Awesome, API level 3 works great! I knew it had to be something simple like that. I also knew the slashdot "forums" would get me a quicker answer than anywhere else. Just insult a fanboy's favorite tech and you'll get an answer quick. I didn't even take that much of a tongue lashing for missing something basic. Slashdot, you rock! (And thanks to you too bnenning)
I'm not sure about the devices (I'm just working with the SDK and emulator right now), but the whole thing is like pulling teeth. Hello World took a bit of time, which I should considering the platform is, by necessity, complex, but I figured things would go smoothly after that. Usually it's a) get Hello World working, b) use the API docs, c) profit. But then I tried adding Internet access, GPS and image capture, the later two of which was unnecessarily complicated. I still can't get image capture working because the SDK example for that simply directs you to the Camera API docs and Eclipse can't resolve MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE, even though it's used in every example I can find online. Come one Google, one would think I could at least download an example app that uses key features like camera and GPS and get them to work without modification.
That's great. Planning for the future must truly be what separates man from beast. I do the same thing. Here's my personal roadmap:
2010) - Get in shape, including 6-pack, benchpressing twice my weight and being able to do a Triathlon in Olympic-qualifying time. 2011) - Win Powerball. Quit job 2012) - Use lottery winnings to build self-sufficient compound to survive Mayan apocalypse. 2013) - Now that I'm the only one in the world with means of survival, all the girls will like me. Procreate wildly to start new human race.
That sucks. Why should I still have to put up with my twittering twit of a co-worker just because he's NOT a sex offender. If they'd just ban social networking all together, people would have to revert to dealing with each other in person (gasp!), which would prevent and solve all kinds of problems.
What do Design Documents have to do with anything. Considering that most developers put them straight in the circular file, I fail to see how that would help you hack the system.
> just realize that the next thing we need to figure out in space is how to get people into space both safely and cheaply.
No, the next thing we need to figure out is why the hell anyone would want to go to space (save the novelty of it). Until we terraform the moon, mine on the asteroid belt or develop cost-effective agriculture on a space station, there is no practical reason to go to space and surely nothing to justify spending my hard-earned $$$ on it. I always been a liberal democrat but this is enough to make me switch sides.
While I agree the IE's poor standards support has been a bottleneck to moving the web forward, I put a much larger share of the blame on the w3c than on M$. After all, Flash (1998), Java (1998) and ActiveX (1996) have all been around for over a decade, but HTML doesn't even have vector-based graphics yet. The w3c is an incompetent, useless body that does nothing except hold us back. They really just need to have a few devs from IE and Mozilla have a conference call once a month and we'd do a whole lot better. I'll even volunteer to pay the phone bill for the call if they'd be willing to go that route.
So how about we have CyberSitter push an update to all PCs with an Chinese IP address that encrypts all the data and disables the computer. We'll send China the decryption keys if they forgive their share of the U.S. taxpayer's national debt (less than England and Japan on last count, but still significant). Either we get our money back for free or the Chinese people oust their undemocratic government for stupidity.
Wait, wait, that won't work. If we go around ousting governments for stupidity, we'll have anarchy here in the U.S. too.
Isn't it funny that the more one knows about computers the less one trusts the answers they bring us? To all those climate-change advocates out there, where's your healthy mistrust of the unknown?
I've coded an evolutionary model that predicts that this loss of fear of the unknown has a >95% chance of causing the extinction of all human life on earth within the next 3 decades. Someone's got to do something about that.
Oh, wait, Gore already did. When people realize CO2 isn't making WaterWorld a reality, we'll all stop trusting science. That will be just about the time when we get the computer models right and they tell us we're headed for an ice age due to decreasing solar input. But all the funding for atmospheric research that might have helped us figure out how we COULD use CO2 to maintain the planet's temperature will be cut due to our newly rediscovered mistrust of the unknown, so it looks like we're doomed either way.
Quick! Everyone start having lots of end-of-the-world sex!
Finally. Now if only the rest of Microsoft's products follow suit.
My notebook has.5G of ram. It runs XP great. I can gvim, PuTTY, notepad and solitaire without complaint. But when I try to Outlook, Office, IE, or Firefox (yes, I know it's not a M$ product. I include it to point out that M$ isn't the only guilty party), it slows to a crawl from time to time. Outlook especially. I'm glad the OS is finally getting out of the way, but from the end user's perspective, software is still too bloated.
I haven't had a chance to get me hands on 7 yet (I'm the linux guy at work), but by boss (the Windows guy) just installed it and loves it. He's running on a system with an Atom and 1G of ram and says it's fabulous specifically because it's really fast.
Before I go to the trouble clearing off a partition for it somewhere, does anyone else have actual Windows 7 experience? I wonder if the benchmark people have their head up their @ss and are just analyzing data quantitatively but haven't bothered to actually use the stupid thing and see what they think.
Assuming it's true, this could actually be really good for the US and world economies. The U.S.'s biggest export is knowledge and information. We produce software, entertainment, pharmaceutical research, etc. There's a big demand for it overseas. But China, India, and the like don't enforce copyrights and patents because they have no incentive to do so. So we produce it for everyone and pay for it for everyone too.
Now that China has some intellectual property of it's own they have incentive. We'll enforce their patents if they enforce ours. This could mean that the economy can fairly price this stuff on world market instead of just in the U.S. and Europe. Imagine if cutting edge research occurred world-wide and the cost was spread over 6 Billion people instead of just the few billion (or less) in the U.S. and Europe. We'll start to see economies of a whole new scale. And this is good for everyone.
I think that the entire computer industry is a Natural Monopoly. Think about it. Intel, IBM and Sun basically duplicate a heck of a lot of work trying to do the same thing: make silicon add faster. Microsoft and the Linux community likewise do the same thing with operating systems. Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX/GWT: redundant. PHP/Rails/J2EE/.Net: redundant. And it's not just the companies that duplicate efforts. All their users and those who develop for these platforms duplicate efforts as well.
These technologies aren't identical. They each have some nice features that appeal to some small subset of the user and developer bases, but the majority of uses can be implemented on whatever technology stack is available. The differences either force developers to learn multiple ways of doing things and learn about multiple sets of quirks of each tech stack, or get tied to one particular stack and risk having major parts of their skill die if that platform looses support.
That said, I think Oracle should probably dump as much of Sun's crap as possible. A platform either needs 110% support, needs to implement lots and lots of features, needs to fix bugs as if the earth itself depended on it, needs to be cheap and easy, or needs to not waste everyone's time in the first place.
Think about the PC. Microsoft and Intel got the 10% right that did 99% of what 99% of potential customers needed. It was affordable, it worked well enough, and it was easy to use. Since then, they used their economies of scale to take off, and now, for all the academic imperfection of i386, it's a really good, really stable platform. Even Windows (save some Visa graphics drivers) is a pretty stable platform by this point.
True, competition from AMD made Intel get of their ass with x86_64, multi-core, and virtualization, but AMD did it all while maintaining 100% backwards compatibility with x86. i386 is like an open standard that anyone can try to do better than Intel. If they do, they make money and Intel plays catch-up. If they don't KEEP doing it better... well, they they can just get some dumbass CEO to buy a shitty GPU maker.
True also that perceived competition from Linux has probably made Microsoft work a bit harder and cleaning things up. But in reality, Linux just proved that the *nix market really IS a natural monopoly and killed the other *nixes. Linux hasn't truly provided competition to M$ yet because it's not trivial to port an app from Windows to Linux. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just one OS to worry about (or better yet, one browser).
The true problems with technology today are:
1) Providing fast, reliable (read: clustered/redundant) full-featured (no limited SQL or proprietary database access methods) access to server-side data without compromising security on the server and without bumping into firewalls while forcing the end-user application developer to have to learn as little as possible about how that works. No specifying port numbers. No knowledge of http caching. Transparent (to the developer) statefullness. Minimal, simple interface for handling failed requests that uses the programming language's own error-handling mechanism (i.e. exceptions).
2) Full-featured client-side programs (read: 3D, video, multiple windows, local filesystem with appropriate security and space limitations) that can be written in any language, work on any client platform, don't compromise security on the client even though you're running untrusted code and don't require deployment of a browser plug-in or other runtime environment.
Oracle should aim big and do that, and keep it simple and easy instead of trying to tie developers to their language (Java) and/or platform (.NET).
Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before failure,
and then...
[ Powering up and down PCs is OK -- but find out why powering down servers is a calculated risk. ]
and in the linked article, by the same author:
...machines can handle being shut down a finite number of times. Arguably, the number is large enough for regular power cycling over an extended period of time. "Most server vendors today say they'll support a certain number of cycles of powering things on and off," Monroe said. "I believe most of the server vendors would say [the number] is in the hundreds as opposed to the thousands."
So which is it? This guy should be fired and this publication should be completely ignored. Do they even have editors there to read these things before they're published?
Saying that broadband internet access will help kids get smarter is like saying that giving money to over-leveraged banks and other companies will help America get richer or that eating nothing but fat and protein will make you healthier and skinnier.
Want to be skinny and stay healthy? Eat a balanced diet of lean meats, whole grains and fresh vegetables. That's not the latest diet book, people have know that for centuries. No carbs is just starvation.
What a stronger economy? Let those who made bad bets fail and make more useful products and services for less cost. More money in the system will just eventually devalue the dollar. Of course the banks haven't lent out Paulson's $350b. Who are they going to lend it to? Who's making stuff better for cheaper such that they can pay it back with interest?
Want to make kids smarter? Get better teacher and parents who are involved in their kids' education. Leaving them to "learn" from the Internet instead of a real person will result in short attention spans and a gullible population that believes all the crap the read on the internet. Just look at me, I'm wasting my time ranting here on/.
You're underestimating incompetence. Ideally, the pentagon and other places that deal with information that actually needs to be secure start with physical security. Think of a computer with no USB, a network cable that connects inside the case, and a case that destroys the power supply and alerts someone if it's opened), separate networks, training for users, full-time staff dedicated to monitoring, etc., etc., etc. It's not impossible to keep information secure.
But do you think it actually works that way? I deal with various government agencies all the time, and we have to do things like assign some users a static IP and send them that user's IP address. Maybe that's part of a more comprehensive security plan and they only do that to keep the riff-raff out. But then again, it may be the entire security plan, either because the guy who made the rule didn't know what he was doing or he did, and, faced with constraints on time and staff, took that approach because at least then he could say "well, the remote system was compromised, so it was out of our hands".
I'm just saying, don't discount the possibility that very important info receives inadequate protection and this results in a very real problem for American military, government, and business, and it could effect all of us. Just because you know they COULD do it the right way doesn't mean they do. And fixing broken security without shutting down the system is much more difficult than setting it up right in the first place, so just because someone must know about the problem doesn't mean it can just be fixed.
White House itself had to deal with unidentifiable intrusions in its networks.
It's hilarious that they're just finding out about this now. I remember visiting whitehouse.com years ago and it had been 0wned and turned into a porn site. And if you go there now, it still is! You'd think they'd have fixed that by now.
who hasn't fantasized about Maggie flying in through your bedroom window naked?
Well I hadn't. Until you just said it. Looks like that makes YOU guilty of child porn, and me the innocent victim. Stay where you are, the Aussie police will be there momentarily to arrest you, you pervert.
And what do you think dolls and tea sets are made of? Plastics, of course. All those guys that used to say the future was in plastics were right. I, for one, welcome our new plastic fembot overlords.
Yes, with a population of only 1,15B, I don't know where they found the people to do it. Or maybe you were referring to the land area of a mere 1,269,210.
> However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets.
People think these things are the difference between republicans and democrats. They're not.
Essentially, any intelligent, non-idealistic person (and many of you don't qualify) knows full well that the matters that government deals with are complicated and the general public, not spending all of our time studying these matters, simply isn't qualified to make decisions. That's why we're more of a republic (vote for people who make the decisions) rather than a direct democracy (public votes on each issue), and in places where we have direct democracy via ballot initiative (like Colorado and California), the ballot are long, annoying, and end up with conflicting, hard to implement, hard to enforce, laws enshrined in the state constitution.
The real difference between democrats and republicans is not that democrats want big government and regulations and republicans want small government and free markets, but that democrats realize that our best bet is to trust out elected officials to make good decisions on the right amount of taxes and regulations after doing their homework while republicans assume government is always bad and the free market always ends up with the right answer. Democrats are in the difficult position of knowing that the free markets don't always fix things (need I site the bailout), but that elected officials routinely screw up as well. We just have to vote and hope for the best. Republicans are delusional people who blame government and the immoral lefties who draw the wrath of God for all the county's problems.
And please pardon my gross generalizations of wide swaths of America. Or just flame me, whichever suits your fancy.
Where are you getting the idea that AMD's technology is so much faster. Crappy benchmarks that try to sum up a complex problem into a single number?
I do IT support for scientific computing and I just don't see it. In fact, I spent all last week benchmarking some of my user's programs on an AMD 2212 vs an Intel E8400, and the Intel system is wiping the floor with the AMD system (20% faster) for this particular program. And I'm not an Intel fanboy. I used to be an AMD fanboy, but then I got a whole mess of various different models of Tyan AMD motherboards that consistently got MCEs and kernel panics under load (yes, I'm using both memory and CPUs from Tyan's list of supported chips for that specific board). It could be Tyan and it could be AMD, but since I switched to Intel, I can't get an machine check to save my life.
My point is that the very small subset of that actually run CPU-bound programs for any significant length of time know that the best performance is: a) Very application specific b) Switches back and forth all the time c) Represents differences less than a factor of 1, so if your code is actually too slow to run, you'll have to resort to tuning your software rather than buying better hardware (unless, of course, your hardware is many years old).
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome, API level 3 works great! I knew it had to be something simple like that. I also knew the slashdot "forums" would get me a quicker answer than anywhere else. Just insult a fanboy's favorite tech and you'll get an answer quick. I didn't even take that much of a tongue lashing for missing something basic. Slashdot, you rock! (And thanks to you too bnenning)
I'm not sure about the devices (I'm just working with the SDK and emulator right now), but the whole thing is like pulling teeth. Hello World took a bit of time, which I should considering the platform is, by necessity, complex, but I figured things would go smoothly after that. Usually it's a) get Hello World working, b) use the API docs, c) profit. But then I tried adding Internet access, GPS and image capture, the later two of which was unnecessarily complicated. I still can't get image capture working because the SDK example for that simply directs you to the Camera API docs and Eclipse can't resolve MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE, even though it's used in every example I can find online. Come one Google, one would think I could at least download an example app that uses key features like camera and GPS and get them to work without modification.
> If antivirus protectors could collect data from machines and users... ...it would be malware.
As is, antivirus simply eats up all your CPU and memory, so it's more like a DOS.
That's great. Planning for the future must truly be what separates man from beast. I do the same thing. Here's my personal roadmap:
2010) - Get in shape, including 6-pack, benchpressing twice my weight and being able to do a Triathlon in Olympic-qualifying time.
2011) - Win Powerball. Quit job
2012) - Use lottery winnings to build self-sufficient compound to survive Mayan apocalypse.
2013) - Now that I'm the only one in the world with means of survival, all the girls will like me. Procreate wildly to start new human race.
That sucks. Why should I still have to put up with my twittering twit of a co-worker just because he's NOT a sex offender. If they'd just ban social networking all together, people would have to revert to dealing with each other in person (gasp!), which would prevent and solve all kinds of problems.
What do Design Documents have to do with anything. Considering that most developers put them straight in the circular file, I fail to see how that would help you hack the system.
> just realize that the next thing we need to figure out in space is how to get people into space both safely and cheaply.
No, the next thing we need to figure out is why the hell anyone would want to go to space (save the novelty of it). Until we terraform the moon, mine on the asteroid belt or develop cost-effective agriculture on a space station, there is no practical reason to go to space and surely nothing to justify spending my hard-earned $$$ on it. I always been a liberal democrat but this is enough to make me switch sides.
While I agree the IE's poor standards support has been a bottleneck to moving the web forward, I put a much larger share of the blame on the w3c than on M$. After all, Flash (1998), Java (1998) and ActiveX (1996) have all been around for over a decade, but HTML doesn't even have vector-based graphics yet. The w3c is an incompetent, useless body that does nothing except hold us back. They really just need to have a few devs from IE and Mozilla have a conference call once a month and we'd do a whole lot better. I'll even volunteer to pay the phone bill for the call if they'd be willing to go that route.
So how about we have CyberSitter push an update to all PCs with an Chinese IP address that encrypts all the data and disables the computer. We'll send China the decryption keys if they forgive their share of the U.S. taxpayer's national debt (less than England and Japan on last count, but still significant). Either we get our money back for free or the Chinese people oust their undemocratic government for stupidity.
Wait, wait, that won't work. If we go around ousting governments for stupidity, we'll have anarchy here in the U.S. too.
Isn't it funny that the more one knows about computers the less one trusts the answers they bring us? To all those climate-change advocates out there, where's your healthy mistrust of the unknown?
I've coded an evolutionary model that predicts that this loss of fear of the unknown has a >95% chance of causing the extinction of all human life on earth within the next 3 decades. Someone's got to do something about that.
Oh, wait, Gore already did. When people realize CO2 isn't making WaterWorld a reality, we'll all stop trusting science. That will be just about the time when we get the computer models right and they tell us we're headed for an ice age due to decreasing solar input. But all the funding for atmospheric research that might have helped us figure out how we COULD use CO2 to maintain the planet's temperature will be cut due to our newly rediscovered mistrust of the unknown, so it looks like we're doomed either way.
Quick! Everyone start having lots of end-of-the-world sex!
Did anyone else read it as asPCa and wonder if the USPTO had, true to form, approved a patent involving blackcats, cats (the living kind), and string?
> the kind with less than a gigabyte of RAM.
Finally. Now if only the rest of Microsoft's products follow suit.
My notebook has .5G of ram. It runs XP great. I can gvim, PuTTY, notepad and solitaire without complaint. But when I try to Outlook, Office, IE, or Firefox (yes, I know it's not a M$ product. I include it to point out that M$ isn't the only guilty party), it slows to a crawl from time to time. Outlook especially. I'm glad the OS is finally getting out of the way, but from the end user's perspective, software is still too bloated.
I haven't had a chance to get me hands on 7 yet (I'm the linux guy at work), but by boss (the Windows guy) just installed it and loves it. He's running on a system with an Atom and 1G of ram and says it's fabulous specifically because it's really fast.
Before I go to the trouble clearing off a partition for it somewhere, does anyone else have actual Windows 7 experience? I wonder if the benchmark people have their head up their @ss and are just analyzing data quantitatively but haven't bothered to actually use the stupid thing and see what they think.
Assuming it's true, this could actually be really good for the US and world economies. The U.S.'s biggest export is knowledge and information. We produce software, entertainment, pharmaceutical research, etc. There's a big demand for it overseas. But China, India, and the like don't enforce copyrights and patents because they have no incentive to do so. So we produce it for everyone and pay for it for everyone too.
Now that China has some intellectual property of it's own they have incentive. We'll enforce their patents if they enforce ours. This could mean that the economy can fairly price this stuff on world market instead of just in the U.S. and Europe. Imagine if cutting edge research occurred world-wide and the cost was spread over 6 Billion people instead of just the few billion (or less) in the U.S. and Europe. We'll start to see economies of a whole new scale. And this is good for everyone.
Windows [...snip...] a Support Nightmare.
There. Fixed that for ya.
These technologies aren't identical. They each have some nice features that appeal to some small subset of the user and developer bases, but the majority of uses can be implemented on whatever technology stack is available. The differences either force developers to learn multiple ways of doing things and learn about multiple sets of quirks of each tech stack, or get tied to one particular stack and risk having major parts of their skill die if that platform looses support.
That said, I think Oracle should probably dump as much of Sun's crap as possible. A platform either needs 110% support, needs to implement lots and lots of features, needs to fix bugs as if the earth itself depended on it, needs to be cheap and easy, or needs to not waste everyone's time in the first place.
Think about the PC. Microsoft and Intel got the 10% right that did 99% of what 99% of potential customers needed. It was affordable, it worked well enough, and it was easy to use. Since then, they used their economies of scale to take off, and now, for all the academic imperfection of i386, it's a really good, really stable platform. Even Windows (save some Visa graphics drivers) is a pretty stable platform by this point.
True, competition from AMD made Intel get of their ass with x86_64, multi-core, and virtualization, but AMD did it all while maintaining 100% backwards compatibility with x86. i386 is like an open standard that anyone can try to do better than Intel. If they do, they make money and Intel plays catch-up. If they don't KEEP doing it better... well, they they can just get some dumbass CEO to buy a shitty GPU maker.
True also that perceived competition from Linux has probably made Microsoft work a bit harder and cleaning things up. But in reality, Linux just proved that the *nix market really IS a natural monopoly and killed the other *nixes. Linux hasn't truly provided competition to M$ yet because it's not trivial to port an app from Windows to Linux. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just one OS to worry about (or better yet, one browser).
The true problems with technology today are: 1) Providing fast, reliable (read: clustered/redundant) full-featured (no limited SQL or proprietary database access methods) access to server-side data without compromising security on the server and without bumping into firewalls while forcing the end-user application developer to have to learn as little as possible about how that works. No specifying port numbers. No knowledge of http caching. Transparent (to the developer) statefullness. Minimal, simple interface for handling failed requests that uses the programming language's own error-handling mechanism (i.e. exceptions).
2) Full-featured client-side programs (read: 3D, video, multiple windows, local filesystem with appropriate security and space limitations) that can be written in any language, work on any client platform, don't compromise security on the client even though you're running untrusted code and don't require deployment of a browser plug-in or other runtime environment.
Oracle should aim big and do that, and keep it simple and easy instead of trying to tie developers to their language (Java) and/or platform (.NET).
Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before failure,
and then...
[ Powering up and down PCs is OK -- but find out why powering down servers is a calculated risk. ]
and in the linked article, by the same author:
...machines can handle being shut down a finite number of times. Arguably, the number is large enough for regular power cycling over an extended period of time. "Most server vendors today say they'll support a certain number of cycles of powering things on and off," Monroe said. "I believe most of the server vendors would say [the number] is in the hundreds as opposed to the thousands."
So which is it? This guy should be fired and this publication should be completely ignored. Do they even have editors there to read these things before they're published?
Saying that broadband internet access will help kids get smarter is like saying that giving money to over-leveraged banks and other companies will help America get richer or that eating nothing but fat and protein will make you healthier and skinnier.
Want to be skinny and stay healthy? Eat a balanced diet of lean meats, whole grains and fresh vegetables. That's not the latest diet book, people have know that for centuries. No carbs is just starvation.
What a stronger economy? Let those who made bad bets fail and make more useful products and services for less cost. More money in the system will just eventually devalue the dollar. Of course the banks haven't lent out Paulson's $350b. Who are they going to lend it to? Who's making stuff better for cheaper such that they can pay it back with interest?
Want to make kids smarter? Get better teacher and parents who are involved in their kids' education. Leaving them to "learn" from the Internet instead of a real person will result in short attention spans and a gullible population that believes all the crap the read on the internet. Just look at me, I'm wasting my time ranting here on /.
You're underestimating incompetence. Ideally, the pentagon and other places that deal with information that actually needs to be secure start with physical security. Think of a computer with no USB, a network cable that connects inside the case, and a case that destroys the power supply and alerts someone if it's opened), separate networks, training for users, full-time staff dedicated to monitoring, etc., etc., etc. It's not impossible to keep information secure.
But do you think it actually works that way? I deal with various government agencies all the time, and we have to do things like assign some users a static IP and send them that user's IP address. Maybe that's part of a more comprehensive security plan and they only do that to keep the riff-raff out. But then again, it may be the entire security plan, either because the guy who made the rule didn't know what he was doing or he did, and, faced with constraints on time and staff, took that approach because at least then he could say "well, the remote system was compromised, so it was out of our hands".
I'm just saying, don't discount the possibility that very important info receives inadequate protection and this results in a very real problem for American military, government, and business, and it could effect all of us. Just because you know they COULD do it the right way doesn't mean they do. And fixing broken security without shutting down the system is much more difficult than setting it up right in the first place, so just because someone must know about the problem doesn't mean it can just be fixed.
White House itself had to deal with unidentifiable intrusions in its networks.
It's hilarious that they're just finding out about this now. I remember visiting whitehouse.com years ago and it had been 0wned and turned into a porn site. And if you go there now, it still is! You'd think they'd have fixed that by now.
who hasn't fantasized about Maggie flying in through your bedroom window naked?
Well I hadn't. Until you just said it. Looks like that makes YOU guilty of child porn, and me the innocent victim. Stay where you are, the Aussie police will be there momentarily to arrest you, you pervert.
And what do you think dolls and tea sets are made of? Plastics, of course. All those guys that used to say the future was in plastics were right. I, for one, welcome our new plastic fembot overlords.
Yes, with a population of only 1,15B, I don't know where they found the people to do it. Or maybe you were referring to the land area of a mere 1,269,210.
> However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets.
People think these things are the difference between republicans and democrats. They're not.
Essentially, any intelligent, non-idealistic person (and many of you don't qualify) knows full well that the matters that government deals with are complicated and the general public, not spending all of our time studying these matters, simply isn't qualified to make decisions. That's why we're more of a republic (vote for people who make the decisions) rather than a direct democracy (public votes on each issue), and in places where we have direct democracy via ballot initiative (like Colorado and California), the ballot are long, annoying, and end up with conflicting, hard to implement, hard to enforce, laws enshrined in the state constitution.
The real difference between democrats and republicans is not that democrats want big government and regulations and republicans want small government and free markets, but that democrats realize that our best bet is to trust out elected officials to make good decisions on the right amount of taxes and regulations after doing their homework while republicans assume government is always bad and the free market always ends up with the right answer. Democrats are in the difficult position of knowing that the free markets don't always fix things (need I site the bailout), but that elected officials routinely screw up as well. We just have to vote and hope for the best. Republicans are delusional people who blame government and the immoral lefties who draw the wrath of God for all the county's problems.
And please pardon my gross generalizations of wide swaths of America. Or just flame me, whichever suits your fancy.
Where are you getting the idea that AMD's technology is so much faster. Crappy benchmarks that try to sum up a complex problem into a single number?
I do IT support for scientific computing and I just don't see it. In fact, I spent all last week benchmarking some of my user's programs on an AMD 2212 vs an Intel E8400, and the Intel system is wiping the floor with the AMD system (20% faster) for this particular program. And I'm not an Intel fanboy. I used to be an AMD fanboy, but then I got a whole mess of various different models of Tyan AMD motherboards that consistently got MCEs and kernel panics under load (yes, I'm using both memory and CPUs from Tyan's list of supported chips for that specific board). It could be Tyan and it could be AMD, but since I switched to Intel, I can't get an machine check to save my life.
My point is that the very small subset of that actually run CPU-bound programs for any significant length of time know that the best performance is:
a) Very application specific
b) Switches back and forth all the time
c) Represents differences less than a factor of 1, so if your code is actually too slow to run, you'll have to resort to tuning your software rather than buying better hardware (unless, of course, your hardware is many years old).