> We are 1 month into 2003Q1. 2003Q1 is when it is supposed to be released in limited numbers. > How is that 4-5 months behind schedule?
Not that I want to help the troll to whom you respond, but the Hammer was initially projected for a 2001 release. Barton was initially slated for something like early to mid 2002. Of course they're late. But they're not so bad as the aforementioned troll mentioned. Their processors are far more competitive than, for example, when they had the K6 family. It is simply that it's been over a year since AMD's processors were definitively faster on the highest level for Microsoft Windows (they still have an advantage, iirc, in prominent Linux benchmarks). And AMD is only seen by the general geek public as "equal" to Intel if their processors are simultaneously unarguably faster and cheaper. Right now, they're merely almost as fast and generally cheaper, so people get confused as to whether or not the company still exists.;)
But I digress. The AMD processors in question, just like most AMD, Intel, Motorola, Sun, IBM and HP processors, are much delayed.
-JC
Score -6 Really Badly Done But Successful Troll
on
AMD's Fab 30 Revealed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I mean, seriously, folks. I've been out of the technology loop for a good half year now (and there's another half year on top of that where I was just coasting), and even I'm not slow enough to mod this one up. Sixteen thousand 48-bit registers? *Think* about it!
And Dresden has been running for quite some time, producing tons of 30nm copper interconnect (y'all do remember copper, right?) chips.
Still, Tiger's post got modded up to 5, so I guess that it's a phenomenally successful troll. It just irks me. It's like having an article on Microsoft's Windows code and having a comment about Microsoft switching over to gcc modded up!
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
Grove: So, what do you want on your TombStone, Jerry? Sanders: Ummm... pepperoni and copper interconnects. Grove: Aye, [shouting] TOMBSTONE PIZZA, CRAIG!
> We've used XEON's on our DB server for a few months now. The performance > has been outstanding. You also see 4 processors when you run top.
> At first we thought this was an error, and got in touch with Dell's tech support. > But the geeks there said this is normal behavior.
Of course it's normal behavior. Windows is (well, basically) counting the number of threads that the system can simultaneously execute (that's probably not entirely an accurate depiction), not the number of physical processors. But this does not mean that you're getting the performance of four processors. You still only have the execution resources of two processors at your system's disposal. The best that simultaneous multithreading can do is make more efficient use of the existing execution units. This can result in very nice performance boosts, no performance boosts at all, and (in some rarer circumstances) performance penalties. But it is in no way anything near like having that actual number of processors.
Probably, a good rule of thumb would be "if it already stresses the execution units, then you won't see a boost, but if the code causes frequent thread stalls, then you'll probably see a nice jump".
*EDIT* Crap, I didn't notice that you said top. Made the assumption about Windows. Sorry about that. My post more or less stands as the same, though.:)
> Well, unless you have a computer that has multiple physical CPUs.
You have a point, but he does, as well. SMT ("hyper-threading") should work automatically for multiprocessor systems. So if you have a dual processor, SMT-capable board in a system that's unaware of the SMT functionality, you should still get a boost from SMT. Unless Hyper-Threading is a really, really bizarre implementation of SMT. Reviewers should really compare against an SMP system that is incapable of doing SMT, because it'll do it automatically (or it should), even if you don't tell it to. Alternatively, you could approximate the same results by forcing the system to only use a number of threads equivalent to the number of processors. Not all programs can do this, though (compiling is the only thing that immediately comes to mind).
Granted, I've been out of the loop a bit, so I might be making some really off the wall (and inaccurate) assumptions about Intel's SMT implementation.
> But microlensing events are exceedingly rare. In this case, the null result is interesting, > because it highlights that baryonic matter is not as prolific as we want/need!
...wait. Isn't dark matter supposed to still have mass and gravity? So any dark matter of sufficient size would cause microlensing, not just baryons, no?
> If you're in a car that's going at the speed of > light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?
Moot question. It would literally take you an infinite amount of time to turn on your headlights. Well, not *infinite*. Better word to describe it is that it's a number divisible by zero. Since your rate of time progression is zero, so the amount of time required to do any action would be proportionate to the inverse of that rate.
> Congratulations! You yourself come off as much more idiotic than those you mock!
Actually, I have a friend who pretty much exactly parallels his mock attitude. BMX XXX (a console game whose selling point is that you can play a naked bicycle girl) is his next "must have". He loves the wrestling pay per views because they have women touching each other. His main saving grace at the recent "Star Trek" movie (he's not a Trek fan except for Enterprise, because it has people regularly smothering each other's torsos with various exotic gels) was that the doctor was a girl (he spent the rest of the weekend incessently complaining about how he doesn't like having hairy man doctors asking him to cough).
Oh, and he won't watch Braveheart. Because Mel Gibson wears a skirt.
He's not a particularly stupid person, but... well, sometimes, people just really do put style far beyond substance.
> If you have 20 years of programming experience (and I'm assuming you don't mean you've held a > job for those 20 years, if you had, this applies more so) and you fear that by next year > you will be living homeless with no food, then you really never learned how to invest and save > money did you? I'm not trying to belittle the fact that you may get fired, but there are other > jobs out there, there's always good ol unemployment/welfare and if worst comes to worst, > you can always take a job in a low wage area until you find a new job.
Just for token support of that other guy: I've been working since I was 12 years old. I'm 27 now, so that's sort of 15 years of work experience, though only about half of that is direct work experience in my field. I'm a computer guy. I can program in C/C++, I'm a fairly hardcore perl hacker, I can put together computers and diagnose basic problems, I was a popular webmaster for a few years (a technology fan site that routinely got thousands of page views a day and that was frequented by other well known webmasters in the field, I am a very fast typist, I'm usually pretty good at teaching people computer stuff without overwhelming them, although I'm not very strong I find that I can do a good amount of lifting and moving without needing to complain, I have a pleasant though somewhat quirky personality, I can administer Netware, NT, BSD and Linux boxe{s|n}, and I have various other useful skills.
I graduated at SUNY Stony Brook with a BS in CompSci. I spend less money than my primary friends, usually waiting for sales and deals (such as on http://slickdeals.net). I buy cheap food. I eat Kraft Easy Mac for breakfast (that's like a dime per breakfast if you shop at CostCo/PriceClub) I don't eat lunch. I eat cheap TV dinners and leftovers from other people for dinner. I use few luxuries.
Despite my qualifications, I am poor. Tech is not a fruitful industry unless you have sales skills. I make less than my best friend, and he's a clerk (secretary w/o phone responsibilities) who has a far shorter commute and free food from the bosses every week. I have some money, and I could survive for a while if I lost my job, but I do not have enough money to move out from my parents' house. It doesn't help that my car has failed in every possible way this year, costing me over $2500 to keep going, not including gasoline (which would add on another grand due to my intense commute), even with a father who is capable of fixing most moderately advanced car problems (save for those that involve the computer systems) without needing a shop.
I tried getting a different job for over a year recently. It just isn't possible. The only prospects pay less than I get now.
My name is John, and I'm barely getting through life. I have a safety net (my family), but I can easily see that other people could be more dedicated, skilled and experienced yet have less success in life than me.
> I know my kid wouldn't settle for seeing some grainy rip of a movie at 200 x 180 > (or whatever crappy res it looks least bad at).
> Hardly a comparison to the movie on a big screen.
Well, for what it's worth, SVCD appears to be something like 576x480. That's seven or eight times the number of pixels as you descibe above. Definitely good enough to enjoy fully.
Still, watching in a theater is still comparatively unparalleled. I go to the movies every week, even though I could download nearly every film that comes out (and even though I'm rather substantially poor). That's gotta count for something.
> Oh cmon, I'm tired of people complaining about how expensive Macs are. I'm a Marine, I earn > below the minimum wage, in fact well below the poverty line. I take home $2012 each month > after taxes. With that, I have to pay ~$1000 (USD - Yen rate fluctuates) plus food, gas, > adsl etc and provide for my wife and 2 kids. Yet I can afford an ibook, and old PC, and just > ordered an iMac for the wife. They are not that expensive, if you just manage your money and > save for a while. I'm sure someone in the IT industry could do better than me;)
Hah! I'm someone in the IT industry. I'm a programmer, webmaster, network administrator and tech support guy well versed in Windows 9x/NT, unix, perl, and a few other areas. I would *love* to make two thousand dollars each month after taxes. As it is, this year I made less than $1500 a month *before* taxes, though I *might* make $2000 per month *before* taxes next year. What's that? $1500/mo after taxes? Combine that with $2500 in unexpected car repair payments, more than another thousand in car insurance, $2600 in rent for the year, tons of gas money for my 45-minute-a-day commute, then add food (and I'm on a [successful!] diet, so I'm actually spending a lot less than I otherwise would) and assorted other requirements that don't come to mind at the moment, and the end result is that I have barely enough cash to go to the movies with my friends every week. Geez, is it any wonder why people steal mp3s (I don't, but...) and other luxuries instead of footing the expensive bills for them?
Incidentally, are you sure you're making below minimum wage? I think that's $5.15 in the US still. I may be incorrect, but if that's the case, you'd have to work four hundred hours to make two thousand dollars before taxes, and probably more like 550 hours a month to make that after taxes. That's 25 hours a day if you don't count weekends. Colour me skeptical.
To others, I apologize for the off-topic post. I'm just a disgruntled techie. ^_^
> Huh? An obvious example would be Warp Drive > (wormholes are not FTL travel). Unless I haven't > seen it, I haven't seen any viable theories about > usurping Einstein.
Miguel Alcubierre put together a very interesting hypothesis. It is said to be scientifically valid, save for the requirement of exotic matter and nigh impossible amounts of energy. But it seems to not conflict with existing theory.
"...within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the ``warp drive'' of science fiction"
> Also as far as I know, there is no viable > theory as to how to make a transporter work > (quantum-level effects notwithstanding).
Yeah, I'll give you that one. I also agree with your general position, that the vast majority of science in Star Trek is not well thought out with relation to reality. It's too bad, since they started out with so much obvious effort, and now they simply don't care about even a semblance of realism.
The really scary part is that I laughed at the improper use of "ain't" in this sentence immediately, but I had to be reminded by another message that "sayin" isn't a word!:(
> Palm just lost it. They had a dreat idea, ran > with it, and then fumbled. Now CE is slowly > replacing them. Zire just reaffirms that they > still don't get it anymore.
While I agree with most of your message, I would like to point out that there was a recent bit of news posted recently (like a week or two ago, though maybe not on slashdot) stating that PalmOS had increased market share over Windows CE on a year to year basis.
But, yeah, Zire is pretty crappy and does sort of insult the consumers.
> Try leaving your mom's basement and looking for > a real job. You'll be surprised what's out there.
That's a weak troll. I've been looking for a real job for two years. Granted, I make no claims about job hunting skills, but even most good job hunters have tons of difficulty finding even moderate paying jobs these days, especially if it's in a technical area.
In my area (Manhattan, Long Island), available jobs for programmers, system administrators and the like tend towards twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars. Yay.
> When will people finally grow up an realise that > there is life in this planet of ours, and that > there is absolutely no evidence for life exiting > anywhere else in the universe at all.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Pbbbllllt!;P
> Remember that astronomers once said Mars was > covered with a complex network of irrigation > ditches, which implied the presence of life.
Are you sure about this? I wasn't around at the time, but I recall that the confusion was brought on by badly translating journalists. Basically, a scientist in Italy said something like "Canali su Marte" (I'm using google... pheer my mad inaccurate Italian skillz0rz:p ), which means "Channels on Mars". Journalists thought he said "There are [artificial] canals on Mars!".
He didn't. The scientist didn't make a mistake. The unscientists listening to him made the mistake.
Granted, it's possible that *other* scientists held the misconception. I know nothing of this either way.
> Just because someone leaves the door open > doesn't mean I have the right to enter.
Correct. But it's *not* illegal to recognize that the door is open, and it is *not* illegal to let people know that the door is open.
Additionally, if somebody in that door is casually and carelessly tossing leaflets out his or her window, into a public street, you have the right to pick it up and read it.
> I would hate to see it, but i know something will > crop up. I mean in book one Rowling spent almost > a full page explaining how much they look alike. > In book two she did it again at the end when he > meets Tom Riddle.
I may be way off kilter, but a few ganglions here and there are insisting to my brain that one of the books either establishes or hints that Harry is distantly descended from a Mr. Slytherin. Do I remember this correctly, or should I attribute this to random neuron firings?
> ESC is just the Cancel button (on the front > panel) and CTRL I think is the "Fn" button, Fn+C > does a CTRL-C in the console anyway.
For most control keys, you hit CTRL-SHIFT-?. CTRL-C is one of the two or three exceptions.
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/zaurus-faq/secti on s/character_input.php3 is one source of info on this. There's a chart somewhere, but I'm working on eight seconds or so of sleep and my cups of tea and coffee haven't kicked in yet, so I can't find it.
> For one, no adult is that stupid, you would > literally have to jam & crumple that floppy in to > get the tray to close. Second, besides the tray > being jammed shut, I really don't think there > would be any "horrible sound" as a CD-Rom doesnt > try to spin up unless a real disc is inserted.
While you may be correct, I just wanted to point out that not all CD-ROM drives had trays, especially early on in the life of the technology.
I like to download old episodes of shows that you don't see on TV anymore, the kind of stuff that I loved as a kid and for which I have unending nostalgia. Additionally, earlier this year I casually decided to give professional wrestling programs a chance, and for some inexplicable reason I now find myself hooked on it. Now, I don't care so much for the poorly written, [often, but with a few very talented exceptions] poorly performed WWE (formerly WWF), so I like to download more region oriented events, those which I cannot obtain via reasonable methods (such as via Pay-Per-View or on regular TV).
My usenet downloading program creates tremendously huge databases of binary newsgroups and their contents. Occasionally, the application can be locked up while it's thinking about how to display or manipulate this data. Additionally, it takes a lot of processing resources to convert from yEnc or UUE to a binary file.
Usually, these files are RAR files that are broken up into many parts. Because some of the parts may not reach all the servers, a bunch of parity files (.PAR) are also put onto usenet for each of these RAR sets. If you're missing some RAR parts, you use the parity files to rebuild those missing fragments. But this is an intensely computational process, and it could take a *looooong* time before you're all rebuilt.
Then you have to use WinRAR to transform all these fragments into a single mpeg or ogm or whatever format the movie file is in. This can take a long time. Usually, a Video-CD will take several minutes to be extracted from the RARs (mind you, I usually have a bunch of apps active at the same time as this).
On my Duron 800 with 768MB PC133 SDRAM, it'll take two hours to convert an SVCD to VCD format (if I want to burn the video to a CD-R so that I could view it in some DVD players or so that I could simply keep it in cold storage for viewing some later time.
All the above applications are incredibly time consuming and would increase in speed greatly if I upgraded the processor in my computer. There is no upper frequency limit where the benefit stops being critical.
There are some other things that would be positively affected by upgrading. I usually have in excess of thirty web pages opening up at once in Opera. My email database has tens of thousands of messages in it, and it sometimes takes a while for the searches and the filtering to finish.
There are probably other things, but there you have some very strong reasons why at least this one guy can use an Athlon XP 7500+.;P
Slashdot Mirror
> We are 1 month into 2003Q1. 2003Q1 is when it is supposed to be released in limited numbers.
;)
> How is that 4-5 months behind schedule?
Not that I want to help the troll to whom you respond, but the Hammer was initially projected for a 2001 release. Barton was initially slated for something like early to mid 2002. Of course they're late. But they're not so bad as the aforementioned troll mentioned. Their processors are far more competitive than, for example, when they had the K6 family. It is simply that it's been over a year since AMD's processors were definitively faster on the highest level for Microsoft Windows (they still have an advantage, iirc, in prominent Linux benchmarks). And AMD is only seen by the general geek public as "equal" to Intel if their processors are simultaneously unarguably faster and cheaper. Right now, they're merely almost as fast and generally cheaper, so people get confused as to whether or not the company still exists.
But I digress. The AMD processors in question, just like most AMD, Intel, Motorola, Sun, IBM and HP processors, are much delayed.
-JC
I mean, seriously, folks. I've been out of the technology loop for a good half year now (and there's another half year on top of that where I was just coasting), and even I'm not slow enough to mod this one up. Sixteen thousand 48-bit registers? *Think* about it!
... pepperoni and copper interconnects.
And Dresden has been running for quite some time, producing tons of 30nm copper interconnect (y'all do remember copper, right?) chips.
Still, Tiger's post got modded up to 5, so I guess that it's a phenomenally successful troll. It just irks me. It's like having an article on Microsoft's Windows code and having a comment about Microsoft switching over to gcc modded up!
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
Grove: So, what do you want on your TombStone, Jerry?
Sanders: Ummm
Grove: Aye, [shouting] TOMBSTONE PIZZA, CRAIG!
> We've used XEON's on our DB server for a few months now. The performance
:)
> has been outstanding. You also see 4 processors when you run top.
> At first we thought this was an error, and got in touch with Dell's tech support.
> But the geeks there said this is normal behavior.
Of course it's normal behavior. Windows is (well, basically) counting the number of threads that the system can simultaneously execute (that's probably not entirely an accurate depiction), not the number of physical processors. But this does not mean that you're getting the performance of four processors. You still only have the execution resources of two processors at your system's disposal. The best that simultaneous multithreading can do is make more efficient use of the existing execution units. This can result in very nice performance boosts, no performance boosts at all, and (in some rarer circumstances) performance penalties. But it is in no way anything near like having that actual number of processors.
Probably, a good rule of thumb would be "if it already stresses the execution units, then you won't see a boost, but if the code causes frequent thread stalls, then you'll probably see a nice jump".
*EDIT* Crap, I didn't notice that you said top. Made the assumption about Windows. Sorry about that. My post more or less stands as the same, though.
> Well, unless you have a computer that has multiple physical CPUs.
You have a point, but he does, as well. SMT ("hyper-threading") should work automatically for multiprocessor systems. So if you have a dual processor, SMT-capable board in a system that's unaware of the SMT functionality, you should still get a boost from SMT. Unless Hyper-Threading is a really, really bizarre implementation of SMT. Reviewers should really compare against an SMP system that is incapable of doing SMT, because it'll do it automatically (or it should), even if you don't tell it to. Alternatively, you could approximate the same results by forcing the system to only use a number of threads equivalent to the number of processors. Not all programs can do this, though (compiling is the only thing that immediately comes to mind).
Granted, I've been out of the loop a bit, so I might be making some really off the wall (and inaccurate) assumptions about Intel's SMT implementation.
> But microlensing events are exceedingly rare. In this case, the null result is interesting,
...wait. Isn't dark matter supposed to still have mass and gravity? So any dark matter of sufficient size would cause microlensing, not just baryons, no?
> because it highlights that baryonic matter is not as prolific as we want/need!
-JC
> If you're in a car that's going at the speed of
> light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?
Moot question. It would literally take you an infinite amount of time to turn on your headlights. Well, not *infinite*. Better word to describe it is that it's a number divisible by zero. Since your rate of time progression is zero, so the amount of time required to do any action would be proportionate to the inverse of that rate.
-JC
> Congratulations! You yourself come off as much more idiotic than those you mock!
... well, sometimes, people just really do put style far beyond substance.
Actually, I have a friend who pretty much exactly parallels his mock attitude. BMX XXX (a console game whose selling point is that you can play a naked bicycle girl) is his next "must have". He loves the wrestling pay per views because they have women touching each other. His main saving grace at the recent "Star Trek" movie (he's not a Trek fan except for Enterprise, because it has people regularly smothering each other's torsos with various exotic gels) was that the doctor was a girl (he spent the rest of the weekend incessently complaining about how he doesn't like having hairy man doctors asking him to cough).
Oh, and he won't watch Braveheart. Because Mel Gibson wears a skirt.
He's not a particularly stupid person, but
-JC
> If you have 20 years of programming experience (and I'm assuming you don't mean you've held a
> job for those 20 years, if you had, this applies more so) and you fear that by next year
> you will be living homeless with no food, then you really never learned how to invest and save
> money did you? I'm not trying to belittle the fact that you may get fired, but there are other
> jobs out there, there's always good ol unemployment/welfare and if worst comes to worst,
> you can always take a job in a low wage area until you find a new job.
Just for token support of that other guy: I've been working since I was 12 years old. I'm 27 now, so that's sort of 15 years of work experience, though only about half of that is direct work experience in my field. I'm a computer guy. I can program in C/C++, I'm a fairly hardcore perl hacker, I can put together computers and diagnose basic problems, I was a popular webmaster for a few years (a technology fan site that routinely got thousands of page views a day and that was frequented by other well known webmasters in the field, I am a very fast typist, I'm usually pretty good at teaching people computer stuff without overwhelming them, although I'm not very strong I find that I can do a good amount of lifting and moving without needing to complain, I have a pleasant though somewhat quirky personality, I can administer Netware, NT, BSD and Linux boxe{s|n}, and I have various other useful skills.
I graduated at SUNY Stony Brook with a BS in CompSci. I spend less money than my primary friends, usually waiting for sales and deals (such as on http://slickdeals.net). I buy cheap food. I eat Kraft Easy Mac for breakfast (that's like a dime per breakfast if you shop at CostCo/PriceClub) I don't eat lunch. I eat cheap TV dinners and leftovers from other people for dinner. I use few luxuries.
Despite my qualifications, I am poor. Tech is not a fruitful industry unless you have sales skills. I make less than my best friend, and he's a clerk (secretary w/o phone responsibilities) who has a far shorter commute and free food from the bosses every week. I have some money, and I could survive for a while if I lost my job, but I do not have enough money to move out from my parents' house. It doesn't help that my car has failed in every possible way this year, costing me over $2500 to keep going, not including gasoline (which would add on another grand due to my intense commute), even with a father who is capable of fixing most moderately advanced car problems (save for those that involve the computer systems) without needing a shop.
I tried getting a different job for over a year recently. It just isn't possible. The only prospects pay less than I get now.
My name is John, and I'm barely getting through life. I have a safety net (my family), but I can easily see that other people could be more dedicated, skilled and experienced yet have less success in life than me.
-JC
> Dimension-hopping perverts who cavort with
:P
> dragons and vacation in the land of Oz?
That's PerVECTS!
-JC
(droops head sadly as he realizes noone gets the reference)
PS: And furthermore, that's Aahz, not Oz.
> > Unless you want to spend your online time manning some post on Hoth
> aka "the ass end of space"
No, no, that's Tatooine, silly.
Hoth is the "ice cube"
-JC
> I know my kid wouldn't settle for seeing some grainy rip of a movie at 200 x 180
> (or whatever crappy res it looks least bad at).
> Hardly a comparison to the movie on a big screen.
Well, for what it's worth, SVCD appears to be something like 576x480. That's seven or eight times the number of pixels as you descibe above. Definitely good enough to enjoy fully.
Still, watching in a theater is still comparatively unparalleled. I go to the movies every week, even though I could download nearly every film that comes out (and even though I'm rather substantially poor). That's gotta count for something.
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Oh cmon, I'm tired of people complaining about how expensive Macs are. I'm a Marine, I earn ;)
> below the minimum wage, in fact well below the poverty line. I take home $2012 each month
> after taxes. With that, I have to pay ~$1000 (USD - Yen rate fluctuates) plus food, gas,
> adsl etc and provide for my wife and 2 kids. Yet I can afford an ibook, and old PC, and just
> ordered an iMac for the wife. They are not that expensive, if you just manage your money and
> save for a while. I'm sure someone in the IT industry could do better than me
Hah! I'm someone in the IT industry. I'm a programmer, webmaster, network administrator and tech support guy well versed in Windows 9x/NT, unix, perl, and a few other areas. I would *love* to make two thousand dollars each month after taxes. As it is, this year I made less than $1500 a month *before* taxes, though I *might* make $2000 per month *before* taxes next year. What's that? $1500/mo after taxes? Combine that with $2500 in unexpected car repair payments, more than another thousand in car insurance, $2600 in rent for the year, tons of gas money for my 45-minute-a-day commute, then add food (and I'm on a [successful!] diet, so I'm actually spending a lot less than I otherwise would) and assorted other requirements that don't come to mind at the moment, and the end result is that I have barely enough cash to go to the movies with my friends every week. Geez, is it any wonder why people steal mp3s (I don't, but...) and other luxuries instead of footing the expensive bills for them?
Incidentally, are you sure you're making below minimum wage? I think that's $5.15 in the US still. I may be incorrect, but if that's the case, you'd have to work four hundred hours to make two thousand dollars before taxes, and probably more like 550 hours a month to make that after taxes. That's 25 hours a day if you don't count weekends. Colour me skeptical.
To others, I apologize for the off-topic post. I'm just a disgruntled techie. ^_^
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Huh? An obvious example would be Warp Drive
s /abstracts/miguel94a.html
> (wormholes are not FTL travel). Unless I haven't
> seen it, I haven't seen any viable theories about
> usurping Einstein.
http://www.astro.cf.ac.uk/groups/relativity/paper
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre+drive
Miguel Alcubierre put together a very interesting hypothesis. It is said to be scientifically valid, save for the requirement of exotic matter and nigh impossible amounts of energy. But it seems to not conflict with existing theory.
"...within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the ``warp drive'' of science fiction"
> Also as far as I know, there is no viable
> theory as to how to make a transporter work
> (quantum-level effects notwithstanding).
Yeah, I'll give you that one. I also agree with your general position, that the vast majority of science in Star Trek is not well thought out with relation to reality. It's too bad, since they started out with so much obvious effort, and now they simply don't care about even a semblance of realism.
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> The girlfriend's of geeks. 95% of the time they
> are balls to the wall hot. Cute chicks love dorks.
And, pray tell, what's the best way that I, one of essentially certified dorkage, can test out this most interesting hypothesis of yours?
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> That ain't sayin much.
:(
The really scary part is that I laughed at the improper use of "ain't" in this sentence immediately, but I had to be reminded by another message that "sayin" isn't a word!
-JC (a 'merican)
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Palm just lost it. They had a dreat idea, ran
> with it, and then fumbled. Now CE is slowly
> replacing them. Zire just reaffirms that they
> still don't get it anymore.
While I agree with most of your message, I would like to point out that there was a recent bit of news posted recently (like a week or two ago, though maybe not on slashdot) stating that PalmOS had increased market share over Windows CE on a year to year basis.
But, yeah, Zire is pretty crappy and does sort of insult the consumers.
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Try leaving your mom's basement and looking for
> a real job. You'll be surprised what's out there.
That's a weak troll. I've been looking for a real job for two years. Granted, I make no claims about job hunting skills, but even most good job hunters have tons of difficulty finding even moderate paying jobs these days, especially if it's in a technical area.
In my area (Manhattan, Long Island), available jobs for programmers, system administrators and the like tend towards twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars. Yay.
-JC
> When will people finally grow up an realise that
;P
> there is life in this planet of ours, and that
> there is absolutely no evidence for life exiting
> anywhere else in the universe at all.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Pbbbllllt!
> Remember that astronomers once said Mars was
... pheer my mad inaccurate Italian skillz0rz :p ), which means "Channels on Mars". Journalists thought he said "There are [artificial] canals on Mars!".
> covered with a complex network of irrigation
> ditches, which implied the presence of life.
Are you sure about this? I wasn't around at the time, but I recall that the confusion was brought on by badly translating journalists. Basically, a scientist in Italy said something like "Canali su Marte" (I'm using google
He didn't. The scientist didn't make a mistake. The unscientists listening to him made the mistake.
Granted, it's possible that *other* scientists held the misconception. I know nothing of this either way.
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Just because someone leaves the door open
> doesn't mean I have the right to enter.
Correct. But it's *not* illegal to recognize that the door is open, and it is *not* illegal to let people know that the door is open.
Additionally, if somebody in that door is casually and carelessly tossing leaflets out his or her window, into a public street, you have the right to pick it up and read it.
-JC
> I would hate to see it, but i know something will
> crop up. I mean in book one Rowling spent almost
> a full page explaining how much they look alike.
> In book two she did it again at the end when he
> meets Tom Riddle.
I may be way off kilter, but a few ganglions here and there are insisting to my brain that one of the books either establishes or hints that Harry is distantly descended from a Mr. Slytherin. Do I remember this correctly, or should I attribute this to random neuron firings?
-JC
> ESC is just the Cancel button (on the front
i on s/character_input.php3
> panel) and CTRL I think is the "Fn" button, Fn+C
> does a CTRL-C in the console anyway.
For most control keys, you hit CTRL-SHIFT-?. CTRL-C is one of the two or three exceptions.
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/zaurus-faq/sect
is one source of info on this. There's a chart somewhere, but I'm working on eight seconds or so of sleep and my cups of tea and coffee haven't kicked in yet, so I can't find it.
> For one, no adult is that stupid, you would
> literally have to jam & crumple that floppy in to
> get the tray to close. Second, besides the tray
> being jammed shut, I really don't think there
> would be any "horrible sound" as a CD-Rom doesnt
> try to spin up unless a real disc is inserted.
While you may be correct, I just wanted to point out that not all CD-ROM drives had trays, especially early on in the life of the technology.
-JC
Maybe he just downloaded one, and he's thanking Napster for delivering all of it.
-JC
> But for what else?
;P
I like to download old episodes of shows that you don't see on TV anymore, the kind of stuff that I loved as a kid and for which I have unending nostalgia. Additionally, earlier this year I casually decided to give professional wrestling programs a chance, and for some inexplicable reason I now find myself hooked on it. Now, I don't care so much for the poorly written, [often, but with a few very talented exceptions] poorly performed WWE (formerly WWF), so I like to download more region oriented events, those which I cannot obtain via reasonable methods (such as via Pay-Per-View or on regular TV).
My usenet downloading program creates tremendously huge databases of binary newsgroups and their contents. Occasionally, the application can be locked up while it's thinking about how to display or manipulate this data. Additionally, it takes a lot of processing resources to convert from yEnc or UUE to a binary file.
Usually, these files are RAR files that are broken up into many parts. Because some of the parts may not reach all the servers, a bunch of parity files (.PAR) are also put onto usenet for each of these RAR sets. If you're missing some RAR parts, you use the parity files to rebuild those missing fragments. But this is an intensely computational process, and it could take a *looooong* time before you're all rebuilt.
Then you have to use WinRAR to transform all these fragments into a single mpeg or ogm or whatever format the movie file is in. This can take a long time. Usually, a Video-CD will take several minutes to be extracted from the RARs (mind you, I usually have a bunch of apps active at the same time as this).
On my Duron 800 with 768MB PC133 SDRAM, it'll take two hours to convert an SVCD to VCD format (if I want to burn the video to a CD-R so that I could view it in some DVD players or so that I could simply keep it in cold storage for viewing some later time.
All the above applications are incredibly time consuming and would increase in speed greatly if I upgraded the processor in my computer. There is no upper frequency limit where the benefit stops being critical.
There are some other things that would be positively affected by upgrading. I usually have in excess of thirty web pages opening up at once in Opera. My email database has tens of thousands of messages in it, and it sometimes takes a while for the searches and the filtering to finish.
There are probably other things, but there you have some very strong reasons why at least this one guy can use an Athlon XP 7500+.
-JC