Not so simple, it's.5% of Applecare cases, not.5% of iPhone 4 users. So the actual answer is much smaller as undoubtedly most iPhone users have never called customer service.
Nope, it's.5% (Jobs actually said.55%) of all iPhone 4 users.
Next, some really interesting data from AppleCare, we looked at the statistics, we asked what's the percentage of all iPhone 4 users that have called AppleCare about the antenna or reception, or anything near reception problems. Because you would have thought 'Jesus, it must be a lot of users complaining about this' -- So what percentage have called AppleCare? 0.55% Just one half of one percent.
As others have stated, that number may not mean much, since most people were aware that *something* was going to be done about it, and therefore a number of people may have held off on calling about it. But approximately 16,500 iPhone 4 users did call AppleCare regarding the antenna/reception.
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/apple/iPhone4/part2/signalbarmapping.jpg is a good picture comparing the display changes in 4.0.1.
4.0 was broken down as -51 to -91 / -91 to -101 / -101 to -103 / -103 to -107 / -107 to -113.
4.0.1 is broken down as -51 to -76 / -76 to -87 / -87 to -98 / -98 to -107 / -107 to -121.
Android's four bars are divided up as -51 to -89 / -89 to -97 / -97 to -103 / -103 to -113.
With 4.0.1, it will accept a lower signal before dropping to "No Service" (-121 instead of -113). It also divides the range up more evenly. What was previously the lower end of the 5th bar is now in the range of the 3rd bar, as one of the largest examples of how this display update changes things around.
Anand found that gripping the iPhone 4 a certain way could indeed cause up to 24dB of signal drop. This was worst-case, with a sweaty deathgrip. Touching more lightly or with less moisture had less of an effect. Gripping other smartphones near their antennas also caused a drop in signal.
Which means exactly nothing.
First, successful connections are not determined by signal strength (that's dBm (decibels per Miliwatt) not dB (decibels)), they are determined by Signal to Noise, an area with a high signal strength and a high SNR are more likely to drop calls then an area with low signal strength and low SNR.
Yup.
That brings me to the way that signal quality should really be reported - Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). SNR is essentially a measure of how much of the signal is compromised by noise or interference. It's readily apparent that because the iPhone 4 works almost perfectly fine at -113 dBm, it has much better sensitivity. The deciding factor for reporting the signal quality metric is then SNR, something Apple and other handset manufacturers will have to move to eventually instead of just power. In reality, reporting based on SNR makes a lot more sense, since I couldn't make calls drop driving around an entire day cupping the phone, despite being at -113 dBm (1 bar) most of the time.
Anand agrees with you that SNR is more important, and suggests that phone makers will need to switch to that sometime. However, the iPhone currently works by displaying signal strength, so that's what he's using for this test.
Secondly, it fails to actually test the antenna. Anand is only testing the strength output signal not an actual connection. The problem with the Iphones aerial is not that it is dropping signal, that's just the easily visible side effect. The problem with the Iphone aerial is that when you make contact with it your hand becomes part of the aerial which changes the electrical length of the aerial. The electrical length determines which frequencies the aerial receives and transmits on. This means that out of the same signal you had before, most of it is now being interpreted as noise. The drop in dBm in just the obvious part, the electrical length is the real problem and why the phone drops calls/signal.
I don't think it really matters that Anand didn't test the antenna specifically. He tested the cause (bridging the antennas while holding the phone) and reported on the effects to the end user (a drop in signal bars). For someone looking at whether or not this is a real problem and how it will affect their usage of the phone, it doesn't matter if the problem is in the antenna, the radio, the housing, or the box Apple shipped the phone in. It just matters whether or not holding the phone a certain way affects the phone's performance.
For the end user, the dropping signal is indeed the problem, with the root cause being the altering of the antenna due to bridging. If bridging the antenna caused no change in how the phone performs, then it wouldn't be a problem at all in the user's eyes. For Apple, the technical problem may be that the antenna is susceptible to having its properties altered via simple contact with the user, but that's all just technical details behind the problem in the eyes of the user (who simply wants his phone to work properly while holding it).
I'm looking at this testing from the end user's point of view. From your comments, I'm inferring that you interpreted this more from a technician/engineer's point of view. I think Anand did this more as a way to help people figure out if they'll have substantial problems with an iPhone 4, not as a guide for Apple as to how they can fix the problem.
What happens if you touch it when you have 3 bars? Would that 24db put you at -125db ?
I see your point, but your argument is flawed.
Yes, that's exactly what would happen. It would drop you down below the -113dB threshold, and your phone would display "No Service". If you were on a call, it would drop.
Anand found that gripping the iPhone 4 a certain way could indeed cause up to 24dB of signal drop. This was worst-case, with a sweaty deathgrip. Touching more lightly or with less moisture had less of an effect. Gripping other smartphones near their antennas also caused a drop in signal.
The non-linear signal representation of the "bars" can also lead to some confusion related to this. The valid range is between -113dB (no signal) and -51dB (full signal). However, 5 bars represents the range of -51 to -91. 4 bars is -91 to -101. 3 bars is -101 to -103. 2 bars is -103 to -107. 1 bar is -107 to -113. If you have a full strength 5 bar connection, that 24dB drop won't even move you out of the 5th bar. If you've just barely got 5 bars, the same 24dB drop can put you down to 1 or 0 bars.
Anand's testing also confirmed what sjonke said in the comment above. Even when it was showing the same signal strength, the iPhone 4 was better at not dropping calls compared to the 3GS. The page shows a screenshot of a 625/31 run on Speedtest.net during a call with only -113dB.
That's not the end-all, be-all for all comparisons, but it gives you a good idea how the different brands and generations compare to each other in general. Before Nvidia released the GTX400 series months later, ATI had the two fastest video cards available (the HD5870 and the dual-GPU HD5970 which is still the fastest single card).
Nvidia seems to throw more money at developers with their The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, but I honestly haven't noticed any specific problems after upgrading to my HD5870 a few months ago (after having only Nvidia since buying my GeForce 2 GTS the week they were released). A lot of people seem to be coming to the conclusion that both camps' drivers suck but in different ways. I honestly think that most people running single cards in common configs with popular games will never notice a difference in gameplay either way.
You do get some bonuses like PhysX with Nvidia, but there are open options in the works, and the Radeons are more efficient. The 5870 uses about 15% less power than my old GTX285, and in the GPGPU apps I run (dnetc), it's actually about 6x as fast (and still over twice as fast as an overclocked GTX480, which is a little faster in most games). The efficiency difference probably won't be noticed on your power bill, but it does mean a cooler card, which in turn means less fan noise and less heat in your case/room.
You can easily change your user-agent in Opera and I would assume Chrome would be the same.
But you shouldn't, because then they'll never support Opera or Chrome "because none of their customers use it".
Firefox didn't start getting support from big websites because of people changing its user-agent to IE.
If possible, an option is to tweak your existing UA to include whatever string they're looking for. I remember back in the day I'd change my Firefox UA from "Firefox" to "Firefox, not IE". Having "IE" in the string would be enough to get it past the dumb UA checks, but any sort of log analysis should indicate that I was using Firefox. Yes, you are "giving in" and telling them what they want to hear. However, if it's something that you can't reasonably boycott, this is a way to be able to use it, while at the same time indicating to them that you're using a different browser.
If all the Chrome and Opera users simply stop using the site, then their logs will show that 0% of their users actually use those browsers (even if it's because the site is blocking them), therefore it's completely unnecessary to support them. For a browser-related boycott to be successful, you need to let them know that you've stopped using the site because of that, otherwise the lack of use can actually reinforce the idea that you don't need to support those browsers.
And it's all relative. By that time, 1366 will be three years old. I'll have had mine for over 2.5 years. Note that I bought my i7 system because my high-end AMD board, which was 16 months old at the time, was only AM2 and therefore couldn't support the newer AMD CPUs. I had to buy a new board whether I went with AMD or Intel. Even the article you linked states that guaranteeing motherboard support this early in the game is difficult, but AMD is usually good about maintaining socket compatibility. You may be able to slip a Zambezi into your current day Socket-AM3 motherboards. You and your current AM3 board might end up being just as screwed as me and my 1366 board.
Plus you're forgetting that the Phenom II X4 was designed to compete with the C2Q, not the i7. In an old review (can't find the link right now), the i7-920 at stock 2.66GHz still beat out a Phenom II 955BE overclocked to 3.7GHz by 27% on some compression benchmark. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-black-edition/6 shows similar results - in the 7-Zip/Mplayer test, the stock 2.8GHz i7-930 beats the 3.87GHz Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition by over 20%. Yes, the AMD has 50% more cores (not taking into account HyperThreading) and 38% higher clockspeed, but the Intel is still 20% faster.
AMD's CPUs can be a great value, especially for gaming where the GPU is usually the bottleneck. However, Intel's CPUs are simply more powerful for a large number of tasks. Depending on what hardware you currently have, there may or may not be a significant difference in upgrade costs between the two brands. It's pretty safe to say that the Intel will probably cost more, but you'll probably also be getting more performance out of it.
The older LGA775 chips did use VT as a selling point, but I believe that most current Intel CPUs support it. Since VT was required for Win7's VirtualPC XP Mode, it became a more standard option recently.
It's XFX that has the double lifetime warranty. EVGA has a lifetime warranty and the StepUp upgrade program (which I personally think is of little use to most people, having used it myself).
StepUp only gives you back what you originally paid for your card, and charges you full retail for the new card. If you got a smoking deal and snagged a GTX470 for $100, you get back the $100 to put toward a $500 GTX480, completely negating the original deal you got. Plus you get to pay shipping on both the new card coming to you and for the old one going back to them. To top it all off, you have to send your old card back before they send you the new one, which means you'll be without a card for a bit. StepUp is handy if you really need to buy a new card right now, but a new model might be coming out in the next few months and you're planning on paying full price for it. Other than the shipping costs, you can essentially undo your first purchase and buy the new card for MSRP. I used StepUp on my mobo to get a new release that was only available at MSRP, plus the original was bought in a combo, meaning I got credit for the full MSRP while retaining my good deal via the other items in the combo. The downtime and shipping sucked, but the pricing worked out ok for me.
XFX's double lifetime warranty can increase resale value though. If I sell my used XFX card to you, you can have your own full lifetime warranty. You don't have to mess around with sending it back to me to have me return it for you (if I decide I'm nice enough to do that for you), you simply send it in yourself. Since you have a full valid warranty from the manufacturer, you don't have to worry as much about what I did to it before selling it to you - as long as it's not physically damaged, you're covered by your own warranty if it does die. In my eyes, this is a lot more useful than a 90-day window for upgrading your part at full MSRP plus double shipping and downtime.
I happened to buy an AM2 board around the time AM2+ was released (late 2007). In February 2009, I upgraded to an i7 system because my AM2 board wasn't updated to support AM2+. If my board had supported AM2+/AM3, I could've simply dropped in a new CPU for a significant upgrade. However, it didn't, so a faster AMD processor also meant a new motherboard and most likely new RAM (the exact same components needed for an Intel upgrade). The simple fact of the matter is that depending on what you buy and when, you'll sometimes get lucky and be able to upgrade for quite a while and sometimes you won't. Previous to my A64 X2, I had a SocketA system. At the time I bought it, it was about the best you could buy. I was able to drop in a faster CPU, but the board didn't support the additional multiplier bit of the unlocked CPU, so I was never actually able to run it at the full rated speed.
LGA1366 has been out for over a year and a half now and most X58 boards support the new hex-core i7 with just a BIOS update. At this point, I'd say that my new i7 system is more upgradeable than my last AMD system, and probably just as upgradeable as the previous AMD system. That's due partially to the coincidental timing of my purchases, but it doesn't change the fact that my last two AMD systems simply weren't as upgradeable as some people would have you believe all AMD products are.
Actually, I don't think the part about the lack of debit card consumer protections is factually accurate. Here's the blurb from The FTC's Facts for Consumers:
ATM or Debit Card Loss or Fraudulent Transfers (EFTA). Your liability under federal law for unauthorized use of your ATM or debit card depends on how quickly you report the loss. If you report an ATM or debit card missing before it's used without your permission, the EFTA says the card issuer cannot hold you responsible for any unauthorized transfers. If unauthorized use occurs before you report it, your liability under federal law depends on how quickly you report the loss.
For example, if you report the loss within two business days after you realize your card is missing, you will not be responsible for more than $50 for unauthorized use. However, if you don't report the loss within two business days after you discover the loss, you could lose up to $500 because of an unauthorized transfer. You also risk unlimited loss if you fail to report an unauthorized transfer within 60 days after your bank statement containing unauthorized use is mailed to you. That means you could lose all the money in your bank account and the unused portion of your line of credit established for overdrafts. However, for unauthorized transfers involving only your debit card number (not the loss of the card), you are liable only for transfers that occur after 60 days following the mailing of your bank statement containing the unauthorized use and before you report the loss.
If unauthorized transfers show up on your bank statement, report them to the card issuer as quickly as possible. Once you've reported the loss of your ATM or debit card, you cannot be held liable for additional unauthorized transfers that occur after that time.
The problem is that "not being responsible for the charges" and "having your money while things get sorted out" are two separate things. While you might get every penny back in the end, you might not have access to your money for quite a while during the investigation.
Unfortunately, the best solution is to get a credit card. The liability is about the same, but if something happens, you're out credit which you can't be forced to repay during the investigation, rather than losing the cash you actually had in your bank account for two months while they figure it out. It requires some self-control to put everything on a credit card instead of a debit card and pay it all off every month, but if something does happen you lose (access to) imaginary money rather than real money. Depending on the card you get, you may even make some money from their rewards program. I recently had Discover deposit $200 into my checking account from my Cashback. Since I always pay it off fully, there were no charges of any type on the purchases that earned me the $200.
This seems to be an update of last year's story, just to mention that the HD5000 series is now supported, and it's faster on the newer, faster video cards.
I read the article. I understand what he's proposing. However, the method is simply a way of finding things that are hiding in memory. By swapping out the hider-app, you disable its ability to hide. Your RAM + random bits hash will then expose things that were messing with RAM.
This doesn't detect malware itself, it simply allows you to determine if something is altering RAM to hide itself, which most likely would turn out to be malware. If you're simply taking a hash of the whole RAM space, I'm not even sure you'd be able to find out where the problematic bits were located (which would point to the swapped-out culprit).
While it would be nice to know if something is covertly tinkering with your memory, this test alone won't find the actual malware. It also relies on a lot of things, like the external verifier and that the scanner itself is not compromised. It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure how much practical value it has.
AMD's chips don't change sockets every 2 months. I can upgrade my AMD CPU without having to upgrade my entire machine. You can't compare the cost of the Intel chip directly to the AMD chip without taking the other costs into account as well.
I actually built my system with an i7 because my AM2 board (about 16 months old and fairly high-end) apparently came out just before AM2+ and therefore couldn't be reused. If you happen to have a good AM2+ system, you may be able to drop in an AM3 CPU for a boost, but simply because you have AMD doesn't mean you suddenly have a free upgrade path. In my case, I would've had to buy the same components to go with Intel or AMD, so I ended up spending a little more on Intel to get a lot more performance.
As for the "2 month" crack, the LGA1366 socket used by the i7 980X being reviewed was first released for the i7 in November 2008. It's almost a year and a half old already. I waited for the prices to drop some before building my i7 system, and I've had it for over a year now.
I doubt I'll spend $1,000 on a new CPU but I may upgrade to one of these 6-core 32nm models when they release a more reasonable version. These new CPUs have been supported by many LGA1366 boards for a while with nothing more than a BIOS update.
But intel should have kept the 1156 socket around longer. They did jump to socket 1366 really fast when compared to how long the 775 socket was around.
1366 came out first for the i7. 1156 came out recently for the i5 and i7. Both are still around, and will be for at least a while. 1366 is aimed at enthusiasts and workstations, while 1156 is a "mainstream" part with some limitations compared to 1366.
Throughout the game, the player is accompanied by a nameless dog. Before every level, the dog sniffs around a grassy area, then jumps into it barking excitedly when he smells ducks. After that, he either does one of two things for a player: retrieves the ducks a player shoots and congratulates them, or laughs at them for missing (as well as for failing to advance to a higher level). Since then, the nameless dog has passed into video gaming folklore. The dog has become so infamous for his laugh that ScrewAttack rated him first in their "Top 10 Douchebags" list.
Not an SSD - easily outperforms dozens of SSDs and a single server
From 80GB - 320GB of enterprise-grade, solid-state Flash
"It's not SSD + RAID, it's solid state memory in parallel channels!"
No, it's not X25-M's on an Adaptec card. However, it is NAND flash with a bunch of parallel channels. It's the exact same idea behind SSD + RAID, it's just above the level that you'll get with "regular" SSD + RAID.
Similarly, I blocked http://*.tynt.com/javascripts/* myself. I prefer to be as specific as possible for what I want to block (their scripts in this case) so as not to completely block the whole site, while still trying to block the widest swath of the unwanted stuff. Not that I ever plan to go there, but this way it won't block it if I decide to check out their ToS or something.
Unfortunately, a bit of a let-down for some might be, that the product still currently can't be utilized as a boot volume.
That means you still need some other drive (probably an "old" SATA SSD) to boot from. You can then load all your apps (and probably even some parts of the OS with a little hacking) onto this beast, but you still can't use it as your primary drive.
Fusion-io assures us that this feature will be supported in future driver and/or firmware revisions but also didn't commit to a schedule for that roll-out just yet.
Hopefully it comes along soon and at no cost for the early adopters of this item. I'd love to see these become the standard, but it doesn't really fit for me at the moment. As stated above, the jump from HDD to SATA SSD is a much larger percentage increase than SATA SSD to PCIe SSD, and cheaper too.
"Imagine using the same display for monitoring server uptime, or RSS feeds!"
I'm trying to imagine it, man, but it's BLOWING MY FREAKIN' MIND.
Wait, I thought this article was about using voice control with the display, not the display itself (which is ancient).
I just managed to get my server to stop calling 900 numbers and start calling my Google Voice. RSS feeds haven't worked so well though. With the server calling and leaving a new voicemail every millisecond, the website can never seem to get through.
The behaviour their driver has in the benchmark is also used in several games... ie Crysis Warhead. RTFA.
The issue is that the driver treats different games differently, based on filename. Some get this boost and some don't. Whether you put 3DMark into the boosted or unboosted category, its results will be indicative of some games and not of others.
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Not so simple, it's .5% of Applecare cases, not .5% of iPhone 4 users. So the actual answer is much smaller as undoubtedly most iPhone users have never called customer service.
Nope, it's .5% (Jobs actually said .55%) of all iPhone 4 users.
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone-reception-pc-0894-rm-eng.jpg is the slide stating the same thing. The extra .05% would actually bump that number up to 16,500.
As others have stated, that number may not mean much, since most people were aware that *something* was going to be done about it, and therefore a number of people may have held off on calling about it. But approximately 16,500 iPhone 4 users did call AppleCare regarding the antenna/reception.
But only .5% (not 5 percent, half a percent) of users have even reported the problem.
And how many users comprise .5%?
Based on 3 million iPhone 4's sold, that'd be 15,000.
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/apple/iPhone4/part2/signalbarmapping.jpg is a good picture comparing the display changes in 4.0.1.
4.0 was broken down as -51 to -91 / -91 to -101 / -101 to -103 / -103 to -107 / -107 to -113.
4.0.1 is broken down as -51 to -76 / -76 to -87 / -87 to -98 / -98 to -107 / -107 to -121.
Android's four bars are divided up as -51 to -89 / -89 to -97 / -97 to -103 / -103 to -113.
With 4.0.1, it will accept a lower signal before dropping to "No Service" (-121 instead of -113). It also divides the range up more evenly. What was previously the lower end of the 5th bar is now in the range of the 3rd bar, as one of the largest examples of how this display update changes things around.
Which means exactly nothing.
First, successful connections are not determined by signal strength (that's dBm (decibels per Miliwatt) not dB (decibels)), they are determined by Signal to Noise, an area with a high signal strength and a high SNR are more likely to drop calls then an area with low signal strength and low SNR.
Yup.
Anand agrees with you that SNR is more important, and suggests that phone makers will need to switch to that sometime. However, the iPhone currently works by displaying signal strength, so that's what he's using for this test.
Secondly, it fails to actually test the antenna. Anand is only testing the strength output signal not an actual connection. The problem with the Iphones aerial is not that it is dropping signal, that's just the easily visible side effect. The problem with the Iphone aerial is that when you make contact with it your hand becomes part of the aerial which changes the electrical length of the aerial. The electrical length determines which frequencies the aerial receives and transmits on. This means that out of the same signal you had before, most of it is now being interpreted as noise. The drop in dBm in just the obvious part, the electrical length is the real problem and why the phone drops calls/signal.
I don't think it really matters that Anand didn't test the antenna specifically. He tested the cause (bridging the antennas while holding the phone) and reported on the effects to the end user (a drop in signal bars). For someone looking at whether or not this is a real problem and how it will affect their usage of the phone, it doesn't matter if the problem is in the antenna, the radio, the housing, or the box Apple shipped the phone in. It just matters whether or not holding the phone a certain way affects the phone's performance.
For the end user, the dropping signal is indeed the problem, with the root cause being the altering of the antenna due to bridging. If bridging the antenna caused no change in how the phone performs, then it wouldn't be a problem at all in the user's eyes. For Apple, the technical problem may be that the antenna is susceptible to having its properties altered via simple contact with the user, but that's all just technical details behind the problem in the eyes of the user (who simply wants his phone to work properly while holding it).
I'm looking at this testing from the end user's point of view. From your comments, I'm inferring that you interpreted this more from a technician/engineer's point of view. I think Anand did this more as a way to help people figure out if they'll have substantial problems with an iPhone 4, not as a guide for Apple as to how they can fix the problem.
What happens if you touch it when you have 3 bars? Would that 24db put you at -125db ?
I see your point, but your argument is flawed.
Yes, that's exactly what would happen. It would drop you down below the -113dB threshold, and your phone would display "No Service". If you were on a call, it would drop.
Anand found that gripping the iPhone 4 a certain way could indeed cause up to 24dB of signal drop. This was worst-case, with a sweaty deathgrip. Touching more lightly or with less moisture had less of an effect. Gripping other smartphones near their antennas also caused a drop in signal.
The non-linear signal representation of the "bars" can also lead to some confusion related to this. The valid range is between -113dB (no signal) and -51dB (full signal). However, 5 bars represents the range of -51 to -91. 4 bars is -91 to -101. 3 bars is -101 to -103. 2 bars is -103 to -107. 1 bar is -107 to -113. If you have a full strength 5 bar connection, that 24dB drop won't even move you out of the 5th bar. If you've just barely got 5 bars, the same 24dB drop can put you down to 1 or 0 bars.
Anand's testing also confirmed what sjonke said in the comment above. Even when it was showing the same signal strength, the iPhone 4 was better at not dropping calls compared to the 3GS. The page shows a screenshot of a 625/31 run on Speedtest.net during a call with only -113dB.
That's not the end-all, be-all for all comparisons, but it gives you a good idea how the different brands and generations compare to each other in general. Before Nvidia released the GTX400 series months later, ATI had the two fastest video cards available (the HD5870 and the dual-GPU HD5970 which is still the fastest single card).
Nvidia seems to throw more money at developers with their The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, but I honestly haven't noticed any specific problems after upgrading to my HD5870 a few months ago (after having only Nvidia since buying my GeForce 2 GTS the week they were released). A lot of people seem to be coming to the conclusion that both camps' drivers suck but in different ways. I honestly think that most people running single cards in common configs with popular games will never notice a difference in gameplay either way.
You do get some bonuses like PhysX with Nvidia, but there are open options in the works, and the Radeons are more efficient. The 5870 uses about 15% less power than my old GTX285, and in the GPGPU apps I run (dnetc), it's actually about 6x as fast (and still over twice as fast as an overclocked GTX480, which is a little faster in most games). The efficiency difference probably won't be noticed on your power bill, but it does mean a cooler card, which in turn means less fan noise and less heat in your case/room.
You can easily change your user-agent in Opera and I would assume Chrome would be the same.
But you shouldn't, because then they'll never support Opera or Chrome "because none of their customers use it". Firefox didn't start getting support from big websites because of people changing its user-agent to IE.
If possible, an option is to tweak your existing UA to include whatever string they're looking for. I remember back in the day I'd change my Firefox UA from "Firefox" to "Firefox, not IE". Having "IE" in the string would be enough to get it past the dumb UA checks, but any sort of log analysis should indicate that I was using Firefox. Yes, you are "giving in" and telling them what they want to hear. However, if it's something that you can't reasonably boycott, this is a way to be able to use it, while at the same time indicating to them that you're using a different browser.
If all the Chrome and Opera users simply stop using the site, then their logs will show that 0% of their users actually use those browsers (even if it's because the site is blocking them), therefore it's completely unnecessary to support them. For a browser-related boycott to be successful, you need to let them know that you've stopped using the site because of that, otherwise the lack of use can actually reinforce the idea that you don't need to support those browsers.
I suppose all of this is a mute because the LGA 1156 platform and LGA 1366 platform are being discontinued next year, so if you don't already have a i7 compatible motherboard you'd be buying a board that won't be compatible with any cpus made 7 months from now. I wouldn't buy a i7 cpu unless intel started selling them for $50, while AM3 boards available now are compatible with future 16-core cpus
First off, 3Q11 isn't 7 months away.
And it's all relative. By that time, 1366 will be three years old. I'll have had mine for over 2.5 years. Note that I bought my i7 system because my high-end AMD board, which was 16 months old at the time, was only AM2 and therefore couldn't support the newer AMD CPUs. I had to buy a new board whether I went with AMD or Intel. Even the article you linked states that guaranteeing motherboard support this early in the game is difficult, but AMD is usually good about maintaining socket compatibility. You may be able to slip a Zambezi into your current day Socket-AM3 motherboards. You and your current AM3 board might end up being just as screwed as me and my 1366 board.
Plus you're forgetting that the Phenom II X4 was designed to compete with the C2Q, not the i7. In an old review (can't find the link right now), the i7-920 at stock 2.66GHz still beat out a Phenom II 955BE overclocked to 3.7GHz by 27% on some compression benchmark. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-black-edition/6 shows similar results - in the 7-Zip/Mplayer test, the stock 2.8GHz i7-930 beats the 3.87GHz Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition by over 20%. Yes, the AMD has 50% more cores (not taking into account HyperThreading) and 38% higher clockspeed, but the Intel is still 20% faster.
AMD's CPUs can be a great value, especially for gaming where the GPU is usually the bottleneck. However, Intel's CPUs are simply more powerful for a large number of tasks. Depending on what hardware you currently have, there may or may not be a significant difference in upgrade costs between the two brands. It's pretty safe to say that the Intel will probably cost more, but you'll probably also be getting more performance out of it.
What? The cheapest LGA1156 CPU listed on Newegg, the Pentium G6950 for $98, supports VT. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43230 So does the cheapest i3 they offer, the $115 530. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=46472
The older LGA775 chips did use VT as a selling point, but I believe that most current Intel CPUs support it. Since VT was required for Win7's VirtualPC XP Mode, it became a more standard option recently.
It's XFX that has the double lifetime warranty. EVGA has a lifetime warranty and the StepUp upgrade program (which I personally think is of little use to most people, having used it myself).
StepUp only gives you back what you originally paid for your card, and charges you full retail for the new card. If you got a smoking deal and snagged a GTX470 for $100, you get back the $100 to put toward a $500 GTX480, completely negating the original deal you got. Plus you get to pay shipping on both the new card coming to you and for the old one going back to them. To top it all off, you have to send your old card back before they send you the new one, which means you'll be without a card for a bit. StepUp is handy if you really need to buy a new card right now, but a new model might be coming out in the next few months and you're planning on paying full price for it. Other than the shipping costs, you can essentially undo your first purchase and buy the new card for MSRP. I used StepUp on my mobo to get a new release that was only available at MSRP, plus the original was bought in a combo, meaning I got credit for the full MSRP while retaining my good deal via the other items in the combo. The downtime and shipping sucked, but the pricing worked out ok for me.
XFX's double lifetime warranty can increase resale value though. If I sell my used XFX card to you, you can have your own full lifetime warranty. You don't have to mess around with sending it back to me to have me return it for you (if I decide I'm nice enough to do that for you), you simply send it in yourself. Since you have a full valid warranty from the manufacturer, you don't have to worry as much about what I did to it before selling it to you - as long as it's not physically damaged, you're covered by your own warranty if it does die. In my eyes, this is a lot more useful than a 90-day window for upgrading your part at full MSRP plus double shipping and downtime.
I happened to buy an AM2 board around the time AM2+ was released (late 2007). In February 2009, I upgraded to an i7 system because my AM2 board wasn't updated to support AM2+. If my board had supported AM2+/AM3, I could've simply dropped in a new CPU for a significant upgrade. However, it didn't, so a faster AMD processor also meant a new motherboard and most likely new RAM (the exact same components needed for an Intel upgrade). The simple fact of the matter is that depending on what you buy and when, you'll sometimes get lucky and be able to upgrade for quite a while and sometimes you won't. Previous to my A64 X2, I had a SocketA system. At the time I bought it, it was about the best you could buy. I was able to drop in a faster CPU, but the board didn't support the additional multiplier bit of the unlocked CPU, so I was never actually able to run it at the full rated speed.
LGA1366 has been out for over a year and a half now and most X58 boards support the new hex-core i7 with just a BIOS update. At this point, I'd say that my new i7 system is more upgradeable than my last AMD system, and probably just as upgradeable as the previous AMD system. That's due partially to the coincidental timing of my purchases, but it doesn't change the fact that my last two AMD systems simply weren't as upgradeable as some people would have you believe all AMD products are.
Actually, I don't think the part about the lack of debit card consumer protections is factually accurate. Here's the blurb from The FTC's Facts for Consumers:
The problem is that "not being responsible for the charges" and "having your money while things get sorted out" are two separate things. While you might get every penny back in the end, you might not have access to your money for quite a while during the investigation.
Unfortunately, the best solution is to get a credit card. The liability is about the same, but if something happens, you're out credit which you can't be forced to repay during the investigation, rather than losing the cash you actually had in your bank account for two months while they figure it out. It requires some self-control to put everything on a credit card instead of a debit card and pay it all off every month, but if something does happen you lose (access to) imaginary money rather than real money. Depending on the card you get, you may even make some money from their rewards program. I recently had Discover deposit $200 into my checking account from my Cashback. Since I always pay it off fully, there were no charges of any type on the purchases that earned me the $200.
This seems to be an update of last year's story, just to mention that the HD5000 series is now supported, and it's faster on the newer, faster video cards.
I read the article. I understand what he's proposing. However, the method is simply a way of finding things that are hiding in memory. By swapping out the hider-app, you disable its ability to hide. Your RAM + random bits hash will then expose things that were messing with RAM.
This doesn't detect malware itself, it simply allows you to determine if something is altering RAM to hide itself, which most likely would turn out to be malware. If you're simply taking a hash of the whole RAM space, I'm not even sure you'd be able to find out where the problematic bits were located (which would point to the swapped-out culprit).
While it would be nice to know if something is covertly tinkering with your memory, this test alone won't find the actual malware. It also relies on a lot of things, like the external verifier and that the scanner itself is not compromised. It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure how much practical value it has.
AMD's chips don't change sockets every 2 months. I can upgrade my AMD CPU without having to upgrade my entire machine. You can't compare the cost of the Intel chip directly to the AMD chip without taking the other costs into account as well.
I actually built my system with an i7 because my AM2 board (about 16 months old and fairly high-end) apparently came out just before AM2+ and therefore couldn't be reused. If you happen to have a good AM2+ system, you may be able to drop in an AM3 CPU for a boost, but simply because you have AMD doesn't mean you suddenly have a free upgrade path. In my case, I would've had to buy the same components to go with Intel or AMD, so I ended up spending a little more on Intel to get a lot more performance.
As for the "2 month" crack, the LGA1366 socket used by the i7 980X being reviewed was first released for the i7 in November 2008. It's almost a year and a half old already. I waited for the prices to drop some before building my i7 system, and I've had it for over a year now.
I doubt I'll spend $1,000 on a new CPU but I may upgrade to one of these 6-core 32nm models when they release a more reasonable version. These new CPUs have been supported by many LGA1366 boards for a while with nothing more than a BIOS update.
But intel should have kept the 1156 socket around longer. They did jump to socket 1366 really fast when compared to how long the 775 socket was around.
1366 came out first for the i7. 1156 came out recently for the i5 and i7. Both are still around, and will be for at least a while. 1366 is aimed at enthusiasts and workstations, while 1156 is a "mainstream" part with some limitations compared to 1366.
They even show a picture of the gun (along with the lifelike Wii gun). http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/abc_pistol_100309_mn.jpg
While the ioDrive may offer great performance, I hate their marketing.
http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive/
"It's not SSD + RAID, it's solid state memory in parallel channels!"
No, it's not X25-M's on an Adaptec card. However, it is NAND flash with a bunch of parallel channels. It's the exact same idea behind SSD + RAID, it's just above the level that you'll get with "regular" SSD + RAID.
Similarly, I blocked http://*.tynt.com/javascripts/* myself. I prefer to be as specific as possible for what I want to block (their scripts in this case) so as not to completely block the whole site, while still trying to block the widest swath of the unwanted stuff. Not that I ever plan to go there, but this way it won't block it if I decide to check out their ToS or something.
This ioXtreme is rated at 80 microseconds, while the Intel X25-M G2 is rated at 50 microseconds.
Unfortunately, a bit of a let-down for some might be, that the product still currently can't be utilized as a boot volume.
That means you still need some other drive (probably an "old" SATA SSD) to boot from. You can then load all your apps (and probably even some parts of the OS with a little hacking) onto this beast, but you still can't use it as your primary drive.
Fusion-io assures us that this feature will be supported in future driver and/or firmware revisions but also didn't commit to a schedule for that roll-out just yet.
Hopefully it comes along soon and at no cost for the early adopters of this item. I'd love to see these become the standard, but it doesn't really fit for me at the moment. As stated above, the jump from HDD to SATA SSD is a much larger percentage increase than SATA SSD to PCIe SSD, and cheaper too.
"Imagine using the same display for monitoring server uptime, or RSS feeds!"
I'm trying to imagine it, man, but it's BLOWING MY FREAKIN' MIND.
Wait, I thought this article was about using voice control with the display, not the display itself (which is ancient).
I just managed to get my server to stop calling 900 numbers and start calling my Google Voice. RSS feeds haven't worked so well though. With the server calling and leaving a new voicemail every millisecond, the website can never seem to get through.
The behaviour their driver has in the benchmark is also used in several games... ie Crysis Warhead. RTFA.
The issue is that the driver treats different games differently, based on filename. Some get this boost and some don't. Whether you put 3DMark into the boosted or unboosted category, its results will be indicative of some games and not of others.