You're thinking of the P75 (1.5 * 50); this was the ONLY Pentium processor to run at 50MHz bus. It was released at the same time as the P90 and P100, and was the first "value" Pentium chip. It was only slightly faster than it's predecessors (P60, P66) because of the reduced bus speed.
I'll agree, this is as pointless as Thompson's previous "replacement" for mp3, mp3Pro.
mp3Pro sounded good on-paper: it split the spectrum into two slices: one, a 0-11 Khz mp3 file, and the other, a new codec handling the information from 11-22 KHz. It was a good compromise, because mp3 was very efficient at lower frequencies, and poor at representing higher frequencies.
The concept was: thanks to the impressive new high-frequency codec, you could produce the same quality as a 192k mp3 in a bitrate of 128k or less. You could play-back these files on normal mp3 players.
But then, reality set-in. When played-back on normal mp3 players, the file always sounded muffled, because the frequency range was limited to 11 KHz. And the late arrival of the codec guaranteed zero industry support, so there was no way to grow into the new format.
This isn't insightful, it's ignorant. Most of the country is ignorant, where DC local govenment is concerned.
DC local government is a puppet-state. It was created by Congress as a concession to silence the statehood movement, but they never really gave DC real local rule. Instead, the government is forced to kowtow to the whims of Congress, who holds the purse strings (just like the states) AND the dummy strings (NOT like the states).
Every time DC tries to stand up on it's own, Congress finds some way to stamp them out. There has been talk of adding taxes to improve DC's financial independence, like a congestion charge, but Congress has pulled strings to makes sure this doesn't happen. Even small things like legalizing pot (passed by council vote) were blocked by Congress. And of course, there's always the representation thing: did you know that even today, in the best political climate possible, the bill to give DC a voting House member is stalled? That's just pathetic.
DC government can't grow because Congress doesn't won't allow it to. Real independent governments don't have to put-up with this shit - Congress controls some state purse strings, but that is all they control; the state has the final decision. The people of DC have no pride in their government because they all know it's a sham, and the moment Congress gets annoyed, they can block a resolution they don't like, or go extreme and toss-out the government for an appointed control board.
The last time I upgraded a processor was with my Celeron 300a (450 overclocked) to a Celeron 533A (800 overclocked), and that was a special point in history:
At this time, computers were still "slow" for most tasks, so people were always hungry for more processing power. The BX chipset brought a %50 increase in bandwidth, and the on-die cache of the celeron made chipset bandwidth even less of a factor than usual. ATA/33 was fast enough for most hard drives for several years after release, and add-in cards were cheap. The move from slot to socket meant that there was a huge demand for slotkets, so building-in support for the newer flip-chips was an easy add-on. Finally, the i820 chipset meant to replace the BX chipset had no performance advantage, and required expensive RDRAM.
This bore us a market ripe for upgrades. This market does not exist today.
In my current machine purchased a year ago, I bought a midrange Core2, with the capability to upgrade to Core2 Quad in the future. So far, I'm not feeling the desire - very few games support quad-cores, and all of these games run smoothly on my Core2. I don't do much video transcoding, so there's really no drive for me to double my cores.
The 45nm Core2 processors are even cooler - they have a TDP of 45w, and the average processor uses much less.
Please note: the measurements above are of processor power consumption only, not total system consumption. As you might expect, only the top-end 45nm Core2 procesors consume anywhere near their 45w TDP, just as only the top-end 65nm Core2 processors consume near 65w.
As for the i7, it only performs well in perfectly-multithreaded benchmarks that are completely I/O-limited (like the aggressive multi-pass.h264 encoder), otherwise it performs about as well as a Core2 Quad. And when you consider the starting price for an i7 motherboard is around $200-250, you have to be nuts to consider purchasing such a monstrosity.
...if they bother to do a better mix for the LP, that is. Just ask the people pissed-off about Death Magnetic LP having the same crap mix as the CD. I think this comment sums-it-up beautifully:
From what I've read on other posts.. the vinyl sounds exactly like the CD.. The clipping and distortion is built into the final mix, and they went with the same mix for the Vinyl and CD.. How the needle doesn't jump off the record, I have no idea.
The good news? Some artists actually give a fuck about their listeners, and release unmixed tracks to let their fans go-to-town (for those who don't know, the Stems CD contains raw unmixed tracks of Ben Fold's latest CD, Way To Normal).
What, not even indepedent artists? I've found some smashingly-good CDs in the last two years by local artists (that have nothing whatsoever to do with the RIAA). Support your local artists, and give the RIAA the finger - you'll have new music AND a clearer conscience.
Yeah, you're right. The reason mp3 at 128k got such a bad name is because people with no clue and no processing power loved the Xing encoder.
Xing was one of the first third-party mp3 encoders, and made it's way into a lot of early mp3 tools. It's fast and craptacular, and is responsible for the majority of bad mp3s around the net.
Even an mp3 encoded in 2002 with LAME 128k CBR would not have sounded all that bad.
You said it, man. My mother has crap eyesight, as do many older people, and she can't tell the difference between standard def and high-def TV. This is not surprising, as she couldn't see the (amazing) difference between VHS and DVD. Really, the only reason she has ditched VHS tapes is because DVDs are more convenient (no rewinds), and easier to find today.
Multiply this problem by the hundreds of millions of people with crap eyesight, and you begin to see why high-def is a non-starter. When I consider this, it makes me laugh when I read that there are already movements witnin the industry to quadruple the current 1080p resolution of HDTV. Good luck selling that.
Especially a 6-year-old rip. Although LAME can produce almost transparent results today at 128k VBR, 6 years ago 128k CBR sounded like crap.
I still can't believe most of his students don't care. Even on crap speakers, I was able to hear the artifacts in early 128k mp3s. It has to be that they don't give a shit - some people just don't care about the quality of the music, because music is just background noise for them.
PAE won't help with this problem, because it splits the memory space into multiple 4GB chunks, and you can only access one chunk at a time. Technically, you could have a game use more than 2GB ram using PAE, but the performance hit switching between memory spaces is astronomical, so you'd have to find a way to streamline it.
A flat 64-bit memory space is so much easier. PAE was really intended for multiple server processes to run at-once, with a small hit for process switching. Nothing real-time was ever intended for PAE.
This would've been nice two years ago, but we are already at the 4GB barrier. And sadly we are out of options. If available memory cannot increase, the quality of games will not improve. Yeah, you can go XP-64, but from what I've seen, it's not nearly as good as Vista/7 64. And if you're going to upgrade to XP-64, you might as well consider 7 instead.
In addition, the demand just isn't there anymore. There was a huge clamor for DX10 in XP when Vista was released, but now that's died-down. It turns out that a lot of good games don't support DX10, and most of those that do have huge performance hits for small graphical improvements, or small performance gains with no graphical improvements. The slowing sales of Vista are proof-positive that DX10 is not a selling point anymore.
Hornung: Mr. Grunwald, in addition to your occupation as a spoon, is it not true that you are a driving instructor? Grunwald: No. Hornung: Then it is true. Grunwald: Yes. Hornung: That you're not a driving instructor? Grunwald: No. Hornung: Your Honor, I object to this line of questioning. Judge: Overruled. Hornung: Very well, then; I'd like some time to go over my briefs. Judge: Please. Hornung: [inspects his underwear] They're fine.
No. The small EDRAM is not the sole reason games aren't pushing 720p. It's because the graphice hardware in both consoles cannot display 1280x720+ without giving-up framerate or details. Since details sell (why they keep increasing), and framerate is mandatory, designers have been pushing things at the cost of resolution.
Even many PS3 games don't run at 720p these days, and there's no EDRAM to make that happen.
I owned a 7900, and I'm well-aware of what it can do. Oblivion brought the card to it's knees (had to settle for 1152x864, medium settings, HDR). They were able to run it at 720p on the 360, despite the 10MB EDRAM limit, and despite the overhead of HDR.
Today, games look even better than Oblivion, and take more graphics power to render. The only solution is to reduce the resolution, or your framerate will go all to hell.
And no, Sony didn't intend Cell to supplement shaders - they intended Cell to BE the shader. That's why RSX wasn't added to the PS3 until the last-minute, once they realized that Cell wasn't fast enough to render 3D.
And yes, you could use Cell to do supplemental effects, but that's a difficult undertaking: you have to properly synchronize the Cell thread so that the GPU isn't waiting on it, and you have to make sure that your shader isn't cannibalizing too much memory bandwidth (rendering is bandwidth-intensive, usually heavily-offset by the complex cache architecture of the GPU, something an SPE can't do).
Just got back from the movie (3 hours!). Since I'm a night owl, you'll get my thoughts now.
The movie was a bit long, and my gf explained that it could have been longer. One example she gave was the scene on Mars arguing the fate of humanity; this was more dragged-out in the book. Overall, I felt it was well-paced, with action spaced between a lot of emotional stopovers to flesh-out characters.
Reality: a lot of people who are looking for a brain-dead action flick are going to be disappointed.
I really liked how all the characters had their dark pasts. It made them a lot more fun to get into.
One thing that I did have to question is this: where did all these people get such super strength and reflexes? These people are breaking bones, moving fast, catching bullets, and smashing holes through furniture - if they're just regular joes in-costumes, how can they do all this? Manhattan is explained, but no one else is.
I'd like to add: a lot of the GP's 'fuel sippers' don't get anywhere near those numbers unless you drive them like a machine. Your average spirited driver is going to get much lower mileage numbers with those cars, because mileage depends as much on your driving style as the design of the car (just ask this famous hypermiler).
My experience:
I am a spirited driver; I have to be, to survive on our great nation's freeways. My previous car was a Saturn SC2 (auto), and although it was lightweight, aerodynamic, with a small 2.0L engine, I wasn't getting near the advertised 34 mpg. On pure highway driving, I would get 31, and in mixed driving (still mostly highway) I would get 29. Last year, I replaced it with a Scion xB (2.5L engine with more torque), and I'm getting 27 mpg combined from the box (only 2 mpg less than the Saturn)!
The xB weighs 500 pounds more, has worse aerodynamics, has more engine displacement, and has a 4-speed auto just like the Saturn. But the improved torque (155 versus 115 lb) means that the new engine is better-designed to handle my high-speed driving, and I'm sure the transmission is also better-tuned for high-speed.
So yeah, you go on touting the wonders of fuel sippers. Thankfully, I can buy a car that reflects my driving style, because for me a 'fuel sipper' would be a wasted effort.
Yes, but at 1x PCIe 1.0, it's a mere shadow of what video demands today. The 1x lane on the ExpressCard slot (2Gbps after 8/10 encoding) was intended to be an inexpensive, nice upgrade over PCI (Cardbus), and nothing more. It makes me wish thay had planned-ahead, and pushed 2x into the slot for a little more cost.
It has one other serious problem: due to bandwidth limitatations, you can't route the images from the video card expansion back to the laptop LCD, so this is not a "portable" solution. Even though the expansion box is very small, you must connect it to an external display, and that is NOT small.
The good news: ExpressCard 2.0 will be released in 2010, and will feature USB 3.0 and PCIe 2.0, so the data rate will jump to 4.0 Gbps. That might actually be enough to make this concept work.
I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You want replies from people who aren't huge fans, but you posted this before most people get off work today. Only a true fan would skip work/school to watch a movie.
I've not read the book (I just finished chapter 1), and I'm seeing it tonight at 9:30; if you still want the viewpoint of a non-obsessed fan, check back tomorrow for my reply to this post.
Yup, you can knock $100 off the top by just trading the Velociraptor for a 7200 RPM drive. The Raptor has somewhat better benchmarks, but not enough to justify the price. You basically only buy it if (A) you're a developer and will be hitting the disk IO or (B) price is no object. And at that point, you might consider trading-up to an SSD.
I will say, although I wouldn't buy an AMD chip today, it's good to have them back in the saddle competing again. Phenom was a disaster: late, defective and under-performing. They had my money with the Athlon 64, and they'll get my money again when they build the chip with the best performance/watt (the 45nm Core2 Quads litterally stomp the Phenom II in power consumption).
They'll name it Serenity, since that's the "real" option with all the votes. I'm sure Colbert will be pissed when he finds out that he was beaten by a pack of rabid Joss Whedon fans:)
The problem is, all the bands that people could unite behind in the 1990s broke-up at the height of their careers. Sometimes, it was due to irreconcilable differences; other times, it was due to untimely death.
Guns N' Roses Nirvana Smashing Pumpkins Alice in Chains Soundgarden Stone Temple Pilots
Thankfully, we still have Pearl Jam and Metallica, but that's a very short list of survivors of 90s rock. IT's no wonder the kids today are reaching back to the 70s.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of the P75 (1.5 * 50); this was the ONLY Pentium processor to run at 50MHz bus. It was released at the same time as the P90 and P100, and was the first "value" Pentium chip. It was only slightly faster than it's predecessors (P60, P66) because of the reduced bus speed.
60MHz bus:
P60, P90, P120, P150
66MHz bus:
P66,P100, P133, P166, P200
I'll agree, this is as pointless as Thompson's previous "replacement" for mp3, mp3Pro.
mp3Pro sounded good on-paper: it split the spectrum into two slices: one, a 0-11 Khz mp3 file, and the other, a new codec handling the information from 11-22 KHz. It was a good compromise, because mp3 was very efficient at lower frequencies, and poor at representing higher frequencies.
The concept was: thanks to the impressive new high-frequency codec, you could produce the same quality as a 192k mp3 in a bitrate of 128k or less. You could play-back these files on normal mp3 players.
But then, reality set-in. When played-back on normal mp3 players, the file always sounded muffled, because the frequency range was limited to 11 KHz. And the late arrival of the codec guaranteed zero industry support, so there was no way to grow into the new format.
Hell, if you're going to include Dublin, you'd have to include Austin first. Known in the Industry as "Silicon Hills," it's the global headquarters of Dell, AMD's former Fab 25, and many other high-tech companies. It also hosts the huge SXSWi festival.
This isn't insightful, it's ignorant. Most of the country is ignorant, where DC local govenment is concerned.
DC local government is a puppet-state. It was created by Congress as a concession to silence the statehood movement, but they never really gave DC real local rule. Instead, the government is forced to kowtow to the whims of Congress, who holds the purse strings (just like the states) AND the dummy strings (NOT like the states).
Every time DC tries to stand up on it's own, Congress finds some way to stamp them out. There has been talk of adding taxes to improve DC's financial independence, like a congestion charge, but Congress has pulled strings to makes sure this doesn't happen. Even small things like legalizing pot (passed by council vote) were blocked by Congress. And of course, there's always the representation thing: did you know that even today, in the best political climate possible, the bill to give DC a voting House member is stalled? That's just pathetic.
DC government can't grow because Congress doesn't won't allow it to. Real independent governments don't have to put-up with this shit - Congress controls some state purse strings, but that is all they control; the state has the final decision. The people of DC have no pride in their government because they all know it's a sham, and the moment Congress gets annoyed, they can block a resolution they don't like, or go extreme and toss-out the government for an appointed control board.
The last time I upgraded a processor was with my Celeron 300a (450 overclocked) to a Celeron 533A (800 overclocked), and that was a special point in history:
At this time, computers were still "slow" for most tasks, so people were always hungry for more processing power. The BX chipset brought a %50 increase in bandwidth, and the on-die cache of the celeron made chipset bandwidth even less of a factor than usual. ATA/33 was fast enough for most hard drives for several years after release, and add-in cards were cheap. The move from slot to socket meant that there was a huge demand for slotkets, so building-in support for the newer flip-chips was an easy add-on. Finally, the i820 chipset meant to replace the BX chipset had no performance advantage, and required expensive RDRAM.
This bore us a market ripe for upgrades. This market does not exist today.
In my current machine purchased a year ago, I bought a midrange Core2, with the capability to upgrade to Core2 Quad in the future. So far, I'm not feeling the desire - very few games support quad-cores, and all of these games run smoothly on my Core2. I don't do much video transcoding, so there's really no drive for me to double my cores.
The 45nm Core2 processors are even cooler - they have a TDP of 45w, and the average processor uses much less.
Please note: the measurements above are of processor power consumption only, not total system consumption. As you might expect, only the top-end 45nm Core2 procesors consume anywhere near their 45w TDP, just as only the top-end 65nm Core2 processors consume near 65w.
As for the i7, it only performs well in perfectly-multithreaded benchmarks that are completely I/O-limited (like the aggressive multi-pass .h264 encoder), otherwise it performs about as well as a Core2 Quad. And when you consider the starting price for an i7 motherboard is around $200-250, you have to be nuts to consider purchasing such a monstrosity.
...if they bother to do a better mix for the LP, that is. Just ask the people pissed-off about Death Magnetic LP having the same crap mix as the CD. I think this comment sums-it-up beautifully:
From what I've read on other posts.. the vinyl sounds exactly like the CD.. The clipping and distortion is built into the final mix, and they went with the same mix for the Vinyl and CD.. How the needle doesn't jump off the record, I have no idea.
The good news? Some artists actually give a fuck about their listeners, and release unmixed tracks to let their fans go-to-town (for those who don't know, the Stems CD contains raw unmixed tracks of Ben Fold's latest CD, Way To Normal).
What, not even indepedent artists? I've found some smashingly-good CDs in the last two years by local artists (that have nothing whatsoever to do with the RIAA). Support your local artists, and give the RIAA the finger - you'll have new music AND a clearer conscience.
Yeah, that's great - tell me, did they improve on the hard-limit of 2048 triangles per-frame?
Even if you add memory, it's geometry that's holding the DS graphics back - that, and the lack of bilinear filtering.
Yeah, you're right. The reason mp3 at 128k got such a bad name is because people with no clue and no processing power loved the Xing encoder.
Xing was one of the first third-party mp3 encoders, and made it's way into a lot of early mp3 tools. It's fast and craptacular, and is responsible for the majority of bad mp3s around the net.
Even an mp3 encoded in 2002 with LAME 128k CBR would not have sounded all that bad.
You said it, man. My mother has crap eyesight, as do many older people, and she can't tell the difference between standard def and high-def TV. This is not surprising, as she couldn't see the (amazing) difference between VHS and DVD. Really, the only reason she has ditched VHS tapes is because DVDs are more convenient (no rewinds), and easier to find today.
Multiply this problem by the hundreds of millions of people with crap eyesight, and you begin to see why high-def is a non-starter. When I consider this, it makes me laugh when I read that there are already movements witnin the industry to quadruple the current 1080p resolution of HDTV. Good luck selling that.
Especially a 6-year-old rip. Although LAME can produce almost transparent results today at 128k VBR, 6 years ago 128k CBR sounded like crap.
I still can't believe most of his students don't care. Even on crap speakers, I was able to hear the artifacts in early 128k mp3s. It has to be that they don't give a shit - some people just don't care about the quality of the music, because music is just background noise for them.
PAE won't help with this problem, because it splits the memory space into multiple 4GB chunks, and you can only access one chunk at a time. Technically, you could have a game use more than 2GB ram using PAE, but the performance hit switching between memory spaces is astronomical, so you'd have to find a way to streamline it.
A flat 64-bit memory space is so much easier. PAE was really intended for multiple server processes to run at-once, with a small hit for process switching. Nothing real-time was ever intended for PAE.
This would've been nice two years ago, but we are already at the 4GB barrier. And sadly we are out of options. If available memory cannot increase, the quality of games will not improve. Yeah, you can go XP-64, but from what I've seen, it's not nearly as good as Vista/7 64. And if you're going to upgrade to XP-64, you might as well consider 7 instead.
In addition, the demand just isn't there anymore. There was a huge clamor for DX10 in XP when Vista was released, but now that's died-down. It turns out that a lot of good games don't support DX10, and most of those that do have huge performance hits for small graphical improvements, or small performance gains with no graphical improvements. The slowing sales of Vista are proof-positive that DX10 is not a selling point anymore.
Hornung: Mr. Grunwald, in addition to your occupation as a spoon, is it not true that you are a driving instructor?
Grunwald: No.
Hornung: Then it is true.
Grunwald: Yes.
Hornung: That you're not a driving instructor?
Grunwald: No.
Hornung: Your Honor, I object to this line of questioning.
Judge: Overruled.
Hornung: Very well, then; I'd like some time to go over my briefs.
Judge: Please.
Hornung: [inspects his underwear] They're fine.
No. The small EDRAM is not the sole reason games aren't pushing 720p. It's because the graphice hardware in both consoles cannot display 1280x720+ without giving-up framerate or details. Since details sell (why they keep increasing), and framerate is mandatory, designers have been pushing things at the cost of resolution.
Even many PS3 games don't run at 720p these days, and there's no EDRAM to make that happen.
I owned a 7900, and I'm well-aware of what it can do. Oblivion brought the card to it's knees (had to settle for 1152x864, medium settings, HDR). They were able to run it at 720p on the 360, despite the 10MB EDRAM limit, and despite the overhead of HDR.
Today, games look even better than Oblivion, and take more graphics power to render. The only solution is to reduce the resolution, or your framerate will go all to hell.
And no, Sony didn't intend Cell to supplement shaders - they intended Cell to BE the shader. That's why RSX wasn't added to the PS3 until the last-minute, once they realized that Cell wasn't fast enough to render 3D.
And yes, you could use Cell to do supplemental effects, but that's a difficult undertaking: you have to properly synchronize the Cell thread so that the GPU isn't waiting on it, and you have to make sure that your shader isn't cannibalizing too much memory bandwidth (rendering is bandwidth-intensive, usually heavily-offset by the complex cache architecture of the GPU, something an SPE can't do).
Just got back from the movie (3 hours!). Since I'm a night owl, you'll get my thoughts now.
The movie was a bit long, and my gf explained that it could have been longer. One example she gave was the scene on Mars arguing the fate of humanity; this was more dragged-out in the book. Overall, I felt it was well-paced, with action spaced between a lot of emotional stopovers to flesh-out characters.
Reality: a lot of people who are looking for a brain-dead action flick are going to be disappointed.
I really liked how all the characters had their dark pasts. It made them a lot more fun to get into.
One thing that I did have to question is this: where did all these people get such super strength and reflexes? These people are breaking bones, moving fast, catching bullets, and smashing holes through furniture - if they're just regular joes in-costumes, how can they do all this? Manhattan is explained, but no one else is.
Yes, but you can't assume anywhere near %100 recycle effiency for Lithium, so you have to remember that it is a consumable.
Futher, if demand outstrips our supply, the fact that it is consumed slowly does not matter.
I'd like to add: a lot of the GP's 'fuel sippers' don't get anywhere near those numbers unless you drive them like a machine. Your average spirited driver is going to get much lower mileage numbers with those cars, because mileage depends as much on your driving style as the design of the car (just ask this famous hypermiler).
My experience:
I am a spirited driver; I have to be, to survive on our great nation's freeways. My previous car was a Saturn SC2 (auto), and although it was lightweight, aerodynamic, with a small 2.0L engine, I wasn't getting near the advertised 34 mpg. On pure highway driving, I would get 31, and in mixed driving (still mostly highway) I would get 29. Last year, I replaced it with a Scion xB (2.5L engine with more torque), and I'm getting 27 mpg combined from the box (only 2 mpg less than the Saturn)!
The xB weighs 500 pounds more, has worse aerodynamics, has more engine displacement, and has a 4-speed auto just like the Saturn. But the improved torque (155 versus 115 lb) means that the new engine is better-designed to handle my high-speed driving, and I'm sure the transmission is also better-tuned for high-speed.
So yeah, you go on touting the wonders of fuel sippers. Thankfully, I can buy a car that reflects my driving style, because for me a 'fuel sipper' would be a wasted effort.
Yes, but at 1x PCIe 1.0, it's a mere shadow of what video demands today. The 1x lane on the ExpressCard slot (2Gbps after 8/10 encoding) was intended to be an inexpensive, nice upgrade over PCI (Cardbus), and nothing more. It makes me wish thay had planned-ahead, and pushed 2x into the slot for a little more cost.
It has one other serious problem: due to bandwidth limitatations, you can't route the images from the video card expansion back to the laptop LCD, so this is not a "portable" solution. Even though the expansion box is very small, you must connect it to an external display, and that is NOT small.
The good news: ExpressCard 2.0 will be released in 2010, and will feature USB 3.0 and PCIe 2.0, so the data rate will jump to 4.0 Gbps. That might actually be enough to make this concept work.
You want replies from people who aren't huge fans, but you posted this before most people get off work today. Only a true fan would skip work/school to watch a movie.
I've not read the book (I just finished chapter 1), and I'm seeing it tonight at 9:30; if you still want the viewpoint of a non-obsessed fan, check back tomorrow for my reply to this post.
Yup, you can knock $100 off the top by just trading the Velociraptor for a 7200 RPM drive. The Raptor has somewhat better benchmarks, but not enough to justify the price. You basically only buy it if (A) you're a developer and will be hitting the disk IO or (B) price is no object. And at that point, you might consider trading-up to an SSD.
I will say, although I wouldn't buy an AMD chip today, it's good to have them back in the saddle competing again. Phenom was a disaster: late, defective and under-performing. They had my money with the Athlon 64, and they'll get my money again when they build the chip with the best performance/watt (the 45nm Core2 Quads litterally stomp the Phenom II in power consumption).
10 INPUT "What is your name: ", U$ : PRINT "Hello "; U$ : INPUT "How many Libraries of Congress do you want: ", N : PRINT N : END
So long as you don't use branches, your line length is virtually unlimited. And it executes faster too :)
They'll name it Serenity, since that's the "real" option with all the votes. I'm sure Colbert will be pissed when he finds out that he was beaten by a pack of rabid Joss Whedon fans :)
The problem is, all the bands that people could unite behind in the 1990s broke-up at the height of their careers. Sometimes, it was due to irreconcilable differences; other times, it was due to untimely death.
Guns N' Roses
Nirvana
Smashing Pumpkins
Alice in Chains
Soundgarden
Stone Temple Pilots
Thankfully, we still have Pearl Jam and Metallica, but that's a very short list of survivors of 90s rock. IT's no wonder the kids today are reaching back to the 70s.