 0.2 ) ]
Perhaps what we need is better tools to help identify opportunities for such optimization. We can do a lot of it using current profiling tools, but those don't run on production systems. It would be humbling to see exactly how many of those 64kb "just in case" string buffers actually get used to store a 2-byte Unicode character.
This is a big part of what made Pascal, and other compiled languages of the time, so damn fast. They didn't bother with the "just in case" scenarios, you want a string ? How big you need it, 2 bytes ? DONE! No epic stack protection needed, this string is 2 bytes long, end of story. See, I'll even store a 2 next to it so all the string functions can trivially check the size. C-style nul-terminated-strings-of-doom were implemented with the AnsiString class, which used a pointer on the heap and would happily let you poop all over it, like all good pointers should. It was also uber-fucking-slow compared to native fixed-length strings.
That's just one inconvenient thing modern languages have abstracted away. What used to cost about 15 clock cycles (in the 386 days, less now), was turned into a probably 2000-cycle recital of bounds checking, pointer dereferencing, cache invalidating, memory row hopping, resource hogging, cpu chugging boilerplate code.
Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Toshiba, and Samsung, they have all had good batches and bad batches. Over the past 15 years, I'd say they all even out. The true measure of a hard drive manufacturer isn't really in the product itself, but in their warranty service. In that sense, I have to give WD the crown, followed very closely by Seagate. The key thing to remember is that all drives will eventually fail.
WD: zero hassle RMA. Plug in up to 5 serial numbers, and optionally order a cross-shipped replacement. 30 second process for 5 drives.
Seagate: slight hassle RMA. You can only do them one by one (or maybe two). About 1 in 5 drives will be falsely rejected by the web app, requiring a phone call. Pay $10 for a "advanced RMA" (cross-shipping), but that also covers your return shipping. 5 minute process per drive.
As a guy who was flogging in excess of 50 drives a month before the floods, I find WD's process much simpler and faster. They also don't limit you to 5 RMAs, that's just how many cross-shipments you can do in one batch on the web site. Of course, what matters to me, may not matter to you. If you only have one or two hard drives in your household, this is all moot.
This is what pushed me away from CentOS after about a year or two. It makes it rather frustrating to compile your own stuff, due to the RPM hell that hasn't changed all that much since the early RH days (I'm talking 1990's). If a tarball doesn't come with a Spec file, you're fucked and will be spending an extra couple of hours figuring it out on your own - either that, or you install the CentOS-maintained version and install the source-built on over top, fingers crossed hoping you don't break some critical lib.
As suicidal as it may sound, I got frustrated enough with RPMs that I switched for Gentoo. Yes, I would rather build _everything_ from source, than fuss with binary packages that almost never provide what I want. While Gentoo's quality has slipped in recent years, it's still quite pleasant to maintain, especially if you set up a private Portage mirror to ensure consistency across all your hosts. Sync the master only when you want/need it, and network-wide maintenance becomes a simple matter of testing the update once, and rolling your own binary packages out to the nodes.
I agree with about 75% of your post. AMD fucked up, because current operating systems already know how to handle hyper-threading, of which Bulldozer is basically a reimagining. If their CPU reported as 4 cores with 8 threads, chances are most schedulers would treat it like an Intel HT and not overburden it with uncooperative threads.
AMD fucked up, because they either didn't know this would happen (unlikely), or pretended we wouldn't notice. Now that the reviews are out, their PR team is spinning the blame on software. Why didn't they go back to the designers and address these issues ? Why didn't they work with MS to release a fix before the product's launch ? What they are doing is the tech equivalent of getting caught with your balls in your stepson's mouth and telling your wife it's the neighbour's fault. It is a total WTF denial of their role in this failed product design.
You're right, and yet HT processors still offered repeatable performance gains in real-world usage, even under Windows XP. HT-aware scheduling improved the margin somewhat, and narrowed the worst-case losses, but by and large Prescott showed a measurable improvement from day one. HT takes existing code and finds idle "holes" to sneak in another thread's instructions, improving performance with existing software.
Bulldozer just adds a bunch more physical cores, each one of them running slower than before, and completely ignores the fact that the majority of all desktop software, even if multithreaded, still relies on a heavy "primary" thread to do the bulk of the work. They might offload some tasks to additional threads but usually as an afterthought, cheaply tacked on to an existing codebase that predates multicore processors. Games, web browsers, office suites, media players... This is what Joe Random uses on a daily basis, and thus should be the focus of new consumer products.
The average user does not spend all day encoding video, or running "make world" for kicks. Their PR crew is spinning this half-baked hardware design as a software failure ? Who are they targeting with this release ? Not the gamers. Not the server crowd. Not the value segment. Not system builders. Who's left ? This doesn't feel like an HPC part, not unless they cram another 8 cores on that die and deliver 4-way and 8-way boards before Q2 2012, but then they would have called it an Opteron.
I think AMD enjoyed runaway success because of the P4, which was a very vulnerable platform for countless reasons. Poor IPC, awful thermals, and absurdly high prices. This gave AMD a giant gaping opportunity to dominate with their not-so-shitty AMD64. Then they released the dual-core, another great hit. They enjoyed nearly 4 years without any serious competition from Intel, but the moment Core 2 landed, it trounced AMD64 across the board, and came at a very reasonable price to boot. Sure, Intel learned from their mistakes, but AMD learned nothing. They still didn't have any major pull with OEMs, and their marketing arm did fuckall. The only people who even knew of AMD were gamers and techies. If I tried to sell anyone else a bang-for-the-buck AMD system, they'd ask "wtf is that garbage, I want an Intel"... user ignorance, sure, but AMD did nothing to improve their branding.
They have been playing catch-up ever since. In a year, when Bulldozer's successor comes out, Intel will also have something new to show. If AMD wants to take the performance crown, I'm fine with that idea, but they need to knock those early reviews out of the park with stellar performance. If they can't accomplish that, then stop trying and just focus on the growing value segment, where they are already known and loved.
There is a difference between a CPU upgrade and an SSD, which is not a hard drive at all and thus exhibits completely different performance characteristics. SSDs are a radical departure from the norm. A multi-core CPU is not.
I don't claim to know how CPU design works, but surely they must have ways to study or simulate real-world performance before the product is finalized and placed on shipping pallets. Windows' scheduler "sucks" ? Funny, it works fine with all the other Intel and AMD systems, even chunky ones like my 12-core SMP rig... Maybe AMD should have tweaked the chip to better handle the existing scheduler, instead of revving up the spin department to compensate for the hardware's embarrassing failure.
At the low end, AMD is still king. They have been for a good while now, and I've always been happy to flog excellent power-sipping machines based on the Athlon X2/X3/X4. Maybe they should just settle for that market and quit making asses of themselves in the high-end segment. They haven't had a praise-worthy flagship ever since Intel's Conroe.
Those kinds of people are very vulnerable to an optimistic young techie destroying their rep as a purchaser, or so my last two years of sales would suggest. I displaced someone who would only buy "the best", which in his view meant something 5x more expensive, and where every tech dispatch was accompanied by a sales guy, to work the purchaser while techie was busy installing the goods.
If AMD can deliver better performance per $ and per watt in the server room, I'll consider them, and so will my clients if it improves their bottom line.
Freedom to have a cheap laptop whose battery life drops from 2 hours when new, to 30 minutes after a couple years ? Yeah, you can keep your freedom.
I like the freedom to go to a pub, log a half-day of billable while sipping craft beer, and still have some power left for the bus/cab ride home. My Dell, HP, and Asus laptops couldn't handle that, so I bit the bullet and bought an MBP. It cost at least twice as much as a similar-spec PC, which does suck, but on the other hand it has paid for itself many times over since I can focus on my work instead of hunting for power outlets.
If/when I no longer need to write stupid iOS apps for a living, I'll happily dual-boot to Linux and continue enjoying the excellent hardware.
Applecare, as I understand it, is just an extended hardware warranty with limited software support ("How do I ____ with OSX?" type stuff).
I didn't buy it for mine, because $379 seems a bit egregious. If a manufacturing defect doesn't manifest in the first year, I don't see the point in paying for 2 more years of coverage. I use my laptop every day on the go, if something's screwy on it, it's gonna die young.
I'm a lifelong PC guy who bought a Macbook about six months ago. It still feels "wrong", in that my home rigs all run Windows or Linux, which I've been using since, well, ever, so switching to the Mac is often confusing as I instinctively use the wrong keyboard shortcuts and whatnot. That said, I have been extremely impressed with the hardware since day one. It's the software that annoys me, but the machine itself is superbly built, the display has great brightness/colour and viewing angle, battery life is just fantastic, the keyboard has a good feel as opposed to the flimsy scissor-switch keys on almost every other laptop.
The downside ? Three thousand fucking dollars. Mind you, that's the 17" with 8gb Ram and a Seagate hybrid drive so it's fully decked out, but even the entry-level MBP is what, 1200 or so ? It costs as much as two similar-spec PC laptops, assuming you have a strong tolerance for Asus or Dell cheapness. I have not yet tried to install Linux on it natively, I suspect it would require some tweaking to support the Fn-keys, GPU and lid sleep/wake, nothing too difficult I guess.
For myself, PC wasn't really an option as my day job consists of mobile app development. Sure, I could have used VMware to cheat around the OS requirement, but I tried that and it was quite cumbersome and slow, and the battery life was also a key factor as every other beefy laptop I had tried would conk out after 90 minutes to 2 hours, tops. It's hard to find a 17" unit that isn't designed (read: hastily cobbled together) for A/C-powered gaming. This guy can handle 5 hours of iOS development on a single charge. It's not that I'm far from a power outlet, but I do prefer being cordless when I'm out and about, whether it's at a client site or the pub.
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I hope this gets Zynga sued into oblivion. I always despised that skeevy company and am offended that they've become so large by peddling garbage games via Facebook. Simply clicking on one of their icons feels like the digital equivalent of sticking your dick in broken glass covered in hot sauce.
Do we really need to repeat Eurogamer's uninformative gush piece ?
Don't get me wrong, I bought the damn game at midnight (though I didn't line up 3 hours early like the 100 or so twits at my local Best Buy). I like it. It's MW2 with new, busier maps and just a tiny infusion of the stupid UI stuff Treyarch did in Black Ops, but it plays almost exactly like MW2. That's a good thing.
I do think that everyone who's interested in that kind of shooter either already owns the game, or is getting it as a gift for their birthday or the holidays or "9 months since I fucked my cousin" day if you're from Alberta. Nerds don't need to be reminded of this product's existence, we've known for a long time.
What I would love to read about is stats about the game. How many copies sold in the first 24 hours, which desperate attention whore first reached level 70 or 80 or whatever the cap is this time, and how many people were mugged/killed/injured on launch night. I'm know there's at least one, because I one excited dweeb drive into a light pole, right in the parking lot - he way too busy heckling the line and flashing his limited edition package to watch where he was going.
Another thing that would be relevant is what West and Zampella's new company are up to, after the nasty tiff between then and Activision. Now that all eyes are on MW3, this would be a great time for those guys to come out of the woodwork and promote a new game, especially since MW3 is the same old game with a new set of tires, it's a great opportunity for blood rivals to come out with something fresh.
That's funny, because from Ontario my impression is that Alberta is undertaxed. Calgary and Edmonton are the D.C. of Canada, where countless corporations and wealthy individuals establish themselves to avoid taxes.
Quebec's tax rate is actually quite favorable to the poor, compared to Ontario, and extremely punitive to practically anyone above minimum wage. If I were to move about 2 miles north of here, back to Quebec, I'd be paying nearly $10k more in income tax... for nothing. The buildings are older, there's no significant customer base for my professional services, the roads are poorly maintained, and there's exponentially more riff-raff just dying to break into my home and steal my shit. Pretty much the only business worth establishing in Quebec is a freakin' payday loan and pawn shop. Crabs in a bucket.
I am French Canadian, and I hate the French! Well, not quite, but I hate the idiocracy of Quebec, with its high taxes, low education, and glut of unemployed teen mothers. They're not unemployed from a lack of available jobs, they're unemployed because it's better to stay on welfare, collecting that baby bonus on top of their welfare cheque while popping babies with that cockroach of a boyfriend in mom's subsidized apartment.
There is a pervasive culture in Quebec of doing as little as needed to barely get by. It's so sloppy that if I'm dealing with a Quebec company, I immediately assume they're chumps, because any entrepreneur with even half a brain would move his business to a place where taxes are lower and the talent pool is deeper - but that would mean competition, so the lazy stay in Quebec where the contracts are easy and the clients are blood-related :P Every society will have its share of inbred bottom-feeding swine, but the government of Quebec actively encourages it with excessive welfare provisions while sticking everyone else with the bill.
Myself, I did the opposite of you, I moved to Ottawa from Quebec. Sure, the rent is a bit steep, and people think paying $8 for a beer is somehow normal outside of a strip club, but then I pay nearly $10k less income tax, presumably because this province doesn't spend anywhere near as much on parasitic neanderthal turbo-breeders. I can't think of any good reason to invest in the people who won't even invest in themselves. If rampant welfare is the answer, then Quebec must have asked a really stupid question.
That's right. Some of us have evolved beyond such primitive territorial quarrels. We tend to get annoyed at the societies that are still shedding blood over imaginary lines on a piece of paper.
Israel, on the other hand, is still living in the past, fighting a tired old war where the only way it could ever end is by having one side completely genocide the other. Winner gets a mound of dirt covered in the rotting dead flesh of their vanquished enemies. Israel vs Palestine, Iran vs Iraq, Sudan vs South Sudan... Brother vs brother. If they can't put in the effort to bury their grandparents' feuds for the greater good, then why should we be putting any effort into helping them ?
If I were Sarkozy, well I'd probably kill myself for being such a turd. But if I were any other UN member leader, I'd tell the Israeli PM to go fuck himself. We have enough irresponsible leaders in the developed world, we don't need to recruit the morally bankrupt ones.
Funny, my laptop is plenty reliable and I carry it every day as I walk/pub/cab to and from pubs and the occasional client site. In 12 years of laptops I have had exactly zero hard drive failures. Luck ? Maybe... but even if I'd had one or two failures in 12 years, it's still not enough to call them "unreliable". I could tolerate a failure every few years, it won't ruin my life. That's what backups are for.
In contrast, I've had to RMA quite a few SSDs that had died prematurely. Thankfully, OCZ's RMA service is quick and painless, but they are still ironing out the kinks in this relatively new tech. Again, backups for the win.
You are correct on most points, though in Windows, updating part of a compressed file does not require reprocessing the entire file. It works on 64kb chunks, so only affected chunks need to be updated. Despite that, there are other considerations such as fragmentation that do hurt performance, as compressing a 64kb chunk down to, say 20kb, still leaves a 44kb "gap" which must either be seeked over, or read through and discarded.
Compression works well in some special cases, but not at the OS level. For example, backup tapes greatly benefit from compression, because they have relatively slow transfer rates to begin with, might as well maximize capacity and throughput. Modern SSDs also benefit from block-level compression because it helps squeeze more out of each memory cell, in terms of both throughput and longevity by decreasing the number of erase/write cycles needed - in this case, compression is handled in the SSD's controller chip at full speed (~6.0gbps in current models).
Compression made sense for the Linux kernel "bzImage", back when we were booting from floppies and slow hard drives, where it often saved 30 seconds in loading times and allowed to fit the kernel onto small removable media. Today I think we just do it out of habit, because the difference between loading a 3mb file vs a 10mb file is negligible on modern hard drives - roughly 1/10th of a second.
Don't blame FUSE - well, not entirely at least. Blame the slow kerneluserspace linkage that requires lots of memcpy-on-memcpy action to get anything done. It is too tightly coupled to allow good performance unless you implement your own fancy async bufferingon the userspace side. The idea of FUSE is great, but the current implementation is half-assed and no one seems to be motivated to fix it - myself included - because none of the hardcore devs have any use for it.
I'm not a hardcore kernel guy, but I do tend to build idealized environments for myself. If I need to store 40gb of files, I get 40gb of space, screw compression. Even with today's processors, compression is still a big resource hog and I have better uses for that CPU time. If we had hardware-accelerated compression, my stance would be different - someone call Jen-Hsun Huang!
That is the fundamental problem. To the average human, a patent is total gibberish. To an expert, it is still gibberish. The only people who can "read" patents are lawyers, and they lack the subject matter expertise to make any real sense of it.
I say patent writers need to "sell" the patent examiner on the merit of their patent. You want an exclusive license to extort the world with an idea ? Ok, prove to me that you've actually created something new. If it's a tech patent, it needs to be reviewed by an examiner with at least 5-10 years of experience in the field. That way they will be better equipped to tell if the patent covers something trivial.
If the greedy hypercapitalist swine who support the patent system aren't willing to abolish it, then we should at least require that the patents be written in such a way that a novice can understand it. It's like usability testing. I don't expect my 80-year-old grandparents to understand (for example) FTP, but even a first-year CS student should be able to figure out from the first paragraph that it is a file transfer protocol that copies bits from one networked computer to another. By extension, an examiner with 5-10 years of applied experience should be able to identify which parts of a proposed file transfer protocol are painfully obvious, and which parts are innovative and potentially patent-worthy.
I personally can't think of any such innovations over existing protocols, but that's why I don't hold any patents. To a one-trick tech wizard like me, everything is obvious, as it should be. Just like my father thinks I'm a retard for not knowing that light flutter in my car's hum is caused by a bad fuel line pump, because he's a freakin' mechanic - it's obvious to him. We need to ditch obvious patents once and for all so the lawyers can find something better to do, and leave us experts in peace so we can start innovating again.
Because sometimes the criminals are the ones on our payroll.
If I set up a fake tower to sniff people's cell packets, I go directly to jail. That's practically indefensible.
If the government does it "to catch a criminal", they need to request permission via the proper channels, i.e. warrants. It is a special privilege that must be diligently controlled and protected from abuse. If we start giving law enforcement officials (and their subcontractors) carte-blanche to effectively commit criminal acts, without oversight nor disclosure, in the name of crime-fighting, then democracy is effectively abolished.
How important is that, really ? The only times I've used NTFS compression were for freeing up temp space on ancient servers, back when 9gb and 18gb SCSI drives were the norm. Seems like a throwaway feature to me.
For portable usage like CD/DVD and USB flash, a full-disk compressor like squashfs is just fine.
What, you don't open ports to your passwordless MS terminal server ?
It's a Word document, which means it exploits a weakness in MS word to deliver the payload.
But seriously, what is this, Digg ? Who is this "Unknown Lamer" and why doesn't he go fuck himself ? We used to have standards around here...
I think the beef is that even importing that simple String clas results in a whole mess of dependencies tagging along for the ride, when all you wanted was a goddamned String. Compilers can only discard code that's not actually referenced, but the tendency is to have everything depend on everything, for the sake of some marginally useful feature that you may or may not use.
Desqview... thank you for bringing up such awful memories. I remember lusting after that stupid thing for so long, only to discard it about 20 minutes after installation.
OS/2 Warp ftw.
Yes, actually, it is worth the time to shave 20% off the memory usage, because now that app can scale 25% larger [ 1 / ( 1 - 0.2 ) ]
Perhaps what we need is better tools to help identify opportunities for such optimization. We can do a lot of it using current profiling tools, but those don't run on production systems. It would be humbling to see exactly how many of those 64kb "just in case" string buffers actually get used to store a 2-byte Unicode character.
This is a big part of what made Pascal, and other compiled languages of the time, so damn fast. They didn't bother with the "just in case" scenarios, you want a string ? How big you need it, 2 bytes ? DONE! No epic stack protection needed, this string is 2 bytes long, end of story. See, I'll even store a 2 next to it so all the string functions can trivially check the size. C-style nul-terminated-strings-of-doom were implemented with the AnsiString class, which used a pointer on the heap and would happily let you poop all over it, like all good pointers should. It was also uber-fucking-slow compared to native fixed-length strings.
That's just one inconvenient thing modern languages have abstracted away. What used to cost about 15 clock cycles (in the 386 days, less now), was turned into a probably 2000-cycle recital of bounds checking, pointer dereferencing, cache invalidating, memory row hopping, resource hogging, cpu chugging boilerplate code.
Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Toshiba, and Samsung, they have all had good batches and bad batches. Over the past 15 years, I'd say they all even out. The true measure of a hard drive manufacturer isn't really in the product itself, but in their warranty service. In that sense, I have to give WD the crown, followed very closely by Seagate. The key thing to remember is that all drives will eventually fail.
WD: zero hassle RMA. Plug in up to 5 serial numbers, and optionally order a cross-shipped replacement. 30 second process for 5 drives.
Seagate: slight hassle RMA. You can only do them one by one (or maybe two). About 1 in 5 drives will be falsely rejected by the web app, requiring a phone call. Pay $10 for a "advanced RMA" (cross-shipping), but that also covers your return shipping. 5 minute process per drive.
As a guy who was flogging in excess of 50 drives a month before the floods, I find WD's process much simpler and faster. They also don't limit you to 5 RMAs, that's just how many cross-shipments you can do in one batch on the web site. Of course, what matters to me, may not matter to you. If you only have one or two hard drives in your household, this is all moot.
This is what pushed me away from CentOS after about a year or two. It makes it rather frustrating to compile your own stuff, due to the RPM hell that hasn't changed all that much since the early RH days (I'm talking 1990's). If a tarball doesn't come with a Spec file, you're fucked and will be spending an extra couple of hours figuring it out on your own - either that, or you install the CentOS-maintained version and install the source-built on over top, fingers crossed hoping you don't break some critical lib.
As suicidal as it may sound, I got frustrated enough with RPMs that I switched for Gentoo. Yes, I would rather build _everything_ from source, than fuss with binary packages that almost never provide what I want. While Gentoo's quality has slipped in recent years, it's still quite pleasant to maintain, especially if you set up a private Portage mirror to ensure consistency across all your hosts. Sync the master only when you want/need it, and network-wide maintenance becomes a simple matter of testing the update once, and rolling your own binary packages out to the nodes.
I agree with about 75% of your post. AMD fucked up, because current operating systems already know how to handle hyper-threading, of which Bulldozer is basically a reimagining. If their CPU reported as 4 cores with 8 threads, chances are most schedulers would treat it like an Intel HT and not overburden it with uncooperative threads.
AMD fucked up, because they either didn't know this would happen (unlikely), or pretended we wouldn't notice. Now that the reviews are out, their PR team is spinning the blame on software. Why didn't they go back to the designers and address these issues ? Why didn't they work with MS to release a fix before the product's launch ? What they are doing is the tech equivalent of getting caught with your balls in your stepson's mouth and telling your wife it's the neighbour's fault. It is a total WTF denial of their role in this failed product design.
You're right, and yet HT processors still offered repeatable performance gains in real-world usage, even under Windows XP. HT-aware scheduling improved the margin somewhat, and narrowed the worst-case losses, but by and large Prescott showed a measurable improvement from day one. HT takes existing code and finds idle "holes" to sneak in another thread's instructions, improving performance with existing software.
Bulldozer just adds a bunch more physical cores, each one of them running slower than before, and completely ignores the fact that the majority of all desktop software, even if multithreaded, still relies on a heavy "primary" thread to do the bulk of the work. They might offload some tasks to additional threads but usually as an afterthought, cheaply tacked on to an existing codebase that predates multicore processors. Games, web browsers, office suites, media players... This is what Joe Random uses on a daily basis, and thus should be the focus of new consumer products.
The average user does not spend all day encoding video, or running "make world" for kicks. Their PR crew is spinning this half-baked hardware design as a software failure ? Who are they targeting with this release ? Not the gamers. Not the server crowd. Not the value segment. Not system builders. Who's left ? This doesn't feel like an HPC part, not unless they cram another 8 cores on that die and deliver 4-way and 8-way boards before Q2 2012, but then they would have called it an Opteron.
Funny, I don't see it that way at all.
I think AMD enjoyed runaway success because of the P4, which was a very vulnerable platform for countless reasons. Poor IPC, awful thermals, and absurdly high prices. This gave AMD a giant gaping opportunity to dominate with their not-so-shitty AMD64. Then they released the dual-core, another great hit. They enjoyed nearly 4 years without any serious competition from Intel, but the moment Core 2 landed, it trounced AMD64 across the board, and came at a very reasonable price to boot. Sure, Intel learned from their mistakes, but AMD learned nothing. They still didn't have any major pull with OEMs, and their marketing arm did fuckall. The only people who even knew of AMD were gamers and techies. If I tried to sell anyone else a bang-for-the-buck AMD system, they'd ask "wtf is that garbage, I want an Intel"... user ignorance, sure, but AMD did nothing to improve their branding.
They have been playing catch-up ever since. In a year, when Bulldozer's successor comes out, Intel will also have something new to show. If AMD wants to take the performance crown, I'm fine with that idea, but they need to knock those early reviews out of the park with stellar performance. If they can't accomplish that, then stop trying and just focus on the growing value segment, where they are already known and loved.
There is a difference between a CPU upgrade and an SSD, which is not a hard drive at all and thus exhibits completely different performance characteristics. SSDs are a radical departure from the norm. A multi-core CPU is not.
I don't claim to know how CPU design works, but surely they must have ways to study or simulate real-world performance before the product is finalized and placed on shipping pallets. Windows' scheduler "sucks" ? Funny, it works fine with all the other Intel and AMD systems, even chunky ones like my 12-core SMP rig... Maybe AMD should have tweaked the chip to better handle the existing scheduler, instead of revving up the spin department to compensate for the hardware's embarrassing failure.
At the low end, AMD is still king. They have been for a good while now, and I've always been happy to flog excellent power-sipping machines based on the Athlon X2/X3/X4. Maybe they should just settle for that market and quit making asses of themselves in the high-end segment. They haven't had a praise-worthy flagship ever since Intel's Conroe.
Those kinds of people are very vulnerable to an optimistic young techie destroying their rep as a purchaser, or so my last two years of sales would suggest. I displaced someone who would only buy "the best", which in his view meant something 5x more expensive, and where every tech dispatch was accompanied by a sales guy, to work the purchaser while techie was busy installing the goods.
If AMD can deliver better performance per $ and per watt in the server room, I'll consider them, and so will my clients if it improves their bottom line.
Freedom to have a cheap laptop whose battery life drops from 2 hours when new, to 30 minutes after a couple years ? Yeah, you can keep your freedom.
I like the freedom to go to a pub, log a half-day of billable while sipping craft beer, and still have some power left for the bus/cab ride home. My Dell, HP, and Asus laptops couldn't handle that, so I bit the bullet and bought an MBP. It cost at least twice as much as a similar-spec PC, which does suck, but on the other hand it has paid for itself many times over since I can focus on my work instead of hunting for power outlets.
If/when I no longer need to write stupid iOS apps for a living, I'll happily dual-boot to Linux and continue enjoying the excellent hardware.
Applecare, as I understand it, is just an extended hardware warranty with limited software support ("How do I ____ with OSX?" type stuff).
I didn't buy it for mine, because $379 seems a bit egregious. If a manufacturing defect doesn't manifest in the first year, I don't see the point in paying for 2 more years of coverage. I use my laptop every day on the go, if something's screwy on it, it's gonna die young.
*dons troll-proof helmet*
I'm a lifelong PC guy who bought a Macbook about six months ago. It still feels "wrong", in that my home rigs all run Windows or Linux, which I've been using since, well, ever, so switching to the Mac is often confusing as I instinctively use the wrong keyboard shortcuts and whatnot. That said, I have been extremely impressed with the hardware since day one. It's the software that annoys me, but the machine itself is superbly built, the display has great brightness/colour and viewing angle, battery life is just fantastic, the keyboard has a good feel as opposed to the flimsy scissor-switch keys on almost every other laptop.
The downside ? Three thousand fucking dollars. Mind you, that's the 17" with 8gb Ram and a Seagate hybrid drive so it's fully decked out, but even the entry-level MBP is what, 1200 or so ? It costs as much as two similar-spec PC laptops, assuming you have a strong tolerance for Asus or Dell cheapness. I have not yet tried to install Linux on it natively, I suspect it would require some tweaking to support the Fn-keys, GPU and lid sleep/wake, nothing too difficult I guess.
For myself, PC wasn't really an option as my day job consists of mobile app development. Sure, I could have used VMware to cheat around the OS requirement, but I tried that and it was quite cumbersome and slow, and the battery life was also a key factor as every other beefy laptop I had tried would conk out after 90 minutes to 2 hours, tops. It's hard to find a 17" unit that isn't designed (read: hastily cobbled together) for A/C-powered gaming. This guy can handle 5 hours of iOS development on a single charge. It's not that I'm far from a power outlet, but I do prefer being cordless when I'm out and about, whether it's at a client site or the pub.