ISO certification means that Microsoft Word is just as open as ODF or ASCII for purposes of government and business contracts.
Yes but not as open as ODF or ASCII for purposes of actually implementing interoperability or being able to ensure documents written today are readable in the future.
It's nothing but a bullet-point feature for MS to not be shut out of those contracts automatically. But any government purchasing agent who was truly interested in "open" would continue to avoid OOXML. Sadly that's rarely the case, and even when it is Microsoft will just go over their head to the congressman or whoever and say that their being denied the contract was unfair, after all ISO says OOXML is a standard.
If you continue to have to submit resumes in "Microsoft Word Format," there is no way that anyone else can get a toehold in the market. There is also no way that in 30 years we're going to be able to read the documents that we generate today.
And if OOXML wins purchasing contracts on the basis of its ISO standardization, then this will continue to be the case. OOXML == Microsoft Word Format for all practical purposes.
That is the major effect though. I think that most unbiased observers would conclude that Microsoft's main goal in having OOXML rushed through is to allow.govs to tick the box that allows them to keep purchasing Microsoft Office.
Oh I agree completely, that's the one and only reason MS went to all this trouble.
I was just wondering why ISO would need a "way forward" wrt ODF, since that standard is perfectly fine, and the external issues of people making purchasing decisions isn't anything ISO can affect, outside of removing OOXML's standard status, but again that's to do with OOXML not ODF.
Why is that even an issue? ODF passed, it's a clear and well-defined standard that nobody has a problem with and nobody had to be bribed to support.
The only issue is that cluster-fuck of submarine proprietary technology posing as an open standard called OOXML.
Keep OOXML, or reject that POS like they should have to begin with, the only effect that has on ODF is in the purchasing decisions that may be swayed by MS also having a "standard".
You're not in CS are you? A lot of places "already" say basically either: have 10 years experience, a masters/doctorate, or find your way out of the building.
Yeah but after they told me that, I was able to find my way out of the building (only ran into one dead end), so they brought me back in for an interview.
Right you are! I am old enough to remember the polio epidemics in the summer and being scared shitless of winding up in an iron lung. Swimming pools and libraries got closed and people were afraid to go to the ballgame. These Luddites should go live in Afghanistan or The Sudan with their like-minded brethren.
I really don't know what my problem is. I'm not even close to being old enough to remember polio epidemics, I only know of polio via the history books I was forced to read in school. And yet, despite this, I'm still concerned that people avoiding vaccines for silly reasons could result in some of these diseases coming back or new ones coming and remaining unrestrained. It's almost as though... I was somehow able to learn from history without having to directly experience its lessons, and am able to appreciate the reasons for and benefits of the vaccination programs.
Except that there is no evidence that DDT caused the thinning, and, in fact, the shells have continued to thin long after DDT use had stopped.
No, they didn't, once you account for the time it takes for the DDT to leave the food chain. Birds of prey consumed DDT by eating other things that had absorbed DDT from the environment, perhaps by themselves eating other things, so until all the DDT is gone from the environment, and every animal up the food chain that had absorbed some was dead, the birds were still being damaged. And very shortly after the ban, the populations of birds that despite being protected had continued to decline rapidly began to recover. The bald eagle is safely off of the list of endangered species because of the DDT ban.
There is tons of evidence that DDT was killing these birds and damaging their eggs and young (many of the young whose shells didn't crack still died due to DDT poisoning).
Nope. DDT thins bird shells in trace amounts, and has a measurable effect on humans. Notice how it's not sprayed everywhere anymore?
Yeah, nobody who knows anything about bald eagle populations before and after the ban would say that it was a crock. They had been legally protected for decades, but the populations were still dropping and they became endangered. Then DDT was banned. Populations started to rise. Now the population has risen, they're no longer endangered, and bald eagles are relatively common across the country once again.
As a bird lover (especially of big raptors =D), I'm extremely grateful. If the DDT ban hadn't been passed, I would probably have never been able to actually see a wild bald eagle, and as of today I've seen several. And they are magnificent birds.
There are an astounding number of idiots in this thread who seem to think they can will their cars into stopping no matter the situation, as though all that momentum in the car is just a suggestion they can forget about. Brakes have limits, you know?
They are apparently completely ignorant of the fact that yellow light durations are determined based on how fast a car can stop assuming they're going at the speed limit. At a certain distance from the light, a car cannot stop, and the light must be long enough for the car to make it through the light in that case.
So when they lower the duration of the yellow light, the city is creating an essentially inescapably dangerous situation. When that light turns yellow, and you're too close to brake, then your choices are 1) run a red light at full speed, possibly getting in a collision with other traffic 2) try to brake, skidding through the intersection, running the red light anyway, and possibly getting in a collision with other traffic.
Dear idiots: This is bad, and they should stop doing it. Your anal retentiveness about other peoples' bad driving habits is irrelevant.
Yes, you have a choice. You're supposed to stop on yellow, if you can manage it reasonably. Being used to gunning your engine through a yellow light isn't a valid defense. If you believe otherwise, we might as well ditch the yellow light altogether.
And if you can't reasonably stop, you're supposed to go through, because coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the intersection is worse.
If they shorten the yellow light to the point where you can neither stop, nor go through the light, then yeah you might as well ditch the yellow light because that defeats the entire purpose. Because then you don't have a choice to do something safe.
Do you know how they determine the length that the yellow light should be? Basically, the make some assumptions about a car's typical breaking power and the posted speed limit, and measure how close to the light a car can be before it can stop "reasonably". Then, they calculate how long it would take to get from that point through the intersection at the speed limit. Tack on some time for human reaction time and the time needed to make the break/go on judgment call, and you've got the minimum safe yellow light time.
And then they pass a law that says you can't have a yellow light time shorten than that for a given speed limit.
And then these money-grubbing municipalities shorten the yellow light below that time.
This may come as a shock to many, but in most (all?) states, you are supposed to stop on yellow if possible. Not 'beat the red', but stop. Really.
Yes, and if it isn't possible to stop, you're supposed to go through the light.
If they shorten the yellow to the point where you can neither stop nor go through the light, then you are in either case *forced* to do something unsafe.
That's WHY their are legal limits on the length of yellow lights, and why shortening the lights below those limits is insane.
More importantly, already being in the intersection means that you're not breaking the law when the light turns red -- it's only illegal to enter it under a red light.
Do the cameras know that?
Can they figure out that you were in the intersection from the picture?
And will they care? Or would I have to fight an automatic traffic ticket in court?
However as a sometime game show contestant I know you have to take into account one fact that is left out of the classical form of this problem.
WHEN YOU ARE ON A GAME SHOW, YOU ONLY GET ONE ATTEMPT!
Hehe, oh, and there's a bigger fact that is left out of the classical form of this problem, one that was revealed when someone asked Monty Hall himself what he thought of the eponymous probability problem.
The problem assumes that Hall always offers you the choice to switch, but this was not the case! He did not necessarily have to give you the choice (which kinda makes that part of the game show boring), and in fact said that he mostly only offered the choice to switch when the player had chosen the correct door, in order to lure them away from it!
So in the math problem version, switching is the best choice (by a factor of 2 even), while in the real-world version, staying was the better choice (by some unknown factor, but maybe a lot more than 2 depending on how evil Mr. Hall was).
Well there's a long-standing debate as to whether or not probability means anything at all for any individual trial. I personally think that while the statistics may not apply, the reasoning behind the probabilities is a decent guide to your actions. I.e. if you don't *know* that the top card on the deck is an Ace, then getting hit when you're at 20 in Blackjack is probably going to result in a bust and you should just stand.
The whole point of probability is to be able to reason about outcomes without complete knowledge, and I think it does that job well.
Imagine a two hour flight with everyone talking to their hands. Or the ones with blinking blue cockroaches in their ears talking to the seat in front of them. No thanks.
For serious. I don't care what their excuse is, maintain the ban on cellphones! I've even pretended to agree with the technical reasons for the ban before when someone has asked me. "Oh, cell phones? Oh yeah, the FAA is right, they'll fuck a plane up. All those e-m wave frequencies can interfere with the avionics, and the tachyons generated will totally reverse the polarity of the flux capacitor."
I hear ya, it's the whole mobile/low power push that's changed things. In fact, I'd bet your laptop would crush just about any laptop from 2004, much as you would normally expect in desktops.:)
What you are probably thinking of, in terms of glasses that need to be synchronized, are shutter glasses. These glasses have an LCD filter over each eye that electronically switches from clear to opaque so that each frame is only seen by one eye. Typically they will have IR sensors on them to sync up with the projector, and I've even seen them with built-in speakers for a surround-sound effect. I've only seen them used in the more upscale IMAX 3D theaters in the US, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're using them in regular theaters too.
This is the same technique as the 3D glasses that come with some video cards and which have to be plugged into the card itself in order to get the sync signal.
And those version at least tend to cause massive headaches if you use them for very long. I'd have to assume the ones in the "upscale" IMAX theaters work better, or they wouldn't be very "upscale" for long.:P
So let me know when the 2D versions come out? Kthxbye.
Uh...
At the same time as the 3D version?
Most theaters aren't equipped to project 3D (at least not the polarized version, and the red-blue version is far to shitty to even be worth making). Basically no TVs are. Unless this announcement is intended to mean that Pixar has decided to stick with limited release to specific venues, rather than mass-market, as if to say "We at Pixar decided we don't like making so much money", then the 2D version will be the more widely released and heavily advertised version.
Basically, you'll have to go out of your way to see the 3D version. So... just don't stumble into an "IMAX 3D!" theater by accident and you'll be fine.
Of course, I do realise that it's was an el-cheapo laptop.
Yeah, sadly the industry doesn't move that quickly, especially now that the low end is defined by low-power mobile chips, vs the high-end monsters that take up multiple pci-e slots and have big blower fans louder than your cpu fan. The gap is now wider than ever, and thus the low end trails the high end by more than ever.
A game that people were buying new video cards for in 2004, runs unacceptably on an 'el cheapo' mobile chip in 2007? Yeah, that sounds about right.
That X1100 still runs games better than the comparable entry-level NVidia integrated solution. I don't know what about "quite good" made you think "the bottom tier option will run your demanding game well"; that's a fairly unrealistic expectation based on the history of the industry. Regardless, they generally outperform the comparable NVidia option, mirroring the situation in the add-on graphics card market where NVidia holds the advantage.
Reducing your workforce when your problems are based on Sales and Technical issues is a stupid move. Because those are some of the major areas which need people to get the product back on par.
AMD knows it's a bad idea. They've said as much over the past couple years as their profits turned into losses, and the analysts naturally started wondering if layoffs were coming. AMD said that they did not want to reduce costs via layoffs, for essentially the reasons you gave, in particular that reducing your engineering staff makes it harder to make the product that helps you get out of the hole.
But to quote myself as they've repeated this quarter after quarter, "that can't go on forever". The email from Dirk Myer posted to the Inquirer makes it sound like this quarter is going to be particularly bad, and investors are only going to be patient for so long before they demand substantial action. Layoffs aren't the only thing they could do, at least in theory, but payroll presents some major low-hanging fruit for cost savings.
It sucks, it's sub-optimal, but it probably won't break the company or anything. AMD has been in worse straights, and had to have larger layoffs, and they're still here. Their unprecedented recent success just makes this seem like a larger fall. They just need to get their new products out (the delays to Barcelona being a major factor in this situation) and recover from the stumble.
In the short term, it was always a bad idea and I think they knew that. ATI didn't have anything to offer against nVidia for dx10 and they wouldn't for a while.
As far as current products go, I think AMD was more interested in ATI's chipsets and embedded graphics, which are quite good, and help AMD build better 'platform' stories. Now they can provide a platform using mostly AMD chips, and that offers high performance, whereas before AMD made chipsets but they were generally not the best performing.
in the long term they were hoping to be able to start revolutionizing the video industry with tighter integration between the CPU and video card.
It's a neat idea, and there's a lot of potential there. We'll see if the potential ever becomes reality.
If they keep shedding people, probably not would be my guess.:P
Apache is clearly more secure than IIS, so the argument isn't the same, but thanks for being an ass about it in your response.
Ah, so you do recognize that it's not a case of "all software has bugs, some just get targeted more", and that there is truly such a thing as superior software and shitty software. That's good. Sorry if I was an ass about establishing a baseline that many people making the marketshare argument don't agree with.
I'm arguing that Windows, OS X, and Linux are architecturally comparable with regards to security.
I don't believe it for a second. Maybe Vista, XP no way. Linux is clearly more secure than XP. Connect an XP machine to the internet without applying the service packs, and also without even bothering to launch a browser or download anything, if you dare. In many cases it's not even about "architecture", it's about straight-up shitty code.
It's not fair to combine the two architectures when saying that--it definitely makes the numbers look bigger.
Okay, you're right, but 5% vs 10% makes little difference when they're effectively 0% of infected machines.
Does it make sense to target 5% of the population if your goal is purely market penetration?
Given that this 5% generally does not use antivirus software at all, then if these were in fact vulnerable machines then yes it would make sense to target them. That 5% could easily provide a botnet in the tens of thousands, if you were able to exploit it. And it's an untapped market! You'd be the only game in town making your MacOS botnet. Surely, if all else were equal, some malware vendor would decide to add that to their existing botnets. These spammers are pulling in lots of money if the reports are to be believed; surely one of them can afford to hire a hacker to make a MacOS virus. Unless they've tried and found it was more effort than its worth, because even without anti-virus software, it's just too hard to find an attack vector vs Mac OSX, and so easy to find a new one against MS Windows. If was as easy to find a MacOSX exploit as a Windows one, you'd think there'd be at least a couple common Mac viruses out of the thousands and thousands of Windows viruses.
But yes, why would you target anything but the largest portion of the market, when that portion is also the most easily exploited?
OS X has historically had a tiny market share until very recently.
Yeah? Well it's up to a little over 7% now. I'm still waiting for the flood of Mac viruses.
This little theory is only going to last so long. The notion that all the OSes are equally secure, and popularity is the only thing keeping them from being equally virus-festooned as Windows, is being put out to pasture to await its demise.
It's the difference between "this platform is inherently more secure" and "this platform is safer because it's not targeted as much." Apple's market share is rising--if it gets too high, it will likely become the target of malware authors.
Apache vs IIS. Now never mention the "not targeted as much because it's not as popular" theory again.
Seriously, malware authors are not just about targeting the *largest* market but the *easiest*, and right now nothing is easier to pwn than Windows XP. If MacOS and Windows had equal market share, Windows would still be the primary target because it would be the more successful target.
Look at the fact that right now most people using Linux and Mac don't even run AV software at all, and are perfectly fine. Given the relative market share, and the number of Windows viruses out there, shouldn't there be at least enough Mac/Linux viruses to necessitate running an AV program? There are certainly enough machines out there to create multi-thousand node botnets, but I'm supposed to believe that despite holding a roughly combined 10% marketshare, they're effectively not targeted at all?
Then there's the fact that many of these botnet machines are actually within the walls of Fortune 500 computers. Large companies use plenty of Linux machines as servers, they should compose a tasty target, yet the only AV software our sysadmins are using on our Linux servers are to filter out Windows viruses from email.
Ultimately, there is some truth to the whole "malware targeting is proportional to market share" statement, but it does not come close to capturing the entirety of the situation. Once you also include the statement that "malware success is proportional to the shittiness of the OS", you arrive at the reason why the proportion of pwned Macs and Linux machines is orders of magnitude less than their relative market share.
Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!" No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more at the same time that it gives you less effect.
WoW is nothing like cocaine, this is true, and claiming the "addiction" of something like WoW is comparable to that of cocaine (or opium, or cigarettes, or hell even caffeine) is ludicrous. It's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind.
That said, WoW (and most other MMORPGS) is essentially a form of variable schedule operant conditioning. Just like feeding a rat after a random number of lever-pushes can lead to the rat compulsively pushing the lever, in addition to coming to believe that all kinds of strange rituals or dances influence when the food comes out. Just how a WoW player keeps grinding the same dungeons hoping for the drop they want. Because ultimately, rationality is a trick on top of the malleable mammal brain we inherited from the same source as the rat.
I think calling it an "addiction" is to vastly overstate and mis-characterize. But to call it "conditioning" I think is fairly accurate.
Oh man, that would have been so much better, yes. It would have given Smith a great chance to ham it up with his "I'm a brooding, damaged soul!" routine he put on for the first half of the movie one last time.
I'd never read the book or anything, but I was still disappointed in the whole "intelligent zombie" aspect of the Smith film. He starts off with the assumption that they are mindless killers, sees some minor evidence to the contrary which he blows off as them going crazy with hunger, then major evidence in the form of them setting a trap for him. And it goes nowhere. Other than allowing me to guess that the reason the zombies are so intent on killing him now is that Smith kidnapped the leader's girlfriend, it never matters at all. Lame.
Slashdot Mirror
ISO certification means that Microsoft Word is just as open as ODF or ASCII for purposes of government and business contracts.
Yes but not as open as ODF or ASCII for purposes of actually implementing interoperability or being able to ensure documents written today are readable in the future.
It's nothing but a bullet-point feature for MS to not be shut out of those contracts automatically. But any government purchasing agent who was truly interested in "open" would continue to avoid OOXML. Sadly that's rarely the case, and even when it is Microsoft will just go over their head to the congressman or whoever and say that their being denied the contract was unfair, after all ISO says OOXML is a standard.
If you continue to have to submit resumes in "Microsoft Word Format," there is no way that anyone else can get a toehold in the market. There is also no way that in 30 years we're going to be able to read the documents that we generate today.
And if OOXML wins purchasing contracts on the basis of its ISO standardization, then this will continue to be the case. OOXML == Microsoft Word Format for all practical purposes.
That is the major effect though. I think that most unbiased observers would conclude that Microsoft's main goal in having OOXML rushed through is to allow .govs to tick the box that allows them to keep purchasing Microsoft Office.
Oh I agree completely, that's the one and only reason MS went to all this trouble.
I was just wondering why ISO would need a "way forward" wrt ODF, since that standard is perfectly fine, and the external issues of people making purchasing decisions isn't anything ISO can affect, outside of removing OOXML's standard status, but again that's to do with OOXML not ODF.
Why is that even an issue? ODF passed, it's a clear and well-defined standard that nobody has a problem with and nobody had to be bribed to support.
The only issue is that cluster-fuck of submarine proprietary technology posing as an open standard called OOXML.
Keep OOXML, or reject that POS like they should have to begin with, the only effect that has on ODF is in the purchasing decisions that may be swayed by MS also having a "standard".
You're not in CS are you? A lot of places "already" say basically either: have 10 years experience, a masters/doctorate, or find your way out of the building.
Yeah but after they told me that, I was able to find my way out of the building (only ran into one dead end), so they brought me back in for an interview.
Right you are! I am old enough to remember the polio epidemics in the summer and being scared shitless of winding up in an iron lung. Swimming pools and libraries got closed and people were afraid to go to the ballgame. These Luddites should go live in Afghanistan or The Sudan with their like-minded brethren.
I really don't know what my problem is. I'm not even close to being old enough to remember polio epidemics, I only know of polio via the history books I was forced to read in school. And yet, despite this, I'm still concerned that people avoiding vaccines for silly reasons could result in some of these diseases coming back or new ones coming and remaining unrestrained. It's almost as though... I was somehow able to learn from history without having to directly experience its lessons, and am able to appreciate the reasons for and benefits of the vaccination programs.
Am I insane?
Except that there is no evidence that DDT caused the thinning, and, in fact, the shells have continued to thin long after DDT use had stopped.
No, they didn't, once you account for the time it takes for the DDT to leave the food chain. Birds of prey consumed DDT by eating other things that had absorbed DDT from the environment, perhaps by themselves eating other things, so until all the DDT is gone from the environment, and every animal up the food chain that had absorbed some was dead, the birds were still being damaged. And very shortly after the ban, the populations of birds that despite being protected had continued to decline rapidly began to recover. The bald eagle is safely off of the list of endangered species because of the DDT ban.
There is tons of evidence that DDT was killing these birds and damaging their eggs and young (many of the young whose shells didn't crack still died due to DDT poisoning).
Nope. DDT thins bird shells in trace amounts, and has a measurable effect on humans. Notice how it's not sprayed everywhere anymore?
Yeah, nobody who knows anything about bald eagle populations before and after the ban would say that it was a crock. They had been legally protected for decades, but the populations were still dropping and they became endangered. Then DDT was banned. Populations started to rise. Now the population has risen, they're no longer endangered, and bald eagles are relatively common across the country once again.
As a bird lover (especially of big raptors =D), I'm extremely grateful. If the DDT ban hadn't been passed, I would probably have never been able to actually see a wild bald eagle, and as of today I've seen several. And they are magnificent birds.
There are an astounding number of idiots in this thread who seem to think they can will their cars into stopping no matter the situation, as though all that momentum in the car is just a suggestion they can forget about. Brakes have limits, you know?
They are apparently completely ignorant of the fact that yellow light durations are determined based on how fast a car can stop assuming they're going at the speed limit. At a certain distance from the light, a car cannot stop, and the light must be long enough for the car to make it through the light in that case.
So when they lower the duration of the yellow light, the city is creating an essentially inescapably dangerous situation. When that light turns yellow, and you're too close to brake, then your choices are 1) run a red light at full speed, possibly getting in a collision with other traffic 2) try to brake, skidding through the intersection, running the red light anyway, and possibly getting in a collision with other traffic.
Dear idiots: This is bad, and they should stop doing it. Your anal retentiveness about other peoples' bad driving habits is irrelevant.
Yes, you have a choice. You're supposed to stop on yellow, if you can manage it reasonably. Being used to gunning your engine through a yellow light isn't a valid defense. If you believe otherwise, we might as well ditch the yellow light altogether.
And if you can't reasonably stop, you're supposed to go through, because coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the intersection is worse.
If they shorten the yellow light to the point where you can neither stop, nor go through the light, then yeah you might as well ditch the yellow light because that defeats the entire purpose. Because then you don't have a choice to do something safe.
Do you know how they determine the length that the yellow light should be? Basically, the make some assumptions about a car's typical breaking power and the posted speed limit, and measure how close to the light a car can be before it can stop "reasonably". Then, they calculate how long it would take to get from that point through the intersection at the speed limit. Tack on some time for human reaction time and the time needed to make the break/go on judgment call, and you've got the minimum safe yellow light time.
And then they pass a law that says you can't have a yellow light time shorten than that for a given speed limit.
And then these money-grubbing municipalities shorten the yellow light below that time.
What part of this is defensible to you?
This may come as a shock to many, but in most (all?) states, you are supposed to stop on yellow if possible. Not 'beat the red', but stop. Really.
Yes, and if it isn't possible to stop, you're supposed to go through the light.
If they shorten the yellow to the point where you can neither stop nor go through the light, then you are in either case *forced* to do something unsafe.
That's WHY their are legal limits on the length of yellow lights, and why shortening the lights below those limits is insane.
More importantly, already being in the intersection means that you're not breaking the law when the light turns red -- it's only illegal to enter it under a red light.
Do the cameras know that?
Can they figure out that you were in the intersection from the picture?
And will they care? Or would I have to fight an automatic traffic ticket in court?
However as a sometime game show contestant I know you have to take into account one fact that is left out of the classical form of this problem.
WHEN YOU ARE ON A GAME SHOW, YOU ONLY GET ONE ATTEMPT!
Hehe, oh, and there's a bigger fact that is left out of the classical form of this problem, one that was revealed when someone asked Monty Hall himself what he thought of the eponymous probability problem.
The problem assumes that Hall always offers you the choice to switch, but this was not the case! He did not necessarily have to give you the choice (which kinda makes that part of the game show boring), and in fact said that he mostly only offered the choice to switch when the player had chosen the correct door, in order to lure them away from it!
So in the math problem version, switching is the best choice (by a factor of 2 even), while in the real-world version, staying was the better choice (by some unknown factor, but maybe a lot more than 2 depending on how evil Mr. Hall was).
Well there's a long-standing debate as to whether or not probability means anything at all for any individual trial. I personally think that while the statistics may not apply, the reasoning behind the probabilities is a decent guide to your actions. I.e. if you don't *know* that the top card on the deck is an Ace, then getting hit when you're at 20 in Blackjack is probably going to result in a bust and you should just stand.
The whole point of probability is to be able to reason about outcomes without complete knowledge, and I think it does that job well.
Imagine a two hour flight with everyone talking to their hands. Or the ones with blinking blue cockroaches in their ears talking to the seat in front of them. No thanks.
For serious. I don't care what their excuse is, maintain the ban on cellphones! I've even pretended to agree with the technical reasons for the ban before when someone has asked me. "Oh, cell phones? Oh yeah, the FAA is right, they'll fuck a plane up. All those e-m wave frequencies can interfere with the avionics, and the tachyons generated will totally reverse the polarity of the flux capacitor."
I hear ya, it's the whole mobile/low power push that's changed things. In fact, I'd bet your laptop would crush just about any laptop from 2004, much as you would normally expect in desktops. :)
What you are probably thinking of, in terms of glasses that need to be synchronized, are shutter glasses. These glasses have an LCD filter over each eye that electronically switches from clear to opaque so that each frame is only seen by one eye. Typically they will have IR sensors on them to sync up with the projector, and I've even seen them with built-in speakers for a surround-sound effect. I've only seen them used in the more upscale IMAX 3D theaters in the US, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're using them in regular theaters too.
:P
This is the same technique as the 3D glasses that come with some video cards and which have to be plugged into the card itself in order to get the sync signal.
And those version at least tend to cause massive headaches if you use them for very long. I'd have to assume the ones in the "upscale" IMAX theaters work better, or they wouldn't be very "upscale" for long.
So let me know when the 2D versions come out? Kthxbye.
Uh...
At the same time as the 3D version?
Most theaters aren't equipped to project 3D (at least not the polarized version, and the red-blue version is far to shitty to even be worth making). Basically no TVs are. Unless this announcement is intended to mean that Pixar has decided to stick with limited release to specific venues, rather than mass-market, as if to say "We at Pixar decided we don't like making so much money", then the 2D version will be the more widely released and heavily advertised version.
Basically, you'll have to go out of your way to see the 3D version. So... just don't stumble into an "IMAX 3D!" theater by accident and you'll be fine.
Of course, I do realise that it's was an el-cheapo laptop.
Yeah, sadly the industry doesn't move that quickly, especially now that the low end is defined by low-power mobile chips, vs the high-end monsters that take up multiple pci-e slots and have big blower fans louder than your cpu fan. The gap is now wider than ever, and thus the low end trails the high end by more than ever.
A game that people were buying new video cards for in 2004, runs unacceptably on an 'el cheapo' mobile chip in 2007? Yeah, that sounds about right.
That X1100 still runs games better than the comparable entry-level NVidia integrated solution. I don't know what about "quite good" made you think "the bottom tier option will run your demanding game well"; that's a fairly unrealistic expectation based on the history of the industry. Regardless, they generally outperform the comparable NVidia option, mirroring the situation in the add-on graphics card market where NVidia holds the advantage.
Reducing your workforce when your problems are based on Sales and Technical issues is a stupid move. Because those are some of the major areas which need people to get the product back on par.
AMD knows it's a bad idea. They've said as much over the past couple years as their profits turned into losses, and the analysts naturally started wondering if layoffs were coming. AMD said that they did not want to reduce costs via layoffs, for essentially the reasons you gave, in particular that reducing your engineering staff makes it harder to make the product that helps you get out of the hole.
But to quote myself as they've repeated this quarter after quarter, "that can't go on forever". The email from Dirk Myer posted to the Inquirer makes it sound like this quarter is going to be particularly bad, and investors are only going to be patient for so long before they demand substantial action. Layoffs aren't the only thing they could do, at least in theory, but payroll presents some major low-hanging fruit for cost savings.
It sucks, it's sub-optimal, but it probably won't break the company or anything. AMD has been in worse straights, and had to have larger layoffs, and they're still here. Their unprecedented recent success just makes this seem like a larger fall. They just need to get their new products out (the delays to Barcelona being a major factor in this situation) and recover from the stumble.
In the short term, it was always a bad idea and I think they knew that. ATI didn't have anything to offer against nVidia for dx10 and they wouldn't for a while.
:P
As far as current products go, I think AMD was more interested in ATI's chipsets and embedded graphics, which are quite good, and help AMD build better 'platform' stories. Now they can provide a platform using mostly AMD chips, and that offers high performance, whereas before AMD made chipsets but they were generally not the best performing.
in the long term they were hoping to be able to start revolutionizing the video industry with tighter integration between the CPU and video card.
It's a neat idea, and there's a lot of potential there. We'll see if the potential ever becomes reality.
If they keep shedding people, probably not would be my guess.
Apache is clearly more secure than IIS, so the argument isn't the same, but thanks for being an ass about it in your response.
Ah, so you do recognize that it's not a case of "all software has bugs, some just get targeted more", and that there is truly such a thing as superior software and shitty software. That's good. Sorry if I was an ass about establishing a baseline that many people making the marketshare argument don't agree with.
I'm arguing that Windows, OS X, and Linux are architecturally comparable with regards to security.
I don't believe it for a second. Maybe Vista, XP no way. Linux is clearly more secure than XP. Connect an XP machine to the internet without applying the service packs, and also without even bothering to launch a browser or download anything, if you dare. In many cases it's not even about "architecture", it's about straight-up shitty code.
It's not fair to combine the two architectures when saying that--it definitely makes the numbers look bigger.
Okay, you're right, but 5% vs 10% makes little difference when they're effectively 0% of infected machines.
Does it make sense to target 5% of the population if your goal is purely market penetration?
Given that this 5% generally does not use antivirus software at all, then if these were in fact vulnerable machines then yes it would make sense to target them. That 5% could easily provide a botnet in the tens of thousands, if you were able to exploit it. And it's an untapped market! You'd be the only game in town making your MacOS botnet. Surely, if all else were equal, some malware vendor would decide to add that to their existing botnets. These spammers are pulling in lots of money if the reports are to be believed; surely one of them can afford to hire a hacker to make a MacOS virus. Unless they've tried and found it was more effort than its worth, because even without anti-virus software, it's just too hard to find an attack vector vs Mac OSX, and so easy to find a new one against MS Windows. If was as easy to find a MacOSX exploit as a Windows one, you'd think there'd be at least a couple common Mac viruses out of the thousands and thousands of Windows viruses.
But yes, why would you target anything but the largest portion of the market, when that portion is also the most easily exploited?
OS X has historically had a tiny market share until very recently.
Yeah? Well it's up to a little over 7% now. I'm still waiting for the flood of Mac viruses.
This little theory is only going to last so long. The notion that all the OSes are equally secure, and popularity is the only thing keeping them from being equally virus-festooned as Windows, is being put out to pasture to await its demise.
It's the difference between "this platform is inherently more secure" and "this platform is safer because it's not targeted as much." Apple's market share is rising--if it gets too high, it will likely become the target of malware authors.
Apache vs IIS. Now never mention the "not targeted as much because it's not as popular" theory again.
Seriously, malware authors are not just about targeting the *largest* market but the *easiest*, and right now nothing is easier to pwn than Windows XP. If MacOS and Windows had equal market share, Windows would still be the primary target because it would be the more successful target.
Look at the fact that right now most people using Linux and Mac don't even run AV software at all, and are perfectly fine. Given the relative market share, and the number of Windows viruses out there, shouldn't there be at least enough Mac/Linux viruses to necessitate running an AV program? There are certainly enough machines out there to create multi-thousand node botnets, but I'm supposed to believe that despite holding a roughly combined 10% marketshare, they're effectively not targeted at all?
Then there's the fact that many of these botnet machines are actually within the walls of Fortune 500 computers. Large companies use plenty of Linux machines as servers, they should compose a tasty target, yet the only AV software our sysadmins are using on our Linux servers are to filter out Windows viruses from email.
Ultimately, there is some truth to the whole "malware targeting is proportional to market share" statement, but it does not come close to capturing the entirety of the situation. Once you also include the statement that "malware success is proportional to the shittiness of the OS", you arrive at the reason why the proportion of pwned Macs and Linux machines is orders of magnitude less than their relative market share.
Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!" No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more at the same time that it gives you less effect.
WoW is nothing like cocaine, this is true, and claiming the "addiction" of something like WoW is comparable to that of cocaine (or opium, or cigarettes, or hell even caffeine) is ludicrous. It's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind.
That said, WoW (and most other MMORPGS) is essentially a form of variable schedule operant conditioning. Just like feeding a rat after a random number of lever-pushes can lead to the rat compulsively pushing the lever, in addition to coming to believe that all kinds of strange rituals or dances influence when the food comes out. Just how a WoW player keeps grinding the same dungeons hoping for the drop they want. Because ultimately, rationality is a trick on top of the malleable mammal brain we inherited from the same source as the rat.
I think calling it an "addiction" is to vastly overstate and mis-characterize. But to call it "conditioning" I think is fairly accurate.
Oh man, that would have been so much better, yes. It would have given Smith a great chance to ham it up with his "I'm a brooding, damaged soul!" routine he put on for the first half of the movie one last time.
I'd never read the book or anything, but I was still disappointed in the whole "intelligent zombie" aspect of the Smith film. He starts off with the assumption that they are mindless killers, sees some minor evidence to the contrary which he blows off as them going crazy with hunger, then major evidence in the form of them setting a trap for him. And it goes nowhere. Other than allowing me to guess that the reason the zombies are so intent on killing him now is that Smith kidnapped the leader's girlfriend, it never matters at all. Lame.