Yah, and next time someone in Mgmt decided they need a reason to fire you with cause, they just point out how you broke company policy on a daily basis...
How do you trust that the keys posted on the public key servers? Say I wanted to send you a message, How do I know that the key posted on the key server is in fact, from you? (See Certificate Authority) If a malicious party could intercept messages to you and decrypt them (using the bogus public/private key pair) and then re-encrypt the message to you using your formerly available public key, you'd receive the message and have no knowledge of the MITM attack.
You are, of course correct, but that is what key signing and webs of trust are all about. The "hard" part is finding an out of band communication method that can be trusted to verify the key signature. Its actually pretty "easy" if your willing to pick up the phone and call someone and say "hey, am about to sign your key, can you tell me what its fingerprint is".
You do get _SECURITY_ this way, what you don't get is anonymity.
I want to send you a message so I ask you for a key. You generate a public/private key pair and send me the public one. NSA gets it.
And generates their own public/private key pair. They then forward their public key to you instead of mine. You encrypt a message using it and the NSA gets it, decrypts it, and recrypts it using the public key I sent you, then forwards it to me.
MITM works for public keys too if you can't trust the public key exchange. That is why before you sign a 3rd party key (outside of your trust circle), you should verify in an out of band method, that the key your are signing matches the key identity of the 3rd party. Aka, pick up the phone and ask them what the key fingerprint is.
Its not that clear cut. The throughput of the instructions count as well. In many cases AVX isn't faster than SSE because the core can retire 2x the SSE instructions per cycle. Furthermore, it can be harder to get a x8 vector than a x4 one.
Think how useful 4x4 matrix operations are for 3d graphics. Then consider how to write optimal code using a x8 vector.
Now all that said, AVX(/2) can really win in some cases
Discoverability, 20 years of UI/GUI research out the window. It started around the XP timeframe when someone decided it was a good idea to hide the keyboard shortcut hints if the alt key wasn't pressed. 8 is just the latest version of that, where even a computer literate person has to get out the manual (???) to discover how to close a metro app, or 3/4 of the tasks a user is going to have to do in the first 5 minutes of using the OS. Plus, tons of functionality is buried behind a really poor "search" feature. If you don't know its there or you don't know what its called its never going to get used even if its a really useful function.
Frankly, without google I often find myself lost... And I'm like the local windows guru for a number of fairly technical people.
complete with the 4-bit color palette. I've been saying for a while now that windows 8 is windows 386, missing the 3,6 and extended to 64-bits...
Complete with lack of overlapping windows/etc.
Without knowing how deep the cycle was. Furthermore, the rate of discharge and temperature during the discharge will also have a fairly significant affect.
Basically, you will get about 1/10th the charge cycles out of a battery that is nearly completely discharged vs one that is only discharged to 10%.
Its better to really think of LI as providing a fixed number of watt hours. You can consume them in small bites, or you can consume them in big chunks but once you consume them they are gone.
The best rule for laptops is carry the charger and use it when at all possible.
Oh, and don't buy machines without replaceable batteries. If the "average" user can get 3 years out of it, and you decide your going to use all 8 hours of battery life every day, and charge it at night, you will probably be lucky if it lasts a year.
Plus, if your laptop gets hot (either by being left somewhere hot, or because of poor cooling) then the battery life is going to nose dive even if your plugged in. If your going to be doing a lot of intense gaming, your probably better taking the battery off and placing it somewhere cool (just don't let it discharge).
I don't understand why this is the case, but it's how the 2nd amendment is interpreted.
And its BS, because being a privateer and privately owning a ship complete with cannon sufficient to damage major naval vessels, forts and cities was common enough in early American history.
Yah, and the truth is that its easier to stabilize most servers than a desktops. The server is going to be running a fairly limited set of programs which don't tend to change.
The average desktop probably has 4 or 5x the applications installed and used on a regular basis leveraging more kernel subsystems.
Most server applications only really stress the network/memory and disk subsystems.
Desktop apps do that, plus they stress the graphical, hotplug (for USB devices), sound, wireless (ethernet and bluetooth) and a crap load of other subsystems that may never even be used on a server.
I mean, you only look like a dork with a man bag, with a tablet attached via straps to your body you look like a full on social outcast.
My wife has a fairly normal looking purse, but she can carry an ipad, camera, phone etc and still have room to smuggle popcorn into the movie theater.
Then again, you know you could survive without it....
Back in the day, it was socially acceptable to talk to people on the bus/etc... I assume that is still true, assuming you can find anyone not lost in their own little digital world.
The first tablets ran windows 95, and were powered by Pentiums.
Actually, somewhere around 93/94 time-frame the company I worked for was looking for a device for our customers to use as a carry around input device. I remember one of the devices we considered was a windows 3.1 based "tablet" computer, although I think it was called a "pen" computer back then.
I sort of wish I still had the thing, because it would be good for a laugh now. It was about the size of a laptop (in other words it was about two-three inches thick) and was just a rectangular box with a (12" maybe) touch screen on one side. IIRC it had a floppy and assorted ports arranged around it.
The handwriting recognition was a PITA though. You tapped where you wanted to input text and it popped up a little dialog with a grid (like some paper forms a few years ago) and you were expected to write one letter per box and it would generate the letter it thought you entered below it.
Of the 3 or 4 of us that tired to use it, none of us could get a reasonable recognition rate out of the thing. I think we ended up trying to use it with one of the accessibility keyboards on screen. That by itself was a PITA, but for a device intended to be used while standing up/walking around it was impossible. Holding it in a position with one arm while entering data with the other got tiring really quickly. Probably, because it weighted something like 10 lbs.
In the end I think we ended up using a little calculator sized device with a keyboard. It wasn't great but you could hold it with two hands and type with your thumbs at a pretty decent rate.
BTW: I think it was a 486, and poking around on google I noticed that "Windows for Pen Computing" which is what it was running was released in 1991, a few years before we were trying to use it.
No, as just happened on the route I ride, they repainted the 2x2 traffic lanes at intersections down to 1x1 and replaced the two lanes with bike lanes. Sure they get used, but now the traffic is backing up like crazy and its still the summer. Wait until school starts and what previously took a single light cycle to get through will for sure take 3 or 4.
I don't mind spending money on bike lanes, what I hate is when it comes at the expense of existing road lanes.
Yah, and 5 seconds tells you there is a difference between building a giant highway going into the farmland and adding a few extra lanes to a road running through the middle of downtown.
The former is actually pretty easy/inexpensive, while the latter is expensive and difficult. Yet, the former actually gets done all the time, even though it actually makes the traffic worse.
The worse part is "encouraging" alternative methods of transport really don't work until they hit critical mass. All over the southern and Midwestern US the public transportation is the only thing worse than the garbage roads. You have bike lanes that are used by a couple dozen people, while a few thousand are stuck sitting in their idling cars... Or buses that stop to pick up one person blocking 10 or 15 cars for a minute or more while they fumble for their pass...
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Sounds like they are making steps in the right direction, I personally purchased a kindle because of kindle freetime. That decision was more than just restricting the kids, a big part was access to the free time unlimited content library and the age based content controls.
The article doesn't say if google is planning a similar service, which is what seems to be driving my associates with kids to buy the kindles.
Which is why you don't do what HP did (just more incompetence, what did you expect?).
Instead lowering the price gradually until the devices start to move at a target pace. That way MS both makes the maximum from each one as well as moves them at the rate they wish. This isn't even that hard when compared with something like concert/airline tickets because the people coming into the pool late aren't the ones willing to pay more than the average.
But, it seems some manager somewhere got a bonus by claiming they would make $X on $Y units, and fixed the price at that level.
"In order to address these scale/DPI issues, in Window 8.1 the maximum DPI scaling value was increased from 150% to 200%"
So, basically, somewhere between XP/2003 and windows 8, Microsoft removed the 200% scaling option? Lets hear it for progress, windows 8.1 now with features we had 14 years ago. What next overlapping windows?
Ha, no wonder people keep complaining about windows scaling.
Also, per their full screen chrome screenshot, maybe the guy in charge of the pcper style sheet should consider that fixed width layouts sort of suck. Even on a 1920 wide screen it looks stupid that 50% of the horizontal resolution is whitespace.
I've tried time and time again to like eclipse. I think they have done a pretty good job of providing a lot of useful functionality via plugins. I've even recommended co-workers use it, only to have to later apologize..
The problem is that it always seems like its 90% done. There is always some critical problem that keeps it from working correctly. Plus, the last couple of times I started it, it was such a resource hog, and kept crashing so frequently I couldn't actually use it. Of course i've never used it for java development rather trying to use it for C++ or PHP, so that is probably the real issue. I can only hope that the java portions are more polished.
I was under the impression that for a editor to be considered a "programmers editor" it had to have some kind of programming/macro language built in. Because, sometimes you find yourself repeating some action over and over and over. Dropping to $shellutiilty to perform the same task is basically just admitting your editor sucks.
Bonus points if your editor lets you assign arbitrary keys to the given macro.
Frankly, I sort of gave up on visual studio after version 6 when they decided to rebind all the keys, and started rewriting parts of it in.net. Before that, it was a pretty good C++ environment, after that the C++ functionality took a back seat to the C# functionality that appeared to be trying to replicate visual basic/delphi, and frankly doing a pretty crummy job of it.
Actually, having worked with a couple of ex-microsoft guys in the OS division, my understanding from them is that huge swaths of Microsoft actually use slickedit (IIRC) rather than visual studio. Basically anyone not programming in a.net environment. Maybe that has changed as Microsoft has tried to add support for driver development in VS, but it was definitely frowned on for a while.
The difference with the touchpad is that the fire-sale price was 1/2 to 1/3 of these devices.
Furthermore, it wasn't nearly as locked down. There are some fairly nice android distributions for the touchpad, and it was as easy to root as typing "webos20090606" into the search bar. Plus, there is a fairly large homebrew community, providing everything from an xserver and ubuntu like environments to popular game emulators (NES/etc) allowing access to large catalogs of applications not originally written for the device.
Best darn $250 i've spent in years (I got one with a touchstone, case and keyboard), as I also provide one of the more popular applications in the app store and its more than paid for the device and the few dozen hours I spent porting/writting the app.
I'm a pretty strong lover of geek toys myself. And I was "lucky" enough to have a brand spanking new mainframe (z114) provided to me at work, to complete some things I was working on.
Let me tell you right now, this thing cost a fortune and is a _HUGE_ piece of proprietary junk. Sure it can run zOS, but Hercules running on my desktop is actually faster because IBM likes to license the CPU performance, and the machine starts at 26 "MIPS". Let me try to explain how fast a 26 MIP mainframe is.... Its has roughly the same performance as a Pentium 90 from the early '90's.
I also have a IFL, to run zvm and linux, let me describe how fast an unlocked z114 running linux is... Its about as fast as the 5 year old servers we are decommissioning. Plus, zvm makes building xen from source and hacking config files by hand look like a walk in the park.
Then there is IO capability, which pretty much sucks as everything runs though this huge bottleneck called "ficon" before being converted to SCSI/FC at the attached control unit.
About the only thing going for the IBM mainframe seems to be the fact that IBM has this insane level of compatibility with machines they produced 40 years ago. This allows applications written 40 years ago to run on "modern" hardware. Of course that modern hardware is jumping through emulation hoops (can you say MOD9 DASD!) to provide an environment that feels like a time machine has been employed.
I might be more understanding, if it weren't for the fact that IBM charges hundreds of thousands for a machine that has less capability to run zOS than your average smart phone. To get any real compute power its an 8 figure number.
You are quoting the heritage foundation, which has a specific agenda. If you don't know what it is then that is your problem.
How about I quote the war resisters league, where they claim 47% of the government spending is military related.
The difference between the two numbers is, what one considers military spending, and what considers government spending in general. For example, is the NSA's gigantic surveillance military spending (it is after all part of the "defense department")? How about the pension program for veterans?
A rational mind would say they both are part of the military, the second is simply part of the benefits program we give to our soldiers who risk their lives. A built in cost because at some point, someone said it was a damn good idea to take care of soldiers when they come home lest they become the troops for the next revolution.
So, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, although aside from the removal of the social security program (which isn't directly part of your income taxes) which I think is a little disingenuous, I think the war resisters league gets it a little more accurate because they count things like the portion of NASA's budget used to launch military devices and similar things.
Samsung announced a laptop last year with a >1080p screen (to lazy to google it). For about 6-8 months I regularly went to their site and searched google/ebay for one.
Nada. It was just a paper release. Now this, maybe they will release it, but until I can click buy and have it shipped to my door in a couple days its just BS.
Frankly, I can't really believe that the only manufacture making a laptop with a screen >150PPI is Apple. Every single PC manufacture thinks it ok to put a garbage screen on their crapbooks, and maybe grace the really high end ones with full 1080p, like its some kind of magic resolution. No wonder dell/HP are screwed, 3/4's of the tablets I look at have better resolutions than nearly every laptop sold at retail outside of an apple store.
I've been running a bunch of single thread in house application benchmarks under linux using GCC and a generic x86_64 target.
The results of AMD machines (4300's) vs the Intel (E5's) machines are not reflected in the benchmarks being run at places like tom's hardware. Those benchmarks are pretty split, AMD wins some, Intel wins some but the price difference between the machines is about 3x. Oh and the AMD machine stomps the intel machine when all the cores load up. But that could have something to do with the fact it has 2x the cores.
Just as an example try running nbench...
Of course if I use ICC, I can shift the results one way or the other by 50% or more. And its not always the way one expects. I was trying to speed up a Reed-Solomon calculation, and I optimized it for the specific intel I was using, and it doubled in performance. Then I ran the same code on the AMD and it doubled too. The result was the AMD still won.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, and next time someone in Mgmt decided they need a reason to fire you with cause, they just point out how you broke company policy on a daily basis...
Sometimes its just better not to fight.
How do you trust that the keys posted on the public key servers? Say I wanted to send you a message, How do I know that the key posted on the key server is in fact, from you? (See Certificate Authority) If a malicious party could intercept messages to you and decrypt them (using the bogus public/private key pair) and then re-encrypt the message to you using your formerly available public key, you'd receive the message and have no knowledge of the MITM attack.
You are, of course correct, but that is what key signing and webs of trust are all about. The "hard" part is finding an out of band communication method that can be trusted to verify the key signature. Its actually pretty "easy" if your willing to pick up the phone and call someone and say "hey, am about to sign your key, can you tell me what its fingerprint is".
You do get _SECURITY_ this way, what you don't get is anonymity.
I want to send you a message so I ask you for a key. You generate a public/private key pair and send me the public one. NSA gets it.
And generates their own public/private key pair. They then forward their public key to you instead of mine. You encrypt a message using it and the NSA gets it, decrypts it, and recrypts it using the public key I sent you, then forwards it to me.
MITM works for public keys too if you can't trust the public key exchange. That is why before you sign a 3rd party key (outside of your trust circle), you should verify in an out of band method, that the key your are signing matches the key identity of the 3rd party. Aka, pick up the phone and ask them what the key fingerprint is.
Its not that clear cut. The throughput of the instructions count as well. In many cases AVX isn't faster than SSE because the core can retire 2x the SSE instructions per cycle. Furthermore, it can be harder to get a x8 vector than a x4 one.
Think how useful 4x4 matrix operations are for 3d graphics. Then consider how to write optimal code using a x8 vector.
Now all that said, AVX(/2) can really win in some cases
Discoverability, 20 years of UI/GUI research out the window. It started around the XP timeframe when someone decided it was a good idea to hide the keyboard shortcut hints if the alt key wasn't pressed. 8 is just the latest version of that, where even a computer literate person has to get out the manual (???) to discover how to close a metro app, or 3/4 of the tasks a user is going to have to do in the first 5 minutes of using the OS. Plus, tons of functionality is buried behind a really poor "search" feature. If you don't know its there or you don't know what its called its never going to get used even if its a really useful function.
Frankly, without google I often find myself lost... And I'm like the local windows guru for a number of fairly technical people.
complete with the 4-bit color palette. I've been saying for a while now that windows 8 is windows 386, missing the 3,6 and extended to 64-bits...
Complete with lack of overlapping windows/etc.
Without knowing how deep the cycle was. Furthermore, the rate of discharge and temperature during the discharge will also have a fairly significant affect.
Basically, you will get about 1/10th the charge cycles out of a battery that is nearly completely discharged vs one that is only discharged to 10%.
Its better to really think of LI as providing a fixed number of watt hours. You can consume them in small bites, or you can consume them in big chunks but once you consume them they are gone.
The best rule for laptops is carry the charger and use it when at all possible.
Oh, and don't buy machines without replaceable batteries. If the "average" user can get 3 years out of it, and you decide your going to use all 8 hours of battery life every day, and charge it at night, you will probably be lucky if it lasts a year.
Plus, if your laptop gets hot (either by being left somewhere hot, or because of poor cooling) then the battery life is going to nose dive even if your plugged in. If your going to be doing a lot of intense gaming, your probably better taking the battery off and placing it somewhere cool (just don't let it discharge).
See this link http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
I don't understand why this is the case, but it's how the 2nd amendment is interpreted.
And its BS, because being a privateer and privately owning a ship complete with cannon sufficient to damage major naval vessels, forts and cities was common enough in early American history.
Yah, and the truth is that its easier to stabilize most servers than a desktops. The server is going to be running a fairly limited set of programs which don't tend to change.
The average desktop probably has 4 or 5x the applications installed and used on a regular basis leveraging more kernel subsystems.
Most server applications only really stress the network/memory and disk subsystems.
Desktop apps do that, plus they stress the graphical, hotplug (for USB devices), sound, wireless (ethernet and bluetooth) and a crap load of other subsystems that may never even be used on a server.
Just get a big purse, or if your male a man bag.
Basically a bag with a shoulder strap.
I mean, you only look like a dork with a man bag, with a tablet attached via straps to your body you look like a full on social outcast.
My wife has a fairly normal looking purse, but she can carry an ipad, camera, phone etc and still have room to smuggle popcorn into the movie theater.
Then again, you know you could survive without it....
Back in the day, it was socially acceptable to talk to people on the bus/etc... I assume that is still true, assuming you can find anyone not lost in their own little digital world.
Check out this video: ~2.50 mins in. Its Bill Gates talking about their "tablet" circa 1991.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenDjMXfVBQ
The first tablets ran windows 95, and were powered by Pentiums.
Actually, somewhere around 93/94 time-frame the company I worked for was looking for a device for our customers to use as a carry around input device. I remember one of the devices we considered was a windows 3.1 based "tablet" computer, although I think it was called a "pen" computer back then.
I sort of wish I still had the thing, because it would be good for a laugh now. It was about the size of a laptop (in other words it was about two-three inches thick) and was just a rectangular box with a (12" maybe) touch screen on one side. IIRC it had a floppy and assorted ports arranged around it.
The handwriting recognition was a PITA though. You tapped where you wanted to input text and it popped up a little dialog with a grid (like some paper forms a few years ago) and you were expected to write one letter per box and it would generate the letter it thought you entered below it.
Of the 3 or 4 of us that tired to use it, none of us could get a reasonable recognition rate out of the thing. I think we ended up trying to use it with one of the accessibility keyboards on screen. That by itself was a PITA, but for a device intended to be used while standing up/walking around it was impossible. Holding it in a position with one arm while entering data with the other got tiring really quickly. Probably, because it weighted something like 10 lbs.
In the end I think we ended up using a little calculator sized device with a keyboard. It wasn't great but you could hold it with two hands and type with your thumbs at a pretty decent rate.
BTW: I think it was a 486, and poking around on google I noticed that "Windows for Pen Computing" which is what it was running was released in 1991, a few years before we were trying to use it.
No, as just happened on the route I ride, they repainted the 2x2 traffic lanes at intersections down to 1x1 and replaced the two lanes with bike lanes. Sure they get used, but now the traffic is backing up like crazy and its still the summer. Wait until school starts and what previously took a single light cycle to get through will for sure take 3 or 4.
I don't mind spending money on bike lanes, what I hate is when it comes at the expense of existing road lanes.
Yah, and 5 seconds tells you there is a difference between building a giant highway going into the farmland and adding a few extra lanes to a road running through the middle of downtown.
The former is actually pretty easy/inexpensive, while the latter is expensive and difficult. Yet, the former actually gets done all the time, even though it actually makes the traffic worse.
The worse part is "encouraging" alternative methods of transport really don't work until they hit critical mass. All over the southern and Midwestern US the public transportation is the only thing worse than the garbage roads. You have bike lanes that are used by a couple dozen people, while a few thousand are stuck sitting in their idling cars... Or buses that stop to pick up one person blocking 10 or 15 cars for a minute or more while they fumble for their pass...
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Sounds like they are making steps in the right direction, I personally purchased a kindle because of kindle freetime. That decision was more than just restricting the kids, a big part was access to the free time unlimited content library and the age based content controls.
The article doesn't say if google is planning a similar service, which is what seems to be driving my associates with kids to buy the kindles.
Which is why you don't do what HP did (just more incompetence, what did you expect?).
Instead lowering the price gradually until the devices start to move at a target pace. That way MS both makes the maximum from each one as well as moves them at the rate they wish. This isn't even that hard when compared with something like concert/airline tickets because the people coming into the pool late aren't the ones willing to pay more than the average.
But, it seems some manager somewhere got a bonus by claiming they would make $X on $Y units, and fixed the price at that level.
"In order to address these scale/DPI issues, in Window 8.1 the maximum DPI scaling value was increased from 150% to 200%"
So, basically, somewhere between XP/2003 and windows 8, Microsoft removed the 200% scaling option? Lets hear it for progress, windows 8.1 now with features we had 14 years ago. What next overlapping windows?
Ha, no wonder people keep complaining about windows scaling.
Also, per their full screen chrome screenshot, maybe the guy in charge of the pcper style sheet should consider that fixed width layouts sort of suck. Even on a 1920 wide screen it looks stupid that 50% of the horizontal resolution is whitespace.
I've tried time and time again to like eclipse. I think they have done a pretty good job of providing a lot of useful functionality via plugins. I've even recommended co-workers use it, only to have to later apologize..
The problem is that it always seems like its 90% done. There is always some critical problem that keeps it from working correctly. Plus, the last couple of times I started it, it was such a resource hog, and kept crashing so frequently I couldn't actually use it. Of course i've never used it for java development rather trying to use it for C++ or PHP, so that is probably the real issue. I can only hope that the java portions are more polished.
I was under the impression that for a editor to be considered a "programmers editor" it had to have some kind of programming/macro language built in. Because, sometimes you find yourself repeating some action over and over and over. Dropping to $shellutiilty to perform the same task is basically just admitting your editor sucks.
Bonus points if your editor lets you assign arbitrary keys to the given macro.
Frankly, I sort of gave up on visual studio after version 6 when they decided to rebind all the keys, and started rewriting parts of it in .net. Before that, it was a pretty good C++ environment, after that the C++ functionality took a back seat to the C# functionality that appeared to be trying to replicate visual basic/delphi, and frankly doing a pretty crummy job of it.
Actually, having worked with a couple of ex-microsoft guys in the OS division, my understanding from them is that huge swaths of Microsoft actually use slickedit (IIRC) rather than visual studio. Basically anyone not programming in a .net environment. Maybe that has changed as Microsoft has tried to add support for driver development in VS, but it was definitely frowned on for a while.
The difference with the touchpad is that the fire-sale price was 1/2 to 1/3 of these devices.
Furthermore, it wasn't nearly as locked down. There are some fairly nice android distributions for the touchpad, and it was as easy to root as typing "webos20090606" into the search bar. Plus, there is a fairly large homebrew community, providing everything from an xserver and ubuntu like environments to popular game emulators (NES/etc) allowing access to large catalogs of applications not originally written for the device.
Best darn $250 i've spent in years (I got one with a touchstone, case and keyboard), as I also provide one of the more popular applications in the app store and its more than paid for the device and the few dozen hours I spent porting/writting the app.
I'm a pretty strong lover of geek toys myself. And I was "lucky" enough to have a brand spanking new mainframe (z114) provided to me at work, to complete some things I was working on.
Let me tell you right now, this thing cost a fortune and is a _HUGE_ piece of proprietary junk. Sure it can run zOS, but Hercules running on my desktop is actually faster because IBM likes to license the CPU performance, and the machine starts at 26 "MIPS". Let me try to explain how fast a 26 MIP mainframe is.... Its has roughly the same performance as a Pentium 90 from the early '90's.
I also have a IFL, to run zvm and linux, let me describe how fast an unlocked z114 running linux is... Its about as fast as the 5 year old servers we are decommissioning. Plus, zvm makes building xen from source and hacking config files by hand look like a walk in the park.
Then there is IO capability, which pretty much sucks as everything runs though this huge bottleneck called "ficon" before being converted to SCSI/FC at the attached control unit.
About the only thing going for the IBM mainframe seems to be the fact that IBM has this insane level of compatibility with machines they produced 40 years ago. This allows applications written 40 years ago to run on "modern" hardware. Of course that modern hardware is jumping through emulation hoops (can you say MOD9 DASD!) to provide an environment that feels like a time machine has been employed.
I might be more understanding, if it weren't for the fact that IBM charges hundreds of thousands for a machine that has less capability to run zOS than your average smart phone. To get any real compute power its an 8 figure number.
You are quoting the heritage foundation, which has a specific agenda. If you don't know what it is then that is your problem.
How about I quote the war resisters league, where they claim 47% of the government spending is military related.
The difference between the two numbers is, what one considers military spending, and what considers government spending in general. For example, is the NSA's gigantic surveillance military spending (it is after all part of the "defense department")? How about the pension program for veterans?
A rational mind would say they both are part of the military, the second is simply part of the benefits program we give to our soldiers who risk their lives. A built in cost because at some point, someone said it was a damn good idea to take care of soldiers when they come home lest they become the troops for the next revolution.
So, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, although aside from the removal of the social security program (which isn't directly part of your income taxes) which I think is a little disingenuous, I think the war resisters league gets it a little more accurate because they count things like the portion of NASA's budget used to launch military devices and similar things.
Samsung announced a laptop last year with a >1080p screen (to lazy to google it). For about 6-8 months I regularly went to their site and searched google/ebay for one.
Nada. It was just a paper release. Now this, maybe they will release it, but until I can click buy and have it shipped to my door in a couple days its just BS.
Frankly, I can't really believe that the only manufacture making a laptop with a screen >150PPI is Apple. Every single PC manufacture thinks it ok to put a garbage screen on their crapbooks, and maybe grace the really high end ones with full 1080p, like its some kind of magic resolution. No wonder dell/HP are screwed, 3/4's of the tablets I look at have better resolutions than nearly every laptop sold at retail outside of an apple store.
What benchmark?
I've been running a bunch of single thread in house application benchmarks under linux using GCC and a generic x86_64 target.
The results of AMD machines (4300's) vs the Intel (E5's) machines are not reflected in the benchmarks being run at places like tom's hardware. Those benchmarks are pretty split, AMD wins some, Intel wins some but the price difference between the machines is about 3x. Oh and the AMD machine stomps the intel machine when all the cores load up. But that could have something to do with the fact it has 2x the cores.
Just as an example try running nbench...
Of course if I use ICC, I can shift the results one way or the other by 50% or more. And its not always the way one expects. I was trying to speed up a Reed-Solomon calculation, and I optimized it for the specific intel I was using, and it doubled in performance. Then I ran the same code on the AMD and it doubled too. The result was the AMD still won.
So, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.