I've got an older X series notebook (x40). I think they're nice, given them a good word a time or two here. There are certainly limitations though. The screen, for one. When I'm at home I've got 4800 pixels worth of horizontal space on my desk and 1200 vertical. At school, 1024x768 can be quite painful, although I don't think it really hampers my productivity. It certainly isn't comfortable to make use of in many situations, fortunately I don't do anything where a lavish excess of screen real estate is a requirement. The keyboards is great, has a nice feel to it for a notebook.
I can't say much about the reliability, I had a disk drive fail, thankfully I sync all my data with my home machine, but a replacement was sent overnight as soon as I reported the problem (and this is after Lenovo bought the pc business, IBM still carries out the remaining support contracts AFAIK). Cosmetically it has suffered some very minor damage and I haven't treated it very nicely. It gets tossed in my bag next to a stack of books that would kill my cat.
The price on these machines new make Apple notebooks look kind of cheap, and honestly the portability is nothing more than a supreme convenience. It is nice to be able to wake up in the morning and pull your notebook out of the dock, and walk out the door with your bagel. You're not tied to a wall, I typically get about 5 hours of real usage out of the battery which is more than enough for me. Given it is relatively underpowered and has no screen real estate to speak of, however, the product line is an exercise in compromise. If I was doing a 9-5 I think I would manage with a 15" or even maybe a 17" notebook, if I needed one at all.
The problem is you either need a dedicated machine for movie watching or you have to divy up time on the machine between watching movies and using the machine. I've got a fairly high end graphics card and I'm sure the picture quality is nice but it is far more convenient to simply have a stand alone dvd player. Now building a stand-alone machine might sound like a great deal for as little as 700 USD or however cheap you can slap one together , that is , compared to the 2000 USD machine. But who buys the 2000 USD machine, i'll tell you, morons and people who have so much money they don't know what to spend it on. I mean it is a common fact that your ability to enjoy a film is based solely on the diagonal of your monitor, and of course measuring in cm is much more impressive. This is completely ignoring the administrative aspect, which is, to say the least non trivial. A mac mini might sound like a bargain for a mere 500 USD and well suited for the job but consider its graphics accelerator is not very powerful, hence, the image quality will only be marginally improved, if at all.
Re:Apple opted for poor quality when they chose In
on
Apple's Growing Pains
·
· Score: 1
the c2d xeon is called woodcrest, i don't think it is readily available yet but will be soon. C2D pretty much stomps the snot shit out of K8 though and sun's multi-hyper-quadruple-super-ultra threading processors can't do shit when it comes to heavy lifting, not to mention the premium price of Sun hardware.
You're right that FPS has nothing to do with "network" latency but it does affect apparent latency quite a bit. Figure you're getting a mean of 60 fps and a 3 second low & high mean of 30 and 80 respectively with abs instantaneous mins and maxes of 20 and 100 (10 to 50 ms between frames). Take into account double or triple buffering (frame delay & buffering come out to: 20-150 ms). That's pretty reasonable for a modern game, do the math, that's a bit of latency. Add in the fact that most panels are synced @ 60 Hz (20 ms) and the delay they add when actually drawing what happened. Now granted it is likely many of these delays will collide or overlap, but as you can see there are many components to "apparent" latency. Certainly you can't draw a frame containing information that is still being transmitted down the pipe. Network transit is only 1 component, and seeing as this product is clearly shenanigans I think it is altogether reasonable to suggest a system performance upgrade as a latency reduction. It will certainly do more than this, which frankly, is a joke.
1. GPUs have higher transistor counts than modern CPUs.
2. The development cycle for GPUs is much shorter than CPUs
3. The shelf life of GPU designs is much shorter than CPU designs (the C2D is a direct descendant of the P5, (pentium 4 arch is a dead end evolutionarily).
Given the preceding, it is unlikely that a reduction of power consumption will be the focus of GPU companies in the future, it would be suicide in a market which demands performance above all else. nVidia has shown that there are significant gains to be made from G70>G71, but nothing to the order necessary, R580 (ATI) has proven to be a bloated SUV with respect to power consumption but performs quite well. Considering the difference in die size between R580 and G71 I think the mandate in this regard is profits, ATi's die is nearly twice the size of nVidia's and they are priced similarily (G71 actually pulls bigger money). Still, their power consumptions are not seperated by such a divide (a 60 watt differential would be generous). Honestly, to a great extent, this call for chip engineers to focus on poower consumption is equivalent to asking top fuel dragster engineers to focus on fuel consumption. It is not a priority, and modern graphic cards draw very little power when they aren't doing anything, which is most of the time. A situation will manifest itself if top end systems start to surpass 10 to 15A draws on the 120v line (1200-1800 watt peak), but that is a way off yet. Heat dissipation will become a problem long before we hit those kind of limits I would suspect.
With proper water cooling i'm able to run @ 780/890 on these with only soft modifications. With hard voltage modifications these cards will do a lot more. (25-30% out of spec) Of course, from a value proposition it is all a waste of money, but it is fun to tinker. I don't think this is a good 'value proposition' either. Middle of the road is the best I suppose.
A X1600 is not comparable to a 7900 GS/GTX Go, orders of magnitude difference, literally. Also, if you're spending money on a Dell, you can wait some time and score an even better deal (real discounts from coupons, sometimes in excess of 30%). Personally, I take a liking to IBM/Lenovo notebooks but they are very expensive, even more so than Apple's machines. They say you get what you pay for, and it isn't stylish excess in the case of an X series thinkpad, though other manufacturers have made considerable inroads in the way of truly portable computing, including Apple.
1080 refers to the number of vertical scanlines in the images. a 1080 tv has a resolution to the order of 1920x1080. i/p refers to the nature of the signal, interlaced or progressive, an interlaced set draws every other scanline for each vertical refresh i.e. the effective 'frame' resolution is 1920x540. Progressive draws every line before moving to the next portion of the signal. The worst part about interlaced signals isnt that they reduce visual quality from the reduction in resolution, but that they introduce the ugliest visual artifacts you've ever seen on high motion film.
On a related note, I've heard that very few "1080p" televisions can actually accept a 1080p signal, they typically internally upsample the content to 1080p.
Modern flash devices sport a million write/read cycle and defect levelling, the controller keeps track of how many times each sector has been written to and compensates accordingly, since files do not need to be contiguous on a flash drive. In any event, your better off replacing your hard drive at least every 5 years, more like 3, so it won't bother me if it wears out this fast.
Can't handle the other half-truths, maybe a bit of bias yourself? What is wrong with doing a good job copying something that works? It's hard to be a pundit when there is nothing to complain about, evidenced by you moaning about disk space requirements in the day and age that a single session of photography uses up 4 GiBs of memory. That is something Apple users do, right?
Are you scared that Microsoft might have actually done something right after 7 years? The company of incompetents everyone loves to hate? When Apple mimics, the occurence isn't worth mentioning, when Microsoft does so it is 'theft'? A priori you hated Vista, simply because it comes from M$.
OS X is a good design, but it hardly invented anything, they just looked at where the next dot was going to be on the trendline. Microsoft has employed the same tactic, its just taken them a 'bit' longer.
Some choice quotes from the man of 'no bias.'
"Could it be the anti-apple cultists?"
It's so funny that the biggest complainers about Apple products are people that generally don't even own an Apple product. When these people post to the Apple message boards, if you ask them simple Apple-centric questions to try and help them with their supposed problems they don't respond or when they do, they respond with things that clearly indicate that they aren't using, and never have used, any Apple products.
"wow what a fat os"
I can't get over the idea that it requires 15 GB of hard drive space.
Heck, OS X comes in needing a measly "3GB of available hard disk space (4GB if you install the developer tools)" [apple.com] and most of the new features in VISTA were essentially stolen concepts from Apple, again...
Microsoft needs to give up on the backwards compatible bloatware concept and finally release a quick streamlined version of their OS. Faster processors and more memory shouldn't be what's required to run the OS faster every single time. Nobody cares if they can run Windows 98 software or not.
The heyday AMD has been having with Intel and their nutbust architecture is coming to an end, mid-July. Picture this, Intel is going to blow out the price floor on AMD and offer better performance, clock per clock, in addition to outclocking the K8 by a healthy margin (~20%). the T6600, an low-end chip is proving to outperform the FX-62 (AMD's bad dog) in pretty much every category worth noting, has full support for X86-64, and has a lower TDP. Comparing price is a joke, the T6600 is going to retail for ~300 USD and the FX-62 is ~900-1000 USD.
ThinGs actually look quite bleak for AMD right now. Intel has hemorrhaged hundreds of Engineering Samples to enthusiast circles and it has been independently confirmed. This isn't just "hype", barring some unforseen miracle, AMD will find themselves in the same position relative to Intel they were a decade ago.
Anybody with half a brain knows this is just mindless PR, most games gain nothing from dual-core processors as it is, aside from driver-level multithreading. The latency between physical cores is such that a SMP system is worthless for loads which are not embarrasingly parallel. AMD should be embarrased they're even trying to sell this crap.
This is a hack only in the weakest sense of the word. If somebody hadn't cooked this up chinese pirates would be making optical duplicates of the 360 discs. If someone does manage to run unsigned code on the 360, THAT will be a hack, and I'm placing my bets on microsoft this round, the hackers only 'won' the last round due to a careless oversight by the xbox team, and it is unlikely we will see a repeat. The code execution security system may not be bulletproof, but the cracker community only has pellet guns in their arsenal.
Typically Prime95 is used to test processor stability but obviously it does not stress all the 'pieces' of a CPU. The computations it does are already inexact due to limited point precision, basically it compares the results your CPU produced against known correct results (and rounding error estimates). You run the CPU @ 100% utilization for ~24 hours and if the program does not fail then it is pretty safe to say at least the parts of your cpu it stresses are highly stable (although there obviously is a degree of uncertainty). I totally agree though, I still wouldn't run an overclocked chip on a machine that processes sensitive data or is mission critical, the extra performance doesn't justify the huge risk. If you're using your machine for entertainment there isn't any such risk. Generally by the time a component fails from over-volting it has already reached the end of it's useful lifespan, although there are some notable exceptions (i.e. Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome, google it).
By your own admission there is a lot more than 'mindless clicking' occuring in a modern RTS and I would argue these are the functions that make the game competitive, if you want ai to do all this for you play civilization, as that is essentially what that would do to a rts. Further, games like civilization do have enormous tech trees to make up for the fact there really isn't any other substance to the game. Of course, the end result is not as cinematic. If battles did not become entirely deterministic from this change then you would simply see a push for more units and the management would become meta-management. i.e. macro-micro. Morale is a trivial thing to implement but it would tend to favor outcomes which are already likely (i.e. overwhelming force -> you're pwned) and hence doesn't add anything to the game. Unit pathing could always use improvement and it has improved, just look at w2->sc->w3, there is a big difference in the interface and pathing capabilities between these games
Leaks are fairly easy to prevent if you use decent tubing and metal barbs, and stay away from brittle plastics (like lexan) which have a tendency to crack, delrin is fine though. If you're not running your equipment out of spec watercooling is worthless (noise reduction can be a good argument here I suppose), and even then it generally isn't worth the cost. Cherry picking good units will get you much farther than a big investment in watercooling will.
Based on the information available it does seem Britannica has made very valid points. The studies methodology was flawed and the results are invalid. Many of Britannica's criticisms, however, appear to be grasping at straws. Several of their rebuttals consist of "we haven't changed in our most recent revision, we stand by this statement."
The reviewer errors are not troubling as they likely infected both sides of the study to a roughly equal degree. However, it appears that the organizers of the study manipulated the data in non trivial and non methodological ways both before and after the reviewers handled the documents. Can't say I agree with that.
Choice excerpts from their rebuttal
Other reviewers were sent only sections taken from longer articles. For example, what the
Nature editors referred to as Britannicas articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium
are actually separate sections of our article on the theory of evolution, written by one of
the foremost experts on evolution in the world. What they claimed to be an article on fieldeffect
transistors was actually only one section of our article on integrated circuits.
In some cases reviewers were sent patchworks
of text taken from two or more articles and pieced together in a way that made a mockery of
the original entries. The article on aldol reaction that the journal sent its reviewer consisted of
passages taken selectively from two different Encyclopædia Britannica articles and joined together
with text evidently written by Natures editors.
. . . we sometimes disregarded items that our reviewers had identified as errors or critical
omissions. In particular, as we were interested in testing the entries from the point of view of
typical encyclopaedia users, we felt that experts in the field might sometimes cite omissions as
critical when in fact they probably werent - at least for a general understanding of the topic.
Likewise, the errors identified sometimes strayed into merely being badly phrased - so we
ignored these unless they significantly hindered understanding.
When was it a crime to waste you're own time and money? You're not doing anyone a favor by barring people who legitimately use such technology to 'enhance' their learning to 'protect' the weak willed among us. Sounds like this professor is a technophobe, or just gets really pissed when people don't pay attention to her.
I've taken plenty of 'distribution requirements' in which the professor had no interesting information to divulge, aside from their ppt slides which they read back to the class verbatim. I am capable of reading, thank you professor:) I'm not the sort to take notes in most of my classes because many instructors make sensible use of modern technology and provide them for you. Or you can just crack open the textbook.
The stuff that fits in between is what you have to actually be paying attention during class to catch. I have a notebook but I rarely use it to take notes. Often I use wikipedia to learn more about the topics being discussed in class. Occassionally I find that a tangent to the subject is more interesting than the discussion at hand and find myself reading something completely unrelated when class is dismissed...
Certainly you do not need a second 7900gtx to compute physics effects in games. This is just nVidia "putting their hands on your stack." GPU's are already incredibly good at doing these sorts of computations. A $100.00 video card would probably suffice. nVidia has designed SLI to work with symmetric board configurations but I don't see why they couldn't do a redesign to offload just physics computations to the second GPU (since they state that the intended configuration is to work with single gpu "next gen" configurations). Of course this would repurpose obselete and low end hardware which is something nVidia most definitely does not want to do. However, ATi's 'crossfire' seems to work with mismatched boards so when they implement this it will certainly be more cost effective.
I would imagine that anti-rejection drugs are used to 'fill in the gap' so to speak. Less the task is simply intractable, I doubt any one of the ~60,000 people in the world which share the same combination of antigens are willing to give their vital organs up. Or at least it is more of a miracle than I ever imagined.
Wow you're a bloody brick. The climate in most guilds is such that any person who was openly gay would be mercilessly ridiculed, essentially such guilds are "heterosexual" only. The norm for communication nowadays is VoIP so any such person is sure to be identified and targeted rather quickly. I really don't think most gays are up in arms about the fact they don't fit into a lot of communities, the current administration has sent that message to them, loud and clear, with the backing of the public, it is likely something they've had to deal with for a very long time. Preventing them from creating their own social atmosphere in a game which is basically a chatroom with a graphical backdrop is wrong.
Sure, it is a huge sum of cash and perhaps the 'shareholders' might get more short term benefit out of investing the same sum of money into commodity microprocessor R&D but the itanium could eventually pay off in a big kind of way. It seems that most people posting here are just as impatient as shareholders when it comes to results, they want them NOW! Good things can't always manifest themselves in a short period of time and I think it is impressive that Intel & HP continue to invest money into something that has yet to produce any tangible benefits over existing architecture. I'm willing to bet that x86 isn't the omega to processor design ideology, and itanium may not be either, but Intel & HP seem to believe it is a step in the right direction. Very few people that post here have the knowledge necessary to even begin assessing whether such a design may ever pan out and it appears the jury is still out among those who have the capacity to decide. Meanwhile Apple continues to recieve gratuitous praise for releasing shiny white computers with chamfered corners. Maybe if Intel & HP invested 10 Bn into cosmetic processor design they would be recieved more favorably with the press.
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I can't say much about the reliability, I had a disk drive fail, thankfully I sync all my data with my home machine, but a replacement was sent overnight as soon as I reported the problem (and this is after Lenovo bought the pc business, IBM still carries out the remaining support contracts AFAIK). Cosmetically it has suffered some very minor damage and I haven't treated it very nicely. It gets tossed in my bag next to a stack of books that would kill my cat.
The price on these machines new make Apple notebooks look kind of cheap, and honestly the portability is nothing more than a supreme convenience. It is nice to be able to wake up in the morning and pull your notebook out of the dock, and walk out the door with your bagel. You're not tied to a wall, I typically get about 5 hours of real usage out of the battery which is more than enough for me. Given it is relatively underpowered and has no screen real estate to speak of, however, the product line is an exercise in compromise. If I was doing a 9-5 I think I would manage with a 15" or even maybe a 17" notebook, if I needed one at all.
The problem is you either need a dedicated machine for movie watching or you have to divy up time on the machine between watching movies and using the machine. I've got a fairly high end graphics card and I'm sure the picture quality is nice but it is far more convenient to simply have a stand alone dvd player. Now building a stand-alone machine might sound like a great deal for as little as 700 USD or however cheap you can slap one together , that is , compared to the 2000 USD machine. But who buys the 2000 USD machine, i'll tell you, morons and people who have so much money they don't know what to spend it on. I mean it is a common fact that your ability to enjoy a film is based solely on the diagonal of your monitor, and of course measuring in cm is much more impressive. This is completely ignoring the administrative aspect, which is, to say the least non trivial. A mac mini might sound like a bargain for a mere 500 USD and well suited for the job but consider its graphics accelerator is not very powerful, hence, the image quality will only be marginally improved, if at all.
the c2d xeon is called woodcrest, i don't think it is readily available yet but will be soon. C2D pretty much stomps the snot shit out of K8 though and sun's multi-hyper-quadruple-super-ultra threading processors can't do shit when it comes to heavy lifting, not to mention the premium price of Sun hardware.
You're right that FPS has nothing to do with "network" latency but it does affect apparent latency quite a bit. Figure you're getting a mean of 60 fps and a 3 second low & high mean of 30 and 80 respectively with abs instantaneous mins and maxes of 20 and 100 (10 to 50 ms between frames). Take into account double or triple buffering (frame delay & buffering come out to: 20-150 ms). That's pretty reasonable for a modern game, do the math, that's a bit of latency. Add in the fact that most panels are synced @ 60 Hz (20 ms) and the delay they add when actually drawing what happened. Now granted it is likely many of these delays will collide or overlap, but as you can see there are many components to "apparent" latency. Certainly you can't draw a frame containing information that is still being transmitted down the pipe. Network transit is only 1 component, and seeing as this product is clearly shenanigans I think it is altogether reasonable to suggest a system performance upgrade as a latency reduction. It will certainly do more than this, which frankly, is a joke.
My apologies, the C2D is a descendant of the P6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_Microarchi tecture
1. GPUs have higher transistor counts than modern CPUs.
2. The development cycle for GPUs is much shorter than CPUs
3. The shelf life of GPU designs is much shorter than CPU designs (the C2D is a direct descendant of the P5, (pentium 4 arch is a dead end evolutionarily).
Given the preceding, it is unlikely that a reduction of power consumption will be the focus of GPU companies in the future, it would be suicide in a market which demands performance above all else. nVidia has shown that there are significant gains to be made from G70>G71, but nothing to the order necessary, R580 (ATI) has proven to be a bloated SUV with respect to power consumption but performs quite well. Considering the difference in die size between R580 and G71 I think the mandate in this regard is profits, ATi's die is nearly twice the size of nVidia's and they are priced similarily (G71 actually pulls bigger money). Still, their power consumptions are not seperated by such a divide (a 60 watt differential would be generous). Honestly, to a great extent, this call for chip engineers to focus on poower consumption is equivalent to asking top fuel dragster engineers to focus on fuel consumption. It is not a priority, and modern graphic cards draw very little power when they aren't doing anything, which is most of the time. A situation will manifest itself if top end systems start to surpass 10 to 15A draws on the 120v line (1200-1800 watt peak), but that is a way off yet. Heat dissipation will become a problem long before we hit those kind of limits I would suspect.
With proper water cooling i'm able to run @ 780/890 on these with only soft modifications. With hard voltage modifications these cards will do a lot more. (25-30% out of spec) Of course, from a value proposition it is all a waste of money, but it is fun to tinker. I don't think this is a good 'value proposition' either. Middle of the road is the best I suppose.
A X1600 is not comparable to a 7900 GS/GTX Go, orders of magnitude difference, literally. Also, if you're spending money on a Dell, you can wait some time and score an even better deal (real discounts from coupons, sometimes in excess of 30%). Personally, I take a liking to IBM/Lenovo notebooks but they are very expensive, even more so than Apple's machines. They say you get what you pay for, and it isn't stylish excess in the case of an X series thinkpad, though other manufacturers have made considerable inroads in the way of truly portable computing, including Apple.
On a related note, I've heard that very few "1080p" televisions can actually accept a 1080p signal, they typically internally upsample the content to 1080p.
Modern flash devices sport a million write/read cycle and defect levelling, the controller keeps track of how many times each sector has been written to and compensates accordingly, since files do not need to be contiguous on a flash drive. In any event, your better off replacing your hard drive at least every 5 years, more like 3, so it won't bother me if it wears out this fast.
Are you scared that Microsoft might have actually done something right after 7 years? The company of incompetents everyone loves to hate? When Apple mimics, the occurence isn't worth mentioning, when Microsoft does so it is 'theft'? A priori you hated Vista, simply because it comes from M$.
OS X is a good design, but it hardly invented anything, they just looked at where the next dot was going to be on the trendline. Microsoft has employed the same tactic, its just taken them a 'bit' longer.
Some choice quotes from the man of 'no bias.'
The heyday AMD has been having with Intel and their nutbust architecture is coming to an end, mid-July. Picture this, Intel is going to blow out the price floor on AMD and offer better performance, clock per clock, in addition to outclocking the K8 by a healthy margin (~20%). the T6600, an low-end chip is proving to outperform the FX-62 (AMD's bad dog) in pretty much every category worth noting, has full support for X86-64, and has a lower TDP. Comparing price is a joke, the T6600 is going to retail for ~300 USD and the FX-62 is ~900-1000 USD.
r s for performance comparisons, see: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1970194 ,00.asp, http://www.xtremesystems.com/index.php.
ThinGs actually look quite bleak for AMD right now. Intel has hemorrhaged hundreds of Engineering Samples to enthusiast circles and it has been independently confirmed. This isn't just "hype", barring some unforseen miracle, AMD will find themselves in the same position relative to Intel they were a decade ago.
Anybody with half a brain knows this is just mindless PR, most games gain nothing from dual-core processors as it is, aside from driver-level multithreading. The latency between physical cores is such that a SMP system is worthless for loads which are not embarrasingly parallel. AMD should be embarrased they're even trying to sell this crap.
I've exclusively used AMD processors since the 'thunderbird, i.e. K7., Arstechnica did an overview of the new Core architecture recently, and it is a good primer on what is different. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/core.a
This is a hack only in the weakest sense of the word. If somebody hadn't cooked this up chinese pirates would be making optical duplicates of the 360 discs. If someone does manage to run unsigned code on the 360, THAT will be a hack, and I'm placing my bets on microsoft this round, the hackers only 'won' the last round due to a careless oversight by the xbox team, and it is unlikely we will see a repeat. The code execution security system may not be bulletproof, but the cracker community only has pellet guns in their arsenal.
Typically Prime95 is used to test processor stability but obviously it does not stress all the 'pieces' of a CPU. The computations it does are already inexact due to limited point precision, basically it compares the results your CPU produced against known correct results (and rounding error estimates). You run the CPU @ 100% utilization for ~24 hours and if the program does not fail then it is pretty safe to say at least the parts of your cpu it stresses are highly stable (although there obviously is a degree of uncertainty). I totally agree though, I still wouldn't run an overclocked chip on a machine that processes sensitive data or is mission critical, the extra performance doesn't justify the huge risk. If you're using your machine for entertainment there isn't any such risk. Generally by the time a component fails from over-volting it has already reached the end of it's useful lifespan, although there are some notable exceptions (i.e. Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome, google it).
By your own admission there is a lot more than 'mindless clicking' occuring in a modern RTS and I would argue these are the functions that make the game competitive, if you want ai to do all this for you play civilization, as that is essentially what that would do to a rts. Further, games like civilization do have enormous tech trees to make up for the fact there really isn't any other substance to the game. Of course, the end result is not as cinematic. If battles did not become entirely deterministic from this change then you would simply see a push for more units and the management would become meta-management. i.e. macro-micro. Morale is a trivial thing to implement but it would tend to favor outcomes which are already likely (i.e. overwhelming force -> you're pwned) and hence doesn't add anything to the game. Unit pathing could always use improvement and it has improved, just look at w2->sc->w3, there is a big difference in the interface and pathing capabilities between these games
Leaks are fairly easy to prevent if you use decent tubing and metal barbs, and stay away from brittle plastics (like lexan) which have a tendency to crack, delrin is fine though. If you're not running your equipment out of spec watercooling is worthless (noise reduction can be a good argument here I suppose), and even then it generally isn't worth the cost. Cherry picking good units will get you much farther than a big investment in watercooling will.
The reviewer errors are not troubling as they likely infected both sides of the study to a roughly equal degree. However, it appears that the organizers of the study manipulated the data in non trivial and non methodological ways both before and after the reviewers handled the documents. Can't say I agree with that.
Choice excerpts from their rebuttal
I understand what you were saying now, misread the post.
I believe the xbox and the ps3 both use PPC instructions...
When was it a crime to waste you're own time and money? You're not doing anyone a favor by barring people who legitimately use such technology to 'enhance' their learning to 'protect' the weak willed among us. Sounds like this professor is a technophobe, or just gets really pissed when people don't pay attention to her.
:) I'm not the sort to take notes in most of my classes because many instructors make sensible use of modern technology and provide them for you. Or you can just crack open the textbook.
I've taken plenty of 'distribution requirements' in which the professor had no interesting information to divulge, aside from their ppt slides which they read back to the class verbatim. I am capable of reading, thank you professor
The stuff that fits in between is what you have to actually be paying attention during class to catch. I have a notebook but I rarely use it to take notes. Often I use wikipedia to learn more about the topics being discussed in class. Occassionally I find that a tangent to the subject is more interesting than the discussion at hand and find myself reading something completely unrelated when class is dismissed...
Certainly you do not need a second 7900gtx to compute physics effects in games. This is just nVidia "putting their hands on your stack." GPU's are already incredibly good at doing these sorts of computations. A $100.00 video card would probably suffice. nVidia has designed SLI to work with symmetric board configurations but I don't see why they couldn't do a redesign to offload just physics computations to the second GPU (since they state that the intended configuration is to work with single gpu "next gen" configurations). Of course this would repurpose obselete and low end hardware which is something nVidia most definitely does not want to do. However, ATi's 'crossfire' seems to work with mismatched boards so when they implement this it will certainly be more cost effective.
gnuplot is great. Excel won't even do 500 element charts and can't import csv's with more than 65535 items. Ridiculous.
I would imagine that anti-rejection drugs are used to 'fill in the gap' so to speak. Less the task is simply intractable, I doubt any one of the ~60,000 people in the world which share the same combination of antigens are willing to give their vital organs up. Or at least it is more of a miracle than I ever imagined.
Wow you're a bloody brick. The climate in most guilds is such that any person who was openly gay would be mercilessly ridiculed, essentially such guilds are "heterosexual" only. The norm for communication nowadays is VoIP so any such person is sure to be identified and targeted rather quickly. I really don't think most gays are up in arms about the fact they don't fit into a lot of communities, the current administration has sent that message to them, loud and clear, with the backing of the public, it is likely something they've had to deal with for a very long time. Preventing them from creating their own social atmosphere in a game which is basically a chatroom with a graphical backdrop is wrong.
Sure, it is a huge sum of cash and perhaps the 'shareholders' might get more short term benefit out of investing the same sum of money into commodity microprocessor R&D but the itanium could eventually pay off in a big kind of way. It seems that most people posting here are just as impatient as shareholders when it comes to results, they want them NOW! Good things can't always manifest themselves in a short period of time and I think it is impressive that Intel & HP continue to invest money into something that has yet to produce any tangible benefits over existing architecture. I'm willing to bet that x86 isn't the omega to processor design ideology, and itanium may not be either, but Intel & HP seem to believe it is a step in the right direction. Very few people that post here have the knowledge necessary to even begin assessing whether such a design may ever pan out and it appears the jury is still out among those who have the capacity to decide. Meanwhile Apple continues to recieve gratuitous praise for releasing shiny white computers with chamfered corners. Maybe if Intel & HP invested 10 Bn into cosmetic processor design they would be recieved more favorably with the press.