is that 230mpg in gasoline-only operation, or 230mpg when you're cheating by pre-charging it electrically?
Their website clearly states that the MPG curve starts at around a ridiculous 1000 Miles per gallon for short electric-only trips and is asymptotic to 130 MPG (where it will stay all day long driving on gas only). The 230MPG figure was chosen at a range of 120 Miles of driving which is about 3X the average daily commute.
The *WORST* MPG you'll get is 130MPG. To get the 230MPG you are required to precharge. With prechargeing you have the potential to get much better than that if you have a short commute and the gas engine never turns on, you could get the energy equivalent of 1,000 MPG.
The problem with MPEG encoding and decoding is that the data itself is not well suited to multi-threaded analysis.
You can also break down a frame into discrete rectalinear regions and have each separate region be performed by various threads. This block-based approach is a simple (although probably not 100% optimal) way to get parallelism with an operation involving only two buffers (current and output) in any 2D filter / transform from MPEG frame decoding to JPEG decompression to a Photoshop filter.
For a bit better performance, make sure to align the blocks so you're not getting cache sharing misses on the block boundaries if possible.
Yes but Vista gives you 15 different ways to log out / shut it down including nine on the start menu alone (7 actual menu items that branch off a little triangle next to an icon and two additional shutdown/logoff icons).
You mean it uses the hard disk a lot;-) All those things are true of XP too.
I did say that XP uses the HD a lot... just VISTA uses it more -- by an order of magnitude. There are a lot of features I forgot to mention in that list like the extra OS logging and the aggressive application prefetch (that prefetch file writing shows up a lot in the Resource Manager). On an SSD, the "application prefetch" is completely useless but there's no easy way to say turn off prefetch for files stored on HD X:. MS should disable the feature automagically for drives with a very low seek time of less than 0.5 ms -- same with defrag on said drives.
Unless your working set is larger than your physical RAM, you shouldn't need a pagefile or swap partition at all.
This is certainly not true for VISTA and many other modern OS's. VISTA performa aggressive background prefetching of commonly used applications. It also builds a prefetch file in the background. This takes a big chunk of memory and a big of HD space. In cases like this where your OS is constantly doing lots of stuff with any of your extra memory in the background, sometimes it makes sense to swap out infrequently used memory to increase performance even if your entire working set fits into RAM. VISTA will run faster with a swap file even if you have 3GB of RAM and do little other than browsing the web. The extra memory from swapping out pages is used as file cache and for background operations that can be sped up by extra memory.
Oh, and why does NTFS need to be defragmented?
For the most part NTFS doesn't need to be defragmented. I've gone long periods of time without defragging on XP. However, if your disk starts getting over 80% full or you get more than 20% fragmentation on the HD, then your performance begins to suffer due to seeking. VISTA defragmentation is actually "smarter" internally than XP even though the interface has been dumbed down. It realizes that some fragments aren't a bad thing as long as the ratio of fragments to file size is reasonable. I believe it tries to make fragments be at least 64MB in size. Therefore a 2GB VOB file could be split into as many as 32 fragments before the file would be considered fragmented. This makes the defragmenter run much faster than XP (which tries to coalesce the whole 2GB file) with very little penalty in performance on the final defragged image. It also makes finding free space for coalescing fragments much easier.
It's a terrible shame that MS dumbed down the VISTA defragmenter interface and makes it hard for you to exclude drives (like SSD's which don't need defragging) from the automatic defrag schedule. It would have been much smarter for them to have the "dumb" interface with a single button to go to "advanced" or "power user" mode that had more options like drive exclusion.
Oh, also. Vista has a great tool for seeing how much disk activity is going on. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL then click on "Start Task Manager". On the "Performance" tab, click "Resource Manager". UAC will prompt you to continue. Then click to expand the "Disk" section.
You can see even when you think your computer should be idle that Vista has anywhere from several dozen to over a hundred outstanding writes queued up to the hard drive at just about any time.
Vista does lots and lots of writing - especially lots of small writes... Then again so does XP - just Vista does more.
Continuously queries and makes small writes to the registry for nearly every action performed by the OS including on continual background basis.
Frequent writes to the PageFile for Virtual Memory
NTFS filesystem updates Last Access Time whenever a file is touched in any way (including just looking at it)
Additional journaling writes by NTFS
Background Building of Search Indices for Built-In Windows Search
Runs "System Restore" on volumes by default
"Simplified" disk defragmenter scheduled to run on all volumes
May store arbitrary install and temp files on any drive (examples: MSOCACHE, ie temporary install files, service pack files, etc)
Runs background scans on disk (Windows Defender)
Writes for automatic optimization of disk for boot (not aware that it's unnecessary for SSD)
Etc, etc, etc (too many more to list)
Trust me, Vista is vicious to a hard drive. I got a new Quad6600 with 3GB and it felt slow... sometimes absolutely crawling because it had a slower 8MB cache 500GB drive installed. I finally figured out that the HD was the performance bottle neck. I just bought a WD Velociraptor (10K RPM 32MB cache) for $300 and my computer feels about twice as fast for daily usage.
Since when does the Wii contain a MIPS chip? Last I checked, the "Broadway" chip was a PowerPC processor running at 729MHz.
D'oh, you're right... The funny thing is that I've worked on both of these platforms... I must have just wanted to suppress the memories of pain involved in porting to them - haha:-)
>The hardware is low-end (and low power, which is good). The drivers ahve always proven rock-solid to me. And all the features work out of the box with no tweaking.
It's wouldn't be that bad except that Intel claims their integrated graphics are Vista-ready and 3D-game ready which are both lies.
There are no decent 3D games out there that are less than 5 years old that run at a decent framerate on Intel graphics and even the Vista Aero interface is too overwhelming for the Intel graphics to run quickly.
Having solid drivers that always work doesn't mean the chips are any good if dragging a window around in Vista slows your machine to an unuseable crawl.
Not necessarily true. First of all the Wii is quite a bit faster than PSP. Second, they are both MIPS so you don't need to emulate most code, it can run natively. You just have to hook the right calls. Third, most PSP games do not access any hardware directly (all the rendering is done through a library similar to a very light opengl and all the file and audio calls are similarly through system libraries). If you got the system libraries running, all you have to do is hook them up and then you can do a WINE style system where you're not actually emulating at all, you're just replacing system calls.
FWIW, your screen is just as likely (if not more likely) to break / crack than the HD fail if you're dropping the laptop repeatedly unless you've paid a couple thousand extra for a ruggedized laptop.
Not even if you are buying a used iPhone from someone; you have to get the iPhone package. In fact I *just* closed the window I had with an AT&T support chat asking this question.
That's too bad. I have WIFI at home and work and I'm seldom more than a couple blocks away from free WIFI at a coffee shop. It'd be much cheaper if I could get the phone without a data plan (possibly even blocking all non-WIFI-data access) and pay $30 a month less for it.
The big architectural difference with the CELL SPU's is that SPU's really are not meant to directly access system memory. Each SPU has a very limited local memory buffer it can directly access. System memory can be modelled as a RAM DISK and accesses to system memory are through a DMA that can be considered the equivalent to an asynchronous file read/write using the RAM DISK analogy.
Blizzard surely sees a profit opportunity in their stupidity.
Ummm, $6E ($10-11 US?) is going to make them a big profit ??? They're going to gain about $0.25 profit or less after you consider their costs for the device, the licensing, and the development support of implementing it.
You have to realize, that Blizzard isn't concerned about making a profit on this device. What they are concerned about is having a stolen account anger a customer enough to make them leave WoW and then they lose $180/yr ($14.99/mo) which is the real source of their profit.
FWIW, I have the PayPal Security Key which is a similar device which generates a 6-digit extension to your password valid for 30 seconds. $5 and it fits easily on a keychain (although I leave it secured at home because I don't really want to use my paypal account more than I have to). I don't think PayPal makes money on these either... it's about giving your customers an option to protect themselves.
Reserves are the main reason I quit even bothering with e-bay. I got tired of bidding on something, and then 3 days later, finding out that the person selling the item had dismissed my bid before I even placed it.
I'm not a big fan of Reserves either but you'd have to be EXTREMELY SLOW (in more than one way) to not be able to determine whether or not your bid is valid for three days. As a matter of fact, a person who can read should know instantly if their bid met the reserve. All reserve auctions say "Reserve not yet met" until the reserve price is met. E-bay also tells you in the bid confirmation page if your bid is higher than the reserves or not.
When Hippocrates invented his eponymous oath, most Greeks were okay with abortion
Abortion presented a lot of risks to the mother back in those days so generally the way to get rid of an unwanted (or unhealthy) baby was infanticide by exposure. In fact, the Greeks were hardly alone as a culture in their use of infanticide.
I didn't say that was my opinion. I think that a woman could be a good programmer and work in games. That said, I have yet to work with or encounter a "rockstar" prgrammer who was a woman (like I said, I've worked with 2 full-time women who couldn't handle it and hundreds of guys who did just fine). The game industry has a plethora of highly focused, extremely driven and talented male programmers who are willing to work 80-100 hours a week, foregoing comforts of sleeping, showering, sunlight, etc. who crank out tons of code to get games to ship on their frantic schedules. But the female coding talent here is AWOL - there are very few women in the trenches with us and I have yet to hear of any "superstars" among them.
"you can't be a real programmer, you've got boobs"
BTW, I've known plenty of "real" programmers with (man)boobs:-)
I work in the game industry. The programming field here is about 99% male. I've only personally interacted with four female programmers in the companies I've worked at for the past 15 years. Two of them were college interns - one was actually quite good. The two full-time professionals both cracked under the stress of the game programming industry and went into other industries. That's not necessarily saying women are any worse than men -- plenty of guys crack after going through a couple months of 80+ hour crunch weeks and the frayed nerves and tensions when trying to ship a game on time.
However, I don't think I've ever heard someone talk about a female programmer who was good enough that someone said "She's a rockstar programmer" -- the best I've heard is "She's pretty good for a woman" and the qualifier there means that the person saying it would think she was just an average programmer if she were a man. Again, it may be the game industry drives away good female programmers. I have a friend in the movie industry with a super-smart programmer girlfriend and she said she got this from a game programming (and artist) recruiting booth at SIGGRAPH.
(* Ensuring that you have both the source code to the software (what all versions of the GPL did) and the ability to install and run it (what the GPL3 does, which is why it was necessary) is merely the mechanism by which the Free Software Foundation attempts to accomplish this.)
You wouldn't happen to be a LISP programmer would you?
Although it's not politically correct to say so, anyone who doesn't think Race is a factor need only look at this map. It looks like the North vs the South (with the West Coast siding with the North and all the plain states siding with the South)
Slashdot Mirror
is that 230mpg in gasoline-only operation, or 230mpg when you're cheating by pre-charging it electrically?
Their website clearly states that the MPG curve starts at around a ridiculous 1000 Miles per gallon for short electric-only trips and is asymptotic to 130 MPG (where it will stay all day long driving on gas only). The 230MPG figure was chosen at a range of 120 Miles of driving which is about 3X the average daily commute.
The *WORST* MPG you'll get is 130MPG. To get the 230MPG you are required to precharge. With prechargeing you have the potential to get much better than that if you have a short commute and the gas engine never turns on, you could get the energy equivalent of 1,000 MPG.
The problem with MPEG encoding and decoding is that the data itself is not well suited to multi-threaded analysis.
You can also break down a frame into discrete rectalinear regions and have each separate region be performed by various threads. This block-based approach is a simple (although probably not 100% optimal) way to get parallelism with an operation involving only two buffers (current and output) in any 2D filter / transform from MPEG frame decoding to JPEG decompression to a Photoshop filter.
For a bit better performance, make sure to align the blocks so you're not getting cache sharing misses on the block boundaries if possible.
Yes but Vista gives you 15 different ways to log out / shut it down including nine on the start menu alone (7 actual menu items that branch off a little triangle next to an icon and two additional shutdown/logoff icons).
You mean it uses the hard disk a lot ;-) All those things are true of XP too.
I did say that XP uses the HD a lot... just VISTA uses it more -- by an order of magnitude. There are a lot of features I forgot to mention in that list like the extra OS logging and the aggressive application prefetch (that prefetch file writing shows up a lot in the Resource Manager). On an SSD, the "application prefetch" is completely useless but there's no easy way to say turn off prefetch for files stored on HD X:. MS should disable the feature automagically for drives with a very low seek time of less than 0.5 ms -- same with defrag on said drives.
Unless your working set is larger than your physical RAM, you shouldn't need a pagefile or swap partition at all.
This is certainly not true for VISTA and many other modern OS's. VISTA performa aggressive background prefetching of commonly used applications. It also builds a prefetch file in the background. This takes a big chunk of memory and a big of HD space. In cases like this where your OS is constantly doing lots of stuff with any of your extra memory in the background, sometimes it makes sense to swap out infrequently used memory to increase performance even if your entire working set fits into RAM. VISTA will run faster with a swap file even if you have 3GB of RAM and do little other than browsing the web. The extra memory from swapping out pages is used as file cache and for background operations that can be sped up by extra memory.
Oh, and why does NTFS need to be defragmented?
For the most part NTFS doesn't need to be defragmented. I've gone long periods of time without defragging on XP. However, if your disk starts getting over 80% full or you get more than 20% fragmentation on the HD, then your performance begins to suffer due to seeking. VISTA defragmentation is actually "smarter" internally than XP even though the interface has been dumbed down. It realizes that some fragments aren't a bad thing as long as the ratio of fragments to file size is reasonable. I believe it tries to make fragments be at least 64MB in size. Therefore a 2GB VOB file could be split into as many as 32 fragments before the file would be considered fragmented. This makes the defragmenter run much faster than XP (which tries to coalesce the whole 2GB file) with very little penalty in performance on the final defragged image. It also makes finding free space for coalescing fragments much easier.
It's a terrible shame that MS dumbed down the VISTA defragmenter interface and makes it hard for you to exclude drives (like SSD's which don't need defragging) from the automatic defrag schedule. It would have been much smarter for them to have the "dumb" interface with a single button to go to "advanced" or "power user" mode that had more options like drive exclusion.
Oh, also. Vista has a great tool for seeing how much disk activity is going on. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL then click on "Start Task Manager". On the "Performance" tab, click "Resource Manager". UAC will prompt you to continue. Then click to expand the "Disk" section.
You can see even when you think your computer should be idle that Vista has anywhere from several dozen to over a hundred outstanding writes queued up to the hard drive at just about any time.
Vista does lots and lots of writing - especially lots of small writes... Then again so does XP - just Vista does more.
Trust me, Vista is vicious to a hard drive. I got a new Quad6600 with 3GB and it felt slow... sometimes absolutely crawling because it had a slower 8MB cache 500GB drive installed. I finally figured out that the HD was the performance bottle neck. I just bought a WD Velociraptor (10K RPM 32MB cache) for $300 and my computer feels about twice as fast for daily usage.
Galinstan's been done before. There was already a liquid metal cooler using Galinstan for a Sapphire Radeon back in 2005.
Here's a really good link on cooling with Liquid Metal NaK. It even describes how the magnetic pump technology works.
Since when does the Wii contain a MIPS chip? Last I checked, the "Broadway" chip was a PowerPC processor running at 729MHz.
:-)
D'oh, you're right... The funny thing is that I've worked on both of these platforms... I must have just wanted to suppress the memories of pain involved in porting to them - haha
>>The Intel integrated graphics is Crap.
>The hardware is low-end (and low power, which is good). The drivers ahve always proven rock-solid to me. And all the features work out of the box with no tweaking.
It's wouldn't be that bad except that Intel claims their integrated graphics are Vista-ready and 3D-game ready which are both lies.
There are no decent 3D games out there that are less than 5 years old that run at a decent framerate on Intel graphics and even the Vista Aero interface is too overwhelming for the Intel graphics to run quickly.
Having solid drivers that always work doesn't mean the chips are any good if dragging a window around in Vista slows your machine to an unuseable crawl.
Not necessarily true. First of all the Wii is quite a bit faster than PSP. Second, they are both MIPS so you don't need to emulate most code, it can run natively. You just have to hook the right calls. Third, most PSP games do not access any hardware directly (all the rendering is done through a library similar to a very light opengl and all the file and audio calls are similarly through system libraries). If you got the system libraries running, all you have to do is hook them up and then you can do a WINE style system where you're not actually emulating at all, you're just replacing system calls.
FWIW, your screen is just as likely (if not more likely) to break / crack than the HD fail if you're dropping the laptop repeatedly unless you've paid a couple thousand extra for a ruggedized laptop.
Not even if you are buying a used iPhone from someone; you have to get the iPhone package. In fact I *just* closed the window I had with an AT&T support chat asking this question.
That's too bad. I have WIFI at home and work and I'm seldom more than a couple blocks away from free WIFI at a coffee shop. It'd be much cheaper if I could get the phone without a data plan (possibly even blocking all non-WIFI-data access) and pay $30 a month less for it.
On a side note I was VERY disappointed when I found several Sex oriented rooms.
This guy needs to watch "Avenue Q".... sing it with me...
The internet is for pRoN....
Niagara has direct access to memory AFAIK.
The big architectural difference with the CELL SPU's is that SPU's really are not meant to directly access system memory. Each SPU has a very limited local memory buffer it can directly access. System memory can be modelled as a RAM DISK and accesses to system memory are through a DMA that can be considered the equivalent to an asynchronous file read/write using the RAM DISK analogy.
And yes, IAAAL.
Just a quick question... If IAAL stands for I Am A Lawyer, what is the extra "A" for?
Blizzard surely sees a profit opportunity in their stupidity.
Ummm, $6E ($10-11 US?) is going to make them a big profit ??? They're going to gain about $0.25 profit or less after you consider their costs for the device, the licensing, and the development support of implementing it.
You have to realize, that Blizzard isn't concerned about making a profit on this device. What they are concerned about is having a stolen account anger a customer enough to make them leave WoW and then they lose $180/yr ($14.99/mo) which is the real source of their profit.
FWIW, I have the PayPal Security Key which is a similar device which generates a 6-digit extension to your password valid for 30 seconds. $5 and it fits easily on a keychain (although I leave it secured at home because I don't really want to use my paypal account more than I have to). I don't think PayPal makes money on these either... it's about giving your customers an option to protect themselves.
Reserves are the main reason I quit even bothering with e-bay. I got tired of bidding on something, and then 3 days later, finding out that the person selling the item had dismissed my bid before I even placed it.
I'm not a big fan of Reserves either but you'd have to be EXTREMELY SLOW (in more than one way) to not be able to determine whether or not your bid is valid for three days. As a matter of fact, a person who can read should know instantly if their bid met the reserve. All reserve auctions say "Reserve not yet met" until the reserve price is met. E-bay also tells you in the bid confirmation page if your bid is higher than the reserves or not.
When Hippocrates invented his eponymous oath, most Greeks were okay with abortion
Abortion presented a lot of risks to the mother back in those days so generally the way to get rid of an unwanted (or unhealthy) baby was infanticide by exposure. In fact, the Greeks were hardly alone as a culture in their use of infanticide.
seeing as how taking oaths has worked so well for doctors, lawyers and Presidents.
Hey now, the president has already taken a Hypocritic Oath or whatever that thingamaggie is called.
Between the "you're good for a woman" commentary
:-)
I didn't say that was my opinion. I think that a woman could be a good programmer and work in games. That said, I have yet to work with or encounter a "rockstar" prgrammer who was a woman (like I said, I've worked with 2 full-time women who couldn't handle it and hundreds of guys who did just fine). The game industry has a plethora of highly focused, extremely driven and talented male programmers who are willing to work 80-100 hours a week, foregoing comforts of sleeping, showering, sunlight, etc. who crank out tons of code to get games to ship on their frantic schedules. But the female coding talent here is AWOL - there are very few women in the trenches with us and I have yet to hear of any "superstars" among them.
"you can't be a real programmer, you've got boobs"
BTW, I've known plenty of "real" programmers with (man)boobs
I work in the game industry. The programming field here is about 99% male. I've only personally interacted with four female programmers in the companies I've worked at for the past 15 years. Two of them were college interns - one was actually quite good. The two full-time professionals both cracked under the stress of the game programming industry and went into other industries. That's not necessarily saying women are any worse than men -- plenty of guys crack after going through a couple months of 80+ hour crunch weeks and the frayed nerves and tensions when trying to ship a game on time.
However, I don't think I've ever heard someone talk about a female programmer who was good enough that someone said "She's a rockstar programmer" -- the best I've heard is "She's pretty good for a woman" and the qualifier there means that the person saying it would think she was just an average programmer if she were a man. Again, it may be the game industry drives away good female programmers. I have a friend in the movie industry with a super-smart programmer girlfriend and she said she got this from a game programming (and artist) recruiting booth at SIGGRAPH.
(* Ensuring that you have both the source code to the software (what all versions of the GPL did) and the ability to install and run it (what the GPL3 does, which is why it was necessary) is merely the mechanism by which the Free Software Foundation attempts to accomplish this.)
You wouldn't happen to be a LISP programmer would you?
*ducks*
Although it's not politically correct to say so, anyone who doesn't think Race is a factor need only look at this map. It looks like the North vs the South (with the West Coast siding with the North and all the plain states siding with the South)