Re:Duron will eventually use Marketing Ploy
on
1.3GHz Duron Arrives
·
· Score: 1
If I remember correctly, I think the original Athlon came out a very short time after the G4 came out... the irony being that the Athlon smoked both the G4 and PIII of the time
Re:Duron will eventually use Marketing Ploy
on
1.3GHz Duron Arrives
·
· Score: 1
Didn't Apple get whacked when they tried to say their 500MHz G4s were "faster" than 1GHz PIIIs?
"optimized for Windows XP Home and Professional OSs". Could prove ugly in the not too distant future?
Probably not, AMD's target market for the Duron is primarily the home and corporate users who do not tend to upgrade on a regular basis. Quite a few of these users never even open up their cases! Corporate users in general have a great disincentive to upgrade existing machines, mainly because the time and effort put into them often translates into what could have been spent on a newer system.
With that in mind, most of the OEMs which put machines together based around the Duron will be installing XP Home or Professional on them, so I think it makes sense for AMD to target this market in this manner.
They should have done more COPS crossovers!
on
The End of The X-Files
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Arguably the funniest episode was the one they crossed over from COPS. The whole "BACK TO THE CAR! BACK TO THE CAR" line just did it for me:)
Consider taxes on your phone bill
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And if you think it's low cost, sorry. With all options turned off, no long distance, the most basic of basic service, I was still paying $40 a month. Which is nuts.
Taxes tend to add a lot to the cost of a phone bill. For example, down here near Philadelphia (on the PA side of the river), the phone book lists the going rate for an unlimited local calling phone line w/ touch tone for about $15 (or some other unbelievably low price). However, they don't mention the taxes, regulatory fees, bullshit fees, etc., etc. which really drive up that cost. My own real life story was when I had my own line in State College, PA. The base price of the line (unlimited local calling, etc.) was about $11 a month, but all the taxes and other government surcharges drove that up to about $18 a month.
But that was the middle of nowhere, I'm sure that where you are (in civilization) the base price of the phone line might be more (simply because people are willing to pay more, etc.), but you might want to look at the amount of money that taxes raise your bill.
New Jersey is a famously high-tax state. I wouldn't be surprised if they taxed the shit out of the phone bill.
I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!
That is not true, when demand for a product is high, that means people will be more willing to pay more for it, so if the supply stays constant, then the price will go up.
A good example of this occurs when any new halfway descent game console when it comes out. There is rarely enough supply to meet the demand, so as a result, people will spend hundreds more than the asking price of the console, e.g., people buying PS2s on Ebay for $1000 when they were initially released, etc.
When I left Penn State, that was already the case. Having either cable modem or DSL access has become an implicit requirement to rent an apartment there. Many apartment complexes which could not provide either (including my own, which was "served" by yet another worthless mom and pop cable company), were experiencing major losses in tenants because of the lack of broadband.
As I look for a new place in the Philadelphia area now, I am starting to see the beginnings of the same thing, many ads for real estate now include cable modem or DSL availability as features. If this trend continues, it will mean that buildings without broadband internet access may incur lower property values as a result.
In the Western suburbs of Philadelphia (mainly Chester County), unless you live near the center of town, DSL is nonexistant. As for cable modems, Comcast has been saying they will be ready "Real Soon Now" for the past 3 years.
As for the DSL, I claim that its mainly cheapness on the part of Verizon as for the reason we cannot get it. Verizon is a Fortune 10 company, and as a result, we could have DSL tomorrow if they were willing to set it up here. What surprises me is that this is a fairly rich part of Penna., meaning that any DSL upgrade for the phone company here would result in an immediate ROI. But oh well
As for the cable modems though, that is a different story, prior to Comcast's buying out of the previous mom and pop cable company, there was no hope of getting cable modems here (the original company was saying 2006). It seems though, based on more and more of my friends in the county who are getting cable modems, that their availability is slowly spreading. As for me, I am near the bottom of the list for it. Not much to complain about, just sitting here waiting for Comcast to get going and deliver it... real soon now... hehehe
Definitly true, no court order would be required in this case... I just thought it'd be an interesting (although moderately off-topic) story to point out.
This ruling also will most likely apply the "Evidence in Plain View" rule to the Internet... meaning that if you are caught doing something illegal online (analogous to being stopped for speeding and a cop sees a bag of pot in your passenger seat), that evidence may also be used against you.
But we know no one here does bad things like that!
In my mind the real question isn't about the keystroke recorder, but the fact that the govt. let them essentially break-in and secretly install it.
Interestingly, we (the USA) used the same tactic to steal classified information from the Soviets during the cold war. A (separate) camera was installed inside the Soviet embassy's photocopier which took pictures of every single document which went through the copier. A "service personnel" would then come and remove the film and the USA would immediately have perfect copies of numerous Soviet documents.
But back to the topic, the government would still need a court order to do these things, meaning they would have to convince a judge that an investigation would be imperiled if they did not do these things. My assumption is that this ruling would also extend to the exceptions granted the government to pursue a search without a warrent, as is allowed in "hot pursuits", "honest mistakes by the police", "evidence in plain view", etc.
This ruling means that they don't need to get a warant to sniff, just a court order.
I believe the two are synonymous. You have to go to a judge to get a warrent to perform any kind of search or seizure. I don't believe that this lowers the legal standard.
A job I had two years ago was shitcanned because the investors didn't like the R&D budget increase the president decided on!
I'm not sure of the age of your company, but I will infer from your post that it was one of those younger dot-coms. Please correct me if I am mistaken in this assumption.
In my own (admittingly short) business experience, shareholders typically don't like to pay for R&D (unless that is the company's primary revenue source, like a pharmaceutical company, etc.) mainly because it has the potential to become a sieve. One open-ended research project can easily baloon into a development quagmire, sucking up coders from all other parts of the company from paying projects (and thus costing more money), unless such projects are "nipped in the bud" early on.
Can't get the big servers till you have a profit; can't profit without the infrastructure. Sounds about right.:-)
Yup... that is exactly right! Until you make enough money to buy the high end server, you'll have to settle for the converted $300 e-machine (are they still even around?!)
I'm a firm believer in getting as much as you can up front, because upgrading is a real bitch
You're definitly correct about that. However, if you spend all your money in huge capital exspenditures, you take money away from other resources, such as development and product support, which can make you more money.
Unfortunately, in the world of business, there is no long-term strategy except to make a long streak of short-term profits. That is, without a good short term, there will be no long term. And that means its better to go easy on those huge capital expenditures, such as leather ez-chairs, the latest and greatest servers, computers, etc. until you are making a profit.:)
For a simple example, compare the C qsort with a C++ template Quicksort function...
Interesting comparison, I am wondering though, in many general purpose compilers, such as MSVC++, gcc, etc., aren't many of the built-in functions, such as qsort, etc, internally optimized (through whatever magic means needed, which would be outside the normal scope of what a programmer would do) so that they would automatically run more efficiently than anything that a programmer could write on their own?
"very bloated" is really incorrect nowadays for modern compilers for OO languages such as C++. This is a common misconception that old timer real-time and embedded programmers like to cling to whenever anybody mentions OO.
Not quite. The reason my statement about compiled code being very bloated, especially on embedded systems, is because there are numerous embedded CPUs for which you can develop software, and good-quality compilers for each of these chips (yes, you need a compiler for each individual chip!) are only now beginning to enter the fray.
Many of these compilers do not take advantage of many of the obscure but highly efficient CPU instructions which can truly optimize the machine code. Additionally, speed is not necessarily the only objective for which a coder would wish to optimize. In the embedded world, other factors such as minimal code size, power consumption and memory consumption, among other things, often take precedence over speed.
So hence, many programmers still prefer to use hand-coded assembly for these types of systems.
OOP is much faster, allowing you to re-use much code to deal with things in a similar way when they can be and use the specifics only when needed.
OOP tends to produce very bloated machine code though. In some mission critical real time systems, or on embedded systems in which there are siginificant resource limits, this may not be a good programming tactic. Yes, it reduces development time, but it tends to increase execution time.
But its sure saved my ass on numerous occaisions! Because of OOP, many of my non-trivial programs "practically write themselves!"
If you want port 80 open, you have to shell out for a leased line of some sort. Apparently they don't want their T1 customers switching to DSL and sending a smaller check every month.
Hehehe... imagine that!
Oh well, it just goes to show if you want your website to be taken seriously, get some real hosting. types into their browser http://www.amazon.com:81 ! Or could you imagine a radio ad saying: www dot amazon dot com colon eighty one? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, I think the original Athlon came out a very short time after the G4 came out... the irony being that the Athlon smoked both the G4 and PIII of the time
Didn't Apple get whacked when they tried to say their 500MHz G4s were "faster" than 1GHz PIIIs?
Dell's case screws are probably XP compliant. ugh.
That reminds of the "Windows 95 Compatible" surge protectors I used to see in the stores awhile back :)
"optimized for Windows XP Home and Professional OSs". Could prove ugly in the not too distant future?
Probably not, AMD's target market for the Duron is primarily the home and corporate users who do not tend to upgrade on a regular basis. Quite a few of these users never even open up their cases! Corporate users in general have a great disincentive to upgrade existing machines, mainly because the time and effort put into them often translates into what could have been spent on a newer system.
With that in mind, most of the OEMs which put machines together based around the Duron will be installing XP Home or Professional on them, so I think it makes sense for AMD to target this market in this manner.
Lucasfilm has made them even more powerful than they could ever have imagined.
Yea... but it looks like Lucasfilm slipped and fell into the bottomless pit while they were telling these guys "Who's your daddy!"
The T&A alone makes SU2 worth watching :)
Arguably the funniest episode was the one they crossed over from COPS. The whole "BACK TO THE CAR! BACK TO THE CAR" line just did it for me :)
And if you think it's low cost, sorry. With all options turned off, no long distance, the most basic of basic service, I was still paying $40 a month. Which is nuts.
Taxes tend to add a lot to the cost of a phone bill. For example, down here near Philadelphia (on the PA side of the river), the phone book lists the going rate for an unlimited local calling phone line w/ touch tone for about $15 (or some other unbelievably low price). However, they don't mention the taxes, regulatory fees, bullshit fees, etc., etc. which really drive up that cost. My own real life story was when I had my own line in State College, PA. The base price of the line (unlimited local calling, etc.) was about $11 a month, but all the taxes and other government surcharges drove that up to about $18 a month.
But that was the middle of nowhere, I'm sure that where you are (in civilization) the base price of the phone line might be more (simply because people are willing to pay more, etc.), but you might want to look at the amount of money that taxes raise your bill.
New Jersey is a famously high-tax state. I wouldn't be surprised if they taxed the shit out of the phone bill.
I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!
That is not true, when demand for a product is high, that means people will be more willing to pay more for it, so if the supply stays constant, then the price will go up.
A good example of this occurs when any new halfway descent game console when it comes out. There is rarely enough supply to meet the demand, so as a result, people will spend hundreds more than the asking price of the console, e.g., people buying PS2s on Ebay for $1000 when they were initially released, etc.
Maybe Algore should have hired Microsoft to run his campaign :)
I also heard that Microsoft will manage Argentina's next election!
When I left Penn State, that was already the case. Having either cable modem or DSL access has become an implicit requirement to rent an apartment there. Many apartment complexes which could not provide either (including my own, which was "served" by yet another worthless mom and pop cable company), were experiencing major losses in tenants because of the lack of broadband.
As I look for a new place in the Philadelphia area now, I am starting to see the beginnings of the same thing, many ads for real estate now include cable modem or DSL availability as features. If this trend continues, it will mean that buildings without broadband internet access may incur lower property values as a result.
In the Western suburbs of Philadelphia (mainly Chester County), unless you live near the center of town, DSL is nonexistant. As for cable modems, Comcast has been saying they will be ready "Real Soon Now" for the past 3 years.
As for the DSL, I claim that its mainly cheapness on the part of Verizon as for the reason we cannot get it. Verizon is a Fortune 10 company, and as a result, we could have DSL tomorrow if they were willing to set it up here. What surprises me is that this is a fairly rich part of Penna., meaning that any DSL upgrade for the phone company here would result in an immediate ROI. But oh well
As for the cable modems though, that is a different story, prior to Comcast's buying out of the previous mom and pop cable company, there was no hope of getting cable modems here (the original company was saying 2006). It seems though, based on more and more of my friends in the county who are getting cable modems, that their availability is slowly spreading. As for me, I am near the bottom of the list for it. Not much to complain about, just sitting here waiting for Comcast to get going and deliver it... real soon now... hehehe
Definitly true, no court order would be required in this case... I just thought it'd be an interesting (although moderately off-topic) story to point out.
This ruling also will most likely apply the "Evidence in Plain View" rule to the Internet... meaning that if you are caught doing something illegal online (analogous to being stopped for speeding and a cop sees a bag of pot in your passenger seat), that evidence may also be used against you.
But we know no one here does bad things like that!
In my mind the real question isn't about the keystroke recorder, but the fact that the govt. let them essentially break-in and secretly install it.
Interestingly, we (the USA) used the same tactic to steal classified information from the Soviets during the cold war. A (separate) camera was installed inside the Soviet embassy's photocopier which took pictures of every single document which went through the copier. A "service personnel" would then come and remove the film and the USA would immediately have perfect copies of numerous Soviet documents.
But back to the topic, the government would still need a court order to do these things, meaning they would have to convince a judge that an investigation would be imperiled if they did not do these things. My assumption is that this ruling would also extend to the exceptions granted the government to pursue a search without a warrent, as is allowed in "hot pursuits", "honest mistakes by the police", "evidence in plain view", etc.
This ruling means that they don't need to get a warant to sniff, just a court order.
I believe the two are synonymous. You have to go to a judge to get a warrent to perform any kind of search or seizure. I don't believe that this lowers the legal standard.
The company was spun off from it's parent sometime during the 80's, as I recall.
Goes to show that bad business decisions are not just the hallmark of the dot-bombs :)
A job I had two years ago was shitcanned because the investors didn't like the R&D budget increase the president decided on!
I'm not sure of the age of your company, but I will infer from your post that it was one of those younger dot-coms. Please correct me if I am mistaken in this assumption.
In my own (admittingly short) business experience, shareholders typically don't like to pay for R&D (unless that is the company's primary revenue source, like a pharmaceutical company, etc.) mainly because it has the potential to become a sieve. One open-ended research project can easily baloon into a development quagmire, sucking up coders from all other parts of the company from paying projects (and thus costing more money), unless such projects are "nipped in the bud" early on.
Can't get the big servers till you have a profit; can't profit without the infrastructure. Sounds about right. :-)
Yup... that is exactly right! Until you make enough money to buy the high end server, you'll have to settle for the converted $300 e-machine (are they still even around?!)
I'm a firm believer in getting as much as you can up front, because upgrading is a real bitch
You're definitly correct about that. However, if you spend all your money in huge capital exspenditures, you take money away from other resources, such as development and product support, which can make you more money.
Unfortunately, in the world of business, there is no long-term strategy except to make a long streak of short-term profits. That is, without a good short term, there will be no long term. And that means its better to go easy on those huge capital expenditures, such as leather ez-chairs, the latest and greatest servers, computers, etc. until you are making a profit. :)
(A .com in my building "moved out" just before Xmas - 100s of Herman Millers went into the rent-a-truck. Glad I wasn't an investor.)
This shows the real reason why the .coms failed... they spent more money than they made! Its the only rule of business you need to know!
For a simple example, compare the C qsort with a C++ template Quicksort function...
Interesting comparison, I am wondering though, in many general purpose compilers, such as MSVC++, gcc, etc., aren't many of the built-in functions, such as qsort, etc, internally optimized (through whatever magic means needed, which would be outside the normal scope of what a programmer would do) so that they would automatically run more efficiently than anything that a programmer could write on their own?
"very bloated" is really incorrect nowadays for modern compilers for OO languages such as C++. This is a common misconception that old timer real-time and embedded programmers like to cling to whenever anybody mentions OO.
Not quite. The reason my statement about compiled code being very bloated, especially on embedded systems, is because there are numerous embedded CPUs for which you can develop software, and good-quality compilers for each of these chips (yes, you need a compiler for each individual chip!) are only now beginning to enter the fray.
Many of these compilers do not take advantage of many of the obscure but highly efficient CPU instructions which can truly optimize the machine code. Additionally, speed is not necessarily the only objective for which a coder would wish to optimize. In the embedded world, other factors such as minimal code size, power consumption and memory consumption, among other things, often take precedence over speed.
So hence, many programmers still prefer to use hand-coded assembly for these types of systems.
OOP is much faster, allowing you to re-use much code to deal with things in a similar way when they can be and use the specifics only when needed.
OOP tends to produce very bloated machine code though. In some mission critical real time systems, or on embedded systems in which there are siginificant resource limits, this may not be a good programming tactic. Yes, it reduces development time, but it tends to increase execution time.
But its sure saved my ass on numerous occaisions! Because of OOP, many of my non-trivial programs "practically write themselves!"
If you want port 80 open, you have to shell out for a leased line of some sort. Apparently they don't want their T1 customers switching to DSL and sending a smaller check every month.
Hehehe... imagine that!
Oh well, it just goes to show if you want your website to be taken seriously, get some real hosting. types into their browser http://www.amazon.com:81 ! Or could you imagine a radio ad saying: www dot amazon dot com colon eighty one? I think not.