Our political system has certain mathematical and social properties that ensure the success of only two parties at a time. As far as presidential elections go, those parties have been the Democrats and the Republicans since the 1850's. So yea - he's only been excluded from half the parties.
Using criteria such as whether the candidate was recognized in the national news media
Wait a second... not only do the media have massive power to influence how people vote - their approval is also are one of the criteria used to decide if a candidate is allowed to run at all? WTF?
Why does anyone bother to vote at all? It would be faster to just let the media companies nominate our public officials directly.
Fast computers today are parallel, serial systems aren't an option. Further, they're getting more parallel rather than less.
Contrary to popular FUD, almost all programs can be usefully parallelized.
Sure, a serial system with the computational power would be nicer - but that's really irrelevant in a world where the fastest/cheapest serial processor available comes with three, seven, or fifteen free copies of itself attached.
I never, not once, got the sense that the citizens were running around informing to the SS troops about what their grandmother said the other day, or whatever.
Yea. It turns out that that oppression technique has been popularized so much that it's not economical to use it at the moment - it's like wearing a big "we're evil fascists" sign. Unfortunately, bad guys are sometimes smart enough to not wear black hats.
The desktop that they're showing in the screenshots (Enlightenment + Some File Manager + Some Dock App) is as full featured as any common desktop system today, and it should be able to compete at bling as well. Going with XFCE probably would have been better-integrated, but to noob users this system will look as good as a Mac (and thus *look* better than Vista).
We have had about 40 years of practice getting one processing unit to pretend to be n, and we're pretty good at it now.
We've also had decades of practice solving problems using multiple processing units. In fact, for the sort of problems that today's processors can just barely handle (i.e. those problems that processing power is still an issue on) we've had *more* practice solving them on compute arrays than we have solving them on single processors.
That's true, but the algorithms / program designs that work great with a hundred cores work like crap on one or two cores. Personally, I expect to see video games designed to be truly concurrent just as soon as low-end gamers have quad core machines (and high-end gamers have 32-thread systems).
Cores only help so much- if your problem is not paralelizable, or if it is only minimally so, a billion cores won't help.
This is true.
Here's the thing: Every one of the applications that people commonly run on a desktop PC can be parallelized.
The real problem is that programmers who are used to single-thread designs cringe when they see the parallel version. Not only is it moderately more complex, but to generalize to many cores a design frequently entails a 10% to 50% performance penalty compared to the single-threaded version. That means that the code that runs four times as fast on an 8 core processor may only run half as fast on a single core, and may see no performance gain at all on a dual core.
So the problem isn't that word processors and video games can't be parallelized, it's that there seems to be no advantage to writing solid parallel code that runs best on 8+ core machines when most people are just moving from single to dual core.
This is only talking about a 20% clockspeed jump over a current overclocked workstation platform. Sure, that won't translate into a 20% performance jump overall, but it'll still be a performance jump. I'm not really up for spending an extra $1000 for an 8% framerate increase, but for those people who like that plan this is a perfectly reasonable product. Further, it sets the bar higher for future products - and as a technology enthusiast I can always get behind rasing the bar.
Well... AFD isn't great, but in the absence of a better system it works OK.
Here's a better system:
Is it spam?
Yes -- Create a new revision blanking the page and lock it that way for a week.
No --
-- Is it notable?
-- Yes -- Do nothing.
-- No -- Put up a "not notable, you can move this article and re-use the name" notice at the top of the page.
I've had real jobs at real companies, and I've really managed to avoid dealing with Microsoft Office to any significant extent in the process. In the real world, people can read PDFs. In the real world, you can get actual people to download and install OpenOffice because it's $0 and takes them a couple minutes - and then they're usually overjoyed to find out that Microsoft's monopoly is incomplete.
It's only bureaucrats with degrees in stapler management and paperclip accounting who actually insist on Microsoft Office for everything - at least in the real world.
Everyone reads it. It was originally developed for interoperability.
RTF has *never* been an interoperable document format. There may have been a simple version of it once, but that version is now lost to antiquity and buried under mounds of incompatible proprietary extensions. Hell, even Microsoft Word 97 format is probably more compatible than RTF.
Apple and Microsoft have both tried to confuse the issue by presenting RTF as a compatible document format, but for what the subset of RTF that actually is compatible provides you might as well just save as HTML.
Noise level is one of the factors that you need to consider in selecting / constructing a gaming machine. If you're really paranoid about it, go for water cooling. If not, check some reviews and buy the card that gets "it's really quiet" comments.
For that matter, if you're going to buy a $600 high end PC video card, why not buy a PS3 for less money instead.
For that matter, if you're going to buy a Mac Truck why not buy a top of the line BMW instead? The BMW is cheaper.
People buy different products because they are different. Although the PS3 brings console gaming closer to PC gaming than ever before, it's still a console, and PC gaming still has all of its traditional advantages.
The market of the past nine months (before the Radeon 2900 Pro or the GeForce 8800 GT were released) was really odd compared to the market for the past 5 or 6 years in that there was no "mid-range" card in it at all. The 8800 GTS and Radeon HD 2900 XT were both priced as high end cards and had the appropriate specs to fill that role. The 8800 GTX was in the ultra-high-end bracket (which isn't anything new). The 8600 GTS is an overclocked entry-level card.
It really depends what graphics quality "fine" is, and how recent your "most games" are.
The graphical difference between 1024x768 0xAA and 1600x1200 4xAA is *huge*. Sure, some people say that they don't care, but most of them are lying - they're just too busy pinching pennies to accept the fact that any aesthetic difference could be worth $100.
Similarly, the processing load demanded for, say, Half Life 2 versus Crysis is pretty big.
Combining those two issues gets you the difference between a $50 graphics card and a $500 graphics card. You can save $450 by waiting a couple years, but you also don't get to enjoy the pretty new game while people are still talking about it.
The $50 card you bought a year ago is about as powerful as a mid-range card from three years ago - which is exactly what Source engine games were designed for. Recent games, (even HL2 ep2 probably) will need a better card for good performance.
This is false. The price brackets for video cards have stayed the same for almost 10 years now - $120 entry level, $200+ mid range gaming, $350+ high end. If anything, the "low end" $30 - $70 price point is a relatively recent development that makes video cards seem cheaper. I'm damn sure that's how it was 5 years ago (in late 2002), because I bought a new card then and looked at the market.
Is it really even worth playing the game on Lowest? Wouldn't it be more fun to play some HL2 Episode 2 and maybe some Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and wait a year or so until you're willing to buy a rig that will play Crysis in all it's glory?
Why not go SLi with another of your current cards?
Because that plan has never actually worked. One next-generation card has always been faster than two previous-generation cards in SLI. He'll save $50, overload his power supply, and his computer will sound like a helicopter taking off. Bad deal.
The real question is this: How much more performance will he actually get on Crysis? The 8800 GT is fast, but if he's complaining about "10 fps" with his old high-end card, my guess is that he'll crank the settings way too high with his new card too.
Show me a video card that is sub 3-digit in price. No way am I going to spend $200 on a video card.
Show me a new car that's less than 5 digits in price. No way am I going to spend $15000 on a new car.
Show me an appartment in boston that's less than 4-digits/month in price. No way am I going to spend $1400/month on an apartment.
Sorry... things cost what they cost. You can cut corners, but you won't end up with the same thing that you would have gotten had you been willing to simply pay for it. PC gaming may not be your thing - but that doesn't mean that $250 isn't a reasonable price for a new gaming video card.
Being an early adopter isn't a stupid purchasing decision. The only stupid part is failing to realize that all you're buying is a reasonably small amount of time - normally months, sometimes less. If spending $200 to get a certain level of performance three months in advance sounds like a bad deal to you - just don't do it. For some of us, we're intentionally willing to make that trade.
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Our political system has certain mathematical and social properties that ensure the success of only two parties at a time. As far as presidential elections go, those parties have been the Democrats and the Republicans since the 1850's. So yea - he's only been excluded from half the parties.
Wait a second... not only do the media have massive power to influence how people vote - their approval is also are one of the criteria used to decide if a candidate is allowed to run at all? WTF?
Why does anyone bother to vote at all? It would be faster to just let the media companies nominate our public officials directly.
Not at all. The point is this:
Sure, a serial system with the computational power would be nicer - but that's really irrelevant in a world where the fastest/cheapest serial processor available comes with three, seven, or fifteen free copies of itself attached.
Yea. It turns out that that oppression technique has been popularized so much that it's not economical to use it at the moment - it's like wearing a big "we're evil fascists" sign. Unfortunately, bad guys are sometimes smart enough to not wear black hats.
Wait, what?
The desktop that they're showing in the screenshots (Enlightenment + Some File Manager + Some Dock App) is as full featured as any common desktop system today, and it should be able to compete at bling as well. Going with XFCE probably would have been better-integrated, but to noob users this system will look as good as a Mac (and thus *look* better than Vista).
Spending $100 for a 512 meg RAM upgrade is just dumb - even with OEM Vista Home Basic. For $100 you should be swapping in 2 gigs or more.
That's not a problem. That's the first step to any hope of accomplishing anything useful politically in the USA.
We've also had decades of practice solving problems using multiple processing units. In fact, for the sort of problems that today's processors can just barely handle (i.e. those problems that processing power is still an issue on) we've had *more* practice solving them on compute arrays than we have solving them on single processors.
That's true, but the algorithms / program designs that work great with a hundred cores work like crap on one or two cores. Personally, I expect to see video games designed to be truly concurrent just as soon as low-end gamers have quad core machines (and high-end gamers have 32-thread systems).
This is true.
Here's the thing: Every one of the applications that people commonly run on a desktop PC can be parallelized.
The real problem is that programmers who are used to single-thread designs cringe when they see the parallel version. Not only is it moderately more complex, but to generalize to many cores a design frequently entails a 10% to 50% performance penalty compared to the single-threaded version. That means that the code that runs four times as fast on an 8 core processor may only run half as fast on a single core, and may see no performance gain at all on a dual core.
So the problem isn't that word processors and video games can't be parallelized, it's that there seems to be no advantage to writing solid parallel code that runs best on 8+ core machines when most people are just moving from single to dual core.
This is only talking about a 20% clockspeed jump over a current overclocked workstation platform. Sure, that won't translate into a 20% performance jump overall, but it'll still be a performance jump. I'm not really up for spending an extra $1000 for an 8% framerate increase, but for those people who like that plan this is a perfectly reasonable product. Further, it sets the bar higher for future products - and as a technology enthusiast I can always get behind rasing the bar.
Here's a better system:
Is it spam?
Yes -- Create a new revision blanking the page and lock it that way for a week.
No --
-- Is it notable?
-- Yes -- Do nothing.
-- No -- Put up a "not notable, you can move this article and re-use the name" notice at the top of the page.
I've had real jobs at real companies, and I've really managed to avoid dealing with Microsoft Office to any significant extent in the process. In the real world, people can read PDFs. In the real world, you can get actual people to download and install OpenOffice because it's $0 and takes them a couple minutes - and then they're usually overjoyed to find out that Microsoft's monopoly is incomplete.
It's only bureaucrats with degrees in stapler management and paperclip accounting who actually insist on Microsoft Office for everything - at least in the real world.
RTF has *never* been an interoperable document format. There may have been a simple version of it once, but that version is now lost to antiquity and buried under mounds of incompatible proprietary extensions. Hell, even Microsoft Word 97 format is probably more compatible than RTF.
Apple and Microsoft have both tried to confuse the issue by presenting RTF as a compatible document format, but for what the subset of RTF that actually is compatible provides you might as well just save as HTML.
Noise level is one of the factors that you need to consider in selecting / constructing a gaming machine. If you're really paranoid about it, go for water cooling. If not, check some reviews and buy the card that gets "it's really quiet" comments.
So... why don't they release a (traditional twitchtastic) X-Wing title?
For that matter, if you're going to buy a Mac Truck why not buy a top of the line BMW instead? The BMW is cheaper.
People buy different products because they are different. Although the PS3 brings console gaming closer to PC gaming than ever before, it's still a console, and PC gaming still has all of its traditional advantages.
The market of the past nine months (before the Radeon 2900 Pro or the GeForce 8800 GT were released) was really odd compared to the market for the past 5 or 6 years in that there was no "mid-range" card in it at all. The 8800 GTS and Radeon HD 2900 XT were both priced as high end cards and had the appropriate specs to fill that role. The 8800 GTX was in the ultra-high-end bracket (which isn't anything new). The 8600 GTS is an overclocked entry-level card.
It really depends what graphics quality "fine" is, and how recent your "most games" are.
The graphical difference between 1024x768 0xAA and 1600x1200 4xAA is *huge*. Sure, some people say that they don't care, but most of them are lying - they're just too busy pinching pennies to accept the fact that any aesthetic difference could be worth $100.
Similarly, the processing load demanded for, say, Half Life 2 versus Crysis is pretty big.
Combining those two issues gets you the difference between a $50 graphics card and a $500 graphics card. You can save $450 by waiting a couple years, but you also don't get to enjoy the pretty new game while people are still talking about it.
The $50 card you bought a year ago is about as powerful as a mid-range card from three years ago - which is exactly what Source engine games were designed for. Recent games, (even HL2 ep2 probably) will need a better card for good performance.
This is false. The price brackets for video cards have stayed the same for almost 10 years now - $120 entry level, $200+ mid range gaming, $350+ high end. If anything, the "low end" $30 - $70 price point is a relatively recent development that makes video cards seem cheaper. I'm damn sure that's how it was 5 years ago (in late 2002), because I bought a new card then and looked at the market.
Is it really even worth playing the game on Lowest? Wouldn't it be more fun to play some HL2 Episode 2 and maybe some Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and wait a year or so until you're willing to buy a rig that will play Crysis in all it's glory?
Because that plan has never actually worked. One next-generation card has always been faster than two previous-generation cards in SLI. He'll save $50, overload his power supply, and his computer will sound like a helicopter taking off. Bad deal.
The real question is this: How much more performance will he actually get on Crysis? The 8800 GT is fast, but if he's complaining about "10 fps" with his old high-end card, my guess is that he'll crank the settings way too high with his new card too.
Show me a new car that's less than 5 digits in price. No way am I going to spend $15000 on a new car.
Show me an appartment in boston that's less than 4-digits/month in price. No way am I going to spend $1400/month on an apartment.
Sorry... things cost what they cost. You can cut corners, but you won't end up with the same thing that you would have gotten had you been willing to simply pay for it. PC gaming may not be your thing - but that doesn't mean that $250 isn't a reasonable price for a new gaming video card.
Being an early adopter isn't a stupid purchasing decision. The only stupid part is failing to realize that all you're buying is a reasonably small amount of time - normally months, sometimes less. If spending $200 to get a certain level of performance three months in advance sounds like a bad deal to you - just don't do it. For some of us, we're intentionally willing to make that trade.