Go ahead and defend my Stats teacher making us memorise the formula for standard deviation and forcing us to do it by hand. Excuse me for not beinghappy about this.
Many people have commented on the price of laptops, claiming the "digital divide" is widening, leaving them and/or other people behind the wave. However, the policy some schools have of requiring students to buy a standard laptop has been around for a few years at least, and usually the laptops aren't $5k Dell Inspirons. Also, financial aid is generally available to students unable to afford a laptop in the first place. However, the final fact is, people never seem to complain that exorbitant tuition at places like Rensselaer, where I'm going next year, widen the "digital divide," when the difference in price between that and many schools is in excess of $5k. As always, if you can't afford to go to a given college, you can't go. Why is it suddenly such a big deal when the price difference is due to a laptop instead of higher tuition?
Most schools with this policy have further scholarships to cover this problem. And if you can't get one, there are always plenty of colleges that don't require laptops, but don't stand in the way of those that wish to provide a given environment for students to streamline teaching.
This must be a particularly forward-looking school. I always wondered at the point of memorising much of the useless shit you get tested on. This school appears to have realized that the real skill is in being able to find and sort through information you're looking for, not memorise a specific set of "facts." I feel this type of learning would be much more beneficial than what I'm getting now in high school.
If this could be made practical on a smallish scale, this could make public transportation very appealing. Using less energy than maglev makes it more eco-friendly, and if it could somehow be made to work at an altitude higher than a car, it would enable public transportation to avoid traffic with ease. This is promising!
I think the craze over putting Linux on anything with a processor is getting ridiculous. Is it really all that horrible to use an item for what it was intended? I mean Christ, I don't see Linux on my digital watch, why doesn't someone fix that? It must be because Casio is conspiring to make it impossible! Open source digital watches!
This is not completely true. Yes, with sufficient cooling and added power, one can increase a processor's speed dramatically. However, this cannot be done to "almost any speed," because at a certain point, the signal strength becomes so great that the signal in one wire interferes with its neighbors, and that is a Bad Thing(TM). The maximum power is partly determined by architecture, and partly by die size. However, one can usually take a processor to half again its rated speed, even if it's not a Celeron, with sifficient cooling and provided it's not top of the line.
When I said the cache was helping the P3 in comparitive benchmarks, I wasn't referring strictly to fp/gaming, but to benchmarks as a whole. On-die cache could make the Athlon bench faster all around, not just on some benchmarks.
Importance of the cache existing is one thing. However, if you're going to have cache on a gaming rig, faster is better than bigger. Look at the competition at Anandtech between dual Celerons and P3s in SMP Smackdown if you doubt that.:)
The move to on-die cache is what has me most interested. High-speed cache is what affects gaming most, not the actual size of the cache, and as we all know, gaming is what counts.:) For repetitive tasks, such as searching a database, a larger L2 cache is superior. For non-repetitive tasks, like drawing triangles, the faster cache will win out. Of course, if you can get both, like the Xeon or alleged Athlons with 8 Meg full-speed cache, life is good.
Full-speed cache is the only thing letting aluminummines approach or outperform Athlons, just look at the graphs and you'll see that the P3s get closer and closer as the speed increases, and the Athlon's cache gets slower and slower by comparison. With full-speed cache, AMD will be in a very good position as far as benchmarks go. If you think the Athlon is a good performer now, just wait.:)
Am I the only one thinking we'll be seeing the BiAthlon and TriAthlon just like the P2 and P3 came along?
If, as some self-important trolls claim, trolling is an "art form," then it's not art on a level with the Louvre, it's like annoying street mimes who won't leave you alone when you try to take walk. And we all know what happens when street mimes get too annoying... (They get beaten savagely with olive loaves.)
Actually, according to PriceWatch, SDRAM is DAMN close to 50c/meg, at $67 for 128megs, so if RDRAM is $8/meg, it's actually more like 16x more expensive...
Also, when i read that Timna will have native RAMBUS only forced through a MTH so it can only take SDRAM, I was confused, as that cripples performance, until I realized, "Intel's doing that so Rambus will get a cut of the price due to royalties," which is probably due to exclusivity contracts with Rambus.
Finally, it's interesting that Intel is pushing DDRRAM for servers, which are notorious for needing high performance, which seems to say Rambus can't cut it at that level, yet at a far higher price. So, in all likelyhood they know Rambus is inferior, yet are still pushing it for consumer-level. Gotta love that company!
One minor little question, CmdrTaco: You stated "We don't post any submissions with the word 'Linux' or 'Microsoft.'" So where do all the MS/Linux stories come from? Were they submitted without mentioning the forbidden words?
1: Were these computers really provided by the employer? I didn't see any mention in the article, although it was implied in the summary. 2: Anyone happen to know if any of these computers were encrypted? 3: Does anyone know if any of these computers are being held by the police, and if so, will they be held semi-permanently, similar to police action in drug cases? 4: What possible repercussions are being considered if the claims are true? 5: What happens if one of these boxen has DeCSS? Not trolling, really curious. And finally, and possibly most importantly, 6: What are they counting as "computer?" Since the accusition was made about e-mail, did they search any advanced cell-phones/PDAs?
>>The quick answer is, they probably won't. But when the mentality is "if I want to do this, everybody should be able to", then it does affect me. Because just as people don't want morality forced upon them, I don't want immorality forced upon me.
He would only be providing you with the ability to be immoral. How does this force you to be immoral?
Slashdot Mirror
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When I said the cache was helping the P3 in comparitive benchmarks, I wasn't referring strictly to fp/gaming, but to benchmarks as a whole. On-die cache could make the Athlon bench faster all around, not just on some benchmarks.
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Full-speed cache is the only thing letting aluminummines approach or outperform Athlons, just look at the graphs and you'll see that the P3s get closer and closer as the speed increases, and the Athlon's cache gets slower and slower by comparison. With full-speed cache, AMD will be in a very good position as far as benchmarks go. If you think the Athlon is a good performer now, just wait. :)
Am I the only one thinking we'll be seeing the BiAthlon and TriAthlon just like the P2 and P3 came along?
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However, it already had been by graphics cards(look at nVidia's web site, "MOORE'S LAW IS FOR WIMPS!"), so I'm not as impressed as I might be.
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(They get beaten savagely with olive loaves.)
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Also, when i read that Timna will have native RAMBUS only forced through a MTH so it can only take SDRAM, I was confused, as that cripples performance, until I realized, "Intel's doing that so Rambus will get a cut of the price due to royalties," which is probably due to exclusivity contracts with Rambus.
Finally, it's interesting that Intel is pushing DDRRAM for servers, which are notorious for needing high performance, which seems to say Rambus can't cut it at that level, yet at a far higher price. So, in all likelyhood they know Rambus is inferior, yet are still pushing it for consumer-level. Gotta love that company!
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You stated "We don't post any submissions with the word 'Linux' or 'Microsoft.'"
So where do all the MS/Linux stories come from? Were they submitted without mentioning the forbidden words?
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Egypt
South Africa
Zaire
Somalia
Ethiopia
There you go.
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1: Were these computers really provided by the employer? I didn't see any mention in the article, although it was implied in the summary.
2: Anyone happen to know if any of these computers were encrypted?
3: Does anyone know if any of these computers are being held by the police, and if so, will they be held semi-permanently, similar to police action in drug cases?
4: What possible repercussions are being considered if the claims are true?
5: What happens if one of these boxen has DeCSS? Not trolling, really curious.
And finally, and possibly most importantly,
6: What are they counting as "computer?" Since the accusition was made about e-mail, did they search any advanced cell-phones/PDAs?
Just idle curiosity.
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>>The quick answer is, they probably won't. But when the mentality is "if I want to do this, everybody should be able to", then it does affect me. Because just as people don't want morality forced upon them, I don't want immorality forced upon me.
He would only be providing you with the ability to be immoral. How does this force you to be immoral?
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