Realize that there isn't a laptop on the planet that can make use of a 64 bit address space, and come to my senses?
It is a pretty common misconception that 64 bit OS's are only useful if you want more than 4GB of physical RAM. The reality is that ability to address more than 4 GB of virtual memory is very helpful if you have more than 2 GB of RAM.
With a 64 bit CPU you can locate memory mapped files and I/O devices outside a 4GB pysical RAM space making it possible to fully utilize 4GB of physical RAM - something not possible with a 32 bit CPU. It is a big advantage for 64 bit CPUs even if you only intend to use 4 GB of RAM.
With 2GB SODIMMs available and dropping in price it is something to consider when you are thinking about buying a laptop.
AMD has both Turion and Sempron 64 bit processors available for mobile platforms, but you may notice that they are very difficult to find in new laptops.
That is crazy talk. Visit hp.com and you will see a raft of them. Fujitsu, Acer, and other major manufacturers offer Turion based laptops.
Not hardly. None of Merom/Conroe or AM2 can be purchased by users today, and Merom is late 2006 at the earliest.
This is very relevant to me because my 4 year old laptop died Sunday. I now have a choice between Core Duo or Turion. Core Duo is the better technology if I was happy with 32 bits, but what I really want is a 64 bit dual core laptop. My best hope is gutting it out until May 9 when AMD introduces the Turion X2 on AM2 or S1. For a dual core 64 bit laptop from Intel the wait would be too long.
We have them at work, and I've found that the ones I've used are very nice workhorse machines in a men in black dress code sort of way. The PC support people also seem to like the support they get on these machines. The keyboards are particularly nice, however I my must say that the quality of the Thinkpad keyboard I have now is a cut below the machine I had previously.
However I am also in the market for a machine for personal use - and I've found that Lenovo just doesn't offer the features I'm looking for, including a 17" LCD and AMD CPUs in their Thinkpad line. So I'm going to be looking at HP and others.
Even then pure resistive heating is inefficient from a thermodynamic point of view. Electricity used to run a heat pump can result in greater heat transfer than is generated by resistance heating. In most parts of the US a heat pump can generate twice as much heat as using the same amount of electricity in a resistive heater.
The whole concept that there is no energy wasted in waste heat thrown during lighting is just wrong - that electrical energy has efficency costs in generation, tranmission and in inefficient use.
Actually there is a lot of waste heat in electrical heating. Transmission losses average about 7.2% in the US, and most electricity in the US is generated by burning fossil fuels. Conversion efficiency of combustion to electricity is only about 30%.
Compared to a modern condensing gas furnace which gets about 90%+ conversion efficiency of fuel to useful heat, electrical heating is incredibly inefficient.
Cygwin is quite useful, but if you are coming from a Mac, which has Darwin as it's OS you already have everything that Cygwin offers, only a heck of a lot better integrated and with much nicer windowing support. If anything Cygwin is a reason NOT to use Windows.
My experience has been that the main reasons to want a PC over a Mac is games and maybe some very specialized niche software. There really isn't anything else.
"First, the government gathers statistics in a number of ways."
Of course. And unemployment claims or numbers collecting benefits are a useful statistic. But that is not how unemployment rate generally is calculated.
"The typical survey method is by telephone."
You can criticize any method used to gather unemployment rate data. But if you have a professional statistician doing the analysis there is also no question that biases in the data can be accounted for.
Here is a more detailed description of the household survey.
The main thing here is to dispell the common myth that unemployment rate is determined by the number of people collecting unemployment insurance. It just isn't so.
It is driven by good old fashioned economics. Worker's comp claims for ergo related injuries have soared - insurance companies now give businesses better rates if they have a good ergonomics program in house.
Simple application of the notions of supply and demand suggest that the demand for CS jobs is slightly outpaced by the supply, as of 2004. No amount of spin from the various megacorps can deny this.
I generally agree with this - the aftereffects of the bubble are still with us to a certain extent, and some sectors that were heavy CS employers (telecomm for example) are not growing. However the supply/demand situation is in better balance than it has been in the past 6-8 years. Computer related employment is at higher levels than at the peak of the bubble, and enrollment levels have probably overcompensated.
Longer term it will be interesting to see what happens - for example 44% of CS PhDs are over age 50.
Your argument is hand-waving dismissal of real data, or just flat out urban myth. For example:
"The government also has incomplete figures on people out of work. When someone who had a high-tech job loses it, and applies for unemployment benefits, then they get counted. But when the benefits run out, they aren't counted anymore."
This is just not true. US Bureau of Statistics unemployment figures are based of household surveys, NOT numbers of people collectiing unemployment benefits.
Sony has become the most fucked up, schizophrenic, self-destructive company on the corporate landscape.
Nah, that title belongs to GM. Sony has a lot going for it with some great products, and is quite profitable. Sony also has a new CEO who seems to be making some headway in clearing out a lot of the underbrush that is preventing Sony from achieving what it is capable of (which is a LOT more than Microsoft).
core
n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor.
=
If now Intel has gone to using old ferrite core memory to perform CPU functions (maybe because of a huge silicon shortage or maybe to get persistance in case of blackouts due to power failures) I predict that this is finally the end of Moore's law, the game industry, the Internet and pretty much everything else dependent on cheap fast CPUs. A new 64 bit Core CPU will now contain 64 little magnets strung on wires.
Of course if the rest of the industry fails to follow Intel's lead, I sure wouldn't want to be a stockholder.
One example is the movie industry, which moved to California in the early 1900s in part to make "it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents."
I think that comment in Wikipedia is still looking for a citation to back it up. Personally I don't believe it. Why couldn't Edison just hire lawyers in California? Not only that, but some of the earliest players in California were members of the film patent trust "Motion Picture Patents Company" which was founded before film companies started moving to California. Ultimately Hollywood flourished because of the year round good weather for film making, not because of the patent situation which stopped being an issue in about 1915 when Edison's patents expired and the MPPC was found to be in violation of anti-trust laws.
Although I'm sure that will change as soon as they have something worth copying.
Exactly. If you are trying to play catch-up then weak IP laws can be a benefit. But once you are trying to encourage innovation in your own country, IP laws are needed.
History shows, repeatedly, that countries and/or markets with little or no IP protection flourish
Please citations on this one. The industrial revolution occurred immediately after the institution of a patent system in the UK. Much of what became the British Empire was based on the industrial supremacy of the UK. All through history it has been the strongest economies that have had sound patent systems, and the economically depressed third world nations that have had not patent systems.
part from the obvious suggestion of switching OS, is there any other solution to this disturbing trend?
Just think how much nicer life would be without a computer.
1. No pesky RIAA lawsuits. 2. No broadband bill. 3. No losing your life savings to pesky phishers. 4. No worrying about hackers stealing you megahertz.
The US has had some of the worst telephone service in the world for quite some time now, and most of the problem is just regulatory.
Or more likely economic. The US had by far the best telephone service in the world until deregulation and breakup of ATT. After the breakup companies couldn't make enough bux to build state of the art infrastructure anymore, so service went downhill.
If you live in urban areas you can get decent to very good connections - look up FIOS and Cablevision Boost service for examples. But it is spotty.
I guess the COO has never tried downloading a DVD-sized ISO of a Linux distribution.
Cablevision if doing a brisk business with it's new premium Boost service (2 Mbps up, 25 Mbps down) so somebody must feel the need for speed.
I wonder if anyone would notice the difference between 1.5 Mbps and 25 Mbps?
Don't be an early adopter
on
Tech on the Cheap?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't buy into a new technology for the first couple of years unless it is immediately apparent the item will repay your money over a 1-year time frame. Generally it takes 3 years for the rapid advancement period to come to a conclusion and product lines to stabilize. You will also avoid a lot of fads this way.
Avoid any proprietary formats - MD Disc, Blu-Ray, DVD-Audio. These never work out in the long run.
Star Wars played in local theaters for a full year. But this was before anyone but the super rich had a home theater. Now a decent home theater is available to any middle class family, so technology has ultimately changed the market forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Realize that there isn't a laptop on the planet that can make use of a 64 bit address space, and come to my senses?
It is a pretty common misconception that 64 bit OS's are only useful if you want more than 4GB of physical RAM. The reality is that ability to address more than 4 GB of virtual memory is very helpful if you have more than 2 GB of RAM.
With a 64 bit CPU you can locate memory mapped files and I/O devices outside a 4GB pysical RAM space making it possible to fully utilize 4GB of physical RAM - something not possible with a 32 bit CPU. It is a big advantage for 64 bit CPUs even if you only intend to use 4 GB of RAM.
With 2GB SODIMMs available and dropping in price it is something to consider when you are thinking about buying a laptop.
So what would you do if you wanted a dual core 64 bit laptop?
AMD has both Turion and Sempron 64 bit processors available for mobile platforms, but you may notice that they are very difficult to find in new laptops.
That is crazy talk. Visit hp.com and you will see a raft of them. Fujitsu, Acer, and other major manufacturers offer Turion based laptops.
'Yet' is now.
_ mobile_roadmap_feb_06/
Not hardly. None of Merom/Conroe or AM2 can be purchased by users today, and Merom is late 2006 at the earliest.
This is very relevant to me because my 4 year old laptop died Sunday. I now have a choice between Core Duo or Turion. Core Duo is the better technology if I was happy with 32 bits, but what I really want is a 64 bit dual core laptop. My best hope is gutting it out until May 9 when AMD introduces the Turion X2 on AM2 or S1. For a dual core 64 bit laptop from Intel the wait would be too long.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/02/09/intel
We have them at work, and I've found that the ones I've used are very nice workhorse machines in a men in black dress code sort of way. The PC support people also seem to like the support they get on these machines. The keyboards are particularly nice, however I my must say that the quality of the Thinkpad keyboard I have now is a cut below the machine I had previously.
However I am also in the market for a machine for personal use - and I've found that Lenovo just doesn't offer the features I'm looking for, including a 17" LCD and AMD CPUs in their Thinkpad line. So I'm going to be looking at HP and others.
Even then pure resistive heating is inefficient from a thermodynamic point of view. Electricity used to run a heat pump can result in greater heat transfer than is generated by resistance heating. In most parts of the US a heat pump can generate twice as much heat as using the same amount of electricity in a resistive heater.
/ heatpump.html#c2
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo
The whole concept that there is no energy wasted in waste heat thrown during lighting is just wrong - that electrical energy has efficency costs in generation, tranmission and in inefficient use.
Actually there is a lot of waste heat in electrical heating. Transmission losses average about 7.2% in the US, and most electricity in the US is generated by burning fossil fuels. Conversion efficiency of combustion to electricity is only about 30%.
Compared to a modern condensing gas furnace which gets about 90%+ conversion efficiency of fuel to useful heat, electrical heating is incredibly inefficient.
Is that you Buffy? Still here after that pink April Fool's motif?
"They are leaving out an entire class of unemployed ... INTENTIONALLY!"
You mean that class of people who never actually contact an employer to ask for a job? Give me a break.
Cygwin is quite useful, but if you are coming from a Mac, which has Darwin as it's OS you already have everything that Cygwin offers, only a heck of a lot better integrated and with much nicer windowing support. If anything Cygwin is a reason NOT to use Windows.
My experience has been that the main reasons to want a PC over a Mac is games and maybe some very specialized niche software. There really isn't anything else.
"First, the government gathers statistics in a number of ways."
Of course. And unemployment claims or numbers collecting benefits are a useful statistic. But that is not how unemployment rate generally is calculated.
"The typical survey method is by telephone."
You can criticize any method used to gather unemployment rate data. But if you have a professional statistician doing the analysis there is also no question that biases in the data can be accounted for.
Here is a more detailed description of the household survey.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
The main thing here is to dispell the common myth that unemployment rate is determined by the number of people collecting unemployment insurance. It just isn't so.
It is driven by good old fashioned economics. Worker's comp claims for ergo related injuries have soared - insurance companies now give businesses better rates if they have a good ergonomics program in house.
Simple application of the notions of supply and demand suggest that the demand for CS jobs is slightly outpaced by the supply, as of 2004. No amount of spin from the various megacorps can deny this.
I generally agree with this - the aftereffects of the bubble are still with us to a certain extent, and some sectors that were heavy CS employers (telecomm for example) are not growing. However the supply/demand situation is in better balance than it has been in the past 6-8 years. Computer related employment is at higher levels than at the peak of the bubble, and enrollment levels have probably overcompensated.
Longer term it will be interesting to see what happens - for example 44% of CS PhDs are over age 50.
Un, no. CS graduate salaries went up in 2005, and are expected to do so again in 2006.
http://www.jobweb.com/SalaryInfo/05_summer.htm
Note also that degrees in fields where there really is an oversupply i.e. English, History, etc. are paying 40% less than CS degrees.
Your argument is hand-waving dismissal of real data, or just flat out urban myth. For example:
"The government also has incomplete figures on people out of work. When someone who had a high-tech job loses it, and applies for unemployment benefits, then they get counted. But when the benefits run out, they aren't counted anymore."
This is just not true. US Bureau of Statistics unemployment figures are based of household surveys, NOT numbers of people collectiing unemployment benefits.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Mod parent down - the author is a foul mouthed misogynist who doesn't know the difference between anecdote and real measurements.
Sony has become the most fucked up, schizophrenic, self-destructive company on the corporate landscape.
Nah, that title belongs to GM. Sony has a lot going for it with some great products, and is quite profitable. Sony also has a new CEO who seems to be making some headway in clearing out a lot of the underbrush that is preventing Sony from achieving what it is capable of (which is a LOT more than Microsoft).
Abstracted from the hacker's dictionary,
core
n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor.
=
If now Intel has gone to using old ferrite core memory to perform CPU functions (maybe because of a huge silicon shortage or maybe to get persistance in case of blackouts due to power failures) I predict that this is finally the end of Moore's law, the game industry, the Internet and pretty much everything else dependent on cheap fast CPUs. A new 64 bit Core CPU will now contain 64 little magnets strung on wires.
Of course if the rest of the industry fails to follow Intel's lead, I sure wouldn't want to be a stockholder.
One example is the movie industry, which moved to California in the early 1900s in part to make "it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents."
I think that comment in Wikipedia is still looking for a citation to back it up. Personally I don't believe it. Why couldn't Edison just hire lawyers in California? Not only that, but some of the earliest players in California were members of the film patent trust "Motion Picture Patents Company" which was founded before film companies started moving to California. Ultimately Hollywood flourished because of the year round good weather for film making, not because of the patent situation which stopped being an issue in about 1915 when Edison's patents expired and the MPPC was found to be in violation of anti-trust laws.
Although I'm sure that will change as soon as they have something worth copying.
Exactly. If you are trying to play catch-up then weak IP laws can be a benefit. But once you are trying to encourage innovation in your own country, IP laws are needed.
History shows, repeatedly, that countries and/or markets with little or no IP protection flourish
Please citations on this one. The industrial revolution occurred immediately after the institution of a patent system in the UK. Much of what became the British Empire was based on the industrial supremacy of the UK. All through history it has been the strongest economies that have had sound patent systems, and the economically depressed third world nations that have had not patent systems.
part from the obvious suggestion of switching OS, is there any other solution to this disturbing trend?
Just think how much nicer life would be without a computer.
1. No pesky RIAA lawsuits.
2. No broadband bill.
3. No losing your life savings to pesky phishers.
4. No worrying about hackers stealing you megahertz.
and yes,
No annoying pop-ups.
The US has had some of the worst telephone service in the world for quite some time now, and most of the problem is just regulatory.
Or more likely economic. The US had by far the best telephone service in the world until deregulation and breakup of ATT. After the breakup companies couldn't make enough bux to build state of the art infrastructure anymore, so service went downhill.
If you live in urban areas you can get decent to very good connections - look up FIOS and Cablevision Boost service for examples. But it is spotty.
I guess the COO has never tried downloading a DVD-sized ISO of a Linux distribution.
Cablevision if doing a brisk business with it's new premium Boost service (2 Mbps up, 25 Mbps down) so somebody must feel the need for speed.
I wonder if anyone would notice the difference between 1.5 Mbps and 25 Mbps?
Don't buy into a new technology for the first couple of years unless it is immediately apparent the item will repay your money over a 1-year time frame. Generally it takes 3 years for the rapid advancement period to come to a conclusion and product lines to stabilize. You will also avoid a lot of fads this way.
Avoid any proprietary formats - MD Disc, Blu-Ray, DVD-Audio. These never work out in the long run.
Star Wars played in local theaters for a full year. But this was before anyone but the super rich had a home theater. Now a decent home theater is available to any middle class family, so technology has ultimately changed the market forever.