Addiction is an interesting thing, and it varies with different people. People don't always get addicted because they are unhappy. In fact, the drugs can be a lot of fun to use in the beginning. Initially, it is all good. However as you continue on it becomes more pain, less pleasure, a bigger problem. The thing is, quitting will cause a lot of pain at that point and you may have already messed up your life to a degree, so it is harder to quit.
Drugs with actual, physical, addictions can be real insidious in that way. That's also why you'll hear addicts talk about the need to "hit bottom". What that means is things have to get bad enough that you realize and accept what you need to do to try and recover, to deal with the difficulty of recovery. For some people, that bottom is pretty high. They'll stop the addiction early. For others, even death isn't the bottom.
I'm quite sure his original stuff about the NSA's prism program is accurate. It is some of the later stuff I'm questioning. I don't doubt that he had access to classified data, and it certainly seem like it is at least somewhat, if not completely, accurate given the reaction. But then there keeps being more and more leaks that are less and less related, which do not seem to be generating much reaction.
It is just causing me to wonder on their veracity.
Not of the NSA (I mean seriously, you weren't already?) but of these leaks? I am starting to have doubts that this one contractor had access to all this varied data, about various programs, and now even about non-American agencies.
I am seriously starting to wonder if he, or others, are making up some shit for their own ends. I just have trouble buying that he has all this disparate data, on all this stuff, particularly given the compartmentalization of highly classified data.
Generally to actually wind up without a place to live, one of those two things come in to play. With mental issues it is fairly easy to understand: The person is crazy, does not perceive reality, and makes choice most find very strange. Also, even if help is available (which it quite often isn't in the US), they don't want it since a sad part of many mental illnesses is to make you not think you are ill. After all they are a problem with the brain and your brain is what you use to tell if you have problems.
Drugs, including alcohol, are the much more common problem. You get addicts who are so deep in to their addiction that nothing else matters to them. Not only can they not hold down a job, but they end up alienating all their family and friends. People give them chances but they keep abusing it and finally they kick them out. Eventually, they are out of people to go to.
Seriously it never ceases to amaze me the morons that go and do something stupid like this to get a copy of a game without waiting in line. You don't have to do that anymore. You go and order on Amazon, and they'll have it sent to your house, on release day. No waiting in line, no BS, it just gets delivered to you.
While the irrational need to have a new game RIGHT NAO is stupid enough (and I say this as a huge gamer) you don't have to wait in line, there's just no reason, in this day and age services will happily deliver to you.
Battlefield 3 would be an example. Launched the same day on all platforms and worked well on all of them.
It really isn't a big deal to simultaneously develop for multiple platforms and when you get down to it the PC is likely more similar to the Xbox 360 than the 360 is to the PS3 in terms of development tools and style.
The problem is Rockstar are console heads, for various reasons, and relegate the PC release to second class status.
You can also see it with shit like GTA 4. Not only did it come out way after the consoles, but it performed for crap. They can't argue "Oh well the PC just isn't powerful enough," as PCs dominate consoles in every respect at the moment. It was just poorly implemented and optimized.
The US intelligence community is fairly compartmentalized in to a bunch of agencies that do different things. For satellites, it's the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office. The NSA is signals intelligence, intercepting phone calls, radio communications, e-mail, that kind of thing. Hence all the stuff that has leaked about what they've been doing.
Also NASA (in tandem with NOAA and the USGS) operates a number of Earth facing sats like the Landsat series. They aren't all that high resolution, lower resolution than the stuff you see on Google Earth, since they are for monitoring things like vegetation index and so on. The newest one, Landsat 8, has some pretty badass multi-spectral sensors.
And if you have problems with photo satellites, well then there are going to be a lot of countries, and private companies, you have an issue with. There are lots of sats looking down at the Earth.
I played Quake Team Fortress (the original, for Quake 1) quite competitively. So there was no zoom key for sniping and the like, you just had to play with FOV. You made some binds to toggle FOV leves as you saw fit. This lead me to try bigger FOV numbers, and that worked too. So I had 4 FOV buttons, 10, 30, 90, and 160. 90 was where I played most of the time, 30 and 10 were for sniping, which I did rarely. 160 was for flag defense, which is often what I was assigned to. I could watch an entire flag room from one corner. Then, when I saw someone, I'd drop the FOV to 90 and go after them.
AMD has long had driver performance issues, compared to nVidia. Their hardware started really kicking some ass with the 4000 series and was just dominant with the 5000 series, but the software side has had some issues. I'm not sure what the issue is, maybe they need more people, maybe they need better people, maybe they need a better process. Whatever the case they end up having more issues. Stuttering and rendering partial frames has been one (that they have largely cleared up with single display setups), issues with Endur would be another (a year after my laptop release, it still has big issues).
So it just is what it is. If you get an AMD card you know you may have some issues like this, but you also know they will work on it, though any resolution may not be fast.
However this is a big issue for AMD fanboys. They, like all fanboys, put their identity, their ego, in AMD being the One True Way(tm) and being better than those other guys. So when something makes their chosen toy look bad, they have to steer the discussion away. They'll find a bug in nVidia drivers and say "BUT LOOK NVIDIA HAS T3H PROBLEMS!!!" to try and deflect the argument.
Rather than simply buying the card they want and enjoying the purchase, they have to make it an "us vs them" kind of thing.
The crime rate is 0.001% of what it was pre-ban? So if their crime rate was, say 10 in 100,000 citizens it would now be 1 in 10,000,000 citizens.
Ok well in the first two months of 2013 2500 people were killed. This is just murder here, we aren't looking at lesser crimes right now (http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/venezuelan-government-recognizes-record-murder-rate). That means we can expect around 15,000 murders this year. By your logic, that means there was 15,000,000 murders last year, or over half their population.
However if we do a little more looking, in the same article, we discover that no, there was about 16,000 murders last year, meaning this one looks about the same as the last.
In other words, you are just completely making shit up. If you have to resort to logic that faulty, that far out, that totally made up to support your position, it leads one to ask how valid your position is.
However, you have to have a pretty narrow expectation of what you do on your desktop. Basically it is good for network related tasks, e-mail, web, remote systems access, that kind of thing. It is also ok at document authoring, good enough for more individuals, but potentially problematic in business settings (where people go apeshit with Excel macros and such). It is acceptable at media playback provided you have the right hardware, and nothing you want to play back has DRM.
So you can use it for basic desktop usage, if that's all you do. If you want to do that then the other trick is making sure you have supported hardware. This generally means that the hardware be popular, and not too new. Don't get latest and greatest, stay a couple generations back (which is no big deal these days, it is still plenty fast).
However if you want to start doing gaming, media creation, that kind of thing, well then prepare for a fight, and to perhaps simply not be able to do what you want.
I'm a proponent of Windows desktops, in part because I'm a Windows support professional so it is what I know, but Linux is something that can work on some desktops. You just have to be aware of the limits, and be ok with them. If you are a gamer, that is generally a show stopper right there.
What you are really saying is "The OS I'm a rabid fanboy about can't do that, so I hate it and don't want others to do it because it makes my OS look bad!"
That is very silly. Playing games on the computer is a perfectly valid use for it. One of the great things about a computer is it can do, well, almost anything. You can have a computer that does a whole host of different things, all in one OS. And games are a great form of entertainment. They are much more stimulating and interactive than TV, and they are good value for the money in terms of hours of entertainment per dollar spent. If you don't enjoy them that is fine but acting as if they are invalid is stupid.
It is even sillier to imply that you should only want to do "real things" which really sounds like work. Guess what? When you grow up and get a real job you'll find that after working for 8+ hours a day, and then doing housework and all that, you don't feel particularly inclined to do more work that you don't need to. You may wish to unwind. How you do that may vary, TV, books, yoga, videogames, music (listening or playing), sports, etc, etc. However whatever you do, that is not a waste of time, it is quite necessary to maintain a healthy mental state. Focusing all of your time and energy on work is a surefire way to burn out.
Also, if you don't believe that you can do "real things" with Windows, that only belies your own zealotry and inexperience with computers in an enterprise setting. Real shit gets done on Windows every day, all over the planet.
If their chosen product can't do something, then that something is unimportant, or shouldn't be done, or makes you a sissy, or whatever. They can't admit that the thing they are a fan of is less than perfect so they hate on things it does not have.
I've gotten that with numerous things regarding Linux. Games would be one of them. A Linux fan is trying to convince me to switch so I say "Ok, if you wish to convince me then here are the things I do with my computer that you need to show me how I can do in Linux." Games are a big one, since they are my primary form of entertainment when I've free time, and many of the games I want don't run in Linux. Often the response to this is "You shouldn't play games on your computer, get a console if you want to play games." That's a bogus argument, of course, but it is what they do rather than just admit "Ya, Linux is probably not the right answer for you at this point."
Same shit here. Visual Studio really is an amazing development environment that makes for some efficient workflow. There is nothing else I'm aware of that is as good. So fanboys hate on what it does as stuff that you "shouldn't need" and that you should just "man up" and do it their way.
There are some real good arguments for it. Having kids is a big commitment. Kids aren't a fashion accessory, they aren't a plaything, they aren't something you have to make yourself feel better. They are a serious, difficult, commitment. You owe it to them most of all, but to society and to yourself as well, to provide them with all the support, love, stability, and help you can. It is a long term commitment too. The financial commitment alone lasts a long time, and the emotional commitment lasts a lifetime.
Well, if you are going to make that commitment, it isn't unreasonable to ask that you make the commitment to the other person with whom you are making the kids. You commit to each other to stay together and help each other, if for no reason other than you kids. Having two parents helps a lot in raising children. It is a difficult job to do single, in particular since you almost certainly also have to have a job to provide for your family as well.
So really, if marriage is something you aren't willing to commit to, then I have to ask if you are ready for the much larger commitment that is children. There's nothing wrong if you aren't but then don't have kids. It is perfectly valid to not have kids, to have a steady population without draconian measures like China we need people who do not wish to have kids to be free to do so such that those who wish to have many can also do so.
However if you do want kids, you need to accept the massive commitment that it is, and I would say also be willing to commit to your partner in raising those kids. Realize that it isn't going to be about what you want, it is going to be about what you kids need, and you need to be committed to that even when it isn't fun, isn't what you want.
So I don't think it is at all unreasonable to ask why a couple that wants to have children wouldn't get married, particularly given the legal ramifications. For some good insight on that, look up what Dan Savage has to say about it. He and his partner Terry (he's gay) adopted a kid but couldn't get married until recently. This created a number of issues with regards to insurance, critical care, and so on that just aren't a problem now that they are married and these issues affect their child. They didn't want to get married just because, they wanted to get married because they have a child they are committed to, and there are legal reasons why having that within a married relationship is beneficial.
Not parents. Good parenting requires walking a middle path where you are kind, protective, and providing to your children but not overly permissive or accommodating. It is not the easiest thing to do. So bad parents, and there are many, fall to one extreme. They either tend to be overly authoritarian, expecting that their needs and demands are primary and children are to do as they are told, no matter what, and often using violence to get their way, or just as a release of anger. Or they are overly permissive, they want to be friends with their kids, they will let them do pretty much whatever they want, even when they know it is bad, will acquiesce to all demands, give in to tantrums, and so on.
Either style of bad parenting is easier than good parenting, and so you see plenty of both.
It strikes me that the parents in the article are of the permissive kind of bad parents, combined with a fair bit of narcissism. They want their kids to be their friends, they don't want to be parents, and they want their kids to give them affection and attention. So when electronics were competing, their solution wasn't to put limits on it, but rather to just banish it all. That way they weren't being the bad guys since "everyone" including them had the same restrictions.
1) Maybe going to "kick the ball around" is a little boring? I understand the wish to have kids engage in physical play, it is very important to good health. However that doesn't mean that it can't be interesting. Just kicking a ball around is rather boring and shows a lack of creativity on the part of the adult proposing it. How about spend a little time trying to set up some outdoor activities that are more fun? It isn't even like you have to invent anything, people have been playing outdoors for centuries, you can find out what they've done. Playing in the various treehouses my father built and playing capture the flag with my friends in the woods are some of my fond childhood memories. I would not have been so enamoured had my dad said "Hey let's go out back and kick a ball around. No, we won't do anything other than kick it back and forth, but it is good because it is outside!"
2) Perhaps liking to play with technology isn't a bad thing. I was a real tech-lover as a kid, and still am. When I got a NES that was my favourite toy and my friends and I spent a lot of time playing video games. When I finally got a computer, it was my new favourite toy, largely for games, and still is. To this day I play videogames all the time on my computer. It is my preferred form of entertainment instead of TV. Well my parents did worry that such a thing had no real application to anything that made money. Like good parents they made sure it wasn't all I did, and that I had to do chores, homework, etc before I got to play. However they still thought it was kinda a waste of time...
Well actually, it is why I now have my job, which I like quite a lot and that pays pretty well. I do computer support professionally. The reason is the skills and interest I developed playing with computers as a kid. I learned how they worked, how to deal with them, etc, all in messing with them to play games. That interest stuck with me, and has led to my career. Very little of what I learned in school was of much relevance (really English and other communication related courses more than anything else), nothing I did in University, etc. It was all my hobby that lead to my career, one which I enjoy, am good at, and make a good living doing.
Do you have some evidence to show that "using their own brains to entertain themselves," is the One True Way(tm) to do entertainment, that is better more healthy, etc? Or is just this some BS you've made up?
Also perhaps we should look at some of the older forms of entertainment that society has, and many of which are still in use. Sports would be a good example. Organized and unorganized sports have been and remain a staple in entertainment for humans. So really, how much are you using your brain there, as opposed to something like a computer game? The rules are all laid out, the goals, the objectives. It isn't like Calvinball, everyone has agreed on the rules beforehand, often set down long before hand, and you operate in those. How does that differ from a computer game?
If physical exercise is the argument that's fine, but then none of this "using their own brains," stuff which implies imaginary play. Not that there's anything wrong with imaginary play, but you have to show how it is better than other kinds of play for your argument to stand.
For that matter, how is playing something like Minecraft any different than playing legos? As someone who's done both in their life, I have to say I think it is the same sort of thing. You play with blocks, with loose goals mostly set by your own creativity. If those blocks are physical or virtual makes no real difference, other than in what you like.
So that you can look through it when you are preparing to be a jackass and critique someone's spelling to make sure you are right. While catched is not standard modern English usage, it is valid and is seen in certain dialects.
Or you could just, you know, not be a jackass and try to make yourself look smart by attacking the form rather than the message. People fuck up in their written and spoken word all the time, particularly on an informal forum like Slashdot. Attacking that because you don't like the message is stupid. Let it go.
Goes double because you never know, the person making a post may not speak English as their primary, or even secondary, language. The Internet is international. Their understanding of the language may be incorrect and incomplete, but that does not mean that their ideas have less merit.
However, in this case, the joke's on you. Like I said, buy yourself a copy of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary or Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. You'll find catched in there. It isn't modern usage, I wouldn't teach it in an English class, but it is allowable and correcting someone, particularly someone online, is rather silly.
This is particularly obvious from the date they chose which relates to them, not to anything larger. It isn't like they did some research and then said "We have decided that all the important technology was developed by this date, hence nothing past it." No, rather it was the time when they were born. Basically a "I don't want to give up anything *I* had growing up, but screw anything since then!"
This guy sucks at being a father and rather than going and maybe doing some research (the Internet is helpful there), taking classes, talking to other parents, etc he decided "Nope, I'll just ban new things. That'll do it!"
A complete egocentric move, and one that is likely to have the opposite effect that he wants long term: His kids are going to like him less. In particular because if they are still living in a modern society, well the kids are going to be exposed to the modern things all the time. The kids will see what they are missing and will understand that it is just because daddy is a jackass.
Ya I think ARM fanboys need to step back and have a glass of perspective and soda. There seems to be this article of faith among the ARM fan community that ARM chips are faster per watt, dollar, whatever than Intel chips by a big amount. Also that ARM could, if they wish, just scale their chips up and make laptop/desktop chips that would annihilate Intel price/performance wise. However for some strange reason, ARM just doesn't do that.
The real reason is, of course, it isn't true. ARM makes excellent very low power chips. They are great when you need something for a phone, or an integrated controller (Samsung SSDs use an ARM chip to control themselves) and so on. However that doesn't mean they have some magic juju that Intel doesn't, nor does it mean they'll scale without adding power consumption.
In particular you can't just throw cores at things. Not all tasks are easy to split down and make parallel. You already find with with 4/6 core chips on desktops. Some things scale great and use 100% of your CPU (video encoding for example). Others can use all the cores, but only to a degree. You see some games like this. They'll use one core to capacity, another near to it, and the 3rd and 4th only partially. Still other things make little to no use of the other cores.
So ARM can't go and just whack together a 100 core chip and call it a desktop processor and expect it to be useful.
Really, Intel is quite good at what they do and their chips actually are pretty efficient in the sector they are in. A 5-10 watt laptop/ultrabook chip does use a lot more than an ARM chip in a smartphone, but it also does more.
Also Intel DOES have some magic juju ARM doesn't, namely that they are a node ahead. You might notice that other companies are talking about 22/20nm stuff. They are getting it ready to go, demonstrating prototypes, etc. Intel however has been shipping 22nm stuff, in large volume, since April of last year. They are now getting ready for 14nm. Not ready as in far off talking about, they are putting the finishing touches on the 14nm fab in Chandler, they have prototype chips actually out and testing, they are getting ready to finalize things and start ramping up volume production.
Intel spends billions and billions a year on R&D, including fab R&D, and thus has been a node ahead of everyone else for quite some time. That alone gives them an advantage. Even if all other things are equal, they've smaller gates, which gives them lower power consumption.
None of this is to say ARM is bad, they are very good at what they do as their sales in the phone market shows. But ARM fans need to stop pretending they are some sleeping behemoth that could crush Intel if only they felt like it. No, actually, Intel's stuff is pretty damn impressive.
The CPU is the GPU in low power systems, they are integrated units. Gone is the time when integrated Intel GPUs were worthless. These days, they can handle stuff quite well, even modern games at lower resolutions. The display is still a non-trivial power user too but the CPU is a big one.
Disks aren't a big deal when you go SSD, which is what you want to do for the ultra low power units. They use little in operation, and less than a tenth of a watt when idle.
So ya, keeping CPU power low is a big thing for low power laptops. Doesn't matter so much if you have a big desktop replacement with a 17" screen, dual drives, discrete GPU and all that, but even then it can help when you are on battery. I have such a laptop and it is amazing, I can get 2-3 hours of battery life when using the iGPU and doing regular web surfing and the like. No longer do you have to have a behemoth that really has a battery only as a joke. While it needs to be plugged in to spool all the way up and run powerful stuff, it can crank down nicely for mobile use and the low power CPU is part of that.
Of course the real target isn't laptops like that, but smaller ones that just have the iGPU, have a lower power CPU, and a smaller, not as bright, screen. They can then last for a whole day on a battery no problem.
They think that it is much, MUCH faster and more efficient than that nasty x86 and ARM could make desktop CPUs that would crush Intel, if only they wanted to or thought there was a market. So Apple-ARM fans want to see Apple move to ARM so that Apple can once again be "faster" than those evil PCs.
A big part of the Apple fanboy identity was that Macs were faster and better because of their different CPUs. Didn't matter how manifestly wrong that was becoming (particularly near the time when they transitioned), they had contrived benchmarks to prove that to themselves and it made them happy. They got real upset when the transition to Intel leaked. In fact, some came up with elaborate fantasies that Intel was going to release a new "Core X" chip just for Macs that was faster and more efficient.
So when you have someone who;s both an ARM fanboy, and thinks ARM has some magic juju that Intel doesn't (and for some reason just doesn't use that on bigger CPUs) and a Mac fanboy who wants Apple to be different and better, well you get them thinking Apple should stick an ARM CPU in their desktop.
Apple loves to be "first". They love to have something they can claim to be first on, be better on. Doesn't matter if said thing really is an improvement, they'll sell it like one and fanboys buy in to it pretty heavily.
So, here they can claim to be 64-bit and talk about how that is better. Doesn't matter that it doesn't actually help in the real world, at least at this point, they can sell it as awesome and powerful and something those other nasty, crappy, phones don't have.
In terms of app compatibility, that is all to do with APIs. 64-bit matters not at all, since ARM and x86 are completely different architectures so there WILL be a recompile, no matter what. If they put their iOS APIs on OS-X, then that can be used to port apps to it pretty easy.
So my bet is you are right, this is all marketing at this point. They can say "OMG we has 64 of t3h bits!" and use that as a selling point.
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Addiction is an interesting thing, and it varies with different people. People don't always get addicted because they are unhappy. In fact, the drugs can be a lot of fun to use in the beginning. Initially, it is all good. However as you continue on it becomes more pain, less pleasure, a bigger problem. The thing is, quitting will cause a lot of pain at that point and you may have already messed up your life to a degree, so it is harder to quit.
Drugs with actual, physical, addictions can be real insidious in that way. That's also why you'll hear addicts talk about the need to "hit bottom". What that means is things have to get bad enough that you realize and accept what you need to do to try and recover, to deal with the difficulty of recovery. For some people, that bottom is pretty high. They'll stop the addiction early. For others, even death isn't the bottom.
I'm quite sure his original stuff about the NSA's prism program is accurate. It is some of the later stuff I'm questioning. I don't doubt that he had access to classified data, and it certainly seem like it is at least somewhat, if not completely, accurate given the reaction. But then there keeps being more and more leaks that are less and less related, which do not seem to be generating much reaction.
It is just causing me to wonder on their veracity.
Not of the NSA (I mean seriously, you weren't already?) but of these leaks? I am starting to have doubts that this one contractor had access to all this varied data, about various programs, and now even about non-American agencies.
I am seriously starting to wonder if he, or others, are making up some shit for their own ends. I just have trouble buying that he has all this disparate data, on all this stuff, particularly given the compartmentalization of highly classified data.
Generally to actually wind up without a place to live, one of those two things come in to play. With mental issues it is fairly easy to understand: The person is crazy, does not perceive reality, and makes choice most find very strange. Also, even if help is available (which it quite often isn't in the US), they don't want it since a sad part of many mental illnesses is to make you not think you are ill. After all they are a problem with the brain and your brain is what you use to tell if you have problems.
Drugs, including alcohol, are the much more common problem. You get addicts who are so deep in to their addiction that nothing else matters to them. Not only can they not hold down a job, but they end up alienating all their family and friends. People give them chances but they keep abusing it and finally they kick them out. Eventually, they are out of people to go to.
"You can get your game without waiting in line!"
Seriously it never ceases to amaze me the morons that go and do something stupid like this to get a copy of a game without waiting in line. You don't have to do that anymore. You go and order on Amazon, and they'll have it sent to your house, on release day. No waiting in line, no BS, it just gets delivered to you.
While the irrational need to have a new game RIGHT NAO is stupid enough (and I say this as a huge gamer) you don't have to wait in line, there's just no reason, in this day and age services will happily deliver to you.
Battlefield 3 would be an example. Launched the same day on all platforms and worked well on all of them.
It really isn't a big deal to simultaneously develop for multiple platforms and when you get down to it the PC is likely more similar to the Xbox 360 than the 360 is to the PS3 in terms of development tools and style.
The problem is Rockstar are console heads, for various reasons, and relegate the PC release to second class status.
You can also see it with shit like GTA 4. Not only did it come out way after the consoles, but it performed for crap. They can't argue "Oh well the PC just isn't powerful enough," as PCs dominate consoles in every respect at the moment. It was just poorly implemented and optimized.
The US intelligence community is fairly compartmentalized in to a bunch of agencies that do different things. For satellites, it's the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office. The NSA is signals intelligence, intercepting phone calls, radio communications, e-mail, that kind of thing. Hence all the stuff that has leaked about what they've been doing.
Also NASA (in tandem with NOAA and the USGS) operates a number of Earth facing sats like the Landsat series. They aren't all that high resolution, lower resolution than the stuff you see on Google Earth, since they are for monitoring things like vegetation index and so on. The newest one, Landsat 8, has some pretty badass multi-spectral sensors.
And if you have problems with photo satellites, well then there are going to be a lot of countries, and private companies, you have an issue with. There are lots of sats looking down at the Earth.
I played Quake Team Fortress (the original, for Quake 1) quite competitively. So there was no zoom key for sniping and the like, you just had to play with FOV. You made some binds to toggle FOV leves as you saw fit. This lead me to try bigger FOV numbers, and that worked too. So I had 4 FOV buttons, 10, 30, 90, and 160. 90 was where I played most of the time, 30 and 10 were for sniping, which I did rarely. 160 was for flag defense, which is often what I was assigned to. I could watch an entire flag room from one corner. Then, when I saw someone, I'd drop the FOV to 90 and go after them.
AMD has long had driver performance issues, compared to nVidia. Their hardware started really kicking some ass with the 4000 series and was just dominant with the 5000 series, but the software side has had some issues. I'm not sure what the issue is, maybe they need more people, maybe they need better people, maybe they need a better process. Whatever the case they end up having more issues. Stuttering and rendering partial frames has been one (that they have largely cleared up with single display setups), issues with Endur would be another (a year after my laptop release, it still has big issues).
So it just is what it is. If you get an AMD card you know you may have some issues like this, but you also know they will work on it, though any resolution may not be fast.
However this is a big issue for AMD fanboys. They, like all fanboys, put their identity, their ego, in AMD being the One True Way(tm) and being better than those other guys. So when something makes their chosen toy look bad, they have to steer the discussion away. They'll find a bug in nVidia drivers and say "BUT LOOK NVIDIA HAS T3H PROBLEMS!!!" to try and deflect the argument.
Rather than simply buying the card they want and enjoying the purchase, they have to make it an "us vs them" kind of thing.
The crime rate is 0.001% of what it was pre-ban? So if their crime rate was, say 10 in 100,000 citizens it would now be 1 in 10,000,000 citizens.
Ok well in the first two months of 2013 2500 people were killed. This is just murder here, we aren't looking at lesser crimes right now (http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/venezuelan-government-recognizes-record-murder-rate). That means we can expect around 15,000 murders this year. By your logic, that means there was 15,000,000 murders last year, or over half their population.
However if we do a little more looking, in the same article, we discover that no, there was about 16,000 murders last year, meaning this one looks about the same as the last.
In other words, you are just completely making shit up. If you have to resort to logic that faulty, that far out, that totally made up to support your position, it leads one to ask how valid your position is.
Right which is why I can go out and buy one of those right now! ...
Oh wait I can't. They haven't made a desktop chip since the ARM2 in the 80s.
We are talking about the actual real world, here today, where you can buy Intel laptop, desktop, and server CPUs but not ARM CPUs in those markets.
However, you have to have a pretty narrow expectation of what you do on your desktop. Basically it is good for network related tasks, e-mail, web, remote systems access, that kind of thing. It is also ok at document authoring, good enough for more individuals, but potentially problematic in business settings (where people go apeshit with Excel macros and such). It is acceptable at media playback provided you have the right hardware, and nothing you want to play back has DRM.
So you can use it for basic desktop usage, if that's all you do. If you want to do that then the other trick is making sure you have supported hardware. This generally means that the hardware be popular, and not too new. Don't get latest and greatest, stay a couple generations back (which is no big deal these days, it is still plenty fast).
However if you want to start doing gaming, media creation, that kind of thing, well then prepare for a fight, and to perhaps simply not be able to do what you want.
I'm a proponent of Windows desktops, in part because I'm a Windows support professional so it is what I know, but Linux is something that can work on some desktops. You just have to be aware of the limits, and be ok with them. If you are a gamer, that is generally a show stopper right there.
"You should be playing games on your computer!"
What you are really saying is "The OS I'm a rabid fanboy about can't do that, so I hate it and don't want others to do it because it makes my OS look bad!"
That is very silly. Playing games on the computer is a perfectly valid use for it. One of the great things about a computer is it can do, well, almost anything. You can have a computer that does a whole host of different things, all in one OS. And games are a great form of entertainment. They are much more stimulating and interactive than TV, and they are good value for the money in terms of hours of entertainment per dollar spent. If you don't enjoy them that is fine but acting as if they are invalid is stupid.
It is even sillier to imply that you should only want to do "real things" which really sounds like work. Guess what? When you grow up and get a real job you'll find that after working for 8+ hours a day, and then doing housework and all that, you don't feel particularly inclined to do more work that you don't need to. You may wish to unwind. How you do that may vary, TV, books, yoga, videogames, music (listening or playing), sports, etc, etc. However whatever you do, that is not a waste of time, it is quite necessary to maintain a healthy mental state. Focusing all of your time and energy on work is a surefire way to burn out.
Also, if you don't believe that you can do "real things" with Windows, that only belies your own zealotry and inexperience with computers in an enterprise setting. Real shit gets done on Windows every day, all over the planet.
If their chosen product can't do something, then that something is unimportant, or shouldn't be done, or makes you a sissy, or whatever. They can't admit that the thing they are a fan of is less than perfect so they hate on things it does not have.
I've gotten that with numerous things regarding Linux. Games would be one of them. A Linux fan is trying to convince me to switch so I say "Ok, if you wish to convince me then here are the things I do with my computer that you need to show me how I can do in Linux." Games are a big one, since they are my primary form of entertainment when I've free time, and many of the games I want don't run in Linux. Often the response to this is "You shouldn't play games on your computer, get a console if you want to play games." That's a bogus argument, of course, but it is what they do rather than just admit "Ya, Linux is probably not the right answer for you at this point."
Same shit here. Visual Studio really is an amazing development environment that makes for some efficient workflow. There is nothing else I'm aware of that is as good. So fanboys hate on what it does as stuff that you "shouldn't need" and that you should just "man up" and do it their way.
There are some real good arguments for it. Having kids is a big commitment. Kids aren't a fashion accessory, they aren't a plaything, they aren't something you have to make yourself feel better. They are a serious, difficult, commitment. You owe it to them most of all, but to society and to yourself as well, to provide them with all the support, love, stability, and help you can. It is a long term commitment too. The financial commitment alone lasts a long time, and the emotional commitment lasts a lifetime.
Well, if you are going to make that commitment, it isn't unreasonable to ask that you make the commitment to the other person with whom you are making the kids. You commit to each other to stay together and help each other, if for no reason other than you kids. Having two parents helps a lot in raising children. It is a difficult job to do single, in particular since you almost certainly also have to have a job to provide for your family as well.
So really, if marriage is something you aren't willing to commit to, then I have to ask if you are ready for the much larger commitment that is children. There's nothing wrong if you aren't but then don't have kids. It is perfectly valid to not have kids, to have a steady population without draconian measures like China we need people who do not wish to have kids to be free to do so such that those who wish to have many can also do so.
However if you do want kids, you need to accept the massive commitment that it is, and I would say also be willing to commit to your partner in raising those kids. Realize that it isn't going to be about what you want, it is going to be about what you kids need, and you need to be committed to that even when it isn't fun, isn't what you want.
So I don't think it is at all unreasonable to ask why a couple that wants to have children wouldn't get married, particularly given the legal ramifications. For some good insight on that, look up what Dan Savage has to say about it. He and his partner Terry (he's gay) adopted a kid but couldn't get married until recently. This created a number of issues with regards to insurance, critical care, and so on that just aren't a problem now that they are married and these issues affect their child. They didn't want to get married just because, they wanted to get married because they have a child they are committed to, and there are legal reasons why having that within a married relationship is beneficial.
Not parents. Good parenting requires walking a middle path where you are kind, protective, and providing to your children but not overly permissive or accommodating. It is not the easiest thing to do. So bad parents, and there are many, fall to one extreme. They either tend to be overly authoritarian, expecting that their needs and demands are primary and children are to do as they are told, no matter what, and often using violence to get their way, or just as a release of anger. Or they are overly permissive, they want to be friends with their kids, they will let them do pretty much whatever they want, even when they know it is bad, will acquiesce to all demands, give in to tantrums, and so on.
Either style of bad parenting is easier than good parenting, and so you see plenty of both.
It strikes me that the parents in the article are of the permissive kind of bad parents, combined with a fair bit of narcissism. They want their kids to be their friends, they don't want to be parents, and they want their kids to give them affection and attention. So when electronics were competing, their solution wasn't to put limits on it, but rather to just banish it all. That way they weren't being the bad guys since "everyone" including them had the same restrictions.
Few other things they should think about:
1) Maybe going to "kick the ball around" is a little boring? I understand the wish to have kids engage in physical play, it is very important to good health. However that doesn't mean that it can't be interesting. Just kicking a ball around is rather boring and shows a lack of creativity on the part of the adult proposing it. How about spend a little time trying to set up some outdoor activities that are more fun? It isn't even like you have to invent anything, people have been playing outdoors for centuries, you can find out what they've done. Playing in the various treehouses my father built and playing capture the flag with my friends in the woods are some of my fond childhood memories. I would not have been so enamoured had my dad said "Hey let's go out back and kick a ball around. No, we won't do anything other than kick it back and forth, but it is good because it is outside!"
2) Perhaps liking to play with technology isn't a bad thing. I was a real tech-lover as a kid, and still am. When I got a NES that was my favourite toy and my friends and I spent a lot of time playing video games. When I finally got a computer, it was my new favourite toy, largely for games, and still is. To this day I play videogames all the time on my computer. It is my preferred form of entertainment instead of TV. Well my parents did worry that such a thing had no real application to anything that made money. Like good parents they made sure it wasn't all I did, and that I had to do chores, homework, etc before I got to play. However they still thought it was kinda a waste of time...
Well actually, it is why I now have my job, which I like quite a lot and that pays pretty well. I do computer support professionally. The reason is the skills and interest I developed playing with computers as a kid. I learned how they worked, how to deal with them, etc, all in messing with them to play games. That interest stuck with me, and has led to my career. Very little of what I learned in school was of much relevance (really English and other communication related courses more than anything else), nothing I did in University, etc. It was all my hobby that lead to my career, one which I enjoy, am good at, and make a good living doing.
Do you have some evidence to show that "using their own brains to entertain themselves," is the One True Way(tm) to do entertainment, that is better more healthy, etc? Or is just this some BS you've made up?
Also perhaps we should look at some of the older forms of entertainment that society has, and many of which are still in use. Sports would be a good example. Organized and unorganized sports have been and remain a staple in entertainment for humans. So really, how much are you using your brain there, as opposed to something like a computer game? The rules are all laid out, the goals, the objectives. It isn't like Calvinball, everyone has agreed on the rules beforehand, often set down long before hand, and you operate in those. How does that differ from a computer game?
If physical exercise is the argument that's fine, but then none of this "using their own brains," stuff which implies imaginary play. Not that there's anything wrong with imaginary play, but you have to show how it is better than other kinds of play for your argument to stand.
For that matter, how is playing something like Minecraft any different than playing legos? As someone who's done both in their life, I have to say I think it is the same sort of thing. You play with blocks, with loose goals mostly set by your own creativity. If those blocks are physical or virtual makes no real difference, other than in what you like.
So that you can look through it when you are preparing to be a jackass and critique someone's spelling to make sure you are right. While catched is not standard modern English usage, it is valid and is seen in certain dialects.
Or you could just, you know, not be a jackass and try to make yourself look smart by attacking the form rather than the message. People fuck up in their written and spoken word all the time, particularly on an informal forum like Slashdot. Attacking that because you don't like the message is stupid. Let it go.
Goes double because you never know, the person making a post may not speak English as their primary, or even secondary, language. The Internet is international. Their understanding of the language may be incorrect and incomplete, but that does not mean that their ideas have less merit.
However, in this case, the joke's on you. Like I said, buy yourself a copy of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary or Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. You'll find catched in there. It isn't modern usage, I wouldn't teach it in an English class, but it is allowable and correcting someone, particularly someone online, is rather silly.
This is particularly obvious from the date they chose which relates to them, not to anything larger. It isn't like they did some research and then said "We have decided that all the important technology was developed by this date, hence nothing past it." No, rather it was the time when they were born. Basically a "I don't want to give up anything *I* had growing up, but screw anything since then!"
This guy sucks at being a father and rather than going and maybe doing some research (the Internet is helpful there), taking classes, talking to other parents, etc he decided "Nope, I'll just ban new things. That'll do it!"
A complete egocentric move, and one that is likely to have the opposite effect that he wants long term: His kids are going to like him less. In particular because if they are still living in a modern society, well the kids are going to be exposed to the modern things all the time. The kids will see what they are missing and will understand that it is just because daddy is a jackass.
Ya I think ARM fanboys need to step back and have a glass of perspective and soda. There seems to be this article of faith among the ARM fan community that ARM chips are faster per watt, dollar, whatever than Intel chips by a big amount. Also that ARM could, if they wish, just scale their chips up and make laptop/desktop chips that would annihilate Intel price/performance wise. However for some strange reason, ARM just doesn't do that.
The real reason is, of course, it isn't true. ARM makes excellent very low power chips. They are great when you need something for a phone, or an integrated controller (Samsung SSDs use an ARM chip to control themselves) and so on. However that doesn't mean they have some magic juju that Intel doesn't, nor does it mean they'll scale without adding power consumption.
In particular you can't just throw cores at things. Not all tasks are easy to split down and make parallel. You already find with with 4/6 core chips on desktops. Some things scale great and use 100% of your CPU (video encoding for example). Others can use all the cores, but only to a degree. You see some games like this. They'll use one core to capacity, another near to it, and the 3rd and 4th only partially. Still other things make little to no use of the other cores.
So ARM can't go and just whack together a 100 core chip and call it a desktop processor and expect it to be useful.
Really, Intel is quite good at what they do and their chips actually are pretty efficient in the sector they are in. A 5-10 watt laptop/ultrabook chip does use a lot more than an ARM chip in a smartphone, but it also does more.
Also Intel DOES have some magic juju ARM doesn't, namely that they are a node ahead. You might notice that other companies are talking about 22/20nm stuff. They are getting it ready to go, demonstrating prototypes, etc. Intel however has been shipping 22nm stuff, in large volume, since April of last year. They are now getting ready for 14nm. Not ready as in far off talking about, they are putting the finishing touches on the 14nm fab in Chandler, they have prototype chips actually out and testing, they are getting ready to finalize things and start ramping up volume production.
Intel spends billions and billions a year on R&D, including fab R&D, and thus has been a node ahead of everyone else for quite some time. That alone gives them an advantage. Even if all other things are equal, they've smaller gates, which gives them lower power consumption.
None of this is to say ARM is bad, they are very good at what they do as their sales in the phone market shows. But ARM fans need to stop pretending they are some sleeping behemoth that could crush Intel if only they felt like it. No, actually, Intel's stuff is pretty damn impressive.
The CPU is the GPU in low power systems, they are integrated units. Gone is the time when integrated Intel GPUs were worthless. These days, they can handle stuff quite well, even modern games at lower resolutions. The display is still a non-trivial power user too but the CPU is a big one.
Disks aren't a big deal when you go SSD, which is what you want to do for the ultra low power units. They use little in operation, and less than a tenth of a watt when idle.
So ya, keeping CPU power low is a big thing for low power laptops. Doesn't matter so much if you have a big desktop replacement with a 17" screen, dual drives, discrete GPU and all that, but even then it can help when you are on battery. I have such a laptop and it is amazing, I can get 2-3 hours of battery life when using the iGPU and doing regular web surfing and the like. No longer do you have to have a behemoth that really has a battery only as a joke. While it needs to be plugged in to spool all the way up and run powerful stuff, it can crank down nicely for mobile use and the low power CPU is part of that.
Of course the real target isn't laptops like that, but smaller ones that just have the iGPU, have a lower power CPU, and a smaller, not as bright, screen. They can then last for a whole day on a battery no problem.
They think that it is much, MUCH faster and more efficient than that nasty x86 and ARM could make desktop CPUs that would crush Intel, if only they wanted to or thought there was a market. So Apple-ARM fans want to see Apple move to ARM so that Apple can once again be "faster" than those evil PCs.
A big part of the Apple fanboy identity was that Macs were faster and better because of their different CPUs. Didn't matter how manifestly wrong that was becoming (particularly near the time when they transitioned), they had contrived benchmarks to prove that to themselves and it made them happy. They got real upset when the transition to Intel leaked. In fact, some came up with elaborate fantasies that Intel was going to release a new "Core X" chip just for Macs that was faster and more efficient.
So when you have someone who;s both an ARM fanboy, and thinks ARM has some magic juju that Intel doesn't (and for some reason just doesn't use that on bigger CPUs) and a Mac fanboy who wants Apple to be different and better, well you get them thinking Apple should stick an ARM CPU in their desktop.
Apple loves to be "first". They love to have something they can claim to be first on, be better on. Doesn't matter if said thing really is an improvement, they'll sell it like one and fanboys buy in to it pretty heavily.
So, here they can claim to be 64-bit and talk about how that is better. Doesn't matter that it doesn't actually help in the real world, at least at this point, they can sell it as awesome and powerful and something those other nasty, crappy, phones don't have.
In terms of app compatibility, that is all to do with APIs. 64-bit matters not at all, since ARM and x86 are completely different architectures so there WILL be a recompile, no matter what. If they put their iOS APIs on OS-X, then that can be used to port apps to it pretty easy.
So my bet is you are right, this is all marketing at this point. They can say "OMG we has 64 of t3h bits!" and use that as a selling point.