"If it crashes, I have the option of opening the same sites I was at the next time I run it." Is this a frequent problem for you?
Yes because works more generally than that - anytime Opera fails to close cleanly you can return to your previous session. This includes when Opera closes for reasons it had nothing to do with (Windows crash, power failure...)
Not in California. Apparently they've made laws against those pesky "non compete" clauses.
This one has initially will have tricky jurisdiction since Microsoft is in Washington, Google is in California and the dude got shipped to China. Can we just bypass the annoying suits, countersuits and appeals and kick this one up a few levels, since the US Constitution is very clear that this is a federal issue.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 empowers the United States Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
(Although SCotUS seems to have ocassional difficulty defining complex words like "public")
Why doesn't AMD release their *own* compiler? AMD's Compiler would be here: http://www.pgroup.com/
AMD worked closely with PGI while prepping the K8 core for launch to have a 64 bit compiler capable of the same auto-vectorization the icc can do.
Also, Intel does push icc as the best compiler for Windows/x86 linux (which it quite possibly is, this story aside). So they are screwing the people who buy the compiler and later find out that it intentionally sucks for 15% of the market. And AMD then gets hosed by looking appearing slower than the P4 on apps built by Intel's compiler.
The problem with the argument presented is that fansubs are also the only real marketing that anime has, with the exception of the limited number that make it to Cartoon Network. Furthermore, in my group of friends any anime series that we have watched in its entirety fansubbed and is later released at least one person purchases the series.(and often more than one)
Anime is largely different than any other show or movie available on DVD. Movies and American TV shows can be seen somewhere besides the the DVD, (movie studio, TV, On Demand...) to give a person the ability to make the educated decision about what to purchase. Without fansubs people are being asked to purchase Anime sight unseen which is a prospect not that many people are fans of. Some studios have taken to affering cheap DVD's with the first episode or two for $5 or $10 which helps solve the issue. If I were the American distributer I would extend this by offering a DVD samplers with the first episode of 5 different series at that price. This would allow people to get a feel for a show prior to making an investment in it.
The only issue happens to be that Digital broadcast TV doesn't do a good job of replacing Analog broadcast.
The signal quality required for a digital signal to actually display is much higher than for a useful analog signal. My TV has a built in ATSC tuner so I got a quality $50 antenna but all I get is Fox in HD and occasionally PBS. In the meantime I can get all of the networks at decent quality over analog (slight static and/or ghosting). And I live in the first suburb north of the Chicago (Evanston.) My unit just happens to face north, away from the broadcast towers downtown.
(Unfortunately that also means that satellite is out, leaving cable as an expensive and annoying monopoly.)
While the amount the lawyers are getting paid is crazy, keep in mind a few important points.
1) The attorneys involved work on this exclusively for periods of time often exceeding a year or more. 2) They have to pay for research, finding witnesses, deposing testimony... 3) they do all this with no guarantee of any payment. 4) most importantly, without these attorneys the injured parties receive nothing and companies never get called on these things.
How about a consistent driver interface so when I update my kernel I don't have to reinstall my NVidia drivers. Or pray that there is a version of the RAID card driver out there somewhere. Or recompile ivtv and cross my fingers.
I can update Windows XP from a base install to SP2 and all of my hardware still functions, and if I disable the NX/XD functionality so does all software.
And no, NVidia shouldn't have to open source their drivers. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the hardware and supporting drivers, and Open-Sourcing it would give away a significant advantage they may have over their competition (OpenGL performance or explicit hardware details). Plus some code in the drivers is licensed from other companies.
Now I like Linux and have two linux computers (server + pvr) at home, but it seriously pisses me off from time to time.
One reason is that SMT threads end up competing for processor resources, in particular the cache. In particular the P4 has a small L1 cache and data from one thread can be quickly overwritten by another, even though it will be needed shortly by the first thread. In comparison most CMT designs have separate caches, at least at the L1 level so that data is victimized less frequently.
That being said however many of the hardware reviewers have been using the P4 because it is "snappier" in multitasking situations. (For instance i think Kyle Bennett (HardOCP) uses a P4 on his personal computer even though in general his reviews seem to favor the Athlon64's)
What I wish hardware reviews would come up with is tests that have less intense apps in the background to better simulate usage patterns, like say - running SysMark while iTunes is playing in the background.
*note -the first bit about the SMT was from an editorial I read last week but can't find now
but the vocational system doesn't train them for anything like the modern world, so you're not exactly making them any more useful to society in any way by forcing them into the vocational "system"
But the classes we take in 11th/12th grade do prepare us for modern life?
Lets take a look at my senior year of High school:
Independant Study Calc 2, Last used: various college engineering courses
German 4 Last used: testing out of College language requirements (Although had I taken Spanish that would actually have been useful)
Early American Lit, Late English Lit, Expository Writing, Last used: AP exams
Greek and Roman History, Last used: Final exam for Greek and Roman History
Physics, okay useful since I was going to study Engineering in college
Class I wish I'd taken: Senior Auto - where you learn a skill actually useful in modern life.
In general though most high school classes have zero usefulness in the modern world.
For that matter I'm still not sure how useful some college degress are, but that a topic for another rant.
unfortunately yes - OS X's market penetration isn't that good yet - OS 9 compatibility is still necessary when you have to develop for big city schools and libraries who have more pressing fiscal matters than shiny new computers or the annual $$$ OS upgrade (it appears to be $60/seat for up to 100 at educational prices)
Fortunately at this point it's more just updating than new development.
Correlation, not causation. If video games could so drastically affect behavior, where are all the Pac-Man addicts who should be running around eating everything in sight?
The price of the game at launch covers the costs to develop them game over the last n years.
Thats the official line. I would say that it a combination of habit and psychology. "If you're giving the game away it must not be any good" and "Well I already paid $50 for this, I need to subscribe to get my money's worth"
Re:This is actually usually the developer's fault
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
Bioware did just that. They used to be with Interplay, who then tried to screw them since they were going under. Bioware jumped ship and went with Atari then.
Actually, Bioware was mostly following D&D license, which is a whole other story (although they were hosed by Interplay as well PA)
EA knows how to buy licenses at cut-rate prices, strip-mine them to create cookie-cutter games, and market the hell out of them so an ill-informed consumer culture will eat them up.
I beg to differ. EA has done a wonderful job with the Origin franchises. I mean look at Wing Commander... wait what were we talking about again?
I got a new heat sink the other day and it had a little gray patch stuck on it right where the processor would touch the heat sink.
This is a "Thermal pad" - meant to doe the job of a paste and/or good lapping but in general they suck. You are best off removing it completely and using the grease.
In theory there should be exactly one reason to alter the price of the songs: increasing revenue.
As far as I can figure the variable cost of selling more than one song song is esentially $0.00. That is, all of the cost (programming, encoding...) is in providing the first copy and therefore a sunk cost, additional copies cost bandwidth, and a fraction of a percent of a server. As a result the income for Apple/RIAA (I'm putting them together now for simplicity) is effectively equal to the revenue generated.
Lets say Apple sells 10,000 songs per day. That gives them a revenue of of $9900. If raising the price to $1.25 would reduce then number of songs sold to 7500 then the revenue drops to $9375. however if it only drops to 9000 songs per day then the revenue is $11250.
In the first case the raising the price means that, while they may be (insert expletive here), they bad business people who should be fired for incompetence.
In the second case raising the price is not a symbol of (insert expletive here) but rather that they are doing there job and if they don't raisse the price they should be fired for incompetence.
Of course a third scenario could also present itself: dropping the price to say $.75 could raise sales enough to increase revenue in which case that is the business option that should be taken.
Basically the price should be dictated solely by the elasticity of demand. (IANA Economist, so my terms may not be correct since it's been a decade since I had Econ in college, but I think I got the theory right.)
Now I don't know haw the deal between Apple and the record companies works but if its a percentage deal all of this holds, if not you will have to ask an accountant or economist, not a computer programmer.
Hmm, not sure if it's his daily driver (probably not) but he had a Porsche 959 a while back. Though technically illegal (never been emissions or crash certified for US sale) I doubt if many street cops would know, and don't know it's license plate status.
Actually I just read that a Porsche importer (in CA i think) has gotten the 959 street certified - A show car law allows them to bypass the crash test requirements and by replacing the engine management computer it could be verified as passing 1988 CA emissions tests
I saw this in the "Porsche" Magazine about 2 months ago.
*this is a windows system but the compilers are available for linux. Also SPEC uses non-vectorized code, but the Intel compilers can generate vector code on its own so handcrafted code would see a larger boost on the G5.
For the record, Mozilla handles ESPN's website much better than Opera does. The scoreboard pages are a good example - note the text color which is black instead of white for the game headers.
Granted the site is crafted for IE and only bears a passive resemblance to html, but its a pain when I want to know when a game starts, as Opera is browser of choice.
Once you ditch the instruction overhead for doing an operation on X number of successive scalars, the processor spends more time doing the math and the FLOPS goes up. Take a look at the AltiVec unit in the G4, or CRAY vector supercomputers.
Or you could use the 3DNow instructions on any Athlon or the SSE instructions in the Athlon XP, PIII and P4(plus SSE2).
Of course this only works if your problem can be solved in a vectored fashion, and you want to use architecture specific code. (Or have access to a vectorizing compiler like Intel's)
every part of the code is transparently clear -- there are no sections that are obscure to gain effciency
That would be code I would be embarrassed to write.
As an illustration take these two math functions as an example:
F(x) =.46x^3 - 1.4x^2 + 2.4x -.3
G(x) = ((.46x - 1.4)x + 2.4)x -.3
F(x) is cleary a cubic function.
G(x) is more obscure as to what it does.
But if you do the math F(x)=G(x). The difference between the two forms?
G(x) uses 3 multiplications and 3 additions
F(x) uses 6 multiplications and 3 additions
Any program that uses F(x) in place of G(x) does have a name associated with its quality:
Crap!
Um, I hate to break this to you but the internet was created for the technically rich, university professors and government researchers. (Come to think of it thats where computers, microwaves and velcro came from too)
The internet just trickled out to everyone because kids getting out of college into the "real world" after being used to it at school and using it to communicate with their parents and the like.
To view the web at a reasonable speed over a modem use a browser like opera where one can easily toggle whether images are displayed, and can selectively view images. Works for me on a 33.6 modem at home
Slashdot Mirror
Based on the statistics, comic-turn-movies are bringing in around $350 millions each after cost.
Sure - if you pick and choose your sample.
a few more Marvel movies:
The Punisher (1989)
Fantastic Four (1994) (yes there are caveats with this one)
Nick Fury: Agent of Shield (1998) (David Hasslehoff!?)
Captain America (1991)
and I'm sure there are more..
"If it crashes, I have the option of opening the same sites I was at the next time I run it." Is this a frequent problem for you?
...)
Yes because works more generally than that - anytime Opera fails to close cleanly you can return to your previous session. This includes when Opera closes for reasons it had nothing to do with (Windows crash, power failure
Not in California. Apparently they've made laws against those pesky "non compete" clauses.
This one has initially will have tricky jurisdiction since Microsoft is in Washington, Google is in California and the dude got shipped to China. Can we just bypass the annoying suits, countersuits and appeals and kick this one up a few levels, since the US Constitution is very clear that this is a federal issue.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 empowers the United States Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
(Although SCotUS seems to have ocassional difficulty defining complex words like "public")
Why doesn't AMD release their *own* compiler?
AMD's Compiler would be here:
http://www.pgroup.com/
AMD worked closely with PGI while prepping the K8 core for launch to have a 64 bit compiler capable of the same auto-vectorization the icc can do.
Also, Intel does push icc as the best compiler for Windows/x86 linux (which it quite possibly is, this story aside). So they are screwing the people who buy the compiler and later find out that it intentionally sucks for 15% of the market. And AMD then gets hosed by looking appearing slower than the P4 on apps built by Intel's compiler.
The problem with the argument presented is that fansubs are also the only real marketing that anime has, with the exception of the limited number that make it to Cartoon Network. Furthermore, in my group of friends any anime series that we have watched in its entirety fansubbed and is later released at least one person purchases the series.(and often more than one)
Anime is largely different than any other show or movie available on DVD. Movies and American TV shows can be seen somewhere besides the the DVD, (movie studio, TV, On Demand...) to give a person the ability to make the educated decision about what to purchase. Without fansubs people are being asked to purchase Anime sight unseen which is a prospect not that many people are fans of.
Some studios have taken to affering cheap DVD's with the first episode or two for $5 or $10 which helps solve the issue. If I were the American distributer I would extend this by offering a DVD samplers with the first episode of 5 different series at that price. This would allow people to get a feel for a show prior to making an investment in it.
The only issue happens to be that Digital broadcast TV doesn't do a good job of replacing Analog broadcast.
The signal quality required for a digital signal to actually display is much higher than for a useful analog signal. My TV has a built in ATSC tuner so I got a quality $50 antenna but all I get is Fox in HD and occasionally PBS. In the meantime I can get all of the networks at decent quality over analog (slight static and/or ghosting). And I live in the first suburb north of the Chicago (Evanston.) My unit just happens to face north, away from the broadcast towers downtown.
(Unfortunately that also means that satellite is out, leaving cable as an expensive and annoying monopoly.)
While the amount the lawyers are getting paid is crazy, keep in mind a few important points.
1 947940.html
1) The attorneys involved work on this exclusively for periods of time often exceeding a year or more.
2) They have to pay for research, finding witnesses, deposing testimony...
3) they do all this with no guarantee of any payment.
4) most importantly, without these attorneys the injured parties receive nothing and companies never get called on these things.
for an example of life without see: http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2005/04/14/ap
It is PETA which stands for People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.
And here I thought it was People Eating Tasty Animals
Consistent - okay I'll bite.
How about a consistent driver interface so when I update my kernel I don't have to reinstall my NVidia drivers. Or pray that there is a version of the RAID card driver out there somewhere. Or recompile ivtv and cross my fingers.
I can update Windows XP from a base install to SP2 and all of my hardware still functions, and if I disable the NX/XD functionality so does all software.
And no, NVidia shouldn't have to open source their drivers. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the hardware and supporting drivers, and Open-Sourcing it would give away a significant advantage they may have over their competition (OpenGL performance or explicit hardware details). Plus some code in the drivers is licensed from other companies.
Now I like Linux and have two linux computers (server + pvr) at home, but it seriously pisses me off from time to time.
One reason is that SMT threads end up competing for processor resources, in particular the cache. In particular the P4 has a small L1 cache and data from one thread can be quickly overwritten by another, even though it will be needed shortly by the first thread.
In comparison most CMT designs have separate caches, at least at the L1 level so that data is victimized less frequently.
That being said however many of the hardware reviewers have been using the P4 because it is "snappier" in multitasking situations. (For instance i think Kyle Bennett (HardOCP) uses a P4 on his personal computer even though in general his reviews seem to favor the Athlon64's)
What I wish hardware reviews would come up with is tests that have less intense apps in the background to better simulate usage patterns, like say - running SysMark while iTunes is playing in the background.
*note -the first bit about the SMT was from an editorial I read last week but can't find now
but the vocational system doesn't train them for anything like the modern world, so you're not exactly making them any more useful to society in any way by forcing them into the vocational "system"
But the classes we take in 11th/12th grade do prepare us for modern life?
Lets take a look at my senior year of High school:
Independant Study Calc 2, Last used: various college engineering courses
German 4 Last used: testing out of College language requirements (Although had I taken Spanish that would actually have been useful)
Early American Lit, Late English Lit, Expository Writing, Last used: AP exams
Greek and Roman History, Last used: Final exam for Greek and Roman History
Physics, okay useful since I was going to study Engineering in college
Class I wish I'd taken: Senior Auto - where you learn a skill actually useful in modern life.
In general though most high school classes have zero usefulness in the modern world.
For that matter I'm still not sure how useful some college degress are, but that a topic for another rant.
(does anyone sane use Carbon?)
unfortunately yes - OS X's market penetration isn't that good yet - OS 9 compatibility is still necessary when you have to develop for big city schools and libraries who have more pressing fiscal matters than shiny new computers or the annual $$$ OS upgrade (it appears to be $60/seat for up to 100 at educational prices)
Fortunately at this point it's more just updating than new development.
Correlation, not causation. If video games could so drastically affect behavior, where are all the Pac-Man addicts who should be running around eating everything in sight?
n rise.htm
I'd say pretty much everywhere
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/02news/obesityo
4 TB Server: ~ $5500
Display Client $800
Quality UI with standard remote control:
Priceless
The price of the game at launch covers the costs to develop them game over the last n years.
Thats the official line. I would say that it a combination of habit and psychology.
"If you're giving the game away it must not be any good"
and
"Well I already paid $50 for this, I need to subscribe to get my money's worth"
Bioware did just that. They used to be with Interplay, who then tried to screw them since they were going under. Bioware jumped ship and went with Atari then.
Actually, Bioware was mostly following D&D license, which is a whole other story (although they were hosed by Interplay as well PA)
EA knows how to buy licenses at cut-rate prices, strip-mine them to create cookie-cutter games, and market the hell out of them so an ill-informed consumer culture will eat them up.
I beg to differ. EA has done a wonderful job with the Origin franchises. I mean look at Wing Commander... wait what were we talking about again?
I got a new heat sink the other day and it had a little gray patch stuck on it right where the processor would touch the heat sink.
This is a "Thermal pad" - meant to doe the job of a paste and/or good lapping but in general they suck. You are best off removing it completely and using the grease.
In theory there should be exactly one reason to alter the price of the songs: increasing revenue.
As far as I can figure the variable cost of selling more than one song song is esentially $0.00. That is, all of the cost (programming, encoding...) is in providing the first copy and therefore a sunk cost, additional copies cost bandwidth, and a fraction of a percent of a server. As a result the income for Apple/RIAA (I'm putting them together now for simplicity) is effectively equal to the revenue generated.
Lets say Apple sells 10,000 songs per day. That gives them a revenue of of $9900. If raising the price to $1.25 would reduce then number of songs sold to 7500 then the revenue drops to $9375. however if it only drops to 9000 songs per day then the revenue is $11250.
In the first case the raising the price means that, while they may be (insert expletive here), they bad business people who should be fired for incompetence.
In the second case raising the price is not a symbol of (insert expletive here) but rather that they are doing there job and if they don't raisse the price they should be fired for incompetence.
Of course a third scenario could also present itself: dropping the price to say $.75 could raise sales enough to increase revenue in which case that is the business option that should be taken.
Basically the price should be dictated solely by the elasticity of demand. (IANA Economist, so my terms may not be correct since it's been a decade since I had Econ in college, but I think I got the theory right.)
Now I don't know haw the deal between Apple and the record companies works but if its a percentage deal all of this holds, if not you will have to ask an accountant or economist, not a computer programmer.
Hmm, not sure if it's his daily driver (probably not) but he had a Porsche 959 a while back. Though technically illegal (never been emissions or crash certified for US sale) I doubt if many street cops would know, and don't know it's license plate status.
Actually I just read that a Porsche importer (in CA i think) has gotten the 959 street certified - A show car law allows them to bypass the crash test requirements and by replacing the engine management computer it could be verified as passing 1988 CA emissions tests
I saw this in the "Porsche" Magazine about 2 months ago.
For the record, Mozilla handles ESPN's website much better than Opera does. The scoreboard pages are a good example - note the text color which is black instead of white for the game headers. Granted the site is crafted for IE and only bears a passive resemblance to html, but its a pain when I want to know when a game starts, as Opera is browser of choice.
Once you ditch the instruction overhead for doing an operation on X number of successive scalars, the processor spends more time doing the math and the FLOPS goes up. Take a look at the AltiVec unit in the G4, or CRAY vector supercomputers.
Or you could use the 3DNow instructions on any Athlon or the SSE instructions in the Athlon XP, PIII and P4(plus SSE2).
Of course this only works if your problem can be solved in a vectored fashion, and you want to use architecture specific code. (Or have access to a vectorizing compiler like Intel's)
every part of the code is transparently clear -- there are no sections that are obscure to gain effciency .46x^3 - 1.4x^2 + 2.4x -.3 .3
That would be code I would be embarrassed to write.
As an illustration take these two math functions as an example:
F(x) =
G(x) = ((.46x - 1.4)x + 2.4)x -
F(x) is cleary a cubic function.
G(x) is more obscure as to what it does.
But if you do the math F(x)=G(x). The difference between the two forms?
G(x) uses 3 multiplications and 3 additions
F(x) uses 6 multiplications and 3 additions
Any program that uses F(x) in place of G(x) does have a name associated with its quality:
Crap!
Um, I hate to break this to you but the internet was created for the technically rich, university professors and government researchers. (Come to think of it thats where computers, microwaves and velcro came from too)
The internet just trickled out to everyone because kids getting out of college into the "real world" after being used to it at school and using it to communicate with their parents and the like.
To view the web at a reasonable speed over a modem use a browser like opera where one can easily toggle whether images are displayed, and can selectively view images. Works for me on a 33.6 modem at home