Having been in the Marines, I had the oppurtunity to play the auto-bugle at the funerals of several veterans. It actually put me in quite an awkward situation on several occassions.
It's actually quite comical. There I am, someone with zero musical ability, standing in front of an entire funeral, cheeks bulging in and out, pretending to play the bugle. After my "performance" I had several people come up to me (including the teary-eyed widow of the deceased) telling me that I was the best bugle player they ever heard and that my rendition of Taps was the most heartfelt and sincere they had ever witnessed. I didn't have the heart to tell them that it was all just a show, but based on the audience's reaction I should have been awarded an Oscar and a Grammy!
I've seen that some people are curious about Shannon's limit, so I though I would give a little insight to it. It starts, with Nyquist's theorem which states:
max data rate = 2H log V bits/sec
Here, H is the bandwith available, usually through a low-pass filter, and V is the number of discrete signal levels (V = 2 in a straight binary system).
This equation however is for a noiseless channel, which doesn't exist. So Shannon updated the formula for a channel which contains a signal-to-noise ratio. This turns out to be:
max bits/sec = H log (1 + S/N)
Here the log is again base 2, H is still the bandwith (in Hertz) and S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio in dB. Notice that the parameter V is missing. This is because no matter how many discrete symbols you have, or how often you sample them, this is still the maximum number of bits/sec that you will be able to attain.
Most coding schemes, or modulation techniques as they are also called, rely on shifting signal amplitude, frequency, and phase to transmit more than one bit per symbol. The problem is that the more symbols there are, the harder it is to detect them correctly with the addition of noise. Basically, when you fire up your modem, and you hear all that weird buzzing and beeping, a lot of that is time being spent for your modem trying to determine just how noisy the channel is, and what the best modulation scheme it can use is while still being able to detect symbols correctly.
Intel will release these new LCoS televisions which revolutionize the entire home entertainment and television industry, opening the doors for hundreds of other companies. In about 20 years or so one of these companies will make a comparable product and sell it cheaper. Then Slashdotters will be slamming Intel for not ever contributing anything significant.
I used to work for a company that provides hardware support for over 25,000 computers. Basically, large corporations would send their computers to us when something had gone wrong with the hardware. During our yearly reviews we would check to see what our most frequent problems were. It turned out that for all our CPU problems about 3 out of every 4 of them were AMD processors. This is unbelievable too, considering that about 19,600 of the computers we handled have "Intel Inside" of them, compared to about 4,100 for AMD.
We also noticed that motherboards with the Intel chipset fair much better as well compared to those that don't.
Doing a little math, it's easy to see why Intel is on top. Even though the processors cost more in the beginning, in the long run companies still save money by using Intel. Especially considering that their is not much of a price difference for corporations when purchasing large quantities of Intel or AMD computers.
I guess the choice of manufacturing is a bad word. Intel has said however that they have successfully made fully funtctioning chips in their development fab.
Intel in the past just turns their development fab into a manufacturing fab once it's time to start manufacturing the chip and there is no reason to beleive that it will be any different this time.
Wouldn't Moore's Law have failed by now without AMD competing for market share?
I don't think this is because of AMD. I would attribute it more to the fact the Gordon Moore, the creator of Moore's law is a co-founder of Intel and currently the chairman-of-the-board. It's probably more of Intel employees trying to not upset the boss by keeping up with what he obviously feels is the appropriate rate for number of transistors on a chip.
I think Intel is starting to feel the heat from quarters they didnt expect, like AMD and Apple via the good graces of IBM.
This argument is totally untrue. Intel has done better than expected the past two quarters and is expecting to have their best quarter ever for Q4 and is expecting to do well far into the future as well. This doesn't sound to me like a company that is too worried.
Since February both Intel's stock has increased by about 18 points and AMD's by 12.
Besides the fact that it is easier to make the wafers circular, I thought that I would let you know that the wafers are indeed spun. Usually this is to dry them off after they've been dipped in a chemical or water.
The 300mm is a real advantage for any company that has a Fab which supports it. You can produce more than twice as many chips on a 300mm wafer then on a 200mm wafer.
It's not really a breakthrough on AMD's part at all. Intel already has 300mm fabs up and running.
Ever go to a pro game? how much do hotdogs cost? how about a pepsi? goog god they are expensive, and it is because they owners have to 1. pay the players and 2. make some profit...
This is not true at all. Owners will charge as much as they can get away with no matter what the payroll. Coming from a large university, I can tell you from personal experience that the cost of a Hot Dog and a Pepsi and even tickets at a big college sporting event is the same as it is at the professional level, and the players have no payroll at all. There are other trends that would tend to disprove this theory such as tickets to pro-hockey games are generally much more expensive than baseball or basketball tickets yet hockey players get paid the least.
Yes, but the guys that make the multi-millions are generally longer-term players. It is the new guys, making league minimum(1/2 mill?) that don't last long. Ofcourse injuries are also a part of this.
I would tend to agree with you in this respect. Barring injuries, the big money players are the guys who play for a while. Still, in most sports even the big money guys play for about 10 years. That's still not very long considering it's what they devote their entire life to.
Wow, that was interesting. Let me tell you, that making 1 million a year will put them in a pretty comfortable life, let alone several million. hell, 200k a year will put them in a nice lifestyle, depending on COL for the area(oregon is MUCH cheaper to live in than cali).
I agree that you can live comfortably for 200k a year, but that's our opinion. When I first started my job I always said that if I made X, then I would be set and not have to worry about money anymore. Well, now I make more than X and I still worry about money. The point being that most of us can live fine with much less, it's just that people live within their means. Who gets to decide what a comfortable amount of money is? It's all in the eyes of the beholder.
Please tell me how he would be suffering if A-rod only made 2 mill a year instead of, what, 10-15 mill?
I agree that A-rod wouldn't "suffer" if he only made 2 million a year. Still, he is the best at what he does. It just so happens that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to pay money to watch A-rod do his job. He is part of the backbone of a multibillion dollar industry. The owners pay more money for the big names, because the big names bring them more money. Whether A-rod suffers or not has nothing to do with whether he is overpaid.
It's too bad that other professions don't get paid more, but it's not athletes fault. The money in their industry is there for the taking and who can blame them? Once again it comes down to supply and demand. The supply of great athletes is very small, and the demand is very high. A-rod is getting his market value.
1) If you were offered a choice to buy, let's say a football ticket, for either whatever it costs now -$20, for argument's sake or for $5, would you pay $20 because the athletes 'deserve' it?
This argument does not hold water. Ticket prices are not set by athletes. Franchise owners will charge as much as they can for tickets no matter what the payroll of the athletes is. The best example of this is college athletics. Ticket prices to a big name college athletic event are just as much as they are to pro sporting events and colleges don't pay their athletes millions.
Give me a break. I can't stand how everyone complains that athletes are overpaid. There are too many reasons to list here why they deserve that much many, but I'll name just a few of my favorites. First, the average pro athlete has a career which lasts less than 3 years. So in a career with such low job security it is no wonder that they ask for so much money.
Second, the average joe will say things to the extent of "Why does that guy need to make 2 million a year, nobody needs that much money." Well, why don't you go ask a person who lives in poverty or is homeless how much money they think you need to live? Chances are they would say that nobody really needs to make more than 25k a year to live comfortably. My point being that everything is relative.
Third, it's not like the money that athletes make comes from your tax dollar. You aren't losing anything because some lucky people are making millions for doing what they love. If athletes didn't make that much money, it would just get pocketed by the owners.
Finally, if everyone could be a pro athlete then I'm sure they wouldn't make as much money. Athletes have devoted more time to their careers then most anybody else. From ages as young as 4 or 5 they practice daily, typically for hours on end. It's not just fun for them either. They suffer through grueling physical exertion that would cause most of us to hurt just thinking about. While you were playing Nintendo with your friends after school, they were practicing. While you were sleeping late and being lazy during summer vacations, they were practicing. Not too many people realize just how much work it takes to make it to the professional level. It's not like it's a big secret which profession to choose if you want to make money. The truth is that most people just don't have the commitment, dedication, or enough desire to become an athlete. The few that do, deserve their rewards. The reason why someone such as a software engineer doesn't make as much money is because it's easier to become one and that is evident by how easily one can be replaced.
I could continue, but I'll stop there. I'm not sure why people have such a problem with athletes making lots of money. Many argue it's because they do nothing more than provide a form of entertainment. This is ludicrous. Singers, actors, musicians, casino owners, writers and even super-models have careers based mainly on entertaining and some make a lot more money than athletes. Still, they don't receive nearly the the criticism. Personally I think it's just plain old jealousy.
It's a secret. Intel isn't saying what the material is, just that they've discovered a probable solution to fix the achilles heel of the chipmaking industry.
Basically, they are saying that they have found two new materials with a high k dielectric that reduces current leakage by more than a 100 times silicon dioxide and hopefully plan to use it by 2007 in production. They also have tested the materials and had excellent results in a lab environment. Still, they are being vague on the details, and who can blame them if this stuff is as good as they say it is.
Skeptic or beleiver? I guess that's a matter of opinion. But Intel thinks that this will keep Moore's law true for quite some time. In the past if Intel claims they have been able to stay true to Moore's law it's been true. Heck, the can't lie, Moore is the founder of the company.
I remember when I was in elementary school always thinking that the weather must be controlled by principals and teachers somehow. It seemed like it only ever snowed on the weekends. My parents thought I was losing my mind and I only thought it snowed more on the weekends because I wanted snow days.
Come to find out, I was right. I can't remember the exact show, but I recall seeing a show on this. It turns out that scientists attribute it to the amount of pollution caused during the week because of traffic jams, long commutes, school buses, etc.
I understand that most of the benchmarks are for 32-bit applications, but it still seems to me that the benchmarks aren't nearly that impressive. Intel's processor beat AMD in just about every benchmark. Granted, in some obscure 64-bit applications that barely anybody uses AMD wins, but that's not going to impress your typical user, because they don't use 64-bit applications yet.
It's like if Sony released the Playstation 2, but with no games at launch. Sure, it's better than PSOne, but if there are only PSOne games out, then why spend the money. The real truth of the matter is that your banking on companies to release 64-bit software applications, which won't even start to become nearly mainstream for at least a year. Then who knows, maybe Intel will release the Pentium64. Kudos to AMD though, because someone has to get the ball rolling.
I'm not sure what type of network your on, but where I work we have regular 10Mbps Ethernet. Where I go to school, they use 802.11b. I don't ever notice a difference in speed. Chances are most users won't either, because the bottleneck isn't your access medium if your primary use is internet access. I suppose for traffic in your intranet that you'll see the difference but I think that this type of usage in networks these days is relatively low compared to internet traffic. I, for one, love wi-fi. Without it I wouldn't be able to post to Slashdot while sitting through a boring three hour lecture.
What I'm really not impressed with is Intel saying desktop users don't need sixty-four bit. Well, we don't need gobs of cache. We need sixty-four bits.
You may be surprised. If Intel keeps pushing how much L1 or L2 cache it can increase performance dramatically. Probably the best measure of processor performance is instructions per second in a normal computing environment. Probably the biggest cause of lowering the number of ips is due to a cache miss. Since cache is several times faster than main memory it's easy to figure the bigger the cache, the less misses, which means less time waiting for RAM and thus a higher number of ips.
For video, especially compression, this is a huge benefit. For instance an MPEG encoder using a typical full-search algorithm needs information from 2 different frames to calculate motion vectors. With a high quality video, or a video with large frames, this much data can't be stored in cache alone. The number of cache misses is pretty big. That's why it takes so long to compress video. A large cache will speed up this process greatly.
I'm glossing over a lot of details but take my word for it, a larger cache is very beneficial and not only for video compression. It is also useful for gamers and high-end users which is who Intel is marketing it for. Even the casual user may notice a difference in context-switching, etc.
Sure, Intel is releasing smaller percentage increments, they make more money from it. The nice thing is that they still follow Moore's law. So ultimately chip speeds still double about every two years.
This being Slashdot where Linux is infallible, I'm sure there are going to be an abundance of excuses as to why Linux is the most hacked server. I'm sure someone will point out that it's the SysAdmins because they don't keep their boxes secure. Or,it's because there are a lot more Linux servers than Windows servers. If Microsoft servers were found to be more hacked none of these excuses would have flown and it would have been attributed to how evil Microsoft is and how much of a piece of crap operating system Windows is.
Saying that everyone should switch operating systems is not the answer to the problem. Although Windows has more than it's share of problems, other operating systems aren't flawless. If everyone went out tomorrow and switched to a Mac or Linux I can promise you that the number of viruses and worms for these systems would go through the roof. Considering that an average user either a. doesn't know how, or b. even bothers trying to use something as simple as Windows Update, do you really think they are going to know how to secure a Unix based system.
Not the case at the University of Massachusetts. Here Microsoft will give any Engineering, Computer Science, and I beleive a few other majors free copies of all of Microsoft's software (except for Office). It's part of a program Microsoft has called the Microsoft Developer's Network Academic Alliance, or MSDNAA for short. The university has an internal website where you just click on the software you want to download and you get an.iso file to burn onto CD. Needless to say I have just about every piece of Microsoft software made. Not that I ever use it, but it substantially adds to the value of my software collection.
Of course Microsoft is only doing this to try and get all the techies at the school to use Microsoft software, which really is just standard business practice. However we get the best of both worlds since none of the professors are obligated to use Microsoft software for their courses, and most don't. We still learn C/C++, Java, Lisp/Scheme, etc. and most professors encourage the use of Unix based systems. So far I've haven't seen it affect my courses in any way whatsoever and I hope it stays that way.
You would be surprised at what they rank schools on. At princetonreview.com you can find out all kinds of stuff. Which schools are the most/least politically involved, best/worst administration, most hippies, most jocks, drinking school, reefer school, nerdiest schools, you name it.
Of course it's all done by student survey unlike USNews which is done by staff/faculty I believe. You get to see the top five schools for each category unless you register but at least it's free.
In the Northeast U.S. the standard is definitely AIM at least from what I have seen. I used to use ICQ exclusively when I first started college about 5 years ago, but I realized that too many people had never heard of it, and I reluctantly had to switch to AIM so that I could communicate with everyone else. Even my little sister only uses AIM and she is 12. So, here it's not even a preference between different age groups.
I just saw the movie and thought it was pretty decent. Not to hard to understand really. The only question I have is where can I get my hands on some of that cake.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been in the Marines, I had the oppurtunity to play the auto-bugle at the funerals of several veterans. It actually put me in quite an awkward situation on several occassions. It's actually quite comical. There I am, someone with zero musical ability, standing in front of an entire funeral, cheeks bulging in and out, pretending to play the bugle. After my "performance" I had several people come up to me (including the teary-eyed widow of the deceased) telling me that I was the best bugle player they ever heard and that my rendition of Taps was the most heartfelt and sincere they had ever witnessed. I didn't have the heart to tell them that it was all just a show, but based on the audience's reaction I should have been awarded an Oscar and a Grammy!
I've seen that some people are curious about Shannon's limit, so I though I would give a little insight to it. It starts, with Nyquist's theorem which states:
max data rate = 2H log V bits/sec
Here, H is the bandwith available, usually through a low-pass filter, and V is the number of discrete signal levels (V = 2 in a straight binary system).
This equation however is for a noiseless channel, which doesn't exist. So Shannon updated the formula for a channel which contains a signal-to-noise ratio. This turns out to be:
max bits/sec = H log (1 + S/N)
Here the log is again base 2, H is still the bandwith (in Hertz) and S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio in dB. Notice that the parameter V is missing. This is because no matter how many discrete symbols you have, or how often you sample them, this is still the maximum number of bits/sec that you will be able to attain.
Most coding schemes, or modulation techniques as they are also called, rely on shifting signal amplitude, frequency, and phase to transmit more than one bit per symbol. The problem is that the more symbols there are, the harder it is to detect them correctly with the addition of noise. Basically, when you fire up your modem, and you hear all that weird buzzing and beeping, a lot of that is time being spent for your modem trying to determine just how noisy the channel is, and what the best modulation scheme it can use is while still being able to detect symbols correctly.
Intel will release these new LCoS televisions which revolutionize the entire home entertainment and television industry, opening the doors for hundreds of other companies. In about 20 years or so one of these companies will make a comparable product and sell it cheaper. Then Slashdotters will be slamming Intel for not ever contributing anything significant.
I used to work for a company that provides hardware support for over 25,000 computers. Basically, large corporations would send their computers to us when something had gone wrong with the hardware. During our yearly reviews we would check to see what our most frequent problems were. It turned out that for all our CPU problems about 3 out of every 4 of them were AMD processors. This is unbelievable too, considering that about 19,600 of the computers we handled have "Intel Inside" of them, compared to about 4,100 for AMD.
We also noticed that motherboards with the Intel chipset fair much better as well compared to those that don't. Doing a little math, it's easy to see why Intel is on top. Even though the processors cost more in the beginning, in the long run companies still save money by using Intel. Especially considering that their is not much of a price difference for corporations when purchasing large quantities of Intel or AMD computers.
I guess the choice of manufacturing is a bad word. Intel has said however that they have successfully made fully funtctioning chips in their development fab.
Intel in the past just turns their development fab into a manufacturing fab once it's time to start manufacturing the chip and there is no reason to beleive that it will be any different this time.
Wouldn't Moore's Law have failed by now without AMD competing for market share?
I don't think this is because of AMD. I would attribute it more to the fact the Gordon Moore, the creator of Moore's law is a co-founder of Intel and currently the chairman-of-the-board. It's probably more of Intel employees trying to not upset the boss by keeping up with what he obviously feels is the appropriate rate for number of transistors on a chip.
I think Intel is starting to feel the heat from quarters they didnt expect, like AMD and Apple via the good graces of IBM.
This argument is totally untrue. Intel has done better than expected the past two quarters and is expecting to have their best quarter ever for Q4 and is expecting to do well far into the future as well. This doesn't sound to me like a company that is too worried.
Since February both Intel's stock has increased by about 18 points and AMD's by 12.
I'd hate to burst your bubble, but Intel happens to already be manufacturing the chips successfully.
Besides the fact that it is easier to make the wafers circular, I thought that I would let you know that the wafers are indeed spun. Usually this is to dry them off after they've been dipped in a chemical or water.
The 300mm is a real advantage for any company that has a Fab which supports it. You can produce more than twice as many chips on a 300mm wafer then on a 200mm wafer.
It's not really a breakthrough on AMD's part at all. Intel already has 300mm fabs up and running.
Ever go to a pro game? how much do hotdogs cost? how about a pepsi? goog god they are expensive, and it is because they owners have to 1. pay the players and 2. make some profit...
This is not true at all. Owners will charge as much as they can get away with no matter what the payroll. Coming from a large university, I can tell you from personal experience that the cost of a Hot Dog and a Pepsi and even tickets at a big college sporting event is the same as it is at the professional level, and the players have no payroll at all. There are other trends that would tend to disprove this theory such as tickets to pro-hockey games are generally much more expensive than baseball or basketball tickets yet hockey players get paid the least.
Yes, but the guys that make the multi-millions are generally longer-term players. It is the new guys, making league minimum(1/2 mill?) that don't last long. Ofcourse injuries are also a part of this.
I would tend to agree with you in this respect. Barring injuries, the big money players are the guys who play for a while. Still, in most sports even the big money guys play for about 10 years. That's still not very long considering it's what they devote their entire life to.
Wow, that was interesting. Let me tell you, that making 1 million a year will put them in a pretty comfortable life, let alone several million. hell, 200k a year will put them in a nice lifestyle, depending on COL for the area(oregon is MUCH cheaper to live in than cali).
I agree that you can live comfortably for 200k a year, but that's our opinion. When I first started my job I always said that if I made X, then I would be set and not have to worry about money anymore. Well, now I make more than X and I still worry about money. The point being that most of us can live fine with much less, it's just that people live within their means. Who gets to decide what a comfortable amount of money is? It's all in the eyes of the beholder.
Please tell me how he would be suffering if A-rod only made 2 mill a year instead of, what, 10-15 mill?
I agree that A-rod wouldn't "suffer" if he only made 2 million a year. Still, he is the best at what he does. It just so happens that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to pay money to watch A-rod do his job. He is part of the backbone of a multibillion dollar industry. The owners pay more money for the big names, because the big names bring them more money. Whether A-rod suffers or not has nothing to do with whether he is overpaid.
It's too bad that other professions don't get paid more, but it's not athletes fault. The money in their industry is there for the taking and who can blame them? Once again it comes down to supply and demand. The supply of great athletes is very small, and the demand is very high. A-rod is getting his market value.
1) If you were offered a choice to buy, let's say a football ticket, for either whatever it costs now -$20, for argument's sake or for $5, would you pay $20 because the athletes 'deserve' it?
This argument does not hold water. Ticket prices are not set by athletes. Franchise owners will charge as much as they can for tickets no matter what the payroll of the athletes is. The best example of this is college athletics. Ticket prices to a big name college athletic event are just as much as they are to pro sporting events and colleges don't pay their athletes millions.
Give me a break. I can't stand how everyone complains that athletes are overpaid. There are too many reasons to list here why they deserve that much many, but I'll name just a few of my favorites. First, the average pro athlete has a career which lasts less than 3 years. So in a career with such low job security it is no wonder that they ask for so much money.
Second, the average joe will say things to the extent of "Why does that guy need to make 2 million a year, nobody needs that much money." Well, why don't you go ask a person who lives in poverty or is homeless how much money they think you need to live? Chances are they would say that nobody really needs to make more than 25k a year to live comfortably. My point being that everything is relative.
Third, it's not like the money that athletes make comes from your tax dollar. You aren't losing anything because some lucky people are making millions for doing what they love. If athletes didn't make that much money, it would just get pocketed by the owners.
Finally, if everyone could be a pro athlete then I'm sure they wouldn't make as much money. Athletes have devoted more time to their careers then most anybody else. From ages as young as 4 or 5 they practice daily, typically for hours on end. It's not just fun for them either. They suffer through grueling physical exertion that would cause most of us to hurt just thinking about. While you were playing Nintendo with your friends after school, they were practicing. While you were sleeping late and being lazy during summer vacations, they were practicing. Not too many people realize just how much work it takes to make it to the professional level. It's not like it's a big secret which profession to choose if you want to make money. The truth is that most people just don't have the commitment, dedication, or enough desire to become an athlete. The few that do, deserve their rewards. The reason why someone such as a software engineer doesn't make as much money is because it's easier to become one and that is evident by how easily one can be replaced.
I could continue, but I'll stop there. I'm not sure why people have such a problem with athletes making lots of money. Many argue it's because they do nothing more than provide a form of entertainment. This is ludicrous. Singers, actors, musicians, casino owners, writers and even super-models have careers based mainly on entertaining and some make a lot more money than athletes. Still, they don't receive nearly the the criticism. Personally I think it's just plain old jealousy.
It's a secret. Intel isn't saying what the material is, just that they've discovered a probable solution to fix the achilles heel of the chipmaking industry.
Basically, they are saying that they have found two new materials with a high k dielectric that reduces current leakage by more than a 100 times silicon dioxide and hopefully plan to use it by 2007 in production. They also have tested the materials and had excellent results in a lab environment. Still, they are being vague on the details, and who can blame them if this stuff is as good as they say it is.
Skeptic or beleiver? I guess that's a matter of opinion. But Intel thinks that this will keep Moore's law true for quite some time. In the past if Intel claims they have been able to stay true to Moore's law it's been true. Heck, the can't lie, Moore is the founder of the company.
I remember when I was in elementary school always thinking that the weather must be controlled by principals and teachers somehow. It seemed like it only ever snowed on the weekends. My parents thought I was losing my mind and I only thought it snowed more on the weekends because I wanted snow days.
Come to find out, I was right. I can't remember the exact show, but I recall seeing a show on this. It turns out that scientists attribute it to the amount of pollution caused during the week because of traffic jams, long commutes, school buses, etc.
I understand that most of the benchmarks are for 32-bit applications, but it still seems to me that the benchmarks aren't nearly that impressive. Intel's processor beat AMD in just about every benchmark. Granted, in some obscure 64-bit applications that barely anybody uses AMD wins, but that's not going to impress your typical user, because they don't use 64-bit applications yet.
It's like if Sony released the Playstation 2, but with no games at launch. Sure, it's better than PSOne, but if there are only PSOne games out, then why spend the money. The real truth of the matter is that your banking on companies to release 64-bit software applications, which won't even start to become nearly mainstream for at least a year. Then who knows, maybe Intel will release the Pentium64. Kudos to AMD though, because someone has to get the ball rolling.
I'm not sure what type of network your on, but where I work we have regular 10Mbps Ethernet. Where I go to school, they use 802.11b. I don't ever notice a difference in speed. Chances are most users won't either, because the bottleneck isn't your access medium if your primary use is internet access. I suppose for traffic in your intranet that you'll see the difference but I think that this type of usage in networks these days is relatively low compared to internet traffic. I, for one, love wi-fi. Without it I wouldn't be able to post to Slashdot while sitting through a boring three hour lecture.
What I'm really not impressed with is Intel saying desktop users don't need sixty-four bit. Well, we don't need gobs of cache. We need sixty-four bits.
You may be surprised. If Intel keeps pushing how much L1 or L2 cache it can increase performance dramatically. Probably the best measure of processor performance is instructions per second in a normal computing environment. Probably the biggest cause of lowering the number of ips is due to a cache miss. Since cache is several times faster than main memory it's easy to figure the bigger the cache, the less misses, which means less time waiting for RAM and thus a higher number of ips.
For video, especially compression, this is a huge benefit. For instance an MPEG encoder using a typical full-search algorithm needs information from 2 different frames to calculate motion vectors. With a high quality video, or a video with large frames, this much data can't be stored in cache alone. The number of cache misses is pretty big. That's why it takes so long to compress video. A large cache will speed up this process greatly.
I'm glossing over a lot of details but take my word for it, a larger cache is very beneficial and not only for video compression. It is also useful for gamers and high-end users which is who Intel is marketing it for. Even the casual user may notice a difference in context-switching, etc.
Sure, Intel is releasing smaller percentage increments, they make more money from it. The nice thing is that they still follow Moore's law. So ultimately chip speeds still double about every two years.
It's funny you should say this considering that Intel invented the technology....
This being Slashdot where Linux is infallible, I'm sure there are going to be an abundance of excuses as to why Linux is the most hacked server. I'm sure someone will point out that it's the SysAdmins because they don't keep their boxes secure. Or,it's because there are a lot more Linux servers than Windows servers. If Microsoft servers were found to be more hacked none of these excuses would have flown and it would have been attributed to how evil Microsoft is and how much of a piece of crap operating system Windows is.
Just felt like playing Devil's Advocate...
Saying that everyone should switch operating systems is not the answer to the problem. Although Windows has more than it's share of problems, other operating systems aren't flawless. If everyone went out tomorrow and switched to a Mac or Linux I can promise you that the number of viruses and worms for these systems would go through the roof. Considering that an average user either a. doesn't know how, or b. even bothers trying to use something as simple as Windows Update, do you really think they are going to know how to secure a Unix based system.
Not the case at the University of Massachusetts. Here Microsoft will give any Engineering, Computer Science, and I beleive a few other majors free copies of all of Microsoft's software (except for Office). It's part of a program Microsoft has called the Microsoft Developer's Network Academic Alliance, or MSDNAA for short. The university has an internal website where you just click on the software you want to download and you get an .iso file to burn onto CD. Needless to say I have just about every piece of Microsoft software made. Not that I ever use it, but it substantially adds to the value of my software collection.
Of course Microsoft is only doing this to try and get all the techies at the school to use Microsoft software, which really is just standard business practice. However we get the best of both worlds since none of the professors are obligated to use Microsoft software for their courses, and most don't. We still learn C/C++, Java, Lisp/Scheme, etc. and most professors encourage the use of Unix based systems. So far I've haven't seen it affect my courses in any way whatsoever and I hope it stays that way.
You would be surprised at what they rank schools on. At princetonreview.com you can find out all kinds of stuff. Which schools are the most/least politically involved, best/worst administration, most hippies, most jocks, drinking school, reefer school, nerdiest schools, you name it.
Of course it's all done by student survey unlike USNews which is done by staff/faculty I believe. You get to see the top five schools for each category unless you register but at least it's free.
In the Northeast U.S. the standard is definitely AIM at least from what I have seen. I used to use ICQ exclusively when I first started college about 5 years ago, but I realized that too many people had never heard of it, and I reluctantly had to switch to AIM so that I could communicate with everyone else. Even my little sister only uses AIM and she is 12. So, here it's not even a preference between different age groups.
I just saw the movie and thought it was pretty decent. Not to hard to understand really. The only question I have is where can I get my hands on some of that cake.