If this saves the life of one officer I'm all for it. As long as it's priced out of reach for the standard crack addict I don't think it'll be a problem (I'd be more concerned about losers running around with those EMP weapons we read about a few months back).
I can't really see someone lugging one of these around in a nonchalant fashion, and then discretely holding it up against my walls to see if I'm home. I'm pretty sure my neigbors would find it a little odd and do something about it. Not to mention the fact that my German shepherd would hear him before he was able to figure out if anyone was home.
And if I saw someone trying to do this, he'd find himself looking down the business end of a 12-ga (tresspassing, don't you know...).
Quite a lot of mfg design utilizes DES (discrete event simulation) models, and in my experience (which is fairly extensive in the semiconductor industry) these models contain vast amounts of detail. As a result they run REALLY REALLY SLOWLY. We're talking DAYS for a single replication of an experiment (you have to vary your random seeds and average across replications to eliminate the effects of "pseudorandom" numbers). What's worse, since these models are strictly time-based they're not parallelizable to any degree. So a Beowulf cluster buys you....nothing. You just need many CPUs and TONS of RAM to run the experiments in parallel...but you can't parallelize a single run.
OTOH, if you're doing linear or integer programming, those are parallelizable if you're doing branch & bound stuff. But LP/IP doesn't always give you the granularity you need to make decisions as accurately as DES does (and can't account for the stochastic and dynamic nature of manufacturing processes).
Have you ever used AIX on an RS/6000? I did--as an app developer for a Wall Street firm--and let me tell you that thing was hanging more often than my Winblows 3.1 machine did at home. Granted, this wasn't a production machine, but we were just app writers. It wasn't like we were doing anything funky, just building Motif apps for PHBs (pointy-haired brokers). At least the thing booted up pretty quickly (quicker than my Winblows box did!).
Actually, IIRC, the production machines crashed quite often as well...
While other people BMW (bitch, whine, and moan) about how RedHat is taking over the world and releasing buggy distributions etc. etc. etc., the Mandrakesoft guys are actually DOING something about it, and contributing their own GPL apps as well.
Until something else comes along, Linux-Mandrake is the best hope we have for getting Linux to the masses.
Re:Will AMD survive until next year? Prob. not...
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AMD Athlon (K7) Ships
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but let's keep one thing in mind: where does that high-end system demand come from? That's right: corporations. Big ones. We're talking Fortune 500 here. And who do you think corporations are going to trust with their mission-critical IT needs? AMD? It's sad, but AMD has NO presence in the corporate world and coming out with the Athlon isn't going to suddenly , magically make them the right choice for high-performance computing in your CIO's eyes. As a system administrator I've borne witness to the results of the reprehensible testing/burn practices AMD uses just to get as much out the door as possible. Believe it or not, but CIO's know about this as well. Plus there's the PHB "big name" factor--"AMD? Who's that? Just buy the Intel chips!". Yeah, I'm sure Intel probably knows that the K7's a better than anything they've got performance-wise, but if I were them I wouldn't worry since AMD has never been able to produce reliably at large quantities and they don't advertise worth sh*t. But I guess we'll see one way or the other, right?
No, CompactFlash II (or CF+, or CF2, depending on whom you're talking to) is a little thicker than standard CF. It is an agreed-upon standard, though--a number of companies have started making CF2 Ethernet cards, modems, etc. for those WinCE devices. Since there are so few MP3 portables out there right now and so many on the drawing board I can't help but think that SOMEONE will be smart enough to make one with a CF2 slot.
This is ridiculous. This memory stick thing will be the BetaMax of the flash industry...(although Beta was a superior technology).
The Memory Stick is currently available in 4MB, 8MB, and 16MB versions, and will soon have 32MB capacities. By the end of this year, Sony officials expect to ship a 64MB version that could hold about two hours of stereo music in "long play" mode, they said.
OK, let's get something straight--CF is smaller and Pretec has already announced--get this--a 128MB CF2 card and a 320MB CF2 (same size as IBM MicroDrive) card!!
Flash memory is used in small capacities in products like cell phones but is still relatively expensive. The 16MB Memory Stick, for instance, runs about $66.
Yeah, and I just bought two 16MB SmartMedia cards for my Rio from Diamond. Price? $89 for TWO!!!
Maybe they think they can push this memory stick thing with their lame cameras (the floppy-based ones were actually innovative, but who wants to carry around a box of floppies when you can use a single CF card?!) and their new desktop (which retails for only $2500, BTW) with the built-in memory stick "drive". But I say it's more dead-end tech.
I went into my friendly neighborhood Circuit City the other day (comparison shopping to replace my dying TV) and was immediately assaulted by a CC drone.
He proceeded to throw FUD, BS, and outright lies at me trying to get me to buy into Divx (I'd rather be forced to watch my DVDs on a 14-inch monitor).
I wouldn't be the least surprised if Micro$haft and CC/Divx were in cahoots. Anyone know where you could get info like that? Has M$ dumped money into CC/Divx? Or have they just given FUD classes to CC drones?
The problem is that VB and Active X gives you to much power from inside a document, and I don't think requiring a signature is enougth, since most of people (dumb people, but people) simply accept what ever dialog pops into their faces.
No kidding--one job I did was for an office where people blithely clicked "OK" without ever reading what was in the dialog ("Do you want to delete all records? OK!"). It took a bit of social engineering to get around this--in the end we designed dialog boxes that required a typewritten reply to perform catastrophic functions (like deleting records etc.) "You are going to delete all the records. Type in the third word of the second sentence in this box to confirm that you want to do this." While this would have driven me nuts if I had to USE this application it was the only way to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis (and then calling me for tech support afterwards!).
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If this saves the life of one officer I'm all for it. As long as it's priced out of reach for the standard crack addict I don't think it'll be a problem (I'd be more concerned about losers running around with those EMP weapons we read about a few months back).
I can't really see someone lugging one of these around in a nonchalant fashion, and then discretely holding it up against my walls to see if I'm home. I'm pretty sure my neigbors would find it a little odd and do something about it. Not to mention the fact that my German shepherd would hear him before he was able to figure out if anyone was home.
And if I saw someone trying to do this, he'd find himself looking down the business end of a 12-ga (tresspassing, don't you know...).
OTOH, if you're doing linear or integer programming, those are parallelizable if you're doing branch & bound stuff. But LP/IP doesn't always give you the granularity you need to make decisions as accurately as DES does (and can't account for the stochastic and dynamic nature of manufacturing processes).
Have you ever used AIX on an RS/6000? I did--as an app developer for a Wall Street firm--and let me tell you that thing was hanging more often than my Winblows 3.1 machine did at home. Granted, this wasn't a production machine, but we were just app writers. It wasn't like we were doing anything funky, just building Motif apps for PHBs (pointy-haired brokers). At least the thing booted up pretty quickly (quicker than my Winblows box did!).
Actually, IIRC, the production machines crashed quite often as well...
While other people BMW (bitch, whine, and moan) about how RedHat is taking over the world and releasing buggy distributions etc. etc. etc., the Mandrakesoft guys are actually DOING something about it, and contributing their own GPL apps as well.
Until something else comes along, Linux-Mandrake is the best hope we have for getting Linux to the masses.
Can I have all of my telomeres stretched??
Yeah, but let's keep one thing in mind: where does that high-end system demand come from? That's right: corporations. Big ones. We're talking Fortune 500 here. And who do you think corporations are going to trust with their mission-critical IT needs? AMD? It's sad, but AMD has NO presence in the corporate world and coming out with the Athlon isn't going to suddenly , magically make them the right choice for high-performance computing in your CIO's eyes. As a system administrator I've borne witness to the results of the reprehensible testing/burn practices AMD uses just to get as much out the door as possible. Believe it or not, but CIO's know about this as well. Plus there's the PHB "big name" factor--"AMD? Who's that? Just buy the Intel chips!". Yeah, I'm sure Intel probably knows that the K7's a better than anything they've got performance-wise, but if I were them I wouldn't worry since AMD has never been able to produce reliably at large quantities and they don't advertise worth sh*t. But I guess we'll see one way or the other, right?
No, CompactFlash II (or CF+, or CF2, depending on whom you're talking to) is a little thicker than standard CF. It is an agreed-upon standard, though--a number of companies have started making CF2 Ethernet cards, modems, etc. for those WinCE devices. Since there are so few MP3 portables out there right now and so many on the drawing board I can't help but think that SOMEONE will be smart enough to make one with a CF2 slot.
This is ridiculous. This memory stick thing will be the BetaMax of the flash industry...(although Beta was a superior technology).
The Memory Stick is currently available in 4MB, 8MB, and 16MB versions, and will soon have 32MB capacities. By the end of this year, Sony officials expect to ship a 64MB version that could hold about two hours of stereo music in "long play" mode, they said.
OK, let's get something straight--CF is smaller and Pretec has already announced--get this--a 128MB CF2 card and a 320MB CF2 (same size as IBM MicroDrive) card!!
Flash memory is used in small capacities in products like cell phones but is still relatively expensive. The 16MB Memory Stick, for instance, runs about $66.
Yeah, and I just bought two 16MB SmartMedia cards for my Rio from Diamond. Price? $89 for TWO!!!
Maybe they think they can push this memory stick thing with their lame cameras (the floppy-based ones were actually innovative, but who wants to carry around a box of floppies when you can use a single CF card?!) and their new desktop (which retails for only $2500, BTW) with the built-in memory stick "drive". But I say it's more dead-end tech.
Sony will never learn....
I went into my friendly neighborhood Circuit City the other day (comparison shopping to replace my dying TV) and was immediately assaulted by a CC drone.
He proceeded to throw FUD, BS, and outright lies at me trying to get me to buy into Divx (I'd rather be forced to watch my DVDs on a 14-inch monitor).
I wouldn't be the least surprised if Micro$haft and CC/Divx were in cahoots. Anyone know where you could get info like that? Has M$ dumped money into CC/Divx? Or have they just given FUD classes to CC drones?
The problem is that VB and Active X gives you to much power from inside a document, and I don't think requiring a signature is enougth, since most of people (dumb people, but people) simply accept what ever dialog pops into their faces.
No kidding--one job I did was for an office where people blithely clicked "OK" without ever reading what was in the dialog ("Do you want to delete all records? OK!"). It took a bit of social engineering to get around this--in the end we designed dialog boxes that required a typewritten reply to perform catastrophic functions (like deleting records etc.) "You are going to delete all the records. Type in the third word of the second sentence in this box to confirm that you want to do this." While this would have driven me nuts if I had to USE this application it was the only way to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis (and then calling me for tech support afterwards!).
It's not IBM who needs to learn from Dell--it's COMPAQ.
I don't know about this $99 Linux tax... =)
The man says what we've known all along, but never took the time to prove.
Perhaps now we can do away with the travesty of "gnulix" as well.