It's not so much that that is expensive, it's just that a Gigabyte AMD770 board is $100, 4GB of DDR2 is $50... so couple that with $70 savings on the CPU, and you're looking at $688 for Intel and $370 for AMD. As always, you have to pay a major premium for the top 15-20% of performance.
Now, I do have to agree that that both of those options are cheap as far as the history goes. *Especially* the Phenom II option... $400 for that motherboard/cpu/ram option is really cheap, and an awesome upgrade if you need the power.
His own market research shows that most of them give up after 30 seconds. That's his market research data. He can factor it in the design and get their money, or he can stick to his vision and lose their business. It's really that simple.
His market research says that they be using the hint button after 30 seconds if available... It doesn't say that they'd be closing the game down and asking for a refund if one was not available.
I remember the games where I had to sit down and think for more than 30 seconds, I feel good about solving the problem, and I recommend them to my friends. I finish the games where a series of simple steps is required (or hints are easily available), and I never come back or think about them again.
Of course, that's just me. Nonetheless, his market research says nothing about the user's reaction to complex problems with no hints available. His market could be people like me, or people like you, we don't know. You're advocating your preference as the only right way to appeal to everyone.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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The old tales about being able to do things faster and with many fewer lines of code in Ruby are not just fluff. For example being able, in RoR, to take the submission from a 40-element form on a page, and put it in your database with just "my_object.create(params)" is pretty sligging frick, if you ask me. Of course that is only a very simple example, but still.
Well, in Cake it's '$this->Model->create(); $this->Model->save($this->data);'. As examples go, that's not very convincing.
Also that the chipset held up while the CPU was running that as well.
The chipset was running at its usual speed. You don't need to overclock the chipset to overclock the CPU -- that's only the case when the multiplier is locked and you have to get the FSB/HT running higher to get the CPU to run higher... and nobody uses those CPUs for serious overclocking.
If you have "years of experience" with Java yet think of learning Objective C as anything but absolutely trivial, then face it: you're a lameass programmer.
Don't you have years worth of favourite code snipets in C++, Java, etc. that you've developed and reuse in your projects? Switching to Objective-C isn't about learning the trivial syntax differences, it's about having to rewrite what you have because almost nobody has any Objective-C code lying around.
Why does that it have to be one or the other? Microsoft has plenty of people to work on both. Most likely, the people working on making the new taskbar know nothing about how to fix security holes, so you can't even argue that everybody should *only* work on the security holes.
It's the next version, not a service pack. I, for one, expect them to work on improving as many things as possible.
Man I just wish I could explain to business people the failure of performance measurement. I almost feel having no metrics is better than having bad metrics.
That's the problem of trying to eliminate the personal touch in evaluating someone's performance. The aim to have objective performance metrics almost always causes a problem as people find workaround for them.
I remember my early days as a web developer for a large company -- our metric was the number of broken links on our page. Nuts, eh?
Where I work, I evaluate my team based on goals set at the beginning of the period, and they get a mark on how I feel they've accomplished those goals. There are guidelines in place on what meeting or exceeding expectations means, but it's still down to what I feel.
It's not a perfect system, but it works a lot better than meaningless "objective" metrics.
The problem was that MS used anti-competitive measures to hurt Netscape's market share and promote I.E.
Yes, but they also made a better product. Netscape stopped improving their product (and in fact kept making it slower and buggier), while MS made something that worked fairly fast and didn't crash as much.
Who knows what would've happened if "Netscape Firefox" came out when IE3 was out -- it would've been a lot harder to displace its user base.
For example, an SLR 10mm lens is vastly cheaper than that equivalent for a professional video camera.
SLR lenses are much cheaper than video lenses because they don't have to keep the same focal distance through different zoom ranges, while video lenses do... I.e. while taking pictures, you can zoom in/out and refocus, while with video lenses you have to be able to keep focus while zooming.
That's just one of many limitations of doing video on an SLR camera. I look at it as a great addition to current video equipment (fantastic for some very narrow DOF shots that would require a very expensive video camera instead), but it'll hardly replace it.
When I had a crappy computer, I used to run games at 640x480 resolution. Now I run the same games at 16900x1200, and the gameplay is improved not one bit./blockquote?
16900, that has to be a 900" wide screen monitor?:)
But, seriously, try something like Civ4, Galciv2, etc.... games where a lot of information is displayed on the screen. The higher the resolution, the further you can zoom out and still be able to see the details. It improves the gameplay dramatically.
That's ridiculous, it costs more to ship to Canada than to Europe.:( Not to mention that UPS will take another $100 or so in "brokerage fees" and you'll end up paying more for shipping than for the phone itself.
I think you missed one obvious item for which the absolute value of the house matters (a lot) -- the mortgage. If you owe more than your house is worth, than you don't have a collateral for the mortgage loan, and you need to either pay up or lose the house.
"Many of the overnight successes we've witnessed enjoyed the benefits of timing and visibility, advantages quickly being eroded due to market oversaturation," Steinberg added. "Let's put it this way: I wouldn't tell anyone to quit their day job just yet. As with any Cinderella story, chances of recreating this kind of success are few and far between."
And that's very true. If that same game came out now, it would make peanuts... it was simply the only decent puzzle game available with the App Store launch, and it's a very special case.
Me, I just have a 6-yrs-old P4 laptop which, compared to nowadays new models w/ Core Duo, isn't much different. This because there are other bottlenecks: hd speed, RAM, etc.
A 6-year old P4 laptop is very different from a new one, in just about every way except for maybe hard-drives which only got marginally faster. The CPUs use less power, video cards (and even chipsets) have hardware video decoding for many hours of DVD watching on one battery, the RAM is tremendously faster than 6 years ago, screens are brighter... and, well, CPUs themselves are a lot more powerful allowing you to do many workstation-type tasks on a laptop.
So, sure, if you only use your laptop to check email, surf the web, and write documents, and you don't care for long battery life, a 6 year old laptop is fine. It's not a grab at consumer's pockets if you don't need it, as there's plenty of us who do need more out of our computers. Mind you, this article is about a new *server* chip, so...:
Even for middle business servers, we live with two 8-yrs-old Sun machines which are more than adequate for keeping up all the services we need internally. We never have CPU spikes.
Not every server is a "middle business" server. Large-scale database servers, high-load web servers, simulation machines, rendering, research, video editing... all of these need (1) as much computational power as possible, and (2) for as little electric power as possible.
Apparently, they have fined him a few hundred dollars for previous "delusional" suits, and he now has to pre-pay a fee to file any more lawsuits, unless in "immediate physical danger". It's not exactly a counter-lawsuit, but it's pretty close:).
Poor judge who has to deal with it and waste time on actually writing a full motion to dismiss the case, including references to supreme court cases explaining what is delusional and what's not. A fun read nonetheless:).
Note that I don't lay this blame on Microsoft (which is strange...) the business world expects a lot of things that are either misplaced, or a waste of time. Database like functions from a spreadsheet, fancy document layout tools (not useless, but not really suitable for a program with the primary purpose of writing letters and memos), powerpoint (the whole thing).
Those are some pretty big attacks on popular office tools. A word processor is not used primarily to write letters and memos, documentation is most certainly one of its prime uses, and you need to be able to lay out your diagrams, tables, and images in such a way for people to understand what you're writing. Spreadsheets are an obvious way to represent database tables, so it allows users to create mini-databases without the hassle of an actual DB where creating one would provide no advantages. That's why "pseudo-database" functionality is almost more important than actual number crunching. Finally, the usefulness of a presentation tool is obvious to anyone who has worked in an office for more than a few months.
Do you have any suggestions on how to do things better to back up your claims that these things are a waste of time?
From those emails, it seems to me like they discussed using the name GPU to build the market together, there were no discussions about pricing. And, from the emails, ATI guys were saying that they wanted to use the name VPU, instead. I don't see anything particular damning in there. The ATI response to your quote above was something along the lines of "we thought R300 is more than just a graphics chip, so we wanted to go with VPU to distinguish it", it wasn't "yeah, you're right, let's price fix".
I'd say that says pretty loud and clear that there wasn't much of a case here, and they paid some symbolic sum to make it go away instead of wasting the time and money on lawyers to fight it. Whoever agreed to it must've thought the same, otherwise they'd never agree to such a small settlement.
How is that going to help the rest of the affected customers?
The rest of the affected customers bought cards from manufacturers that simply use nvidia/ati chips. You can't sue nvidia/ati for what those manufacturers charged for their cards... unless you claim that they forced them to sell at increased prices, but that'd be a different lawsuit altogether.
I found it very entertaining until I entered the alien spaceship, and then it turned into Quake -- dark, closed quarters, just shoot at anything that moves, and shoot a lot. There was very little strategy at all in that part of the game, and the way it finished with a "boss" battle where you have to hit certain parts of the ship to destroy it was just totally boring -- that was basically the original Doom with better graphics.
For me, it was two games in one, with the first one being awesome, and second being totally bad.
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It's not so much that that is expensive, it's just that a Gigabyte AMD770 board is $100, 4GB of DDR2 is $50... so couple that with $70 savings on the CPU, and you're looking at $688 for Intel and $370 for AMD. As always, you have to pay a major premium for the top 15-20% of performance.
Now, I do have to agree that that both of those options are cheap as far as the history goes. *Especially* the Phenom II option... $400 for that motherboard/cpu/ram option is really cheap, and an awesome upgrade if you need the power.
His market research says that they be using the hint button after 30 seconds if available... It doesn't say that they'd be closing the game down and asking for a refund if one was not available.
I remember the games where I had to sit down and think for more than 30 seconds, I feel good about solving the problem, and I recommend them to my friends. I finish the games where a series of simple steps is required (or hints are easily available), and I never come back or think about them again.
Of course, that's just me. Nonetheless, his market research says nothing about the user's reaction to complex problems with no hints available. His market could be people like me, or people like you, we don't know. You're advocating your preference as the only right way to appeal to everyone.
Well, in Cake it's '$this->Model->create(); $this->Model->save($this->data);'. As examples go, that's not very convincing.
Also that the chipset held up while the CPU was running that as well.
The chipset was running at its usual speed. You don't need to overclock the chipset to overclock the CPU -- that's only the case when the multiplier is locked and you have to get the FSB/HT running higher to get the CPU to run higher... and nobody uses those CPUs for serious overclocking.
Don't you have years worth of favourite code snipets in C++, Java, etc. that you've developed and reuse in your projects? Switching to Objective-C isn't about learning the trivial syntax differences, it's about having to rewrite what you have because almost nobody has any Objective-C code lying around.
Why does that it have to be one or the other? Microsoft has plenty of people to work on both. Most likely, the people working on making the new taskbar know nothing about how to fix security holes, so you can't even argue that everybody should *only* work on the security holes.
It's the next version, not a service pack. I, for one, expect them to work on improving as many things as possible.
That's the problem of trying to eliminate the personal touch in evaluating someone's performance. The aim to have objective performance metrics almost always causes a problem as people find workaround for them.
I remember my early days as a web developer for a large company -- our metric was the number of broken links on our page. Nuts, eh?
Where I work, I evaluate my team based on goals set at the beginning of the period, and they get a mark on how I feel they've accomplished those goals. There are guidelines in place on what meeting or exceeding expectations means, but it's still down to what I feel.
It's not a perfect system, but it works a lot better than meaningless "objective" metrics.
Yes, but they also made a better product. Netscape stopped improving their product (and in fact kept making it slower and buggier), while MS made something that worked fairly fast and didn't crash as much.
Who knows what would've happened if "Netscape Firefox" came out when IE3 was out -- it would've been a lot harder to displace its user base.
SLR lenses are much cheaper than video lenses because they don't have to keep the same focal distance through different zoom ranges, while video lenses do... I.e. while taking pictures, you can zoom in/out and refocus, while with video lenses you have to be able to keep focus while zooming.
That's just one of many limitations of doing video on an SLR camera. I look at it as a great addition to current video equipment (fantastic for some very narrow DOF shots that would require a very expensive video camera instead), but it'll hardly replace it.
If you do, then why do you ask who needs that kind of space? Video files are quite large, it's pretty easy to fill up 40GB or so...
That's ridiculous, it costs more to ship to Canada than to Europe. :( Not to mention that UPS will take another $100 or so in "brokerage fees" and you'll end up paying more for shipping than for the phone itself.
Where do you find a private broker to do this?
I think you missed one obvious item for which the absolute value of the house matters (a lot) -- the mortgage. If you owe more than your house is worth, than you don't have a collateral for the mortgage loan, and you need to either pay up or lose the house.
From TFA:
And that's very true. If that same game came out now, it would make peanuts... it was simply the only decent puzzle game available with the App Store launch, and it's a very special case.
A 6-year old P4 laptop is very different from a new one, in just about every way except for maybe hard-drives which only got marginally faster. The CPUs use less power, video cards (and even chipsets) have hardware video decoding for many hours of DVD watching on one battery, the RAM is tremendously faster than 6 years ago, screens are brighter... and, well, CPUs themselves are a lot more powerful allowing you to do many workstation-type tasks on a laptop.
So, sure, if you only use your laptop to check email, surf the web, and write documents, and you don't care for long battery life, a 6 year old laptop is fine. It's not a grab at consumer's pockets if you don't need it, as there's plenty of us who do need more out of our computers. Mind you, this article is about a new *server* chip, so...:
Not every server is a "middle business" server. Large-scale database servers, high-load web servers, simulation machines, rendering, research, video editing... all of these need (1) as much computational power as possible, and (2) for as little electric power as possible.
Apparently, they have fined him a few hundred dollars for previous "delusional" suits, and he now has to pre-pay a fee to file any more lawsuits, unless in "immediate physical danger". It's not exactly a counter-lawsuit, but it's pretty close :).
Poor judge who has to deal with it and waste time on actually writing a full motion to dismiss the case, including references to supreme court cases explaining what is delusional and what's not. A fun read nonetheless :).
Those are some pretty big attacks on popular office tools. A word processor is not used primarily to write letters and memos, documentation is most certainly one of its prime uses, and you need to be able to lay out your diagrams, tables, and images in such a way for people to understand what you're writing. Spreadsheets are an obvious way to represent database tables, so it allows users to create mini-databases without the hassle of an actual DB where creating one would provide no advantages. That's why "pseudo-database" functionality is almost more important than actual number crunching. Finally, the usefulness of a presentation tool is obvious to anyone who has worked in an office for more than a few months.
Do you have any suggestions on how to do things better to back up your claims that these things are a waste of time?
Well, that has already happened, so they might as well try something new.
It's modded funny, but wouldn't that be the best opening for his presentation? I'd go for it!
From those emails, it seems to me like they discussed using the name GPU to build the market together, there were no discussions about pricing. And, from the emails, ATI guys were saying that they wanted to use the name VPU, instead. I don't see anything particular damning in there. The ATI response to your quote above was something along the lines of "we thought R300 is more than just a graphics chip, so we wanted to go with VPU to distinguish it", it wasn't "yeah, you're right, let's price fix".
I'd say that says pretty loud and clear that there wasn't much of a case here, and they paid some symbolic sum to make it go away instead of wasting the time and money on lawyers to fight it. Whoever agreed to it must've thought the same, otherwise they'd never agree to such a small settlement.
The rest of the affected customers bought cards from manufacturers that simply use nvidia/ati chips. You can't sue nvidia/ati for what those manufacturers charged for their cards... unless you claim that they forced them to sell at increased prices, but that'd be a different lawsuit altogether.
I found it very entertaining until I entered the alien spaceship, and then it turned into Quake -- dark, closed quarters, just shoot at anything that moves, and shoot a lot. There was very little strategy at all in that part of the game, and the way it finished with a "boss" battle where you have to hit certain parts of the ship to destroy it was just totally boring -- that was basically the original Doom with better graphics.
For me, it was two games in one, with the first one being awesome, and second being totally bad.