'Are you saying Intel is so great that they can stay on top even though they're holding back 10x improvements, while AMD and IBM trying as hard as they can are unable to keep up with the sandbagged tech?'
Although the gp was clearly wrong about the architecture it is my opinion that ALL of the manufacturers you mentioned are holding back. They ALL have better technology in the can than on the market and they all have a roadmap on which they intend to release it (although intel has bigger labs and has been researching for a lot longer). Of course having the technology and deploying it are two different things. It isn't as if AMD doesn't have the technology to match intel's fab, they don't have the actual deployment of that technology.
'Or is it that AMD wants to be behind, because having slower products and paying the cost-per-die penalty for a larger transistor node is working so well for them right now?'
Compared to running out of technology to move forward to? And again, having technology is one thing, but it takes time in the real world to deploy and implement technology. Intel discovered that with the P4, which no doubt took up a much larger chunk of their roadmap and they deployed technology sooner than AMD expected, AMD in turn is scrambling to deploy technology they probably already had in the can when the P4 was released in the first place.
Actually superiority of the product isn't even a factor, just ask any marketing droid when he isn't at work;)
Both INTEL and AMD are competing but they are both several technology generations ahead of what they actually have on the market. Their 'competition' involves them releasing small incremental upgrades, each putting out just enough to be ahead of what the other has released. What they have in the can is another issue altogether.
I knew a couple gas station managers with stations right across the street from each other. Through the course of the day/week/month they would watch each other's signs and try to sneak in price drops when the other wasn't watching. A penny difference meant everyone stopped at their station. But they both had an unspoken agreement never to actually make the price as low as they could afford to, that didn't benefit either of them.
Surprise drops were one thing, but cheap gas wasn't on the menu, three blocks off the main strip was a station that didn't have another within sight and yet remained cheaper than either of those at all times.
The same is true of Intel and AMD and most large corporate 'competitors'. They have unspoken agreements to compete in the areas that work out well for companies in their sector. It isn't beneficial to either company to throw all their technology onto the table at once, much better to be way ahead of the curve and release in tiny increments with consumers buying each generation of technology. That way, if your discoveries do ever lag behind pace, the consumer never sees it.
Marijuana has two distinct sexes of plant, the latent ability to produce a male flower remains in the female plants though. It won't manifest without extreme stresses during flowering (particularly skewed and unnatural light cycles) or chemical treatment. The other way to bring this about is to let the plant continue in the flowering cycle well beyond maturation and continue to deny it pollination. Eventually the plant will in desperation form a male flower at the top and self pollinate.
Regardless of the method of stressing the female plant into forming a male flower, females pollinated by that flower will produce no male seeds. The seeds will have an increased chance of yielding genetic hermaphrodites but all seeds which are not hermaphrodites will be female.
While your point is certainly well taken and valid the sheer enourmity of the increase can not be ignored. I'd agree that a slashdot story might increase sales a couple fold, but Monty Python likely enjoys a fairly large sales volume and to increase sales 230 fold over any period of time is fairly impressive.
Again, it comes down to size. When you sell one a day, selling 230 in a day is a nice boost. But when you average 1000 a day, selling 230,000 in a single day is impressive in and of itself. Sustaining that is simply unheard of.
'But what if they weren't? What if they'd published 250,000 copies and sold 200 prior to this?'
That'd make it tough to explain how they are a household brand.;) Seems to me you don't become so well known that every man, woman, and child in the western world knows your product without having significant and persistent sales. This isn't a 23,000% increase in the sales of the box set, its a 23000% increase in OVERALL monty python sales.
I can't help but wonder why anyone who needs a system with those kind of specifications would purchase a laptop in the first place. If you need that kind of performance why not just get a desktop for work and another for home, move your working files between the two and have dramatically better performance for the same money?
'The difference between growing good pot and bad pot, all growing conditions being equal, is simply genetics. No, it's not as simple as "throwing seeds in your back yard" but then neither is growing good tomatoes really either. But if you can provide the necessary light and nutrients to bring a female cannabis plant to mature flowering, whether indoors or outdoors, the potency of your product will virtually entirely depend on the plant's genetics. A novice grower can likely grow better pot than he/she can buy with good seed, but the most experienced grower in the world can't make Sour Diesel from ditchweed seeds. '
Agreed. Actually, left to its own outdoors you can get a massive plants with great buds. You have a mondo light, a natural light cycle, mineral water raining down from the sky. All you need is good soil and a culling of the male plants to prevent pollination. Aside from that its just a question of harvesting and curing properly and 'good enough' can be achieved by tossing the harvest in a couple brown paper bags in the garage.
While millions of people grow the tomatoes you obviously don't consider and supplement their food needs with them there is another aspect to consider. If you grow a tomato plant in your back yard you will potentially get four or five good tomatoes from it. That'll do you for a week.
The average 'heavy' marijuana smoker given free reign will smoke about 1/4oz of dried marijuana flowers per week (for the clueless and the government, no, the leaves aren't actually potent enough to be smoked unless you want a headache). A cannabis sativa bush grown under the open sun and given the same care your average tomato plant is given will yield two to three pounds of dried marijuana flowers. That is in excess of what that a heavy smoker would use in a year.
Actually, in the most the united states its almost that easy. You just have to pick the males as soon as you can differentiate them (marijuana has male and female plants, the good stuff comes from the unpolinated flowers of the female).
Most of the 'secret' information about growing marijuana is needed to compensate for the inability to grow it outside under the full power of the sun, rich natural soil, natural mineral rain water, and the flowing open air. In those conditions outside in a temperate climate marijuana is an annual that will grow to monsterous size, reach nearly the theoretical maximum potency for the strain in question (Not all Cannabis is Cannabis Sativa you willfully ignorant botonists).
Culling the males prevents pollination and causes the females to enlarge the pistols and produce copious amounts of resin on the flowers (the resin is the good stuff) in hopes that pollen will stick to it.
This is a misnomer anyway. The old studies showing that marijuana causes memory loss were refuted long ago. In fact, almost all of the supposed negative effects of marijuana use were reported by one biased research team and their work can generally be dismissed outright.
There is a short term memory impairment caused by consistent regular high dose usage but it returns in an extremely short period of time after discontinuing marijuana use. The memory effects of years of marijuana use are reversed after as little as a month of discontinuing use.
The real negative side effects of marijuana use are 'a false sense of well being' *scratches head over that being considered negative*, the aggravation of already existing heart conditions, and the ability to cause and/or exacerbate lung conditions/cancer. The last is actually caused by the inhalation of smoke and can be avoided by using other means of ingestion.
Whole marijuana, like any other herb, will NEVER be considered a legal treatment for any condition by the AMA or FDA for Alzheimer's or anything else. The medical profession as a whole does not recommend natural supplements and herbs, they prefer prescription medications that are composed of purified and isolated chemicals.
The best that can be hoped is that prohibition and prosecution will be stopped against those using, posessing, distributing, and selling what is a fairly harmless herbal supplement. Addiction rates and known side effects (and liklihood of incidence) pale in comparison to over the counter medications like ephedrine, cough syrup, and asprin; not to mention prescription medications.
'I would guess that you have absolutely no idea how many non-US citizens are on Slashdot.'
Just because there are lots of guests doesn't change the fact that USians are the citizens.
'Of course, now that the US is nearly a third-world country, it is much easier for us Europeans to take over the world.'
How? Last I checked the European economies are all crashing right along with us since they are largely dependent upon suckling on large USian teets (much like the foreign guests here suckle in the form of their dependence on this USian technology forum).
All joking aside, I love having a diverse international audience here on Slashdot and think it makes for interesting and rich discussion. That still doesn't change the fact that this is a USian forum and comments are intended to be read by US audiences. General sums should be in US units and currency, decimals should be defined with a period, etc. It's no different than a US magazine like Vogue. Vogue is probably read by people all over the world, but it is written from the standpoint of USian authors directed toward USian readers, no qualification for the sake of international correctness will be present.
'The simple truth is that these chips come shackled...why not get a little more bang for your buck, and how often does anyone really 'burn out' a CPU before it is obsolete anyways?'
Often, very often. I see them with scorch marks and actual holes burned right in the cpu. I've also seen heat marks around the chipsets and nearby capacitors that are bulging and leaking because they have been operated past spec.
Like another poster in this thread I do watch which chips are overclockable. I might even play with a new chip, but I never run a chipped OC'd for any length of time. Being easily overclockable means the chip will perform extremely well at the shipped speed. I also never order a chip at the top clockspeed in a series BECAUSE it is essentially the same chip overclocked. Pay less and get a chip that is stable.
The truth is that the for most applications (particularly anything on the desktop) the CPU isn't the real bottleneck these days anyway.
'Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.'
I suppose a 'faster' hard drive doesn't make a big difference compared with a 'fast' hard drive. But a fast hard drive compared with a slow hard drive makes a HUGE real world performance difference. Clunky and slow drives are the primary reason that laptops are so doggedly slow compared to desktops.
Of course 'speed' is defined by rpm's in this case, not throughput.
The fact that they are an established brand doesn't make them the exception, it makes them even more impressive. Monty python has been around for a long time, you have to figure that their established fan base already owns their content. ANYTHING increasing the sales of a decades old brand like monty python by an astronomical figure like 23000% is simply amazing.
It's no different than companies, a young company increasing profits by 200% a quarter isn't that noteworthy, IBM managing to increase their sales by 200% in a single quarter would be amazing.
'There are hacks to compile scripting languages but they aren't fully functional and really aren't worthy of more than a footnote for the sake of the pedants.'
Yeah, perhaps you should have read the entire post. For the sake of hackishness just about everything has been done but that doesn't mean you are going to roll it out onto the production floor of a major operating system.
Because the other end is at the opposite side of the lab. Light detect by their eyes tells them whether their assistant collapsed one end and the comparison of measurement tells them whether they read the same information their assistant did.
But all of this verification requires information to be passed by ordinary non-quantum means and if you are going to do that you might as well just send a radio signal.
Cut the crap, that is the only real complaint opponents have. They aren't the needy and don't want to shoulder a proportional share of the costs of civilized society. The tax system is designed to distribute the costs in a way that puts the greatest burden on those with the largest shoulders and those with large shoulders don't like that.
That's why you pay a fee for a driver's license or I.D. card, because some rich asshole wants the poor to pay a disproportionate share of the expense for the service. If you think about it, there should never be fees for ANY government service or process, the entire purpose of taxes is to pay for those things. Every time you see a fee from a public or government service it's a billionaire who thinks life isn't fair when he has to pay his taxes.
The only others complaining are poor hillbillies who can't buy their sick kid medicine or stock the fridge and are mistakenly placing the blame on the $30 that is withheld from their check each week. Really they should be blaming the top 5% of the nation for hording over 90% of our nation's wealth.
Explain to me why as a society we've decided that numerous victimless crimes are punishment by cruel and inhuman treatment in our prison system, yet blatant greed at the expense of the lives and well being of other citizens is treated as if it were a fundamental and sacred right?
And if the law doesn't fit what they want to do, they bring out their arsenal of paid congresscritters to change it to their liking. Usually as some footnote to a bill that has absolutely nothing to do with what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
'Are you saying Intel is so great that they can stay on top even though they're holding back 10x improvements, while AMD and IBM trying as hard as they can are unable to keep up with the sandbagged tech?'
Although the gp was clearly wrong about the architecture it is my opinion that ALL of the manufacturers you mentioned are holding back. They ALL have better technology in the can than on the market and they all have a roadmap on which they intend to release it (although intel has bigger labs and has been researching for a lot longer). Of course having the technology and deploying it are two different things. It isn't as if AMD doesn't have the technology to match intel's fab, they don't have the actual deployment of that technology.
'Or is it that AMD wants to be behind, because having slower products and paying the cost-per-die penalty for a larger transistor node is working so well for them right now?'
Compared to running out of technology to move forward to? And again, having technology is one thing, but it takes time in the real world to deploy and implement technology. Intel discovered that with the P4, which no doubt took up a much larger chunk of their roadmap and they deployed technology sooner than AMD expected, AMD in turn is scrambling to deploy technology they probably already had in the can when the P4 was released in the first place.
'is to release a superior product'
Actually superiority of the product isn't even a factor, just ask any marketing droid when he isn't at work ;)
Both INTEL and AMD are competing but they are both several technology generations ahead of what they actually have on the market. Their 'competition' involves them releasing small incremental upgrades, each putting out just enough to be ahead of what the other has released. What they have in the can is another issue altogether.
I knew a couple gas station managers with stations right across the street from each other. Through the course of the day/week/month they would watch each other's signs and try to sneak in price drops when the other wasn't watching. A penny difference meant everyone stopped at their station. But they both had an unspoken agreement never to actually make the price as low as they could afford to, that didn't benefit either of them.
Surprise drops were one thing, but cheap gas wasn't on the menu, three blocks off the main strip was a station that didn't have another within sight and yet remained cheaper than either of those at all times.
The same is true of Intel and AMD and most large corporate 'competitors'. They have unspoken agreements to compete in the areas that work out well for companies in their sector. It isn't beneficial to either company to throw all their technology onto the table at once, much better to be way ahead of the curve and release in tiny increments with consumers buying each generation of technology. That way, if your discoveries do ever lag behind pace, the consumer never sees it.
Marijuana has two distinct sexes of plant, the latent ability to produce a male flower remains in the female plants though. It won't manifest without extreme stresses during flowering (particularly skewed and unnatural light cycles) or chemical treatment. The other way to bring this about is to let the plant continue in the flowering cycle well beyond maturation and continue to deny it pollination. Eventually the plant will in desperation form a male flower at the top and self pollinate.
Regardless of the method of stressing the female plant into forming a male flower, females pollinated by that flower will produce no male seeds. The seeds will have an increased chance of yielding genetic hermaphrodites but all seeds which are not hermaphrodites will be female.
'At any rate, I bet it would make a good video.'
It has, many many videos ;)
While your point is certainly well taken and valid the sheer enourmity of the increase can not be ignored. I'd agree that a slashdot story might increase sales a couple fold, but Monty Python likely enjoys a fairly large sales volume and to increase sales 230 fold over any period of time is fairly impressive.
Again, it comes down to size. When you sell one a day, selling 230 in a day is a nice boost. But when you average 1000 a day, selling 230,000 in a single day is impressive in and of itself. Sustaining that is simply unheard of.
'But what if they weren't? What if they'd published 250,000 copies and sold 200 prior to this?'
That'd make it tough to explain how they are a household brand. ;) Seems to me you don't become so well known that every man, woman, and child in the western world knows your product without having significant and persistent sales. This isn't a 23,000% increase in the sales of the box set, its a 23000% increase in OVERALL monty python sales.
'I got about 15 - 20 tomatoes per plant...the plants reached about 5' tall.'
That doesn't exactly invalidate my point. 15-20 tomatoes isn't going to last very long, and that is ignoring the fact that they rot.
I can't help but wonder why anyone who needs a system with those kind of specifications would purchase a laptop in the first place. If you need that kind of performance why not just get a desktop for work and another for home, move your working files between the two and have dramatically better performance for the same money?
'The difference between growing good pot and bad pot, all growing conditions being equal, is simply genetics. No, it's not as simple as "throwing seeds in your back yard" but then neither is growing good tomatoes really either. But if you can provide the necessary light and nutrients to bring a female cannabis plant to mature flowering, whether indoors or outdoors, the potency of your product will virtually entirely depend on the plant's genetics. A novice grower can likely grow better pot than he/she can buy with good seed, but the most experienced grower in the world can't make Sour Diesel from ditchweed seeds. '
Agreed. Actually, left to its own outdoors you can get a massive plants with great buds. You have a mondo light, a natural light cycle, mineral water raining down from the sky. All you need is good soil and a culling of the male plants to prevent pollination. Aside from that its just a question of harvesting and curing properly and 'good enough' can be achieved by tossing the harvest in a couple brown paper bags in the garage.
While millions of people grow the tomatoes you obviously don't consider and supplement their food needs with them there is another aspect to consider. If you grow a tomato plant in your back yard you will potentially get four or five good tomatoes from it. That'll do you for a week.
The average 'heavy' marijuana smoker given free reign will smoke about 1/4oz of dried marijuana flowers per week (for the clueless and the government, no, the leaves aren't actually potent enough to be smoked unless you want a headache). A cannabis sativa bush grown under the open sun and given the same care your average tomato plant is given will yield two to three pounds of dried marijuana flowers. That is in excess of what that a heavy smoker would use in a year.
Actually, in the most the united states its almost that easy. You just have to pick the males as soon as you can differentiate them (marijuana has male and female plants, the good stuff comes from the unpolinated flowers of the female).
Most of the 'secret' information about growing marijuana is needed to compensate for the inability to grow it outside under the full power of the sun, rich natural soil, natural mineral rain water, and the flowing open air. In those conditions outside in a temperate climate marijuana is an annual that will grow to monsterous size, reach nearly the theoretical maximum potency for the strain in question (Not all Cannabis is Cannabis Sativa you willfully ignorant botonists).
Culling the males prevents pollination and causes the females to enlarge the pistols and produce copious amounts of resin on the flowers (the resin is the good stuff) in hopes that pollen will stick to it.
That and it's the little known secret ingredient in the production of the paper used for US currency.
This is a misnomer anyway. The old studies showing that marijuana causes memory loss were refuted long ago. In fact, almost all of the supposed negative effects of marijuana use were reported by one biased research team and their work can generally be dismissed outright.
There is a short term memory impairment caused by consistent regular high dose usage but it returns in an extremely short period of time after discontinuing marijuana use. The memory effects of years of marijuana use are reversed after as little as a month of discontinuing use.
The real negative side effects of marijuana use are 'a false sense of well being' *scratches head over that being considered negative*, the aggravation of already existing heart conditions, and the ability to cause and/or exacerbate lung conditions/cancer. The last is actually caused by the inhalation of smoke and can be avoided by using other means of ingestion.
Whole marijuana, like any other herb, will NEVER be considered a legal treatment for any condition by the AMA or FDA for Alzheimer's or anything else. The medical profession as a whole does not recommend natural supplements and herbs, they prefer prescription medications that are composed of purified and isolated chemicals.
The best that can be hoped is that prohibition and prosecution will be stopped against those using, posessing, distributing, and selling what is a fairly harmless herbal supplement. Addiction rates and known side effects (and liklihood of incidence) pale in comparison to over the counter medications like ephedrine, cough syrup, and asprin; not to mention prescription medications.
'I would guess that you have absolutely no idea how many non-US citizens are on Slashdot.'
Just because there are lots of guests doesn't change the fact that USians are the citizens.
'Of course, now that the US is nearly a third-world country, it is much easier for us Europeans to take over the world.'
How? Last I checked the European economies are all crashing right along with us since they are largely dependent upon suckling on large USian teets (much like the foreign guests here suckle in the form of their dependence on this USian technology forum).
All joking aside, I love having a diverse international audience here on Slashdot and think it makes for interesting and rich discussion. That still doesn't change the fact that this is a USian forum and comments are intended to be read by US audiences. General sums should be in US units and currency, decimals should be defined with a period, etc. It's no different than a US magazine like Vogue. Vogue is probably read by people all over the world, but it is written from the standpoint of USian authors directed toward USian readers, no qualification for the sake of international correctness will be present.
'The simple truth is that these chips come shackled...why not get a little more bang for your buck, and how often does anyone really 'burn out' a CPU before it is obsolete anyways?'
Often, very often. I see them with scorch marks and actual holes burned right in the cpu. I've also seen heat marks around the chipsets and nearby capacitors that are bulging and leaking because they have been operated past spec.
Like another poster in this thread I do watch which chips are overclockable. I might even play with a new chip, but I never run a chipped OC'd for any length of time. Being easily overclockable means the chip will perform extremely well at the shipped speed. I also never order a chip at the top clockspeed in a series BECAUSE it is essentially the same chip overclocked. Pay less and get a chip that is stable.
The truth is that the for most applications (particularly anything on the desktop) the CPU isn't the real bottleneck these days anyway.
In a laptop you would have been better off spending it on a fast hard drive if you could find a laptop with a fast drive that didn't weight 10lbs+
'Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.'
I suppose a 'faster' hard drive doesn't make a big difference compared with a 'fast' hard drive. But a fast hard drive compared with a slow hard drive makes a HUGE real world performance difference. Clunky and slow drives are the primary reason that laptops are so doggedly slow compared to desktops.
Of course 'speed' is defined by rpm's in this case, not throughput.
IBM is a hardware company, not a software company ;)
The fact that they are an established brand doesn't make them the exception, it makes them even more impressive. Monty python has been around for a long time, you have to figure that their established fan base already owns their content. ANYTHING increasing the sales of a decades old brand like monty python by an astronomical figure like 23000% is simply amazing.
It's no different than companies, a young company increasing profits by 200% a quarter isn't that noteworthy, IBM managing to increase their sales by 200% in a single quarter would be amazing.
And you think a single product release increased the sales of a well established and household brand by 23,000%?
I rest my case.
'There are hacks to compile scripting languages but they aren't fully functional and really aren't worthy of more than a footnote for the sake of the pedants.'
Yeah, perhaps you should have read the entire post. For the sake of hackishness just about everything has been done but that doesn't mean you are going to roll it out onto the production floor of a major operating system.
Because the other end is at the opposite side of the lab. Light detect by their eyes tells them whether their assistant collapsed one end and the comparison of measurement tells them whether they read the same information their assistant did.
But all of this verification requires information to be passed by ordinary non-quantum means and if you are going to do that you might as well just send a radio signal.
'Higher taxes'
Cut the crap, that is the only real complaint opponents have. They aren't the needy and don't want to shoulder a proportional share of the costs of civilized society. The tax system is designed to distribute the costs in a way that puts the greatest burden on those with the largest shoulders and those with large shoulders don't like that.
That's why you pay a fee for a driver's license or I.D. card, because some rich asshole wants the poor to pay a disproportionate share of the expense for the service. If you think about it, there should never be fees for ANY government service or process, the entire purpose of taxes is to pay for those things. Every time you see a fee from a public or government service it's a billionaire who thinks life isn't fair when he has to pay his taxes.
The only others complaining are poor hillbillies who can't buy their sick kid medicine or stock the fridge and are mistakenly placing the blame on the $30 that is withheld from their check each week. Really they should be blaming the top 5% of the nation for hording over 90% of our nation's wealth.
Explain to me why as a society we've decided that numerous victimless crimes are punishment by cruel and inhuman treatment in our prison system, yet blatant greed at the expense of the lives and well being of other citizens is treated as if it were a fundamental and sacred right?
And if the law doesn't fit what they want to do, they bring out their arsenal of paid congresscritters to change it to their liking. Usually as some footnote to a bill that has absolutely nothing to do with what they want.