That would make it the next flop. Lots of applications are still 32bit, and there is no reason to enforce a quick change here. 4 GByte are not enough for everyone, but for many users they are. Take x86 support away, and the complaints will be enormous.
It will take at least another 10 years until a Windows without x86 support is accepted.
For the most common purposes, like text documents and spreadsheets there is already ODF. It is even an ISO standard. Unless there are unexpected problems with things like Asian fonts, that should be a no-brainer.
A German company named Alphakat is developing a similat technology. On their website they claim to have some pilot plants already in production: http://www.alphakat.de/temp/company.php
In other ways too. A few years ago they started using translation software for the non-english pages of MSDN. The quality is as expected.
Fortunately, my English is pretty good so I don't need translations. Unfortunately, even if I choose English, there are annoying popups with translated text that cover up links. And if I switch off Javascript, parts of the site won't work anymore.
Older Word versions (Word 6, Word 2000) were error prone enough that the number of software crashes exceeded my number of stupid mistakes.
Now Office 2010 has changed that for me, so *today* you are right (and Libre Office is also pretty stable). But historically, GP had good reasons for his attitude.
Depends on how much that percent of the CPU die holds the rest back in terms of complexity and maybe performance limitations (not really my area of expertise). You may be right that it does not really matter.
On the other hand, "prior to 1992" means DOS and maybe Windows 3.x software. I'm aware that there are still a few DOS-based maintenance tools for the PC around, but otherwise I don't know anyone who still works with DOS software.
I used to work for a company that was really backwards that way, until a few years ago they produced a medical device with DOS-based software as "implicit real time system" (no other thread that can steal the CPU). But even they have given up on DOS, as the technical limitations became too bothersome. The successor of that device, now on the market, uses Windows 7 with a real time extension to the OS.
By now it might be safe to ditch all 8, 16, and 32 bit backwards compatibility with the x86 family. But AMD64 compatibility is too important to ignore.
Dropping 16 bit backwards compatibility is probably OK by now, and I don't think there is such a thing as 8 bit programs on x86 at all. But 32 bit software is still widely used and backwards compatibility to it is an important feature of AMD64. AMD would be crazy to drop that in an AMD64 compatible CPU.
At the same time however, they are developing ARM-based server processors which are not x86 compatible at all. So there seems to be a market for that. There certainly is in the tablet world. I just don't see it for the desktop yet.
Well I guess Intel have the volume too, so that is another thing going for them. AMD with its lower volume may be (more strongly) forced to go with a foundry.
At the same time, progress in fabrication processes seems to slow down a bit, and cost advantages are no longer so obvious with a new generation. Maybe the gap between Intel and AMD in manufacturing will shrink due to that.
Possible but not attractive if the time frames between upgrades was a bit longer.
Bought an Athlon X2 with DDR2 RAM in 2007.
Wanted an upgrade in 2011 and found that the price per GByte of DDR2 RAM was much higher than for DDR3 RAM. CPU and GPU needed changing anyway. 4GByte of DDR3 RAM were not more expensive than buying another 2GByte of DDR2 RAM would have cost. Some Athlons and Phenoms for socket AM2+ were still available but the socket AM3 CPUs looked considerably better.
So I settled on a Phenom II X4 on a relatively inexpensive new socket AM3 Board. Bottom line, I paid some extra for the new board but got better memory bandwidth and a more power efficient CPU out of it. The old board remained operational, as I did not rip out CPU, GPU or RAM.
I also still had a nice case from 2004 hanging around so I shelled out a bit additional money for a PSU and a new hard disk, and put the new system into the old case. Overall, I paid maybe 150 euros more than with maximum reuse of the old stuff. But that way I kept the 2007 PC usable, which is still useful from time to time:-)
If it's done well, then yes, voice acting can enhance a game. But if writing and storytelling are weak, you might as well go back to displaying the text only and save a few bucks. Same for bad voice actors.
That much is true, especially if you already have a fan base. The downside comes when you try to sell the next game after delivering something that barely deserves to be called a game, let alone a good one.
I-Novae studios are doing something similar, AFAIK with a bit more budget and limited to terrain generation: https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology This may be a better example of what a large game studio might go for. Overall a bit more conventional than Limit Theory, and needing more manpower, but still a big win in not having to model the terrain by hand.
It seems a lot of the budgets goes into more shiny graphics, not necessarily into more sophisticated game play. Perhaps it is time to try something new, such as procedural generation of more game assets.
A good example would be Limit Theory, a space game currently in development where only the user interface is designed the traditional way. Ship models and asteroids are created by procedural generation. Here is the latest development update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2albJYS-wI
Still looks a bit blocky, but considering the game had a $50.000 dollar goal on Kickstarter and the developer feels more than comfortable with the $187,865 that were pledged, the value for money is going to be impressive.
A slightly larger team with a budget of perhaps a few million should be able to do amazing things with that approach. Assuming the team members are as talented as Josh Parnell;-)
New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.
Never had one of those "sandwiched" ones, must be pretty rare. All CDs I own are of the label laquer - data layer - plastic variety.
BTW and slightly off topic, DVDs have the data layer between two equally thick layers of plastic. So they should be fairly resistant to physical damage. Not that I intend to try;-)
Agreed, and even where a replacement would be easy, I think we have too much planned obsolescence already. Not all users will be computer-savvy enough to understand how to update their systems. This proposal would cause unnecessary costs and waste.
Actually the fines in the EU are not all that large, compared to the site of businesses. IIRC the maximum is 10% of the yearly turnover of the company. And that is rarely applied.
The biggest fine ever handed out was against Microsoft, $794 million in 2004 and an additional $448.58 million in 2006 because they failed to comply with their obligations from the 2003 ruling. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case#Judgement) By comparison, Microsoft's revenue from 2003 was around 32 billion $, so the fine was roughly 4% of yearly turnover.
Yes, it is an unusual model and building something along these lines might not be a good idea in engineering. But who knows what stupid concepts evolution might come up with. All it takes is a local maximum in efficiency and development can get stuck there.
The government loads contracts with all kinds of deliverables beyond the actual product being requested, such as documentation that never reflects reality since there is never enough time to do all of it and deliver a product. Everyone knows it won't be read anyway.As often as not these things distract the contractors. Then there are the process mandates and contract requirements that employ large numbers of people who are all busy checking checkboxes.
Obviously, this drives up prices. But that alone is no reason NOT to include the extra effort in the bid price and time estimate. Some contractors will intentionally make an unrealistic bid and then try to charge extra anyway. Reminds me of Toll Collect in Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect). That was a consortium of really large gompanies BTW. Fraud anyone?
Obviously when you don't really know who is accountable for something you don't know who to ask for reliable information, so people start making assumptions. "You want escalators, not elevators? But the contract says vertical lift system. We interpreted that to as..."
OK, that is a problem where the government is at least partly at fault. Any cost overruns coming from that are IMHO more justified.
and perhaps AMD has learned their lesson and has realized that getting crummy product to market sooner is only a good strategy if you are first to market
Hehe, especially as a new x86 CPU is not "first to market" anyway. It competes with a pretty well established line-up of competitors and has to be better than those.
First to market works only when you have an entirely new kind of product (VHS tapes versus the competition) or overcome a major limitation of the existing product. The last time such a thing happened in the desktop computing world was the AMD64 instruction set. A clear win for AMD. Of course, it also helped that Intel had their Netburst oops at the same time;-)
On a performance per $ metric, AMD are arguably still competitive, at the expense of selling cheaply and barely breaking even financially. They are currently not competitive in performance per watt and absolute performance (both on the desktop, mobile looks a bit better).
AMD really fucked up with the Bulldozer, and while there have been modest improvements to that with Vishera and Steamroller, they were insufficient to close the gap to Intel.
I've always had full sized ATX gaming rigs, but at the moment I'm thinking about a new mini ITX build. It amazes me that the form factor which a few years ago used to get laughed at as weak can now include most mainstream CPUs and GPUs, even if cable routing is a bit of a pain. I just like the idea of compressing the power of my 50 x 50 x 25 cm ATX machine into one not much more than 30 cm cubed so it takes up less space under my desk, and that's actually big for the ITX form factor. A few years ago this wouldn't have been possible, or it would have been extortionately expensive.
Under your desk, I submit that height is usually not a problem, as a typical desk has around 70 cm room between floor and desk plate. Even if yours is a bit smaller or has a drawer under the table, a compact micro-ATX case should fit nicely. For instance, the Aerocool Qs-200 Advance is only 185 x 367 x 395 mm large (just an example I recently looked at, there are even smaller solutions but the Aerocool has decent room for components).
Depth is also not a problem, and in terms of width the 185mm of the Areocool actually beat many ITX boxes.
Also, floppies in general are disappearing. In 2010 for instance, Sony ended production of the 3 1/2" floppy.
A company I worked for until recently was still producing a device with DOS based software and 3 1/2" floppies a few years ago. Due to lack of floppy suppliers, they had to switch to pseudo-floppy drives that used specially formatted USB sticks and pretended to be floppy drives to the PC. And they were lucky that workaround existed. AFAIK it was developed for users of old but expensive manufacturing equipment that had the same problem, who did not want to scrap the machines.
I believe that particular device is out of production by now, but this illustrates the difficulties in using such obsolete hardware. Of course, Strategic Air Command might have the budget to keep some small scale manufacturing going;-)
You can delay roll-out of the update while it goes through testing. Now I've never worked in a company that did this consequently, to the best of my knowledge. But it is an option.
In my experience, compatibility between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice is still not at 100%. Most of the time it works, but sometimes formatting gets lost or a particular feature is not there (patterned table backgrounds in Word come to mind).
So data exchange between the people using LibreOffice and those using Microsoft Office could make problems. If you migrate the whole company, that would be fixed by eliminating Microsoft Office internally, but what about customers and suppliers outside the company?
Slashdot Mirror
That would make it the next flop. Lots of applications are still 32bit, and there is no reason to enforce a quick change here. 4 GByte are not enough for everyone, but for many users they are. Take x86 support away, and the complaints will be enormous.
It will take at least another 10 years until a Windows without x86 support is accepted.
For the most common purposes, like text documents and spreadsheets there is already ODF.
It is even an ISO standard. Unless there are unexpected problems with things like Asian fonts, that should be a no-brainer.
A German company named Alphakat is developing a similat technology.
On their website they claim to have some pilot plants already in production:
http://www.alphakat.de/temp/company.php
In other ways too. A few years ago they started using translation software for the non-english pages of MSDN. The quality is as expected.
Fortunately, my English is pretty good so I don't need translations. Unfortunately, even if I choose English, there are annoying popups with translated text that cover up links. And if I switch off Javascript, parts of the site won't work anymore.
Older Word versions (Word 6, Word 2000) were error prone enough that the number of software crashes exceeded my number of stupid mistakes.
Now Office 2010 has changed that for me, so *today* you are right (and Libre Office is also pretty stable). But historically, GP had good reasons for his attitude.
Depends on how much that percent of the CPU die holds the rest back in terms of complexity and maybe performance limitations (not really my area of expertise). You may be right that it does not really matter.
On the other hand, "prior to 1992" means DOS and maybe Windows 3.x software. I'm aware that there are still a few DOS-based maintenance tools for the PC around, but otherwise I don't know anyone who still works with DOS software.
I used to work for a company that was really backwards that way, until a few years ago they produced a medical device with DOS-based software as "implicit real time system" (no other thread that can steal the CPU). But even they have given up on DOS, as the technical limitations became too bothersome. The successor of that device, now on the market, uses Windows 7 with a real time extension to the OS.
By now it might be safe to ditch all 8, 16, and 32 bit backwards compatibility with the x86 family. But AMD64 compatibility is too important to ignore.
Dropping 16 bit backwards compatibility is probably OK by now, and I don't think there is such a thing as 8 bit programs on x86 at all. But 32 bit software is still widely used and backwards compatibility to it is an important feature of AMD64. AMD would be crazy to drop that in an AMD64 compatible CPU.
At the same time however, they are developing ARM-based server processors which are not x86 compatible at all. So there seems to be a market for that. There certainly is in the tablet world. I just don't see it for the desktop yet.
Well I guess Intel have the volume too, so that is another thing going for them. AMD with its lower volume may be (more strongly) forced to go with a foundry.
At the same time, progress in fabrication processes seems to slow down a bit, and cost advantages are no longer so obvious with a new generation. Maybe the gap between Intel and AMD in manufacturing will shrink due to that.
Possible but not attractive if the time frames between upgrades was a bit longer.
Bought an Athlon X2 with DDR2 RAM in 2007.
Wanted an upgrade in 2011 and found that the price per GByte of DDR2 RAM was much higher than for DDR3 RAM. CPU and GPU needed changing anyway. 4GByte of DDR3 RAM were not more expensive than buying another 2GByte of DDR2 RAM would have cost. Some Athlons and Phenoms for socket AM2+ were still available but the socket AM3 CPUs looked considerably better.
So I settled on a Phenom II X4 on a relatively inexpensive new socket AM3 Board. Bottom line, I paid some extra for the new board but got better memory bandwidth and a more power efficient CPU out of it. The old board remained operational, as I did not rip out CPU, GPU or RAM.
I also still had a nice case from 2004 hanging around so I shelled out a bit additional money for a PSU and a new hard disk, and put the new system into the old case. Overall, I paid maybe 150 euros more than with maximum reuse of the old stuff. But that way I kept the 2007 PC usable, which is still useful from time to time :-)
If it's done well, then yes, voice acting can enhance a game. But if writing and storytelling are weak, you might as well go back to displaying the text only and save a few bucks. Same for bad voice actors.
That much is true, especially if you already have a fan base. The downside comes when you try to sell the next game after delivering something that barely deserves to be called a game, let alone a good one.
I-Novae studios are doing something similar, AFAIK with a bit more budget and limited to terrain generation:
https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology
This may be a better example of what a large game studio might go for. Overall a bit more conventional than Limit Theory, and needing more manpower, but still a big win in not having to model the terrain by hand.
It seems a lot of the budgets goes into more shiny graphics, not necessarily into more sophisticated game play. Perhaps it is time to try something new, such as procedural generation of more game assets.
A good example would be Limit Theory, a space game currently in development where only the user interface is designed the traditional way. Ship models and asteroids are created by procedural generation. Here is the latest development update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2albJYS-wI
Still looks a bit blocky, but considering the game had a $50.000 dollar goal on Kickstarter and the developer feels more than comfortable with the $187,865 that were pledged, the value for money is going to be impressive.
A slightly larger team with a budget of perhaps a few million should be able to do amazing things with that approach. Assuming the team members are as talented as Josh Parnell ;-)
Nope, Metallica's album "Death Magnetic" was still butchered in 2008 due to excessive compression.
New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.
Never had one of those "sandwiched" ones, must be pretty rare. All CDs I own are of the label laquer - data layer - plastic variety.
BTW and slightly off topic, DVDs have the data layer between two equally thick layers of plastic. So they should be fairly resistant to physical damage. Not that I intend to try ;-)
Agreed, and even where a replacement would be easy, I think we have too much planned obsolescence already. Not all users will be computer-savvy enough to understand how to update their systems. This proposal would cause unnecessary costs and waste.
Actually the fines in the EU are not all that large, compared to the site of businesses. IIRC the maximum is 10% of the yearly turnover of the company. And that is rarely applied.
The biggest fine ever handed out was against Microsoft, $794 million in 2004 and an additional $448.58 million in 2006 because they failed to comply with their obligations from the 2003 ruling.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case#Judgement)
By comparison, Microsoft's revenue from 2003 was around 32 billion $, so the fine was roughly 4% of yearly turnover.
Yes, it is an unusual model and building something along these lines might not be a good idea in engineering. But who knows what stupid concepts evolution might come up with. All it takes is a local maximum in efficiency and development can get stuck there.
The government loads contracts with all kinds of deliverables beyond the actual product being requested, such as documentation that never reflects reality since there is never enough time to do all of it and deliver a product. Everyone knows it won't be read anyway.As often as not these things distract the contractors. Then there are the process mandates and contract requirements that employ large numbers of people who are all busy checking checkboxes.
Obviously, this drives up prices. But that alone is no reason NOT to include the extra effort in the bid price and time estimate. Some contractors will intentionally make an unrealistic bid and then try to charge extra anyway. Reminds me of Toll Collect in Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect). That was a consortium of really large gompanies BTW. Fraud anyone?
Obviously when you don't really know who is accountable for something you don't know who to ask for reliable information, so people start making assumptions. "You want escalators, not elevators? But the contract says vertical lift system. We interpreted that to as..."
OK, that is a problem where the government is at least partly at fault. Any cost overruns coming from that are IMHO more justified.
and perhaps AMD has learned their lesson and has realized that getting crummy product to market sooner is only a good strategy if you are first to market
Hehe, especially as a new x86 CPU is not "first to market" anyway. It competes with a pretty well established line-up of competitors and has to be better than those.
First to market works only when you have an entirely new kind of product (VHS tapes versus the competition) or overcome a major limitation of the existing product. The last time such a thing happened in the desktop computing world was the AMD64 instruction set. A clear win for AMD. Of course, it also helped that Intel had their Netburst oops at the same time ;-)
On a performance per $ metric, AMD are arguably still competitive, at the expense of selling cheaply and barely breaking even financially. They are currently not competitive in performance per watt and absolute performance (both on the desktop, mobile looks a bit better).
AMD really fucked up with the Bulldozer, and while there have been modest improvements to that with Vishera and Steamroller, they were insufficient to close the gap to Intel.
I've always had full sized ATX gaming rigs, but at the moment I'm thinking about a new mini ITX build. It amazes me that the form factor which a few years ago used to get laughed at as weak can now include most mainstream CPUs and GPUs, even if cable routing is a bit of a pain. I just like the idea of compressing the power of my 50 x 50 x 25 cm ATX machine into one not much more than 30 cm cubed so it takes up less space under my desk, and that's actually big for the ITX form factor. A few years ago this wouldn't have been possible, or it would have been extortionately expensive.
Under your desk, I submit that height is usually not a problem, as a typical desk has around 70 cm room between floor and desk plate. Even if yours is a bit smaller or has a drawer under the table, a compact micro-ATX case should fit nicely. For instance, the Aerocool Qs-200 Advance is only 185 x 367 x 395 mm large (just an example I recently looked at, there are even smaller solutions but the Aerocool has decent room for components).
Depth is also not a problem, and in terms of width the 185mm of the Areocool actually beat many ITX boxes.
Also, floppies in general are disappearing. In 2010 for instance, Sony ended production of the 3 1/2" floppy.
A company I worked for until recently was still producing a device with DOS based software and 3 1/2" floppies a few years ago.
Due to lack of floppy suppliers, they had to switch to pseudo-floppy drives that used specially formatted USB sticks and pretended to be floppy drives to the PC. And they were lucky that workaround existed. AFAIK it was developed for users of old but expensive manufacturing equipment that had the same problem, who did not want to scrap the machines.
I believe that particular device is out of production by now, but this illustrates the difficulties in using such obsolete hardware. Of course, Strategic Air Command might have the budget to keep some small scale manufacturing going ;-)
You can delay roll-out of the update while it goes through testing. Now I've never worked in a company that did this consequently, to the best of my knowledge. But it is an option.
In my experience, compatibility between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice is still not at 100%. Most of the time it works, but sometimes formatting gets lost or a particular feature is not there (patterned table backgrounds in Word come to mind).
So data exchange between the people using LibreOffice and those using Microsoft Office could make problems. If you migrate the whole company, that would be fixed by eliminating Microsoft Office internally, but what about customers and suppliers outside the company?