You need to hang with normal people. How many megahertz does this have? How much ram does the Hard Disk have?
Normal people don't know ATI from Nvidia from HP! They will look at how big the numbers are, how big the screen is, and how low the price is. Unlike me that will look how big the numbers are, how big the screen is, how heavy it is, does it support Linux, and how cheap it is.... Hey it is notebook.
I would have to disagree. I just got an Macbook for development. For the price it is a very well made PC. I have used Lenovo and IBM thinkpads and Fujitsu life books. The MacBook has great battery life and a very good display.
Frankly I am a build your own PC kinda guy but the Macbook is a very good piece of kit that gets the job done well. Throw in the lack of crappletts and it really is a joy to use. That and the power adapter really is a nice idea Over all it is just a well made computer. Most notebooks are over powered for the average user. I am not even an average user and I have to wish that the Macbook was faster. Even the compile times are pretty good. If I had to pay for it myself I would probably get a $500 laptop but I am cheap.
Not really. You must step out of the PC mindset. Imagine a bank with thousands of ATMs located all over the planet. Or a Telcomm with a million users. Things like billing by the minute?
We are talking about huge number of transactions. These are high value transactions not thinks like tweets or even Goggle searches. You will want things like auditing and roll back and commit on those transactions that you just don't get on NOSQL databases. For that type of a system a Mainframe is a very good solution.
It has been a while but really? I have never seen a mainframe that didn't use Zulu time. Also in the shop I worked all software was quality verified. One machine was at the five year uptime mark when I left but it was a none commercial system.
"For CISC you need more bytes per instruction, because there are more instructions. With RISC your executable has more instructions but they each use less storage." Actually no. RISC uses fixed length instructions while CISC uses variable length. Also in RISC everything is done in registers so let's say you need to increment a variable in memory. On a RISK system you would first load it which would be two 32 bit accesses one for the instruction and one for the pointer. Then you would have the increment instructions which would be another 32 bit memory fetch. Finally you would store the value back in memory which would be two more 32 bit values, So this would take 20 bytes of memory space. Now this is a pure RISC ISA. Adding one to a memory location is such a common operations that I am sure that many RISC ISAs have a load and increment instruction. In that case you are down to just 16 bytes. Or course both cases are assuming that we have a free register to work with and I am not checking for an overflow flag. Now lets look at a theoretical CISC ISA. On this cpu we have a 16 bit increment memory location so we have two bytes for the instruction and four bytes for the pointer. Total memory used is just six bytes. Or if the increment is 32bits then it you are at 8 bytes. Each instruction in CISC does more than in RISC.
The reality is that most CPUs today are RISC at heart even the X86s. They have hardware decoders that decode the CISC instructions into RISC instructions that the CPU then executes. Even RISC chips often break with RISC every now and then. A lot of RISC CPUs have things like a memory copy instruction to copy memory from one location to another. Other wise to copy a byte you would need a load and save for each copy.
Pure RISC was great when memory ran at CPU speeds or at least very close. Now that CPUs have gotten a lot faster than memory pure RISC is not as good. But RISC has changed as well over time. The Power line of RISC chips is anything but Reduced!
"They say it's an old CISC architecture. This is probably the sort of system that runs horribly outdated and un-updatable code, like the tax system." You mean like Windows? The X86 is also an old CISC architecture.
Actually the Power line is RISC anyway. When it is used in a ZMachine the old style 360/370/390 CISC ISA is translated to RISC and then executed. Before you go ew that is what modern X86 chips do as well as ARM when using the Thumb Instruction set. The ZSystem ISA is so high end it is almost a high level language so the translation doesn't really effect performance much at all. Also that old CISC architecture is much better than the mess that we have on the X86. I am not sure about how IBM does the translation. On the System 38 AS/400 System-I the translation was done during the IPL aka Initial Program Load. On the Zs it may be done as a JIT but I am not sure. Honestly I love the idea and wish that Linux would adopt it. You could then have one binary that would work on any Linux system on an CPU. The AS400 way kept a native binary copy along with the TIMI copy. When the program was run the first time it would translate the TIMI copy into the native segment. Yes the first time you ran the program it might take a bit to start but after that it would run at full speed and start fast. Of course you could add a binary segment when you first released the code for the ISA of your choice.
All in all those old Mainframes and Minis had a lot of brilliant tech we still don't have today on our PCs.
Banks, Credit card companies, hospitals, Insurance companies... Cheap clusters are great but they are not always the best tool for the job. Very large traditional datasets involving lots of high value transactions, with 5 9s uptime requirements do not tend to scale well to COTS clusters. IBM mainframes have uptimes measured in years if not decades. They have hot swapable everything including CPUs. so you can do ugrades with zero downtime. Also you need to take a look at the costs involved. The costs to throw out a working software system that has been used for decades and then the cost to redesign it to work on a Cluster of X86 boes will be huge. Not to mention the investment in making it fault tolerant and if it is used in certain markets the cost of the auditing the software. Not to mention that ZSystems tend to be really secure. There are just not a lot of exploits on Zsystems.
When downtime can cost millions of dollars hardware costs are just no that big of a deal. Now if you are starting from scratch then you may save money by going with a cluster but then you may not depending on just how good your programmers are.
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"Suppose the poster has been forbidden to use the Internet by the courts? " Actually in that case your just nuts to be posting on slashdot to start with. But if you are dumb enough to do it then create a new account with a different username. If the court ordered you to not use the internet which has happened how often? I would hope that you are taking a lot more precautions than just posting as an AC. Frankly I would say that if you think posting as an AC gives you any protection from law enforcement then it is you that is showing your limited knowledge. I have had to actually hide my identity while using online resources before. If you every work for a company and are doing any type of online research you have more than one online identity. Yea posting as an AC is going to be helpful avoiding the police. Really? Only if you avoiding Otis the Drunk trying to avoid Barnny Fife and Sheriff Taylor.
So nope you are wrong. Same thing if you it might reflect badly at work. I am not saying you can not use an handle and not your real name. Just not as an AC. Not a perfect solution but frankly I would say a good 70% of the AC trolls are not smart enough to figure out to make a different identity.
And no it really is. If you only listen to those that tell you what you already believe you will not grow or learn anything new at all. Unless of course you are sure every view you have is exactly correct and unquestionably right. In that case you have other issues that posting on Slashdot.
"Surely even one crash saved makes ANY improvement worth the effort. After all, what price a human life?" Do you drive a car? Do you ever speed in the car? Do you eat food that isn't good for you? Do you use fossil fuel? Do you driver over any bridges or go into any buildings? People die building bridges and buildings. People die drilling for oil and mining coal. People die driving cars. People die because people speed. There are people starving and dieing because of lack of medical care. Do you send every cent you make that you don't need for too keep you alive to charity? It may well be that you put having an XBox or an iPod over somebodies life. Yea it is an uncomfortable thought isn't it but every luxury you buy is money that you could give to help someone and maybe save a life. It is even uglier if you think that every moment you are not spending earning money to help people could cost someone's life. Yes that nap could have cost someone their life. There is a price for everything even for doing nothing.
Really that is such a silly rebuttal of you really think about it. Lets put it another way. You have 100 million dollars to spend. Do you want to spend it on an improved black box system that may save an on average 10 lives per year. Assuming that it prevents one airliner crash every 20 years. Or do you want to spend in on Mosquito nets that will prevent 10,000 people a year from getting Malaria and goodness knows how many deaths from Malaria or complications?
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One mans troll is another's disagree.
I do not think that there is anything one can only say as an AC. I mean what your afraid of loosing Karma? Karma doesn't affect your paycheck or get you put in jail. Being an AC doesn't pass your comment through a TOR node so it doesn't offer you any protection from the government.
I have decided long ago to never post as an AC. There are times when I know my post will get moded down because I dare to criticize the one of the Slashdot sacred cows. There are also times when someone on Slashdot ticks me off that I wish to release a torrent of profanity at them that would make a sailor blush. By not allowing myself to post as an AC I have to decide is it worth it. I will take a hit for something I believe in and will stand behind it. But I will not take the hit just because someone is a total jerk-face and I am angry. So no I do not think that the problem really is the moderation because it is too hard to know the heart and knowledge base of the person doing the modding. An example case is someone says "X group believes Y those bastards!" Someone that is a member of that group knows that isn't the policy of the group so they mod it down. Not because they disagree but because it is not true. You and I may not know any better and think he is just doing a -1 disagree when in fact they just know more than we do.
As to the moderation system not working. Actually I think it works pretty well. Go read the comments on CNN sometime. They have no moderation and have no AC postings at all! Man they make Slashdot look like a bastion of good manners and reason! Now if we could just not allow AC posting or allow people to post as an AC so your name is hidden but still make you take the karma hit or get the good karma from your post. I could see someone not wanting to post I am Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, Catholic, and or Gay publicly because they would then become a target for some of the jerk-faces on Slashdot.
As to browsing by which moderators we are in sympathy we are with. That is a really bad idea. Frankly one of the problems of the internet is we can always find "news" sources that share our sympathy. That means we find sources that will reinforce our bias. If nothing else we need to see the posts that challenge our bias more than reinforce them. That is the only way that we can learn and grow. A personal example is that I started out being pro death penalty. Over time I felt that it was till a good idea just used too much. Eventually I became anti-death penalty. People change and grow only by being challenged but in a respectful and honestly polite way. What you want will not help growth but only polarization which frankly is inhibited growth. Frankly if you are in moral right I feel you are under a moral obligation to kindly persuade those that disagree with you. But hey that is just my opinion and you can agree or not.
Okay let's see. AMD Intel NVidia Global Foundries.
Four companies. You know Global Foundries the company that AMD spun off after buying ATI. If you are just going to count companies and not competitors in a market.
That is not correct. If a type of aircraft failed in flight and the flight recorder was lost and then a second aircraft failed in flight and the recorder was found. If the recorder has the cause then it is very probable that the loss of the first flight recorder contributed to the loss of the second flight. So I guess you could say that it is impossible to know but their is a high probability. But then if your logic 101 professor took physics then he would would state that it is impossible to know anything with a 100% certainty. It is all just probabilities.
They choose not to. They could just use the OS codec support which I feel is the correct way to go. That way if a new codec comes out or if a better hardware accelerated version is created you program uses it. FF doesn't want to support h.264 because they feel it is wrong to support it. Frankly I fear that will be the death of FF. When it doesn't work people will go to Chrome, Opera, Safari, or even stay with IE.
Which mix? In the Graphics market you had three companies. ATI, Nvidia, and Intel. You had three to pick from. Now you can pick from three companies as well. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. In the CPU X/86 market you had two companies really to pick from. AMD and Intel with Via as sort of the odd man out. Now you have AMD and Intel with with Via as the odd man out.
But before if you wanted to get an x86 cpu+gpu+chipset from one company you had one choice. Intel. Now you have two choices with AMD offering all AMD cpu+gpu+ plus chipset and again you have Via as sort of the odd third player. So now in that very important market you now have more choice. That market is where all the OEMs shop which means that now you have more choice in desktops and notebooks.
It isn't any odd math but reality. The problem is that you just don't want to see it or admit to it so you throw a silly insult out.
The company really at risk is Nvidia because it has not merged with a CPU company. Interrogated CPUs will keep getting better and better. Once they offer really good performance at 1080p the market for after market cards will shrink. Thing is with out this merger then instead of Nvidia being at risk it would be nVidia, AMD, and ATI at risk. I am not too worried about Nvidia long term. They will get new profits from the Mobile market "Tegra" and from super computing "Tesla". I do not see them ever leaving the high end video card market. Via I just do not know how they keep chugging along. Maybe the Embedded market?
You also left out the part about the government hiding crucial data. You know like when Grey's cause a plane to crash or when the Illuminati shoot one down to see how we will react. Where is my tin foil hat? What people don't understand is that you are more likely to die in your car or hit by lightning than in an airliner crash. It is a flashy news worthy event when it happens because it is so rare. Here is the big question. How many times has a black box not been found? And how many times has the lack of one caused other planes to crash? The airlines are already adding real time telemetry to their new airlines if for no other reason than to improve maintenance. The older black boxes are getting replaced be newer and better ones. The old ones do actually work very well and have provided the data needed to improve safety over the years. So for this most part this whole thing is a paranoid issue with very little merit in the big scheme of things.
I got news for you it is not just Republicans that voted for that law. And it is not just Republicans that wouldn't want to vote to change it.
STOP PLAYING THE PARTY GAME! Find out how your local congress folk stand on the issues and vote them in or out.
The Democratic party is not the source of all goodness and light anymore than the GOP is. Start thinking and stop being cheerleaders. VOTE FOR PEOPLE AND NOT NOT PARTIES!
"AMD bought ATI. Four companies became three". Yea and...
"The lines between CPU and GPU will blur." That is a given. It is a natural evolution. GPUs are getting better and better at doing math. CPUs can use GPU to help them do math heavy things like trans-coding, physics modeling, and so on. "Fewer companies does not mean more competition. Less competition means we get fucked." Agreed but this will help competition and not hurt it. "f you still need clarification, contact me offline and I'll explain it with charts." No need I will because you are the one that needs clarification.
Intel is already moving GPUs into package and will move them onto the die as soon as possible. Their GPUs are not good but they are usable for the low end. AMD is also moving the GPU on die. The thing is that it looks as if their GPU is much better than Intel's because they bought ATI. This will make AMD more competitive in the all important low end desktop and notebook categories. With out a high quality GPU to integrate with their CPU AMD would be dead. So the benefits of this merger are. 1. A healthier AMD that can compete better with Intel. 2. ATI graphics cards users have seen a real improvement in driver quality. Linux has probably benefited the most. 3. AMD users have much better and more stable chipsets than in the past plus AMD now has a family of AMD chipsets to offer to better complete with Intel CPUs on Intel chipsets. 4. AMD has made a lot of effort to open their GPUs to the FOSS community. They have released a large amount of documentation and we are getting close to true FOSS drivers for AMD's GPUs. 5. There was no loss of manufacturing jobs because of this buy out because ATI was a fabless company.
The only down side is some mythical loss of competition that you feel may in the future negatively impact the consumer. The thing is that all evidence points to that not being true. Since the merger AMD has produced some really good CPUs in the low end of the market. They compete very well with Intel now in every segment of the desktop space except the "Cost is no object" uber gamer market. In graphics they are still neck and neck with Nvidia. So in high end graphics before the merger you had two big players. Now after the merger you have two big players. In the low end graphics market you had three big players. Now you have three big players. In the CPU market you had two big players and now you have two big players. Nothing was lost and a lot has been gained. AMD is now a better competitor with Intel. AMD is also a better competitor with nVidia now because of improvements in drivers and driver support. It is now a good competitor in the Linux space when before it really wasn't because of driver problems. And now we have an actual high end graphics card maker actively supporting and effort to create FOSS drivers. Something we have not seen since the days when Mattrox was a leading graphics card provider.
There are a lot more than three CPU makers. There are just three x86 CPU makers. Would I lake more. That would probably be a good thing. But here is the flip side... Do you want less? AKA if AMD had not bought ATI odds are pretty good that AMD would be less competitive than it is now. If anything the AMD ATI merger is pro competition because it help maintain AMD as a competitor to Intel. ATI never made CPUs at all. So the end result is things not getting any worse. Which is better than ATI and AMD going belly up. Frankly Nvidia is in real danger now of that happening. Intel really seems to be working hard to lock them out of their market. But over all yea I am good with the ATI AMD deal because I think it is a good thing. Frankly I worry more about ARMs dominance in the mobile market than I do with only 3 X86 cpu makers. At least they seem to license their cores to lots of people but still it is becoming a huge mono-culture. Now if Intel, AMD, IBM, Apple, Google, or Nokia tries to buy ARM then yea that would be very bad.
Wow what sillines sis this. First drop the Bush Justice department crap. Obama has been president for a while and the UA Continental merger is on his watch. Second what is your problem? There are several GPU makers are then market right now. Via, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD all make GPUs for the PC X86 market. You have three x86 CPU makers Intel, AMD, and VIA. So there are several GPU makers in this one product segment. Now for your other issues. Manufacturing jobs? ATI doesn't have any. They used FABs to make their chips. They have been outsourcing those for years. AMD has spun off their fabs which is true but they still exist and hopefully will thrive because they can now make chips for other companies as well as AMD. Finally this merger was a GREAT idea to OK. AMD has been in a world of hurt for years. Intel has had the lead since they finally dropped Netburst and moved on. The merger of AMD and ATI has made AMD a stronger competitor to Intel and has given consumers more choice. If AMD and ATI had not merged AMD would be at risk of going out of business. Then we would be left with just Intel and VIA for CPUs. Let's face it VIA is at best a minnor player and doesn't really compete with Intel very well at all. In the end I would say it saved jobs and has improved things for the consumer. So your just nuts and spouting some of the worst political babble I have heard in a while.
Actually light years can work for this metaphor. IE Light peak is a great distance away from shipping.. Not really any different than you missed your performance make by a mile or your not even in the same neighborhood with that bid. Now if he said it will will be light years before light peak ships that would be a bad metaphor. But in this case I think it was a fine use. Don't be so literal. After all LightPeak is still not shipping at all. It has a ways to go before we see it in real products at BestBuyMart.
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You need to hang with normal people.
How many megahertz does this have?
How much ram does the Hard Disk have?
Normal people don't know ATI from Nvidia from HP!
They will look at how big the numbers are, how big the screen is, and how low the price is.
Unlike me that will look how big the numbers are, how big the screen is, how heavy it is, does it support Linux, and how cheap it is....
Hey it is notebook.
I would have to disagree. I just got an Macbook for development. For the price it is a very well made PC. I have used Lenovo and IBM thinkpads and Fujitsu life books.
The MacBook has great battery life and a very good display.
Frankly I am a build your own PC kinda guy but the Macbook is a very good piece of kit that gets the job done well.
Throw in the lack of crappletts and it really is a joy to use.
That and the power adapter really is a nice idea Over all it is just a well made computer.
Most notebooks are over powered for the average user. I am not even an average user and I have to wish that the Macbook was faster. Even the compile times are pretty good.
If I had to pay for it myself I would probably get a $500 laptop but I am cheap.
Not really. You must step out of the PC mindset. Imagine a bank with thousands of ATMs located all over the planet.
Or a Telcomm with a million users. Things like billing by the minute?
We are talking about huge number of transactions. These are high value transactions not thinks like tweets or even Goggle searches.
You will want things like auditing and roll back and commit on those transactions that you just don't get on NOSQL databases.
For that type of a system a Mainframe is a very good solution.
It has been a while but really?
I have never seen a mainframe that didn't use Zulu time. Also in the shop I worked all software was quality verified. One machine was at the five year uptime mark when I left but it was a none commercial system.
"For CISC you need more bytes per instruction, because there are more instructions. With RISC your executable has more instructions but they each use less storage."
Actually no.
RISC uses fixed length instructions while CISC uses variable length.
Also in RISC everything is done in registers so let's say you need to increment a variable in memory.
On a RISK system you would first load it which would be two 32 bit accesses one for the instruction and one for the pointer.
Then you would have the increment instructions which would be another 32 bit memory fetch.
Finally you would store the value back in memory which would be two more 32 bit values,
So this would take 20 bytes of memory space.
Now this is a pure RISC ISA. Adding one to a memory location is such a common operations that I am sure that many RISC ISAs have a load and increment instruction.
In that case you are down to just 16 bytes.
Or course both cases are assuming that we have a free register to work with and I am not checking for an overflow flag.
Now lets look at a theoretical CISC ISA.
On this cpu we have a 16 bit increment memory location so we have two bytes for the instruction and four bytes for the pointer.
Total memory used is just six bytes.
Or if the increment is 32bits then it you are at 8 bytes.
Each instruction in CISC does more than in RISC.
The reality is that most CPUs today are RISC at heart even the X86s.
They have hardware decoders that decode the CISC instructions into RISC instructions that the CPU then executes.
Even RISC chips often break with RISC every now and then.
A lot of RISC CPUs have things like a memory copy instruction to copy memory from one location to another. Other wise to copy a byte you would need a load and save for each copy.
Pure RISC was great when memory ran at CPU speeds or at least very close. Now that CPUs have gotten a lot faster than memory pure RISC is not as good. But RISC has changed as well over time. The Power line of RISC chips is anything but Reduced!
"They say it's an old CISC architecture. This is probably the sort of system that runs horribly outdated and un-updatable code, like the tax system."
You mean like Windows?
The X86 is also an old CISC architecture.
Actually the Power line is RISC anyway. When it is used in a ZMachine the old style 360/370/390 CISC ISA is translated to RISC and then executed.
Before you go ew that is what modern X86 chips do as well as ARM when using the Thumb Instruction set. The ZSystem ISA is so high end it is almost a high level language so the translation doesn't really effect performance much at all. Also that old CISC architecture is much better than the mess that we have on the X86.
I am not sure about how IBM does the translation. On the System 38 AS/400 System-I the translation was done during the IPL aka Initial Program Load. On the Zs it may be done as a JIT but I am not sure.
Honestly I love the idea and wish that Linux would adopt it. You could then have one binary that would work on any Linux system on an CPU.
The AS400 way kept a native binary copy along with the TIMI copy. When the program was run the first time it would translate the TIMI copy into the native segment. Yes the first time you ran the program it might take a bit to start but after that it would run at full speed and start fast. Of course you could add a binary segment when you first released the code for the ISA of your choice.
All in all those old Mainframes and Minis had a lot of brilliant tech we still don't have today on our PCs.
Banks, Credit card companies, hospitals, Insurance companies...
Cheap clusters are great but they are not always the best tool for the job.
Very large traditional datasets involving lots of high value transactions, with 5 9s uptime requirements do not tend to scale well to COTS clusters.
IBM mainframes have uptimes measured in years if not decades.
They have hot swapable everything including CPUs. so you can do ugrades with zero downtime.
Also you need to take a look at the costs involved. The costs to throw out a working software system that has been used for decades and then the cost to redesign it to work on a Cluster of X86 boes will be huge.
Not to mention the investment in making it fault tolerant and if it is used in certain markets the cost of the auditing the software.
Not to mention that ZSystems tend to be really secure. There are just not a lot of exploits on Zsystems.
When downtime can cost millions of dollars hardware costs are just no that big of a deal.
Now if you are starting from scratch then you may save money by going with a cluster but then you may not depending on just how good your programmers are.
"Suppose the poster has been forbidden to use the Internet by the courts? "
Actually in that case your just nuts to be posting on slashdot to start with. But if you are dumb enough to do it then create a new account with a different username.
If the court ordered you to not use the internet which has happened how often? I would hope that you are taking a lot more precautions than just posting as an AC. Frankly I would say that if you think posting as an AC gives you any protection from law enforcement then it is you that is showing your limited knowledge. I have had to actually hide my identity while using online resources before. If you every work for a company and are doing any type of online research you have more than one online identity. Yea posting as an AC is going to be helpful avoiding the police. Really? Only if you avoiding Otis the Drunk trying to avoid Barnny Fife and Sheriff Taylor.
So nope you are wrong. Same thing if you it might reflect badly at work.
I am not saying you can not use an handle and not your real name. Just not as an AC.
Not a perfect solution but frankly I would say a good 70% of the AC trolls are not smart enough to figure out to make a different identity.
And no it really is. If you only listen to those that tell you what you already believe you will not grow or learn anything new at all.
Unless of course you are sure every view you have is exactly correct and unquestionably right. In that case you have other issues that posting on Slashdot.
"Surely even one crash saved makes ANY improvement worth the effort. After all, what price a human life?"
Do you drive a car? Do you ever speed in the car? Do you eat food that isn't good for you? Do you use fossil fuel? Do you driver over any bridges or go into any buildings?
People die building bridges and buildings. People die drilling for oil and mining coal.
People die driving cars.
People die because people speed.
There are people starving and dieing because of lack of medical care. Do you send every cent you make that you don't need for too keep you alive to charity?
It may well be that you put having an XBox or an iPod over somebodies life.
Yea it is an uncomfortable thought isn't it but every luxury you buy is money that you could give to help someone and maybe save a life.
It is even uglier if you think that every moment you are not spending earning money to help people could cost someone's life. Yes that nap could have cost someone their life.
There is a price for everything even for doing nothing.
Really that is such a silly rebuttal of you really think about it.
Lets put it another way. You have 100 million dollars to spend.
Do you want to spend it on an improved black box system that may save an on average 10 lives per year. Assuming that it prevents one airliner crash every 20 years. Or do you want to spend in on Mosquito nets that will prevent 10,000 people a year from getting Malaria and goodness knows how many deaths from Malaria or complications?
One mans troll is another's disagree.
I do not think that there is anything one can only say as an AC.
I mean what your afraid of loosing Karma? Karma doesn't affect your paycheck or get you put in jail.
Being an AC doesn't pass your comment through a TOR node so it doesn't offer you any protection from the government.
I have decided long ago to never post as an AC. There are times when I know my post will get moded down because I dare to criticize the one of the Slashdot sacred cows. There are also times when someone on Slashdot ticks me off that I wish to release a torrent of profanity at them that would make a sailor blush.
By not allowing myself to post as an AC I have to decide is it worth it. I will take a hit for something I believe in and will stand behind it.
But I will not take the hit just because someone is a total jerk-face and I am angry.
So no I do not think that the problem really is the moderation because it is too hard to know the heart and knowledge base of the person doing the modding. An example case is someone says "X group believes Y those bastards!" Someone that is a member of that group knows that isn't the policy of the group so they mod it down. Not because they disagree but because it is not true.
You and I may not know any better and think he is just doing a -1 disagree when in fact they just know more than we do.
As to the moderation system not working. Actually I think it works pretty well. Go read the comments on CNN sometime. They have no moderation and have no AC postings at all! Man they make Slashdot look like a bastion of good manners and reason!
Now if we could just not allow AC posting or allow people to post as an AC so your name is hidden but still make you take the karma hit or get the good karma from your post.
I could see someone not wanting to post I am Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, Catholic, and or Gay publicly because they would then become a target for some of the jerk-faces on Slashdot.
As to browsing by which moderators we are in sympathy we are with. That is a really bad idea.
Frankly one of the problems of the internet is we can always find "news" sources that share our sympathy. That means we find sources that will reinforce our bias.
If nothing else we need to see the posts that challenge our bias more than reinforce them.
That is the only way that we can learn and grow.
A personal example is that I started out being pro death penalty. Over time I felt that it was till a good idea just used too much. Eventually I became anti-death penalty. People change and grow only by being challenged but in a respectful and honestly polite way. What you want will not help growth but only polarization which frankly is inhibited growth.
Frankly if you are in moral right I feel you are under a moral obligation to kindly persuade those that disagree with you.
But hey that is just my opinion and you can agree or not.
Okay let's see.
AMD
Intel
NVidia
Global Foundries.
Four companies.
You know Global Foundries the company that AMD spun off after buying ATI.
If you are just going to count companies and not competitors in a market.
Probably no more so when you get hit by lighting.
That is not correct.
If a type of aircraft failed in flight and the flight recorder was lost and then a second aircraft failed in flight and the recorder was found. If the recorder has the cause then it is very probable that the loss of the first flight recorder contributed to the loss of the second flight.
So I guess you could say that it is impossible to know but their is a high probability.
But then if your logic 101 professor took physics then he would would state that it is impossible to know anything with a 100% certainty. It is all just probabilities.
Why not use XFS or JFS if you need a better file system than EXT3? XFS has good performance on big file systems.
Good example of why I often wish that AC couldn't post on Slashdot.
You mean that nobody has ported GCC to it yet? It must run NetBSD right?
Shocked I tell you just shocked.
They choose not to.
They could just use the OS codec support which I feel is the correct way to go. That way if a new codec comes out or if a better hardware accelerated version is created you program uses it.
FF doesn't want to support h.264 because they feel it is wrong to support it.
Frankly I fear that will be the death of FF. When it doesn't work people will go to Chrome, Opera, Safari, or even stay with IE.
Which mix?
In the Graphics market you had three companies. ATI, Nvidia, and Intel. You had three to pick from.
Now you can pick from three companies as well. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.
In the CPU X/86 market you had two companies really to pick from. AMD and Intel with Via as sort of the odd man out.
Now you have AMD and Intel with with Via as the odd man out.
But before if you wanted to get an x86 cpu+gpu+chipset from one company you had one choice. Intel.
Now you have two choices with AMD offering all AMD cpu+gpu+ plus chipset and again you have Via as sort of the odd third player.
So now in that very important market you now have more choice. That market is where all the OEMs shop which means that now you have more choice in desktops and notebooks.
It isn't any odd math but reality. The problem is that you just don't want to see it or admit to it so you throw a silly insult out.
The company really at risk is Nvidia because it has not merged with a CPU company. Interrogated CPUs will keep getting better and better. Once they offer really good performance at 1080p the market for after market cards will shrink. Thing is with out this merger then instead of Nvidia being at risk it would be nVidia, AMD, and ATI at risk.
I am not too worried about Nvidia long term. They will get new profits from the Mobile market "Tegra" and from super computing "Tesla". I do not see them ever leaving the high end video card market. Via I just do not know how they keep chugging along. Maybe the Embedded market?
You also left out the part about the government hiding crucial data. You know like when Grey's cause a plane to crash or when the Illuminati shoot one down to see how we will react. Where is my tin foil hat?
What people don't understand is that you are
more likely to die in your car or hit by lightning than in an airliner crash. It is a flashy news worthy event when it happens because it is so rare.
Here is the big question. How many times has a black box not been found? And how many times has the lack of one caused other planes to crash?
The airlines are already adding real time telemetry to their new airlines if for no other reason than to improve maintenance. The older black boxes are getting replaced be newer and better ones. The old ones do actually work very well and have provided the data needed to improve safety over the years.
So for this most part this whole thing is a paranoid issue with very little merit in the big scheme of things.
I got news for you it is not just Republicans that voted for that law. And it is not just Republicans that wouldn't want to vote to change it.
STOP PLAYING THE PARTY GAME!
Find out how your local congress folk stand on the issues and vote them in or out.
The Democratic party is not the source of all goodness and light anymore than the GOP is.
Start thinking and stop being cheerleaders. VOTE FOR PEOPLE AND NOT NOT PARTIES!
"AMD bought ATI. Four companies became three". Yea and...
"The lines between CPU and GPU will blur."
That is a given. It is a natural evolution. GPUs are getting better and better at doing math. CPUs can use GPU to help them do math heavy things like trans-coding, physics modeling, and so on.
"Fewer companies does not mean more competition. Less competition means we get fucked."
Agreed but this will help competition and not hurt it.
"f you still need clarification, contact me offline and I'll explain it with charts."
No need I will because you are the one that needs clarification.
Intel is already moving GPUs into package and will move them onto the die as soon as possible. Their GPUs are not good but they are usable for the low end.
AMD is also moving the GPU on die. The thing is that it looks as if their GPU is much better than Intel's because they bought ATI.
This will make AMD more competitive in the all important low end desktop and notebook categories. With out a high quality GPU to integrate with their CPU AMD would be dead.
So the benefits of this merger are.
1. A healthier AMD that can compete better with Intel.
2. ATI graphics cards users have seen a real improvement in driver quality. Linux has probably benefited the most.
3. AMD users have much better and more stable chipsets than in the past plus AMD now has a family of AMD chipsets to offer to better complete with Intel CPUs on Intel chipsets.
4. AMD has made a lot of effort to open their GPUs to the FOSS community. They have released a large amount of documentation and we are getting close to true FOSS drivers for AMD's GPUs.
5. There was no loss of manufacturing jobs because of this buy out because ATI was a fabless company.
The only down side is some mythical loss of competition that you feel may in the future negatively impact the consumer. The thing is that all evidence points to that not being true.
Since the merger AMD has produced some really good CPUs in the low end of the market. They compete very well with Intel now in every segment of the desktop space except the "Cost is no object" uber gamer market.
In graphics they are still neck and neck with Nvidia.
So in high end graphics before the merger you had two big players. Now after the merger you have two big players.
In the low end graphics market you had three big players. Now you have three big players.
In the CPU market you had two big players and now you have two big players.
Nothing was lost and a lot has been gained. AMD is now a better competitor with Intel. AMD is also a better competitor with nVidia now because of improvements in drivers and driver support. It is now a good competitor in the Linux space when before it really wasn't because of driver problems. And now we have an actual high end graphics card maker actively supporting and effort to create FOSS drivers. Something we have not seen since the days when Mattrox was a leading graphics card provider.
So to put it simply, no you are wrong.
There are a lot more than three CPU makers.
There are just three x86 CPU makers.
Would I lake more. That would probably be a good thing.
But here is the flip side...
Do you want less?
AKA if AMD had not bought ATI odds are pretty good that AMD would be less competitive than it is now.
If anything the AMD ATI merger is pro competition because it help maintain AMD as a competitor to Intel.
ATI never made CPUs at all. So the end result is things not getting any worse.
Which is better than ATI and AMD going belly up.
Frankly Nvidia is in real danger now of that happening. Intel really seems to be working hard to lock them out of their market. But over all yea I am good with the ATI AMD deal because I think it is a good thing.
Frankly I worry more about ARMs dominance in the mobile market than I do with only 3 X86 cpu makers. At least they seem to license their cores to lots of people but still it is becoming a huge mono-culture. Now if Intel, AMD, IBM, Apple, Google, or Nokia tries to buy ARM then yea that would be very bad.
Wow what sillines sis this.
First drop the Bush Justice department crap. Obama has been president for a while and the UA Continental merger is on his watch.
Second what is your problem?
There are several GPU makers are then market right now. Via, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD all make GPUs for the PC X86 market.
You have three x86 CPU makers Intel, AMD, and VIA.
So there are several GPU makers in this one product segment.
Now for your other issues.
Manufacturing jobs? ATI doesn't have any. They used FABs to make their chips. They have been outsourcing those for years.
AMD has spun off their fabs which is true but they still exist and hopefully will thrive because they can now make chips for other companies as well as AMD.
Finally this merger was a GREAT idea to OK. AMD has been in a world of hurt for years. Intel has had the lead since they finally dropped Netburst and moved on. The merger of AMD and ATI has made AMD a stronger competitor to Intel and has given consumers more choice.
If AMD and ATI had not merged AMD would be at risk of going out of business. Then we would be left with just Intel and VIA for CPUs. Let's face it VIA is at best a minnor player and doesn't really compete with Intel very well at all.
In the end I would say it saved jobs and has improved things for the consumer.
So your just nuts and spouting some of the worst political babble I have heard in a while.
Yep and lots of server mother boards still have RS-232 ports and PS/2 ports. Old ports never die completely they just get embedded.
Actually light years can work for this metaphor. IE Light peak is a great distance away from shipping.. Not really any different than you missed your performance make by a mile or your not even in the same neighborhood with that bid. Now if he said it will will be light years before light peak ships that would be a bad metaphor.
But in this case I think it was a fine use.
Don't be so literal. After all LightPeak is still not shipping at all. It has a ways to go before we see it in real products at BestBuyMart.