Where is this fantasy land where we should
build, in your opinion?
90% of the planet! For some reason, humans
just prefer living in fairly dangerous
places. In the US, we could avoid virtually
all the hurricanes we hear about simply by
avoiding the two or three hundred miles nearest
the coast from Louisiana through Virgina; almost
all the earthquakes and the worst of the droughts
by not living in the desert; all the volcanos by
not living on the slopes of one; Tornados shouldn't
actually cause damage if people living in
tornado-prone areas built appropriate housing;
Tsunamis only cause serious damage right on
the coast itself.
Are those minimum wage jobs going to allow
you to take time off to go out-of-state to scout
out the housing/job/etc. situation in your
intended destination?
Currently, the businesses in the region hit by
Katrina can't open for purely practical reasons.
Most people have no homes intact to which they
can return. You yourself called the area very
economically depressed. So I would repeat myself,
why stay??? "too poor to move" doesn't
mean much when staying doesn't have anything more
to offer beyond the possibility that the same thing
might happen again next year, and the promise
that it will happen again eventually. And
one slum seems as good as another...
If they can't rebuild what they call their house,
there's no reason for them to linger anywhere
Why encourage them to linger in the same
place nature gave them a smack-down in the
first place??? "It sank into the swamp. So,
I built a second one. That sank into the
swamp. So I built a third one. That burned
down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth one..."
What can I say if you don't "get" that
the humor in that sketch doesn't come from
the fourth one staying up?
Louisiana ain't exactly the richest state in the
Union and New Orleans is among the worst of it
And you consider that a reason TO STAY???
This may not apply in "real" third-world countries, but
in the US, any schmuck that can sign their name can get
a job at WallyWorld or McDonalds.
I have chosen to live in a place that doesn't
get floods, deadly droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes,
tidal waves, volcanos, earthquakes, plagues of locusts,
or anything of the sort. I therefore have VERY
little sympathy (in fact, you could call it "outright
annoyance that my tax dollars need to bail their
asses out over and over and over") for people who
live in places that do have such problems
chronically.
Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps.
Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the
slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest
poing in the general area. Don't completely deforest
the surrounding area. These don't take a rocket
scientist to figure out. And if you do,
don't expect to see me chopping a hole in your roof
to save your worthless life after you ignore
an evacuation order.
The reality is that law enforcement and
copyright holders, just like you and me, can
indeed walk and chew gum at the same time.
You've tried to write off the arguement as a
red herring, yet missed the uderlying idea
entirely... Yes, one cop can write me a
ticket at the same time as another cop
busts a rapist. And, as the number of cops
approach infinity, they can do both without
the one having any impact on the other.
But in the real world, we have a finite
number of cops with a finite set of resources.
Doing one thing DOES reduce their ability
to do something else at the same time.
Thus, the argument "why go after downloaders
when rapists run free" doesn't commit
a logical error - It quite seriously takes
the severity of the crime into consideration,
and correctly asserts that if one extra cop
walking a beat can stop one rape, that BY
FAR takes precedence over busting 12YOs
who have their upload and download directories
pointing to the same place.
So, as long as you can open the daily paper
and read about a rape, a murder, a CEO's golden
parachute, an armed robbery, a meth lab, or
similar "real" crimes, you most certainly
should consider it the most insulting
kind of slap in the face that we have police
busting grannies and teens for using Kazaa.
The salaries of the researchers are
probably paid by MIT
No, the salary of the lead researcher
most likely comes from MIT. The countless
grad students who did 99% of the work almost
certainly get paid from the grant, not the
school.
However, in most cases, you could call this
a meaningless distinction. When a prof gets
a grant, the school usually takes all of it,
keeps a nice clean half of it for the privelage
of "affiliation", and then doles the rest out
to the actual research team in a standard
salary/expenses manner.
I now run a gateway appliance that draws
about 5 watts.
I had considered that route, but wanted the
flexibility of a basically-complete Linux
system (without X) as well. If I ever
manage to make it off-grid, I'll certainly
reevaluate that choice, but for now, the
difference has more value to me than saving
$0.25 per month on the electric bill.
I've been using the Kill-a-Watt wattmeter
Same here - Great little toy, and it has
already saved me more than its cost.
It amazed me how much power various devices
around the house consume! As my very first
change, I ditched my 21" CRT for a 19" LCD.
Dropped my electric bill $5/month right there
(although the LCD cost me a few hundred, I had
meant to get one anyway - Seeing my CRT suck
250W just sped up the decision).
When your boss asks about the relative merits
of switching from a microcontroller-based product
to one that uses CPLD's
...You'll wake up horribly dissapointed that such
conversations don't happen in the real world.
Even if your immediate boss understands the question
(mine at the moment would, and you cannot imagine
how happy that makes me), he in turn has any important
decisions handed down based on buzzword-worthiness.
My favorite, ever (fortunately a friend, not myself,
had this disaster as a task) - The customer wanted
something vaguely like a POS terminal. They specified
the hardware platform, and that we needed to code
everything in C++. I don't know if the customer actually
had a clue what "C++" meant beyond a buzzword at the time,
but suffice it to say, no C++ compiler existed for the
specified target platform.
Kids - Your senior project doesn't matter. Your school's
reputation (assuming something better than "Bill's house
of Diplomas") doesn't matter. The opinions of your professors
don't matter. No one cares how much "community
service"/"volunteer work"/ "social BS" you performed.
Do the least work possible to pass - I wouldn't even
say worry about getting an "A" unless you already have
highest-honors status and a B would lower that. And as
the GP pointed out, once you get your first job, no one
will ever care about your college work as more than idle
conversation over beers while commiserating about the
Dilbertian nature of "real" work... And even your first
job doesn't care what you did in college - If you worked
at a decent intership, your experience there for a total
of 12 months out of the previous four years, will count
for FAR more than the 36 months of academic work you did
in the same time.
You want to know what does matter? Get the
framed piece of paper to wave (doesn't matter what
it actually says), and don't let yourself get into
too much debt - Many employers now run credit checks
on job applicants, meaning the schmuck who went $100k+
into debt at a private school and "wasted" his summers
sucking up to professors will get turned down in favor
of the guy who went to a state university and managed
to pay tuition with the wages from a summer internship.
And I say this as someone who did keep a high GPA,
in two different degrees, worked with professors on their
pet research, and ended up with glowing, obviously-personal
(rather than cookie-cutter) recommendations from two
separate department chairs. Fortunately I also went to a
state university and kept out of debt. And what mattered,
for my first post-college job? The summer internship.
No one, in any of the interviews I've endured (and yes,
"endured" makes the right word to describe the process
of inverviewing), cared in the least about the (IMO) very
cool research I did in college. They cared that I knew X,
Y, and Z (where X, Y, and Z frequently had no actual relation
to the job description), that I could solve riddles quickly,
that I passed a background check, and how I dealt with my
worst failure at work (a tough question, considering that
I never really failed by my own faults, and saying
"management made the project physically impossible"
sounds like a cop-out).
As one last point, to give all you poor bastards
about to graduate a small sliver of hope that you
haven't just wasted four years of your life - My
current job violates most of the above complaints,
but I consider it pretty much a one-in-a-million
position. I interviewed directly with a real, live,
competent engineer, who cared more about my skills
than about mind games and buzzwords. Management has
a decent knowledge of technology, but also the wisdom not
to pretend they know enough to micromanage the IT
department. I can speak with the head honcho casually,
on a first-name basis, and don't find my desk contents
waiting at security in a cardboard box for me when I
come in the next morning. So such jobs exist, but
good luck finding them.
I've also been wondering for the same thing.
I now was with a long disputed battle to leave
on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.
Personally, I have two always-on machines...
My internet gateway, and my file server (both
running Linux). I recently upgraded both from
old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for
the CPU, as you mention.
For my Masq'ing box, I went with an Epia CL 600
and a 512MB CF disk (via a CF to IDE adapter).
Won't break any number-crunching records, but
it sips a nice 28W, total, at-the-wall. Best of
all, I could run it fanless, which would
make it have no moving parts at all. I didn't
like that it would creep up above 50C, however,
so threw in an as-close-to-silent-as-you-can-get
120mm fan, keeping it down in the low 30s.
For the file server, I used an Athlon 64 (90nm
Winchester 3000). Before drives, it sucks
under 50W (again, at-the-wall). Each drive
will add 15-25W, so scale up from there.
The whole system, however, can
realistically draw less than just
a naked P4, if I limited it to only two
drives (but of course I have more than that,
currently four, each as the master with no
slave).
One interesting point I'd like to see discussed,
if anyone has a few good links - Motherboard power
consumption (aside from the CPU), and "real world"
HDD draw. I have three Winchester 3000s (two of
which I plan to drop X2s in when they come down in
price a tad) in three different motherboards, and
they vary by 20W (ie, half the total) idle power use
(with the same low-end PCI video card, except one
system has on-board video a hell of a lot stronger
than that old Trident card (an ATI Radeon XPress 200),
and it sucks the least power of the three). Then for
HDDs, I can of course find the published TDP, but as
with CPUs, that means very close to nothing beyond
"make sure your power supply can handle this, but it
will never actually need to".
And, as a last point, if you care about shaving off a
few more watts more than money or horsepower (but want
something heftier than an Epia), get a Pentium-M board. They can
manage around half the power consumption of an Athlon 64
(3W vs 7W idle, and (roughly) 25W vs 50W at load), with
around 80% of the performance. At idle (an always-on home
server sits idle over 99% of the time, I'd say, unless you
stick something like Seti@Home on it), that should compare
well (wattage-wise) even to a high-end Epia board.
If you're the music industry, and you give
a discount to the misses, you're going to end
up making less money.
Nah... You just need to realize that the
"could go for substantially less" part of
the deal means maybe all the way down
to $0.95. They threw that in there to make
the idea more palatable, but in practice, it
won't happen that way.
Also, consider that even a slight reduction
could end up boosting sales of such
material, in the same way that otherwise
slow-selling unknowns fly out of the
cutout/discount bin at any local music store...
We might agonize over whether or not to buy
a decent new release at $18.99, but we'll throw
away a $50 without blinking on $5-$10 discs
we've never heard of.
When you said Prescott EE, I figured you
meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You
should be more specific.
I figured the exact model number counted as
specific enough...;)
I do see the ambiguity now, though, and
apologize. Didn't even cross my mind that
"Extreme Edition" would abbreviate to EE.
Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a
passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the
thing for a while.
Tell it that...:)
I do realize, though, that if I kept it pegged
at 100% for a while, it would overheat. But
as I said, it doesn't do much (just a file
server). As my point in that particular factoid,
I meant to point out the low-end consumption of
both chips - An idle Prescott draws enough
to cook it.
For some hard data (I didn't post my own
numbers because no one believes me that a
non-crippled modern machine can draw a mere
60W at the wall), try:
This comparison... A heavily loaded 90nm
Athlon 64 draws just about the same as an idle
Prescott. FWIW, I've seen a better full-family
comparison on Tom's Hardware, but can't seem to
find it at the moment. Same basic trend, though...
All along the two chip families, roughly paired by
performance, the AMD's max draw matches the idle
P4's.
I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's
new processors on "normal" power usage when you
don't even have any info on it.
I agree, and didn't mean to do that... In fact,
I'll go so far as to say that, if they
can pull off the power they claim, and if
AMD hasn't beaten them even more by then, and
if they don't force Pentium-M style
pricing (ie, out of my range for a personal
machine) on us - Then my next upgrade may well
use one of Intel's next gen chips.
AMD could actually lose this one
If Intel, for instance, chooses to pit a dual
Itanium 2 system against the dual Opteron.
Not in x86 emulation mode, they won't.
AMD covered their butts on that one... The
challenge specifically states x86, with "the
corresponding Intel x86 server processors that are
commercially available in volume."
Beyond that, the main thrust here is the
misunderstanding of the parent (like saying
Intel's chips should have gone multi core,
when they did).
Three quick points...
First, the EE parts have two cores - Prescot rev
"E", times two. Thus, "EE".
Second, Intel has yet to take the Pentium M
to dual-core. Everyone speculated on it, and
you could call this new "announcement" little
more than the next gen of the M with dual core
and 64b in mind, but you cannot currently get
a dual-core M.
Finally, TDP, which the parent accurately
gave, does not equal "normal" consumption.
It only means "if you could switch every
single transistor on this chip at once, it
would take X watts". That does not happen,
ever. You can't even come up with a
totally unrealistic program that can cause such
a condition, it just can't happen. Now, I can't
personally compare the dual core parts (due to
a lack of having any of them) but for the single
cores, a Winchester's worst-case draw comes in
around one third of a Prescott's (measured
at-the-wall on similar hardware, adjusted for PS
losses, and with the published typical-case draw
of the MB, GPU, and HDD subtracted). Thus my
claim of 3-5x.
Or to put it another way - I have one machine,
admittedly not heavily loaded, running a Winchester
3000 with a passive heatsink. Hasn't hit
40C yet. Try that with a Prescott.
So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance
First the OB-peeve: Moore's Law has nothing to do with
clock speed or relative performance, only that
the number of transistors per unit of area will double
every X months (where X lies between 12 and 18, depending
on which "version" of his law you use).
Okay, that taken care of...:)
AMD and Intel hit a barrier "harder" than the mere doubling
of transistors... They reached a point where running a PC
noticeably increases the electric bill (a typical single-core
P4 costs around $1.50 per month to run 24/7 in the Northeastern
US, just for the CPU, not counting the graphics card,
monitor, hair dryer, or whatever other power-sucking toys you
might have attached); and relatedly, that high density of
power consumption requires getting rid of a proportional amount
of heat.
By dropping the energy requirements by a fifth, you can
consequently have five times as many cores for the same
heat-dissipating capacity. If each of those pushes a mere
half the numerical performance of the single
power-hungry core, you still get a net gain of 1.5 units
of processing per unit of area.
Intel plans to release these in Q2 2006.
They will use a 65nm process, support dual
cores, and get 5x the per-watt performance
of the Prescott EE.
AMD has dual core chips available now, that
get 3-5x the per-watt performance of Intel's
Prescott EE line (depending on how they define
certain things - Idle? Mean power/load?
Peak realistic-but-not-theoretical? TDP?).
And AMD only uses 90nm at the moment, and
will have two 65nm fabs up by the end of
this year - Which will give them
another nice boost in terms of per-watt
performance.
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line
entering the arena, but this smells an awfully
lot like more of Intel playing catch-up, and
in a way they won't win.
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever
reason, reached a hard wall for performance,
Intel would have done better to expand it to
multi core - Perhaps jump right to 4 cores
just to bypass the whole "catch up with dual"
criticism - And dropped the price to undercut
AMD (at least per-core). But this? Well,
it has potential, but unless Intel has decided
to seriously under hype a major
announcement, I won't lose any sleep worrying that
I just upgraded three machines to readiness for
AMD's X2 line (can't afford the damn things yet,
so currently just running Winchester 3000s, but
all just a chip-swap away from going to X2).
Rather than do the usual slashdot "Science
is EViL" thing, why not really think about the
potential here...
Think about the potential... Hmm, let's see...
168 hour work weeks. 24-hour "rush hour"
traffic. Overpopulation as bored people start
"getting it on" more to pass the time. Massively
increased demands on the electrical grid. And of
course the obvious, no more sleeping and dreaming
(I happen to enjoy sleep - I consider it
something to look forward to every night, not as
some sort of nuissance that interferes with my
available productivity).
And those assume this drug works perfectly
and safely. Based on past attempts at freeing
humans from our need for sleep, I wouldn't bet
my health or sanity on CX717 as a magic bullet.
Ofcause you have to remember to do everything
in a single command otherwise if you delete the
old version you cannot run anything else.
It amazes me that every single Linux distro
doesn't just come with statically linked/bin and/sbin utilities (along with a few in
the similar/usr dirs (such as ldd, nm, and
a small editor like nano).
Modern HDDs have oodles of space. Wasting a few
extra megs in exchange for an almost-worst-case
recoverable installation seems like a no-brainer
to me.
Of course, I can (and do) install exactly such
statically linked utils as my first task after
a new install, but I shouldn't need to...
Not to mention, many of the basic Linux programs
take a whole lot more than just passing a
"--enable-static" to the configure script or
passing in an "LDFLAGS=-static".
For my next upgrade (when the CPUs themselves
drop a tad in price, perhaps 6 months), I plan
to go with a dual-socket dual-core-Opteron-2xx
system. Poof, four cores. If I had cash to
burn, I could go all the way to 16 cores,
today, with an 8 Opteron 8xx dual-core
machine. That seems a tad overkill for
a home PC at the moment, though (not that
I'd turn down a free one...).
2. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari
cartridges to eight CPUs
And what might they could call this new
style of plugging in chips? Hmm... How
about "SECC3"?
3. Mobos as blades to passive
backplanes
You see that already in some high-end servers,
but for the most part, the home user would hate
something like that. For one thing, it costs
more to organize a system like that,
since each "blade" needs to have the potential
to drive the whole system - Alternatively,
it can require a "master" blade that costs more,
but then you just have what amounts to an odd
way to plug a bus riser (the passive backplane
itself) into a motherboard (the master blade).
For another, most low-grade techies have a
hell of a time just trying to match compatible
motherboards, CPUs, memory, and video cards.
You want to add in a whole new realm of
complexity?
4. Home blade servers and thin
clients.
I tend to agree with this one for the mid-term
future, but not the short term. Until largish
high-quality LCD-like (flat, light, and low
power - the actual underlying tech doesn't
really matter) displays start costing
significantly less (under $100), you won't
see thin clients in anything more than niche
uses, such as POS systems.
He violated the TOS of the game. Unless doing
so broke other laws (ie, my ISP's TOS
say I can't commit copyright violations - Doing
so would not only violate the TOS, but break
"real" laws rather than just fictional corporate
rules), any punishment really needs to
stay directly related to his account. Namely,
limited to the "death penalty" of deleting his
account and banning him.
This mixes levels in a very, very dangerous
way. People need to not confuse a game for
reality, nor a TOS violation for actual fraud.
Corporate rules != law, and law != reality,
no matter how much both of the previous LHSs
might wish otherwise.
I usually have pretty good reaction times, and
in the flash test, purely by chance (well, okay,
just because, having conducted psych research
myself, I like to screw with their heads) I chose
the third sequence first.
I didn't see the target.
I replayed that thing about a dozen times
before I finally caught it.
I suspect I missed it because "rotated 90
degrees" doesn't stand out enough to notice,
with such complicated images and only a tenth
of a second per image - Though I suppose using
something like simple brightly colored shapes
would tend to make the "graphic" image stand
out unduly.
Anyway, once I finally spotted the target image
in the last sequence, I nailed it first try in
the first two sequences (the ones supposed to
induce temporary blindness).
Then again, perhaps I just have a deep fear of
fire hydrants, while bloody stumps don't really
phase me.
You don't have the freedom of speech to
solicit someone to perform an illegal act
...Such as, oh, say, soliciting someone to say
"big brother double plus bad"?
Either you have freedom of ALL speech,
or you have no freedoms at all.
And no, I don't naively believe that
Americans have "real" freedom of speech,
either. No truly free society has ever
existed on this planet, and probably never
will. But don't try to excuse laws against
certain kinds of speech by pointing to other
laws making it illegal - That reduces to the
tautology "X breaks the law because X has a
law against it", not to any basis in physical reality.
any more than you can say "Come here and buy heroin!"
Why can't I? Now, if I actally sell
heroin, I've broken an entirely different
set of laws (with which I also strongly
disagree, but I'll stick to one ran per post).
But to just say it?
Baa-aa-aa.
As for laws against gambling - Another poster
already made the only point that needs saying - Every
government in the world has state-sponsored "lotteries"
of some sort. The criminals-in-power simply dislike
competition.
Where in fair use rights is permission to
make unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted
works?
Most of the idea of "fair use" centers
around making "Unauthorized" copies - What else
would you apply it to?
Copies for backups.
Copies for format-shifting (CD to tape, CD
to MP3, now we even need CD to CD to remove
the DRM that makes it not play in my car's
CD player).
Copies for time-shifting (the primary, and
court-upheld, purpose of the entirely legal
VCR).
Copies for friends? That seems to land
squarely on the boundary between okay and
not okay.
Short of absurdly abusing one of
the above "rights", the RIAA would have a hell
of a time convincing even the current batch of
corporate-friendly courts that making a copy of
a CD deliberately-broken-from-the-factory so
the owner can play it their car somehow
violates copyright to a punishable degree.
We only unarguably cross the classic hard-line
test for fair use when the copier starts
selling the copies.
Interestingly enough, the whole P2P situation
has arisen because it fills a niche between
what I describe above as "absurdly abusing"
fair use, and commercial copying... The sharer
doesn't (usually) profit from the copying,
but can manage to give away enough copies that
it could potentially undermine the market for
the real product (For both our sakes, I'll
entirely skip the idea of whether P2P actually
helps or hurts sales).
Fair use is fine and dandy. Copyright
infringement is not.
No insult intended here, but you've just quoted
RIAA doublespeak, for the reason given in my
very first sentence of this post - Fair use
means nothing less than permissible
copyright infringement.
Sadly, in another 50 years, saying that might
not even make sense to most people. But if you
stop to consider why we have copyrights in the
first place - A limited monopoly to reward
the creator of a work - You'll immediately
see why even so egregious an act as copying an
entire CD for a friend doesn't violate the spirit
of copyright. The creator still has his monopoly
(or whatever cut therefrom he has managed to negotiate),
and has lost at most one sale (but has
not incurred a real physical "loss" as a result,
only the potential non-attainment of a potential
gain). It only even starts makes sense to consider
small-scale personal copying "bad" when viewed from
the perspective of a huge infrastructure designed
to extract maximum profits from the creative process.
No middle ground will be realized until
both sides of this issue grow the hell up.
Who wants middle ground?
I buy quite a lot of CDs (20 to 50 per month).
The RIAA could consider me one of their best
customers (even with over half my
purchases going to indie labels), except that
I deliberately buy only used discs. Why?
The RIAA has basically shot themselves in
the foot, in three ways:
Technologically, I loathe DRM; although I
have yet to find a disc I can't rip, the
mere fact that they would try to
prevent me from using music I buy (and spare
me the "owned-vs-licenced" semantic BS - to
the typical consumer, if I pay cash for a
physical product that doesn't have a return
date on it, I "own" it) however the hell I
want, very much offends me.
Politically, I don't like the bullying tactics
of the RIAA, nor do I like their constant
attempts to legislate their business model
into what amounts to perpetual profit for
no further work input. Although I can't
hurt them all that much, I certainly won't
help pay for their war-on-the-little-guy.
Economically, the most simple, they charge
too much for no good reason. Do they have
that right? Yes, certainly, they could charge
$500 per CD if they so desired. But perception
matters quite a lot - Even nonhuman primates
will petulantly turn their noses at a known
bad deal ("tolerable" vs "preferred" food as reward
for doing something, when they've seen someone else
get the preferred reward for the same task). Tapes
cost around ten times as much to manufacture
as CDs, yet cost half as much? Keep your lettuce,
and stack your damned colored blocks by yourself!
So, who wants a middle ground? I say, Screw
the RIAA. Let 'em go under. The artists
will still create, they just won't have so
many mob-affiliated middlemen taking a cut
of the till. And thanks to the internet, the
artists can actually do just that, in
a manner far more effective than the old
standby of offering tapes/CDs for sale at
their concerts.
and the other side doesn't want to pay anything
No, one side wants too much control, and the
other side wants the same "fair use" rights they've
had all along. I consider the "money" part of this
issue the least important.
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Where is this fantasy land where we should build, in your opinion?
90% of the planet! For some reason, humans just prefer living in fairly dangerous places. In the US, we could avoid virtually all the hurricanes we hear about simply by avoiding the two or three hundred miles nearest the coast from Louisiana through Virgina; almost all the earthquakes and the worst of the droughts by not living in the desert; all the volcanos by not living on the slopes of one; Tornados shouldn't actually cause damage if people living in tornado-prone areas built appropriate housing; Tsunamis only cause serious damage right on the coast itself.
Are those minimum wage jobs going to allow you to take time off to go out-of-state to scout out the housing/job/etc. situation in your intended destination?
Currently, the businesses in the region hit by Katrina can't open for purely practical reasons. Most people have no homes intact to which they can return. You yourself called the area very economically depressed. So I would repeat myself, why stay??? "too poor to move" doesn't mean much when staying doesn't have anything more to offer beyond the possibility that the same thing might happen again next year, and the promise that it will happen again eventually. And one slum seems as good as another...
If they can't rebuild what they call their house, there's no reason for them to linger anywhere
Why encourage them to linger in the same place nature gave them a smack-down in the first place??? "It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one..."
What can I say if you don't "get" that the humor in that sketch doesn't come from the fourth one staying up?
Louisiana ain't exactly the richest state in the Union and New Orleans is among the worst of it
And you consider that a reason TO STAY???
This may not apply in "real" third-world countries, but in the US, any schmuck that can sign their name can get a job at WallyWorld or McDonalds.
I have chosen to live in a place that doesn't get floods, deadly droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tidal waves, volcanos, earthquakes, plagues of locusts, or anything of the sort. I therefore have VERY little sympathy (in fact, you could call it "outright annoyance that my tax dollars need to bail their asses out over and over and over") for people who live in places that do have such problems chronically.
Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps. Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest poing in the general area. Don't completely deforest the surrounding area. These don't take a rocket scientist to figure out. And if you do, don't expect to see me chopping a hole in your roof to save your worthless life after you ignore an evacuation order.
The reality is that law enforcement and copyright holders, just like you and me, can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time.
You've tried to write off the arguement as a red herring, yet missed the uderlying idea entirely... Yes, one cop can write me a ticket at the same time as another cop busts a rapist. And, as the number of cops approach infinity, they can do both without the one having any impact on the other.
But in the real world, we have a finite number of cops with a finite set of resources. Doing one thing DOES reduce their ability to do something else at the same time.
Thus, the argument "why go after downloaders when rapists run free" doesn't commit a logical error - It quite seriously takes the severity of the crime into consideration, and correctly asserts that if one extra cop walking a beat can stop one rape, that BY FAR takes precedence over busting 12YOs who have their upload and download directories pointing to the same place.
So, as long as you can open the daily paper and read about a rape, a murder, a CEO's golden parachute, an armed robbery, a meth lab, or similar "real" crimes, you most certainly should consider it the most insulting kind of slap in the face that we have police busting grannies and teens for using Kazaa.
The salaries of the researchers are probably paid by MIT
No, the salary of the lead researcher most likely comes from MIT. The countless grad students who did 99% of the work almost certainly get paid from the grant, not the school.
However, in most cases, you could call this a meaningless distinction. When a prof gets a grant, the school usually takes all of it, keeps a nice clean half of it for the privelage of "affiliation", and then doles the rest out to the actual research team in a standard salary/expenses manner.
"So, we want to audit your use of Flash for compliance with our New and Improved Draconian Terms(tm)."
"What the hell gives you that right?"
"Well, you agreed to the EULA when you installed it...".
"Oh. In that case, I have no copies installed."
"Well, you have to let us verify that!"
"And what gives you that right?"
"I repeat, The EULA."
"You mean the one I didn't agree to when I didn't install Flash?"
"Ummm... Just a dolphin, ma'am..."
I now run a gateway appliance that draws about 5 watts.
I had considered that route, but wanted the flexibility of a basically-complete Linux system (without X) as well. If I ever manage to make it off-grid, I'll certainly reevaluate that choice, but for now, the difference has more value to me than saving $0.25 per month on the electric bill.
I've been using the Kill-a-Watt wattmeter
Same here - Great little toy, and it has already saved me more than its cost. It amazed me how much power various devices around the house consume! As my very first change, I ditched my 21" CRT for a 19" LCD. Dropped my electric bill $5/month right there (although the LCD cost me a few hundred, I had meant to get one anyway - Seeing my CRT suck 250W just sped up the decision).
When your boss asks about the relative merits of switching from a microcontroller-based product to one that uses CPLD's
...You'll wake up horribly dissapointed that such
conversations don't happen in the real world.
Even if your immediate boss understands the question (mine at the moment would, and you cannot imagine how happy that makes me), he in turn has any important decisions handed down based on buzzword-worthiness.
My favorite, ever (fortunately a friend, not myself, had this disaster as a task) - The customer wanted something vaguely like a POS terminal. They specified the hardware platform, and that we needed to code everything in C++. I don't know if the customer actually had a clue what "C++" meant beyond a buzzword at the time, but suffice it to say, no C++ compiler existed for the specified target platform.
Kids - Your senior project doesn't matter. Your school's reputation (assuming something better than "Bill's house of Diplomas") doesn't matter. The opinions of your professors don't matter. No one cares how much "community service"/"volunteer work"/ "social BS" you performed. Do the least work possible to pass - I wouldn't even say worry about getting an "A" unless you already have highest-honors status and a B would lower that. And as the GP pointed out, once you get your first job, no one will ever care about your college work as more than idle conversation over beers while commiserating about the Dilbertian nature of "real" work... And even your first job doesn't care what you did in college - If you worked at a decent intership, your experience there for a total of 12 months out of the previous four years, will count for FAR more than the 36 months of academic work you did in the same time.
You want to know what does matter? Get the framed piece of paper to wave (doesn't matter what it actually says), and don't let yourself get into too much debt - Many employers now run credit checks on job applicants, meaning the schmuck who went $100k+ into debt at a private school and "wasted" his summers sucking up to professors will get turned down in favor of the guy who went to a state university and managed to pay tuition with the wages from a summer internship.
And I say this as someone who did keep a high GPA, in two different degrees, worked with professors on their pet research, and ended up with glowing, obviously-personal (rather than cookie-cutter) recommendations from two separate department chairs. Fortunately I also went to a state university and kept out of debt. And what mattered, for my first post-college job? The summer internship. No one, in any of the interviews I've endured (and yes, "endured" makes the right word to describe the process of inverviewing), cared in the least about the (IMO) very cool research I did in college. They cared that I knew X, Y, and Z (where X, Y, and Z frequently had no actual relation to the job description), that I could solve riddles quickly, that I passed a background check, and how I dealt with my worst failure at work (a tough question, considering that I never really failed by my own faults, and saying "management made the project physically impossible" sounds like a cop-out).
As one last point, to give all you poor bastards about to graduate a small sliver of hope that you haven't just wasted four years of your life - My current job violates most of the above complaints, but I consider it pretty much a one-in-a-million position. I interviewed directly with a real, live, competent engineer, who cared more about my skills than about mind games and buzzwords. Management has a decent knowledge of technology, but also the wisdom not to pretend they know enough to micromanage the IT department. I can speak with the head honcho casually, on a first-name basis, and don't find my desk contents waiting at security in a cardboard box for me when I come in the next morning. So such jobs exist, but good luck finding them.
I've also been wondering for the same thing. I now was with a long disputed battle to leave on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.
Personally, I have two always-on machines... My internet gateway, and my file server (both running Linux). I recently upgraded both from old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for the CPU, as you mention.
For my Masq'ing box, I went with an Epia CL 600 and a 512MB CF disk (via a CF to IDE adapter). Won't break any number-crunching records, but it sips a nice 28W, total, at-the-wall. Best of all, I could run it fanless, which would make it have no moving parts at all. I didn't like that it would creep up above 50C, however, so threw in an as-close-to-silent-as-you-can-get 120mm fan, keeping it down in the low 30s.
For the file server, I used an Athlon 64 (90nm Winchester 3000). Before drives, it sucks under 50W (again, at-the-wall). Each drive will add 15-25W, so scale up from there. The whole system, however, can realistically draw less than just a naked P4, if I limited it to only two drives (but of course I have more than that, currently four, each as the master with no slave).
One interesting point I'd like to see discussed, if anyone has a few good links - Motherboard power consumption (aside from the CPU), and "real world" HDD draw. I have three Winchester 3000s (two of which I plan to drop X2s in when they come down in price a tad) in three different motherboards, and they vary by 20W (ie, half the total) idle power use (with the same low-end PCI video card, except one system has on-board video a hell of a lot stronger than that old Trident card (an ATI Radeon XPress 200), and it sucks the least power of the three). Then for HDDs, I can of course find the published TDP, but as with CPUs, that means very close to nothing beyond "make sure your power supply can handle this, but it will never actually need to".
And, as a last point, if you care about shaving off a few more watts more than money or horsepower (but want something heftier than an Epia), get a Pentium-M board. They can manage around half the power consumption of an Athlon 64 (3W vs 7W idle, and (roughly) 25W vs 50W at load), with around 80% of the performance. At idle (an always-on home server sits idle over 99% of the time, I'd say, unless you stick something like Seti@Home on it), that should compare well (wattage-wise) even to a high-end Epia board.
If you're the music industry, and you give a discount to the misses, you're going to end up making less money.
Nah... You just need to realize that the "could go for substantially less" part of the deal means maybe all the way down to $0.95. They threw that in there to make the idea more palatable, but in practice, it won't happen that way.
Also, consider that even a slight reduction could end up boosting sales of such material, in the same way that otherwise slow-selling unknowns fly out of the cutout/discount bin at any local music store... We might agonize over whether or not to buy a decent new release at $18.99, but we'll throw away a $50 without blinking on $5-$10 discs we've never heard of.
Was there any legitimate excuse for DS not having FULL wi-fi capability at launch?
Yeah - It's primary use, as a portable handheld console-like gaming system.
Not "coffee powered WLAN party", not "excuse for geeks to feign sociability", not "MMORPG that leaves your parents basement".
You feed it roms and batteries and it helps pass the time on long trips and in the waiting room at the dentist.
And the PSP? I only have one question - Has anything "Now available on DVD and for PSP" sold a single "for PSP" copy?
One company, getting trashed in the marketplace, badmouthing the current leader. Nothing to see here, move along.
When you said Prescott EE, I figured you meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You should be more specific.
;)
:)
I figured the exact model number counted as specific enough...
I do see the ambiguity now, though, and apologize. Didn't even cross my mind that "Extreme Edition" would abbreviate to EE.
Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the thing for a while.
Tell it that...
I do realize, though, that if I kept it pegged at 100% for a while, it would overheat. But as I said, it doesn't do much (just a file server). As my point in that particular factoid, I meant to point out the low-end consumption of both chips - An idle Prescott draws enough to cook it.
For some hard data (I didn't post my own numbers because no one believes me that a non-crippled modern machine can draw a mere 60W at the wall), try: This comparison... A heavily loaded 90nm Athlon 64 draws just about the same as an idle Prescott. FWIW, I've seen a better full-family comparison on Tom's Hardware, but can't seem to find it at the moment. Same basic trend, though... All along the two chip families, roughly paired by performance, the AMD's max draw matches the idle P4's.
I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's new processors on "normal" power usage when you don't even have any info on it.
I agree, and didn't mean to do that... In fact, I'll go so far as to say that, if they can pull off the power they claim, and if AMD hasn't beaten them even more by then, and if they don't force Pentium-M style pricing (ie, out of my range for a personal machine) on us - Then my next upgrade may well use one of Intel's next gen chips.
A lot of "if"s in that, though...
AMD could actually lose this one
If Intel, for instance, chooses to pit a dual Itanium 2 system against the dual Opteron.
Not in x86 emulation mode, they won't.
AMD covered their butts on that one... The challenge specifically states x86, with "the corresponding Intel x86 server processors that are commercially available in volume."
Beyond that, the main thrust here is the misunderstanding of the parent (like saying Intel's chips should have gone multi core, when they did).
Three quick points...
First, the EE parts have two cores - Prescot rev "E", times two. Thus, "EE".
Second, Intel has yet to take the Pentium M to dual-core. Everyone speculated on it, and you could call this new "announcement" little more than the next gen of the M with dual core and 64b in mind, but you cannot currently get a dual-core M.
Finally, TDP, which the parent accurately gave, does not equal "normal" consumption. It only means "if you could switch every single transistor on this chip at once, it would take X watts". That does not happen, ever. You can't even come up with a totally unrealistic program that can cause such a condition, it just can't happen. Now, I can't personally compare the dual core parts (due to a lack of having any of them) but for the single cores, a Winchester's worst-case draw comes in around one third of a Prescott's (measured at-the-wall on similar hardware, adjusted for PS losses, and with the published typical-case draw of the MB, GPU, and HDD subtracted). Thus my claim of 3-5x.
Or to put it another way - I have one machine, admittedly not heavily loaded, running a Winchester 3000 with a passive heatsink. Hasn't hit 40C yet. Try that with a Prescott.
Ask a teenager to hum or whistle their favorite song
Why bother asking? Just call them, and their cell ringtone will reveal the answer.
So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance
:)
First the OB-peeve: Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed or relative performance, only that the number of transistors per unit of area will double every X months (where X lies between 12 and 18, depending on which "version" of his law you use).
Okay, that taken care of...
AMD and Intel hit a barrier "harder" than the mere doubling of transistors... They reached a point where running a PC noticeably increases the electric bill (a typical single-core P4 costs around $1.50 per month to run 24/7 in the Northeastern US, just for the CPU, not counting the graphics card, monitor, hair dryer, or whatever other power-sucking toys you might have attached); and relatedly, that high density of power consumption requires getting rid of a proportional amount of heat.
By dropping the energy requirements by a fifth, you can consequently have five times as many cores for the same heat-dissipating capacity. If each of those pushes a mere half the numerical performance of the single power-hungry core, you still get a net gain of 1.5 units of processing per unit of area.
Intel plans to release these in Q2 2006. They will use a 65nm process, support dual cores, and get 5x the per-watt performance of the Prescott EE.
AMD has dual core chips available now, that get 3-5x the per-watt performance of Intel's Prescott EE line (depending on how they define certain things - Idle? Mean power/load? Peak realistic-but-not-theoretical? TDP?).
And AMD only uses 90nm at the moment, and will have two 65nm fabs up by the end of this year - Which will give them another nice boost in terms of per-watt performance.
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line entering the arena, but this smells an awfully lot like more of Intel playing catch-up, and in a way they won't win.
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever reason, reached a hard wall for performance, Intel would have done better to expand it to multi core - Perhaps jump right to 4 cores just to bypass the whole "catch up with dual" criticism - And dropped the price to undercut AMD (at least per-core). But this? Well, it has potential, but unless Intel has decided to seriously under hype a major announcement, I won't lose any sleep worrying that I just upgraded three machines to readiness for AMD's X2 line (can't afford the damn things yet, so currently just running Winchester 3000s, but all just a chip-swap away from going to X2).
Rather than do the usual slashdot "Science is EViL" thing, why not really think about the potential here...
Think about the potential... Hmm, let's see... 168 hour work weeks. 24-hour "rush hour" traffic. Overpopulation as bored people start "getting it on" more to pass the time. Massively increased demands on the electrical grid. And of course the obvious, no more sleeping and dreaming (I happen to enjoy sleep - I consider it something to look forward to every night, not as some sort of nuissance that interferes with my available productivity).
And those assume this drug works perfectly and safely. Based on past attempts at freeing humans from our need for sleep, I wouldn't bet my health or sanity on CX717 as a magic bullet.
Ofcause you have to remember to do everything in a single command otherwise if you delete the old version you cannot run anything else.
/bin and /sbin utilities (along with a few in
the similar /usr dirs (such as ldd, nm, and
a small editor like nano).
It amazes me that every single Linux distro doesn't just come with statically linked
Modern HDDs have oodles of space. Wasting a few extra megs in exchange for an almost-worst-case recoverable installation seems like a no-brainer to me.
Of course, I can (and do) install exactly such statically linked utils as my first task after a new install, but I shouldn't need to... Not to mention, many of the basic Linux programs take a whole lot more than just passing a "--enable-static" to the configure script or passing in an "LDFLAGS=-static".
1. Four cores standard
For my next upgrade (when the CPUs themselves drop a tad in price, perhaps 6 months), I plan to go with a dual-socket dual-core-Opteron-2xx system. Poof, four cores. If I had cash to burn, I could go all the way to 16 cores, today, with an 8 Opteron 8xx dual-core machine. That seems a tad overkill for a home PC at the moment, though (not that I'd turn down a free one...).
2. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari cartridges to eight CPUs
And what might they could call this new style of plugging in chips? Hmm... How about "SECC3"?
3. Mobos as blades to passive backplanes
You see that already in some high-end servers, but for the most part, the home user would hate something like that. For one thing, it costs more to organize a system like that, since each "blade" needs to have the potential to drive the whole system - Alternatively, it can require a "master" blade that costs more, but then you just have what amounts to an odd way to plug a bus riser (the passive backplane itself) into a motherboard (the master blade). For another, most low-grade techies have a hell of a time just trying to match compatible motherboards, CPUs, memory, and video cards. You want to add in a whole new realm of complexity?
4. Home blade servers and thin clients.
I tend to agree with this one for the mid-term future, but not the short term. Until largish high-quality LCD-like (flat, light, and low power - the actual underlying tech doesn't really matter) displays start costing significantly less (under $100), you won't see thin clients in anything more than niche uses, such as POS systems.
Finally enough bandwidth for us all to cut the cord?
Multi-channel 802.11a has plenty of bandwidth to cut the cord. Even plain ol' 802.11g would suffice.
However, only one question really matters, and I doubt a positive answer:
Can it give me a decent signal more than one room away from the AP?
The guy commited fraud.
Fraud?
He violated the TOS of the game. Unless doing so broke other laws (ie, my ISP's TOS say I can't commit copyright violations - Doing so would not only violate the TOS, but break "real" laws rather than just fictional corporate rules), any punishment really needs to stay directly related to his account. Namely, limited to the "death penalty" of deleting his account and banning him.
This mixes levels in a very, very dangerous way. People need to not confuse a game for reality, nor a TOS violation for actual fraud. Corporate rules != law, and law != reality, no matter how much both of the previous LHSs might wish otherwise.
I usually have pretty good reaction times, and in the flash test, purely by chance (well, okay, just because, having conducted psych research myself, I like to screw with their heads) I chose the third sequence first.
I didn't see the target.
I replayed that thing about a dozen times before I finally caught it.
I suspect I missed it because "rotated 90 degrees" doesn't stand out enough to notice, with such complicated images and only a tenth of a second per image - Though I suppose using something like simple brightly colored shapes would tend to make the "graphic" image stand out unduly.
Anyway, once I finally spotted the target image in the last sequence, I nailed it first try in the first two sequences (the ones supposed to induce temporary blindness).
Then again, perhaps I just have a deep fear of fire hydrants, while bloody stumps don't really phase me.
You don't have the freedom of speech to solicit someone to perform an illegal act
...Such as, oh, say, soliciting someone to say
"big brother double plus bad"?
Either you have freedom of ALL speech, or you have no freedoms at all.
And no, I don't naively believe that Americans have "real" freedom of speech, either. No truly free society has ever existed on this planet, and probably never will. But don't try to excuse laws against certain kinds of speech by pointing to other laws making it illegal - That reduces to the tautology "X breaks the law because X has a law against it", not to any basis in physical reality.
any more than you can say "Come here and buy heroin!"
Why can't I? Now, if I actally sell heroin, I've broken an entirely different set of laws (with which I also strongly disagree, but I'll stick to one ran per post). But to just say it?
Baa-aa-aa.
As for laws against gambling - Another poster already made the only point that needs saying - Every government in the world has state-sponsored "lotteries" of some sort. The criminals-in-power simply dislike competition.
Where in fair use rights is permission to make unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works?
Most of the idea of "fair use" centers around making "Unauthorized" copies - What else would you apply it to?
Copies for backups.
Copies for format-shifting (CD to tape, CD to MP3, now we even need CD to CD to remove the DRM that makes it not play in my car's CD player).
Copies for time-shifting (the primary, and court-upheld, purpose of the entirely legal VCR).
Copies for friends? That seems to land squarely on the boundary between okay and not okay.
Short of absurdly abusing one of the above "rights", the RIAA would have a hell of a time convincing even the current batch of corporate-friendly courts that making a copy of a CD deliberately-broken-from-the-factory so the owner can play it their car somehow violates copyright to a punishable degree.
We only unarguably cross the classic hard-line test for fair use when the copier starts selling the copies.
Interestingly enough, the whole P2P situation has arisen because it fills a niche between what I describe above as "absurdly abusing" fair use, and commercial copying... The sharer doesn't (usually) profit from the copying, but can manage to give away enough copies that it could potentially undermine the market for the real product (For both our sakes, I'll entirely skip the idea of whether P2P actually helps or hurts sales).
Fair use is fine and dandy. Copyright infringement is not.
No insult intended here, but you've just quoted RIAA doublespeak, for the reason given in my very first sentence of this post - Fair use means nothing less than permissible copyright infringement.
Sadly, in another 50 years, saying that might not even make sense to most people. But if you stop to consider why we have copyrights in the first place - A limited monopoly to reward the creator of a work - You'll immediately see why even so egregious an act as copying an entire CD for a friend doesn't violate the spirit of copyright. The creator still has his monopoly (or whatever cut therefrom he has managed to negotiate), and has lost at most one sale (but has not incurred a real physical "loss" as a result, only the potential non-attainment of a potential gain). It only even starts makes sense to consider small-scale personal copying "bad" when viewed from the perspective of a huge infrastructure designed to extract maximum profits from the creative process.
No middle ground will be realized until both sides of this issue grow the hell up.
Who wants middle ground?
I buy quite a lot of CDs (20 to 50 per month). The RIAA could consider me one of their best customers (even with over half my purchases going to indie labels), except that I deliberately buy only used discs. Why? The RIAA has basically shot themselves in the foot, in three ways:
Technologically, I loathe DRM; although I have yet to find a disc I can't rip, the mere fact that they would try to prevent me from using music I buy (and spare me the "owned-vs-licenced" semantic BS - to the typical consumer, if I pay cash for a physical product that doesn't have a return date on it, I "own" it) however the hell I want, very much offends me.
Politically, I don't like the bullying tactics of the RIAA, nor do I like their constant attempts to legislate their business model into what amounts to perpetual profit for no further work input. Although I can't hurt them all that much, I certainly won't help pay for their war-on-the-little-guy.
Economically, the most simple, they charge too much for no good reason. Do they have that right? Yes, certainly, they could charge $500 per CD if they so desired. But perception matters quite a lot - Even nonhuman primates will petulantly turn their noses at a known bad deal ("tolerable" vs "preferred" food as reward for doing something, when they've seen someone else get the preferred reward for the same task). Tapes cost around ten times as much to manufacture as CDs, yet cost half as much? Keep your lettuce, and stack your damned colored blocks by yourself!
So, who wants a middle ground? I say, Screw the RIAA. Let 'em go under. The artists will still create, they just won't have so many mob-affiliated middlemen taking a cut of the till. And thanks to the internet, the artists can actually do just that, in a manner far more effective than the old standby of offering tapes/CDs for sale at their concerts.
and the other side doesn't want to pay anything
No, one side wants too much control, and the other side wants the same "fair use" rights they've had all along. I consider the "money" part of this issue the least important.