But, you missed the business model. They already had (and sold) decoders and latches and buffers that "digital designers" were using for other purposes. This was the one chip to rule them all, one chip to find them, one chip to bring them all and in the darkness require them (thus driving sales...)
More like, my boss in 1991 believed in the value of cutting edge hardware (more than the value of paying people anything above minimum market rate...) Today I work for a startup that supplies us from the lower end of the Dell catalog. Not that I'm complaining, the hardware is no longer the limiting factor, although I could use a third screen....
You don't vote "against" a candidate - you vote FOR a candidate.
Maybe you don't, I, personally, have never seen a candidate worth voting for, my vote is "for" the least of evils, and more often "against" the greater.
It's also disappointing that you'd classify anyone who voted for Bush as an "abrasive ignorant jerk," as if thinking people cannot have legitimate differences and disagreements.
I was responding to somebody who was being overly pedantic, if you get pedantic about what I actually posted, I made no correlation between Bush voters and "abrasive ignorant jerks," just that the term can be applied to about half of us. Which half depends mostly on your own personal viewpoints... (i.e. do you consider Talk Radio a source of accurate information from which to form your own personal opinions)
Nearly 70 and doing everything I can to avoid a computer for my entire retirement?
You miss the Kurzweil reference, if medical progress keeps pace, 70 will be young.
I think the half-way mark 1991 makes an interesting reference point: in 1991, my desktop PC at work cost 2 months salary, it was a 16MHz 386 with a 640x480 resolution 15" color monitor. My desktop PC at work today cost about 3 days pay and is a 2+GHz i5 with two 1920x1080 24" flat panels.
My simplistic understanding of "voxel" is that it is a 3D version of the 2D "pixel".
You can render them, represent them, store them, compress them, do whatever you want with them, but at the end of the day a voxel is just a conceptual volume of a discrete cube of space in a Cartesian coordinate system.
Noone who matters was ever in doubt that gameplay matters. But if you, as a developer, want to get paid at some point before actually having an early beta available for people to pre-order, you're gonna have to work for someone who already has the money. And if you're working for someone, expect to be asked to do as they say.
Sorry, too lazy to read TFA in-depth, but isn't the point that Minecraft netted $50M essentially "up front" before this release?
I'm sorry, 50.1% was intended to be an obvious hip-shot from memory. To get research based about it:
In 2000, 52.1% of voting U.S. Americans voted against George W. Bush.
In 2004, only 49.3% of voting U.S. Americans voted against him.
So, I can see how George W. Bush's actions from 2000 to 2004, in total, could be argued to have won over 2.8% of voting U.S. Americans, although there are mitigating effects such as those people who are pre-disposed to vote for/against a sitting president (I believe the balance still favors for), and the variation in his opposing candidates, which I would characterize as creepy in 2000 vs. un-likeable in 2004.
My point is, not all U.S. Americans are abrasive ignorant jerks - only about half of us.
Agree - speedstep in a notebook running on battery makes some sense, but if your desktop CPU is drawing less current than your CFL bulb, what are you really trying to accomplish with speedstep?
If you dig down into the hardware, are those 232 ports actually implemented as a USB-232 converter?
I was shocked that my Dell i5 came with a native DB-9 232 port on the MB - it looks like the real deal in the drivers section of Windows... I'm thrilled to have it, but shocked that Dell would spend the extra $0.15 for the DB-9 connector.
Because you can power off the graphics card and still do 1080p HD video decoding, or play some lower-end games. That'll shave a good 300w off of your total power usage. Not to be scoffed at.
Damn, if you just buy a $300 nettop, the whole system only consumes 30w while doing 1080p HD video decoding.
Last time I had a graphics card that consumed 300W was... well, never. Live 2 years behind the curve and you can save a lot of CO2 emissions.
It is for people who demand the max performance and aren't concerned with the stiff price premium to have it.
For my, personal taste, I prefer Atoms - they draw less power, I can leave 3 of them them booted and running 24/7 for the cost of a single "barnburner" like the latest i7 running 8 hours a day, and they do what I need.
However, if you need the performance, increasing the cost of a processor from $150 to $1150 is only going to increase your total system cost by a factor of 3 (2 if you pay for a copy of Windows...), for a performance increase of 4x or more....
The value proposition is there, much better than the (warning: bad car analogy ahead) Ferrari to Honda performance vs. value proposition.
The question is: do you really need it? If all you're doing is booting to a web-browser 30 seconds faster, buy an Atom and leave it booted up - hell, buy an Atom for every room in the house and save yourself the time spent walking to/from the PC.
At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public.
OK, so the owner is secretly diluting the shares he promised to the employees, is that the problem? Because I would expect that to be illegal. Insider trading, no?
A bigger issue than the dilution (which amounted to approximately 1-2%), was the representation of "the deal," and his participation in the risk. At the time, what was represented to the employees was that the owner was "participating in the deal" and buying a "larger quantity of shares" than the employees. What was not disclosed was the variation in his price and restriction period.
Imagine if the mayor of your town (someone you have known for years, and are supposed to respect and trust) asks you, the public, to buy into a bond issue and represents that, despite the city's dire financial straits and D-- credit rating, he himself is also participating in the offering. What would happen if a similar disparity of terms were revealed after the public participants were locked in?
Amusingly, in my company's case, the shares did fall to 1/4 their value before recovering, they recovered to roughly 2x by the time the year lockout expired (so, employees profited by a factor of 4x at that time) and, due to a.com tie-in, spiraled to 12x that value within the next 2 years. The 12x inflation leaked back out after.com popped.
In post.com years, the company first acquired a trust fund backed family as loyal supporters, and later was courted by big oil money. As you might imagine, children raised in the '60s and supported their entire life by trust fund money (beyond living expense money they all received guaranteed annual $25K Christmas "bonuses," and some of them were generating income from their own investment activity) , these people were a little on the idealistic side. When the big oil money came around and proposed what was essentially a pump and dump scheme, they all balked based on the fact that big oil wanted to keep a lion's share of the profit from the pump and dump, they still hadn't really learned that "he who has the gold, makes the rules..."
The little folks need to step up and push for more transparency in their government, now that it is actually possible. If politicians and big wallets want to scratch each other's backs, make it bright and clear for all to see what is going on... especially other politicians who can point it out to gain popularity from their colleagues weakness.
If the shareholders want the CEO to pay the judgment, they can put that in his employment contract before it happens, or they can condition his future employment on him paying it. It's completely between the CEO and the shareholders.
The problem is that "the shareholders" (of any voting block size) are all "in the club" and would never ask a potential new CEO to accept anything as *shudder* gauche as liability. The things that are deemed acceptable, even for owners of tiny little $10M companies, wouldn't pass the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" fairness test of an 8 year old.
Apparently, it is accepted as fair and reasonable for an owner to offer a block of restricted shares to the employees for purchase to help the company during a time of crisis. These shares are priced at 1/2 current market and may not be sold for a period of one year. The year represents risk, and the 1/2 market price represents reward... sound fair so far? At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public. The deal was "approved" by a paid "ethics consultant." Pure genius.
He who has the gold makes the rules, indeed, and those rules invariably give him more gold in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
http://singinst.org/overview/whatisthesingularity/
The question is, will the "smarter than human intelligence" see any reason to improve human lifespan?
Visions of the powercells in the Matrix just popped to mind....
But, you missed the business model. They already had (and sold) decoders and latches and buffers that "digital designers" were using for other purposes. This was the one chip to rule them all, one chip to find them, one chip to bring them all and in the darkness require them (thus driving sales...)
Good thing you got that raise!
More like, my boss in 1991 believed in the value of cutting edge hardware (more than the value of paying people anything above minimum market rate...) Today I work for a startup that supplies us from the lower end of the Dell catalog. Not that I'm complaining, the hardware is no longer the limiting factor, although I could use a third screen....
You don't vote "against" a candidate - you vote FOR a candidate.
Maybe you don't, I, personally, have never seen a candidate worth voting for, my vote is "for" the least of evils, and more often "against" the greater.
It's also disappointing that you'd classify anyone who voted for Bush as an "abrasive ignorant jerk," as if thinking people cannot have legitimate differences and disagreements.
I was responding to somebody who was being overly pedantic, if you get pedantic about what I actually posted, I made no correlation between Bush voters and "abrasive ignorant jerks," just that the term can be applied to about half of us. Which half depends mostly on your own personal viewpoints... (i.e. do you consider Talk Radio a source of accurate information from which to form your own personal opinions)
I'm pretty sure that's not true.
50.1% of Americans voted against him coming back for a second term (and a first one, for that matter.)
You got that backwards. Bush Jr *received* 50.7% of the vote. Perhaps you were thinking of Bill Clinton who did not receive 50% in either election.
http://www.usconstitution.net/elections.html
I think you misread me - I don't like anybody who has been in the President's office in my lifetime. I dislike some more than others...
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips where better?
I don't know, but this is surely cool:
http://www.visual6502.org/
Be glad you got to know your grandparents... some people miss out on that experience entirely.
Obligatory:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of zero cost 4004s....
Nearly 70 and doing everything I can to avoid a computer for my entire retirement?
You miss the Kurzweil reference, if medical progress keeps pace, 70 will be young.
I think the half-way mark 1991 makes an interesting reference point: in 1991, my desktop PC at work cost 2 months salary, it was a 16MHz 386 with a 640x480 resolution 15" color monitor. My desktop PC at work today cost about 3 days pay and is a 2+GHz i5 with two 1920x1080 24" flat panels.
If we've come this far in 40 years, where will we be in 40 more?
Kind of my point - I didn't say which half was abrasive, or that it even correlates to voting patterns.
However, there are some statistics about voting patterns and ignorance...
My simplistic understanding of "voxel" is that it is a 3D version of the 2D "pixel".
You can render them, represent them, store them, compress them, do whatever you want with them, but at the end of the day a voxel is just a conceptual volume of a discrete cube of space in a Cartesian coordinate system.
Noone who matters was ever in doubt that gameplay matters. But if you, as a developer, want to get paid at some point before actually having an early beta available for people to pre-order, you're gonna have to work for someone who already has the money. And if you're working for someone, expect to be asked to do as they say.
Sorry, too lazy to read TFA in-depth, but isn't the point that Minecraft netted $50M essentially "up front" before this release?
I'm sorry, 50.1% was intended to be an obvious hip-shot from memory. To get research based about it:
In 2000, 52.1% of voting U.S. Americans voted against George W. Bush.
In 2004, only 49.3% of voting U.S. Americans voted against him.
So, I can see how George W. Bush's actions from 2000 to 2004, in total, could be argued to have won over 2.8% of voting U.S. Americans, although there are mitigating effects such as those people who are pre-disposed to vote for/against a sitting president (I believe the balance still favors for), and the variation in his opposing candidates, which I would characterize as creepy in 2000 vs. un-likeable in 2004.
My point is, not all U.S. Americans are abrasive ignorant jerks - only about half of us.
I'm pretty sure that's not true.
50.1% of Americans voted against him coming back for a second term (and a first one, for that matter.)
Flashback 2006: the worst thing about owning my new MacBook
...the fanbois are just awful.
it's actually the only major company in the industry that does have such research center. I wish I worked there :-P
Google X might be larger, if anyone knew where it was....
Agree - speedstep in a notebook running on battery makes some sense, but if your desktop CPU is drawing less current than your CFL bulb, what are you really trying to accomplish with speedstep?
If you dig down into the hardware, are those 232 ports actually implemented as a USB-232 converter?
I was shocked that my Dell i5 came with a native DB-9 232 port on the MB - it looks like the real deal in the drivers section of Windows... I'm thrilled to have it, but shocked that Dell would spend the extra $0.15 for the DB-9 connector.
It's a giant RFID tag that the aliens can read from their cloaked ship in orbit...
Because you can power off the graphics card and still do 1080p HD video decoding, or play some lower-end games. That'll shave a good 300w off of your total power usage. Not to be scoffed at.
Damn, if you just buy a $300 nettop, the whole system only consumes 30w while doing 1080p HD video decoding.
Last time I had a graphics card that consumed 300W was... well, never. Live 2 years behind the curve and you can save a lot of CO2 emissions.
It is for people who demand the max performance and aren't concerned with the stiff price premium to have it.
For my, personal taste, I prefer Atoms - they draw less power, I can leave 3 of them them booted and running 24/7 for the cost of a single "barnburner" like the latest i7 running 8 hours a day, and they do what I need.
However, if you need the performance, increasing the cost of a processor from $150 to $1150 is only going to increase your total system cost by a factor of 3 (2 if you pay for a copy of Windows...), for a performance increase of 4x or more....
The value proposition is there, much better than the (warning: bad car analogy ahead) Ferrari to Honda performance vs. value proposition.
The question is: do you really need it? If all you're doing is booting to a web-browser 30 seconds faster, buy an Atom and leave it booted up - hell, buy an Atom for every room in the house and save yourself the time spent walking to/from the PC.
At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public.
OK, so the owner is secretly diluting the shares he promised to the employees, is that the problem? Because I would expect that to be illegal. Insider trading, no?
A bigger issue than the dilution (which amounted to approximately 1-2%), was the representation of "the deal," and his participation in the risk. At the time, what was represented to the employees was that the owner was "participating in the deal" and buying a "larger quantity of shares" than the employees. What was not disclosed was the variation in his price and restriction period.
Imagine if the mayor of your town (someone you have known for years, and are supposed to respect and trust) asks you, the public, to buy into a bond issue and represents that, despite the city's dire financial straits and D-- credit rating, he himself is also participating in the offering. What would happen if a similar disparity of terms were revealed after the public participants were locked in?
Amusingly, in my company's case, the shares did fall to 1/4 their value before recovering, they recovered to roughly 2x by the time the year lockout expired (so, employees profited by a factor of 4x at that time) and, due to a .com tie-in, spiraled to 12x that value within the next 2 years. The 12x inflation leaked back out after .com popped.
In post .com years, the company first acquired a trust fund backed family as loyal supporters, and later was courted by big oil money. As you might imagine, children raised in the '60s and supported their entire life by trust fund money (beyond living expense money they all received guaranteed annual $25K Christmas "bonuses," and some of them were generating income from their own investment activity) , these people were a little on the idealistic side. When the big oil money came around and proposed what was essentially a pump and dump scheme, they all balked based on the fact that big oil wanted to keep a lion's share of the profit from the pump and dump, they still hadn't really learned that "he who has the gold, makes the rules..."
The little folks need to step up and push for more transparency in their government, now that it is actually possible. If politicians and big wallets want to scratch each other's backs, make it bright and clear for all to see what is going on... especially other politicians who can point it out to gain popularity from their colleagues weakness.
If the shareholders want the CEO to pay the judgment, they can put that in his employment contract before it happens, or they can condition his future employment on him paying it. It's completely between the CEO and the shareholders.
The problem is that "the shareholders" (of any voting block size) are all "in the club" and would never ask a potential new CEO to accept anything as *shudder* gauche as liability. The things that are deemed acceptable, even for owners of tiny little $10M companies, wouldn't pass the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" fairness test of an 8 year old.
Apparently, it is accepted as fair and reasonable for an owner to offer a block of restricted shares to the employees for purchase to help the company during a time of crisis. These shares are priced at 1/2 current market and may not be sold for a period of one year. The year represents risk, and the 1/2 market price represents reward... sound fair so far? At the same time, the owner (secretly) offers himself a block of shares four times as large as the employees at 1/4 market price, restricted for a period of 6 months. This only comes out after 6 months have passed and the owner's sale of a portion of these shares is made public. The deal was "approved" by a paid "ethics consultant." Pure genius.
He who has the gold makes the rules, indeed, and those rules invariably give him more gold in the end.