First off, you want to compare the same application to the extent you can, or is this a faulty methodology? By your logic, maybe they should've used Premiere Pro (which is far more stable and more powerful than its predecessor. Maybe you would like to compare ClarisWorks or OpenOffice instead?
Well, let's do a little examination of real benchmarks and use some deduction and estimation to get some better facts than you present. The first thing is this barefeats.com article comparing the dual G4 1GHz to various flavors of G5, including the dual G5. The Dual G5 scores 836 in the After Effects versus the Dual G4's score of 355. About 2.5x the performance. Great. Let's put that in our back pocket for now.
If one looks at the Mediaworkstation.com benchmarks for After Effects where they pit a dual G4 1.0GHz versus a dual Athlon MP1800+, the dual Athlons are nearly double the performance of the dual G4s in many benchmarks.
Now, a dual Athlon MP1800+ is limited not only by its lower bus speeds and non-integrated memory controller, but by its relative lack of internal registers as compared to the Opteron/Athlon64. You'd be lucky to get the equivalent performance of a P4 3.2GHz HT on the dual Athlon MP1800+ box. Yet the single-processor Athlon64/Opterons seems to be much faster than that P4 box according to PC World.
My point is that, if you want to compare your "gut feeling" based on extension of real benchmarks (versus your complete lack of evidence and questionable comparison methodology), I have the feeling that the dual G5 at best will approximately match the best single-processor Athlon64/Opteron configuration. That's a far cry from your claimed "trouncing" of the Athlon64 by the dual G5.
If you want to argue for the dual G5, why don't you simply state something such as the fact that FCP4 is, for now, the only editing program this side of a $30k Avid or $150k Discreet that will run on an average consumer-level PC? FCP is one of the de-facto standards in the editing world now. Regardless of the power of a computer, it could be a far more compelling reason for a certain niche of users to go Mac than Wintel.
Michael Newdow, the plaintiff in this case, is basically using his daughter as a vehicle to be able to use this case as a way to promote his own views. From the New Jersey State Bar Foundation:
According to CNN reports, the government will also argue that Dr. Newdow cannot claim to be an injured party because he is not required to recite the Pledge, and therefore "lacks proper standing" to bring a lawsuit. Dr. Newdow has stated all along that he brought the lawsuit on behalf of his eight-year-old daughter. However, as CNN reports, Dr. Newdow's ex-wife has come forward claiming legal custody of the girl and says her daughter has no problem with reciting the Pledge in school.
This little girl certainly deserves a better dad than this guy who puts her in the middle of a constitutional challenge in apparent defiance of the girl's mother.
And one more thing - please give us a break with your activism, Michael (the/. guy). At least try to see just a tiny bit objective in your headlines. If you want to bring these issues up, go over to k5.
Suppose you do get a call on your cell phone from a telemarketer. How do you prove that the telemarketer didn't dial your cell phone with the assistance of an automated dialer? Without a search warrant on their premises, it'd be awfully difficult to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Furthermore, this is a federal crime. This means that you have to convince a federal prosecutor that he should pursue action against the telemarketer. An individual would likely have no success in convincing a prosecutor to do this. At best, it would take a body of complaints against the same telemarketer to be able to establish a case. If they block the caller ID or you receive an out of area call, you may have a lot of trouble trying to find out who the jokers are unless you listen to their entire spiel. Worse, if it's only a small local operation, good luck trying to track them down and prove that they had used automated dialing equipment if they mysteriously pack it up and go on to the next town.
The government needs to step in quickly to close the loopholes and ban all telemarketers from making calls to any number to which the recipient may incur charges, including but not limited to cell phones, personal 800 numbers, and forwarding services.
I remember that RIP was the first vector graphics interpreter for dial-up BBS' in the late 80s/early 90s. It required a special client but it made the BBS experience that much nicer.
It makes me wonder: why it took so long for it to be incorporated in some fashion as a web standard?
As far as I'm concerned, Western companies can't compete against China not just because of the low salaries, but because the government provides benefits beyond what most people receive here. It's an artificial government boost that should IMO be compensated for with trade sanctions. When will people realize that this is part and parcel of why tech is dying in the US, Canada and Europe?
Firewall - Kerio Personal Firewall - bloat-free firewall, very small memory footprint, extremely powerful, and it's free.
Compression - 7zip - compression utility that handles virtually every format, integrated into UI, and it's free.
Imaging - Irfanview - image viewer handles virtually all image formats, plays Flash and video, plus can thumbnail, batch-convert, retouch, and it's free.
Music - Winamp - Plays virtually all music formats (including WMA without the DRM annoyances), plus 2.91 now plays video and streaming video, and it's free.
The key here is these programs are capable replacements for a lot of more expensive pay programs. For example, Norton Firewall, Winzip, ACDsee together come to about $200 retail.
Nice, but where's the color calibration?
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 1
One of the key features of Photoshop is its integrated color calibration tools. Getting your monitor to display the colors that you will see in your final product is a critical issue in both the printing and video production environments. The fact that you can separate CYMK is good if you want your output directed towards a professional printing solution, but it's not enough.
There are solutions for Windows and Mac but not for Linux/BSD. Maybe someone could start an open color matching standard at some point. In any case, this issue is IMO what will hold GIMP back from professional use.
It sure changed, alright...
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 0
The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" as radiation and would avoid them. In fact, it actually does have everything to do with both nuclei and radiation, but why sit and argue what it really means with Joe and Jane Average? It's a very similar situation to the bad rap that microwave ovens initially had.
Note: This is not my factoid, I owe this to one of my EE professors who did research in this field.
I don't see how you can say that -R is going to be usurped simply because of speed issues. The fact is that they could make 8x double-layer DVD-Rs if the DVD-Forum decided to make them. Also, there are very few video applications that require the double-layer standard.
The fact is this: if you want maximum compatibility today with DVD readers and players, including legacy devices, you must go with DVD-R. There was even a recent/. article about it. If someone is publishing a corporate or school training video, and the viewers have an old DVD player, the chances that it will play anything but a -R are slim. Particularly with schools, it is a challenge to be replacing capital equipment even as trivial as a DVD player when budgets are so tight these days. For that reason alone, the format can't and shouldn't go away completely for the foreseeable future. But the DVD-Forum had better respond in kind and in short order, because as time goes on things will change, and +R may yet usurp this.
The other thing to remember is that you need to use good quality blanks with stable dyes (i.e. MAM-E/Mitsui Archive Gold, Verbatim Data Life) if you want to retain your data over the long term. Philips hasn't mass-produced these double-layer DVD+Rs yet, so we don't know about their longevity or even their real compatibility in the field. I'd take a more mature mass-storage technology over the bleeding edge, even if it meant dealing with more physical media.
Note: I submitted this as a news story, and I believe it was major Linux-related news but it was rejected. Fortunately it's still relatively fresh and this a good topic to repeat it in. It clearly demonstrates that Linux is an excellent platform for editors in the broadcast field.
Discreet Launches First High-End Online Editing System for the Linux Operating System
Press Release -- Discreet
Debuts smoke 6 Standard Definition Online Editing and Finishing System
Page 1 of 1
MONTREAL (Sep. 04, 2003) -- Discreet announced the high-end non-linear editing and finishing system for the Linux operating system, smoke 6. The addition of Linux workstation support in the version 6 release, combined with new pricing, will significantly extend Discreet's market for smoke; ensuring its accessibility to broadcasters and a new segment of mid-range post-production facilities. Discreet will debut both Linux and Irix versions of smoke 6 at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (booth 7.421) from September 12-16, 2003.
With more than seven years of leadership in online editing, smoke will be one of the most sophisticated digital media applications ever released on the Linux operating system. The performance of today's PC workstations combined with newly enhanced capabilities of the Linux operating system enables robust support for the rigorous editing and finishing performance demands of smoke. smoke 6 on Linux is a standard definition (SD) editing system designed to work with Red Hat Linux 8 and will ship as a turnkey solution on IBM's high-performance IntelliStation Z Pro 6221 workstation.
Startup secrecy can be a sign of incompetence
on
The Cult of the NDA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At my last position, I was in charge of winning new business, particularly at startups. The evaluation process was challenging to say the least, in terms of funding, management experience, etc..
One particular company, involved in one of the latest and greatest tech crazes, had requested that we design ASICs (custom chips) for them. At our first meeting, they made it known in no uncertain terms that we (the vendor) were not to ask any deeply probing questions regarding the end product, or they would promptly and henceforth terminate all discussions. This was the first clue, since we already had a comprehensive NDA and it's a very atypical request.
At one point in a subsequent discussion they wanted to include an embedded processor from one of the well-known embedded processor providers. They claimed another vendor could run it at some number of MHz, and asked what we could do ours at. I replied that I wanted to understand some basic things regarding the processor's use - MIPS rating, types of ops like multiply-accumulates, any add-on DSP functions, etc.. The response I got: "Well, we're not sure, we just want the fastest one." I said "we are quite comparable in process performance and can rework it to at least as good a standard depending on your needs." The impression from other engineers working with me was that they had no clue what they were doing.
Needless to say, soon thereafter they had undergone a major reorg and we didn't hear anything until many months hence, when a different individual with very specific requirements came by and who was very easy to make a business case for. As we found out, the thing that made them "special" had nothing to do with us directly anyway.
The point I'm trying to make is that, in a rush for secrecy, you can end up hiding a lot of the issues from vendors, customers, and investors. Most startups that I have dealt with are basically taking one or more old ideas and adding their "special sauce" to the equation. That "special sauce" needn't be revealed, but if they want some cooperation and funding (and ultimately survival), they should be a little less secretive. At best, you will appear incompetent, and at worst, you will look like so many swindlers in the business world before you.
If you look at media benchmarks, encoding requires a lot of processing power. So, while ripping your DVD may not take any more time on your P3-1GHz versus your P4-2.4GHz, converting it to DivX MPEG-4 for your media jukebox will take significantly longer on the P3 than the P4. In fact, decoding H.264 video and WMP9 High Definition supposedly requires 3GHz (or the equivalent in AMD doublespeak) processors. Add to that the fact that you may want to do more than one thing at once (i.e. encode video in the background and play back another), and you will quickly run into a hard wall. Check out this link for a very nice roundup of how older processors fare against newer processors. A simple DV-to-MPEG2 conversion takes approximately twice as long on a P3-1GHz than it does on a P4-2.4GHz. That's a lot of time when you have a couple of hours of video to encode. Audio and image manipulation applications, video editing and the like will also benefit in similar ways.
Games, it goes without saying, scale in a similar way and a similar doubling of performance.
The caveat: for many business applications, you will hardly notice a difference. A faster I/O subsystem and more RAM, as you mention, will pay much larger dividends for these users than any processor upgrade will. In fact, this post is being written up on my trusty P2-400MHz all-SCSI box and it's still going strong, though it's getting a bit long in the tooth.
First, who says what the posted limit is? If it is arbitrarily set at a low point, then the speed cameras are placed where the speed limit is artificially low, then who is that saving? I would argue it increases driver frustration and may lead to more accidents.
Second, you don't seem to understand that there is more to traffic fatalities than speed. The vast majority of traffic fatalities fall into one of two categories: impaired driving, and not wearing seatbelts. People continue to drive under the influence and/or without seatbelts. Speed could potentially kill at 30mph. What do we do? Lower it to 5mph? That'd defeat the purpose of automobiles, wouldn't it?
Since you obviously don't live in an area where this is a problem, take a look at this link and find out what happens when automated enforcement gets out of control. On another note: traffic fatalities are already double in Edmonton what they were last year. Goes to show that speed cameras are nothing but a money grab.
Since I use a Dell Axim as my organizer/music/movie player, I carry around emulators for all my favorite old toys. One of them is GNU Emu48CE. It emulates most flavors of HP48, and replaces my need for the built-in calculator or to carry around my beloved HP48GX. In fact, through emulation I have the equivalent of a desk full of equipment with me wherever I go. It's pretty neat, though it runs a Small-and-Flaccid OS.
Criminal: Case against defendants must be proven by prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt.
Civil: Case against defendants must be proven by plaintiffs that it is more likely than not (somewhat like a 50% + 1) that defendants are liable. Percentage liabilities can be assigned by judges among multiple defendants if found liable.
IANAL, but I've watched enough court shows to understand this basic fact. This is also why they are not pursuing criminal charges. It would be next to impossible that a particular individual was the source of the file sharing. The civil burden is much easier.
This is also why someone I know in Canada got out of an unlawful computer entry criminal charge - the prosecution couldn't prove that it was any particular person behind the keyboard.
If you look at a modern evaluation board with gigabit SERDES or SERialization-DESerialization (e.g. the 3.125Gbit/s differential signal pair per channel), the trace routes are typically rounded, with no square corners. This is done to reduce the effective impedance along the line which needs to be carefully controlled. They also run in parallel closely-routed pairs because it's typically a differential signal. Actually looks a bit like a set of minature train tracks without the railroad ties.
In fact, multichannel SERDES is the next real interconnect technology. It's used in Infiniband, HyperTransport, PCI Express, Rambus RDRAM and in 10 Gb/s Ethernet (usually as 4x3.125Gbit/s channels as a XAUI interface between optical module and switch fabric silicon with 8b/10b conversion). There are even variants, such as LSI Logic's HyperPHY, that are deployed specifically for numerous high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnections. The problem that is cropping up is that the traditional laminate PCBs are becoming the limiting factor in increasing per-channel connectivity, to the extent that 10Gbit/s per channel speeds are next to impossible on these boards due to the lack of signal integrity. There has been some experimentation for very short hops on regular boards, as well as using PTFE resins to manufacture the boards themselves, but it's precarious at best.
As for Sun's technology, it's interesting but I don't know how much it will catch on or how feasible it will be. It creates packaging issues and requires good thermal modelling and 3-D field modelling to account for expansion and contraction through the operating temperature range and the presence of nearby signals, which could affect the integrity of the signals.
You CAN have a static magnetic or electric field without the presence of the other. Case in point - motors and generators. A generator will not generate electricity (and a corresponding electric field) unless the wires are moving relative to the magnetic core. Even motors with brush magnets are simply magnets until you apply current to the motor coils. Until then, the motors/generator are at best regular magnets, and most large motors don't use magnets but metal cores with proper magnetic permeability.
Only a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, and so on.
There's more to it than 64-bit instructions
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For one thing, I wonder what its physical external address bus looks like. Can it address more than 4GB of physical memory without paging? The Athlon64 and Opteron can. In addition, they are discounting the benefits of an on-board memory controller. This feature alone is a huge performance boost. To top it off, AMD gear comes with HyperTransport and a host of other goodies associated with AMD, like nForce chipsets with the best on-board sound of any integrated solution (and I don't suspect this will be different with nForce3 chipsets).
In short, it seems like Intel is starting a concerted marketing blitz against AMD but with little avail. With the Prescott and this new extreme edition P4 with 2.5MB cache (I shudder at the yield hit that much cache has per wafer for them), we have a lot of sudden refocus towards Intel just prior to the launch. Product quality counts, but so does marketing.
Poor treatment of aboriginals is a major sticking point in Canadian politics. Do you have any idea how much the government spends on aboriginals? The whole reservation mentality and government treaty payments has to stop. They should basically buy them out one time and let them sustain themselves, culturally and otherwise. Educational metrics are also important, because Canadian schools are getting progressively worse (e.g. larger class sizes, lowering of standards to let people pass high school in Nova Scotia). And finally GDP...good ol' GDP is a major barometer of economic health.
In any case, the original poster made the assertion that by objective measures that Canada is better. The UN study shows otherwise. Let the poster back up his statement and I will be more than happy to discuss it further at that time.
Like the other guy above you who commented to my post, that is the point. How am I supposed to take any message in a film seriously if its is full of lies? Some of his crap, like walking into Walmart in Ontario to buy ammo which was either a crime or staged, wants to make us believe something about Canada that simply isn't true. We have home invasions and gun crime and lots of these problems that Americans have. We also have 1/10th the population in a larger landmass.
I seriously don't care who it is - Republican, Democrat, Green, Communist - the fact of the matter is that lying detracts from your message and destroys any respect I might have for you.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, you want to compare the same application to the extent you can, or is this a faulty methodology? By your logic, maybe they should've used Premiere Pro (which is far more stable and more powerful than its predecessor. Maybe you would like to compare ClarisWorks or OpenOffice instead?
Well, let's do a little examination of real benchmarks and use some deduction and estimation to get some better facts than you present. The first thing is this barefeats.com article comparing the dual G4 1GHz to various flavors of G5, including the dual G5. The Dual G5 scores 836 in the After Effects versus the Dual G4's score of 355. About 2.5x the performance. Great. Let's put that in our back pocket for now.
If one looks at the Mediaworkstation.com benchmarks for After Effects where they pit a dual G4 1.0GHz versus a dual Athlon MP1800+, the dual Athlons are nearly double the performance of the dual G4s in many benchmarks.
Now, a dual Athlon MP1800+ is limited not only by its lower bus speeds and non-integrated memory controller, but by its relative lack of internal registers as compared to the Opteron/Athlon64. You'd be lucky to get the equivalent performance of a P4 3.2GHz HT on the dual Athlon MP1800+ box. Yet the single-processor Athlon64/Opterons seems to be much faster than that P4 box according to PC World.
My point is that, if you want to compare your "gut feeling" based on extension of real benchmarks (versus your complete lack of evidence and questionable comparison methodology), I have the feeling that the dual G5 at best will approximately match the best single-processor Athlon64/Opteron configuration. That's a far cry from your claimed "trouncing" of the Athlon64 by the dual G5.
If you want to argue for the dual G5, why don't you simply state something such as the fact that FCP4 is, for now, the only editing program this side of a $30k Avid or $150k Discreet that will run on an average consumer-level PC? FCP is one of the de-facto standards in the editing world now. Regardless of the power of a computer, it could be a far more compelling reason for a certain niche of users to go Mac than Wintel.
This little girl certainly deserves a better dad than this guy who puts her in the middle of a constitutional challenge in apparent defiance of the girl's mother.
And one more thing - please give us a break with your activism, Michael (the
Suppose you do get a call on your cell phone from a telemarketer. How do you prove that the telemarketer didn't dial your cell phone with the assistance of an automated dialer? Without a search warrant on their premises, it'd be awfully difficult to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Furthermore, this is a federal crime. This means that you have to convince a federal prosecutor that he should pursue action against the telemarketer. An individual would likely have no success in convincing a prosecutor to do this. At best, it would take a body of complaints against the same telemarketer to be able to establish a case. If they block the caller ID or you receive an out of area call, you may have a lot of trouble trying to find out who the jokers are unless you listen to their entire spiel. Worse, if it's only a small local operation, good luck trying to track them down and prove that they had used automated dialing equipment if they mysteriously pack it up and go on to the next town.
The government needs to step in quickly to close the loopholes and ban all telemarketers from making calls to any number to which the recipient may incur charges, including but not limited to cell phones, personal 800 numbers, and forwarding services.
I remember that RIP was the first vector graphics interpreter for dial-up BBS' in the late 80s/early 90s. It required a special client but it made the BBS experience that much nicer.
It makes me wonder: why it took so long for it to be incorporated in some fashion as a web standard?
As far as I'm concerned, Western companies can't compete against China not just because of the low salaries, but because the government provides benefits beyond what most people receive here. It's an artificial government boost that should IMO be compensated for with trade sanctions. When will people realize that this is part and parcel of why tech is dying in the US, Canada and Europe?
Firewall - Kerio Personal Firewall - bloat-free firewall, very small memory footprint, extremely powerful, and it's free.
Compression - 7zip - compression utility that handles virtually every format, integrated into UI, and it's free.
Imaging - Irfanview - image viewer handles virtually all image formats, plays Flash and video, plus can thumbnail, batch-convert, retouch, and it's free.
Music - Winamp - Plays virtually all music formats (including WMA without the DRM annoyances), plus 2.91 now plays video and streaming video, and it's free.
The key here is these programs are capable replacements for a lot of more expensive pay programs. For example, Norton Firewall, Winzip, ACDsee together come to about $200 retail.
One of the key features of Photoshop is its integrated color calibration tools. Getting your monitor to display the colors that you will see in your final product is a critical issue in both the printing and video production environments. The fact that you can separate CYMK is good if you want your output directed towards a professional printing solution, but it's not enough.
There are solutions for Windows and Mac but not for Linux/BSD. Maybe someone could start an open color matching standard at some point. In any case, this issue is IMO what will hold GIMP back from professional use.
Slashdotted out of existence, to be exact.
This was a real issue to get the public to accept this technology as a life saver without irrational fear.
The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" as radiation and would avoid them. In fact, it actually does have everything to do with both nuclei and radiation, but why sit and argue what it really means with Joe and Jane Average? It's a very similar situation to the bad rap that microwave ovens initially had.
Note: This is not my factoid, I owe this to one of my EE professors who did research in this field.
I don't see how you can say that -R is going to be usurped simply because of speed issues. The fact is that they could make 8x double-layer DVD-Rs if the DVD-Forum decided to make them. Also, there are very few video applications that require the double-layer standard.
/. article about it. If someone is publishing a corporate or school training video, and the viewers have an old DVD player, the chances that it will play anything but a -R are slim. Particularly with schools, it is a challenge to be replacing capital equipment even as trivial as a DVD player when budgets are so tight these days. For that reason alone, the format can't and shouldn't go away completely for the foreseeable future. But the DVD-Forum had better respond in kind and in short order, because as time goes on things will change, and +R may yet usurp this.
The fact is this: if you want maximum compatibility today with DVD readers and players, including legacy devices, you must go with DVD-R. There was even a recent
The other thing to remember is that you need to use good quality blanks with stable dyes (i.e. MAM-E/Mitsui Archive Gold, Verbatim Data Life) if you want to retain your data over the long term. Philips hasn't mass-produced these double-layer DVD+Rs yet, so we don't know about their longevity or even their real compatibility in the field. I'd take a more mature mass-storage technology over the bleeding edge, even if it meant dealing with more physical media.
Note: I submitted this as a news story, and I believe it was major Linux-related news but it was rejected. Fortunately it's still relatively fresh and this a good topic to repeat it in. It clearly demonstrates that Linux is an excellent platform for editors in the broadcast field.
From this link:
Discreet Launches First High-End Online Editing System for the Linux Operating System Press Release -- Discreet
Debuts smoke 6 Standard Definition Online Editing and Finishing System Page 1 of 1
MONTREAL (Sep. 04, 2003) -- Discreet announced the high-end non-linear editing and finishing system for the Linux operating system, smoke 6. The addition of Linux workstation support in the version 6 release, combined with new pricing, will significantly extend Discreet's market for smoke; ensuring its accessibility to broadcasters and a new segment of mid-range post-production facilities. Discreet will debut both Linux and Irix versions of smoke 6 at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (booth 7.421) from September 12-16, 2003.
With more than seven years of leadership in online editing, smoke will be one of the most sophisticated digital media applications ever released on the Linux operating system. The performance of today's PC workstations combined with newly enhanced capabilities of the Linux operating system enables robust support for the rigorous editing and finishing performance demands of smoke. smoke 6 on Linux is a standard definition (SD) editing system designed to work with Red Hat Linux 8 and will ship as a turnkey solution on IBM's high-performance IntelliStation Z Pro 6221 workstation.
At my last position, I was in charge of winning new business, particularly at startups. The evaluation process was challenging to say the least, in terms of funding, management experience, etc..
One particular company, involved in one of the latest and greatest tech crazes, had requested that we design ASICs (custom chips) for them. At our first meeting, they made it known in no uncertain terms that we (the vendor) were not to ask any deeply probing questions regarding the end product, or they would promptly and henceforth terminate all discussions. This was the first clue, since we already had a comprehensive NDA and it's a very atypical request.
At one point in a subsequent discussion they wanted to include an embedded processor from one of the well-known embedded processor providers. They claimed another vendor could run it at some number of MHz, and asked what we could do ours at. I replied that I wanted to understand some basic things regarding the processor's use - MIPS rating, types of ops like multiply-accumulates, any add-on DSP functions, etc.. The response I got: "Well, we're not sure, we just want the fastest one." I said "we are quite comparable in process performance and can rework it to at least as good a standard depending on your needs." The impression from other engineers working with me was that they had no clue what they were doing.
Needless to say, soon thereafter they had undergone a major reorg and we didn't hear anything until many months hence, when a different individual with very specific requirements came by and who was very easy to make a business case for. As we found out, the thing that made them "special" had nothing to do with us directly anyway.
The point I'm trying to make is that, in a rush for secrecy, you can end up hiding a lot of the issues from vendors, customers, and investors. Most startups that I have dealt with are basically taking one or more old ideas and adding their "special sauce" to the equation. That "special sauce" needn't be revealed, but if they want some cooperation and funding (and ultimately survival), they should be a little less secretive. At best, you will appear incompetent, and at worst, you will look like so many swindlers in the business world before you.
If you look at media benchmarks, encoding requires a lot of processing power. So, while ripping your DVD may not take any more time on your P3-1GHz versus your P4-2.4GHz, converting it to DivX MPEG-4 for your media jukebox will take significantly longer on the P3 than the P4. In fact, decoding H.264 video and WMP9 High Definition supposedly requires 3GHz (or the equivalent in AMD doublespeak) processors. Add to that the fact that you may want to do more than one thing at once (i.e. encode video in the background and play back another), and you will quickly run into a hard wall. Check out this link for a very nice roundup of how older processors fare against newer processors. A simple DV-to-MPEG2 conversion takes approximately twice as long on a P3-1GHz than it does on a P4-2.4GHz. That's a lot of time when you have a couple of hours of video to encode. Audio and image manipulation applications, video editing and the like will also benefit in similar ways.
Games, it goes without saying, scale in a similar way and a similar doubling of performance.
The caveat: for many business applications, you will hardly notice a difference. A faster I/O subsystem and more RAM, as you mention, will pay much larger dividends for these users than any processor upgrade will. In fact, this post is being written up on my trusty P2-400MHz all-SCSI box and it's still going strong, though it's getting a bit long in the tooth.
First, who says what the posted limit is? If it is arbitrarily set at a low point, then the speed cameras are placed where the speed limit is artificially low, then who is that saving? I would argue it increases driver frustration and may lead to more accidents.
Second, you don't seem to understand that there is more to traffic fatalities than speed. The vast majority of traffic fatalities fall into one of two categories: impaired driving, and not wearing seatbelts. People continue to drive under the influence and/or without seatbelts. Speed could potentially kill at 30mph. What do we do? Lower it to 5mph? That'd defeat the purpose of automobiles, wouldn't it? Since you obviously don't live in an area where this is a problem, take a look at this link and find out what happens when automated enforcement gets out of control. On another note: traffic fatalities are already double in Edmonton what they were last year. Goes to show that speed cameras are nothing but a money grab.
Since I use a Dell Axim as my organizer/music/movie player, I carry around emulators for all my favorite old toys. One of them is GNU Emu48CE. It emulates most flavors of HP48, and replaces my need for the built-in calculator or to carry around my beloved HP48GX. In fact, through emulation I have the equivalent of a desk full of equipment with me wherever I go. It's pretty neat, though it runs a Small-and-Flaccid OS.
Criminal: Case against defendants must be proven by prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt.
Civil: Case against defendants must be proven by plaintiffs that it is more likely than not (somewhat like a 50% + 1) that defendants are liable. Percentage liabilities can be assigned by judges among multiple defendants if found liable.
IANAL, but I've watched enough court shows to understand this basic fact. This is also why they are not pursuing criminal charges. It would be next to impossible that a particular individual was the source of the file sharing. The civil burden is much easier.
This is also why someone I know in Canada got out of an unlawful computer entry criminal charge - the prosecution couldn't prove that it was any particular person behind the keyboard.
If you look at a modern evaluation board with gigabit SERDES or SERialization-DESerialization (e.g. the 3.125Gbit/s differential signal pair per channel), the trace routes are typically rounded, with no square corners. This is done to reduce the effective impedance along the line which needs to be carefully controlled. They also run in parallel closely-routed pairs because it's typically a differential signal. Actually looks a bit like a set of minature train tracks without the railroad ties.
In fact, multichannel SERDES is the next real interconnect technology. It's used in Infiniband, HyperTransport, PCI Express, Rambus RDRAM and in 10 Gb/s Ethernet (usually as 4x3.125Gbit/s channels as a XAUI interface between optical module and switch fabric silicon with 8b/10b conversion). There are even variants, such as LSI Logic's HyperPHY, that are deployed specifically for numerous high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnections. The problem that is cropping up is that the traditional laminate PCBs are becoming the limiting factor in increasing per-channel connectivity, to the extent that 10Gbit/s per channel speeds are next to impossible on these boards due to the lack of signal integrity. There has been some experimentation for very short hops on regular boards, as well as using PTFE resins to manufacture the boards themselves, but it's precarious at best.
As for Sun's technology, it's interesting but I don't know how much it will catch on or how feasible it will be. It creates packaging issues and requires good thermal modelling and 3-D field modelling to account for expansion and contraction through the operating temperature range and the presence of nearby signals, which could affect the integrity of the signals.
A super-precision 32-bit carry/overflow.
You CAN have a static magnetic or electric field without the presence of the other. Case in point - motors and generators. A generator will not generate electricity (and a corresponding electric field) unless the wires are moving relative to the magnetic core. Even motors with brush magnets are simply magnets until you apply current to the motor coils. Until then, the motors/generator are at best regular magnets, and most large motors don't use magnets but metal cores with proper magnetic permeability.
Only a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, and so on.
For one thing, I wonder what its physical external address bus looks like. Can it address more than 4GB of physical memory without paging? The Athlon64 and Opteron can. In addition, they are discounting the benefits of an on-board memory controller. This feature alone is a huge performance boost. To top it off, AMD gear comes with HyperTransport and a host of other goodies associated with AMD, like nForce chipsets with the best on-board sound of any integrated solution (and I don't suspect this will be different with nForce3 chipsets). In short, it seems like Intel is starting a concerted marketing blitz against AMD but with little avail. With the Prescott and this new extreme edition P4 with 2.5MB cache (I shudder at the yield hit that much cache has per wafer for them), we have a lot of sudden refocus towards Intel just prior to the launch. Product quality counts, but so does marketing.
I suspect this has more to do with retaining customers already "file sharing" and avoiding bad PR than it does to be protecting customer privacy.
"Many, particularly those in the open source community, dispute the allegations of infringement that we have made."
Isn't this a bit like calling a nuclear war a "mild nuclear war"?
Poor treatment of aboriginals is a major sticking point in Canadian politics. Do you have any idea how much the government spends on aboriginals? The whole reservation mentality and government treaty payments has to stop. They should basically buy them out one time and let them sustain themselves, culturally and otherwise. Educational metrics are also important, because Canadian schools are getting progressively worse (e.g. larger class sizes, lowering of standards to let people pass high school in Nova Scotia). And finally GDP...good ol' GDP is a major barometer of economic health.
In any case, the original poster made the assertion that by objective measures that Canada is better. The UN study shows otherwise. Let the poster back up his statement and I will be more than happy to discuss it further at that time.
Like the other guy above you who commented to my post, that is the point. How am I supposed to take any message in a film seriously if its is full of lies? Some of his crap, like walking into Walmart in Ontario to buy ammo which was either a crime or staged, wants to make us believe something about Canada that simply isn't true. We have home invasions and gun crime and lots of these problems that Americans have. We also have 1/10th the population in a larger landmass.
I seriously don't care who it is - Republican, Democrat, Green, Communist - the fact of the matter is that lying detracts from your message and destroys any respect I might have for you.