It is about time WP starts pushing back crappy office
Yes, since it's been nearly a decade since Word pushed out crappy WP.
I agree that MS has gotten a lot of it's influence through shady dealings (undocumented calls, blackmail via OS monopoly, etc) but you also have to go back and look at the early days of GUI Word Processors. WordPerfect was utter shit. It lost the market share because they didn't transition from DOS-based word processing to WYSIWYG GUI word processing fast enough. And when they finally did make the transition they released a crappy product that was full of bugs and missing features.
If you want a real competitor for Word, take a look at Ami Pro. The only reason I can see for it's failure is the miserable marketing out of Lotus (and later IBM). It had most of the features before Word did, it was faster, slimmer, and worked great. Those ubiquitous button bars that are in GUI apps nowadays? Came from Ami Pro. I'm sure it had some technical shortcomings, but I don't know what they were offhand.
Ok, I quit playing over 6 months ago and haven't looked back. So I have no idea what stuff goes for now, what the cool items are, etc. -- but he's right in general. Plat is plentiful and irrelevant at the high end. Before the last expansion (Shadows of Luclin) plat was needed in massive quantities for high end guilds due to expenditures on spell reagents. My guild would go through roughly 5-10k a night, every night. And since we had a jackass steal plat from the guildfund it was actually an issue for awhile.
So I started selling. I listed all the crap the guild had and didn't need on a webpage and sold it at below market prices. In 6 hours (one night) I'd average 100k. And I wasn't a trader - they could do 2-3x that easily, but they worked each sale. I didn't care to. In under a month the guildfund went from empty to roughtly 1.5M platinum, at which point I quit the game.
From what I understand everything has severely depreciated since the Bazaar finally started working (imagine that! Eliminate artificial constraints on trade and false shortages and prices fall!), but the need for platinum in high end guilds has also been severely reduced - raids that used to cost 10k in materials now cost under 1k, because of mass group buff and other special abilities.
Oh yeah... at various times we had GMs investigate us for duping. Apparantly we were tying up something like 40% of the platinum on the server, and they just couldn't believe that it was legit (which it was).
By the time Kunark came out individuals had amassed hundreds of thousands of pp. I know my character had something like 80k pp prior to Kunark.
Before SoL came out there were numerous guilds on various servers with over 1 million pp in guildfund. And I know that quite a few people in a guild have more than the guildfund itself - usually because they were obsessive traders and horders.
Shrug. Platinum is worthless at the high end. It serves only as another expendable commodity like food or water - the only thing you need tons of plat for is reagents (peridots, etc), and with the group buffing spells even that has become irrelevant (or so I hear - I stopped playing over 6 months ago).
Lights, like these OLEDs, are additive color. I can't imagine them not being able to make white
They probably can make white - but is it efficient?
If they're having lifespan issues with the blue emitters (as they are according to older articles and other posts) then it may be far better to have a fourth element which emits white than to use the 3 separate elements to create white.
Just a SWAG - I'm not up to speed on the technology at all.
Correct, which is inane since UD has distributed.net people working with them, a large portion of the UD framework is built on the d.net framework, and the d.net client is certainly cross-platform.
Shrug.
I run UD on my Windows boxen. When I setup some Linux boxen I'll run Folding@Home on them. They're both good projects. But I do prefer UD simply because I've seen cancer affect too many friends and family and I also worked in an oncology ward as a summer job.
The cancer project is being run through United Devices. This is a non-profit project and the data being generated will not be sold to a for-profit firm.
There's also Folding@Home which researches protein folding as well - although instead of only for cancer research it's generally for other medical research such as Alzheimer's, MS, etc. - also non-profit.
There's Genome@Home which analyzes the genome for medical purposes. Non-profit.
And, finally, if you're looking for a generic listing of distributed computing projects, check here.
Are you going to make the inane argument that two speakers at roughly 60 degrees of separation from the listening point can accurately and faithfully reproduce 360 degrees of sound? And I'm not even touching the Z-axis issue here.
What we need is intelligent speakers, with DSP's in them. Then you plug a microphone in to it, and place it at your preferred listening spot. Then the speaker could analyse itself, and your listening area allowing it to compensate for any weaknesses in your setup
You've almost got it. But you don't put that logic in the speakers - you put it in the receiver/pre-amp.
Which is exactly what several high-end models do. Plug in the supplied microphone (thus alleviating the transfer issue brought up), place it at the listening position, and the receiver will automagically calibrate the speakers appropriately. It won't make up for abundantly bad room response, but it will at least calibrate levels and delays correctly.
Sigh... brands? I don't recall and I don't have my back issues of Stereophile Guide to Home Theater here for reference. But there's at least 3 or 4 different brands in the mid to high price range doing this now. Expect to see the same feature on commodity electronics in 2-3 years.
This has the advantage of making all music sources, stereos, and listening rooms sound better WITHOUT having to fork out more cash for new media
It does not solve the multi-channel issue. And guestimating 4 or 5 channels out of two channels is dicey at best. In general "Live" CDs will sound ok this way. Everything else will sound like crap.
Circuit City is eliminating sales of pre-recorded VHS movies at their stores nationwide. It's expected that the other major chains will follow suit in the next couple years. They're still selling VCRs and blank tapes, but that's it. I suspect that in a few years they won't even do that.
VHS takes up more shelf space than DVD and offers a lower profit margin. Consumers have bought DVD players in droves and you can get one for well under $100 now. Since most consumers don't even use the recording features of VCRs and DVD offers far greater convienence than VHS does it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that VHS is in its final years.
So go to the restroom. Oh, you might lose? Yeah... so what? If you're playing on the stratospheric level where there's actually money involved that's one thing. Otherwise does it really matter?
And yes, I play online games. I know that there's other people playing as well and that in team games they're relying on you -- if you can't just quit the game to go AFK, then let them know you're AFK and they'll cover for you.
Ever heard of Core Wars? That was one of the first popular bot vs. bot games
Non sequitor. The OP was not playing a bot-vs-bot game, where the purpose is to write a better program than your adversary. It's a level playing field.
Writing a bot for a human played game may show you have programming skill, but actually using it to defeat other players is just lame. It doesn't prove you have any skill regarding the actual game. It just proves that you can code and are willing to cheat to make you look better.
Using a bot written by someone else to play is even lamer. That just shows you have no skill in any manner.
Anytime you modularize you have to design interfaces. Interfaces are inherently slow - there's a physical disconnect which simply can't have as good of an electrical connection, they're bulky (consider that while a Pentium IV chip package is 35 mm on a side (1225 mm^2), the actual chip is only 131 mm^2 - the size is needed primarily for all the pinouts from the chip), and they're noisy.
Consider that while you can buy a P4 that runs at 2.8 GHz internally (and the fast ALUs run at 5.6 GHz, although they're only 16-bits wide), the memory bus is a lackluster 133 MHz (which you get an effective 533 MHz from because it's quad pumped - you read 4 values every clock instead of just 1). The I/O bus also runs at 133 MHz. These are the only two external buses the CPU deals with.
If you were to try and segment the CPU similarly you'd quickly hit limitations. You simply can't run a multi-GHz electrical signal over a physical disconnect, at least not with current technology.
All of that said, if you look at how CPU cores are laid out the cache is distinctly segmented from the ALU, the ALU is segmented from the FPU, and so forth. It makes chip design easier since if you want to make a change to one part of the chip you minimize effects on other parts. It also helps for signal routing and noise prevention.
Also you can do more or less what you're asking - just not at high speeds. Modern chips are often preliminarily tested using gate arrays that can be reprogrammed quickly and easily... but instead of running at 3 GHz this test chip runs at 2 MHz. Maybe.
Oh... a final bit... back in the days of the 386 and 486 the 2nd level cache was actually on the motherboard, and different MB vendors would put different amounts of cache. Some even had it socketed or solderable so you could add more if you wanted! But by the time the P2 came out clock speeds were too high for this. The connection latency and distance were simply too high. So we wound up with the slot processors, where a CPU slot card had the CPU core and 1-4 second level caches on it. Pretty soon both Intel and AMD integrated the 2nd level cache onto the CPU itself (which wasn't previously possible because it would have made the chips far too big), which further improved speed. The next generation of CPUs are requiring 3rd level cache on the motherboards. How long before that gets integrated onto the CPU?
As others mentioned, MCA (MicroChannel Architecture) was IBM's abysmal attempt at recapturing the PC market. It died a horrible death, and deserved it. Frankly, the technology sucked only slightly less than the ISA/EISA bus it wanted to replace.
Anyone else remember the horrors of all those damn control files on floppies?
There are a lot of architectural nightmares in the PC design... and while some of them are at the CPU level (like the 6 GP registers), most of them are at the bus level. Who the hell puts the keyboard on the 2nd most important interrupt (IRQ1)? The entire bus is still borked, although PCI has mostly hidden that now. But the system and memory buses are the sole reason that IBM, HP, Sun, etc. have higher performance ratings than x86 -- the P4 and Athlon processors are faster in virtually every case on a CPU to CPU basis.
The bus and memory architecture is also why x86 does so incredibly bad in multi-CPU boxes. It's just not designed for it, the contention issues are hideous, and while you may only get 1.9x the performance going to a 2 CPU Sun box, you'll only get 1.7x on x86. It gets worse as you scale (note - those numbers are for reference only, I don't recall the exact relationships for dual CPU x86 boxes anymore, but the RISC systems handle it better due to bus design).
Really there's nothing wrong with the x86 processors except to the CompE/EE/CS student. I was there once and couldn't stand it. Real life has shown that it isn't that bad, and recent times have shown that it's actually really damn good. Except for the buses. They suck. And while things like PCI-X and 3GIO are on the horizon, I don't see them seriously changing the core issues without causing massive compatibility problems.
Both Intel Pentium III and IV and the AMD K6-2, and K7 (Athlon) are essentially RISC processors in the core. There's an outer layer that essentially translates from the x86 ISA to their internal micro architecture. Excepting for a few outdated commands that are virtually never used, which are implemented in microcode (and thus slow as hell comparatively).
There is no way to directly access the core ISA, nor do I know of it being documented anywhere. Intel planned to move the industry off the x86 ISA to Itanium, but so far that's utterly failed and with the Intergraph lawsuit it may be dead in the water now.
AMD's x86-64 still uses the x86 ISA, but extends it. Additionally if you talk to the chip in 64 bit mode then 8 (I think) additional GP registers are available in silicon - not just register renaming, which occurs already in every major CPU on the market today. The additional registers (all 64-bit wide) pretty much eliminate the need for an architecture move, at least as it relates to registers. Intel hasn't yet adopted x86-64 though (although they can since AMD must license to them because of IP agreements).
Still, what's funny is this desire for a performance increase... the x86 chips are the fastest CPUs on the market for integer performance and in the top 5 for floating point - although Alpha still reigns supreme for FP I believe. But compare the price of an x86 chip to pretty much anyone else and you start wondering exactly what the performance issue is.
The performance problems are not with the CPU anymore. The bus and memory interfaces are slow. They've been getting faster over the years, but closed vendor boxes like Sun, HP, IBM, etc. will always do better because they don't have to deal with getting a half dozen different major OEMs on board, along with countless peripheral manufacturers. Nor do they have to concern themselves overly with backwards compatibility.
Switching architectures is not that trivial. You seem to think that every company has the source code available for every piece of software they run. That isn't true. You seem to think that programs can easily be compiled between programs if written in C/C++ - also untrue. You think that the bug fixes for compiling between platforms are "small peculiarities" -- well, they may be small, but that doesn't make them easy. In fact, it makes it fucking hard because the differences are so buried in libraries, case-specific, and undocumented that it's a nightmare to find them. Yes, I've done this kind of thing. It's godawful.
Changing architecture is difficult. This is not a closed vendor market - anyone can put together an x86 box and you have at least 3 different CPU vendors to chose from, 3 - 5 motherboard chipsets, and a virtually infinite variety of other hardware. If Dell computer suddenly decides to move to a PPC architecture what's going to happen? They're going to lose all their customers and fast. Because the very limited benefits of a different architecture do not make up for the costs of going to one.
Yes, I said limited benefits. Yeah, when I was in college taking CompE, EE, and CS courses on CPU and system design I also found the x86 ISA to be the most demonic thing this side of Hell. Well, I'm older and wiser now and while x86 isn't perfect, it's not that bad either. It's price/performance ratio is utterly insane and getting better yearly. Contrary to the RISC architecture doom and gloomers, x86 didn't die under it's own backwards compatibility problems. It's actually grown far more than anyone expected and is now eating those same manufacturers for lunch.
You know, back in the early 90s when RISC was first starting to make noise the jibe was that Intel's x86 architecture was so bad because it couldn't ramp up in clock speeds. Intel was sitting at 66 MHz for their fastest chip while MIPS, Sparc, etc. were doing 300 MHz. Of course, now Intel has the MHz crown, with demonstrations exceeding 4 GHz, and the RISC crowd is saying that MHz isn't everything and they do more work/cycle than Intel (which is true, but the point remains).
All that said, go look at the SPEC CInt2000 and FP2000 results. Would you care to state what system has the highest integer performance? And whose chip has the highest floating point?
Oh, and let's not forget that I can buy roughly 50 server-class x86 systems for the price of one mid-level Sun/IBM/HP/etc. server.
Note - server performance isn't all about CPU, but since the OP wanted to make that argument, I just thought I'd point out how wrong he is. There is still quite a bit of need for high end servers with improved bus and memory architectures, but don't even try to argue that the CPU is more powerful. It isn't.
DTV (which includes HDTV) uses no more bandwidth than current analog signals do. It's just that the technology is 50 years more advanced - you can do things in the same bandwidth that were previously impossible. And, better yet, it requires less spacing between bands because we're that much better about broadcasting too.
I don't know about this new digital radio, but I'd be surprised if it used more bandwidth than an FM station.
As for your concerns - one of the biggest proponents of DTV are the emergency services (police, fire, ambulance). Because they're in desperate need of bandwidth and Congress promised them a chunk of the current analog TV spectrum. Until DTV has completely replaced analog they can't get it. And they can't simply change their systems out and use the same bandwidth - it would require every single emergency service in the US to change at the same time, or else you'd wind up with areas of mixed mode traffic that are unusable for both systems.
Military? Uh... the military is not in need of additional broadcast bandwidth. In fact, they're giving a lot of it back. If you think the bandwidth magic performed by DTV is incredible you haven't seen the military systems yet. Most comms are now point-to-point via laser or directional antenna to either an airborne platform or a satellite. Broadcast is spread spectrum and digital. Both use heavy encryption. The military is feeling the crunch, but in other ways -- the dependance on sat comms means that they don't have enough bandwidth on the sats themselves. That can be solved by finding additional orbital slots and launching new birds with better comms equipment.
CBs and cellphones hardly need more bandwidth. Unless, of course, you're talking about illegal CBs that have had their wattage pumped way beyond FCC regs. Imagine that - they cause problems to everything on nearby or resonant frequencies. This is why the FCC limited them, and why there are newer technologies using different spectra and different encoding (often digital). Cellphone bandwidth is a total non-issue.
As for your pseudo-science claims, you've managed to ignore all the real science in bandwidth usage and allocation thus far, so I'm not surprised you're bashing a channel that makes no attempt at real science and instead just shows entertainment. Oh, and it uses no over-the-air bandwidth either.
Don't even get me started on the idea of credit cards
What's wrong with them? They're a wonderful way to get a free 30-60 day float on money. Hell, some companies can't even get that much float from creditors!
Oh... you mean not paying them off in full every month? Well barring sudden emergencies that is stupid. Of course, for emergencies there should be an emergency fund, but sometimes shit flows thick. Fortunately it hasn't happened to me yet.
If a ten year loan costs too much per month, buy a cheaper house.
That's a fallacy. Yes, a 30 year mortgage will mean you deeply overpay for the house. Making additional payments can radically reduce the final payments of course - I expect to have my 30 year loan paid off in 15. So why don't I get a 15 year loan? Flexibility. If my wife and I both lose our jobs then I'd rather make the minimum payment on the house than wind up in foreclosure. And no, we're nowhere even close to overbought. I wasn't close to overbought on my single salary.
A 10 year loan schedule simply isn't viable for most people. I don't live in an area with absurdly overpriced housing, but a 10 year mortgage would've still put me in a neighborhood that would have shitty schools and potentially endangered my life. No thanks.
Besides, the argument can be made that you're better off owing on a house than owning it outright at the moment. 30 year mortgage rates are around 6% nationally. I bet you can make more than 6% on a 30 year investment if done wisely. It's not my cup of tea - I want to own my house, not pay the bank, but it's a viable strategy.
I agree with the gist of your argument - don't spend more than you make. Don't think creature comforts are necessities. Life within your means and your life will be far richer than having all the latest toys.
As others have said, you're doing better than a lot of adults. However, you're also rather mistargeted about what "you have to do".
Yes, saving money is smart. But going overboard isn't. Our economy is based on people buying stuff, not putting money in the mattress, or a savings account, or even stocks. Investing money is a good long term bet, but you still have to live and enjoy life. There is, as always, a good midpoint.
I'm not saying to go spend all your money to pump up the economy. I'm just saying that stashing it won't help either.
Oh, and as far as preparing "the day when the power goes out for good and there's no more water coming out of the tap" -- saving won't do you any good if that happens. If our economy and infrastructure falls apart that badly then the dollar will be worthless. Your best bet at that point is food, fuel, and weapons. Frankly, I don't see that happening, and if it does happen I'm not sure I want to be around to deal with it.
So basically, keep doing well like you seem to be. Worry less. Enjoy more. There is no replay option for your life.
Depends on your local housing market... some are way overinflated, but not all are.
As for the investment bit - houses are not a short term investment. Neither are stocks. If you're not going to be in either one for 5 years minimum then you might as well spend your money gambling.
If you do happen to live in an area where the housing market has gone over the top then you probably will see some deals in the next year or so.
As usual, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Don't overbuy on your house. Don't buy the best house in the neighborhood. Location, location, location.
The telling statistic I heard was that the annual murder rate for whatever municipal district tripled because of these shootings
To be clear, the Montgomery County sheriff stated that the first 5 murders had increased the homicide rate by 300%. This excludes the 6th killing (which was in Washington D.C. and outside the county lines as best I can tell).
Assuming that the sheriff is doing the math right, that means prior to this starting there had only been two murders in the county.
In response to the previous poster - the average serial killer is a white male in the upper 20's (average 28.5 for first victem). See here for more info. According to that page, however, the sniper isn't a serial killer since there wasn't a "cooling off" period... not that I particularly agree with that.
Yes. If it's a series 1 box then you can get an ethernet card from 9th Tee - there is a pseudo-PCI connector on the inside of the box and this heavily modified ethernet adaptor can be used. The v3.0 software even includes all the drivers needed - although it's not an officially supported mod still.
For series 2 boxes you can plug in a USB ethernet adapter to one of the USB 1.1 ports.
In either case you'll need a firewall, NAT, and something that provides DHCP services (which virtually all Cable/DSL routers do).
My wife and I currently have two TiVos, both standalone with lifetime subs. After losing a bunch of trees in our backyard we may finally be able to get DirecTV.
Are you saying that we could get a DirecTiVo's, transfer one lifetime sub to it, and in the future add a second DirecTiVo and have it be covered under the same subscription?
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It is about time WP starts pushing back crappy office
Yes, since it's been nearly a decade since Word pushed out crappy WP.
I agree that MS has gotten a lot of it's influence through shady dealings (undocumented calls, blackmail via OS monopoly, etc) but you also have to go back and look at the early days of GUI Word Processors. WordPerfect was utter shit. It lost the market share because they didn't transition from DOS-based word processing to WYSIWYG GUI word processing fast enough. And when they finally did make the transition they released a crappy product that was full of bugs and missing features.
If you want a real competitor for Word, take a look at Ami Pro. The only reason I can see for it's failure is the miserable marketing out of Lotus (and later IBM). It had most of the features before Word did, it was faster, slimmer, and worked great. Those ubiquitous button bars that are in GUI apps nowadays? Came from Ami Pro. I'm sure it had some technical shortcomings, but I don't know what they were offhand.
Ok, I quit playing over 6 months ago and haven't looked back. So I have no idea what stuff goes for now, what the cool items are, etc. -- but he's right in general. Plat is plentiful and irrelevant at the high end. Before the last expansion (Shadows of Luclin) plat was needed in massive quantities for high end guilds due to expenditures on spell reagents. My guild would go through roughly 5-10k a night, every night. And since we had a jackass steal plat from the guildfund it was actually an issue for awhile.
So I started selling. I listed all the crap the guild had and didn't need on a webpage and sold it at below market prices. In 6 hours (one night) I'd average 100k. And I wasn't a trader - they could do 2-3x that easily, but they worked each sale. I didn't care to. In under a month the guildfund went from empty to roughtly 1.5M platinum, at which point I quit the game.
From what I understand everything has severely depreciated since the Bazaar finally started working (imagine that! Eliminate artificial constraints on trade and false shortages and prices fall!), but the need for platinum in high end guilds has also been severely reduced - raids that used to cost 10k in materials now cost under 1k, because of mass group buff and other special abilities.
Oh yeah... at various times we had GMs investigate us for duping. Apparantly we were tying up something like 40% of the platinum on the server, and they just couldn't believe that it was legit (which it was).
Wow, that number is so off it's not even funny.
By the time Kunark came out individuals had amassed hundreds of thousands of pp. I know my character had something like 80k pp prior to Kunark.
Before SoL came out there were numerous guilds on various servers with over 1 million pp in guildfund. And I know that quite a few people in a guild have more than the guildfund itself - usually because they were obsessive traders and horders.
Shrug. Platinum is worthless at the high end. It serves only as another expendable commodity like food or water - the only thing you need tons of plat for is reagents (peridots, etc), and with the group buffing spells even that has become irrelevant (or so I hear - I stopped playing over 6 months ago).
Lights, like these OLEDs, are additive color. I can't imagine them not being able to make white
They probably can make white - but is it efficient?
If they're having lifespan issues with the blue emitters (as they are according to older articles and other posts) then it may be far better to have a fourth element which emits white than to use the 3 separate elements to create white.
Just a SWAG - I'm not up to speed on the technology at all.
Correct, which is inane since UD has distributed.net people working with them, a large portion of the UD framework is built on the d.net framework, and the d.net client is certainly cross-platform.
Shrug.
I run UD on my Windows boxen. When I setup some Linux boxen I'll run Folding@Home on them. They're both good projects. But I do prefer UD simply because I've seen cancer affect too many friends and family and I also worked in an oncology ward as a summer job.
The cancer project is being run through United Devices. This is a non-profit project and the data being generated will not be sold to a for-profit firm.
There's also Folding@Home which researches protein folding as well - although instead of only for cancer research it's generally for other medical research such as Alzheimer's, MS, etc. - also non-profit.
There's Genome@Home which analyzes the genome for medical purposes. Non-profit.
And, finally, if you're looking for a generic listing of distributed computing projects, check here.
This is way better than any VCR on the face of the planet.
Besides which, did you just utterly and completely miss the statement that most consumers don't even use the recording capabilities of VCRs?
And your point is?
Are you going to make the inane argument that two speakers at roughly 60 degrees of separation from the listening point can accurately and faithfully reproduce 360 degrees of sound? And I'm not even touching the Z-axis issue here.
When you figure that one out, let us know.
What we need is intelligent speakers, with DSP's in them. Then you plug a microphone in to it, and place it at your preferred listening spot. Then the speaker could analyse itself, and your listening area allowing it to compensate for any weaknesses in your setup
You've almost got it. But you don't put that logic in the speakers - you put it in the receiver/pre-amp.
Which is exactly what several high-end models do. Plug in the supplied microphone (thus alleviating the transfer issue brought up), place it at the listening position, and the receiver will automagically calibrate the speakers appropriately. It won't make up for abundantly bad room response, but it will at least calibrate levels and delays correctly.
Sigh... brands? I don't recall and I don't have my back issues of Stereophile Guide to Home Theater here for reference. But there's at least 3 or 4 different brands in the mid to high price range doing this now. Expect to see the same feature on commodity electronics in 2-3 years.
This has the advantage of making all music sources, stereos, and listening rooms sound better WITHOUT having to fork out more cash for new media
It does not solve the multi-channel issue. And guestimating 4 or 5 channels out of two channels is dicey at best. In general "Live" CDs will sound ok this way. Everything else will sound like crap.
Circuit City is eliminating sales of pre-recorded VHS movies at their stores nationwide. It's expected that the other major chains will follow suit in the next couple years. They're still selling VCRs and blank tapes, but that's it. I suspect that in a few years they won't even do that.
VHS takes up more shelf space than DVD and offers a lower profit margin. Consumers have bought DVD players in droves and you can get one for well under $100 now. Since most consumers don't even use the recording features of VCRs and DVD offers far greater convienence than VHS does it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that VHS is in its final years.
What if you really have to use the restroom?
So go to the restroom. Oh, you might lose? Yeah... so what? If you're playing on the stratospheric level where there's actually money involved that's one thing. Otherwise does it really matter?
And yes, I play online games. I know that there's other people playing as well and that in team games they're relying on you -- if you can't just quit the game to go AFK, then let them know you're AFK and they'll cover for you.
Ever heard of Core Wars? That was one of the first popular bot vs. bot games
Non sequitor. The OP was not playing a bot-vs-bot game, where the purpose is to write a better program than your adversary. It's a level playing field.
Writing a bot for a human played game may show you have programming skill, but actually using it to defeat other players is just lame. It doesn't prove you have any skill regarding the actual game. It just proves that you can code and are willing to cheat to make you look better.
Using a bot written by someone else to play is even lamer. That just shows you have no skill in any manner.
Which is made by Intel. Note I said "whose" and didn't specifically target x86.
Not that the P4 2.8GHz is very far behind the I2.
Anytime you modularize you have to design interfaces. Interfaces are inherently slow - there's a physical disconnect which simply can't have as good of an electrical connection, they're bulky (consider that while a Pentium IV chip package is 35 mm on a side (1225 mm^2), the actual chip is only 131 mm^2 - the size is needed primarily for all the pinouts from the chip), and they're noisy.
Consider that while you can buy a P4 that runs at 2.8 GHz internally (and the fast ALUs run at 5.6 GHz, although they're only 16-bits wide), the memory bus is a lackluster 133 MHz (which you get an effective 533 MHz from because it's quad pumped - you read 4 values every clock instead of just 1). The I/O bus also runs at 133 MHz. These are the only two external buses the CPU deals with.
If you were to try and segment the CPU similarly you'd quickly hit limitations. You simply can't run a multi-GHz electrical signal over a physical disconnect, at least not with current technology.
All of that said, if you look at how CPU cores are laid out the cache is distinctly segmented from the ALU, the ALU is segmented from the FPU, and so forth. It makes chip design easier since if you want to make a change to one part of the chip you minimize effects on other parts. It also helps for signal routing and noise prevention.
Also you can do more or less what you're asking - just not at high speeds. Modern chips are often preliminarily tested using gate arrays that can be reprogrammed quickly and easily... but instead of running at 3 GHz this test chip runs at 2 MHz. Maybe.
Oh... a final bit... back in the days of the 386 and 486 the 2nd level cache was actually on the motherboard, and different MB vendors would put different amounts of cache. Some even had it socketed or solderable so you could add more if you wanted! But by the time the P2 came out clock speeds were too high for this. The connection latency and distance were simply too high. So we wound up with the slot processors, where a CPU slot card had the CPU core and 1-4 second level caches on it. Pretty soon both Intel and AMD integrated the 2nd level cache onto the CPU itself (which wasn't previously possible because it would have made the chips far too big), which further improved speed. The next generation of CPUs are requiring 3rd level cache on the motherboards. How long before that gets integrated onto the CPU?
As others mentioned, MCA (MicroChannel Architecture) was IBM's abysmal attempt at recapturing the PC market. It died a horrible death, and deserved it. Frankly, the technology sucked only slightly less than the ISA/EISA bus it wanted to replace.
Anyone else remember the horrors of all those damn control files on floppies?
There are a lot of architectural nightmares in the PC design... and while some of them are at the CPU level (like the 6 GP registers), most of them are at the bus level. Who the hell puts the keyboard on the 2nd most important interrupt (IRQ1)? The entire bus is still borked, although PCI has mostly hidden that now. But the system and memory buses are the sole reason that IBM, HP, Sun, etc. have higher performance ratings than x86 -- the P4 and Athlon processors are faster in virtually every case on a CPU to CPU basis.
The bus and memory architecture is also why x86 does so incredibly bad in multi-CPU boxes. It's just not designed for it, the contention issues are hideous, and while you may only get 1.9x the performance going to a 2 CPU Sun box, you'll only get 1.7x on x86. It gets worse as you scale (note - those numbers are for reference only, I don't recall the exact relationships for dual CPU x86 boxes anymore, but the RISC systems handle it better due to bus design).
Really there's nothing wrong with the x86 processors except to the CompE/EE/CS student. I was there once and couldn't stand it. Real life has shown that it isn't that bad, and recent times have shown that it's actually really damn good. Except for the buses. They suck. And while things like PCI-X and 3GIO are on the horizon, I don't see them seriously changing the core issues without causing massive compatibility problems.
Both Intel Pentium III and IV and the AMD K6-2, and K7 (Athlon) are essentially RISC processors in the core. There's an outer layer that essentially translates from the x86 ISA to their internal micro architecture. Excepting for a few outdated commands that are virtually never used, which are implemented in microcode (and thus slow as hell comparatively).
There is no way to directly access the core ISA, nor do I know of it being documented anywhere. Intel planned to move the industry off the x86 ISA to Itanium, but so far that's utterly failed and with the Intergraph lawsuit it may be dead in the water now.
AMD's x86-64 still uses the x86 ISA, but extends it. Additionally if you talk to the chip in 64 bit mode then 8 (I think) additional GP registers are available in silicon - not just register renaming, which occurs already in every major CPU on the market today. The additional registers (all 64-bit wide) pretty much eliminate the need for an architecture move, at least as it relates to registers. Intel hasn't yet adopted x86-64 though (although they can since AMD must license to them because of IP agreements).
Still, what's funny is this desire for a performance increase... the x86 chips are the fastest CPUs on the market for integer performance and in the top 5 for floating point - although Alpha still reigns supreme for FP I believe. But compare the price of an x86 chip to pretty much anyone else and you start wondering exactly what the performance issue is.
The performance problems are not with the CPU anymore. The bus and memory interfaces are slow. They've been getting faster over the years, but closed vendor boxes like Sun, HP, IBM, etc. will always do better because they don't have to deal with getting a half dozen different major OEMs on board, along with countless peripheral manufacturers. Nor do they have to concern themselves overly with backwards compatibility.
Ok, when you get to the Real World, let us know.
Switching architectures is not that trivial. You seem to think that every company has the source code available for every piece of software they run. That isn't true. You seem to think that programs can easily be compiled between programs if written in C/C++ - also untrue. You think that the bug fixes for compiling between platforms are "small peculiarities" -- well, they may be small, but that doesn't make them easy. In fact, it makes it fucking hard because the differences are so buried in libraries, case-specific, and undocumented that it's a nightmare to find them. Yes, I've done this kind of thing. It's godawful.
Changing architecture is difficult. This is not a closed vendor market - anyone can put together an x86 box and you have at least 3 different CPU vendors to chose from, 3 - 5 motherboard chipsets, and a virtually infinite variety of other hardware. If Dell computer suddenly decides to move to a PPC architecture what's going to happen? They're going to lose all their customers and fast. Because the very limited benefits of a different architecture do not make up for the costs of going to one.
Yes, I said limited benefits. Yeah, when I was in college taking CompE, EE, and CS courses on CPU and system design I also found the x86 ISA to be the most demonic thing this side of Hell. Well, I'm older and wiser now and while x86 isn't perfect, it's not that bad either. It's price/performance ratio is utterly insane and getting better yearly. Contrary to the RISC architecture doom and gloomers, x86 didn't die under it's own backwards compatibility problems. It's actually grown far more than anyone expected and is now eating those same manufacturers for lunch.
You know, back in the early 90s when RISC was first starting to make noise the jibe was that Intel's x86 architecture was so bad because it couldn't ramp up in clock speeds. Intel was sitting at 66 MHz for their fastest chip while MIPS, Sparc, etc. were doing 300 MHz. Of course, now Intel has the MHz crown, with demonstrations exceeding 4 GHz, and the RISC crowd is saying that MHz isn't everything and they do more work/cycle than Intel (which is true, but the point remains).
All that said, go look at the SPEC CInt2000 and FP2000 results. Would you care to state what system has the highest integer performance? And whose chip has the highest floating point?
Oh, and let's not forget that I can buy roughly 50 server-class x86 systems for the price of one mid-level Sun/IBM/HP/etc. server.
Note - server performance isn't all about CPU, but since the OP wanted to make that argument, I just thought I'd point out how wrong he is. There is still quite a bit of need for high end servers with improved bus and memory architectures, but don't even try to argue that the CPU is more powerful. It isn't.
What crack are you on?
DTV (which includes HDTV) uses no more bandwidth than current analog signals do. It's just that the technology is 50 years more advanced - you can do things in the same bandwidth that were previously impossible. And, better yet, it requires less spacing between bands because we're that much better about broadcasting too.
I don't know about this new digital radio, but I'd be surprised if it used more bandwidth than an FM station.
As for your concerns - one of the biggest proponents of DTV are the emergency services (police, fire, ambulance). Because they're in desperate need of bandwidth and Congress promised them a chunk of the current analog TV spectrum. Until DTV has completely replaced analog they can't get it. And they can't simply change their systems out and use the same bandwidth - it would require every single emergency service in the US to change at the same time, or else you'd wind up with areas of mixed mode traffic that are unusable for both systems.
Military? Uh... the military is not in need of additional broadcast bandwidth. In fact, they're giving a lot of it back. If you think the bandwidth magic performed by DTV is incredible you haven't seen the military systems yet. Most comms are now point-to-point via laser or directional antenna to either an airborne platform or a satellite. Broadcast is spread spectrum and digital. Both use heavy encryption. The military is feeling the crunch, but in other ways -- the dependance on sat comms means that they don't have enough bandwidth on the sats themselves. That can be solved by finding additional orbital slots and launching new birds with better comms equipment.
CBs and cellphones hardly need more bandwidth. Unless, of course, you're talking about illegal CBs that have had their wattage pumped way beyond FCC regs. Imagine that - they cause problems to everything on nearby or resonant frequencies. This is why the FCC limited them, and why there are newer technologies using different spectra and different encoding (often digital). Cellphone bandwidth is a total non-issue.
As for your pseudo-science claims, you've managed to ignore all the real science in bandwidth usage and allocation thus far, so I'm not surprised you're bashing a channel that makes no attempt at real science and instead just shows entertainment. Oh, and it uses no over-the-air bandwidth either.
Don't even get me started on the idea of credit cards
What's wrong with them? They're a wonderful way to get a free 30-60 day float on money. Hell, some companies can't even get that much float from creditors!
Oh... you mean not paying them off in full every month? Well barring sudden emergencies that is stupid. Of course, for emergencies there should be an emergency fund, but sometimes shit flows thick. Fortunately it hasn't happened to me yet.
If a ten year loan costs too much per month, buy a cheaper house.
That's a fallacy. Yes, a 30 year mortgage will mean you deeply overpay for the house. Making additional payments can radically reduce the final payments of course - I expect to have my 30 year loan paid off in 15. So why don't I get a 15 year loan? Flexibility. If my wife and I both lose our jobs then I'd rather make the minimum payment on the house than wind up in foreclosure. And no, we're nowhere even close to overbought. I wasn't close to overbought on my single salary.
A 10 year loan schedule simply isn't viable for most people. I don't live in an area with absurdly overpriced housing, but a 10 year mortgage would've still put me in a neighborhood that would have shitty schools and potentially endangered my life. No thanks.
Besides, the argument can be made that you're better off owing on a house than owning it outright at the moment. 30 year mortgage rates are around 6% nationally. I bet you can make more than 6% on a 30 year investment if done wisely. It's not my cup of tea - I want to own my house, not pay the bank, but it's a viable strategy.
I agree with the gist of your argument - don't spend more than you make. Don't think creature comforts are necessities. Life within your means and your life will be far richer than having all the latest toys.
As others have said, you're doing better than a lot of adults. However, you're also rather mistargeted about what "you have to do".
Yes, saving money is smart. But going overboard isn't. Our economy is based on people buying stuff, not putting money in the mattress, or a savings account, or even stocks. Investing money is a good long term bet, but you still have to live and enjoy life. There is, as always, a good midpoint.
I'm not saying to go spend all your money to pump up the economy. I'm just saying that stashing it won't help either.
Oh, and as far as preparing "the day when the power goes out for good and there's no more water coming out of the tap" -- saving won't do you any good if that happens. If our economy and infrastructure falls apart that badly then the dollar will be worthless. Your best bet at that point is food, fuel, and weapons. Frankly, I don't see that happening, and if it does happen I'm not sure I want to be around to deal with it.
So basically, keep doing well like you seem to be. Worry less. Enjoy more. There is no replay option for your life.
Depends on your local housing market... some are way overinflated, but not all are.
As for the investment bit - houses are not a short term investment. Neither are stocks. If you're not going to be in either one for 5 years minimum then you might as well spend your money gambling.
If you do happen to live in an area where the housing market has gone over the top then you probably will see some deals in the next year or so.
As usual, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Don't overbuy on your house. Don't buy the best house in the neighborhood. Location, location, location.
The telling statistic I heard was that the annual murder rate for whatever municipal district tripled because of these shootings
To be clear, the Montgomery County sheriff stated that the first 5 murders had increased the homicide rate by 300%. This excludes the 6th killing (which was in Washington D.C. and outside the county lines as best I can tell).
Assuming that the sheriff is doing the math right, that means prior to this starting there had only been two murders in the county.
In response to the previous poster - the average serial killer is a white male in the upper 20's (average 28.5 for first victem). See here for more info. According to that page, however, the sniper isn't a serial killer since there wasn't a "cooling off" period... not that I particularly agree with that.
Nah... maximum security Federal prisons are no fun to be sure, but they're not nearly as ugly as a "longtimer" State penn.
Yes. If it's a series 1 box then you can get an ethernet card from 9th Tee - there is a pseudo-PCI connector on the inside of the box and this heavily modified ethernet adaptor can be used. The v3.0 software even includes all the drivers needed - although it's not an officially supported mod still.
For series 2 boxes you can plug in a USB ethernet adapter to one of the USB 1.1 ports.
In either case you'll need a firewall, NAT, and something that provides DHCP services (which virtually all Cable/DSL routers do).
The key bit is that you have to have the telephone line plugged into a surge protector... which a lot of people don't.
Of course, the second time mine died it was plugged into one (including phone line) and it didn't help.
Could you explain further?
My wife and I currently have two TiVos, both standalone with lifetime subs. After losing a bunch of trees in our backyard we may finally be able to get DirecTV.
Are you saying that we could get a DirecTiVo's, transfer one lifetime sub to it, and in the future add a second DirecTiVo and have it be covered under the same subscription?