Some of us 'bloggers write EXCLUSIVELY essays. I have never written a post about my dog or music that was not speculative and insightful, or at the very least long winded and pretentious.
Then again, I majored in essays...and I can't give them up. Shit, that's why I've got over 3000 longwinded Slashdot comments, as well.
In fact, that's something the Internet has that talk radio and TV panels do not: you can take as much time and as much space as you need to to be an effective disputant. Can you sum up your idea into a thirty second soundbite? Great. But if it takes you 10,000 words...the Internet doesn't give a shit...post 'em if you got 'em.
OK, better example. I want to buy my brother a CD, but you can't return CDs here and if he doesn't like it, or already has it, I'm out the money. If I give him cash, he won't use it to buy a CD, he'll blow it on fast food and crap like that. I give him gift cards because he simply isn't very good with money but definitely wants CDs.
Doesn't seem to stop any of the kids who do it all day. Rarely do I see older people doing it; in fact, I have seen people begging for sub pass money right by the dispensers. This might be the increased police presence, though.
Actually, the thinking probably went like this: if I buy my picky friend a gift from BigStore, he will thank me and then return it for store credit which he will use to buy something he likes from BigStore. To save him and the returns department a big hassle, I will instead buy him a small plastic card charged with the cost of the gift I'd like to give him. This is superior to cash, as it MUST be used to buy something he will enjoy rather than something he needs but doesn't like, such as gasoline or a bus pass.
Incidentally, my wife just gave my picky brother in law a gas card and a bus pass for his birthday, because he always gripes it is too expensive to come visit.
Or maybe they make it just a little difficult for small time grifters -- who WalMart attracts by the hundreds as it is, I once saw a guy return a worn and dirty pair of boots, claiming he bought them that way, and got his money back, i returned several broken PSXs back in the day -- to take advantage of their goodwill. I mean, shit, if you believe everything the customer says, you're inviting cheapskates to lie to you. A little suspicion goes a long way.
Meanwhile, the person you gave it to got a nice, sturdy, attractive plastic card rather than a flimsy piece of paper, meaning it's more likely they'll keep it in their wallet and not lose or damage it.
I had a $50 gift certificate get soaked, I essentially lost the money. Another time, I had a $800 gift certificate to a canoe and kayak shop (wedding present from ALL my friends) that got misplaced in a move...luckily, the guy recorded all his large GCs and was able to look us up!
The plastic debit card system is a GODSEND for giving gift certificates, which are a great gift for somebody whose tastes you're not sure of or who only needs things that are more expensive than you can afford on your own. I commonly get gift certificates to the Apple store or to my local speaker shop, because everybody knows I like good audio but nobody's going to drop $1000 on a pair of speakers that I haven't even listened to yet. Gift certificates are slightly more intimate than just giving cash (cash goes into pockets and is used for gas, groceries, whatever, GCs are spent where you think that person would like to shop) and occasionally some businesses sell discounted GCs...so buying one is like buying anything at the store 10% off, and they often stack with coupons. Bob's stores was notorious for doing that in our area -- I used to get my Dockers for $10-$15 a pair.
Good for the customer, good for the business...I wouldn't be surprised to see GC only business pop up here and there. Jillian's tavern works sort of like that...you buy a game card and put credits onto it, with no limit on how many credits you have to use. I have a pair of $80+ game cards that were gifts, meaning that's essentially $160 Jillian's made and I never cashed in on, mostly because I hate Jillian's.
The point is, when you take about Dave to people who don't know him, you rarely say "Dave." You say, "Dave Cardgage" or "That guy Dave with the brown jacket" or "This guy I know names Dave."
Software's the same way. If people would actually say "Firefox Web Browser," it would be okay. Instead they say things like "SSH via PUTTY to your Fedore Core 2 box with SCREEN installed and pipe MAN to GREP." For Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, this is impossible to understand through context clues.
Everybody understands the concepts of cars and they know basically what they want -- naming the car is something to make the Mazda mid-level sedan seem like something special. Not everybody understands the tasks covered by a specific piece of computer software, and very rarely do two packages fill the same niche. Therefore, describing the software is a good idea. If you are coming from a 0 knowledge perspective, which sounds better to you: Internet Information Server or Apache?
Yes, I'm sure the API changes have nothing at all to do with restructuring a terse and complex API or adding changes from user and deveoper requests to improve on the GUI. I'm sure it has everything to do with breaking WINE.
As opposed to the OSS world, where naming is working overtime.
Tell me -- just from the names -- what the following programs do:
Apache Firefox Thunderbird Mono BitTorrent Grep Putty (and the fucking stupidest ever) Script-Fu, part of The Gimp
The idea, I guess, is to glamorize the program name like a brand name, and I suppose it works for some things (Apache, for example). Most of the time, however, it only serves to confuse people who have never heard of a program before. Microsoft errs on the side of shit you can understand, because when they use funky names (like BackOffice), they spend a lot of time explaining what the damn program does.
The PC is doing okay, man. I vastly prefer the current state of affairs to a return to the days of buying software and a piece of hardware that was required to use it. This model decreased choice in software as well as the ability of the average jerk to install it. My mom has no trouble putting a disk into a drive. She would have immense trouble seating an 80 column card.
No, of course it doesn't. A Flop is a flop. What people don't realize is how little the speed of processing matters for most applications. If you're reading a file over ethernet, performing one operation on it, and spitting it back out, optimized code on a 300 MHz processor would be as fast as a 40 GHz processor.
It's hurry up and wait, like my old Internet job (sigh).
Point is, most of the time on a PC we're waiting for the hard disk, or keyboard input, or network data, etc. One of the reasons GPUs run so fast is that we're letting them do work that used to be done elsewhere themselves, and training them to do jobs they don't already know how to do. There is nothing keeping us from training them to do any task we want...but if the task is waiting for an instruction, performing one op, and pushing it back out, training them to do it would be a waste of time.
The GPU's instruction set is designed to perform a simple series of operations in an iterative manner. It probably can't do any of the whiz-bang things that make a CPU so great for general purpose stuff, like branch prediction, instruction caching, etc. The smaller instruction set probably means there are compatibility instructions it can't perform, or hardware that it can't understand. The simplicity of the contraints on the GPU means that it can process faster than the CPU, but that there are some things it could never do. Think of it like a Ferrari: that V12 is fast as hell, but you can't fit four people into it, there's no room for luggage and no trailer hitch.
Besides, the GPU doesn't have all the management tools it needs to survive on its own. Your CPU has to push data and instructions to it, and pull them off when it's done. Furthermore, the GPU has much lower memory bandwidth to your system's memory and thus I/O devices including disks and other peripherals. For this reason, most processing tasks would be better off on a second CPU then on a CPU. The GPU works best for things that need heavy processing (which is easy due to the high clock rate and specialized instruction set), little flow control (harder, since it needs to sync with the CPU) and low I/O.
Some functions of a word processor (grammar checking, for one) would be well suited to a GPU...the algorithm is relatively small, the processing per byte of data relatively high, and the result need not be immediate.
That's what GPUs are designed for -- performing massively iterative algorithms on sets of data and returning the processed dataset. There are lots of algorithms that might benefit from this: encoding better digital video, searching for patterns, crunching numbers for encryption, etc. There are also lots of algorithms that would be NO GOOD -- SQL select statements, for example, or rendering web pages. Basically, any time processing is low and I/O is high, the GPU is a bad idea.
Think of the GPU as a tiny little distributed computing network on your own computer. And thank the video game industry for finally making signal co-processors commercially viable.
I really enjoy the phrase "Forced to open platforms."
It reminds me of our government's foreign policy. "We're going in there, and we're going to kick their ass until they're free."
Anyhow. Open Source cell phones would have the same effect on the cell phone companies that Linux has had on most third party Windows software companies: none at all.
Dude, if you think you're going to take a decent photograph with a camera, you've got another thing coming. Camera phones are a TERRIBLE idea for anything besides the sort of quick "Hey, wish you were here, look at this old guy" message you see on their commercials.
The real estate dedicated to the camera electronics demands a small lens, small detector and no fancy features. And the fact that you put the thing in your pocket with your keys means that little plastic lens isn't lasting long.
Camera phones are a bad idea, but they're cheap to make and you can charge more for them.
I think it was that fatass Michael Moore who said "I don't have a cell phone; I'll buy one once they've been invented." Implying that cell service is so summarily shitty now that you're crazy to be an early adopter. You're throwing money at a device that 60% of the time won't work (I have never had a call end right with my provider, instead i get "call lost," and I have the best provider in my area).
In many, many areas, the GSM network is vastly underpowered. Around here, T-Mobile (back when it was VoiceStream) used to give prospective clients a full month to try out the phone before charging them, because so many people would go home to find their phones no longer worked. I went four months without using my phone due to poor coverage.
AT&T just moved in and brought slightly improved GSM service with them, but around here at least, if you're not on Sprint or Verizon, there's no reason to get cellular at all. You're just buying a trendy hunk of plastic.
As somebody who wants a cell phone to do one thing -- make phone calls without having to be plugged in to a pole in the ground -- I an ecstatic that they are charging people to send little messages or browse a shittier version of the world wide web, or play crummy games, or download retarded tinklings to replace the ringing of the phone.
All of these dumbass little features bring money in to the cell phone company, keeping it afloat, keeping service good, keeping coverage high, and keeping them dumping money into promotional deals to let me get 4 phones -- one for me and my wife, one for my mom and for my dad -- for less than $100 a month for only $50 up front.
Keep it up, guys. Charge for all the extras you want, i don't give a shit. So long as Verizon is the best cellular network in this area by a wide margin, I'm going to use it no matter what -- and all this dumb stuff is just making it cheaper for me to do so.
Check your power settings on both, because something is very wrong. This machine has been on for three hours and it is STILL cold to the touch, with torrents in the background!
Apple's recall covered batteries less than two years old. IBM's recall is for batteries 4 to 5 years old. Does this mean a) Apple's failed sooner or b) IBM took longer to admit their batteries were catching fire?
Just keep the Powerbook. I ordered my replacement battery at 6 pm on Thursday; the new one was waiting when I got home the next day. They covered shipping both ways via DHL.
Got an ice cold Aluminum powerbook on my chest that begs to differ with you.
Want a cool lappy? You have to buy one that breathes (good ventilation, metal case, good board layout), shuts off the hard drive often as it can and one that has a real mobile processor such as a Pentium M or G4. You can't buy a machine with a desktop chip like the Athlon XP or P4 laptops and expect it not to be a fusion reactor...the price you pay for a little extra speed is third degree burns, not to mention heavier batteries with decreased life. The Powerbook battery is something like half a pound and you can keep an extra one in your pocket (they're smaller than palm pilots).
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us 'bloggers write EXCLUSIVELY essays. I have never written a post about my dog or music that was not speculative and insightful, or at the very least long winded and pretentious.
Then again, I majored in essays...and I can't give them up. Shit, that's why I've got over 3000 longwinded Slashdot comments, as well.
In fact, that's something the Internet has that talk radio and TV panels do not: you can take as much time and as much space as you need to to be an effective disputant. Can you sum up your idea into a thirty second soundbite? Great. But if it takes you 10,000 words...the Internet doesn't give a shit...post 'em if you got 'em.
OK, better example. I want to buy my brother a CD, but you can't return CDs here and if he doesn't like it, or already has it, I'm out the money. If I give him cash, he won't use it to buy a CD, he'll blow it on fast food and crap like that. I give him gift cards because he simply isn't very good with money but definitely wants CDs.
Doesn't seem to stop any of the kids who do it all day. Rarely do I see older people doing it; in fact, I have seen people begging for sub pass money right by the dispensers. This might be the increased police presence, though.
Actually, the thinking probably went like this: if I buy my picky friend a gift from BigStore, he will thank me and then return it for store credit which he will use to buy something he likes from BigStore. To save him and the returns department a big hassle, I will instead buy him a small plastic card charged with the cost of the gift I'd like to give him. This is superior to cash, as it MUST be used to buy something he will enjoy rather than something he needs but doesn't like, such as gasoline or a bus pass.
Incidentally, my wife just gave my picky brother in law a gas card and a bus pass for his birthday, because he always gripes it is too expensive to come visit.
Try looking out your window. Chances are they're building one next door.
Or maybe they make it just a little difficult for small time grifters -- who WalMart attracts by the hundreds as it is, I once saw a guy return a worn and dirty pair of boots, claiming he bought them that way, and got his money back, i returned several broken PSXs back in the day -- to take advantage of their goodwill. I mean, shit, if you believe everything the customer says, you're inviting cheapskates to lie to you. A little suspicion goes a long way.
Meanwhile, the person you gave it to got a nice, sturdy, attractive plastic card rather than a flimsy piece of paper, meaning it's more likely they'll keep it in their wallet and not lose or damage it.
I had a $50 gift certificate get soaked, I essentially lost the money. Another time, I had a $800 gift certificate to a canoe and kayak shop (wedding present from ALL my friends) that got misplaced in a move...luckily, the guy recorded all his large GCs and was able to look us up!
The plastic debit card system is a GODSEND for giving gift certificates, which are a great gift for somebody whose tastes you're not sure of or who only needs things that are more expensive than you can afford on your own. I commonly get gift certificates to the Apple store or to my local speaker shop, because everybody knows I like good audio but nobody's going to drop $1000 on a pair of speakers that I haven't even listened to yet. Gift certificates are slightly more intimate than just giving cash (cash goes into pockets and is used for gas, groceries, whatever, GCs are spent where you think that person would like to shop) and occasionally some businesses sell discounted GCs...so buying one is like buying anything at the store 10% off, and they often stack with coupons. Bob's stores was notorious for doing that in our area -- I used to get my Dockers for $10-$15 a pair.
Good for the customer, good for the business...I wouldn't be surprised to see GC only business pop up here and there. Jillian's tavern works sort of like that...you buy a game card and put credits onto it, with no limit on how many credits you have to use. I have a pair of $80+ game cards that were gifts, meaning that's essentially $160 Jillian's made and I never cashed in on, mostly because I hate Jillian's.
The point is, when you take about Dave to people who don't know him, you rarely say "Dave." You say, "Dave Cardgage" or "That guy Dave with the brown jacket" or "This guy I know names Dave."
Software's the same way. If people would actually say "Firefox Web Browser," it would be okay. Instead they say things like "SSH via PUTTY to your Fedore Core 2 box with SCREEN installed and pipe MAN to GREP." For Joe Not A UNIX Administrator, this is impossible to understand through context clues.
Everybody understands the concepts of cars and they know basically what they want -- naming the car is something to make the Mazda mid-level sedan seem like something special. Not everybody understands the tasks covered by a specific piece of computer software, and very rarely do two packages fill the same niche. Therefore, describing the software is a good idea. If you are coming from a 0 knowledge perspective, which sounds better to you: Internet Information Server or Apache?
Not to mention that the reasons the article states for DX sucking HAVE been improved upon my Microsoft, and in most cases, greatly so.
Meaning that this article serves as a shining example of MS listening to developers.
Yes, I'm sure the API changes have nothing at all to do with restructuring a terse and complex API or adding changes from user and deveoper requests to improve on the GUI. I'm sure it has everything to do with breaking WINE.
As opposed to the OSS world, where naming is working overtime.
Grep
Tell me -- just from the names -- what the following programs do:
Apache
Firefox
Thunderbird
Mono
BitTorrent
Putty
(and the fucking stupidest ever) Script-Fu, part of The Gimp
The idea, I guess, is to glamorize the program name like a brand name, and I suppose it works for some things (Apache, for example). Most of the time, however, it only serves to confuse people who have never heard of a program before. Microsoft errs on the side of shit you can understand, because when they use funky names (like BackOffice), they spend a lot of time explaining what the damn program does.
The PC is doing okay, man. I vastly prefer the current state of affairs to a return to the days of buying software and a piece of hardware that was required to use it. This model decreased choice in software as well as the ability of the average jerk to install it. My mom has no trouble putting a disk into a drive. She would have immense trouble seating an 80 column card.
No, of course it doesn't. A Flop is a flop. What people don't realize is how little the speed of processing matters for most applications. If you're reading a file over ethernet, performing one operation on it, and spitting it back out, optimized code on a 300 MHz processor would be as fast as a 40 GHz processor.
It's hurry up and wait, like my old Internet job (sigh).
Point is, most of the time on a PC we're waiting for the hard disk, or keyboard input, or network data, etc. One of the reasons GPUs run so fast is that we're letting them do work that used to be done elsewhere themselves, and training them to do jobs they don't already know how to do. There is nothing keeping us from training them to do any task we want...but if the task is waiting for an instruction, performing one op, and pushing it back out, training them to do it would be a waste of time.
The GPU's instruction set is designed to perform a simple series of operations in an iterative manner. It probably can't do any of the whiz-bang things that make a CPU so great for general purpose stuff, like branch prediction, instruction caching, etc. The smaller instruction set probably means there are compatibility instructions it can't perform, or hardware that it can't understand. The simplicity of the contraints on the GPU means that it can process faster than the CPU, but that there are some things it could never do. Think of it like a Ferrari: that V12 is fast as hell, but you can't fit four people into it, there's no room for luggage and no trailer hitch.
Besides, the GPU doesn't have all the management tools it needs to survive on its own. Your CPU has to push data and instructions to it, and pull them off when it's done. Furthermore, the GPU has much lower memory bandwidth to your system's memory and thus I/O devices including disks and other peripherals. For this reason, most processing tasks would be better off on a second CPU then on a CPU. The GPU works best for things that need heavy processing (which is easy due to the high clock rate and specialized instruction set), little flow control (harder, since it needs to sync with the CPU) and low I/O.
Some functions of a word processor (grammar checking, for one) would be well suited to a GPU...the algorithm is relatively small, the processing per byte of data relatively high, and the result need not be immediate.
That's what GPUs are designed for -- performing massively iterative algorithms on sets of data and returning the processed dataset. There are lots of algorithms that might benefit from this: encoding better digital video, searching for patterns, crunching numbers for encryption, etc. There are also lots of algorithms that would be NO GOOD -- SQL select statements, for example, or rendering web pages. Basically, any time processing is low and I/O is high, the GPU is a bad idea.
Think of the GPU as a tiny little distributed computing network on your own computer. And thank the video game industry for finally making signal co-processors commercially viable.
I really enjoy the phrase "Forced to open platforms."
It reminds me of our government's foreign policy. "We're going in there, and we're going to kick their ass until they're free."
Anyhow. Open Source cell phones would have the same effect on the cell phone companies that Linux has had on most third party Windows software companies: none at all.
Dude, if you think you're going to take a decent photograph with a camera, you've got another thing coming. Camera phones are a TERRIBLE idea for anything besides the sort of quick "Hey, wish you were here, look at this old guy" message you see on their commercials.
The real estate dedicated to the camera electronics demands a small lens, small detector and no fancy features. And the fact that you put the thing in your pocket with your keys means that little plastic lens isn't lasting long.
Camera phones are a bad idea, but they're cheap to make and you can charge more for them.
I think it was that fatass Michael Moore who said "I don't have a cell phone; I'll buy one once they've been invented." Implying that cell service is so summarily shitty now that you're crazy to be an early adopter. You're throwing money at a device that 60% of the time won't work (I have never had a call end right with my provider, instead i get "call lost," and I have the best provider in my area).
In many, many areas, the GSM network is vastly underpowered. Around here, T-Mobile (back when it was VoiceStream) used to give prospective clients a full month to try out the phone before charging them, because so many people would go home to find their phones no longer worked. I went four months without using my phone due to poor coverage.
AT&T just moved in and brought slightly improved GSM service with them, but around here at least, if you're not on Sprint or Verizon, there's no reason to get cellular at all. You're just buying a trendy hunk of plastic.
As somebody who wants a cell phone to do one thing -- make phone calls without having to be plugged in to a pole in the ground -- I an ecstatic that they are charging people to send little messages or browse a shittier version of the world wide web, or play crummy games, or download retarded tinklings to replace the ringing of the phone.
All of these dumbass little features bring money in to the cell phone company, keeping it afloat, keeping service good, keeping coverage high, and keeping them dumping money into promotional deals to let me get 4 phones -- one for me and my wife, one for my mom and for my dad -- for less than $100 a month for only $50 up front.
Keep it up, guys. Charge for all the extras you want, i don't give a shit. So long as Verizon is the best cellular network in this area by a wide margin, I'm going to use it no matter what -- and all this dumb stuff is just making it cheaper for me to do so.
VZ DSL is a pretty good deal, too.
Check your power settings on both, because something is very wrong. This machine has been on for three hours and it is STILL cold to the touch, with torrents in the background!
Apple's recall covered batteries less than two years old. IBM's recall is for batteries 4 to 5 years old. Does this mean a) Apple's failed sooner or b) IBM took longer to admit their batteries were catching fire?
Just keep the Powerbook. I ordered my replacement battery at 6 pm on Thursday; the new one was waiting when I got home the next day. They covered shipping both ways via DHL.
Got an ice cold Aluminum powerbook on my chest that begs to differ with you.
Want a cool lappy? You have to buy one that breathes (good ventilation, metal case, good board layout), shuts off the hard drive often as it can and one that has a real mobile processor such as a Pentium M or G4. You can't buy a machine with a desktop chip like the Athlon XP or P4 laptops and expect it not to be a fusion reactor...the price you pay for a little extra speed is third degree burns, not to mention heavier batteries with decreased life. The Powerbook battery is something like half a pound and you can keep an extra one in your pocket (they're smaller than palm pilots).
Funny, I heard it was a message offering us all free iPods...