"I'm still with my wife at this point in time. We're in weekly counselling. Sometimes I feel that it's the right thing to do and sometimes I feel like I'm a complete sucker."
First off, I'm very sorry to hear about your experiences. It's truly a shame for someone who is sincere and devoted to be hurt so badly.
Unfortunately, I really think you're just wasting your time with the counselling. Whatever her problems are, they've long since grown into something that's far beyond anything that can be "fixed". Weekly counselling 20 years ago might have made a difference. Now? I really think you're kidding yourself if you believe you could ever get back to the way things were. Her behavior suggests that she either has some deep emotional problems, or has some very ingrained issues with intimacy. Obviously, since you even went so far as to suggest that you two could find ways together to satisfy idle curiosity (so-called "shopping around"), that isn't the issue.
Mid life doesn't mean your love life is over, nor does it mean that you have no chance at finding new love - though reading slashdot daily can definitely dim your prospects.;) My advice would be to put this entire situation out of its (and your) misery ASAP. I'm sure you feel a strong moral duty to stay with her, try to work things out, provide for her, and to "make the marriage work", but you're only hurting yourself. There's no reason for you to be punished for her abuse of your trust and your love. If it makes you feel any better, you can put in for an annulment. In any case, I think the sooner you file the divorce papers and start moving on with your life, the better off you'll be. That doesn't mean you have to throw her out on the street, but with her infidelity, it certainly gives you far more flexibility over just how much you're willing you continue shelling out for her. I am, of course, assuming that you're the primary breadwinner in the family. If you're not, then the whole situation becomes even easier to back out of.
The real question you're facing is whether you're going to continue basking in the pain of being constantly reminded of the death of your first love, or whether you're going to move forward with your life in persuit of happiness. Neither choice is easy to make, nor easy to carry out, but at least the latter holds a glimmer of hope. The statistics you've quoted would seem to indicate that there are plenty of other jilted lovers out there of the female variety who are or have been sitting in the same position you are now. Your chances of meeting them improve drastically once you let this go and seek new happiness.
" Does anyone with knowledge of Austrailian law know if the Austrailian treaty will violate some of their freedoms in the way the American DMCA has violated some of the United States citizen's freedoms contained within the constitution?"
As of late, governments are discovering that getting on with their business of the day becomes far easier if things like their Constitution, the rule of law, human rights, additional rights of the people, basic decency, and respect for human dignity are entirely ignored. Thus, men are no longer ruled by ideals or laws, but by the whims of those who happen to be in power at any given time. Luckily, we've become sufficiently advanced, militarily, that the revolutions of old which had always corrected such problems are no longer possible.
The fact that you're not 'feeling' it doesn't negate the fact that it is indeed happening. Every time you buy a CD-r, even if it's for your family photos, you're paying out money to the Canadian version of the RIAA. The law to which I alluded previously has indeed passed. As of Dec 12 of last year, the new law allows them to collect money for each MP3 player sold, in addition to every blank cassette, audio CD-r, data CD-r, etc. Apparently, MP3 players could end up costing anywhere from $19 to $100 more under the new rules.
Before you go on jabbering about the so-called "ass-backwards" laws of the US, perhaps you should take a good look behind you. Your own government has been bending you over the counter for a while now, allowing the RIAA et all to tap your wallet without you even realizing it. We may have some silly copyright laws, but at least I don't have to pay the RIAA every time I want to give some pictures to grandma.
Re:Well :: I said it more than once, I'll say it
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Kazaa Offices Raided
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· Score: 1
"how the fuck do you plan on defending yerself against like say, the pure brute force tactics of a DEA raid, which in LA include tank like objects with battering rams, choppers, SWAT teams."
DEA != RIAA.
The RIAA raiders might have handguns, if even that. I would suspect that allowing the raiders to carry guns in the course of their jobs would open the RIAA up to such a horrendous liability that they wouldn't risk using an openly-armed militia-like force. Against 5 lightly armed men who are trying into my home, I could do considerable damage. I suspect that the first two would drop before anyone knew the raid had gone bad. Whoever runs away can go, but invade my home and die.
"We cant even get into the NON possibility of you taking out the national guard, etc.."... " But this I will defend myself against the greatest armed forces in the entire world thing simply has to go."
I said defend, I never said defeat. First of all, I have absolutely no problem complying with a valid search warrant, signed by a judge, supported by oath or affirmation, with those executing the warrant behaving in good faith, so long as the warrant and search are respectively obtained and executed within the bounds of the Constitution. I'm not doing anything worthy of my home being searched, so I'm not terribly worried about being served with a search warrant. That being said, if the government began a campaign of breaking down doors to go on "fishing expeditions" as we call them here in the 'States, they're going to run into a problem when they get to my door. That doesn't mean that armored vehicles and helicopters are coming down at my hands, but it does mean that I'm not about to roll over like many others seem content to do. You apparently have either never heard, or simply don't believe in the phrase, "better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees". Or perhaps this one makes a bit more sense for you - "Live Free or Die".
"So what the fuck is it with you gun nuts, besides from the fact you're just that: Nuts?"
Gun nut? I own a few firearms, mostly for hunting, a couple for protection. Other than that, I'm not terribly into them. I don't subscribe to magazines and newsletters and such for guns, nor am I an NRA member or associated with any of the crazy militia groups. I'm just someone who values my liberty more than my life. I consider that the only non-cowardly take on the subject. I have no respect whatsoever for those who would relinquish their liberty in a vain effort to preserve their life. To me, such a life and such a way of life is pyrrhic by its very nature. My take on guns is that they provide protection not from overwhelming force, but from the self-preservation instinct that beseiges each individual to surrender liberty to tyranny when called upon to do so under penalty of death. A gun can be a tool to give one the courage to stand up and be prepared to pay the ultimate price in an effort to preserve the very things that make life worthwhile. Death is not defeat when one dies fighting for liberty. In this case, death is a victory, as the tyrant no longer holds any conceivable power over you, and you have died with honor.
"You must live in an ass-backward place (say, like the USA) to have such lopsided laws. Up here, downloading MP3s as well as copying music CDs is totally legal when done for private use."
Sure it is, because you pay extra taxes on every kind of medium you could possibly be writing the copyrighted works to. As I recall, your government is even trying to throw a huge tax into hard drives, mp3 players, and just about anything else that can hold information that isn't already taxed all to hell. Everytime you buy a CD-r, even if it's to backup your Quickbooks files or save your family photos, you're paying money to the Canadian version of the RIAA.
I can only hope that the RIAA starts trying this sort of thing in the US, and that they attempt to "force" their way into my home. I'd suspect that I'd be on the telephone for quite a while with the RIAA arranging for the cleaning of my walls, the shampooing of my carpets, and the removal of the bodies of the henchmen at the RIAA's expense.
And to think, so many foreigners have decried the US's "fascination with firearms". It's for precisely things like this that we maintain our rights to bear arms. When private organizations can arbitrarily act as law enforcement for the state, the state becomes indistinguishable from a private organization. Thus, the battle for control begins. Your government has weapons, do you?
One thing Americans have, for the most part, retained is a healthy mistrust of their government. Hopefully, situations like this will bring more folks around in other nations. Big government solves little, though the problems it creates would make for an impossibly long list.
I'm referring to speculative execution in a more generalized way. That would include branch prediction, data prefetch, etc. What it may also include is an early termination, whereby under certain circumstances, you don't have to surf the entire pipeline to get a result. The Sparcs have done this since about '94 (simpledoc here). An Inquirer article hinted at the possibility of this being included in the Prescott chips, mentioning that this would explain why the incredibly long pipeline doesn't seem to have a hugely negative effect in many different benchmarks.
"Now, if you couldn't understand the context I was using before then you should be aware of it now. I'm sorry to have confused you, now that you understand where I am comig from I will once again summarize for you: In my experience I have found that Intel based computers work better and more reliably than similar AMD based systems. I would attribute a lot of this to the fact that AMD cpu's and hardware tend to be of lower quality than similar Intel based hardware because AMD systems generally appeal to the price minded buyer."
The highlighted part is what I questioned. I understand and agree with the point that cheaper does not equal better, but I think the overall point that most people make is that it's just as fast or faster than a similarly-marketed Intel CPU and that's it's generally less expensive, while implying that quality remains the same.
Your experience might include putting AMD CPUs on the cheapest hardware money can buy, but for the enthusiast who knows what mainboard, graphics card, etc to buy, this simply isn't the case. That you choose to stick an AMD CPU onto a cheap board with cheap parts says nothing of AMD's quality control. What it does say is that when you stick a CPU, regardless of its quality, onto the cheapest boards available, you're likely to have problems. Stick an Intel CPU on an el-cheapo ECS board and see what happens. I had about 7 or 8 PIII systems sold to a church built on ECS P6STM boards. I had made the mistake of giving them a try. Of those, 5 or 6 ended up needing the board replaced at least once, and 4 or 5 of those I ended up just putting in a Gigabyte board after multiple replacements. Haven't had a problem with them since (this was a few years ago). The ones that did work were running slower PIIIs. While the P6STM was supposed to run everything up to about 1GHz, they would be very unpredictable at any clock frequency above 800Mhz or so. Intel chips, cheap boards, problems. Now, I sell AMD based systems almost exclusively. I use nothing but Asus mainboards and quality power supplies and haven't had a single hardware problem with a new machine in the last couple of years.
If you're going to knock AMD's CPU quality, please provide at least a shred of evidence to back up your claims. If you're simply trolling, I'll have to make a note to stop feeding you. If you want to get into a debate about quality control at microprocessor manufacturers, I suggest you take a look at the link I posted.
Intel has had problems with nearly every CPU type sold since 1994 - this includes Itanium.
"Don't forget the extra pipe stages... those count for a lot. I can't say how many transistors, but it should make a dent in the numbers."
We can also assume there's some form of speculative execution integrated into the CPU to bypass the latter stages of the extremely long pipeline where possible.
I'm not entirely sure who "the rest of us" is, but unless Intel is making a special version of the CPU marketed just for me, it's Level 3 cache on all their P4EEs. The P4EE has 20K (8+12) L1, 512KB L2, and 2MB of L3. As I recall, the L3 mirrors what's in the L2, thus giving you an effective 1.5MB L3. The latency on that L3 cache is more than double the latency for the L2 (13.44ns vs 5.94ns), which still beats the hell out of the memory latency (about 64ns).
" I've had problems with AMD cpu's and poorly made hardware, Mobo's especially."
AMD makes motherboards? Also, what does the CPU have to do with the motherboard? Until the PII, Intel and AMD CPUs fit in the same boards. If the board was junk, an Intel chip isn't going to magically re-draw the traces, nor add extra layers to combat EMI.
"Of course way back in the day there were a lot of applications that simply would not work on AMD architecture - this goes back to Windows 9x"
Really? Which ones had problems specific to errors, bugs, or errata (to use Intel marketspeak) in the AMD CPUs? I can remember a few problems with Windows, mostly having to do with bugs in the Windows software that only showed up on AMD CPUs, as AMD wasn't privvy to the bugs ahead of time as was Intel. This goes to the relationship between Intel and Microsoft, in that they showed one another where things were screwed up so they could come up with a workaround. It had nothing to do with anything AMD was doing in the FAB.
"About the only benchmarks that AMD was beating the P4 with were in game playing."
AMD CPUs generally perform well in things like gaming and office-style applications. Content-creation and compression/encoding tend to like the long-pipeline/low-IPC/high clock frequency of the P4s.
"I'm also a great believer in getting what you paid for. I might pay a little more for my Intel cpu, but I know it will overclock further"
650MHz Durons usually overclocked to 900MHz+ with air cooling. I can't recall having ever seen anything else match that. High-end chips generally don't overclock well from either company.
"and that it was designed to be on 24/7."
On which planet does this make any sense? You appear to imply that AMD CPUs are somehow not designed to run all the time. Actually, neither company seems to say much at all about expected usage, though I've had and run both 24/7 for months on end without issue. If this is a slap at heat dissipation, then you might want to check Prescott's TDP of 103W, or perhaps the board specs released by Intel to board manufacturers telling them that boards designed to scale to the 3.7GHz Prescott must be able to handle as much as 137W TDP. Compare this to AMD's max of about 89W.
If you'd really like to get into a discussion about CPU quality control, allow me to start you off with a little reading over here.
"The chip with the largest cache won. Hands down, no contest."
You make it sound as though cache is the primary factor in CPU performance.
That's... absurd.
Also, the statement is non-sequitur. The Athlon64 3400+ has more L1+L2 cache than the P4 Prescott or the P4 3.2 Northwood, and I believe also the P4EE (Gallatin). The P4EE has 2MB of L3 cache. There was no discernable "winner". There were only a handfull of chips tested. The AthlonFX wasn't amoung them. There were only a handfull of benchmarks. This is an example of a very small sample of a very small sample using a very small sample. Thus, the margin of error for the overall results is so extreme as to virtually negate the purpose of testing in the first place.
WEEK 24 - Fixed it, running out of air, something else broke, scaled down design a bit more, Cost estimate $2.8 Trillion
Anyone ever have a really bad date? Did you try to make it work out, or did you take her home and put the date out of its misery? I think that's the problem - most guys at NASA haven't ever had A date. Thus, when they finally have a "bad date", (aka the ISS), they not only take it to the movies, dinner, and mini golf, they take it on a Carribbean cruise, trip to Europe, flight on the Concord, and finally propose marriage.
Fellas, let's see if we can figure out if there's another woman we can try with, eh?
As an American citizen, a patriot, and a human being, I find this entire concept offensive.
There is a growing effort amoung governments, especially the United States, Brittain, and Australia to reduce the sum of a human being's existence to database entries and reports. Within the context of "databasing" (to 'verb' the word) the human experience, there is an implied range of that which is to be considered "normal". Those falling outside that which is considered normal (as defined by those in power at any given time) are to be subject to additional scrutiny, regardless of whether any criminal acts are even suspected. With this new trend, we also see other fairly new changes occuring. Probably the two most important changes are the loss of the presumption of innocence, and the warped relationship between the people and their government. Ordinary folks no longer feel as though they control their government. Instead, they feel the need to stay out of their government's way to avoid being cast into the dungeons. It is truly miraculous to have transformed this nation from a government actually ruled by ordinary people to a burgeoning police state within a mere two centuries. I spend more time worrying about the actions of John Ashcroft than I do worrying about the actions of Osama bin Laden. The worst bin Laden can do to me is take my life. Ashcroft, and perhaps more frightening, Bush, appear unsatisfied with simply providing the best protection possible under the law and the Constitution. What they could do far outweighs anything bin Laden could ever hope to accomplish. They can, and appear ready to, fundamentally alter the very nature of liberty and how a human being is conceptualized by terrifying the nation and blackmailing the Congress. Their Final Solution appears to be using technology to track every word, action, and thought of every person, every minute of every day, compile it all into a databse, and use that information to glean who is worthy of not spending the rest of their life behind bars. They seem content with removing the judiciary from the entire process, and perhaps the Congress as well should their power ever meet a Congressional check. Somehow or other, they have even managed to get some states thinking that this is in some way, shape, or form a Good Idea. It is not. When you create a system such as this, and you then remove the checks and balances necessary to correct mistakes, you must believe that the system is perfect. When you use a "perfect" system for "law enforcement", you have Minority Report. The side effect of compiling a person's life into a database (or "databasing" them) is that any human dignity or value is lost. The person is no longer a person, but rather a row. The person becomes a series of numbers - of digits - to be moved about, locked away, or "deleted" at the will of the system's resident operator. The end result is a system in which terrorism is no longer a threat because there is nothing left to threaten. Life without liberty is meaningless and without value.
Repeat after me: I am NOT a database entry. I am a human being. I have value and dignity. I will fight every effort to reduce my God-given value and dignity. I will win.
Liberty is now, and always will be more important than life. Taking away my liberty to save my life is like removing my head to save my body. In the war against terrorism, George Bush and John Ashcroft are leading us to a whole new level of meaning for the term 'Pyrrhic Victory'. Looking at the damage done in the past two years, I don't know if this country can take another four. As a person with a very deep love for my country, my heart weeps for our nation.
"In regards to "give up your freedom or risk being blown up" I think this is a real choice for us to make."
Some people already made that choice; they founded the nation and the freedom that we claim to cherish. The good people of the state of New Hampshire codified into a state motto the overriding motivation of the American Civil War: "Live Free or Die."
I, for one, believe that anything less than living up to this example shows us to be little more than cowards cowering in the face of a bully. Liberty is the concept of freedom within the social context - freedom limited only by the freedoms of others. Thus, my freedom to punch you in the face is restricted by your freedom to not be punched in the face. Thus, it is said that I do not have the liberty to punch you in the face. Any restriction beyond this is an affront to the ideals expressed within our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
I will draw my last breath long before conceding my liberty to anyone who claims that it is necessary for my "security". For all meaningful intents and purposes, my liberty IS my security. I fear death for myself and for those whom I love far less than I fear the hand of a corrupt authority digging into the vein of liberty to choke off that which makes life worth living.
If you're looking for a place that values making choices between freedom and security, please see China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Nazis Germany.
There's one thing those who continue to preach compromise keep forgetting - when you're dealing with folks like Al Qaeda, the most committed wins. I'm ready to die to preserve the liberty and the way of life that was here before me; are you?
Preach on. As an American citizen and die-hard patriot, I can say with absolute certainty that there are times, such as these, that make me absolutely furious with my own government. I had a sig for a while that expressed the feeling fairly well, I think. It read:
"I love my country with all my heart, but goddamn my government's being a bitch right now"
"given these things, i think the cpu may be designed quite well given its current performance with numerous internal slow downs."
So.... new CPUs are supposed to run slower than those they are replacing? I see...
"i'm sure in their next core,"
Which won't be just a core; it'll be a whole new CPU running the Tejas core, and will probably be marketed as a Pentium 5 or thereabouts. It's due out some time early next year.
" they will be able to reduce the latency by significant amounts"
What latency? Where? How much of a latency redction are you expecting to see that you refer to it as "significant"? Do you have information sources with which to back this up, or is this something you gathered from an in-depth conversation with Ms Cleo at $4.99/min?
"increase the branch prediction system"
What does that mean?! I assume you mean that they're going to improve branch prediction. Well now, this helps to a certain extent with predictable branchs such as those seen in simple loops. Currently, branch prediction units are rating somewhere around 90 - 95%, depending on which Intel/AMD tech docs you're reading. How much of an improvement do you hope to accomplish above and beyond this?
"thereby causing their future cpus to perform better than current iteration."
So Prescott performs slower than Northwood, and this is Good(tm), and the next "core" is going to perform faster than Prescott, and this is also Good(tm). Seems like Intel just can't lose - make a chip that's slow; good - make a chip that's fast; good. Amazing.
" first, refine their 90nm processing of the cpu. they will be able to iron out manufacturing bugs"
You're kind of supposed to do that before you start shipping the CPUs.
"probably, i believe that in around 1 year's time, just like their transition from williamete to northwood, their cpu will be much faster."
Again, your conversations with Ms Cleo are really just a waste of your money, as she's feeding you bad information - possibly from evil spirits. In a year from now, We'll have Tejas-core CPUs, probably called Pentium 5s, shipping to the masses. They'll probably have 64-bit instructions at the ready, if not enabled, and they'll probably also be dual-core capable. In a year from now, if they're still trying to hammer out problems with Prescott, they may as well start reselling Opteron CPUs.
" they may already adopt a very good branch prediction unit that will reduce the effects of a very long pipeline."
They already have an excellent branch prediction unit. Unfortunately for your comment, it has little to do with the long pipeline. The effect of the longer pipeline is to allow for scaling to higher clock frequencies. By lowering the IPC and extending the pipeline, they can ramp up in frequency, whereas Northwood was approaching a frequency ceiling. Higher clock frequencies offset longer pipelines, just as better branch prediction somewhat offsets high latency from cache misses in certain situations.
"so pretty much everything you buy not will almost be worthless by next year."
Completely incorrect. What you buy now will always be outdated in a year's time - this is true of any given time in the tech industry. However, computers being bought now will continue to function in an increasingly limited fashion for the foreseable future. I still see PCs in use from the early 1990s. They don't run the latest and greatest software, but they often do all that which is required of them by their respective users.
" the cpu packaging will be changed to lga."
For Intel CPUs. Sockets for AMD CPUs will remain the same (with the exception of an addition of 939-pin) for the forseable future. Even socket A will live into 2005, according to AMD's brass.
" The way it works is that an XP2600+ is 2.6 times faster than a 1GHz Duron, a 3000+ is 3 times faster than a 1GHz Duron, etc. This is according to "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" 3rd edition (O'Reilly). Can anyone back this up with a reference from AMD?"
Nope, but I can happily dispute it. According to this document from AMD's site, it's based on the performance that would come from a 2.6GHz Athlon processor. The specific core to which it's compared is not detailed, however it would only make sense from a marketing perspective to compare it to the last core used prior to PR implementation, which was the Thunderbird core. The Thunderbird core, as any other, will not necessarily scale in performance in a perfect linear fashion simply by increasing clock frequency. Thus, it is more correct to state that an AthlonXP 2600+ performs similarly to a Thunderbird-core Athlon at 2.6GHz, if such a creature were to exist. To say that it is 2.x times faster is to belie the reality of diminishing returns.
"Basically, looks like it's faster, but still not the fastest in all areas."
Just what definition are you using for the word "faster"? To my eyes, it's slower than the older Northwood core in the majority of real-world situations, clock-for-clock. If you're talking about absolute performance, then it's significantly slower than, say, the AthlonFX CPUs. Even the biased-as-hell airbags at Tom's didn't have much good to say about this CPU. That's not to say that it wont see strong performance gains as applications are recompiled to support the new features (SSE3 et al) of Prescott, but I don't have the slightest idea where from where your statment comes based upon the reviews and benchmarks published thus far.
You make it sound like it's a superb new chip that outperforms almost every other chip on almost every application. That's criminally wrong.
The DoD's budget does not include emergency supplementals, such as the $40 billion supplemental in '02, or the $87 billion supplemental requested in '03.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm still with my wife at this point in time. We're in weekly counselling. Sometimes I feel that it's the right thing to do and sometimes I feel like I'm a complete sucker."
;) My advice would be to put this entire situation out of its (and your) misery ASAP. I'm sure you feel a strong moral duty to stay with her, try to work things out, provide for her, and to "make the marriage work", but you're only hurting yourself. There's no reason for you to be punished for her abuse of your trust and your love. If it makes you feel any better, you can put in for an annulment. In any case, I think the sooner you file the divorce papers and start moving on with your life, the better off you'll be. That doesn't mean you have to throw her out on the street, but with her infidelity, it certainly gives you far more flexibility over just how much you're willing you continue shelling out for her. I am, of course, assuming that you're the primary breadwinner in the family. If you're not, then the whole situation becomes even easier to back out of.
First off, I'm very sorry to hear about your experiences. It's truly a shame for someone who is sincere and devoted to be hurt so badly.
Unfortunately, I really think you're just wasting your time with the counselling. Whatever her problems are, they've long since grown into something that's far beyond anything that can be "fixed". Weekly counselling 20 years ago might have made a difference. Now? I really think you're kidding yourself if you believe you could ever get back to the way things were. Her behavior suggests that she either has some deep emotional problems, or has some very ingrained issues with intimacy. Obviously, since you even went so far as to suggest that you two could find ways together to satisfy idle curiosity (so-called "shopping around"), that isn't the issue.
Mid life doesn't mean your love life is over, nor does it mean that you have no chance at finding new love - though reading slashdot daily can definitely dim your prospects.
The real question you're facing is whether you're going to continue basking in the pain of being constantly reminded of the death of your first love, or whether you're going to move forward with your life in persuit of happiness. Neither choice is easy to make, nor easy to carry out, but at least the latter holds a glimmer of hope. The statistics you've quoted would seem to indicate that there are plenty of other jilted lovers out there of the female variety who are or have been sitting in the same position you are now. Your chances of meeting them improve drastically once you let this go and seek new happiness.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
" Does anyone with knowledge of Austrailian law know if the Austrailian treaty will violate some of their freedoms in the way the American DMCA has violated some of the United States citizen's freedoms contained within the constitution?"
As of late, governments are discovering that getting on with their business of the day becomes far easier if things like their Constitution, the rule of law, human rights, additional rights of the people, basic decency, and respect for human dignity are entirely ignored. Thus, men are no longer ruled by ideals or laws, but by the whims of those who happen to be in power at any given time. Luckily, we've become sufficiently advanced, militarily, that the revolutions of old which had always corrected such problems are no longer possible.
Let's hear it for progress, ladies and gentlemen.
He'd really like that... really. Please?
"If I'm being taxed, I'm certainly not hurting."
The fact that you're not 'feeling' it doesn't negate the fact that it is indeed happening. Every time you buy a CD-r, even if it's for your family photos, you're paying out money to the Canadian version of the RIAA. The law to which I alluded previously has indeed passed. As of Dec 12 of last year, the new law allows them to collect money for each MP3 player sold, in addition to every blank cassette, audio CD-r, data CD-r, etc. Apparently, MP3 players could end up costing anywhere from $19 to $100 more under the new rules.
Congratulations.
Read more here.
Before you go on jabbering about the so-called "ass-backwards" laws of the US, perhaps you should take a good look behind you. Your own government has been bending you over the counter for a while now, allowing the RIAA et all to tap your wallet without you even realizing it. We may have some silly copyright laws, but at least I don't have to pay the RIAA every time I want to give some pictures to grandma.
"how the fuck do you plan on defending yerself against like say, the pure brute force tactics of a DEA raid, which in LA include tank like objects with battering rams, choppers, SWAT teams."
... " But this I will defend myself against the greatest armed forces in the entire world thing simply has to go."
DEA != RIAA.
The RIAA raiders might have handguns, if even that. I would suspect that allowing the raiders to carry guns in the course of their jobs would open the RIAA up to such a horrendous liability that they wouldn't risk using an openly-armed militia-like force. Against 5 lightly armed men who are trying into my home, I could do considerable damage. I suspect that the first two would drop before anyone knew the raid had gone bad. Whoever runs away can go, but invade my home and die.
"We cant even get into the NON possibility of you taking out the national guard, etc.."
I said defend, I never said defeat. First of all, I have absolutely no problem complying with a valid search warrant, signed by a judge, supported by oath or affirmation, with those executing the warrant behaving in good faith, so long as the warrant and search are respectively obtained and executed within the bounds of the Constitution. I'm not doing anything worthy of my home being searched, so I'm not terribly worried about being served with a search warrant. That being said, if the government began a campaign of breaking down doors to go on "fishing expeditions" as we call them here in the 'States, they're going to run into a problem when they get to my door. That doesn't mean that armored vehicles and helicopters are coming down at my hands, but it does mean that I'm not about to roll over like many others seem content to do. You apparently have either never heard, or simply don't believe in the phrase, "better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees". Or perhaps this one makes a bit more sense for you - "Live Free or Die".
"So what the fuck is it with you gun nuts, besides from the fact you're just that: Nuts?"
Gun nut? I own a few firearms, mostly for hunting, a couple for protection. Other than that, I'm not terribly into them. I don't subscribe to magazines and newsletters and such for guns, nor am I an NRA member or associated with any of the crazy militia groups. I'm just someone who values my liberty more than my life. I consider that the only non-cowardly take on the subject. I have no respect whatsoever for those who would relinquish their liberty in a vain effort to preserve their life. To me, such a life and such a way of life is pyrrhic by its very nature. My take on guns is that they provide protection not from overwhelming force, but from the self-preservation instinct that beseiges each individual to surrender liberty to tyranny when called upon to do so under penalty of death. A gun can be a tool to give one the courage to stand up and be prepared to pay the ultimate price in an effort to preserve the very things that make life worthwhile. Death is not defeat when one dies fighting for liberty. In this case, death is a victory, as the tyrant no longer holds any conceivable power over you, and you have died with honor.
Price-gouging
Payola
Illegally maintaining a distribution monopoly
Price-fixing
Fraud
Conspiracy to defraud
RICO violations
Breachs of Contract
Bribery of public officials
Barratry
Anything else I missed? Essentially, by basing their entire business model on illegal acts, they've doomed themselves to failure.
"You must live in an ass-backward place (say, like the USA) to have such lopsided laws. Up here, downloading MP3s as well as copying music CDs is totally legal when done for private use."
Sure it is, because you pay extra taxes on every kind of medium you could possibly be writing the copyrighted works to. As I recall, your government is even trying to throw a huge tax into hard drives, mp3 players, and just about anything else that can hold information that isn't already taxed all to hell. Everytime you buy a CD-r, even if it's to backup your Quickbooks files or save your family photos, you're paying money to the Canadian version of the RIAA.
Talk about ass-backward laws.
I can only hope that the RIAA starts trying this sort of thing in the US, and that they attempt to "force" their way into my home. I'd suspect that I'd be on the telephone for quite a while with the RIAA arranging for the cleaning of my walls, the shampooing of my carpets, and the removal of the bodies of the henchmen at the RIAA's expense.
And to think, so many foreigners have decried the US's "fascination with firearms". It's for precisely things like this that we maintain our rights to bear arms. When private organizations can arbitrarily act as law enforcement for the state, the state becomes indistinguishable from a private organization. Thus, the battle for control begins. Your government has weapons, do you?
One thing Americans have, for the most part, retained is a healthy mistrust of their government. Hopefully, situations like this will bring more folks around in other nations. Big government solves little, though the problems it creates would make for an impossibly long list.
" sorry, my mistake, I was basing my comment on a post in ace's hardware:"
;)
Let it never be said that a comment in Ace's forums isn't worthy of citation.
I love Ace's, as it's one of the few places where the topics can go over my head from time to time.
"You mean branch prediction?"
I'm referring to speculative execution in a more generalized way. That would include branch prediction, data prefetch, etc. What it may also include is an early termination, whereby under certain circumstances, you don't have to surf the entire pipeline to get a result. The Sparcs have done this since about '94 (simpledoc here). An Inquirer article hinted at the possibility of this being included in the Prescott chips, mentioning that this would explain why the incredibly long pipeline doesn't seem to have a hugely negative effect in many different benchmarks.
"Now, if you couldn't understand the context I was using before then you should be aware of it now. I'm sorry to have confused you, now that you understand where I am comig from I will once again summarize for you:
In my experience I have found that Intel based computers work better and more reliably than similar AMD based systems. I would attribute a lot of this to the fact that AMD cpu's and hardware tend to be of lower quality than similar Intel based hardware because AMD systems generally appeal to the price minded buyer."
The highlighted part is what I questioned. I understand and agree with the point that cheaper does not equal better, but I think the overall point that most people make is that it's just as fast or faster than a similarly-marketed Intel CPU and that's it's generally less expensive, while implying that quality remains the same.
Your experience might include putting AMD CPUs on the cheapest hardware money can buy, but for the enthusiast who knows what mainboard, graphics card, etc to buy, this simply isn't the case. That you choose to stick an AMD CPU onto a cheap board with cheap parts says nothing of AMD's quality control. What it does say is that when you stick a CPU, regardless of its quality, onto the cheapest boards available, you're likely to have problems. Stick an Intel CPU on an el-cheapo ECS board and see what happens. I had about 7 or 8 PIII systems sold to a church built on ECS P6STM boards. I had made the mistake of giving them a try. Of those, 5 or 6 ended up needing the board replaced at least once, and 4 or 5 of those I ended up just putting in a Gigabyte board after multiple replacements. Haven't had a problem with them since (this was a few years ago). The ones that did work were running slower PIIIs. While the P6STM was supposed to run everything up to about 1GHz, they would be very unpredictable at any clock frequency above 800Mhz or so. Intel chips, cheap boards, problems. Now, I sell AMD based systems almost exclusively. I use nothing but Asus mainboards and quality power supplies and haven't had a single hardware problem with a new machine in the last couple of years.
If you're going to knock AMD's CPU quality, please provide at least a shred of evidence to back up your claims. If you're simply trolling, I'll have to make a note to stop feeding you. If you want to get into a debate about quality control at microprocessor manufacturers, I suggest you take a look at the link I posted.
Intel has had problems with nearly every CPU type sold since 1994 - this includes Itanium.
"Don't forget the extra pipe stages... those count for a lot. I can't say how many transistors, but it should make a dent in the numbers."
We can also assume there's some form of speculative execution integrated into the CPU to bypass the latter stages of the extremely long pipeline where possible.
"That's level 2 cache to the rest of us..."
I'm not entirely sure who "the rest of us" is, but unless Intel is making a special version of the CPU marketed just for me, it's Level 3 cache on all their P4EEs. The P4EE has 20K (8+12) L1, 512KB L2, and 2MB of L3. As I recall, the L3 mirrors what's in the L2, thus giving you an effective 1.5MB L3. The latency on that L3 cache is more than double the latency for the L2 (13.44ns vs 5.94ns), which still beats the hell out of the memory latency (about 64ns).
" I've had problems with AMD cpu's and poorly made hardware, Mobo's especially."
AMD makes motherboards? Also, what does the CPU have to do with the motherboard? Until the PII, Intel and AMD CPUs fit in the same boards. If the board was junk, an Intel chip isn't going to magically re-draw the traces, nor add extra layers to combat EMI.
"Of course way back in the day there were a lot of applications that simply would not work on AMD architecture - this goes back to Windows 9x"
Really? Which ones had problems specific to errors, bugs, or errata (to use Intel marketspeak) in the AMD CPUs? I can remember a few problems with Windows, mostly having to do with bugs in the Windows software that only showed up on AMD CPUs, as AMD wasn't privvy to the bugs ahead of time as was Intel. This goes to the relationship between Intel and Microsoft, in that they showed one another where things were screwed up so they could come up with a workaround. It had nothing to do with anything AMD was doing in the FAB.
"About the only benchmarks that AMD was beating the P4 with were in game playing."
AMD CPUs generally perform well in things like gaming and office-style applications. Content-creation and compression/encoding tend to like the long-pipeline/low-IPC/high clock frequency of the P4s.
"I'm also a great believer in getting what you paid for. I might pay a little more for my Intel cpu, but I know it will overclock further"
650MHz Durons usually overclocked to 900MHz+ with air cooling. I can't recall having ever seen anything else match that. High-end chips generally don't overclock well from either company.
"and that it was designed to be on 24/7."
On which planet does this make any sense? You appear to imply that AMD CPUs are somehow not designed to run all the time. Actually, neither company seems to say much at all about expected usage, though I've had and run both 24/7 for months on end without issue. If this is a slap at heat dissipation, then you might want to check Prescott's TDP of 103W, or perhaps the board specs released by Intel to board manufacturers telling them that boards designed to scale to the 3.7GHz Prescott must be able to handle as much as 137W TDP. Compare this to AMD's max of about 89W.
If you'd really like to get into a discussion about CPU quality control, allow me to start you off with a little reading over here.
" Vodka-cooled Russians have traditionally dominated the field."
But when the Americans transitioned to 90nm SOI, we got Bobby Fischer, who required no cooling at all.
Then again, he went pretty nuts and disappeared for a while, so perhaps a heat sink would have been a good idea.
"The chip with the largest cache won. Hands down, no contest."
You make it sound as though cache is the primary factor in CPU performance.
That's... absurd.
Also, the statement is non-sequitur. The Athlon64 3400+ has more L1+L2 cache than the P4 Prescott or the P4 3.2 Northwood, and I believe also the P4EE (Gallatin). The P4EE has 2MB of L3 cache. There was no discernable "winner". There were only a handfull of chips tested. The AthlonFX wasn't amoung them. There were only a handfull of benchmarks. This is an example of a very small sample of a very small sample using a very small sample. Thus, the margin of error for the overall results is so extreme as to virtually negate the purpose of testing in the first place.
WEEK 1 - Cost estimate: $3 Billion
WEEK 3 - Cost estimate: $20 Billion
WEEK 6 - Something breaks
WEEK 7 - Fixed problem, Cost estimate: $130 Billion
WEEK 9 - Running out of air
WEEK 12 - Cost esimtate: $200 Billion, still low on air
WEEK 15 - Got more air
WEEK 17 - Sent most humans home, Cost estimate $420 Billion
WEEK 22 - Redesigned entire station so it does less than half what it was going to do, Cost estimate: $600 Billion
WEEK 23 - Something broke, Cost estimate $1.2 Trillion
WEEK 24 - Fixed it, running out of air, something else broke, scaled down design a bit more, Cost estimate $2.8 Trillion
Anyone ever have a really bad date? Did you try to make it work out, or did you take her home and put the date out of its misery? I think that's the problem - most guys at NASA haven't ever had A date. Thus, when they finally have a "bad date", (aka the ISS), they not only take it to the movies, dinner, and mini golf, they take it on a Carribbean cruise, trip to Europe, flight on the Concord, and finally propose marriage.
Fellas, let's see if we can figure out if there's another woman we can try with, eh?
As an American citizen, a patriot, and a human being, I find this entire concept offensive.
There is a growing effort amoung governments, especially the United States, Brittain, and Australia to reduce the sum of a human being's existence to database entries and reports. Within the context of "databasing" (to 'verb' the word) the human experience, there is an implied range of that which is to be considered "normal". Those falling outside that which is considered normal (as defined by those in power at any given time) are to be subject to additional scrutiny, regardless of whether any criminal acts are even suspected. With this new trend, we also see other fairly new changes occuring. Probably the two most important changes are the loss of the presumption of innocence, and the warped relationship between the people and their government. Ordinary folks no longer feel as though they control their government. Instead, they feel the need to stay out of their government's way to avoid being cast into the dungeons. It is truly miraculous to have transformed this nation from a government actually ruled by ordinary people to a burgeoning police state within a mere two centuries. I spend more time worrying about the actions of John Ashcroft than I do worrying about the actions of Osama bin Laden. The worst bin Laden can do to me is take my life. Ashcroft, and perhaps more frightening, Bush, appear unsatisfied with simply providing the best protection possible under the law and the Constitution. What they could do far outweighs anything bin Laden could ever hope to accomplish. They can, and appear ready to, fundamentally alter the very nature of liberty and how a human being is conceptualized by terrifying the nation and blackmailing the Congress. Their Final Solution appears to be using technology to track every word, action, and thought of every person, every minute of every day, compile it all into a databse, and use that information to glean who is worthy of not spending the rest of their life behind bars. They seem content with removing the judiciary from the entire process, and perhaps the Congress as well should their power ever meet a Congressional check. Somehow or other, they have even managed to get some states thinking that this is in some way, shape, or form a Good Idea. It is not. When you create a system such as this, and you then remove the checks and balances necessary to correct mistakes, you must believe that the system is perfect. When you use a "perfect" system for "law enforcement", you have Minority Report. The side effect of compiling a person's life into a database (or "databasing" them) is that any human dignity or value is lost. The person is no longer a person, but rather a row. The person becomes a series of numbers - of digits - to be moved about, locked away, or "deleted" at the will of the system's resident operator. The end result is a system in which terrorism is no longer a threat because there is nothing left to threaten. Life without liberty is meaningless and without value.
Repeat after me:
I am NOT a database entry.
I am a human being.
I have value and dignity.
I will fight every effort to reduce my God-given value and dignity.
I will win.
Liberty is now, and always will be more important than life. Taking away my liberty to save my life is like removing my head to save my body. In the war against terrorism, George Bush and John Ashcroft are leading us to a whole new level of meaning for the term 'Pyrrhic Victory'. Looking at the damage done in the past two years, I don't know if this country can take another four. As a person with a very deep love for my country, my heart weeps for our nation.
"In regards to "give up your freedom or risk being blown up" I think this is a real choice for us to make."
Some people already made that choice; they founded the nation and the freedom that we claim to cherish. The good people of the state of New Hampshire codified into a state motto the overriding motivation of the American Civil War: "Live Free or Die."
I, for one, believe that anything less than living up to this example shows us to be little more than cowards cowering in the face of a bully. Liberty is the concept of freedom within the social context - freedom limited only by the freedoms of others. Thus, my freedom to punch you in the face is restricted by your freedom to not be punched in the face. Thus, it is said that I do not have the liberty to punch you in the face. Any restriction beyond this is an affront to the ideals expressed within our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
I will draw my last breath long before conceding my liberty to anyone who claims that it is necessary for my "security". For all meaningful intents and purposes, my liberty IS my security. I fear death for myself and for those whom I love far less than I fear the hand of a corrupt authority digging into the vein of liberty to choke off that which makes life worth living.
If you're looking for a place that values making choices between freedom and security, please see China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Nazis Germany.
There's one thing those who continue to preach compromise keep forgetting - when you're dealing with folks like Al Qaeda, the most committed wins. I'm ready to die to preserve the liberty and the way of life that was here before me; are you?
Preach on. As an American citizen and die-hard patriot, I can say with absolute certainty that there are times, such as these, that make me absolutely furious with my own government. I had a sig for a while that expressed the feeling fairly well, I think. It read:
"I love my country with all my heart, but goddamn my government's being a bitch right now"
Who's feeding you this stuff?
"given these things, i think the cpu may be designed quite well given its current performance with numerous internal slow downs."
So.... new CPUs are supposed to run slower than those they are replacing? I see...
"i'm sure in their next core,"
Which won't be just a core; it'll be a whole new CPU running the Tejas core, and will probably be marketed as a Pentium 5 or thereabouts. It's due out some time early next year.
" they will be able to reduce the latency by significant amounts"
What latency? Where? How much of a latency redction are you expecting to see that you refer to it as "significant"? Do you have information sources with which to back this up, or is this something you gathered from an in-depth conversation with Ms Cleo at $4.99/min?
"increase the branch prediction system"
What does that mean?! I assume you mean that they're going to improve branch prediction. Well now, this helps to a certain extent with predictable branchs such as those seen in simple loops. Currently, branch prediction units are rating somewhere around 90 - 95%, depending on which Intel/AMD tech docs you're reading. How much of an improvement do you hope to accomplish above and beyond this?
"thereby causing their future cpus to perform better than current iteration."
So Prescott performs slower than Northwood, and this is Good(tm), and the next "core" is going to perform faster than Prescott, and this is also Good(tm). Seems like Intel just can't lose - make a chip that's slow; good - make a chip that's fast; good. Amazing.
" first, refine their 90nm processing of the cpu. they will be able to iron out manufacturing bugs"
You're kind of supposed to do that before you start shipping the CPUs.
"probably, i believe that in around 1 year's time, just like their transition from williamete to northwood, their cpu will be much faster."
Again, your conversations with Ms Cleo are really just a waste of your money, as she's feeding you bad information - possibly from evil spirits. In a year from now, We'll have Tejas-core CPUs, probably called Pentium 5s, shipping to the masses. They'll probably have 64-bit instructions at the ready, if not enabled, and they'll probably also be dual-core capable. In a year from now, if they're still trying to hammer out problems with Prescott, they may as well start reselling Opteron CPUs.
" they may already adopt a very good branch prediction unit that will reduce the effects of a very long pipeline."
They already have an excellent branch prediction unit. Unfortunately for your comment, it has little to do with the long pipeline. The effect of the longer pipeline is to allow for scaling to higher clock frequencies. By lowering the IPC and extending the pipeline, they can ramp up in frequency, whereas Northwood was approaching a frequency ceiling. Higher clock frequencies offset longer pipelines, just as better branch prediction somewhat offsets high latency from cache misses in certain situations.
"so pretty much everything you buy not will almost be worthless by next year."
Completely incorrect. What you buy now will always be outdated in a year's time - this is true of any given time in the tech industry. However, computers being bought now will continue to function in an increasingly limited fashion for the foreseable future. I still see PCs in use from the early 1990s. They don't run the latest and greatest software, but they often do all that which is required of them by their respective users.
" the cpu packaging will be changed to lga."
For Intel CPUs. Sockets for AMD CPUs will remain the same (with the exception of an addition of 939-pin) for the forseable future. Even socket A will live into 2005, according to AMD's brass.
"slots in the computer will feature pci express."
" The way it works is that an XP2600+ is 2.6 times faster than a 1GHz Duron, a 3000+ is 3 times faster than a 1GHz Duron, etc.
This is according to "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" 3rd edition (O'Reilly).
Can anyone back this up with a reference from AMD?"
Nope, but I can happily dispute it. According to this document from AMD's site, it's based on the performance that would come from a 2.6GHz Athlon processor. The specific core to which it's compared is not detailed, however it would only make sense from a marketing perspective to compare it to the last core used prior to PR implementation, which was the Thunderbird core. The Thunderbird core, as any other, will not necessarily scale in performance in a perfect linear fashion simply by increasing clock frequency. Thus, it is more correct to state that an AthlonXP 2600+ performs similarly to a Thunderbird-core Athlon at 2.6GHz, if such a creature were to exist. To say that it is 2.x times faster is to belie the reality of diminishing returns.
"Basically, looks like it's faster, but still not the fastest in all areas."
Just what definition are you using for the word "faster"? To my eyes, it's slower than the older Northwood core in the majority of real-world situations, clock-for-clock. If you're talking about absolute performance, then it's significantly slower than, say, the AthlonFX CPUs. Even the biased-as-hell airbags at Tom's didn't have much good to say about this CPU. That's not to say that it wont see strong performance gains as applications are recompiled to support the new features (SSE3 et al) of Prescott, but I don't have the slightest idea where from where your statment comes based upon the reviews and benchmarks published thus far.
You make it sound like it's a superb new chip that outperforms almost every other chip on almost every application. That's criminally wrong.
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength"
And don't forget:
America is at war with Saddam. America has always been at war with Saddam.
America is at war with Osama. America has always been at war with Osama.
time 6.14.02 reporting doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
America is fighting a new kind of war.
"Do you expect NASA to fabricate every component in the spacecraft?"
If we gave them a budget? Yes.
Nasa's fiscal year 2003 budget: $15.1 Billion.
DoD's fiscal year 2003 budget: $396.1 Billion.
The DoD's budget does not include emergency supplementals, such as the $40 billion supplemental in '02, or the $87 billion supplemental requested in '03.