What you *can* do is put the DVD into one machine (a PowerBook you just happen to have knocking around, say) and boot it in target disk mode. Plug this into the firewire port of the machine you want to install onto and it will boot off the CD in the PowerBook and you'll be able to install like that.
There are bonus marks available for not then installing the OS onto the hard drive in the laptop.
Exactly what I was going to say. Not exactly a representative study, is it?
Still, on the plus side we now have a clear definition of what it is to be a "gamer". I apparently need to do an average of 20 hours a week and spend the equivalent of US$700 a year. Timewise I'm down, massively, a factor of four I guess. Spendwise... ummm... just don't mention it to SWMBO, OK? (Damn you nVidia).
I imagine none - or some number close to it. However, they've certainly lost appreciable business due to the A64 kicking the P4's arse at the high end, and appreciable revenue due to downward price pressure from the A64 somewhere in the midrange.
What's more interesting is how for the first time Intel are playing catch up on their own platform. Retrofitting EM64T or whatever it's called has got to be costing them in terms of taking the initiative on new technologies - and between that and having to move to the Pentium M line for future processors their forward movement has basically dropped to nil.
OTOH they may well be rescued by the dual core thing - it does, after all, have a much bigger bang/buck than 64 bit ever did. Interesting times ahead...
"EE" stands for "Extremely Expensive", "Centrino" means "doesn't suck on laptops". Other than that, I also am now completely lost as to what Intel's lineup actually is. Their marketing department are fucked.
The games will become very expensive with the testing required to debug locking issues.
No, I don't think so. Generally speaking games developers go to the shops and buy a game engine these days, and even if the cost of such things doubles it's still going to be fairly small compared to the art costs and the ludicrous quantities of hype.
Had you suggested that games will become more buggy, of course, I'd have to agree:)
See, I take exception to this view of startup.com. The film makers went out of their way to paint this as another dotcom goldrush but when you look at it they had a solid idea, they had customers - thousands of them (right at the end of the film) - and they had the shitty execution that was "best practice" at the time.
It's unfortunate how they chose to run that company. A four man startup with ten times as less cash would have done a much better job, but in terms of doing something that had value they were right on the money.
You need to be running a 2.4 kernel. I hear what you're saying, and you are right, and that's why I'm running 2.4. (from Debian).
Frankly I'm surprised anyone has a 2.6 kernel in production, but then I guess there are places where you could need it. Mind you, if I'd paid a million dollars for a 32 cpu box, I'd want somebody to bloody holler at if the kernel had a bug...
you have this massive aerial plus they can pick up signals off your TV (or so they claim)
They can indeed. Whether or not they actually do, as opposed to the singularly cheap option of just assuming everyone has a telly, is a matter of some debate.
Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought? It's all about numbers.
Nah, nothing to do with that. The problem is that the most basic onboard soundcard you can possibly buy is fine. The AC'97 I have on my PC is fine. The Soundblaster Pro you bought in 1995 is fine. Sure there are improvements to be had, but it's not an order of magnitude is it?
The other way to look at it is to, indeed, look at the numbers. With 44.1KHz audio a soundcard has to "render" 88k samples per second. A video card pulling 50 fps on 1024x768 is doing approximately 500 times as much work, and with anisotropic filters, antialiasing and procedural textures each of those samples takes a lot more work. *This* is why video cards are such a battleground, and so damn expensive.
. One of us three older non-autistic siblings is going to have to take care of her in a few decades when our parents are no longer around, and although nobody's said anything, it's obvious that nobody wants to be that sibling.
This is going to sound mean, but it's not meant to be, and actually I think it's not.
Pay someone to do it. Pay for her to have full time care. You and your siblings can, y'know, go to work and stuff... and it will be someone else's job to look after her. During the day at least.
My neighbour is a single mother. Luckily for her she's also vastly intelligent and hence was able to pick up part time work for extremely reasonable dollars. Point is that she has therefore employed two nannies, both of which have been just fabulous for her daughter. This *is* a plausible way of both living and caring for someone.
Or maybe graphs showing how the number of dynamic link points that need to be hooked up before something can start has increased over the years.
Perhaps a description of COM's dispatch interface along with timings for calling across different kinds of function calls and, perhaps, some more nice graphs showing the just stellar number of dispatch interface calls that Microsoft software uses now.
Maybe even a discussion of out of process objects, their rise and associated context swapping costs.
Perhaps something on the ludicrous inefficiency associated with big chunks of OSX being written in Objective-C.
But, no, "it all goes on extra functionality". My arse it does. It goes on making libraries easier to write and use at the expense of CPU power.
"Remember the recent discussion on Binary XML? Well, this has nothing to do with it, but we are proud to present a standard for larding out XML even more before attaching it to an email."
I, for one, welcome our new bandwidth eating plaintext overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
(ObAOL) Me too! It would make sense from a "pro gets two procs, home gets one" point of view as well.
Dave
What you *can* do is put the DVD into one machine (a PowerBook you just happen to have knocking around, say) and boot it in target disk mode. Plug this into the firewire port of the machine you want to install onto and it will boot off the CD in the PowerBook and you'll be able to install like that.
There are bonus marks available for not then installing the OS onto the hard drive in the laptop.
Dave
Ah, OK. I just thought you were under the impression the *nix world was stuck at select().
Cheers,
Dave
I hope Matt expands his work to include super-scalable I/O systems like I/O Completion Ports.
This has been in FreeBSD for about five years and is called kqueue. It exhibits O(1) scaling and goes like a rocket.
Check out these rather old benchmarks.
It's on OSX too, of course.
Dave
Exactly what I was going to say. Not exactly a representative study, is it?
... ummm ... just don't mention it to SWMBO, OK? (Damn you nVidia).
Still, on the plus side we now have a clear definition of what it is to be a "gamer". I apparently need to do an average of 20 hours a week and spend the equivalent of US$700 a year. Timewise I'm down, massively, a factor of four I guess. Spendwise
Dave
I guess we'll find out what Silent Bob has been thinking about all this time as well.
I imagine none - or some number close to it. However, they've certainly lost appreciable business due to the A64 kicking the P4's arse at the high end, and appreciable revenue due to downward price pressure from the A64 somewhere in the midrange.
What's more interesting is how for the first time Intel are playing catch up on their own platform. Retrofitting EM64T or whatever it's called has got to be costing them in terms of taking the initiative on new technologies - and between that and having to move to the Pentium M line for future processors their forward movement has basically dropped to nil.
OTOH they may well be rescued by the dual core thing - it does, after all, have a much bigger bang/buck than 64 bit ever did. Interesting times ahead...
Dave
WTF does "Extreme" mean in relation to a CPU?
"EE" stands for "Extremely Expensive", "Centrino" means "doesn't suck on laptops". Other than that, I also am now completely lost as to what Intel's lineup actually is. Their marketing department are fucked.
Dave
The games will become very expensive with the testing required to debug locking issues.
:)
No, I don't think so. Generally speaking games developers go to the shops and buy a game engine these days, and even if the cost of such things doubles it's still going to be fairly small compared to the art costs and the ludicrous quantities of hype.
Had you suggested that games will become more buggy, of course, I'd have to agree
Dave
I was reading Blue's News and Aspyr announced TODAY that Doom 3 had been released. It was out on pc when? Last august?
:)
Yeah? This is good, Mac owners got warning of how much it sucks
Dave
See, I take exception to this view of startup.com. The film makers went out of their way to paint this as another dotcom goldrush but when you look at it they had a solid idea, they had customers - thousands of them (right at the end of the film) - and they had the shitty execution that was "best practice" at the time.
It's unfortunate how they chose to run that company. A four man startup with ten times as less cash would have done a much better job, but in terms of doing something that had value they were right on the money.
Dave
You need to be running a 2.4 kernel. I hear what you're saying, and you are right, and that's why I'm running 2.4. (from Debian).
Frankly I'm surprised anyone has a 2.6 kernel in production, but then I guess there are places where you could need it. Mind you, if I'd paid a million dollars for a 32 cpu box, I'd want somebody to bloody holler at if the kernel had a bug...
Dave
you have this massive aerial plus they can pick up signals off your TV (or so they claim)
They can indeed. Whether or not they actually do, as opposed to the singularly cheap option of just assuming everyone has a telly, is a matter of some debate.
Dave
Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought? It's all about numbers.
Nah, nothing to do with that. The problem is that the most basic onboard soundcard you can possibly buy is fine. The AC'97 I have on my PC is fine. The Soundblaster Pro you bought in 1995 is fine. Sure there are improvements to be had, but it's not an order of magnitude is it?
The other way to look at it is to, indeed, look at the numbers. With 44.1KHz audio a soundcard has to "render" 88k samples per second. A video card pulling 50 fps on 1024x768 is doing approximately 500 times as much work, and with anisotropic filters, antialiasing and procedural textures each of those samples takes a lot more work. *This* is why video cards are such a battleground, and so damn expensive.
Dave
Ah, good. Someone that actually does this.
What's the precision like? Good? Good enough?
Cheers,
Dave
They should mame him.
. One of us three older non-autistic siblings is going to have to take care of her in a few decades when our parents are no longer around, and although nobody's said anything, it's obvious that nobody wants to be that sibling.
... and it will be someone else's job to look after her. During the day at least.
This is going to sound mean, but it's not meant to be, and actually I think it's not.
Pay someone to do it. Pay for her to have full time care. You and your siblings can, y'know, go to work and stuff
My neighbour is a single mother. Luckily for her she's also vastly intelligent and hence was able to pick up part time work for extremely reasonable dollars. Point is that she has therefore employed two nannies, both of which have been just fabulous for her daughter. This *is* a plausible way of both living and caring for someone.
Anyway, my two cents.
Dave
So this will just be like the last time Rambus had their hooks into a product, it will die a very expensive and slow death.
You mean like the PS2 did (given that is uses RDRAM)?
Dave
Or maybe graphs showing how the number of dynamic link points that need to be hooked up before something can start has increased over the years.
Perhaps a description of COM's dispatch interface along with timings for calling across different kinds of function calls and, perhaps, some more nice graphs showing the just stellar number of dispatch interface calls that Microsoft software uses now.
Maybe even a discussion of out of process objects, their rise and associated context swapping costs.
Perhaps something on the ludicrous inefficiency associated with big chunks of OSX being written in Objective-C.
But, no, "it all goes on extra functionality". My arse it does. It goes on making libraries easier to write and use at the expense of CPU power.
Dave
We're flying low under the radar as we develop the service
Not any more, you're not.
Dave
You can never get tired of monkey boy.
Dave
"Remember the recent discussion on Binary XML? Well, this has nothing to do with it, but we are proud to present a standard for larding out XML even more before attaching it to an email."
I, for one, welcome our new bandwidth eating plaintext overlords.
Dave
Right.
We have this guy who is now *famous* for leaking trade secrets and you think he's going to get a job?
Sure.
Dave
The point of the code is to implement strcpy().
It's 2005. Strcpy should be implemented with wellingtons, concrete and a river.
Dave
So, what you're saying is that this ... record - is toast?
Dave