Exactly. It's like MAD, except there's no threat of personal injury to the people involved. Each side is worried that if they give so much as an inch, the other side will take two more.
Sure, it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to; that's just the way escalalation works out.
I'm not sure how Linux is doing it, but Windows x86-64 runs 32-bit applications in WOW (Windows on Windows). I'm guessing Microsoft's goal was a clean 64-bit implementation with a 32-bit legacy mode for applications only, since this would by-far be the least tedious to design and support.
So they leave that out of the Free Software driver they release. Big deal.
You really have no idea how pervasive S3TC is, do you?
S3TC was released as part of the DirectX standard (now called DXTC). It was a dying gasp from S3 about 6 years ago. It was immediately picked up by card makers (Nvidia has supported it since the GeForce 2, and ATI since the Radeon), and has become an industry standard.
I guarantee EVERY GAME RELEASED today uses DXTC without even telling you...and you don't even notice it!
If you want perspective on what that means for users, how about this:
Doom 3 has an "Ultra Quality" mode, which uses the same resolution textures as the "High Quality" mode, but leaves them uncompressed. The "Ultra Quality" mode requires a SMASHING 512MB ram, and reviewers and players alike can't tell the difference between it and "High Quality."
The hardware difference? "High Quality" only requires 256MB of ram. THAT is why S3 / DirectX Texture Compression is so critical.
This is because x86-64 is an open standard. AMD released it as open when they announced it, because it was the only way to gain industry acceptance.
Once AMD got Microsoft's cooperation building support for x86-64 into Windows, they hardped on about the open standard. This protected AMD from Intel, who were already secretly working on their own implementation of x86-64. Normally, once Intel realized how potentially powerful x86-64 was, they were sure to create their own incompatible version (ala SSE and 3DNOW!) to try and derail AMD.
But the open standard stopped Intel from doing this. Microsoft pointed to the open standard, and told Intel flat-out that they were not going to support two versions of 64-bit x86.
x86-64 is an open standard. AMD's copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is called AMD64. Inte;'s copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is EMT64.
Now tell me: why are the likes of NVidia and ATI keeping their products undocumented and their drivers closed?
Because, if they DO PROTECT THEIR IP, The OTHER GUY has to waste TONS OF MONEY on reverse-engineering teams and highly-qualified people to reverse-engineer the processor via electron microscopes.
It's not the EQUIPMENT that is expensive, it is the PEOPLE. And, as you Linux zealots know FULL WELL, reverse-engineering is EXPENSIVE in terms of PEOPLE and TIME.
If you publish the specifications of your latest graphics chip for all to see, suddenly your competitors don't have to divert staff from working on next-generation architectures just to reverse-engineer your system. Instead, they can analyze your documentation in a fraction of the time.
It's a two-way street, so stop deluding yourself that there's only one side to the story. Publishing full specs for your graphics chips is like writing your competition a blank check. Intel is the only one who doesn't have an issues doing this because their graphics technology is always following.
And to counter your argument: what happens in two years when ATI and NVidia decide your card is too old to support, and yet it still performs very well but you NEED the features in the latest kernel and latest x.org? Go ahead, buy a new video card.
Yes. There are still many well-supported video cards sold in AGP. In fact, you can still get well-supported video cards in PCI, a fifteen-year-old technology. They're not top-performers, but beggars can't be choosers.
The video card market is transitioning to PCIe with surprising speed precisely because they do not want another VLB fiasco. The PCI -> AGP transition was slow because PCI still had a future for other types of cards, but the AGP -> PCIe transition was rushed to avoid market confusion. You can still buy plenty of AGP cards, but the big players have made it clear: there won't be any more improvements for AGP.
Windows almost _never_ recognizes my hardware out of the box. Even stuff as mundane as onboard chipsets for AC97 audio,SiS video and Realtek eth send me scrambling for the motherboard utilities/driver disc, where on the other hand, Linux recognizes these devices at boot.
No, it recognizes EVERYTHING (that's why you get the prompt), it simply doesn't have the space to store the bounty of drivers you'd like on that single CD.
THREE REASONS:
1. Look at the market today. Five years ago, we had Intel chipsets with the lion's share, and tiny Via, SiS and ALI trying to compete. Good chipsets lasted two years or more. Now, thanks to AMD's splintering of the chip market, we have Nvidia, ATI, ULI (now Nvidia) in addition to the old players. Now, chipsets are outdated within a year, and there are more players, so it's not so feasable to ship Windows with all the drivers you need.
2. Over time, the OS has grown larger as more features have been added, but the storage medium has not. So what gets left out? DRIVERS!
3. Also consider: while Windows has enlarged, so have the drivers (have you SEEN the SIZE of some fo these things?), so once again you have to slim down the number of drivers shipping with Windows.
The move to DVD with Windows Vista should bring us back to the old days, where you could install Windows 98 on a BX-chipset system without touching a driver disk.
There's a reason why new audio-specific lossless compression algorithms were developed. Back in the day, the performance of other general compression algorithms was even worse with audio - RAR has seen a lot of improvement, for example. But even with improvements, they can't come close to audio-specific compression schemes. Also, audio-specific compression schemes are aimed at LOW requirements for decompression.
It just so happens that FLAC and APE are two of the earliest formats to show significant gains over RAR, so they're firmly seated in the top spot now.
Yes, and that works JUST FINE. Those are 4-core systems, and like I said IN MY FIRST POST, they perform GREAT.
But for the THIRD FUCKING TIME PEOPLE, this article is about Kentsfield and Cloverton, which are two dual-core processors in one socket package. That's TWO processors on the same bus, and that is why Cloverton is going to use the pathetic 1066 MHz bus.
AND THAT IS WHY IT WILL HAVE A SEVERE BANDWIDTH PROBLEM.
That's not the real reason Opera is shunned.
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A Browser War Preview
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't use Opera for the following reasons:
1. I am lazy when it comes to browsers.
2. Up until last year, Opera had the attached stigma of being a "for pay" or "advertising-supported" browser. For years, it also lacked solid features supported by many mainstream browsers, (like javascript). Only now is it feature-complete AND free.
So, let's address the lazy part (my background):
First browser: Netscape 3. Used until: Communicator 4.7 Reason for switch: was tired of putting up with increased crashes, which had been bugging me since Communicator 4.
Finally gave in and tried IE 5.0, which was faster and hardly crashed at all.
Second browser: IE 5 Used until: IE 6 Reason for switch: reduced stability over IE 5, increased pop-ups and pop-unders, more security holes every day, random site redirects bugging me to install spyware without my asking.
Finally gave in and tried Phoenix just for the pop-up blocking and improved stability and security. Got hooked on the tabbed-browsing and extensions.
Third browser: Phoenix 0.6 Used until: present day (Firefox 1.5) Reason to consider switching: not much. 1.5 isn't as stable as 1.0, but it's not bad enough yet to consider a switch.
See my point yet? Most people are stuck in their ways - a favorite browser is like a favorite chair or pen: when it's really good, it's REALLY good. When it starts to suck, you make due until it really starts to bug you.
Let's now come back to reason #2:
Opera has just been badly marketed, so lazy people havn't considered it.
Opera made a bad move charging money for their browser because it meant I never seriously considered it as an option. I couldn't stand the idea of having an ad-supported browser, so I threw it out of consideration. Same goes for many people I know.
Then Opera missed the boat last year: they only made their software free AFTER the big Firefox advertising campaign. This was very stupid, because with the limelight on Firefox, nobody cared. If it had been announced before or polssibly a few months after the big Firefox hodown, it would have made a bigger splash.
Intel already has processors at 1333Mhz FSB, check the 5100 series, chipset and processors.
And my point was that 1333 MHz, while plenty for two cores, is not nearly enough bandwidth for 4 cores on a single bus. Their advanced L2 cache can hide the huge latency to memory, but it cannot make up for bandwidth starvation.
Additionally, I seriously doubt that Intel will be able to clock the FSB any faster than 1066 MHz. In the past, Intel has not been able to run multi-processor systems at the same bus speed as single processors. According to this link, Cloverton will be a 1066 MHz part, and I expect the same of Kentsfield.
Intel knows this very well, they've been having trouble with bandwidth for years while stuck at 800 MHz FSB. The only dual-core Pentium 4 processors to show efficient use of the second core are the EE-series, with 1066 MHz bus.
Even if Intel can successfuly crank the FSB up to 1333 MHz bus, that's still significantly less than they need to feed twice as many processors as Conroe. If this were AMD, they'd just add more memory controllers and more HT links...but for Intel this is not an option.
Intel does offer a Dual-Independent Bus architecture, but this is designed for Woodcrest, and is extremely expensive to implement. DIP does allow Woodcreast to scale effortlessly to 4 cores, and that is why we've seen Intel encourage reviews of their 4-core (2 processor) Woodcrest platforms. Unfortunately, even this DIB architecture will not scale well into 8 cores (4 cores per bus), and Intel's cheaper-to-implement quad-core processors will really feel the squeeze.
Exactly what I was thinking. Why hasn't an ATI or and AMD or an NVidia pounced on them?
The Nvidia - SGI relationship is still sour. Nvidia was formed by ex-SGI employees who saw the writing on the wall. They created their own chips which infringed on SGI technology. SGI brough suit against Nvidia, and as part of the settlement, they entered a cross-licensing "initiative."
Nvidia knows SGI far too well to bother absorbing it.
ATI, on the other hand, doesn't need to consider purchasing SGI at all. ATI has the better brand name, having been one of the top PC video OEMs for over a decade, and they're starting to make a name for themselves in chipsets (both branded ATI chipsets, and as a major supplier for Intel motherboards). Further, they've been taking advantage of SGI's need for multi-chip graphics solutions: SGI pays through the nose to finance research on multi-chip boards, which translates to easier and cheaper consumer-level CrossFire solutions.
The brand itself is still worth a good chunk-o-change I would think.
This isn't 1997. SGI has been a complete non-factor in the 3D market for the last decade. When SGI didn't continue their push for creating "affordable" 3D hardware after they designed the N64, they wrote their own death sentence. Other companies came along and did it for them.
I made a trip to Puerto Rico last year, and I was a bit amazed at the architecture: with the exception of downtown San Juan and tourist hotels, all of the habitations have no glass. Designs are built open to the air, with shutters built-in to all the windows. There are window air-conditioners, but nobody bothers with forced-air HVAC systems.
Sounds inefficient, right? Wrong. For most of the year, the people leave their houses open to the air witout using the AC, and it is quite nice. During the humid summer months, when mosquitos are about, they use the shutters to close up the house at night, and run the window air-conditioner to cool the room enough to sleep.
This is a nice compromise, because in a place like Puerto Rico, glass is an expensive building material, and is also a liability come hurricane season. Shutters make a lot more sense, both as hurricane protection, and as a cheap way to insulate and easily cool single rooms.
Yes, thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I read into this, and about 6 months ago the prevailing belief was that Merom was a 64-bit Yonah. Apparently, it is just an undervolted Conroe.
But it still stands that Intel cannot put all their chips on a single platter. Intel is not going to abandon the Yonah architecture for Merom, because it has much better performance / watt than the 4+1 design of Conroe & company. Sossaman is proof that Yonah is already completely capable of 64-bit and virtualization support, so its not going anywhere. Merom will be relegated to high-horsepower portables and desktop replacements.
Merom and Yonah are basically dual-core Pentium M chips - 3 instruction decoders, 3-wide instruction issue / retire. They include the Pentium M's instructional units, including 2 64-bit SSE units per core.
Conroe and Woodcrest are complete redesigns of the Pentium M architecture, and are 4 + 1 decode, 4-wide issue and retire. Intel completely revamped the execution units: they include additional execution ports, and more floating-point power (ncluding full 128-bit wide SSE processing paths).
While they are both of the same pedigree (P6 -> Pentium M), they are NOT AT ALL the same. One is designed for efficiency, and the other tosses some efficiency out the window in favor of increased performance. See the preview article here at Real World Technologies.
You are thinking of the AMD Athlon / Opteron / Turion, which are the exact same chip with different microcode paths enabled. These chips can most certainly be taken from the same wafer.
Damn straight. I work 40 hours a week, and I'm getting my MS, and I like to hang with friends whenever I can...
But when I have time to game, I occasionally like to play something long and complex. Even though I've been busy, I still have found time to play Oblivion recently (although I'm nowhere near done with it).
Oh, and I must agree on the music...there's a time for short pop songs, and then there's that hour you set aside on Sunday afternoon to LISTEN to Close to the Edge, or Mahler's Symphony No. 2, or whatever you fancy. There's something unique about getting lost in creations of that magnitude.
When I went to college in 1997, a full name-brand computer with a printer and 15" monitor was around $1500. My computer I bought for college was around $2000, a Pentium 233 MMX w/32MB ram and 17" monitor, and it wasn't even top-of-the-line. I could have spent a couple thousand more on a Pentium II 300 monster with a SCSI disk and larger monitor, but I thought it was too expensive.
Nowadays, you'd cringe at paying more than $1000 for a "mid-range" PC, and no more than $500 for an entry-level PC. However, you can still find plenty of places that will be happy to charge you thousands of dollars for a top-of-the-line performance PC. In other words, only one thing has changed: the minimum price of entry has gone down...but the sky is still the limit so far as top-of-the-line prices go (PCs included).
See my point? The perspective of what is "expensive" changes with time, because prices continue to fall. $899 is a good chunk of change, and is not necessarily competitive with PC offerings...but it is a mighty good deal if all you want is a fairly powerful mid-range Macintosh.
Would I buy it? Hell no, but that's mostly because I don't want an all-in-one computer.
According to the update here, Sekhon acknowledges the discovery of the performance issue with malloc. He does, however, still find issues with medium-sized datasets. There only logical explanation for this is darwin system call overhead (discussed in the article I linked, AND the comments of the blog post you linked).
Switching purely for security reasons inherently requires two things:
1. A person is SMART enough to realize they have a CHOICE in security measures, and are PROACTIVE enough to implement that decision.
2. A person who is too STUPID or LAZY to practice proper safe usage habits. Examples include idiots who cannot seem to pick "No" when prompted by software, or can't be bothered to pay attention and update when security patches are released.
See the problem there? If you are a competent user, you RARELY have security problems (now that most security issues boil down to automated attacks like zombies and trojans). You KNOW you can switch for better security, but since your experience has been good, security is not a big impetus for you to switch.
The fact of the matter is, YOU CAN have a %99.9 worry-free experience with Windows if you use a hardware / software firewall, use Firefox as your web browser, and don't open strange attachments. Since most people with a clue already do this, they have little impetus to switch for security alone.
If you are an idiot user, your security experience is pretty crappy, but you usually have no idea that you have a choice. These people are usually too afraid of technology to educate themselves.
So, security ends up being a tiny issue for getting people to switch operating systems. This is, as-opposed to applications, where the more secure versions are gaining ground.
Look up Babilon - that's current Iraq. Look up the Ottoman empire. That's Turkey. Back then oil was useless, but these countries were world powers.
You're drawing the wrong comparison. The Ottoman Empire was great because it controlled all trade routes for spices and silk from the Far East. Trade made it great, and as a result they had the money and spare time to come up with advancements like our modern number system.
The Middle East is still great because of trade, but now they are the source, rather than the means, of the item in demand.
The parent poster claims that releasing the Saturn V data would provide states with technology we don't want them to have, technology that can disrupt our power base, and he is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.
Let me draw a comparison: do you know what happened to the Ottoman Empire? At the height, it controlled land routes with solid armies, and short-haul water trade routes in the Mediterranean. What happened? Europe invented more advanced seafaring technology which allowed them to bypass the Ottoman monopoly on trade routes. The Ottomans, who occupied Spain for 700 years, were quicky kicked out of Spain and then Europe around the same time Portugese and Spanish sailors found routes to the Far East around Africa, and untouched lands in the Americas.
In fact, the unprotected nature of sailing technology meant that anyone could pick it up. Thus, within 200 years, Spain rose and fell hard, quickly losing their advantage as their competitors caught up.
The refusal to share technology like the Saturn V with the world may slow down advancements, but it ultimately provides more stability for those at the top. And that is what our government is most concerned with: staying on top.
Heh. Call me back when you grew enough of a spine and learned about personal responsibility. For example about honestly admitting a mistake instead of pulling a prom-queen maneuver of pretending you've said something else.
Ahh, but I did admit the mistake. Twice. See my response to my second post. I intended all along to post units of fatal crashes per million flight hours, but obviously I did not. Twice.
You cannot refute that the 79 fatal crashes per million flight hours compares favorably to the general aviation number of 68 fatal accidents per million miles.
I cannot refute that a %1.75 chance of fatal crash per flight is high.
I do propose that the true reliability of the Space Shuttle lies somewhere betwen those numbers, making is less reliabile than general aviation, but not more than a couple orders of magnitude. This would reflect the fact that we both agree that the "space bus" concept is in its technological infancy, and is expected to be much less reliable than other established busses.
The units for all three numbers are fatal accidents per million miles, my mistake typing the wrong units. But as for you, YOU could have taken 5 minutes to check that my figures were RIGHT, the units were just typed in wrong. But no, you just went and laid into me.
While you were busy turning the numbers in your favor, and discrediting mine, you forgot two things:
* My mentioning of the fact that crashes are most likely during takeoff and landing does not ursurp the significance of my original statistic: that the Shuttle has safety on the same order as general aviation. No aspect of spaceflight is so routine that you can ignore it statistically, not even the orbital flight portion.
There could be a critical failure of onboard equipment, or collision with derbis or the space station. The fact that we HAVN'T yet had an orbital accident only means we're more and more likely to see one. Would be very funny if, after all this preparation for another foam hit, the Shuttle explosively decompresses in-orbit because someone forgot to tighten a screw after fucking with the Shutle for the hundredth time this month.
* You're deluded that the Shuttle, a craft which moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER than a commercial passenger aircraft, and travels further than the average airline trip JUST TO GET TO ORBIT, should have anywhere near the same saftey record. The numbers I put forth, the crashes per million hours, look at the numbers from their good side, and your comparison looks at the numbers from their bad side. Somewhere in-between those is the true reliability for the Shuttle, and they're NOT THAT BAD.
My point is that, how could you NOT be satisfied with those numbers? This craft is EXPERIMENTAL. No two are exactly the same, and the later-built models benefited from the earlier ones. For a craft of such complexity and uniqueness, pushed to such excessive speeds and tensions, how could you expect anything more?
Remember your baby, the commericial aircraft industry (read: air bus)? It used to be quite dangerous to take a flight. In the last 35 years, the accident rate of commercial airlines has reduced over an order of magnitude! There also every indication that accident rates in the 50s and 60s were even higher!
Well, guess what folks? Right now our "space bus" industry is in the "1940s" of the commercial aircraft industry. Most of our spaceplanes are still custom-built, and there's still a lot left to learn. Commericial interestest are only just now starting to explore the possibilities of manned space flights. And you want the reliability of our commercial aircraft industry for the year 2000? You're NUTS.
Sure, the Space Shuttle isn't nearly as safe as modern aircraft, but that didn't stop people from flying fairly dangerous "air busses" back in the 1940s as the industry was budding. On the same line, the Space Shuttle is a bit more dangerous than modern aircraft, but not so much that you can't justify the flight. Call me back when your head finds its way out of your ass.
1045.99 days, 2 fatal accidents = 79 fatal accidents per million hours. That's in the same range as general aviation, and only an order of magnitude higher than commercial aviation. Not bad for a craft which travels seventeen thousand miles per hour to break away from the earth, then re-enter the atmosphere at mach 25. It looks even more amazing when you consider: the orbiter is technically still experimental; what else do you call a craft which has been manufacturered less than a dozen times, each with its own customizations? Certainly not a PRODUCTION model.
And don't tell me this is a bad comparison. Just like the Space Shuttle, aircraft spend most of their operating hours in cruise. And just like aircraft, the Shuttle is most likely to suffer an accident during takeoff and landing. If you believe that commercial airline flights are as safe as they can be, then the 79 accidents per million miles for the Shuttle is an exemplary safety record.
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Exactly. It's like MAD, except there's no threat of personal injury to the people involved. Each side is worried that if they give so much as an inch, the other side will take two more.
Sure, it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to; that's just the way escalalation works out.
I'm not sure how Linux is doing it, but Windows x86-64 runs 32-bit applications in WOW (Windows on Windows). I'm guessing Microsoft's goal was a clean 64-bit implementation with a 32-bit legacy mode for applications only, since this would by-far be the least tedious to design and support.
So they leave that out of the Free Software driver they release. Big deal.
You really have no idea how pervasive S3TC is, do you?
S3TC was released as part of the DirectX standard (now called DXTC). It was a dying gasp from S3 about 6 years ago. It was immediately picked up by card makers (Nvidia has supported it since the GeForce 2, and ATI since the Radeon), and has become an industry standard.
I guarantee EVERY GAME RELEASED today uses DXTC without even telling you...and you don't even notice it!
If you want perspective on what that means for users, how about this:
Doom 3 has an "Ultra Quality" mode, which uses the same resolution textures as the "High Quality" mode, but leaves them uncompressed. The "Ultra Quality" mode requires a SMASHING 512MB ram, and reviewers and players alike can't tell the difference between it and "High Quality."
The hardware difference? "High Quality" only requires 256MB of ram. THAT is why S3 / DirectX Texture Compression is so critical.
This is because x86-64 is an open standard. AMD released it as open when they announced it, because it was the only way to gain industry acceptance.
Once AMD got Microsoft's cooperation building support for x86-64 into Windows, they hardped on about the open standard. This protected AMD from Intel, who were already secretly working on their own implementation of x86-64. Normally, once Intel realized how potentially powerful x86-64 was, they were sure to create their own incompatible version (ala SSE and 3DNOW!) to try and derail AMD.
But the open standard stopped Intel from doing this. Microsoft pointed to the open standard, and told Intel flat-out that they were not going to support two versions of 64-bit x86.
x86-64 is an open standard. AMD's copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is called AMD64. Inte;'s copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is EMT64.
Now tell me: why are the likes of NVidia and ATI keeping their products undocumented and their drivers closed?
Because, if they DO PROTECT THEIR IP, The OTHER GUY has to waste TONS OF MONEY on reverse-engineering teams and highly-qualified people to reverse-engineer the processor via electron microscopes.
It's not the EQUIPMENT that is expensive, it is the PEOPLE. And, as you Linux zealots know FULL WELL, reverse-engineering is EXPENSIVE in terms of PEOPLE and TIME.
If you publish the specifications of your latest graphics chip for all to see, suddenly your competitors don't have to divert staff from working on next-generation architectures just to reverse-engineer your system. Instead, they can analyze your documentation in a fraction of the time.
It's a two-way street, so stop deluding yourself that there's only one side to the story. Publishing full specs for your graphics chips is like writing your competition a blank check. Intel is the only one who doesn't have an issues doing this because their graphics technology is always following.
And to counter your argument: what happens in two years when ATI and NVidia decide your card is too old to support, and yet it still performs very well but you NEED the features in the latest kernel and latest x.org? Go ahead, buy a new video card.
Yes. There are still many well-supported video cards sold in AGP. In fact, you can still get well-supported video cards in PCI, a fifteen-year-old technology. They're not top-performers, but beggars can't be choosers.
The video card market is transitioning to PCIe with surprising speed precisely because they do not want another VLB fiasco. The PCI -> AGP transition was slow because PCI still had a future for other types of cards, but the AGP -> PCIe transition was rushed to avoid market confusion. You can still buy plenty of AGP cards, but the big players have made it clear: there won't be any more improvements for AGP.
Windows almost _never_ recognizes my hardware out of the box. Even stuff as mundane as onboard chipsets for AC97 audio,SiS video and Realtek eth send me scrambling for the motherboard utilities/driver disc, where on the other hand, Linux recognizes these devices at boot.
No, it recognizes EVERYTHING (that's why you get the prompt), it simply doesn't have the space to store the bounty of drivers you'd like on that single CD.
THREE REASONS:
1. Look at the market today. Five years ago, we had Intel chipsets with the lion's share, and tiny Via, SiS and ALI trying to compete. Good chipsets lasted two years or more. Now, thanks to AMD's splintering of the chip market, we have Nvidia, ATI, ULI (now Nvidia) in addition to the old players. Now, chipsets are outdated within a year, and there are more players, so it's not so feasable to ship Windows with all the drivers you need.
2. Over time, the OS has grown larger as more features have been added, but the storage medium has not. So what gets left out? DRIVERS!
3. Also consider: while Windows has enlarged, so have the drivers (have you SEEN the SIZE of some fo these things?), so once again you have to slim down the number of drivers shipping with Windows.
The move to DVD with Windows Vista should bring us back to the old days, where you could install Windows 98 on a BX-chipset system without touching a driver disk.
And honestly. FLAC and APE get about 2:1 compression. So does ZIP, GZ and BZ2 when applied to PCM. What, exactly, is the difference?
No, they don't.
The difference is:
APE: %55 of original size
FLAC: %59 of original size
RAR: %67.5 of original size
BZip2: %84 of original size
GZip: %91.5 of original size
There's a reason why new audio-specific lossless compression algorithms were developed. Back in the day, the performance of other general compression algorithms was even worse with audio - RAR has seen a lot of improvement, for example. But even with improvements, they can't come close to audio-specific compression schemes. Also, audio-specific compression schemes are aimed at LOW requirements for decompression.
It just so happens that FLAC and APE are two of the earliest formats to show significant gains over RAR, so they're firmly seated in the top spot now.
Yes, and that works JUST FINE. Those are 4-core systems, and like I said IN MY FIRST POST, they perform GREAT.
But for the THIRD FUCKING TIME PEOPLE, this article is about Kentsfield and Cloverton, which are two dual-core processors in one socket package. That's TWO processors on the same bus, and that is why Cloverton is going to use the pathetic 1066 MHz bus.
AND THAT IS WHY IT WILL HAVE A SEVERE BANDWIDTH PROBLEM.
I don't use Opera for the following reasons:
1. I am lazy when it comes to browsers.
2. Up until last year, Opera had the attached stigma of being a "for pay" or "advertising-supported" browser. For years, it also lacked solid features supported by many mainstream browsers, (like javascript). Only now is it feature-complete AND free.
So, let's address the lazy part (my background):
First browser: Netscape 3.
Used until: Communicator 4.7
Reason for switch: was tired of putting up with increased crashes, which had been bugging me since Communicator 4.
Finally gave in and tried IE 5.0, which was faster and hardly crashed at all.
Second browser: IE 5
Used until: IE 6
Reason for switch: reduced stability over IE 5, increased pop-ups and pop-unders, more security holes every day, random site redirects bugging me to install spyware without my asking.
Finally gave in and tried Phoenix just for the pop-up blocking and improved stability and security. Got hooked on the tabbed-browsing and extensions.
Third browser: Phoenix 0.6
Used until: present day (Firefox 1.5)
Reason to consider switching: not much. 1.5 isn't as stable as 1.0, but it's not bad enough yet to consider a switch.
See my point yet? Most people are stuck in their ways - a favorite browser is like a favorite chair or pen: when it's really good, it's REALLY good. When it starts to suck, you make due until it really starts to bug you.
Let's now come back to reason #2:
Opera has just been badly marketed, so lazy people havn't considered it.
Opera made a bad move charging money for their browser because it meant I never seriously considered it as an option. I couldn't stand the idea of having an ad-supported browser, so I threw it out of consideration. Same goes for many people I know.
Then Opera missed the boat last year: they only made their software free AFTER the big Firefox advertising campaign. This was very stupid, because with the limelight on Firefox, nobody cared. If it had been announced before or polssibly a few months after the big Firefox hodown, it would have made a bigger splash.
Intel already has processors at 1333Mhz FSB, check the 5100 series, chipset and processors.
And my point was that 1333 MHz, while plenty for two cores, is not nearly enough bandwidth for 4 cores on a single bus. Their advanced L2 cache can hide the huge latency to memory, but it cannot make up for bandwidth starvation.
Additionally, I seriously doubt that Intel will be able to clock the FSB any faster than 1066 MHz. In the past, Intel has not been able to run multi-processor systems at the same bus speed as single processors. According to this link, Cloverton will be a 1066 MHz part, and I expect the same of Kentsfield.
Don't expect Intel's performance beyond 4 cores to be anything amazing. AMD's K8L, with an additional HT link and the ability to use "half links," will be the shining star of 8 and 16-core systems next year.
Intel knows this very well, they've been having trouble with bandwidth for years while stuck at 800 MHz FSB. The only dual-core Pentium 4 processors to show efficient use of the second core are the EE-series, with 1066 MHz bus.
Even if Intel can successfuly crank the FSB up to 1333 MHz bus, that's still significantly less than they need to feed twice as many processors as Conroe. If this were AMD, they'd just add more memory controllers and more HT links...but for Intel this is not an option.
Intel does offer a Dual-Independent Bus architecture, but this is designed for Woodcrest, and is extremely expensive to implement. DIP does allow Woodcreast to scale effortlessly to 4 cores, and that is why we've seen Intel encourage reviews of their 4-core (2 processor) Woodcrest platforms. Unfortunately, even this DIB architecture will not scale well into 8 cores (4 cores per bus), and Intel's cheaper-to-implement quad-core processors will really feel the squeeze.
Exactly what I was thinking. Why hasn't an ATI or and AMD or an NVidia pounced on them?
The Nvidia - SGI relationship is still sour. Nvidia was formed by ex-SGI employees who saw the writing on the wall. They created their own chips which infringed on SGI technology. SGI brough suit against Nvidia, and as part of the settlement, they entered a cross-licensing "initiative."
Nvidia knows SGI far too well to bother absorbing it.
ATI, on the other hand, doesn't need to consider purchasing SGI at all. ATI has the better brand name, having been one of the top PC video OEMs for over a decade, and they're starting to make a name for themselves in chipsets (both branded ATI chipsets, and as a major supplier for Intel motherboards). Further, they've been taking advantage of SGI's need for multi-chip graphics solutions: SGI pays through the nose to finance research on multi-chip boards, which translates to easier and cheaper consumer-level CrossFire solutions.
The brand itself is still worth a good chunk-o-change I would think.
This isn't 1997. SGI has been a complete non-factor in the 3D market for the last decade. When SGI didn't continue their push for creating "affordable" 3D hardware after they designed the N64, they wrote their own death sentence. Other companies came along and did it for them.
I made a trip to Puerto Rico last year, and I was a bit amazed at the architecture: with the exception of downtown San Juan and tourist hotels, all of the habitations have no glass. Designs are built open to the air, with shutters built-in to all the windows. There are window air-conditioners, but nobody bothers with forced-air HVAC systems.
Sounds inefficient, right? Wrong. For most of the year, the people leave their houses open to the air witout using the AC, and it is quite nice. During the humid summer months, when mosquitos are about, they use the shutters to close up the house at night, and run the window air-conditioner to cool the room enough to sleep.
This is a nice compromise, because in a place like Puerto Rico, glass is an expensive building material, and is also a liability come hurricane season. Shutters make a lot more sense, both as hurricane protection, and as a cheap way to insulate and easily cool single rooms.
Yes, thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I read into this, and about 6 months ago the prevailing belief was that Merom was a 64-bit Yonah. Apparently, it is just an undervolted Conroe.
But it still stands that Intel cannot put all their chips on a single platter. Intel is not going to abandon the Yonah architecture for Merom, because it has much better performance / watt than the 4+1 design of Conroe & company. Sossaman is proof that Yonah is already completely capable of 64-bit and virtualization support, so its not going anywhere. Merom will be relegated to high-horsepower portables and desktop replacements.
Merom and Yonah are basically dual-core Pentium M chips - 3 instruction decoders, 3-wide instruction issue / retire. They include the Pentium M's instructional units, including 2 64-bit SSE units per core.
Conroe and Woodcrest are complete redesigns of the Pentium M architecture, and are 4 + 1 decode, 4-wide issue and retire. Intel completely revamped the execution units: they include additional execution ports, and more floating-point power (ncluding full 128-bit wide SSE processing paths).
While they are both of the same pedigree (P6 -> Pentium M), they are NOT AT ALL the same. One is designed for efficiency, and the other tosses some efficiency out the window in favor of increased performance. See the preview article here at Real World Technologies.
You are thinking of the AMD Athlon / Opteron / Turion, which are the exact same chip with different microcode paths enabled. These chips can most certainly be taken from the same wafer.
Damn straight. I work 40 hours a week, and I'm getting my MS, and I like to hang with friends whenever I can...
But when I have time to game, I occasionally like to play something long and complex. Even though I've been busy, I still have found time to play Oblivion recently (although I'm nowhere near done with it).
Oh, and I must agree on the music...there's a time for short pop songs, and then there's that hour you set aside on Sunday afternoon to LISTEN to Close to the Edge, or Mahler's Symphony No. 2, or whatever you fancy. There's something unique about getting lost in creations of that magnitude.
What is "expensive," really?
When I went to college in 1997, a full name-brand computer with a printer and 15" monitor was around $1500. My computer I bought for college was around $2000, a Pentium 233 MMX w/32MB ram and 17" monitor, and it wasn't even top-of-the-line. I could have spent a couple thousand more on a Pentium II 300 monster with a SCSI disk and larger monitor, but I thought it was too expensive.
Nowadays, you'd cringe at paying more than $1000 for a "mid-range" PC, and no more than $500 for an entry-level PC. However, you can still find plenty of places that will be happy to charge you thousands of dollars for a top-of-the-line performance PC. In other words, only one thing has changed: the minimum price of entry has gone down...but the sky is still the limit so far as top-of-the-line prices go (PCs included).
See my point? The perspective of what is "expensive" changes with time, because prices continue to fall. $899 is a good chunk of change, and is not necessarily competitive with PC offerings...but it is a mighty good deal if all you want is a fairly powerful mid-range Macintosh.
Would I buy it? Hell no, but that's mostly because I don't want an all-in-one computer.
According to the update here, Sekhon acknowledges the discovery of the performance issue with malloc. He does, however, still find issues with medium-sized datasets. There only logical explanation for this is darwin system call overhead (discussed in the article I linked, AND the comments of the blog post you linked).
Next time, read the page you link.
Switching purely for security reasons inherently requires two things:
1. A person is SMART enough to realize they have a CHOICE in security measures, and are PROACTIVE enough to implement that decision.
2. A person who is too STUPID or LAZY to practice proper safe usage habits. Examples include idiots who cannot seem to pick "No" when prompted by software, or can't be bothered to pay attention and update when security patches are released.
See the problem there? If you are a competent user, you RARELY have security problems (now that most security issues boil down to automated attacks like zombies and trojans). You KNOW you can switch for better security, but since your experience has been good, security is not a big impetus for you to switch.
The fact of the matter is, YOU CAN have a %99.9 worry-free experience with Windows if you use a hardware / software firewall, use Firefox as your web browser, and don't open strange attachments. Since most people with a clue already do this, they have little impetus to switch for security alone.
If you are an idiot user, your security experience is pretty crappy, but you usually have no idea that you have a choice. These people are usually too afraid of technology to educate themselves.
So, security ends up being a tiny issue for getting people to switch operating systems. This is, as-opposed to applications, where the more secure versions are gaining ground.
Look up Babilon - that's current Iraq. Look up the Ottoman empire. That's Turkey.
Back then oil was useless, but these countries were world powers.
You're drawing the wrong comparison. The Ottoman Empire was great because it controlled all trade routes for spices and silk from the Far East. Trade made it great, and as a result they had the money and spare time to come up with advancements like our modern number system.
The Middle East is still great because of trade, but now they are the source, rather than the means, of the item in demand.
The parent poster claims that releasing the Saturn V data would provide states with technology we don't want them to have, technology that can disrupt our power base, and he is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.
Let me draw a comparison: do you know what happened to the Ottoman Empire? At the height, it controlled land routes with solid armies, and short-haul water trade routes in the Mediterranean. What happened? Europe invented more advanced seafaring technology which allowed them to bypass the Ottoman monopoly on trade routes. The Ottomans, who occupied Spain for 700 years, were quicky kicked out of Spain and then Europe around the same time Portugese and Spanish sailors found routes to the Far East around Africa, and untouched lands in the Americas.
In fact, the unprotected nature of sailing technology meant that anyone could pick it up. Thus, within 200 years, Spain rose and fell hard, quickly losing their advantage as their competitors caught up.
The refusal to share technology like the Saturn V with the world may slow down advancements, but it ultimately provides more stability for those at the top. And that is what our government is most concerned with: staying on top.
I'm officially distracted today.
:D
- wrong units: 2
- unclosed italics: 1
I'm 0-3 in terms of posting what I intended
DO NOT let me fly the Space Shuttle.
Heh. Call me back when you grew enough of a spine and learned about personal responsibility. For example about honestly admitting a mistake instead of pulling a prom-queen maneuver of pretending you've said something else.
Ahh, but I did admit the mistake. Twice. See my response to my second post. I intended all along to post units of fatal crashes per million flight hours, but obviously I did not. Twice.
You cannot refute that the 79 fatal crashes per million flight hours compares favorably to the general aviation number of 68 fatal accidents per million miles.
I cannot refute that a %1.75 chance of fatal crash per flight is high.
I do propose that the true reliability of the Space Shuttle lies somewhere betwen those numbers, making is less reliabile than general aviation, but not more than a couple orders of magnitude. This would reflect the fact that we both agree that the "space bus" concept is in its technological infancy, and is expected to be much less reliable than other established busses.
We are at an impasse.
Man, I am so distracted today. I should just give up.
The units are in fatal acccidents per million FLIGHT HOURS, not miles, despite the fact that I've posted miles TWICE...
The units for all three numbers are fatal accidents per million miles, my mistake typing the wrong units. But as for you, YOU could have taken 5 minutes to check that my figures were RIGHT, the units were just typed in wrong. But no, you just went and laid into me.
While you were busy turning the numbers in your favor, and discrediting mine, you forgot two things:
* My mentioning of the fact that crashes are most likely during takeoff and landing does not ursurp the significance of my original statistic: that
the Shuttle has safety on the same order as general aviation. No aspect of spaceflight is so routine that you can ignore it statistically, not even the orbital flight portion.
There could be a critical failure of onboard equipment, or collision with derbis or the space station. The fact that we HAVN'T yet had an orbital accident only means we're more and more likely to see one. Would be very funny if, after all this preparation for another foam hit, the Shuttle explosively decompresses in-orbit because someone forgot to tighten a screw after fucking with the Shutle for the hundredth time this month.
* You're deluded that the Shuttle, a craft which moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER than a commercial passenger aircraft, and travels further than the average airline trip JUST TO GET TO ORBIT, should have anywhere near the same saftey record. The numbers I put forth, the crashes per million hours, look at the numbers from their good side, and your comparison looks at the numbers from their bad side. Somewhere in-between those is the true reliability for the Shuttle, and they're NOT THAT BAD.
My point is that, how could you NOT be satisfied with those numbers? This craft is EXPERIMENTAL. No two are exactly the same, and the later-built models benefited from the earlier ones. For a craft of such complexity and uniqueness, pushed to such excessive speeds and tensions, how could you expect anything more?
Remember your baby, the commericial aircraft industry (read: air bus)? It used to be quite dangerous to take a flight. In the last 35 years, the accident rate of commercial airlines has reduced over an order of magnitude! There also every indication that accident rates in the 50s and 60s were even higher!
Well, guess what folks? Right now our "space bus" industry is in the "1940s" of the commercial aircraft industry. Most of our spaceplanes are still custom-built, and there's still a lot left to learn. Commericial interestest are only just now starting to explore the possibilities of manned space flights. And you want the reliability of our commercial aircraft industry for the year 2000? You're NUTS.
Sure, the Space Shuttle isn't nearly as safe as modern aircraft, but that didn't stop people from flying fairly dangerous "air busses" back in the 1940s as the industry was budding. On the same line, the Space Shuttle is a bit more dangerous than modern aircraft, but not so much that you can't justify the flight. Call me back when your head finds its way out of your ass.
The Shuttle is safe to fly. Don't believe me? Run the numbers:
This page gives us ~ 5 fatal crashes per million miles for commercial aviation, and 68 fatal accidents per million miles for general aviation in 2004.
Space Shuttle:
1045.99 days, 2 fatal accidents = 79 fatal accidents per million hours. That's in the same range as general aviation, and only an order of magnitude higher than commercial aviation. Not bad for a craft which travels seventeen thousand miles per hour to break away from the earth, then re-enter the atmosphere at mach 25. It looks even more amazing when you consider: the orbiter is technically still experimental; what else do you call a craft which has been manufacturered less than a dozen times, each with its own customizations? Certainly not a PRODUCTION model.
And don't tell me this is a bad comparison. Just like the Space Shuttle, aircraft spend most of their operating hours in cruise. And just like aircraft, the Shuttle is most likely to suffer an accident during takeoff and landing. If you believe that commercial airline flights are as safe as they can be, then the 79 accidents per million miles for the Shuttle is an exemplary safety record.