There is usually some kind of balance between luck and skill. Some people won't play pure skill games. Almost no one will play pure luck games, except for money.
This is an interesting point I'd like to underscore. There are pure-skill games like Pente that I enjoy a lot, but the trouble with pure-skill games is that a better player virtually always beats a lesser player, making the game seem somewhat futile for the latter. If rank amateurs can win perhaps one in four or five games by luck, then it will be more fun for them.
Yes, clock for clock it outperforms, but that's not surprising as there are few modern processors that do less per clock than a Pentium. They survive on stratospheric clock rates.
Too bad about the memory size. Hopefully, you have a good upgrade path to hardware that lets you get past the 4GB mark.
Ok, so you're reduced to a 32-bit physical memory space, so you think you could have used a Pentium. Take solace that (a) the Opteron has twice as many registers as the Xeon, (b) it has a 128k L1 cache (versus around 32k for Xeon), and (c) assuming you have a 2-way SMP, you have more memory bandwidth than a Xeon.
I'd be surprised if your machine doesn't outperform a similarly-priced Pentium box, even with only 4GB of ram. (Wow, did I just say "only 4GB of ram"??)
He's not talking about slashdot. Take another look.
Re:Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torre
on
3D Modelling From a Sketch
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe people who post 48MB files on their website should smarten up and use Bittorrent themselves. Even if they don't get slashdotted, it's a wise move if they expect more than a few people to want the file.
You probably know this already, but the problem you describe could be because your code is not strictly ANSI-compliant (ie. it makes use of undefined behaviour). So it may not necessarily be the compiler's fault.
So imagine if people had to resort to making films for the love of the art. Boy that would suck.
You don't see a lot of painters whining that they need to recoup the cost of their paints and canvas on each and every piece. I write software, and I get paid for it, but you can bet I would still be doing it even if I weren't paid, and I wouldn't support laws to imprison people who pirate my software based on the claim that I need to recoup the cost of my computer. I do it because I love to find elegant solutions to interesting problems, and for the most part, the software written by people who don't feel this way isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Ever took an Early 90's software and run it on today's machine? The software back then was just as functional, runs screamingly fast on low end machines today, and ran in 1MB.
I agree for the most part. It's a bit nostalgic to say the software was just as functional, but I agree that the system requirements seem to have grown much faster than the functionality.
"I don't understand why people would need more than 4gb..." (Bill Gates in an interview on 64 bit ccomputing, in which he said he didn't understand peoples' interest in it)
I've heard some dumb quotes attributed to Bill Gates, so I was skeptical that he said this, so I looked it up. Here is what he said:
But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology.
That's pretty short-sighted. As I write this, my biggest single process (Mozilla) is using 33MB. The last time I seriously used a machine with less than 33MB of physical RAM was about 6 years ago. Now I use a machine with 512MB of RAM, so if my single-process RAM needs continue grow at the same rate as the RAM in my work machines, I will need 2GB processes within 10 years. That means my largest processes will no longer fit in the 2GB limit Win32 places on a single process. 18 months later (about 10 years from now), they won't fit in 4GB, so barring any terrible segmentation schemes or other egregious hacks, they will be incompatible with any 32-bit architecture.
I think I have fairly modest RAM requirements---after all, my biggest process is Mozilla---so I can only imagine others will need 4GB processes before I will. So what does Mr Gates expect? That the industry should just sit and wait until a customer asks for a 64-bit machine, and then start developing them?
Sorry for the off-topic post. I was afraid the parent article had somehow hacked the URL to do something nasty with a person's Slashdot account when they clicked. Turns out it was pure coincidence.
Your receipt cannot be decoded by anyone,
or otherwise linked to your vote, except by
decrypting with (or breaking) all the secret
keys of which each trustee has its own.
I don't think this is sufficient. Brute-forcing a private key is only a matter of time. This is why truly secure systems need to change keys periodically. In contrast, my vote will be there for all to see throughout eternity, encrypted with the same keys, so someone sufficiently patient and determined will eventually discover my vote.
Moreover, imagine some scandal occurs whereby all the keys are made public. Perhaps the Voting Trustee's Union doesn't like their benefits package, and so threatens to reveal all the keys. With this scheme, every voter's privacy in every vote could be held ransomed indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad about the memory size. Hopefully, you have a good upgrade path to hardware that lets you get past the 4GB mark.
I'd be surprised if your machine doesn't outperform a similarly-priced Pentium box, even with only 4GB of ram. (Wow, did I just say "only 4GB of ram"??)
I was thinking the same thing. I wonder if the experiment would still work if the animals were unconscious.
He's not talking about slashdot. Take another look.
Maybe people who post 48MB files on their website should smarten up and use Bittorrent themselves. Even if they don't get slashdotted, it's a wise move if they expect more than a few people to want the file.
I second this. It's my all-time favourite video game, and it will scream on the hardware this guy has.
You probably know this already, but the problem you describe could be because your code is not strictly ANSI-compliant (ie. it makes use of undefined behaviour). So it may not necessarily be the compiler's fault.
Well said.
You are 27 minutes late my friend.
You don't see a lot of painters whining that they need to recoup the cost of their paints and canvas on each and every piece. I write software, and I get paid for it, but you can bet I would still be doing it even if I weren't paid, and I wouldn't support laws to imprison people who pirate my software based on the claim that I need to recoup the cost of my computer. I do it because I love to find elegant solutions to interesting problems, and for the most part, the software written by people who don't feel this way isn't worth the paper it's written on.
I think I have fairly modest RAM requirements---after all, my biggest process is Mozilla---so I can only imagine others will need 4GB processes before I will. So what does Mr Gates expect? That the industry should just sit and wait until a customer asks for a 64-bit machine, and then start developing them?
You'd have more if you bought one of these.
Sorry for the off-topic post. I was afraid the parent article had somehow hacked the URL to do something nasty with a person's Slashdot account when they clicked. Turns out it was pure coincidence.
That "whoosh" sound you just heard is a joke going over your head.
Uh, does that url really have "42270" in it, or is my browser lying to me? That's my Slashdot user ID.
We need a new Slashdot category for "Predictions of the End of Moore's Law".
Moreover, imagine some scandal occurs whereby all the keys are made public. Perhaps the Voting Trustee's Union doesn't like their benefits package, and so threatens to reveal all the keys. With this scheme, every voter's privacy in every vote could be held ransomed indefinitely.
You mean when you boot up the latest KDE, you get a splash screen that looks like the Xerox Alto?
Don't you mean a 65mm wafer size? Oh wait, I'm thinking of another article.
Well, of all the people that accused me of not understanding the issues, you're the only one that appologized, so thank you. :-)