Ok, so I see the new tags under each story. Now, how do I actually browse by tag? For example, how do I find all the stories tagged as web20? Isn't that the point of tags? I'm probably just not doing something right, but when I click a tag, it just pops up a little window allowing me to enter more tags.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I think that it's something like:
mov ax, 4Ch int 21h
I think that interrupt 21h is the DOS interrupt for things like printing text to the screen and other miscellaneous stuff. If I had to guess, I'd say function 4Ch is "exit program." Of course, I could be completely wrong.
I was a BIOS programmer for several years... I did a lot of work on the BIOSes for the NForce-1, NForce-2, and NForce-4 chips. So with a sig like that, I'm guessing you write assembly code?
How, exactly, is the craze "over?" Pretty much every game released today is 3D. Every console game, every PC game, every handheld game (PSP and DS)... I've even seen a few crappy 3D games available for download on my crusty old phone. And you can be sure that new phones are integrating much more powerful 3D chips. Just about every sci-fi or fantasy movie made today uses 3D rendering extensively. Hospitals have machines devoted to rendering 3D versions of MRI scans, etc... It just matches the way the brain interacts with the real world better than 2D graphics do.
A 3D web will never be "necessary" any more than 3D games are necessary. We could all still be playing games just like Contra and Street Fighter, but with really high-resolution graphics, without 3D. But people just like 3D. It's cool, and it's more like the real world. Ask any guy who just paid $1200 for a pair of NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI if the 3D craze is over.
Well, believe it or not, a really terrible name can have a big impact on how great the games are. If they had named it the "Nintendo Donkey Turd," that would have a pretty negative effect on the sales of the console. And game developers really just go where the money is. If they don't expect the Donkey Turd to sell very well, then they don't expect their game to sell very well on that platform. So having a crappy name and having great games aren't completely orthogonal issues.
There may be a hundred reasons not to sign with an RIAA label, but it doesn't matter. There is one and only one reason to sign with them: they control all of mass media. That prety much trumps everything else, including whatever high moral standards an artist may have.
The RIAA and their record labels control what is played on the radio and what is played on MTV and everything else. The reason every 14-year-old bought Britney Spear's last album is because they had it drilled into their head 24 hours a day, seven days a week through every form of media available.
And that's why you see ridiculous legislation like this, and the broadcast flag, and the "INDUCE" act. The RIAA controls the media, and they have an infinite supply of money to buy legislation to make sure that they stay in control of the media.
It's all pretty impressive, really. Record execs don't buy big houses, they buy big islands, literally. Think about it... So 50-Cent just bought a new solid gold Bentley with 57" wheels. Then think about the fact that he gets less than a dollar out of every one of his CDs that sells. So what does that tell you about the guy who signs his checks? And then think about the fact that every major artist you see on MTV or hear on the radio is donating 95% of their revenue to the record companies and the RIAA. Got an idea of what you're up against now?
So do whatever you want -- vote for or against some puppet congressman, but just KNOW that the RIAA owns everything, including the congressman that comes in to replace the guy who you voted out of office. Don't like it? Tough titties. If you want to fight them, find a way to amass hundreds of billion dollars and start competing with them for airtime on MTV, radio, and satellite radio. Or, just stop paying for their shitty music and let them rot.
That's a very nice explanation of a problem that is actually very difficult for an amateur to grasp.
So, anyway, I've been putzing around with the P=NP issue for a while, as have many hobbiest mathematicians... And I have a question about it. If I could solve subset-sum (for example) in polynomial time, that would count as a solution to the whole problem. But, on the other hand, suppose that I could prove that subset-sum cannot be solved in polynomial time... Would that count as a solution to the P=NP debate? Would that prove that P/= NP?
Slow down there... There's either some unintentional errors in your post, or you've missed something in your study of compression algorithms.
Lossless compression is nothing more than an algorithmic lookup table. It's a substitution cipher like what you find in famous quote puzzles.
Well, it's not quite "nothing more than" a lookup table... There's definitely more to it than that. It's not a one-to-one substitution like the cryptoquote puzzles. Otherwise there would be no compression. And there can be more than one way to represent the uncompressed data in compressed form, so it's actually a many-to-one mapping. Take RLE (run-length encoding), for example. The simplest form is just a single byte that represents the length of the run, followed by the repeated character. Now suppose the data that you want to compress is the ASCII text message: "HI!!!!!!!!" So, the encoded data would be (in hex) 01 48 01 49 08 20. Instead of ten bytes, you have six. They are a representation of the data that says "One letter H, then one letter I, and then eight exclamation points." But you could have just as easily compressed it as "One letter H, then one letter I, then five exclamation points, and then three exclamation points." And obviously, RLE is just about the simplest compression around. Take a look at PNG compression... It is extremely complex, and lossless, and certainly quite a bit more than a lookup table.
You only need about eighteen bits to store enough positions for every word in the dictionary. A good compression algorithm for text... a look-up table optimized for written English...
Huh? No one really compresses text with a "compression algorithm for text." Maybe they used to at some point... I don't know. But modern compression algorithms are smart enough to work on lots of different types of data with high efficiency on each. Text compresses nicely simply because it wastes a lot of bits by its nature, not because the compression algorithm knows what "text" is and knows what words are used frequently, or whatever you're suggesting there. A compression algorithm that was optimized for English would be pretty much useless, for many reasons, e.g. bad spellers, jargon, other languages, etc...
You only need six bytes to store most of the frequently-used characters in text
Six bytes? ASCII characters are a single byte, and that covers 256 possible characters. "Wide" characters are two bytes, which is enough for Unicode (UTF-16), which can handle just about every written language on Earth. Maybe you meant "six bits" instead of "six bytes," which would be enough 64 characters, but that wouldn't cover anything more than upper case (A-Z), lower case (a-z), numbers (0-9), and two other characters (maybe space and period?). Not very useful.
If you've got a program that could compress a 100 Mbyte file down to 1 Mbyte...but the compression software itself took several gigabytes of space, that ain't gonna do you much good.
What? Why not? If you had an algorithm that could achieve 100:1 compression on most data, you'd be a very rich person, no matter how much disk space the software occupied. The size of the software itself is a one-time cost. The compression savings that you get as a result is a recurring savings, indefinitely. I mean, imagine an extreme case, where the compression software itself is even too big to fit on a hard disk. Say it's like a terabyte, but it gives you 100:1 compression. No problem, install the software on a massive server somewhere, then everyone can upload their files to the server and download the resulting files which are 100 times smaller. Every end user in the world gets to store 100x more crap on their PC, at the cost of adding a few extra hard drives to a server somewhere, plus network bandwidth.
Well, the problem here is that the Slashdot blurb says that "the Pentagon says it will wage war against the internet"... That clearly suggests that the internet is the target of the war. However, the article itself says this:
technologies are being deployed to wage the war on terror on the internet
That seems to state pretty clearly that the war is against "terror." So the person guilty of misreporting is the "anonymous reader" who wrote that blurb (or technically ScuttleMonkey for posting it that way), and not the person who wrote the article.
They make it sound like it's a huge surprise that the most basic levels of physics are strongly connected to the most basic mysteries of mathematics (primes, for example). I would expect that just about every mathematician and physicist, even down to the hobbiest level, has suspected this in some form or another. Some modern scientists like Wolfram and Fredkin have based their careers on this idea, and have built loyal followings. It makes sense that there's a strong connection between the two. And it's what we secretly want to believe, as logical beings -- that there's a simple pattern to be found at the most basic level of existence.
It's amazing that people are so put off by announcements like this. "Oh great, ANOTHER new video card. Whoop-dee-doo!" The graphics industry has apparently been too good to all of you. Imagine if any other industry on the planet moved like the graphics industry... Would you complain if every six months you could buy a car that went twice as fast as your old one and consumed half as much gas? So maybe you don't want to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest video card, but here's the secret: you don't have to! There are never games that require the latest and greatest card. Game developers are smart guys, and they know who their audience is. They aren't going to write a game that only 0.001% of the population can play. People seem to feel like they're being left behind by this ongoing horsepower race in the graphics industry, when in reality, what's happening is that they're getting substantial leaps in technology at a fairly constant price. The top-of-the-line today is $600-$700, and the card that was the top of the line six months ago is somewhere around $300-$400. Not to mention that they're providing derivative cards at every possible level, so you can spend just about whatever you want, all the way down below $100, and still get something that plays a vast majority of the games out there. Just enjoy it. You are the winner here, any way you look at it. If you're so annoyed by all this technology that's being developed for you, just download MAME and relive the glory days of 300x200 resolution with 16 colors.
Well, that would do half of it, I guess. But the other advantage to web-based applications is that they are maintained by the host. You (the user) don't have to bother with installing them or upgrading them or migrating them or whatever. For example, I haven't installed an e-mail app in years and years. But I still get the very latest version, all the time.
Also, many people who use office don't know what VNC or SSH are. But they know how to type in a URL.
Apparently you're right, there are morons lurking around Slashdot. Specifically, the people who modded up your comment.
AOL and Yahoo are not going to permit people to send spam.
Well, call it what you will, but they're going to permit people to bypass spam filters. How are they going to guarantee that only non-spam messages pass through this loophole? If they really had a way to accurately detect spam versus non-spam, then the whole issue would be moot.
Spammers aren't willing to pay money; their business would become entirely unprofitable.
Really? Even if paying 1/4 cent per mail guarantees that their message will get through all spam filters, directly to your inbox? They'd be saving money on all the crap that they already have to do to beat the spam filters.
... set up the special infrastructure necessary to ensure that they and only they are able to evade the spam filters.
What special infrastructure? It sounds pretty simple to me... you pay Yahoo/AOL money, and they whitelist your domain in their spam filters. What needs to be setup? I have a mail server and a spam filter, and I promise you that I could make this happen in about five minutes. The difference between my mail server and Yahoo's is that I don't have thousands and thousands of users, or more precisely, a "captive audience" for the spammers. Therefore, spammers wouldn't be willing to pay me anything. Whether they're willing to pay Yahoo/AOL or not remains to be seen.
Disclosure: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems' qmail implementation to be used by Yahoo.
Don't get all pissed off just because everyone is trash-talking something that you worked on. It's still a bad idea, whether you contributed to it or not, and whether you had good intentions at the time or not.
This just in from our reporter at the scene, "Obvious Guy":
The number of Gmail users has tripled during the five minutes since this story broke. Sources say that Yahoo and AOL were shocked to learn that their e-mail users actually didn't like the idea of having Yahoo and AOL profit from delivering unwanted spam directly to their inboxes.
The Google OS doesn't need to run Windows apps right away. They probably don't even want to go down that road at all... If people really want to run Windows apps on "Goobuntu," then let them install a Windows emulator. This is all just guesswork, but this OS is probably going to be targetted at people who just want to do stuff on the web, e-mail, blog, whatever. There's no need for Google to jump into direct competition on every level all at once. Start by appealing to the average (non-Slashdot) user... Give them something that plays solitaire, browses the web, checks e-mail, displays the family photo album, and plays MP3s. And remember that all of that can be done from a very thin client, which is probably what they're shooting for. As other posters have suggested, they could basically make this whole thing run from a CD, with all the apps on the web. Imagine having a PC with a single 120GB hard drive, and actually having 120GB available for your data. Yeah, it's not really a huge selling point, but it is definitely possible.
... so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
This statement is essentially nonsense. It is equivalent to me saying, "The chances of my friend Joe flooglebarging a flarglefilk are essentially zero." It's something that no one has ever done before, something that no one has any idea how to do, and something that no one has any statistical data on whatsoever. As far as we know, every single planet in existence could be completely saturated with living creatures, or ours could be the only one in the entire universe.
You're right, this would solve the spam problem, because everyone would just stop using e-mail. I would. Right now, I get things done through e-mail... Bug reports are all done through e-mail. Source code is shared through e-mail. The source code version control server sends e-mail with every check-in by every user. I'd be looking at like $50 a day just to do the work that I need to do. And then at the end of the day, I'd be debating whether or not I can afford to send my old friend an e-mail.
Is the theory here that it would eventually balance out, because people I send mail to would reply? Maybe true for just casual e-mails to friends, but not for work-related stuff – if I happen to be the guy running the bug database, or the source control server, I get screwed.
What if this were combined with a white-list? So only people who aren't in your list have to pay a dime. That way friends and people that I work with could be exempt.
if it were not for the non-stop planned obsolence [sic] of video-cards where the obsurdly expensive card you bought three months ago is now obsolete.
The video card industry is certainly not guilty of planned obsolescence. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. The two major competitors are in a non-stop fight to the death, pushing the technology at a remarkable pace, not to mention driving the cost to the consumer down. This is one of the rare industries where the biggest "winner" of the competition is the consumer.
Think about it. You can buy the previous generation of video card technology cheap, because many other people are willing to pay top dollar for cutting edge video cards. And that video card will play just about all of the games that are available today, as well as every game that came before. To put it in more concrete terms, you can go out and buy a GeForce 6600 and play almost every game made recently (e.g. Doom 3), all the way back to Lemmings or Super Mario. That card that you buy will always be able to play that same set of games, as well as any new games that come out that aren't more graphically demanding than your card can handle.
Planned obsolescence is the opposite situation. The automotive industry is the most obvious example. Today, for $20000, you can buy a car that can go 100 MPH and gets 25 MPG. In five years, it's just about a 100% certainty that it's going to need some work done to it, and it's probably going to be worth about $5000 (if you're lucky). In ten years, it will be pretty much worthless, because the cost of the needed repairs are going to be more than the car's value. So, the usual solution then is to just buy a new car. But here's the catch -- That new car that you buy is going to cost you $20000 again, and it's going to go 100 MPH and get 25 MPG. The "performance" will have changed 0%. But you have no choice but to buy a new car, because your old one is obsolete.
If the automotive industry paralleled the video card industry, your next car (which you could buy just six months from now) would go twice as fast and get twice the mileage, for the same price you paid for your last car. Yes, it's true that the value of your old car (only six months old) would be driven down pretty harshly, but so what? Just drive it for a few years and skip a few generations of new technology. Then in just a few of years, buy a new car that goes 8000 MPh and gets 2000 MPG.
I don't know why they're offering that CPU. Maybe it truly is just a "token" offering to show that they're not 100% Intel.
But you're exactly right about the pricing... That's the game that they've been playing since day one. Dell says "Oh, Intel, this time we're serious, we just might use AMD processors in our new XYZ desktop model." And Intel says, "Ok, fine, we'll knock five bucks off the new HyperMegaUltraThreading-XeonPentiumCeleron-Extreme Edition if you stick with us." And then Dell suddenly cancels their phantom AMD project. It happens every single time. It's completely un-American and illegal, but that's just the way it has always been between the two. I have known people from inside both companies, and I work somewhere that has very close ties with both companies. And whether anyone wants to believe it or not, I don't care. But I will cover whatever bets you want to make on it.
I predict that his web page will be really awful looking, with weird lime green colors and that the text will be shifted too far over to the left, so that black line slices right through the first letter of each paragraph.
And BOOOM, just like that, I'm one for one (100%) for 2006.
Ok, you got me, they did ship "a CPU." But what I meant (which should have been obvious, given the context of the comment) was that Dell will not ship a system with an AMD CPU in it.
I got modded "Troll" the last time I said it, years ago, and I'll be modded "Troll" again this time, but I'll still be right, just like I was last time:
Dell and Intel are effectively the same company. Intel makes the CPUs and Dell makes the cases. Dell will not ship an AMD CPU.
How many times is this "news" going to have to come out that Dell is seriously considering shipping an AMD CPU, followed by the "news" that they decided not to at the last minute?
But in general, why on earth do we maintain this system?...and benefits no one except politicans wanting to play social engineering!
Well, if anyone has ever answered their own question more directly, I'd like to see it. "We" maintain the current system because it makes "us" rich. The "we" and "us" that I'm talking about is the lawmakers, the congressmen, definitely not you and I.
Survey 100 American citizens and ask them how they feel about the tax system in the US. It's unlikely you'll get a single one that says "It's great!" And I don't mean asking the question "Do you like to pay taxes?" I mean asking about the system itself, and whether or not it's the best way to do things.
But we don't make the laws. All we can do is write letters to congress, post to blogs, and whine. I'm sure the lawmakers will eventually tax postage and the Internet enough so that we can't even afford to do that any more. Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- we can vote! We'll vote those greedy bastards out of office and replace them with down-to-Earth, hard-working, honest people! Not likely.
I used to feel outraged when I would see the RIAA/MPAA doing blatantly un-American things like this, but I really just don't care any more. Every single time, the net effect is this:
1) People who follow the rules and actually pay for music/movies/whatever have more difficulty.
2) People who already pirate music/movies/whatever are unaffected.
Microsoft estimates that 3% of XBoxes are defective. The various online polls say 15% to 20%. So expect the polls to be higher than the real number, and expect Microsoft's estimate to be lower than the real number, and figure that the real number is somewhere in between. 8%? 10%? Who knows...
And, by the way:
If all we had left were Vulcan Jedis... would they say: "Live long, prosper, and may the force be with you?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I see the new tags under each story. Now, how do I actually browse by tag? For example, how do I find all the stories tagged as web20? Isn't that the point of tags? I'm probably just not doing something right, but when I click a tag, it just pops up a little window allowing me to enter more tags.
I think that interrupt 21h is the DOS interrupt for things like printing text to the screen and other miscellaneous stuff. If I had to guess, I'd say function 4Ch is "exit program." Of course, I could be completely wrong.
I was a BIOS programmer for several years... I did a lot of work on the BIOSes for the NForce-1, NForce-2, and NForce-4 chips. So with a sig like that, I'm guessing you write assembly code?
How, exactly, is the craze "over?" Pretty much every game released today is 3D. Every console game, every PC game, every handheld game (PSP and DS)... I've even seen a few crappy 3D games available for download on my crusty old phone. And you can be sure that new phones are integrating much more powerful 3D chips. Just about every sci-fi or fantasy movie made today uses 3D rendering extensively. Hospitals have machines devoted to rendering 3D versions of MRI scans, etc... It just matches the way the brain interacts with the real world better than 2D graphics do.
A 3D web will never be "necessary" any more than 3D games are necessary. We could all still be playing games just like Contra and Street Fighter, but with really high-resolution graphics, without 3D. But people just like 3D. It's cool, and it's more like the real world. Ask any guy who just paid $1200 for a pair of NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI if the 3D craze is over.
Well, believe it or not, a really terrible name can have a big impact on how great the games are. If they had named it the "Nintendo Donkey Turd," that would have a pretty negative effect on the sales of the console. And game developers really just go where the money is. If they don't expect the Donkey Turd to sell very well, then they don't expect their game to sell very well on that platform. So having a crappy name and having great games aren't completely orthogonal issues.
There may be a hundred reasons not to sign with an RIAA label, but it doesn't matter. There is one and only one reason to sign with them: they control all of mass media. That prety much trumps everything else, including whatever high moral standards an artist may have.
The RIAA and their record labels control what is played on the radio and what is played on MTV and everything else. The reason every 14-year-old bought Britney Spear's last album is because they had it drilled into their head 24 hours a day, seven days a week through every form of media available.
And that's why you see ridiculous legislation like this, and the broadcast flag, and the "INDUCE" act. The RIAA controls the media, and they have an infinite supply of money to buy legislation to make sure that they stay in control of the media.
It's all pretty impressive, really. Record execs don't buy big houses, they buy big islands, literally. Think about it... So 50-Cent just bought a new solid gold Bentley with 57" wheels. Then think about the fact that he gets less than a dollar out of every one of his CDs that sells. So what does that tell you about the guy who signs his checks? And then think about the fact that every major artist you see on MTV or hear on the radio is donating 95% of their revenue to the record companies and the RIAA. Got an idea of what you're up against now?
So do whatever you want -- vote for or against some puppet congressman, but just KNOW that the RIAA owns everything, including the congressman that comes in to replace the guy who you voted out of office. Don't like it? Tough titties. If you want to fight them, find a way to amass hundreds of billion dollars and start competing with them for airtime on MTV, radio, and satellite radio. Or, just stop paying for their shitty music and let them rot.
That's a very nice explanation of a problem that is actually very difficult for an amateur to grasp.
/= NP?
So, anyway, I've been putzing around with the P=NP issue for a while, as have many hobbiest mathematicians... And I have a question about it. If I could solve subset-sum (for example) in polynomial time, that would count as a solution to the whole problem. But, on the other hand, suppose that I could prove that subset-sum cannot be solved in polynomial time... Would that count as a solution to the P=NP debate? Would that prove that P
They make it sound like it's a huge surprise that the most basic levels of physics are strongly connected to the most basic mysteries of mathematics (primes, for example). I would expect that just about every mathematician and physicist, even down to the hobbiest level, has suspected this in some form or another. Some modern scientists like Wolfram and Fredkin have based their careers on this idea, and have built loyal followings. It makes sense that there's a strong connection between the two. And it's what we secretly want to believe, as logical beings -- that there's a simple pattern to be found at the most basic level of existence.
It's amazing that people are so put off by announcements like this. "Oh great, ANOTHER new video card. Whoop-dee-doo!" The graphics industry has apparently been too good to all of you. Imagine if any other industry on the planet moved like the graphics industry... Would you complain if every six months you could buy a car that went twice as fast as your old one and consumed half as much gas? So maybe you don't want to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest video card, but here's the secret: you don't have to! There are never games that require the latest and greatest card. Game developers are smart guys, and they know who their audience is. They aren't going to write a game that only 0.001% of the population can play. People seem to feel like they're being left behind by this ongoing horsepower race in the graphics industry, when in reality, what's happening is that they're getting substantial leaps in technology at a fairly constant price. The top-of-the-line today is $600-$700, and the card that was the top of the line six months ago is somewhere around $300-$400. Not to mention that they're providing derivative cards at every possible level, so you can spend just about whatever you want, all the way down below $100, and still get something that plays a vast majority of the games out there. Just enjoy it. You are the winner here, any way you look at it. If you're so annoyed by all this technology that's being developed for you, just download MAME and relive the glory days of 300x200 resolution with 16 colors.
Well, that would do half of it, I guess. But the other advantage to web-based applications is that they are maintained by the host. You (the user) don't have to bother with installing them or upgrading them or migrating them or whatever. For example, I haven't installed an e-mail app in years and years. But I still get the very latest version, all the time.
Also, many people who use office don't know what VNC or SSH are. But they know how to type in a URL.
The Google OS doesn't need to run Windows apps right away. They probably don't even want to go down that road at all... If people really want to run Windows apps on "Goobuntu," then let them install a Windows emulator. This is all just guesswork, but this OS is probably going to be targetted at people who just want to do stuff on the web, e-mail, blog, whatever. There's no need for Google to jump into direct competition on every level all at once. Start by appealing to the average (non-Slashdot) user... Give them something that plays solitaire, browses the web, checks e-mail, displays the family photo album, and plays MP3s. And remember that all of that can be done from a very thin client, which is probably what they're shooting for. As other posters have suggested, they could basically make this whole thing run from a CD, with all the apps on the web. Imagine having a PC with a single 120GB hard drive, and actually having 120GB available for your data. Yeah, it's not really a huge selling point, but it is definitely possible.
Ok, no more excuses Slashdot... It's time to start caching pages and preventing the Slashdot effect.
You're right, this would solve the spam problem, because everyone would just stop using e-mail. I would. Right now, I get things done through e-mail... Bug reports are all done through e-mail. Source code is shared through e-mail. The source code version control server sends e-mail with every check-in by every user. I'd be looking at like $50 a day just to do the work that I need to do. And then at the end of the day, I'd be debating whether or not I can afford to send my old friend an e-mail.
Is the theory here that it would eventually balance out, because people I send mail to would reply? Maybe true for just casual e-mails to friends, but not for work-related stuff – if I happen to be the guy running the bug database, or the source control server, I get screwed.
What if this were combined with a white-list? So only people who aren't in your list have to pay a dime. That way friends and people that I work with could be exempt.
Think about it. You can buy the previous generation of video card technology cheap, because many other people are willing to pay top dollar for cutting edge video cards. And that video card will play just about all of the games that are available today, as well as every game that came before. To put it in more concrete terms, you can go out and buy a GeForce 6600 and play almost every game made recently (e.g. Doom 3), all the way back to Lemmings or Super Mario. That card that you buy will always be able to play that same set of games, as well as any new games that come out that aren't more graphically demanding than your card can handle.
Planned obsolescence is the opposite situation. The automotive industry is the most obvious example. Today, for $20000, you can buy a car that can go 100 MPH and gets 25 MPG. In five years, it's just about a 100% certainty that it's going to need some work done to it, and it's probably going to be worth about $5000 (if you're lucky). In ten years, it will be pretty much worthless, because the cost of the needed repairs are going to be more than the car's value. So, the usual solution then is to just buy a new car. But here's the catch -- That new car that you buy is going to cost you $20000 again, and it's going to go 100 MPH and get 25 MPG. The "performance" will have changed 0%. But you have no choice but to buy a new car, because your old one is obsolete.
If the automotive industry paralleled the video card industry, your next car (which you could buy just six months from now) would go twice as fast and get twice the mileage, for the same price you paid for your last car. Yes, it's true that the value of your old car (only six months old) would be driven down pretty harshly, but so what? Just drive it for a few years and skip a few generations of new technology. Then in just a few of years, buy a new car that goes 8000 MPh and gets 2000 MPG.
I don't know why they're offering that CPU. Maybe it truly is just a "token" offering to show that they're not 100% Intel.
e Edition if you stick with us." And then Dell suddenly cancels their phantom AMD project. It happens every single time. It's completely un-American and illegal, but that's just the way it has always been between the two. I have known people from inside both companies, and I work somewhere that has very close ties with both companies. And whether anyone wants to believe it or not, I don't care. But I will cover whatever bets you want to make on it.
But you're exactly right about the pricing... That's the game that they've been playing since day one. Dell says "Oh, Intel, this time we're serious, we just might use AMD processors in our new XYZ desktop model." And Intel says, "Ok, fine, we'll knock five bucks off the new HyperMegaUltraThreading-XeonPentiumCeleron-Extrem
I predict that his web page will be really awful looking, with weird lime green colors and that the text will be shifted too far over to the left, so that black line slices right through the first letter of each paragraph. And BOOOM, just like that, I'm one for one (100%) for 2006.
Ok, you got me, they did ship "a CPU." But what I meant (which should have been obvious, given the context of the comment) was that Dell will not ship a system with an AMD CPU in it.
I got modded "Troll" the last time I said it, years ago, and I'll be modded "Troll" again this time, but I'll still be right, just like I was last time:
Dell and Intel are effectively the same company. Intel makes the CPUs and Dell makes the cases. Dell will not ship an AMD CPU.
How many times is this "news" going to have to come out that Dell is seriously considering shipping an AMD CPU, followed by the "news" that they decided not to at the last minute?
Survey 100 American citizens and ask them how they feel about the tax system in the US. It's unlikely you'll get a single one that says "It's great!" And I don't mean asking the question "Do you like to pay taxes?" I mean asking about the system itself, and whether or not it's the best way to do things.
But we don't make the laws. All we can do is write letters to congress, post to blogs, and whine. I'm sure the lawmakers will eventually tax postage and the Internet enough so that we can't even afford to do that any more. Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- we can vote! We'll vote those greedy bastards out of office and replace them with down-to-Earth, hard-working, honest people! Not likely.
I agree, and I also said the same thing the first time this ridiculous bill was mentioned:d =13927180
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167022&ci
I used to feel outraged when I would see the RIAA/MPAA doing blatantly un-American things like this, but I really just don't care any more. Every single time, the net effect is this:
1) People who follow the rules and actually pay for music/movies/whatever have more difficulty.
2) People who already pirate music/movies/whatever are unaffected.
So fuck it.
And, by the way: A Jedi could totally kick a Vulcan's ass.