This probably covers a fair range of desktop machines from the OEM's too. Has anyone here actually looked inside a low-midrange dell/etc lately? Your lucky if there is a PCIe slot much less extra SATA ports.
Here's a simple fact. Your "entitlements" are not sustainable.
Which it total republican bullshit. If you look at the budget, less than 1/3 is "entitlements", the rest is service on debt (mostly caused by wars), and the military itself. Cut the military by 7/8th and we still have the most expensive one in the world, convert medicare to a fully socialized system, with minimum standards of care, and poof the deficit is gone. In fact I'd wager that if we left tax rates at current levels for the next decade or two under a plan like that the debt would disappear too. The result then (and only then) would be the fact that we could actually cut federal tax rates by 2/3's and still keep all our existing social, and pet projects (clean energy, infrastructure, etc).
But you ask what about the military? I would also venture to bet that within the next 10-20 years all this money we are currently spending on aircraft, aircraft carriers, subs, and other machines to transport fighting men around is going to look silly when a manufacturing powerhouse starts to make shittons of extremely accurate (thing really good vision recognition in multiple wavelengths) cruise missiles/unmaned vehicles. The falklands war was in the early 80's when cruise missiles had less processing power than your average phone from 5 years ago. I'm betting that anything moving slower than mach 1 is going to be toast from devices costing millions (maybe billions in the case of aircraft carriers) less. At higher speeds the devices will cost more, but the military has already admitted that manned fighter aircraft have reached the limit of what is possible with a human inside. The next generations won't have them.
Well it also covers younger people who are unable to work, hence why its called "social security". It was suppose to keep grandma from living under a bridge. It was never meant to be a retirement plan. Why its been morphed into that I have no idea, but I'm pretty much in the camp that it should be more like a welfare program. You have a disability (if thats being to old to move well, then so be it) and you don't have any money then you get social security. I guess the original problem is that they even set a single "retirement" age rather than setting up some fairly basic tiers and medical guidelines. I'm skeptical of the simple, raise the retirement age argument, although the idea is basically right. I don't believe there should be a large portion of the population, that is fully capable of working for another 20 years siting around and not contributing to society (course there is always the argument that a lot of these people are providing valuable social services). Instead SS shouldn't kick in until it becomes apparent that someone probably doesn't have another 5-10 years to live. For that matter there are a number of 50 year olds that probably qualify.
Yah, and no one is willing to actually propose a solution because none of the solutions fit anyone's ideals. What I don't understand is how we can get into this completely fsked up situation where the government basically pays anything the "capitalist" society demands for health care and no one points this out. Its totally the worst of both worlds, no wonder it costs so much here, and the outcomes are so bad. At least they fixed the student loan fiasco. If the financial industry can't just caused a huge recession you can bet that would have been as big a fight as the health insurance reform bill was.
And the part the Republicans miss is that without science and infrastructure you can't have an advanced military. Without a large manufacturing base you cant win with the zerg rush either (aka WII where we (and the Russians) flung tons of crappy hardware at the germans). Frankly the whole military (/police) spending just makes me sick. I've seen graphs where people point out that a huge part of the current national debt is directly attributable to past military expendtures. With that kind of logic instead of investing in infrastructure and education we basically waste fsck tons of money on a military that already costs more than nearly all the remaining militaries in the world. The current budge discussions make me sick, we fight over all the little shit while, no one will bring up serious military cuts without referencing Eisenhower, as if that somehow makes even having the discussion ok. Its like having the clean energy discussions without even talking about the N word.
Bah, go watch the transportation oversight meeting in the senate last year. The TSA has already said that they intend to start implementing more security on subways/trains similar to what is in airports. I watched it live, and I have yet to hear a single person in the traditional news point out what was actually said in that meeting.
Now, what we can do is exactly what the president said: innovation and technology.
Strange, but I find the raw difference in population in China or India vs the US, to basically translate to the fact that for every single smart driven person here in the US innovating something there will be 10 of them in india/china doing exactly the same thing. Just given the shear number of engineers that china has been graduating vs the US, its an unstoppable reality that within a few years they will be doing the design work too. While our politicians blow smoke up our asses, the Chinese have been gaming the system. As long as that lasts, I believe the sucking sound in the US will continue.
Part of the reason for the fast releases, is because previous versions of HTML were playing catch up with what was happening at the browser vendors and on the web. Back then, tags were being added left and right to the browsers to do things people wanted to be able to do.
BTW: when one of the values is a constant you obviously don't need the loop, instead the compiler just emits a couple shifts and adds right into the instruction stream.
We're talking about assembly, not C++. There is no compiler in assembly, there's an assembler, and it directly translates the human-readable asm to machine code.
Maybe we misunderstood each other, I didn't see any mention of language, only instruction set. As someone who has written tens of thousand of lines of assembly professionally, and maybe just as much as a hobbyist dating all the way back to a 6502, I thought we were talking about the lack of a multiply instruction. That affects anyone writing code, not just assembly programmers, because hardware multiplies tend to be much faster than generic software algorithms for the common case of generic two variable multiplies (neither a constant). As far as coding in assembly (6502), multiplying two non constant variables is as easy as loading them into a couple registers (or 0-page for 16-bit) and jsr'ing to the multiply routine. There was no reason to rewrite it all the time. Heck with a decent macro assembler (ORCA/M), optimizing constant multiplies was as easy as using a macro, again not requiring any real thought.
BTW: The macros for constant multiplies obviously aren't (usually) going to be 1-1 mnemonic to machine code. So, in that regard assembling things by hand, is nearly as much a PITA as compiling something by hand. I can take a fairly short C routine and generate machine code with that too. Nothing special there, its just tedious.
I just replied to your comment because you provide a repeat addition algorithm, instead of the just as simple, shift/add algorithm. This made me blink, because for most cases the shift/add is so much better its not even worth talking about repeat sums, unless for some reason you don't understand shift/add.
So for those people who have never written a multiply using shift/add, a basic one is:
while multiplier is !=0, check low bit of multiplier, if set, add multiplicand to result. Shift multiplicand left, multiplier right, repeat.
That algorithm works in C, unlike many of the roll through carry ones, which only work in assembly. Its actually fairly useful even today, if you want a fairly small integer larger than the word-size of the target machine. Aka 128 bit multiply on 64-bit arch.
I know your probably trolling, but I would just like to point out a better comparison to the 6502 would probably be the 6800 (or 8080), not the 68000. When you do that you find that they are very similar in their limitations, as well as their release date
Back in the 70's computer designs were accelerating a lot faster than they are now. When you didn't have infinite transistors for the logic aspects of a CPU design things got cut. The 6502 (and 6800) ran in about 4k transistors, compared with the 68k which was about 68k transistors, or about 4 generations newer. See http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2001-May/170288.html. When you compare the 6502 to a CPU of its generation it comes out looking really good. By the time the 68k was out, the world had changed. Of course the 6502 (production in 1975), vs the 68k (production in 1980) game can also be played the other way. Compare the 68k with the ROMP, or if your willing to wait another 5 years the R2k.
Ha, you change the algorithm from O(2^N) to O(N) (where N=number of bits in the number) by using shift, instead of the first grade method of multiplication (repeat sums). No one in their right mind does repeated sums.
BTW: when one of the values is a constant you obviously don't need the loop, instead the compiler just emits a couple shifts and adds right into the instruction stream. This still happens today, as some arches are faster doing a shift/add for small constant values, than invoking the full blow multiplier.
Also, Big Number libraries often still do shift/add for certain operations/variable sizes because it ends up being faster than calling the hardware multiplier. I've got a little C++ template bignum library of my own creation that uses the multiplier for small bignums (512 bits or less, think column multiplication with base 2^64) and then switches to shift add based algorithms because they are simply faster.
Even on some modern arches there are a fair number of cases where shift/add combinations are faster than using the hardware multiplier. Also take a look at GNU MP.
I've been around long enough to see this. You really have to ask what is wrong with the IT departments. If a middle manager who doesn't know anything about programming can use a tool to solve his problem in a fairly short period of time, why can't the IT department do it quicker with better maintainability using a similar tool. Personally I believe its the same mindset that results in the IT department spending two weeks fscking around with Samba patches and config files to solve some obscure problem, when a crappy windows server doesn't have the problem. Its a serious case of "we know better, this is how it should be done" and an unwillingness to admit that maybe instead of building the golden gate bridge all we need is a couple of cinder blocks in the middle of the creek. This totally applies to access, I rarely meet someone who's job is IT/Programming who would stoop to using access to solve a problem. Instead its got to be done using Java (which still doesn't have a decent RAD environment), or PHP or any one of a number of other languages which can be used to build fairly large complex systems, but fail miserably when tasked with creating a functional UI to manipulate a couple database tables, in a hour or two. It still amazes me how hard it is in many languages to just display a table to the user complete with column sorting and searching, and similar functionality to what can be achieved with Access (VB, Delphi, etc) in a manner of minutes, often without any actual programming.
Fifteen years ago I had a job where I spent 50% of my time doing C++ for back-end processing, and 50% of my time in Access creating a UI to access/update data being handled by the back-end system. It taught me a very important lesson about picking the right tool for the job. Years later I'm still working on spit systems, only now its a PHP/Javascript/HTML front-end and C++ backend, and every day I think, this was easier 10 years ago. Back then, C++ was the heavyweight language with a lot of code to get anything done. Now the situation has reversed, and the C++ code is small and lean (100k or so), while the UI is approaching 3x that. Plus writing it with a web UI has actually made the job of concurrent access to the system harder for my particular circumstance, because the management aspect is far more complex than just selecting a couple of values and submitting a form.
Is a totally fantastic game. I purchased it last year, and played it probably for 40 hours (which is a lot for me). Its one of those simple to understand, total PITA, to master, games. Similar in that regard to tetris. That said, the level difficulty progress at just the right rate. I definitely had to try some of them multiple times before I succeeded, but it never got to the point where I though, damn this is too difficult. Plus, the levels are very repayable once you unlock them all. In some cases there are multiple strategies that can be successful, so winning with one strategy, leaves the level repayable with a different strategy. It also has a simple beauty, both with the graphics and the music, which blend together very nicely. Most games just don't seem very polished, this isn't one of them. Its obvious that while the game is pretty simple, a lot of time was spent on the small details.
While i'm reviewing games:
I also purchased the last humble indy bundle, but really only played one of the games, Penumbra, which was pretty good. The game itself had a fairly good story, and was quite entertaining. Enough so that I put up with the annoying controls for the few hours it took me to get through it. The remaining games, didn't really get me very excited and I didn't play any of them for more than a few minutes. If it wern't for the control suckage I might have purchased the next penumbra game.
The 6xxx are in theory more power friendly, which they are, except for the 5850 which has roughly the same performance/power ratio as the newer 6xxx cards.
I picked up one of the 5850's earlier this year for a small PC I was building because its performance/power ratio was far better than any of the other ATI/NVIDIA cards at the time. Nothing currently offered beats it by any significant margin in that regard.
BTW: ATI is just taking a page out of the Nvidia playbook in this regard. For years they just renamed the 8800, first to the 9800 then to the 250. Every time it seemed to get a little slower, but it was basically the same hardware with basically the same performance although it seemed to get a percent or two slower on a regular basis.
They need to quit spending so fucking much money. Start by immediately STOP sending foreign aid. Take care of home first. Cut the bureaucracy....the federal govt should not be one of the best paying largest employers in the nation. Raise the age of SS. Means test medicare, etc....
You sound like some kind of talking points memo.. Take a look at the government spending. Oh and don't include SS, cause its technically not part of the main budget and pays for itself (repeat after me, SS is a Ponzi scheme and pays for itself). See whats left? Oh yah baby those new $140B carriers are sexy as is the $388B for the not yet 100% functional F35s we are buying, or the ~1T we spent in Iraq. I will give you a clue, its our "defense"/military industrial complex, whatever you wish to call it. The best part is that if you look at a site like warresisters you might get convinced that almost our entire federal budget problems have one solution. Strangely, just about no one in politics brings this up, ever wonder why?
Basically, just like your personal budget, if your spending all your income on a house, you should seriously consider downgrading it so you can afford food. Cutting how much water you drink, after you already stopped taking showers, and flushing the toilet isn't going to solve anything. The federal budget has a lot of very useful programs everyone fights about, that in the end don't mean a damn thing cause they are so tiny.
After replacing the VGA connection between my PC and my LCD monitor with a DVI cable, I'd never remotely consider downgrading back to VGA.
Personally, I've been using DVI pretty much since I could afford a monitor with DVI. That said, if you saw that large of a difference between VGA and DVI, you were using crappy cables, monitors, video cards or over driving your setup. Generally, the most obvious problems were cables. For some reason people would buy a big expensive monitor and then use a crappy cable (it always seemed to me that the more you paid for a monitor the less likely it was to come with a cable), or a shitty extension. Its one thing to laugh at the people running audio on expensive cables, its quite another thing to attempt a few hundred Mhz of bandwidth over an 8 foot cable that cost $1. Lots of times, lowering the refresh from 120Hz or higher helps too. Back before CRT's explicitly disallowed "unsupported" resolutions, a lot of monitors would try to sync to anything you sent them, and people were more than happy to push a monitor to 160Hz cause "faster refresh=better" in most peoples minds.
Also, back in the day, a lot of people choose cards from manufactures like matrox because the image quality was better (BTW: early nvidia cards were absolute crap). So, you couldn't just assume that everything would look good, like you can today. With DVI LCD's if the monitor shows a picture its generally pretty good.
BTW: I buy the cheapest DVI/HDMI cables, and I've rarely had a problem. So in one regard DVI lowered my cable bills, but I doubt it (or HDMI in particular) does that for most people. I have a 8 port HDMI switch connected to a bunch of components with $.75 cent ebay cables, and a ~40' fry's cable ($30) going to the TV. Works fantastically, although I had a $3 cable that caused snow plugged into one of the switch ports. I laugh my ass off at the people paying $50 at worst buy for a 6' HDMI cable.
Re:Back in the day, there was 1600x1200
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 2
I really miss the vertical screen estate
I prefer 4x3 monitors, but you just need to select your monitors more carefully, and buy ones with stands that allow the monitors to rotate.
a 1920x1080 monitor rotated to 1080x1920 is pretty good for vertical real-estate. You may have to screw with cleartype if your running windows, but its well worth it. Of course I rotate my 4x3 1600x1200 monitors (at work) too, at home I found a irresistible set of 24" 1920x1200 IPS panels on ebay for $150 to replace my old 4x3's a couple years ago. The only thing wrong with the 24" widescreens is that they don't support HDCP (darn hu?). Its actually pretty good, because it reduces my temptation to get lazy and allow HDCP on my PC. Right now, I have an "alternate" method of HD content extraction that allows me to play blury's on my PC (and other stuff) without dealing with all the BS, or corrupting my signal path.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
I think you got that backwards. PS/2 has a dedicated interrupt (aka you press a key the processor gets interrupted, you don't press a key nothing happens), USB is polled.
Yah, lets heard it for 1 step forward two steps back. But this seems to be common practice with a lot of recent hardware specs.
More electricity needed - debunked [futurepundit.com]. Here's the link to the original [ornl.gov] Oak Ridge Nation Laboratory Report (currently down).
That whole article is a neat piece of fantasy math. It makes the assumption that no-one will charge any of those cars during the day. Furthermore, from what I understand their estimates were based on something like a plug-in prius, where the majority of the energy continues to come from the gasoline engine.
Consider this, there are a _LOT_ of places in the US, that you cannot currently install instant hot-water heaters because the neighborhood the house is in is already running at capacity. Also, do you remember the fact that every couple of years some part of the country experiences blackouts due to weather (to hot/cold)? What happens when enough cars get plugged in during daylight hours to drive the average up 5% at 5PM?
The bottom line is that new power plants or power storage systems _WILL_ be required, but that won't be the primary problem. The problem with widespread use is going to be all the people trying to upgrade their 100A electric service to 200A or more. This will result in major expenses rewiring neighborhoods, and running high voltage power lines.
Slashdot Mirror
This probably covers a fair range of desktop machines from the OEM's too. Has anyone here actually looked inside a low-midrange dell/etc lately? Your lucky if there is a PCIe slot much less extra SATA ports.
They probably don't care if they win or lose, by the time this gets settled no one will even know what a PS3 is.
Packet radio.
Here's a simple fact. Your "entitlements" are not sustainable.
Which it total republican bullshit. If you look at the budget, less than 1/3 is "entitlements", the rest is service on debt (mostly caused by wars), and the military itself. Cut the military by 7/8th and we still have the most expensive one in the world, convert medicare to a fully socialized system, with minimum standards of care, and poof the deficit is gone. In fact I'd wager that if we left tax rates at current levels for the next decade or two under a plan like that the debt would disappear too. The result then (and only then) would be the fact that we could actually cut federal tax rates by 2/3's and still keep all our existing social, and pet projects (clean energy, infrastructure, etc).
But you ask what about the military? I would also venture to bet that within the next 10-20 years all this money we are currently spending on aircraft, aircraft carriers, subs, and other machines to transport fighting men around is going to look silly when a manufacturing powerhouse starts to make shittons of extremely accurate (thing really good vision recognition in multiple wavelengths) cruise missiles/unmaned vehicles. The falklands war was in the early 80's when cruise missiles had less processing power than your average phone from 5 years ago. I'm betting that anything moving slower than mach 1 is going to be toast from devices costing millions (maybe billions in the case of aircraft carriers) less. At higher speeds the devices will cost more, but the military has already admitted that manned fighter aircraft have reached the limit of what is possible with a human inside. The next generations won't have them.
Well it also covers younger people who are unable to work, hence why its called "social security". It was suppose to keep grandma from living under a bridge. It was never meant to be a retirement plan. Why its been morphed into that I have no idea, but I'm pretty much in the camp that it should be more like a welfare program. You have a disability (if thats being to old to move well, then so be it) and you don't have any money then you get social security. I guess the original problem is that they even set a single "retirement" age rather than setting up some fairly basic tiers and medical guidelines. I'm skeptical of the simple, raise the retirement age argument, although the idea is basically right. I don't believe there should be a large portion of the population, that is fully capable of working for another 20 years siting around and not contributing to society (course there is always the argument that a lot of these people are providing valuable social services). Instead SS shouldn't kick in until it becomes apparent that someone probably doesn't have another 5-10 years to live. For that matter there are a number of 50 year olds that probably qualify.
Yah, and no one is willing to actually propose a solution because none of the solutions fit anyone's ideals. What I don't understand is how we can get into this completely fsked up situation where the government basically pays anything the "capitalist" society demands for health care and no one points this out. Its totally the worst of both worlds, no wonder it costs so much here, and the outcomes are so bad. At least they fixed the student loan fiasco. If the financial industry can't just caused a huge recession you can bet that would have been as big a fight as the health insurance reform bill was.
And the part the Republicans miss is that without science and infrastructure you can't have an advanced military. Without a large manufacturing base you cant win with the zerg rush either (aka WII where we (and the Russians) flung tons of crappy hardware at the germans). Frankly the whole military (/police) spending just makes me sick. I've seen graphs where people point out that a huge part of the current national debt is directly attributable to past military expendtures. With that kind of logic instead of investing in infrastructure and education we basically waste fsck tons of money on a military that already costs more than nearly all the remaining militaries in the world. The current budge discussions make me sick, we fight over all the little shit while, no one will bring up serious military cuts without referencing Eisenhower, as if that somehow makes even having the discussion ok. Its like having the clean energy discussions without even talking about the N word.
Well, said. Especially as there are 10 smart, educated, innovative, and driven people in china for ever one in the US.
Bah, go watch the transportation oversight meeting in the senate last year. The TSA has already said that they intend to start implementing more security on subways/trains similar to what is in airports. I watched it live, and I have yet to hear a single person in the traditional news point out what was actually said in that meeting.
Now, what we can do is exactly what the president said: innovation and technology.
Strange, but I find the raw difference in population in China or India vs the US, to basically translate to the fact that for every single smart driven person here in the US innovating something there will be 10 of them in india/china doing exactly the same thing. Just given the shear number of engineers that china has been graduating vs the US, its an unstoppable reality that within a few years they will be doing the design work too. While our politicians blow smoke up our asses, the Chinese have been gaming the system. As long as that lasts, I believe the sucking sound in the US will continue.
Part of the reason for the fast releases, is because previous versions of HTML were playing catch up with what was happening at the browser vendors and on the web. Back then, tags were being added left and right to the browsers to do things people wanted to be able to do.
BTW: when one of the values is a constant you obviously don't need the loop, instead the compiler just emits a couple shifts and adds right into the instruction stream.
We're talking about assembly, not C++. There is no compiler in assembly, there's an assembler, and it directly translates the human-readable asm to machine code.
Maybe we misunderstood each other, I didn't see any mention of language, only instruction set. As someone who has written tens of thousand of lines of assembly professionally, and maybe just as much as a hobbyist dating all the way back to a 6502, I thought we were talking about the lack of a multiply instruction. That affects anyone writing code, not just assembly programmers, because hardware multiplies tend to be much faster than generic software algorithms for the common case of generic two variable multiplies (neither a constant). As far as coding in assembly (6502), multiplying two non constant variables is as easy as loading them into a couple registers (or 0-page for 16-bit) and jsr'ing to the multiply routine. There was no reason to rewrite it all the time. Heck with a decent macro assembler (ORCA/M), optimizing constant multiplies was as easy as using a macro, again not requiring any real thought.
BTW: The macros for constant multiplies obviously aren't (usually) going to be 1-1 mnemonic to machine code. So, in that regard assembling things by hand, is nearly as much a PITA as compiling something by hand. I can take a fairly short C routine and generate machine code with that too. Nothing special there, its just tedious.
I just replied to your comment because you provide a repeat addition algorithm, instead of the just as simple, shift/add algorithm. This made me blink, because for most cases the shift/add is so much better its not even worth talking about repeat sums, unless for some reason you don't understand shift/add.
So for those people who have never written a multiply using shift/add, a basic one is:
while multiplier is !=0, check low bit of multiplier, if set, add multiplicand to result. Shift multiplicand left, multiplier right, repeat.
That algorithm works in C, unlike many of the roll through carry ones, which only work in assembly. Its actually fairly useful even today, if you want a fairly small integer larger than the word-size of the target machine. Aka 128 bit multiply on 64-bit arch.
I know your probably trolling, but I would just like to point out a better comparison to the 6502 would probably be the 6800 (or 8080), not the 68000. When you do that you find that they are very similar in their limitations, as well as their release date
Back in the 70's computer designs were accelerating a lot faster than they are now. When you didn't have infinite transistors for the logic aspects of a CPU design things got cut. The 6502 (and 6800) ran in about 4k transistors, compared with the 68k which was about 68k transistors, or about 4 generations newer. See http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2001-May/170288.html. When you compare the 6502 to a CPU of its generation it comes out looking really good. By the time the 68k was out, the world had changed. Of course the 6502 (production in 1975), vs the 68k (production in 1980) game can also be played the other way. Compare the 68k with the ROMP, or if your willing to wait another 5 years the R2k.
Speed it up?
Ha, you change the algorithm from O(2^N) to O(N) (where N=number of bits in the number) by using shift, instead of the first grade method of multiplication (repeat sums). No one in their right mind does repeated sums.
BTW: when one of the values is a constant you obviously don't need the loop, instead the compiler just emits a couple shifts and adds right into the instruction stream. This still happens today, as some arches are faster doing a shift/add for small constant values, than invoking the full blow multiplier.
Also, Big Number libraries often still do shift/add for certain operations/variable sizes because it ends up being faster than calling the hardware multiplier. I've got a little C++ template bignum library of my own creation that uses the multiplier for small bignums (512 bits or less, think column multiplication with base 2^64) and then switches to shift add based algorithms because they are simply faster.
Even on some modern arches there are a fair number of cases where shift/add combinations are faster than using the hardware multiplier. Also take a look at GNU MP.
rather than to-and-fro with the IT department
I've been around long enough to see this. You really have to ask what is wrong with the IT departments. If a middle manager who doesn't know anything about programming can use a tool to solve his problem in a fairly short period of time, why can't the IT department do it quicker with better maintainability using a similar tool. Personally I believe its the same mindset that results in the IT department spending two weeks fscking around with Samba patches and config files to solve some obscure problem, when a crappy windows server doesn't have the problem. Its a serious case of "we know better, this is how it should be done" and an unwillingness to admit that maybe instead of building the golden gate bridge all we need is a couple of cinder blocks in the middle of the creek. This totally applies to access, I rarely meet someone who's job is IT/Programming who would stoop to using access to solve a problem. Instead its got to be done using Java (which still doesn't have a decent RAD environment), or PHP or any one of a number of other languages which can be used to build fairly large complex systems, but fail miserably when tasked with creating a functional UI to manipulate a couple database tables, in a hour or two. It still amazes me how hard it is in many languages to just display a table to the user complete with column sorting and searching, and similar functionality to what can be achieved with Access (VB, Delphi, etc) in a manner of minutes, often without any actual programming.
Fifteen years ago I had a job where I spent 50% of my time doing C++ for back-end processing, and 50% of my time in Access creating a UI to access/update data being handled by the back-end system. It taught me a very important lesson about picking the right tool for the job. Years later I'm still working on spit systems, only now its a PHP/Javascript/HTML front-end and C++ backend, and every day I think, this was easier 10 years ago. Back then, C++ was the heavyweight language with a lot of code to get anything done. Now the situation has reversed, and the C++ code is small and lean (100k or so), while the UI is approaching 3x that. Plus writing it with a web UI has actually made the job of concurrent access to the system harder for my particular circumstance, because the management aspect is far more complex than just selecting a couple of values and submitting a form.
Is a totally fantastic game. I purchased it last year, and played it probably for 40 hours (which is a lot for me). Its one of those simple to understand, total PITA, to master, games. Similar in that regard to tetris. That said, the level difficulty progress at just the right rate. I definitely had to try some of them multiple times before I succeeded, but it never got to the point where I though, damn this is too difficult. Plus, the levels are very repayable once you unlock them all. In some cases there are multiple strategies that can be successful, so winning with one strategy, leaves the level repayable with a different strategy. It also has a simple beauty, both with the graphics and the music, which blend together very nicely. Most games just don't seem very polished, this isn't one of them. Its obvious that while the game is pretty simple, a lot of time was spent on the small details.
While i'm reviewing games:
I also purchased the last humble indy bundle, but really only played one of the games, Penumbra, which was pretty good. The game itself had a fairly good story, and was quite entertaining. Enough so that I put up with the annoying controls for the few hours it took me to get through it. The remaining games, didn't really get me very excited and I didn't play any of them for more than a few minutes. If it wern't for the control suckage I might have purchased the next penumbra game.
The 6xxx are in theory more power friendly, which they are, except for the 5850 which has roughly the same performance/power ratio as the newer 6xxx cards.
I picked up one of the 5850's earlier this year for a small PC I was building because its performance/power ratio was far better than any of the other ATI/NVIDIA cards at the time. Nothing currently offered beats it by any significant margin in that regard.
BTW: ATI is just taking a page out of the Nvidia playbook in this regard. For years they just renamed the 8800, first to the 9800 then to the 250. Every time it seemed to get a little slower, but it was basically the same hardware with basically the same performance although it seemed to get a percent or two slower on a regular basis.
They need to quit spending so fucking much money. Start by immediately STOP sending foreign aid. Take care of home first. Cut the bureaucracy....the federal govt should not be one of the best paying largest employers in the nation. Raise the age of SS. Means test medicare, etc....
You sound like some kind of talking points memo.. Take a look at the government spending. Oh and don't include SS, cause its technically not part of the main budget and pays for itself (repeat after me, SS is a Ponzi scheme and pays for itself). See whats left? Oh yah baby those new $140B carriers are sexy as is the $388B for the not yet 100% functional F35s we are buying, or the ~1T we spent in Iraq. I will give you a clue, its our "defense"/military industrial complex, whatever you wish to call it. The best part is that if you look at a site like warresisters you might get convinced that almost our entire federal budget problems have one solution. Strangely, just about no one in politics brings this up, ever wonder why?
Basically, just like your personal budget, if your spending all your income on a house, you should seriously consider downgrading it so you can afford food. Cutting how much water you drink, after you already stopped taking showers, and flushing the toilet isn't going to solve anything. The federal budget has a lot of very useful programs everyone fights about, that in the end don't mean a damn thing cause they are so tiny.
After replacing the VGA connection between my PC and my LCD monitor with a DVI cable, I'd never remotely consider downgrading back to VGA.
Personally, I've been using DVI pretty much since I could afford a monitor with DVI. That said, if you saw that large of a difference between VGA and DVI, you were using crappy cables, monitors, video cards or over driving your setup. Generally, the most obvious problems were cables. For some reason people would buy a big expensive monitor and then use a crappy cable (it always seemed to me that the more you paid for a monitor the less likely it was to come with a cable), or a shitty extension. Its one thing to laugh at the people running audio on expensive cables, its quite another thing to attempt a few hundred Mhz of bandwidth over an 8 foot cable that cost $1. Lots of times, lowering the refresh from 120Hz or higher helps too. Back before CRT's explicitly disallowed "unsupported" resolutions, a lot of monitors would try to sync to anything you sent them, and people were more than happy to push a monitor to 160Hz cause "faster refresh=better" in most peoples minds.
Also, back in the day, a lot of people choose cards from manufactures like matrox because the image quality was better (BTW: early nvidia cards were absolute crap). So, you couldn't just assume that everything would look good, like you can today. With DVI LCD's if the monitor shows a picture its generally pretty good.
BTW: I buy the cheapest DVI/HDMI cables, and I've rarely had a problem. So in one regard DVI lowered my cable bills, but I doubt it (or HDMI in particular) does that for most people. I have a 8 port HDMI switch connected to a bunch of components with $.75 cent ebay cables, and a ~40' fry's cable ($30) going to the TV. Works fantastically, although I had a $3 cable that caused snow plugged into one of the switch ports. I laugh my ass off at the people paying $50 at worst buy for a 6' HDMI cable.
I really miss the vertical screen estate
I prefer 4x3 monitors, but you just need to select your monitors more carefully, and buy ones with stands that allow the monitors to rotate.
a 1920x1080 monitor rotated to 1080x1920 is pretty good for vertical real-estate. You may have to screw with cleartype if your running windows, but its well worth it. Of course I rotate my 4x3 1600x1200 monitors (at work) too, at home I found a irresistible set of 24" 1920x1200 IPS panels on ebay for $150 to replace my old 4x3's a couple years ago. The only thing wrong with the 24" widescreens is that they don't support HDCP (darn hu?). Its actually pretty good, because it reduces my temptation to get lazy and allow HDCP on my PC. Right now, I have an "alternate" method of HD content extraction that allows me to play blury's on my PC (and other stuff) without dealing with all the BS, or corrupting my signal path.
I think you got that backwards. PS/2 has a dedicated interrupt (aka you press a key the processor gets interrupted, you don't press a key nothing happens), USB is polled.
Yah, lets heard it for 1 step forward two steps back. But this seems to be common practice with a lot of recent hardware specs.
We used to have various other systems to find the IP address of a host that we knew was out there (Archie?)
Standard NIS, still shipped on nearly every unix/clone can serve/receive hosts files, and a tweak of the nsswitch.conf file can make it precede DNS.
I'm sure there are quite a few places I can say something that gets me arrested. The airport comes to mind, as does the local courthouse.
More electricity needed - debunked [futurepundit.com]. Here's the link to the original [ornl.gov] Oak Ridge Nation Laboratory Report (currently down).
That whole article is a neat piece of fantasy math. It makes the assumption that no-one will charge any of those cars during the day. Furthermore, from what I understand their estimates were based on something like a plug-in prius, where the majority of the energy continues to come from the gasoline engine.
Consider this, there are a _LOT_ of places in the US, that you cannot currently install instant hot-water heaters because the neighborhood the house is in is already running at capacity. Also, do you remember the fact that every couple of years some part of the country experiences blackouts due to weather (to hot/cold)? What happens when enough cars get plugged in during daylight hours to drive the average up 5% at 5PM?
The bottom line is that new power plants or power storage systems _WILL_ be required, but that won't be the primary problem. The problem with widespread use is going to be all the people trying to upgrade their 100A electric service to 200A or more. This will result in major expenses rewiring neighborhoods, and running high voltage power lines.