Wonder where they'd be if the had put half as much effort into selling their products instead of lawyers fees.
If they put the same amount and quality of effort as they did into their legal arguments?
Probably same place they are now, in bankruptcy court, but instead of their creditors being Novel and a pipe fund, it'd be all the plaintiffs' owed damages when SCO was ruled liable for their servers exploding.
You are absolutely correct. The validity of the election results is not the relevant issue anymore. Whats relevant is that the Iranian people saw how their government acted before and after, how they announced the results early, how they silenced all opposition media, how they arrested opposition leaders, how they sent riot police into the streets to battle their own people. As a result this is becoming a movement that goes well beyond whether Ahmadinejad was really elected or Mosavi's platform of modest reforms. It's becoming a cultural battle. While I know I'm going way out on a limb here, in a way it feels like East Germany in the year before the wall came down, when the people saw the brutality of their own government against them, and refused to sit down and accept it any more. If the protests go on, and the government's response remains as violent, then the cause will only reinforce itself.
Anyone can write an application, and put the compiled binary up on their website, and "self-publish". Steam gives exactly what a publisher does: direct access to a large distribution network. In this case, that comes in the form of a desktop client app that serves as a storefront.
Sounds like a virtual store chain that accepts products not made by a big publisher to me, not a publisher. Like if you could walk into Borders with your book in hand, and they'd sell it for you. Do it electronically where they can sell it in Border's nation wide and online, and you have Steam. Or its like a virtual Farmer's Market, where you use their storefront to sell your produce.
A publisher is someone who pays to produce the work (or sometimes pays to get the rights to an already produced work), not simply provides an outlet to sell it.
And now, you're upset because a big corp came in and sat on your made-up word. Ha-ha! What, they changed its meaning? It didn't have any meaning in the first place, other than to make words next to it look better to easily-impressed insular twits.
They're called "instwits", and I was one back when it meant something. You kids today don't know anything about self-congratulatory myopia, you think you can just blindly state that yours is the only pure form of artistic expression unsullied by corporate soul-sucking and that makes you a real instwit. Please. I was bouncing the idea of how unique and on the pulse of the times I was around an echo-chamber of like-minded pretentious blowhards while you were still battling with Suzie Stinkypants over who got the "special" blue carpet square to sit on for story time. But it wasn't special, you only thought that because a cadre of corpdroids* at the carpet factory calculated it to be "daring" and "edgy" while also not violating your burgeoning sense of conformity. That and all the others were either red or yellowish-beige.
* Now there's a word that used to mean something, too. Nowadays anyone thinks they can show a little slavish devotion to a soulless entity at the expense of their integrity and respect for their fellow man and it makes them a corpdroid. Why in my day...
I guess I should just say this first: I'm no fan of the P4 architecture, to be frank I always thought it was stupid, and driven by marketing. It was a big mistake on Intel's part that cost them heavily (as I alluded to last post when I said they would have been better off if they had skipped it entirely). But not all the facts about the P4 are negative, and what I feel are matters of history at this point should be fairly represented to give Intel engineers credit where credit is due.
A big part of what was wrong with the P4 was that it had a super-long pipeline and the price for branch misprediction was gigantic.
Indeed. This was the basic problem with the architecture, the Achilles's heel as it were. Though to make up for this it had basically the best branch predictor in the industry at the time. Nevertheless, code with hard to predict branches was not its friend.
Higher-clock rate parts actually had longer pipelines with more stages which were there just to add latency.
Yes, the pipe stages kept increasing, which I thought was ridiculous, but not all of it was there just to reduce cycle time, a lot of it was there to add additional logic that boosted the IPC. From Willamette to Northrwood, Intel made a lot of improvements to the architecture. Based on the frequency scaling in 180 and 130nm and projections to future generations they had a very compelling argument that this architecture had a lot of headroom in terms of increasing clock stages to increase frequency with marginal loss in IPC, such that the curve, despite having diminishing returns, looked very good out through around 20GHz parts.
The Northwood core was quite solid, and performed well against AMD on most things, while dominating on streaming-related things (which obviously it was designed well for, and Intel could leverage the ISA to help with).
And the leakage current did indeed "bit[e] them in the ass", so P4 did not scale.
It was a scalable architecture was my point, but yes, the reality of device physics trumps the world of pure boolean logic. The thing is, I don't think anyone was expecting to hit the leakage wall at 90nm like everyone did. I think the best projections everyone had been making were wrong -- and Intel had the best process and process engineers. The increasing parasitic capacitance was what everyone was worried about as they delved deeper into sub-micron technologies, they thought that RC delay constants were going to be limiting processor growth -- Intel took this into account in their projections, btw. RC delay went up, but not like leakage did where it went from 1-10% to 30-50% of the power. IBM and AMD both seemed to be caught off guard by it too, to a lesser degree though because they weren't betting as much on frequency scaling.
Nevertheless, Prescott was actually a pretty good part, performance wise... if you were willing to accept it being not-so-good in terms of sucking juice, sounding like a jet engine, and counteracting your air-conditioner. Sure it pushed the envelope of how much current you could pull from a standard outlet, but was that really more outrageous than using liquid (nitrogen?) cooling? Oh, right, yes it was, because while both are expensive, the liquid cooling solution results in something quiet and not susceptible to poor room ventilation.
because functional units are closed together and there's a logical flow to the physical design of the processor... that the P4 lacks.
The P4 pipeline was quite logical and flowed well imo. It was pretty much necessary to get the clockspeeds they did. Very direct paths from the L2 through decode into the trace cache, to the branch predictor and dispatch, schedulers with fixed-latency replay paths for things like l1dc misses tuned to l2 latency in order to make a lot of decisions simpler.
The high clock rate Pentium 4 processors were designed to get high benchmark scores, plain and simple.
More to the point -- the Pentium 4 was mandated by marketin
Wait, you have to roll a 20 when you cast Raise Dead now? Man, I must be a few editions behind.
Naw, that goes back to the 1st Edition magical item the Staff of Healing (aka the Heal Stick), which you used to heal someone by beating them with it. On a critical hit, it could even heal the dead. In the universes with such an item, the term "beating a dead horse" referred to the inordinate amount of time a martially unskilled but greedy rancher would spend bludgeoning a valuable deceased horse with a Heal Stick attempting to bring it back.
Iran has only had six presidents, and only for the last two has there been any real contest. When you only have 30 years of voting history to go on, big 'unexplainable' changes are bound to pop up once in a while.
In other words its just serendipity. That's great. You do realize that while statistics operate under the assumption that variance is random, that's just a way of predicting mass behavior and does not mean that the actual result is itself random, in particular when we're talking about human behavior.
When the previous results -- culturally insular tribes voting for their own candidate, a pattern repeated in many similar environments for many years and elections -- has such a good, non-random explanation, resorting to serendipitous random happenings to explain away a complete reversal of everyone's educated guess requires some reasoning behind why that guess educated by basic human nature and history is wrong.
It'd be like if Obama had won every state from Texas to Georgia, though in some ways so much more so since our country has racism but has never really had tribalism. You couldn't just shrug and say "weird things happen". At, least, not and say something useful or meaningful.
Yes, it's possible it's just a random fluke. There needs to be a better explanation than that. The Iranian people deserve a better explanation than that, and the reformers at least are just as surprised as I am so what does that tell you? Basically at this point I consider your "random chance" hypothesis to require evidence as much as the "rigged election" hypothesis. This isn't isn't chemistry or physics, the Null Hypothesis is not the default choice.
There is a very real possibility that the announced election results were fairly accurate.
Yes. There is a real possibility the results are genuine. I readily admit that. And there's an even more real possibility the results were decided well in advance. You should admit that too. If you can't admit that shit is suspicious and that there are real questions that need to be answered, with "well it doesn't necessarily mean anything" NOT being an acceptable answer, then I don't think you're looking at this rationally.
"Precedent" really has very little to do with it. Quebec isn't Iran. So something happening there for understandable reasons isn't validation of something odd happening elsewhere.
Explain how Ahmadinejad won areas that have never voted for anyone but their local ethnic candidate, with the same percentage of the votes as Ahmadinejad got everywhere else.
"Doesn't necessarily mean" and "doesn't prove" is a cop-out. Nothing necessarily means anything and nothing definitively proves anything because our basic axioms of the universe could be wrong. We can't prove that there is a universe at all.
This is nothing like Kerry in 04. We're not talking about some counties shifting a couple percentage points one way or the other in an election decided by fractions of a percent. We're talking about areas going from essentially zero support for the President to handing him a landslide victory. You can't just waive your hands and say it doesn't necessarily mean anything. That needs to be explained.
We can't get a "smoking gun" because the only possible "smoking gun" proof would be held by the Iranian government, and I would think their reaction after the election indicates how willing they would be to hand said proof over.
I wish to purchase one of these fine straw men, for placement in my cornfield.
What?! You're saying only men made of straw are "fine" and other types of crow-scaring men such as those stuffed with hay or wool are not only inferior, but the work of Satanic Communist Pedophiles?!
Er, yes. Tiny microbes that we don't filter are the danger. Learning about their existence is not dangerous, it's the opposite of dangerous. This is just the "Oh shit, we've been exposed and didn't know it" moment.
Yeah, The Internet is a fucking hypocrite. It's almost like it's an amalgamation of a huge number of people with a huge number of differing opinions instead of a single entity. Doesn't it know it must be internally consistent, ideologically!?
Well that was the theory, but once he actually got there, he had to admit that the moon was unlike any cheese he'd ever tasted.
Which was kinda like "duh!" How could the moon be made of Wensleydale when they don't output enough cheese to make a moon! Clearly it's a unique form of space cheese.
Yeah I realize I completely ignored the Sega systems after the Genesis. It hardly detracts from my point that hardware power doesn't correlate with success, since those Sony systems still beat better hardware, and Sega marginalized itself for reasons that had nothing to do with the hardware itself.
Agreed, however, that doesn't mean there aren't pathogens out there that small that we just haven't found yet.
Yeah, that's the danger. Not that this microbe could be infectious (an extreme long shot), but it is an existence proof for microbes smaller than what we filter for.
Any chance we're going to get a new dinosaur out of this? I don't know about you, but I've been preparing to go to Jurassic park since I was 13.
Yeah, there's a chance, but I wouldn't be pre-ordering my tickets to Jurassic Park if I were you since the last time we got a dinosaur from a microbe it took about 1.5 billion years.
There are a number of problems with your analysis, not least that the Pentium III is faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium IV at almost all workloads; its failing was that it did not scale
Performance = Instructions Per Cycle * Cycles Per Second. Yes the P4 had lower IPC than the P3, but yes it did in fact scale very well with frequency. Both in the sense that it's highly pipelined design allowed for higher clock frequencies, but also in that IPC didn't drop off as fast with increased frequency as it did with the P3. The first P4s (especially when paired with SDRAM) were slower than P3s because the clock frequencies were very similar. But the P4's frequency rose much faster than the P3 could have, and with subsequent revs fixing some of the biggest IPC problems it got good performance. So yeah, it did scale -- at least until leakage current bit them in the ass. That and the changing market doomed the P4, but yes it scaled.
but it begat the Pentium M and to some degree, the Core architecture.
Not really. The Pentium M is a direct architectural descendant of the P3, which is itself a descendant of the PPro. The Core is a modified Pentium M, and Core 2 an updated Core. The only aspect of the P4 that survived is in the ISA, which really doesn't have anything to do with the microarchitecture (though the P4 being highly suited to streaming may have inspired development of SSE2/3).
So yeah. The P4 was a gamble that at first looked like it would pay off, but ultimately Intel would have been better off having never made it and moving directly to further enhanced PPro-derived architectures.
I guess the popularity of the whole 'Twilight' might work in your favour.
Yeah except little Saury does not twinkle in the sunlight (I made sure during the screening process).
On the other hand, any budding Dark Lord would probably have to work on his dating skills ('Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark then any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor' - not exactly dinner and a movie, is it?).
Oh yeah. They say they like dark, dangerous, and supernaturally evil, but really they're more into the idea of dark, dangerous, and supernaturally evil more than the reality.
The lionesses allow this to happen -- a cruel edge to their mothering nature.
Well "allow" may not be the right term. "Looks on helplessly (but then gets over it)" may be better. A male lion is bigger and stronger than a lioness. Some do actually try to stop it, but it usually doesn't work for the same reason the lionesses weren't able to stop the male lion from coming in and taking over the pride in the first place.
Which reminds me of a great moment in a nature show. There was a small pride of lions with one male, three females, and a few young cubs. The lion was away for some reason I can't remember, and while he was gone another male decided to try horn his way in. First, he rolled around in rhino dung, supposedly to get charged up on the testosterone that is present in large quantities in the dung. Then he marches into the pride's territory. Two of the lionesses go out to face him, knowing that killing the cubs would be one of his first orders of business. There's some roaring and bluster, the male isn't dissuaded and pushes on and a fight breaks out. The lionesses fight with great ferocity, getting a couple licks in even as they take them, but its all they can do to keep the big lion in check. Then out of nowhere the third lioness comes charging in and BAM tackles the lion from the side catching him completely off guard, sending the both of them rolling, and letting the other two lionesses pounce on him. He fights his way up, but having gotten more than he bargained for he runs off with his face cut up pretty good.
Temporarily beaten, but not out of the game, he licks his wounds and comes back the next day. By this time, though, the pride's male has returned, and he's even bigger than the intruding male. He goes out alone to challenge the intruder, who quickly realizes his opportunity is past and leaves without another fight.
Aside from lion fights being completely awesome (lioness vs 3 hyenas was also a great fight), this also shows I think that lionesses will fight to protect their young, but it's a tough thing and not always a fight they can win. If it had been the bigger male who had been the intruder, things could have ended very differently. Hell, maybe that's how that male gained control of the pride in the first place.
The mother will feed only one chick, and as it grows stronger it will peck its weaker sibling to death. What is especially gruesome about this is that the mother will look on impassively as her youngster is dispatched.
Lots of birds do this, more or less. I watched a bunch of nesting great egrets, and in one nest, two larger siblings pushed a smaller one out of the nest. It fell into the nest of some roseate spoonbills, who naturally also pushed it out, leaving it stranded on the end of a narrow branch above the water, which was infested with alligators and where many a young egret had met their demise. The parents were standing right there, and didn't even cock their heads.
Not as gruesome as actually pecking their siblings to death, but the result is the same. This kind of competition among siblings is relatively common in the bird world.
You should take a look at some more PSX titles then.
I played most of those games (except Ace Combat and Omega Boost) and yeah I stand by my statement.
Medal of Honor on the PSX used fully polygonal characters, so I don't know what you mean about sprites.
Okay maybe I just remember them looking like sprites because they were so flat and blocky. *shrug*
I won't argue the technical specs of the two systems. I had both consoles and I only know that, to me, Playstation games looked and sounded a lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! When did The Hulk become a Marxist? I'd be afraid, capitalists. Che Guevara doesn't have anything on the Hulk as a revolutionary.
Wonder where they'd be if the had put half as much effort into selling their products instead of lawyers fees.
If they put the same amount and quality of effort as they did into their legal arguments?
Probably same place they are now, in bankruptcy court, but instead of their creditors being Novel and a pipe fund, it'd be all the plaintiffs' owed damages when SCO was ruled liable for their servers exploding.
You are absolutely correct. The validity of the election results is not the relevant issue anymore. Whats relevant is that the Iranian people saw how their government acted before and after, how they announced the results early, how they silenced all opposition media, how they arrested opposition leaders, how they sent riot police into the streets to battle their own people. As a result this is becoming a movement that goes well beyond whether Ahmadinejad was really elected or Mosavi's platform of modest reforms. It's becoming a cultural battle. While I know I'm going way out on a limb here, in a way it feels like East Germany in the year before the wall came down, when the people saw the brutality of their own government against them, and refused to sit down and accept it any more. If the protests go on, and the government's response remains as violent, then the cause will only reinforce itself.
Anyone can write an application, and put the compiled binary up on their website, and "self-publish". Steam gives exactly what a publisher does: direct access to a large distribution network. In this case, that comes in the form of a desktop client app that serves as a storefront.
Sounds like a virtual store chain that accepts products not made by a big publisher to me, not a publisher. Like if you could walk into Borders with your book in hand, and they'd sell it for you. Do it electronically where they can sell it in Border's nation wide and online, and you have Steam. Or its like a virtual Farmer's Market, where you use their storefront to sell your produce.
A publisher is someone who pays to produce the work (or sometimes pays to get the rights to an already produced work), not simply provides an outlet to sell it.
And now, you're upset because a big corp came in and sat on your made-up word. Ha-ha! What, they changed its meaning? It didn't have any meaning in the first place, other than to make words next to it look better to easily-impressed insular twits.
They're called "instwits", and I was one back when it meant something. You kids today don't know anything about self-congratulatory myopia, you think you can just blindly state that yours is the only pure form of artistic expression unsullied by corporate soul-sucking and that makes you a real instwit. Please. I was bouncing the idea of how unique and on the pulse of the times I was around an echo-chamber of like-minded pretentious blowhards while you were still battling with Suzie Stinkypants over who got the "special" blue carpet square to sit on for story time. But it wasn't special, you only thought that because a cadre of corpdroids* at the carpet factory calculated it to be "daring" and "edgy" while also not violating your burgeoning sense of conformity. That and all the others were either red or yellowish-beige.
* Now there's a word that used to mean something, too. Nowadays anyone thinks they can show a little slavish devotion to a soulless entity at the expense of their integrity and respect for their fellow man and it makes them a corpdroid. Why in my day...
I guess I should just say this first: I'm no fan of the P4 architecture, to be frank I always thought it was stupid, and driven by marketing. It was a big mistake on Intel's part that cost them heavily (as I alluded to last post when I said they would have been better off if they had skipped it entirely). But not all the facts about the P4 are negative, and what I feel are matters of history at this point should be fairly represented to give Intel engineers credit where credit is due.
A big part of what was wrong with the P4 was that it had a super-long pipeline and the price for branch misprediction was gigantic.
Indeed. This was the basic problem with the architecture, the Achilles's heel as it were. Though to make up for this it had basically the best branch predictor in the industry at the time. Nevertheless, code with hard to predict branches was not its friend.
Higher-clock rate parts actually had longer pipelines with more stages which were there just to add latency.
Yes, the pipe stages kept increasing, which I thought was ridiculous, but not all of it was there just to reduce cycle time, a lot of it was there to add additional logic that boosted the IPC. From Willamette to Northrwood, Intel made a lot of improvements to the architecture. Based on the frequency scaling in 180 and 130nm and projections to future generations they had a very compelling argument that this architecture had a lot of headroom in terms of increasing clock stages to increase frequency with marginal loss in IPC, such that the curve, despite having diminishing returns, looked very good out through around 20GHz parts.
The Northwood core was quite solid, and performed well against AMD on most things, while dominating on streaming-related things (which obviously it was designed well for, and Intel could leverage the ISA to help with).
And the leakage current did indeed "bit[e] them in the ass", so P4 did not scale.
It was a scalable architecture was my point, but yes, the reality of device physics trumps the world of pure boolean logic. The thing is, I don't think anyone was expecting to hit the leakage wall at 90nm like everyone did. I think the best projections everyone had been making were wrong -- and Intel had the best process and process engineers. The increasing parasitic capacitance was what everyone was worried about as they delved deeper into sub-micron technologies, they thought that RC delay constants were going to be limiting processor growth -- Intel took this into account in their projections, btw. RC delay went up, but not like leakage did where it went from 1-10% to 30-50% of the power. IBM and AMD both seemed to be caught off guard by it too, to a lesser degree though because they weren't betting as much on frequency scaling.
Nevertheless, Prescott was actually a pretty good part, performance wise... if you were willing to accept it being not-so-good in terms of sucking juice, sounding like a jet engine, and counteracting your air-conditioner. Sure it pushed the envelope of how much current you could pull from a standard outlet, but was that really more outrageous than using liquid (nitrogen?) cooling? Oh, right, yes it was, because while both are expensive, the liquid cooling solution results in something quiet and not susceptible to poor room ventilation.
because functional units are closed together and there's a logical flow to the physical design of the processor... that the P4 lacks.
The P4 pipeline was quite logical and flowed well imo. It was pretty much necessary to get the clockspeeds they did. Very direct paths from the L2 through decode into the trace cache, to the branch predictor and dispatch, schedulers with fixed-latency replay paths for things like l1dc misses tuned to l2 latency in order to make a lot of decisions simpler.
The high clock rate Pentium 4 processors were designed to get high benchmark scores, plain and simple.
More to the point -- the Pentium 4 was mandated by marketin
Wait, you have to roll a 20 when you cast Raise Dead now? Man, I must be a few editions behind.
Naw, that goes back to the 1st Edition magical item the Staff of Healing (aka the Heal Stick), which you used to heal someone by beating them with it. On a critical hit, it could even heal the dead. In the universes with such an item, the term "beating a dead horse" referred to the inordinate amount of time a martially unskilled but greedy rancher would spend bludgeoning a valuable deceased horse with a Heal Stick attempting to bring it back.
Iran has only had six presidents, and only for the last two has there been any real contest. When you only have 30 years of voting history to go on, big 'unexplainable' changes are bound to pop up once in a while.
In other words its just serendipity. That's great. You do realize that while statistics operate under the assumption that variance is random, that's just a way of predicting mass behavior and does not mean that the actual result is itself random, in particular when we're talking about human behavior.
When the previous results -- culturally insular tribes voting for their own candidate, a pattern repeated in many similar environments for many years and elections -- has such a good, non-random explanation, resorting to serendipitous random happenings to explain away a complete reversal of everyone's educated guess requires some reasoning behind why that guess educated by basic human nature and history is wrong.
It'd be like if Obama had won every state from Texas to Georgia, though in some ways so much more so since our country has racism but has never really had tribalism. You couldn't just shrug and say "weird things happen". At, least, not and say something useful or meaningful.
Yes, it's possible it's just a random fluke. There needs to be a better explanation than that. The Iranian people deserve a better explanation than that, and the reformers at least are just as surprised as I am so what does that tell you? Basically at this point I consider your "random chance" hypothesis to require evidence as much as the "rigged election" hypothesis. This isn't isn't chemistry or physics, the Null Hypothesis is not the default choice.
There is a very real possibility that the announced election results were fairly accurate.
Yes. There is a real possibility the results are genuine. I readily admit that. And there's an even more real possibility the results were decided well in advance. You should admit that too. If you can't admit that shit is suspicious and that there are real questions that need to be answered, with "well it doesn't necessarily mean anything" NOT being an acceptable answer, then I don't think you're looking at this rationally.
"Precedent" really has very little to do with it. Quebec isn't Iran. So something happening there for understandable reasons isn't validation of something odd happening elsewhere.
Explain how Ahmadinejad won areas that have never voted for anyone but their local ethnic candidate, with the same percentage of the votes as Ahmadinejad got everywhere else.
"Doesn't necessarily mean" and "doesn't prove" is a cop-out. Nothing necessarily means anything and nothing definitively proves anything because our basic axioms of the universe could be wrong. We can't prove that there is a universe at all.
This is nothing like Kerry in 04. We're not talking about some counties shifting a couple percentage points one way or the other in an election decided by fractions of a percent. We're talking about areas going from essentially zero support for the President to handing him a landslide victory. You can't just waive your hands and say it doesn't necessarily mean anything. That needs to be explained.
We can't get a "smoking gun" because the only possible "smoking gun" proof would be held by the Iranian government, and I would think their reaction after the election indicates how willing they would be to hand said proof over.
What to do in the meantime is the question. I've got a deck of cards and a frisbee.
I wish to purchase one of these fine straw men,
for placement in my cornfield.
What?! You're saying only men made of straw are "fine" and other types of crow-scaring men such as those stuffed with hay or wool are not only inferior, but the work of Satanic Communist Pedophiles?!
There, that should work for you, and it was free!
Update: Dr. Hans Blitzen now reports that everything is fine, and there is nothing to worry about.
Er, yes. Tiny microbes that we don't filter are the danger. Learning about their existence is not dangerous, it's the opposite of dangerous. This is just the "Oh shit, we've been exposed and didn't know it" moment.
Yeah, The Internet is a fucking hypocrite. It's almost like it's an amalgamation of a huge number of people with a huge number of differing opinions instead of a single entity. Doesn't it know it must be internally consistent, ideologically!?
Geeze. The Internet is also pretty sarcastic.
Well that was the theory, but once he actually got there, he had to admit that the moon was unlike any cheese he'd ever tasted.
Which was kinda like "duh!" How could the moon be made of Wensleydale when they don't output enough cheese to make a moon! Clearly it's a unique form of space cheese.
Yeah I realize I completely ignored the Sega systems after the Genesis. It hardly detracts from my point that hardware power doesn't correlate with success, since those Sony systems still beat better hardware, and Sega marginalized itself for reasons that had nothing to do with the hardware itself.
Agreed, however, that doesn't mean there aren't pathogens out there that small that we just haven't found yet.
Yeah, that's the danger. Not that this microbe could be infectious (an extreme long shot), but it is an existence proof for microbes smaller than what we filter for.
In unrelated news, team zoologist Dr. Hans Blitzen has reported that his prize alaskan malamute, Sparky, has begun acting very strangely.
Any chance we're going to get a new dinosaur out of this? I don't know about you, but I've been preparing to go to Jurassic park since I was 13.
Yeah, there's a chance, but I wouldn't be pre-ordering my tickets to Jurassic Park if I were you since the last time we got a dinosaur from a microbe it took about 1.5 billion years.
There are a number of problems with your analysis, not least that the Pentium III is faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium IV at almost all workloads; its failing was that it did not scale
Performance = Instructions Per Cycle * Cycles Per Second. Yes the P4 had lower IPC than the P3, but yes it did in fact scale very well with frequency. Both in the sense that it's highly pipelined design allowed for higher clock frequencies, but also in that IPC didn't drop off as fast with increased frequency as it did with the P3. The first P4s (especially when paired with SDRAM) were slower than P3s because the clock frequencies were very similar. But the P4's frequency rose much faster than the P3 could have, and with subsequent revs fixing some of the biggest IPC problems it got good performance. So yeah, it did scale -- at least until leakage current bit them in the ass. That and the changing market doomed the P4, but yes it scaled.
but it begat the Pentium M and to some degree, the Core architecture.
Not really. The Pentium M is a direct architectural descendant of the P3, which is itself a descendant of the PPro. The Core is a modified Pentium M, and Core 2 an updated Core. The only aspect of the P4 that survived is in the ISA, which really doesn't have anything to do with the microarchitecture (though the P4 being highly suited to streaming may have inspired development of SSE2/3).
So yeah. The P4 was a gamble that at first looked like it would pay off, but ultimately Intel would have been better off having never made it and moving directly to further enhanced PPro-derived architectures.
How's the economy over there?
Terrible, but I'm hopeful President Oprah will be able to turn things around.
So you're saying that the rocket could hit the Giant Enemy Moon's weak spot for MASSIVE DAMAGE?
I guess the popularity of the whole 'Twilight' might work in your favour.
Yeah except little Saury does not twinkle in the sunlight (I made sure during the screening process).
On the other hand, any budding Dark Lord would probably have to work on his dating skills ('Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark then any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor' - not exactly dinner and a movie, is it?).
Oh yeah. They say they like dark, dangerous, and supernaturally evil, but really they're more into the idea of dark, dangerous, and supernaturally evil more than the reality.
The lionesses allow this to happen -- a cruel edge to their mothering nature.
Well "allow" may not be the right term. "Looks on helplessly (but then gets over it)" may be better. A male lion is bigger and stronger than a lioness. Some do actually try to stop it, but it usually doesn't work for the same reason the lionesses weren't able to stop the male lion from coming in and taking over the pride in the first place.
Which reminds me of a great moment in a nature show. There was a small pride of lions with one male, three females, and a few young cubs. The lion was away for some reason I can't remember, and while he was gone another male decided to try horn his way in. First, he rolled around in rhino dung, supposedly to get charged up on the testosterone that is present in large quantities in the dung. Then he marches into the pride's territory. Two of the lionesses go out to face him, knowing that killing the cubs would be one of his first orders of business. There's some roaring and bluster, the male isn't dissuaded and pushes on and a fight breaks out. The lionesses fight with great ferocity, getting a couple licks in even as they take them, but its all they can do to keep the big lion in check. Then out of nowhere the third lioness comes charging in and BAM tackles the lion from the side catching him completely off guard, sending the both of them rolling, and letting the other two lionesses pounce on him. He fights his way up, but having gotten more than he bargained for he runs off with his face cut up pretty good.
Temporarily beaten, but not out of the game, he licks his wounds and comes back the next day. By this time, though, the pride's male has returned, and he's even bigger than the intruding male. He goes out alone to challenge the intruder, who quickly realizes his opportunity is past and leaves without another fight.
Aside from lion fights being completely awesome (lioness vs 3 hyenas was also a great fight), this also shows I think that lionesses will fight to protect their young, but it's a tough thing and not always a fight they can win. If it had been the bigger male who had been the intruder, things could have ended very differently. Hell, maybe that's how that male gained control of the pride in the first place.
The mother will feed only one chick, and as it grows stronger it will peck its weaker sibling to death. What is especially gruesome about this is that the mother will look on impassively as her youngster is dispatched.
Lots of birds do this, more or less. I watched a bunch of nesting great egrets, and in one nest, two larger siblings pushed a smaller one out of the nest. It fell into the nest of some roseate spoonbills, who naturally also pushed it out, leaving it stranded on the end of a narrow branch above the water, which was infested with alligators and where many a young egret had met their demise. The parents were standing right there, and didn't even cock their heads.
Not as gruesome as actually pecking their siblings to death, but the result is the same. This kind of competition among siblings is relatively common in the bird world.
You should take a look at some more PSX titles then.
I played most of those games (except Ace Combat and Omega Boost) and yeah I stand by my statement.
Medal of Honor on the PSX used fully polygonal characters, so I don't know what you mean about sprites.
Okay maybe I just remember them looking like sprites because they were so flat and blocky. *shrug*
I won't argue the technical specs of the two systems. I had both consoles and I only know that, to me, Playstation games looked and sounded a lot better.
K.