The player commerce, guilds/companies, corporate battles (some of them are quite interesting to watch if you stand back...) when one guy decides you're building too many space stations near to his. Great fun. 99% of the content in the game seems to be player driven, and while you spend a great deal of time mining and waiting for the skills to learn (but at least this kind of grinding is easier if you have friends in your corporation to help you, and you only waste TIME waiting for a skill to learn; there's no effort, it's as if your avatar is reading a book while you're idle, there's no running and jumping and skinning to do).
All in all i think a better organised game with a much better player experience, but if you don't like space, trading or corporate/interplanetary rivalry, you're pretty fucked. WoW is the best of a pretty okay genre of fantasy MMORPG, but I can't think of any other ones to rival EVE.
Once they get their heads around the next expansion why not start on a real Linux port? Linux is definitely growing in popularity. Blizzard could do well in mindshare alone by creating - even if it is just an authorized version to play through Cedega - a real Linux version, rather than having people run through a relatively unauthorized emulation system which can cause quirks with their weird anti-bot stuff.
I'd happily buy phone that played audio but Apple would have a huge market to compete with (every midrange phone has an SD or MMC slot these days and can do it, I see 100 people on the train every morning in Frankfurt fiddling with their playlists on their Samsungs and RAZRs)
Playing video would sap the juice out of any phone, and there are plenty of those around already too. I don't think Apple could get into it because there would be just too much competition, not because of battery life. Even with iTunes they can't compete on the contract-bundle market (an iPhone would have a significant commodity/style price attached to it even on contract, no doubt.. the kind where you sign up for 24 months *AND* pay up $179.99 for the damn music player capability and Apple chic)
Cell in the PS3 has 7 SPE units at 3.2GHz, and an AltiVec unit on the PPE. Add in nVidia's RSX which is about the same as their GeForce 8xxx series is supposed to be.
There's a good performance white paper on the Cell. Peak performance on the units put together is something like 250 GFLOPS/s. Real world performance is about 100 GFLOPS/s in the standard BLAS benchmark. Page 11 and 13 for pretty graphics.
Core 2 Duo; I dunno. But there is an Opteron and Xeon for you. Check page 6 for the pretties again.
5 GFLOP/s? I think 100 divided by 5 is about 20. Yes, it's the same test, BLAS is used in LINPACK and LINPACK is how they benchmark supercomputers. It's a pretty good test.
10 GFLOP/s maximum? It's still 10x the performance in best case for a top end Opteron, for 8x the power consumption! Core 2 Duo might be a bit faster, but consider.. Core 2 Duo also comes in 1.6GHz chips for laptops (same performance scaled) whereas Cell for the PS3 comes in ONE 3.2GHz version. You could have to find a nice, 3.2GHz chip from Intel, with memory bandwidth that doesn't exist, to even get that down to single figure multiplication factor.
Simple floating point power of the SIMD units is easy enough to benchmark.
Core Duo has one SIMD unit. Cell has 10 (7 SPE and 3 AltiVec). You can Google for this stuff fairly easily. It's even the same benchmarks.
In 5 years the Core Duo will be just as fast; and everyone will have bought a new PC (or two) to get it. Sony has to put this chip out now, so that it will still be relevant in the MIDDLE of the console lifecycle.
The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined. Add nVidia's RSX.. you're looking at a system which has stayed within the budget (even less) for systems of today.
In the future they'll process reduce it, cost reduce it, the PS3 will end up using less power. However you can't get done what they want to do in 5 years, without forcing everyone to buy a new PS3 every year, without hammering the electricity grid now:)
Usual disclaimer applies: Speculating/trading in [anything] carries a high risk to your capital. You may lose more than your initial deposit. Only speculate with funds that you can afford to lose. Understand the risks. Seek expert advice if necessary... you can't say "these people got screwed because they took a risk and failed". The reason you would stand to make so much money on them is partly because involved. That's how the entire stocks and shares and foreign exchange market works. You speculate on something, hope it will go up.. if it does, great. If you made a giant leap out there you're rich. If you took a safer bet, maybe you got your money back and enough to buy a Wal*Mart discount DVD.
It's GAMBLING.
Would you enter a poker game and whine when you lost? Oh that's not fair all my money is gone!! I gambled and I have no money left!
If they won't take payments in L$, you can go to www.slexchange.com - just like the article said - and convert it back to AUS$ - and then pay the tax man.
There is something slightly fishy about the report though, being that it says the 360 is banned based on MAC address. Those of us familiar with the OSI model and common network implementations will immediately know this is not true, because MAC addresses are part of the Ethernet protocol and live on Layer 2, and never get routed over the internet. In simple terms: your 360s MAC address is not remotely identifiable. An option could be that the Xbox Live login code sends the MAC address itself to the Live servers to be able to uniquely identify the 360, but that would be plain silly since MAC addresses are known not to be unique: they only need to be unique within their physical subnet. A far more obvious solution on Microsoft's part would be to use the console serial number for this, which is embedded in the system anyway and truly unique.
Oh my god, are these guys thinking about this too hard or what?
Boot system. Find serial number. Modify MAC address in PHY configuration to match serial number. This number is now unique on any network and is not in any way limited to building ethernet frames. You can pull the number back out and send it.
Every system we ship has it's serial number encoded into the MAC address. You start with our IEEE vendor code - 0x0002bf in our case - and the last 6 digits (that's 16.7 million permutations) are the serial number permuted through some clever algorithm.
More than 16 million XBoxes in the world? Well that's easy! Get a new vendor code. The IEEE are perfectly happy to give you a new vendor code once you exhaust your first 16 million network cards:)
For any system on any network, the MAC address is almost guaranteed to be unique in the world. When it is not, this MAC address has been modified by a user - not the hardware vendor. 3Com, Intel, any other network chipset company that ships NIC devices do not ship cards to different parts of the world with the same MAC address; each one is different and it is usually written on the damn card. Every motherboard you buy from ASUS or Dell will usually be encoded to match the above encoding (some serial number added to their IEEE code).
So, no, it's not stupid to try and identify a system by it's MAC address. And the MAC address is not some scary limited-to-ethernet value. It's just 12 bytes at the end of the day.
As long as beautiful doesn't mean low-contrast black and silver "I want my desktop to look like my Denon amplifier".
You can easily theme and modify Linux apps to LOOK beautiful. With enough effort and Xgl you can also have it ANIMATE beautifully. However removing all the bullshit that has crept into most distributions these days.. I still despair at half the apps (in GNOME no less!) not having working keyboard shortcuts. Why not make it ACT right first, and THEN pretty it up?
This industry for some reason seems more focussed on how fucking skinnable an OS needs to be, rather than real functionality and usability issues.
I think the US Air Force had some doubts; they still use the other eye surgery method (I really forget the name) and will even deny your application to join the air force if you have ever has LASIK. They've been doing that since well, well before it turned out it wasn't so good a procedure.
I guess unproven crazy surgeries aren't good to have. To be honest I wouldn't go through anything like this - no weird-ass pills for contraception, no lasers on my cornea, no nothing. I'd rather die of cancer than do chemotherapy and lose my hair. At least it would be a fairly sure death, and not years of running on empty wondering if it's really working or not or if it will reappear.
Sometimes you just have to accept life deals you a dog turd, wearing gloves doesn't make it that you are somehow not holding a shit in your hand.
The guy is obviously a roaring fag who is looking for a cause to rant about; how his whiney lil subset of the larger gay community (which includes me:) needs to feel oppressed by everything.
Bishy? I mean.. jeez. That's not a word I would use in an article. He could have at least used the real Japanese word and not his abbreviation:)
A lot of noise only ever gave anyone a reason to shut the door and put in earplugs. Sony can survive an angry mob. Because it is just noise.
I just think you can't do it if your main focus is to hit them financially.
They can also survive a financial glitch, or a change in revenue from their entire business. Boycotting Sony now, means all the stores that already have Sony stuff have already paid for it. Stores that need to reorder Sony products - sometime the middle of next year - may not order so many. But a boycott TODAY for the next few months, won't have any effect whatsoever on their bottom line until well after real consumers and boycotters have decided it isn't doing anything.
(their shareholder filing for the quarter AFTER THAT may be a scare story, but this is.. a year away! Can you convince millions of people to boycott EVERY Sony-related good, forever, in order to make the financial dent that would cause them to shake?)
Can they really live down "Sony's revolutionary Playstation 3 console at no. 4 in console sale charts last quarter" on every news site? I doubt it. The Gamecube never did. As soon as popular media gets to put a told-you-so, Sony will look up and wonder.. why didn't it sell so many? And why are the sales charts important? Well, because they are updated pretty quickly, whereas the financial repercussions may still be rippling, and then soaked up by consumer apathy and resumption of purchasing Sony goods, or at least been completely negated by whatever new business strategy they pick up over a whole year.
You can say the same of voting; one man never made a difference (except in Futurama) but 100,000 people might; but then the guy running for President has a lot more tricks up his sleeve than 100,000 people that don't like him. The last 6 years are evidence of that.
Sony have a lot of resources to make a boycott on financial terms not matter. Print media and news articles are archived forever. Nobody will forget the year that Sony Lost Christmas in just sales terms. All it takes is for everyone to hold off for a month, or buy a Wii instead. Or both. Nobody needs to stop buying Sony forever; just hit them gently in the Baubles. Sales in February don't matter a shit in the games market, so resumption of buying by an apathetic bored Final Fantasy-craving consumer won't matter.
I am sure Nike really miss the few hundred dollars you'd spend on them, compared to the many billions they make off everyone else.
At the end of the day, you can't effectively boycott a company which takes in so much cash per week as Nike, Sony or so on. You may win morally and feel nice inside but they will never see any impact on their bottom line. They probably own a bunch of brands you buy anyway, you just don't know it. It's pretty hard to do when these companies are so big and have so many assets and sub-brands.
However, doing it to the PS3 might be easy; you can make Sony Computer Entertainment look up from their beanbag chairs, by making the Wii the top selling console this Christmas. Or the XBox360. It won't take much. Or do things like buy a DS instead of a PSP - but, well, everyone is doing that ANYWAY. Your choice.
That would be easy to do given their problems with production we so hear rumors about. It only takes a hiccup over that holiday buying period for them to take notice. After years of domination of the console market, why not just show that over 2 or 3 weeks, you can knock them off the CHARTS (not lose them money or mindshare..) and stop them being so smug? Then they get the moral message of it.
You can buy a PS3 after Christmas if you are not still too disgusted with them.
Depriving them of money or mindshare isn't the answer, making a recordable, long-lived statement is, and I think having them lose the holiday season top-seller contest is a prime target.
Actually.. being the lazy soul I am, and since I have a personal start page on Google, I just go straight for that.
And then type in "Wikipedia Blah Blah" with my search term.
The Google index just seems a little more reliable in "guessing" the article I wanted, than the "please try and work out the exact article name" Wikis tend to employ.
IBM are the odd one out there; Apple fizzled but IBM are still making their own chips; and have plenty of other buyers. And Freescale and AMCC make the same kind of chips. And Xilinx have synthesisable ones. There are lots of options. I don't see the POWER5 market fizzling soon for IBM's own-chip own-servers market, even though they do use Intel and AMD.
Integration is the key to cost reduction, performance improvement and power efficiency.
L2 cache used to be external. Then they integrated it when technology and performance allowed. L3 cache then became external while L2 was integrated; now you can buy processors with all this inside. Put the memory controller inside the CPU and you no longer need to spread out high (er than CPU core voltage) IO lines with nasty length requirements between Northbridge and CPU, and can clock the bus faster. Put the ethernet and so on inside the Northbridge and you no longer need discrete chips and buses for them, and can run them faster with tighter integration to a DMA controller and embedded RAM.
Integrate the graphics hardware into the CPU and you can have most of the high-bandwidth devices on the fastest possible bus.
Take Freescale's nearly-done 8641D Power Architecture processor. It's 2 G4s, 4 gigabit ethernet, USB2, PCI Express and RapidIO, DMA, interrupt and memory controller, I2C, serial. This chip is priced LOWER than equivalently specced Core Duo 2 combinations (CPU, i975MCH/ICH combination), and the performance.. is about the same. However board implementation will be much easier, and lower power. All you need for a system is to add your peripherals; a SATA chip, perhaps. I can't think of anything else that is missing besides graphics.
There is no such thing as anonymity if you have a name and address.
Someone, anyone, can find that given enough patience.
Sure it is creepy that people can do it with Google now, but private detectives have made a business out of this for a very long time. They never had a monopoly on being able to do it, and therefore Google does not break any monopoly on people who can find out where you live.
You're right. A lot of stuff on the internet now (cookie tracking etc.) is lauded as some kind of infringement of civil rights, personal privavy, god-given liberties or whatever, when it is nothing that wasn't being done before. If you pay taxes, the government knows who you are. If you have a bank account your bank knows who you are. If you have certain spending habits or look like you are in need of credit they send you brochures in the mail for credit cards, or if you walk into a bank, the computer will flag for you if you are discussing with a teller, that you are eligible for the latest and greatest whatever they are trying to sell. This was done even in the days of VT100s sitting in banks, little green text lines would pop up and say "ask customer if they want to update to super-fly checking account). If you go to Amazon and buy something, signing up for an account and therefore telling them who you are, they start to collect data on your habits to better serve your needs, what's the difference here?
The solution to not being hunted down by someone you pissed off on the internet, is stop being a jackass and stop pissing people off on Yahoo! IM - that barrier of "he can't punch me because he is only text in a box" needs removing from peoples' minds. If it was a personal confrontation, most people would not say these things. Even the dry, sarcastic witty remarks you refer to, when made in social situations with cues, and similarly intelligent and sarcasm-aware company, can go down badly.
Isn't that it? That we are a world of fucking assholes who will stop at nothing to get a snide remark out, and simply wallow and relish in the fact that we can do it from the safety and comfort of our own living room, rather than at the end of someone else's fist?
Yeah, forget hiding behind privacy, rights and liberties, you fucking jerks, and start being more polite to each other!!!
You could do exactly the same thing using paper resources if you had the time and patience. There were plenty of stalkers around before the internet reared it's head. I don't think there are really any more these days, simply a greater proportion of them doing it faster.
The reviewer is obviously getting his panties in a twist over numbers. Numbers, numbers, more numbers, or the review will suck!
He misses the fact that a CrossFire X1950 Pro outperforms a GeForce SLI G80 because he is too focussed on the INCREASE in speed for this configuration. If the SLI card performs at 90% improvement, but the ATI card only gives an 80% improvement, he has discounted SLI as "better" even though the CrossFire configuration gave a higher framerate overall.
It just goes to show, most website reviewers are full of fucking shit and couldn't do a feature study of a real product if they really had to.
Just read the review and click the banner ads, sir. That is all they require. Accuracy and information is some side note.
Slashdot Mirror
The player commerce, guilds/companies, corporate battles (some of them are quite interesting to watch if you stand back...) when one guy decides you're building too many space stations near to his. Great fun. 99% of the content in the game seems to be player driven, and while you spend a great deal of time mining and waiting for the skills to learn (but at least this kind of grinding is easier if you have friends in your corporation to help you, and you only waste TIME waiting for a skill to learn; there's no effort, it's as if your avatar is reading a book while you're idle, there's no running and jumping and skinning to do).
All in all i think a better organised game with a much better player experience, but if you don't like space, trading or corporate/interplanetary rivalry, you're pretty fucked. WoW is the best of a pretty okay genre of fantasy MMORPG, but I can't think of any other ones to rival EVE.
Once they get their heads around the next expansion why not start on a real Linux port? Linux is definitely growing in popularity. Blizzard could do well in mindshare alone by creating - even if it is just an authorized version to play through Cedega - a real Linux version, rather than having people run through a relatively unauthorized emulation system which can cause quirks with their weird anti-bot stuff.
I'd happily buy phone that played audio but Apple would have a huge market to compete with (every midrange phone has an SD or MMC slot these days and can do it, I see 100 people on the train every morning in Frankfurt fiddling with their playlists on their Samsungs and RAZRs)
Playing video would sap the juice out of any phone, and there are plenty of those around already too. I don't think Apple could get into it because there would be just too much competition, not because of battery life. Even with iTunes they can't compete on the contract-bundle market (an iPhone would have a significant commodity/style price attached to it even on contract, no doubt.. the kind where you sign up for 24 months *AND* pay up $179.99 for the damn music player capability and Apple chic)
Can't you fuckers use Google?
E RS/cell-linpack-2006.pdf
e volution/Archive/PDF06/06-Cozzini_S_final.pdf
Cell in the PS3 has 7 SPE units at 3.2GHz, and an AltiVec unit on the PPE. Add in nVidia's
RSX which is about the same as their GeForce 8xxx series is supposed to be.
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAP
There's a good performance white paper on the Cell. Peak performance on the
units put together is something like 250 GFLOPS/s. Real world performance is
about 100 GFLOPS/s in the standard BLAS benchmark. Page 11 and 13 for pretty
graphics.
http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/Linux-HPC-R
Core 2 Duo; I dunno. But there is an Opteron and Xeon for you. Check page 6 for
the pretties again.
5 GFLOP/s? I think 100 divided by 5 is about 20. Yes, it's the same test, BLAS
is used in LINPACK and LINPACK is how they benchmark supercomputers. It's a
pretty good test.
10 GFLOP/s maximum? It's still 10x the performance in best case for a top end Opteron,
for 8x the power consumption! Core 2 Duo might be a bit faster, but consider.. Core 2
Duo also comes in 1.6GHz chips for laptops (same performance scaled) whereas Cell for
the PS3 comes in ONE 3.2GHz version. You could have to find a nice, 3.2GHz chip from
Intel, with memory bandwidth that doesn't exist, to even get that down to single
figure multiplication factor.
Simple floating point power of the SIMD units is easy enough to benchmark.
Core Duo has one SIMD unit. Cell has 10 (7 SPE and 3 AltiVec). You can
Google for this stuff fairly easily. It's even the same benchmarks.
In 5 years the Core Duo will be just as fast; and everyone will have bought a
new PC (or two) to get it. Sony has to put this chip out now, so that it will
still be relevant in the MIDDLE of the console lifecycle.
The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined. Add nVidia's RSX.. you're looking at a system which has stayed within the budget (even less) for systems of today.
:)
In the future they'll process reduce it, cost reduce it, the PS3 will end up using less power. However you can't get done what they want to do in 5 years, without forcing everyone to buy a new PS3 every year, without hammering the electricity grid now
Is that a side effect or an intentional thing?
:)
No sex = definitely no babies. 100% effective
The site is down. Hooray for Slashdot. The ultimate click-relief for websites.
Usual disclaimer applies: Speculating/trading in [anything] carries a high risk to your capital. You may lose more than your initial deposit. Only speculate with funds that you can afford to lose. Understand the risks. Seek expert advice if necessary. .. you can't say "these people got screwed because they took a risk and failed". The reason you would stand to make so much money on them is partly because involved. That's how the entire stocks and shares and foreign exchange market works. You speculate on something, hope it will go up.. if it does, great. If you made a giant leap out there you're rich. If you took a safer bet, maybe you got your money back and enough to buy a Wal*Mart discount DVD.
It's GAMBLING.
Would you enter a poker game and whine when you lost? Oh that's not fair all my money is gone!! I gambled and I have no money left!
If they won't take payments in L$, you can go to www.slexchange.com - just like the article said - and convert it back to AUS$ - and then pay the tax man.
From the article;
There is something slightly fishy about the report though, being that it says the 360 is banned based on MAC address. Those of us familiar with the OSI model and common network implementations will immediately know this is not true, because MAC addresses are part of the Ethernet protocol and live on Layer 2, and never get routed over the internet. In simple terms: your 360s MAC address is not remotely identifiable. An option could be that the Xbox Live login code sends the MAC address itself to the Live servers to be able to uniquely identify the 360, but that would be plain silly since MAC addresses are known not to be unique: they only need to be unique within their physical subnet. A far more obvious solution on Microsoft's part would be to use the console serial number for this, which is embedded in the system anyway and truly unique.
Oh my god, are these guys thinking about this too hard or what?
Boot system. Find serial number. Modify MAC address in PHY configuration to match serial number. This number is now unique on any network and is not in any way limited to building ethernet frames. You can pull the number back out and send it.
Every system we ship has it's serial number encoded into the MAC address. You start with our IEEE vendor code - 0x0002bf in our case - and the last 6 digits (that's 16.7 million permutations) are the serial number permuted through some clever algorithm.
More than 16 million XBoxes in the world? Well that's easy! Get a new vendor code. The IEEE are perfectly happy to give you a new vendor code once you exhaust your first 16 million network cards
For any system on any network, the MAC address is almost guaranteed to be unique in the world. When it is not, this MAC address has been modified by a user - not the hardware vendor. 3Com, Intel, any other network chipset company that ships NIC devices do not ship cards to different parts of the world with the same MAC address; each one is different and it is usually written on the damn card. Every motherboard you buy from ASUS or Dell will usually be encoded to match the above encoding (some serial number added to their IEEE code).
So, no, it's not stupid to try and identify a system by it's MAC address. And the MAC address is not some scary limited-to-ethernet value. It's just 12 bytes at the end of the day.
As long as beautiful doesn't mean low-contrast black and silver "I want my desktop to look like my Denon amplifier".
You can easily theme and modify Linux apps to LOOK beautiful. With enough effort and Xgl you can also have it ANIMATE beautifully. However removing all the bullshit that has crept into most distributions these days.. I still despair at half the apps (in GNOME no less!) not having working keyboard shortcuts. Why not make it ACT right first, and THEN pretty it up?
This industry for some reason seems more focussed on how fucking skinnable an OS needs to be, rather than real functionality and usability issues.
I think the US Air Force had some doubts; they still use the other eye surgery method (I really forget the name) and will even deny your application to join the air force if you have ever has LASIK. They've been doing that since well, well before it turned out it wasn't so good a procedure.
I guess unproven crazy surgeries aren't good to have. To be honest I wouldn't go through anything like this - no weird-ass pills for contraception, no lasers on my cornea, no nothing. I'd rather die of cancer than do chemotherapy and lose my hair. At least it would be a fairly sure death, and not years of running on empty wondering if it's really working or not or if it will reappear.
Sometimes you just have to accept life deals you a dog turd, wearing gloves doesn't make it that you are somehow not holding a shit in your hand.
Didn't they say that when they did the first trials for the female contraceptive pill?
Totally safe! No apparent bad things can happen!
Except blood clots and cancer, 20 years later..
to be offended by something on the internet you actually have to intentionally search for it.
Yeah, it would suck if Google were a search engine, wouldn't it?
OOPS!!!
Even worse! Bloody militant lesbians!?
The guy is obviously a roaring fag who is looking for a cause to rant about; how his whiney lil subset of the larger gay community (which includes me :) needs to feel oppressed by everything.
:)
Bishy? I mean.. jeez. That's not a word I would use in an article. He could have at least used the real Japanese word and not his abbreviation
A lot of noise only ever gave anyone a reason to shut the door and put in earplugs. Sony can survive an angry mob. Because it is just noise.
I just think you can't do it if your main focus is to hit them financially.
They can also survive a financial glitch, or a change in revenue from their entire business. Boycotting Sony now, means all the stores that already have Sony stuff have already paid for it. Stores that need to reorder Sony products - sometime the middle of next year - may not order so many. But a boycott TODAY for the next few months, won't have any effect whatsoever on their bottom line until well after real consumers and boycotters have decided it isn't doing anything.
(their shareholder filing for the quarter AFTER THAT may be a scare story, but this is.. a year away! Can you convince millions of people to boycott EVERY Sony-related good, forever, in order to make the financial dent that would cause them to shake?)
Can they really live down "Sony's revolutionary Playstation 3 console at no. 4 in console sale charts last quarter" on every news site? I doubt it. The Gamecube never did. As soon as popular media gets to put a told-you-so, Sony will look up and wonder.. why didn't it sell so many? And why are the sales charts important? Well, because they are updated pretty quickly, whereas the financial repercussions may still be rippling, and then soaked up by consumer apathy and resumption of purchasing Sony goods, or at least been completely negated by whatever new business strategy they pick up over a whole year.
You can say the same of voting; one man never made a difference (except in Futurama) but 100,000 people might; but then the guy running for President has a lot more tricks up his sleeve than 100,000 people that don't like him. The last 6 years are evidence of that.
Sony have a lot of resources to make a boycott on financial terms not matter. Print media and news articles are archived forever. Nobody will forget the year that Sony Lost Christmas in just sales terms. All it takes is for everyone to hold off for a month, or buy a Wii instead. Or both. Nobody needs to stop buying Sony forever; just hit them gently in the Baubles. Sales in February don't matter a shit in the games market, so resumption of buying by an apathetic bored Final Fantasy-craving consumer won't matter.
I am sure Nike really miss the few hundred dollars you'd spend on them, compared to the many billions they make off everyone else.
At the end of the day, you can't effectively boycott a company which takes in so much cash per week as Nike, Sony or so on. You may win morally and feel nice inside but they will never see any impact on their bottom line. They probably own a bunch of brands you buy anyway, you just don't know it. It's pretty hard to do when these companies are so big and have so many assets and sub-brands.
However, doing it to the PS3 might be easy; you can make Sony Computer Entertainment look up from their beanbag chairs, by making the Wii the top selling console this Christmas. Or the XBox360. It won't take much. Or do things like buy a DS instead of a PSP - but, well, everyone is doing that ANYWAY. Your choice.
That would be easy to do given their problems with production we so hear rumors about. It only takes a hiccup over that holiday buying period for them to take notice. After years of domination of the console market, why not just show that over 2 or 3 weeks, you can knock them off the CHARTS (not lose them money or mindshare..) and stop them being so smug? Then they get the moral message of it.
You can buy a PS3 after Christmas if you are not still too disgusted with them.
Depriving them of money or mindshare isn't the answer, making a recordable, long-lived statement is, and I think having them lose the holiday season top-seller contest is a prime target.
Actually.. being the lazy soul I am, and since I have a personal start page on Google, I just go straight for that.
And then type in "Wikipedia Blah Blah" with my search term.
The Google index just seems a little more reliable in "guessing" the article I wanted, than the "please try and work out the exact article name" Wikis tend to employ.
IBM are the odd one out there; Apple fizzled but IBM are still making their own chips; and have plenty of other buyers. And Freescale and AMCC make the same kind of chips. And Xilinx have synthesisable ones. There are lots of options. I don't see the POWER5 market fizzling soon for IBM's own-chip own-servers market, even though they do use Intel and AMD.
Integration is the key to cost reduction, performance improvement and power efficiency.
e t/MPC8641DDLCRFS.pdf
L2 cache used to be external. Then they integrated it when technology and performance allowed. L3 cache then became external while L2 was integrated; now you can buy processors with all this inside. Put the memory controller inside the CPU and you no longer need to spread out high (er than CPU core voltage) IO lines with nasty length requirements between Northbridge and CPU, and can clock the bus faster. Put the ethernet and so on inside the Northbridge and you no longer need discrete chips and buses for them, and can run them faster with tighter integration to a DMA controller and embedded RAM.
Integrate the graphics hardware into the CPU and you can have most of the high-bandwidth devices on the fastest possible bus.
Take Freescale's nearly-done 8641D Power Architecture processor. It's 2 G4s, 4 gigabit ethernet, USB2, PCI Express and RapidIO, DMA, interrupt and memory controller, I2C, serial. This chip is priced LOWER than equivalently specced Core Duo 2 combinations (CPU, i975MCH/ICH combination), and the performance.. is about the same. However board implementation will be much easier, and lower power. All you need for a system is to add your peripherals; a SATA chip, perhaps. I can't think of anything else that is missing besides graphics.
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_she
Eventually SATA will go in there, you can bet on that. Then graphics. Then one chip per board is a possibility. You thought NanoITX was small..?
There is no such thing as anonymity if you have a name and address.
Someone, anyone, can find that given enough patience.
Sure it is creepy that people can do it with Google now, but private detectives have made a business out of this for a very long time. They never had a monopoly on being able to do it, and therefore Google does not break any monopoly on people who can find out where you live.
You're right. A lot of stuff on the internet now (cookie tracking etc.) is lauded as some kind of infringement of civil rights, personal privavy, god-given liberties or whatever, when it is nothing that wasn't being done before. If you pay taxes, the government knows who you are. If you have a bank account your bank knows who you are. If you have certain spending habits or look like you are in need of credit they send you brochures in the mail for credit cards, or if you walk into a bank, the computer will flag for you if you are discussing with a teller, that you are eligible for the latest and greatest whatever they are trying to sell. This was done even in the days of VT100s sitting in banks, little green text lines would pop up and say "ask customer if they want to update to super-fly checking account). If you go to Amazon and buy something, signing up for an account and therefore telling them who you are, they start to collect data on your habits to better serve your needs, what's the difference here?
The solution to not being hunted down by someone you pissed off on the internet, is stop being a jackass and stop pissing people off on Yahoo! IM - that barrier of "he can't punch me because he is only text in a box" needs removing from peoples' minds. If it was a personal confrontation, most people would not say these things. Even the dry, sarcastic witty remarks
you refer to, when made in social situations with cues, and similarly intelligent and sarcasm-aware company, can go down badly.
Isn't that it? That we are a world of fucking assholes who will stop at nothing to get a snide remark out, and simply wallow and relish in the fact that we can do it from the safety and comfort of our own living room, rather than at the end of someone else's fist?
Yeah, forget hiding behind privacy, rights and liberties, you fucking jerks, and start being more polite to each other!!!
Why is it creepy?
You could do exactly the same thing using paper resources if you had the time and patience. There were plenty of stalkers around before the internet reared it's head. I don't think there are really any more these days, simply a greater proportion of them doing it faster.
The reviewer is obviously getting his panties in a twist over numbers. Numbers, numbers, more numbers, or the review will suck!
He misses the fact that a CrossFire X1950 Pro outperforms a GeForce SLI G80 because he is too focussed on the INCREASE in speed for this configuration. If the SLI card performs at 90% improvement, but the ATI card only gives an 80% improvement, he has discounted SLI as "better" even though the CrossFire configuration gave a higher framerate overall.
It just goes to show, most website reviewers are full of fucking shit and couldn't do a feature study of a real product if they really had to.
Just read the review and click the banner ads, sir. That is all they require. Accuracy and information is some side note.