Not true. The numbers I have seen from IBM have put the 970FX 2.5GHz at ~65w, full-load.
The 90nm Opterons are showing similar power characteristics at matching performance levels, but that's no surprise; they also take advantage of IBM's advanced process techniques (SOI).
The 970FX is an impressive chip, but it's nothing particularly special in this competitive environment. VT's supercomputer is an impressive undertaking for it's thrift, but the fact of the matter is it could have been done with other systems on the market with similar end characteristics.
But why do we have to absurdly claim that the a gay relationship is the same as a hetero one.
Because marriage is no longer just about a man and a woman having babies under the "grace of god". There are various LEGAL (read: SECULAR) benefits that ONLY "spouses" can claim, ranging from immediate family health insurance coverage offered by employers to tax benefits for married couples. I've also experienced other less obvious things, like house renters who would only rent to married couples (they consider them lower-risk than "unmarried" couples or, even worse, unrelated people living together).
There's nothing you can do to stop this trend of using "marriage" as a legal classification factor, so people who consider themselves "married," but don't get the legal recognition, rightfully want the recognition they deserve.
Right off the wheel, a hetero couple is going to most likely make babies, whereas gays won't.
There's nothing in anyone's marriage contract that requires them to "make babies". You know, some couples decide they'd rather adopt than put more lives into this overpopulated planet. Some couples don't get the choice at all, because one or both partners are infertile, or the mother's life would be endangered by carrying a child to term.
Are these people not married? Perhaps not by your terms. But the LAW says they're married, and that's the important issue here. What's wrong with a homosexual couple adopting just like any of the above worthy heterosexual couples? Again, being LEGALLY married actuaklly HELPS couples to be eligible for adoption (they're seen as a more stable home). So, it's hardly surprising that homosexual couples who want to adopt woukld also like to be "married".
The emotional interplay between a man and a woman, especially if she's pregnant, is completely different than what a man and a man or a woman and a woman is, and so gay unions should be called something else.
You have personal experience on both sides of the fence? Considering your rampant homophobia, I seriously doubt that.
Sure, extend gays every legal right to partner up, but don't call it marriage, because its not.
I'll tell you what. You can still get married in Our Lady of the Homophobic Church of God, and pretend that gays are farm animals who shouldn't raise kids because they might "give them the gay". You can live out your years comfortably knowing that there's not a major Protestant or Catholic church on this planet that would marry a gay couple, because gays aren't children under God.
But please don't extend your homophobia such that people who are just as deserving as you can't get ALL the benefits you and your loved one enjoy, in a nice secular public ceremony.
On a related note don't use PUBLIC schools to teach children that homosexuality is okay and normal (i.e. sex ed programs in a few states).
Why not?
The government has been teaching tolerance since the civil rights movement and the appearance of "equal opportunity."
In the same school that teaches that homosexuality is okay and normal, you might find teachers also delivering the message that being born retarded is normal.
And the fact is, retardation defects in their various forms are a NORMAL minority of all births. But instead, many attach the stigma that these people are "abnormal," or perhaps even "monstrosities", simply because their limited exposure dictates such a reaction. These people believe that retardation makes people less human, but they don't tend to speak up about it because these "lesser" people rarely tend to directly involve them.
You get a similar reaction from a large portion of the population when you mention homosexuality...a large portion of people label them automatically as less than human. But then, most of these people don't tend to get worked up about it, because they're rarely directly affected by homosexuality.
The last time the reactionary portion of the population got worked up about homosexuality was in the late 70s and early 80s, when homosexual groups were fighting for recognition. This may not seem like much, but consider this: here was a portion of the population that had existed since the dawn of mankind...and had been ignored as an abberation, rather than embraced as a variation, in our modern times. These were people fighting to be called human, and on the other side were people who had been indoctrinated that such an unholy, filthy creature could not exist on God's green earth.
So certainly, now that they've pretty much won that harsh battle, they're out to reap all the legal benefits of being "human". I'll tell you one thing, I love seeing people get their panties in a bunch over the concept that marriage is "holy" matrimony, and that such a union would be "unholy". These people mush have been asleep the day that legal benefits of marriage were conceived of in this country. There no longer any requirement for marriage to be "holy"...you can get a civil ceremony in any of the 50 states (yup, even Utah), and you can reap all the lovely legal / monetary benefits of a contract of marriage.....Unless you are gay. See, some of you folks still don't think homosexuals are people, and that THEY might also want to get a piece of all these lovely benefits. And worst of all, marriage is one of the oldest "exclusive" clubs...existing members pander all the people they like to join up. Clubs maintain legitimacy by continued membership.
But clubs also have this strange mentality that you can see in many different instances in thius modern world, and that lies in a loss of legitimacy when a club becomes less exclusive. People would refer to this concept as "bandwagon", and can be seen in everything from fashion fads to sports teams. "Early adopters" tend to shun the bandwagon fans...after all, they tend to make the early adopters look less unique and creative.
So here you have it. Most of the folks who don't blindly call on religious arguments to shun the thought of homosexual marriage fall into one or both of the above two categories.
Exclusive Club: people who are married want their marriage to mean something. By allowing in "animals", they believe this devalues the exclusive nature of marriage. I know, it's crazy, because ANY PAIR OF IDIOTS can get married, but people really have this glorified mindset. Thus, the system perpetuates itself because people, as members, actively recruit (ever had your mother bug you for the thousandth time to get married? No? Is your mother STILL BREATHING?). Because they convince themselves that the system IS EXCLUSIVE, they come to the conslusion that they need to recruit...and who better to recruit then their own offspring, who just happen to
I bought a new Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454 about a year ago. At the time I decided that flat panels were still not up to task, and that my NEXT purchase (in 4 or 5 years) would be a panel. So no, I won't be taking advantage of this deal.
But it is nice to know that I will have an acceptable replacement when I'm looking to buy. Furthermore, competing technologies like OLED and ThinCRT should make the market interesting by the time I'm shopping around.
Toms Hardware does a full spectrum response time analysis on all their latest LCD monitor reviews.
As for me, up until a few weeks ago I believed LCDs were still not ready to replace CRTs for gaming. Most of the ones with good enough response time have other unforgivable shortcomings like TERRIBLE scaling in non-native resolution, and poor color rendering.
But then my roomate bought a Dell 2001FP. Advertised 16ms response time, even the worst-case response in games produced no ghosting.
Best of all, the scaling hardware was fantastic. I have never to this day seen scaling hardware this good. Color rendering was also impressive. The only problem I could mention was the glare...it's more noticeable than a CRT.
Unfortunately, the reason so many things were so good on this monitor is that you pay out the ass - ~$1000 MSRP, or around $800 if you can get a good deal. Other LCDs in the "affordable" $300-500 range can't offer such quality features, so I'd be loath to recommend them.
I've scoured whitepapers and other sources looking for this, and IBM and Apple do guard their power numbers quite thoroughly.
I did find one graph for a 2.5GHz 970FX (90nm G5) processor that showed about 60 watts maximum power usage under full load. That tapered to below 20 watts when the machine automatically reduced voltage and frequency when load was low.
I imagine they're reluctant to hype the numbers because they're not particularly impressive. The Athlon 64 90nm shrink has shown similar power levels for the same performance (as you would expect, as they both use IBM's SOI), and also features similar on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling.
See, actually, this is the real issue I saw with this device.
Anyone who has ever programmed a "univeral" remote knows that, for many manufacturers, there are multiple codes. The best part is, many of those codes may work partially for a TV in question, ie: one may work fine, except the channel up/down doesn't work, another may have a dodgy mute signal, but otherwise work fine, and one my only support the power toggle...get the picture?
What you're going to have is a system that probably goes through each brand and code combination in order. This will probably result in several valid "toggle" commands intermixed with invalid ones, because the remote has no idea when it's found a working code. So, you'll probably get a funky response where the TV turns itself on and off several times, and eventually comes to rest on the last valid toggle.
The trick will be disabling the remote BEFORE it toggles the TV back on again...but at one minute to attempt the entire database, you'd have to be aweful fast.
Unfortunately, onboard audio is hit-or-miss, and there's no real consistency between manufacturers because it's the isolation that counts.
If you asked me about onboard sound two years ago, I would have said it was a lost cause. But then I got a new workstation last year with Intel onboard audio, and I was fairly impressed...no hissing even at fairly high amplification levels. My old workstation (from 2001), had some terribly implemented onboard Realtek codec, and it was noisy just like you've noted. Unfortunately, I imagine lots of boards made today still have issues like this.
It's not impossible to deliver high sound quality in this day and age, just more expensive than most manufacturers are willing to pay for something as ubiquitous as sound.
Ten years ago, the PowerPC was fresh, and injected some much-needed innovation into a market dominated by old, CISC designs both at the high-end (VAX, etc) and the low-end (x86, 68000).
Unfortunately, the result is the PowerPC platform today has absolutely no inherent advantages. Nearly every modern processor available for the desktop has integrated optimized pipelines and superscalar execution units, plus a whole slew of other advanced features designed to streamline execution flow.
PowerPC, in that same timeframe, has also borrowed many features from the market, and is now much changed from when the first cores were released. But this is not an attempt to revolutionize, so much as it is an attempt to keep pace and stay competitive.
The end result: you have a whole range of chip selections to choose from today, and they're quite varied in what they offer. The PowerPC 970FX stays strictly in the midrange: it has competitive but not leading performance, good multi-CPU scalability, and has a combination of slightly lower power usage and on-the-fly frequency and voltage adjustments.
The thing is, you can find the same features in x86 processors, they're just spread out differently. You can typically get more performance for your dollar from chips from Intel or AMD. AMD has also seen similar improvements in power consumption in the move to 90nm as IBM has seen for the 970FX, so there's more than one competitor offer a good balance of power and performance. The Opteron also offers the most efficient multi-processor bus subsystem ever to grace a low-end server, so there's definitely still competition there. Finally, both Intel and AMD offer chips with on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling, although it's still not an easy task to find a desktop board for the Pentium M (that will change soon).
So basically, with no performance advantage, Windows on PowerPC would flounder...and hey, it did flounder, way back in the NT 4 days. Funny that, the RISCy Pentium Pro was the final nail in the NT 4 PowerPC's coffin.
"A Well Thought-Out Englilsh Paper" by: Kyle "The Yellow Dart" Smith
Since maybe like the Middle Ages, there have been many differing opinions about hustle and bustle. This cannot be denied. It is my intention to sit down and play video games for several hours.
First, moving around quickly, and with purpose, is a true sign of character. Secondarily, bustle(e.g. hustle) yields more product for the working types. "Hustle and bustle are like my right and left arms," said Li'l Spicy in his famous "Hustle and Bustle Are Like My Right and Left Arms" speech. Webster's defines bustle as "excited and often noisy activity; a stir." A stir, indeed. Finally, sometimes gross stuff can be funny.
In conclusion, I, "The Yellow Dart," think I have done a great job illustrating the many differing opinions about hustle and bustle, may they both rest in peace. Also, I think Strong Bad should decrease The Cheat's allowance.
Thanks much to Strong Bad for this crapfully crappy piece of literature.
Well, the concept of 10 miles IS special when you're talking about "last mile" solutions, because the "last mile" is really the "last five miles" outside of major metropolitan areas, and that's only if you have a DSLAM or cable internet available in your area. DSL makes it even harder because, even if you have access, you're screwed if you're 5 miles away.
The concept of 10 mile wireless access without the restriction of a physical connection means better coverage with less infarstructure. It also gives current 3rd-party DSL providers a future service path where they no longer pay big lease fees to the bells.
FUD about battery life "problems". Sony has said from day 1 that developers shouldn't stream content. This should be obvious to everybody!
This is the one aspect of the PSP that I NEVER could comprehend...I said so over a year ago.
There are SO MANY BIG PS2 games that rely heavily on the concept of streaming. Without streaming, their environments would be duller and have more repetitive textures. Streaming allows game designers to create vibrant worlds and REALLY use up the capacity offered by a CD-ROM, let alone the latest and greatest DVD media.
So now, you have the impressive disc with over a gigabyte of capacity, and what exactly does Sony expect developers to do with it? Do we go back to the PS1 days where you load an entire level before play, and never touch the disc? What a waste of extra space that is, they might as well go back to using...rom cartridges.
Actually, for CRTs, active power usage depends on the rate of the dot clock.
The power usage of a monitor will increase linearly with dot clock (with some minimum accounting for the brightness of the display).
Most high-end 19" monitors (with high-speed dot-clocks) have a maximum power usage of around 140w. Those numbers you have quoted are for THE HIGHEST supported resolution and refresh rate, with the maximum brightness...they vary because the maximum brightness and maximum dot clock speed vary among them.
On the other hand, most people use the recommended resolution and brightness set by the manufacturer. That is usually 1280x1024@85Hz on a 19" monitor, for a dot clock of around 111MHz.
For comparison, if you run your 19" monitor at 1600x1200@85Hz, you'll see a clock of 163MHz, and a proportionate increase in power usage.
For example, my monitor (Vision Master Pro 454) has a maximum rated output of 135w. If we ignore the brightness issue, then we assume that at maximum frequency (1920x1440@85), or 235MHz, the power usage is 135w.
So, scale down to a more reasonable resolution like 1600x1200, and we're only using ~ 93w. Or use the recommended resolution at 1280x1024, and we're sipping a cool ~ 63w.
Of course, these numbers are probably a bit higher due to components I have not taken into account. I do recall that the instruction booklet for my 454 lists power usage at multiple resolutions, and they did display this linear relationship, but I don't have access to it now.
You have a choice. You can send your child to public school for cheap, or pay the price to send your kid to private school, and bitch and moan about how you're still having to pay tax dollars toward that terrible public school.
We've been doing this for over a century with publicly funded versus private colleges. I've never once heard any parent bitch that their tax dollars were being wasted on some state university while they sent their child off to Princeton.
Why does the public and private college system work? Because college students are more mobile, and actually tend to shop around. The public institutions have to offer more than a great price, because private insitutions can often match state assistance levels through private endowments.
Most parents of kids do not care so much about where they get their elementary and high school education. They are also typically not willing to move around to allow the kid choice os schools, or send the kid off to boarding school.
If you want to create a system that REALLY works, and REALLY creates competition in both the public and private elementary and high-school level education fields, you'd better get off this voucher high-horse, because it is not the answer.
Now, if you'd like to completely privatize education in this country, or perhaps create an endowment system for every public school in the nation that state legislatures cannot dip into anytime they feel like it...THEN, you might see a useful improvement. But just taking the money away from a school that is NOT ALLOWED to compete fairly is just stupid.
the electors can vote for whoever they want, regardless of who wins the popular vote in their state
Actually, this is another right that has been slowly eroded in our two-party system.
In 26 states and DC, the electors by law must vote the way they are pledged. Combined with "winner take all" assignment of electors, this locks in the perpetual disenfranchisement of minority voters in non-swing states.
The electroal college is not a broken concept...it is a broken implementation. Assignment of electors by voting district, and allowing electors to vote their own way in all 50 + 1 states would go a long way toward encouraging more than two parties, and raising voter turnout.
1. Compilers need to optimize the code order for optimal execution, as there is no out-of-order execution. When Intel first conceived of EPIC, they were still developing the very RISCy Pentium Pro, so they couldn't bet on the new features being as effective as they were.
2. IA-64 chips have a high cost of production, and a bad price / performance ratio. The original Merced cores were laughable...basically for it's first 2-3 years of life, the Itanium was in a "second" beta. They couldn't ramp up the speeds, and nobody was willing to pay so much for a chip with little advantage to leverage and little industry support.
NOW, the industry support is there, and the cores have gotten cheaper and ramped up in performance...but then, the same thing has happened to all the chips on the market, including other high-end competitors like IBM et al. The Itanium still needs a humongous cache to deliver the performance numbers it needs to dazzle PHBs in glossy published benchmarks, so it still costs too much for what it delivers.
I didn't particularly like the job system because it was REQUIRED that you micromanage your characters. I'm much more fond of more optional micromanagement available in newer games:
FFX: grid-style stats let you micromanage your character's path to your heart's content, or sit back on your lazy ass and take the default path.
Tales of Symphonia: depending on the title you choose, and how your EX skills are leaning (T vs S), you can end up with many different combinations of stats and skills. Or, you can be lazy and just get a few more levels to make up the stats difference, and live without the extra goodies.
Games that deliver the level of involvement that EACH PLAYER wants are by-far the best implementation of growth options. The job system in FF5 felt just like...a job, because you basically had to use it. If you didn't constantly measure your growth and set long-term goals, your characters floundered.
Other problems I had with FF5:
FF4 PLOT: I tried to stop the evil guy from getting to the crystals, but hey, I get to go to the moon.
FF5 PLOT: I tried to stop the evil guy from getting to the crystals, but hey, I get to go to another planet.
Character development was also pretty thin. And talk about bad storyline...the biggest plot "twist" in the game is a severe letdown:
So, the only living original Dawn Warrior dies at the hand of your great enemy...and is instantly replaced by his daughter, who magically inherits all of his abilities and stats. How cheesy can you get? Note that, shortly after hitting this amazingly pitiful plot twist, I decided to stop playing.
1. It's not easy to configure urpmi with the proper repositories, and the one I've used (MDK 9.1) didn't come with ANY pre-configured, nor was good documentation on the process easy to find. If it wasn't on the install discs, it wasn't available.
2. I've had many times when RPM hell has surfaced using urpmi. Sometimes, it simply cannot resolve a dependency because it THINKS I don't have something installed that I actually do have. Other times, it has suggested outrageous things for pddly little installations.
For example, just the other day, my roomate wanted to introduce me to the joys of latex ("la-tek", not the polymer, you twisted fucks:). Anyway, just to install a small tool, urpmi wantyed me to INSTALL X. Yeah, that's right, the version that came on the install CD, the same version I already had installed.
I gave up. I'm about to start over and go debian with apt. I LOVE the extra tools and the easy setup of Mandrake, but RPM hell sucks, even when you package it in a fancy urpmi candy wrapper.
MST3K didn't do it live...they didn't do it with a live interactive audience
I beg to differ.
Mystery Anime Theater 3000 has been performed live for years at the annual Otakon convention in Baltimore.
The show is fully licensed, and is most definitely live. I believe I even spotted an original cast voice or two. It's been the feature event for years, although for some reason it was not performed at Otakon 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The numbers I have seen from IBM have put the 970FX 2.5GHz at ~65w, full-load.
The 90nm Opterons are showing similar power characteristics at matching performance levels, but that's no surprise; they also take advantage of IBM's advanced process techniques (SOI).
The 970FX is an impressive chip, but it's nothing particularly special in this competitive environment. VT's supercomputer is an impressive undertaking for it's thrift, but the fact of the matter is it could have been done with other systems on the market with similar end characteristics.
But why do we have to absurdly claim that the a gay relationship is the same as a hetero one.
Because marriage is no longer just about a man and a woman having babies under the "grace of god". There are various LEGAL (read: SECULAR) benefits that ONLY "spouses" can claim, ranging from immediate family health insurance coverage offered by employers to tax benefits for married couples. I've also experienced other less obvious things, like house renters who would only rent to married couples (they consider them lower-risk than "unmarried" couples or, even worse, unrelated people living together).
There's nothing you can do to stop this trend of using "marriage" as a legal classification factor, so people who consider themselves "married," but don't get the legal recognition, rightfully want the recognition they deserve.
Right off the wheel, a hetero couple is going to most likely make babies, whereas gays won't.
There's nothing in anyone's marriage contract that requires them to "make babies". You know, some couples decide they'd rather adopt than put more lives into this overpopulated planet. Some couples don't get the choice at all, because one or both partners are infertile, or the mother's life would be endangered by carrying a child to term.
Are these people not married? Perhaps not by your terms. But the LAW says they're married, and that's the important issue here. What's wrong with a homosexual couple adopting just like any of the above worthy heterosexual couples? Again, being LEGALLY married actuaklly HELPS couples to be eligible for adoption (they're seen as a more stable home). So, it's hardly surprising that homosexual couples who want to adopt woukld also like to be "married".
The emotional interplay between a man and a woman, especially if she's pregnant, is completely different than what a man and a man or a woman and a woman is, and so gay unions should be called something else.
You have personal experience on both sides of the fence? Considering your rampant homophobia, I seriously doubt that.
Sure, extend gays every legal right to partner up, but don't call it marriage, because its not.
I'll tell you what. You can still get married in Our Lady of the Homophobic Church of God, and pretend that gays are farm animals who shouldn't raise kids because they might "give them the gay". You can live out your years comfortably knowing that there's not a major Protestant or Catholic church on this planet that would marry a gay couple, because gays aren't children under God.
But please don't extend your homophobia such that people who are just as deserving as you can't get ALL the benefits you and your loved one enjoy, in a nice secular public ceremony.
On a related note don't use PUBLIC schools to teach children that homosexuality is okay and normal (i.e. sex ed programs in a few states).
...Unless you are gay. See, some of you folks still don't think homosexuals are people, and that THEY might also want to get a piece of all these lovely benefits. And worst of all, marriage is one of the oldest "exclusive" clubs...existing members pander all the people they like to join up. Clubs maintain legitimacy by continued membership.
Why not?
The government has been teaching tolerance since the civil rights movement and the appearance of "equal opportunity."
In the same school that teaches that homosexuality is okay and normal, you might find teachers also delivering the message that being born retarded is normal.
And the fact is, retardation defects in their various forms are a NORMAL minority of all births. But instead, many attach the stigma that these people are "abnormal," or perhaps even "monstrosities", simply because their limited exposure dictates such a reaction. These people believe that retardation makes people less human, but they don't tend to speak up about it because these "lesser" people rarely tend to directly involve them.
You get a similar reaction from a large portion of the population when you mention homosexuality...a large portion of people label them automatically as less than human. But then, most of these people don't tend to get worked up about it, because they're rarely directly affected by homosexuality.
The last time the reactionary portion of the population got worked up about homosexuality was in the late 70s and early 80s, when homosexual groups were fighting for recognition. This may not seem like much, but consider this: here was a portion of the population that had existed since the dawn of mankind...and had been ignored as an abberation, rather than embraced as a variation, in our modern times. These were people fighting to be called human, and on the other side were people who had been indoctrinated that such an unholy, filthy creature could not exist on God's green earth.
So certainly, now that they've pretty much won that harsh battle, they're out to reap all the legal benefits of being "human". I'll tell you one thing, I love seeing people get their panties in a bunch over the concept that marriage is "holy" matrimony, and that such a union would be "unholy". These people mush have been asleep the day that legal benefits of marriage were conceived of in this country. There no longer any requirement for marriage to be "holy"...you can get a civil ceremony in any of the 50 states (yup, even Utah), and you can reap all the lovely legal / monetary benefits of a contract of marriage..
But clubs also have this strange mentality that you can see in many different instances in thius modern world, and that lies in a loss of legitimacy when a club becomes less exclusive. People would refer to this concept as "bandwagon", and can be seen in everything from fashion fads to sports teams. "Early adopters" tend to shun the bandwagon fans...after all, they tend to make the early adopters look less unique and creative.
So here you have it. Most of the folks who don't blindly call on religious arguments to shun the thought of homosexual marriage fall into one or both of the above two categories.
Exclusive Club: people who are married want their marriage to mean something. By allowing in "animals", they believe this devalues the exclusive nature of marriage. I know, it's crazy, because ANY PAIR OF IDIOTS can get married, but people really have this glorified mindset. Thus, the system perpetuates itself because people, as members, actively recruit (ever had your mother bug you for the thousandth time to get married? No? Is your mother STILL BREATHING?). Because they convince themselves that the system IS EXCLUSIVE, they come to the conslusion that they need to recruit...and who better to recruit then their own offspring, who just happen to
I bought a new Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454 about a year ago. At the time I decided that flat panels were still not up to task, and that my NEXT purchase (in 4 or 5 years) would be a panel. So no, I won't be taking advantage of this deal.
But it is nice to know that I will have an acceptable replacement when I'm looking to buy. Furthermore, competing technologies like OLED and ThinCRT should make the market interesting by the time I'm shopping around.
Toms Hardware does a full spectrum response time analysis on all their latest LCD monitor reviews.
As for me, up until a few weeks ago I believed LCDs were still not ready to replace CRTs for gaming. Most of the ones with good enough response time have other unforgivable shortcomings like TERRIBLE scaling in non-native resolution, and poor color rendering.
But then my roomate bought a Dell 2001FP. Advertised 16ms response time, even the worst-case response in games produced no ghosting.
Best of all, the scaling hardware was fantastic. I have never to this day seen scaling hardware this good. Color rendering was also impressive. The only problem I could mention was the glare...it's more noticeable than a CRT.
Unfortunately, the reason so many things were so good on this monitor is that you pay out the ass - ~$1000 MSRP, or around $800 if you can get a good deal. Other LCDs in the "affordable" $300-500 range can't offer such quality features, so I'd be loath to recommend them.
I've scoured whitepapers and other sources looking for this, and IBM and Apple do guard their power numbers quite thoroughly.
I did find one graph for a 2.5GHz 970FX (90nm G5) processor that showed about 60 watts maximum power usage under full load. That tapered to below 20 watts when the machine automatically reduced voltage and frequency when load was low.
I imagine they're reluctant to hype the numbers because they're not particularly impressive. The Athlon 64 90nm shrink has shown similar power levels for the same performance (as you would expect, as they both use IBM's SOI), and also features similar on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling.
Does that make the older SX-6 "Sexist"?
thanks, you've been a great audience, I'll be here all week...
See, actually, this is the real issue I saw with this device.
Anyone who has ever programmed a "univeral" remote knows that, for many manufacturers, there are multiple codes. The best part is, many of those codes may work partially for a TV in question, ie: one may work fine, except the channel up/down doesn't work, another may have a dodgy mute signal, but otherwise work fine, and one my only support the power toggle...get the picture?
What you're going to have is a system that probably goes through each brand and code combination in order. This will probably result in several valid "toggle" commands intermixed with invalid ones, because the remote has no idea when it's found a working code. So, you'll probably get a funky response where the TV turns itself on and off several times, and eventually comes to rest on the last valid toggle.
The trick will be disabling the remote BEFORE it toggles the TV back on again...but at one minute to attempt the entire database, you'd have to be aweful fast.
Unfortunately, onboard audio is hit-or-miss, and there's no real consistency between manufacturers because it's the isolation that counts.
If you asked me about onboard sound two years ago, I would have said it was a lost cause. But then I got a new workstation last year with Intel onboard audio, and I was fairly impressed...no hissing even at fairly high amplification levels. My old workstation (from 2001), had some terribly implemented onboard Realtek codec, and it was noisy just like you've noted. Unfortunately, I imagine lots of boards made today still have issues like this.
It's not impossible to deliver high sound quality in this day and age, just more expensive than most manufacturers are willing to pay for something as ubiquitous as sound.
Ten years ago, the PowerPC was fresh, and injected some much-needed innovation into a market dominated by old, CISC designs both at the high-end (VAX, etc) and the low-end (x86, 68000).
Unfortunately, the result is the PowerPC platform today has absolutely no inherent advantages. Nearly every modern processor available for the desktop has integrated optimized pipelines and superscalar execution units, plus a whole slew of other advanced features designed to streamline execution flow.
PowerPC, in that same timeframe, has also borrowed many features from the market, and is now much changed from when the first cores were released. But this is not an attempt to revolutionize, so much as it is an attempt to keep pace and stay competitive.
The end result: you have a whole range of chip selections to choose from today, and they're quite varied in what they offer. The PowerPC 970FX stays strictly in the midrange: it has competitive but not leading performance, good multi-CPU scalability, and has a combination of slightly lower power usage and on-the-fly frequency and voltage adjustments.
The thing is, you can find the same features in x86 processors, they're just spread out differently. You can typically get more performance for your dollar from chips from Intel or AMD. AMD has also seen similar improvements in power consumption in the move to 90nm as IBM has seen for the 970FX, so there's more than one competitor offer a good balance of power and performance. The Opteron also offers the most efficient multi-processor bus subsystem ever to grace a low-end server, so there's definitely still competition there. Finally, both Intel and AMD offer chips with on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling, although it's still not an easy task to find a desktop board for the Pentium M (that will change soon).
So basically, with no performance advantage, Windows on PowerPC would flounder...and hey, it did flounder, way back in the NT 4 days. Funny that, the RISCy Pentium Pro was the final nail in the NT 4 PowerPC's coffin.
Havn't you ever seen Sleepaway Camp?
You bury your victim in the ground and use the lawnmower to decapitate them.
DUUUUHHHHHH
"A Well Thought-Out Englilsh Paper"
by: Kyle "The Yellow Dart" Smith
Since maybe like the Middle Ages, there have been many differing opinions about hustle and bustle. This cannot be denied. It is my intention to sit down and play video games for several hours.
First, moving around quickly, and with purpose, is a true sign of character. Secondarily, bustle(e.g. hustle) yields more product for the working types. "Hustle and bustle are like my right and left arms," said Li'l Spicy in his famous "Hustle and Bustle Are Like My Right and Left Arms" speech. Webster's defines bustle as "excited and often noisy activity; a stir." A stir, indeed. Finally, sometimes gross stuff can be funny.
In conclusion, I, "The Yellow Dart," think I have done a great job illustrating the many differing opinions about hustle and bustle, may they both rest in peace. Also, I think Strong Bad should decrease The Cheat's allowance.
Thanks much to Strong Bad for this crapfully crappy piece of literature.
Well, the concept of 10 miles IS special when you're talking about "last mile" solutions, because the "last mile" is really the "last five miles" outside of major metropolitan areas, and that's only if you have a DSLAM or cable internet available in your area. DSL makes it even harder because, even if you have access, you're screwed if you're 5 miles away.
The concept of 10 mile wireless access without the restriction of a physical connection means better coverage with less infarstructure. It also gives current 3rd-party DSL providers a future service path where they no longer pay big lease fees to the bells.
FUD about battery life "problems". Sony has said from day 1 that developers shouldn't stream content. This should be obvious to everybody!
This is the one aspect of the PSP that I NEVER could comprehend...I said so over a year ago.
There are SO MANY BIG PS2 games that rely heavily on the concept of streaming. Without streaming, their environments would be duller and have more repetitive textures. Streaming allows game designers to create vibrant worlds and REALLY use up the capacity offered by a CD-ROM, let alone the latest and greatest DVD media.
So now, you have the impressive disc with over a gigabyte of capacity, and what exactly does Sony expect developers to do with it? Do we go back to the PS1 days where you load an entire level before play, and never touch the disc? What a waste of extra space that is, they might as well go back to using...rom cartridges.
Actually, for CRTs, active power usage depends on the rate of the dot clock.
The power usage of a monitor will increase linearly with dot clock (with some minimum accounting for the brightness of the display).
Most high-end 19" monitors (with high-speed dot-clocks) have a maximum power usage of around 140w. Those numbers you have quoted are for THE HIGHEST supported resolution and refresh rate, with the maximum brightness...they vary because the maximum brightness and maximum dot clock speed vary among them.
On the other hand, most people use the recommended resolution and brightness set by the manufacturer. That is usually 1280x1024@85Hz on a 19" monitor, for a dot clock of around 111MHz.
For comparison, if you run your 19" monitor at 1600x1200@85Hz, you'll see a clock of 163MHz, and a proportionate increase in power usage.
For example, my monitor (Vision Master Pro 454) has a maximum rated output of 135w. If we ignore the brightness issue, then we assume that at maximum frequency (1920x1440@85), or 235MHz, the power usage is 135w.
So, scale down to a more reasonable resolution like 1600x1200, and we're only using ~ 93w. Or use the recommended resolution at 1280x1024, and we're sipping a cool ~ 63w.
Of course, these numbers are probably a bit higher due to components I have not taken into account. I do recall that the instruction booklet for my 454 lists power usage at multiple resolutions, and they did display this linear relationship, but I don't have access to it now.
Mine took NiMH batteries just fine. I dusted it off recently to replay through Defenders of Oasis, probably the only game still worth playing.
You have a choice. You can send your child to public school for cheap, or pay the price to send your kid to private school, and bitch and moan about how you're still having to pay tax dollars toward that terrible public school.
We've been doing this for over a century with publicly funded versus private colleges. I've never once heard any parent bitch that their tax dollars were being wasted on some state university while they sent their child off to Princeton.
Why does the public and private college system work? Because college students are more mobile, and actually tend to shop around. The public institutions have to offer more than a great price, because private insitutions can often match state assistance levels through private endowments.
Most parents of kids do not care so much about where they get their elementary and high school education. They are also typically not willing to move around to allow the kid choice os schools, or send the kid off to boarding school.
If you want to create a system that REALLY works, and REALLY creates competition in both the public and private elementary and high-school level education fields, you'd better get off this voucher high-horse, because it is not the answer.
Now, if you'd like to completely privatize education in this country, or perhaps create an endowment system for every public school in the nation that state legislatures cannot dip into anytime they feel like it...THEN, you might see a useful improvement. But just taking the money away from a school that is NOT ALLOWED to compete fairly is just stupid.
the electors can vote for whoever they want, regardless of who wins the popular vote in their state
Actually, this is another right that has been slowly eroded in our two-party system.
In 26 states and DC, the electors by law must vote the way they are pledged. Combined with "winner take all" assignment of electors, this locks in the perpetual disenfranchisement of minority voters in non-swing states.
The electroal college is not a broken concept...it is a broken implementation. Assignment of electors by voting district, and allowing electors to vote their own way in all 50 + 1 states would go a long way toward encouraging more than two parties, and raising voter turnout.
IA-64 and EPIC have a few things holding it back.
1. Compilers need to optimize the code order for optimal execution, as there is no out-of-order execution. When Intel first conceived of EPIC, they were still developing the very RISCy Pentium Pro, so they couldn't bet on the new features being as effective as they were.
2. IA-64 chips have a high cost of production, and a bad price / performance ratio. The original Merced cores were laughable...basically for it's first 2-3 years of life, the Itanium was in a "second" beta. They couldn't ramp up the speeds, and nobody was willing to pay so much for a chip with little advantage to leverage and little industry support.
NOW, the industry support is there, and the cores have gotten cheaper and ramped up in performance...but then, the same thing has happened to all the chips on the market, including other high-end competitors like IBM et al. The Itanium still needs a humongous cache to deliver the performance numbers it needs to dazzle PHBs in glossy published benchmarks, so it still costs too much for what it delivers.
Pennsylvania is the only state I know of where people actually follow this rule (left lane is for passing only on major highways).
:D
Of course, this is only typical outside major cities...and it's not like the roads are in any condition for high speed driving
Eh, there's always a catch.
I didn't particularly like the job system because it was REQUIRED that you micromanage your characters. I'm much more fond of more optional micromanagement available in newer games:
FFX: grid-style stats let you micromanage your character's path to your heart's content, or sit back on your lazy ass and take the default path.
Tales of Symphonia: depending on the title you choose, and how your EX skills are leaning (T vs S), you can end up with many different combinations of stats and skills. Or, you can be lazy and just get a few more levels to make up the stats difference, and live without the extra goodies.
Games that deliver the level of involvement that EACH PLAYER wants are by-far the best implementation of growth options. The job system in FF5 felt just like...a job, because you basically had to use it. If you didn't constantly measure your growth and set long-term goals, your characters floundered.
Other problems I had with FF5:
FF4 PLOT: I tried to stop the evil guy from getting to the crystals, but hey, I get to go to the moon.
FF5 PLOT: I tried to stop the evil guy from getting to the crystals, but hey, I get to go to another planet.
Character development was also pretty thin. And talk about bad storyline...the biggest plot "twist" in the game is a severe letdown:
So, the only living original Dawn Warrior dies at the hand of your great enemy...and is instantly replaced by his daughter, who magically inherits all of his abilities and stats. How cheesy can you get? Note that, shortly after hitting this amazingly pitiful plot twist, I decided to stop playing.
Uh oh!
Bull.
:). Anyway, just to install a small tool, urpmi wantyed me to INSTALL X. Yeah, that's right, the version that came on the install CD, the same version I already had installed.
1. It's not easy to configure urpmi with the proper repositories, and the one I've used (MDK 9.1) didn't come with ANY pre-configured, nor was good documentation on the process easy to find. If it wasn't on the install discs, it wasn't available.
2. I've had many times when RPM hell has surfaced using urpmi. Sometimes, it simply cannot resolve a dependency because it THINKS I don't have something installed that I actually do have. Other times, it has suggested outrageous things for pddly little installations.
For example, just the other day, my roomate wanted to introduce me to the joys of latex ("la-tek", not the polymer, you twisted fucks
I gave up. I'm about to start over and go debian with apt. I LOVE the extra tools and the easy setup of Mandrake, but RPM hell sucks, even when you package it in a fancy urpmi candy wrapper.
It's serial data, although the voltage is not correct, so you could probably splice it into a MAX232A and pipe it directly into your serial port.
Of course, then you would have to write your own driver...
MST3K didn't do it live...they didn't do it with a live interactive audience
I beg to differ.
Mystery Anime Theater 3000 has been performed live for years at the annual Otakon convention in Baltimore.
The show is fully licensed, and is most definitely live. I believe I even spotted an original cast voice or two. It's been the feature event for years, although for some reason it was not performed at Otakon 2004.