We buy AMD where we can, but will be buying more intel in this next round.
AMDs biggest mistake in recent times was killing off the excellent Phenom 2 line. Their new bulldozer-based FX processors, while okay for office apps, are absolutely *terrible* at FPU-intensive tasks such as gaming or research software such as Matlab or Mathematica.
I know the bulldozer processors share one FPU per two "cores", but the performance difference between a six-core FX and a four-core i5 is at present a factor of four. Again, this is only for FPU intensive applications. Integer arithmetic tasks give much better performance by comparison.
AMD had better have something pretty special up their sleeve for the next line...
Funny you should mention the car door, which hasn't been mentioned much here yet. I have not been hit by a car door, but the people I know who have (and lived), tell me that the biked stopped suddenly and they kept going, head over heels, with them landing flat on the road. It would take a special kind of skill to manage a stunt like that *without* hitting your head on the ground in exactly the manner you described above.
Here's the problem with your rebuttal: E(k) = 1/2 mv^2
When you're travelling at speed the consequences of coming to a sudden stop increase enormously. All that energy has to go somewhere. In the case of unprotected motorcyclists for example that energy is often dissipated by forming a new opening in the skull and evacuating the contents thereof through it.
I guess you don't watch BMX racing. I have seen people round these parts commuting on pushbikes with full-face helmets. They're by no means the norm but they're out there. More common here than the odd idiot who doesn't wear a helmet at all.
I agree with you on all counts except for the steel part. Aluminium frames have been the norm here for the past 6-8 years. Can you even still get steel framed bikes? I haven't seen any recently.
Then again, I do live in a somewhat hilly area. When pedalling up a hill, every kg is working against you. Mind you they are also beneficial on the flat (less resistance when taking off and maintaining speed, less momentum so less stopping distance/brake wear). And of course, no rust!
Well, a good portion of the women here do in fact bike to work. And none of them are stupid enough NOT to wear a helmet.
Honestly, where does this anti-helmet drivel come from? Impressionable people watching Easy Rider?
The one time I came off my bike at speed, the back of my helmet hit the road. Hard. It hurt. But I was still conscious. I would most likely not have been had the helmet not been present. Upon inspecting it, the tough plastic was cracked. That would have been my skull.
... that my taskbar will finally start up on a deterministic screen, and no longer the crapshoot of Left-only, Right-only, or spanned-across-both every single time I log on?
I thought that the Google Dalvik case would have ended all fear about repercussions from developing a viable alternative implementation. And with Oracles horrible, horrible track record I would have thought people would have been scrambling to do so.
I agree with you there. Hydro has a massive initial impact on the environment (destroying local ecosystems and creating massive sediment downstream). However once that damage is done the actual running of the dam has very little environmental impact.
Though depending on how the power distribution is set up in that area, a high demand from a large consumer could result in less power from that dam available to the national grid, which could in turn lead to increased demand on other more polluting energy sources.
If you wish to continue with Windows, then I fully recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free for individuals and small companies running XP upwards, and perhaps more importantly doesn't seem to bog things down nearly as much as Norton or McAfee, while remaining just as effective.
See that's the thing - I actually don't mind sensible ads on web pages. Slashdot ads for example don't get in my way so I make no efforts to block them. In fact, a while ago a checkbox appeared on my front/. page letting me disable advertising, apparently as a reward for the contributions I have made to the site - presumably good/. karma. I have not checked that box, because the ads are simply not a burden to me.
The ones I *do* have a problem with, are the ones I see on other sites that are either too intrusive (flashing colours, flash-based, massive banners, clickthroughs, etc) or outright lies ("congratulations you are our millionth customer, click to claim your prize", "1,701 infected files found on your computer, click here to fix").
Surprisingly the most intrusive advertising I have seen recently comes from none other than Google, via YouTube - in my part of the world popular YouTube movies are now preceded by full video advertisements, accompanied with a yellow progress bar. The more benign (read:less obnoxious) ones let you skip the ad after 30 seconds of watching. Some make you wait up to two minutes. I doubt any ad blocker will be able to get around this one, as it is integrated into the Flash stream - the video content isn't there until the ad has finished.
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Purchaser for a large organization here.
We buy AMD where we can, but will be buying more intel in this next round.
AMDs biggest mistake in recent times was killing off the excellent Phenom 2 line. Their new bulldozer-based FX processors, while okay for office apps, are absolutely *terrible* at FPU-intensive tasks such as gaming or research software such as Matlab or Mathematica.
I know the bulldozer processors share one FPU per two "cores", but the performance difference between a six-core FX and a four-core i5 is at present a factor of four. Again, this is only for FPU intensive applications. Integer arithmetic tasks give much better performance by comparison.
AMD had better have something pretty special up their sleeve for the next line...
Please don't mention September around here. Some of us are still waiting for 1 October, 1993.
Funny you should mention the car door, which hasn't been mentioned much here yet. I have not been hit by a car door, but the people I know who have (and lived), tell me that the biked stopped suddenly and they kept going, head over heels, with them landing flat on the road. It would take a special kind of skill to manage a stunt like that *without* hitting your head on the ground in exactly the manner you described above.
Here's the problem with your rebuttal: E(k) = 1/2 mv^2
When you're travelling at speed the consequences of coming to a sudden stop increase enormously. All that energy has to go somewhere. In the case of unprotected motorcyclists for example that energy is often dissipated by forming a new opening in the skull and evacuating the contents thereof through it.
I guess you don't watch BMX racing. I have seen people round these parts commuting on pushbikes with full-face helmets. They're by no means the norm but they're out there. More common here than the odd idiot who doesn't wear a helmet at all.
I agree with you on all counts except for the steel part. Aluminium frames have been the norm here for the past 6-8 years. Can you even still get steel framed bikes? I haven't seen any recently.
Then again, I do live in a somewhat hilly area. When pedalling up a hill, every kg is working against you. Mind you they are also beneficial on the flat (less resistance when taking off and maintaining speed, less momentum so less stopping distance/brake wear). And of course, no rust!
Well, a good portion of the women here do in fact bike to work. And none of them are stupid enough NOT to wear a helmet.
Honestly, where does this anti-helmet drivel come from? Impressionable people watching Easy Rider?
The one time I came off my bike at speed, the back of my helmet hit the road. Hard. It hurt. But I was still conscious. I would most likely not have been had the helmet not been present. Upon inspecting it, the tough plastic was cracked. That would have been my skull.
Damn, it's times like this I almost wish /. had a "Like" or "Me, too" button.
Thank you.
The result - I put my money straight into the Chinese economy now by buying all kinds of shiny stuff, hence driving the Chinese economy.
FTFY
So which turd are you gong to vote for? Because, after all, we wouldn't want the wrong turd getting in would we?
Well not with *that* attitude.
...and for some reason consumers in the west still throw about half their money to them.
... that my taskbar will finally start up on a deterministic screen, and no longer the crapshoot of Left-only, Right-only, or spanned-across-both every single time I log on?
You and I must be using very different KDE's, because that has not been my experience at all.
Of course, that may be literally true, as I'm running KDE on Fedora so all bets are off.
Here's my list of distros that I regularly use, as a rough Gantt chart, starting in the late 1990s and running to the present day.
I thought that the Google Dalvik case would have ended all fear about repercussions from developing a viable alternative implementation. And with Oracles horrible, horrible track record I would have thought people would have been scrambling to do so.
So far we have... nothing I can think of.
Number of viable alternative desktop implementations? Ditto.
That scares me. There are certain "luxury" items such as a Windows dashboard and remote-controlled immobilization that I don't want in any of my cars.
We could all just bypass Oracle and Microsoft, and move to Dalvik.
Wait, so the ARM Cortex A8 architecture is completely open while the Raspberry Pi's ARM11 architecture isn't? I'm not sure I follow...
Otherwise, this project looks very interesting!
I agree with you there. Hydro has a massive initial impact on the environment (destroying local ecosystems and creating massive sediment downstream). However once that damage is done the actual running of the dam has very little environmental impact.
Though depending on how the power distribution is set up in that area, a high demand from a large consumer could result in less power from that dam available to the national grid, which could in turn lead to increased demand on other more polluting energy sources.
If you wish to continue with Windows, then I fully recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free for individuals and small companies running XP upwards, and perhaps more importantly doesn't seem to bog things down nearly as much as Norton or McAfee, while remaining just as effective.
Remember, I said IF.
See that's the thing - I actually don't mind sensible ads on web pages. Slashdot ads for example don't get in my way so I make no efforts to block them. In fact, a while ago a checkbox appeared on my front /. page letting me disable advertising, apparently as a reward for the contributions I have made to the site - presumably good /. karma. I have not checked that box, because the ads are simply not a burden to me.
The ones I *do* have a problem with, are the ones I see on other sites that are either too intrusive (flashing colours, flash-based, massive banners, clickthroughs, etc) or outright lies ("congratulations you are our millionth customer, click to claim your prize", "1,701 infected files found on your computer, click here to fix").
Surprisingly the most intrusive advertising I have seen recently comes from none other than Google, via YouTube - in my part of the world popular YouTube movies are now preceded by full video advertisements, accompanied with a yellow progress bar. The more benign (read:less obnoxious) ones let you skip the ad after 30 seconds of watching. Some make you wait up to two minutes. I doubt any ad blocker will be able to get around this one, as it is integrated into the Flash stream - the video content isn't there until the ad has finished.
I hear for an encore he's going to try the same thing in Saudi Arabia.