Ah, you have run into the classic problem of integrating too many features into one piece of hardware. Now, instead of just upgrading your video card, you have to upgrade your entire processor and possibly your entire system (new mobo for new CPU pin configuration and new memory due to a different memory control used in the new CPU/GPU). I've always felt that the components you are most likely to upgrade (CPU, GPU, and Memory) should always be separate so you are not forced to upgrade all at once. But of course that means less money for AMD/ATI, so who cares what the consumer wants;)
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem isn't that people are "lazy" or "don't care" (or at least most people aren't that way), it's that the solutions to the problems are very difficult and sometimes are just not possible. It is much easier to accommodate people physically, such as providing a wheelchair ramp (just pour some concrete and make sure it isn't too steep) or a menu for a blind person (brail is a standard and there are special printers you can buy to make them for you).
Trying to accommodate people on the web, though, is drastically more challenging and in some respects technically impossible without changing the very nature of the web.
I guess you haven't been paying attention for the last few years.
1. An internal memo was leaked from the CEO of diebold basically promising to "deliver that state of Ohio" to Present Bush in the previous election.
2. There have been many demonstrations, some by reputable security people and some by gray-hat hackers, showing how insanely easy it is to open, hack, or crash Diebold's voting machines (mini-bar key opening the casing...)
3. In the past there have been reports of "repair persons" opening up Diebold machines and changing the firmware/software on them the night before elections. This should have forced those machines to be recertified, but they weren't. Who knows what kind of results they actually tabulated.
The bottom line is that there have been enough little events to suggest a much bigger goal. And since Diebold's machines are proprietary, we can never really know unless there is a criminal case brought against them, forcing their code into the open for examination by security experts.
Well, up until 9/11 the people in the USA were not as paranoid as we are now. I really wish we could go back to those days. What we have put into place really doesn't stop anyone who really wants to cause some problems, only the really really really stupid ones.
Ya, I love PDX (I'm live in the Beaver state too!), but I have one complaint. After 9/11, no one without a boarding pass could go past the security check points (just like every other airport). While I don't enjoy not being able to see my loved ones off when they fly, that isn't my complaint. The true annoyance is that the only Starbucks in the airport is on the other side of a checkpoint! I'm a total Starbucks whore, so only being able to see them and not get some coffee is just cruel!
I wish I had mod points to give you a "+1 Real World Info" rating. Too many people fail to see past the numbers and look at how the device will be used in the real world.
You'd rather people stayed with the old, proven-insecure IE6?
No, I would rather they download FireFox or Opera than use IE.
Remember - total number of downloads and total number of users are not the same thing...
And we all know how honest companies like MS are in pointing facts like that out. "Ya, we have 100million downloads so far! However, we only show about 15% of web users actually using it.... guess that means IE7 sucks. Oh well. Hey, why are all the shareholders selling or calling for our CEO to resign all of a sudden??"
Why the sprint to "merging" the web and the desktop into something that tries to be both and does neither very well? It's like all those new cell phones that all you to make calls/take pictures/listen to music/write documents/diagnose your foot pain/force your enemies to cower before you/etc, yet they do none of those tasks very well. Why not just admit there are something tasks that must be done locally, somethings that must be done remotely, and only a handful that can be done in either domain? Why the need to muddle the line between the two domains to provide a solution to all problems yet solve none of them?
Yet more proof that your average American voter is no more intelligent in their voting patterns than a trained chimp. I wish I could say "I'm moving someplace better", but so far the US is the better place compared to the rest of the world. Oh well, time to learn how to train chimps >:).
Wow, you are such a moron I'm not even going to take the time to walk you through, point by point, where your assumptions are completely wrong. Have fun being an idiotic AMD fanboy.
Almost, but not quite. He basically washed his hands of responsibility for the lack of standards compliance in IE by blaming the developers and end-users. IE supports what they want, and since they don't have an infinite number of developers and/or an infinite amount of development time, they make those features first. Of course, you have to wonder if that is the best solution in this situation. If the developers are only familiar with IE, then they won't know about all the possible standards they could be developing for. If IE did support CSS fully, for example, I think you would see more developers making use of the more advance features. This would improve both the developers' experience (make more interesting web pages easier) and the end-user experience (more interesting web pages).
NetBurst based processors sucked. The new Core 2 processors kick AMD's ass up and down the block AND consume less power. AMD isn't competing much on price, performance, or availability.
This is true of all uP manufacturers. Most build in redundancy into their designs to help with this. For example, a processor with 4MB of L2 cache has physically more cache than 4MB. There may be an extra couple of rows of transistors for a block of memory so if a row or two is corrupted the block can still be functional.
Intel has demonstrated working transistors all the way down to 1nm. The big question though, is can those transistors be manufactured in high quantities reliably? 40nm will not be the final step down, but we are getting closer.
For clarification, what do you mean by AMD competing with Intel? Are you referring to units sold to consumers, units sold to OEMs, manufacturing capacity, or design innovations? In some of those areas, Intel and AMD are neck-and-neck and trade places (who is in the lead) every few years. In other places, such as manufacturing capacity, Intel has always had the clear advantage. Intel is much further ahead in manufacturing processes, with AMD playing catchup. While AMD is transitioning to 65nm, Intel will be moving to the next step down. And when AMD finally moves to 40nm, Intel will have already transitioned to the next step down.
Yup, this was one of those "bullet point" items why Apple went with Intel over AMD. Only Intel (and IBM) have the kind of manufacturing capacity that Apple needs in order to keep the supply chain moving while still providing to other customers. It would/will take many many years of constant fab building for AMD to compete with Intel on production scale.
Maybe because using the torrent I was able to download the entire ISO in record time (dl speed hitting 1MB/s+ O_o) while using apt-get would take much longer. And having a burned CD around making life easier when you need to re-install or install it on a friends computer.
I think it is too early to make any predictions on the relative security level of the Vista kernel. In previous Windows generations, the new version was built on top of an already existing code base. While this did make things harder to add (thus opening new security holes), it also had the advantage of all the security patches given to the previous generations. The net result was a kernel that was getting more secure (until new features were added and then the new holes patched). With Vista, they started from scratch (that's why it's been 5+ years between XP and Vista). Therefore, even if security was at the forefront of the design and development of the new kernel + APIs, it still hasn't gone through the 'baptism by fire' that XP/Win2k/etc has gone through.
So, while what you say is true in the general sense, Vista is a new battleground between hackers and MS. I will put my money on the hackers for a few years since they will be constantly finding the cracks in the new shiny Vista kernel and exploiting them. In the end, we all loose as we must now wait for MS both for patches and tools to protect our systems until they are patched. I for one am not very optimistic of MS's ability to keep a Vista system secure.
And you think what MS is doing will prevent that? If anything, it'll take 2 months for the exploit methods to begin circulating around the piracy/hacking groups instead of 1 month. There is nothing MS can make that some smart hacker can't tear down. If you don't believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Who says they will provide an API? It's a great way to knock at McAfee et al. and for them to monopolize yet another industry (OS security software).
To me, this just highlights the ever growing differences between Windows and Linux. While MS has to lock everything down to the point that no one but them can perform certain actions, Linux has everything out in the open for all. While that means more bugs will be made public, it also means they will be fixed faster. With MS, they can sit on kernel bug fixes for as long as they want, since only they know about them (and the hackers).
Yes and no. Some software, such as firmware, can give information on trade secrets used in the hardware. This can help other hardware venders reverse engineer those secrets. While you can do that directly from the firmware, why help your competition by giving the source code away (which is much more readable). Of course, doing binary blobs with open source code wrapped around it reduces this threat, which is why Nvidia uses this technique.
Hardware requires software in the form of firmware, drivers, user programs, training program, etc. Not hard to produce a lot of software when you produce a large variety of hardware.
There was a story here on/. years (eons) ago that said government agencies such as CIA and NSA have problems finding qualified computer experts/hackers because they have to pass the same tests as all the other potential employees. These included passing a physical test (can you imagine your typical computer geek running a mile under some time limit??) and a psychological analysis. The problem is that the best people to track down cyber-criminals have to think like the bad guys. This causes them to fail the psych. tests as they raise 'red flags'.
Basicly, those agencies have no one to blame but themselves. There are plenty of people who would be willing to work for them on computer issues if they weren't so set on shooting themselves in the foot.
While the core idea of your's is not wrong, what you are suggesting would actually cost more. While a lot of silicon manufacturers (Intel, AMD, IBM, ATI, Nvidia, etc) do have some features that they can turn "off" when they want to sell a part cheaper than the fully enabled product, I very much doubt that they have a significant number of them. Remember, these are not software features we are talking about, in which the product is the same size (roughly) on the CD as the full version. In silicon manufacturing, die size is a big factor in the cost. As the die size increases, the number of chips per wafer decreases, thus increasing the cost per chip. Add in the decrease in yield for very large dies and the cost goes up more. Manufacturing designs with the full 24/48/64/etc pipelines and then disabling some of them using software is a waste of space and thus wasted money. It makes more sense to develope designs that can easily have more pipelines added to make the higher end products than to waste space on the die.
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Ah, you have run into the classic problem of integrating too many features into one piece of hardware. Now, instead of just upgrading your video card, you have to upgrade your entire processor and possibly your entire system (new mobo for new CPU pin configuration and new memory due to a different memory control used in the new CPU/GPU). I've always felt that the components you are most likely to upgrade (CPU, GPU, and Memory) should always be separate so you are not forced to upgrade all at once. But of course that means less money for AMD/ATI, so who cares what the consumer wants ;)
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem isn't that people are "lazy" or "don't care" (or at least most people aren't that way), it's that the solutions to the problems are very difficult and sometimes are just not possible. It is much easier to accommodate people physically, such as providing a wheelchair ramp (just pour some concrete and make sure it isn't too steep) or a menu for a blind person (brail is a standard and there are special printers you can buy to make them for you). Trying to accommodate people on the web, though, is drastically more challenging and in some respects technically impossible without changing the very nature of the web.
Alaska, here I come!
1. An internal memo was leaked from the CEO of diebold basically promising to "deliver that state of Ohio" to Present Bush in the previous election.
2. There have been many demonstrations, some by reputable security people and some by gray-hat hackers, showing how insanely easy it is to open, hack, or crash Diebold's voting machines (mini-bar key opening the casing...)
3. In the past there have been reports of "repair persons" opening up Diebold machines and changing the firmware/software on them the night before elections. This should have forced those machines to be recertified, but they weren't. Who knows what kind of results they actually tabulated.
The bottom line is that there have been enough little events to suggest a much bigger goal. And since Diebold's machines are proprietary, we can never really know unless there is a criminal case brought against them, forcing their code into the open for examination by security experts.
Well, up until 9/11 the people in the USA were not as paranoid as we are now. I really wish we could go back to those days. What we have put into place really doesn't stop anyone who really wants to cause some problems, only the really really really stupid ones.
Ya, I love PDX (I'm live in the Beaver state too!), but I have one complaint. After 9/11, no one without a boarding pass could go past the security check points (just like every other airport). While I don't enjoy not being able to see my loved ones off when they fly, that isn't my complaint. The true annoyance is that the only Starbucks in the airport is on the other side of a checkpoint! I'm a total Starbucks whore, so only being able to see them and not get some coffee is just cruel!
I wish I had mod points to give you a "+1 Real World Info" rating. Too many people fail to see past the numbers and look at how the device will be used in the real world.
No, I would rather they download FireFox or Opera than use IE.
And we all know how honest companies like MS are in pointing facts like that out. "Ya, we have 100million downloads so far! However, we only show about 15% of web users actually using it.... guess that means IE7 sucks. Oh well. Hey, why are all the shareholders selling or calling for our CEO to resign all of a sudden??"
Why the sprint to "merging" the web and the desktop into something that tries to be both and does neither very well? It's like all those new cell phones that all you to make calls/take pictures/listen to music/write documents/diagnose your foot pain/force your enemies to cower before you/etc, yet they do none of those tasks very well. Why not just admit there are something tasks that must be done locally, somethings that must be done remotely, and only a handful that can be done in either domain? Why the need to muddle the line between the two domains to provide a solution to all problems yet solve none of them?
Yet more proof that your average American voter is no more intelligent in their voting patterns than a trained chimp. I wish I could say "I'm moving someplace better", but so far the US is the better place compared to the rest of the world. Oh well, time to learn how to train chimps >:).
Wow, you are such a moron I'm not even going to take the time to walk you through, point by point, where your assumptions are completely wrong. Have fun being an idiotic AMD fanboy.
Almost, but not quite. He basically washed his hands of responsibility for the lack of standards compliance in IE by blaming the developers and end-users. IE supports what they want, and since they don't have an infinite number of developers and/or an infinite amount of development time, they make those features first. Of course, you have to wonder if that is the best solution in this situation. If the developers are only familiar with IE, then they won't know about all the possible standards they could be developing for. If IE did support CSS fully, for example, I think you would see more developers making use of the more advance features. This would improve both the developers' experience (make more interesting web pages easier) and the end-user experience (more interesting web pages).
NetBurst based processors sucked. The new Core 2 processors kick AMD's ass up and down the block AND consume less power. AMD isn't competing much on price, performance, or availability.
This is true of all uP manufacturers. Most build in redundancy into their designs to help with this. For example, a processor with 4MB of L2 cache has physically more cache than 4MB. There may be an extra couple of rows of transistors for a block of memory so if a row or two is corrupted the block can still be functional.
For clarification, what do you mean by AMD competing with Intel? Are you referring to units sold to consumers, units sold to OEMs, manufacturing capacity, or design innovations? In some of those areas, Intel and AMD are neck-and-neck and trade places (who is in the lead) every few years. In other places, such as manufacturing capacity, Intel has always had the clear advantage. Intel is much further ahead in manufacturing processes, with AMD playing catchup. While AMD is transitioning to 65nm, Intel will be moving to the next step down. And when AMD finally moves to 40nm, Intel will have already transitioned to the next step down.
Yup, this was one of those "bullet point" items why Apple went with Intel over AMD. Only Intel (and IBM) have the kind of manufacturing capacity that Apple needs in order to keep the supply chain moving while still providing to other customers. It would/will take many many years of constant fab building for AMD to compete with Intel on production scale.
2. Larger size = higher average chance of defect per die
3. Larger size = more expensive to manufacture per processor
So you see, size DOES matter :)
Maybe because using the torrent I was able to download the entire ISO in record time (dl speed hitting 1MB/s+ O_o) while using apt-get would take much longer. And having a burned CD around making life easier when you need to re-install or install it on a friends computer.
So, while what you say is true in the general sense, Vista is a new battleground between hackers and MS. I will put my money on the hackers for a few years since they will be constantly finding the cracks in the new shiny Vista kernel and exploiting them. In the end, we all loose as we must now wait for MS both for patches and tools to protect our systems until they are patched. I for one am not very optimistic of MS's ability to keep a Vista system secure.
And you think what MS is doing will prevent that? If anything, it'll take 2 months for the exploit methods to begin circulating around the piracy/hacking groups instead of 1 month. There is nothing MS can make that some smart hacker can't tear down. If you don't believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
To me, this just highlights the ever growing differences between Windows and Linux. While MS has to lock everything down to the point that no one but them can perform certain actions, Linux has everything out in the open for all. While that means more bugs will be made public, it also means they will be fixed faster. With MS, they can sit on kernel bug fixes for as long as they want, since only they know about them (and the hackers).
Yes and no. Some software, such as firmware, can give information on trade secrets used in the hardware. This can help other hardware venders reverse engineer those secrets. While you can do that directly from the firmware, why help your competition by giving the source code away (which is much more readable). Of course, doing binary blobs with open source code wrapped around it reduces this threat, which is why Nvidia uses this technique.
Hardware requires software in the form of firmware, drivers, user programs, training program, etc. Not hard to produce a lot of software when you produce a large variety of hardware.
Basicly, those agencies have no one to blame but themselves. There are plenty of people who would be willing to work for them on computer issues if they weren't so set on shooting themselves in the foot.
While the core idea of your's is not wrong, what you are suggesting would actually cost more. While a lot of silicon manufacturers (Intel, AMD, IBM, ATI, Nvidia, etc) do have some features that they can turn "off" when they want to sell a part cheaper than the fully enabled product, I very much doubt that they have a significant number of them. Remember, these are not software features we are talking about, in which the product is the same size (roughly) on the CD as the full version. In silicon manufacturing, die size is a big factor in the cost. As the die size increases, the number of chips per wafer decreases, thus increasing the cost per chip. Add in the decrease in yield for very large dies and the cost goes up more. Manufacturing designs with the full 24/48/64/etc pipelines and then disabling some of them using software is a waste of space and thus wasted money. It makes more sense to develope designs that can easily have more pipelines added to make the higher end products than to waste space on the die.