It has been rumored that after Intel gets its yield up, they no longer have to rate each CPU for MHZ, and just randomly mark each one however they want depending on what the market asks for. If they need more 2.8ghz this month, they will mark more of them 2.8ghz. Since they are all tested high enough, they don't have to worry about which goes where. Essentially, the same exact CPU is being sold in different packages, with different prices, and as different products.
When Bausch and Lomb did this with yearly, monthly, and weekly contact lenses, they were convicted of fraud. Now you can't find the so called "yearly" contact lenses they used to make, and they don't cost 150$ a pop. Now the eye doctor will tell you to buy the weekly's and clean them every day and keep them until they tear, if you are interested in saving money.
your whole timing argument is off, and wrong. Timing issues can be seen when you run your FSB unsynched with the memory clock, or the PCI clock, or any other bus that is important to performance.
Increasing your CPU clock speed by increasing the multiplier has nothing to do with timing issues related to any of these busses. The cpu only interfaces via the Front Side Bus, and as long as you keep it at the same speed, and use a multiplier to clock your CPU, all other busses will sync up with it just fine and dandy, with no penalty.
Even if you DO increase your FSB, most chipsets have syncronous memory, agp, and PCI busses (especially back then) which sync with the FSB no matter what clock you have it at, by increasing their own clock by a dividor or multiplier. Thus you will see an improvement in performance. (note, stability may be decreased, but performance will only increase)
When you get into asyncronous busses, or north bridges that don't sync the FSB with the Memory bus, then you run into timing issues that do have real performance problems. But only have those been introduced into the PC market with the newer VIA Chipsets that support faster DDR memory clock than the CPU's FSB interface can handle.
IIRC, the Apple G3 was overclocked using a multiplier clock modification. I heard of some people also increasing the FSB. But since the mac G3 had the same FSB as Memory clock, no matter what you did to the FSB, it was always exactly the same as the memory bus, and thus no timing issues were involved.
While you make some good points about the cost of living, I still disagree with your basic argument.
According to the data, the classes of America are polarizing. the upper 40% are getting significantly richer, and the lower 60% are getting only marginally richer.so the graph will have a thin spot in the middle if you do a linear representation of income vs year. That means that there will be very few people making the mean wage in America, and many many people making closer to the extremes.
Now, while this trend is represented in the table, you do make a good point about living cost. But if you think about it, that will only change the thresholds that seperate the lower class from the poverty level. and the lower class from the eventually relatively non-existant middle class.
Since in fact the lower class will be getting larger (percentage wise) due to this trend, but without the data to support it, I am willing to bet that the percentage of people below the poverty line will increase, just because of the fact that there will be more percentage of people squished on that side of the spectrum.
But even if the poverty line is such that nobody gets below it, due to some reason that is irrelevant, You will still have a lopsided and polarized class spectrum. where the middle class is relatively small (compared to today), the lower class has the numbers, and the upper class has the wealth.
This structure would be somewhat different than today, because the middle class wouldn't be so fat compared to the poles. Even if everyone is above the poverty line, do we really want this kind of class structure in America? I doubt it.
Unless of course, the trend discontinues, or the government interveans. In which case, all the above would be irrelevant
The data very much supports exactly that argument. Everything is relative. If you increased your wealth by $90K one year, 100K the next, 110K after thatetc.. each year, and I increase my wealth by $15K one year, 12K the next, then 10K, etc.. each year, and this is general to the entire population of the United States (being more poor than rich, this is possible, and is what the charts reflect), then the people generating less wealth than the richer person is getting poorer relative to the mean of the wealth. In other words, the poor people are all losing a percentage of the overall wealth, and the richer people are gaining a percentage of the overall wealth. If this trend continues over many years (which it has already done for the last 10+), it will effectively polarize the economic classes in America. There is only so much wealth. and it is increasing in size each day due to inflation. According to the charts I have shown, the middle column, and everything to the left is losing money after taking into account the overall added income to the whole of the people.
Sure, 4.25/hr could get you by if you carefully allocated each penny in your budget in 1995, but today, that ain't getting you anywhere but homeless. So they raised minimum wages to 5.15. Maybe one day someone will raise minimum wage up again, because if they don't, the poorest of the poor will soon be screwed according to current trends.
Although we are about due for another pole reversal, this is not going to lose any data stored on magnetic devices (unless there is a huge influx of magnetic field, significantly larger than the current magnetic field of the earth).
To test your hypothesis of pole reversals ruining your data, take a hard drive that is turned on and in a machine (such as a laptop computer), face the computer magnetic north (use a compass, not the north star) and then spin the laptop computer 180 degrees. If there is significant data loss, then your hypothesis may be correct. If there is no data loss, you are probably just full of hot air.
You can replicate this experiment to more exacting specifications by sending a laptop to australia from the US and see if the data is still intact when it arrives.
As far as magnetic storms, this is another possability that needs to be looked into. It will be nice one day when cheap, large, and standard optical backup storage becomes mainstream. (CD-R is not large, and DVD-R is not standard nor cheap nor fast. IMHO, tape backups are a waste of time if they are magnetic unless you are storing them in seperate physical locations (which most people I have run into don't) when you could be using mirroring. Maybe one day we will have optical tapes that can be as large as we want. I doubt that day will come any time in the near future.
The most interesting table is the one titled "Share of Aggregate Income: All races"
These tables are divided into 5 sections by population of people. Out of all the people in America, 20% have 3.5% of the wealth, 20% have 8.7% of the wealth, 20% have 14.6% of the wealth... etc... and the top 20% have 50.1% of the total yearly income. Each column represents the same number of people (except the last column, representing only the top 5%, which is just extra info.), in their respective 1/5th of the spectrum: Lower, Lower-Middle, Middle, Upper-Middle, Upper, and finally, Upper-Upper(5%)
As you can see, over the years, only the Upper-Middle and Upper class have increased their percentage of total US Income. Middle class, Lower-Middle class, and Lower class have all taken decreases in their paycheck w.r.t. overall combined US Income.
As you can see, the poorer are getting poorer (Relatively, which is all that matters), and the richer keep getting richer.
If you tabulate the statistics as represented here, there is no such thing as "middle class shrinking" syndrome as I have described in the above post (because they are equal # of people in each column). And I cannot find any US Census tables which represent their defined middle class size, upper class size, and lower class size. But as has been demonstrated, Since the upper 40% of the people are continually increasing their net worth, and the lower 60% are continually decreasing their net worth, the "middle" Middle class is dispersing left, and the "upper" Middle class is dispersing right. This is in effect how the class structure is polarizing as I described above.
If anybody can find actual numbers of middle class, lower class, and upper class over the years, I would be interested in seeing them. But they will look similar to what I have described, given the data provided in the above link.
I'm sorry but I cannot find the article I once read last year about the american middle class shrinking faster than european countries, but I'm quite sure I did read it, and if I happen to find it, I will post it here.
The alternative is already here, and has been getting stronger and stronger by the year. Do you really think we aren't currently, and have been, going back to this alternative the past 5 years?
The middle class of the United States is shrinking faster than ever, and significantly faster than most other democratic countries. We have the smallest percentage of people in our middle class compared to other top democratic countries. The upper class is also shrinking, but becoming more powerfull. The poor people are increasing in numbers like nobody's business. While this might not have anything to do with unions, they (unions) certaintly aren't preventing it.
I believe unions had their place, but now are pretty much obsolete considering that the coporations have congress people literally, and legally, on their payroll.
The only problem with your argument is that this wasn't PnP. It was predetermined cards that were supported in the basic OS.
If there was any hardware that came out after the version of OS you had, it either had to have a user installed driver, manually, or it had to be hardware that was compatible with thie OS's built in drivers.
This is in no way, shape, form, or fashion remotely close to what PnP is. In the mac, if the hardware was supported, it worked. If it wasn't, it didn't ever work.
The funny thing is that the same is true for current OS 9 and OS X. It either "just works" or it doesnt work at all.
What PnP really means, and has always really ment, is that system resources (such as IRQs, and IO addresses) were allocated by the OS automatically, with no jumper configuration. Since the mac supported so very little pieces of hardware compared to x86, there wasn't any need for PnP on the mac platform.
BTW, everything that is a PCI card IS PnP, by nature it's IRQ's and IO's are set by either the BIOS Or OS. When people talk about PnP in win95, they mean ISA-PnP, which was a dirty hack that didn't work with most hardware. When people talk about PnP today, that is something that all OS's with PCI implementations support. There was no such notion of PnP before ISA-PnP. Anything before then that "just worked" only worked because its IRQ's and IO's were predetermined, or the factory jumper settings were such that there were no conflicts with existing hardware in your system.
That is the most ridiculous blanket statement I have ever seen.
Anyway, what about those other services that need identd? just because they aren't used often, doesn't mean they aren't usefull. NATing everyone is the most retarted thing you could do, and no amount of rationalization is going to fix that.
"Lets charge our students outrageous network fees with tuition, and then NAT the fuck out of them. That will sure put our network to some GREAT USE!!! wah00000!"
If you want to effectively stop outsiders to not be able to get to your students computers, why not give them real IPs and filter certain ports at the router level to improve security. I have heard of people using protocol detection software to filter protocols and known exploits that are unwanted. At least then you will:
1) do less maintenance work 2) have less support costs 3) have an actual working network that is usefull.
Part of the cost of running a network and selling network access, which universities do, is to provide a usefull network with reasonable restrictions to reasonable people. What's next, are you going to start serving DOG FOOD at the school cafeteria because the kitchen staff is too fucking lazy to cook dinner????
Get real.
I'm sorry my friend, but your wrong, both technically and morally. NAT isn't going to stop the spread of viruses over your network. It isn't going to stop people from sharing files, and it isn't going to improve security any significant amount that couldn't be done with other means. All it is going to do is restrict usage for the only users on the network that are actually PAYING for the access.
Security is a full time job. Ignoring the problem by denying access so you can take an extra cigarette break each day is not the solution, and isn't what network admins are hired to do.
The funny thing about your statement is that the bug technically isn't "Invalid" according to HTML specifications..
What is really needed, and what mozilla project finally decided to do way after all this shit went down, is add a second quirks mode for transitional that doesn't force people to use full blown quirks, but allows them to use standard, compliant html4.01 code and still render correctly in opera, mozilla, and IE/win. The root of the problem is that if you trigger quirks mode, it doesn't work properly in IE/win or Opera, but if you trigger standards mode(by using html4.01 transitional), the very same HTML(standard compliant HTML 4.01 transitional, nonetheless) won't render under mozilla properly, but will in IE/win and Opera. Denial of a bug does not make a bug cease to exist.
The reason for this problem is that "transitional" code was being rendered with standards mode, which standards mode could not possibly do correctly. And no standard says to treat "transitional" as "standard". Common practice (the reason quoted by mozilla developers) is no excuse for denial of a known bug's existance.
Stating that these comments were abusive, or uninformed is just plain silly. They were all legitimate concerns, and it was on the part of mozilla developers' arrogance (or maybe lazyness) that the bug wasn't fixed in a reasonable timeframe.
In the end, you can't blame the developers, because they are volunteers, but with a "developer is always right" attitude, as such was the case in this bug report, then you can't blame the users for letting them know they are in fact wrong.
Reading bug reports that are full of information on what exactly the bug is, where it is reproduced, how to reproduce it, why its doing it, when its doing it, etc.. is going to give the developer a usefull report with information that he needs to fix the bug..
If you add extra information that is not needed, inflamatory or not, that is extra work the developer has to do to fix the bug. It is equivilent to sorting through your spam mail every day. You pick out the bugs you see have usefull information, and proiritize them above the rest. Since bug reports continuously flow into the database, there is usually no time for a bug report that gives no worthwhile information because all the developers time is spent fixing bugs that have REAL bug reports.
It is signal to noise ratio, and if you can't understand that, your a fucking idiot.
"How do you know how much the students at this person's school are paying for network access? Do you have any idea how much that network access costs? $50 a month will not purchase you all of the core routing equipment so that you can get (at minimum) 10 mbps connections to all of the campus servers. When you buy DSL, what do you get? One connection. At a Uni you are connecting to potentially thousands of other computers at very high speeds."
This is just my point. wether this school is private or public, the students are paying for at least half the bandwidth, directly(unless there are extreme circumstances where the state pays for it all). A university that has this student access policy is in effect giving something less than you could get with DSL, for a far far greater price. This is just plain silly, and having access to thousands of computers at high speed really doesnt make any difference if you can't access the outside world from your home PC in your dorm. Not to mention that it is impossible physically to get 3rd party internet service in a dorm (because of school policy and contracts in effect at most universities)
This is rediculous and since the students are paying out the ass for this access, really shouldn't be tolerated. Not only is this the most extreme use of a firewall to block access to PAYING USERS (yes, they pay a fucking fortune, more than 50/month they could be getting for DSL, included in the room fee) but it is just plain incompetance that any admin or policy would willfully do such a thing.
This is not even a reasonable option. this effectively is a DoS to all yoru users requiring ident and other features that non-routeable IP's cannot do.
Looking at my port forwarding rules on my router, if I were ever paying for access for a non routeable IP, I would stop paying immediately, especially since these students are paying hundreds of dollars per year in internet access (yes, the internet fee is directly included into the price of the room, per semester)
"You are assuming that a 64-bit processor can actually process all the data in its larger address space in the time it takes a 32-bit processor to process data in its smaller address space. That would mean a 64-bit processor would have to be thousands of times faster than a 32, but really you'll be lucky if it's twice as fast."
Actually, YOU are assuming that is what he means. What he really means is that currently, video games need to do 64 bit math. Currently, on a 32 bit CPU, you have to do multiple instructions to do 64 bit integer math. With 64 bit computing on the new AMD x86-64 platform, you will be able to process 64 bit integers in LESS time than you can on currently available Athlon CPU's. Your parent post said nothing about >4G of memory. He is talking about data processing speed. The facts are that on AMD's new 64 bit platform, nearly all processing (both 64 and 32 bit chuncks of data) is inherantly faster. To top it off, processing of 64 bit numbers is more than two times faster than on traditional 32 bit machines.
(Faster, because there is more cache, and more general purpose registers, and memory latency is reduced by having on chip memory controler, and on 32 bit machines, it takes at minimum of 2 instructions to process 64 bit integers [and in actuality, more than that])
The molecular structure of the liquid he mentions is such that when packed into a liquid, it takes up less volume than liquid hydrogen. Its like the puzzel pieces fit together more nicely.
I do not know if this particular compound he mentioned is like this, and I'm not a chemist. But I remember in chemistry class we mixed 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol with 1/2 cup some other liquid, and out came ~3/4 cup liquid, not a full cup like expected. The reason for this is as I have described above.
"The addition of hardware MMU (preemptive multitasking and protected memory) and on-chip FPU meant that a 386 added considerable value over a 286. The one advantage of 64-bit processors like Opteron is that it can address >4G of memory. It's more like the jump from P2 to P3 in terms of actual impact on the market."
Actually, since you didn't do your research first, I'll enlighten you with what "going to 64 bit" means.. In AMD's case, with x86-64, not only are the general purpose registers doubling in size, but they are doubling in number. And since they are double in size, and the circuitry is there, you can do math on 64 bit integers in the same time as you can do 32 bit integers on a 32 bit machine. When adding more general purpose registers, this means the CPU doesn't have to access main memory nearly as much, and the same holds true for L1 and L2 cache. Top this off with the fact that AMD is doubling its L2 on chip cache, and you have yourself a much much much faster machine. Even if you run it in legacy 32 bit mode, you still have a faster machine than an Athlon. Run in native 64 bit mode, and you have 16 General purpose registers, plus all the other advantages mentioned above. To top this all off, AMD has improved on their SIMD units, and it looks as if they will be able to do floating point math much faster than traditional x87 code if developers choose to use it. (note, this also holds true for intel's latest offerings)
"you can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC. Gamers tend to see themselves as the most important part of the market, but the most important market is actually the corporate desktop. People who, every now and again, buy PCs by the thousand or the ten thousand."
So what if I can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC? Are you going to use that on the home desktop? (which BTW, is the second biggest market for PC's our there, second only to coporate desktops). You think nVidia made all their money on coporate desktops? I don't see my geforce 4 running on any Sun Blades around here...
Secondly, I never said that gamers were the most important part of the market, I simply stated the fact that the video game market is traditionally what pushes the home PC to a faster and faster standard.
"'One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components.'
If Intel and AMD are smart, they'll do it like Apple - essentially throw away their old hardware and rely on emulation for compatibility. It is inevitable that AMD will have had to make compromises to ensure backwards compatibility, and those will hurt it in the long run."
If you will re-read my post, I stated exactly what you think AMD should do. With the x86-64 platform, AMD has discontinued real modes, and other outdated parts to the x86 ISA to shed the bloat. But you are still mistaken on what exactly compatibility means. I never said anything about old hardware I needed to be compatible with. I mentioned USB scanners, printers, and webcams. Since when are these old hardware, and since when does apple not support the same things? Where EXACTLY is the 64 bit system from Sun and everyone else that will run this COMMODITY hardware that is in every computer store on the planet? Short answer: there isn't.
In closing, you have not refuted a single statement I have made, and insted went off on a tangent argument in every single rebuttal you made. You haven't shown anything except repeat your origional premise that nobody needs 64 bit, and have given no new evidence, or argument. Next time maybe you should try to think about it before you get labeled as a troll.
"But Engineers are the only people in the near future who need 64-bit processors on their desktops."
To add to the list of this siblings' posts, most newer video games from the top manufacturers are also going to need 64 bit. Unreal will soon require 64 bit for their mod development tools, I'm sure id software is also going to have no problem improving performance on 64 bit platforms.
Did anybody really need 32 bit CPU's when intel went from 286 -> 386? Maybe not, maybe so. But that is what happened, and now everyone uses 32 bit, and needs AT LEAST that. It's only evolution that we move to 64bit cpu's, more general purpose registers, and shed the excess bloat that AMD is doing.
Sure, you might not find a use for it yourself, and if you haven't, you should keep buying 32 bit cpu's. But for me, and many more gamers and game developoers/modders (who are the ones that have pushing the desktop performance barrier higher and higher over the years) are going to use them, and NEED them. I plan on running the latest video games on my 64bit athlons when they arrive.
"But there already are affordable 64-bit servers for the masses, cheap SPARCs, PPCs and so on."
If you consider cheap SPARCs, PPC,s and so on to be cheap, high performance, and usefull on the desktop, you have another thing coming. For one, there are no, and never will be, drivers for commodity hardware for these platforms. Secondly the chips that offer reasonable performance aren't "cheap" as you call it. They are very very expensive, and their platform is also very very expensive (relative to x86-64, and x86-32). And there is only a small handfull of software packages(that the mainstream doesn't use, gamers can't use, etc..) that run on them compared to what AMD is offering.
"The one and only edge that x86 has is backwards compatibility and the use of very cheap commodity components."
though this is not the only edge x86 has (ie, look at its high competition market, which drives performance up way faster than the platforms you mentioned previously) you have hit this nail right on the head. One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components. Untill those SPARC, 64bit PPC, and Alpha machines run my webcam, my USB Scanner, my USB printer, my IDE hard drives for a reasonable price without having to buy proprietary and expensive compatibility components, your argument stands mute.
Mars's lower than earth gravity is just one small reason its atmosphere is so thin. The main reason is that there is not much volcano activity on the surface (or in the non-existant oceans) to replenish the atmosphere.
All planets lose atmosphere at a continuous rate, which depends on their mass of the planet, thickness of the atmosphere, and temperature. The determining factor on keeping one's atmosphere is wether or not there is something to bring new gasses to the surface from within the planet. Mars, unlike Earth, has very little of this activity, and therefore, cannot maintain a very thick atmosphere on it's own.
On a side note, one of the reasons there is little volcanic activity is related to its mass. The smaller a planet, the sooner its inner core will cool to the point that the crust is too thick to allow volcanoes, and just the general lower temperatures and less molten rock. The moon is an extreme case of this that once had molten oceans, and now has almost no (if any) molten rock in its inner core. Eventually, the earth will have the same problem.
I don't think you seem to understand the concepts of how programs are run...
When you load quake3, it loads the executeable into system ram, and all texture, model, map, and sound data into system RAM.
Technically, you can burn a CD with the quake3 directory in it and run the game without problems (provided you don't change the configs, in which case, you would need to patch quake3 to support configs in other directories than the game directory.)
The drawback is that game load times will suffer horribly, unless its a small game that is less than a few megs to load.
As it stands now, the map, texture, sound, and model data is in the order of hundreds of megabytes (per level!), and that ain't gonna load off a CD-ROM at any reasonable speed. Most systems with 7200 RPM drives and 1GB memory (read: not using swap) still have to pause for considerable time periods while waiting for map loads.
The idea is sound, but not practical for modern 3D Games, and it will never happen for games more complex than minesweeper.
BTW, this same principle is true for most binary programs run on windows, and especially true for most 3D games, not just quake3
to answer this question, I think the main reason to release in BSD license is so anybody can use it. If it was only licensed under GPL, commercial companies might not want to deal with QT under just a GPL License. Currently, if you want to keep your source closed, you must use the QT proprietary license which you pay for, if a company were to buy this license, develop a closed product, and then Troll Tech later tanked, they would still have a license that would allow them to keep their code closed, and actively maintained by the community.
Mainly, I think they don't want companies to shy away from QT (and hence, KDE) because they think they might be locked in to just the GPL(which requires the soruce be given) in case TrollTech went under.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you don't like it, move; I really don't give a damn."
I wholely agree. People with such attitude should leave. They are doing more harm than good.
It has been rumored that after Intel gets its yield up, they no longer have to rate each CPU for MHZ, and just randomly mark each one however they want depending on what the market asks for. If they need more 2.8ghz this month, they will mark more of them 2.8ghz. Since they are all tested high enough, they don't have to worry about which goes where. Essentially, the same exact CPU is being sold in different packages, with different prices, and as different products.
When Bausch and Lomb did this with yearly, monthly, and weekly contact lenses, they were convicted of fraud. Now you can't find the so called "yearly" contact lenses they used to make, and they don't cost 150$ a pop. Now the eye doctor will tell you to buy the weekly's and clean them every day and keep them until they tear, if you are interested in saving money.
your whole timing argument is off, and wrong. Timing issues can be seen when you run your FSB unsynched with the memory clock, or the PCI clock, or any other bus that is important to performance.
Increasing your CPU clock speed by increasing the multiplier has nothing to do with timing issues related to any of these busses. The cpu only interfaces via the Front Side Bus, and as long as you keep it at the same speed, and use a multiplier to clock your CPU, all other busses will sync up with it just fine and dandy, with no penalty.
Even if you DO increase your FSB, most chipsets have syncronous memory, agp, and PCI busses (especially back then) which sync with the FSB no matter what clock you have it at, by increasing their own clock by a dividor or multiplier. Thus you will see an improvement in performance. (note, stability may be decreased, but performance will only increase)
When you get into asyncronous busses, or north bridges that don't sync the FSB with the Memory bus, then you run into timing issues that do have real performance problems. But only have those been introduced into the PC market with the newer VIA Chipsets that support faster DDR memory clock than the CPU's FSB interface can handle.
IIRC, the Apple G3 was overclocked using a multiplier clock modification. I heard of some people also increasing the FSB. But since the mac G3 had the same FSB as Memory clock, no matter what you did to the FSB, it was always exactly the same as the memory bus, and thus no timing issues were involved.
While you make some good points about the cost of living, I still disagree with your basic argument.
According to the data, the classes of America are polarizing. the upper 40% are getting significantly richer, and the lower 60% are getting only marginally richer.so the graph will have a thin spot in the middle if you do a linear representation of income vs year. That means that there will be very few people making the mean wage in America, and many many people making closer to the extremes.
Now, while this trend is represented in the table, you do make a good point about living cost. But if you think about it, that will only change the thresholds that seperate the lower class from the poverty level. and the lower class from the eventually relatively non-existant middle class.
Since in fact the lower class will be getting larger (percentage wise) due to this trend, but without the data to support it, I am willing to bet that the percentage of people below the poverty line will increase, just because of the fact that there will be more percentage of people squished on that side of the spectrum.
But even if the poverty line is such that nobody gets below it, due to some reason that is irrelevant, You will still have a lopsided and polarized class spectrum. where the middle class is relatively small (compared to today), the lower class has the numbers, and the upper class has the wealth.
This structure would be somewhat different than today, because the middle class wouldn't be so fat compared to the poles. Even if everyone is above the poverty line, do we really want this kind of class structure in America? I doubt it.
Unless of course, the trend discontinues, or the government interveans. In which case, all the above would be irrelevant
The data very much supports exactly that argument. Everything is relative. If you increased your wealth by $90K one year, 100K the next, 110K after thatetc.. each year, and I increase my wealth by $15K one year, 12K the next, then 10K, etc.. each year, and this is general to the entire population of the United States (being more poor than rich, this is possible, and is what the charts reflect), then the people generating less wealth than the richer person is getting poorer relative to the mean of the wealth. In other words, the poor people are all losing a percentage of the overall wealth, and the richer people are gaining a percentage of the overall wealth. If this trend continues over many years (which it has already done for the last 10+), it will effectively polarize the economic classes in America.
There is only so much wealth. and it is increasing in size each day due to inflation. According to the charts I have shown, the middle column, and everything to the left is losing money after taking into account the overall added income to the whole of the people.
Sure, 4.25/hr could get you by if you carefully allocated each penny in your budget in 1995, but today, that ain't getting you anywhere but homeless. So they raised minimum wages to 5.15. Maybe one day someone will raise minimum wage up again, because if they don't, the poorest of the poor will soon be screwed according to current trends.
Although we are about due for another pole reversal, this is not going to lose any data stored on magnetic devices (unless there is a huge influx of magnetic field, significantly larger than the current magnetic field of the earth).
To test your hypothesis of pole reversals ruining your data, take a hard drive that is turned on and in a machine (such as a laptop computer), face the computer magnetic north (use a compass, not the north star) and then spin the laptop computer 180 degrees. If there is significant data loss, then your hypothesis may be correct. If there is no data loss, you are probably just full of hot air.
You can replicate this experiment to more exacting specifications by sending a laptop to australia from the US and see if the data is still intact when it arrives.
As far as magnetic storms, this is another possability that needs to be looked into. It will be nice one day when cheap, large, and standard optical backup storage becomes mainstream. (CD-R is not large, and DVD-R is not standard nor cheap nor fast. IMHO, tape backups are a waste of time if they are magnetic unless you are storing them in seperate physical locations (which most people I have run into don't) when you could be using mirroring. Maybe one day we will have optical tapes that can be as large as we want. I doubt that day will come any time in the near future.
Check these first 3 tables...
... etc ... and the top 20% have 50.1% of the total yearly income. Each column represents the same number of people (except the last column, representing only the top 5%, which is just extra info.), in their respective 1/5th of the spectrum: Lower, Lower-Middle, Middle, Upper-Middle, Upper, and finally, Upper-Upper(5%)
Link
The most interesting table is the one titled
"Share of Aggregate Income: All races"
These tables are divided into 5 sections by population of people. Out of all the people in America, 20% have 3.5% of the wealth, 20% have 8.7% of the wealth, 20% have 14.6% of the wealth
As you can see, over the years, only the Upper-Middle and Upper class have increased their percentage of total US Income. Middle class, Lower-Middle class, and Lower class have all taken decreases in their paycheck w.r.t. overall combined US Income.
As you can see, the poorer are getting poorer (Relatively, which is all that matters), and the richer keep getting richer.
If you tabulate the statistics as represented here, there is no such thing as "middle class shrinking" syndrome as I have described in the above post (because they are equal # of people in each column). And I cannot find any US Census tables which represent their defined middle class size, upper class size, and lower class size. But as has been demonstrated, Since the upper 40% of the people are continually increasing their net worth, and the lower 60% are continually decreasing their net worth, the "middle" Middle class is dispersing left, and the "upper" Middle class is dispersing right. This is in effect how the class structure is polarizing as I described above.
If anybody can find actual numbers of middle class, lower class, and upper class over the years, I would be interested in seeing them. But they will look similar to what I have described, given the data provided in the above link.
I'm sorry but I cannot find the article I once read last year about the american middle class shrinking faster than european countries, but I'm quite sure I did read it, and if I happen to find it, I will post it here.
The alternative is already here, and has been getting stronger and stronger by the year. Do you really think we aren't currently, and have been, going back to this alternative the past 5 years?
The middle class of the United States is shrinking faster than ever, and significantly faster than most other democratic countries. We have the smallest percentage of people in our middle class compared to other top democratic countries. The upper class is also shrinking, but becoming more powerfull. The poor people are increasing in numbers like nobody's business. While this might not have anything to do with unions, they (unions) certaintly aren't preventing it.
I believe unions had their place, but now are pretty much obsolete considering that the coporations have congress people literally, and legally, on their payroll.
So true.. It's a shame, but so true...
The only problem with your argument is that this wasn't PnP. It was predetermined cards that were supported in the basic OS.
If there was any hardware that came out after the version of OS you had, it either had to have a user installed driver, manually, or it had to be hardware that was compatible with thie OS's built in drivers.
This is in no way, shape, form, or fashion remotely close to what PnP is. In the mac, if the hardware was supported, it worked. If it wasn't, it didn't ever work.
The funny thing is that the same is true for current OS 9 and OS X. It either "just works" or it doesnt work at all.
What PnP really means, and has always really ment, is that system resources (such as IRQs, and IO addresses) were allocated by the OS automatically, with no jumper configuration. Since the mac supported so very little pieces of hardware compared to x86, there wasn't any need for PnP on the mac platform.
BTW, everything that is a PCI card IS PnP, by nature it's IRQ's and IO's are set by either the BIOS Or OS. When people talk about PnP in win95, they mean ISA-PnP, which was a dirty hack that didn't work with most hardware. When people talk about PnP today, that is something that all OS's with PCI implementations support. There was no such notion of PnP before ISA-PnP. Anything before then that "just worked" only worked because its IRQ's and IO's were predetermined, or the factory jumper settings were such that there were no conflicts with existing hardware in your system.
That is the most ridiculous blanket statement I have ever seen.
Anyway, what about those other services that need identd? just because they aren't used often, doesn't mean they aren't usefull. NATing everyone is the most retarted thing you could do, and no amount of rationalization is going to fix that.
"Lets charge our students outrageous network fees with tuition, and then NAT the fuck out of them. That will sure put our network to some GREAT USE!!! wah00000!"
If you want to effectively stop outsiders to not be able to get to your students computers, why not give them real IPs and filter certain ports at the router level to improve security. I have heard of people using protocol detection software to filter protocols and known exploits that are unwanted. At least then you will:
1) do less maintenance work
2) have less support costs
3) have an actual working network that is usefull.
Part of the cost of running a network and selling network access, which universities do, is to provide a usefull network with reasonable restrictions to reasonable people. What's next, are you going to start serving DOG FOOD at the school cafeteria because the kitchen staff is too fucking lazy to cook dinner????
Get real.
I'm sorry my friend, but your wrong, both technically and morally. NAT isn't going to stop the spread of viruses over your network. It isn't going to stop people from sharing files, and it isn't going to improve security any significant amount that couldn't be done with other means. All it is going to do is restrict usage for the only users on the network that are actually PAYING for the access.
Security is a full time job. Ignoring the problem by denying access so you can take an extra cigarette break each day is not the solution, and isn't what network admins are hired to do.
The funny thing about your statement is that the bug technically isn't "Invalid" according to HTML specifications..
What is really needed, and what mozilla project finally decided to do way after all this shit went down, is add a second quirks mode for transitional that doesn't force people to use full blown quirks, but allows them to use standard, compliant html4.01 code and still render correctly in opera, mozilla, and IE/win. The root of the problem is that if you trigger quirks mode, it doesn't work properly in IE/win or Opera, but if you trigger standards mode(by using html4.01 transitional), the very same HTML(standard compliant HTML 4.01 transitional, nonetheless) won't render under mozilla properly, but will in IE/win and Opera. Denial of a bug does not make a bug cease to exist.
The reason for this problem is that "transitional" code was being rendered with standards mode, which standards mode could not possibly do correctly. And no standard says to treat "transitional" as "standard". Common practice (the reason quoted by mozilla developers) is no excuse for denial of a known bug's existance.
Stating that these comments were abusive, or uninformed is just plain silly. They were all legitimate concerns, and it was on the part of mozilla developers' arrogance (or maybe lazyness) that the bug wasn't fixed in a reasonable timeframe.
In the end, you can't blame the developers, because they are volunteers, but with a "developer is always right" attitude, as such was the case in this bug report, then you can't blame the users for letting them know they are in fact wrong.
The funny thing is how the exact article you linked to links to another article with quotes from mozilla developers crying about not picking gecko...
Oh well, RTFA next time lol
Actually, it is.
Reading bug reports that are full of information on what exactly the bug is, where it is reproduced, how to reproduce it, why its doing it, when its doing it, etc.. is going to give the developer a usefull report with information that he needs to fix the bug..
If you add extra information that is not needed, inflamatory or not, that is extra work the developer has to do to fix the bug. It is equivilent to sorting through your spam mail every day. You pick out the bugs you see have usefull information, and proiritize them above the rest. Since bug reports continuously flow into the database, there is usually no time for a bug report that gives no worthwhile information because all the developers time is spent fixing bugs that have REAL bug reports.
It is signal to noise ratio, and if you can't understand that, your a fucking idiot.
"How do you know how much the students at this person's school are paying for network access? Do you have any idea how much that network access costs? $50 a month will not purchase you all of the core routing equipment so that you can get (at minimum) 10 mbps connections to all of the campus servers. When you buy DSL, what do you get? One connection. At a Uni you are connecting to potentially thousands of other computers at very high speeds."
This is just my point. wether this school is private or public, the students are paying for at least half the bandwidth, directly(unless there are extreme circumstances where the state pays for it all). A university that has this student access policy is in effect giving something less than you could get with DSL, for a far far greater price. This is just plain silly, and having access to thousands of computers at high speed really doesnt make any difference if you can't access the outside world from your home PC in your dorm. Not to mention that it is impossible physically to get 3rd party internet service in a dorm (because of school policy and contracts in effect at most universities)
This is rediculous and since the students are paying out the ass for this access, really shouldn't be tolerated. Not only is this the most extreme use of a firewall to block access to PAYING USERS (yes, they pay a fucking fortune, more than 50/month they could be getting for DSL, included in the room fee) but it is just plain incompetance that any admin or policy would willfully do such a thing.
This is not even a reasonable option. this effectively is a DoS to all yoru users requiring ident and other features that non-routeable IP's cannot do.
Looking at my port forwarding rules on my router, if I were ever paying for access for a non routeable IP, I would stop paying immediately, especially since these students are paying hundreds of dollars per year in internet access (yes, the internet fee is directly included into the price of the room, per semester)
"You are assuming that a 64-bit processor can actually process all the data in its larger address space in the time it takes a 32-bit processor to process data in its smaller address space. That would mean a 64-bit processor would have to be thousands of times faster than a 32, but really you'll be lucky if it's twice as fast."
Actually, YOU are assuming that is what he means. What he really means is that currently, video games need to do 64 bit math. Currently, on a 32 bit CPU, you have to do multiple instructions to do 64 bit integer math. With 64 bit computing on the new AMD x86-64 platform, you will be able to process 64 bit integers in LESS time than you can on currently available Athlon CPU's. Your parent post said nothing about >4G of memory. He is talking about data processing speed. The facts are that on AMD's new 64 bit platform, nearly all processing (both 64 and 32 bit chuncks of data) is inherantly faster. To top it off, processing of 64 bit numbers is more than two times faster than on traditional 32 bit machines.
(Faster, because there is more cache, and more general purpose registers, and memory latency is reduced by having on chip memory controler, and on 32 bit machines, it takes at minimum of 2 instructions to process 64 bit integers [and in actuality, more than that])
The molecular structure of the liquid he mentions is such that when packed into a liquid, it takes up less volume than liquid hydrogen. Its like the puzzel pieces fit together more nicely.
I do not know if this particular compound he mentioned is like this, and I'm not a chemist. But I remember in chemistry class we mixed 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol with 1/2 cup some other liquid, and out came ~3/4 cup liquid, not a full cup like expected. The reason for this is as I have described above.
"The addition of hardware MMU (preemptive multitasking and protected memory) and on-chip FPU meant that a 386 added considerable value over a 286. The one advantage of 64-bit processors like Opteron is that it can address >4G of memory. It's more like the jump from P2 to P3 in terms of actual impact on the market."
Actually, since you didn't do your research first, I'll enlighten you with what "going to 64 bit" means.. In AMD's case, with x86-64, not only are the general purpose registers doubling in size, but they are doubling in number. And since they are double in size, and the circuitry is there, you can do math on 64 bit integers in the same time as you can do 32 bit integers on a 32 bit machine. When adding more general purpose registers, this means the CPU doesn't have to access main memory nearly as much, and the same holds true for L1 and L2 cache. Top this off with the fact that AMD is doubling its L2 on chip cache, and you have yourself a much much much faster machine. Even if you run it in legacy 32 bit mode, you still have a faster machine than an Athlon. Run in native 64 bit mode, and you have 16 General purpose registers, plus all the other advantages mentioned above. To top this all off, AMD has improved on their SIMD units, and it looks as if they will be able to do floating point math much faster than traditional x87 code if developers choose to use it. (note, this also holds true for intel's latest offerings)
"you can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC. Gamers tend to see themselves as the most important part of the market, but the most important market is actually the corporate desktop. People who, every now and again, buy PCs by the thousand or the ten thousand."
So what if I can buy a Sun Blade for roughly the same price as a PC? Are you going to use that on the home desktop? (which BTW, is the second biggest market for PC's our there, second only to coporate desktops). You think nVidia made all their money on coporate desktops? I don't see my geforce 4 running on any Sun Blades around here...
Secondly, I never said that gamers were the most important part of the market, I simply stated the fact that the video game market is traditionally what pushes the home PC to a faster and faster standard.
"'One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components.'
If Intel and AMD are smart, they'll do it like Apple - essentially throw away their old hardware and rely on emulation for compatibility. It is inevitable that AMD will have had to make compromises to ensure backwards compatibility, and those will hurt it in the long run."
If you will re-read my post, I stated exactly what you think AMD should do. With the x86-64 platform, AMD has discontinued real modes, and other outdated parts to the x86 ISA to shed the bloat. But you are still mistaken on what exactly compatibility means. I never said anything about old hardware I needed to be compatible with. I mentioned USB scanners, printers, and webcams. Since when are these old hardware, and since when does apple not support the same things? Where EXACTLY is the 64 bit system from Sun and everyone else that will run this COMMODITY hardware that is in every computer store on the planet? Short answer: there isn't.
In closing, you have not refuted a single statement I have made, and insted went off on a tangent argument in every single rebuttal you made. You haven't shown anything except repeat your origional premise that nobody needs 64 bit, and have given no new evidence, or argument. Next time maybe you should try to think about it before you get labeled as a troll.
"But Engineers are the only people in the near future who need 64-bit processors on their desktops."
To add to the list of this siblings' posts, most newer video games from the top manufacturers are also going to need 64 bit. Unreal will soon require 64 bit for their mod development tools, I'm sure id software is also going to have no problem improving performance on 64 bit platforms.
Did anybody really need 32 bit CPU's when intel went from 286 -> 386? Maybe not, maybe so. But that is what happened, and now everyone uses 32 bit, and needs AT LEAST that. It's only evolution that we move to 64bit cpu's, more general purpose registers, and shed the excess bloat that AMD is doing.
Sure, you might not find a use for it yourself, and if you haven't, you should keep buying 32 bit cpu's. But for me, and many more gamers and game developoers/modders (who are the ones that have pushing the desktop performance barrier higher and higher over the years) are going to use them, and NEED them. I plan on running the latest video games on my 64bit athlons when they arrive.
"But there already are affordable 64-bit servers for the masses, cheap SPARCs, PPCs and so on."
If you consider cheap SPARCs, PPC,s and so on to be cheap, high performance, and usefull on the desktop, you have another thing coming. For one, there are no, and never will be, drivers for commodity hardware for these platforms. Secondly the chips that offer reasonable performance aren't "cheap" as you call it. They are very very expensive, and their platform is also very very expensive (relative to x86-64, and x86-32). And there is only a small handfull of software packages(that the mainstream doesn't use, gamers can't use, etc..) that run on them compared to what AMD is offering.
"The one and only edge that x86 has is backwards compatibility and the use of very cheap commodity components."
though this is not the only edge x86 has (ie, look at its high competition market, which drives performance up way faster than the platforms you mentioned previously) you have hit this nail right on the head. One of the biggest advantages x86 has is its compatibility with commodity components. Untill those SPARC, 64bit PPC, and Alpha machines run my webcam, my USB Scanner, my USB printer, my IDE hard drives for a reasonable price without having to buy proprietary and expensive compatibility components, your argument stands mute.
What is it exactly that makes information NOT have free will again?
Before you answer that, think about the question at least a little longer than you thought about your last post...
Mars's lower than earth gravity is just one small reason its atmosphere is so thin. The main reason is that there is not much volcano activity on the surface (or in the non-existant oceans) to replenish the atmosphere.
All planets lose atmosphere at a continuous rate, which depends on their mass of the planet, thickness of the atmosphere, and temperature. The determining factor on keeping one's atmosphere is wether or not there is something to bring new gasses to the surface from within the planet. Mars, unlike Earth, has very little of this activity, and therefore, cannot maintain a very thick atmosphere on it's own.
On a side note, one of the reasons there is little volcanic activity is related to its mass. The smaller a planet, the sooner its inner core will cool to the point that the crust is too thick to allow volcanoes, and just the general lower temperatures and less molten rock. The moon is an extreme case of this that once had molten oceans, and now has almost no (if any) molten rock in its inner core. Eventually, the earth will have the same problem.
I don't think you seem to understand the concepts of how programs are run...
When you load quake3, it loads the executeable into system ram, and all texture, model, map, and sound data into system RAM.
Technically, you can burn a CD with the quake3 directory in it and run the game without problems (provided you don't change the configs, in which case, you would need to patch quake3 to support configs in other directories than the game directory.)
The drawback is that game load times will suffer horribly, unless its a small game that is less than a few megs to load.
As it stands now, the map, texture, sound, and model data is in the order of hundreds of megabytes (per level!), and that ain't gonna load off a CD-ROM at any reasonable speed. Most systems with 7200 RPM drives and 1GB memory (read: not using swap) still have to pause for considerable time periods while waiting for map loads.
The idea is sound, but not practical for modern 3D Games, and it will never happen for games more complex than minesweeper.
BTW, this same principle is true for most binary programs run on windows, and especially true for most 3D games, not just quake3
Oops, already answered your msg ;-P
to answer this question, I think the main reason to release in BSD license is so anybody can use it. If it was only licensed under GPL, commercial companies might not want to deal with QT under just a GPL License. Currently, if you want to keep your source closed, you must use the QT proprietary license which you pay for, if a company were to buy this license, develop a closed product, and then Troll Tech later tanked, they would still have a license that would allow them to keep their code closed, and actively maintained by the community.
Mainly, I think they don't want companies to shy away from QT (and hence, KDE) because they think they might be locked in to just the GPL(which requires the soruce be given) in case TrollTech went under.