"but as soon as I forget about the fact that I am or am not watching an HD source and just go ahead and watch the content, I very quickly forget I'm watching DVD."
The difference is detail. DVD or DVD-quality rips on my 47" 1080p television I sit 2 metres from are lower quality than HD content. In movies, things are "fuzzy" around edges (or, worse, jaggy if I get aliasing effects) -- while HD movies have complete detail (I could pause the playback and count the change on a table, or read the flavour text that's in a lot of movies on props, etc). With non-HD, you're only getting a vague sense of the set and setting around the actors. Corpse Bride is so clean in 1080p, that you can see details that remind you they're little dolls again (like dust sometimes showing up in a shot, which DVD would just blur away). Older HD content (eg: Taxi Driver) shows more film grain, and reminds me more of home cinema experience than DVD does.
In gaming wise, aliasing is a lot more obvious. A 1080p image from the Xbox 360 looks a lot nicer and more detailed than the Xbox Originals, or something like a PS2 game.
If you think self-modifying assembly is an art, you need to grow up and learn about software engineering and maintainability.
Algorithms are very beautiful, and have nice properties you can prove. They are the art in programming. Writing clever code that is hard to write and even harder to maintain is just the mark of an arrogant, immature programmer.
As someone who lives far enough north that snow is a fixture from October until May, I can tell you that I have gotten through my winters in 4cylinder, FWD cars just fine -- Accords, Festivas, Civics, and even an Excel. It teaches you how to drive correctly in the weather. I have never had trouble when it has snowed (even during blizzards), but I can't say about floods (we don't have those). When I move, I borrow a van (vans have this nice feature of having a roof for protecting belongings, especially a nice van like the Dodge Sprinter which gets great diesel fuel economy and I can stand up in). I also haven't driven into a ditch in a bit over a decade of driving (I pay attention to the road).
I don't hate truck owners -- but I also don't like truck owners who are dicks and full of themselves. It's ok, though, because I also don't like drivers of any car if the driver in question is not paying attention to the road or being courteous. I think most people don't hate truck owners, they just hate dicks who drive trucks.
"After the first couple of years, emulation of the Gameboy was widely available."
Not to derail your otherwise +3 funny post, but I don't recall any Gameboy emulators in 1991, 1992, or 1993 (years #2, 3, and 4 of the Gameboy). In fact, I don't think they were really easily available until sometime around 1997/1998, about 8-9 years after its general release.
Part of this is the fact the Internet as we know it didn't exist then, but also because the computers of the era couldn't handle it.
You are the most trusting person here, then. Already Google admitted to being in cahoots with the NSA/FBI/CIA (etc) in providing them with data on their Google web app usage. Facebook is just as bad with their beacon source, etc.
Seriously, I barely trust myself with my personal info -- why trust a complete stranger (or set of strangers) that are based out of a country where the gov't can just lean on a company to get private data?
The staff at Facebook don't give two shits about privacy, otherwise all those stupid "apps" which you add to your profile wouldn't be able to spider your friends or send them stupid form letters to encourage them to allow/add them (furthering the data-mining by the app writer). Try turning the privacy settings up by disabling everything when adding an app. It won't let you, because then the app "wouldn't work" correctly.
"And of course any virtual reality scenario will not profit from extra power."
It's more a matter of what kind of speedup you see, and what algorithm you start with.
If your algorithm is serial, and there is no parallelism to speed it up, you're not going to see any speed increase. This applies to a lot of things, such as access to the player-character status variables (all cores use the same memory address, so they need a mutex or other synchronization anyway). Any AI-NPC interactions would likely need to be coordinated. You could divide the large stuff across some collection of cores (physics core, AI core, book-keeping core, input core), but not all of those will break down further (so an 80 core machine is a limited speedup over a 4 core machine -- which is, itself, a limited speedup over a basic 2-core machine for most people).
The easy things to breakup are embarrassingly parallel problems (like certain graphics activities), and they are being broken up across GPUs already. Algorithms, even if they are entirely easy to parallelize, are still linear. To be 10 times faster, you need 10 processors (this is why GPUs have a lot of simple graphics pipelines and shader processors -- they're throwing more hardware at the problem). If a problem is simply too big (you need to be 1000 times faster, or exponential and beyond algorithms), more hardware isn't going to help.
People seem to think that parallel programming will make the impossible into something possible. That's not true. Proving NP = P and coming up with efficient algorithms for certain things will. More hardware won't -- it'll just make things that were O(n) or O(log n) [for a sufficiently large n, like the number of pixels in a 1920x1200 monitor] possible. It won't affect O(n^2) and above.
"However, what multiple cores might do is enable previously impractical tasks to be done on modest PCs. Things like NP problems, optimizations, simulations."
Like hell. NP means non-polynomial -- exponential growth. This means if you have a problem with 2 items in it, it takes 4x the effort of 1 item. 4 items takes 16x the effort. 8 items takes 256x the effort. Want to solve a problem like the travelling salesman problem? It's trivial if you visit one or two cities. However, were you to want to visit the 30,000 or so cities in the US, you're looking at something like 30,000 to the power of 30,000 things to examine (type it into a bc in a terminal -- you might want to time how long it takes to print a number that large). Having 2 CPUs is not going to solve that any faster than having 1,000 CPU cores in a box would -- you need an exponential speedup, which means either a new algorithm, or quantum computing. That, or patience to see if the universe ends in heat death or a big crunch before you get your answer.
Optimized scheduling and goods flow (with more than 2 restrictions) is NP as well. You can approximate NP solutions with heuristics and clever algorithms, even doing some fancy work with stats and running approximations in parallel to get arbitrarily close to a solution in some cases, but you're still not solving the NP problem:p
Simulations and particle physics could be done in parallel, potentially, but there are limits there as well. If you have a scene with 32 items, you do still need to synchronize their interactions (you can only split the parallelism so far). The reason we're seeing multiple cores is because it's getting harder to make a single CPU a significant amount faster. Multiple cores just means we spend less time faking multiple cores, and won't solve problems that require more than a linear speedup to become computable in reasonable or real-time.
Multicore is not a panacea. The trouble people whine about is because multithreaded programming is hard in a lot of languages and environments due to side effects. If you can convince people to switch over en-masse to Scheme, Haskell, SML, Prolog, you might solve this problem -- or at least make it less of a big deal. I doubt that's going to happen (but I'd love to be wrong).
"Half the number of buttons, provide a more intelligent, context aware system, and I imagine many people would have an easier time using it."
Be careful with this line of thought. VI is a context-aware, modal editor. I don't think anyone would argue that vi is more usable to mere-mortals than MS Word is. Different contexts and modes should be avoided when possible.
The issue here is that a lot of these remotes are design-by-committee monstrosities. Different people are in charge of different functionality, and they put in their own top-level buttons to support it. It's why you see remotes with OK, ENTER, RETURN, and CANCEL -- when these could all be folded into 2 buttons (and with enter and return being ambiguous, since usually return means back -- not enter!).
I've seen it in a lot of other places, too. The Petro Canada stations in my city have pay-at-the-pump, as do the Co-op gas stations. The Petro-Can ones use an interface like an ATM -- a few general purpose buttons next to a display, a number pad, ok, cancel. The Co-op ones have these, and also have yes and no. Ok, cancel, yes, no. Is it necessary to have 4 buttons for these 2 basic ideas?
32-bit OSes can't reach 2^32 bits of memory due to hardware IO ranges. Duh.
So why didn't you install 64-bit Ubuntu? Flash works'n'everything in 7.10 64-bit. VMware? They have 64-bit builds. Everything else I run is FOSS. There is no reason not to install it, AFAICT!
"Besides, if you let them supply 'pre-ripped' tracks, guess what--they'll still come with ads, thou-shalt-not-steal warnings, etc. burned into the file. No thanks, I'll do it myself."
Good to hear there is someone who enjoys commercials and FBI warnings to the point they'll put them into the files they rip;) Personally, I'd stick with just ripping the content:)
Sounds like someone has a bad MUA behind their MTA. Upgrade to Cyrus IMAP. It's very smart and culls duplicates by message ID with a sliding window, tunable by the administrator.
This MTA behaviour is, like it or not, the correct behaviour at the MTA level. Postfix (my secure MTA choice for the past 9 years, and [IMO] a far superior one to Qmail) behaves identically regarding duplicates, as does every other MTA I've looked at. I wouldn't be surprised if this was written up in an RFC on SMTP as the correct behaviour.
Now if we're going to talk about incorrect behaviour, we should all jump on the 10.5.0 finder which is completely non-spatial!
"The investment that will be required for this business to come up to "speed" will become legacy within a couple of years. The cost does not generate any new revenue for the business and no longer gives them a productivity advantage."
The exact same argument applies to security. We know that security is such a low priority that it has to be legislated into being (see the state of California's laws in such events). Would you, if you were management at a company, downplay security? There's something to be said for doing things right the first time, and doing it in a way that can be kept updated over time. Sometimes decisions were made 20 years ago that don't apply now, though, and the companies should work to migrate. It's like checking and updating the security. It's cheaper to do it now while the costs are low than later when the costs are large, even if you don't believe there will be a time when these things fail (they will).
"If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption. Amdahl's law and all that."
Amdahl's law relates parallelism to MP -- it has nothing to do with power consumption. Amdahl's law is why only embarrassingly parallel software will gain much from a quad core (or octo-core) setup, unless you're running a system multiple people access concurrently.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with speed binning; a 65nm part such as the X2 3600+, once verified by coherency tests (that is -- do the transistors retain their accuracy), is just as good at higher speeds as lower speeds. As for reduction of lifetime, I suspect you've never taken a real CMOS course. Even if the lifetime were reduced (which it isn't), I can always buy another cheap AM2 AMD processor to replace it.
When I looked at upgrading my system, I had a choice. The Core 2 Duos that weren't crippled and had a proper amount of L2 cache started at $240. The AMD X2 systems with built-in memory controller and decent amounts of L2 cache started at $75.
Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150. That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2. To get a 1066Mhz FSB C2D requires you go up to $190 or so.
Intel motherboards seem to require a premium as well. nVidia can make AM2 chipsets with firewire, dual ethernet, onboard 7.1 audio, multiple SATA and eSATA connectors, etc, for roughly $100 less than then equivalent Intel chipset board. Is that because Intel wants more $$ for its chipset licences?
So... when you do get this same base performance, it comes at a price. Honestly, you would be better served by getting an 8800 instead of an 8600 GeForce for the difference in CPU and motherboard costs. Plus, those SLI motherboards for AM2 are around $150 vs. the $220 + for Intel ones.
A friend of mine and myself both upgraded our desktop PCs. They chose an Intel Core 2 Duo because "Intel wins in all the benchmarks." I bought AMD instead.
Their system is based around a E6600 ($270 at the time), mine is based around an X2 3600+ 65nm ($75 at the time). Their system has 2gb of RAM, mine has 4gb of RAM. My motherboard (with nVidia chipset) was $80 cheaper than their P5B Deluxe. Overall my system was $400 cheaper -- with double the RAM. I go into my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe BIOS and change the clock rate of my CPU from 1.9Ghz to 2.4Ghz with no ill effects and get the same # of 3D Marks as them because I have the same kind of video card (8600 GTS PCI-E). They're happy because they bought "performance" (as sold to them via Intel marketing), and I'm happy because I bought the same performance (as proved by benchmarks) for a lot less.
What's the lesson? For my workstation use in Linux compiling and rendering and working with large images, 4gb of RAM that run at the same speed as L2 cache (thanks to AMD's integrated memory controller) beats the piss out of that Intel setup (which has much lower memory bw and also half the RAM). For gaming use, I get the same # of 3D Marks and similar performance because an Intel 2.4Ghz CPU and an AMD 2.4Ghz CPU happen to be within a few % of each other on the same video card (which is the true bottleneck; don't lie to yourself and say it's that CPU that's 14-18x faster than RAM).
I got the same performance for $400, but with more RAM. My CPU was $190 cheaper. My motherboard was also cheaper. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of all those people who rave and Intel Xeon power consumption, and ignore the fact that those require power-hungry FB-DIMMs and have chipsets that dissipate more power than the difference in CPU watts.
Your computer it NOT just a CPU -- it is an entire system that must be balanced. Go watch a Lotus Elise race some muscle-bound 7.7 litre Mustang and see which is a better balanced car. Clearly the Lotus is just as not competitive with that Mustang because it has a much smaller engine! Clearly that statement is just as true as AMD not being competitive with Intel.
"Seems like the real concern is not that ATI's code opens a security hole. You know ATI will patch it."
That's a really naive attitude. I think Bruce Schneier put it best: "Once you stop thinking about security backward, you immediately understand why the current software security paradigm of patching doesn't make us any more secure. If vulnerabilities are so common, finding a few doesn't materially reduce the quantity remaining. A system with 100 patched vulnerabilities isn't more secure than a system with 10, nor is it less secure. A patched buffer overflow doesn't mean that there's one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code."
I say to ATI: your Kung Fu is lousy. This would also be why I haven't (on purpose) purchased an ATI card in years, and also why I continue to be disappointed with some of Apple's hardware choices. At least Apple manages the ATI drivers themselves, but if you wanted to use BootCamp (...). We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?); why do people continue to buy their snake-oil and bullshit?
PS: If you are not innocent, you are worse than a murderer because you cause a lot more damage when you kill a full car full of people than just murder someone, and you also do a hell of a lot of damage when you cripple or maim people (which, let's be honest, is a best-case scenario for a pair of giant metal shells on wheels hitting at 50+kph).
In war, crippling a solider is better than killing because they have to take care of their wounded. Then those people come home after the war and have to live a different life. Except these people didn't sign up to go to Iraq -- they just happened to be on the road when you decided that you getting home under your own (intoxicated) powers was right and just and OK. That is immoral. That should lead you to being locked up for a long time.
You're a lucky person if you don't know anyone who's been killed or maimed by a DUI. I'm not even in my 30s, and I know half-a-dozen people who've been killed or maimed.
They meant procedural content generation, like L systems, used to make believable looking plants that grow and change over time.
It's all about repeated iteration over a particular type of finite automata with a particular string.. Easily done if you've taken your 3xx/4xx graphics an theory classes, but perhaps past what most technology reporters are capable of.
So, to summarize: * C is an example of procedural programming. * Haskell is an example of functional programming. * L-systems are an example of procedural content generation (content generated by a procedure, in a deterministic fashion).
"I would like to formally thank Microsoft and Nintendo for cracking down on the little guy with a soldering iron in his garage,..."
As long as people with money have more influence over those who make laws than people without money, the system will continue to represent the interests of those who have money. Look at the rejection of the justice system of allowing people on welfare to object to random searches of their houses; that's a rather large difference from what the US constitution has to say on the matter, but it is done to serve the interests of those who pay taxes against those who lack the ability (for whatever reason) to pay taxes. MPAA and RIAA crackdowns and suing actions (including those against the Swedes in their own country via the US gov't!) are similar reflections of the concept that money is power, not personal choice.
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
I wouldn't say next up GPS, I'd say that this is more for the ACLU trying to get some legal boundaries up. Right now they're fighting something that most might agree is a correct use -- looking for criminals and stolen things using cameras. The trick is that this is a slippery slope. Once you define x as OK, is x+1 also OK? At what point do we hit a boundary where x+y is beyond what most people would agree is correct us?
If the ACLU wins here, they'll have their line that's not to be crossed and backed by legal precedent. If they lose, then they have legal precedent to build upon when they make a case against the next iteration of this idea. Either way the people affected by these laws will win.
I think it's a sound legal strategy (but I'm also not a lawyer).
Slashdot Mirror
"but as soon as I forget about the fact that I am or am not watching an HD source and just go ahead and watch the content, I very quickly forget I'm watching DVD."
The difference is detail. DVD or DVD-quality rips on my 47" 1080p television I sit 2 metres from are lower quality than HD content. In movies, things are "fuzzy" around edges (or, worse, jaggy if I get aliasing effects) -- while HD movies have complete detail (I could pause the playback and count the change on a table, or read the flavour text that's in a lot of movies on props, etc). With non-HD, you're only getting a vague sense of the set and setting around the actors. Corpse Bride is so clean in 1080p, that you can see details that remind you they're little dolls again (like dust sometimes showing up in a shot, which DVD would just blur away). Older HD content (eg: Taxi Driver) shows more film grain, and reminds me more of home cinema experience than DVD does.
In gaming wise, aliasing is a lot more obvious. A 1080p image from the Xbox 360 looks a lot nicer and more detailed than the Xbox Originals, or something like a PS2 game.
In both cases, the difference is pretty obvious.
"but we've had multitasking since the pentium first appeared. "
Shit, I must've been on some good drugs back when I had a 486, because I must've hallucinated that multitasking I did.
No wonder the K&R guys never show up anywhere, they must've had a much harder trip when they thought the PDP-11 was multitasking and time-sharing!
I'm glad Intel showed us the way by introducing multitasking in the mid-1990s.
If you think self-modifying assembly is an art, you need to grow up and learn about software engineering and maintainability.
Algorithms are very beautiful, and have nice properties you can prove. They are the art in programming. Writing clever code that is hard to write and even harder to maintain is just the mark of an arrogant, immature programmer.
As someone who lives far enough north that snow is a fixture from October until May, I can tell you that I have gotten through my winters in 4cylinder, FWD cars just fine -- Accords, Festivas, Civics, and even an Excel. It teaches you how to drive correctly in the weather. I have never had trouble when it has snowed (even during blizzards), but I can't say about floods (we don't have those). When I move, I borrow a van (vans have this nice feature of having a roof for protecting belongings, especially a nice van like the Dodge Sprinter which gets great diesel fuel economy and I can stand up in). I also haven't driven into a ditch in a bit over a decade of driving (I pay attention to the road).
I don't hate truck owners -- but I also don't like truck owners who are dicks and full of themselves. It's ok, though, because I also don't like drivers of any car if the driver in question is not paying attention to the road or being courteous. I think most people don't hate truck owners, they just hate dicks who drive trucks.
"After the first couple of years, emulation of the Gameboy was widely available."
Not to derail your otherwise +3 funny post, but I don't recall any Gameboy emulators in 1991, 1992, or 1993 (years #2, 3, and 4 of the Gameboy). In fact, I don't think they were really easily available until sometime around 1997/1998, about 8-9 years after its general release.
Part of this is the fact the Internet as we know it didn't exist then, but also because the computers of the era couldn't handle it.
You are the most trusting person here, then. Already Google admitted to being in cahoots with the NSA/FBI/CIA (etc) in providing them with data on their Google web app usage. Facebook is just as bad with their beacon source, etc.
Seriously, I barely trust myself with my personal info -- why trust a complete stranger (or set of strangers) that are based out of a country where the gov't can just lean on a company to get private data?
The staff at Facebook don't give two shits about privacy, otherwise all those stupid "apps" which you add to your profile wouldn't be able to spider your friends or send them stupid form letters to encourage them to allow/add them (furthering the data-mining by the app writer). Try turning the privacy settings up by disabling everything when adding an app. It won't let you, because then the app "wouldn't work" correctly.
"And of course any virtual reality scenario will not profit from extra power."
It's more a matter of what kind of speedup you see, and what algorithm you start with.
If your algorithm is serial, and there is no parallelism to speed it up, you're not going to see any speed increase. This applies to a lot of things, such as access to the player-character status variables (all cores use the same memory address, so they need a mutex or other synchronization anyway). Any AI-NPC interactions would likely need to be coordinated. You could divide the large stuff across some collection of cores (physics core, AI core, book-keeping core, input core), but not all of those will break down further (so an 80 core machine is a limited speedup over a 4 core machine -- which is, itself, a limited speedup over a basic 2-core machine for most people).
The easy things to breakup are embarrassingly parallel problems (like certain graphics activities), and they are being broken up across GPUs already. Algorithms, even if they are entirely easy to parallelize, are still linear. To be 10 times faster, you need 10 processors (this is why GPUs have a lot of simple graphics pipelines and shader processors -- they're throwing more hardware at the problem). If a problem is simply too big (you need to be 1000 times faster, or exponential and beyond algorithms), more hardware isn't going to help.
People seem to think that parallel programming will make the impossible into something possible. That's not true. Proving NP = P and coming up with efficient algorithms for certain things will. More hardware won't -- it'll just make things that were O(n) or O(log n) [for a sufficiently large n, like the number of pixels in a 1920x1200 monitor] possible. It won't affect O(n^2) and above.
"However, what multiple cores might do is enable previously impractical tasks to be done on modest PCs. Things like NP problems, optimizations, simulations."
:p
Like hell. NP means non-polynomial -- exponential growth. This means if you have a problem with 2 items in it, it takes 4x the effort of 1 item. 4 items takes 16x the effort. 8 items takes 256x the effort. Want to solve a problem like the travelling salesman problem? It's trivial if you visit one or two cities. However, were you to want to visit the 30,000 or so cities in the US, you're looking at something like 30,000 to the power of 30,000 things to examine (type it into a bc in a terminal -- you might want to time how long it takes to print a number that large). Having 2 CPUs is not going to solve that any faster than having 1,000 CPU cores in a box would -- you need an exponential speedup, which means either a new algorithm, or quantum computing. That, or patience to see if the universe ends in heat death or a big crunch before you get your answer.
Optimized scheduling and goods flow (with more than 2 restrictions) is NP as well. You can approximate NP solutions with heuristics and clever algorithms, even doing some fancy work with stats and running approximations in parallel to get arbitrarily close to a solution in some cases, but you're still not solving the NP problem
Simulations and particle physics could be done in parallel, potentially, but there are limits there as well. If you have a scene with 32 items, you do still need to synchronize their interactions (you can only split the parallelism so far). The reason we're seeing multiple cores is because it's getting harder to make a single CPU a significant amount faster. Multiple cores just means we spend less time faking multiple cores, and won't solve problems that require more than a linear speedup to become computable in reasonable or real-time.
Multicore is not a panacea. The trouble people whine about is because multithreaded programming is hard in a lot of languages and environments due to side effects. If you can convince people to switch over en-masse to Scheme, Haskell, SML, Prolog, you might solve this problem -- or at least make it less of a big deal. I doubt that's going to happen (but I'd love to be wrong).
"Half the number of buttons, provide a more intelligent, context aware system, and I imagine many people would have an easier time using it."
Be careful with this line of thought. VI is a context-aware, modal editor. I don't think anyone would argue that vi is more usable to mere-mortals than MS Word is. Different contexts and modes should be avoided when possible.
The issue here is that a lot of these remotes are design-by-committee monstrosities. Different people are in charge of different functionality, and they put in their own top-level buttons to support it. It's why you see remotes with OK, ENTER, RETURN, and CANCEL -- when these could all be folded into 2 buttons (and with enter and return being ambiguous, since usually return means back -- not enter!).
I've seen it in a lot of other places, too. The Petro Canada stations in my city have pay-at-the-pump, as do the Co-op gas stations. The Petro-Can ones use an interface like an ATM -- a few general purpose buttons next to a display, a number pad, ok, cancel. The Co-op ones have these, and also have yes and no. Ok, cancel, yes, no. Is it necessary to have 4 buttons for these 2 basic ideas?
32-bit OSes can't reach 2^32 bits of memory due to hardware IO ranges. Duh.
So why didn't you install 64-bit Ubuntu? Flash works'n'everything in 7.10 64-bit. VMware? They have 64-bit builds. Everything else I run is FOSS. There is no reason not to install it, AFAICT!
"Besides, if you let them supply 'pre-ripped' tracks, guess what--they'll still come with ads, thou-shalt-not-steal warnings, etc. burned into the file. No thanks, I'll do it myself."
;) Personally, I'd stick with just ripping the content :)
Good to hear there is someone who enjoys commercials and FBI warnings to the point they'll put them into the files they rip
Sounds like someone has a bad MUA behind their MTA. Upgrade to Cyrus IMAP. It's very smart and culls duplicates by message ID with a sliding window, tunable by the administrator.
This MTA behaviour is, like it or not, the correct behaviour at the MTA level. Postfix (my secure MTA choice for the past 9 years, and [IMO] a far superior one to Qmail) behaves identically regarding duplicates, as does every other MTA I've looked at. I wouldn't be surprised if this was written up in an RFC on SMTP as the correct behaviour.
Now if we're going to talk about incorrect behaviour, we should all jump on the 10.5.0 finder which is completely non-spatial!
Don't click that URL, it violates a patent!!!
"The investment that will be required for this business to come up to "speed" will become legacy within a couple of years. The cost does not generate any new revenue for the business and no longer gives them a productivity advantage."
The exact same argument applies to security. We know that security is such a low priority that it has to be legislated into being (see the state of California's laws in such events). Would you, if you were management at a company, downplay security? There's something to be said for doing things right the first time, and doing it in a way that can be kept updated over time. Sometimes decisions were made 20 years ago that don't apply now, though, and the companies should work to migrate. It's like checking and updating the security. It's cheaper to do it now while the costs are low than later when the costs are large, even if you don't believe there will be a time when these things fail (they will).
"If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption. Amdahl's law and all that."
Amdahl's law relates parallelism to MP -- it has nothing to do with power consumption. Amdahl's law is why only embarrassingly parallel software will gain much from a quad core (or octo-core) setup, unless you're running a system multiple people access concurrently.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with speed binning; a 65nm part such as the X2 3600+, once verified by coherency tests (that is -- do the transistors retain their accuracy), is just as good at higher speeds as lower speeds. As for reduction of lifetime, I suspect you've never taken a real CMOS course. Even if the lifetime were reduced (which it isn't), I can always buy another cheap AM2 AMD processor to replace it.
When I looked at upgrading my system, I had a choice. The Core 2 Duos that weren't crippled and had a proper amount of L2 cache started at $240. The AMD X2 systems with built-in memory controller and decent amounts of L2 cache started at $75.
Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150. That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2. To get a 1066Mhz FSB C2D requires you go up to $190 or so.
Intel motherboards seem to require a premium as well. nVidia can make AM2 chipsets with firewire, dual ethernet, onboard 7.1 audio, multiple SATA and eSATA connectors, etc, for roughly $100 less than then equivalent Intel chipset board. Is that because Intel wants more $$ for its chipset licences?
So... when you do get this same base performance, it comes at a price. Honestly, you would be better served by getting an 8800 instead of an 8600 GeForce for the difference in CPU and motherboard costs. Plus, those SLI motherboards for AM2 are around $150 vs. the $220 + for Intel ones.
A friend of mine and myself both upgraded our desktop PCs. They chose an Intel Core 2 Duo because "Intel wins in all the benchmarks." I bought AMD instead.
Their system is based around a E6600 ($270 at the time), mine is based around an X2 3600+ 65nm ($75 at the time). Their system has 2gb of RAM, mine has 4gb of RAM. My motherboard (with nVidia chipset) was $80 cheaper than their P5B Deluxe. Overall my system was $400 cheaper -- with double the RAM. I go into my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe BIOS and change the clock rate of my CPU from 1.9Ghz to 2.4Ghz with no ill effects and get the same # of 3D Marks as them because I have the same kind of video card (8600 GTS PCI-E). They're happy because they bought "performance" (as sold to them via Intel marketing), and I'm happy because I bought the same performance (as proved by benchmarks) for a lot less.
What's the lesson? For my workstation use in Linux compiling and rendering and working with large images, 4gb of RAM that run at the same speed as L2 cache (thanks to AMD's integrated memory controller) beats the piss out of that Intel setup (which has much lower memory bw and also half the RAM). For gaming use, I get the same # of 3D Marks and similar performance because an Intel 2.4Ghz CPU and an AMD 2.4Ghz CPU happen to be within a few % of each other on the same video card (which is the true bottleneck; don't lie to yourself and say it's that CPU that's 14-18x faster than RAM).
I got the same performance for $400, but with more RAM. My CPU was $190 cheaper. My motherboard was also cheaper. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of all those people who rave and Intel Xeon power consumption, and ignore the fact that those require power-hungry FB-DIMMs and have chipsets that dissipate more power than the difference in CPU watts.
Your computer it NOT just a CPU -- it is an entire system that must be balanced. Go watch a Lotus Elise race some muscle-bound 7.7 litre Mustang and see which is a better balanced car. Clearly the Lotus is just as not competitive with that Mustang because it has a much smaller engine! Clearly that statement is just as true as AMD not being competitive with Intel.
Every single 9/11 terrorists highjacker had a valid passport.
This is security theatre -- worse still, it removes freedoms from us non-terrorists.
"She duel-enrolled"
Suddenly your claims of spelling are more dubious when you fail to distinguish between dual and duel. One of them involves combat!
"Seems like the real concern is not that ATI's code opens a security hole. You know ATI will patch it."
That's a really naive attitude. I think Bruce Schneier put it best: "Once you stop thinking about security backward, you immediately understand why the current software security paradigm of patching doesn't make us any more secure. If vulnerabilities are so common, finding a few doesn't materially reduce the quantity remaining. A system with 100 patched vulnerabilities isn't more secure than a system with 10, nor is it less secure. A patched buffer overflow doesn't mean that there's one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code."
I say to ATI: your Kung Fu is lousy. This would also be why I haven't (on purpose) purchased an ATI card in years, and also why I continue to be disappointed with some of Apple's hardware choices. At least Apple manages the ATI drivers themselves, but if you wanted to use BootCamp (...). We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?); why do people continue to buy their snake-oil and bullshit?
"If you are not innocent, **IN THEORY** the easiest way to lower your reading is to silently hyperventilate prior to blowing. "
I do believe I should say BUSTED.
PS: If you are not innocent, you are worse than a murderer because you cause a lot more damage when you kill a full car full of people than just murder someone, and you also do a hell of a lot of damage when you cripple or maim people (which, let's be honest, is a best-case scenario for a pair of giant metal shells on wheels hitting at 50+kph).
In war, crippling a solider is better than killing because they have to take care of their wounded. Then those people come home after the war and have to live a different life. Except these people didn't sign up to go to Iraq -- they just happened to be on the road when you decided that you getting home under your own (intoxicated) powers was right and just and OK. That is immoral. That should lead you to being locked up for a long time.
You're a lucky person if you don't know anyone who's been killed or maimed by a DUI. I'm not even in my 30s, and I know half-a-dozen people who've been killed or maimed.
They meant procedural content generation, like L systems, used to make believable looking plants that grow and change over time.
It's all about repeated iteration over a particular type of finite automata with a particular string.. Easily done if you've taken your 3xx/4xx graphics an theory classes, but perhaps past what most technology reporters are capable of.
So, to summarize:
* C is an example of procedural programming.
* Haskell is an example of functional programming.
* L-systems are an example of procedural content generation (content generated by a procedure, in a deterministic fashion).
"I would like to formally thank Microsoft and Nintendo for cracking down on the little guy with a soldering iron in his garage, ..."
As long as people with money have more influence over those who make laws than people without money, the system will continue to represent the interests of those who have money. Look at the rejection of the justice system of allowing people on welfare to object to random searches of their houses; that's a rather large difference from what the US constitution has to say on the matter, but it is done to serve the interests of those who pay taxes against those who lack the ability (for whatever reason) to pay taxes. MPAA and RIAA crackdowns and suing actions (including those against the Swedes in their own country via the US gov't!) are similar reflections of the concept that money is power, not personal choice.
If you wish to not be in a situation where money decides power, move to a country with a representative democracy, where the representatives are purely chosen via 1 vote per 1 person, and where lobbying money is not allowed.
I wouldn't say next up GPS, I'd say that this is more for the ACLU trying to get some legal boundaries up. Right now they're fighting something that most might agree is a correct use -- looking for criminals and stolen things using cameras. The trick is that this is a slippery slope. Once you define x as OK, is x+1 also OK? At what point do we hit a boundary where x+y is beyond what most people would agree is correct us?
If the ACLU wins here, they'll have their line that's not to be crossed and backed by legal precedent. If they lose, then they have legal precedent to build upon when they make a case against the next iteration of this idea. Either way the people affected by these laws will win.
I think it's a sound legal strategy (but I'm also not a lawyer).