The government announced that it planned to clone and mass produce the bat-winged craft for use against its enemies.
Good luck with that. Unless you have some magical way to reverse-engineer likely 100,000+ lines of compiled source code, you'll never have more than a remote-controlled airplane with a fancy skin.
And I really expect that the software is encrypted (or possibly even destroyed). Also, with the expected levels of anti-temper built into the hardware (required by the US Government since the start of this decade), they'll have a helluva time speccing-out the hardware interfaces using test tools.
Good luck writing your own software from scratch with no idea how the hardware works!
Now, if they had performed a cyber-attack and stolen source code and hardware specs, THEN I would be concerned. The plane part is relatively easy to build.
...or sit at their computer eating pizza and playing farmville while simultaneously leveling two alts on WoW and watching their Justin Bieber Twitter feed for updates.
The more bored people get, the more they rely on technology to make themselves feel useful.
Printing metal in-place is not going to work.
on
Printing a Building
·
· Score: 1
And the reality is concrete needs rebar to be strong and a support structure to be truly useful.,a href="http://www.shapeways.com/themes/stainless_steel_3dprinting_gallery">These are the only people who have made printed 3D metal, and it has two caveats:
(1) Strong, but not as strong as forged metals. (2) Has to be baked in an oven to transition from powder to solid metal.
So, not really interesting until hey solve the whole in-place metal printing problem. Right now all you can make is trinkets.
...are the people who have power. From those of us that STILL do not have power (this includes myself, with an ETA from BGE of FRIDAY): go fuck yourselves.
The wind speed and classification doesn't fucking matter. What does matter is the amount of DAMAGE the storm left in it's wake.
They've become bored talking about the same old shit while HURD took twenty years to get to "release" (if you can call this pile of shit "release"). Meanwhile we have practical examples of every kind of OS you can imagine, so the results are pretty clear-cut.
There comes a time when debates are mostly over-and-done-with because the world LEARNS what works best. The same thing has happened to processor architecture debates, now that most processors are (1) RISC and (2) reaching the limits of performance with a single thread.
Well no, what you're missing here is that PCs are getting passed-over for tablets. Netbook sales, once Acer's bread-and-butter, have dried-up in recent years. Acer went from over %10 of the US PC market to around %8, basically trading places with Apple.
Apple's customer base is relatively fixed, and that means that when the cheap-end of the PC market falters, their "percentage" of the market grows without needing any sales growth. In addition, Apple released a major refresh on their most popular models this quarter (something folks have been waiting on after years of Core 2), so they were able to satisfy a lot of pent-up demand.
So, this is not some "amazing" milestone, nor is it an indicator of impressive growth for Apple in the PC market. Instead, Apple merely traded places with Acer, and pumped their share a little due to the largest lineup refresh in over a year.
The games LOOKED a lot better, but the framerates were still unplayable. I got an S3 Onboard promo CD with my ViRGE card, and it came with native demos of Escape Velocity and Actua Soccer.
Neither title was what I would call "playable." Escape Velocity cranked-out 15-20fps, and Actua Soccer was probably chugging at around 10fps. That might be faster than software, but it's not playable.
When I got my Rendition v2200 card, it was like night-and-day: games played smoothly at between 30/50fps in OpenGL/Direct3D with much better graphics fidelity (60fps in native RRedline games). Even the predecessor v1000 series managed 30fps in native games, so there's no excuse for how terrible ViRGE really was.
If the only person you share books with is your father, then get him a Kindle and add it to your account. You can add up to 5 kindles to one account, and anyone can read anything in your library (even at the same time).
Those are pretty lax terms IMHO. This won't work for people who pass their books to several different people after reading, but for those of you who keep it in the family, it's a pretty good deal.
Also, like you've discovered: you can use a Kindle and get your Ebooks from wherever you want (they just won't be conveniently manageable from your Library...you'll have to copy them to the device yourself). But Amazon offers a free email conversion service, and if that does not suit you, then you can us a more fully-featured tool like Mobipocket.
That's a VERY small group. Don't do the entire world of "creatives" the disservice of lumping them together.
If you think there are a lot of creative people who can afford an Apple computer, you are mistaken. There are tons of creatives I hang out with constantly who will never be published, and will never receive a dime for their efforts. These people have a hard enough time scraping money for a netbook to take to writeins, or time at a small studio. They buy more for economy and usability over style.
Most of the people I see with Apple computers in that same age range are (A) Linux geeks turned Apple nuts, and (B) Rich kid posers who have never produced anything creative in their lives, and have nothing better to do than flaunt their money.
I would not put too much faith on the theoretical 2x performance increase offered by AVX this generation. Although the processing hardware is there, the processor itself is not designed with enough fetch width to keep the units fed.
Just pick a selection that's so outlandish you know it won't take. Then when it refuses your choice, select the first entry.
This way you have to be REALLY sure you want the first selection, so sure that you'd risk selecting something completely wrong just to have the opportunity. That's not a bug, that's a feature!
Because you're a lot more likely to inherit money than to have a new business idea so amazing that banks will trip over themselves to hand bags of money to an eighteen-year-old with no real-world experience.
Good unique business ideas plus the acumen to execute it properly are one-in-a-million. Of course, you can bullshit and convince people that you have the acumen, but I don't know many recent high school grads who are that slick.
Yeah, but you're still at the mercy of an employer, and those typically won't let you through the door without a degree. There are some exceptions, but they are few.
So, you want to go into business for yourself? No way in hell, unless you've inherited some cash (or have some really stupid acquaintances who will invest). You need money to start a business, and banks won't just give start-up capital to anyone, even if you have a business plan.
They will give money freely to college students, however. Sometimes that's your only option in "investing in your future."
Itanium is the #2 high-end UNIX server processor, ahead of SPARC but behind POWER. Itanium systems get between $4bn and $5bn and sales, and are growing. It didn't meet the original goal of taking over the world, but I don't know what parallel universe you live in to think it's a failure.
It is a failure simply because the cost of engineering a new processor architecture is not really recouped by the current sales. Let's take a look at the math:
1. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to design a new CPU architecture. A basic CPU design can cost over 100 million dollars (4 years, 100 men). Let's guesstimate somewhere closer to $150-200 million for a new Itanium release, since this is a high-end multiprocessing chip that's on-track to take 5 years to develop
So, they design their new CPU...now they have 2.5 years to make money off the architecture before it gets replaced. So, how much money do thy really make on Itanium?
2. HP's System Sales were 4.4 Billion in 2008 (3.5 Billion in 2009, I noticed you chose to ignore that), but Intel only gets a tiny chunk of that total system cost, because they only make the processor and chipset.
Take Tukwila, for instance: the top price per-processor (9350) is nearly $4000, but you can bet the most sales are in the realm of the $2000 (9330, 9340). Let's split the difference and overestimate the average selling price per-socket at $3000 (this would also include the chipset).
According to industry analysts, Intel makes about 200,000 Itanium processors in a year (2007). After the sales hit in 2009, I'm inclined to think this is still accurate. 200,000 x $3,000 = $600 Million in revenues, which is a Intel's cut of the total system sales.
Now, consider manufacturing costs to Intel (not included in the architectural development). Tukwila is a huge die size (very few CPUs per-wafer, much room for defects), and the processor is advertised as having top-end RAS in the sales pitch, so you can bet they test and discard many cores that would have passed normal desktop CPU tests. The cost of wafers, testing and defect throwaways will be a huge percentage of the cost of the chip - I'd say at least %30, and could go as high as %50. So take that off the top of 600 million, and you're left with 300-400 million. Add in the costs of advertising, maintaining (and improving) the development toolset of your proprietary architecture (who else is going to do it?), and real profits for a year could be as low as 200 million.
So, over the course of a 2.5-year product cycle, Itanium earns Intel somewhere between 500 million to 1 billion dollars in real income, minus the $150-200 million to develop. That's a pretty sorry amount for a company that makes almost 12 billion net per-year.
Intel would be better served spending this money on their top-end Xeon processors. Right now, Itanium is NOT a real growth market - the recent spikes were because of people fleeing PA-RISC and Alpha, and those sales will die-off. The only real growth potential for Intel would be to add the same level of RAS to their top Xeon line, and entice people away from RISC with the incredible support and toolset of x86-64.
Sure, some of the installed software could be classified as "Crapware" (e.g. Zune) but most of it is useful (Windows Live Essentials, Acrobat Reader), and some of the software is among the best in it's class (Microsoft Security Essentials, Windows Media Center).
You know exactly what you are getting, and it's a whole lot better than your average Windows laptop load-out. And yeah, you pay more (the sale right now knocks $150 off - regular prices are usually $50-100 more than other online stores). But you pay EVEN MORE to get the same star treatment from Apple, so you can hardly call them "overpriced."
Did you ever consider that it's this very picky and insatiable mindset of the average Linux hardcore user (today) that scares mainstream companies away from the platform?
After all, why try to service geeks who will never be satisfied no matter what you do? Modern linux-only geeks include some of the most self-important perfectionists I've ever met. Every time "not your favorite distro" gets some special treatment from a company, they come out and complain about lack of full control. Every time a company actually releases open-source specs, they complain about how long it takes to release the specs, or bitch about how it sometimes takes years to develop solid drivers.
Would you really want to develop a distribution platform and games for people like these? Prima donnas aren't worth the headaches, and since those who are willing to compromise have already left for Windows or OS X (at least on the desktop), there's nobody else left.
Yes, in PG13 you can have as much violence as you want, so long as it's not TOO graphic. But god forbid you have any titties or drug references - those will get you slapped with an R immediately.
Rick Rubin single-handedly ruined the best Metallica album in 20 years, but then people discovered the tracks were unaltered on Guitar Hero 3, and made them available. Although the raw GH3 tracks are not very punchy, there are many fan reproductions that sound surprisingly good without the ridiculous clipping.
In my engineering undergrad, I had certain professors who handed out copies of the previous year's exam as a study guide. They would give you a week to work things out on your own and then supply answers a few days before the real exam. They also allowed a single page of handwritten notes (because no engineer would be expected to remember every single formula in existence, but writing them down on a sheet of paper was an excellent way to study).
The purpose was to give you realistic expectations of the types of questions you might encounter, without making you "cheat" and ask around for previous exams. It also deterred any actual attempts at cheating because it became clear-as-day to people that the professor would never reuse an exam, and the page of notes covered any excuse people might still have to do it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The government announced that it planned to clone and mass produce the bat-winged craft for use against its enemies.
Good luck with that. Unless you have some magical way to reverse-engineer likely 100,000+ lines of compiled source code, you'll never have more than a remote-controlled airplane with a fancy skin.
And I really expect that the software is encrypted (or possibly even destroyed). Also, with the expected levels of anti-temper built into the hardware (required by the US Government since the start of this decade), they'll have a helluva time speccing-out the hardware interfaces using test tools.
Good luck writing your own software from scratch with no idea how the hardware works!
Now, if they had performed a cyber-attack and stolen source code and hardware specs, THEN I would be concerned. The plane part is relatively easy to build.
...or sit at their computer eating pizza and playing farmville while simultaneously leveling two alts on WoW and watching their Justin Bieber Twitter feed for updates.
The more bored people get, the more they rely on technology to make themselves feel useful.
Everything will be free :)
And we'll be bored out of our minds.
And the reality is concrete needs rebar to be strong and a support structure to be truly useful. ,a href="http://www.shapeways.com/themes/stainless_steel_3dprinting_gallery">These are the only people who have made printed 3D metal, and it has two caveats:
(1) Strong, but not as strong as forged metals.
(2) Has to be baked in an oven to transition from powder to solid metal.
So, not really interesting until hey solve the whole in-place metal printing problem. Right now all you can make is trinkets.
...are the people who have power. From those of us that STILL do not have power (this includes myself, with an ETA from BGE of FRIDAY): go fuck yourselves.
The wind speed and classification doesn't fucking matter. What does matter is the amount of DAMAGE the storm left in it's wake.
But not an AFFORDABLE tablet. That 80MB flash drive would have cost more than a car in 1995!
They've become bored talking about the same old shit while HURD took twenty years to get to "release" (if you can call this pile of shit "release"). Meanwhile we have practical examples of every kind of OS you can imagine, so the results are pretty clear-cut.
There comes a time when debates are mostly over-and-done-with because the world LEARNS what works best. The same thing has happened to processor architecture debates, now that most processors are (1) RISC and (2) reaching the limits of performance with a single thread.
Well no, what you're missing here is that PCs are getting passed-over for tablets. Netbook sales, once Acer's bread-and-butter, have dried-up in recent years. Acer went from over %10 of the US PC market to around %8, basically trading places with Apple.
Apple's customer base is relatively fixed, and that means that when the cheap-end of the PC market falters, their "percentage" of the market grows without needing any sales growth. In addition, Apple released a major refresh on their most popular models this quarter (something folks have been waiting on after years of Core 2), so they were able to satisfy a lot of pent-up demand.
So, this is not some "amazing" milestone, nor is it an indicator of impressive growth for Apple in the PC market. Instead, Apple merely traded places with Acer, and pumped their share a little due to the largest lineup refresh in over a year.
The games LOOKED a lot better, but the framerates were still unplayable. I got an S3 Onboard promo CD with my ViRGE card, and it came with native demos of Escape Velocity and Actua Soccer.
Neither title was what I would call "playable." Escape Velocity cranked-out 15-20fps, and Actua Soccer was probably chugging at around 10fps. That might be faster than software, but it's not playable.
When I got my Rendition v2200 card, it was like night-and-day: games played smoothly at between 30/50fps in OpenGL/Direct3D with much better graphics fidelity (60fps in native RRedline games). Even the predecessor v1000 series managed 30fps in native games, so there's no excuse for how terrible ViRGE really was.
If the only person you share books with is your father, then get him a Kindle and add it to your account. You can add up to 5 kindles to one account, and anyone can read anything in your library (even at the same time).
Those are pretty lax terms IMHO. This won't work for people who pass their books to several different people after reading, but for those of you who keep it in the family, it's a pretty good deal.
Also, like you've discovered: you can use a Kindle and get your Ebooks from wherever you want (they just won't be conveniently manageable from your Library...you'll have to copy them to the device yourself). But Amazon offers a free email conversion service, and if that does not suit you, then you can us a more fully-featured tool like Mobipocket.
iDon'tCare
Or worse, consider how fast the cloud hype ship will crash when employers start blocking the cloud at work.
Since mobile internet already has tight caps, there's not much else use for the cloud.
That's a VERY small group. Don't do the entire world of "creatives" the disservice of lumping them together.
If you think there are a lot of creative people who can afford an Apple computer, you are mistaken. There are tons of creatives I hang out with constantly who will never be published, and will never receive a dime for their efforts. These people have a hard enough time scraping money for a netbook to take to writeins, or time at a small studio. They buy more for economy and usability over style.
Most of the people I see with Apple computers in that same age range are (A) Linux geeks turned Apple nuts, and (B) Rich kid posers who have never produced anything creative in their lives, and have nothing better to do than flaunt their money.
I would not put too much faith on the theoretical 2x performance increase offered by AVX this generation. Although the processing hardware is there, the processor itself is not designed with enough fetch width to keep the units fed.
See Here
Summary: a few tests topped %20 improvement.
And Here
Summary: a couple of tests topped %20 improvement. Many tests produced slower results with AVX enabled.
The overall performance boost looks to be around %20-30, at least for now.
Here's your new for today.
Just pick a selection that's so outlandish you know it won't take. Then when it refuses your choice, select the first entry.
This way you have to be REALLY sure you want the first selection, so sure that you'd risk selecting something completely wrong just to have the opportunity. That's not a bug, that's a feature!
Because you're a lot more likely to inherit money than to have a new business idea so amazing that banks will trip over themselves to hand bags of money to an eighteen-year-old with no real-world experience.
Good unique business ideas plus the acumen to execute it properly are one-in-a-million. Of course, you can bullshit and convince people that you have the acumen, but I don't know many recent high school grads who are that slick.
Yeah, but you're still at the mercy of an employer, and those typically won't let you through the door without a degree. There are some exceptions, but they are few.
So, you want to go into business for yourself? No way in hell, unless you've inherited some cash (or have some really stupid acquaintances who will invest). You need money to start a business, and banks won't just give start-up capital to anyone, even if you have a business plan.
They will give money freely to college students, however. Sometimes that's your only option in "investing in your future."
Agreed. And PCM Memory will remove the standby power required for DRAM, which is a significant drain on battery life.
Of course, the jury is still out on whether the writes will take more power than DRAM. If so, the power savings could be much less.
It is a failure simply because the cost of engineering a new processor architecture is not really recouped by the current sales. Let's take a look at the math:
1. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to design a new CPU architecture. A basic CPU design can cost over 100 million dollars (4 years, 100 men). Let's guesstimate somewhere closer to $150-200 million for a new Itanium release, since this is a high-end multiprocessing chip that's on-track to take 5 years to develop
So, they design their new CPU...now they have 2.5 years to make money off the architecture before it gets replaced. So, how much money do thy really make on Itanium?
2. HP's System Sales were 4.4 Billion in 2008 (3.5 Billion in 2009, I noticed you chose to ignore that), but Intel only gets a tiny chunk of that total system cost, because they only make the processor and chipset.
Take Tukwila, for instance: the top price per-processor (9350) is nearly $4000, but you can bet the most sales are in the realm of the $2000 (9330, 9340). Let's split the difference and overestimate the average selling price per-socket at $3000 (this would also include the chipset).
According to industry analysts, Intel makes about 200,000 Itanium processors in a year (2007). After the sales hit in 2009, I'm inclined to think this is still accurate. 200,000 x $3,000 = $600 Million in revenues, which is a Intel's cut of the total system sales.
Now, consider manufacturing costs to Intel (not included in the architectural development). Tukwila is a huge die size (very few CPUs per-wafer, much room for defects), and the processor is advertised as having top-end RAS in the sales pitch, so you can bet they test and discard many cores that would have passed normal desktop CPU tests. The cost of wafers, testing and defect throwaways will be a huge percentage of the cost of the chip - I'd say at least %30, and could go as high as %50. So take that off the top of 600 million, and you're left with 300-400 million. Add in the costs of advertising, maintaining (and improving) the development toolset of your proprietary architecture (who else is going to do it?), and real profits for a year could be as low as 200 million.
So, over the course of a 2.5-year product cycle, Itanium earns Intel somewhere between 500 million to 1 billion dollars in real income, minus the $150-200 million to develop. That's a pretty sorry amount for a company that makes almost 12 billion net per-year.
Intel would be better served spending this money on their top-end Xeon processors. Right now, Itanium is NOT a real growth market - the recent spikes were because of people fleeing PA-RISC and Alpha, and those sales will die-off. The only real growth potential for Intel would be to add the same level of RAS to their top Xeon line, and entice people away from RISC with the incredible support and toolset of x86-64.
Yes, you can. Microsoft, in trying to improve the image of the PC, now sells Signature laptops on their online store.
Sure, some of the installed software could be classified as "Crapware" (e.g. Zune) but most of it is useful (Windows Live Essentials, Acrobat Reader), and some of the software is among the best in it's class (Microsoft Security Essentials, Windows Media Center).
You know exactly what you are getting, and it's a whole lot better than your average Windows laptop load-out. And yeah, you pay more (the sale right now knocks $150 off - regular prices are usually $50-100 more than other online stores). But you pay EVEN MORE to get the same star treatment from Apple, so you can hardly call them "overpriced."
Did you ever consider that it's this very picky and insatiable mindset of the average Linux hardcore user (today) that scares mainstream companies away from the platform?
After all, why try to service geeks who will never be satisfied no matter what you do? Modern linux-only geeks include some of the most self-important perfectionists I've ever met. Every time "not your favorite distro" gets some special treatment from a company, they come out and complain about lack of full control. Every time a company actually releases open-source specs, they complain about how long it takes to release the specs, or bitch about how it sometimes takes years to develop solid drivers.
Would you really want to develop a distribution platform and games for people like these? Prima donnas aren't worth the headaches, and since those who are willing to compromise have already left for Windows or OS X (at least on the desktop), there's nobody else left.
Yes, in PG13 you can have as much violence as you want, so long as it's not TOO graphic. But god forbid you have any titties or drug references - those will get you slapped with an R immediately.
I really hate the ratings system in this country.
It's the only way we would have ever gotten a clean copy of Death Magnetic.
Rick Rubin single-handedly ruined the best Metallica album in 20 years, but then people discovered the tracks were unaltered on Guitar Hero 3, and made them available. Although the raw GH3 tracks are not very punchy, there are many fan reproductions that sound surprisingly good without the ridiculous clipping.
In my engineering undergrad, I had certain professors who handed out copies of the previous year's exam as a study guide. They would give you a week to work things out on your own and then supply answers a few days before the real exam. They also allowed a single page of handwritten notes (because no engineer would be expected to remember every single formula in existence, but writing them down on a sheet of paper was an excellent way to study).
The purpose was to give you realistic expectations of the types of questions you might encounter, without making you "cheat" and ask around for previous exams. It also deterred any actual attempts at cheating because it became clear-as-day to people that the professor would never reuse an exam, and the page of notes covered any excuse people might still have to do it anyway.