Yes, but that's mostly only when you use the GUI builder tool. The concept of using a 'GUI renderer' (one that takes, say, XML and renders the GUI from that XML description) is very powerful. For some advanced things, you may have to generate your GUI programatically at runtime by building the XML (or portions of it) at runtime, which is a bit more work than just click-click-click on a GUI builder tool and shipping that XML description as a part of the deliverable (static and unchanging).
Intel's got a shared L2 that's 2-4 times the size of the AMD equivalents' pool. AMD's got a coherent, but NON-shared L2 split across multiple CPUs- each core has it's own L2. You'll have less L2 thrash with that design.
Under an SMP load, the AMD design will have an edge if all four cores are busy in different parts of system memory. If you pop out of cache, the memory bus design and overall architecture of the AMD parts will have an edge.
In CPU architecture circles, the shared L2 is considered a more ideal design than split L2 for multi-core processors. There are plenty of talks around the 'net as to why.
As far as cache size, that's a design tradeoff just like any other. Because of the slowness of main memory, you want to have as large a cache system as possible. However, cache system latency increases with the size of the cache so that is a tradeoff as well. Intel chose to use some chip realestate for cache. "Faulting" them for this is just being an apologist for your puppy.
There are many types of "SMP loads". Multi-threaded loads where all threads work on the same data will be similar on both as there is only one pipe to the memory on both the NUMA and the FSB model, for example. But yet, on SMP loads that are more 'lose', you can get good benefits from NUMA. By the way, Intel also has the IMC with their equivalent to HT on the roadmaps, so this discussion (NUMA vs FSB) won't be relevant for much longer.
Additionally, it isn't until AMD's 'next thing' where their NUMA architecture will be able to scale much better (it doesn't do that well with lots of sockets because it falls back to being limited by the number of HT connections so some communication has to be multi-jump with current multi-socket solutions - the new core adds an HT link so that 4+ sockets can have a more direct path around the system).
There are a number of examples of "popping out of cache" in the tests on various sites. AMD does show that it helps in those when it can use the bandwidth of both NUMA branches but it isn't convincingly better than Intel's FSB on many/any of the tests that are shown (you'd hope to see idealistically 2x performance improvement on many of those, but even with all the extra bandwidth, AMD doesn't seem to 'blow the doors' off of the Intel parts... in fact, AMD doesn't even beat them even with the added bandwidth... this just shows that there may be more to the picture than an IMC + more bandwidth). Even AMD's latency isn't that much better than Intel's FSB design anymore (the nice advantage that had against NetBurst is pretty much gone).
I'm eagerly awaiting AMD's next 'real' move, myself, but given that Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and even on 65nm Core is able to clock to 3.5GHz ranges (meaning Intel has a lot of headroom even on 65nm), the short amount of time that Intel and AMD will overlap on 65nm will probably just show equality (at best) between the two. I haven't really seen what performance advantages AMD's new features give, other than the obvious benefits of wider paths and the FPU issue increase (to bring it equal to Intel's issue rate, although AMD has typically had a stronger FPU). AMD claims a lot, but that could simply be marketing at this point.
overclocked the QX part from 2.66GHz to 3.55GHz even.
My bad... I read that wrong. The Core2Duo was overclocked to 3.55GHz, not the quad core part. However, this still shows the amount of headroom the core has on 65nm.
Notably, that 2 AMD 64 processors (granted, the 1207 pin versions) scale up to Intel's brand new Core 2 QX series best (itself 2 CPUs slapped together). It will be interesting when AMD releases their true quad core CPUs on 65nm in 2007.
"true" again... spoken like a "true" fanboi. Anyway... Core has a lot of headroom for frequency increases. In the ExtremeTech article, they overclocked the QX part from 2.66GHz to 3.55GHz even. Not only that, but Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and will likely have 45nm Core parts out by the time AMD can ship enough 65nm to really matter to the market. Along with 45nm comes even more clockspeed increases (rumors are of, or nearly, 4GHz rated Core parts, not overclocked, sampling now).
*WE* need AMD to catch up so at least we have competition in the market again. I buy what's best on the market. For the past few years, that was AMD and I have 6 AMD machines (four AMD64/X2) because AMD was the best. It doesn't look like I'll be buying any more AMD parts for a while, even with the 'release' of this 4x4 junk. Barcelona remains to be seen, but the day (or the deay before) it's released, I'm sure Intel will release a few frequency bumps that will take a lot of the shine off the new AMD parts.
Actually, I have seen a few vending machines that take plastic. The hotdog vendor on the corner probably doesn't, though... but you shouldn't be eating those anyway:P
WOW's "massive community" is simply numbers. The actual "community experience", in my opinion, is much less than that of other games. EQ, for example, when I played didn't have instancing. You had to share all the content with everyone and multiple groups simultaneously. Sebilis, for example, was full of people and, while annoying in that everything was always dead, tended to get people interacting with each other, even if a bit silly. Late nights in Sebilis were typically filled with local chat and all kinds of silliness as players waited for NPCs to spawn. On our server, our guild (and anyone's guild) interacted constantly with other guilds so that you most likely knew 100s of toons who weren't in your guild and probably many who were in "rival" guilds. If nothing else, you had to deal with other guilds as you raced to spawns. Contact with many players outside of your guild and "in the wild" was unavoidable in EQ.
In WOW, by contrast, you know those in your guild and maybe a select few from other guilds. The local chat in The Barrens, for example, is mostly ignored because, like almost all open areas, your time there is fairly limited. You're just going through The Barrens either on your way to somewhere else or even if you are leveling through it, you're only there for an afternoon before you leave it. When you go to any of the instances, you're there by yourself and isolated from everyone else. Even in PvP, the only way to 'do' the various games is to group up with regulars you know because pickup groups aren't usually competitive. The only "community experience" in WOW is on message boards, at most. There just isn't any reason to be much of a community in WoW other than guild association.
I'm not saying that WoW isn't a good game, because it is. It's just that I would never claim it is that much of a 'community experience' game, coming from other games that had much more of what I'd consider 'community experience' than WoW.
Wouldn't help that much anyway in this case. Such a limited number of units at release would still drive a huge eBay market for the things even with a world-wide launch.
Well... I started about 8 months ago, too, and in that time, a large alliance (Huzzah) was involved in a war and ultimately collapsed, leaving a hole there. The current war between BoB and ASCN is kinda lame though... it seems mostly about who can post the most on the boards about the other side using exploits and messing with the other team's Ventrillo.
Not sure where you're coming from. I was one of those scientists (worked in an academic research facility) for a while and my pay wasn't so bad... I wasn't living a rock star lifestyle off of it but I was reasonably comfortable. Plus, getting published increases your equity in yourself and your pay can increase because of them (become noted in your field and you can have your pick of better jobs and more pay).
Most, if not all, of the research (and the money that the scientist makes) in an academic facility is funded by contracts with commercial companies. They get a bargain by tossing you a few $100k and you practically get indentured servants (in the form of graduate students). In return, they don't have to (potentially) hire employees and buy equipment. Researchers bill their salaries out of those research funds. It's a lot like a service model. The cost of your research is amortized across several similar research contracts so you can charge less per contract than if you were only did it as a one shot project.
Then... if you do good enough research and find something interesting, you sometimes have the option to be hired by the company that funded you or you can spin-off from the facility and start your own company doing things similar to what you did for the research (which is what I did).
Or let's say I have the idea for a new kind of hat. I pay a hat designer to make one for me, and after a while I start seeing people wearing copies of that hat. Am I upset because they're getting the hat for free... or am I happy because I've started a fashion trend?
That works for something you can sit down and design in an hour. The designer will charge for an hour of their time. It doesn't work when what you want requires lots and lots of time and many people. Supposed you *could* put a car on a Xerox machine and get a real copy of it. It still takes a lot of time to design the car (aerodynamics, mechanical design, etc.). So, do you want to go pay the salaries of 10 engineers for 6 months to get your unique car? and then let everyone else have it for free?
Sure, you'll say you just want to customize the color and such but not the design. Well... we have that now. And the way the salaries of the engineers and all the workers to assemble it is amortized over the cost of selling many such vehicles with "personalizations" such as color.
Ditto... It took my wife a little while to get into it (I had to keep begging her to watch the shows). After we got into Season 2, she started wanting to watch them. By Season 3, she was hooked like me. "Sleeping in Light" made her cry (heh, and I always seem to get something in my eye when I watch that episode as well). It's now a standing joke between us that anytime she says she's bored, I suggest watching "Sleeping in Light", which she always refuses.
From what I've read about Intel's quad-core; it is not native like AMD's will be. They are basically are going to have two dual core's and they will communicate via FSB. That sucks compare to AMD's offering which will be native.
Intel's method is designed to give higher yields than a "true" quad core approach. In any case, take a look at the performance numbers and see how much it hurts not being "true" quad core. Sure, that doesn't mean that there's no room for improvement but the "true quad core" argument is sort of fanboish.
For example, AMD fanbois tend to trot out synthetic benchmark bandwidth numbers and the IMC all the time, but if you look at a large swath of benchmarks, even though an AthlonX2 has higher synthetic benchmark memory bandwidth scores, see which processor of the Core2Duo and the AthlonX2 has higher non-synthetic benchmark scores.
Indeed... even Bill has said that this round of new formats (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) will most likely be the last physical format because of the eventual and inevitable switch to downloads.
Many universities support a Co-op program where you go to school a semester and then work for a semester. There may be limitations on this, such as you can only coop starting your junior year or something, though. The advantage of this is that you go to school *and* you get a *real* job (with not-so-bad pay) that can definitely lead into a real job after you graduate. If nothing else, you get experience while you're in school as an undergraduate at the expense of taking longer to graduate. I know that in the past, companies like IBM, Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and a host of others have had such programs with the university that I attended, to give examples.
. Fully support NTFS so I can dual boot and not only be able to work with my linux files from linux and my windows files from windows. At least have full read-write support on NTFS so I can really be able to use it in linux.
The 'work with' and 'use it' parts you glossed over is a far larger problem than being able to read/write files on the file systems from the two different OSs.
The old rumor is that Sony originally intended for a Q4'2007 release but Microsoft forced their hand by aggressively (and purposefully) releasing the XBox360 in 2005. Sony felt they had to move it up a year in order to remain relevant and this is what is causing all the problems... blue-ray availability problems (supply, actually working)... cell processor availibility problems (working to the desired spec, not on the originally spec'd/desired process), etc.
On the other side of the coin, Sony has a large religious following so it doesn't matter what they do (up to and including comments that they could sell their customer base crap in a box and they'd buy it), it'll still sell well.
So, by entering into a partnership with Novel/SuSE Linux, Microsoft can develop tools/services/apps that can be used on SuSE to interoperate well with Microsoft offerings but may be prohibited on other Linux distributions... Speculating... an actual Microsoft Exchange backend that runs on SuSE Linux, and interoperates well with the various Windows Exchange client flavors, and not available for other Linux distributions (think of the back-end pieces that this could apply to...)
This means that *the* Linux distribution you'd want to use in a mixed house (basically all houses... and even those that aren't heavily will have a couple of Windows boxes in it) will be Novell/SuSE Linux.
This alone may be enough to make the default business/corporate Linux distribution Novell/SuSE Linux.
Plus, Microsoft may possibly strenghten Mono a great deal to make cross-platform.NET a reality.
This could possibly play out to be a fairly huge deal (not speculating on goodness/badness for any particular community at this time, though).
Except that most people probably figure that food, medical supplies, and basic education are more important for third world development than a computer, at this point in time.
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Yes, but that's mostly only when you use the GUI builder tool. The concept of using a 'GUI renderer' (one that takes, say, XML and renders the GUI from that XML description) is very powerful. For some advanced things, you may have to generate your GUI programatically at runtime by building the XML (or portions of it) at runtime, which is a bit more work than just click-click-click on a GUI builder tool and shipping that XML description as a part of the deliverable (static and unchanging).
In CPU architecture circles, the shared L2 is considered a more ideal design than split L2 for multi-core processors. There are plenty of talks around the 'net as to why.
As far as cache size, that's a design tradeoff just like any other. Because of the slowness of main memory, you want to have as large a cache system as possible. However, cache system latency increases with the size of the cache so that is a tradeoff as well. Intel chose to use some chip realestate for cache. "Faulting" them for this is just being an apologist for your puppy.
There are many types of "SMP loads". Multi-threaded loads where all threads work on the same data will be similar on both as there is only one pipe to the memory on both the NUMA and the FSB model, for example. But yet, on SMP loads that are more 'lose', you can get good benefits from NUMA. By the way, Intel also has the IMC with their equivalent to HT on the roadmaps, so this discussion (NUMA vs FSB) won't be relevant for much longer.
Additionally, it isn't until AMD's 'next thing' where their NUMA architecture will be able to scale much better (it doesn't do that well with lots of sockets because it falls back to being limited by the number of HT connections so some communication has to be multi-jump with current multi-socket solutions - the new core adds an HT link so that 4+ sockets can have a more direct path around the system).
There are a number of examples of "popping out of cache" in the tests on various sites. AMD does show that it helps in those when it can use the bandwidth of both NUMA branches but it isn't convincingly better than Intel's FSB on many/any of the tests that are shown (you'd hope to see idealistically 2x performance improvement on many of those, but even with all the extra bandwidth, AMD doesn't seem to 'blow the doors' off of the Intel parts... in fact, AMD doesn't even beat them even with the added bandwidth... this just shows that there may be more to the picture than an IMC + more bandwidth). Even AMD's latency isn't that much better than Intel's FSB design anymore (the nice advantage that had against NetBurst is pretty much gone).
I'm eagerly awaiting AMD's next 'real' move, myself, but given that Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and even on 65nm Core is able to clock to 3.5GHz ranges (meaning Intel has a lot of headroom even on 65nm), the short amount of time that Intel and AMD will overlap on 65nm will probably just show equality (at best) between the two. I haven't really seen what performance advantages AMD's new features give, other than the obvious benefits of wider paths and the FPU issue increase (to bring it equal to Intel's issue rate, although AMD has typically had a stronger FPU). AMD claims a lot, but that could simply be marketing at this point.
My bad... I read that wrong. The Core2Duo was overclocked to 3.55GHz, not the quad core part. However, this still shows the amount of headroom the core has on 65nm.
"true" again... spoken like a "true" fanboi. Anyway... Core has a lot of headroom for frequency increases. In the ExtremeTech article, they overclocked the QX part from 2.66GHz to 3.55GHz even. Not only that, but Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and will likely have 45nm Core parts out by the time AMD can ship enough 65nm to really matter to the market. Along with 45nm comes even more clockspeed increases (rumors are of, or nearly, 4GHz rated Core parts, not overclocked, sampling now).
*WE* need AMD to catch up so at least we have competition in the market again. I buy what's best on the market. For the past few years, that was AMD and I have 6 AMD machines (four AMD64/X2) because AMD was the best. It doesn't look like I'll be buying any more AMD parts for a while, even with the 'release' of this 4x4 junk. Barcelona remains to be seen, but the day (or the deay before) it's released, I'm sure Intel will release a few frequency bumps that will take a lot of the shine off the new AMD parts.
Since when?
Actually, I have seen a few vending machines that take plastic. The hotdog vendor on the corner probably doesn't, though... but you shouldn't be eating those anyway :P
no one (not even your computer) can hear you typing!
WOW's "massive community" is simply numbers. The actual "community experience", in my opinion, is much less than that of other games. EQ, for example, when I played didn't have instancing. You had to share all the content with everyone and multiple groups simultaneously. Sebilis, for example, was full of people and, while annoying in that everything was always dead, tended to get people interacting with each other, even if a bit silly. Late nights in Sebilis were typically filled with local chat and all kinds of silliness as players waited for NPCs to spawn. On our server, our guild (and anyone's guild) interacted constantly with other guilds so that you most likely knew 100s of toons who weren't in your guild and probably many who were in "rival" guilds. If nothing else, you had to deal with other guilds as you raced to spawns. Contact with many players outside of your guild and "in the wild" was unavoidable in EQ.
In WOW, by contrast, you know those in your guild and maybe a select few from other guilds. The local chat in The Barrens, for example, is mostly ignored because, like almost all open areas, your time there is fairly limited. You're just going through The Barrens either on your way to somewhere else or even if you are leveling through it, you're only there for an afternoon before you leave it. When you go to any of the instances, you're there by yourself and isolated from everyone else. Even in PvP, the only way to 'do' the various games is to group up with regulars you know because pickup groups aren't usually competitive. The only "community experience" in WOW is on message boards, at most. There just isn't any reason to be much of a community in WoW other than guild association.
I'm not saying that WoW isn't a good game, because it is. It's just that I would never claim it is that much of a 'community experience' game, coming from other games that had much more of what I'd consider 'community experience' than WoW.
Actually... it's exactly opposite of that. 1-59 is fun (the first few times you do it). After you hit 60, it's nothing but grinding raids.
Wouldn't help that much anyway in this case. Such a limited number of units at release would still drive a huge eBay market for the things even with a world-wide launch.
Well... I started about 8 months ago, too, and in that time, a large alliance (Huzzah) was involved in a war and ultimately collapsed, leaving a hole there. The current war between BoB and ASCN is kinda lame though... it seems mostly about who can post the most on the boards about the other side using exploits and messing with the other team's Ventrillo.
You're right. I should have clarified my field because I don't know how it's done in other fields. I worked in a Computer Science group.
Not sure where you're coming from. I was one of those scientists (worked in an academic research facility) for a while and my pay wasn't so bad... I wasn't living a rock star lifestyle off of it but I was reasonably comfortable. Plus, getting published increases your equity in yourself and your pay can increase because of them (become noted in your field and you can have your pick of better jobs and more pay).
Most, if not all, of the research (and the money that the scientist makes) in an academic facility is funded by contracts with commercial companies. They get a bargain by tossing you a few $100k and you practically get indentured servants (in the form of graduate students). In return, they don't have to (potentially) hire employees and buy equipment. Researchers bill their salaries out of those research funds. It's a lot like a service model. The cost of your research is amortized across several similar research contracts so you can charge less per contract than if you were only did it as a one shot project.
Then... if you do good enough research and find something interesting, you sometimes have the option to be hired by the company that funded you or you can spin-off from the facility and start your own company doing things similar to what you did for the research (which is what I did).
That works for something you can sit down and design in an hour. The designer will charge for an hour of their time. It doesn't work when what you want requires lots and lots of time and many people. Supposed you *could* put a car on a Xerox machine and get a real copy of it. It still takes a lot of time to design the car (aerodynamics, mechanical design, etc.). So, do you want to go pay the salaries of 10 engineers for 6 months to get your unique car? and then let everyone else have it for free?
Sure, you'll say you just want to customize the color and such but not the design. Well... we have that now. And the way the salaries of the engineers and all the workers to assemble it is amortized over the cost of selling many such vehicles with "personalizations" such as color.
Never heard of sleep() or pause(), I guess.
Ditto... It took my wife a little while to get into it (I had to keep begging her to watch the shows). After we got into Season 2, she started wanting to watch them. By Season 3, she was hooked like me. "Sleeping in Light" made her cry (heh, and I always seem to get something in my eye when I watch that episode as well). It's now a standing joke between us that anytime she says she's bored, I suggest watching "Sleeping in Light", which she always refuses.
Indeed... even Bill has said that this round of new formats (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) will most likely be the last physical format because of the eventual and inevitable switch to downloads.
The even ones? How many is that?
Many universities support a Co-op program where you go to school a semester and then work for a semester. There may be limitations on this, such as you can only coop starting your junior year or something, though. The advantage of this is that you go to school *and* you get a *real* job (with not-so-bad pay) that can definitely lead into a real job after you graduate. If nothing else, you get experience while you're in school as an undergraduate at the expense of taking longer to graduate. I know that in the past, companies like IBM, Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and a host of others have had such programs with the university that I attended, to give examples.
The 'work with' and 'use it' parts you glossed over is a far larger problem than being able to read/write files on the file systems from the two different OSs.
The old rumor is that Sony originally intended for a Q4'2007 release but Microsoft forced their hand by aggressively (and purposefully) releasing the XBox360 in 2005. Sony felt they had to move it up a year in order to remain relevant and this is what is causing all the problems... blue-ray availability problems (supply, actually working)... cell processor availibility problems (working to the desired spec, not on the originally spec'd/desired process), etc.
On the other side of the coin, Sony has a large religious following so it doesn't matter what they do (up to and including comments that they could sell their customer base crap in a box and they'd buy it), it'll still sell well.
So, by entering into a partnership with Novel/SuSE Linux, Microsoft can develop tools/services/apps that can be used on SuSE to interoperate well with Microsoft offerings but may be prohibited on other Linux distributions... Speculating... an actual Microsoft Exchange backend that runs on SuSE Linux, and interoperates well with the various Windows Exchange client flavors, and not available for other Linux distributions (think of the back-end pieces that this could apply to...)
.NET a reality.
This means that *the* Linux distribution you'd want to use in a mixed house (basically all houses... and even those that aren't heavily will have a couple of Windows boxes in it) will be Novell/SuSE Linux.
This alone may be enough to make the default business/corporate Linux distribution Novell/SuSE Linux.
Plus, Microsoft may possibly strenghten Mono a great deal to make cross-platform
This could possibly play out to be a fairly huge deal (not speculating on goodness/badness for any particular community at this time, though).
Well... I just got knocked down a notch... I only have nine machines at home :(
Except that most people probably figure that food, medical supplies, and basic education are more important for third world development than a computer, at this point in time.