Something tells me that the follow up to the quad core processor isn't going to contain five cores. I don't think so either. Most of the time, chip makers do things in powers of 2. So after the quad core processor, we would get 8-cores, 16-cores and so on. Maybe there will be a mechanism to switch off individual broken cores, so there might be 7-cores or 15-cores too that are sold cheaper. Rumours about the PS3 say that it can run on a Cell with only 7 intact SPEs. Which would be a version of the above.
If it will crater = be ignored by gamers, is not known yet. A lot will depend on how good the games really are. But one thing is sure: Sony's delays in manufacturing will also delay game sales, and that will hurt Sony. No matter how good the finished product is, people who cannot buy it in the first place won't pay for it => less revenue.
Intel and Microsoft are obviously trying to make as big profit as possible, but that doesn't mean they're idiots. Yes, Windows Me sucked, but it was not developed to provide excellent stability and security. It was well known that as long as it's built on the Win95 kernel, it's going to suck about as bad.
I am sure Microsoft knew that. But Windows ME was still marketed as an improvement, and that is the point: Selling something often has higher priority than making sure the customer is happy and will return. Companies are serious about making money, product quality is only a necessity that is sometimes neglected.
In general, young people tend to have more extreme views than older people. That's why societies with a larger proportion of young people tend to have more radical governments (and why Western governments are becoming more conservative as their populations get older). Young people are also more impressionable. (my opinion - unsubstantiated)
While just your opinion - unsubstantiated, It is probably more corect the incorect. This leads us to the unimplied position that people get smarter with age too. I'm wondering how correct the younger generation could actualy be.
Not necessarily smarter. Experience helps somewhat to recognize most radical ideas as bullshit. But aside from that, old people simply become more set in their ways. Which is almost indistinguishable from being conservative.
If you want a "man's hobby" for your childen, get into historical reenacting. They can learn to shoot a gun, dress in military uniforms, pretend to kill people, cook food over an open fire, and camp under the stars all in the same day. If you join something like a competitive target shooters club, they can fire live rounds at targets too. In fact, there are clubs that fire live artillery rounds. That's a real man's hobby. Forget bowling.
Martial arts are not bad either, pick one that includes sparring fights early in a student's career. They can acquire some hand-to hand fighting skills and learn to take the occasional bruise (even if nobody intends it, minor accidents will happen). At the same time, there is not much danger of a serious accident involved. I did Karate for a few years at university, and we had less serious accidents in our group than similar groups of soccer or volleyball players. With serious accidents I mean things like torn ligaments, broken limbs or anything bigger.
I am willing to sacrifice a few pecentage points worth of performance in exchange for buying from a [somewhat more] ethical company.
If you are not, you are part of the problem with industry today: the customer doesn't give a shit.
What a ridiculous, overbroad statement. Well - I take that back. If you apply that belief equally, in every facet of your life, then it is neither ridiculous nor overbroad.
That would mean that that you research each and every company you purchase from, for every item you purchase.
He did not say that he researches everything. Neither do I, btw. But when I happen to learn about disgusting behaviour by a company, I tend to boycott them. Which is not that rare, since sites like Slashdot will report most of the stuff that becomes public. Examples include: -Blizzard because of the bnetd ligitation, URL:http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bne td/>, which I consider an abuse of the legal system. -Sony because of the audio CD rootkit -Any games vendor that uses Starforce -in theory, SCO (not that I would have any reason to buy from them anyway)
No doubt there are dozens more with just as slimy behaviour. They can consider themselves lucky that I don't know about their misdeeds yet;-)
It is probably a question of "how fast can you ramp up production". I'm assuming that their established manufacturing lines do not suddenly decrease their output (accidents to that effect can happen but I don't consider it very likely). More likely, their recent acquisition of Dell as customer has increased demand to a point where production has difficulties to keep up.
NVIDIA's drivers only work for 2d and business applications. I can't even run ET or WoW. Day of Defeat Source runs at 30fps with the stock driver and is unplayable with the latest beta driver. [...] I just built a new system last weekend with an Intel DP965LT motherboard, Pentium D 805 (yes its hot but i had a small budget), and an NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GS PCIe. My old system was a Dell Precision 650 dual 2.0ghz Xeon with an ATI AIW 9600xt. So far, my new system is much faster with disk io and cpu bound tasks. (expected with sata and faster processor) The video framerate is poor with the NVIDIA card.
Interesting... are the 30fps in Day of Defeat Source also measured with the NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GS PCIe?
I'm asking because I currently get similar framerates in DOD Source from a ATI Radeon 9600pro. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on map. Resolution is 1280x1024. CPU/Ram is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GByte RAM (single core, but AFAIK DOD Source does not support multiple processors anyway).
So if the cheap Geforce 7300 GS can do 30fps in DOD Source, I might get the faster but still affordable 7300 GT for my next PC. It is widely available with passive cooling, which would suit me as the cheap fans most vendors use are really annoying;-)
The Core 2 Duo is pretty impressive, but I still see the 80 core chips that top out at 1 TeraFlop as vaporware. Intel has made big promises before, remember the 5 GHz Pentium 4? All you can (somewhat) rely on in this business are the things that are already close to rollout. For instance, I'm pretty sure that AMD will get their quad-core released in 2007, Intel maybe sooner. Anything beyond that is speculation.
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Otherwise, yes, Core 2 Duo is superior at the moment. I wonder if this will last when AMD goes to 65 nm.
On top of that, they are crying about something that is really not important to today's politics. Bill Clinton is sooo yesterday's news, and while I'm not in favour of censoring anti-Clinton satire, this seems not very newsworthy.
If you buy a retail copy of Vista for your current PC, then pitch your current PC and build a new PC, then you might want to transfer your OS. Or perhaps if your PC died completely, you might want to transfer the license, and you would be allowed to do so once under this license.
I have one PC (originally from 1996) that got two replacements each for CPU, mainboard and harddisk. The harddisk changes were for capacity, 1GByte => 6.3 GByte => 45 GByte. CPU/mainboard were changed for performance the first time (P133 => Athlon), due to a defect the second time. Now I don't personally have many scruples to pirate Windows, but as a legit user of Vista I'd have a problem under similar circumstances.
Since there is no clause in the license that says it is time-limited, I'd expect a class action lawsuit to happen. And the users might win. Personally, I still prefer to avoid the hassle altogether and stick to Win2000. And when WINE is mature enough someday, Linux.
Most of the facts (correct or not) were taken from Ed Bott's blog or Techweb. So if you accuse someone of overactive imagination, it would have to be them.
Others have already pointed out the difference between patent, copyright and trademark.
I'd like to add that filing a lawsuit does not guarantee you win. In the case of SCO, it already seems they will suffer a massive defeat (see Groklaw.net;-). Transmeta may be more successful, if they can show violation of their IP in court.
indeed, what an obviously self-selected sample set. Asking the _internet_ to tell you what spam is?
I reealize this was a European court and Spam is not popular over there, but imagine what you'd get if you asked, say 100 people as they walked through the canned meats section of a supermarket.
In an European supermarket? Of course you would meet many people that way who are not familiar with internet spam, but the "Hormel spam" is not very well known over here. I guess the definition of spam as unsolicited bulk e-mail would still win out.
This said, the fact that spam is already a generic term among computer users should be reason enough to reject the trademark application as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. Granting Hormel a trademark for spam as canned meat would still be OK, but that is not what they asked for.
I'd like that for plugins like flash, which can be annoying at times. Firefox already has checkboxes to activate/deactivate Java and Javascript under Tools => Options => Content. Can we please have a list of checkboxes for the various plugins? Hmm, maybe I should head over to mozilla.org and propose that...
Ingnoring your little pantomime, Ballmer's point is legitimate -- even 'user created' content is a HUGE liability on the website. A World of Warcraft video w/ a soundtrack from a current music album, populated with soundbits from TV shows... lawyers no longer need viagra.
True, but in a different way than you think. Because (I guess except for the soundtrack) one might argue that we have fair use here. Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_und er_United_States_law Sorting this out could go all the way to the Supreme Court, with big lawyer fees and lots of publicity for the law firm.
They DO drop support eventually. And if the software vendor goes bankrupt, it may even be "out of the blue". But let us take a well known example: Microsoft's operating systems. Yes, they announce the end of support early. But it will come. AFAIK, Win98 is de-supported now. There is usually a replacement, but with strings attached: 1) The upgrade is NOT free. You will have to pay for new licenses and often for new hardware, as the hardware requirements go up. 2) It is not always fully compatible. For instance, the Windows NT/2000/XP series does not allow direct hardware access by applications. Now there were good reasons for this, but if you have an old application that accesses hardware directly you are still stranded.
A somwhat unusual example of 1): The company I work for has recently started to support networking of their Windows-based devices. When reading files from a shared directory on the network, performance suffers. The problem is caused by a custom file open dialog where a few kBytes from each file are read. For Windows 2000 performance is (barely) acceptable, for Windows XP it is slower by a factor of 3. We have spent several days trying to fix that on the Windows side, without success. By now we also have a prototype of an optimized new software version that will perform acceptably under XP. Actually releasing it will take more work for validation and documentation.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them. If North Korea nukes the South, the Americans will nuke North Korea; if the Americans nuke North Korea, the North Koreans will nuke the South. So both sides have to rely on their conventional armies, just like before.
True, but only if both sides have them. If only one side has them, there is no threat of retaliation and the nukes may actually be used. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I did, because of "product activation". Later, increasingly intrusive anti-piracy measures in XP reinforced that stance. Otherwise, I might switch to XP. Instead, my private machines still run Windows 2000. With the occasional attempt to run Linux. So far, the games are the showstoppers - few available for Linux, and WINE is not perfect yet. But I guess eventually there will be a version that handles the most important ones;-)
Amplifier? I guess you mean a "Variable frequency drive". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Frequency_Dr ive AFAIK this is the state of the art for electric cars. Digging something up on Google... Unfortunately, I could not find a system made specifically for cars on the quick. But for an example of a complete VFD, the following should give you a rough idea of prize, size and weight: http://www.joliettech.com/abb_acs-550_ac_drive_ove rview.htm Note that the ABB ACS550 AC is somewhat different from what you want in a car. It takes power from a 3-phase AC line, so it will have a rectifier and some big buffer capacitor that would be unnecessary in a car system where you draw DC from the battery. OTOH, you might want energy recovery when braking, which is not specified for the above and would probably cost extra.
I'll leave the search for motors and batteries to someone else;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Something tells me that the follow up to the quad core processor isn't going to contain five cores.
I don't think so either. Most of the time, chip makers do things in powers of 2. So after the quad core processor, we would get 8-cores, 16-cores and so on.
Maybe there will be a mechanism to switch off individual broken cores, so there might be 7-cores or 15-cores too that are sold cheaper. Rumours about the PS3 say that it can run on a Cell with only 7 intact SPEs. Which would be a version of the above.
If it will crater = be ignored by gamers, is not known yet. A lot will depend on how good the games really are. But one thing is sure:
Sony's delays in manufacturing will also delay game sales, and that will hurt Sony. No matter how good the finished product is, people who cannot buy it in the first place won't pay for it => less revenue.
I am sure Microsoft knew that. But Windows ME was still marketed as an improvement, and that is the point:
Selling something often has higher priority than making sure the customer is happy and will return. Companies are serious about making money, product quality is only a necessity that is sometimes neglected.
Not necessarily smarter.
Experience helps somewhat to recognize most radical ideas as bullshit. But aside from that, old people simply become more set in their ways. Which is almost indistinguishable from being conservative.
Martial arts are not bad either, pick one that includes sparring fights early in a student's career. They can acquire some hand-to hand fighting skills and learn to take the occasional bruise (even if nobody intends it, minor accidents will happen).
At the same time, there is not much danger of a serious accident involved. I did Karate for a few years at university, and we had less serious accidents in our group than similar groups of soccer or volleyball players.
With serious accidents I mean things like torn ligaments, broken limbs or anything bigger.
So could you sue EA in order to get a version without spyware? ;-)
Sounds interesting, and might give them quite a headache indeed.
He did not say that he researches everything. Neither do I, btw. But when I happen to learn about disgusting behaviour by a company, I tend to boycott them. Which is not that rare, since sites like Slashdot will report most of the stuff that becomes public. Examples include:
-Blizzard because of the bnetd ligitation, URL:http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bn
-Sony because of the audio CD rootkit
-Any games vendor that uses Starforce
-in theory, SCO (not that I would have any reason to buy from them anyway)
No doubt there are dozens more with just as slimy behaviour. They can consider themselves lucky that I don't know about their misdeeds yet
It is probably a question of "how fast can you ramp up production". I'm assuming that their established manufacturing lines do not suddenly decrease their output (accidents to that effect can happen but I don't consider it very likely).
More likely, their recent acquisition of Dell as customer has increased demand to a point where production has difficulties to keep up.
Interesting... are the 30fps in Day of Defeat Source also measured with the NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GS PCIe?
I'm asking because I currently get similar framerates in DOD Source from a ATI Radeon 9600pro. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on map. Resolution is 1280x1024. CPU/Ram is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GByte RAM (single core, but AFAIK DOD Source does not support multiple processors anyway).
So if the cheap Geforce 7300 GS can do 30fps in DOD Source, I might get the faster but still affordable 7300 GT for my next PC. It is widely available with passive cooling, which would suit me as the cheap fans most vendors use are really annoying
The Core 2 Duo is pretty impressive, but I still see the 80 core chips that top out at 1 TeraFlop as vaporware. Intel has made big promises before, remember the 5 GHz Pentium 4?
All you can (somewhat) rely on in this business are the things that are already close to rollout. For instance, I'm pretty sure that AMD will get their quad-core released in 2007, Intel maybe sooner. Anything beyond that is speculation.
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Otherwise, yes, Core 2 Duo is superior at the moment. I wonder if this will last when AMD goes to 65 nm.
On top of that, they are crying about something that is really not important to today's politics. Bill Clinton is sooo yesterday's news, and while I'm not in favour of censoring anti-Clinton satire, this seems not very newsworthy.
I have one PC (originally from 1996) that got two replacements each for CPU, mainboard and harddisk.
The harddisk changes were for capacity, 1GByte => 6.3 GByte => 45 GByte.
CPU/mainboard were changed for performance the first time (P133 => Athlon), due to a defect the second time.
Now I don't personally have many scruples to pirate Windows, but as a legit user of Vista I'd have a problem under similar circumstances.
You want an open source Windows clone? Go write one.
Better yet: Help with http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html. They are trying to clone Windows outright.
Ahh, so I really missed something... :-(
I learned the rule at school, but obviously not all the exceptions
Since there is no clause in the license that says it is time-limited, I'd expect a class action lawsuit to happen. And the users might win.
Personally, I still prefer to avoid the hassle altogether and stick to Win2000. And when WINE is mature enough someday, Linux.
Most of the facts (correct or not) were taken from Ed Bott's blog or Techweb.
So if you accuse someone of overactive imagination, it would have to be them.
Others have already pointed out the difference between patent, copyright and trademark.
;-). Transmeta may be more successful, if they can show violation of their IP in court.
I'd like to add that filing a lawsuit does not guarantee you win. In the case of SCO, it already seems they will suffer a massive defeat (see Groklaw.net
In an European supermarket?
Of course you would meet many people that way who are not familiar with internet spam, but the "Hormel spam" is not very well known over here. I guess the definition of spam as unsolicited bulk e-mail would still win out.
This said, the fact that spam is already a generic term among computer users should be reason enough to reject the trademark application as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. Granting Hormel a trademark for spam as canned meat would still be OK, but that is not what they asked for.
I'd like that for plugins like flash, which can be annoying at times.
Firefox already has checkboxes to activate/deactivate Java and Javascript under Tools => Options => Content. Can we please have a list of checkboxes for the various plugins?
Hmm, maybe I should head over to mozilla.org and propose that...
True, but in a different way than you think. Because (I guess except for the soundtrack) one might argue that we have fair use here. Consider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_un
Sorting this out could go all the way to the Supreme Court, with big lawyer fees and lots of publicity for the law firm.
They DO drop support eventually. And if the software vendor goes bankrupt, it may even be "out of the blue". But let us take a well known example:
Microsoft's operating systems.
Yes, they announce the end of support early. But it will come. AFAIK, Win98 is de-supported now.
There is usually a replacement, but with strings attached:
1) The upgrade is NOT free. You will have to pay for new licenses and often for new hardware, as the hardware requirements go up.
2) It is not always fully compatible. For instance, the Windows NT/2000/XP series does not allow direct hardware access by applications. Now there were good reasons for this, but if you have an old application that accesses hardware directly you are still stranded.
A somwhat unusual example of 1):
The company I work for has recently started to support networking of their Windows-based devices. When reading files from a shared directory on the network, performance suffers. The problem is caused by a custom file open dialog where a few kBytes from each file are read.
For Windows 2000 performance is (barely) acceptable, for Windows XP it is slower by a factor of 3. We have spent several days trying to fix that on the Windows side, without success. By now we also have a prototype of an optimized new software version that will perform acceptably under XP. Actually releasing it will take more work for validation and documentation.
True, but only if both sides have them.
If only one side has them, there is no threat of retaliation and the nukes may actually be used. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I did, because of "product activation". Later, increasingly intrusive anti-piracy measures in XP reinforced that stance. Otherwise, I might switch to XP. ;-)
Instead, my private machines still run Windows 2000. With the occasional attempt to run Linux. So far, the games are the showstoppers - few available for Linux, and WINE is not perfect yet. But I guess eventually there will be a version that handles the most important ones
Amplifier? I guess you mean a "Variable frequency drive".r ivee rview.htm
;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Frequency_D
AFAIK this is the state of the art for electric cars. Digging something up on Google...
Unfortunately, I could not find a system made specifically for cars on the quick. But for an example of a complete VFD, the following should give you a rough idea of prize, size and weight:
http://www.joliettech.com/abb_acs-550_ac_drive_ov
Note that the ABB ACS550 AC is somewhat different from what you want in a car. It takes power from a 3-phase AC line, so it will have a rectifier and some big buffer capacitor that would be unnecessary in a car system where you draw DC from the battery. OTOH, you might want energy recovery when braking, which is not specified for the above and would probably cost extra.
I'll leave the search for motors and batteries to someone else