Well, I have played CoH and a bunch of other MMORPGs, and many years on MUDs before. Not saying that to brag, just saying that (A) I do understand what you mean about griefing, and (B) the grandparent poster was right: COH _is_ designed to prevent griefing.
The thing is, most MUDs and MMORPGs are either (A) designed by not caring about griefing at all (see the first years of UO, where idiotic "realism" excuses took precedence over the players' real problems) or (B) designed by griefers for griefers.
It's like with buffer overflows or security: griefing is something that designers seem to ignore until it comes and bites them in the ass. Or even after it's bitten them in the ass. (Origin ignored it long after it cost it its market leader position in MMOs.)
I've only seen two MMO games so far which were designed from the ground up to prevent griefing, as much as physically possible: City of Heroes and Sega's Phantasy Star Online.
Admittedly, PSO was even more effective, in that there was literally _nothing_ you could do to harm a player. You couldn't even stand in a door to block their retreat. Training monsters? Didn't work either, since anything more than 10-20 ft or so would require them to go through a door, and they simply couldn't go through doors. Tricking newbies into dangerous areas? Nope, teleporting back to safety was always a button click away. (Plus, again, wheth they were in over their head, they only needed to run back through a door. Monsters couldn't follow through doors.) Stealing newbies' XP? Nope. As long as they still got at least one hit in (fairly easy with a pistol or rifle), they got xp too. Etc.
Sega had done an amazingly thorough design work there.
(In all fairness, PSO was more vulnerable to cheating, but still... even if you cheated yourself to be godly, you still couldn't harm or inconvenience another player with it. Which kept griefers away.)
CoH isn't that thorough about it, but still, you can tell that they gave the problem a lot of thought.
And generally, I say that's the right direction that a game should take. Instead of recruiting vigilante mobs of players to police against problems, the problems should be solved or prevented by the code whenever possible. It's possible. It just needs lots of work.
In 32 bit mode, the PR numbers for _both_ the XP and the A64 are inofficially based on a comparison with the P4, and officially on one with the Thunderbird.
Yes, so the A64 does have slightly higher IPC, the integrated memory controller, etc. But those are already factored into the PR number.
E.g., a Barton XP 2800+ is 2083 MHz, while an A64 2800+ is 1800 MHz. So the "does more work per MHz" part is already factored in by AMD.
So, well, to cut a long story short:
1. Since AMD itself does compare both to the P4 when assigning those PR numbers, I think it's fair enough to do that in a benchmark.
2. For the end-user generations and architectures are irrelevant anyway. What matters is "ok, I need a new computer. Do I get an Athlon 64 or a P4? Which one is faster?"
So one way or the other you do have to make that comparison. Regardless of what's fair and what the generation numbers are, that's what Joe Average wants to know.
To summarize all that apt description of image and wearing stuff which screams "I have disposable income", the words you're looking for are: "conspicuous consumption".
" the fact that the number of general-purpose registers has doubled from 8 to 16, greatly reducing the amount of register variable swapping needed. Again, most apps simply do not care if they can fit huge numbers in a register, because they do not need them."
And here's your free clue for the day: you only get those in 64 bit software. Because that's part of those 64 bit extensions.
And, indeed, that's largely the reason why software compiled in 64 bit mode rocks on an Athlon 64. (As opposed to actually running slower, as happens on an Ultra-SPARC.)
That said, it only makes the comparison fair after all. Both CPUs were using 32 bit registers and the same number of registers too.
I don't even think he has a given bias as such. He'll just say or do anything that brings clicks.
Whether that means trolling a certain user group (e.g., the insulting editorials about AMD fans), trolling about other popular (and far more competent) sites, or saying what the majority wants to hear, or some cheap lame publicity stunt. (E.g., the video about an Athlon burning horribly without a heatsink at all. Except what he won't tell you is that it only happens without a heatsink at all, so outside of such el-cheapo publicity stunts it never happened.)
Add to that a good dose of self-adoration and downright verbal masturbation. I've yet to see a THG article in the last years that stays on topic, and isn't just an excuse to brag about how Tom's Hardware is the greatest ever. And recap how cool his past publicity stunts were.
Often not even in the right topic. "Today we talk about hard drives. But first, remember kids, we were the first ones who showed you an Athlon burn without a heatsink! And we were the first to include a 33 MHz 486 in a P4-vs-Athlon benchmark! We're soo cool!" Well, not an actual quote, but that's the impression THG articles leave me with.
Basically Tom's is just sucking up to the majority for clicks. He's probably only pro-Intel as long as most folks buy Intel. Since most folks started buying AMD retail lately, expect him to do an about-face turn in no time. He's sure done such about-face turns before, about other issues.
Either way, some results you can't downright spin into victories, but you can downplay. Trumpet as complete victories those cases where your favourite is 1% faster, but when it loses just spin it into sounding like only a marginal loss or an unlikely-to-happen scenario.
E.g., let's say you have two CPUs (or GPUs), let's call them CPU-A and CPU-B. Let's call them Bench-A and BenchB.
In both cases the difference is 5%. How do you spin that into sounding like CPU-A still is the fastest across the board? Easy. Use lame games like "CPU-B is barely 5% faster and only in this particular case" when talking about Bench-A, but trumpet Bench-B as "Here we see CPU-A wipe the floor with CPU-B, scoring a whole 50 points higher!"
Think it doesn't happen? Well, THG's video card reviews do just that every single time. (And those on some other low standard sites too, of course.)
AMD chips used to cost very little, yes, but nowadays they're pretty much on par with Intel.
E.g, since we're talking about the P4EE, a fair comparison would be the Athlon FX. A quick look at an online shop here (www.alternate.de) says:
Athlon 64 FX-55... 899 Euro Athlon 64 FX-53... 849 Euro
Not exactly a budget chip either, eh?
But let's look at something more mainstream:
Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754, 2 GHz)... 174 Euro Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 939, 1.8 GHz)... 184 Euro
Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Northwood)... 189 Euro Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Prescott)... 184 Euro
So it looks to me like they're very much on par, as price goes.
Now this isn't a scientific study or anything, and I didn't even try to find the lowest price or anything. I just stopped at the first online shop that came to mind.
On the other hand, if microchips are fragile, then Intel and AMD should never have shipped them with the silicon exposed. (And yes, it was Intel that came up with the idiotic exposed flip-chip packaging in the P3, but AMD should have known better than to mindlessly copy it.)
It's not something that happened only to some clumsy (l)user. Even people from big benchmarking sites (e.g., Hard-OCP), which get to play with hundreds of chips, still managed to grind a corner off a chip, or put the wrong heatsink on and burn it.
Basically shipping a chip like that is just as stupid as shipping a remote control that cracks if you push the button too hard. Sure, you could expect the users to be careful, and you could take the lame way of blaming the user, but it still will happen.
And it looks like bad design to me. Good design should strive to prevent problems, not just shrug and call the user names.
A solution isn't even hard or expensive, as the P4's heat spreader (then copied by the A64) proved it. But you need someone to actually think in terms of "how can we solve or prevent a potential problem?" instead of "duh, yet another clueless idiot cracked his chip. Someone should shoot these people."
And that doesn't go only for chips. Software is the same. A lot of it seems based on the requirement that the user is an expert and never makes a mistake. And then when the user does do a mistake it's time to act offended and do a "gee, we let this kinda idiots use computers?" flame.
The AMD 64 is covered by a heat spreader, just like the P4. In a nutshell, short of using a sledgehammer to install the heatsink, it's pretty damn impossible to crack the chip even if you wanted to.
We don't get that sick joke called "support" from IBM either. Again, we're talking support to a corporation. Paid-for premium support.
And it's so useless, you just can't describe how useless it is. All that huge message I've wrote doesn't even scratch the surface of the madness.
We've actually had several people quitting because of WebSphere and the frustration of dealing with IBM's support. Roll it around in your head. In a job market collapse, people rather quitting than keeping working with a product. That bad.
So again, it's not even hard for MS to look good by comparison. It's not that MS products are great per se, it's just that "software quality" or "good support" nowadays are complete oxymorons. Microsoft's just happens to be, well, "among the least bad".
It's sorta like choosing the "best" between being whipped and being kicked repeatedly in the balls, really. Me, I'll take the whipping if I have a choice.
Much as I'm not sure if Linux is anywhere near ready yet, it _is_ possible that a cheaper product tips a giant by virtue of price alone.
Unix itself got to be a default standard for one single merit: it was cheap.
Bearing in mind that Unix in the beginning was not what you call Unix or Linux nowadays. It was more or less a toy OS, compared to what mainframe or even mini OSes offered at the time. If you did only a feature comparison between Unix and pretty much any mainframe offering, Unix was not going to win.
It had a major advantage, though. It was cheap and it ran on cheap hardware. A university or business could easier afford smaller computers running Unix, than a top-of-the-line IBM mainframe. In fact they could afford several Unix computers for the price of an IBM mainframe.
And universities to this day are still churning _legions_ of people who got trained on Unix. Guess what that meant for the companies that then hired them. Not only advocacy but a clear case of "it's cheaper to just use Unix than retrain everyone." (The same point nowadays used to justify Windows.)
And Microsoft itself got where it is by dethroning giants in much the same way.
E.g., at the time Windows NT stole the fileserver market from Novell, I used to talk to a bunch of IT people. Partialy over the fido-net, partially family friends. (Both my parents are professional nerds.)
Being still (A) a student, and (B) a nerd, I had of course no sense of economics. So for me it was baffling that someone would prefer the primitive NT to the superior Netware. And FFS, NT needed more RAM and generally a more expensive computer too!
So they patiently explained that, for what they needed, NT was (A) enough, and (B) much cheaper. Even after you factored in the extra RAM for NT, it still ended up way under Novell's price. So they bought NT instead.
Contrary to popular mis-conceptions on/. Microsoft fanboyism or click-and-drool interfaces didn't even figure in those plans. It was just a cool headed bang-per-buck analysis. NT won, and the former almost-monopoly in that market is nowadays no longer even a leader.
Or take the history of DEC. How the mighty have fallen. The PC and MS-DOS were a joke compared to a good Vax. Even the Mac was't anywhere near comparable to a mini. But both were one helluva lot cheaper, and good enough for most people. And DEC just didn't get it. They stuck for too long to selling "proven solutions" to a rapidly shrinking user base, while the PCs and Macs were taking over their market like wildfire.
Where is DEC now? Well, it doesn't even exist any more.
So basically all I'm saying is that a tipping point does exist, it happened repeatedly before, and Microsoft itself got here because of it. Now maybe Linux won't be it. But eventually something will.
Here's some free clue for you: "support" doesn't mean they'll come administer your servers for free, or write your programs for you. Which is what would put people out of job.
It means you can call when you have a problem.
And "world class" is a very relative term. Support from most companies is a sick joke nowadays. Support people are something like taxes: you pay them because you have to, but you don't want to pay a cent more than you absolutely have to. So the ones hired are the cheapest monkeys who can read a bulleted list. Occasionally even the right bulleted list, but no biggie if they read the grocery list instead.
So it's not even hard for MS to actually be in the top tier. You know, the thing about the one-eyed man among the blind.
E.g., having spent the last 2.5 years dealing with WebSphere, which is a buggy unfinished sick joke if you actually use EJBs. And reporting the bugs to IBM. Now IBM's WebSphere support is enough to drive one neurotic, to drinking, or both. And we're not talking support to end-(lusers) but to a big corporate client.
It's a feat just getting past the mindless check-list reading drones. They don't even read what we send them. The first _weeks_ are spent just with them sending us canned "solutions" off their check lists, that don't even match what we wrote in the bug description. That idiotic.
And once you got past those, it's like dealing with a corporate sized Wally (from the Dilbert comics.) It's an endless delay tactic. Including, but not limited to, asking if they can close the bug report just because they want to go on vacation. (No, I'm not making this up. It's too sad to make up, folks.) Or sending us a Jar file as a "fix" that didn't solve the problem, or one even broke WebSphere completely. Or once, after such a "fix" didn't solve the problem, they sent us the exact same file again, as the new "fix".
Or to get you an idea of software quality: they never run the tests we send them to reproduce the problem, and obviously don't have any test cases of their own.
An annoyed coleague finally actually asked them what test cases they used to prove they fixed the problem, 'cause their fix did nothing for us. The answer? A longer version of "no, we didn't actually test it, we didn't even reproduce the problem, but we're confident that we've fixed it. And we thatk you for testing it for us." (Again, I'm not even making it up. They thank us for acting as testers for them.)
Or here's one actual support case that didn't involve a bug: Another team needed to import a SSL certifficate to get IBM's WebSphere Portal Server to talk to another server. So they ask IBM. After getting nowhere with the phone support, they actually pay a big heap of money to get an IBM "consultant" to come show them.
Again, not some underpaid, overworked telephone support slave. A consultant. IBM consultants cost a small fortune.
So the consultant messed around with the server for a _week_, and then said something to the effect of "uhh... I have no bloody idea. Try searching for key store files in all directories and importing your certificate in all of them. It's got to be one of those. I have no idea which, though."
Sad.
So, well, again, it's not even hard for MS to be better than such clowns. It may not be the ideal support by the client's standards, but it's waay better than the sick joke you get as support from some other companies.
Yes, I'm if you will a Nintendo anti-fanboy. I want to see them die a horrible death, or at least go away for ever.
I hope the PSP finally puts these fuckers out of their retarded misery. Better yet, I hope MS gets into the handheld market and puts as much money behind it as they put behind the XBox. Heck, I'd even preorder some 20 MS handhelds.
They've been using every single strong-arm tactic they thought they could get away with.
They threatened emu makers. They threaten sites for merely mentioning their games.
They broke trade laws in Europe and actually _planned_ that they'll get fined, but probably will make more money than the fine. (Much to their surprise, the EU had a much nastier bite than they had planned.)
When they were still the number 1 console, they imposed all sorts of surrealistic restrictions on the game devs. Just because they're the big N, and you're just a worthless peon begging to make a game for their console.
And generally, I dunno, they just fucking act like they whole fucking Earth revolves around them. They're the Alpha and the Omega, they're The Big N, God's bless to gamers, and so on.
At a time when the N64 was having a grand total of some 3 genres for it, and about 2 games per whole fucking year (at least in Europe, anyway), Nintendo was shooting its mouth off to the press about how they're great and have all the games they need. See, it's Sony who'll go bankrupt for having hundreds of games on their consoles. You just wait and see. All those stray developpers will come begging back to Nintendo.
No, literally.
Not only idiotic, but a downright slap in the face to all of us whose N64 was catching dust for lack of games.
And so on.
And I don't know... I wish they just ate shit and died already. All this corporate narcisism is making me sick already.
You have to understand though that the stock market's expectations have nothing to do with whether the company is doing well or not.
Surrealistic point in case: at one point 3Com had a lower market value than the Palm daughter-company. Basically if you subtract the value of the Palm shares, the whole rest of 3Com was actually worth a _negative_ value for the stock market.
And we're talking divisions which were making a tidy profit. Yet they were apparently worth a _negative_ number.
No, it's not a joke. Roll it around a bit in your head to fully grasp how completely sad and idiotic that is. Real profits, real assets, worth a negative number of dollars. Stupid.
Or at the other end of the spectrum you have Microsoft whose stock market value is _way_ above the value of its assets. Without paying any dividends or acquiring much in the way of long term assets, people just flocked to drive the price up and make Bill Gates rich. Basically to give their money to Bill Gates and not even get a Windows CD in return.
The thing is, however, the stock market value has _nothing_ to do with a company's value or profits. The value of a share is only worth as much or as little as people want to believe it is. It is like Monopoly (the board game, not MS;) money: if tomorrow we decide that the blue bills are worth 10% more and the red bills are worth 10% less, who's to argue with that.
The _only_ reason the stock market on the whole goes up is basically because yearly people dump more money into it. Basically it goes up just because people want to believe it's going up, and put their money where their belief is.
And the way those values fluctuate, now that just has to do with hype and greed.
The stocks worth buying are those who'll make you a profit: typically meaning they'll raise in value. The stocks worth selling are those who don't.
Except with no intrinsic value it becomes a game of guessing what the other lemmings will buy (driving the price up), and what the other lemmings will sell (driving the price down.)
One thing that makes lemmings buy is the prospect of growth. Hence, hype is good. Hence, yes, shares in a cancerous tumor would sell like hot cakes and rocket sky high in price.
Hence, conversely, shares in a company which doesn't grow or otherwise cause more lemmings to buy, are not worth holding on to. Because they won't bring a profit. If Microsoft truly plateaued and didn't pay dividends either, regardless of how much profits it made at that point, its shares would plummet. Because between holding onto a share in MS that doesn't bring a profit, and investing in some startup that grows quickly, the second promises more of a ROI.
Now that's all a bit of an over-simplification.
Of course, there are other factors. Like just paying dividends to give people a reason to hold onto your shares even without massive hype and growth. (See why MS started doing that when its market explosion slowed down.) Or like fraud: "analysts" just telling lemmings what to buy, and thus drive up the price of the shared owned by the "analyst" and his/her clients. Etc.
But as a quick intro to the madness of the stock market, it will have to do.
Good points about the ATA and ethernet controllers. I hadn't given it that much thought, I must confess.
The thought of keeping the AGP or PCI-Express connector, and being able to plug them into a backplane, did cross my mind too though. Not a bad idea either. Just thought I'd keep the post on topic, for a change.
You have to admit it's a very obvious idea once you start from "let's mix a CPU into a graphics card." Just begs the mental image with the AGP or PCI-Express connector still on the side of the card.
And from there it just begs the thought of "well, can I plug 8 such cards into one computer? And can I pack a rack full of computers with 8 such boards each?" Would have some serious density there.
Not sure I'd still keep the GPU core on board for the server boards, though. I'd rather give them a bigger cache instead. (Although, from a cost point of view keeping the same CPU for both does have a major advantage.)
You can probably get away with just one graphics board for a whole such computer, on the backplane, instead of one per card. If you will, a design in which you plug the motherboards into the graphics card, instead of the current way around.
No, what stands in the way is price
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Cray XT-3 Ships
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The real problem that stands between scientists and them having lots of shiny toys is funding.
E.g., yeah, having a 30,000 CPU super-computer to simulate your gene model on would be nice. Forking over half a billion for it, well, it's suddenly not that nice any more.
Having one of those to simulate an electronic circuit, now that would probably rock. Again, paying half a billion for it, suddenly isn't that attractive.
The real question isn't how nice a toy you'd like to have, it's ROI. (Unless you work for the government, and just have a budget you _have_ to blow on stuff, whether you need that stuff or not.)
And in that context, you'd be surprised what you _can_ do with a lot less expensive toys.
Having Cray's custom interconnects sure is impressive, but for a lot of problems they're not even needed any more. _That_ is what killed Cray.
Most RL problems are not really the kind described as "_one_ huge indivisible data set, that you have to process in _one_ huge batch process." They're more like "we have this process with a small data set that we have to run 100,000,000 times." Most design problems or biology problems are really of that kind: run the same thing 100,000,000 times with different parameters.
And as Seti@Home or Folding@Home proved, a helluva lot of those don't really need _any_ kind of shared memory or fancy interconnects. The real ticket is noting that instead of accelerating the batch run 200 times, you could just split it into 200 smaller batches ran on 200 single-CPU machines.
The super-computer solution costs 2,000,000 just for the machine alone, while the 200 PCs solution costs 200,000 or so. I.e., 10 times cheaper. Better yet, the 200 PCs solution is also far cheaper to program. (Anyone can program a non-threaded batch app.) _And_ for that kind of a problem the 200 PCs solution would actually finish faster, since it has no contention issues whatsoever.
Again, that's what really killed Cray and the super-computers. They're techologically impressive, they're a geek's wet dream, but... for 99.9% of the problems out there they're just not worth the price any more.
Can you buy a board with a ton of interfaces, voltage regulators, 128 MB RAM, etc, for less than 100$ today. Well, yes. It's called a graphics card.
No, I'm not going for "Funny" mod points. Bear with me. I'm trying to make a point.
The point is that you want to minimize the number of chips and the PCB complexity to the maximum.
It's not even a new idea. Back in the day, ZX Spectrum computers were very cheap because of the "ULA" chip. Basically Sir Clive Sinclair had invented the north-bridge. With integrated graphics, no less. No, again, it's not a joke.
Instead of having a ton of smaller chips, the ZX Spectrum basically had one custom designed chip with all the needed functions. It cut the price a lot.
For a more modern point for it, look at the PS2 vs XBox. The PS2 went and integrated pretty much everything it could into the CPU. The XBox went with a traditional PC design. The PS2 is a lot cheaper to produce. And the XBox loses money hand over fist because it's expensive to produce.
So basically that's the way I'd go. Take an idea from the AMD K8: it already integrates the memory controller on the CPU. Aside from saving traces on the mobo, it also gives it awesome latency on memory access.
So I'd take that idea and run amok with it all the way: integrate _everything_ possible on the CPU. Including ATA controller, a simple 2D graphics core, etc.
Of course, I'd probably not base it on the K8, which uses too much power and is large anyway. I'd want something like a P3 made in 90nm (yes, it's called a Dothan) and with a minimal cache. Say, 256K will do just fine.
That leaves lots of space to pack the other goodies around it. Again, the idea is to pack both "north bridge" and "south bridge" and sound card too on the same chip as the CPU.
I'd probably go for a Kyro 1 graphics core. Yes, it's old, but it does just fine even in simple 3D games, on very little memory bandwidth. And since it's gonna be an integrated graphics solution, bandwidth is what it won't have.
So basically at the end you'd have a motherboard which is the size of a graphics card, and looks much like a graphics card. A central chip, some 8 RAM chips soldered around it, a big cooler and a couple of connectors.
A very useful point to remember, indeed. I'll definitely aggree with you there. And it's refreshing to see someone thinking about the "what can happen?" part instead of just repeating mantras. That's what security is all about.
However, what I was advocating was a bit more restrictive than even just running ActiveX on the user's, well, user.
Basically if I was Microsoft and if I was designing an ActiveX kinda system, I'd generate a new temporary user ID for each control loaded, and those users would belong to another group too.
That fictive temporary user would _only_ have access to its newly-created empty home directory, and to a newly-created empty temporary directory. Anything else would be off limits.
Basically that control would not be able to access _any_ files, except whatever temporary files it creates itself. And even for those I'd give it a max disk space quota.
For any other operations, including opening TCP/IP sockets, printing, whatever, I'd want it sandboxed to heck and back and forbidden by default. It _is_ possible to sandbox those, since all those go through the OS at one point or another.
Briefly it's just a theoretical exercise in "how an untrusted binary program _could_ be sandboxed even without resorting to emulating a fictive machine." If you will, just doing a real assessment of what can go wrong, and how to prevent it (if you also wrote the OS), rather than blindly repeating the mantra ".exe files in the browser = bad, virtual machine = good and infailible".
1. First and foremost, GCC's bytecode isn't Sun's or MS's proprietary stuff.
2. It _is_ more efficient. Java on the desktop is still by and large a fscking disaster. It uses more RAM, its GC doesn't play nice with the swapping, and it _still_ runs at about half the speed of native C++ code in real apps. (As opposed to Sun's cleverly crafted micro-benchmarketting.)
(Virtualizing everything and emulating fictional machines instead of dealing with the _real_ machine, is every Computer Scientist's wet dream. When you live in a theoretical world, it's easy to forget about the concerns of the _real_ world. Such as performance. Or memory footprint. Or the fact that computers have finite memory and a swap file, so an idiotic GC will cause thrashing when the machine is overloaded.)
3. A Swing app tends to look-and-feel nothing like a native app.
(And it's not just about the "look", but about users being able to just use their existing skills on a new app. E.g., not having to learn yet another file chooser dialog. What's wrong with the existing Windows one? Coding yet another set of personalized widgets is every geek's wet dream, which is why every idiot just has to do that. Using yet another new widget set is, however, something every non-geek would rather avoid if he/she had half a choice.)
Now the last two points _are_ slowly getting better. JIT compiling has come a long way, for example. We're no longer in the days of Java 1.0 running 20 times slower than even the worst written C++ program. And IBM's SWT sure is what Swing and AWT _could_ have been, if Sun's engineers didn't have their heads firmly up their arse.
Still, you know... can't help wondering why we keep waiting for Sun's proprietary thing to eventually get fixed, instead of using the open alternative that already exists and which already works better. Are we _that_ addicted to Sun's marketting and lies, or?
You know, I'm quite fed up with the double standards here. In fact, with the double standards surrounding F/OSS in general.
On one hand, "hey, ProgramX is cool, stable, 100% secure! You should switch to it right now!" On the other hand as soon as you mention a bug or mis-feature or UI problem... it's either (1) "uh, well, it's still work in progress", or (2) "it's OSS, so drop all else you were doing and fix it yourself, you idiot", or (3) "you didn't pay a dime, so WTF do you expect? Commercial quality?" Or some other variants of those.
The falacy works something like this. I'll use different product names to illustrate the point better:
Premise 1: "Excel could be better... for a commercial program made by a big corporation."
Premise 2: "The free 4-operations calculator written by the neighbour's 12 year old geeky son, is _amazing_... for a free program written by a 12 year old in an afternoon. That kid is amazing."
(False) Conclusion: "If Excel 'could be better' and BillysCalc 'is amazing', then BillysCalc is better than Excel. And everyone should uninstall Excel and download Billy's 4-operation calculator instead."
Which is just false. It's based on deliberately taking stuff out of context, and comparing it to something taken out of another context.
There is no such thing as "X is better than Y, considering that X is a pre-beta, so you should ignore all the bugs and security holes in X." It's either better compared as is, or it isn't.
If I uninstalled Y and installed X, would I get less bugs? More security? What? Is X, taken as it is _now_ and without the excuses and "yeah, but"s, indeed better?
No, I don't give a flying fuck about excuses as to why X should be excused for still being buggier. I'm not interested in what X _could_ be in a distant future and an alternate universe, but in what it is _now_.
That's all. All the rest is just piss-poor excuses and a piss-poor smoke-and-mirrors show.
And the sooner the F/OSS community as a whole can get out of this "but _I_ can be excused if my programs are buggy and unusable" mentality, the sooner it will be taken more seriously outside the die-hard fanboy circles.
Every single F/OSS project that did make it, even on the server side, was stuff which just worked here and now, on its own merits. No excuses, no "yeah, but it's still a beta." (After, what, 6 years already?)
Apache, for example, is usually _the_ example of a F/OSS project that not only is in widespread use, but which actually still keeps MS from getting the server-side monopoly they fight to achieve. But you know what?
Apache is also the prime example of a project that actually _worked_ and never made a "but I have a good excuse" show. Apache was always provably better _right_ _now_. Not "after we get around to fixing the bugs", not "really soon now", not in any other kind of wishful possible future.
You could do a straight apples-to-apples comparison between Apache and IIS to your boss, and never need to come up with excuses for Apache.
I will also concede the point that coding for one proprietary platform is bad.
However, you know, I can't see a point in locking people up into Sun's proprietary platform either. Whether it's Windows DLLs or.Net or Sun's Java, it's still a proprietary non-open platform.
What I would like to see is a good F/OSS environment. A good one.
Preferrably do away with the whole virtualization idiocy too. You _can_ be portable even without emulating a non-existent CPU and inventing a new machine code for it. (Java bytecode is just that.)
E.g., I'm thinking: GCC is portable, right? It may not always write the highest performance code, but it can generate code for more platforms than Java runs on anyway.
So why not use GCC as a platform instead?
Make an equivalent of the "class" files that's basically a semi-compiled C/C++ file. That is, right before the actual machine-dependent code generation. But otherwise already pre-processed and parsed.
Then the runtime on the client machine would just take this file and finish the compilation, abd links it producing the actual executable.
And, as I've said before, it can be as sandboxed as Java is anyway. Since you control the final code generation and linking, you can link it to libraries that are as sandboxed as you want them to be.
A native program running in a well designed OS is just as secure as Java.
That's why, for example, we used to let 20+ students at terminals at a mainframe or mini, in universities for example. They could run whatever programs they wanted on that machine, including their own code and including stuff they found on a hacker BBS. And in fact in all CS universities they're _supposed_ to program on those machines. Yet none of them came anywhere _near_ owning the machine.
The concept that a program once running on a machine automatically can retrieve or overwrite _all_ data, format the drive, or generally even blow an alien mothership up, is (A) Hollywood idiocy, and (B) never true except for the simplest single-user OS's like Win'95.
Or to put it otherwise: what do you tell Unix users? "Don't run as root except to install programs or other admin tasks. Especially don't go online as roo." Then they ask: why? "Because if someone takes control of the program via an exploit, they can't do as much harm if it doesn't run as root."
For all practical purposes, a modern OS is (or could be) just as virtualized as any Java sandbox. Programs no longer run directly on the bare metal, like in the days of DOS. (Which was barely a program loader.) They have to go through the OS to do _anything_. Including, but not limited to, reading or writing files, opening TCP/IP sockets, installing stuff.
Heck, even directly accessing RAM from other apps or directly poking machine ports can be blocked when running on a 386 or above (and _is_ blocked when you don't have kernel access).
Basically when running an app on a 32 bit CPU it can be as sandboxed as you want it to be.
E.g. don't want them accessing files? That's trivial. Just run them as a different user that can only access its temporary directory.
So ActiveX _could_ work, and it _could_ be extremely secure. Maybe not on Windows, and maybe not implemented by MS. I'll concede that point. But at least theoretically it can be at least as safe as Java, and without needing users to download 100 MB plugins that get wantonly changed by Sun.
Well, I know that. Yes, it's just a simplified table-top game, and yes everyone with half a brain sidesteps some of the stuff.
Nevertheless, all I was saying is that its view of "good vs evil" is a major simplification. Good enough as merely a secondary prop for a normal game, yes.
The problem is when a game is _supposed_ to be all about good and evil, and bases its hype on its supposed modelling good and evil. E.g., Black and White, and to some extent Fable.
In that case it's no longer a secondary prop, it's the whole subject of the game. And in that case I'd expect it to have a lot more depth.
If you will, it's the difference between a game which only incidentally has some airplane model as part of the scenery (e.g., a certain Counter-Strike map), and a flight sim. The first one merely needs an airplane model, while the flight sim damn better simulate the actual flight physics.
That's all I'm saying: D&D can get away with its simplified "good vs evil" prop, but a game like "Black and White" had no excuse to be just as simplistic about it.
As our AC friend pointed out, real life people are far more complex and less unidimensional than the "good" and "evil" in games.
An example I've given before is Al Capone. On one hand, he ordered brutal executions and even personally killed people. On the other hand, he opened the first soup kitchens after the stock market crash. He also ordered merchants to give food and clothing to the extremely poor on his own expense.
Was he good or was he evil? IRL I think we'd still all aggree that he was evil. In D&D's or PM's view he is basically neither. Heck, in D&D or in any computer game that would probably balance out as "neutral".
I also have a major problem with reducing evil to something that can be automatically detected by a spell or by a better sword. It no longer is something that depends on what you've done, but, well, something like the colour of your eyes. You were just born with it, and is so obvious that even an inanimate item can detect it.
I also have a problem with it being just an excuse to _kill_ on sight. _Especially_ after being reduced to something that meaningless. D&D's view can basically be reduced to "if you're good, go ahead and kill some evil guys already." If someone showed as the wrong alignment to your spell, that's your clue to slaughter them for xp.
Which is a sick and stupid view of what "good" is. E.g., a noble paladin burning down a drow orphanage, with the drow children still in it, would probably count as just doing a good deed. Sorry, nope. No way. That's not what "good" means.
Also I have a major problem with D&D's shoving whole species under automatically evil.
1. The way it works, in that it's an automatic excuse to kill whole races on sight, is _nazi_. Whole species or cultures are destined to be mass-slaughtered by the "good" guys, for no other reason than the race they were born in.
It doesn't matter if any member of that race actually did anything wrong in their whole life. They're evil and free-for-all to kill anyway.
Not only in D&D. I still remember setting Populous 1 on auto-play, and watching the "evil" guys just minding their own evil business. Ploughing their evil fields, building their evil cities, and the like. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, the "good" guys built an army and slaughtered them all.
Who was "good" and who was "evil" there?
2. Such a race where everyone is just waiting for half an occasion to rob or murder each other, would have never made it out of stone age. There is no way a drow culture for example would have got anywhere near where it is in D&D, as a race where everyone is born evil.
For me Fable was a _great_ game. And I'm not even a fan of real-time RPGs.
It wouldn't have hurt if it were a bit longer, though.
But then, you know, that's a sign that you actually enjoyed whatever content was in it: it leaves you wanting for more. I can think of other games I said "good riddance" to at the end, or even games which I never bothered (or even wanted to) finish.
Whereas Fable had me pretty much glued to the chair until the end. It had me thinking about it at work. And then there I was thinking "whaaa...? Over already. But I want more!"
I never tried drugs, but I'd imagine that's what drug addiction is like.
And heck, as hype goes it definitely wasn't a selling point for me. After the utter shit that was Black and White, another hyped PM game was _not_ quite something I'd fall for that easily. Doubly so another game where he passes piss-poor judgment on what "good" and "evil" means.
I mean, that guy may well be obsessed with "good vs evil", but he's totally unable to depict more than a carricature of what either means. None of his games, ever since Populous 1, raised above the over-simplified AD&D notion of "good" and "evil".
So the short version is: all that the hype had as an effect is that I was actually planning _not_ to buy it. It took a lot of talking to friends and co-workers who've actually played it before I tried it.
So basically, please. Fable may not have been _everyone's_ cup of tea. No game ever is. But there are also one helluva lot of us who think it was worth every cent and then some. In fact, in my case it was also worth every cent I paid for the XBox just to play it. (I didn't already own an XBox.)
Basically for a lot of us it _did_ live up to the hype, and then some.
You'd be surprised how much of a market does exist for computers which aren't a l33t 3D gaming machine. Think: corporate market.
For example, there are more servers sold with an ancient 2D ATI Rage graphics chip on-board, than gaming machines with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Or, heck, until very recently Sun still sold workstations with a renamed ATI Rage PCI card in them.
The problem however is that
1. that's a bulk low-profit margin market. It's not about selling marked up boxed graphics card, it's about selling bulk chips at mere cents above the manufacturing cost.
2. it's already being savaged by integrated graphics. OEMs already operate on single digit profit margins. It's increasingly hard to justify even the extra traces or mobo space for an extra graphics chip, when for 2D any integrated graphics are already good enough.
3. Competing for merits -- _any_ merits, including OSS drivers -- in the 2D market it's gonna be a major feat. For 2D _all_ current chips are supported well enough by F/OSS drivers.
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Well, I have played CoH and a bunch of other MMORPGs, and many years on MUDs before. Not saying that to brag, just saying that (A) I do understand what you mean about griefing, and (B) the grandparent poster was right: COH _is_ designed to prevent griefing.
The thing is, most MUDs and MMORPGs are either (A) designed by not caring about griefing at all (see the first years of UO, where idiotic "realism" excuses took precedence over the players' real problems) or (B) designed by griefers for griefers.
It's like with buffer overflows or security: griefing is something that designers seem to ignore until it comes and bites them in the ass. Or even after it's bitten them in the ass. (Origin ignored it long after it cost it its market leader position in MMOs.)
I've only seen two MMO games so far which were designed from the ground up to prevent griefing, as much as physically possible: City of Heroes and Sega's Phantasy Star Online.
Admittedly, PSO was even more effective, in that there was literally _nothing_ you could do to harm a player. You couldn't even stand in a door to block their retreat. Training monsters? Didn't work either, since anything more than 10-20 ft or so would require them to go through a door, and they simply couldn't go through doors. Tricking newbies into dangerous areas? Nope, teleporting back to safety was always a button click away. (Plus, again, wheth they were in over their head, they only needed to run back through a door. Monsters couldn't follow through doors.) Stealing newbies' XP? Nope. As long as they still got at least one hit in (fairly easy with a pistol or rifle), they got xp too. Etc.
Sega had done an amazingly thorough design work there.
(In all fairness, PSO was more vulnerable to cheating, but still... even if you cheated yourself to be godly, you still couldn't harm or inconvenience another player with it. Which kept griefers away.)
CoH isn't that thorough about it, but still, you can tell that they gave the problem a lot of thought.
And generally, I say that's the right direction that a game should take. Instead of recruiting vigilante mobs of players to police against problems, the problems should be solved or prevented by the code whenever possible. It's possible. It just needs lots of work.
In 32 bit mode, the PR numbers for _both_ the XP and the A64 are inofficially based on a comparison with the P4, and officially on one with the Thunderbird.
Yes, so the A64 does have slightly higher IPC, the integrated memory controller, etc. But those are already factored into the PR number.
E.g., a Barton XP 2800+ is 2083 MHz, while an A64 2800+ is 1800 MHz. So the "does more work per MHz" part is already factored in by AMD.
So, well, to cut a long story short:
1. Since AMD itself does compare both to the P4 when assigning those PR numbers, I think it's fair enough to do that in a benchmark.
2. For the end-user generations and architectures are irrelevant anyway. What matters is "ok, I need a new computer. Do I get an Athlon 64 or a P4? Which one is faster?"
So one way or the other you do have to make that comparison. Regardless of what's fair and what the generation numbers are, that's what Joe Average wants to know.
To summarize all that apt description of image and wearing stuff which screams "I have disposable income", the words you're looking for are: "conspicuous consumption".
" the fact that the number of general-purpose registers has doubled from 8 to 16, greatly reducing the amount of register variable swapping needed. Again, most apps simply do not care if they can fit huge numbers in a register, because they do not need them."
And here's your free clue for the day: you only get those in 64 bit software. Because that's part of those 64 bit extensions.
And, indeed, that's largely the reason why software compiled in 64 bit mode rocks on an Athlon 64. (As opposed to actually running slower, as happens on an Ultra-SPARC.)
That said, it only makes the comparison fair after all. Both CPUs were using 32 bit registers and the same number of registers too.
I don't even think he has a given bias as such. He'll just say or do anything that brings clicks.
Whether that means trolling a certain user group (e.g., the insulting editorials about AMD fans), trolling about other popular (and far more competent) sites, or saying what the majority wants to hear, or some cheap lame publicity stunt. (E.g., the video about an Athlon burning horribly without a heatsink at all. Except what he won't tell you is that it only happens without a heatsink at all, so outside of such el-cheapo publicity stunts it never happened.)
Add to that a good dose of self-adoration and downright verbal masturbation. I've yet to see a THG article in the last years that stays on topic, and isn't just an excuse to brag about how Tom's Hardware is the greatest ever. And recap how cool his past publicity stunts were.
Often not even in the right topic. "Today we talk about hard drives. But first, remember kids, we were the first ones who showed you an Athlon burn without a heatsink! And we were the first to include a 33 MHz 486 in a P4-vs-Athlon benchmark! We're soo cool!" Well, not an actual quote, but that's the impression THG articles leave me with.
Basically Tom's is just sucking up to the majority for clicks. He's probably only pro-Intel as long as most folks buy Intel. Since most folks started buying AMD retail lately, expect him to do an about-face turn in no time. He's sure done such about-face turns before, about other issues.
Either way, some results you can't downright spin into victories, but you can downplay. Trumpet as complete victories those cases where your favourite is 1% faster, but when it loses just spin it into sounding like only a marginal loss or an unlikely-to-happen scenario.
E.g., let's say you have two CPUs (or GPUs), let's call them CPU-A and CPU-B. Let's call them Bench-A and BenchB.
And let's say that the scores are as follows:
Bench-A: CPU-A=100, CPU-B=105
Bench-B: CPU-A=1050, CPU-B=1000
In both cases the difference is 5%. How do you spin that into sounding like CPU-A still is the fastest across the board? Easy. Use lame games like "CPU-B is barely 5% faster and only in this particular case" when talking about Bench-A, but trumpet Bench-B as "Here we see CPU-A wipe the floor with CPU-B, scoring a whole 50 points higher!"
Think it doesn't happen? Well, THG's video card reviews do just that every single time. (And those on some other low standard sites too, of course.)
AMD chips used to cost very little, yes, but nowadays they're pretty much on par with Intel.
... 899 Euro ... 849 Euro
... 174 Euro ... 184 Euro
... 189 Euro ... 184 Euro
E.g, since we're talking about the P4EE, a fair comparison would be the Athlon FX. A quick look at an online shop here (www.alternate.de) says:
Athlon 64 FX-55
Athlon 64 FX-53
Not exactly a budget chip either, eh?
But let's look at something more mainstream:
Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754, 2 GHz)
Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 939, 1.8 GHz)
Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Northwood)
Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Prescott)
So it looks to me like they're very much on par, as price goes.
Now this isn't a scientific study or anything, and I didn't even try to find the lowest price or anything. I just stopped at the first online shop that came to mind.
On the other hand, if microchips are fragile, then Intel and AMD should never have shipped them with the silicon exposed. (And yes, it was Intel that came up with the idiotic exposed flip-chip packaging in the P3, but AMD should have known better than to mindlessly copy it.)
It's not something that happened only to some clumsy (l)user. Even people from big benchmarking sites (e.g., Hard-OCP), which get to play with hundreds of chips, still managed to grind a corner off a chip, or put the wrong heatsink on and burn it.
Basically shipping a chip like that is just as stupid as shipping a remote control that cracks if you push the button too hard. Sure, you could expect the users to be careful, and you could take the lame way of blaming the user, but it still will happen.
And it looks like bad design to me. Good design should strive to prevent problems, not just shrug and call the user names.
A solution isn't even hard or expensive, as the P4's heat spreader (then copied by the A64) proved it. But you need someone to actually think in terms of "how can we solve or prevent a potential problem?" instead of "duh, yet another clueless idiot cracked his chip. Someone should shoot these people."
And that doesn't go only for chips. Software is the same. A lot of it seems based on the requirement that the user is an expert and never makes a mistake. And then when the user does do a mistake it's time to act offended and do a "gee, we let this kinda idiots use computers?" flame.
The AMD 64 is covered by a heat spreader, just like the P4. In a nutshell, short of using a sledgehammer to install the heatsink, it's pretty damn impossible to crack the chip even if you wanted to.
I never said I wanted it for free.
We don't get that sick joke called "support" from IBM either. Again, we're talking support to a corporation. Paid-for premium support.
And it's so useless, you just can't describe how useless it is. All that huge message I've wrote doesn't even scratch the surface of the madness.
We've actually had several people quitting because of WebSphere and the frustration of dealing with IBM's support. Roll it around in your head. In a job market collapse, people rather quitting than keeping working with a product. That bad.
So again, it's not even hard for MS to look good by comparison. It's not that MS products are great per se, it's just that "software quality" or "good support" nowadays are complete oxymorons. Microsoft's just happens to be, well, "among the least bad".
It's sorta like choosing the "best" between being whipped and being kicked repeatedly in the balls, really. Me, I'll take the whipping if I have a choice.
Much as I'm not sure if Linux is anywhere near ready yet, it _is_ possible that a cheaper product tips a giant by virtue of price alone.
/. Microsoft fanboyism or click-and-drool interfaces didn't even figure in those plans. It was just a cool headed bang-per-buck analysis. NT won, and the former almost-monopoly in that market is nowadays no longer even a leader.
Unix itself got to be a default standard for one single merit: it was cheap.
Bearing in mind that Unix in the beginning was not what you call Unix or Linux nowadays. It was more or less a toy OS, compared to what mainframe or even mini OSes offered at the time. If you did only a feature comparison between Unix and pretty much any mainframe offering, Unix was not going to win.
It had a major advantage, though. It was cheap and it ran on cheap hardware. A university or business could easier afford smaller computers running Unix, than a top-of-the-line IBM mainframe. In fact they could afford several Unix computers for the price of an IBM mainframe.
And universities to this day are still churning _legions_ of people who got trained on Unix. Guess what that meant for the companies that then hired them. Not only advocacy but a clear case of "it's cheaper to just use Unix than retrain everyone." (The same point nowadays used to justify Windows.)
And Microsoft itself got where it is by dethroning giants in much the same way.
E.g., at the time Windows NT stole the fileserver market from Novell, I used to talk to a bunch of IT people. Partialy over the fido-net, partially family friends. (Both my parents are professional nerds.)
Being still (A) a student, and (B) a nerd, I had of course no sense of economics. So for me it was baffling that someone would prefer the primitive NT to the superior Netware. And FFS, NT needed more RAM and generally a more expensive computer too!
So they patiently explained that, for what they needed, NT was (A) enough, and (B) much cheaper. Even after you factored in the extra RAM for NT, it still ended up way under Novell's price. So they bought NT instead.
Contrary to popular mis-conceptions on
Or take the history of DEC. How the mighty have fallen. The PC and MS-DOS were a joke compared to a good Vax. Even the Mac was't anywhere near comparable to a mini. But both were one helluva lot cheaper, and good enough for most people. And DEC just didn't get it. They stuck for too long to selling "proven solutions" to a rapidly shrinking user base, while the PCs and Macs were taking over their market like wildfire.
Where is DEC now? Well, it doesn't even exist any more.
So basically all I'm saying is that a tipping point does exist, it happened repeatedly before, and Microsoft itself got here because of it. Now maybe Linux won't be it. But eventually something will.
Here's some free clue for you: "support" doesn't mean they'll come administer your servers for free, or write your programs for you. Which is what would put people out of job.
It means you can call when you have a problem.
And "world class" is a very relative term. Support from most companies is a sick joke nowadays. Support people are something like taxes: you pay them because you have to, but you don't want to pay a cent more than you absolutely have to. So the ones hired are the cheapest monkeys who can read a bulleted list. Occasionally even the right bulleted list, but no biggie if they read the grocery list instead.
So it's not even hard for MS to actually be in the top tier. You know, the thing about the one-eyed man among the blind.
E.g., having spent the last 2.5 years dealing with WebSphere, which is a buggy unfinished sick joke if you actually use EJBs. And reporting the bugs to IBM. Now IBM's WebSphere support is enough to drive one neurotic, to drinking, or both. And we're not talking support to end-(lusers) but to a big corporate client.
It's a feat just getting past the mindless check-list reading drones. They don't even read what we send them. The first _weeks_ are spent just with them sending us canned "solutions" off their check lists, that don't even match what we wrote in the bug description. That idiotic.
And once you got past those, it's like dealing with a corporate sized Wally (from the Dilbert comics.) It's an endless delay tactic. Including, but not limited to, asking if they can close the bug report just because they want to go on vacation. (No, I'm not making this up. It's too sad to make up, folks.) Or sending us a Jar file as a "fix" that didn't solve the problem, or one even broke WebSphere completely. Or once, after such a "fix" didn't solve the problem, they sent us the exact same file again, as the new "fix".
Or to get you an idea of software quality: they never run the tests we send them to reproduce the problem, and obviously don't have any test cases of their own.
An annoyed coleague finally actually asked them what test cases they used to prove they fixed the problem, 'cause their fix did nothing for us. The answer? A longer version of "no, we didn't actually test it, we didn't even reproduce the problem, but we're confident that we've fixed it. And we thatk you for testing it for us." (Again, I'm not even making it up. They thank us for acting as testers for them.)
Or here's one actual support case that didn't involve a bug: Another team needed to import a SSL certifficate to get IBM's WebSphere Portal Server to talk to another server. So they ask IBM. After getting nowhere with the phone support, they actually pay a big heap of money to get an IBM "consultant" to come show them.
Again, not some underpaid, overworked telephone support slave. A consultant. IBM consultants cost a small fortune.
So the consultant messed around with the server for a _week_, and then said something to the effect of "uhh... I have no bloody idea. Try searching for key store files in all directories and importing your certificate in all of them. It's got to be one of those. I have no idea which, though."
Sad.
So, well, again, it's not even hard for MS to be better than such clowns. It may not be the ideal support by the client's standards, but it's waay better than the sick joke you get as support from some other companies.
Yes, I'm if you will a Nintendo anti-fanboy. I want to see them die a horrible death, or at least go away for ever.
I hope the PSP finally puts these fuckers out of their retarded misery. Better yet, I hope MS gets into the handheld market and puts as much money behind it as they put behind the XBox. Heck, I'd even preorder some 20 MS handhelds.
They've been using every single strong-arm tactic they thought they could get away with.
They threatened emu makers. They threaten sites for merely mentioning their games.
They broke trade laws in Europe and actually _planned_ that they'll get fined, but probably will make more money than the fine. (Much to their surprise, the EU had a much nastier bite than they had planned.)
When they were still the number 1 console, they imposed all sorts of surrealistic restrictions on the game devs. Just because they're the big N, and you're just a worthless peon begging to make a game for their console.
And generally, I dunno, they just fucking act like they whole fucking Earth revolves around them. They're the Alpha and the Omega, they're The Big N, God's bless to gamers, and so on.
At a time when the N64 was having a grand total of some 3 genres for it, and about 2 games per whole fucking year (at least in Europe, anyway), Nintendo was shooting its mouth off to the press about how they're great and have all the games they need. See, it's Sony who'll go bankrupt for having hundreds of games on their consoles. You just wait and see. All those stray developpers will come begging back to Nintendo.
No, literally.
Not only idiotic, but a downright slap in the face to all of us whose N64 was catching dust for lack of games.
And so on.
And I don't know... I wish they just ate shit and died already. All this corporate narcisism is making me sick already.
You have to understand though that the stock market's expectations have nothing to do with whether the company is doing well or not.
Surrealistic point in case: at one point 3Com had a lower market value than the Palm daughter-company. Basically if you subtract the value of the Palm shares, the whole rest of 3Com was actually worth a _negative_ value for the stock market.
And we're talking divisions which were making a tidy profit. Yet they were apparently worth a _negative_ number.
No, it's not a joke. Roll it around a bit in your head to fully grasp how completely sad and idiotic that is. Real profits, real assets, worth a negative number of dollars. Stupid.
Or at the other end of the spectrum you have Microsoft whose stock market value is _way_ above the value of its assets. Without paying any dividends or acquiring much in the way of long term assets, people just flocked to drive the price up and make Bill Gates rich. Basically to give their money to Bill Gates and not even get a Windows CD in return.
The thing is, however, the stock market value has _nothing_ to do with a company's value or profits. The value of a share is only worth as much or as little as people want to believe it is. It is like Monopoly (the board game, not MS;) money: if tomorrow we decide that the blue bills are worth 10% more and the red bills are worth 10% less, who's to argue with that.
The _only_ reason the stock market on the whole goes up is basically because yearly people dump more money into it. Basically it goes up just because people want to believe it's going up, and put their money where their belief is.
And the way those values fluctuate, now that just has to do with hype and greed.
The stocks worth buying are those who'll make you a profit: typically meaning they'll raise in value. The stocks worth selling are those who don't.
Except with no intrinsic value it becomes a game of guessing what the other lemmings will buy (driving the price up), and what the other lemmings will sell (driving the price down.)
One thing that makes lemmings buy is the prospect of growth. Hence, hype is good. Hence, yes, shares in a cancerous tumor would sell like hot cakes and rocket sky high in price.
Hence, conversely, shares in a company which doesn't grow or otherwise cause more lemmings to buy, are not worth holding on to. Because they won't bring a profit. If Microsoft truly plateaued and didn't pay dividends either, regardless of how much profits it made at that point, its shares would plummet. Because between holding onto a share in MS that doesn't bring a profit, and investing in some startup that grows quickly, the second promises more of a ROI.
Now that's all a bit of an over-simplification.
Of course, there are other factors. Like just paying dividends to give people a reason to hold onto your shares even without massive hype and growth. (See why MS started doing that when its market explosion slowed down.) Or like fraud: "analysts" just telling lemmings what to buy, and thus drive up the price of the shared owned by the "analyst" and his/her clients. Etc.
But as a quick intro to the madness of the stock market, it will have to do.
Good points about the ATA and ethernet controllers. I hadn't given it that much thought, I must confess.
The thought of keeping the AGP or PCI-Express connector, and being able to plug them into a backplane, did cross my mind too though. Not a bad idea either. Just thought I'd keep the post on topic, for a change.
You have to admit it's a very obvious idea once you start from "let's mix a CPU into a graphics card." Just begs the mental image with the AGP or PCI-Express connector still on the side of the card.
And from there it just begs the thought of "well, can I plug 8 such cards into one computer? And can I pack a rack full of computers with 8 such boards each?" Would have some serious density there.
Not sure I'd still keep the GPU core on board for the server boards, though. I'd rather give them a bigger cache instead. (Although, from a cost point of view keeping the same CPU for both does have a major advantage.)
You can probably get away with just one graphics board for a whole such computer, on the backplane, instead of one per card. If you will, a design in which you plug the motherboards into the graphics card, instead of the current way around.
The real problem that stands between scientists and them having lots of shiny toys is funding.
E.g., yeah, having a 30,000 CPU super-computer to simulate your gene model on would be nice. Forking over half a billion for it, well, it's suddenly not that nice any more.
Having one of those to simulate an electronic circuit, now that would probably rock. Again, paying half a billion for it, suddenly isn't that attractive.
The real question isn't how nice a toy you'd like to have, it's ROI. (Unless you work for the government, and just have a budget you _have_ to blow on stuff, whether you need that stuff or not.)
And in that context, you'd be surprised what you _can_ do with a lot less expensive toys.
Having Cray's custom interconnects sure is impressive, but for a lot of problems they're not even needed any more. _That_ is what killed Cray.
Most RL problems are not really the kind described as "_one_ huge indivisible data set, that you have to process in _one_ huge batch process." They're more like "we have this process with a small data set that we have to run 100,000,000 times." Most design problems or biology problems are really of that kind: run the same thing 100,000,000 times with different parameters.
And as Seti@Home or Folding@Home proved, a helluva lot of those don't really need _any_ kind of shared memory or fancy interconnects. The real ticket is noting that instead of accelerating the batch run 200 times, you could just split it into 200 smaller batches ran on 200 single-CPU machines.
The super-computer solution costs 2,000,000 just for the machine alone, while the 200 PCs solution costs 200,000 or so. I.e., 10 times cheaper. Better yet, the 200 PCs solution is also far cheaper to program. (Anyone can program a non-threaded batch app.) _And_ for that kind of a problem the 200 PCs solution would actually finish faster, since it has no contention issues whatsoever.
Again, that's what really killed Cray and the super-computers. They're techologically impressive, they're a geek's wet dream, but... for 99.9% of the problems out there they're just not worth the price any more.
Can you buy a board with a ton of interfaces, voltage regulators, 128 MB RAM, etc, for less than 100$ today. Well, yes. It's called a graphics card.
No, I'm not going for "Funny" mod points. Bear with me. I'm trying to make a point.
The point is that you want to minimize the number of chips and the PCB complexity to the maximum.
It's not even a new idea. Back in the day, ZX Spectrum computers were very cheap because of the "ULA" chip. Basically Sir Clive Sinclair had invented the north-bridge. With integrated graphics, no less. No, again, it's not a joke.
Instead of having a ton of smaller chips, the ZX Spectrum basically had one custom designed chip with all the needed functions. It cut the price a lot.
For a more modern point for it, look at the PS2 vs XBox. The PS2 went and integrated pretty much everything it could into the CPU. The XBox went with a traditional PC design. The PS2 is a lot cheaper to produce. And the XBox loses money hand over fist because it's expensive to produce.
So basically that's the way I'd go. Take an idea from the AMD K8: it already integrates the memory controller on the CPU. Aside from saving traces on the mobo, it also gives it awesome latency on memory access.
So I'd take that idea and run amok with it all the way: integrate _everything_ possible on the CPU. Including ATA controller, a simple 2D graphics core, etc.
Of course, I'd probably not base it on the K8, which uses too much power and is large anyway. I'd want something like a P3 made in 90nm (yes, it's called a Dothan) and with a minimal cache. Say, 256K will do just fine.
That leaves lots of space to pack the other goodies around it. Again, the idea is to pack both "north bridge" and "south bridge" and sound card too on the same chip as the CPU.
I'd probably go for a Kyro 1 graphics core. Yes, it's old, but it does just fine even in simple 3D games, on very little memory bandwidth. And since it's gonna be an integrated graphics solution, bandwidth is what it won't have.
So basically at the end you'd have a motherboard which is the size of a graphics card, and looks much like a graphics card. A central chip, some 8 RAM chips soldered around it, a big cooler and a couple of connectors.
A very useful point to remember, indeed. I'll definitely aggree with you there. And it's refreshing to see someone thinking about the "what can happen?" part instead of just repeating mantras. That's what security is all about.
However, what I was advocating was a bit more restrictive than even just running ActiveX on the user's, well, user.
Basically if I was Microsoft and if I was designing an ActiveX kinda system, I'd generate a new temporary user ID for each control loaded, and those users would belong to another group too.
That fictive temporary user would _only_ have access to its newly-created empty home directory, and to a newly-created empty temporary directory. Anything else would be off limits.
Basically that control would not be able to access _any_ files, except whatever temporary files it creates itself. And even for those I'd give it a max disk space quota.
For any other operations, including opening TCP/IP sockets, printing, whatever, I'd want it sandboxed to heck and back and forbidden by default. It _is_ possible to sandbox those, since all those go through the OS at one point or another.
Briefly it's just a theoretical exercise in "how an untrusted binary program _could_ be sandboxed even without resorting to emulating a fictive machine." If you will, just doing a real assessment of what can go wrong, and how to prevent it (if you also wrote the OS), rather than blindly repeating the mantra ".exe files in the browser = bad, virtual machine = good and infailible".
The difference is basically that:
1. First and foremost, GCC's bytecode isn't Sun's or MS's proprietary stuff.
2. It _is_ more efficient. Java on the desktop is still by and large a fscking disaster. It uses more RAM, its GC doesn't play nice with the swapping, and it _still_ runs at about half the speed of native C++ code in real apps. (As opposed to Sun's cleverly crafted micro-benchmarketting.)
(Virtualizing everything and emulating fictional machines instead of dealing with the _real_ machine, is every Computer Scientist's wet dream. When you live in a theoretical world, it's easy to forget about the concerns of the _real_ world. Such as performance. Or memory footprint. Or the fact that computers have finite memory and a swap file, so an idiotic GC will cause thrashing when the machine is overloaded.)
3. A Swing app tends to look-and-feel nothing like a native app.
(And it's not just about the "look", but about users being able to just use their existing skills on a new app. E.g., not having to learn yet another file chooser dialog. What's wrong with the existing Windows one? Coding yet another set of personalized widgets is every geek's wet dream, which is why every idiot just has to do that. Using yet another new widget set is, however, something every non-geek would rather avoid if he/she had half a choice.)
Now the last two points _are_ slowly getting better. JIT compiling has come a long way, for example. We're no longer in the days of Java 1.0 running 20 times slower than even the worst written C++ program. And IBM's SWT sure is what Swing and AWT _could_ have been, if Sun's engineers didn't have their heads firmly up their arse.
Still, you know... can't help wondering why we keep waiting for Sun's proprietary thing to eventually get fixed, instead of using the open alternative that already exists and which already works better. Are we _that_ addicted to Sun's marketting and lies, or?
You know, I'm quite fed up with the double standards here. In fact, with the double standards surrounding F/OSS in general.
On one hand, "hey, ProgramX is cool, stable, 100% secure! You should switch to it right now!" On the other hand as soon as you mention a bug or mis-feature or UI problem... it's either (1) "uh, well, it's still work in progress", or (2) "it's OSS, so drop all else you were doing and fix it yourself, you idiot", or (3) "you didn't pay a dime, so WTF do you expect? Commercial quality?" Or some other variants of those.
The falacy works something like this. I'll use different product names to illustrate the point better:
Premise 1: "Excel could be better... for a commercial program made by a big corporation."
Premise 2: "The free 4-operations calculator written by the neighbour's 12 year old geeky son, is _amazing_... for a free program written by a 12 year old in an afternoon. That kid is amazing."
(False) Conclusion: "If Excel 'could be better' and BillysCalc 'is amazing', then BillysCalc is better than Excel. And everyone should uninstall Excel and download Billy's 4-operation calculator instead."
Which is just false. It's based on deliberately taking stuff out of context, and comparing it to something taken out of another context.
There is no such thing as "X is better than Y, considering that X is a pre-beta, so you should ignore all the bugs and security holes in X." It's either better compared as is, or it isn't.
If I uninstalled Y and installed X, would I get less bugs? More security? What? Is X, taken as it is _now_ and without the excuses and "yeah, but"s, indeed better?
No, I don't give a flying fuck about excuses as to why X should be excused for still being buggier. I'm not interested in what X _could_ be in a distant future and an alternate universe, but in what it is _now_.
That's all. All the rest is just piss-poor excuses and a piss-poor smoke-and-mirrors show.
And the sooner the F/OSS community as a whole can get out of this "but _I_ can be excused if my programs are buggy and unusable" mentality, the sooner it will be taken more seriously outside the die-hard fanboy circles.
Every single F/OSS project that did make it, even on the server side, was stuff which just worked here and now, on its own merits. No excuses, no "yeah, but it's still a beta." (After, what, 6 years already?)
Apache, for example, is usually _the_ example of a F/OSS project that not only is in widespread use, but which actually still keeps MS from getting the server-side monopoly they fight to achieve. But you know what?
Apache is also the prime example of a project that actually _worked_ and never made a "but I have a good excuse" show. Apache was always provably better _right_ _now_. Not "after we get around to fixing the bugs", not "really soon now", not in any other kind of wishful possible future.
You could do a straight apples-to-apples comparison between Apache and IIS to your boss, and never need to come up with excuses for Apache.
I will also concede the point that coding for one proprietary platform is bad.
.Net or Sun's Java, it's still a proprietary non-open platform.
However, you know, I can't see a point in locking people up into Sun's proprietary platform either. Whether it's Windows DLLs or
What I would like to see is a good F/OSS environment. A good one.
Preferrably do away with the whole virtualization idiocy too. You _can_ be portable even without emulating a non-existent CPU and inventing a new machine code for it. (Java bytecode is just that.)
E.g., I'm thinking: GCC is portable, right? It may not always write the highest performance code, but it can generate code for more platforms than Java runs on anyway.
So why not use GCC as a platform instead?
Make an equivalent of the "class" files that's basically a semi-compiled C/C++ file. That is, right before the actual machine-dependent code generation. But otherwise already pre-processed and parsed.
Then the runtime on the client machine would just take this file and finish the compilation, abd links it producing the actual executable.
And, as I've said before, it can be as sandboxed as Java is anyway. Since you control the final code generation and linking, you can link it to libraries that are as sandboxed as you want them to be.
A native program running in a well designed OS is just as secure as Java.
That's why, for example, we used to let 20+ students at terminals at a mainframe or mini, in universities for example. They could run whatever programs they wanted on that machine, including their own code and including stuff they found on a hacker BBS. And in fact in all CS universities they're _supposed_ to program on those machines. Yet none of them came anywhere _near_ owning the machine.
The concept that a program once running on a machine automatically can retrieve or overwrite _all_ data, format the drive, or generally even blow an alien mothership up, is (A) Hollywood idiocy, and (B) never true except for the simplest single-user OS's like Win'95.
Or to put it otherwise: what do you tell Unix users? "Don't run as root except to install programs or other admin tasks. Especially don't go online as roo." Then they ask: why? "Because if someone takes control of the program via an exploit, they can't do as much harm if it doesn't run as root."
For all practical purposes, a modern OS is (or could be) just as virtualized as any Java sandbox. Programs no longer run directly on the bare metal, like in the days of DOS. (Which was barely a program loader.) They have to go through the OS to do _anything_. Including, but not limited to, reading or writing files, opening TCP/IP sockets, installing stuff.
Heck, even directly accessing RAM from other apps or directly poking machine ports can be blocked when running on a 386 or above (and _is_ blocked when you don't have kernel access).
Basically when running an app on a 32 bit CPU it can be as sandboxed as you want it to be.
E.g. don't want them accessing files? That's trivial. Just run them as a different user that can only access its temporary directory.
So ActiveX _could_ work, and it _could_ be extremely secure. Maybe not on Windows, and maybe not implemented by MS. I'll concede that point. But at least theoretically it can be at least as safe as Java, and without needing users to download 100 MB plugins that get wantonly changed by Sun.
Well, I know that. Yes, it's just a simplified table-top game, and yes everyone with half a brain sidesteps some of the stuff.
Nevertheless, all I was saying is that its view of "good vs evil" is a major simplification. Good enough as merely a secondary prop for a normal game, yes.
The problem is when a game is _supposed_ to be all about good and evil, and bases its hype on its supposed modelling good and evil. E.g., Black and White, and to some extent Fable.
In that case it's no longer a secondary prop, it's the whole subject of the game. And in that case I'd expect it to have a lot more depth.
If you will, it's the difference between a game which only incidentally has some airplane model as part of the scenery (e.g., a certain Counter-Strike map), and a flight sim. The first one merely needs an airplane model, while the flight sim damn better simulate the actual flight physics.
That's all I'm saying: D&D can get away with its simplified "good vs evil" prop, but a game like "Black and White" had no excuse to be just as simplistic about it.
As our AC friend pointed out, real life people are far more complex and less unidimensional than the "good" and "evil" in games.
An example I've given before is Al Capone. On one hand, he ordered brutal executions and even personally killed people. On the other hand, he opened the first soup kitchens after the stock market crash. He also ordered merchants to give food and clothing to the extremely poor on his own expense.
Was he good or was he evil? IRL I think we'd still all aggree that he was evil. In D&D's or PM's view he is basically neither. Heck, in D&D or in any computer game that would probably balance out as "neutral".
I also have a major problem with reducing evil to something that can be automatically detected by a spell or by a better sword. It no longer is something that depends on what you've done, but, well, something like the colour of your eyes. You were just born with it, and is so obvious that even an inanimate item can detect it.
I also have a problem with it being just an excuse to _kill_ on sight. _Especially_ after being reduced to something that meaningless. D&D's view can basically be reduced to "if you're good, go ahead and kill some evil guys already." If someone showed as the wrong alignment to your spell, that's your clue to slaughter them for xp.
Which is a sick and stupid view of what "good" is. E.g., a noble paladin burning down a drow orphanage, with the drow children still in it, would probably count as just doing a good deed. Sorry, nope. No way. That's not what "good" means.
Also I have a major problem with D&D's shoving whole species under automatically evil.
1. The way it works, in that it's an automatic excuse to kill whole races on sight, is _nazi_. Whole species or cultures are destined to be mass-slaughtered by the "good" guys, for no other reason than the race they were born in.
It doesn't matter if any member of that race actually did anything wrong in their whole life. They're evil and free-for-all to kill anyway.
Not only in D&D. I still remember setting Populous 1 on auto-play, and watching the "evil" guys just minding their own evil business. Ploughing their evil fields, building their evil cities, and the like. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, the "good" guys built an army and slaughtered them all.
Who was "good" and who was "evil" there?
2. Such a race where everyone is just waiting for half an occasion to rob or murder each other, would have never made it out of stone age. There is no way a drow culture for example would have got anywhere near where it is in D&D, as a race where everyone is born evil.
For me Fable was a _great_ game. And I'm not even a fan of real-time RPGs.
It wouldn't have hurt if it were a bit longer, though.
But then, you know, that's a sign that you actually enjoyed whatever content was in it: it leaves you wanting for more. I can think of other games I said "good riddance" to at the end, or even games which I never bothered (or even wanted to) finish.
Whereas Fable had me pretty much glued to the chair until the end. It had me thinking about it at work. And then there I was thinking "whaaa...? Over already. But I want more!"
I never tried drugs, but I'd imagine that's what drug addiction is like.
And heck, as hype goes it definitely wasn't a selling point for me. After the utter shit that was Black and White, another hyped PM game was _not_ quite something I'd fall for that easily. Doubly so another game where he passes piss-poor judgment on what "good" and "evil" means.
I mean, that guy may well be obsessed with "good vs evil", but he's totally unable to depict more than a carricature of what either means. None of his games, ever since Populous 1, raised above the over-simplified AD&D notion of "good" and "evil".
So the short version is: all that the hype had as an effect is that I was actually planning _not_ to buy it. It took a lot of talking to friends and co-workers who've actually played it before I tried it.
So basically, please. Fable may not have been _everyone's_ cup of tea. No game ever is. But there are also one helluva lot of us who think it was worth every cent and then some. In fact, in my case it was also worth every cent I paid for the XBox just to play it. (I didn't already own an XBox.)
Basically for a lot of us it _did_ live up to the hype, and then some.
You'd be surprised how much of a market does exist for computers which aren't a l33t 3D gaming machine. Think: corporate market.
For example, there are more servers sold with an ancient 2D ATI Rage graphics chip on-board, than gaming machines with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Or, heck, until very recently Sun still sold workstations with a renamed ATI Rage PCI card in them.
The problem however is that
1. that's a bulk low-profit margin market. It's not about selling marked up boxed graphics card, it's about selling bulk chips at mere cents above the manufacturing cost.
2. it's already being savaged by integrated graphics. OEMs already operate on single digit profit margins. It's increasingly hard to justify even the extra traces or mobo space for an extra graphics chip, when for 2D any integrated graphics are already good enough.
3. Competing for merits -- _any_ merits, including OSS drivers -- in the 2D market it's gonna be a major feat. For 2D _all_ current chips are supported well enough by F/OSS drivers.