Of course you weren't forgiving me because I hadn't said anything to you yet.
The same cause as your grammatical or mental problem with tense (as in past and future) is probably what is responsible for you missing out on the English comprehension to get the connotations of "cheap". Legos are not cheap. Cheap knock-offs of legos are cheap. "Cheap, plasticky" in the age of mass-produced Chinese crap at Wal-Mart means the battery door on your universal remote that breaks the first time you use it, the vinyl seats of the folding chair that tear because they're thinner and thus a cent cheaper. Legos are one of the least-cheap, most sturdy products Wal-Mart sells.
Hopefully that explains why paraphrasing the article as saying "flimsy" isn't as outrageous as you say if you understand the meanings connotations of English words. If you're still having problems with the whole past/future thing, I can't help you.
The Wiki article suggests that Level 3 supports only 1-bit alpha channel, or a transparent color which is really the same thing encoded in a different way.
Good point. Awesome authors alliterate a lot. Plus a lot of kids think pedantry is just so cool that they try to use it when inappropriate for hilarious self-pwnage.
Forgive me for jumping in (hah!) but regardless of what implies what, wouldn't it be better to use words from the article in the summary?
Sure, but at the same time, it still conveys largely the same meaning as what was in the article. As you note, someone would find a way to argue with whatever wording was used. I do grant that Zonk is a shitty editor, and in quotes "cheap, plasticky" would have actually had more punch (I'm assuming this wasn't the submitter's headline, or its their fault, though Zonk still sucks). "Cheap" has negative connotations beyond just merely being flimsy, and it was really funny to hear Super arguing that "cheap, plasticky" was a better review than "flimsy".
I'm sorry that sentence was not appropriately caveated with what I thought was the obvious implied context.
"The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had before the first Gulf War"
As to whether a non-functional WMD whose chemical payload was not maintained and is hence no longer a WMD counts as "destroyed" is up to you, or better whatever legalese makes up the agreement Saddam signed.
It doesn't really matter to the question of: Did Saddam have an active program after Gulf War I, to which the answer is "No".
If Bush had argued that we should invade Iraq because he had pre-Gulf War weapons that would no longer function, would we have invaded? Of course not. Thus Bush argued that Saddam had new weapons and an active program. No evidence has been found for this.
The meaning of plasticky does not seem to be apparent to you.
The meaning of cheap does not seem to be apparent to you. Neither does it's combination with "plasticky". It generally means light, and composed of cheap plastic (imagine that!), and has quite a lot to do with durability, especially in the vernacular, where "cheap plastic" is a common slur against something made for the least amount of money possible and which breaks the first time you put any torque on it.
If those words don't imply "Flimsy" to you, then you really are the one who lacks basic English comprehension. I do suppose you can be forgiven since you were willing to forgive.
I have it on good authority that the axes are actually offset by 0.05 degrees.
Really, does it matter? There are six conceptual axes, and nothing inherent saying they must be the same. It's six degrees of freedom, but maybe "SixFree" didn't ring the right bells for their marketing department.
...PSP UMDs come flying out like throwing stars during normal gameplay all the time...
Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of a negative review of a Sony product before it is even released. I'll wait until I see a demo unit and judge for myself.
I know, man. Those fanbois will come up with anything based on zero knowledege at all.
For example I myself was skeptical about the "PSP disks shoot out like ninja stars". I'll tell you I was quite dissapointed and ended up deciding not to purchase a PSP when I discovered that the fanboi hype turned out to be BS.
Seriously, I'd by a dozen PSPs with "UMD shuriken" technology. Firing a deadly barrage of "Armageddon", "XXX", and "Matrix: Revolutions" at my enemies would be the greatest thing ever.
So Ol' Jackie Boy thinks he was denied due process, eh? Well it turns out there's a perfect mechanism in place for him to bring his grievences to, which is the Appeals Court. If he really suffered as badly as he described, and the Judge so obviously was remiss in his duty to provide Jackie with fair and impartial access to the law, then he should easily be able to get the Court of Appeals to rule in his favor.
So we'll see what the appeals court has to say. I'm willing to bet most of his grievances in that letter don't show up in the appeal.
Sorry, but that argument just doesn't stick. You have the highest crime and murder rate in the world for a reason. And it's not JUST because of viodegames;)
No, but it isn't because of guns either. Guns are used to commit crimes; they do not cause crimes to be comitted. You can argue about the guy who wanted to commit a crime but couldn't because he couldn't get a gun, which probably would occur, but does he need a gun when he knows that his victims won't have one either? Are you saying it wouldn't be just as easy to hold you up in an alley with a nail bat?
Yes, the U.S. has a crime problem. However if you compare us to other modern democracies with and without guns and their crime rates, you will find something remarkable: The existence of guns does not correlate with a vastly higher crime rate, nor does the lack correlate with a vastly reduced crime rate. The U.S. has a high crime rate compared to a lot of other countries with guns. There are, as always, other factors of crime.
In this way anti-gun arguments are similar to anti-video game arguments. They both miss the fundamental, underlying causes of why crimes occur. Did a guy rob a liquor store because he had a gun, or because he was poor and desperate? Of course it's not to the same degree. A gun is actually a useful tool for committing crimes, whereas Grand Theft Auto doesn't teach you anything useful about grand theft auto, much less murder or armed robbery. It's not batshit crazy to blame crime on guns. It just misses the vastly more important underlying causes of crime that getting rid of guns would not help. You'd just end up with more nail-battings instead of shootings.
AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
No, what really matters is that there are now two stable, reliable providers of X86 parts throughout pretty much all market segments that should be around for the forseeable future.
In the past, K6 days, AMD competed only in the desktop space, and survived only because their parts were very cheap and had good price/performance -- maybe not the best, but good price/perf with a very low price is a good deal. During the K7 days, AMD survived only because their parts were the performance leaders and still rather cheap. Throughout these times, things were sketchy for AMD as a single botched product or a truly aggressive price war with Intel could put them under. With K8, AMD started to compete in server and HPC markets, and more and more in mobile markets, and in server and high-end desktop started charging a good deal of money, sacrificing some price/perf for profits. In other words they started to enjoy some of the high margin sales that Intel had been using to bank their price wars.
For the past couple years, AMD has been handing Intel their ass. Only complete morons thought Intel would sit on the ass they'd just been handed. Even if P4 and Itanium aren't the best products ever, Intel is a very capable company with the best fab tech and highest capacity of anyone. So now they've got their response to K8 lined up, and it looks very good. Nothing abnormal, completely predictable.
The difference between now and the past is that if say in the K7 days Intel had come out with a clearly superior product at a good price, AMD would have taken a huge hit. It took AMD having a superior product at a lower price to get the marketshare they had at the time, and without that their growth would have stagnated immediately. Now AMD has the reputation and revenue to survive such a thing. Now they can have a chance to come out with their own response to Intel.
Now this is all irrelevent if what you want to do is buy a processor tomorrow, in which case the price/perf comparisons of today will be most important to you. But in the overall sense of where the industry is going, the news is that AMD is still definitely in the race, and thus we have a more healthy processor industry than we've had in the past.
Note that Clinton has said that the intelligence available to his administration when he left office indicated that Iraq was actively developing WMDs.
I'm not sure how to take that. So Clinton's intelligence was also bad? Bush had more intel than Clinton did, but still bad intel is bad intel.
In other words, Saddam could say he'd destroyed every last WMD until he's blue in the face, but we would never know one way or the other until Saddam acquiesced to full and unfettered inspections.
Well, right, but he felt he couldn't do that, because if we had the opportunity to give Iraq a definitive thumbs up on being clean of chemical weapons, he wouldn't have leverage against his neighbors. That's part of that suicidal bluff I mentioned. It gave Bush the pretext he needed to go to war. And let's face it, that's what it was. I don't care how he frames it, Bush had a lot of reasons that he wanted to invade Iraq, it only matters which one will resonate with the people.
Frankly, the only way I would have ever wanted to hear the Iraq war framed is: "After having succesfully completed rebuilding Afghanistan and withdrawing our troops, we feel it is time..."
As long as you're happy with your wandering logic. Let me summarize: he had WMDs, but wasn't sure which ones he had and/or how many. So none of it counts.
He had none at the time that it mattered -- when the case for war was made.
It's that simple, and laser focused. No, none of the weapons from before Gulf War I that were not maintained count. And that, so far, is every one we've found.
Yay, my amateur ramblings were backed up by nuclear engineers!
The seismic people have enough experience looking at explosions to be able to tell chemical from nuclear, and this one apparently looks nuclear. It also looks to be 0.5kT or so. That makes it by far the smallest yield 1st test ever. Which either means they have perfected making small bombs (which is incredibly complicated and wasn't done by the Los Alamos people until 15 years after their first test), or they failed in their test. The latter is very likely.
I remember they called China in advance. According to the first article I found on Google news they told China to expect a 4KT explosion. Definitely sounds like a failed test.
No, the sarin was not largely potent, it was degraded and no longer sarin at all.
Bush claimed that Saddam had an active program and was continuing to stockpile. This is false, and continues to be false.
The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had. That they were badly accounted for is also not in doubt, as it was all part of Saddam's suicidally stupid bluff. It was not a "stockpile" if it was not maintained, and hence claiming that he had WMD is incorrect if you accept that an impotent WMD is not a WMD.
The theory is trivial, and the tech and materials are mostly trivial, again with the exception of the plutonium. But that doesn't mean constructing a working implosion device is trivial. You have to be extremely precise in your calculations in order to pull it off. This is why the culmination of a nuclear program always involves a live test, because that's really the only way to be sure that your math and engineering were correct.
And, because in the modern age there are thousands of seismic sites and many radiological sites that can detect the seismic and radioactive signature of a nuclear explosion, a nuclear test is also the announcement that you have succeeded in your nuclear ambitions. For a recent example of how a nuclear test is both final exam and public announcement, see Pakistan.
So the fact that a successfull nuclear test would be quite apparent (and as we are seeing the absence of a nuclear test as well), and that NK called China to tell them so they would be sure China was watching closely, tells me that this was probably a real nuclear test. A test that, it would appear, failed. If memory serves, they told China to expect a 2KT explosion, with the actual measurement at about 0.5KT?
Sounds to me like they had at best a partial detonation of the nuclear material, but didn't have the timing of the high explosives good enough to pack all the plutonium into a small enough ball for it all to react before the reaction force blew it apart.
Saddam could bluff about having chemical weapons. Kim can bluff about developing nukes, but it really doesn't make sense to try to bluff a nuclear test. And of course we know he desperately wants them. So I'm going with the theory that this was a real nuclear test, just a failed one, and North Korea doesn't have a working nuke yet, but they are very close. The data from just this test may be enough for them to fix it.
I'm not going to bother with links, you should be able to find some yourself, but to an extent the GP is correct in that we found warheads...
Of course what he fails to mention is that these weapons pre-dated the first gulf war, and their payloads, which degrade over time, had not been maintained and were useless as chemical weapons (well, you might give a few people nasty side side effects just like you would spraying pesticides randomly, but no horrible Sarin gas death).
The claim that Saddam had an active weapons program and that he had working chemical weapons while under sanction, continues to be completely unsupported.
Sycophants however will continue to say that these findings prove Bush was right. As you are very astute to note, Bush himself will not claim so.
Agreed, there. I'm not bothering to pre-order. I'll probably stop by one of the stores on the day it's out, and if they don't have any, I'll try a week later, or so. If they don't have it, it's not the end of the world. I still play with my SNES, so given that I'll probably be keeping the Wii for years, who cares if I don't get it for another week? I'm not trying to impress anyone by getting it first.
Says who? Like I said, it's used that way in industry a lot, but it varies. Multi-core can mean per chip or per die, usually depending on the context. E.g. as an architect I wouldn't call an MCM multi-core because from my perspective the other core is on the other side of the FSB.
Chip, by the way, is another one of those words that can vary depending on context to mean either a die or package, so you probably should have asked for clarification from whoever told you that it means "on a single chip".
A good example of another way of looking at this is IBM's Power 5, which is a dual-core chip, and when packaged onto a gigantic MCM with 3 other Power 5 the result is called "eight-way", using the terminology for an MP system.
only when you've bought into the falsehood of your first claim. Single die is no more "true" multi-core than MCM is.
No, there is still a distinction, because you can call an MCM multi-core, fine, but it isn't multi-core done right. You are focusing entirely on the "true multi-core" aspect, whereas I'm focusing on the "architercurally significant differences in design" aspect. You're taking it entirely as an issue of "is Intel allowed to call their product multi-core", a literalist view. I was taking "true" in a less existential form, one that means "multi-core done right".
It is in every way. The purpose of such claims is to cast doubt on the performance of the Intel product until AMD can bring theirs to market. It's classic FUD and nothing other than that. Intel's MCM will deliver 4 cores on a single processor. That's a true quad core part regardless of what AMD says and the fact that they say otherwise proves that AMD is practicing FUD.
You're right, it is of course a marketing ploy to cast doubt on the performance of the Intel product, and in that sense it is FUD. I got caught up in the new definition of "FUD" meaning "bullshit", which this isn't, because the fact is that you should doubt the performance of Intel's MCM as a direct result of it not being a single die. By the same token it's FUD when AMD casts aspersions on Intel's bus architecture and MP scalability, even though those aspersions are for the most part accurate.
At the same time, Intel's MCM itself is nothing but a marketing ploy. "Intel's MCM will deliver 4 cores on a single processor". Check off that bullet point on the marketing brochure. Is it a good implementation? Well, no, but the bullet point is still checked off, and besides they'll do it "right" in the near future anyway.
Certainly, but a single die solution can't be brought to market as quickly. A processor that I can buy today is infinitely faster than one I can't.
Being to market faster with an inferior product helps Intel, but not really the customer, who in most cases would be better served by waiting until Intel comes out with their four-cores-on-one-die product, which they absolutely will. The MCM is a stop-gap whose sole function is not to deliver a quality product to customers but to prevent AMD from being the first to have a quad-core part. It's innevitable short life, just like the short life of the dual-core MCM, shows what Intel really thinks of their "true" multi-core.
AMD has a legitimate point to make, but you've taken issue with their wording. That's fine, I'm not going to defend their marketing department, but there is a legitimate point to be made and that's the point I'm making.
Yes, implications like lower yield, which will result in higher prices and probably lower clock rates until the process improves.
That's one of them, yes. AMD will have to work hard to get their yields up.
That isn't going to mean lower clock rates as a result. I mean, it's a new process (65nm), so that will take time to ramp both the frequency and yields, but that is irrespective of the choice to have a single quad core die. The things causing the faults that make a processor inoperable are different than the things that cause variations in transistor speed, and while the former occur more or less at random and are thus more likely with larger error, the latter tend to be more widely spread across the wafer.
I would expect that the higher die area would result in a percentage loss across all speed bins, but not to significantly change the ratio of bin splits.
Speaking of clock frequencies, though, be aware that one of the reason why an MCM is worse is because it creates a greater signal integrity problem for the FSB. Intel's bus already has major issues, the reason why the MP parts have always had lower bus frequencies than the non-MP parts. This makes it worse.
If you doubt the superiority of single-die solutions, then watch Intel. They are going to move to a single-die quadcore part as soon as they finish developing one, just like they did with their dual-core parts which also started life as MCMs. The only reason they are making the MCM is for time-to-market reasons -- which should be obvious, because with their huge capacity and the best process in the world, they certainly aren't worried about the yield issues of a quad-core die.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that (though I'd wait to buy the real deal instead of the MCM myself), it's Intel's way of being able to say "we did it first", and pointing out the difference between their and AMD's solution is AMD's way of saying "no you didn't".
Well there isn't some tech language board like there is with the French language, but usually the usage of multi-core implies on a single die, not an MCM. Still Intel can legitimately call it that, AMD is just pointing out that there is a distinction between an MCM and a "true" multi-core, which there is.
And the condemnation isn't FUD -- there are implications of that choice that affect the performance of the resulting part. Does it make the Intel quadcore part bad? Not necessarily, but worse than it would be were it a single die.
Yes, but saying "Oooh, our chip is true quad core and yours isn't" doesn't on its own say anything about final cost or performance.
If you know something about computer architecture it does. This is MPF, so it is reasonable to assume a good portion of the audience would understand the implications of that statement.
Just because that statement by itself does not produce a benchmark score for you doesn't mean that it is not a useful statement.
Um, actually, in this case it's more like saying Siamese twins are the only true twins, and taking two non-conjoined twins and sewing them together does not make them Siamese.
And it will undoubtedly happen again. Yet here we are, a mere millenium and a half after the Roman collapse, bigger and better than ever before.
Right, and in between we had the Dark Ages. If you had told the Romans that their civilization was about to collapse, but not to worry because after a thousand years of wretched barbary and ignorance that a new enlightened civilization would arise, do you think they wouldn't have worried?
If this kind of adaptability and survivability showed up once or twice, I'd call it luck, and wish for more. But when it turns out to be the normal thing, repeated constantly throughout all of human history, it stops being luck and starts being the fundamental nature of the human species.
Adaptability is without a doubt an aspect of the human species, and it isn't "luck" any more than a cheetah running fast is luck. However depending on adaptability to bring us through any particular calamity, particularly when we cannot name what form that adapatability would have to take, is indeed luck. Just like being able to run fast doesn't guarantee a cheetah's survival -- being able to sprint won't produce game for them to hunt. Being able to understand and utilize new sources of energy won't cause one to appear.
I've read before that it is believed that mankind barely survived the last major ice age, with the worldwide population dropping to under a hundred individuals. However you slice it, that was a lucky break. For whatever reason that those hundred survived, it was clearly not an attribute common to humans in general, who for all their adaptability were unable to survive the harsh conditions. While those few may have had a (lucky) genetic advantage, I suspect it was more the praticulars of their environment. Which could have easily been different, and a hundred humans easily could have easily been wiped away by a thousand things that no amount of 'adaptability' would overcome.
We adapt. We endure. We survive. We build and grow and prosper. We respond to setbacks not by going extinct, but by overcoming them and growing beyond them. This isn't wishing. This is a reasonable interpretation of the historical record.
You can only say that we have failed to go extinct for the period that our species has existed, perhaps 100,000 years, which would hardly impress many other species. The dinosaurs had a reign of tens of millions of years before being wiped out. If you had gone off of historical trends during the late Cretaceous, you would have determined that while some specias may die out and others arise, the dinosaurs were there to stay forever as the dominant animals.
The only reasonable interpretation of the historical record is that we haven't gone extinct yet, and are not so ill-adapted that it seems likely we will soon.
But that notwithstanding, if your overal point is that humanity will probably not go extinct as a result of our failure to develop a new source of energy, then I remain thoroughly unimpressed. I personally would like to do better than that.
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Of course you weren't forgiving me because I hadn't said anything to you yet.
The same cause as your grammatical or mental problem with tense (as in past and future) is probably what is responsible for you missing out on the English comprehension to get the connotations of "cheap". Legos are not cheap. Cheap knock-offs of legos are cheap. "Cheap, plasticky" in the age of mass-produced Chinese crap at Wal-Mart means the battery door on your universal remote that breaks the first time you use it, the vinyl seats of the folding chair that tear because they're thinner and thus a cent cheaper. Legos are one of the least-cheap, most sturdy products Wal-Mart sells.
Hopefully that explains why paraphrasing the article as saying "flimsy" isn't as outrageous as you say if you understand the meanings connotations of English words. If you're still having problems with the whole past/future thing, I can't help you.
The Wiki article suggests that Level 3 supports only 1-bit alpha channel, or a transparent color which is really the same thing encoded in a different way.
Good point. Awesome authors alliterate a lot. Plus a lot of kids think pedantry is just so cool that they try to use it when inappropriate for hilarious self-pwnage.
Forgive me for jumping in (hah!) but regardless of what implies what, wouldn't it be better to use words from the article in the summary?
Sure, but at the same time, it still conveys largely the same meaning as what was in the article. As you note, someone would find a way to argue with whatever wording was used. I do grant that Zonk is a shitty editor, and in quotes "cheap, plasticky" would have actually had more punch (I'm assuming this wasn't the submitter's headline, or its their fault, though Zonk still sucks). "Cheap" has negative connotations beyond just merely being flimsy, and it was really funny to hear Super arguing that "cheap, plasticky" was a better review than "flimsy".
I'm sorry that sentence was not appropriately caveated with what I thought was the obvious implied context.
"The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had before the first Gulf War"
As to whether a non-functional WMD whose chemical payload was not maintained and is hence no longer a WMD counts as "destroyed" is up to you, or better whatever legalese makes up the agreement Saddam signed.
It doesn't really matter to the question of: Did Saddam have an active program after Gulf War I, to which the answer is "No".
If Bush had argued that we should invade Iraq because he had pre-Gulf War weapons that would no longer function, would we have invaded? Of course not. Thus Bush argued that Saddam had new weapons and an active program. No evidence has been found for this.
The meaning of plasticky does not seem to be apparent to you.
The meaning of cheap does not seem to be apparent to you. Neither does it's combination with "plasticky". It generally means light, and composed of cheap plastic (imagine that!), and has quite a lot to do with durability, especially in the vernacular, where "cheap plastic" is a common slur against something made for the least amount of money possible and which breaks the first time you put any torque on it.
If those words don't imply "Flimsy" to you, then you really are the one who lacks basic English comprehension. I do suppose you can be forgiven since you were willing to forgive.
I have it on good authority that the axes are actually offset by 0.05 degrees.
Really, does it matter? There are six conceptual axes, and nothing inherent saying they must be the same. It's six degrees of freedom, but maybe "SixFree" didn't ring the right bells for their marketing department.
...PSP UMDs come flying out like throwing stars during normal gameplay all the time...
Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of a negative review of a Sony product before it is even released. I'll wait until I see a demo unit and judge for myself.
I know, man. Those fanbois will come up with anything based on zero knowledege at all.
For example I myself was skeptical about the "PSP disks shoot out like ninja stars". I'll tell you I was quite dissapointed and ended up deciding not to purchase a PSP when I discovered that the fanboi hype turned out to be BS.
Seriously, I'd by a dozen PSPs with "UMD shuriken" technology. Firing a deadly barrage of "Armageddon", "XXX", and "Matrix: Revolutions" at my enemies would be the greatest thing ever.
Nice link.
So Ol' Jackie Boy thinks he was denied due process, eh? Well it turns out there's a perfect mechanism in place for him to bring his grievences to, which is the Appeals Court. If he really suffered as badly as he described, and the Judge so obviously was remiss in his duty to provide Jackie with fair and impartial access to the law, then he should easily be able to get the Court of Appeals to rule in his favor.
So we'll see what the appeals court has to say. I'm willing to bet most of his grievances in that letter don't show up in the appeal.
Sorry, but that argument just doesn't stick. You have the highest crime and murder rate in the world for a reason. And it's not JUST because of viodegames ;)
No, but it isn't because of guns either. Guns are used to commit crimes; they do not cause crimes to be comitted. You can argue about the guy who wanted to commit a crime but couldn't because he couldn't get a gun, which probably would occur, but does he need a gun when he knows that his victims won't have one either? Are you saying it wouldn't be just as easy to hold you up in an alley with a nail bat?
Yes, the U.S. has a crime problem. However if you compare us to other modern democracies with and without guns and their crime rates, you will find something remarkable: The existence of guns does not correlate with a vastly higher crime rate, nor does the lack correlate with a vastly reduced crime rate. The U.S. has a high crime rate compared to a lot of other countries with guns. There are, as always, other factors of crime.
In this way anti-gun arguments are similar to anti-video game arguments. They both miss the fundamental, underlying causes of why crimes occur. Did a guy rob a liquor store because he had a gun, or because he was poor and desperate? Of course it's not to the same degree. A gun is actually a useful tool for committing crimes, whereas Grand Theft Auto doesn't teach you anything useful about grand theft auto, much less murder or armed robbery. It's not batshit crazy to blame crime on guns. It just misses the vastly more important underlying causes of crime that getting rid of guns would not help. You'd just end up with more nail-battings instead of shootings.
AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
No, what really matters is that there are now two stable, reliable providers of X86 parts throughout pretty much all market segments that should be around for the forseeable future.
In the past, K6 days, AMD competed only in the desktop space, and survived only because their parts were very cheap and had good price/performance -- maybe not the best, but good price/perf with a very low price is a good deal. During the K7 days, AMD survived only because their parts were the performance leaders and still rather cheap. Throughout these times, things were sketchy for AMD as a single botched product or a truly aggressive price war with Intel could put them under. With K8, AMD started to compete in server and HPC markets, and more and more in mobile markets, and in server and high-end desktop started charging a good deal of money, sacrificing some price/perf for profits. In other words they started to enjoy some of the high margin sales that Intel had been using to bank their price wars.
For the past couple years, AMD has been handing Intel their ass. Only complete morons thought Intel would sit on the ass they'd just been handed. Even if P4 and Itanium aren't the best products ever, Intel is a very capable company with the best fab tech and highest capacity of anyone. So now they've got their response to K8 lined up, and it looks very good. Nothing abnormal, completely predictable.
The difference between now and the past is that if say in the K7 days Intel had come out with a clearly superior product at a good price, AMD would have taken a huge hit. It took AMD having a superior product at a lower price to get the marketshare they had at the time, and without that their growth would have stagnated immediately. Now AMD has the reputation and revenue to survive such a thing. Now they can have a chance to come out with their own response to Intel.
Now this is all irrelevent if what you want to do is buy a processor tomorrow, in which case the price/perf comparisons of today will be most important to you. But in the overall sense of where the industry is going, the news is that AMD is still definitely in the race, and thus we have a more healthy processor industry than we've had in the past.
Note that Clinton has said that the intelligence available to his administration when he left office indicated that Iraq was actively developing WMDs.
I'm not sure how to take that. So Clinton's intelligence was also bad? Bush had more intel than Clinton did, but still bad intel is bad intel.
In other words, Saddam could say he'd destroyed every last WMD until he's blue in the face, but we would never know one way or the other until Saddam acquiesced to full and unfettered inspections.
Well, right, but he felt he couldn't do that, because if we had the opportunity to give Iraq a definitive thumbs up on being clean of chemical weapons, he wouldn't have leverage against his neighbors. That's part of that suicidal bluff I mentioned. It gave Bush the pretext he needed to go to war. And let's face it, that's what it was. I don't care how he frames it, Bush had a lot of reasons that he wanted to invade Iraq, it only matters which one will resonate with the people.
Frankly, the only way I would have ever wanted to hear the Iraq war framed is: "After having succesfully completed rebuilding Afghanistan and withdrawing our troops, we feel it is time..."
As long as you're happy with your wandering logic. Let me summarize: he had WMDs, but wasn't sure which ones he had and/or how many. So none of it counts.
He had none at the time that it mattered -- when the case for war was made.
It's that simple, and laser focused. No, none of the weapons from before Gulf War I that were not maintained count. And that, so far, is every one we've found.
Yay, my amateur ramblings were backed up by nuclear engineers!
The seismic people have enough experience looking at explosions to be able to tell chemical from nuclear, and this one apparently looks nuclear. It also looks to be 0.5kT or so. That makes it by far the smallest yield 1st test ever. Which either means they have perfected making small bombs (which is incredibly complicated and wasn't done by the Los Alamos people until 15 years after their first test), or they failed in their test. The latter is very likely.
I remember they called China in advance. According to the first article I found on Google news they told China to expect a 4KT explosion. Definitely sounds like a failed test.
No, the sarin was not largely potent, it was degraded and no longer sarin at all.
Bush claimed that Saddam had an active program and was continuing to stockpile. This is false, and continues to be false.
The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had. That they were badly accounted for is also not in doubt, as it was all part of Saddam's suicidally stupid bluff. It was not a "stockpile" if it was not maintained, and hence claiming that he had WMD is incorrect if you accept that an impotent WMD is not a WMD.
No relevent devices have been found to this day.
The theory is trivial, and the tech and materials are mostly trivial, again with the exception of the plutonium. But that doesn't mean constructing a working implosion device is trivial. You have to be extremely precise in your calculations in order to pull it off. This is why the culmination of a nuclear program always involves a live test, because that's really the only way to be sure that your math and engineering were correct.
And, because in the modern age there are thousands of seismic sites and many radiological sites that can detect the seismic and radioactive signature of a nuclear explosion, a nuclear test is also the announcement that you have succeeded in your nuclear ambitions. For a recent example of how a nuclear test is both final exam and public announcement, see Pakistan.
So the fact that a successfull nuclear test would be quite apparent (and as we are seeing the absence of a nuclear test as well), and that NK called China to tell them so they would be sure China was watching closely, tells me that this was probably a real nuclear test. A test that, it would appear, failed. If memory serves, they told China to expect a 2KT explosion, with the actual measurement at about 0.5KT?
Sounds to me like they had at best a partial detonation of the nuclear material, but didn't have the timing of the high explosives good enough to pack all the plutonium into a small enough ball for it all to react before the reaction force blew it apart.
Saddam could bluff about having chemical weapons. Kim can bluff about developing nukes, but it really doesn't make sense to try to bluff a nuclear test. And of course we know he desperately wants them. So I'm going with the theory that this was a real nuclear test, just a failed one, and North Korea doesn't have a working nuke yet, but they are very close. The data from just this test may be enough for them to fix it.
I'm not going to bother with links, you should be able to find some yourself, but to an extent the GP is correct in that we found warheads...
Of course what he fails to mention is that these weapons pre-dated the first gulf war, and their payloads, which degrade over time, had not been maintained and were useless as chemical weapons (well, you might give a few people nasty side side effects just like you would spraying pesticides randomly, but no horrible Sarin gas death).
The claim that Saddam had an active weapons program and that he had working chemical weapons while under sanction, continues to be completely unsupported.
Sycophants however will continue to say that these findings prove Bush was right. As you are very astute to note, Bush himself will not claim so.
No, they aren't going to get funny either.
Agreed, there. I'm not bothering to pre-order. I'll probably stop by one of the stores on the day it's out, and if they don't have any, I'll try a week later, or so. If they don't have it, it's not the end of the world. I still play with my SNES, so given that I'll probably be keeping the Wii for years, who cares if I don't get it for another week? I'm not trying to impress anyone by getting it first.
says who? It means on a single chip.
Says who? Like I said, it's used that way in industry a lot, but it varies. Multi-core can mean per chip or per die, usually depending on the context. E.g. as an architect I wouldn't call an MCM multi-core because from my perspective the other core is on the other side of the FSB.
Chip, by the way, is another one of those words that can vary depending on context to mean either a die or package, so you probably should have asked for clarification from whoever told you that it means "on a single chip".
A good example of another way of looking at this is IBM's Power 5, which is a dual-core chip, and when packaged onto a gigantic MCM with 3 other Power 5 the result is called "eight-way", using the terminology for an MP system.
only when you've bought into the falsehood of your first claim. Single die is no more "true" multi-core than MCM is.
No, there is still a distinction, because you can call an MCM multi-core, fine, but it isn't multi-core done right. You are focusing entirely on the "true multi-core" aspect, whereas I'm focusing on the "architercurally significant differences in design" aspect. You're taking it entirely as an issue of "is Intel allowed to call their product multi-core", a literalist view. I was taking "true" in a less existential form, one that means "multi-core done right".
It is in every way. The purpose of such claims is to cast doubt on the performance of the Intel product until AMD can bring theirs to market. It's classic FUD and nothing other than that. Intel's MCM will deliver 4 cores on a single processor. That's a true quad core part regardless of what AMD says and the fact that they say otherwise proves that AMD is practicing FUD.
You're right, it is of course a marketing ploy to cast doubt on the performance of the Intel product, and in that sense it is FUD. I got caught up in the new definition of "FUD" meaning "bullshit", which this isn't, because the fact is that you should doubt the performance of Intel's MCM as a direct result of it not being a single die. By the same token it's FUD when AMD casts aspersions on Intel's bus architecture and MP scalability, even though those aspersions are for the most part accurate.
At the same time, Intel's MCM itself is nothing but a marketing ploy. "Intel's MCM will deliver 4 cores on a single processor". Check off that bullet point on the marketing brochure. Is it a good implementation? Well, no, but the bullet point is still checked off, and besides they'll do it "right" in the near future anyway.
Certainly, but a single die solution can't be brought to market as quickly. A processor that I can buy today is infinitely faster than one I can't.
Being to market faster with an inferior product helps Intel, but not really the customer, who in most cases would be better served by waiting until Intel comes out with their four-cores-on-one-die product, which they absolutely will. The MCM is a stop-gap whose sole function is not to deliver a quality product to customers but to prevent AMD from being the first to have a quad-core part. It's innevitable short life, just like the short life of the dual-core MCM, shows what Intel really thinks of their "true" multi-core.
AMD has a legitimate point to make, but you've taken issue with their wording. That's fine, I'm not going to defend their marketing department, but there is a legitimate point to be made and that's the point I'm making.
Yes, implications like lower yield, which will result in higher prices and probably lower clock rates until the process improves.
That's one of them, yes. AMD will have to work hard to get their yields up.
That isn't going to mean lower clock rates as a result. I mean, it's a new process (65nm), so that will take time to ramp both the frequency and yields, but that is irrespective of the choice to have a single quad core die. The things causing the faults that make a processor inoperable are different than the things that cause variations in transistor speed, and while the former occur more or less at random and are thus more likely with larger error, the latter tend to be more widely spread across the wafer.
I would expect that the higher die area would result in a percentage loss across all speed bins, but not to significantly change the ratio of bin splits.
Speaking of clock frequencies, though, be aware that one of the reason why an MCM is worse is because it creates a greater signal integrity problem for the FSB. Intel's bus already has major issues, the reason why the MP parts have always had lower bus frequencies than the non-MP parts. This makes it worse.
If you doubt the superiority of single-die solutions, then watch Intel. They are going to move to a single-die quadcore part as soon as they finish developing one, just like they did with their dual-core parts which also started life as MCMs. The only reason they are making the MCM is for time-to-market reasons -- which should be obvious, because with their huge capacity and the best process in the world, they certainly aren't worried about the yield issues of a quad-core die.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that (though I'd wait to buy the real deal instead of the MCM myself), it's Intel's way of being able to say "we did it first", and pointing out the difference between their and AMD's solution is AMD's way of saying "no you didn't".
Well there isn't some tech language board like there is with the French language, but usually the usage of multi-core implies on a single die, not an MCM. Still Intel can legitimately call it that, AMD is just pointing out that there is a distinction between an MCM and a "true" multi-core, which there is.
And the condemnation isn't FUD -- there are implications of that choice that affect the performance of the resulting part. Does it make the Intel quadcore part bad? Not necessarily, but worse than it would be were it a single die.
Yes, but saying "Oooh, our chip is true quad core and yours isn't" doesn't on its own say anything about final cost or performance.
If you know something about computer architecture it does. This is MPF, so it is reasonable to assume a good portion of the audience would understand the implications of that statement.
Just because that statement by itself does not produce a benchmark score for you doesn't mean that it is not a useful statement.
Um, actually, in this case it's more like saying Siamese twins are the only true twins, and taking two non-conjoined twins and sewing them together does not make them Siamese.
And it will undoubtedly happen again. Yet here we are, a mere millenium and a half after the Roman collapse, bigger and better than ever before.
Right, and in between we had the Dark Ages. If you had told the Romans that their civilization was about to collapse, but not to worry because after a thousand years of wretched barbary and ignorance that a new enlightened civilization would arise, do you think they wouldn't have worried?
If this kind of adaptability and survivability showed up once or twice, I'd call it luck, and wish for more. But when it turns out to be the normal thing, repeated constantly throughout all of human history, it stops being luck and starts being the fundamental nature of the human species.
Adaptability is without a doubt an aspect of the human species, and it isn't "luck" any more than a cheetah running fast is luck. However depending on adaptability to bring us through any particular calamity, particularly when we cannot name what form that adapatability would have to take, is indeed luck. Just like being able to run fast doesn't guarantee a cheetah's survival -- being able to sprint won't produce game for them to hunt. Being able to understand and utilize new sources of energy won't cause one to appear.
I've read before that it is believed that mankind barely survived the last major ice age, with the worldwide population dropping to under a hundred individuals. However you slice it, that was a lucky break. For whatever reason that those hundred survived, it was clearly not an attribute common to humans in general, who for all their adaptability were unable to survive the harsh conditions. While those few may have had a (lucky) genetic advantage, I suspect it was more the praticulars of their environment. Which could have easily been different, and a hundred humans easily could have easily been wiped away by a thousand things that no amount of 'adaptability' would overcome.
We adapt. We endure. We survive. We build and grow and prosper. We respond to setbacks not by going extinct, but by overcoming them and growing beyond them. This isn't wishing. This is a reasonable interpretation of the historical record.
You can only say that we have failed to go extinct for the period that our species has existed, perhaps 100,000 years, which would hardly impress many other species. The dinosaurs had a reign of tens of millions of years before being wiped out. If you had gone off of historical trends during the late Cretaceous, you would have determined that while some specias may die out and others arise, the dinosaurs were there to stay forever as the dominant animals.
The only reasonable interpretation of the historical record is that we haven't gone extinct yet, and are not so ill-adapted that it seems likely we will soon.
But that notwithstanding, if your overal point is that humanity will probably not go extinct as a result of our failure to develop a new source of energy, then I remain thoroughly unimpressed. I personally would like to do better than that.