I don't really care if Music Match is crap, because I just happen to know that iTunes is almost as bad.
It's slow (in a Win32-PC anyway), eats tens of MB's of memory, creates couple of useless processes and f*cks up your entire mp3-collection if you are not careful enough.
Yes, it has nice music store, some nice features (like party playlist), but basically it's just a bloated piece of software that feels as nimble as a 10ft wide paintbrush when you are trying to fit a complete essay to a single A4/letter using kanji writing... Or at least it feels like that after several years with 'few hundred kb' Winamp 1.xx and 2.xx's
And yes, I have an iPod and I do love it. I just can't see the advantages of iTunes when i'm just playing my mp3's in Windows. iTunes is probably better on a Mac when you don't have to load all the UI candy for just one program.
Mars is quite hostile to all flying things and even for parachutes, because surface pressure of Martian athmosphere is something like 7 mbars. Which is less than 1% of Earth's.
That is also one reason why manned Mars flights are so hard. You have to have fuel even for landing as you just can't brake enough with parachutes. And getting decent amount of fuel for landing and liftoff for a vehicle capable of sustaining couple of astronauts/taikonauts/cosmonauts for over a year in space is technically pretty challenging.
It doesn't matter how high it goes unless it can achieve orbital velocity.
At 200km orbital velocity you need to achieve in order to stay in orbit is 7.78 km/sec or if you prefer 28 008 km/h, 17403 mph or ~22 Machs. SpaceShipOne only reaches about 2.9 Machs.
For certain kind of calculations Virginia Tech cluster is about as useful as one X-server with two processors... Each node in Real Supercomputer can communicate about gazillion times faster with other nodes when compared to nodes in cluster based on slow 1gb/s ethernet.
Clusters are great for Seti@Home, but they suck ass in another kind of number crunching.
Btw, BlueGene/L actually is actually only 18TFlops when doing calculations that need lot of communication with other nodes. Every other processor is dedicated for communication only. BlueGene reaches its peak rate only in cluster favorable calculations. (It's still much better than VT's machine for non-cluster favorable stuff).
This just proves that you really can't get a Real Supercomputer for free. But sometimes you almost can.
I just wonder what happened to battery life. I wouldn't sacrifice a minute of battery life for few hudred MHz's... Hopefully they were able to lower operation voltage of the processor. Well, maybe it's still ok.
If Apple would add IBM style trackpoint pointing devices to their laptops I wouldn't even have to consider buying a PC laptop... They could leave the touchpad attached so it would please everyone. I'd easily pay 20$ or more for trackpoint...
P4 and Xeons are pretty much same stuff, right... Both are x86 compatible, both (in theory, not yet) run X86-64 extensions. Itanium is something very different, it runs IA64 instuctions which are very incompatible with x86-64.
For me this looks like the last attempt to screw things up for AMD and x86-64 architecture in high-end workstations / servers.
Let's assume that you are a pretty big boss in a normal company. Your company has decided to upgrade their High-End computers. You have basically two options:
Either you recommend 100% Intel Hardware that runs current 32-bit stuff fine and is ready to be upgraded or is even compatible with IA-64 stuff. x86-64 compliance is hardly mentioned in specs. If there even is such compatibility. 64-bit thing is important for future. Not probably yet, but in future. (Xeon/Itanium mixed platform)
or
"50% Intel compatible" AMD platform which runs current 32-bit stuff very well, but the x86-64 instruction set is non-compatible with Intels High-End IA-64 infrastructure. So only partial Intel compatibility, sounds bad... Thats like 50% Intel incompatible... (A64 / Opteron platform)
You are really going to have hard time convincing yourself and your even bigger bosses, that Non-Intel compatibility is good for your business. Mainly because Intel compatibility has been THE most important thing for last 15 years or so...
Then Intel just starts it's advertising/lobbying campaings and hopes that this is enough to turn the tide for them...
ps. if there are typos just blame the damn internet-cafe's german kezboard... somebody has swapped mz Z and Y.
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I don't really care if Music Match is crap, because I just happen to know that iTunes is almost as bad.
It's slow (in a Win32-PC anyway), eats tens of MB's of memory, creates couple of useless processes and f*cks up your entire mp3-collection if you are not careful enough.
Yes, it has nice music store, some nice features (like party playlist), but basically it's just a bloated piece of software that feels as nimble as a 10ft wide paintbrush when you are trying to fit a complete essay to a single A4/letter using kanji writing... Or at least it feels like that after several years with 'few hundred kb' Winamp 1.xx and 2.xx's
And yes, I have an iPod and I do love it. I just can't see the advantages of iTunes when i'm just playing my mp3's in Windows. iTunes is probably better on a Mac when you don't have to load all the UI candy for just one program.
Mars is quite hostile to all flying things and even for parachutes, because surface pressure of Martian athmosphere is something like 7 mbars. Which is less than 1% of Earth's.
That is also one reason why manned Mars flights are so hard. You have to have fuel even for landing as you just can't brake enough with parachutes. And getting decent amount of fuel for landing and liftoff for a vehicle capable of sustaining couple of astronauts/taikonauts/cosmonauts for over a year in space is technically pretty challenging.
It doesn't matter how high it goes unless it can achieve orbital velocity. At 200km orbital velocity you need to achieve in order to stay in orbit is 7.78 km/sec or if you prefer 28 008 km/h, 17403 mph or ~22 Machs. SpaceShipOne only reaches about 2.9 Machs.
For certain kind of calculations Virginia Tech cluster is about as useful as one X-server with two processors... Each node in Real Supercomputer can communicate about gazillion times faster with other nodes when compared to nodes in cluster based on slow 1gb/s ethernet. Clusters are great for Seti@Home, but they suck ass in another kind of number crunching. Btw, BlueGene/L actually is actually only 18TFlops when doing calculations that need lot of communication with other nodes. Every other processor is dedicated for communication only. BlueGene reaches its peak rate only in cluster favorable calculations. (It's still much better than VT's machine for non-cluster favorable stuff). This just proves that you really can't get a Real Supercomputer for free. But sometimes you almost can.
I just wonder what happened to battery life. I wouldn't sacrifice a minute of battery life for few hudred MHz's... Hopefully they were able to lower operation voltage of the processor. Well, maybe it's still ok. If Apple would add IBM style trackpoint pointing devices to their laptops I wouldn't even have to consider buying a PC laptop... They could leave the touchpad attached so it would please everyone. I'd easily pay 20$ or more for trackpoint...
Here in Finland penguins basically taste like ice cream. http://www.valio.fi/tuotteet/jaatelot/pingviini.ht ml
Local manufacturer produces various tastes of cones under brand 'Penguin' (Pingviini in finnish).
P4 and Xeons are pretty much same stuff, right... Both are x86 compatible, both (in theory, not yet) run X86-64 extensions. Itanium is something very different, it runs IA64 instuctions which are very incompatible with x86-64.
For me this looks like the last attempt to screw things up for AMD and x86-64 architecture in high-end workstations / servers.
Let's assume that you are a pretty big boss in a normal company. Your company has decided to upgrade their High-End computers. You have basically two options:
Either you recommend 100% Intel Hardware that runs current 32-bit stuff fine and is ready to be upgraded or is even compatible with IA-64 stuff. x86-64 compliance is hardly mentioned in specs. If there even is such compatibility. 64-bit thing is important for future. Not probably yet, but in future. (Xeon/Itanium mixed platform)
or
"50% Intel compatible" AMD platform which runs current 32-bit stuff very well, but the x86-64 instruction set is non-compatible with Intels High-End IA-64 infrastructure. So only partial Intel compatibility, sounds bad... Thats like 50% Intel incompatible... (A64 / Opteron platform)
You are really going to have hard time convincing yourself and your even bigger bosses, that Non-Intel compatibility is good for your business. Mainly because Intel compatibility has been THE most important thing for last 15 years or so...
Then Intel just starts it's advertising/lobbying campaings and hopes that this is enough to turn the tide for them...
ps. if there are typos just blame the damn internet-cafe's german kezboard... somebody has swapped mz Z and Y.