Getting a space elevator mentioned in Nature is huge, whether or not it is a viable project. It will help give it the exposure it needs to get debated on whether it is a viable project by people that could actually help get it off the ground.
I hope it isn't premature. I worry about generating a lot of hype about an elevator, and then have it go nowhere, or have a high-profile experiment/test fail. I don't want to see it go the way of cold fusion, where everyone knows what it is, and thinks its a joke, so you can never get funding for it again.
In WWI, the French held off the Germans for years. In the process, they lost millions of men. They essentially threw an entire generation of young men into the meat grinder, and held off the German advance. That takes balls.
In WWII, if either GB or the US had France's long land border with Germany, they would have been destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, just like France was. The only reason GB wasn't destroyed is the English Channel. The only reason we weren't is because of the Atlantic Ocean. Stalin had the Russian Winter as a natural barrier. What about France?
So the only reason we get to call the French cowards is a fluke of geography. That seems cowardly to me.
I never claimed te electoral college was better than a direct election, eh? Just mentioned that your one vote _is_ more likely to be the one that turns the entire election, and so _could_ carry even more weight than the original poster gave it credit for.
Except that's not true. Are you paying attention? I live in Texas. My vote is not more likely to turn the election than it would be in a direct election. In fact, if I had lived in TX in 2000, then my vote would have been far more likely to turn a direct election than the electoral college.
The big lie of the "your vote is more important than in a direct election" statement is that it's only true if you live someplace that at least approximates the assumptions of your argument.
So in general, your statement is false. In specific cases, it may be true, but giving some people more power in exchange for completely removing power from others is, to my mind, the opposite of democracy.
Granted, the primary system is also broken. But if we didn't have the electoral college, then it would be easier for the person most acceptable to the majority to run on an independent ticket.
Part of the impetus for digital voting is to continually try to make the process as simple as possible for the idiots who can't figure anything out. What was the problem with the Florida elections? Very little was wrong with the ELECTION process and law, except it presumed that the people voting actually had a brain.
Well, except for the part that didn't require the machines to be configured to spit back out unreadable ballots instead of eating them.
Seriously, why do you think all those ballots in Florida were ruined? Could the machine not tell that they were invalid? Of course it could! In some places, it spits the ballot back out. In others it ate them. In the news, it was simply assumed that all the people in the counties with high invalidation rates -- counties that happened to have large minority populations -- were stupid, and the people in other counties were just smart. And people just bought it, never asking why an invalid ballot would be accepted (and then destroyed) in the first place, when the obvious answer was "it doesn't need to be, and wasn't in many places".
There was definitely something wrong with the process in Florida.
Why should someone with a 6th grade education GET a vote?
Having a 6th grade education doesn't mean you can't understand the issues you care about. It also doesn't mean you aren't a citizen.
Or a non-english speaker? If the person isn't minimally competent in english, how informed a voter ARE they?
If they read non-English press, probably more informed than you.;)
If they can't figure out voting, it's pretty good proof that they're not competent to cast a vote. Sorry if that's not politically correct enough but is it so terrible to require a minimum level of sensibility to participate in a democracy?
Only when some select group defines what "sensibility" means. Since historically those select groups have been majorities in power who have used the definition of "sensibility" to prevent minorities from ever entering the ballot box, then yes I think I can say with history on my side that it is quite terrible.
I think the other problem comes from trying to apply technology to solve every problem, actually. Paper ballots, marked in ink, are the simplest tech around and should be used for the actual voting (because ultimately there is a paper trail). Let the technology be applied at the ballot desk, where the voter can feed their sheet in and are IMMEDIATELY told if it was read OK. If it's ok, the person presses the 'confirm' button and the computer increments the various candidates' vote counts.
I agree completely. The best way to apply voting machine technology is as a vote verifier not as an authoritative reader/counter. Many machines were in fact used in this manner, at least for voter verification, rejecting ballots that it could not read for the voter to fix. Were you not aware of this? What was that about not being able to vote if you're not informed? Still want to vote? I rest my case.:)
Actually, under the electoral college system your single vote is more likely to sway the election in the event of a close vote than it would be in a direct majority count, and is therefore, theoretically, _more_ important.
Ah yes, I remember the first/. article where some educated person posited this inane theory. Yes, it does in fact amplify the power of groups of small groups of voters thus allowing them to effect the larger election in ways their raw numbers would not. There are a couple reasons why the electoral college is still bad.
First, it assumes that having the chance for one vote to sway the entire election is a positive thing, or the best measure of the importance of your vote. I don't really want my vote to be the one that decides the election; I want it to be the votes of myself and everyone who has similar views, wherever they may be.
Second, as you said: your vote can only turn the election if the race is very close in your county/state. Thus only votes in contested districts are theoretically more important. Votes in uncontested districts are instead nullified. They are less important. In fact they are completely irrelevant. So to give individual voters in highly contested districts more power, you remove power from individuals in uncontested districts entriely.
This is not a good tradeoff. You disenfranchise political minorities so that a voting machine... er, I mean voter in Florida can turn the entire election.
Let me put it this way: I live in Texas. I'm not going to vote for Bush. Tell me again how the Electoral College makes my vote more important?
One of the things I really miss when I sit behind a windows computer is a bash shell, tab completion, gcc, vi... and you usually arent allowed to install cygwin on people's systems:)
Yeah, I'm considering getting a USB flash stick and putting cygwin and other stuff on it for when I'm stuck at a windows machine. And hey, I can put my config files on it for when I'm at a new unix machine as well.
NX bit may not be a panacea, but it's still very useful. There's a reason OpenBSD is trying to support it. Is it supported in Linux yet? And if not, why not? "Don't allow this to execute" is a basic permission, like read-only, that should have been in the VM system from day 1 -- and I think it was, in many other architectures.
And yes, I do think you'd find a shitstorm on/. if MS didn't release this.
Why, Why did Columbus find us, instead of the REAL India?!!!
Um... Since his plan was "sail west from Spain until we reach India", the odds were pretty strongly against him finding India before he found the Americas. At least according to my globe.
The FEMA boxes effectively turn the tens of thousands of individual broadcast stations into a single government propaganda channel. When activated, there will be only one version of the news: the government version.
I'm not sure but I think that's called the Emergency Alert System;)
Not so fast! I've heard of this before, and it does turn thousands of individual broadcast stations into government propaganda outlets. But I think he got the wrong acronym for Fox News.
Shouldn't the valuable lesson be "leave the dildo in the car when you go into Target?"
Heh. Yep! Leave it to a geek to learn the impractical lesson. "Never leave the house without your cross-spectrum radio-frequency jammer, tin foil, and collapsable antennae, because otherwise you won't be able to take dildos with you into Target."
Which, granted, is advice I could have used on several occasions. Where was he then?!
Sure as shit they can profit, if SCO's scam pays off. If it doesn't and SCO combusts, well, Canopy gets first dibs on reclaiming what they lost. In other words, they pay the shyster to shit (which is what shysters do), and if the law complains the shit smells too much, they can get their money back. Great potential gains, absolute minimal risk.
You'll never come up with a purely quantitative and accurate measure of "worth" since the word itself is far too vague, and is dependent on the observer. It's entirely a human-derived qualitative value, so trying to find some scale that measures it perfectly like degrees Kelvin is simply not possible.
Money as worth? That's insane. The cost of something is simply how much two parties were able to agree upon, where "agree" should not be construed to mean that both parties have equal say in what the final cost is.
Is the "worth" of a CD $15, or is it the average of the times I decided to pay $15 for a CD and the times I said "That's not worth $15" and didn't buy it? Maybe I'd have been willing to pay $7 in some of those cases, but the opportunity to negotiate wasn't there. What is the "worth" now?
The only time money is a good measure of worth is to the person/business selling something for money. In that case, money is the only thing they get for something, so that's all they can measure by. In most other cases, if money is involved at all it is simply a factor to be considered as part of overall worth.
Equating money and worth is nuts! There are way too many obvious examples for me to list them all. Teachers and diamonds both come to mind.
Who cares if Al Franken dislikes you, when the term "lying liar" is accurately applied to you regardless?
Or are you just saying that if Al Franken noticed you enough to personally call you on your lies, you'd realize you'd finally lied your way to the big time!
The media's going to have its work cut out trying to verify claims made by such groups this year...
Yeah, which is probably why they won't bother.
They didn't bother with the Kerry photo, did they?
If someone else goes through the trouble to figure out when someone was lying/faking/etc then the news agencies will report on that. But actually do investigative work themselves? Sorry, but I'm not holding my breath.
You have to go up to Figure 5 to see what they're actually claiming: a method to preview your virtual desktops on the entire display.
Yeah, actually reading (or just skimming) the application shows that the "invention" is a preview button that preferably lives on the taskbar. You click the button, you get a full-screen preview of all the desktops. Clearly a useful idea, that may not have any specific prior art.
But it still kinda cheeses me. Basically, you take the Enlightenment pager, which already includes dynamic previews, and add a button that scales it up to full screen and back on demand. Useful, but does it require full patent protection?
I mean, I'm all for innovation in interfaces, but does every tiny policy change mean a new patent? What if instead of a button, I prefered the preview panes to pop up when I hover the mouse over the pager? Or maybe have it automatically pop up when I start a new window, so I can set my WM to have me manually place windows, and I can then easily put the new window on any desktop that has room. Dropping the window on a certain section of the preview pane creates a new virtual desktop for that window. Do I get to patent that idea? I spent a whole twenty seconds thinking of it; don't I deserve however many years of protection for my innovation?
It's these kinds of simple-yet-possibly-useful WM policy decisions that make me want to switch to Sawfish, which is scriptable in something like Lisp. But the thought that every ten lines of code I write could be someone's patentable "invention" just annoys me.
He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he's being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime.
Case 2:
Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.
What is the difference between these two cases?
Is it citizenship? Doubtful. There would be much less outcry if the non-citizens were held without due process and the citizens were given due process. Indeed, we may never have heard of Guantanamo at all. Instead we have the opposite.
The difference is evidence. If the government had any evidence that Padilla or Hamdi were actually guilty of being terrorists, then that evidence would have been presented at a Grand Jury. Justice would be served, the Government could put a tick mark in their column that'd look good come Novermber, and everyone would be happy (who wasn't an unfortunate non-citizen held without due process).
The only reason the government would not do this is because they have no evidence. After eighteen months they have no evidence that would stand up in court. After eighteen months, they have nothing that would convince a judge that Jose Padilla should continue to be held. Eighteen months, and the government can't do anything to justify his incarceration other than declare it their right by Executive Fiat.
Which perhaps is the point -- to see if the Executive Fiat thing flies. So far so good -- the ability of the President (or any person who he appoints to such a task) to remove a citizen's rights at will with no explanation whatsoever has been upheld.
Do I need to say that again for the slow-of-thinking? The ability of the President (or any person who he appoints to such a task) to remove a citizen's rights at will with no explanation whatsoever has been upheld.
Congratulations, my comrades! You're living in a dictatorship!
I thought that whole difference between S939 and S949 was that one pin that is needed for 8xx. After looking at pinout, there seems no reason for rearrangements. HTs get premiere position at the edges, convieninently arranged so they can be routed without fuss and everything else seems to be adapted to this.
The problem is the DRAM channels.
Notice how all S940 processors require buffered memory. Granted, in a server you would want buffered memory anyway, but for the Athlon FX this is a big problem. An FX-based workstation/gaming rig actually does worse than A64 on some things, due to the increased memory latency. The reason for this requirement is that the signal integrity of the DDR channels is simply not good enough to support non-buffered DIMMS. So, they are making S939 which will optimize the DRAM channel pinouts, allowing unbuffered DIMMS and finally making the FX chips the top performers they should be.
Sounds like a good reason to re-do the pinout, no?
I really don't see the issue of having extra 2 layers on board. Since NorthBridge is in the CPU, that should outweight the price difference of the board.
But why settle for no change in cost when you can go to a 4-layer board and have a net decrease in cost? You cannot underestimate how cost-conscious motherboard makers can be.
Besides, when one pays quite a price for Opteron, why should extra few bucks for more layers in board make such a difference ?
It's not, yet. But consider how the price of the lower-end FX chips will drop between now and the introduction of S939-based motherboards. Being able to fit an FX-based system into the upper-mid level market segments will be a good thing.
Also, I think AMD is planning to eventually EOL the 734-pin package, and put all K8-based chips in S939. I'm sure system builders would be very happy about that (er, at least once they forget about the R&D cost of making the S734 boards...). If I'm right, then the ability to make 4-layer boards will be absolutely crucial once A64 works its way into the segments currently occupied by Barton/Thoroughbred.
IMHO no board should have less than 6 layers anyway. Server MBs need them for stability and overclocker MBs need them for speed...
If you're not an overclocker, or running a server, then the savings for a 4 layer board are worth it, IMO. Regardless, the motherboard makers are demanding it, and thusly AMD will deliver.
Slashdot Mirror
So next time someone snaps my picture., my sweater will explode.
Once again, a new technology's most obvious application is in pornography.
Getting a space elevator mentioned in Nature is huge, whether or not it is a viable project. It will help give it the exposure it needs to get debated on whether it is a viable project by people that could actually help get it off the ground.
I hope it isn't premature. I worry about generating a lot of hype about an elevator, and then have it go nowhere, or have a high-profile experiment/test fail. I don't want to see it go the way of cold fusion, where everyone knows what it is, and thinks its a joke, so you can never get funding for it again.
... is really silly.
In WWI, the French held off the Germans for years. In the process, they lost millions of men. They essentially threw an entire generation of young men into the meat grinder, and held off the German advance. That takes balls.
In WWII, if either GB or the US had France's long land border with Germany, they would have been destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, just like France was. The only reason GB wasn't destroyed is the English Channel. The only reason we weren't is because of the Atlantic Ocean. Stalin had the Russian Winter as a natural barrier. What about France?
So the only reason we get to call the French cowards is a fluke of geography. That seems cowardly to me.
$ uname -a /usr/sbin/killall
/usr/sbin/killall
:)
SunOS 5.8 Generic_108528-27 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-20
$ which killall
Good for you!
Now type:
$
and post the results after you're done logging back in!
I never claimed te electoral college was better than a direct election, eh? Just mentioned that your one vote _is_ more likely to be the one that turns the entire election, and so _could_ carry even more weight than the original poster gave it credit for.
Except that's not true. Are you paying attention? I live in Texas. My vote is not more likely to turn the election than it would be in a direct election. In fact, if I had lived in TX in 2000, then my vote would have been far more likely to turn a direct election than the electoral college.
The big lie of the "your vote is more important than in a direct election" statement is that it's only true if you live someplace that at least approximates the assumptions of your argument.
So in general, your statement is false. In specific cases, it may be true, but giving some people more power in exchange for completely removing power from others is, to my mind, the opposite of democracy.
Granted, the primary system is also broken. But if we didn't have the electoral college, then it would be easier for the person most acceptable to the majority to run on an independent ticket.
Part of the impetus for digital voting is to continually try to make the process as simple as possible for the idiots who can't figure anything out. What was the problem with the Florida elections? Very little was wrong with the ELECTION process and law, except it presumed that the people voting actually had a brain.
;)
:)
Well, except for the part that didn't require the machines to be configured to spit back out unreadable ballots instead of eating them.
Seriously, why do you think all those ballots in Florida were ruined? Could the machine not tell that they were invalid? Of course it could! In some places, it spits the ballot back out. In others it ate them. In the news, it was simply assumed that all the people in the counties with high invalidation rates -- counties that happened to have large minority populations -- were stupid, and the people in other counties were just smart. And people just bought it, never asking why an invalid ballot would be accepted (and then destroyed) in the first place, when the obvious answer was "it doesn't need to be, and wasn't in many places".
There was definitely something wrong with the process in Florida.
Why should someone with a 6th grade education GET a vote?
Having a 6th grade education doesn't mean you can't understand the issues you care about. It also doesn't mean you aren't a citizen.
Or a non-english speaker? If the person isn't minimally competent in english, how informed a voter ARE they?
If they read non-English press, probably more informed than you.
If they can't figure out voting, it's pretty good proof that they're not competent to cast a vote. Sorry if that's not politically correct enough but is it so terrible to require a minimum level of sensibility to participate in a democracy?
Only when some select group defines what "sensibility" means. Since historically those select groups have been majorities in power who have used the definition of "sensibility" to prevent minorities from ever entering the ballot box, then yes I think I can say with history on my side that it is quite terrible.
I think the other problem comes from trying to apply technology to solve every problem, actually. Paper ballots, marked in ink, are the simplest tech around and should be used for the actual voting (because ultimately there is a paper trail). Let the technology be applied at the ballot desk, where the voter can feed their sheet in and are IMMEDIATELY told if it was read OK. If it's ok, the person presses the 'confirm' button and the computer increments the various candidates' vote counts.
I agree completely. The best way to apply voting machine technology is as a vote verifier not as an authoritative reader/counter. Many machines were in fact used in this manner, at least for voter verification, rejecting ballots that it could not read for the voter to fix. Were you not aware of this? What was that about not being able to vote if you're not informed? Still want to vote? I rest my case.
Actually, under the electoral college system your single vote is more likely to sway the election in the event of a close vote than it would be in a direct majority count, and is therefore, theoretically, _more_ important.
/. article where some educated person posited this inane theory. Yes, it does in fact amplify the power of groups of small groups of voters thus allowing them to effect the larger election in ways their raw numbers would not. There are a couple reasons why the electoral college is still bad.
Ah yes, I remember the first
First, it assumes that having the chance for one vote to sway the entire election is a positive thing, or the best measure of the importance of your vote. I don't really want my vote to be the one that decides the election; I want it to be the votes of myself and everyone who has similar views, wherever they may be.
Second, as you said: your vote can only turn the election if the race is very close in your county/state. Thus only votes in contested districts are theoretically more important. Votes in uncontested districts are instead nullified. They are less important. In fact they are completely irrelevant. So to give individual voters in highly contested districts more power, you remove power from individuals in uncontested districts entriely.
This is not a good tradeoff. You disenfranchise political minorities so that a voting machine... er, I mean voter in Florida can turn the entire election.
Let me put it this way: I live in Texas. I'm not going to vote for Bush. Tell me again how the Electoral College makes my vote more important?
One of the things I really miss when I sit behind a windows computer is a bash shell, tab completion, gcc, vi... and you usually arent allowed to install cygwin on people's systems :)
Yeah, I'm considering getting a USB flash stick and putting cygwin and other stuff on it for when I'm stuck at a windows machine. And hey, I can put my config files on it for when I'm at a new unix machine as well.
A friend of mine once said something along the lines of: "Eventually Windows will have everything UNIX does because developers will demand it."
Well, looks like he was right. Good call, dtowne!
NX bit may not be a panacea, but it's still very useful. There's a reason OpenBSD is trying to support it. Is it supported in Linux yet? And if not, why not? "Don't allow this to execute" is a basic permission, like read-only, that should have been in the VM system from day 1 -- and I think it was, in many other architectures.
/. if MS didn't release this.
And yes, I do think you'd find a shitstorm on
Why, Why did Columbus find us, instead of the REAL India?!!!
Um... Since his plan was "sail west from Spain until we reach India", the odds were pretty strongly against him finding India before he found the Americas. At least according to my globe.
I'm not sure but I think that's called the Emergency Alert System
Not so fast! I've heard of this before, and it does turn thousands of individual broadcast stations into government propaganda outlets. But I think he got the wrong acronym for Fox News.
Shouldn't the valuable lesson be "leave the dildo in the car when you go into Target?"
Heh. Yep! Leave it to a geek to learn the impractical lesson. "Never leave the house without your cross-spectrum radio-frequency jammer, tin foil, and collapsable antennae, because otherwise you won't be able to take dildos with you into Target."
Which, granted, is advice I could have used on several occasions. Where was he then?!
Sure as shit they can profit, if SCO's scam pays off. If it doesn't and SCO combusts, well, Canopy gets first dibs on reclaiming what they lost. In other words, they pay the shyster to shit (which is what shysters do), and if the law complains the shit smells too much, they can get their money back. Great potential gains, absolute minimal risk.
What was your point again?
You'll never come up with a purely quantitative and accurate measure of "worth" since the word itself is far too vague, and is dependent on the observer. It's entirely a human-derived qualitative value, so trying to find some scale that measures it perfectly like degrees Kelvin is simply not possible.
Money as worth? That's insane. The cost of something is simply how much two parties were able to agree upon, where "agree" should not be construed to mean that both parties have equal say in what the final cost is.
Is the "worth" of a CD $15, or is it the average of the times I decided to pay $15 for a CD and the times I said "That's not worth $15" and didn't buy it? Maybe I'd have been willing to pay $7 in some of those cases, but the opportunity to negotiate wasn't there. What is the "worth" now?
The only time money is a good measure of worth is to the person/business selling something for money. In that case, money is the only thing they get for something, so that's all they can measure by. In most other cases, if money is involved at all it is simply a factor to be considered as part of overall worth.
Equating money and worth is nuts! There are way too many obvious examples for me to list them all. Teachers and diamonds both come to mind.
Liars are so amusing when they're caught. :)
Who (and what) is a wound up neo-lib? Al Franken?
And with the Smith/Neo fight at the end of Revolutions, we now know that a live-action Dragonball Z is possible.
And also thanks to the Smitch/Neo fight at the end of Revolutions, we now know that a live-action Dragonball Z would totally, totally suck.
Well, I did kinda go off in the last paragraph or two. I could have made my point without that, but I was in a bold kind of mood. :)
Who cares if Al Franken dislikes you, when the term "lying liar" is accurately applied to you regardless?
:)
Or are you just saying that if Al Franken noticed you enough to personally call you on your lies, you'd realize you'd finally lied your way to the big time!
Yeah, that makes sense. HAND!
Only not important.
:)
HAND.
The media's going to have its work cut out trying to verify claims made by such groups this year...
Yeah, which is probably why they won't bother.
They didn't bother with the Kerry photo, did they?
If someone else goes through the trouble to figure out when someone was lying/faking/etc then the news agencies will report on that. But actually do investigative work themselves? Sorry, but I'm not holding my breath.
You have to go up to Figure 5 to see what they're actually claiming: a method to preview your virtual desktops on the entire display.
Yeah, actually reading (or just skimming) the application shows that the "invention" is a preview button that preferably lives on the taskbar. You click the button, you get a full-screen preview of all the desktops. Clearly a useful idea, that may not have any specific prior art.
But it still kinda cheeses me. Basically, you take the Enlightenment pager, which already includes dynamic previews, and add a button that scales it up to full screen and back on demand. Useful, but does it require full patent protection?
I mean, I'm all for innovation in interfaces, but does every tiny policy change mean a new patent? What if instead of a button, I prefered the preview panes to pop up when I hover the mouse over the pager? Or maybe have it automatically pop up when I start a new window, so I can set my WM to have me manually place windows, and I can then easily put the new window on any desktop that has room. Dropping the window on a certain section of the preview pane creates a new virtual desktop for that window. Do I get to patent that idea? I spent a whole twenty seconds thinking of it; don't I deserve however many years of protection for my innovation?
It's these kinds of simple-yet-possibly-useful WM policy decisions that make me want to switch to Sawfish, which is scriptable in something like Lisp. But the thought that every ten lines of code I write could be someone's patentable "invention" just annoys me.
Case 1:
He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he's being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime.
Case 2:
Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.
What is the difference between these two cases?
Is it citizenship? Doubtful. There would be much less outcry if the non-citizens were held without due process and the citizens were given due process. Indeed, we may never have heard of Guantanamo at all. Instead we have the opposite.
The difference is evidence. If the government had any evidence that Padilla or Hamdi were actually guilty of being terrorists, then that evidence would have been presented at a Grand Jury. Justice would be served, the Government could put a tick mark in their column that'd look good come Novermber, and everyone would be happy (who wasn't an unfortunate non-citizen held without due process).
The only reason the government would not do this is because they have no evidence. After eighteen months they have no evidence that would stand up in court. After eighteen months, they have nothing that would convince a judge that Jose Padilla should continue to be held. Eighteen months, and the government can't do anything to justify his incarceration other than declare it their right by Executive Fiat.
Which perhaps is the point -- to see if the Executive Fiat thing flies. So far so good -- the ability of the President (or any person who he appoints to such a task) to remove a citizen's rights at will with no explanation whatsoever has been upheld.
Do I need to say that again for the slow-of-thinking?
The ability of the President (or any person who he appoints to such a task) to remove a citizen's rights at will with no explanation whatsoever has been upheld.
Congratulations, my comrades! You're living in a dictatorship!
I thought that whole difference between S939 and S949 was that one pin that is needed for 8xx. After looking at pinout, there seems no reason for rearrangements. HTs get premiere position at the edges, convieninently arranged so they can be routed without fuss and everything else seems to be adapted to this.
The problem is the DRAM channels.
Notice how all S940 processors require buffered memory. Granted, in a server you would want buffered memory anyway, but for the Athlon FX this is a big problem. An FX-based workstation/gaming rig actually does worse than A64 on some things, due to the increased memory latency. The reason for this requirement is that the signal integrity of the DDR channels is simply not good enough to support non-buffered DIMMS. So, they are making S939 which will optimize the DRAM channel pinouts, allowing unbuffered DIMMS and finally making the FX chips the top performers they should be.
Sounds like a good reason to re-do the pinout, no?
I really don't see the issue of having extra 2 layers on board. Since NorthBridge is in the CPU, that should outweight the price difference of the board.
But why settle for no change in cost when you can go to a 4-layer board and have a net decrease in cost? You cannot underestimate how cost-conscious motherboard makers can be.
Besides, when one pays quite a price for Opteron, why should extra few bucks for more layers in board make such a difference ?
It's not, yet. But consider how the price of the lower-end FX chips will drop between now and the introduction of S939-based motherboards. Being able to fit an FX-based system into the upper-mid level market segments will be a good thing.
Also, I think AMD is planning to eventually EOL the 734-pin package, and put all K8-based chips in S939. I'm sure system builders would be very happy about that (er, at least once they forget about the R&D cost of making the S734 boards...). If I'm right, then the ability to make 4-layer boards will be absolutely crucial once A64 works its way into the segments currently occupied by Barton/Thoroughbred.
IMHO no board should have less than 6 layers anyway. Server MBs need them for stability and overclocker MBs need them for speed...
If you're not an overclocker, or running a server, then the savings for a 4 layer board are worth it, IMO. Regardless, the motherboard makers are demanding it, and thusly AMD will deliver.
He could have been using Cygwin, which I personally love.
"Cygwin: Making Windows barely tolerable since whenever they started doing that."
Okay, maybe I'll stay out of marketing.