Obama's foreign policy guy is Brzezinski, who isn't specifically anti-war. Only when it's a terrible, terrible idea.
Well that largely rules out war against Iran barring an overt act of hostility against us or an ally of ours. Which is more than enough for me.
The scariest moments for me in the last 8 years were when it seemed like Bush was almost serious about trying to push for a preemptive war against Iran. Such a thing would have made Iraq look like Venice Beach. Fortunately even the morons who thought Iraq would in fact be like Venice Beach knew what a bad idea that was so it never got much past the saber rattling stage -- plus Iraq was already going sour so they knew there'd be no support for it.
We're not going to topple the hard-line Iranian government by going to war with it. Our aggressive attitude towards them empowers the hard-liners and weakens the reformers, because regardless of what we'd like to think the Iranian people would rather their government tell them what to do than let our government tell them what to do. Engagement with Iran on the other hand weakens the hard-liners by taking away the threat they claim -- with quite some substantiation -- we represent.
2. Due to reaction time, the second car has to decelerate at a higher rate in order to maintain a safe distance from first car.
Reaction time isn't an issue if there's enough space between you and the car in front of you to create a cushion. In fact it can completely eliminate the need to brake at all. A long time ago when I read a blog article about this very phenomenon I started to put this into practice, and it really can work.
Unfortunately, very slow people and tail-gaiters ruin it.
3. Due to most drivers only looking at the car in front of them (instead of also checking whether the cars farther ahead are braking),
I try to keep an eye on the whole field of cars in front of me, because it makes it much easier to get through congested traffic, especially if I don't want to be super-aggressive (which I don't). Unfortunately, huge-ass SUVs with tinted windows make this impossible.
Solution: Use computer to eliminate/reduce the influences in bold print above. No traffic jam.
Yeah, that's a solution that won't be practical for some time. In the meantime, there is a practical solution for #2, and the best part is that it works even if not everyone follows it, though the more people who do the better it works. The only solution for #3 is for people to stop driving huge ass trucks if they have no reason to, but fortunately economics is starting to impact that.
Wow, a little to much unintentional self-revelation in there. Seriously, masturbating to other peoples' mothers that you haven't met in your parents basement is pretty sad.
I didn't say it was intentional, by the way, unless you think retards do stupid things on purpose, so you're completely off base on the paranoid thing. But then again you probably think you say the stupid things you say on purpose.
And the answer is because Fox Broadcasting is run by clinical retards (no offense to anyone who is or is related to an actual retarded person, as you or they are probably vastly overqualified to run Fox).
Seriously, first they dick around with Family Guy's time slot enough that nobody knows when its on, it gets bad ratings, so they cancel it. Then the simians (apologies to monkeys) realize they were flushing a heap of cash down the toilet when the DVD sales were through the roof. So they brought it back, and hey, if a little Seth McFarlane humor is good, more is better, so let's make American Dad too! And hey that's not doing bad so let's go for broke and make a third show that's essentially the same!
I bet once they've saturated the market (more), the spin-offs won't do so well and they'll start screwing around with the scheduling of all three shows until they've once again convinced themselves they aren't worth it and shit-can the lot.
And it isn't like they haven't screwed up plenty of shows before like this *cough*Futurama*cough*Firefly*cough* Personally I think the only thing they ever had going for them is that they'd air shows other networks wouldn't take a chance on, and the only reason they had their early hits of The Simpsons and Married With Children is because back then they were so starved for content they simply didn't have the capacity to screw up those shows.
Anyway, I think pretty much any Family Guy spinoff is doomed to failure, whether it's Cleveland or Quagmire or Meg for that matter (oh hey, they have a Mike Judge show, maybe a Family Guy/Daria crossover! where's my money, Fox?!)
Then "God" in your theory is superfluos: your theory *with* god doesn't explain or predict anything that your theory *without* God doesn't do equally well, so there's no reason to include him in the theory in the first place.
Christianity isn't a scientific theory, so Occam's Razor simply doesn't apply. Christianity is a religion, or if you will a philosophy. Science can tell you the how of the universe's workings, but it cannot ever tell you why, because why cannot be proven through experiment. That's the realm of philosophy. Philosophy wonders about the things that can't be proven empirically. What this means is that if you believe in a particular philosophy, then you must do so without proof that it is optimal or "true".
One interesting twist on this is that there is a school of philosophy which says that you cannot prove anything at all to be true, while at the same time there's a mathematical theorem that says there are things that are true which cannot be proven.
If your personal philosophy is that you cannot believe in anything which cannot be proven empirically, well that's fine. I'm not trying to tell you that you should believe in God. I'm trying to tell you why for other people belief in God and belief in Evolution are not mutually exclusive. Because you were never intended to find God by conducting an experiment and measuring the results, you were intended to find God through your heart and soul.
Also, I know the Creationist assholes are trying to act like Genesis is a physics textbook so that they can kick Evolution out of the classroom, but they're idiots and you shouldn't play that game. It's this implication that you can't believe in Science and God at the same time that creates the antagonism and their imagined sense of persecution. Don't be a real-life version of their strawman.
Evolution actually cheats a bit by throwing away the fair coins and favoring those that come out heads more often than not - But it still takes simply inconceivable spans of time for real results to occur naturally.
That's not cheating, and it isn't a bit. It's TREMENDOUS.
A little mathematical background in statistical optimization methods is all you need to see that this isn't inconceivable at all.
Random modifications of a potential solution, which are then measured for how well they perform and the good ones kept and the bad ones thrown out is an extremely powerful optimization tool with a solid and proven mathematical basis. And it doesn't take an inconceivable amount of time -- in fact for many complex problems it works much, much faster than attempting to find an optimal solution through direct means.
With extreme selective pressure (as in, a strong impetus to optimize) 6,000 years isn't too short at all. Hell we've already seen in the course of fifty years evolution of snakes in Australia in response to imported poisonous toads, and elephant tusks in response to poachers.
Of course the people who actually are adamant that the world was created 6,000 years ago aren't going to believe in evolution even though it is possible to have occurred on a young earth, because their weird and a-historical literal interpretation of the Bible requires that all animals be constant and unchanging because God made them that way. I wonder who they are to say how God has to do things, but that's a different discussion.
"What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?"
The answer is "A man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age."
Ha ha, what a moron! The answer is a donkey. It has four legs in the morning, then at noon you chop two of em off, and then in the evening you stick one back on.
But I guess Emo Phillips isn't Sophocles.
Anyway, what Mr. "You need to read Genesis again" seems to be missing is that Genesis was originally written in Ancient Hebrew, which, I feel I need to point out, is not English so a literal interpretation of the English translation makes no sense at all. In ancient Hebrew, the word that is translated as "day" can mean "day" or it can mean "a large division of time", and an equally accurate translation would be "eon" or "age".
Hebrew was a poetic and yes, symbolic language so translating it into a language which lacks these features, and then interpreting this translation literally as though it is the infallible Word of God is stupid. If it's so infallible that even translations can be taken literally, then why are there multiple English translations?
My dear fellow Christians: The Word is not a book.
Well there's two people up for the job. A lot of independent commentators thing Dr. Light is the most qualified, but Dr. Wily contributed a lot of money to the campaigns of senators on the Homeland Security subcommittee, and there's an old photograph of him playing golf with Dick Cheney.
Why would I, a terrorist, go to all the effort of developing and building a sophisticated machine when I can can just blow stuff up?
Well in a battle between a nation-state's military and a guerrilla force, "sophisticated" is relative and the arms race can be neck-and-neck while both sides still operate at completely different levels of sophistication.
Look at the arms race between the IEDs used by insurgents in Iraq and our army -- they go from simple stashes of explosives buried under ground, to re-purposed mines in stacks to even shaped charges, while we go from armored Humvees to MRAPs. They're still basically using cobbled together piles of high explosives, while we're using extremely expensive vehicles, and we're trying to come from behind in this race.
Or the terrorist equivalent of our cruise missiles -- an old station wagon stuffed with explosives and driven by a would-be martyr.
Similarly, a "sophisticated" robot or the terrorists might be a wheeled pallet with a simple electric motor and some kind of remote control (even a thin wire based one to prevent jamming or source tracking like they do now with IEDs) that can carry a pile of explosives into the line of police recruits or next to the checkpoint. While our robot has to be something with complicated vision and maneuvering and fire control systems, and that might put the two robots on somewhat equal footing.
Of course in the absolute sense of terrorists actually trying to match the technology we deploy, that's simply insane, just as much as it is for them to use APCs or cruise missiles when there are much simpler but from their standpoint equally effective methods. In this sense you're absolutely right.
Also, I'm with you on having autonomous guns that make their own decisions on when to fire is a very bad idea. You can have the robot decide how to shoot, even exactly when and where. But the question of whether the robot shoots at all should be decided by a human.
It's not childish name calling if it's his summation of actual flaws in the expert's methodology, which given that he lists specific failings, it sounds like it is.
Calling in your own expert to criticize the work of the other side's expert is bog-standard legal strategy. If he can expose actual flaws in the other expert's testimony, and if they are indeed as severe as suggested, then this will do anything but backfire.
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
That's a pretty big exception, especially considering that the server market is the place where businesses plop down large amounts of cash for expensive solutions. People who some years ago were shelling out the big bucks for an IBM system and support contract running a proprietary UNIX are now shelling out the big bucks for an IBM system and support contract running Linux. They aren't doing that because Linux is cheaper.
However for situations where the proprietary software is in fact superior (or in some cases benefits from an entrenched monopoly and resulting network effect, sorry but you can't talk about MS' desktop success without this factor), then the proprietary solution wins.
But what Tetris-guy is saying is that free software isn't fair because proprietary software can't compete. It's his supposition that he is unable to compete with "free". And yes, reality argues strongly that he has no idea what he's talking about. If you lose to free software, it's not because free software cheated, it's because your product isn't good enough to justify paying for it.
The fact that these pills DO NOTHING seem to re-enforce my point, wouldn't you think?
And already the mis-characterization of the study in order to support a pre-supposed conclusion begins...
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
I'm not going to question your personal experience as the others did. It's certainly believable that there's an application where the AMD processor performs 1/4th the speed of an Intel one (and vice versa).
I just want to point out that if the AMD processor actually was 2200 MHz, then you still could have found that the application that interests you performed at 1/4th the speed on that processor than the equivalent Intel one. Meaning that without the performance modeling numbers, you still would have found the equivalent "numbers" to result in an invalid comparison.
Clock frequency is not an automatic benefit for number crunching. If you don't change the architecture, then obviously yes a faster clock helps. But you don't go from a 1600 MHz chip to a 2200 MHz chip in the same time period without changing architectures. Performance is Clock Frequency * Insructions per Cycle, and a wide machine (many execution units) with low memory latency is going to tend to have higher IPC. However, the IPC value varies wildly by benchmark, and a benchmark that reveals certain deficiencies or strengths of the architecture may fall well outside normal, as was your case.
AMDs "modelhertz" or "markethertz" numbers became strained when the new generation of Intel products came out, but for most of the life of the Pentium 4 they were extremely generous to Intel's architecture. It's not just office applications -- go check benchmarks on Tom's, HardOCP, Ace's Hardware, and you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks), even including some media encoding benchmarks though Intel was very strong there and generally dominated.
My point is that if what you're looking for is a singular number by which to compare performance, then there is no "truth" to be stretched. MHz is an actual measurable number, true, but to equate that number with performance is "stretching the truth" to a greater extent than taking an aggregate of a wide variety of benchmark scores and relating that to performance. Marketroids can and do manipulate which benchmarks are chosen, but at least the resulting number means something regarding the performance of those benchmarks. MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
So next time if you want to get the truth about performance, then the truth is that you have to measure the performance of the application you personally care about on the two processors in question. You can get an idea from reading reviews with benchmarks and looking at the results of similar applications (i.e. media encoding, or games, or what have you), but even that won't get you the real picture.
Tell that to anybody who lives in a house with more than one gamer, or with one gamer and one movie buff. It's inconvenient to wait your turn for the big TV.
Okay, so you have a game console for its convenience, and a portable for the convenience of someone who wants to play while the TV is in use.
But they later bought a large HDTV for the living room, so they chose quality over convenience for at least one setting.
The primary display seems to be the main area where people care about quality. Though I'll note that other than the getting it into the house part, you're not really choosing quality *over* convenience here.
Naw. Nintendo is too price-sensitive these days to use an obscure tech like that. They'll just take BluRay, make the discs half the diameter, and make them spin backwards.
I can think of several: vinyl after the introduction of compact cassette; set-top video game consoles after the introduction of Nintendo's Game Boy compact video game system; DVD for those people who had only an RF input on their TV and needed to buy an inconvenient RF modulator; HDTV for those people who have a small SDTV in the bedroom and a large HDTV in the family room.
You have a point about vinyl though old cassette players without auto-reverse weren't all that convenient and extremely crap quality.
Set-top game consoles are more convenient/usable if you're at home than staring a tiny screen. Game Boy is only convenient if you're on the move.
The RF modulator was less of an inconvenience than continuing to use VHS vs DVD, because DVDs are that much more convenient to use.
And it sounds like people with a small SDTV in the bedroom chose convenience when it was an issue.
Now, granted, I don't have any practical ideas for ways to have 1,000 people running around all making their own changes to the world without it devolving into a complete mess as soon as you open the doors, but there's got to be something better possible than the current standard of every action being undone as soon as it's completed (perhaps immediately, perhaps after a brief respawn timer).
I have an idea that is at least an intermediate, and it stems from my initial thoughts on what a Warcraft MMO would mean. Sadly the actual game had carried little of its ancestry of Warcraft the *game*, sticking only with the backstory.
But what if like in Warcraft, you could help build structures to upgrade your faction's towns and cities, and attack and raze to the ground the structures of your enemies (both the other player factions and NPCs)? What if your cities would actually come under attack by NPC armies, and you built structures to upgrade your defenders, gain access to upgrades, and try to push the attackers back? Or raid their city to destroy their sources of reinforcements?
It would all be a fixed set of things you could accomplish -- i.e. you couldn't just go build a new city anywhere you wanted -- but at least if you were doing the "Help the Crossroads build a Mage Tower" quest for the Nth time, it's because the N-1 mage tower had been burned to the ground because you didn't defend it.
This wouldn't solve the "you just killed the Ultimate Evil Dude... now go do it again" problem. Maybe you wouldn't be able to do that, maybe only kill his replaceable lieutenants or something, to keep up the feeling of it being an ongoing war.
It's not perfect, but it would help make the game at least feel more dynamic, and you could actually see your actions changing the world in a way others notice. As opposed to now when you finish some quest to blow up a tower or something and... literally nothing happens. Or a fire graphic appears then vanishes after 10 seconds.
Somebody do it. I promise not to sue you if you make a game out of it (because I'm probably not the first one to think of it, but even if I am I wouldn't sue, I just want fun games!)
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Obama's foreign policy guy is Brzezinski, who isn't specifically anti-war. Only when it's a terrible, terrible idea.
Well that largely rules out war against Iran barring an overt act of hostility against us or an ally of ours. Which is more than enough for me.
The scariest moments for me in the last 8 years were when it seemed like Bush was almost serious about trying to push for a preemptive war against Iran. Such a thing would have made Iraq look like Venice Beach. Fortunately even the morons who thought Iraq would in fact be like Venice Beach knew what a bad idea that was so it never got much past the saber rattling stage -- plus Iraq was already going sour so they knew there'd be no support for it.
We're not going to topple the hard-line Iranian government by going to war with it. Our aggressive attitude towards them empowers the hard-liners and weakens the reformers, because regardless of what we'd like to think the Iranian people would rather their government tell them what to do than let our government tell them what to do. Engagement with Iran on the other hand weakens the hard-liners by taking away the threat they claim -- with quite some substantiation -- we represent.
2. Due to reaction time, the second car has to decelerate at a higher rate in order to maintain a safe distance from first car.
Reaction time isn't an issue if there's enough space between you and the car in front of you to create a cushion. In fact it can completely eliminate the need to brake at all. A long time ago when I read a blog article about this very phenomenon I started to put this into practice, and it really can work.
Unfortunately, very slow people and tail-gaiters ruin it.
3. Due to most drivers only looking at the car in front of them (instead of also checking whether the cars farther ahead are braking),
I try to keep an eye on the whole field of cars in front of me, because it makes it much easier to get through congested traffic, especially if I don't want to be super-aggressive (which I don't). Unfortunately, huge-ass SUVs with tinted windows make this impossible.
Solution: Use computer to eliminate/reduce the influences in bold print above. No traffic jam.
Yeah, that's a solution that won't be practical for some time. In the meantime, there is a practical solution for #2, and the best part is that it works even if not everyone follows it, though the more people who do the better it works. The only solution for #3 is for people to stop driving huge ass trucks if they have no reason to, but fortunately economics is starting to impact that.
Wow, a little to much unintentional self-revelation in there. Seriously, masturbating to other peoples' mothers that you haven't met in your parents basement is pretty sad.
I didn't say it was intentional, by the way, unless you think retards do stupid things on purpose, so you're completely off base on the paranoid thing. But then again you probably think you say the stupid things you say on purpose.
Go back to your BBW websites.
I say why a spin-off at all?
And the answer is because Fox Broadcasting is run by clinical retards (no offense to anyone who is or is related to an actual retarded person, as you or they are probably vastly overqualified to run Fox).
Seriously, first they dick around with Family Guy's time slot enough that nobody knows when its on, it gets bad ratings, so they cancel it. Then the simians (apologies to monkeys) realize they were flushing a heap of cash down the toilet when the DVD sales were through the roof. So they brought it back, and hey, if a little Seth McFarlane humor is good, more is better, so let's make American Dad too! And hey that's not doing bad so let's go for broke and make a third show that's essentially the same!
I bet once they've saturated the market (more), the spin-offs won't do so well and they'll start screwing around with the scheduling of all three shows until they've once again convinced themselves they aren't worth it and shit-can the lot.
And it isn't like they haven't screwed up plenty of shows before like this *cough*Futurama*cough*Firefly*cough* Personally I think the only thing they ever had going for them is that they'd air shows other networks wouldn't take a chance on, and the only reason they had their early hits of The Simpsons and Married With Children is because back then they were so starved for content they simply didn't have the capacity to screw up those shows.
Anyway, I think pretty much any Family Guy spinoff is doomed to failure, whether it's Cleveland or Quagmire or Meg for that matter (oh hey, they have a Mike Judge show, maybe a Family Guy/Daria crossover! where's my money, Fox?!)
Tell that to the biblical literalists.
Believe me, I do. They are my primary target of that line of argument that Genesis is not and was never intended to be a physics textbook.
Then "God" in your theory is superfluos: your theory *with* god doesn't explain or predict anything that your theory *without* God doesn't do equally well, so there's no reason to include him in the theory in the first place.
Christianity isn't a scientific theory, so Occam's Razor simply doesn't apply. Christianity is a religion, or if you will a philosophy. Science can tell you the how of the universe's workings, but it cannot ever tell you why, because why cannot be proven through experiment. That's the realm of philosophy. Philosophy wonders about the things that can't be proven empirically. What this means is that if you believe in a particular philosophy, then you must do so without proof that it is optimal or "true".
One interesting twist on this is that there is a school of philosophy which says that you cannot prove anything at all to be true, while at the same time there's a mathematical theorem that says there are things that are true which cannot be proven.
If your personal philosophy is that you cannot believe in anything which cannot be proven empirically, well that's fine. I'm not trying to tell you that you should believe in God. I'm trying to tell you why for other people belief in God and belief in Evolution are not mutually exclusive. Because you were never intended to find God by conducting an experiment and measuring the results, you were intended to find God through your heart and soul.
Also, I know the Creationist assholes are trying to act like Genesis is a physics textbook so that they can kick Evolution out of the classroom, but they're idiots and you shouldn't play that game. It's this implication that you can't believe in Science and God at the same time that creates the antagonism and their imagined sense of persecution. Don't be a real-life version of their strawman.
Evolution actually cheats a bit by throwing away the fair coins and favoring those that come out heads more often than not - But it still takes simply inconceivable spans of time for real results to occur naturally.
That's not cheating, and it isn't a bit. It's TREMENDOUS.
A little mathematical background in statistical optimization methods is all you need to see that this isn't inconceivable at all.
Random modifications of a potential solution, which are then measured for how well they perform and the good ones kept and the bad ones thrown out is an extremely powerful optimization tool with a solid and proven mathematical basis. And it doesn't take an inconceivable amount of time -- in fact for many complex problems it works much, much faster than attempting to find an optimal solution through direct means.
With extreme selective pressure (as in, a strong impetus to optimize) 6,000 years isn't too short at all. Hell we've already seen in the course of fifty years evolution of snakes in Australia in response to imported poisonous toads, and elephant tusks in response to poachers.
Of course the people who actually are adamant that the world was created 6,000 years ago aren't going to believe in evolution even though it is possible to have occurred on a young earth, because their weird and a-historical literal interpretation of the Bible requires that all animals be constant and unchanging because God made them that way. I wonder who they are to say how God has to do things, but that's a different discussion.
"What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?"
The answer is "A man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age."
Ha ha, what a moron! The answer is a donkey. It has four legs in the morning, then at noon you chop two of em off, and then in the evening you stick one back on.
But I guess Emo Phillips isn't Sophocles.
Anyway, what Mr. "You need to read Genesis again" seems to be missing is that Genesis was originally written in Ancient Hebrew, which, I feel I need to point out, is not English so a literal interpretation of the English translation makes no sense at all. In ancient Hebrew, the word that is translated as "day" can mean "day" or it can mean "a large division of time", and an equally accurate translation would be "eon" or "age".
Hebrew was a poetic and yes, symbolic language so translating it into a language which lacks these features, and then interpreting this translation literally as though it is the infallible Word of God is stupid. If it's so infallible that even translations can be taken literally, then why are there multiple English translations?
My dear fellow Christians: The Word is not a book.
Do you have instructions for removing the cattle prod? Because I laugh a lot, and those shocks fucking hurt!
I sure hope this professor is a nice person.
Well there's two people up for the job. A lot of independent commentators thing Dr. Light is the most qualified, but Dr. Wily contributed a lot of money to the campaigns of senators on the Homeland Security subcommittee, and there's an old photograph of him playing golf with Dick Cheney.
Why would I, a terrorist, go to all the effort of developing and building a sophisticated machine when I can can just blow stuff up?
Well in a battle between a nation-state's military and a guerrilla force, "sophisticated" is relative and the arms race can be neck-and-neck while both sides still operate at completely different levels of sophistication.
Look at the arms race between the IEDs used by insurgents in Iraq and our army -- they go from simple stashes of explosives buried under ground, to re-purposed mines in stacks to even shaped charges, while we go from armored Humvees to MRAPs. They're still basically using cobbled together piles of high explosives, while we're using extremely expensive vehicles, and we're trying to come from behind in this race.
Or the terrorist equivalent of our cruise missiles -- an old station wagon stuffed with explosives and driven by a would-be martyr.
Similarly, a "sophisticated" robot or the terrorists might be a wheeled pallet with a simple electric motor and some kind of remote control (even a thin wire based one to prevent jamming or source tracking like they do now with IEDs) that can carry a pile of explosives into the line of police recruits or next to the checkpoint. While our robot has to be something with complicated vision and maneuvering and fire control systems, and that might put the two robots on somewhat equal footing.
Of course in the absolute sense of terrorists actually trying to match the technology we deploy, that's simply insane, just as much as it is for them to use APCs or cruise missiles when there are much simpler but from their standpoint equally effective methods. In this sense you're absolutely right.
Also, I'm with you on having autonomous guns that make their own decisions on when to fire is a very bad idea. You can have the robot decide how to shoot, even exactly when and where. But the question of whether the robot shoots at all should be decided by a human.
What was that you said about multi-thousand dollar sex dolls?
You may think of it as all good things coming to an end.
I think of it as my brilliant master plan to destroy the earth coming to fruition!
Most evil geniuses just don't have the stones to think in the truly long term.
It's not childish name calling if it's his summation of actual flaws in the expert's methodology, which given that he lists specific failings, it sounds like it is.
Calling in your own expert to criticize the work of the other side's expert is bog-standard legal strategy. If he can expose actual flaws in the other expert's testimony, and if they are indeed as severe as suggested, then this will do anything but backfire.
Personally, I like to arrange things so that there's just enough room to fit the penis-shaped shipping container and four lines black out.
You don't have to use euphemisms, we won't judge. Just say "my penis".
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
That's a pretty big exception, especially considering that the server market is the place where businesses plop down large amounts of cash for expensive solutions. People who some years ago were shelling out the big bucks for an IBM system and support contract running a proprietary UNIX are now shelling out the big bucks for an IBM system and support contract running Linux. They aren't doing that because Linux is cheaper.
However for situations where the proprietary software is in fact superior (or in some cases benefits from an entrenched monopoly and resulting network effect, sorry but you can't talk about MS' desktop success without this factor), then the proprietary solution wins.
But what Tetris-guy is saying is that free software isn't fair because proprietary software can't compete. It's his supposition that he is unable to compete with "free". And yes, reality argues strongly that he has no idea what he's talking about. If you lose to free software, it's not because free software cheated, it's because your product isn't good enough to justify paying for it.
The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.
I'd figure the easiest way to do that would be to get rid of all the L-, T- and S-shaped shipping containers.
The fact that these pills DO NOTHING seem to re-enforce my point, wouldn't you think?
And already the mis-characterization of the study in order to support a pre-supposed conclusion begins...
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
I'm not going to question your personal experience as the others did. It's certainly believable that there's an application where the AMD processor performs 1/4th the speed of an Intel one (and vice versa).
I just want to point out that if the AMD processor actually was 2200 MHz, then you still could have found that the application that interests you performed at 1/4th the speed on that processor than the equivalent Intel one. Meaning that without the performance modeling numbers, you still would have found the equivalent "numbers" to result in an invalid comparison.
Clock frequency is not an automatic benefit for number crunching. If you don't change the architecture, then obviously yes a faster clock helps. But you don't go from a 1600 MHz chip to a 2200 MHz chip in the same time period without changing architectures. Performance is Clock Frequency * Insructions per Cycle, and a wide machine (many execution units) with low memory latency is going to tend to have higher IPC. However, the IPC value varies wildly by benchmark, and a benchmark that reveals certain deficiencies or strengths of the architecture may fall well outside normal, as was your case.
AMDs "modelhertz" or "markethertz" numbers became strained when the new generation of Intel products came out, but for most of the life of the Pentium 4 they were extremely generous to Intel's architecture. It's not just office applications -- go check benchmarks on Tom's, HardOCP, Ace's Hardware, and you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks), even including some media encoding benchmarks though Intel was very strong there and generally dominated.
My point is that if what you're looking for is a singular number by which to compare performance, then there is no "truth" to be stretched. MHz is an actual measurable number, true, but to equate that number with performance is "stretching the truth" to a greater extent than taking an aggregate of a wide variety of benchmark scores and relating that to performance. Marketroids can and do manipulate which benchmarks are chosen, but at least the resulting number means something regarding the performance of those benchmarks. MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
So next time if you want to get the truth about performance, then the truth is that you have to measure the performance of the application you personally care about on the two processors in question. You can get an idea from reading reviews with benchmarks and looking at the results of similar applications (i.e. media encoding, or games, or what have you), but even that won't get you the real picture.
Tell that to anybody who lives in a house with more than one gamer, or with one gamer and one movie buff. It's inconvenient to wait your turn for the big TV.
Okay, so you have a game console for its convenience, and a portable for the convenience of someone who wants to play while the TV is in use.
But they later bought a large HDTV for the living room, so they chose quality over convenience for at least one setting.
The primary display seems to be the main area where people care about quality. Though I'll note that other than the getting it into the house part, you're not really choosing quality *over* convenience here.
Naw. Nintendo is too price-sensitive these days to use an obscure tech like that. They'll just take BluRay, make the discs half the diameter, and make them spin backwards.
Why even send the HD-DVD? Just send a bobcat.
Ooh I want a bobcat! What's your e-bay user name so I can bid on your HD-DVD?
I can think of several: vinyl after the introduction of compact cassette; set-top video game consoles after the introduction of Nintendo's Game Boy compact video game system; DVD for those people who had only an RF input on their TV and needed to buy an inconvenient RF modulator; HDTV for those people who have a small SDTV in the bedroom and a large HDTV in the family room.
You have a point about vinyl though old cassette players without auto-reverse weren't all that convenient and extremely crap quality.
Set-top game consoles are more convenient/usable if you're at home than staring a tiny screen. Game Boy is only convenient if you're on the move.
The RF modulator was less of an inconvenience than continuing to use VHS vs DVD, because DVDs are that much more convenient to use.
And it sounds like people with a small SDTV in the bedroom chose convenience when it was an issue.
The Force... Whatever.
Call me when they think they've found The Schwartz.
Now, granted, I don't have any practical ideas for ways to have 1,000 people running around all making their own changes to the world without it devolving into a complete mess as soon as you open the doors, but there's got to be something better possible than the current standard of every action being undone as soon as it's completed (perhaps immediately, perhaps after a brief respawn timer).
I have an idea that is at least an intermediate, and it stems from my initial thoughts on what a Warcraft MMO would mean. Sadly the actual game had carried little of its ancestry of Warcraft the *game*, sticking only with the backstory.
But what if like in Warcraft, you could help build structures to upgrade your faction's towns and cities, and attack and raze to the ground the structures of your enemies (both the other player factions and NPCs)? What if your cities would actually come under attack by NPC armies, and you built structures to upgrade your defenders, gain access to upgrades, and try to push the attackers back? Or raid their city to destroy their sources of reinforcements?
It would all be a fixed set of things you could accomplish -- i.e. you couldn't just go build a new city anywhere you wanted -- but at least if you were doing the "Help the Crossroads build a Mage Tower" quest for the Nth time, it's because the N-1 mage tower had been burned to the ground because you didn't defend it.
This wouldn't solve the "you just killed the Ultimate Evil Dude... now go do it again" problem. Maybe you wouldn't be able to do that, maybe only kill his replaceable lieutenants or something, to keep up the feeling of it being an ongoing war.
It's not perfect, but it would help make the game at least feel more dynamic, and you could actually see your actions changing the world in a way others notice. As opposed to now when you finish some quest to blow up a tower or something and... literally nothing happens. Or a fire graphic appears then vanishes after 10 seconds.
Somebody do it. I promise not to sue you if you make a game out of it (because I'm probably not the first one to think of it, but even if I am I wouldn't sue, I just want fun games!)