The headline of this story really is misleading. The truth is, DVR's are still hurting ad viewership, just not as much as if all DVR owners skipped 100% of ads. In other words, it's an "increase" only over worst-case assumptions.
I heard an NPR story on this issue. A study found not only that most DVR users do play the commercials, but even users who self-reported skipping ads always or almost always, actually watched far more ads than they thought.
A operating system is not a single process with a single thread. A clean installation of Windows has at least 24 processes at boot time. That means if the Kernel is smart enough it will run each of them on a separate core giving you quite a speed boost, and still leaving lots of space.
Process-level parallelism is fine for servers, but nearly useless for personal computers. The number of processes is irrelevant, it's the number of runnable processes that matters. Most processes spend most of their time waiting for input, such as an interrupt to fire. Your freshly booted Windows may have 24 processes, but what is the CPU load of all of them put together? Maybe 1%? That's how much speedup your multi-core CPU is providing.
You have to go all the way back to the 486 to see that kind of count from Intel.
That might not be a terrible idea. Since the utility of this chip assumes fine-grained parallelism anyways, the new metric would have to be flops per transistor. Implement the 486 design with modern process technology, thus allowing you to put 250 of them on a single chip runing at 100x the original clock speed of 33mhz, and you might get something very nice. Or is that even possible?
Sure would be nice to have a play with it once they have worked out how to program it...
It's very likely you can get one at Best Buy before they have worked out how to program with it. The fact is, current programming paradigms simply aren't suited to fine-grained parallelism - and in saying that, I don't mean to imply that such a paradigm can definitely exist. Sure there are many parallel research languages, but whether those could be adopted by mainstream programmers and used to achieve anywhere near linear speedup on mainstream applications is an open issue. Even the PS3, which is oriented to media applications which are relatively easy to parallelize, is getting little benefit from its measly half dozen computational units.
But with single-thread performance growth at a virtual standstill, Moore's law is going to result in exponential growth in the number of cores, whether or not we're ready to write software for them.
I wonder if we won't move towards a more "biological" paradigm - massive parallelism, but with massive redundancy and therefore inefficiency from a computational standpoint, but also robustness to hardware and software bugs.
He has grumbled about the slow progression of this API in the past. Is now the time when he will make the jump to Direct3D?
Maybe the slow progression doesn't matter as much any more; uptake of the latest version of DirectX seems to be extremely slow.
By protesting that much about a photo, she now has her name and address (not just her cat) blasted all over the web. If she had said nothing, possibly it would have all blown over.
Like those dumb guys in Boston who threw all that tea into the water instead of paying a few lousy pennies of tax. C'mon, guys, quit rocking the boat before you annoy King George.
I agree the comparison to lossless would be interesting.
As for ABX, it seems like the most demanding possible test, which I agree makes it attractive in theory. But in real life, the relevant question is "does this sound good" without a back-to-back reference sample for comparison. I also keep my photo collection in.jpg. Can I see the jpg distortion if I do a 1:1 blowup and carefully compare to a TIFF image? Sure. But at normal viewing size and distance, it just doesn't bother me, and that's my personal benchmark. Neither am I shelling out big bucks for a Blu-Ray player, even though I can see DVD compression artificts if I really try.
Hearing capability is also very individual. I'll be the first to admit my hearing isn't great. Even a simple test on yourself is more valuable than a statistically large sample of people who aren't you.
As for Apple's new offering, I wouldn't pay 3x for a difference that I personally would only maybe be able to detect in a back-to-back comparison that will never happen.
I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today
How the heck did that get modded flaimbait?
Me, I use emacs. It was sluggish back then, and it's still sluggish now:) (At least, the startup time is a little annoying).
Yes. Here's how I configured my laptop to automatically synchronize my mp3 player with my linux laptop. I just plug the player to the laptop usb port, and viola, moments later it's done. I already know this is going to bring heckles from the gui-only crowd, but it really is extremely convenient for me and it might be useful to some of you. You'll have to change the "model" to match your own player, and the music directories on your computer and mp3 player.
Ah yes, Richard Clark, the Digital Pearl Harbor guy. Remember how worried we were all supposed to be about China before 911? I guess every plot needs a villian.
Knowing the best defense is attack, they are in fact still honest.
Obviously you haven't seen the news for a few years. There have been far more US casualies in Iraq than on 911. (Not to mention all the dead Iraqis. For some reason I haven't yet determined, they don't seem to count for much.)
FWIW, I live in a mid-size city and find the $20 Belkin model from WalMart to be usable. After plugging the 6" lead into my mp3 player, I hang the assemblage on my rearview mirror. I find the sound quality OK for voice (All Things Considered, mostly) and movies (on a laptop, when parked of course!) but subpar for music.
But why, oh why, don't all car stereos come with an aux jack?
It's a TV show. Get over it. They cancelled Firefly, now Jericho is gone. As an alternative, these people should consider:
1) Going to the gym
2) Taking a loved one out to dinner
3) Taking up art
Dude, who's worse - them, or you and I blogging on slashdot about them on Saturday morning?
You create this new online world, and pretty soon it's just as crappy as the real one - full of cheaters using money instead of skill to win, ads everywhere constantly nagging you to buy stuff, and anonymity being stripped away in hopes of curbing irresponsible behavior. Whatever happened to cyberspace as a virtual utopia?
In the late 90s I used a Trinitron monitor. I always thought it was great until some jerk complained about those two wires on usenet. It was almost as if reading his words made the lines appear. Before, I had never noticed them. Afterwards, they bugged me.
Slashdot Mirror
Only for games? GUIs are increasingly making routine use of graphics acceleration.
There is really no shortage of sunlight anyways. If only solar cells could be made cheaply. I suppose this will be great for satellites though.
The headline of this story really is misleading. The truth is, DVR's are still hurting ad viewership, just not as much as if all DVR owners skipped 100% of ads. In other words, it's an "increase" only over worst-case assumptions.
I heard an NPR story on this issue. A study found not only that most DVR users do play the commercials, but even users who self-reported skipping ads always or almost always, actually watched far more ads than they thought.
Itanium is doing ridiculously badly. Intel and HP will never recoup the billions they invested through sales of big iron alone.
But with single-thread performance growth at a virtual standstill, Moore's law is going to result in exponential growth in the number of cores, whether or not we're ready to write software for them.
I wonder if we won't move towards a more "biological" paradigm - massive parallelism, but with massive redundancy and therefore inefficiency from a computational standpoint, but also robustness to hardware and software bugs.
They were "local smugglers" from Britain's imperialistic perspective.
I'm holding out for third person singular neutral possessive. If anybody can do it, John Carmack can!
He has grumbled about the slow progression of this API in the past. Is now the time when he will make the jump to Direct3D? Maybe the slow progression doesn't matter as much any more; uptake of the latest version of DirectX seems to be extremely slow.
As for ABX, it seems like the most demanding possible test, which I agree makes it attractive in theory. But in real life, the relevant question is "does this sound good" without a back-to-back reference sample for comparison. I also keep my photo collection in .jpg. Can I see the jpg distortion if I do a 1:1 blowup and carefully compare to a TIFF image? Sure. But at normal viewing size and distance, it just doesn't bother me, and that's my personal benchmark. Neither am I shelling out big bucks for a Blu-Ray player, even though I can see DVD compression artificts if I really try.
Hearing capability is also very individual. I'll be the first to admit my hearing isn't great. Even a simple test on yourself is more valuable than a statistically large sample of people who aren't you.
As for Apple's new offering, I wouldn't pay 3x for a difference that I personally would only maybe be able to detect in a back-to-back comparison that will never happen.
Me, I use emacs. It was sluggish back then, and it's still sluggish now :) (At least, the startup time is a little annoying).
Yes. Here's how I configured my laptop to automatically synchronize my mp3 player with my linux laptop. I just plug the player to the laptop usb port, and viola, moments later it's done. I already know this is going to bring heckles from the gui-only crowd, but it really is extremely convenient for me and it might be useful to some of you. You'll have to change the "model" to match your own player, and the music directories on your computer and mp3 player.
/etc/udev/rules.d/99-IAUDIO.rules:" , SYSFS{model} == "iAUDIO G3", GROUP="users", MODE="660", SYMLINK+="iaudio", RUN+="/bin/sh -c '(/bin/echo; /bin/date; /root/bin/iaudio) >> /tmp/udevlog 2>&1'"
/root/bin/iaudio:
/dev/iaudio /mnt/iaudio && /mnt/media/byartist/NPR/atc /mnt/iaudio/music /mnt/iaudio
#
KERNEL=="sd?1
#
#!/bin/sh
/bin/mount -v -t vfat -o gid=users,umask=007
/usr/bin/rsync --verbose --update --recursive --delete
/bin/umount
Ah yes, Richard Clark, the Digital Pearl Harbor guy. Remember how worried we were all supposed to be about China before 911? I guess every plot needs a villian.
Oops :)
Aside from the patent issue that makes this story sort of tech-related, it's mainly a Labor Day tie-in story.
But why, oh why, don't all car stereos come with an aux jack?
You create this new online world, and pretty soon it's just as crappy as the real one - full of cheaters using money instead of skill to win, ads everywhere constantly nagging you to buy stuff, and anonymity being stripped away in hopes of curbing irresponsible behavior. Whatever happened to cyberspace as a virtual utopia?
In the late 90s I used a Trinitron monitor. I always thought it was great until some jerk complained about those two wires on usenet. It was almost as if reading his words made the lines appear. Before, I had never noticed them. Afterwards, they bugged me.