I may be mistaken on my understanding of heat and efficiency, but I believe that if you have electric heat in your home the "waste" heat from a computer costs the same per preferred unit of heat.
If gas is cheaper than electricity for you like it is for me that doesn't really help as much, but if you have electric heat you may as well run Folding/SETI/Bitcoin/whatever during the cold season.
Agreed as a general principle, but in this case it's a matter of power in vs. power out. If the average power in over a reasonable time the average power out, it's producing power. There's not much room for fooling as far as this is concerned, we can easily measure both. If we can objectively measure a claimed ability it's just a matter of having enough unrelated individuals or teams perform the measurement that a reasonable doubt is defeated. All that's needed here is a search for experimental flaws. If they're truly metering power in and power out, the rest is a matter of what the numbers say.
"Psychics" and those claiming magical powers over subjective matters, that's where magicians shine. When the test involves a judgement of the mind, bring in those who make a living by fooling it.
Perhaps I'm being a little hard on the Linux users. Many of those at Linux conferences are carrying MacBooks.
I was this guy for a while. I like open source, but it's not my top priority. I just want a computer that lets me get done what I need to get done most effectively. For admining *nix boxes and diagnosing networks it's pretty helpful to be on a *nix box yourself, but which variety is not really important as they all tend to have the same basic tools available.
A Mac laptop provides a *nix machine that is 100% supported by the manufacturer with a well-known OS and a good selection of both free and commercial applications. For a while they were better built than most too, my last Macbook Pro was the generation before the "unibody" models and only Thinkpads really compared as far as sturdiness. I haven't yet found a laptop that feels stiffer than one of the unibody models, though some of the PC vendors have adopted that design as well and are thus in the same range.
These days I'm running a refurb Acer because the battery on the MBP wore out and I couldn't see putting more than a third of its remaining value in to a replacement on a Core 2 where the motherboard couldn't reliably handle 4GB RAM sticks (only 2+2 was officially supported, though 2+4 was reported to work with most sticks, 4+4 was not usable in most cases). Core i7, 8GB, 1080p, and 100% of the hardware works in Ubuntu 14.04 so it fits what I need in a laptop.
Why anyone who doesn't need Final Cut would ever buy a Mac desktop I'm not really sure. The G5-like Mac Pro was intermittently price competitive with other workstations in dual-socket form but the new trash can model strikes me as the second coming of the G4 Cube.
Mozilla hasn't made any notable public comments I can find since acknowledging that they would support EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) back in May. I do not see anything about the feature having made it to even the trunk yet, so it'll probably be a while.
Also curious, what difference do you see between Firefox and Chrome as far as UI? I'm on a Windows machine right now so I can't verify if it's the same on Linux but aside from slightly rounder tabs and more blue Firefox 32 looks pretty much the same as Chrome 39. Firefox has a separate search bar by default and the back/forward/refresh layout is a bit different but if I ignore the extra buttons my various extensions have added to both the color scheme is the most significant difference.
Did I ever say I had a problem with Windows overall? I don't, at least no more than any other ordinary OS. It's that second part...the one that starts with an X and ends with a P. That's the problem. Like I said, deploying new Windows XP is fucking stupid.
Windows itself is a fine core platform these days. The key is these days, meaning not a full major revision and two lesser (but hard to call minor) revisions ago.
I'd still personally prefer Linux or a BSD, but I'd have a hard time making a purely technical case for that.
Now they are cheap PCs running poorly configured operating systems.
The important part. Brand new systems are still being deployed with Windows XP. Anyone who doesn't see how fucking idiotic that is should never be allowed to make an IT-related decision again, but unfortunately the people who make these decisions don't know and aren't held accountable for their stupidity.
Most of the local banks have installed new Diebold ATMs that scan checks automatically. I saw one reboot the other day. Take a wild guess what OS...
Fuck "enterprise IT" and the bullshit anti-update mentality. If you can't update, you're doing it wrong.
It's called free market: demand sets the price. Suck it up.
Free market requires competition. If you're required to use this specific model there is not competition. That is not the free market. Suck it yourself.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
Who said the students would keep the calculators? The only situation where you MUST HAVE THIS SPECIFIC CALCULATOR is in the classroom. Keep the calculator there! The special calculator stays where people find it worthwhile, everywhere else the rest of us can use a computer like a normal person.
If you're actually going in to a field where having a fancy calculator is useful versus a smartphone you can buy it yourself then. Most of us have absolutely no need for these things beyond the few tests for which they're required.
Best not to say "Try it in Linux" on Slashdot, you're a lot more likely to run in to someone who already has. My laptop and server are exclusively Linux and my desktop dual-boots. Ubuntu LTS all around, 14.04.1 on the desktop/laptop and I haven't gotten around to upgrading the server from 12.04.5 yet. AMD even lost performance per clock compared to themselves with their recent chips.
My home server previously ran a Phenom II X4 945, a 3 GHz quad core released in mid-late '09. That motherboard blew up after a power event so I switched to an A10-7850K, a 3.7-4.0 (turbo) GHz quad core released in January of this year. It's both faster clocked and a full four years newer, plus I threw double the RAM at it since I had to get new sticks anyways for DDR3 vs the old DDR2, yet somehow it's slower in the real world. My usenet downloads parcheck/extract slower, my Minecraft server bogs down more often, and it can't even manage to proxy Steam traffic at the full 100mbit/sec my internet connection allows.
As for Phoronix, how's this one? The very processor I'm running, the top model of the latest core AMD has released.
In looking at the results the AMD A10-7850K is supposed to be in line with the Intel Core i5 4670K according to AMD's expectations. However, with Ubuntu Linux on this hardware the Core i5 4670 (non-K) was generally running noticeably faster than the Kaveri APU. This is a big deal since the Kaveri APU sells for $190 USD where as the i5-4670 is not much more at a price of about $218.
It barely holds with the Core i3s on average.
I have historically defaulted to AMD. My last Intel outside of laptops was a 300 MHz Pentium II. I regret going with AMD for the server and unless they pull something huge out of their ass in the near future I'll be changing my desktop over as soon as the prices drop on the now last-gen Intels.
Because SSDs are literally the best thing you can do for your computer's performance in desktop applications. Most of the time you're nowhere close to CPU limits and these days standard RAM levels are finally high enough that only the cheapest shitboxes hit swap in normal browsing/chatting/office type tasks. Everything is waiting on the slow old hard drive. Make that an order of magnitude faster and it shouldn't be a surprise that you can rejuvenate even an old computer.
My work laptop is a Dell Vostro from 2010 with a sub-2GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It runs circles around most of my customers' computers in day-to-day stuff even when they have Core i-series processors solely because it has enough RAM (8GB) and more importantly a SSD. It's not even a great SSD, just a cheap Kingston, but it makes a huge difference.
The correct answer for any new computer is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS and applications combined with a regular hard disk for larger stuff like media collections where random access time isn't as important. Only gamers really need to compromise, with so many games these days exceeding 10GB it's still too expensive for a lot of us to have our entire game collections on SSD, but in that case it's still not hard to just install whatever you play most to the SSD and put older/less commonly played titles on the HD.
Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.
They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.
In the US our consumer-grade vacuum cleaners are already effectively capped around the same wattage. The standard household electrical outlet is rated to provide 15 amps and does so somewhere between 100 and 125 volts. That's 1500-1875 watts as the maximum any single device clet an expect to pull without requiring a special outlet. Nothing in reality expects the higher end of the spectrum because it's by no means guaranteed.
Somehow we get along just fine, residential or commercial, with pretty much the same as what this limit allows./me awaits some Brit who's come to explain how their 240v 13A outlets allow them to suck the carpet right off the floor with their cleaners.
Just use a Nexus 5 and an iPhone. Both clean representations of their respective platforms without carrier bullshit, so it's a fair comparison of the networks themselves and nothing more.
Well 44.0.0.0/8 is entirely allocated for amateur radio use, so it's a slightly different situation. It was allocated back when IPs were given away willy-nilly and is so randomly utilized that condensing the space and recovering any of it would be an interesting proposition.
Packet radio is so niche that that particular subnet will probably never even get close to full, so there's no harm in you still having your chunk.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
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· Score: 2
(Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
One of my biggest gripes with most modern terminals, the scrollback buffer is uselessly small in the default configuration. Mac OS X is the only system where I don't feel the need to modify it literally the first time I do "cat/var/log/something"
Memory is not an issue for a graphical terminal on a desktop. There's no good reason for terminals to be defaulting to 200 lines anymore.
I thought so too and selected Nexus 5, but since purchase on January, it has got only one system update and that happened on the first day I used the phone. It seems that Google cares about bugs on already sold devices as much as anybody else in the industry.
Android itself has not seen an update since then. The Nexus 5 initially shipped with 4.4.0 and got both 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 as soon as they were publicly announced. When Android 4.4.3 comes out (apparently soon) you're basically guaranteed to be the first device for which it's available.
Compare this to all the other phone vendors, who at least in the case of the large ones you know have had access to 4.4.3 for some time, where most devices still aren't on 4.4.2. Where devices are still being *launched* brand new and out of date the moment they're available.
i just don't want to be constantly within nagging range of email or texts.
I'm pretty sure there's not a single phone that still works since AMPS was turned off which doesn't have texting. It's a basic part of the GSM standard and I assume fairly basic in the CDMA world as well.
If there was a compelling reason for a smart phone and/or app (other than social media nonsense, or the aforementioned email/texts) i'd buy a smart phone. but right now, it's just about tracking users and this irritating social media bubble that cannot pop soon enough.
Or you can not install any social networking apps on it and use it as the magical information oracle like a lot of us do. Neither Android nor iOS comes with social networking installed by default. Yes, Google has Google+ but the app is not there in a base Android install, you have to get it yourself from the Google app store. It's been a while since I used an iOS device but to my knowledge the closest to "social" they have by default is the Game Center system.
If you're really paranoid you can install CyanogenMod, Replicant, Ubuntu Touch, or any number of alternative OSes and/or Android forks which you can build yourself from source and know exactly what's in it.
Disliking social networks makes sense. Avoiding smartphones because of that doesn't make any sense. No one is forcing you to use social networks just to have a smartphone.
First you end support for XP, which is a good thing, then you end support for Windows 7 in 2020, now you are ending support for Windows 8 on May 8. Why? the bog standard Windows 8 still has newer software than Windows 7, the only thing holding it back is the retarded Modern UI interface.
Why? Easy. Because it's the only way to get the message across to corporate fucktards that we are in the internet era and updating your software is FUCKING MANDATORY. If you're going to be sharing the same global network as the rest of us, you need to understand that stagnation hasn't been an option for over a decade and the old habits formed on XP must be thrown out the window.
They've tried asking nicely for years, people still don't listen, now it's time to hold their feet to the fire. Outdated shit doesn't fly.
Ah, but you do have the control you speak of, just in a different way.
In my experience if you press the button without triggering the appropriate safety interlock (brake or clutch) the car goes in to "on" mode without starting the engine. I can say for sure this works on Kias and Fords, no idea on others.
I would be tempted to assume that push starting works the same way, but I can not confirm as the only manual push button start vehicle I've driven was a test drive in a Focus ST with the salesman in the back seat.
Cranking longer just seems to happen as necessary. My housemate's Optima will pull a 5-7 second crank on a cold morning with just a press of the button.
No it doesn't, because that number is nearly $0. Aside from minor subsidies on special costs associated with serving the disabled and overseas voters, it is $0. There is no tax money going towards the majority of USPS operations.
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I may be mistaken on my understanding of heat and efficiency, but I believe that if you have electric heat in your home the "waste" heat from a computer costs the same per preferred unit of heat.
If gas is cheaper than electricity for you like it is for me that doesn't really help as much, but if you have electric heat you may as well run Folding/SETI/Bitcoin/whatever during the cold season.
Agreed as a general principle, but in this case it's a matter of power in vs. power out. If the average power in over a reasonable time the average power out, it's producing power. There's not much room for fooling as far as this is concerned, we can easily measure both. If we can objectively measure a claimed ability it's just a matter of having enough unrelated individuals or teams perform the measurement that a reasonable doubt is defeated. All that's needed here is a search for experimental flaws. If they're truly metering power in and power out, the rest is a matter of what the numbers say.
"Psychics" and those claiming magical powers over subjective matters, that's where magicians shine. When the test involves a judgement of the mind, bring in those who make a living by fooling it.
Perhaps I'm being a little hard on the Linux users. Many of those at Linux conferences are carrying MacBooks.
I was this guy for a while. I like open source, but it's not my top priority. I just want a computer that lets me get done what I need to get done most effectively. For admining *nix boxes and diagnosing networks it's pretty helpful to be on a *nix box yourself, but which variety is not really important as they all tend to have the same basic tools available.
A Mac laptop provides a *nix machine that is 100% supported by the manufacturer with a well-known OS and a good selection of both free and commercial applications. For a while they were better built than most too, my last Macbook Pro was the generation before the "unibody" models and only Thinkpads really compared as far as sturdiness. I haven't yet found a laptop that feels stiffer than one of the unibody models, though some of the PC vendors have adopted that design as well and are thus in the same range.
These days I'm running a refurb Acer because the battery on the MBP wore out and I couldn't see putting more than a third of its remaining value in to a replacement on a Core 2 where the motherboard couldn't reliably handle 4GB RAM sticks (only 2+2 was officially supported, though 2+4 was reported to work with most sticks, 4+4 was not usable in most cases). Core i7, 8GB, 1080p, and 100% of the hardware works in Ubuntu 14.04 so it fits what I need in a laptop.
Why anyone who doesn't need Final Cut would ever buy a Mac desktop I'm not really sure. The G5-like Mac Pro was intermittently price competitive with other workstations in dual-socket form but the new trash can model strikes me as the second coming of the G4 Cube.
Mozilla hasn't made any notable public comments I can find since acknowledging that they would support EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) back in May. I do not see anything about the feature having made it to even the trunk yet, so it'll probably be a while.
Also curious, what difference do you see between Firefox and Chrome as far as UI? I'm on a Windows machine right now so I can't verify if it's the same on Linux but aside from slightly rounder tabs and more blue Firefox 32 looks pretty much the same as Chrome 39. Firefox has a separate search bar by default and the back/forward/refresh layout is a bit different but if I ignore the extra buttons my various extensions have added to both the color scheme is the most significant difference.
Did I ever say I had a problem with Windows overall? I don't, at least no more than any other ordinary OS. It's that second part...the one that starts with an X and ends with a P. That's the problem. Like I said, deploying new Windows XP is fucking stupid.
Windows itself is a fine core platform these days. The key is these days, meaning not a full major revision and two lesser (but hard to call minor) revisions ago.
I'd still personally prefer Linux or a BSD, but I'd have a hard time making a purely technical case for that.
Now they are cheap PCs running poorly configured operating systems.
The important part. Brand new systems are still being deployed with Windows XP. Anyone who doesn't see how fucking idiotic that is should never be allowed to make an IT-related decision again, but unfortunately the people who make these decisions don't know and aren't held accountable for their stupidity.
Most of the local banks have installed new Diebold ATMs that scan checks automatically. I saw one reboot the other day. Take a wild guess what OS...
Fuck "enterprise IT" and the bullshit anti-update mentality. If you can't update, you're doing it wrong.
It's called free market: demand sets the price. Suck it up.
Free market requires competition. If you're required to use this specific model there is not competition. That is not the free market. Suck it yourself.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
Who said the students would keep the calculators? The only situation where you MUST HAVE THIS SPECIFIC CALCULATOR is in the classroom. Keep the calculator there! The special calculator stays where people find it worthwhile, everywhere else the rest of us can use a computer like a normal person.
If you're actually going in to a field where having a fancy calculator is useful versus a smartphone you can buy it yourself then. Most of us have absolutely no need for these things beyond the few tests for which they're required.
Best not to say "Try it in Linux" on Slashdot, you're a lot more likely to run in to someone who already has. My laptop and server are exclusively Linux and my desktop dual-boots. Ubuntu LTS all around, 14.04.1 on the desktop/laptop and I haven't gotten around to upgrading the server from 12.04.5 yet. AMD even lost performance per clock compared to themselves with their recent chips.
My home server previously ran a Phenom II X4 945, a 3 GHz quad core released in mid-late '09. That motherboard blew up after a power event so I switched to an A10-7850K, a 3.7-4.0 (turbo) GHz quad core released in January of this year. It's both faster clocked and a full four years newer, plus I threw double the RAM at it since I had to get new sticks anyways for DDR3 vs the old DDR2, yet somehow it's slower in the real world. My usenet downloads parcheck/extract slower, my Minecraft server bogs down more often, and it can't even manage to proxy Steam traffic at the full 100mbit/sec my internet connection allows.
As for Phoronix, how's this one? The very processor I'm running, the top model of the latest core AMD has released.
In looking at the results the AMD A10-7850K is supposed to be in line with the Intel Core i5 4670K according to AMD's expectations. However, with Ubuntu Linux on this hardware the Core i5 4670 (non-K) was generally running noticeably faster than the Kaveri APU. This is a big deal since the Kaveri APU sells for $190 USD where as the i5-4670 is not much more at a price of about $218.
It barely holds with the Core i3s on average.
I have historically defaulted to AMD. My last Intel outside of laptops was a 300 MHz Pentium II. I regret going with AMD for the server and unless they pull something huge out of their ass in the near future I'll be changing my desktop over as soon as the prices drop on the now last-gen Intels.
Since slashdot stupidly still doesn't allow edits, here's the mandatory car analogy:
SSDs are like snow tires in Colorado. Sure you can get along without them but you're losing a lot by doing so.
Because SSDs are literally the best thing you can do for your computer's performance in desktop applications. Most of the time you're nowhere close to CPU limits and these days standard RAM levels are finally high enough that only the cheapest shitboxes hit swap in normal browsing/chatting/office type tasks. Everything is waiting on the slow old hard drive. Make that an order of magnitude faster and it shouldn't be a surprise that you can rejuvenate even an old computer.
My work laptop is a Dell Vostro from 2010 with a sub-2GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It runs circles around most of my customers' computers in day-to-day stuff even when they have Core i-series processors solely because it has enough RAM (8GB) and more importantly a SSD. It's not even a great SSD, just a cheap Kingston, but it makes a huge difference.
The correct answer for any new computer is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS and applications combined with a regular hard disk for larger stuff like media collections where random access time isn't as important. Only gamers really need to compromise, with so many games these days exceeding 10GB it's still too expensive for a lot of us to have our entire game collections on SSD, but in that case it's still not hard to just install whatever you play most to the SSD and put older/less commonly played titles on the HD.
*whoosh*
I was just making a dumb joke. Chuckle (or not) and move along.
Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.
They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.
If you wait long enough the mortality rate goes to 100%.
In the US our consumer-grade vacuum cleaners are already effectively capped around the same wattage. The standard household electrical outlet is rated to provide 15 amps and does so somewhere between 100 and 125 volts. That's 1500-1875 watts as the maximum any single device clet an expect to pull without requiring a special outlet. Nothing in reality expects the higher end of the spectrum because it's by no means guaranteed.
Somehow we get along just fine, residential or commercial, with pretty much the same as what this limit allows. /me awaits some Brit who's come to explain how their 240v 13A outlets allow them to suck the carpet right off the floor with their cleaners.
Wow still? Good to see Verizon is still being the same fucksticks they've always been. Exactly why I tell people to never use them.
Just use a Nexus 5 and an iPhone. Both clean representations of their respective platforms without carrier bullshit, so it's a fair comparison of the networks themselves and nothing more.
Well 44.0.0.0/8 is entirely allocated for amateur radio use, so it's a slightly different situation. It was allocated back when IPs were given away willy-nilly and is so randomly utilized that condensing the space and recovering any of it would be an interesting proposition.
Packet radio is so niche that that particular subnet will probably never even get close to full, so there's no harm in you still having your chunk.
(Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
One of my biggest gripes with most modern terminals, the scrollback buffer is uselessly small in the default configuration. Mac OS X is the only system where I don't feel the need to modify it literally the first time I do "cat /var/log/something"
Memory is not an issue for a graphical terminal on a desktop. There's no good reason for terminals to be defaulting to 200 lines anymore.
I thought so too and selected Nexus 5, but since purchase on January, it has got only one system update and that happened on the first day I used the phone. It seems that Google cares about bugs on already sold devices as much as anybody else in the industry.
Android itself has not seen an update since then. The Nexus 5 initially shipped with 4.4.0 and got both 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 as soon as they were publicly announced. When Android 4.4.3 comes out (apparently soon) you're basically guaranteed to be the first device for which it's available.
Compare this to all the other phone vendors, who at least in the case of the large ones you know have had access to 4.4.3 for some time, where most devices still aren't on 4.4.2. Where devices are still being *launched* brand new and out of date the moment they're available.
i just don't want to be constantly within nagging range of email or texts.
I'm pretty sure there's not a single phone that still works since AMPS was turned off which doesn't have texting. It's a basic part of the GSM standard and I assume fairly basic in the CDMA world as well.
If there was a compelling reason for a smart phone and/or app (other than social media nonsense, or the aforementioned email/texts) i'd buy a smart phone. but right now, it's just about tracking users and this irritating social media bubble that cannot pop soon enough.
Or you can not install any social networking apps on it and use it as the magical information oracle like a lot of us do. Neither Android nor iOS comes with social networking installed by default. Yes, Google has Google+ but the app is not there in a base Android install, you have to get it yourself from the Google app store. It's been a while since I used an iOS device but to my knowledge the closest to "social" they have by default is the Game Center system.
If you're really paranoid you can install CyanogenMod, Replicant, Ubuntu Touch, or any number of alternative OSes and/or Android forks which you can build yourself from source and know exactly what's in it.
Disliking social networks makes sense. Avoiding smartphones because of that doesn't make any sense. No one is forcing you to use social networks just to have a smartphone.
First you end support for XP, which is a good thing, then you end support for Windows 7 in 2020, now you are ending support for Windows 8 on May 8. Why? the bog standard Windows 8 still has newer software than Windows 7, the only thing holding it back is the retarded Modern UI interface.
Why? Easy. Because it's the only way to get the message across to corporate fucktards that we are in the internet era and updating your software is FUCKING MANDATORY. If you're going to be sharing the same global network as the rest of us, you need to understand that stagnation hasn't been an option for over a decade and the old habits formed on XP must be thrown out the window.
They've tried asking nicely for years, people still don't listen, now it's time to hold their feet to the fire. Outdated shit doesn't fly.
Ah, but you do have the control you speak of, just in a different way.
In my experience if you press the button without triggering the appropriate safety interlock (brake or clutch) the car goes in to "on" mode without starting the engine. I can say for sure this works on Kias and Fords, no idea on others.
I would be tempted to assume that push starting works the same way, but I can not confirm as the only manual push button start vehicle I've driven was a test drive in a Focus ST with the salesman in the back seat.
Cranking longer just seems to happen as necessary. My housemate's Optima will pull a 5-7 second crank on a cold morning with just a press of the button.
which ignores what we pay the USPS in taxes.
No it doesn't, because that number is nearly $0. Aside from minor subsidies on special costs associated with serving the disabled and overseas voters, it is $0. There is no tax money going towards the majority of USPS operations.
"under God". Added by Congress in 1954 and a clear violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state.