If I recall correctly 32 bit programs that are not rewritten for 64 bit run SLOWER on the Itanium than they do the equivalent Pentium line.
When Apple transitioned from the M68K line to the PPC, they were in the same situation - 68K code would run faster on a 40Mhz 68040 than on a 40Mhz PPC 601. The reason consumers didn't mind was that the the PPC 601 started at 60Mhz (approximately the break-even point to the emulation layer), and (to the end user) didn't cost significantly more.
Until Intel gets the Itanium cost down to the point where they run 32-bit code at equivalent speed to a Pentium at the same cost, Itanium probably isn't ready for the consumer market.
I can only hope that before they went extinct one of these beasts was trapped in amber, and that somewhere on some privately-owned tropical island a group of scientists funded by a megalomaniacal millionaire are standing on the shoulders of geniuses and thinking more about whether they could than whether they should...
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - In a brief press conference outside his part-time home in downtown Milwaukee, God, known to his devotees as the Lord Almighty, announced he was filing suit against a group of researchers at Texas A&M University. God alleges that the domestic cat is his unique creation and that the recent duplication of one of these common animals is a "serious infringement of [his] intellectual property rights". God went on to say that the his research laboratories, Scientology Labs, are hard at work on designing 'uncopyable' creatures which cannot be duplicated outside of the strict guidelines God has set down.
"Ripping and sharing DNA is a crime, and it hurts Me on both a financial and a personal level," intoned the Deity, "and while it pains Me that I must file suit against My children, I must protect My intellectual property from drifting into the public domain, where it could be used by My competitors." God refused to specify which competitors he feared, or what they might do with the genetic algorithms.
"God is simply trying to hold on to an illegally-gained monopoly," stated longtime competitor Satan at a press conference held shortly after in Redmond, Washington. "He's afraid that if genetic protocols are opened for public use, the market would be flooded with non-God organisms, which would of course detract from his brand," added Satan, better known by his stage name, "Prince of Darkness", or by his ubiquitous online handle, "PrttyKtty666". Satan claimed that numerous studies had shown great demand for a wider variety of animals, and that this is the scientific breakthrough that could eventually lead to world populated by Elves, Unicorns, and Dragons. "People love dragons. People love Unicorns. Hell, people even love dinosaurs! Did you ever see Jurassic Park?", opined the source of all evil.
Other major figures in this field have yet to make their voices heard; Religious leaders Buddha, Krishna, Jesus of Nazareth, the Dalai Lama, and Oprah refused to take a stance one way or the other.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
...you probably have no idea what the point is here.
For the uninitiated, the GameBoy Advance lacks the internal backlight present in the older non-advance GameBoys. This makes it very difficult for some people to play in some lighting conditions.
Gak! It's bad enough trying to hold a conversation with someone who just has to answer their phone when it rings. Now it's going to be "You've got mail!"
On the bright side, the world will become far quieter as every single teenage girl on the planet eschews vocal communication in favor of a 24/7 connection to AOL Instant Messager.
"I just want you to know that I can write slicker and tighter code than John."
This is the funniest thing Bill Gates has EVER said.
Your listening license agreement specifically forbids quoting, citing, referring to, or referencing Mr. Gates in any context that has not been Microsoft approved and certified. As Slashdot falls under neither category, quoting Mr. Gates on this site is a license violation that may result in responses such as but not limited to prosecution, abortion of listening rights, or death by electrocution. Please cease all unauthorized quotational operations immediately, or we will be forced to take remonstrative actions.
As Midbar explains "...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms.
Translation:We got a whole room of smart people who worked on it. Sometimes we race them.
The technology includes proprietary electronic circuits and software algorithms.
Translation:It uses computers and stuff. It's like the Jetsons.
The Cactus Data Shield processor is the engine behind the protection and serves as a platform for encoding original content through robust, multi-layer protection schemes.
Translation: I wanted to just call it Bob, but the head of marketing has a cactus fetish.
An engineering solution, the protection schemes are adaptive, easily updated and significantly more robust than software solutions.
Translation: Even though it's basically done in software we can't say that, 'cause it confuses the VPs.
The Cactus Data Shield copy protection slightly alters the information on the CD in several ways while maintaining perfect audio quality.
I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
Looks, is there someone else up there we could talk to?
No. Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
If this makes it into your average car, would you have to take it to a normal mechanic AND a quantum mechanic?
"Yeah, Mr. Schrodinger, we've got your car hooked up to some diagnostic equipment in the other garage, but we haven't opened the garage since we hooked it all up, so..."
"Ya see, we're kinda afraid that if we observe the problem it might alter the system and give you a totally different problem..."
"Well, we're not quite sure where your car is, but we do know exactly how fast it's moving... Would you prefer the other way around? 'Cause I can do that instead if you want..."
EXTRA: Researchers to Gov't: Use Laws to Change Reality!
An influential body of researchers is calling on the US Government to draft laws that would punish software firms that do not do enough to make their products secure. The researchers proposed that in addition to the 'no more security holes' law, this revolutionary thinking could be applied to a vast number of modern problems.
"It's really just a new way of looking at things," explained Robert Fanan, spokesman for the group. "Once we realized that simply passing a law would make it so, things got a lot easier - for instance, tomorrow we're going to propose a law banning rude behavior." Fanan went on to list a number of other ways this precedent-setting principle could be applied, citing bad breath, body odor, unattractive hairstyles, and undercooked french fries as other ills of modern society that could be improved upon. "The real issue has always been that these things are impossible to monitor, and that no method of defeating the problem yet exists. Our solution is to bypass the method entirely - for instance, instead of working towards peace in the Middle East by resolving disputes, one could simply pass a law stating that the Middle East is at peace." Diplomats involved in the Middle East peace process could not be reached for comment.
Other members of the group were equally ecstatic with the recent discoveries: "I'm going to propose we outlaw poor driving!" shouted one ebullient researcher, while another waxed philosophic about mandating a 37% share of the desktop market for Linux. "It's a brave new world," said Fanan in closing, "or at least it will be once we legislate that it is."
I think the main purpose behind supercomputer restrictions in the first place was to limit the amount of nuclear research that could be done. [...] Pakistan just figured out how to split the atom for antihumanitarian purposes, and i guess Gee Dubya Srubya figures the indians are going to wipe out the pakastanis who are going to wipe out the indians anyways, so why not give them a computer powerful enough for them to calculate trejectories carefully enough to make sure thats ALL they destroy (directly)
Of course, you're right! The only possible use for computers in in nuclear research. It's not like you need anything more than an abacus to crack powerful encryption, and I certainly don't think there's any practical use for it - it's not like it's integral to our military or financial systems, or anything.
Oh, wait...
-- Stop @env.textlog! And feel ashamed if you know what it is!
Re:Try telling this one to a friend
on
Pictorial Passwords
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...they have scanners that can scan your DNA... why to they need the cheesy passwords to activate the self destruct mechanism on the ship, the ship could scan the captain, first officer etc. to verify their identity...
Because then all the people from the alternate universe could just waltz on in and blow up the ship - it would be chaos, man, chaos!
Yeah, and when you take a cold shower, you probably turn on the hot water for 20 minutes until it's cold.
Abusing unintended timeouts in your hot water supply to access cold water through hot-water channels may be a violation of the DMCA. Please be advised that hot-water channels are to be used solely for the transport of hot or lukewarm water, and that any other use is prohibited by your license agreement. Sharing information that may allow others to mis-use common hot-water channels in unintended and undesired fashions is irresponsible and may leave you liable for criminal damages.
Comparing these general stats against the stats against a technologically biased site is absolutely absurd. Yes, of course it is. But there are a number of non-technologically-biased sites that nonetheless attract a far different cross-section of users.
Imagine doing a study of browsers hitting Yahoo, and then doing a study of visitors to Google - Google will show a far higher percentage of Linux users (conjecture, mod me down), simply because it's more popular to the sort of person who's likely to use Linux.
What LowEndMac's rebuttal is trying to point out is that because different websites attract different groups in much the same way that different operating systems attract different groups, there will inevitably be some degree of statistical clustering present. Nobody is proposing that we use Slashdot or a Mac-centric site to determine marketshare among desktop OSen - for the simple reason that trying to determine marketshare based on visits to a website is logically flawed.
The whole left-click / right-click thing which we take for granted and do 20000 times a day is NOT easy to catch onto for a new user. ... "Start button? But its already started, why do I want to start it again?". How about the little icons on the taskbar?
It seems kind of odd to me that you're using Windows as a representation of a GUI. You can't point out that the Windows GUI sucks and then deduce that by extensions GUIs in general suck; have you ever used a Mac? These issues are exactly the sorts of thing a well-done GUI seeks to rectify.
I certainly don't want to turn this into yet another Mac vs. Windows flame war, but the simple fact is that most people who are really interested in practical ease of use would agree that Windows is about the worst example of a 'standard' GUI. The Windows user experience was designed by marketers who wanted more bullet points for the back of the box, not by user experience experts who wanted to make the damned thing easier. Do you know what the 'briefcase' is for? 'Cause I'm all out of ideas.
Go find a Mac, and try that out. Go load up BeOS and see how you like it. Hell, check ebay and buy a NeXT box, and find out if that's any better for you. The fact that my car is a gas-guzzling piece of garbage doesn't mean that all cars are the same, and likewise the fact that the GUI you're using stinks doesn't mean that all GUIs are flawed.
-- Error Type Eleven - Programmer made poor career choice.
In some ways OSX takes a step backward by getting rid of the resource fork.
Minor quibble: metadata (type and creator codes) isn't saved in the resource fork, but directly in the file system.
Either way, the thing many people seem to be missing in this debate is that metadata and resource forks have not be removed from OSX so much as they've been deprecated - code that uses these apsects of the filesystem still compiles and runs just fine. It's really more of a change in Apple's recommendations and documenation than any technical difference. If you work at it, you can even get the Finder to open files using the old type/creator heuristic (more or less).
While I'll agree that BFS definitely had some far more interesting applications than HFS does, don't sell HFS short - it still beats the pants off FAT.
Slashdot Mirror
Until Intel gets the Itanium cost down to the point where they run 32-bit code at equivalent speed to a Pentium at the same cost, Itanium probably isn't ready for the consumer market.
--
Damn the Emperor!
Man, I have got to stop reading Slashdot at three AM...
--
Damn the Empteror!
I can only hope that before they went extinct one of these beasts was trapped in amber, and that somewhere on some privately-owned tropical island a group of scientists funded by a megalomaniacal millionaire are standing on the shoulders of geniuses and thinking more about whether they could than whether they should...
--
Damn the Emperor!
"Ripping and sharing DNA is a crime, and it hurts Me on both a financial and a personal level," intoned the Deity, "and while it pains Me that I must file suit against My children, I must protect My intellectual property from drifting into the public domain, where it could be used by My competitors." God refused to specify which competitors he feared, or what they might do with the genetic algorithms.
"God is simply trying to hold on to an illegally-gained monopoly," stated longtime competitor Satan at a press conference held shortly after in Redmond, Washington. "He's afraid that if genetic protocols are opened for public use, the market would be flooded with non-God organisms, which would of course detract from his brand," added Satan, better known by his stage name, "Prince of Darkness", or by his ubiquitous online handle, "PrttyKtty666". Satan claimed that numerous studies had shown great demand for a wider variety of animals, and that this is the scientific breakthrough that could eventually lead to world populated by Elves, Unicorns, and Dragons. "People love dragons. People love Unicorns. Hell, people even love dinosaurs! Did you ever see Jurassic Park?", opined the source of all evil.
Other major figures in this field have yet to make their voices heard; Religious leaders Buddha, Krishna, Jesus of Nazareth, the Dalai Lama, and Oprah refused to take a stance one way or the other.
...you probably have no idea what the point is here.
For the uninitiated, the GameBoy Advance lacks the internal backlight present in the older non-advance GameBoys. This makes it very difficult for some people to play in some lighting conditions.
Such as, for instance, everyone, everywhere.
Visual Aid
--
Free the Pink Halfling!
For those philistines among us who don't regularly read Penny Arcade, the petition to import Japan is best explained here.
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Damn the Emperor!
Q: Wow, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?!
A: Yes I can, it's called a Borg Collective.
--
Damn the Emperor!
Thank you, have a nice day.
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Get on with it!
"Ya see, we're kinda afraid that if we observe the problem it might alter the system and give you a totally different problem..."
"Well, we're not quite sure where your car is, but we do know exactly how fast it's moving... Would you prefer the other way around? 'Cause I can do that instead if you want..."
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Damn the Emperor!
:)
--
Damn the Emperor!
Oh, wait...
--
Stop @env.textlog! And feel ashamed if you know what it is!
--
Mod me down, I'm way off-topic.
--
Damn the Emperor!
--
Mod me down
--
Humour through misdirection: I could write for Angel!
Comparing these general stats against the stats against a technologically biased site is absolutely absurd.
Yes, of course it is. But there are a number of non-technologically-biased sites that nonetheless attract a far different cross-section of users.
Imagine doing a study of browsers hitting Yahoo, and then doing a study of visitors to Google - Google will show a far higher percentage of Linux users (conjecture, mod me down), simply because it's more popular to the sort of person who's likely to use Linux.
What LowEndMac's rebuttal is trying to point out is that because different websites attract different groups in much the same way that different operating systems attract different groups, there will inevitably be some degree of statistical clustering present. Nobody is proposing that we use Slashdot or a Mac-centric site to determine marketshare among desktop OSen - for the simple reason that trying to determine marketshare based on visits to a website is logically flawed.
--
I am Ghorak Zo, hear me roar.
Did someone say FireWire?
It's a bit bigger, but also more capacity and a much more reasonable price - and it's still smaller than a deck of playing cards.
--
Mod me down, I'm off-topic.
I certainly don't want to turn this into yet another Mac vs. Windows flame war, but the simple fact is that most people who are really interested in practical ease of use would agree that Windows is about the worst example of a 'standard' GUI. The Windows user experience was designed by marketers who wanted more bullet points for the back of the box, not by user experience experts who wanted to make the damned thing easier. Do you know what the 'briefcase' is for? 'Cause I'm all out of ideas.
Go find a Mac, and try that out. Go load up BeOS and see how you like it. Hell, check ebay and buy a NeXT box, and find out if that's any better for you. The fact that my car is a gas-guzzling piece of garbage doesn't mean that all cars are the same, and likewise the fact that the GUI you're using stinks doesn't mean that all GUIs are flawed.
--
Error Type Eleven - Programmer made poor career choice.
Either way, the thing many people seem to be missing in this debate is that metadata and resource forks have not be removed from OSX so much as they've been deprecated - code that uses these apsects of the filesystem still compiles and runs just fine. It's really more of a change in Apple's recommendations and documenation than any technical difference. If you work at it, you can even get the Finder to open files using the old type/creator heuristic (more or less).
While I'll agree that BFS definitely had some far more interesting applications than HFS does, don't sell HFS short - it still beats the pants off FAT.