Let me guess their response: "Our executives are retarded. They learned in their freshman business class that getting customers to register their e-mail addresses increased their chances of of buying new products from the same company. They were unaware that forcing customers to do this for basic functionality is the equivalent of eating your entree with your foot, while playing host to the Royal family of England. They are simply incapable of understanding the level of faux pas they have committed, coming up with the two-year old's excuse of 'if it's so bad, why are other people doing it,' and, in light of the bonuses they will no doubt receive shortly before customers permanently turn away from this company, they won't care. Again, we apologize for what passes as an education in this country, and promise, after the glorious revolution, to never speak of it again."
Yes, I imagine they all do, but for different effects. Someone who plays with poppy tea will adopt a style different from someone who drops acid. Same for ketamine.
The bigger problem you are going to run into is the inability of society to tolerate that kind of evolution. See, it may take 5 trips to level up a programmer from standard to 'I understand how to implement an incredible Visitor pattern,' all while your boss, who has never programmed in his life and thinks drugs are of the devil, is going to be messing with you (either harshing your buzz / creating a bad trip, or if it's done off-hours, he will not be appreciate of the changes ("This new pattern, while awesome, differs from the established way of doing things, and is giving your teenage replacements a mind-fuck"). External forces can and will influence the effects of a trip, as can be seen when the drug-taker is a low-class, middle-class, or upper-class individual. Low-class it can end very badly, and I understand typically does. Middle-class it's hard to tell. Upper-class, especially among artists and musicians, can do some incredible stuff. But then, their fields tolerate that just fine, while programming is slowly becoming intolerant of that (lower salaries, plus bosses care more than you are sitting at a desk, day-dreaming, than writing something incredible at home; it is, no doubt, the primary difference between the big 'gains' we were seeing in the programming sector a decade or two ago, and now, where the biggest thing to come out of tech recently was Windows 8 and FailBook's IPO).
Or perhaps that they, in their day, had and many of them being themselves politicians, knew that future politicians would lie / make undeliverable promises as well. And that that was the reason for the creation of the electoral college -> to grab a bunch of people who are used to these types, and let them vet the candidates.
Considering that ballots come with a 'straight-line' party vote, I would assume that their fears were justified. Vote not for a party, but for the person, as it is the person you are putting in office, not the party.
I was surprised to find the voting process to have taken a practical turn. Paper and pens, to my delight. Would only have been made easier had they provided sharpies instead of ballpoint pens.
Even so, someone requested another ballot, having filled one not to their liking / the instructions.
To this end, I found the process favourable. A job well done.
Now if only in four years we can improve the slate of candidates, we might be onto something.
It is a shock to shareholders, and annoys your customers, but 'tis better than the alternative.
Imagine a few hundred thousand credit card numbers being quietly stolen. Imagine waiting two years to admit to this theft. I imagine that that would be more damaging than admitting it immediately.
See, the true source of flack a company is going to receive is not that it has been hacked, but that it had such poor security measures in place to begin with. No one wants to be the captain of the ship who kept unencrypted user-names and passwords in a publicly accessible database. As such, the hit for that is unavoidable once it happens.
Wonderous. See, this is exactly where technology resources should be spent. Why focus on truly ground-breaking technologies like VR immersion, a cure for cancer, or putting a man / woman on Neptune, when we can find a new way to restrict content according to the number of viewers present, terrorize air travellers, or help old men get boners! I want to shake the hands of the people who decided that in this universe of infinite possibilities, these technologies needed top billing. Truly they are gods among men.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in my bed, closing my eyes, and making believe this is a terrible nightmare.
'Tis alright. If they are demented enough to pass these kinds of laws, then their heirs must be having a heyday ripping them off.
"Senator Bob, I'm going to just take your financial securities here, and sell them off for you, keep a little for my trouble" "Billy, you don't come around to see me anymore." "Nonsense Bob, we spent last Wednesday at the park. You do remember, right?" "Err...yes, I think I remember. What was I doing at the park?" "You were feeding the ducks, Bob. You were feeding the ducks."
This message brought to you by the next generation -> we're younger than you, we're going to outlive you, and we are really offended that you are trying to sell us into slavery. We can safeguard you at an old age, or we can ship you off to a retirement home. The choice is yours.
Glorious. Now tell me why a company would want to move their stuff to the cloud?
God, it's good to be right. It's also good to be king. But being right is pretty dandy as well. I cannot wait for Legal at a lot of these corporations who switched over to the cloud to get a good look at this: I'm sure their response will be one of pure horror. Hell, if they're sending confidential emails to their clients on an Exchange server hosted in the cloud, there's a fair chance the opposition will get to eavesdrop on their communications legally. I like to fantasize that the legal crew would recognize the problem immediately, and take one for the team to preserve both themselves and everybody else, but then, if they had been awake, they never would have let the Cloud thing happen.
How disappointing, but completely expected. In a trial between a power which has the public's wallet to call upon, and a defence with more limited resources, how could the outcome be any different?
Does it matter that he's running Windows? Perhaps not. Does it cast doubt on whether this 31337 h@x0r was anything more than a script kiddie acting on the orders of someone else / using someone else's software? Yes.
Honestly, I do not understand why some people seem to think that to be a cracker, you must be an idiot with a flaw. As in, "despite working with dangerous code on a daily basis, no cracker would ever run untrusted code inside a VM with no ports to the internet." That it's all just some form of autism that grants them the ability to do incredible things in the virtual realm, and their below human IQ outside that realm that has them constantly getting caught. In short, you're talking about the existence of something that can't readily exist, and certainly wouldn't in any great quantity. It's too lopsided, you'd need an invisible hand working tirelessly to just to maintain the state necessary for keep them like that. As Ford Prefect, in the HHGTTG, said, "No way a civilization goes from having the plans for a spacecraft to launching one within a year; no one, no matter how motivated, does that; show it to me, and I still won't believe it."
And the part where h@x0rs get nailed by downloading / receiving a file from a 'friend'? Are we stuck in a time loop? Either they don't read the news on how any of their peers are getting caught / have gotten caught for the last two decades, or this story is purely dressed up for the press.
Except that the post is fairly accurate. Operational security is considered a big aspect of the h@x0r culture; the higher up you go, the more operational security they tend to use.
What part of that is BS? Or, as I suspect, with no ID and no evidence to counter my argument, you are purely a troll.
Honestly, I don't care that it would need to dissipate twice the heat. Many of us who upgraded to FX-8150s are already running liquid coolant solutions.
And compared to the i7, which is hot enough to cook an egg under a tight load, AMD has some room to play in before people begin cracking jokes about needing a black-hole to control the heat.
200-250 Watts is perfectly fine in my world. I have an 850 Watt power supply in my main machine, I think it can supply the needed energy.
As for the thermal envelope, which you will probably want to discuss next, I must admit my lack of knowledge here. Would a liquid coolant system be capable of displacing that much energy? I'd like to think yes, and you are correct in that that would be a minor price bump for the processor (it ships with the coolant clip attached, but you still need to invest in the rest of the coolant system). But then, I am already (like many others) using a liquid coolant system on my FX-8150, so the point is somewhat moot.
What would please me more is enabling multiple sockets for a Phenom III. I'd like to be able to buy a board with two or four sockets, especially if the motherboard manufacturer does it right. That means I want those unnecessary overclocking features, I do want as many PCI-Express lanes as is even remotely possible (12 of them would not be enough), and I want as many RAM sockets as you can possibly fit on the board. Frankly, I am absolutely surprised that Asus hasn't stepped up to the plate, and started offering motherboards that would fit 256 GBs of RAM. F*ck the low-cost, low-margin, low-performance world that the tech industry has a perverse hard-on for these days. People will always pay for performance, then don't give a sh*t how much heat it dissipates as long as it freaking delivers! You only catch flack when you put out a terrible design that your competition uses to make their decade old products look good in comparison.
And more SATA sockets. Six is not enough. I have a Thermaltake Armor Full-Tower case, and I can easily fit a dozen hard drives in it. And you get us that PCI-Express 3 stuff that Intel has, and make sure all the USB ports are USB 3.0.
Who would buy this motherboard / processor? Only all the professionals that make up a huge portion of the desktop / server markets. Don't want it to cut into your server offerings? Do something similar for your server CPU offerings...and for the love of Deity, do something about those server motherboards. They are just...disasters in terms of features.
As for ARM, as I said, the market is already over-competitive, and they are having trouble sticking to the ARM instruction set while offering something different (to gain a competitive advantage). Who cares if your ARM processor has an extra two or three instructions if programmers don't want to use it because it breaks their code on devices using a processor from one of the other manufacturers? It's a fools game, just money down the drain. Oh, but ARM is going to replace x86? It's the future? Have you seen how badly these things scale? How you been paying attention to how much performance is being lost in the name of saving a little energy? By the time they are competitive with x86 offerings, they will be seconds away from drawing as much energy, or more, than x86 processors. You've reinvented the wheel!
The GPU on die stuff is cute, but honestly, who cares? The performance is fine for flash-based games, and Portal 2 if you don't run it with high settings, but load up Crysis on Ultra-high or perhaps some Skyrim, and you're not doing so hot. It's essentially a 'nice-to-have' for those long plane rides where you are just tapping out a document or watching a DVD, but that's it! Any, and I mean any, tablet manufacturer or laptop manufacturer that wants to kick the snot out of their competition just needs to work in a mediocre dedicated graphics card from two generations ago, and it will wipe the floor with the competition's integrated crap. It's essentially a video card for people who do not know what a video card is, and will purchase a new machine when they realize the current one can't be upgraded / can't do what they want it to do. I.e. it's just a waste of money. It saves the OEM money in the short term, and possibly the consumer, but 6 months later when the consumer realizes they need something a little more powerful, they need to rebuy
Meh. MS has the odd ability to accidentally make a success, typically without even them thinking it would become a success.
Consider Windows 2000 vs. Windows Millennium. I'm sure all the market studies done before the product launch said that businesses would love 2000, and consumers would love Millennium. Except after launch, consumers had a chance to test drive both, and decided that despite the fact that it wasn't targeted at them, they much preferred Windows 2000 to Windows Millennium. Consumers wanted an OS that didn't need to reboot when a program crashed more than the jazzed up game / home Windows 9x+ OS that everyone thought would be a sure winner. If I had been in charge of a MS division at that point, I would have taken note that our market analytics were pure trash.
And that's how MS tends to operate. The 'sure-winners' that get all the nice literature and pamphlets are, by launch time, seen as over-hyped or totally miss out on what their potential customers wanted. Instead, it's a lot of the 'what the hell, Bob was bored and made an add-on for Office while waiting for his monthly check to clear' that seems to endow MS with those surprise features that people find, and decide they can't do without.
Consider Office for a moment. We'll say Office 2010. Now, the common belief is that people 'just need Word and Powerpoint' with possibly a few people needing 'Excel' and others 'Access' or 'Outlook.' Now me being something of a prima donna (and not trusting any company to not sell me a crippled edition of their software), I tend to send in orders for the Ultimate / Enterprise / all the bling editions of software. Why? Because personal experience has shown me that software developers, paid ones, don't really give a damn about the feature-less standard editions, and put all the magic in the Unobtanium versions. So, I ended up with a copy of MS Office 2010 Business Plus, or whatever it is that has all the fruit. Now, admittedly, I had not been paying attention to some of the previous versions of Office, and so came to a rather pleasant discovery of a program, only bundled of course with the Uber version of Office, that should really have received top billing on the Office brochure. Like, even before mentioning the oldie but goodies, they really needed to mention Sharepoint Workspaces. The ability to synchronize, without needing to handhold or verify, the various folders / files between your laptop and your desktop, the ability to say "Just shutup and automatically synchronize everything between my VS and NetBeans folders whenever you detect changes / the other computer is awake" is really, really something that needs to be mentioned somewhere. In prominent letters.
Yes, yes, we've heard about the cloud bullsh*t, but it is pure bull. Plus, for companies that need to keep an eye on things, that cannot use clouds because that data cannot be let out of their sight (just tons of corporations in there), this is really, really what they need to keep work between the encrypted laptop and their workplace under safe keeps.
They really, really missed the window here. I'd have made that program a standard feature, then abused everyone else for failing to have something comparable. Even the people in the linux realm don't have an equivalent, with a few of them desperate to try and get the thing running on Wine.
Does using a trojan count as hacking? I can't keep up with things these days.
Still the part where the 'hacker' downloads an executable file, and runs it...that's weak sauce. One, it tells us he's probably running Windows. Two, it shows he is an idiot: what 'hacker' blindly runs an executable file, even one given to him by 'friends'?
See, if the 'authorities' had managed to capture an image of him by pulling apart a botnet client, tracing the originating command server through several wayward paths, spelunking their way up the internet one router at a time until they found the source of the packets containing a fraudulant origin IP address, then exploited a weakness on a service running on a common port that wasn't patched / no one knew about, then turned on his webcam to grab a photo or two of him while quietly copying evidence off his machine, I'd be inclined to say "GG" and award some finger-snaps for one-upping someone on their own battlefield.
But using social engineering on someone running a common operating system, someone without the common sense inherent in a level one helldesk operator (do not run unknown executables)...I mean, he doesn't even fire up a VM and lock it off the internet before running the thing? Does anyone actually think this guy was anything more than, at best, a script kiddy, and at worst, a pawn?
If this is the best news that they can put out these days regarding their capture of 'cyber-criminals,' there either aren't any, or they're getting schooled.
Here's a hint for understanding power in the virtual realm -> if you need to work with others to achieve something, or need to get a judge to sign off on something, you're doing it wrong. If you need to call up a Bell to run a data tap to find the equivalent of the opportunistic thief robbing a 7-11...then you don't know enough about technology to 'fight' effectively.
Then they should take some of their idle Sales / Marketing / Business guys, have them fly over to {country}, and let them spend some time charming the other foundries into not only giving them the capacity they need, but doing so at an excellent price. At the very least, it will give them something to do.
Indeed. The one order the CEO can give to save the company is this: "Magical turn-arounds for companies who have been f*cked only happens in textbooks and fair-tales; as such, all resources for CPU design will go into creating a Phenom III with 12 cores and PCI-Express 3.0 and an Opteron design which employs liquid cooling (for the short term), as we are going to give it a major Mhz boost on top of the extra cores / cache we are going to staple on."
Getting involved in the already overgrown ARM market shows nothing but lack of vision. "We're going where everyone else is going, that'll be profitable!" You are going to be *that* guy who shows up late to the party, and wonders why all the booze is gone. Seriously, how do you mismanage stuff this badly? You're a CPU company, and you come up with the brilliant plan that despite being a major competitor in the x86 market, you're going to fix things by buying an oversubscribed design for a CPU in a market that...recursion error.
Think of it being like Ford, not using its own resources to think up a new car design, but paying Honda to license it the design for the Civic. Things are either absolutely atrocious, like AMD's stock should be worth a Haitian penny right now bad and we just haven't been told anything, or somebody doesn't know what he's doing. Go get the old guys your predecessor fired, and bring them back for more money. Find the DEC guys, and offer stock options if you have to to get them on board. Then follow their advice. After a year or two of punishment, AMD will be back on firm ground again.
Indeed. I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense. What was so hard about welding two Phenom II X6's together, using the hyperlinks already present in the CPU design, and calling it a day? Knowing full well that Intel wouldn't be able to compete with that design (they've been core adverse compared to AMD), being happy that all of the cores were full cores (who'd complain?), and that they'd be a hot item for system builders everywhere. Sure, some of the gaming websites like to barf about how single-threaded performance still matters, on some games that no one cares about (the GPU, of course, mattering a lot more than the single-threaded performance of a CPU here), but to take the advantage of having 6 full cores, and trade it in for 8 half-cores...was this some idiotic attempt at market segmentation? Did some moron in a suit have a brain fart, and think "we can't have 12-core Phenom IIIs, it will cannibalize our Opteron server sales"? Fire his ass, and cut the strings on his golden parachute on the way out.
For the life me, I just can't fathom how they turned a major market advantage, with the CPU design practically on the design table already, with a popular and critically acclaimed design, and decided that f*ck it, we're doing so well here, let's go for a lobotomy, and compete on Intel's turd with an unproven half-assed design. Let's go from a full-core design that everyone complements, to some terrible half-core design that nearly killed Intel at some point. Seriously, who is commanding AMD such that they were in their nappies when the whole Intel hyper-threading business was going down (which every half-decent tech knows about), and how did they get boardroom approval?
The proper response, of course, was not the Business School of Failure's attempt at mandating some perverse product differentiation, which bears as much similarity to surgery as bludgeoning a person to death with a hammer, but through true, non-crippling differentiation. Phenom IIIs get 12-cores, and the latest SSE instructions + something that the boys down in the instruction lab cook up; Opterons get larger caches + more cores + special server instruction sets that mean something concrete, even if it means implementing hardware Apache threads; that's on top of the SSE3 stuff and so forth. Would companies buy Opterons over Phenoms if one had hardware accelerated support for web services over the other? I believe the survey would say hell yes.
As for the GPU stuff, the low-cost, low-power stuff is nice for chump change, but it's a fierce market with many competitors. What you want, what large companies no doubt want, is the ability to slam in GPU-daughter boards, to add 10 or 20 7970 GPUs on a single board (preferably with sockets, which drives up the cost a few cents, but also taps into the smaller markets, where you may buy 4 GPUs now, and 6 later), so that they can drive those large super-computing projects that already make use of these GPUs, but do so more efficiently.
As for gaming, the more stream processors, I imagine, the better. When in doubt, double them, as it will give Intel and Nvidia something to curse over.
Depends on who is in the driver's seat, and how things are done.
See, the biggest 'advantage' that teachers have in their clout / ability to stick together when striking / resisting change. That typically forces people to negotiate with them. But that is also their biggest disadvantage -> the teachers have a well known reputation for sticking together and resisting change, which when it comes to important changes, like learning how to use a computer, other options begin manifesting themselves, including the nuclear equivalent of simply replacing them.
Think of it this way. If you are a country that is well known to have an outstanding military that crushes others, when someone decides that it is time to implement a change that would result in you using that military, they are going to plan for the eventuality of having to annihilate that military. It's called automatic escalation.
And here in is the problem. No one has hit the nail on the head yet how to use technology to properly increase a student's ability to learn. If / when that time does come, teachers / professors will need to make a carefully calculated decision how they will react to it. In one scenario, teachers / professors embrace it, talk about and use it as another tool in their line of work, and up until its widespread adoption, use it opportunistically to bank on those performance bonuses that their peers may not be aware of; you go with the change, realize that it cannot replace you, but it can make your life easier. Or you can fight it, dress it up in horns and paint it red, declare it a war on your way of life, and attempt to negotiate in your contracts a ban on its use in the school district; to do so is to give into your fears that you are replaceable, that you having nothing to differentiate yourself from a well-tuned machine, and that others would come to a similar decision; it screams of fears regarding job security, and that your motivation is more towards your own ends than the futures of your students; it also says that you prefer the status quo.
If it's the former, you make out like royalty for a few years, up until Congress realizes that the 'performance-based teacher's encouragement fund' is quickly draining dry, but by then, you'll have a few tends of thousands of dollars socked away in your saving's account. Even after they are phased out, your students will be doing much better, so the chances of closing a previously poor performing school are somewhat limited. Now, it can make things more difficult in that suddenly, there may be less differentiation between a 'good' teacher and a 'bad' teacher, but I expect that in the years between point A and point B you will have thought of a solution to this problem, even if it means spending a little of that extra money to pick up an inexpensive Master's degree from a local university; but then, you are still coming out ahead. Masters degree + more money, plus the more money that a Master's degree itself commands = a win over the status quo. Other possible good news is that less time is spent learning (but more is learned in that time), so a Chemistry class may spend less time learning about how a mole is a unit, and more time trying out an exciting experiment that day.
Thou has a choice, to embrace the unknown, or to fear it. The former grants opportunities, but comes at the cost of having to learn what those opportunities are; the latter is simply a means to its own end (fear generating more fear).
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess their response: "Our executives are retarded. They learned in their freshman business class that getting customers to register their e-mail addresses increased their chances of of buying new products from the same company. They were unaware that forcing customers to do this for basic functionality is the equivalent of eating your entree with your foot, while playing host to the Royal family of England. They are simply incapable of understanding the level of faux pas they have committed, coming up with the two-year old's excuse of 'if it's so bad, why are other people doing it,' and, in light of the bonuses they will no doubt receive shortly before customers permanently turn away from this company, they won't care. Again, we apologize for what passes as an education in this country, and promise, after the glorious revolution, to never speak of it again."
Yes, I imagine they all do, but for different effects. Someone who plays with poppy tea will adopt a style different from someone who drops acid. Same for ketamine.
The bigger problem you are going to run into is the inability of society to tolerate that kind of evolution. See, it may take 5 trips to level up a programmer from standard to 'I understand how to implement an incredible Visitor pattern,' all while your boss, who has never programmed in his life and thinks drugs are of the devil, is going to be messing with you (either harshing your buzz / creating a bad trip, or if it's done off-hours, he will not be appreciate of the changes ("This new pattern, while awesome, differs from the established way of doing things, and is giving your teenage replacements a mind-fuck"). External forces can and will influence the effects of a trip, as can be seen when the drug-taker is a low-class, middle-class, or upper-class individual. Low-class it can end very badly, and I understand typically does. Middle-class it's hard to tell. Upper-class, especially among artists and musicians, can do some incredible stuff. But then, their fields tolerate that just fine, while programming is slowly becoming intolerant of that (lower salaries, plus bosses care more than you are sitting at a desk, day-dreaming, than writing something incredible at home; it is, no doubt, the primary difference between the big 'gains' we were seeing in the programming sector a decade or two ago, and now, where the biggest thing to come out of tech recently was Windows 8 and FailBook's IPO).
Or perhaps that they, in their day, had and many of them being themselves politicians, knew that future politicians would lie / make undeliverable promises as well. And that that was the reason for the creation of the electoral college -> to grab a bunch of people who are used to these types, and let them vet the candidates.
Considering that ballots come with a 'straight-line' party vote, I would assume that their fears were justified. Vote not for a party, but for the person, as it is the person you are putting in office, not the party.
I was surprised to find the voting process to have taken a practical turn. Paper and pens, to my delight. Would only have been made easier had they provided sharpies instead of ballpoint pens.
Even so, someone requested another ballot, having filled one not to their liking / the instructions.
To this end, I found the process favourable. A job well done.
Now if only in four years we can improve the slate of candidates, we might be onto something.
It is a shock to shareholders, and annoys your customers, but 'tis better than the alternative.
Imagine a few hundred thousand credit card numbers being quietly stolen. Imagine waiting two years to admit to this theft. I imagine that that would be more damaging than admitting it immediately.
See, the true source of flack a company is going to receive is not that it has been hacked, but that it had such poor security measures in place to begin with. No one wants to be the captain of the ship who kept unencrypted user-names and passwords in a publicly accessible database. As such, the hit for that is unavoidable once it happens.
Wonderous. See, this is exactly where technology resources should be spent. Why focus on truly ground-breaking technologies like VR immersion, a cure for cancer, or putting a man / woman on Neptune, when we can find a new way to restrict content according to the number of viewers present, terrorize air travellers, or help old men get boners! I want to shake the hands of the people who decided that in this universe of infinite possibilities, these technologies needed top billing. Truly they are gods among men.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in my bed, closing my eyes, and making believe this is a terrible nightmare.
'Tis alright. If they are demented enough to pass these kinds of laws, then their heirs must be having a heyday ripping them off.
"Senator Bob, I'm going to just take your financial securities here, and sell them off for you, keep a little for my trouble" "Billy, you don't come around to see me anymore." "Nonsense Bob, we spent last Wednesday at the park. You do remember, right?" "Err...yes, I think I remember. What was I doing at the park?" "You were feeding the ducks, Bob. You were feeding the ducks."
This message brought to you by the next generation -> we're younger than you, we're going to outlive you, and we are really offended that you are trying to sell us into slavery. We can safeguard you at an old age, or we can ship you off to a retirement home. The choice is yours.
Glorious. Now tell me why a company would want to move their stuff to the cloud?
God, it's good to be right. It's also good to be king. But being right is pretty dandy as well. I cannot wait for Legal at a lot of these corporations who switched over to the cloud to get a good look at this: I'm sure their response will be one of pure horror. Hell, if they're sending confidential emails to their clients on an Exchange server hosted in the cloud, there's a fair chance the opposition will get to eavesdrop on their communications legally. I like to fantasize that the legal crew would recognize the problem immediately, and take one for the team to preserve both themselves and everybody else, but then, if they had been awake, they never would have let the Cloud thing happen.
I was thinking something involving two blonds and a midget.
DHS -> Pays 4chan to run ads for them, is surprised by the number of applicants.
And had the site not retained information pertaining to his identity, what would they have done? Nothing.
How disappointing, but completely expected. In a trial between a power which has the public's wallet to call upon, and a defence with more limited resources, how could the outcome be any different?
I haven't seen a 190 Watt CPU, but I have seen a 150 Watt CPU.
Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Yorkfield XE (45 nm) 3.2 GHz 150 W
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures
Does it matter that he's running Windows? Perhaps not. Does it cast doubt on whether this 31337 h@x0r was anything more than a script kiddie acting on the orders of someone else / using someone else's software? Yes.
Honestly, I do not understand why some people seem to think that to be a cracker, you must be an idiot with a flaw. As in, "despite working with dangerous code on a daily basis, no cracker would ever run untrusted code inside a VM with no ports to the internet." That it's all just some form of autism that grants them the ability to do incredible things in the virtual realm, and their below human IQ outside that realm that has them constantly getting caught. In short, you're talking about the existence of something that can't readily exist, and certainly wouldn't in any great quantity. It's too lopsided, you'd need an invisible hand working tirelessly to just to maintain the state necessary for keep them like that. As Ford Prefect, in the HHGTTG, said, "No way a civilization goes from having the plans for a spacecraft to launching one within a year; no one, no matter how motivated, does that; show it to me, and I still won't believe it."
And the part where h@x0rs get nailed by downloading / receiving a file from a 'friend'? Are we stuck in a time loop? Either they don't read the news on how any of their peers are getting caught / have gotten caught for the last two decades, or this story is purely dressed up for the press.
Except that the post is fairly accurate. Operational security is considered a big aspect of the h@x0r culture; the higher up you go, the more operational security they tend to use.
What part of that is BS? Or, as I suspect, with no ID and no evidence to counter my argument, you are purely a troll.
Honestly, I don't care that it would need to dissipate twice the heat. Many of us who upgraded to FX-8150s are already running liquid coolant solutions.
And compared to the i7, which is hot enough to cook an egg under a tight load, AMD has some room to play in before people begin cracking jokes about needing a black-hole to control the heat.
200-250 Watts is perfectly fine in my world. I have an 850 Watt power supply in my main machine, I think it can supply the needed energy.
As for the thermal envelope, which you will probably want to discuss next, I must admit my lack of knowledge here. Would a liquid coolant system be capable of displacing that much energy? I'd like to think yes, and you are correct in that that would be a minor price bump for the processor (it ships with the coolant clip attached, but you still need to invest in the rest of the coolant system). But then, I am already (like many others) using a liquid coolant system on my FX-8150, so the point is somewhat moot.
What would please me more is enabling multiple sockets for a Phenom III. I'd like to be able to buy a board with two or four sockets, especially if the motherboard manufacturer does it right. That means I want those unnecessary overclocking features, I do want as many PCI-Express lanes as is even remotely possible (12 of them would not be enough), and I want as many RAM sockets as you can possibly fit on the board. Frankly, I am absolutely surprised that Asus hasn't stepped up to the plate, and started offering motherboards that would fit 256 GBs of RAM. F*ck the low-cost, low-margin, low-performance world that the tech industry has a perverse hard-on for these days. People will always pay for performance, then don't give a sh*t how much heat it dissipates as long as it freaking delivers! You only catch flack when you put out a terrible design that your competition uses to make their decade old products look good in comparison.
And more SATA sockets. Six is not enough. I have a Thermaltake Armor Full-Tower case, and I can easily fit a dozen hard drives in it. And you get us that PCI-Express 3 stuff that Intel has, and make sure all the USB ports are USB 3.0.
Who would buy this motherboard / processor? Only all the professionals that make up a huge portion of the desktop / server markets. Don't want it to cut into your server offerings? Do something similar for your server CPU offerings...and for the love of Deity, do something about those server motherboards. They are just...disasters in terms of features.
As for ARM, as I said, the market is already over-competitive, and they are having trouble sticking to the ARM instruction set while offering something different (to gain a competitive advantage). Who cares if your ARM processor has an extra two or three instructions if programmers don't want to use it because it breaks their code on devices using a processor from one of the other manufacturers? It's a fools game, just money down the drain. Oh, but ARM is going to replace x86? It's the future? Have you seen how badly these things scale? How you been paying attention to how much performance is being lost in the name of saving a little energy? By the time they are competitive with x86 offerings, they will be seconds away from drawing as much energy, or more, than x86 processors. You've reinvented the wheel!
The GPU on die stuff is cute, but honestly, who cares? The performance is fine for flash-based games, and Portal 2 if you don't run it with high settings, but load up Crysis on Ultra-high or perhaps some Skyrim, and you're not doing so hot. It's essentially a 'nice-to-have' for those long plane rides where you are just tapping out a document or watching a DVD, but that's it! Any, and I mean any, tablet manufacturer or laptop manufacturer that wants to kick the snot out of their competition just needs to work in a mediocre dedicated graphics card from two generations ago, and it will wipe the floor with the competition's integrated crap. It's essentially a video card for people who do not know what a video card is, and will purchase a new machine when they realize the current one can't be upgraded / can't do what they want it to do. I.e. it's just a waste of money. It saves the OEM money in the short term, and possibly the consumer, but 6 months later when the consumer realizes they need something a little more powerful, they need to rebuy
Meh. MS has the odd ability to accidentally make a success, typically without even them thinking it would become a success.
Consider Windows 2000 vs. Windows Millennium. I'm sure all the market studies done before the product launch said that businesses would love 2000, and consumers would love Millennium. Except after launch, consumers had a chance to test drive both, and decided that despite the fact that it wasn't targeted at them, they much preferred Windows 2000 to Windows Millennium. Consumers wanted an OS that didn't need to reboot when a program crashed more than the jazzed up game / home Windows 9x+ OS that everyone thought would be a sure winner. If I had been in charge of a MS division at that point, I would have taken note that our market analytics were pure trash.
And that's how MS tends to operate. The 'sure-winners' that get all the nice literature and pamphlets are, by launch time, seen as over-hyped or totally miss out on what their potential customers wanted. Instead, it's a lot of the 'what the hell, Bob was bored and made an add-on for Office while waiting for his monthly check to clear' that seems to endow MS with those surprise features that people find, and decide they can't do without.
Consider Office for a moment. We'll say Office 2010. Now, the common belief is that people 'just need Word and Powerpoint' with possibly a few people needing 'Excel' and others 'Access' or 'Outlook.' Now me being something of a prima donna (and not trusting any company to not sell me a crippled edition of their software), I tend to send in orders for the Ultimate / Enterprise / all the bling editions of software. Why? Because personal experience has shown me that software developers, paid ones, don't really give a damn about the feature-less standard editions, and put all the magic in the Unobtanium versions. So, I ended up with a copy of MS Office 2010 Business Plus, or whatever it is that has all the fruit. Now, admittedly, I had not been paying attention to some of the previous versions of Office, and so came to a rather pleasant discovery of a program, only bundled of course with the Uber version of Office, that should really have received top billing on the Office brochure. Like, even before mentioning the oldie but goodies, they really needed to mention Sharepoint Workspaces. The ability to synchronize, without needing to handhold or verify, the various folders / files between your laptop and your desktop, the ability to say "Just shutup and automatically synchronize everything between my VS and NetBeans folders whenever you detect changes / the other computer is awake" is really, really something that needs to be mentioned somewhere. In prominent letters.
Yes, yes, we've heard about the cloud bullsh*t, but it is pure bull. Plus, for companies that need to keep an eye on things, that cannot use clouds because that data cannot be let out of their sight (just tons of corporations in there), this is really, really what they need to keep work between the encrypted laptop and their workplace under safe keeps.
They really, really missed the window here. I'd have made that program a standard feature, then abused everyone else for failing to have something comparable. Even the people in the linux realm don't have an equivalent, with a few of them desperate to try and get the thing running on Wine.
Does using a trojan count as hacking? I can't keep up with things these days.
Still the part where the 'hacker' downloads an executable file, and runs it...that's weak sauce. One, it tells us he's probably running Windows. Two, it shows he is an idiot: what 'hacker' blindly runs an executable file, even one given to him by 'friends'?
See, if the 'authorities' had managed to capture an image of him by pulling apart a botnet client, tracing the originating command server through several wayward paths, spelunking their way up the internet one router at a time until they found the source of the packets containing a fraudulant origin IP address, then exploited a weakness on a service running on a common port that wasn't patched / no one knew about, then turned on his webcam to grab a photo or two of him while quietly copying evidence off his machine, I'd be inclined to say "GG" and award some finger-snaps for one-upping someone on their own battlefield.
But using social engineering on someone running a common operating system, someone without the common sense inherent in a level one helldesk operator (do not run unknown executables)...I mean, he doesn't even fire up a VM and lock it off the internet before running the thing? Does anyone actually think this guy was anything more than, at best, a script kiddy, and at worst, a pawn?
If this is the best news that they can put out these days regarding their capture of 'cyber-criminals,' there either aren't any, or they're getting schooled.
Here's a hint for understanding power in the virtual realm -> if you need to work with others to achieve something, or need to get a judge to sign off on something, you're doing it wrong. If you need to call up a Bell to run a data tap to find the equivalent of the opportunistic thief robbing a 7-11...then you don't know enough about technology to 'fight' effectively.
Then they should take some of their idle Sales / Marketing / Business guys, have them fly over to {country}, and let them spend some time charming the other foundries into not only giving them the capacity they need, but doing so at an excellent price. At the very least, it will give them something to do.
Not without the top-level chip designers their previous CEO nuked. They may be the Chicago Bulls in name, but the player lineup has changed.
Indeed. The one order the CEO can give to save the company is this: "Magical turn-arounds for companies who have been f*cked only happens in textbooks and fair-tales; as such, all resources for CPU design will go into creating a Phenom III with 12 cores and PCI-Express 3.0 and an Opteron design which employs liquid cooling (for the short term), as we are going to give it a major Mhz boost on top of the extra cores / cache we are going to staple on."
Getting involved in the already overgrown ARM market shows nothing but lack of vision. "We're going where everyone else is going, that'll be profitable!" You are going to be *that* guy who shows up late to the party, and wonders why all the booze is gone. Seriously, how do you mismanage stuff this badly? You're a CPU company, and you come up with the brilliant plan that despite being a major competitor in the x86 market, you're going to fix things by buying an oversubscribed design for a CPU in a market that...recursion error.
Think of it being like Ford, not using its own resources to think up a new car design, but paying Honda to license it the design for the Civic. Things are either absolutely atrocious, like AMD's stock should be worth a Haitian penny right now bad and we just haven't been told anything, or somebody doesn't know what he's doing. Go get the old guys your predecessor fired, and bring them back for more money. Find the DEC guys, and offer stock options if you have to to get them on board. Then follow their advice. After a year or two of punishment, AMD will be back on firm ground again.
It's been a while, but wasn't VIA responsible for the really screwy AMD chipsets that used to make people curse under their breathe?
Indeed. I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense. What was so hard about welding two Phenom II X6's together, using the hyperlinks already present in the CPU design, and calling it a day? Knowing full well that Intel wouldn't be able to compete with that design (they've been core adverse compared to AMD), being happy that all of the cores were full cores (who'd complain?), and that they'd be a hot item for system builders everywhere. Sure, some of the gaming websites like to barf about how single-threaded performance still matters, on some games that no one cares about (the GPU, of course, mattering a lot more than the single-threaded performance of a CPU here), but to take the advantage of having 6 full cores, and trade it in for 8 half-cores...was this some idiotic attempt at market segmentation? Did some moron in a suit have a brain fart, and think "we can't have 12-core Phenom IIIs, it will cannibalize our Opteron server sales"? Fire his ass, and cut the strings on his golden parachute on the way out.
For the life me, I just can't fathom how they turned a major market advantage, with the CPU design practically on the design table already, with a popular and critically acclaimed design, and decided that f*ck it, we're doing so well here, let's go for a lobotomy, and compete on Intel's turd with an unproven half-assed design. Let's go from a full-core design that everyone complements, to some terrible half-core design that nearly killed Intel at some point. Seriously, who is commanding AMD such that they were in their nappies when the whole Intel hyper-threading business was going down (which every half-decent tech knows about), and how did they get boardroom approval?
The proper response, of course, was not the Business School of Failure's attempt at mandating some perverse product differentiation, which bears as much similarity to surgery as bludgeoning a person to death with a hammer, but through true, non-crippling differentiation. Phenom IIIs get 12-cores, and the latest SSE instructions + something that the boys down in the instruction lab cook up; Opterons get larger caches + more cores + special server instruction sets that mean something concrete, even if it means implementing hardware Apache threads; that's on top of the SSE3 stuff and so forth. Would companies buy Opterons over Phenoms if one had hardware accelerated support for web services over the other? I believe the survey would say hell yes.
As for the GPU stuff, the low-cost, low-power stuff is nice for chump change, but it's a fierce market with many competitors. What you want, what large companies no doubt want, is the ability to slam in GPU-daughter boards, to add 10 or 20 7970 GPUs on a single board (preferably with sockets, which drives up the cost a few cents, but also taps into the smaller markets, where you may buy 4 GPUs now, and 6 later), so that they can drive those large super-computing projects that already make use of these GPUs, but do so more efficiently.
As for gaming, the more stream processors, I imagine, the better. When in doubt, double them, as it will give Intel and Nvidia something to curse over.
Depends on who is in the driver's seat, and how things are done.
See, the biggest 'advantage' that teachers have in their clout / ability to stick together when striking / resisting change. That typically forces people to negotiate with them. But that is also their biggest disadvantage -> the teachers have a well known reputation for sticking together and resisting change, which when it comes to important changes, like learning how to use a computer, other options begin manifesting themselves, including the nuclear equivalent of simply replacing them.
Think of it this way. If you are a country that is well known to have an outstanding military that crushes others, when someone decides that it is time to implement a change that would result in you using that military, they are going to plan for the eventuality of having to annihilate that military. It's called automatic escalation.
And here in is the problem. No one has hit the nail on the head yet how to use technology to properly increase a student's ability to learn. If / when that time does come, teachers / professors will need to make a carefully calculated decision how they will react to it. In one scenario, teachers / professors embrace it, talk about and use it as another tool in their line of work, and up until its widespread adoption, use it opportunistically to bank on those performance bonuses that their peers may not be aware of; you go with the change, realize that it cannot replace you, but it can make your life easier. Or you can fight it, dress it up in horns and paint it red, declare it a war on your way of life, and attempt to negotiate in your contracts a ban on its use in the school district; to do so is to give into your fears that you are replaceable, that you having nothing to differentiate yourself from a well-tuned machine, and that others would come to a similar decision; it screams of fears regarding job security, and that your motivation is more towards your own ends than the futures of your students; it also says that you prefer the status quo.
If it's the former, you make out like royalty for a few years, up until Congress realizes that the 'performance-based teacher's encouragement fund' is quickly draining dry, but by then, you'll have a few tends of thousands of dollars socked away in your saving's account. Even after they are phased out, your students will be doing much better, so the chances of closing a previously poor performing school are somewhat limited. Now, it can make things more difficult in that suddenly, there may be less differentiation between a 'good' teacher and a 'bad' teacher, but I expect that in the years between point A and point B you will have thought of a solution to this problem, even if it means spending a little of that extra money to pick up an inexpensive Master's degree from a local university; but then, you are still coming out ahead. Masters degree + more money, plus the more money that a Master's degree itself commands = a win over the status quo. Other possible good news is that less time is spent learning (but more is learned in that time), so a Chemistry class may spend less time learning about how a mole is a unit, and more time trying out an exciting experiment that day.
Thou has a choice, to embrace the unknown, or to fear it. The former grants opportunities, but comes at the cost of having to learn what those opportunities are; the latter is simply a means to its own end (fear generating more fear).