You don't seem to understand. More features = higher cost.
The Athlon 64 does not have dual memory controllers, and the typical maxiumum per controller is 4 DIMMS, 3 with performance memory ( 166 DDR ), or 2 with high-performance ( 200 DDR ).
So, to begin with, YOU WANT a chip with dual memory controllers so you can easily break the 2GB ram barrier. This is going to cost you.
Second, dual memory controllers means a SECOND memory bus, which means the complexity of the board goes up ( more traces, possibly more layers ). They also aren't going to sell as many high-specced boards, so they have to price these higher to turn a profit on the production run.
Finally, in order to APPEAL TO PROFESSIONALS, these boards have fancy PROFESSIONAL features lkike PCI-X and Gig Ethernet, just to name a few. The whole board is also designed to pass more rigorous stability testing than your average POS $99 motherboard.
So let's see, you want AMD to GIVE AWAY their highest-performance feature ( dual memory controllers ), AND you want motherboard makers to build a no-frills professional board that lacks the features and tolerances that most customers expect.
YOU ARE NUTS.
Face it, anyone who needs 8GB of memory TODAY is a PROFESSIONAL and CUTTING-EDGE, so far as the workstation market is concerned. You can get a mainstream 8GB machine powered by AMD, Intel, SGI, Sun, IBM, etc, but you will pay through the nose for it.
If you need the power, then pay for it. Otherwise, compromise, or wait until the technology filters down.
So then they come out with the H2, which is not really even a Hummer or anything like the HMMV
You mean like a Jeep Wrangler is not really an Army 'GP'?
Jeep has been selling vehicles with those 'GP' characteristic vertical slat front-ends since the end of WWII. The majority of Jeep vehicles constructed in that time have had this defining feature, even station wagons and the like.
Jeep dumbed down the 'GP' design to sell cars. They are still ripping off the 'GP' today, but nobody cares anymore. The same will happen for the Hummer.
So long as an impersonal society of humans exists, such insanity shall reign. People can't feel truely cheated when they can never be sure how much everyone else gets.
It is the same concept that keeps ruthless tyrants in power, and 10-year olds making shoes 12 hours a day for 5 cents an hour. You will never rid society of this bug because there are always forces fighting to maintain the status quo.
Kazaa with Brilliant Digital Entertainment's B3D Projector was the thing that sparked the mainstream "spyware awareness" movement. The advert downloader "Cydoor" was installed and required for Kazaa to run.
Gator just doesn't have the audience that Kazaa has, even with it's sneaky installation prompt.
The Pentium II did not get into notebooks until 1998, when the Deschutes.25 micron cores were released. Before that, the fastest Intel chip available in the notebook marketplace was the.25 micron Tillamook Pentium MMX core.
The Klamath core Pentium II was far too power hungry to be in a notebook.
So make that a FIVE year-old notebook, and let's continue.
The grandparent made the observation of 'confiscation and destruction'. if here were caught carrying a camera, even one attached to his phone.
I have the same problem, I cannot bring a camera to work or it will be confiscated and destroyed. As companies get more and more proactive about guarding their secrets, more employees will be faced with the same problem.
You have to admit that, of all of the phone's features, the camera is the most gimmicky and least-used. The fact is it is only a stopgap to make everyone forget how delayed 3G and video phones are, and buy a new phone that they don't need.
10 IF ACTION = KILLHUMAN THEN STOP 20 IF ACTION = TAKEORDER THEN DO 30 IF ACTION = SUICIDE THEN STOP 40 IF ACTION = ARRESTOCPEMPLOYEE THEN STOP 50 GOTO 10
Reagan also increased government spending tremendously, such that even with the increased revenues the deficit grew.
Now, this is a no-brainer. Of course your revenues increase when the government is spending more money AND lowering taxes.
I'll tell you what, you want to impress me with your economic skills?
Show me any president who increased revenues significantly through tax cuts to a net-gain. We've been bleeding money like it's water for over 30 years with no end in sight, deficit spending is still the latest fad.
The only things stopping Asimov's concept of tiny atomics is energy conversion, and of course, radiation exposure. Nuclear fission is a compact power source, its the conversion and shielding required that makes it huge.
Unless you want a really hot reactor in the palm of your hand, you'll have to come up with a more efficient conversion to electricity. And unless you want a third limb, you'll need to concoct shielding capable of blocking gamma radiation that doesn't weigh a ton.
Yeah, its not as if current pressed CDs will have the 100-year lifespan the industry claimed on release.
The most likely culprit will be CD rot. Yes, I know that currently, the most publicized case of this was due to use of a bad lacquer by one publishing house, but that is short-term damage. The truth is nobody really knows how well a CD designed to spec will remain sealed from the elements over the years. And as soon as the seal cracks, the aluminium layer oxidizes.
So who cares if the protective layer rots away, I expect the aluminium layer to beat it to the punch.
"Just how much does late-night TV time cost, that there can be so many informercials?"
Nearly nothing, excepting the broadcast power. they run the tape and that's it. There's no in-house production staff, and the informercial people pay for production and the time slot. I'm willing to bet most stations sell that late-night time locally, which means more direct profit.
I imagine they don't make much, but it is a powerful message to be able to broadcast 24/7; helps the network's brand name, especially when they have to compete with cable. After all, it has only been a couple decades since US broadcasters ceased transmissions at night...they HAVE to be gaining something, or they never would have changed.
Does Apple Quicktime for Windows still have that incredibly annoying "Do you want to upgrade to Quicktime Pro?" dialog every freakin time you play a movie?
That is the #1 reason why Quicktime didn't make it back on to my box last year after a reformat.
Windows 95 OSR 2.5 brought limited support for USB peripherals. This coincided with Intel releasing the 430VX and the 430HX chipsets, which were the first PC chipsets to support USB.
Windows 98 was actually the "big launch" for USB on the PC, as it was a heavily touted feature. Windows 98 had much better support for USB than Win95C.
A court ruled that Intel could not trademark the numbers 286, 386, 486... because Intel's own model number scheme included an 'i' in the name, as in "i80286, i80486". Thus, everyone and their dog could sell "486" branded chips, so Intel branded their next-generation processor with a name instead of a number ( Pentium ).
The reason Gateway Pentium systems had the "P5" monkier is due to Intel's internal product codes for the Pentium line:
The Intel Pentium branding initiative was so effective that Intel continued to use the name for sixth ( Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III ) and seventh ( Pentium IV ) generation processors.
Pentium IV CPUs have an internal temperture diode, just like every Intel chip since the Pentium II Deschutes core ( excluding early Celerons ).
As opposed to all chips before it, the Pentium IV will do more than just crash when overheating. It will dynamically reduce it's own clock speed to reduce power consumption. But this feature will only come into play when the cooling solution is unable to keep up with the processor ( IE: dead fan, extremely hot room ), and will not affect performance under normal conditions.
What the parent was referring to is the HLT instruction, which will cause the processor to do nothing and reduce power use. Most modern processors support it, and most modern operating systems ( including NT and Linux ) execute these instructions in an idle thread.
This is basically the concept of this discussion: will your computer run hotter under load rather than running idle HLT commands?
The answer is yes. What this means to you in terms of silicon lifetime is probably beyond the expertise of anyone here on Slashdot, so take every "insight" with a bag of salt.
Most "workstation-class" PCs from major manufacturers are fairly quiet these days.
We just got in some IBM Intellistation Z Pro workstations with dual Xeons. The processor fans are actually temperature-controlled, so they're only supposed to ramp-up when the processors get too hot.
Funny thing is, even under heavy use, I've never heard them spin up faster, and their default speed is nearly silent. Most of the other IBM Intellistations we have here are also near-silent.
The reason you think all PCs are loud is because you only hear about the enthusiast market ( which craves speed above noise ) and the el-cheapo market ( which craves price above noise ).
But while yesterday the announcement of iTunes for Windows was hailed by the slashdot community as a giant leap for all mankind, the new napster service is the 5th column of the RIAA brought upon us to further the goal of destruction of geekdom
Is there any valid reason for that?
Agreed, I still can't get the comparison out of my head.
While Apple zealots cream in their jeans about "not so bad" DRM that you only have to waste time and CDs to convert from AAC, the world + dog is bitching about a service using WMA that basically allows the same thing.
Honestly, I don't care who offers the service, I'm not going to even consider downloading a lossy codec track unless it plays in my portable mp3 player. It's bad enough that MS and Apple are touting their solutions as "High Quality" at 128kbps, when you have to convert it to yet-another format, the quality goes out the window.
I was actually impressed with E-music when I took their free trial, but honestly I know why they're falling apart as we speak. Selection was limited, and mostly unknown. Most tracks were still only 128k mp3s, and many of the tracks I downloaded actually had ENCODING ERRORS ( obvious CD skips ). The sad thing is, this was the closest thing I've seen so far to a reasonable online music disribution system.
Surface-to-air, you can paint an aircraft with radar a lot farther out than you can with a laser beam. Sure, it's easy to tell when radar is tracking you, but you can track any laser powerful enough to guide a missile, too. Hell, I've got a laser detector in my car.
All in all, laser makes a pretty lousy guide for an air intercept missile.
Just one observation, from someone who works in the area. The aperture of your radar beam is typically very large compared to a laser, so you tend to light up the entire aircraft, including EW systems. These EW systems can use antenna arrays utilizing ampiltude difference or interferometry, phase difference, etc. to detect the emitter direction and distance quite accurately.
Laser would be an enigma for an EW system because the beam is tight. Most array-based radar EW systems depend on multiple portions of the array detecting the same emitter, but with laser this is impossible. Of course, this only means that current methods have to be revisited, I have heard through the grapevine that GE has developed an anti-laser EW system, although it is intended for protecting ground craft against laser-guided anti-armor munitions.
Just a note: your car's radar detector doesn't usually detect the laser, it detects the reflections.
I have to second this concept. The software development group I work for understands that each programmer has different skills to leverage, so this "Natural Pair Programming" approach is the norm.
I may call others aside for input, or be called aside myself for as much as an hour or two a day, but that time is extremely productive, and raises the productivity of the rest of my day.
Coincidentally, I have also worked on a project where one writes the unit test and one writes the program code. There were some caveats though: if you're looking for efficiency, then keeping one on the unit test and one on the code full-time is best. If you're looking for team redundancy, then this is not a good approach unless you hand off between test and program coding so you get a feel for both. If your partner isn't going to be there in 3 months when you're %75 done, then you better know both the code and the test aspects.
You can't. All communication with the hardware is done via the board, and even the 12v power for the drive motor is routed through the board.
I suppose if you can hear the drive spin up, that's a good sign, but even the abscense of that is no sure indicator that the drive is dead...could be the 12v is just not reaching the motor due to the fried board.
If you want to fix it yourself, you're going to have to take that leap of faith and invest in replacement boards, its certainly cheaper than the alternative.
Perhaps it is related to the fact that you can go into ESPNZone and get the second-crappiest hamburger you will ever eat in your life.
This is just how they do things in Bmore, lots of effort and shouting, little real results. This would explain why, despite millions in city improvement dollars, over half the city is still a slum, and anything outside the waterfront is sketchy.
Even this current project fits in with the "lots of effort and shouting, little real results" paradigm. Anyone who knows the inner harbor knows that there's only a few blocks between the Maryland Science Center and the World Trade Center, and that's mostly made up of two shopping centers. Many of the inner harbor's actual attractions, including the Convention Center, the National Aquarium, Maritime Museum AND Port Discovery, plus entertainment venues like Power Plant Live are all outside that area.
The word "peopled" sounds too weak due to its lack of gender, as all genderless words tend to.
"Populated" sounds far too technical and general to be speaking about humans.
"Manned" has become the preferred term because the masculine gender makes it sound more proactive, while gender-specific additions like "him/her" can make it more flexible, rather than just be redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to understand. More features = higher cost.
The Athlon 64 does not have dual memory controllers, and the typical maxiumum per controller is 4 DIMMS, 3 with performance memory ( 166 DDR ), or 2 with high-performance ( 200 DDR ).
So, to begin with, YOU WANT a chip with dual memory controllers so you can easily break the 2GB ram barrier. This is going to cost you.
Second, dual memory controllers means a SECOND memory bus, which means the complexity of the board goes up ( more traces, possibly more layers ). They also aren't going to sell as many high-specced boards, so they have to price these higher to turn a profit on the production run.
Finally, in order to APPEAL TO PROFESSIONALS, these boards have fancy PROFESSIONAL features lkike PCI-X and Gig Ethernet, just to name a few. The whole board is also designed to pass more rigorous stability testing than your average POS $99 motherboard.
So let's see, you want AMD to GIVE AWAY their highest-performance feature ( dual memory controllers ), AND you want motherboard makers to build a no-frills professional board that lacks the features and tolerances that most customers expect.
YOU ARE NUTS.
Face it, anyone who needs 8GB of memory TODAY is a PROFESSIONAL and CUTTING-EDGE, so far as the workstation market is concerned. You can get a mainstream 8GB machine powered by AMD, Intel, SGI, Sun, IBM, etc, but you will pay through the nose for it.
If you need the power, then pay for it. Otherwise, compromise, or wait until the technology filters down.
So then they come out with the H2, which is not really even a Hummer or anything like the HMMV
You mean like a Jeep Wrangler is not really an Army 'GP'?
Jeep has been selling vehicles with those 'GP' characteristic vertical slat front-ends since the end of WWII. The majority of Jeep vehicles constructed in that time have had this defining feature, even station wagons and the like.
Jeep dumbed down the 'GP' design to sell cars. They are still ripping off the 'GP' today, but nobody cares anymore. The same will happen for the Hummer.
Greed is mankind's driving force.
Not man, mankind
So long as an impersonal society of humans exists, such insanity shall reign. People can't feel truely cheated when they can never be sure how much everyone else gets.
It is the same concept that keeps ruthless tyrants in power, and 10-year olds making shoes 12 hours a day for 5 cents an hour. You will never rid society of this bug because there are always forces fighting to maintain the status quo.
Kazaa with Brilliant Digital Entertainment's B3D Projector was the thing that sparked the mainstream "spyware awareness" movement. The advert downloader "Cydoor" was installed and required for Kazaa to run.
Gator just doesn't have the audience that Kazaa has, even with it's sneaky installation prompt.
I think the original poster is confused.
.25 micron cores were released. Before that, the fastest Intel chip available in the notebook marketplace was the .25 micron Tillamook Pentium MMX core.
The Pentium II did not get into notebooks until 1998, when the Deschutes
The Klamath core Pentium II was far too power hungry to be in a notebook.
So make that a FIVE year-old notebook, and let's continue.
Then you'll want to avoid both HP and TI.
:)
The instruction book that came with my TI-82 was as thick as the calculator.
The instruction book that came with my TI-89 was twice as thick as the calculator.
In three years, TI will release a calculator with a manual the size of a phone book
The grandparent made the observation of 'confiscation and destruction'. if here were caught carrying a camera, even one attached to his phone.
I have the same problem, I cannot bring a camera to work or it will be confiscated and destroyed. As companies get more and more proactive about guarding their secrets, more employees will be faced with the same problem.
You have to admit that, of all of the phone's features, the camera is the most gimmicky and least-used. The fact is it is only a stopgap to make everyone forget how delayed 3G and video phones are, and buy a new phone that they don't need.
10 IF ACTION = KILLHUMAN THEN STOP
20 IF ACTION = TAKEORDER THEN DO
30 IF ACTION = SUICIDE THEN STOP
40 IF ACTION = ARRESTOCPEMPLOYEE THEN STOP
50 GOTO 10
Reagan cut taxes and revenues doubled in 8 years.
Reagan also increased government spending tremendously, such that even with the increased revenues the deficit grew.
Now, this is a no-brainer. Of course your revenues increase when the government is spending more money AND lowering taxes.
I'll tell you what, you want to impress me with your economic skills?
Show me any president who increased revenues significantly through tax cuts to a net-gain. We've been bleeding money like it's water for over 30 years with no end in sight, deficit spending is still the latest fad.
The only things stopping Asimov's concept of tiny atomics is energy conversion, and of course, radiation exposure. Nuclear fission is a compact power source, its the conversion and shielding required that makes it huge.
Unless you want a really hot reactor in the palm of your hand, you'll have to come up with a more efficient conversion to electricity. And unless you want a third limb, you'll need to concoct shielding capable of blocking gamma radiation that doesn't weigh a ton.
Yeah, its not as if current pressed CDs will have the 100-year lifespan the industry claimed on release.
The most likely culprit will be CD rot. Yes, I know that currently, the most publicized case of this was due to use of a bad lacquer by one publishing house, but that is short-term damage. The truth is nobody really knows how well a CD designed to spec will remain sealed from the elements over the years. And as soon as the seal cracks, the aluminium layer oxidizes.
So who cares if the protective layer rots away, I expect the aluminium layer to beat it to the punch.
"Just how much does late-night TV time cost, that there can be so many informercials?"
Nearly nothing, excepting the broadcast power. they run the tape and that's it. There's no in-house production staff, and the informercial people pay for production and the time slot. I'm willing to bet most stations sell that late-night time locally, which means more direct profit.
I imagine they don't make much, but it is a powerful message to be able to broadcast 24/7; helps the network's brand name, especially when they have to compete with cable. After all, it has only been a couple decades since US broadcasters ceased transmissions at night...they HAVE to be gaining something, or they never would have changed.
No way, it's out! I wonder if they have x87 emulation support yet...
Does Apple Quicktime for Windows still have that incredibly annoying "Do you want to upgrade to Quicktime Pro?" dialog every freakin time you play a movie?
That is the #1 reason why Quicktime didn't make it back on to my box last year after a reformat.
Windows 95 OSR 2.5 brought limited support for USB peripherals. This coincided with Intel releasing the 430VX and the 430HX chipsets, which were the first PC chipsets to support USB.
Windows 98 was actually the "big launch" for USB on the PC, as it was a heavily touted feature. Windows 98 had much better support for USB than Win95C.
Yuengling Lager = win. Mid-priced, tastes as good as most of the more expensive beers, and it's AMERICAN to boot :P
Too bad you can only find it easily on the east coast....but that can change. They've been expanding their reseller areas in the last few years.
A court ruled that Intel could not trademark the numbers 286, 386, 486... because Intel's own model number scheme included an 'i' in the name, as in "i80286, i80486". Thus, everyone and their dog could sell "486" branded chips, so Intel branded their next-generation processor with a name instead of a number ( Pentium ).
The reason Gateway Pentium systems had the "P5" monkier is due to Intel's internal product codes for the Pentium line:
P5: 5v core, 16k cache
P54C: 3.3v core, 16k cache
P55C: split-voltage, 32k cache, MMX instructions
The Intel Pentium branding initiative was so effective that Intel continued to use the name for sixth ( Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III ) and seventh ( Pentium IV ) generation processors.
Yes, the grandparent post is incorrect.
Pentium IV CPUs have an internal temperture diode, just like every Intel chip since the Pentium II Deschutes core ( excluding early Celerons ).
As opposed to all chips before it, the Pentium IV will do more than just crash when overheating. It will dynamically reduce it's own clock speed to reduce power consumption. But this feature will only come into play when the cooling solution is unable to keep up with the processor ( IE: dead fan, extremely hot room ), and will not affect performance under normal conditions.
What the parent was referring to is the HLT instruction, which will cause the processor to do nothing and reduce power use. Most modern processors support it, and most modern operating systems ( including NT and Linux ) execute these instructions in an idle thread.
This is basically the concept of this discussion: will your computer run hotter under load rather than running idle HLT commands?
The answer is yes. What this means to you in terms of silicon lifetime is probably beyond the expertise of anyone here on Slashdot, so take every "insight" with a bag of salt.
Most "workstation-class" PCs from major manufacturers are fairly quiet these days.
We just got in some IBM Intellistation Z Pro workstations with dual Xeons. The processor fans are actually temperature-controlled, so they're only supposed to ramp-up when the processors get too hot.
Funny thing is, even under heavy use, I've never heard them spin up faster, and their default speed is nearly silent. Most of the other IBM Intellistations we have here are also near-silent.
The reason you think all PCs are loud is because you only hear about the enthusiast market ( which craves speed above noise ) and the el-cheapo market ( which craves price above noise ).
But while yesterday the announcement of iTunes for Windows was hailed by the slashdot community as a giant leap for all mankind, the new napster service is the 5th column of the RIAA brought upon us to further the goal of destruction of geekdom
Is there any valid reason for that?
Agreed, I still can't get the comparison out of my head.
While Apple zealots cream in their jeans about "not so bad" DRM that you only have to waste time and CDs to convert from AAC, the world + dog is bitching about a service using WMA that basically allows the same thing.
Honestly, I don't care who offers the service, I'm not going to even consider downloading a lossy codec track unless it plays in my portable mp3 player. It's bad enough that MS and Apple are touting their solutions as "High Quality" at 128kbps, when you have to convert it to yet-another format, the quality goes out the window.
I was actually impressed with E-music when I took their free trial, but honestly I know why they're falling apart as we speak. Selection was limited, and mostly unknown. Most tracks were still only 128k mp3s, and many of the tracks I downloaded actually had ENCODING ERRORS ( obvious CD skips ). The sad thing is, this was the closest thing I've seen so far to a reasonable online music disribution system.
Surface-to-air, you can paint an aircraft with radar a lot farther out than you can with a laser beam. Sure, it's easy to tell when radar is tracking you, but you can track any laser powerful enough to guide a missile, too. Hell, I've got a laser detector in my car.
All in all, laser makes a pretty lousy guide for an air intercept missile.
Just one observation, from someone who works in the area. The aperture of your radar beam is typically very large compared to a laser, so you tend to light up the entire aircraft, including EW systems. These EW systems can use antenna arrays utilizing ampiltude difference or interferometry, phase difference, etc. to detect the emitter direction and distance quite accurately.
Laser would be an enigma for an EW system because the beam is tight. Most array-based radar EW systems depend on multiple portions of the array detecting the same emitter, but with laser this is impossible. Of course, this only means that current methods have to be revisited, I have heard through the grapevine that GE has developed an anti-laser EW system, although it is intended for protecting ground craft against laser-guided anti-armor munitions.
Just a note: your car's radar detector doesn't usually detect the laser, it detects the reflections.
I have to second this concept. The software development group I work for understands that each programmer has different skills to leverage, so this "Natural Pair Programming" approach is the norm.
I may call others aside for input, or be called aside myself for as much as an hour or two a day, but that time is extremely productive, and raises the productivity of the rest of my day.
Coincidentally, I have also worked on a project where one writes the unit test and one writes the program code. There were some caveats though: if you're looking for efficiency, then keeping one on the unit test and one on the code full-time is best. If you're looking for team redundancy, then this is not a good approach unless you hand off between test and program coding so you get a feel for both. If your partner isn't going to be there in 3 months when you're %75 done, then you better know both the code and the test aspects.
You can't. All communication with the hardware is done via the board, and even the 12v power for the drive motor is routed through the board.
I suppose if you can hear the drive spin up, that's a good sign, but even the abscense of that is no sure indicator that the drive is dead...could be the 12v is just not reaching the motor due to the fried board.
If you want to fix it yourself, you're going to have to take that leap of faith and invest in replacement boards, its certainly cheaper than the alternative.
What's the deal with the B-mo Hard Rock?
Perhaps it is related to the fact that you can go into ESPNZone and get the second-crappiest hamburger you will ever eat in your life.
This is just how they do things in Bmore, lots of effort and shouting, little real results. This would explain why, despite millions in city improvement dollars, over half the city is still a slum, and anything outside the waterfront is sketchy.
Even this current project fits in with the "lots of effort and shouting, little real results" paradigm. Anyone who knows the inner harbor knows that there's only a few blocks between the Maryland Science Center and the World Trade Center, and that's mostly made up of two shopping centers. Many of the inner harbor's actual attractions, including the Convention Center, the National Aquarium, Maritime Museum AND Port Discovery, plus entertainment venues like Power Plant Live are all outside that area.
If it's "manned" exploration, why "him/her"?
The word "peopled" sounds too weak due to its lack of gender, as all genderless words tend to.
"Populated" sounds far too technical and general to be speaking about humans.
"Manned" has become the preferred term because the masculine gender makes it sound more proactive, while gender-specific additions like "him/her" can make it more flexible, rather than just be redundant.