Unless it's a pet project, executive types rarely know the intimate details of what's happening in the trenches.
And thus they don't comment on those details. I agree that it is possible that he had no idea what actually went on in the investigation. Yet if that's the case and he didn't know, then he must surely know he didn't know, therefore when he made the statement he was pretending that he knew and making up a story that supported his political agenda, and therefore he was lying.
Since the information exchange between the U.S. and Germany took place before the "Protect America Act" was even passed, I'd have to say that if Mr. McConnel knew anything about the case (like when it happened) then he must have known that said Act had nothing to do with catching the terrorists, and was therefore lying. And if he didn't know anything about the case, then he was just making shit up but acting like he actually knew which is still lying.
I'm not really concerned with the other details, other than that they prove that we can catch terrorists without this crazy Orwellian Act.
According to the dictionary "A lie is a statement made by someone who believes or suspects it to be false, in the expectation that the hearers may believe it."
Yes, and since the actual information regarding the case is clear that unwarranted surveillance had nothing to do with it, this means that either:
1) he was aware of the actual circumstances of the case, yet still claimed surveillance was the key or
2) he was (inexplicably for a man in his position) completely ignorant of the circumstances of the case, and just plain made up the fact that surveillance was involved.
If you make something up on the spot that supports your political agenda, do you usually suspect that what you made up is false? Yes, of course you do. And so does he. So he was lying.
The only thing he was merely wrong as opposed to lying about was whether the truth had already been made public. It had been made public, and that, and only that, is why he retracted his statement. He either knew what he said was wrong, or he knew it was not based in fact. Either way, that's a fucking lie.
I swear, the way people try to weasel out of being caught lying is as sad and reprehensible as the lies themselves.
Um, yeah. You see I'm going to be extremely skeptical of anyone claiming that the sun cannot be performing fusion when based on the very same theories that describe the pressures and energies required for fusion occurring in the sun we have created fusion right here on earth.
I'm skeptical of anyone who claims not only to have solved problems with the existing theory, but to entirely upturn the existing theory itself even the parts that have extensive verification. Hell the last time I crossed baths with an Electric Universe proponent on/., he was claiming that EU explained impact craters, as if EU had now replaced the obvious and rather well tested effects of kinetic energy. Einstein didn't and simply couldn't up-end Newton's theory, he could only explain what Newton failed to. EU tries, and summarily fails.
Epicycles were a case of taking something with a clear explanation -- elliptical orbits -- and deciding that no, everything must be comprised of circles. EU is the same thing -- attempting to turn everything into the universe into electricity, desperately inserting it everywhere even if there is no need.
It's one thing to try to explain the things that our current theories can't. It's quite another to try to invalidate well-verified aspects of those theories.
I'm no fan of science politics in this country, but the most basic bar for any theory is that it should not contradict the existing evidence. Relativity could do that, so even as weird and unlikely and unorthodox as it was considered at the time, it eventually won acceptance and now is one of the best tested theories. EU can't do that, and thus even in a perfect system should be rejected.
It scaled in a good way with more players. You didn't just gang buster your way through if you had more then 1 person but if you had 5-8 people who were decently equipped and knew their role it made life easier. It only really matters in nightmare or hell difficulties. On normal any old group would wade through unscathed.
Yeah, I loved that about Diablo 2. It meant you didn't have to have 8 people to kill Diablo, but if you did it was still challenging. Also, on those difficulties once you got above four people it became very unwise to run off by yourself.
Whoa, whoa there. Noodles aren't "i.e." strings. Noodles are weak, wimpy string posers unable to carry any significant vibrations which given strings their energetic properties. At least according to string theory. Also, according to string theory pirates cannot exist. So you see string theory is the enemy of the FSM.
One of the best things about a $10 million ad campaign is that you can get news agencies/blogs/teh intarweb to discuss the advertising campaign itself, which is automatically advertising for the product the ad campaign is promoting that doesn't come out of that $10 million.
Advertisers are sort of like Satan. I hate them for their unmitigated evil, but I do sometimes have to admire their savvy.
Not a bad idea, but i really meant turning in general. Speaking of Re4 though, based on what peeps are saying I'm definitely picking that one up (played it on the GC, and it was fun, but had the traditional clunky RE controls that I hate)
I sincerely hope that Wii FPS and other shooter games like the upcoming resident evil will support the gamecube controller in addition to the remote.
After playing Metroid, I hope I never have to play another FPS with craptacular double-analog-stick controls again. It's FPS gaming how it should be. I'd say it's even superior to Ye Olde Mouse, at least for aiming. It doesn't allow the speedy 180s of the mouse, so the overall nod has to go to the mouse, but as far as speed, ease, and feel of aiming it's debatably better than the mouse and a billion times better than an analog thumb stick.
Your right hand can access the trigger, a button, and down arrow on the pad without moving. but if you want to hit the (+), (-) or other arrow buttons you have to shift your hand up the remote- screwing up your aim and taking you out of the game immersion. This is not good at all.
But thankfully because you're using the wiimote you can instantly re-acquire your target. This isn't like the craptastic analog aiming, where you have to try to keep the reticle over your target all the time because it takes so long to move it back so losing your aim just to switch weapons would be disastrous.
Others may love it. That's why I want CHOICE.
Having to balance a game both for slow analog control and free-form Wii aiming sounds problematic to me. If they can do it, and you insist on using the old control scheme, more power to you. I personally hope they spend any time they would have spent implementing the old scheme to instead further perfect the wiimote controls.
I don't buy the ZOMG BUSH LISTENS TO ALL UR PHONE CALLS mantra, and I rarely see a proper solution from that crowd anyway - just more whining and complaining.
The solution is for the President to comply with the law, and not ignore the need for warrants simply because it's inconvenient.
Is that a good enough solution for you? I'll admit the biggest problem with this solution is implementing it, since nobody seems to be able to force our President to obey the law and he certainly isn't planning on doing so of his own volition. Does that count as whining? Well what's your solution then?
Eavesdropping on potential terrorists -- assuming "potential" means "suspected" not just "hypothetically possible" -- is all well and good. That's exactly the kind of thing government law enforcement should be doing. That's how law enforcement succeeds in catching real criminals.
If they're claiming this was part of a Carnivore/Echelon style dragnet, then hurray for catching the one tuna in a net bursting with dolphins.
The article mentions listening in on the members of a specific terrorist group, so I'm taking that to mean they already had suspects, and surveilling these suspects allowed them to discover the plot. I.e. the targeted search that is good.
However you can tell in articles like this that they want you to believe that this justifies extended surveillance powers, in particular the we-should-be-able-to-spy-on-anyone-any-time kind.
The article also mentions FISA and how Bush is trying to extend the law that will expire. It is very important to remember that the whole problem with Bush's program was that he couldn't even be bothered to go to the FISA court to get back-dated warrants. The best explanation for why that I've heard so far being that the program was spying on so many people that it was infeasible to actually get a warrant for each one. If they can't take the time to get a warrant for each one, then they certainly couldn't have taken the time to establish probably cause that any of these people were terrorists, and ergo they wouldn't have been granted by FISA anyway.
So look at this how it is -- a success for law enforcement, of the traditional pre-USAPATRIOT and pre-NSA-wiretapping kind. Don't see it how they want you too -- as justification for removing what few of our privacy protections remain, and justification for allowing the Executive branch and law enforcement to operate outside the 4th Ammendment.
Not only is it a weed, it's practically a menace, damned near impossible to kill, grows over acres in a season, requires only rain as it produces its own nitrogen (no fertilizers needed) and grows almost everywhere in the USA and most other countries.
Uh... Yeah, "uncontrollable growth" isn't exactly what I call a strong selling point for agriculture.
At the very least, it would be a great refresher from the traditional "$ANIMAL are overpopulated due to $EVENT, please find $NUMBER of $BODYPARTS and return them to $NPC for $REWARD" dreck.
But that's my favorite quest! And you have to admit, $REWARD makes you look like a bad-ass. Or like a school girl. I can't remember.
damn it, at first I thought it meant "Anarchy Online"
Then what would AO-rated mean?
"This game is rated AO by the ESRB for being a buggy piece of shit that may become mostly playable after several months of heavy patching, and actually enjoyable after many more patches, but we wouldn't hold our breath."
The default is in fact to check for mail manually - these people set it to automatically check mail. Of course the real problem here is the insane roaming charges for mobile data, which is no more costly than voice for the operators.
Yeah, someone else said that it wasn't the default behavior, which makes a lot of my argument moot.
And I agree completely that the ultimate blame lies with AT&T and the other cell providers and their crazy rate plans. Because even if the guy manually turned on automatic downloads, then forgot about it when he traveled abroad and left his phone in standby (which makes sense; if you want to use the phone you don't always want to have to wait to connect to the network first), I find it hard to believe that anyone would associate that behavior with a nearly $5k phone bill.
As the above posters have mentioned, Sony removed the hardware emulation to cut costs on the unit and added another 20GB to make you feel like you got something in exchange.
Uh, no. They added 20GB because 60GB drives are going to be if not already more expensive than 80GB drives, since 80GB is what all the manufacturers are switching to. It's the exact same reason as cutting the Emotion Engine hardware: Cost.
As to whether the 80GB gets a rapid price drop once the 60GB versions are gone, that all depends on how much cost savings Sony got. They lose money on every PS3. The 60GB models are a write-off, but they can't continue to bleed money on every console sold and certainly can't bleed another $100. I would think a price drop in time for Christmas is a pretty sure thing, but before that I wouldn't be so sure.
Wow. That's right up there with "Nintendo hates money and market share so they're holding back the supply of Wiis" for retarded console conspiracy theories.
It's clear that the software is worse than hardware, yet the hardware emulation machines were cheaper.
No, they weren't. The PS3s with the Emotion Engine hardware are undoubtedly more expensive to make than those without. Remember the 60GB PS3s were only discounted because Sony was trying to clear them off the shelves to make way for the 80GB version.
Well, developing MCM capabilities isn't exactly risk-free either. Since in any event the MCM version would be a temporary hold over, the question is does it make sense to spend the R&D time to develop that technology for a product that would, ideally, only exist in the market for a short period?
Remember, AMD isn't Intel. They don't have the same resources as Intel. Spending the time on an MCM design would necessarily mean having fewer resources devoted to the native quad core version, and for whatever follow-on products are certainly in the pipeline now. So the question is -- delay the native quad core by working on an MCM, a technology that AMD has never done before and thus carries its own risks of delays, or focus on the quad core knowing you'll sacrifice some time to market, but hopefully being in a better position once you are done?
AMD chose the latter. Was it the right choice? I can't say. I can say that the time between Intel's MCM quad core and the Barcelona launch has been a bad time for AMD. Before that, AMD was enjoying greater than 30% server market share which is absolutely fantastic given the relative size of the competitors, but now they've dropped back down to around 20% I believe. They can probably gain a lot of it back -- the inherent advantages of Opteron vs equivalent Xeon parts haven't gone away -- but nevertheless they lost a lot of momentum. Certainly the delay in Barcelona's launch hurt them badly.
But if they went the other way? And the MCM part was also delayed, not as good as the native quad core, and the true native quad core delayed even further because of diverting resources from it? The end result may not have been any better. That's the nature of this industry -- there isn't any choice that doesn't involve a lot of risk.
Someone else said that this was not in fact the default behavior, and you have to enable automatic email downloads. As long as it's clear that it does this while the phone is in standby, this wouldn't really be Apple's fault. On the other hand I still couldn't fault the user for not realizing that this would happen. If they turned this on the day they got their iPhone, would they really remember that their phone is using the data connection while "off"?
I think the ultimate blame lies with AT&T and all the other cell phone providers and their insane extortionist plans for making this a consideration in the first place.:P
Ah, my bad, thanks for clearing this up...so that explains Intels ability to suddenly have lower power chips...so it is they that are playing with the numbers this time, interesting:)
To some extent. The Pentium 4 is where this started. The Netburst architecture was very power hungry normally, but it's maximum power was insane. The graph of power consumption vs benchmark had a long "tail", which Intel sought to chop off. See, TDP is a real-life number, since it's used by OEMs and others to design thermal solutions for the parts. If the thermal solution is insufficient, then the parts fail. So it's not actually possible to fudge TDP numbers.
What Intel decided to do was implement an on-chip thermal diode and some logic that halved the effective clock cycle* if the temperature went above a certain threshold. What this meant is that based on how they programmed this logic, they could guarantee that the chip's power consumption would never go above a certain level no matter what code you were running. They had effectively lopped off the long tail. The downside is that if your application does draw more power than the limit, then you'll see vastly reduced performance because of the clock throttling. Most of the time this is transient so it's not that noticeable, but there were benchmarks out there that showed this effect very clearly. Like a certain game benchmark would get lower scores at 640x480 than 1600x1200 because at the lower res the game was cpu bound as was crossing the thermal threshold.
So theoretically with this feature Intel could fudge the numbers however they wanted and claim whatever TDP they desired. In practice they don't have that much flexibility because if they set the bar too low then their effective performance would suck, and their TDP numbers are set at average power + several standard deviations.
The main reason why Intel was able to suddenly have low power chips is because they ditched the Netburst architecture and went back to a design that was more balanced between high clock speeds and high IPC.
They kept the clock throttling logic, though, since it does still give them some benefit in reporting lower TDP numbers. AMD doesn't have this feature, so their TDP is truly the maximum power (as determined by running a "power virus") that you would ever see, even though it's unlikely. Since power has become ever more important as a marketing feature even outside of mobile, I'm not surprised that AMD would decide to start touting expected numbers vs maximum.
* Actually a 50% duty cycle of full speed for some number of microseconds followed by completely off.
You can actually turn an iPhone off. These people left their iPhones on standby and thought they were turned off. Just because the screen is black doesn't mean the device is off.
That's not the problem. Standby vs truly off should not matter other than 1) battery life and 2) receiving network updates and the delay to reconnect to the network when you decide you need to use the phone function. Standby should not result in $4,800 worth of charges, and I say that knowing full well the difference between standby and off. I'd be pissed as hell if I found out my phone was racking up data charges "on my behalf".
THIS is the problem:
"The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on."
Making that the default behavior is a stupid decision, and it's one that is even as we speak costing customers money when they may not be realizing it. Automatically using the data connection without regard to the cell phone plan is completely stupid. Does it know the difference between peak and off-peak hours? Does it know what the customer's monthly data quota is? It apparently doesn't know when the customer is in international roaming!
Having that default behavior may have been sensible if Apple knew that the only plans that would work with an iPhone were 100% global unlimited plans. Then they could assume it's okay to download things whenever it feels like. But with the reality of cell phone plans? No way. That's retarded. And it is not these peoples' fault that they didn't expect their phone to work that way.
No, people just have to learn the difference between "sleep" and "a kind of sleep which isn't actually sleep because the phone is actively using the wireless connection without you realizing it".
My phone, a treo, functions basically the same and like basically every phone with a "standby" mode -- when you hit the power button, it turns off, but as the anonying blinky light indicates the cell phone function is still active, meaning it's communicating with the base station. It will receive incoming calls, and receive other updates from the network. However what it doesn't do is automatically make phone calls, or activate GPRS and start downloading crap off the internet, or otherwise doing anything that will cost me money.
That is what is broken about this. Not the difference between "off with wireless enabled" and "really off". It's the difference between "wireless enabled but not used" and "wireless enabled and being used with no consideration of where you are and how much it's going to cost you". It's the difference between merely being connected to the cell network, and using the cell network in ways that result in charges.
It sounds like a matter of defaults. Setting up the phone to by default automatically download emails is a bad decision, because it causes the phone to work contrary to how most people expect -- which is that in standby mode, you aren't accruing data transfer charges.
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Unless it's a pet project, executive types rarely know the intimate details of what's happening in the trenches.
And thus they don't comment on those details. I agree that it is possible that he had no idea what actually went on in the investigation. Yet if that's the case and he didn't know, then he must surely know he didn't know, therefore when he made the statement he was pretending that he knew and making up a story that supported his political agenda, and therefore he was lying.
Since the information exchange between the U.S. and Germany took place before the "Protect America Act" was even passed, I'd have to say that if Mr. McConnel knew anything about the case (like when it happened) then he must have known that said Act had nothing to do with catching the terrorists, and was therefore lying. And if he didn't know anything about the case, then he was just making shit up but acting like he actually knew which is still lying.
I'm not really concerned with the other details, other than that they prove that we can catch terrorists without this crazy Orwellian Act.
According to the dictionary "A lie is a statement made by someone who believes or suspects it to be false, in the expectation that the hearers may believe it."
Yes, and since the actual information regarding the case is clear that unwarranted surveillance had nothing to do with it, this means that either:
1) he was aware of the actual circumstances of the case, yet still claimed surveillance was the key or
2) he was (inexplicably for a man in his position) completely ignorant of the circumstances of the case, and just plain made up the fact that surveillance was involved.
If you make something up on the spot that supports your political agenda, do you usually suspect that what you made up is false? Yes, of course you do. And so does he. So he was lying.
The only thing he was merely wrong as opposed to lying about was whether the truth had already been made public. It had been made public, and that, and only that, is why he retracted his statement. He either knew what he said was wrong, or he knew it was not based in fact. Either way, that's a fucking lie.
I swear, the way people try to weasel out of being caught lying is as sad and reprehensible as the lies themselves.
Um, yeah. You see I'm going to be extremely skeptical of anyone claiming that the sun cannot be performing fusion when based on the very same theories that describe the pressures and energies required for fusion occurring in the sun we have created fusion right here on earth.
/., he was claiming that EU explained impact craters, as if EU had now replaced the obvious and rather well tested effects of kinetic energy. Einstein didn't and simply couldn't up-end Newton's theory, he could only explain what Newton failed to. EU tries, and summarily fails.
I'm skeptical of anyone who claims not only to have solved problems with the existing theory, but to entirely upturn the existing theory itself even the parts that have extensive verification. Hell the last time I crossed baths with an Electric Universe proponent on
Epicycles were a case of taking something with a clear explanation -- elliptical orbits -- and deciding that no, everything must be comprised of circles. EU is the same thing -- attempting to turn everything into the universe into electricity, desperately inserting it everywhere even if there is no need.
It's one thing to try to explain the things that our current theories can't. It's quite another to try to invalidate well-verified aspects of those theories.
I'm no fan of science politics in this country, but the most basic bar for any theory is that it should not contradict the existing evidence. Relativity could do that, so even as weird and unlikely and unorthodox as it was considered at the time, it eventually won acceptance and now is one of the best tested theories. EU can't do that, and thus even in a perfect system should be rejected.
It scaled in a good way with more players. You didn't just gang buster your way through if you had more then 1 person but if you had 5-8 people who were decently equipped and knew their role it made life easier. It only really matters in nightmare or hell difficulties. On normal any old group would wade through unscathed.
Yeah, I loved that about Diablo 2. It meant you didn't have to have 8 people to kill Diablo, but if you did it was still challenging. Also, on those difficulties once you got above four people it became very unwise to run off by yourself.
saucy noodles (i.e. strings)
Whoa, whoa there. Noodles aren't "i.e." strings. Noodles are weak, wimpy string posers unable to carry any significant vibrations which given strings their energetic properties. At least according to string theory. Also, according to string theory pirates cannot exist. So you see string theory is the enemy of the FSM.
One of the best things about a $10 million ad campaign is that you can get news agencies/blogs/teh intarweb to discuss the advertising campaign itself, which is automatically advertising for the product the ad campaign is promoting that doesn't come out of that $10 million.
Advertisers are sort of like Satan. I hate them for their unmitigated evil, but I do sometimes have to admire their savvy.
Not a bad idea, but i really meant turning in general. Speaking of Re4 though, based on what peeps are saying I'm definitely picking that one up (played it on the GC, and it was fun, but had the traditional clunky RE controls that I hate)
I sincerely hope that Wii FPS and other shooter games like the upcoming resident evil will support the gamecube controller in addition to the remote.
After playing Metroid, I hope I never have to play another FPS with craptacular double-analog-stick controls again. It's FPS gaming how it should be. I'd say it's even superior to Ye Olde Mouse, at least for aiming. It doesn't allow the speedy 180s of the mouse, so the overall nod has to go to the mouse, but as far as speed, ease, and feel of aiming it's debatably better than the mouse and a billion times better than an analog thumb stick.
Your right hand can access the trigger, a button, and down arrow on the pad without moving. but if you want to hit the (+), (-) or other arrow buttons you have to shift your hand up the remote- screwing up your aim and taking you out of the game immersion. This is not good at all.
But thankfully because you're using the wiimote you can instantly re-acquire your target. This isn't like the craptastic analog aiming, where you have to try to keep the reticle over your target all the time because it takes so long to move it back so losing your aim just to switch weapons would be disastrous.
Others may love it. That's why I want CHOICE.
Having to balance a game both for slow analog control and free-form Wii aiming sounds problematic to me. If they can do it, and you insist on using the old control scheme, more power to you. I personally hope they spend any time they would have spent implementing the old scheme to instead further perfect the wiimote controls.
When did Link use a crossbow?
Never. That's why he needs the training, you see.
I don't buy the ZOMG BUSH LISTENS TO ALL UR PHONE CALLS mantra, and I rarely see a proper solution from that crowd anyway - just more whining and complaining.
The solution is for the President to comply with the law, and not ignore the need for warrants simply because it's inconvenient.
Is that a good enough solution for you? I'll admit the biggest problem with this solution is implementing it, since nobody seems to be able to force our President to obey the law and he certainly isn't planning on doing so of his own volition. Does that count as whining? Well what's your solution then?
Eavesdropping on potential terrorists -- assuming "potential" means "suspected" not just "hypothetically possible" -- is all well and good. That's exactly the kind of thing government law enforcement should be doing. That's how law enforcement succeeds in catching real criminals.
If they're claiming this was part of a Carnivore/Echelon style dragnet, then hurray for catching the one tuna in a net bursting with dolphins.
The article mentions listening in on the members of a specific terrorist group, so I'm taking that to mean they already had suspects, and surveilling these suspects allowed them to discover the plot. I.e. the targeted search that is good.
However you can tell in articles like this that they want you to believe that this justifies extended surveillance powers, in particular the we-should-be-able-to-spy-on-anyone-any-time kind.
The article also mentions FISA and how Bush is trying to extend the law that will expire. It is very important to remember that the whole problem with Bush's program was that he couldn't even be bothered to go to the FISA court to get back-dated warrants. The best explanation for why that I've heard so far being that the program was spying on so many people that it was infeasible to actually get a warrant for each one. If they can't take the time to get a warrant for each one, then they certainly couldn't have taken the time to establish probably cause that any of these people were terrorists, and ergo they wouldn't have been granted by FISA anyway.
So look at this how it is -- a success for law enforcement, of the traditional pre-USAPATRIOT and pre-NSA-wiretapping kind. Don't see it how they want you too -- as justification for removing what few of our privacy protections remain, and justification for allowing the Executive branch and law enforcement to operate outside the 4th Ammendment.
Not only is it a weed, it's practically a menace, damned near impossible to kill, grows over acres in a season, requires only rain as it produces its own nitrogen (no fertilizers needed) and grows almost everywhere in the USA and most other countries.
Uh... Yeah, "uncontrollable growth" isn't exactly what I call a strong selling point for agriculture.
At the very least, it would be a great refresher from the traditional "$ANIMAL are overpopulated due to $EVENT, please find $NUMBER of $BODYPARTS and return them to $NPC for $REWARD" dreck.
But that's my favorite quest! And you have to admit, $REWARD makes you look like a bad-ass. Or like a school girl. I can't remember.
Need a "-1 humorless twit" option. I never even played the game, so why would I be angry?
damn it, at first I thought it meant "Anarchy Online"
Then what would AO-rated mean?
"This game is rated AO by the ESRB for being a buggy piece of shit that may become mostly playable after several months of heavy patching, and actually enjoyable after many more patches, but we wouldn't hold our breath."
The default is in fact to check for mail manually - these people set it to automatically check mail. Of course the real problem here is the insane roaming charges for mobile data, which is no more costly than voice for the operators.
Yeah, someone else said that it wasn't the default behavior, which makes a lot of my argument moot.
And I agree completely that the ultimate blame lies with AT&T and the other cell providers and their crazy rate plans. Because even if the guy manually turned on automatic downloads, then forgot about it when he traveled abroad and left his phone in standby (which makes sense; if you want to use the phone you don't always want to have to wait to connect to the network first), I find it hard to believe that anyone would associate that behavior with a nearly $5k phone bill.
As the above posters have mentioned, Sony removed the hardware emulation to cut costs on the unit and added another 20GB to make you feel like you got something in exchange.
Uh, no. They added 20GB because 60GB drives are going to be if not already more expensive than 80GB drives, since 80GB is what all the manufacturers are switching to. It's the exact same reason as cutting the Emotion Engine hardware: Cost.
As to whether the 80GB gets a rapid price drop once the 60GB versions are gone, that all depends on how much cost savings Sony got. They lose money on every PS3. The 60GB models are a write-off, but they can't continue to bleed money on every console sold and certainly can't bleed another $100. I would think a price drop in time for Christmas is a pretty sure thing, but before that I wouldn't be so sure.
Wow. That's right up there with "Nintendo hates money and market share so they're holding back the supply of Wiis" for retarded console conspiracy theories.
It's clear that the software is worse than hardware, yet the hardware emulation machines were cheaper.
No, they weren't. The PS3s with the Emotion Engine hardware are undoubtedly more expensive to make than those without. Remember the 60GB PS3s were only discounted because Sony was trying to clear them off the shelves to make way for the 80GB version.
Well, developing MCM capabilities isn't exactly risk-free either. Since in any event the MCM version would be a temporary hold over, the question is does it make sense to spend the R&D time to develop that technology for a product that would, ideally, only exist in the market for a short period?
Remember, AMD isn't Intel. They don't have the same resources as Intel. Spending the time on an MCM design would necessarily mean having fewer resources devoted to the native quad core version, and for whatever follow-on products are certainly in the pipeline now. So the question is -- delay the native quad core by working on an MCM, a technology that AMD has never done before and thus carries its own risks of delays, or focus on the quad core knowing you'll sacrifice some time to market, but hopefully being in a better position once you are done?
AMD chose the latter. Was it the right choice? I can't say. I can say that the time between Intel's MCM quad core and the Barcelona launch has been a bad time for AMD. Before that, AMD was enjoying greater than 30% server market share which is absolutely fantastic given the relative size of the competitors, but now they've dropped back down to around 20% I believe. They can probably gain a lot of it back -- the inherent advantages of Opteron vs equivalent Xeon parts haven't gone away -- but nevertheless they lost a lot of momentum. Certainly the delay in Barcelona's launch hurt them badly.
But if they went the other way? And the MCM part was also delayed, not as good as the native quad core, and the true native quad core delayed even further because of diverting resources from it? The end result may not have been any better. That's the nature of this industry -- there isn't any choice that doesn't involve a lot of risk.
Someone else said that this was not in fact the default behavior, and you have to enable automatic email downloads. As long as it's clear that it does this while the phone is in standby, this wouldn't really be Apple's fault. On the other hand I still couldn't fault the user for not realizing that this would happen. If they turned this on the day they got their iPhone, would they really remember that their phone is using the data connection while "off"?
:P
I think the ultimate blame lies with AT&T and all the other cell phone providers and their insane extortionist plans for making this a consideration in the first place.
Ah, my bad, thanks for clearing this up...so that explains Intels ability to suddenly have lower power chips...so it is they that are playing with the numbers this time, interesting :)
To some extent. The Pentium 4 is where this started. The Netburst architecture was very power hungry normally, but it's maximum power was insane. The graph of power consumption vs benchmark had a long "tail", which Intel sought to chop off. See, TDP is a real-life number, since it's used by OEMs and others to design thermal solutions for the parts. If the thermal solution is insufficient, then the parts fail. So it's not actually possible to fudge TDP numbers.
What Intel decided to do was implement an on-chip thermal diode and some logic that halved the effective clock cycle* if the temperature went above a certain threshold. What this meant is that based on how they programmed this logic, they could guarantee that the chip's power consumption would never go above a certain level no matter what code you were running. They had effectively lopped off the long tail. The downside is that if your application does draw more power than the limit, then you'll see vastly reduced performance because of the clock throttling. Most of the time this is transient so it's not that noticeable, but there were benchmarks out there that showed this effect very clearly. Like a certain game benchmark would get lower scores at 640x480 than 1600x1200 because at the lower res the game was cpu bound as was crossing the thermal threshold.
So theoretically with this feature Intel could fudge the numbers however they wanted and claim whatever TDP they desired. In practice they don't have that much flexibility because if they set the bar too low then their effective performance would suck, and their TDP numbers are set at average power + several standard deviations.
The main reason why Intel was able to suddenly have low power chips is because they ditched the Netburst architecture and went back to a design that was more balanced between high clock speeds and high IPC.
They kept the clock throttling logic, though, since it does still give them some benefit in reporting lower TDP numbers. AMD doesn't have this feature, so their TDP is truly the maximum power (as determined by running a "power virus") that you would ever see, even though it's unlikely. Since power has become ever more important as a marketing feature even outside of mobile, I'm not surprised that AMD would decide to start touting expected numbers vs maximum.
* Actually a 50% duty cycle of full speed for some number of microseconds followed by completely off.
You can actually turn an iPhone off. These people left their iPhones on standby and thought they were turned off. Just because the screen is black doesn't mean the device is off.
That's not the problem. Standby vs truly off should not matter other than 1) battery life and 2) receiving network updates and the delay to reconnect to the network when you decide you need to use the phone function. Standby should not result in $4,800 worth of charges, and I say that knowing full well the difference between standby and off. I'd be pissed as hell if I found out my phone was racking up data charges "on my behalf".
THIS is the problem:
"The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on."
Making that the default behavior is a stupid decision, and it's one that is even as we speak costing customers money when they may not be realizing it. Automatically using the data connection without regard to the cell phone plan is completely stupid. Does it know the difference between peak and off-peak hours? Does it know what the customer's monthly data quota is? It apparently doesn't know when the customer is in international roaming!
Having that default behavior may have been sensible if Apple knew that the only plans that would work with an iPhone were 100% global unlimited plans. Then they could assume it's okay to download things whenever it feels like. But with the reality of cell phone plans? No way. That's retarded. And it is not these peoples' fault that they didn't expect their phone to work that way.
No, people just have to learn the difference between "sleep" and "a kind of sleep which isn't actually sleep because the phone is actively using the wireless connection without you realizing it".
My phone, a treo, functions basically the same and like basically every phone with a "standby" mode -- when you hit the power button, it turns off, but as the anonying blinky light indicates the cell phone function is still active, meaning it's communicating with the base station. It will receive incoming calls, and receive other updates from the network. However what it doesn't do is automatically make phone calls, or activate GPRS and start downloading crap off the internet, or otherwise doing anything that will cost me money.
That is what is broken about this. Not the difference between "off with wireless enabled" and "really off". It's the difference between "wireless enabled but not used" and "wireless enabled and being used with no consideration of where you are and how much it's going to cost you". It's the difference between merely being connected to the cell network, and using the cell network in ways that result in charges.
It sounds like a matter of defaults. Setting up the phone to by default automatically download emails is a bad decision, because it causes the phone to work contrary to how most people expect -- which is that in standby mode, you aren't accruing data transfer charges.