Hmm.. if Indian programmers are sooooo bad and shitty, wonder why you guys are sooooo worried about losing your jobs, Indians getting all the code jobs, and so on?
Because managers get a bonus for 'saving money' by sending work to India, and will have moved on to another job by the time their successor discovers that the code is late, over-budget, unsupportable and full of bugs.
Can you name any good programs that have come out of India? Because every occasion I know of when work has been sent there has been a disaster.
So that guy who purchased a dual-core AM2 Phenom when they were cutting edge can now socket a hexa-core AM3 Phenom II.
So you buy AMD's most expensive CPU and cripple it by sticking it on an antiquated board with slow memory. Makes perfect sense to me.
Also, I've read that one of the reasons Phenom is slower than Intel's i-series CPUs is because having to support DDR2 as well as DDR3 slows down the memory controller.
I drive 36,000+ miles a year on average - I would have killed for a VW Diesel GTI but they were not selling them in 2008. I was getting around 15-18MPG in a van with no AC or heating and I had my break-even threshold set at $2.37 a gallon. My plan has always been to drive the Prius until the wheels fall off and the battery stops charging, and even then I might do an after-market mod to make it plug-in..
You do 36,000+ miles of urban driving every year? In that case I suspect you're right that you're better off driving a hybrid; the only Priuses I've seen on the road are taxis, where the hybrid engine must surely make sense.
But most people who drive long distances every year probably do so on the highway where there's likely to be minimal benefit to a hybrid and possibly a significant cost (e.g. due to the mass of all those batteries you're carrying around at 70mph).
Personally I'll stick to my Civic, though I would have considered a Volt if it wasn't $40k+.
We've had a "long-term presence" in space for decades - space stations, etc.
No you haven't, and what you have had has been built by governments for prestige purposes, not for the purpose of getting off the planet and staying there.
If we truly want to "get off this rock," we will either need terraforming technology that is pure fantasy at this point or faster than light travel, which is also pure fantasy.
No-one in their right mind will bother terraforming a dead planet to live on if they can build their own self-contained habitat instead. Planets are a lousy place to live if you're a space-faring creature.
While leaving here is impractical NOW, it does not follow that it will ALWAYS remain that way.
For the cost of the war in Iraq, we could easily have bootstrapped a long-term presence in space. A high launch rate would significantly reduce launch costs, and with the use of asteroids or lunar materials we could build anything we want up there.
The energy required to make time stop completely for the entire universe would be, literally, astronomical.
Surely you mean, literally, infinite?
Anything with a rest mass requires infinite energy to reach the speed of light, and then you become an enormous black hole that sucks in the rest of the universe so travelling around it would be the least of your problems:).
The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games. The sad thing is that PC gamers will destroy their own gaming platform by doing so.
Piracy isn't destroying PC gaming. Crappy console ports of crappy console games with ludicrous DRM is killing PC gaming.
>But you know what the next step to prevent piracy will be?
Fully online games.
Then I won't be buying them... I don't want to be tied to the Internet just to play a game, nor do I want the games I've paid for to stop working when Game Company X decides to shut down the servers for 'Super Console Port #1' when they release 'Super Console Port #2'.
Personally my game purchases are down to two types now:
1. From Steam in a sale for $5-10 so long as there's no DRM other than Steam provides. A game which can be arbitrarily disabled is not worth any more than that to me. And if you're going to release a half-finished game and charge for extra content, then I'll wait for the 'actually includes all the stuff' release a year or two later. 2. From DRM-free sources like Gog.com, where I at least know I can play it whenever I want without stupid restrictions.
Games simply aren't important enough to jump through the hoops that game publishers are imposing these days.
BTW, if anyone is going to claim that this is due to EVIL OIL COMPANIES causing GLOBAL WARMING, here's a link to the GISS weather stations around that part of the world:
I like nuclear thermal as much as the next/.er, but is there really any point in thermal rockets beyond attaining orbit?
For one thing there's the slight problem that you die during the transit through the Van Allen belts if you don't have a high-thrust engine or very large radiation shields.
And nuclear thermal rockets kind of suck ass for attaining orbit since you have to ensure that they land somewhere safe if they fail during launch; NASA's test plans for the early models involved polar launch where the flight path was designed to dump it in Antarctica or a remote part of the ocean if something went wrong.
I don't know enough to verify the article. That said, the article linked states that information can travel faster than the speed of light.
And it's still nonsense. The only reason information appears to travel faster than light is because they use a non-relativistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and you can't send any useful information even if you believe that's the case, since you can't control what the spin of the particle turns out to be.
Google 'Transactional Interpretation' and you'll understand why we laugh when people claim that 'entangled photons' are somehow magical.
Part of the problem is that when AMD did have competitive high-end parts (Athlon/Thunderbird/64) Intel was using these practices to keep OEMs from offering them.
But if I remember correctly, AMD was selling every CPU they could produce at that time? And anyone who knew anything about computers -- i.e. those who'd be buying high-end systems -- was saying 'buy AMD, Intel sucks'.
really? whats competative at the $300 point with AMD Phenom II X6 1090T from Intel?
The benchmarks I've seen show even an i5 being competitive with a Phenom II X6, let alone an i7. And if you're really looking for the best possible mult-threaded performance -- which is the only reason for buying a 6-core CPU -- why would you settle for second best?
Do you seriously think that AMD would be selling their top of the range CPUs for $300 if they didn't have to in order to compete with Intel's?
If Intel can't make their prices lower than everyone else via some back-alley 'bundling' then we're not likely to see the same market penetration.
In most markets Intel don't have to worry about 'making their prices lower than everyone else' because there is no-one else who can compete with them. AMD are only really competitive at the low end, precisely because Intel haven't dropped prices low enough to push AMD out of the market.
In addition, while it may have changed now AMD have farmed off their fabs to a third-party, Intel have traditionally had far more production capacity than AMD so there was no way that AMD could take much more of the CPU market without a lot of expensive expansion.
"Then there's games like Modern Warfare 2 where Russians are portrayed as bad guys."
One thing I liked about 'Operation Flashpoint' was that you could play as Americans, Russians or resistance fighters, so you could see all sides of the war.
So we should replace the FDA with psychics who can tell that an untested drug will save 10,000 lives a year?
No, you should let people choose whether to use drugs that they want to use rather than condemning them to death. If you're going to die anyway, why shouldn't you take an untested drug which might kill you or might save your life?
BTW, I'm glad to see you didn't deny that pharmaceutical regulation has killed vast numbers of people.
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Hmm.. if Indian programmers are sooooo bad and shitty, wonder why you guys are sooooo worried about losing your jobs, Indians getting all the code jobs, and so on?
Because managers get a bonus for 'saving money' by sending work to India, and will have moved on to another job by the time their successor discovers that the code is late, over-budget, unsupportable and full of bugs.
Can you name any good programs that have come out of India? Because every occasion I know of when work has been sent there has been a disaster.
LOL. I've never seen any good programming come out of India, and there's no way I'd buy a car if I knew they'd outsourced the programming there.
After all, if you were a good Indian programmer you'd be in America on an H1B.
The thing was running Linux and it's stillbeing blamed on Microsoft!
Perhaps you should try reading the article, where there's no indication at all that the problem is due to running Linux on the entertainment system.
And 'BSOD' is now a generic term meaning 'it just crashed for no good reason and I have no idea what to do'.
Nobody wanted to buy British junk. That's why all they ended with Indians and the Chinese.
Jaguar is Indian these days. So if they've farmed out the in-car electronics development to Indian programmers that could explain a lot.
So that guy who purchased a dual-core AM2 Phenom when they were cutting edge can now socket a hexa-core AM3 Phenom II.
So you buy AMD's most expensive CPU and cripple it by sticking it on an antiquated board with slow memory. Makes perfect sense to me.
Also, I've read that one of the reasons Phenom is slower than Intel's i-series CPUs is because having to support DDR2 as well as DDR3 slows down the memory controller.
Currently, you load 3 pages of noise filled unread ad droppings before you can actually log in and look at your mail.
Strange: I just type 'mail.yahoo.com', log in and I'm there.
Someone should have patented installing a trojan... ON A PHONE... and then they could sue anyone else who did so.
I drive 36,000+ miles a year on average - I would have killed for a VW Diesel GTI but they were not selling them in 2008. I was getting around 15-18MPG in a van with no AC or heating and I had my break-even threshold set at $2.37 a gallon. My plan has always been to drive the Prius until the wheels fall off and the battery stops charging, and even then I might do an after-market mod to make it plug-in..
You do 36,000+ miles of urban driving every year? In that case I suspect you're right that you're better off driving a hybrid; the only Priuses I've seen on the road are taxis, where the hybrid engine must surely make sense.
But most people who drive long distances every year probably do so on the highway where there's likely to be minimal benefit to a hybrid and possibly a significant cost (e.g. due to the mass of all those batteries you're carrying around at 70mph).
Personally I'll stick to my Civic, though I would have considered a Volt if it wasn't $40k+.
We've had a "long-term presence" in space for decades - space stations, etc.
No you haven't, and what you have had has been built by governments for prestige purposes, not for the purpose of getting off the planet and staying there.
If we truly want to "get off this rock," we will either need terraforming technology that is pure fantasy at this point or faster than light travel, which is also pure fantasy.
No-one in their right mind will bother terraforming a dead planet to live on if they can build their own self-contained habitat instead. Planets are a lousy place to live if you're a space-faring creature.
How do you get anything over $8.55/hr in a first world country without any skills?
The local supermarkets have been advertising shelf-stacking jobs for over $10 an hour. That doesn't take much in the way of skills.
While leaving here is impractical NOW, it does not follow that it will ALWAYS remain that way.
For the cost of the war in Iraq, we could easily have bootstrapped a long-term presence in space. A high launch rate would significantly reduce launch costs, and with the use of asteroids or lunar materials we could build anything we want up there.
The energy required to make time stop completely for the entire universe would be, literally, astronomical.
Surely you mean, literally, infinite?
Anything with a rest mass requires infinite energy to reach the speed of light, and then you become an enormous black hole that sucks in the rest of the universe so travelling around it would be the least of your problems :).
The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games. The sad thing is that PC gamers will destroy their own gaming platform by doing so.
Piracy isn't destroying PC gaming. Crappy console ports of crappy console games with ludicrous DRM is killing PC gaming.
>But you know what the next step to prevent piracy will be?
Fully online games.
Then I won't be buying them... I don't want to be tied to the Internet just to play a game, nor do I want the games I've paid for to stop working when Game Company X decides to shut down the servers for 'Super Console Port #1' when they release 'Super Console Port #2'.
Personally my game purchases are down to two types now:
1. From Steam in a sale for $5-10 so long as there's no DRM other than Steam provides. A game which can be arbitrarily disabled is not worth any more than that to me. And if you're going to release a half-finished game and charge for extra content, then I'll wait for the 'actually includes all the stuff' release a year or two later.
2. From DRM-free sources like Gog.com, where I at least know I can play it whenever I want without stupid restrictions.
Games simply aren't important enough to jump through the hoops that game publishers are imposing these days.
BTW, if anyone is going to claim that this is due to EVIL OIL COMPANIES causing GLOBAL WARMING, here's a link to the GISS weather stations around that part of the world:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?datatype=gistemp&data_set=1&name=&world_map.x=282&world_map.y=47
I just took a look at a few of the ones with long-term weather trends and Greenland appears to be cooler today than it was around 1920/1930.
No, this is a sign of AGW.
No, it's not, for numerous different reasons.
And, BTW, ice cover has increased since 2007... is that a sign of Global Cooling?
I like nuclear thermal as much as the next /.er, but is there really any point in thermal rockets beyond attaining orbit?
For one thing there's the slight problem that you die during the transit through the Van Allen belts if you don't have a high-thrust engine or very large radiation shields.
And nuclear thermal rockets kind of suck ass for attaining orbit since you have to ensure that they land somewhere safe if they fail during launch; NASA's test plans for the early models involved polar launch where the flight path was designed to dump it in Antarctica or a remote part of the ocean if something went wrong.
I don't know enough to verify the article. That said, the article linked states that information can travel faster than the speed of light.
And it's still nonsense. The only reason information appears to travel faster than light is because they use a non-relativistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and you can't send any useful information even if you believe that's the case, since you can't control what the spin of the particle turns out to be.
Google 'Transactional Interpretation' and you'll understand why we laugh when people claim that 'entangled photons' are somehow magical.
You can deal with relativistic propagation delays for secondary storage, but not for primary storage.
You could have a few gigabytes of cache on the motherboard :).
BTW, a foot is almost exactly one nanosecond at the speed of light, just another example of why it's superior to metric :).
Part of the problem is that when AMD did have competitive high-end parts (Athlon/Thunderbird/64) Intel was using these practices to keep OEMs from offering them.
But if I remember correctly, AMD was selling every CPU they could produce at that time? And anyone who knew anything about computers -- i.e. those who'd be buying high-end systems -- was saying 'buy AMD, Intel sucks'.
really? whats competative at the $300 point with AMD Phenom II X6 1090T from Intel?
The benchmarks I've seen show even an i5 being competitive with a Phenom II X6, let alone an i7. And if you're really looking for the best possible mult-threaded performance -- which is the only reason for buying a 6-core CPU -- why would you settle for second best?
Do you seriously think that AMD would be selling their top of the range CPUs for $300 if they didn't have to in order to compete with Intel's?
If Intel can't make their prices lower than everyone else via some back-alley 'bundling' then we're not likely to see the same market penetration.
In most markets Intel don't have to worry about 'making their prices lower than everyone else' because there is no-one else who can compete with them. AMD are only really competitive at the low end, precisely because Intel haven't dropped prices low enough to push AMD out of the market.
In addition, while it may have changed now AMD have farmed off their fabs to a third-party, Intel have traditionally had far more production capacity than AMD so there was no way that AMD could take much more of the CPU market without a lot of expensive expansion.
"And I don't want those two countries, ruled by a dictatorship, to have weapons that will enable them to carry out their threats."
Presumably you missed the part where Iran was a democracy before America and Britain staged a coup to oust its democratic government in the 50s?
"Then there's games like Modern Warfare 2 where Russians are portrayed as bad guys."
One thing I liked about 'Operation Flashpoint' was that you could play as Americans, Russians or resistance fighters, so you could see all sides of the war.
I'm looking forward to 'Grand Theft Auto: Baghdad' myself.
So we should replace the FDA with psychics who can tell that an untested drug will save 10,000 lives a year?
No, you should let people choose whether to use drugs that they want to use rather than condemning them to death. If you're going to die anyway, why shouldn't you take an untested drug which might kill you or might save your life?
BTW, I'm glad to see you didn't deny that pharmaceutical regulation has killed vast numbers of people.