Well that too. But that doesn't change what I said. Once demand drops availability increases. That doesn't mean the price WILL change even though it SHOULD.
Tom
[N.B. I have no idea what AMD pricing plans are off the top of my head and I fully don't intend to speak on their behalf, I hate disclaimers...]
Prices wouldn't be high for AMD products if there wasn't demand. Trust me, there is a huge demand for Opterons. Think about it, Opterons and AMD64s are made in the same places...
Once demand for MCW shoots up you'll see AMD prices drop I suspect [*]
Tom
[* Personal hunch not affiliated with my employer...]
I meant that as an example of a place to setup shop. I've been to Ireland it's a neat place, certainly good pub/person quotient.
My point was you don't setup and depend on a shop in a place like India or such if they're not a stable enough region in terms of political, economical and academic senses.
I have yet to crash OpenOffice [and I'm talking v1 days] with a sufficiently large document [more than 200 pages].
I have crashed OpenOffice though. I've also crashed Office. But not due to document size. Usually I hit a formatting bug or something.
As for macros rendered live... I have yet to encounter a place where that is useful. If you want an interactive pretty presentation use XHTML and a CGI script. That's at least portable and doesn't require running things on the client computer.
Well there is two angles to the "anti-outsourcing jobs" thing.
Lou Dobbs Side: Americans are the only ones who should have decent paying jobs, that's the way God wants it.
Pragmatic Side: Most outsourced companies turn to shit because they hire just about anyone willing to work for low wages. Net result are shitty Engrish products that suck twice as hard as most natively built products.
The trick is to note there are many professional and smart people in the "outsourced nations". The problem is companies don't always target them. Specially since most of them move to the West anyways. What you get are the morons at call centres who delete your accounts for fun or otherwise just be bothersome.
Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."
I'm not saying smack about India [cuz frankly I've never been there] but if the region isn't ready for the business in terms of economic, academic and political stability then maybe it isn't wise to DEPEND on them for your business?
It's one thing to ADD to your team with developers from other nations, e.g. setup a firm in Ireland or HK or something. It's another alltogether to depend solely on foreign assets.
Frankly I like the idea of spreading jobs around the globe, but only if the recipients are actually qualified to do the job. And while I like beating up on the average lame india post [see comp.lang.c] I'm not foolish enough to think that North Americans are all that much better in that regard.
The problem is many fold but two such problems are
1. Lack of proper design, often caused by
a. Addition of new team members during product cycle who don't have a clue b. Retention of old team members [yet to be promoted] that don't have a clue c. Features added mid cycle
and
2. Poor implementation
a. Not all developers use the same coding style b. Most developers are not thorough enough to verify their code
Basically you have a poorly maintained product design being implemented by people who often don't have a lot of software experience. The result is code that "works" but isn't proper. It's not uncommon in large products to have scores of warnings in the compiled code that go unnoticed so long as the code passes the CURRENT regression testing suite.
It isn't something wrong with the C or C++ compilers or for the most part with OSes in general. It's just that you mix trying to profit as much as possible with trying to make software and this is what you get as a result.
It's the same with all greedy engineering where you get sloppy work that ends up costing more in the long run. Only difference is in the physical world if you poorly engineer a building or bridge or plane or... you can get imprisoned for it. If you put together shit software you just release a patchset and pretend it never happened.
I've never known Microsoft to allow any arbitrary Office user to phone them up...
You're not going to need the pre-written macro code which is everywhere for Office,
If I wanted to script my documents, I'd use LaTeX and do it properly.
you don't need the excellent VBA IDE,
??? What is that?
you don't need the excellent documentation,
I've found that most of their documentation doesn't cover odd corner cases, that "clippy" is useless and trial and error is usually the best way to go with either suite.
As to the rest... the fact that others don't use it is self-serving. That's not a feature of Office, it's a result of the monopoly MSFT tries to establish. As for not matching the GUI, speak for yourself. It fits in just fine on my Gnome desktop.
And again for the Macros. Dude, go teach yourself LaTeX. That's how you script a proper document.
There are a lot of other goodies behind HT3.0. I dunno how many are public so I won't say. But just say "speed isn't the only improvement".
There is no reason why Intel hasn't chosen to do their own HT "like" network. Other than they would have to aboutface on yet another Intel "truth". That the FSB [with their uber overclocked goodness] is the way to go.
Yeah, well you have to look at the audience... You got mostly white males in the ages of 16-24. They think they know everything about anything and therefore can easily feel comfortable shooting off about entire peoples they have never met. The fact that they're american doesn't help either:-)
On the flipside some of the stereotypes and comments are well deserved. I mean, read comp.lang.c for a week. You'll get a lot of "I have to write this program and I don't have the first damn clue" types of posts, amazingly enough mostly from India. Look at phishing stats, they're mostly organized by people in Eastern block countries. That's not conjecture or hyperbole that's the truth. China does have a track record for more than just reverse engineering. Classic IP violations are more common than in other nations [although I wouldn't say it's epidemic like some people suggest].
So like all nonsense there is some element of truth to it.
And so is reverse engineering skype. I don't see why everyone is harping on China here. It's not like their the only country to do this.
It's just ignorant xenophobia that allows people to bad mouth an entire nation based on what are essentially standard operating practices anywhere else.
Yeah, that's all nice and all but when the colluders own 100% of the market it's hard to get in. You think there is only 8 dram manufacturers in the world? Hell no. You just haven't heard of the others.
The problem with price fixing is the same as with monopolies. It reduces your ability to choose competition. If company A and company B collude and sell otherwise identical products (e.g. they're not competing) and they sell them at the same price, they're effectively one company.
Also, price fixing usually also serves to divide markets. E.g. company A sells to the northeast, company B to the southeast, and so on. This happens less on the consumer end but much more on the OEM side.
I don't spend time on layout. That's the whole point of LaTeX.
Also, when you're working alone you are the layout guy. So you might as well do layout work when your mind hits a roadblock.
But not only that, sometimes you can't tell if your text is going to make the impact you want until you can see it. With an already typesetted text you can print it off, give it to friends, etc.
It's much better than handing them a stream of unformatted paragraphs. Otherwise, why aren't books just streams of unformatted paragraphs?
With HT switching you can easily have 100s, 1000s of processors on one topology. the other "nodes" are simply off a switch which then takes on the responsibility of knowing where memory is. That and HT is an open standard. Your northbridge controller is connected via HT.
There is nothing in the consumer market that exploits connectivity on the HT side but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist in custom shops and labs.
Hint: Conroe while better than Intels current offerings isn't really that much better than AMD offerings. Specially when you factor in the non-desktop uses (e.g. cluster computing where HT links still shine).
Conroe is a good product, hopefully a good design (won't be able to say for myself until I get one...) and will give AMD a run [in my personal opinion] but it won't break the mold and leap ahead of the competition in any sense.
Given where I work [and this post is not on behalf of my employer!!!] I don't view this as a good thing.
Sure Intel should be taken down a peg but competition is what will make technology not only efficient but RELEVANT. If only one supplier makes all the processors on Earth they can stagnate and not improve things. That's bad.
If anything Intel motivates AMD, just as AMD motivates Intel. [without going into too much details]. Hopefully, if this report is true it's not the tip of the iceberg but just adjustments to marketshare.
I look forward to getting my MCW setup later this year, pitting it against my personal AMD gear and doing more LibTomCrypt benchmarks for years to come. Of course, if Intel hooked me up with that stuff for free that'd be nicer...hehehe
search-spam sucks bad. I'm tired of doing searches and finding 100s of useless links and "secondary search pages" with nothing but ads and other junk [spyware/adware].
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on, you don't like using out dated packages on a box you refuse to pay to upgrade? It's fun!!!
I get to use GCC 3.3.3 every day at work. It's simply a pure bundle of joy.
Tom
Well that too. But that doesn't change what I said. Once demand drops availability increases. That doesn't mean the price WILL change even though it SHOULD.
Tom
[N.B. I have no idea what AMD pricing plans are off the top of my head and I fully don't intend to speak on their behalf, I hate disclaimers...]
Prices wouldn't be high for AMD products if there wasn't demand. Trust me, there is a huge demand for Opterons. Think about it, Opterons and AMD64s are made in the same places...
Once demand for MCW shoots up you'll see AMD prices drop I suspect [*]
Tom
[* Personal hunch not affiliated with my employer...]
It's best to take this with a grain of salt.
...].
It depends on what you are doing whether or not Intel is better than AMD [or vice versa].
Getting 300fps in a game doesn't mean the cpu will be good for software development or as a server [e.g. Tomcat + Apache +
Also if you're into SMP or just multi-processing AMD is still the way to go. The HT links are such a performance boost over a FSB scheme.
So really it depends. Hopefully we'll see AMD pulling some rabits out of their hats. In the next year or so.
Tom
I meant that as an example of a place to setup shop. I've been to Ireland it's a neat place, certainly good pub/person quotient.
My point was you don't setup and depend on a shop in a place like India or such if they're not a stable enough region in terms of political, economical and academic senses.
Tom
I have yet to crash OpenOffice [and I'm talking v1 days] with a sufficiently large document [more than 200 pages].
... I have yet to encounter a place where that is useful. If you want an interactive pretty presentation use XHTML and a CGI script. That's at least portable and doesn't require running things on the client computer.
I have crashed OpenOffice though. I've also crashed Office. But not due to document size. Usually I hit a formatting bug or something.
As for macros rendered live
Tom
Anywhere in Manitoba or S'katwan would be fine I guess. Hard to bomb a wheat field. :-)
Tom
Well there is two angles to the "anti-outsourcing jobs" thing.
Lou Dobbs Side: Americans are the only ones who should have decent paying jobs, that's the way God wants it.
Pragmatic Side: Most outsourced companies turn to shit because they hire just about anyone willing to work for low wages. Net result are shitty Engrish products that suck twice as hard as most natively built products.
The trick is to note there are many professional and smart people in the "outsourced nations". The problem is companies don't always target them. Specially since most of them move to the West anyways. What you get are the morons at call centres who delete your accounts for fun or otherwise just be bothersome.
Tom
No, it raises a very good question.
Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."
I'm not saying smack about India [cuz frankly I've never been there] but if the region isn't ready for the business in terms of economic, academic and political stability then maybe it isn't wise to DEPEND on them for your business?
It's one thing to ADD to your team with developers from other nations, e.g. setup a firm in Ireland or HK or something. It's another alltogether to depend solely on foreign assets.
Frankly I like the idea of spreading jobs around the globe, but only if the recipients are actually qualified to do the job. And while I like beating up on the average lame india post [see comp.lang.c] I'm not foolish enough to think that North Americans are all that much better in that regard.
Tom
The problem is many fold but two such problems are
... you can get imprisoned for it. If you put together shit software you just release a patchset and pretend it never happened.
1. Lack of proper design, often caused by
a. Addition of new team members during product cycle who don't have a clue
b. Retention of old team members [yet to be promoted] that don't have a clue
c. Features added mid cycle
and
2. Poor implementation
a. Not all developers use the same coding style
b. Most developers are not thorough enough to verify their code
Basically you have a poorly maintained product design being implemented by people who often don't have a lot of software experience. The result is code that "works" but isn't proper. It's not uncommon in large products to have scores of warnings in the compiled code that go unnoticed so long as the code passes the CURRENT regression testing suite.
It isn't something wrong with the C or C++ compilers or for the most part with OSes in general. It's just that you mix trying to profit as much as possible with trying to make software and this is what you get as a result.
It's the same with all greedy engineering where you get sloppy work that ends up costing more in the long run. Only difference is in the physical world if you poorly engineer a building or bridge or plane or
Tom
you've got machines with RAM to spare,
... the fact that others don't use it is self-serving. That's not a feature of Office, it's a result of the monopoly MSFT tries to establish. As for not matching the GUI, speak for yourself. It fits in just fine on my Gnome desktop.
What? Office ain't light on ram either boy.
you're not going to need support,
I've never known Microsoft to allow any arbitrary Office user to phone them up...
You're not going to need the pre-written macro code which is everywhere for Office,
If I wanted to script my documents, I'd use LaTeX and do it properly.
you don't need the excellent VBA IDE,
??? What is that?
you don't need the excellent documentation,
I've found that most of their documentation doesn't cover odd corner cases, that "clippy" is useless and trial and error is usually the best way to go with either suite.
As to the rest
And again for the Macros. Dude, go teach yourself LaTeX. That's how you script a proper document.
Tom
Now I have an excuse for all those stupid sales presentations I've skipped. :-)
Tom
I'd wait until it's actully in hardware you can buy at the local computer store...
Tom
Apple: Overpriced crap
Dell: Limited selection
Maybe, just maybe, if companies stopped trying to be all exclusive and monopolistic people would appreciate their products.
That and it goes in cycles anyways. Once everyone gets their 2005 computer they're not likely to buy another overpriced monstrocity in 2006.
Tom
There are a lot of other goodies behind HT3.0. I dunno how many are public so I won't say. But just say "speed isn't the only improvement".
There is no reason why Intel hasn't chosen to do their own HT "like" network. Other than they would have to aboutface on yet another Intel "truth". That the FSB [with their uber overclocked goodness] is the way to go.
Tom
Yeah, well you have to look at the audience... You got mostly white males in the ages of 16-24. They think they know everything about anything and therefore can easily feel comfortable shooting off about entire peoples they have never met. The fact that they're american doesn't help either :-)
On the flipside some of the stereotypes and comments are well deserved. I mean, read comp.lang.c for a week. You'll get a lot of "I have to write this program and I don't have the first damn clue" types of posts, amazingly enough mostly from India. Look at phishing stats, they're mostly organized by people in Eastern block countries. That's not conjecture or hyperbole that's the truth. China does have a track record for more than just reverse engineering. Classic IP violations are more common than in other nations [although I wouldn't say it's epidemic like some people suggest].
So like all nonsense there is some element of truth to it.
Tom
Yeah, my original reply was to the troll who basically said that the chinese are a bunch of thiefs and that this was immoral.
I was pointing out that in the 80s the PC revolution was ONLY made possible because of this. And that happened in the USA.
Personally I don't give two shits about the chinese one way or another but if you're going to hate, then hate for a good reason.
Tom
And so is reverse engineering skype. I don't see why everyone is harping on China here. It's not like their the only country to do this.
It's just ignorant xenophobia that allows people to bad mouth an entire nation based on what are essentially standard operating practices anywhere else.
Tom
Um hello, IBM PC clones anyone?
Oh that's right you were born in the 90s and don't remember the 80s.
Kids these days...
Yeah, that's all nice and all but when the colluders own 100% of the market it's hard to get in. You think there is only 8 dram manufacturers in the world? Hell no. You just haven't heard of the others.
The problem with price fixing is the same as with monopolies. It reduces your ability to choose competition. If company A and company B collude and sell otherwise identical products (e.g. they're not competing) and they sell them at the same price, they're effectively one company.
Also, price fixing usually also serves to divide markets. E.g. company A sells to the northeast, company B to the southeast, and so on. This happens less on the consumer end but much more on the OEM side.
Tom
I don't spend time on layout. That's the whole point of LaTeX.
Also, when you're working alone you are the layout guy. So you might as well do layout work when your mind hits a roadblock.
But not only that, sometimes you can't tell if your text is going to make the impact you want until you can see it. With an already typesetted text you can print it off, give it to friends, etc.
It's much better than handing them a stream of unformatted paragraphs. Otherwise, why aren't books just streams of unformatted paragraphs?
Tom
With HT switching you can easily have 100s, 1000s of processors on one topology. the other "nodes" are simply off a switch which then takes on the responsibility of knowing where memory is. That and HT is an open standard. Your northbridge controller is connected via HT.
There is nothing in the consumer market that exploits connectivity on the HT side but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist in custom shops and labs.
Tom
Hint: Conroe while better than Intels current offerings isn't really that much better than AMD offerings. Specially when you factor in the non-desktop uses (e.g. cluster computing where HT links still shine).
Conroe is a good product, hopefully a good design (won't be able to say for myself until I get one...) and will give AMD a run [in my personal opinion] but it won't break the mold and leap ahead of the competition in any sense.
Tom
Given where I work [and this post is not on behalf of my employer!!!] I don't view this as a good thing.
...hehehe
Sure Intel should be taken down a peg but competition is what will make technology not only efficient but RELEVANT. If only one supplier makes all the processors on Earth they can stagnate and not improve things. That's bad.
If anything Intel motivates AMD, just as AMD motivates Intel. [without going into too much details]. Hopefully, if this report is true it's not the tip of the iceberg but just adjustments to marketshare.
I look forward to getting my MCW setup later this year, pitting it against my personal AMD gear and doing more LibTomCrypt benchmarks for years to come. Of course, if Intel hooked me up with that stuff for free that'd be nicer
Tom
search-spam sucks bad. I'm tired of doing searches and finding 100s of useless links and "secondary search pages" with nothing but ads and other junk [spyware/adware].
Tom