Trolls were sparse? I doubt it, you didn't know that you were being trolled.
Truly. I'll wager that every single person here who was into the BBS scene, at some time called some local lamer warez board, chatted to the sysop, and pretended to be a cool phreakin' dude from the other side of the planet. We sure did.. lock your modem to some crazy speed like 4800 baud, blame it on the noise from all the different boxes you were using to phreak, talk in broken english.. and watch this high school kid running a BBS off his twin-floppy no-hard-drive A500 bullshit you about his 500meg of 0-day warez.. hilarious trolling fun!!
I moved from the US to the UK and It was awful, I had no credit or employment history. I got turned down by every bank on the High st for a checking accoung. (Except Lloyds, they wanted me to make an appointment before they turned me down).
The UK is a disaster for immigrants who hope to lead any sort of normal financial life. I know, I've recently moved here myself, and obviously my 9 years of adulthood with perfect credit history in Australia are worthless. I did eventually get a cheque account (with Barclays). Nobody else would give me one, or a debit card. As for a credit card - no way. They all demand your address history for the last 3 years, and if you haven't been in the UK that long - instant rejection.
So in a desperate attempt to drag this back on-topic, I'll say that these credit stories of Jon's are bad, but the credit checking agencies are just flat out arseholes, with or without a privacy-violating database.
OK, I know it's lame to reply to my own post, but..
Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus)
I should point out that quickly scanning over Anand's figures, there were only three tests that back up this Intel claim. Quake 3 at 640x480 (104fps vs. 84fps), 3Mbit DVD playback (24% CPU vs. 34%) and 6Mbit DVD playback (29% CPU vs. 37%). For everything else (and he did like 26 tests), the improvement was less (often far less) than Intel claimed.
I know I look like an Intel basher, but really, this chip just sucks. Even if they halved the price it would still suck.
(a) does this mean that the new Celery will give 150% the performance of an old Celery at the same clock speed?
No. An application that was absolutely, totally bottlenecked by main memory access I guess would be 150% the speed, but that would never be the case, I doubt you could even write something like that as a theoretical experiment. Real-world improvement will therefore be anywhere between nothing and 50%. Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus), so that would translate to about 15% faster at the same clock speed.
(b) is this new Celery that is released at 100 mhz any faster then a Celery that has been OC'ed to a 100 mhz bus.
I think not, I don't believe there are any core changes or anything to this new Celeron, just the faster bus & clock speed.
The competition heats up? Yeah right. On every single one of the (many) tests Anand ran, the Duron 800 beat the Celeron 800. Every single one. On most of them, the Duron _600_ beat it!! But that's OK, right, Celerons are cheap CPUs, not fast CPUs, I hear you say?
No price for a Celeron 800. But a 766 costs $155. And the Durons? $71 for an 800. $47 for a 600. What a miserable piece of shit this Celeron 800 is, 100MHz FSB or no.
Hmm.. the example this article used was Mandrake, which is what I last installed, so I guess I can offer a comment.
First of all, yes, it does come with 1000 packages or whatever. That's a lot. Maybe very few users will even use 10% of them. But hey, it fits on the CD! It'd be downright criminal to leave blank space on the disk just because filling it up would be "too much".
But there must be an easier way to present all this stuff. Does it all need to be in your face at install time? My concept is a minimalist installer than presents you with a few simple choices corresponding to what people are _most likely_ to want to do with the machine. e.g. "Gnome or KDE?" "Install gcc? (y/n)" But not too much. Ideally this would leave the user with a fairly concise desktop environment, maybe at the Windows level of applications, a couple of dozen accessories. No servers! No games! No bloat!
Then, anything you wanted from the rest of the packages could be installed after you have a working setup. Thus, it could be presented in a far friendlier fashion than an endless list of packages with one-line descriptions. You could have a helpfile type thing for the user to browse, with a decent page of info about what the hell each package was. Screenshots even! All the packages would be arranged into categories, of course. And a clickable link which would install it (letting you know about dependencies etc. of course). It could even connect to the distributions site and check for a newer version of the package.
This would I think be very comfortable to use for "experienced" users (who are used to finding new software on the net and downloading/installing it), and not too scary for beginners.
Hmm as I suspected this is slower than SCSI and so, given that technology's increasing affordability, rather begs the question: Why are they developing it?
Is SCSI really becoming increasingly affordable? I'm talking from a position of ignorance here, but I remember that when I shifted from Amiga to PC/Linux (and therefore from SCSI to IDE) about 3-4 years ago, there was only a small premium on the prices of SCSI drives. Now, however, I was just looking at prices the other day (got hold of a Umax scanner which does USB and SCSI, but is only usable under Linux via SCSI.. which made me consider SCSI once more..), and it was horrible!
I recently bought a 30Gb IDE drive for £125 (an IBM deskstar, not some crappy cheap drive) - the cheapest SCSI drive (according to www.pcindex.co.uk, the UK equivalent of pricewatch.com) is £134 - for 4.5Gb!! To get 30Gb would cost me more than £500 - 4x the price of IDE.
Now I loved SCSI all those years I used it on my Amiga, it's clearly a more powerful and flexible technology. But I am 100% positive that it will never, ever again be anywhere near price competitive with IDE. I therefore predict that Serial ATA drives will prove to be far cheaper than SCSI, and be an eminently suitable technology for non-server use.
(addendum: I was just about to post this, and I thought I should check pricewatch.com to see how different the US situation was. 30Gb IDE drives go from around $100 for crappy bands to $130 for IBM. SCSI 36Gb starts at $305. So it's not nearly as bad as the UK, but you're still basically talking double the price)
Shared a lot of hardware with the Amiga 1200 (AGA Graphics, etc), as well as had a bit of custom hardware not on the Amiga AGA computer line (vector chip? Can't remember).
It had lame chunky-to-planar conversion hardware, to make life easier for people trying to do 3D games (which were just starting to take off big, this was the Doom era) which were always a pain on the Amiga's bitplane hardware (one pixel had it's 8 bits spread over 8 different places in memory). This was not a bad idea, but nobody wanted to write a CD32 game that didn't run on a regular A1200, so it wasn't widely used. Especially since the CD32 was pretty much a flop, saleswise. Not to mention the fact that they could have left it out, given the CD32 some fast ram (it just had 2Mb chipram, same as an unexpanded A1200), and people could have done c2p in software faster than this hardware could do it..
The blitter was faster, too.
No, it was identical to the A1200 blitter.
The whole thing might have had potential, but unfortunately it was the last gasp of the dying Commodore.. so it sank out of the commercial arena along with everything else..
Except when someone comes out with an orginal, fun, RTS+Sim hybrid title, no-one buys it!
Majesty? I downloaded the demo, and didn't like it. That's why I didn't buy it.;-)
Mind you, the games I've bought and enjoyed lately can't really be considered too original and innovative.. Carmageddon TDR 2000, and Dungeon Keeper 2 and Might & Magic 6 from a bargain bin.. all sequels. Oh well.:-)
First of all, I can't entirely agree with the bunch of people saying "you can never be sure, every bit of programming involves creating something that has never been created before", etc. Remember that the vast majority of programming that gets done in the world is in-house corporate stuff. I did that for 5 years, and believe me, there ARE a lot of what Chris describes as "normal" projects. Database, various input and update screens/pages, enquiries, reports, etc.
Now, fair enough, Chris is talking about a company with marketroids, so I guess we're not on the corporate in-house track. But maybe he means a sort of "service" model of programming, not producing programs for the open market, but for particular clients. This would definitely explain the marketroids need for accurate deadlines and costings, and also be a situation where lots of fairly straightforward projects are being churned through.
These CAN be estimated pretty accurately, but it needs a senior programmer/project manager who is both skilled in making estimations, and familiar with the team, the tools and the situation. If you've got such a guy, then everything everyone else said applies - you gotta let him estimate, trust his estimates, don't just ignore them if they don't fit your business plan, don't change the requirements halfway through without redoing the schedule, etc. etc.
Real development of software for the open market is a whole different ballgame. Sure, there's people who are good at estimating, people who are terrible, but what it boils down to is that you ARE likely to be dealing with unpredictable situations - people ARE creating something new that has never been created before (hopefully!). So schedules will go wrong.
The way we deal with this is that marketting come up with a list of desired features, we try to make a rough estimate of effort, they throw away the ones that are low importance/high effort, we come up with a rough schedule of what will be in the product and how long it will take. If this is too long, some of the features get dropped. But - and this is the important bit - the features that remain are ranked in order of importance, and we work on the important ones first. That way, if things go wrong and the schedule slips, marketing can make the call as to whether to put off some features until the next version, or put back the release date.
Caveat - this is to do with producing new versions of well-established products. If it's a whole new product developed from scratch you probably won't be able to drop features halfway without wasting any effort on them, because you'll have to do your architecture in such a way as to support them. But I'm sure the same basic marketting/programming relationship can be applied..
Individual system builders are still IMO unlikely to go for a Duron when for $50 more you can have a full Athlon system. Both are cheaper than an equivalent Celeron or Pentium III system. System upgraders probably see little point in upgrading to a Duron when the full T/Bird is within their price band.
This is why a chipset like this is so important! Individual system builders will be willing to spend a little more for an Athlon, usually. System upgraders too. So the target market than the Duron desperately needs to nail is the ultra cheap-ass system mass producers market. These guys do NOT give a damn that a Duron is 90% of the speed of an Athlon - they wouldn't give a damn if it was 50% of the speed! They care only that they can shave $50 off the cost of their systems while still uttering the magic words "700MHz", "800MHz" or whatever.
These guys do not build systems without integrated video/audio - there's just no way they could be ultra cheap-ass if they did. So without a chipset like this SiS one, Duron was never going to sell to this market at all, surrendering it entirely to Celeron. That left only the individual system builders and system upgraders, who, as you pointed out, are more likely to go for a full Athlon.. hence the poor Duron sales..
Durons are just the amd version of the celeron so it doesn't matter much anyway most geeks would buy the athlon anyway.
This Duron + SiS 730S platform isn't aimed at geeks, it's aimed at the goddamn-cheap market, the people who flog crappy PCs at low prices via full-page ads in the newspaper with lots of exclamation marks!! I think it has a lot of potential there - Anand says the 730S will cost $6 more in bulk than the Intel 810E, but that's no great hardship given that low-end Duron CPUs (obviously such machines use low-end CPUs) retail for $18 - $24 less than same-clocked Celerons (pricewatch).
Now of course these machines will suck, because even if the 730S is OK, and (as we all know) Durons are cool, every other component will be complete ass. Nasty 15" monitor, crappy case, cheapest drives in the world, etc. But anyway, it's more sales for AMD, helps fund their work on nice CPUs that geeks will love..
Well duh, you were drunk. Everything's better when you're drunk!
Yeah, but we were drunk when we played Soul Calibur, too! So that had the same advantage as Soulblade.. and yet we still reckoned it to be a far inferior game..
Soul Calibur--the most stunning fighting game I've ever seen. It is truly one of the great all-time classics of the fighting game genre.
Surely you jest. I didn't think was even half as entertaining as the old Soulblade on the PSX. Prettier graphics, but three quarters of the gameplay left out. Sad. Me & my mates spent countless evenings drinking beer and playing Soulblade. Soul Calibur occupied our Dreamcast for half an hour before we tossed it and went back to Powerstones.
Even if you hold the copyright, you cannot use pictures in advertising (e.g., an on-line product brochure or anything else that is selling) without getting a model release from any person whose image is recognizable in the photo.
Excellent, now there's a way for anyone who's pissed off to fight this one. Take a picture of a friend, stick it on the page, get a second friend to order a coffee cup with the picture on it, and let the lawsuits commence!:-)
(and move your pictures off MSN onto some paid-for web space)
Yep. But they spell out in the Terms Of Use that if you upload your property to MSN, they may distribute it, reproduce it, etc., and "no compensation will be paid" to you.
If the law says that the person taking the photos owns the copyright then they should be paying them.
The person who takes the photos owns the copyright. The person who owns the copyright gives Microsoft the right to reproduce the photo without paying compensation. Microsoft does so. Where's the harm?
OK, I'll be honest - I think this is totally unacceptable behaviour. But since it seems to be legal, the obvious solution is not to complain, but to move your damn photos onto some web space that you're paying for, rather than some free web space that comes with odious terms of use.
NONE of the pages that I view everyday (that'd be around a dozen) use Java. In fact, now that I think about it, none that I have viewed in the last month have used Java.
How do you know?
I think what you are saying is: none of the pages that you view everyday have Java applets on them. A fact that you're probably glad of. But some, none or all of them may be using Java code on the server. I freely confess my total ignorance of this field of endeavour (only web coding I ever did was a lame Perl/CGI thing), but every time Java is mentioned on Slashdot, I see a bunch of abnormally coherent comments praising Java in this role. So I trust that it is good for this.
THAT is probably why all the employers want to see Java on your resume.
And while I'm here - C#. What is the deal? Microsoft seem to have forgotten that their corporate goal is to get people to use Windows instead of Linux/Solaris/BSD/insert-Unix-flavour-here. They'd have a lot more luck supporting Java in their.NET platform, make it easy for people to switch, not harder, by forcing them to learn a new language and port all their code
The only problem is using Unix-specific functions (symbolic links, / as directory separator) on Windows
I did some Perl CGI stuff, deployed on a Linux box but I was writing and testing it under Windows (at work, while slacking off and pretending to be working). I had a constant called DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR which I set to "\" under Windows and "/" under Linux, until one day I discovered that you can actually use "/" OK under Windows. It doesn't need a "\" as a separator - that's just a COMMAND.COM quirk, not a DOS thing.
Please note that the GPG website says that "due to the lack of a well tested entropy source, it should be used with some caution" under Windows. Linux is the recommended platform, the BSDs are the only others that get a full thumbs up.
Still, that's an improvement - last time I looked, they said that you should only ever use the Windows version for decrypting and verifying signatures, never for generating keys or encrypting, due to this lack of a secure random source..
As Timothy would have noticed if he'd followed the Slashdot link in the story, the controversy was over a development snapshot of gcc (2.96), not the kernel. I haven't used RedHat 7.0 but I assume it ships with a 2.2 kernel and also has a 2.3 dev kernel in there as an optional package.
If you just joined eBay, and bid on my item, should I refuse to sell you it cause you have a feedback of 0?
No, you just won't send out the item until my payment arrives. That's the most common way to do business on eBay anyway, and it's no risk to the seller. So you buy a few things to get some feedback, and then think about selling stuff..
Or, more to the point in this case, you don't try to sell something for $15000 until you've gotten some positive feedback selling some smaller items. Then people might not think your auction is a fraud.:-)
Then I'm gonna tell you than use that uncertainty as a tool to postpone signing this contract. You (the programmer) are going to go off and try to find these answers. Meanwhile, I'm gonna put an ad out for your position. Really.
Maybe some employers will react like that. Maybe you would, if you were in such a position. But to me that's like saying "I don't want any enthusiastic programmers who love programming, I only want to hire clockwatchers who will cut code from 9 to 5 and then go home - they're easier to manage".
This is funny, following this thread so soon after the "What's The Best Way To Retain Trained Employees?" discussion. How do you not retain good programmers? Tell them that their weekend kernel hacking can't be used in the Linux kernel because the company owns it and doesn't want to GPL it. Idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolls were sparse? I doubt it, you didn't know that you were being trolled.
Truly. I'll wager that every single person here who was into the BBS scene, at some time called some local lamer warez board, chatted to the sysop, and pretended to be a cool phreakin' dude from the other side of the planet. We sure did.. lock your modem to some crazy speed like 4800 baud, blame it on the noise from all the different boxes you were using to phreak, talk in broken english.. and watch this high school kid running a BBS off his twin-floppy no-hard-drive A500 bullshit you about his 500meg of 0-day warez.. hilarious trolling fun!!
I moved from the US to the UK and It was awful, I had no credit or employment history. I got turned down by every bank on the High st for a checking accoung. (Except Lloyds, they wanted me to make an appointment before they turned me down).
The UK is a disaster for immigrants who hope to lead any sort of normal financial life. I know, I've recently moved here myself, and obviously my 9 years of adulthood with perfect credit history in Australia are worthless. I did eventually get a cheque account (with Barclays). Nobody else would give me one, or a debit card. As for a credit card - no way. They all demand your address history for the last 3 years, and if you haven't been in the UK that long - instant rejection.
So in a desperate attempt to drag this back on-topic, I'll say that these credit stories of Jon's are bad, but the credit checking agencies are just flat out arseholes, with or without a privacy-violating database.
Anyhow, we certainly saw a bit of an out pouring for Linus over the last several days ($145 in voluntary contributions so far).
I slung him five bucks. It was worth it, just to put the comment j00 r0x0r, l1nu5! onto Fairtunes.. :-)
OK, I know it's lame to reply to my own post, but..
Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus)
I should point out that quickly scanning over Anand's figures, there were only three tests that back up this Intel claim. Quake 3 at 640x480 (104fps vs. 84fps), 3Mbit DVD playback (24% CPU vs. 34%) and 6Mbit DVD playback (29% CPU vs. 37%). For everything else (and he did like 26 tests), the improvement was less (often far less) than Intel claimed.
I know I look like an Intel basher, but really, this chip just sucks. Even if they halved the price it would still suck.
(a) does this mean that the new Celery will give 150% the performance of an old Celery at the same clock speed?
No. An application that was absolutely, totally bottlenecked by main memory access I guess would be 150% the speed, but that would never be the case, I doubt you could even write something like that as a theoretical experiment. Real-world improvement will therefore be anywhere between nothing and 50%. Intel claims the Celeron/800 (100MHz bus) is 20% faster than a Celeron/766 (66MHz bus), so that would translate to about 15% faster at the same clock speed.
(b) is this new Celery that is released at 100 mhz any faster then a Celery that has been OC'ed to a 100 mhz bus.
I think not, I don't believe there are any core changes or anything to this new Celeron, just the faster bus & clock speed.
The competition heats up? Yeah right. On every single one of the (many) tests Anand ran, the Duron 800 beat the Celeron 800. Every single one. On most of them, the Duron _600_ beat it!! But that's OK, right, Celerons are cheap CPUs, not fast CPUs, I hear you say?
(shuffles over to www.pricewatch.com)
No price for a Celeron 800. But a 766 costs $155. And the Durons? $71 for an 800. $47 for a 600. What a miserable piece of shit this Celeron 800 is, 100MHz FSB or no.
Hmm.. the example this article used was Mandrake, which is what I last installed, so I guess I can offer a comment.
First of all, yes, it does come with 1000 packages or whatever. That's a lot. Maybe very few users will even use 10% of them. But hey, it fits on the CD! It'd be downright criminal to leave blank space on the disk just because filling it up would be "too much".
But there must be an easier way to present all this stuff. Does it all need to be in your face at install time? My concept is a minimalist installer than presents you with a few simple choices corresponding to what people are _most likely_ to want to do with the machine. e.g. "Gnome or KDE?" "Install gcc? (y/n)" But not too much. Ideally this would leave the user with a fairly concise desktop environment, maybe at the Windows level of applications, a couple of dozen accessories. No servers! No games! No bloat!
Then, anything you wanted from the rest of the packages could be installed after you have a working setup. Thus, it could be presented in a far friendlier fashion than an endless list of packages with one-line descriptions. You could have a helpfile type thing for the user to browse, with a decent page of info about what the hell each package was. Screenshots even! All the packages would be arranged into categories, of course. And a clickable link which would install it (letting you know about dependencies etc. of course). It could even connect to the distributions site and check for a newer version of the package.
This would I think be very comfortable to use for "experienced" users (who are used to finding new software on the net and downloading/installing it), and not too scary for beginners.
Hmm as I suspected this is slower than SCSI and so, given that technology's increasing affordability, rather begs the question: Why are they developing it?
Is SCSI really becoming increasingly affordable? I'm talking from a position of ignorance here, but I remember that when I shifted from Amiga to PC/Linux (and therefore from SCSI to IDE) about 3-4 years ago, there was only a small premium on the prices of SCSI drives. Now, however, I was just looking at prices the other day (got hold of a Umax scanner which does USB and SCSI, but is only usable under Linux via SCSI.. which made me consider SCSI once more..), and it was horrible!
I recently bought a 30Gb IDE drive for £125 (an IBM deskstar, not some crappy cheap drive) - the cheapest SCSI drive (according to www.pcindex.co.uk, the UK equivalent of pricewatch.com) is £134 - for 4.5Gb!! To get 30Gb would cost me more than £500 - 4x the price of IDE.
Now I loved SCSI all those years I used it on my Amiga, it's clearly a more powerful and flexible technology. But I am 100% positive that it will never, ever again be anywhere near price competitive with IDE. I therefore predict that Serial ATA drives will prove to be far cheaper than SCSI, and be an eminently suitable technology for non-server use.
(addendum: I was just about to post this, and I thought I should check pricewatch.com to see how different the US situation was. 30Gb IDE drives go from around $100 for crappy bands to $130 for IBM. SCSI 36Gb starts at $305. So it's not nearly as bad as the UK, but you're still basically talking double the price)
Shared a lot of hardware with the Amiga 1200 (AGA Graphics, etc), as well as had a bit of custom hardware not on the Amiga AGA computer line (vector chip? Can't remember).
It had lame chunky-to-planar conversion hardware, to make life easier for people trying to do 3D games (which were just starting to take off big, this was the Doom era) which were always a pain on the Amiga's bitplane hardware (one pixel had it's 8 bits spread over 8 different places in memory). This was not a bad idea, but nobody wanted to write a CD32 game that didn't run on a regular A1200, so it wasn't widely used. Especially since the CD32 was pretty much a flop, saleswise. Not to mention the fact that they could have left it out, given the CD32 some fast ram (it just had 2Mb chipram, same as an unexpanded A1200), and people could have done c2p in software faster than this hardware could do it..
The blitter was faster, too.
No, it was identical to the A1200 blitter.
The whole thing might have had potential, but unfortunately it was the last gasp of the dying Commodore.. so it sank out of the commercial arena along with everything else..
Except when someone comes out with an orginal, fun, RTS+Sim hybrid title, no-one buys it!
Majesty? I downloaded the demo, and didn't like it. That's why I didn't buy it. ;-)
Mind you, the games I've bought and enjoyed lately can't really be considered too original and innovative.. Carmageddon TDR 2000, and Dungeon Keeper 2 and Might & Magic 6 from a bargain bin.. all sequels. Oh well. :-)
First of all, I can't entirely agree with the bunch of people saying "you can never be sure, every bit of programming involves creating something that has never been created before", etc. Remember that the vast majority of programming that gets done in the world is in-house corporate stuff. I did that for 5 years, and believe me, there ARE a lot of what Chris describes as "normal" projects. Database, various input and update screens/pages, enquiries, reports, etc.
Now, fair enough, Chris is talking about a company with marketroids, so I guess we're not on the corporate in-house track. But maybe he means a sort of "service" model of programming, not producing programs for the open market, but for particular clients. This would definitely explain the marketroids need for accurate deadlines and costings, and also be a situation where lots of fairly straightforward projects are being churned through.
These CAN be estimated pretty accurately, but it needs a senior programmer/project manager who is both skilled in making estimations, and familiar with the team, the tools and the situation. If you've got such a guy, then everything everyone else said applies - you gotta let him estimate, trust his estimates, don't just ignore them if they don't fit your business plan, don't change the requirements halfway through without redoing the schedule, etc. etc.
Real development of software for the open market is a whole different ballgame. Sure, there's people who are good at estimating, people who are terrible, but what it boils down to is that you ARE likely to be dealing with unpredictable situations - people ARE creating something new that has never been created before (hopefully!). So schedules will go wrong.
The way we deal with this is that marketting come up with a list of desired features, we try to make a rough estimate of effort, they throw away the ones that are low importance/high effort, we come up with a rough schedule of what will be in the product and how long it will take. If this is too long, some of the features get dropped. But - and this is the important bit - the features that remain are ranked in order of importance, and we work on the important ones first. That way, if things go wrong and the schedule slips, marketing can make the call as to whether to put off some features until the next version, or put back the release date.
Caveat - this is to do with producing new versions of well-established products. If it's a whole new product developed from scratch you probably won't be able to drop features halfway without wasting any effort on them, because you'll have to do your architecture in such a way as to support them. But I'm sure the same basic marketting/programming relationship can be applied..
Individual system builders are still IMO unlikely to go for a Duron when for $50 more you can have a full Athlon system. Both are cheaper than an equivalent Celeron or Pentium III system. System upgraders probably see little point in upgrading to a Duron when the full T/Bird is within their price band.
This is why a chipset like this is so important! Individual system builders will be willing to spend a little more for an Athlon, usually. System upgraders too. So the target market than the Duron desperately needs to nail is the ultra cheap-ass system mass producers market. These guys do NOT give a damn that a Duron is 90% of the speed of an Athlon - they wouldn't give a damn if it was 50% of the speed! They care only that they can shave $50 off the cost of their systems while still uttering the magic words "700MHz", "800MHz" or whatever.
These guys do not build systems without integrated video/audio - there's just no way they could be ultra cheap-ass if they did. So without a chipset like this SiS one, Duron was never going to sell to this market at all, surrendering it entirely to Celeron. That left only the individual system builders and system upgraders, who, as you pointed out, are more likely to go for a full Athlon.. hence the poor Duron sales..
Durons are just the amd version of the celeron so it doesn't matter much anyway most geeks would buy the athlon anyway.
This Duron + SiS 730S platform isn't aimed at geeks, it's aimed at the goddamn-cheap market, the people who flog crappy PCs at low prices via full-page ads in the newspaper with lots of exclamation marks!! I think it has a lot of potential there - Anand says the 730S will cost $6 more in bulk than the Intel 810E, but that's no great hardship given that low-end Duron CPUs (obviously such machines use low-end CPUs) retail for $18 - $24 less than same-clocked Celerons (pricewatch).
Now of course these machines will suck, because even if the 730S is OK, and (as we all know) Durons are cool, every other component will be complete ass. Nasty 15" monitor, crappy case, cheapest drives in the world, etc. But anyway, it's more sales for AMD, helps fund their work on nice CPUs that geeks will love..
"Contestants must be at least 23 years old, no taller than six feet, and no heavier than 187 pounds"
No way! I'm 5'11" and weigh about 180! This was made for me!
Only problem is, I don't speak a word of German, and am hopeless with trivia that isn't computer related. Doh! :-P
Well duh, you were drunk. Everything's better when you're drunk!
Yeah, but we were drunk when we played Soul Calibur, too! So that had the same advantage as Soulblade.. and yet we still reckoned it to be a far inferior game..
Soul Calibur--the most stunning fighting game I've ever seen. It is truly one of the great all-time classics of the fighting game genre.
Surely you jest. I didn't think was even half as entertaining as the old Soulblade on the PSX. Prettier graphics, but three quarters of the gameplay left out. Sad. Me & my mates spent countless evenings drinking beer and playing Soulblade. Soul Calibur occupied our Dreamcast for half an hour before we tossed it and went back to Powerstones.
Even if you hold the copyright, you cannot use pictures in advertising (e.g., an on-line product brochure or anything else that is selling) without getting a model release from any person whose image is recognizable in the photo.
Excellent, now there's a way for anyone who's pissed off to fight this one. Take a picture of a friend, stick it on the page, get a second friend to order a coffee cup with the picture on it, and let the lawsuits commence! :-)
(and move your pictures off MSN onto some paid-for web space)
They are making money off other peoples property.
Yep. But they spell out in the Terms Of Use that if you upload your property to MSN, they may distribute it, reproduce it, etc., and "no compensation will be paid" to you.
If the law says that the person taking the photos owns the copyright then they should be paying them.
The person who takes the photos owns the copyright. The person who owns the copyright gives Microsoft the right to reproduce the photo without paying compensation. Microsoft does so. Where's the harm?
OK, I'll be honest - I think this is totally unacceptable behaviour. But since it seems to be legal, the obvious solution is not to complain, but to move your damn photos onto some web space that you're paying for, rather than some free web space that comes with odious terms of use.
NONE of the pages that I view everyday (that'd be around a dozen) use Java. In fact, now that I think about it, none that I have viewed in the last month have used Java.
How do you know?
I think what you are saying is: none of the pages that you view everyday have Java applets on them. A fact that you're probably glad of. But some, none or all of them may be using Java code on the server. I freely confess my total ignorance of this field of endeavour (only web coding I ever did was a lame Perl/CGI thing), but every time Java is mentioned on Slashdot, I see a bunch of abnormally coherent comments praising Java in this role. So I trust that it is good for this.
THAT is probably why all the employers want to see Java on your resume.
And while I'm here - C#. What is the deal? Microsoft seem to have forgotten that their corporate goal is to get people to use Windows instead of Linux/Solaris/BSD/insert-Unix-flavour-here. They'd have a lot more luck supporting Java in their .NET platform, make it easy for people to switch, not harder, by forcing them to learn a new language and port all their code
.NET - empty air, held together by thin string
The only problem is using Unix-specific functions (symbolic links, / as directory separator) on Windows
I did some Perl CGI stuff, deployed on a Linux box but I was writing and testing it under Windows (at work, while slacking off and pretending to be working). I had a constant called DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR which I set to "\" under Windows and "/" under Linux, until one day I discovered that you can actually use "/" OK under Windows. It doesn't need a "\" as a separator - that's just a COMMAND.COM quirk, not a DOS thing.
So there you go.
Please note that the GPG website says that "due to the lack of a well tested entropy source, it should be used with some caution" under Windows. Linux is the recommended platform, the BSDs are the only others that get a full thumbs up.
Still, that's an improvement - last time I looked, they said that you should only ever use the Windows version for decrypting and verifying signatures, never for generating keys or encrypting, due to this lack of a secure random source..
If anyone is interested in co-author David Diamond, you should check out this profile of Linus he wrote.
Or at least, The Register says he wrote it. Damned if I can find his name on it anywhere. Anyway, it's kind of cute.
As Timothy would have noticed if he'd followed the Slashdot link in the story, the controversy was over a development snapshot of gcc (2.96), not the kernel. I haven't used RedHat 7.0 but I assume it ships with a 2.2 kernel and also has a 2.3 dev kernel in there as an optional package.
so when do you buy/sell on eBay?
If you just joined eBay, and bid on my item, should I refuse to sell you it cause you have a feedback of 0?
No, you just won't send out the item until my payment arrives. That's the most common way to do business on eBay anyway, and it's no risk to the seller. So you buy a few things to get some feedback, and then think about selling stuff..
Or, more to the point in this case, you don't try to sell something for $15000 until you've gotten some positive feedback selling some smaller items. Then people might not think your auction is a fraud. :-)
Then I'm gonna tell you than use that uncertainty as a tool to postpone signing this contract. You (the programmer) are going to go off and try to find these answers. Meanwhile, I'm gonna put an ad out for your position. Really.
Maybe some employers will react like that. Maybe you would, if you were in such a position. But to me that's like saying "I don't want any enthusiastic programmers who love programming, I only want to hire clockwatchers who will cut code from 9 to 5 and then go home - they're easier to manage".
This is funny, following this thread so soon after the "What's The Best Way To Retain Trained Employees?" discussion. How do you not retain good programmers? Tell them that their weekend kernel hacking can't be used in the Linux kernel because the company owns it and doesn't want to GPL it. Idiocy.