That will result in something basically
resembling the desired finished product,
but you've left out the mindset of the
typical user...
Your "happy" client will do nothing but bitch
and moan about having to walk you through
everything, when you just had to sit
in your comfy AC'd room writing code. And
six months??? What the hell did it take you
six months for, his sister's kid (bright
lad, but he won't hold that against
you) could have done the same thing in a week!
People want it right, but if you actually
make them interact with you as part of the
process, they will assume they did
all the work.
Presumeably, it's in case we invented some
fractal compression algorithm that allowed us
to store all our lecture notes as a 10-digit
signed number.
I take it this happened before the days
of modern graphing calculators?
My physics and calc classes let us use our
calculators (I had an original TI-85, overclocked
via the capacitor removal trick, of course), and
you can quite easily fit the formulae needed for
six courses in 32k of memory...
Of course, that made me wonder why they didn't
just let us do the tests open-book - To which,
I discovered the answer that most professors
give you test questions that come straight from
the unassigned chapter questions (the better
ones will actually change the numbers, but still
the same question).
I couldn't, however, fit six classes worth
of chapter questions in 32k of memory.
And for the record - This didn't count as cheating.
The math and (real)science professors realized we
could store massive amounts of info in our calculators,
and just didn't care.
But boy-oh-boy did my intro to cultural anthrpology
prof look at me funny when I pulled out a calculator...;-)
Sorry, but science just isn't ready yet to
make well-supported statements about the
relationship between "race" and "intelligence",
and anybody who does is a charlatan.
But we can accept "Jews have a higher
incidence of Gaucher disease, Tay-Sachs,
and breast cancer? We can safely assert
that blacks have a much higher rate
of diabetes and certain types of strokes?
Yet, we can't say that "Jews perform better
than average on a certain category of tests"?
The only error here involves the assertion that
those tests measure the particular quality we
call "intelligence". But then, believing
that would go against the modern line of PC BS
asserting the nonexistance of "dumb" kids.
Yeah, I could tell... Right about when the
author gets to "Do you remember learning
about electricity in high school? I sure
do - I dreaded it whenever that topic came
around", I felt overwhelmed with confidence
in her ability to comment on such a friendly,
fluffy topic as cold fusion.
Or perhaps "Here's where an amazing and
mysterious force comes in" (mysterious...
Like the author's credibility?) is what you
meant to refer to?
Nonono, don't tell me, "Is there any way of
getting protons close enough together for
fusion to occur that doesnt require the
energy output of a large city to make
it happen?" Golly, we just need to put all
our large cities in pairs, and they can each
use the energy output of the other for all
those pesky things like lights and heat and
such! Then we can tear down all the nukular
reactors, build parks in their place, and
hold hands while singing kum-ba-fuckin'-ya!
I would say, "Wow, welcome to the dawn of a new era", if
totally true, reproduceable, and has a net positive
energy balance.
But the Christian Science Monitor? Yeah, okay... Right
up there with "Fair and Balanced" for deceptive self-descriptions,
and "Military Intelligence" for oxymorons.
When I see it in Science, I'll care. Until then, perhaps
the Slashdot editors would like me to submit this amazing
story I saw on the National Enquirer's web page? Really,
it has a geek angle to it, though what "they" did to
those poor goats, well, probably NSFW...
If we Americans go to India to work we'll
be stuck there because we won't be able to
afford to move back.
I fail to see the problem, if we'll have a
comparable (or better) standard of living
there... Finally a good chance to
escape the ship before it completely goes
down!
Squeek Squeek, baby!
Hmm, I wonder if Hindu zealots seem as
annoying as Fundies/NeoCons....
I know you meant that as a joke, but I really
have to wonder how the use of "microperforated
parchment" counts as magically less of a
violation of the rule than your own suggestion.
If you take it literally, then your own
suggestion would work just fine. If you
interpret it to mean "don't add any more
information", the suggested fix violates
the rule just as much. If we allow something
in between the two, it seems silly to need
to resort to microperformations - Why not a
plain ol' watermark (with no characters in it,
of course, just a low-contrast picture)?
And if we want to resort to high-tech, since
apparently god doesn't object to the use of
science to circumvent his rules - They make
these things out of dead animals. Animals
come right from the factory with a unique ID
already encoded into every single cell in their
bodies...
My 450W power supply is completely
unessecary for my 6HD's, 2 DVD Burners,
12 fans.
You'll notice I didn't suggest that just
because I can live on 2000 calories per day,
an elephant should try to do the same. But
by all means, flog that poor strawman a bit
more...;-)
I should pull it out and downgrade to my
300W power supply what caused system
instability due to low voltages.
Actually, considering how you phrased that, you
probably should pull it out and replace
it. Look for a PS with active PFC - A modern
non-crap power supply does not give you low voltages
on lines near their limit - If rated for 24A@12V,
they give a rock-solid 12V on the 12V line to 23.999A,
and at 24.001A, simply shut off. No fuss, no muss,
no pulling your hair out trying to find an irregularly
occuring problem resulting from an overtaxed PS
giving low voltages, no blown capacitors showering
the insides of your computer with corrosive goo.
I'm a little suprised that no Slashdotter
has commented on the irony of widespread theft
of the book that's the original source for the
"Thou Shalt Not Steal".
I think most Slashdotters still haven't gotten
over the idea that someone would waste a year,
writing in a non-permanant ink, on dried animal
parts, just to have a copy of a book they could
pick up for a few bucks at any Borders.
Let's see... That comes out to a write speed of
7*10^-9. Even IP-over-Pigeon could saturate a
medium that slow...
And, unlike a lot of "hand made" things that people
will pay an obscene amount for lower quality work,
you can't even call it "art", since the goal consists
of producing an exact copy of the mythical original...
we all know most of the people using programs
like Decrypter are using them to make copies of
movies they rent from their favorite dvd rental
place
Do we?
Because... It doesn't actually work for
that particular purpose, most of the time.
Personally, I use it to extract soundtracks from
(for example) concert footage for listening in
my car. For making something that passes as
a backup of movies I actually own, I use DVD
Shink.
Why?
Because almost all new releases on DVD
use double-layer. Meaning that making an
actual copy would currently cost you $10-$15
per disc just for the DL blank, more than you
can outright buy a legal copy of most movies
on sale.
Now, sure, HDDs have gotten rather cheap. But
I suspect the number of people who would set up
a cheap raid of SATA drives just to hold their
pirated movie collection, at a cost only about
25% less than just buying the movies, falls quite
a bit lower than those who would use such a program
legitimately... Which I also consider a low number,
quite likely.
So what do I think most people do with it?
I would say that yes, they rip movies they rent. But
for the purpose of 1) Keeping it just a little longer
than the rental period (perhaps keeping a constant
rotation of 5-10 movies on their HDD), and 2) To
remove the incredibly annoying pUOPs - Personally, it
drives me to near rage when I put a movie into my
player, and it tells me I can't skip right to the
main menu. And yes, I will admit that more than once,
I have taken such a movie (rented or not) immediately
out of the drive and ripped it on a temporary basis
for precisely this reason.
And, y'know, I seriously believe THAT bothers
Hollywood far more than outright piracy. I see movie
sales following the same path magazines took half a
century ago - They only charge a cover price as a
sort of token of interest (to keep people from taking
home the whole print run to burn for heat through the
winter). They actually make the vast majority
of their money from the ads they run, not from the cover
price (thus explaining how they don't hemorrhage money
when they let you subscribe for over 90% off cover).
If someone writes a visualization that
projects a 4D object onto this 3D display,
will it be much easier for the average person
to grasp and understand?
Probably not, for two reasons...
First, we can grasp the idea of 3d objects
projected onto a 2d surface because we
actually do see our 3d world in only 2d (times
two, which we use to extract depth information
via some very expensive and task-dedicated
computational hardware).
As the simplest way to think about that,
consider the situation where you have a
partially obstructed field of vision due
to something rather close to you (a rear-view
mirror, for example) You might have your left
eye only seeing one quarter or so of the
overall scene, but you don't have any drastic
sense that you lack stereo information for
the unshared portions (unless you need to
actively perform in that unshared section,
such as catching an object thrown at you).
Second, we "know" our familiar 3d world, even
having a built-in physics engine according to
some recent research. When we see a drawing
of a 3d scene rendered in 2d, we know what it
"should" represent. Moving up to 4d, we have
no similar frame of reference to compare
against. We cannot directly perceive 4d
objects as a whole; we can at best consider
certain subsets of them (ones uniquely defined
along their w-axis) as the time-evolution
of a 3d object (for example, a melting ice-cube
roughly approximates a hyperpyramid).
So, if you see a melting ice-cube, does it help
you better understand the abstract world of 4d
objects? If you already have a pretty good grasp
of them, yes. If not, then no - It just looks like
a melting ice-cube.
As you can see from this white paper. AMD indicates that...
Yes, I have consulted AMD's documentation on the subject.
But TDP does not equal normal (or even max) real-world
draw. It means that if you could somehow saturate every
functional unit on the chip, you would draw that much.
But in the real world, you can't come anywhere near
that.
Huh? Do you have a reference?
Well, I can't find where I read 7W specifically, but a
comparison on
Tom's Hardware
gives very similar numbers... 3.2W in the lowest power state,
10.8W idle but not in C&Q, and 28.8W at 100% load. Not an exact
match, but not all that far off from the numbers I originally
said (with a bit of fudge-factor room thrown in).
However, I could (and have) found other reviews that give
totally different numbers, and of course AMD's own whitepaper
disagrees, as you point out. My own numbers unfortunately
include the whole system, but extrapolating from that low of
3.2W, would give me a mean of 9.2W, and a max of 20.2W. That
mean and max sound rather low, however (the mean in particular,
if non-C&Q idle draws 10.8W), so I have to suspect the numbers
at Tom's don't quite hit the mark, but come close
enough.
How in the world did you manage to put
together an "old" P-III system that drew
upwards of 108watts?
Keep in mind, I measure that at the plug, so
it includes every component in the system all
acting together.
My new system has a high-quality PS (a SeaSonic
something, I actually chose it for the 120mm
fan and its reputation as one of the most solid
PSs you can get, and got lucky when I later
learned about its efficiency). As I mentioned,
a Winchester 1.8Ghz CPU. On-board everything
(Radeon XPRESS 200 and SB400 chipset). Only
need one HDD and one DVD Burner. Not a server
or a gaming machine, but a totally kickass
desktop with enough space to collect an
awfully lot of crap and good enough graphics
and CPU to play anything but the newest FPSs.
The system it replaced had a PIII 600
(coppermine core) at 34.5W. An add-on GeForce
4 adds another 30W. Two HDDs (adding up to a
whopping 12GB), another 20-30W. That adds up
to at least 80W without even considering PS
efficiency - And considering the ultra-cheapy
power supply I had in that machine, it amazes
me I managed to get over 70% efficiency.
So, does that satisfy your incredulity?
I have to admit, such a low draw shocked
me at first, too. But, the numbers don't
lie, I went from 110-120W, to 54W average.
Oops... Just to clarify, the entire system,
including power supply losses, draws that much.
The CPU itself, from what I've read (published
numbers seem to vary a LOT, and I'd love to see
some hard data on the min, mean, and max draw of
the 90nm Athlon 64s), only eats between 7 and 35W
(for comparison, the Pentium III line came in
at the low 30s) with a theoretical max somewhere
in the 60W range.
Kinda funny, actually... When everyone talks about
needing bigger and better power supplies, with 400W
considered a bare minimum and 600W not all that uncommon
these days, I upgraded from an old P-III system and
the total power consumption of the system dropped
by half.
a very fast, very hot modern processor
(in this case an AMD Athlon 64 4000+)
Very hot? If you haven't already bought one,
just make sure to get one with a Winchester or
Venus core.
Using C&Q, mine (only a 3000, but "close enough"
to make my point) could probably get away with
purely passive cooling. Using a meter at
the plug, it draws a whopping 54 watts average,
with 48W idle (C&Q engaged) and 65W max.
Thanks to modern CPU power saving technologies
as implemented in all newer Athlons and Opterons,
or Pentium M, you really don't need to sacrifice
peak performance for the sake of power and heat.
They deal with usually sitting there idle fairly
well, by throttling back, without needing to
resort to such (relatively) drastic measures as
"suspend" and "hibernate".
I do, however, see one possible use for
underclocking... When you keep your CPU always
pegged at 100% (running Seti @home or the like,
for example). Then, underclocking would allow
you to trade a little bit of performance for a
lot of power and heat reduction.
You can gain other important skills by
other ordinary high-school jobs.
Bull.
Before I took an IT internship the summer of my
junior year in highschool, I had an "ordinary"
job.
Do you want to know what amazing things I
learned by bagging groceries?
Let me tell you - If you think most geeks
have a bad attitude regarding "sheeple", talk
to a minimum wager working a demeaning job.
It did, however, teach me one fact that
I consider VERY useful - Demeaning minimum wage
jobs suck, and I would quite seriously kill
myself before I would go back to working in
one again.
Don't fall for the lies, kids - Work, in and
of itself, has absolutely nothing
"noble" about it. If you like what you do,
great. If you consider the pay-for-aggrevation
tradeoff at least marginally in your favor,
great. Any other reasons involving "character"
or "fortitude" or the like, don't buy it.
And don't even get me started on the
evils of volunteerism.
Dropping $15 (or whatever) for a book is no big
deal for some people and they will feel no obligation
to return the book.
I fail to see the problem... If libraries can make money
by people keeping books, that just means less money the
public needs to spend to fund them.
Not that I don't fully support public funding for libraries...
Hell, I consider them one of the few good uses
for my tax dollars. But if they can reduce their dependence
on public funding without reducing the services they
provide, well, I see very little to object to in that.
They just need to set a policy that if you keep a book for
longer than the, say, twice the standard loaning period, you
can only return it for your deposit back if they
happen to need another copy, to allow them to replace books
that people decide to keep in a timely manner.
As part of the terms of the settlement, you can't
use that $50 to buy music from the iTMS. Name
another Apple product that costs $50 or less...
Going further, since anyone getting this settlement
would already have a portable music player
(ie, an iPod), this settlement strikes me as
nothing more than a 10% off coupon on a Mac
Mini (cue the apologists saying "But I wanted
a Mac Mini anyway..."). Wow, THAT
will teach 'em to make false claims - Companies
hate having more people buy their
products, and never give discounts to
entice them to do so.
What a wonderful settlement. Yet another
example of why I don't join class action
suits. We need to start pushing for
criminal, not civil, action against
these companies. Lock up a few entire
Executive Boards, and see how long it takes
to get real reform.
Re:In a word - "Yes". In two, "Not Yet".
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
Pixels are always "on" since you can't
actually turn a pixel on or off (if we could
LCD's wouldn't have black level problems).
The only thing you can turn on or off is the
backlight, which affects the whole screen.
Then, please tell how you would describe
the transition of a pixel from black to white,
if not in some way turning it "on"? Would you
prefer "activating" it? "Toggling" it?
You act as though I've said something horribly
shocking, and then go on to say the same thing
in different words - Pixel response times
only measure the black-to-white transition, not
the reverse.
Disingenuous, at best. "Wrong, NOT a dozen, but
twelve!".
In a word - "Yes". In two, "Not Yet".
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
CRTs still deliver a few perks that LCDs
cannot: Price, as the single most important;
Response time without blurring (your panel may
say 12ms, but that means time to turn a pixel
on, not black to white and back to fully
black again, which usually takes 5-10x as long);
decent sync from an analog signal
(getting MUCH better, but only if you turn off
ClearType or the like first); Behavior of a
"dead" pixel; washability (go ahead, try to
thoroughly clean an LCD screen... Windex destroys
them, water doesn't work and the wiping action
itself will harm them, and the specialty LCD
cleaning solutions that cost a fortune work
marginally well but nothing like Windex-on-glass).
For now, CRTs enjoy popularity mostly for
price and for the highest quality images.
LCDs will catch up in both those areas over
time, but if you only worry about the 18 month
timescale, I'd say you have no need to fear.
Looking at 5 years out, I'd worry a LOT more,
but not yet.
I'm sure the teenage mp3 sharer really cares
about that guy with his new anonymous p2p warez
sucker.
Perhaps not. But the totally legit downloader
might. I do. I'll agree that, almost
certainly, more than 99% of the traffic I get
has nothing to do with resisting an oppressive
government (unless you count the US's own
Corporatocracy, and consider OSI a sort of
political resistance movement)... But if I can
help hide even one message that helps a Chinese
dissident trying to communicate, I consider that
a truly "good" result.
Slashdot Mirror
And in other news, Bill Gates has started quietly buying controlling stakes in all the major heatsink, fan, and small water pump manufacturers...
Right?
Not quite...
That will result in something basically resembling the desired finished product, but you've left out the mindset of the typical user...
Your "happy" client will do nothing but bitch and moan about having to walk you through everything, when you just had to sit in your comfy AC'd room writing code. And six months??? What the hell did it take you six months for, his sister's kid (bright lad, but he won't hold that against you) could have done the same thing in a week!
People want it right, but if you actually make them interact with you as part of the process, they will assume they did all the work.
Presumeably, it's in case we invented some fractal compression algorithm that allowed us to store all our lecture notes as a 10-digit signed number.
;-)
I take it this happened before the days of modern graphing calculators?
My physics and calc classes let us use our calculators (I had an original TI-85, overclocked via the capacitor removal trick, of course), and you can quite easily fit the formulae needed for six courses in 32k of memory...
Of course, that made me wonder why they didn't just let us do the tests open-book - To which, I discovered the answer that most professors give you test questions that come straight from the unassigned chapter questions (the better ones will actually change the numbers, but still the same question).
I couldn't, however, fit six classes worth of chapter questions in 32k of memory.
And for the record - This didn't count as cheating. The math and (real)science professors realized we could store massive amounts of info in our calculators, and just didn't care.
But boy-oh-boy did my intro to cultural anthrpology prof look at me funny when I pulled out a calculator...
Sorry, but science just isn't ready yet to make well-supported statements about the relationship between "race" and "intelligence", and anybody who does is a charlatan.
But we can accept "Jews have a higher incidence of Gaucher disease, Tay-Sachs, and breast cancer? We can safely assert that blacks have a much higher rate of diabetes and certain types of strokes?
Yet, we can't say that "Jews perform better than average on a certain category of tests"?
The only error here involves the assertion that those tests measure the particular quality we call "intelligence". But then, believing that would go against the modern line of PC BS asserting the nonexistance of "dumb" kids.
The CSM is actually a very well respected paper.
Yeah, I could tell... Right about when the author gets to "Do you remember learning about electricity in high school? I sure do - I dreaded it whenever that topic came around", I felt overwhelmed with confidence in her ability to comment on such a friendly, fluffy topic as cold fusion.
Or perhaps "Here's where an amazing and mysterious force comes in" (mysterious... Like the author's credibility?) is what you meant to refer to?
Nonono, don't tell me, "Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen?" Golly, we just need to put all our large cities in pairs, and they can each use the energy output of the other for all those pesky things like lights and heat and such! Then we can tear down all the nukular reactors, build parks in their place, and hold hands while singing kum-ba-fuckin'-ya!
I would say, "Wow, welcome to the dawn of a new era", if totally true, reproduceable, and has a net positive energy balance.
But the Christian Science Monitor? Yeah, okay... Right up there with "Fair and Balanced" for deceptive self-descriptions, and "Military Intelligence" for oxymorons.
When I see it in Science, I'll care. Until then, perhaps the Slashdot editors would like me to submit this amazing story I saw on the National Enquirer's web page? Really, it has a geek angle to it, though what "they" did to those poor goats, well, probably NSFW...
If we Americans go to India to work we'll be stuck there because we won't be able to afford to move back.
I fail to see the problem, if we'll have a comparable (or better) standard of living there... Finally a good chance to escape the ship before it completely goes down!
Squeek Squeek, baby!
Hmm, I wonder if Hindu zealots seem as annoying as Fundies/NeoCons....
how about two? :)
I know you meant that as a joke, but I really have to wonder how the use of "microperforated parchment" counts as magically less of a violation of the rule than your own suggestion.
If you take it literally, then your own suggestion would work just fine. If you interpret it to mean "don't add any more information", the suggested fix violates the rule just as much. If we allow something in between the two, it seems silly to need to resort to microperformations - Why not a plain ol' watermark (with no characters in it, of course, just a low-contrast picture)?
And if we want to resort to high-tech, since apparently god doesn't object to the use of science to circumvent his rules - They make these things out of dead animals. Animals come right from the factory with a unique ID already encoded into every single cell in their bodies...
My 450W power supply is completely unessecary for my 6HD's, 2 DVD Burners, 12 fans.
;-)
You'll notice I didn't suggest that just because I can live on 2000 calories per day, an elephant should try to do the same. But by all means, flog that poor strawman a bit more...
I should pull it out and downgrade to my 300W power supply what caused system instability due to low voltages.
Actually, considering how you phrased that, you probably should pull it out and replace it. Look for a PS with active PFC - A modern non-crap power supply does not give you low voltages on lines near their limit - If rated for 24A@12V, they give a rock-solid 12V on the 12V line to 23.999A, and at 24.001A, simply shut off. No fuss, no muss, no pulling your hair out trying to find an irregularly occuring problem resulting from an overtaxed PS giving low voltages, no blown capacitors showering the insides of your computer with corrosive goo.
I'm a little suprised that no Slashdotter has commented on the irony of widespread theft of the book that's the original source for the "Thou Shalt Not Steal".
I think most Slashdotters still haven't gotten over the idea that someone would waste a year, writing in a non-permanant ink, on dried animal parts, just to have a copy of a book they could pick up for a few bucks at any Borders.
Let's see... That comes out to a write speed of 7*10^-9. Even IP-over-Pigeon could saturate a medium that slow...
And, unlike a lot of "hand made" things that people will pay an obscene amount for lower quality work, you can't even call it "art", since the goal consists of producing an exact copy of the mythical original...
we all know most of the people using programs like Decrypter are using them to make copies of movies they rent from their favorite dvd rental place
Do we?
Because... It doesn't actually work for that particular purpose, most of the time.
Personally, I use it to extract soundtracks from (for example) concert footage for listening in my car. For making something that passes as a backup of movies I actually own, I use DVD Shink.
Why?
Because almost all new releases on DVD use double-layer. Meaning that making an actual copy would currently cost you $10-$15 per disc just for the DL blank, more than you can outright buy a legal copy of most movies on sale.
Now, sure, HDDs have gotten rather cheap. But I suspect the number of people who would set up a cheap raid of SATA drives just to hold their pirated movie collection, at a cost only about 25% less than just buying the movies, falls quite a bit lower than those who would use such a program legitimately... Which I also consider a low number, quite likely.
So what do I think most people do with it?
I would say that yes, they rip movies they rent. But for the purpose of 1) Keeping it just a little longer than the rental period (perhaps keeping a constant rotation of 5-10 movies on their HDD), and 2) To remove the incredibly annoying pUOPs - Personally, it drives me to near rage when I put a movie into my player, and it tells me I can't skip right to the main menu. And yes, I will admit that more than once, I have taken such a movie (rented or not) immediately out of the drive and ripped it on a temporary basis for precisely this reason.
And, y'know, I seriously believe THAT bothers Hollywood far more than outright piracy. I see movie sales following the same path magazines took half a century ago - They only charge a cover price as a sort of token of interest (to keep people from taking home the whole print run to burn for heat through the winter). They actually make the vast majority of their money from the ads they run, not from the cover price (thus explaining how they don't hemorrhage money when they let you subscribe for over 90% off cover).
Well, hell a 50cm layer of olivine covering a whole goddamn planet is totally feasible.
Why not? Our planet has a layer almost 400km thick of ultramafic rock, mostly peridotite.
If someone writes a visualization that projects a 4D object onto this 3D display, will it be much easier for the average person to grasp and understand?
Probably not, for two reasons...
First, we can grasp the idea of 3d objects projected onto a 2d surface because we actually do see our 3d world in only 2d (times two, which we use to extract depth information via some very expensive and task-dedicated computational hardware). As the simplest way to think about that, consider the situation where you have a partially obstructed field of vision due to something rather close to you (a rear-view mirror, for example) You might have your left eye only seeing one quarter or so of the overall scene, but you don't have any drastic sense that you lack stereo information for the unshared portions (unless you need to actively perform in that unshared section, such as catching an object thrown at you).
Second, we "know" our familiar 3d world, even having a built-in physics engine according to some recent research. When we see a drawing of a 3d scene rendered in 2d, we know what it "should" represent. Moving up to 4d, we have no similar frame of reference to compare against. We cannot directly perceive 4d objects as a whole; we can at best consider certain subsets of them (ones uniquely defined along their w-axis) as the time-evolution of a 3d object (for example, a melting ice-cube roughly approximates a hyperpyramid).
So, if you see a melting ice-cube, does it help you better understand the abstract world of 4d objects? If you already have a pretty good grasp of them, yes. If not, then no - It just looks like a melting ice-cube.
As you can see from this white paper. AMD indicates that...
Yes, I have consulted AMD's documentation on the subject. But TDP does not equal normal (or even max) real-world draw. It means that if you could somehow saturate every functional unit on the chip, you would draw that much. But in the real world, you can't come anywhere near that.
Huh? Do you have a reference?
Well, I can't find where I read 7W specifically, but a comparison on Tom's Hardware gives very similar numbers... 3.2W in the lowest power state, 10.8W idle but not in C&Q, and 28.8W at 100% load. Not an exact match, but not all that far off from the numbers I originally said (with a bit of fudge-factor room thrown in).
However, I could (and have) found other reviews that give totally different numbers, and of course AMD's own whitepaper disagrees, as you point out. My own numbers unfortunately include the whole system, but extrapolating from that low of 3.2W, would give me a mean of 9.2W, and a max of 20.2W. That mean and max sound rather low, however (the mean in particular, if non-C&Q idle draws 10.8W), so I have to suspect the numbers at Tom's don't quite hit the mark, but come close enough.
How in the world did you manage to put together an "old" P-III system that drew upwards of 108watts?
Keep in mind, I measure that at the plug, so it includes every component in the system all acting together.
My new system has a high-quality PS (a SeaSonic something, I actually chose it for the 120mm fan and its reputation as one of the most solid PSs you can get, and got lucky when I later learned about its efficiency). As I mentioned, a Winchester 1.8Ghz CPU. On-board everything (Radeon XPRESS 200 and SB400 chipset). Only need one HDD and one DVD Burner. Not a server or a gaming machine, but a totally kickass desktop with enough space to collect an awfully lot of crap and good enough graphics and CPU to play anything but the newest FPSs.
The system it replaced had a PIII 600 (coppermine core) at 34.5W. An add-on GeForce 4 adds another 30W. Two HDDs (adding up to a whopping 12GB), another 20-30W. That adds up to at least 80W without even considering PS efficiency - And considering the ultra-cheapy power supply I had in that machine, it amazes me I managed to get over 70% efficiency.
So, does that satisfy your incredulity? I have to admit, such a low draw shocked me at first, too. But, the numbers don't lie, I went from 110-120W, to 54W average.
it draws a whopping 54 watts average
Oops... Just to clarify, the entire system, including power supply losses, draws that much. The CPU itself, from what I've read (published numbers seem to vary a LOT, and I'd love to see some hard data on the min, mean, and max draw of the 90nm Athlon 64s), only eats between 7 and 35W (for comparison, the Pentium III line came in at the low 30s) with a theoretical max somewhere in the 60W range.
Kinda funny, actually... When everyone talks about needing bigger and better power supplies, with 400W considered a bare minimum and 600W not all that uncommon these days, I upgraded from an old P-III system and the total power consumption of the system dropped by half.
a very fast, very hot modern processor (in this case an AMD Athlon 64 4000+)
Very hot? If you haven't already bought one, just make sure to get one with a Winchester or Venus core.
Using C&Q, mine (only a 3000, but "close enough" to make my point) could probably get away with purely passive cooling. Using a meter at the plug, it draws a whopping 54 watts average, with 48W idle (C&Q engaged) and 65W max.
Thanks to modern CPU power saving technologies as implemented in all newer Athlons and Opterons, or Pentium M, you really don't need to sacrifice peak performance for the sake of power and heat. They deal with usually sitting there idle fairly well, by throttling back, without needing to resort to such (relatively) drastic measures as "suspend" and "hibernate".
I do, however, see one possible use for underclocking... When you keep your CPU always pegged at 100% (running Seti @home or the like, for example). Then, underclocking would allow you to trade a little bit of performance for a lot of power and heat reduction.
You can gain other important skills by other ordinary high-school jobs.
Bull.
Before I took an IT internship the summer of my junior year in highschool, I had an "ordinary" job.
Do you want to know what amazing things I learned by bagging groceries?
Let me tell you - If you think most geeks have a bad attitude regarding "sheeple", talk to a minimum wager working a demeaning job.
It did, however, teach me one fact that I consider VERY useful - Demeaning minimum wage jobs suck, and I would quite seriously kill myself before I would go back to working in one again.
Don't fall for the lies, kids - Work, in and of itself, has absolutely nothing "noble" about it. If you like what you do, great. If you consider the pay-for-aggrevation tradeoff at least marginally in your favor, great. Any other reasons involving "character" or "fortitude" or the like, don't buy it.
And don't even get me started on the evils of volunteerism.
Dropping $15 (or whatever) for a book is no big deal for some people and they will feel no obligation to return the book.
I fail to see the problem... If libraries can make money by people keeping books, that just means less money the public needs to spend to fund them.
Not that I don't fully support public funding for libraries... Hell, I consider them one of the few good uses for my tax dollars. But if they can reduce their dependence on public funding without reducing the services they provide, well, I see very little to object to in that.
They just need to set a policy that if you keep a book for longer than the, say, twice the standard loaning period, you can only return it for your deposit back if they happen to need another copy, to allow them to replace books that people decide to keep in a timely manner.
Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book, even temporarily.
No one suggested using this system exclusively. Can't afford a $100-or-so deposit? Give your name!
Or, just read the book in the library. AFAIK, that still works just fine, even with the current otherwise-not-anonymous system.
I get $50 in Apple credit
Actually, you don't even get THAT pittance.
As part of the terms of the settlement, you can't use that $50 to buy music from the iTMS. Name another Apple product that costs $50 or less...
Going further, since anyone getting this settlement would already have a portable music player (ie, an iPod), this settlement strikes me as nothing more than a 10% off coupon on a Mac Mini (cue the apologists saying "But I wanted a Mac Mini anyway..."). Wow, THAT will teach 'em to make false claims - Companies hate having more people buy their products, and never give discounts to entice them to do so.
What a wonderful settlement. Yet another example of why I don't join class action suits. We need to start pushing for criminal, not civil, action against these companies. Lock up a few entire Executive Boards, and see how long it takes to get real reform.
Pixels are always "on" since you can't actually turn a pixel on or off (if we could LCD's wouldn't have black level problems). The only thing you can turn on or off is the backlight, which affects the whole screen.
Then, please tell how you would describe the transition of a pixel from black to white, if not in some way turning it "on"? Would you prefer "activating" it? "Toggling" it?
You act as though I've said something horribly shocking, and then go on to say the same thing in different words - Pixel response times only measure the black-to-white transition, not the reverse.
Disingenuous, at best. "Wrong, NOT a dozen, but twelve!".
CRTs still deliver a few perks that LCDs cannot: Price, as the single most important; Response time without blurring (your panel may say 12ms, but that means time to turn a pixel on, not black to white and back to fully black again, which usually takes 5-10x as long); decent sync from an analog signal (getting MUCH better, but only if you turn off ClearType or the like first); Behavior of a "dead" pixel; washability (go ahead, try to thoroughly clean an LCD screen... Windex destroys them, water doesn't work and the wiping action itself will harm them, and the specialty LCD cleaning solutions that cost a fortune work marginally well but nothing like Windex-on-glass).
For now, CRTs enjoy popularity mostly for price and for the highest quality images. LCDs will catch up in both those areas over time, but if you only worry about the 18 month timescale, I'd say you have no need to fear. Looking at 5 years out, I'd worry a LOT more, but not yet.
I'm sure the teenage mp3 sharer really cares about that guy with his new anonymous p2p warez sucker.
Perhaps not. But the totally legit downloader might. I do. I'll agree that, almost certainly, more than 99% of the traffic I get has nothing to do with resisting an oppressive government (unless you count the US's own Corporatocracy, and consider OSI a sort of political resistance movement)... But if I can help hide even one message that helps a Chinese dissident trying to communicate, I consider that a truly "good" result.
Intel had better have a good lure to get consumers to buy this.
Well, at least with the newer 90nm chips, AMD can't claim their processors double as a space-heater...
Consumers aren't stupid
Ahahahahahahahaaaa...
Oh, wow... Man, you had me going there for a minute.
You want proof of the stupidity of consumers? Do you have a local Best Buy and/or Circuit City? There ya go.