I do lab projects for a living, lab projects that aren't working should stay in the lab.
It seems like piledriver is 15% faster clock for clock than first gen bulldozer, that still only brings it up to gufftown levels of performance. Being one step behind Intel has always been AMD's thing, there's nothing wrong with that place in the market, Bulldozer looks like it has put them at least two, and possibly 3 steps behind intel, given that we could see haswell by march of next year.
Also, and as the wikipedia article waffles over, we can disagree over whether or not piledriver counts as a new microarchitecture, or if it's just a minor revision of bulldozer. I tend to think AMD would be better to pretend anything they put out next is a different architecture than bulldozer, even if it isn't, because bulldozer has been a disaster so far.
Now granted, within all of this is one of the core focuses of the question of the article, if AMD can produce something competitive with the i5 2500 (which is, admittedly, more like a 30% gap than 15) they can then correctly claim 'cpu doesn't matter', but I would probably not want to have my job resting on being able to make that case.
150 dollars as the difference between a 500 dollar i5 kit vs a 340 dollar phenom kit. The tigerdirect.ca site has phenom kits for 250 bucks and i5 2500 kits for 400-450.
But looking at what the specs of the PS4 is supposed to be frankly
whatever you're looking at is probably wrong. We teach game development where I am, and we have very good relations with the Console developers nearby and none of them have any idea what the PS4 is going to actually be. There are a lot of good theories on what it could be, or should be, but no one knows what it will be.
I figure we've got another year to year and a half before i'll swap out the GPUs and with 2 hexacores and a quad I doubt we'll be needing new systems for a good 5 years or more.
Depends very much on what people bother to do with the technology. There's nothing glaringly obviously in the pipeline that would make a decent directx 11 card invalid in 5 years, but 5 years is an eternity in this industry. 5 years ago Bioshock and Supreme commander were best sellers. If you pull up decent specs for say bioshock: (their recommended). GPU computing poses some really serious questions to the industry, especially when you start looking at GPU physics and animation, some dramatic change to directx 12/13 and new hardware could render anything existing completely incompatible. We're still at the stage of talking about language features, and what is worth implementing efficiently in hardware, so it's hard to say. This is where the PS4/Xbox3 could really shake up the business, even if they do something very similar to a generic quad core with GTX 660/ATI 7800 they could quite easily do something you just can't do on existing hardware. The 4850 you mention is, for example, antiquated,to put it politely, it's a directx 10.1 part, meaning anything that's directx 11 compute or rendering and it's SOL.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
System RAM: 2GB
Video card: DX9: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better) DX10: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better.
Trying to run anything new today on that at a reasonable framerate is... unlikely. Well other than WoW (which itself was the biggest seller of 2007 with the burning crusade expansion).
5 years before that was say GTA III: Intel Pentium III 700 MHz 128 MB RAM 32 MB DirectX 8.1 video card
Good luck running bioshock on that. So sometimes 5 years makes relatively little difference, and sometimes 5 years is night and day.
Hexacore isn't going to get you anything, it's too rare a part type. If anyone seriously shifts gears into hexacore CPU usage nothing AMD has is going to be clock for clock anywhere near capable. Primarily with an AMD you're running into single core bottlenecks, there are some algorithms that just can't be done in parallel, and once you've stripped out everything else, those tend to run headlong into single cpu performance.
Even the TFA is testing with an AMD 7950, which is a 500 dollar part, half of it can laugh at the 6770 while the other half is actually rendering a game.
Ya, disk speed is a hard one to benchmark out, which is why I pointed at loading times, that's where it makes the most difference, not 'in game' activities. Well that and just general system behaviour.
No, the phenoms aren't actually terrible, they're behind where the equivalent generation i5's are, but bizarrely, they're ahead of the successor FX parts (FX are supposed to be a newer better microarchitecture than phenom).
Depends how you define 'higher end' here too. An i5 2500k is a 200 dollar processor for the OEM version at retail, now that's not full system cost, you'd need a mobo and RAM to go with that, but the phenom x6 is a 150-160 dollar part at retail and is maybe 2/3rds the overall performance (from the chart I linked) and on gaming (from TFA) it's 15-20% worse overall. That's competitive on a performance per dollar measure, but it's still not good considering there's nothing in the AMD family that's hitting even the mid range of the intel family.
20FPS out of 60 is a big deal. Even out of 80 it's a big deal because next years game is going to be that little bit more powerful and you're going to struggle to keep up to it. Now what your tolerance is, and 150 bucks here or there is as a percent a lot, but you're seeing almost linear performance/cost in this range. The point is that once you get past that range you're into virtually no performance per dollar, and if you're trying to build a gaming PC on a 700 dollar budget you have to realize you're not going to get a great experience all of the time. Also, as is sort of the point of TFA, you do get value for your money buying an intel CPU over an AMD one in that price segment so in that case 'cpu does matter' so to speak, but there's a whole lot of headroom where it doesn't.
Naturally, much of this comes from games being made largely around consoles, and no one is going to write a fully dedicated AI or animation system for the PC version of a game and not the console version (all the games they benchmarked are console games with PC versions, sadly). Even a fully PC game (starcraft, diablo, MMO's) you're still constrained by compatibility with lower end machines, so you can't really build something that takes much advantage of a top end CPU while not crippling performance on a low end one.
I wonder if this same logic applies to browser performance
In windows 8 it definitely will, windows 7 and linux, not so much. GPU acceleration is becoming more and more popular because GPU's are able to solve one type of problem significantly better than CPU's, if you can split your problem up, into the rendering problem and the logic problem the CPU becomes a lot less important, assuming it's fast enough to keep up with the GPU for whatever problem you have.
General purpose GPU acceleration isn't standard in use very well on any OS, although MS is doing so with the desktop and fonts in Windows 8, as you ask, it matters a lot more to a web browser than than your desktops. IE10 is natively GPU accelerated and I believe chrome, opera and firefox are all going that route to varying degrees.
In terms of total computer performance though, nothing beats a SSD on a fast memory sub system (sandy bridge or an FX setup). GPU acceleration makes it a bit snappier and responsive, a SSD completely changes how quickly applications start and how fast the machine boots and that sort of thing.
If you read the charts the assertion that 'cpu doesn't matter' is kind of true in a lot of cases.
It's not that it doesn't matter at all, but the difference between an 1100 dollar sandy bridge i7 3960 and a 200 dollar 2500k, even though they are almost a factor of 2 difference in performance side by side (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html) is less than 10% in games. Now those processors are still *way* better than the AMD offerings unfortunately, and the AMD processors are in many cases so bad that becomes the dominant problem.
The new "bulldozer" architecture from AMD is a disaster, in just about every way. They're terrible. The charts clearly show that.
The video card makers (more than the review sites) have correctly pointed out that performance is much more likely to be GPU gated than CPU gated, or, if it's a problem like I'm working on now, it's a single CPU gated for an algorithm that doesn't neatly parallelize - so more cores doesn't do anything. If you're given a choice between a 1000 dollar CPU or a 600 dollar one from the same company odds are you won't be able to tell the difference, so in that sense they're reasonably correct, there's virtually no benefit to buying an extreme CPU or the like if your primary goal is gaming performance. If you're talking about the best use of say 1000 dollars to build a gaming PC, well then the cheapest i5 you can find with the best video card you can afford is probably the best bang for your buck.
As someone above said, an RTS like starcraft is more likely to be CPU limited than GPU limited.
What this tells us is that AMD processors are terrible for gaming, but there's virtually no difference which FX processor you buy (don't buy those though, if you're buying AMD buy a phenom), and within the Intel family there is again, virtually no difference for a factor of 4 or 5 price difference.
What they didn't look at (because you don't really benchmark it) is load times, I think the FX processors have a much faster memory subsystem if you have a good SSD than their Phenom counterparts, but otherwise someone should take a bulldozer to bulldozer.
If we were to revisit the oft used car analogy for computing, it's a fair assertion that which brand of car you buy won't help you get to work any faster day to day, slightly better cars, with faster pickup etc will have a small (but measurable benefit) but that's about it. Well, unless you buy a land rover, or a BMW 7 series (http://www.lovemoney.com/news/cars-computers-and-sport/cars/12461/the-country-that-makes-the-most-reliable-cars, http://www.reliabilityindex.com/ ), at which point, you should budget time into your schedule for the vehicle to be in the shop.
It's what they get for selecting a cultist (mormon) as their presidential nominee, and for calling on Akin to resign.
No matter how crazy you think they are, they'll find another level, don't worry, blaming it on a muslim fascist communist in the whitehouse could work too if it's him cavorting with the devil to disrupt the election plans of the republicans.
you have to be careful too, in that the provisions laid out cover the *maximum* premium, which will probably be the premium, but isn't necessarily what will be the premiums. Hence the health exchanges aiming to bring costs down (which is a plan I cannot possibly envision actually working very well, but who knows).
Ah, but as with countries that have healthcare systems, suddenly your government is going to be very much responsible for what insurance companies are up to, and if governments like to do one thing, it's look like they're doing something by passing regulations. Incidentally, those regulations may actually be good for people and may improve the system (that's why for example there are constraints on how much you can charge, and for what, and so on in the bill already), but that's really a side benefit to the political benefits of being seen to solve the problem and provide better care.
But people figured out that a hospital will treat you even if you cant afford to pay,
Is required to treat you. And can send you a bill afterwards. If you can't pay, then it gets dumped on the insurer of the hospital (which is the government) who have to pay for the service. So they in effect are getting socialized medicine, but with and absolutely crazy system.
Right, but then without the individual mandate + tax no one who is healthy would ever buy insurance, so insurance wouldn't be able stay in business because the only people enrolled in the system would be those with more care costs than they can pay for.
depends on the fine (tax). Seriously. For the first couple of years you're probably right. When someone wises up to your scheme and moves a decimal point, not so much.
The way the provision works is you will have to (eventually) pay an annual penalty of 2.5% of your income (beyond the filing minimum, not 100% sure what that means but probably the minimum amount before you have to file your taxes), if you don't buy insurance. If your income is more than 133% of the federal poverty line, *and* you can't find insurance for less than 2.5 % of your income beyond minimum filing then yes, you *might* be better off not buying insurance and paying the penalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act actually has a handy chart, and you can see where the penalty fits in compared to where your income is. Keep in mind that for 1 person the federal poverty line is like 11k
So you do highlight one thing wrong with the system, someone with 40k income could have an insurance plan costing a maximum of 4 grand, or they could pay the $1000 penalty until they need insurance. Guess how long your plan is going to last before the government moves the decimal place from 2.5 to 25%.
I can't imagine how you'd get health insurance in such a situation
Don't schools provide health insurance for students? I'm in canada and our foreign students automatically get insurance for things that aren't covered by the government (which guarantees them certain healthcare as part of their entrance visa).
The latest story I heard is that the UK is cutting doctor salaries (in order to balance the government budget) and it's leading to many doctors quitting
Probably, the conservatives are gutting the local trusts or whatever they're called too. But that doesn't mean there's going to be a massive shortage of doctors in the UK. When you make cuts and those doctors can pack up an move to switzerland or the US inevitably some will. And then you expand immigration or raise salaries and attract a bunch more. This isn't anything new. The UK can still attract doctors from eastern europe for example.
But as a canadian, there is no way in hell I would trade what we have here for the US system. For the french system or the british system, sure, they have different cost/benefit tradeoffs, but all of us provide on average better care, for less money than the US, and if you're in the US and you care about healthcare the answer is to leave.
After reading the various horror stories of patients unable to find a doctor, or being left to die in waiting rooms, or denied basic preventative measures like PAP smears
The reason you hear about is because we take these things very very seriously. Governments and government agencies are held accountable when they fuck up like this. It does happen, sometimes intentionally so too, as I say with the example of the conservatives in the UK, or with the 'voucher' programme proposed by Paul Ryan for Medicare, when you elect politicians they have a platform they run on for healthcare, sometimes that's good, sometimes bad, and most of the time somewhere inbetween.
And YES I know you've had nothing but great service in your CA or UK care.
No, you really don't understand. Between canada and the UK there are 95 million people, within canada each province runs it's own healthcare service under federal law, in the UK the NHS covers england and wales and northern ireland but not scotland I believe. Inevitably there will be things that go wrong, and an underfunded department will perform as well as any under funded agency will, some doctors are corrupt, some nurses are incompetent, some places can't attract enough qualified people especially in rural canada there aren't going to magically people who want to move 2 hours from the nearest walmart to provide healthcare etc.
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf is pretty much the definitive guide to healthcare outcomes and assessment methodology, I suggest you read that. Seriously. It's not particularly complicated. If you're scared of reading page 18 has the table summary that's important.
That combines coverage, quality and spending into a single index. The French and Italians have the best systems overall (along with san marino) even though they have very different spending profiles.
Now in the long run 'Obamacare' which is basically a copy of the swiss system should be reasonably be expected to have similiar costs to canada (around 11.5% of GDP today), and produce better outcomes (as the swiss system does). So in 2016 or 2017 you might have an argument. But english canada only judges our healthcare system compared to the US, so we pay less, and have better outcomes, and as long that's true no one is going to rock the boat, even though there are better options available. And I'll point out that the swiss system is worse than the UK on both cost and coverage, so theirs isn't really the system you want to copy.
You hear horror stories from our healthcare systems because we actually care about these things as problems that need to be solved. In the US healthcare system you have one party base that advocates "let them die" and 'vouchers' as a policy platform, so we're not even having the same debate. In the US the question is whether or not you should even try to cover people, in canada in the UK it is a question of how best to do that, and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
I think it's 5 seconds and it's definitely a hard shutdown
Duh, sorry, this is what I get for spending my days with equipment that automatically restarts if it ever loses power, and on a network that tells all the machines to power on.
You do realize that the school you went to advertises quite a lot (we advertise our comp sci and software engineering programmes extensively), the places you travel too all advertise to get people to go there, the instruments you buy have a reputation in large part created by advertising, the wine you buy is all premised on advertising etc?
I've been to a lot of countries, even in the poorest villages in the poorest places I've been (which is probably uganda and india) there's still advertising trying to get you to buy vegetables from one cart or stall rather than another. And the richest cities in the richest countries (which would probably be New York, USA and London, UK) there is advertising everywhere. The big cities it's almost at the point of being ineffective there's so much of it.
If you take our software engineering programme as an example, we advertise extensively on the quality of the city, residences, the academic programme, job success afterwards etc. That you took software eng somewhere, and ended up getting a decent enough job out of it means your school might not have been lying about its quality, but that doesn't mean they weren't advertising.
Also, real-time encoding takes a non trivial amount of processing power.
Uh... what decade are you living in?
You have to be careful here, you're assuming you want to render a frame one way, compress it, then decompress it. That's certainly a viable solution, and you can do that real time with a half decent gpu easily enough, but you don't need to render the frame then compress it, you can render straight to a compressed format and output that.
and running a datacenter is very expensive - probably more than $15 per month
Well that would be why they aren't making enough money. Although for the sake of argument the difference between 15 bucks a month and 30 isn't significant to us, but would double their per user revenue.
If you haven't actually tried onlive or the like you should, most of them work reasonably well if you have a low latency connection, this isn't some 'oh they aren't going to be viable', no they're viable already if you're in the range of people who have decent connections to their servers, but that group has the hardware they need already.
Nor is the article (which I didn't write, it's just the most recent one I found that took the time to convey some of the things they thought sucked about windows 8) only about metro. As they point out, the mail and calendar apps don't seem to work as well as their previous versions, search doesn't seem to actually work very well etc. etc.
For the average user it makes more sense to hide that complexity, because it will only confuse them
I'd agree that they aren't all that useful for most users because they don't know the difference between hibernate and sleep, but they, along with log off are all in the same place right now. Changing that behaviour doesn't seem like it adds much.
On windows you actually set the behaviour of the power button (power options under control panel, edit a plan settings, then advanced settings, power button and lid options). By default I believe a 4 second press just hard reboots the computer and that's outside of the OS, but the power button will variously be configured to hibernate, sleep or shut down the machine.
Now if you're not exceptionally savvy on the difference you may not realize when it has hibernated versus slept or the like, but they aren't the same thing, and that's sort of the point, your 4 options (shut down, sleep, hibernate, restart) should all be in the same place, and you shouldn't need to do a google or bing search to find out how to do so.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the 10GB of RAM. I have 12GB and the OS never uses more than 2 of it.
Currently windows is using 8GB of my 12, presumably it has cached some parts of diablo 3 and saints row the third as I was just using those, and presumably then they will load faster.
I grant, I wasn't clear what I was getting at. Chrome uses a boatload of memory in exchange for speed, so fine, it's a deliberate tradeoff, that's why the memory is there. Using memory because you're a bad programmer or just allocating yourself memory in case you might want to use it, or you have memory leaks or whatever is not something I'm fond of, but people (not you) complain about things using a lot of memory and then want it to be fast. The shutdown thing is more unnecessarily odd than it is serious, but that's everything with windows 8. There's not really anything fundamentally broken about it, it's just a series of unnecessarily odd behaviours that are inconsistent with previous versions for no benefit.
The power button is, by the way, the wrong way to shut down a machine. It variously sleeps, hibernates or hard reboots the machine depending on your configuration. On just about everything press and hold for 4 seconds hard reboots (no software shutdown), and the other two cases aren't the same as shutting down, they may be good enough for your purposes, but they aren't actually shutdown. Presumably also the 'reboot' option would be the in same place.
Erm no, that's precisely not what I said. If you take care of things properly you aren't stuck playing catch up, because things are prevented from becoming big problems that require crisis management.
I'm at work 2 hours later than my boss yes, but he goes home at 3, I probably could do the same, but I don't have kids, and don't particularly want to show up at 7 in the morning, he works 7-3, I work 9-5. Although that would be why he always has the 3rd parking spot in our lot for our building with 500+ staff in it.
Windows 8 isn't big and scary. It's just horridly designed.
The issues with the bootloader are one problem, that might pose a problem for linux, but are actually a relatively small part of what is problem with windows 8, because windows 8 is a badly designed mess.
A good overview of some of what is wrong with it http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/why-i-m-uninstalling-windows-8
This isn't a DRM issue, a compatibility issue (although there is some of that), it's not even particularly evil, at least not any more than anything else MS does. It's that it's a nightmare to use because the design is wildly inconsistent for no apparent reason, and it doesn't seem to actually get you anything for that. If you want to use 10 GB of my RAM that's fine if I actually get something out of it, if you're going to change how to shut down the machine, or how apps work etc. it's just unnecessarily confusing.
You have to value yourself, and know your self worth.
This, if you're valuable and capable and willing to take on responsibility for something then you don't bitch about having to actually be responsible for it. That may mean you work 9 hour days or bizarre hours rather than 8 hour days to partially overlap both shifts, it may mean you answer e-mails at night, it may mean you're a doctor and get paid to be on call this week.
.if you are good, you can choose what you want to work for
Sure, and you can choose to never take responsibility for a 24/7 IT shop or whatever. But if you're valuable and stay on top of problems a good employer will recognize and reward that. Especially if they're a 24/7 business and value people who are looking for ways to keep the company from wasting money on idle people.
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I do lab projects for a living, lab projects that aren't working should stay in the lab.
It seems like piledriver is 15% faster clock for clock than first gen bulldozer, that still only brings it up to gufftown levels of performance. Being one step behind Intel has always been AMD's thing, there's nothing wrong with that place in the market, Bulldozer looks like it has put them at least two, and possibly 3 steps behind intel, given that we could see haswell by march of next year.
Also, and as the wikipedia article waffles over, we can disagree over whether or not piledriver counts as a new microarchitecture, or if it's just a minor revision of bulldozer. I tend to think AMD would be better to pretend anything they put out next is a different architecture than bulldozer, even if it isn't, because bulldozer has been a disaster so far.
Now granted, within all of this is one of the core focuses of the question of the article, if AMD can produce something competitive with the i5 2500 (which is, admittedly, more like a 30% gap than 15) they can then correctly claim 'cpu doesn't matter', but I would probably not want to have my job resting on being able to make that case.
150 dollars as the difference between a 500 dollar i5 kit vs a 340 dollar phenom kit. The tigerdirect.ca site has phenom kits for 250 bucks and i5 2500 kits for 400-450.
But looking at what the specs of the PS4 is supposed to be frankly
whatever you're looking at is probably wrong. We teach game development where I am, and we have very good relations with the Console developers nearby and none of them have any idea what the PS4 is going to actually be. There are a lot of good theories on what it could be, or should be, but no one knows what it will be.
I figure we've got another year to year and a half before i'll swap out the GPUs and with 2 hexacores and a quad I doubt we'll be needing new systems for a good 5 years or more.
Depends very much on what people bother to do with the technology. There's nothing glaringly obviously in the pipeline that would make a decent directx 11 card invalid in 5 years, but 5 years is an eternity in this industry. 5 years ago Bioshock and Supreme commander were best sellers. If you pull up decent specs for say bioshock: (their recommended). GPU computing poses some really serious questions to the industry, especially when you start looking at GPU physics and animation, some dramatic change to directx 12/13 and new hardware could render anything existing completely incompatible. We're still at the stage of talking about language features, and what is worth implementing efficiently in hardware, so it's hard to say. This is where the PS4/Xbox3 could really shake up the business, even if they do something very similar to a generic quad core with GTX 660/ATI 7800 they could quite easily do something you just can't do on existing hardware. The 4850 you mention is, for example, antiquated,to put it politely, it's a directx 10.1 part, meaning anything that's directx 11 compute or rendering and it's SOL.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
System RAM: 2GB
Video card: DX9: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better) DX10: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better.
Trying to run anything new today on that at a reasonable framerate is... unlikely. Well other than WoW (which itself was the biggest seller of 2007 with the burning crusade expansion).
5 years before that was say GTA III:
Intel Pentium III 700 MHz
128 MB RAM
32 MB DirectX 8.1 video card
Good luck running bioshock on that. So sometimes 5 years makes relatively little difference, and sometimes 5 years is night and day.
Hexacore isn't going to get you anything, it's too rare a part type. If anyone seriously shifts gears into hexacore CPU usage nothing AMD has is going to be clock for clock anywhere near capable. Primarily with an AMD you're running into single core bottlenecks, there are some algorithms that just can't be done in parallel, and once you've stripped out everything else, those tend to run headlong into single cpu performance.
Even the TFA is testing with an AMD 7950, which is a 500 dollar part, half of it can laugh at the 6770 while the other half is actually rendering a game.
Ya, disk speed is a hard one to benchmark out, which is why I pointed at loading times, that's where it makes the most difference, not 'in game' activities. Well that and just general system behaviour.
No, the phenoms aren't actually terrible, they're behind where the equivalent generation i5's are, but bizarrely, they're ahead of the successor FX parts (FX are supposed to be a newer better microarchitecture than phenom).
Depends how you define 'higher end' here too. An i5 2500k is a 200 dollar processor for the OEM version at retail, now that's not full system cost, you'd need a mobo and RAM to go with that, but the phenom x6 is a 150-160 dollar part at retail and is maybe 2/3rds the overall performance (from the chart I linked) and on gaming (from TFA) it's 15-20% worse overall. That's competitive on a performance per dollar measure, but it's still not good considering there's nothing in the AMD family that's hitting even the mid range of the intel family.
20FPS out of 60 is a big deal. Even out of 80 it's a big deal because next years game is going to be that little bit more powerful and you're going to struggle to keep up to it. Now what your tolerance is, and 150 bucks here or there is as a percent a lot, but you're seeing almost linear performance/cost in this range. The point is that once you get past that range you're into virtually no performance per dollar, and if you're trying to build a gaming PC on a 700 dollar budget you have to realize you're not going to get a great experience all of the time. Also, as is sort of the point of TFA, you do get value for your money buying an intel CPU over an AMD one in that price segment so in that case 'cpu does matter' so to speak, but there's a whole lot of headroom where it doesn't.
Naturally, much of this comes from games being made largely around consoles, and no one is going to write a fully dedicated AI or animation system for the PC version of a game and not the console version (all the games they benchmarked are console games with PC versions, sadly). Even a fully PC game (starcraft, diablo, MMO's) you're still constrained by compatibility with lower end machines, so you can't really build something that takes much advantage of a top end CPU while not crippling performance on a low end one.
on an OS that supports it. No GPU acceleration on Windows XP generally, and older flavours of linux are the same deal.
I wonder if this same logic applies to browser performance
In windows 8 it definitely will, windows 7 and linux, not so much. GPU acceleration is becoming more and more popular because GPU's are able to solve one type of problem significantly better than CPU's, if you can split your problem up, into the rendering problem and the logic problem the CPU becomes a lot less important, assuming it's fast enough to keep up with the GPU for whatever problem you have.
General purpose GPU acceleration isn't standard in use very well on any OS, although MS is doing so with the desktop and fonts in Windows 8, as you ask, it matters a lot more to a web browser than than your desktops. IE10 is natively GPU accelerated and I believe chrome, opera and firefox are all going that route to varying degrees.
In terms of total computer performance though, nothing beats a SSD on a fast memory sub system (sandy bridge or an FX setup). GPU acceleration makes it a bit snappier and responsive, a SSD completely changes how quickly applications start and how fast the machine boots and that sort of thing.
If you read the charts the assertion that 'cpu doesn't matter' is kind of true in a lot of cases.
It's not that it doesn't matter at all, but the difference between an 1100 dollar sandy bridge i7 3960 and a 200 dollar 2500k, even though they are almost a factor of 2 difference in performance side by side (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html) is less than 10% in games. Now those processors are still *way* better than the AMD offerings unfortunately, and the AMD processors are in many cases so bad that becomes the dominant problem.
The new "bulldozer" architecture from AMD is a disaster, in just about every way. They're terrible. The charts clearly show that.
The video card makers (more than the review sites) have correctly pointed out that performance is much more likely to be GPU gated than CPU gated, or, if it's a problem like I'm working on now, it's a single CPU gated for an algorithm that doesn't neatly parallelize - so more cores doesn't do anything. If you're given a choice between a 1000 dollar CPU or a 600 dollar one from the same company odds are you won't be able to tell the difference, so in that sense they're reasonably correct, there's virtually no benefit to buying an extreme CPU or the like if your primary goal is gaming performance. If you're talking about the best use of say 1000 dollars to build a gaming PC, well then the cheapest i5 you can find with the best video card you can afford is probably the best bang for your buck.
As someone above said, an RTS like starcraft is more likely to be CPU limited than GPU limited.
What this tells us is that AMD processors are terrible for gaming, but there's virtually no difference which FX processor you buy (don't buy those though, if you're buying AMD buy a phenom), and within the Intel family there is again, virtually no difference for a factor of 4 or 5 price difference.
What they didn't look at (because you don't really benchmark it) is load times, I think the FX processors have a much faster memory subsystem if you have a good SSD than their Phenom counterparts, but otherwise someone should take a bulldozer to bulldozer.
If we were to revisit the oft used car analogy for computing, it's a fair assertion that which brand of car you buy won't help you get to work any faster day to day, slightly better cars, with faster pickup etc will have a small (but measurable benefit) but that's about it. Well, unless you buy a land rover, or a BMW 7 series (http://www.lovemoney.com/news/cars-computers-and-sport/cars/12461/the-country-that-makes-the-most-reliable-cars, http://www.reliabilityindex.com/ ), at which point, you should budget time into your schedule for the vehicle to be in the shop.
It's what they get for selecting a cultist (mormon) as their presidential nominee, and for calling on Akin to resign.
No matter how crazy you think they are, they'll find another level, don't worry, blaming it on a muslim fascist communist in the whitehouse could work too if it's him cavorting with the devil to disrupt the election plans of the republicans.
you have to be careful too, in that the provisions laid out cover the *maximum* premium, which will probably be the premium, but isn't necessarily what will be the premiums. Hence the health exchanges aiming to bring costs down (which is a plan I cannot possibly envision actually working very well, but who knows).
You have no idea what you're in for.
Ah, but as with countries that have healthcare systems, suddenly your government is going to be very much responsible for what insurance companies are up to, and if governments like to do one thing, it's look like they're doing something by passing regulations. Incidentally, those regulations may actually be good for people and may improve the system (that's why for example there are constraints on how much you can charge, and for what, and so on in the bill already), but that's really a side benefit to the political benefits of being seen to solve the problem and provide better care.
But people figured out that a hospital will treat you even if you cant afford to pay,
Is required to treat you. And can send you a bill afterwards. If you can't pay, then it gets dumped on the insurer of the hospital (which is the government) who have to pay for the service. So they in effect are getting socialized medicine, but with and absolutely crazy system.
Right, but then without the individual mandate + tax no one who is healthy would ever buy insurance, so insurance wouldn't be able stay in business because the only people enrolled in the system would be those with more care costs than they can pay for.
Even with the fine (tax?) I'll save lots of money
depends on the fine (tax). Seriously. For the first couple of years you're probably right. When someone wises up to your scheme and moves a decimal point, not so much.
The way the provision works is you will have to (eventually) pay an annual penalty of 2.5% of your income (beyond the filing minimum, not 100% sure what that means but probably the minimum amount before you have to file your taxes), if you don't buy insurance. If your income is more than 133% of the federal poverty line, *and* you can't find insurance for less than 2.5 % of your income beyond minimum filing then yes, you *might* be better off not buying insurance and paying the penalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act actually has a handy chart, and you can see where the penalty fits in compared to where your income is. Keep in mind that for 1 person the federal poverty line is like 11k
So you do highlight one thing wrong with the system, someone with 40k income could have an insurance plan costing a maximum of 4 grand, or they could pay the $1000 penalty until they need insurance. Guess how long your plan is going to last before the government moves the decimal place from 2.5 to 25%.
I can't imagine how you'd get health insurance in such a situation
Don't schools provide health insurance for students? I'm in canada and our foreign students automatically get insurance for things that aren't covered by the government (which guarantees them certain healthcare as part of their entrance visa).
Please subtract Canada and the UK.
Please stop watching fox news.
The latest story I heard is that the UK is cutting doctor salaries (in order to balance the government budget) and it's leading to many doctors quitting
Probably, the conservatives are gutting the local trusts or whatever they're called too. But that doesn't mean there's going to be a massive shortage of doctors in the UK. When you make cuts and those doctors can pack up an move to switzerland or the US inevitably some will. And then you expand immigration or raise salaries and attract a bunch more. This isn't anything new. The UK can still attract doctors from eastern europe for example.
But as a canadian, there is no way in hell I would trade what we have here for the US system. For the french system or the british system, sure, they have different cost/benefit tradeoffs, but all of us provide on average better care, for less money than the US, and if you're in the US and you care about healthcare the answer is to leave.
After reading the various horror stories of patients unable to find a doctor, or being left to die in waiting rooms, or denied basic preventative measures like PAP smears
The reason you hear about is because we take these things very very seriously. Governments and government agencies are held accountable when they fuck up like this. It does happen, sometimes intentionally so too, as I say with the example of the conservatives in the UK, or with the 'voucher' programme proposed by Paul Ryan for Medicare, when you elect politicians they have a platform they run on for healthcare, sometimes that's good, sometimes bad, and most of the time somewhere inbetween.
And YES I know you've had nothing but great service in your CA or UK care.
No, you really don't understand. Between canada and the UK there are 95 million people, within canada each province runs it's own healthcare service under federal law, in the UK the NHS covers england and wales and northern ireland but not scotland I believe. Inevitably there will be things that go wrong, and an underfunded department will perform as well as any under funded agency will, some doctors are corrupt, some nurses are incompetent, some places can't attract enough qualified people especially in rural canada there aren't going to magically people who want to move 2 hours from the nearest walmart to provide healthcare etc.
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf is pretty much the definitive guide to healthcare outcomes and assessment methodology, I suggest you read that. Seriously. It's not particularly complicated. If you're scared of reading page 18 has the table summary that's important.
That combines coverage, quality and spending into a single index. The French and Italians have the best systems overall (along with san marino) even though they have very different spending profiles.
Now in the long run 'Obamacare' which is basically a copy of the swiss system should be reasonably be expected to have similiar costs to canada (around 11.5% of GDP today), and produce better outcomes (as the swiss system does). So in 2016 or 2017 you might have an argument. But english canada only judges our healthcare system compared to the US, so we pay less, and have better outcomes, and as long that's true no one is going to rock the boat, even though there are better options available. And I'll point out that the swiss system is worse than the UK on both cost and coverage, so theirs isn't really the system you want to copy.
You hear horror stories from our healthcare systems because we actually care about these things as problems that need to be solved. In the US healthcare system you have one party base that advocates "let them die" and 'vouchers' as a policy platform, so we're not even having the same debate. In the US the question is whether or not you should even try to cover people, in canada in the UK it is a question of how best to do that, and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
I think it's 5 seconds and it's definitely a hard shutdown
Duh, sorry, this is what I get for spending my days with equipment that automatically restarts if it ever loses power, and on a network that tells all the machines to power on.
You do realize that the school you went to advertises quite a lot (we advertise our comp sci and software engineering programmes extensively), the places you travel too all advertise to get people to go there, the instruments you buy have a reputation in large part created by advertising, the wine you buy is all premised on advertising etc?
I've been to a lot of countries, even in the poorest villages in the poorest places I've been (which is probably uganda and india) there's still advertising trying to get you to buy vegetables from one cart or stall rather than another. And the richest cities in the richest countries (which would probably be New York, USA and London, UK) there is advertising everywhere. The big cities it's almost at the point of being ineffective there's so much of it.
If you take our software engineering programme as an example, we advertise extensively on the quality of the city, residences, the academic programme, job success afterwards etc. That you took software eng somewhere, and ended up getting a decent enough job out of it means your school might not have been lying about its quality, but that doesn't mean they weren't advertising.
Also, real-time encoding takes a non trivial amount of processing power.
Uh... what decade are you living in?
You have to be careful here, you're assuming you want to render a frame one way, compress it, then decompress it. That's certainly a viable solution, and you can do that real time with a half decent gpu easily enough, but you don't need to render the frame then compress it, you can render straight to a compressed format and output that.
and running a datacenter is very expensive - probably more than $15 per month
Well that would be why they aren't making enough money. Although for the sake of argument the difference between 15 bucks a month and 30 isn't significant to us, but would double their per user revenue.
If you haven't actually tried onlive or the like you should, most of them work reasonably well if you have a low latency connection, this isn't some 'oh they aren't going to be viable', no they're viable already if you're in the range of people who have decent connections to their servers, but that group has the hardware they need already.
Your experience and mine clearly do not align.
Nor is the article (which I didn't write, it's just the most recent one I found that took the time to convey some of the things they thought sucked about windows 8) only about metro. As they point out, the mail and calendar apps don't seem to work as well as their previous versions, search doesn't seem to actually work very well etc. etc.
For the average user it makes more sense to hide that complexity, because it will only confuse them
I'd agree that they aren't all that useful for most users because they don't know the difference between hibernate and sleep, but they, along with log off are all in the same place right now. Changing that behaviour doesn't seem like it adds much.
Erm... no.
On windows you actually set the behaviour of the power button (power options under control panel, edit a plan settings, then advanced settings, power button and lid options). By default I believe a 4 second press just hard reboots the computer and that's outside of the OS, but the power button will variously be configured to hibernate, sleep or shut down the machine.
Now if you're not exceptionally savvy on the difference you may not realize when it has hibernated versus slept or the like, but they aren't the same thing, and that's sort of the point, your 4 options (shut down, sleep, hibernate, restart) should all be in the same place, and you shouldn't need to do a google or bing search to find out how to do so.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the 10GB of RAM. I have 12GB and the OS never uses more than 2 of it.
Currently windows is using 8GB of my 12, presumably it has cached some parts of diablo 3 and saints row the third as I was just using those, and presumably then they will load faster.
I grant, I wasn't clear what I was getting at. Chrome uses a boatload of memory in exchange for speed, so fine, it's a deliberate tradeoff, that's why the memory is there. Using memory because you're a bad programmer or just allocating yourself memory in case you might want to use it, or you have memory leaks or whatever is not something I'm fond of, but people (not you) complain about things using a lot of memory and then want it to be fast. The shutdown thing is more unnecessarily odd than it is serious, but that's everything with windows 8. There's not really anything fundamentally broken about it, it's just a series of unnecessarily odd behaviours that are inconsistent with previous versions for no benefit.
The power button is, by the way, the wrong way to shut down a machine. It variously sleeps, hibernates or hard reboots the machine depending on your configuration. On just about everything press and hold for 4 seconds hard reboots (no software shutdown), and the other two cases aren't the same as shutting down, they may be good enough for your purposes, but they aren't actually shutdown. Presumably also the 'reboot' option would be the in same place.
Erm no, that's precisely not what I said. If you take care of things properly you aren't stuck playing catch up, because things are prevented from becoming big problems that require crisis management.
I'm at work 2 hours later than my boss yes, but he goes home at 3, I probably could do the same, but I don't have kids, and don't particularly want to show up at 7 in the morning, he works 7-3, I work 9-5. Although that would be why he always has the 3rd parking spot in our lot for our building with 500+ staff in it.
Windows 8 isn't big and scary. It's just horridly designed.
The issues with the bootloader are one problem, that might pose a problem for linux, but are actually a relatively small part of what is problem with windows 8, because windows 8 is a badly designed mess.
A good overview of some of what is wrong with it http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/why-i-m-uninstalling-windows-8
This isn't a DRM issue, a compatibility issue (although there is some of that), it's not even particularly evil, at least not any more than anything else MS does. It's that it's a nightmare to use because the design is wildly inconsistent for no apparent reason, and it doesn't seem to actually get you anything for that. If you want to use 10 GB of my RAM that's fine if I actually get something out of it, if you're going to change how to shut down the machine, or how apps work etc. it's just unnecessarily confusing.
You have to value yourself, and know your self worth.
This, if you're valuable and capable and willing to take on responsibility for something then you don't bitch about having to actually be responsible for it. That may mean you work 9 hour days or bizarre hours rather than 8 hour days to partially overlap both shifts, it may mean you answer e-mails at night, it may mean you're a doctor and get paid to be on call this week.
.if you are good, you can choose what you want to work for
Sure, and you can choose to never take responsibility for a 24/7 IT shop or whatever. But if you're valuable and stay on top of problems a good employer will recognize and reward that. Especially if they're a 24/7 business and value people who are looking for ways to keep the company from wasting money on idle people.