Ah yes, "just" rip out a working system for something inefficient at the best of times. Why aren't you in government, calling the shots?
Uh, so you think we should add a complex computer control system to every traffic light rather than rip it out and put a pile of dirt in the middle of the road for people to drive around?
Heck, you don't even need that, a lot of British roundabouts are just a painted circle on the road.
Yes! It is the year 2012, and our traffic lights are still running on timers. They're stupid, they waste time and fuel needlessly... they need to go. We have computers that can understand the spoken word, read the written word, and do whatever the hell it is that Kinect does. Our traffic semaphores should be far more intelligent than they are. I think I'd prefer something more along the lines of computer vision than and RF announcement -- for privacy reasons, but at least there's technology in the works.
Or, as someone suggested up above, you could just rip them out and install roundabouts.
ATI would presumably be sold off; from what I've read ATI's GPU profits seem to have been keeping the CPU side of the company alive for the last few years.
Intel seems to be winning because of marketing. Their top end CPUs out perform AMDs, but few people actually buy those.
Intel's MID-RANGE CPUs beat AMD's high-end, even though the AMD CPUs are 50% larger. That's a recipe for disaster, because AMD are forced to sell their most expensive CPUs for less than Intel's mid-range. Few people can see any good reason to buy a slower, more power-hungry AMD chip instead of an i5 unless the price is low enough to justify that.
I wouldn't bet against Bulldozer in the long term because the benchmarks I've seen seem to indicate some kind of unexpected bottleneck in their hyperthreading implementation; if that's the case then a new generation could actually make some use of all those extra transistors. But for now it's hard to see how they're going to make enough money from it to fund development of the next generation.
People who care about 3D don't rely on CPUs with integrated graphics. Intel's IGP is designed for people who watch Youtube videos and play Facebook Flash games, not the latest Call of Duty.
Saying 'my new integrated GPU is now half as fast as the slowest discrete card!' is not a great marketing win. If you want to play games well you need something better and if you don't care about games you don't care how fast the integrated graphics are.
When Intel produced laughable chips for years they still remain the absolute market leader, because of their unethical tactics.
The original P4s were comparable to the Athlons available at the time; when I bought my P4 it was a bit faster than the comparably priced AMDs for the uses I had for it. It was only when AMD released the Athlon 64 while Intel was struggling to push the P4 faster that they raced ahead... at that point everyone who knew about technology was saying 'Don't buy Intel, buy AMD, P4 sucks', and no amount of 'unethical tactics' could have kept Intel ahead for long.
Ultimately Intel had vastly greater production capabilities than AMD, so there was no way AMD could have filled their niche in the market. From what I remember at the time, several OEMs said they wanted to ship AMD chips but AMD couldn't guarantee them enough supplies. AMD couldn't build enough new fabs fast enough to increase production.
Dell was an especial example of this: in the K7/K8 days they'd make noise every year or two about how they were considering selling AMD-based systems rather than being exclusively Intel, and those of us in IT who wanted/better/ computers would get very excited
Um, if you wanted better computers, why did you keep buying from a company which didn't sell them?
This is the problem with the whole 'evil Intel' argument; you're assuming that customers would continue to buy second-rate products when they could buy better PCs from another company. When AMD released AMD64 they owned much of the server and workstation market and most of the high-end desktop market, because if you cared about CPU performance you didn't buy an Intel space-heater.
Let's not forget the underhanded tactics that Intel used. They were forced to pay a minimal $1bn to AMD for it. I always thought its too small an amount for losing their position as leaders in the CPU market.
AMD didn't lose their position as manufacturer of best x86 chips because of 'underhanded tactics', they lost it because Intel produced better x86 chips than AMD.
First problem is suing the weather guy for unnecessarily ruining your plans. Predictions sometimes fail because they are predictions. They are not statements of facts. They are guesses based on best effort analysis of avaliable data.
Speaking of the 'weather guy', there's the infamous case of Michael Fish announcing on British TV that there wasn't going to be a hurricane that night... followed by not-quite hurricane force winds that caused widespread damage and killed a bunch of people. Even though he was technically correct, the damage might not have been so bad if people hadn't been watching him on the TV news and had been prepared for such a storm.
While I agree that jailing these people in this case seems crazy, no-one should be announcing in public that something can't happen when it's purely the output of a poorly understood model.
Not that I'm aware of. There isn't really anything that people in Canada can do. Our weird political system has given someone with less than 50% of the popular support a *majority government*.
What's weird about that? The last Labour government in the UK gained a majority with around 22% of the votes. Majority government on minority votes seems to be the norm in most Western nations.
Hopefully they will be gone after the next election. The people up here aren't too bright and might re-elect them.
The left clearly aren't too bright because they took a minority government and turned it into a majority government by forcing an election no-one wanted. If they hadn't forced an election Canada would still have a safe minority government who couldn't screw anything up too badly.
How can global warming affect the efficiency of nuclear power plants when FOX News told me that global warming is a myth created by a vast international conspiracy run from an obscure school in the UK?
More to the point, last I looked at the temperature record America was warmer in the 40s than it is today. So if the water is warmer than it was a few decades ago, it's not because of Global Catastrophic Warming Change or whatever the latest buzz-word is.
Teachers don't want to teach science that's controversial and uncertain. News at eleven.
Next you'll be complaining about people pushing evolution training as a means of discouraging teachers from teaching controvrsial and uncertain 'Creation Science'.
I've no idea what the rest of these documents say, but if this is the worst you can drag out of them it looks like desperation on the part of those who deny that climate changes naturally.
Yeah, because making sure there are enough outlets for myriad travellers (assuming that's what you're going to do as an "official" thing, rather than just having your normal number of outlets and just treating their use as first come first serve) is totally easy and free to do, right?
And why would you do that? You already have a ton of power outlets for normal operation, you just stop bugging your customers when they use them.
When I was travelling around the world with a laptop in the 90s I just plugged into the nearest power outlet. No-one ever complained, but that was before they decided they could nickel and dime everyone.
Of course, in classic slashdot style you go right for the ultra cynical "businesses are eeeeeeeeeeevil" route, with your hyperbolic $20 charge for a few tens of watts of power.
You seriously don't think that companies would charge you as much as they can get away with?
DAT was another format Sony killed with copy protection. 'What do you mean I can record digital CD-quality audio, but I'm not allowed to copy digital audio from my CDs?'
I do have a DAT Walkman, but that's because we used to use DAT for sound recording on movies. It doesn't have a digital input but at least it doesn't force you to record at 48kHz instead of 44.1.
Or perhaps, as is much, much, much more likely, it's designed for use *outside the home* at places like bars, airports, malls, coffee shops, restaurants, remote rest areas etc to provide a way to offer power to travelling people who need a quick boost.
I suspect you meant 'charge travelling people for power', since offering power to them is trivial... just ensure there are plenty of power outlets. So instead of them using $0.02 of power while eating a $20 meal, you can charge them $20 for that $0.02 of power.
Spending vast billions on a rocket which will only be a 'backup' for commercial launches makes as much sense as building a new aircraft the size of a C-5 Galaxy from scratch and maintaining a special airport it will fly from as a 'backup' in case NASA employees can't book a flight on a commercial airline.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, "just" rip out a working system for something inefficient at the best of times. Why aren't you in government, calling the shots?
Uh, so you think we should add a complex computer control system to every traffic light rather than rip it out and put a pile of dirt in the middle of the road for people to drive around?
Heck, you don't even need that, a lot of British roundabouts are just a painted circle on the road.
Yes! It is the year 2012, and our traffic lights are still running on timers. They're stupid, they waste time and fuel needlessly... they need to go. We have computers that can understand the spoken word, read the written word, and do whatever the hell it is that Kinect does. Our traffic semaphores should be far more intelligent than they are. I think I'd prefer something more along the lines of computer vision than and RF announcement -- for privacy reasons, but at least there's technology in the works.
Or, as someone suggested up above, you could just rip them out and install roundabouts.
If AMD goes down, is that going to 'end' ATI too?
ATI would presumably be sold off; from what I've read ATI's GPU profits seem to have been keeping the CPU side of the company alive for the last few years.
Intel seems to be winning because of marketing. Their top end CPUs out perform AMDs, but few people actually buy those.
Intel's MID-RANGE CPUs beat AMD's high-end, even though the AMD CPUs are 50% larger. That's a recipe for disaster, because AMD are forced to sell their most expensive CPUs for less than Intel's mid-range. Few people can see any good reason to buy a slower, more power-hungry AMD chip instead of an i5 unless the price is low enough to justify that.
I wouldn't bet against Bulldozer in the long term because the benchmarks I've seen seem to indicate some kind of unexpected bottleneck in their hyperthreading implementation; if that's the case then a new generation could actually make some use of all those extra transistors. But for now it's hard to see how they're going to make enough money from it to fund development of the next generation.
Intel absolutely sucks for integrated graphics.
People who care about 3D don't rely on CPUs with integrated graphics. Intel's IGP is designed for people who watch Youtube videos and play Facebook Flash games, not the latest Call of Duty.
Saying 'my new integrated GPU is now half as fast as the slowest discrete card!' is not a great marketing win. If you want to play games well you need something better and if you don't care about games you don't care how fast the integrated graphics are.
When Intel produced laughable chips for years they still remain the absolute market leader, because of their unethical tactics.
The original P4s were comparable to the Athlons available at the time; when I bought my P4 it was a bit faster than the comparably priced AMDs for the uses I had for it. It was only when AMD released the Athlon 64 while Intel was struggling to push the P4 faster that they raced ahead... at that point everyone who knew about technology was saying 'Don't buy Intel, buy AMD, P4 sucks', and no amount of 'unethical tactics' could have kept Intel ahead for long.
Ultimately Intel had vastly greater production capabilities than AMD, so there was no way AMD could have filled their niche in the market. From what I remember at the time, several OEMs said they wanted to ship AMD chips but AMD couldn't guarantee them enough supplies. AMD couldn't build enough new fabs fast enough to increase production.
Dell was an especial example of this: in the K7/K8 days they'd make noise every year or two about how they were considering selling AMD-based systems rather than being exclusively Intel, and those of us in IT who wanted /better/ computers would get very excited
Um, if you wanted better computers, why did you keep buying from a company which didn't sell them?
This is the problem with the whole 'evil Intel' argument; you're assuming that customers would continue to buy second-rate products when they could buy better PCs from another company. When AMD released AMD64 they owned much of the server and workstation market and most of the high-end desktop market, because if you cared about CPU performance you didn't buy an Intel space-heater.
Let's not forget the underhanded tactics that Intel used. They were forced to pay a minimal $1bn to AMD for it. I always thought its too small an amount for losing their position as leaders in the CPU market.
AMD didn't lose their position as manufacturer of best x86 chips because of 'underhanded tactics', they lost it because Intel produced better x86 chips than AMD.
A firm with a Monopoly has multiple, permanent advantages. That there is little/no interest in breaking it up is another story.
AMD is a monopoly? I think Intel would disagree with that.
Intel just succeeded HUGE. They few years of AMD dominance were more a result of intels missteps.
Bingo. The P4 was a dead end, Intel were betting on Itanium for the 64-bit market, and AMD just kept on building better x86 chips.
Once Intel realised they were falling behind, they dropped their brain-dead policies and pushed out better chips than AMD's.
This is just as ludicrous as what the parent poster wrote. We wouldn't have elections if that was the case.
Yes, just look at all that 'Hope and Change' America has seen since Obama replaced Bush in the White House.
Elections don't matter in the slightest when all candidates are controlled by the same vested interests.
Anyone with this ridiculous mindset shold be banned from 'socialist' stuff.
I take it that "centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State" means nothing to you?
God God, man! Think of all the construction workers who'll be laid off when basements can be dug by computer or remotely from China!
First problem is suing the weather guy for unnecessarily ruining your plans. Predictions sometimes fail because they are predictions. They are not statements of facts. They are guesses based on best effort analysis of avaliable data.
Speaking of the 'weather guy', there's the infamous case of Michael Fish announcing on British TV that there wasn't going to be a hurricane that night... followed by not-quite hurricane force winds that caused widespread damage and killed a bunch of people. Even though he was technically correct, the damage might not have been so bad if people hadn't been watching him on the TV news and had been prepared for such a storm.
While I agree that jailing these people in this case seems crazy, no-one should be announcing in public that something can't happen when it's purely the output of a poorly understood model.
Not that I'm aware of. There isn't really anything that people in Canada can do. Our weird political system has given someone with less than 50% of the popular support a *majority government*.
What's weird about that? The last Labour government in the UK gained a majority with around 22% of the votes. Majority government on minority votes seems to be the norm in most Western nations.
Hopefully they will be gone after the next election. The people up here aren't too bright and might re-elect them.
The left clearly aren't too bright because they took a minority government and turned it into a majority government by forcing an election no-one wanted. If they hadn't forced an election Canada would still have a safe minority government who couldn't screw anything up too badly.
What are the short comings of HTML for this then?
Most ebook formats are just wrapped HTML.
... and this brilliant business sense is why you are middle class and broke
While Steve Jobs runs Windows in Hell.
Isn't this basically the same idea as the Canadian Air Force exercise program of the 50s?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5BX
How can global warming affect the efficiency of nuclear power plants when FOX News told me that global warming is a myth created by a vast international conspiracy run from an obscure school in the UK?
More to the point, last I looked at the temperature record America was warmer in the 40s than it is today. So if the water is warmer than it was a few decades ago, it's not because of Global Catastrophic Warming Change or whatever the latest buzz-word is.
Teachers don't want to teach science that's controversial and uncertain. News at eleven.
Next you'll be complaining about people pushing evolution training as a means of discouraging teachers from teaching controvrsial and uncertain 'Creation Science'.
I've no idea what the rest of these documents say, but if this is the worst you can drag out of them it looks like desperation on the part of those who deny that climate changes naturally.
Yeah, because making sure there are enough outlets for myriad travellers (assuming that's what you're going to do as an "official" thing, rather than just having your normal number of outlets and just treating their use as first come first serve) is totally easy and free to do, right?
And why would you do that? You already have a ton of power outlets for normal operation, you just stop bugging your customers when they use them.
When I was travelling around the world with a laptop in the 90s I just plugged into the nearest power outlet. No-one ever complained, but that was before they decided they could nickel and dime everyone.
Of course, in classic slashdot style you go right for the ultra cynical "businesses are eeeeeeeeeeevil" route, with your hyperbolic $20 charge for a few tens of watts of power.
You seriously don't think that companies would charge you as much as they can get away with?
DAT, MD and ATRAC were quite successful actually.
DAT was another format Sony killed with copy protection. 'What do you mean I can record digital CD-quality audio, but I'm not allowed to copy digital audio from my CDs?'
I do have a DAT Walkman, but that's because we used to use DAT for sound recording on movies. It doesn't have a digital input but at least it doesn't force you to record at 48kHz instead of 44.1.
Can't wait for a sony socket that wont power some device because it's not "authenticated".
I have a vision! Power sockets that will only power Sony products! cue maniacal evil laughter.
I believe some recent Sony camcorders refuse to operate with non-Sony batteries, so it's not so far-fetched.
Or perhaps, as is much, much, much more likely, it's designed for use *outside the home* at places like bars, airports, malls, coffee shops, restaurants, remote rest areas etc to provide a way to offer power to travelling people who need a quick boost.
I suspect you meant 'charge travelling people for power', since offering power to them is trivial... just ensure there are plenty of power outlets. So instead of them using $0.02 of power while eating a $20 meal, you can charge them $20 for that $0.02 of power.
Spending vast billions on a rocket which will only be a 'backup' for commercial launches makes as much sense as building a new aircraft the size of a C-5 Galaxy from scratch and maintaining a special airport it will fly from as a 'backup' in case NASA employees can't book a flight on a commercial airline.