It seems the beast has awoken. They were so far behind in the chip-war with AMD for so damn long, it seemed their market share was getting nibbled to death.
Now they finally seem to have woken up and, by god, they are really moving now, aren't they. $9bn in 45nm fabs? A wafer of 80-core chips already? Speaking as a one-time AMD Fanboi, I have to say - the daddy is back.
There's more to the Prime edition than meets the eye.
Re:Toilet seats are a terrible comparison
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
·
· Score: 1
I beleieve you, but remember that most colds are transmitted through the air. If you aren't visiting different sites full of infected staff all the time and just staying in the same ol' place with the same ol' bugs, you are certainly less likely to catch colds.
However, try staying in that routine for a few years and then go back to on-site support. I guarantee you'll be more susceptible than ever. Constant moderate exposure doesn't make you completely immune to anything (you still get sick), but it does improve your immunity to almost everything. The body adapts to its environment.
Toilet seats are a terrible comparison
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
·
· Score: 5, Informative
400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat
Okay, just to clear this up: the average toilet seat is, believe it or not, one of the most sterile and least bacteria-ridden places you will find anywhere in your household. It is usually a barren plastic surface with little purchase for bacteria or moisture, it is cleaned and disinfected more than most surfaces, and the only real chance it has of catching anything that bacteria feed on is if someone ends up smearing crap on it - I'm really hope that's not the norm. In addition, what is unfortunately likely to end up on the seat is urine, which is totally sterile and would kill rather than feed most bacteria. Anyone who ever cleans their house will have a pretty sterile seat, and there is not much chance that anything you do pick up on the back of your legs is going to be transferred directly to your face by your hand.
Just about the opposite of all the points above can be said about your keyboard and mouse. It should come as absolutely no surprise that these things are riddled with bacteria...
As is your skin. All of it. You are fucking covered in the little guys, and it's rarely a problem. If you're the sort of person who's likely to get sick from a mouse that hasn't been disinfected, your life is too sterile for you to survive easily in the wild. Self-cleaning mice and mobility-scooters for the morbidly obese - they amount to the same thing: people's poor lifestyles causing them to be unfit to survive normally. I understand why people need these things, but if they'd exercised moderation in all things from the start, they wouldn't be in this situation.
I recently installed a fanless 7600GT. This thing makes no noise at all and, with careful internal cabling, has no problem being passively cooled.
Now, playing HL2 at a resolution of 1680x1050 with HDR, AF, all the fancies turned on, it played fine but with a (barely) noticeable judder when things got really busy.
So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.
It occurred to me that when you're at a decent resolution AA really doesn't matter - the individual pixels are so difficult for your eye to distinguish that diagonal lines look diagonal, whether anti-aliased or not.
So basically, AA is an almost useless feature when you've got a good enough resolution. I can't find a game that will slow my card down - Doom3, Oblivion, you name it - and this card was less than £150. There's going to have to be a serious upping of the ante in games detail if anyone expects me to consider one of these £200+ cards to be of any worth.
I heard they need to keep costs down, as every unit they sell will further ensure Sony's doom... or something. Somebody told me.
Seriously, they've fscked up every single aspect of the publicity, popularity and launch of the PS3 through trying to make this system do everything. They even said as much. And then they leave out the rumble.
For those who're interested, the White Knight video really is pretty exciting - there's a certain Final Fantasy about it, but it seems unbelievably more fluid and natural.
Be excited. Oh yes. I just wish I could be arsed with consoles...
This is turning into a bit of a "Summary Judgment throwing contest". I understand why IBM would request them (because SCO doesn't have anything), but then SCO threw some back at the counterclaims, as if to say "Yeah? Well, take that! And you smell!". It's like chimps throwing poo...
There aren't enough "Redundant" modpoints in the world to shut you all up. Just stop yelling Dupe, would you? I think it was pretty obvious from second one.
Ye-eeeess, but they weren't designed, were they? We're talking about the process of design, and what makes a design beautiful. You didn't really understand anything I said after the first sentence, did you?
I just mentioned it as, yes, a hilarious coincidence.
However, you're talking apples & oranges here, although you've raised an interesting point. What wer're talking about is the act of creation, whereas you're talking about the creator (I use "creation" here loosely).
The idea as I understand it is that a well-trained scientist/engineer/mathematician/whatever has a good sense of what works well and what doesn't. He develops a sort of "instinct" for what is a successful and elegant implementation, and what is a botch job that just meets the needs of the job. Usually it is the former that turns out to be the most robust, the easiest to use or maintain, the furthest-reaching in its unanticipated capabilities. The latter will tend to fail under slight changes in function or environment. (Sorry, I'm trying to generalise here).
So, an expert in their field learns to be attracted to solutions that are elegant and practical. They learn to instinctively find beautiful those implementations which will work best. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the parent poster said, and those who spend a lot of time looking at solutions in their particular field will find beauty in function.
Therefore, the aphorism holds quite true. If someone hacks together a product, site, program that looks shoddy to him but apparently meets the specification, they instinctively know that it isn't great and will, in future, cause problems. The quote, I suspect, is meant to encourage those who work in such capacities to have more concern for the "aesthetics" of their product - by which it means "does it look good to you?".
To go back to Hawking, I think he'd agree: if an equation explaining some aspect of the universe looks ugly as hell, it's probably not quite right. This is a source of ongoing debate (is it likely that the universe is based on simple truths, or are we just making particularly good sense of chaos? Can we ever find a Grand Unifying Theory that works?). He no doubt does not see himself as an attractive guy, but that's not the issue - his work is.
When you talk about finding beauty in creatures, these are not our creations and so your comparison is not really relevant. To an entomologist, cockroaches are beautiful because they work so well - not because it's pretty. For years the famous E=mc^2, although a meaningless mess to many, was seen as so beautiful and elegant because, for such a simple equation, it allowed one to extrapolate so much understanding about the way the universe works.
The principle isn't infallible, but it is a very useful insight nonetheless for experts in their fields.
The editor basically slags it off for a number of (valid) reasons, and finishes by saying "I personally expected better from the "creator"."
Fair enough, but why the quotation marks? Is that meant to be a dig at Brah's "supposed" claim to have created it? Be fair, the guy created something that revolutionised the internet as a medium for media. I don't think he deserves that kind of attitude for not doing as great a job at implementing the service as he did with the software.
52 percent of respondents agree that... 46 percent of respondents believe that... 42 percent agree that... 52 percent agree with the assertion... and 42 percent believe...
Excuse me, but did anyone notice that the level of agreement to the vast majority of these statements hovers around the 50% mark? With a sample of 700, that's statistically significant in itself.
Assuming the questions were posed in a "Y/N" fashion, what this study tells anyone with a statistical background is that there is no fucking consensus whatsoever. These guys have no idea - pick any question about 2020 and pose it to one of these guys. They're almost exactly as likely to say "yes" as "no".
It's interesting that this study was done, and it makes an interesting read, but it produced almost exactly no significant results.
This is the company's pathetic online public-access avatar. It is learning, but slowly. Icogno's DECENT effort is Joan, who has won the Loebner prize two years running (not the Gold medal, which would imply passing the Turing Test, but she's done exceptionally well).
So before the "is this the best they can do" crapflood gets out of hand: No, it isn't.
I built a bloody fantastic machine the other week - slick as hell, stable and almost totally inaudible (there's a discreet blue light on the box to tell you it's on).
However, I am having a fucking nightmare trying to get any DVDs to play on it (one of the reasons I wanted it silent). The Intel P965 chipset includes ICH8, which should be brilliant but has some serious problems with drive support when compared with its older sibling the ICH7.
It doesn't have P-ATA IDE support as standard, but sort of "cobbles together" a couple of the 8 SATA ports into a PATA should you set it in the BIOS.
This allowed me to install OS etc using my PATA DVD-RW, but I couldn't play any direct DVD media from the drive no matter what app I used. Having read about the PATA issue I bit the bullet and bought a SATA DVD-RW, but this had no impact whatsoever.
Also note that overclocking on the P965 can be very unstable when you go much above stock. This is, I suspect, not so much due to the chipset itself, but due to the irritating "intelligent overclocking" features it introduces (CIA or somesuch) which always seems to get unstable at far lower speeds than when you adjust manually.
I'm hoping & praying that all the above issues will be sorted out with chipset-driver & BIOS updates, but nothing's been forthcoming since shortly after their release. Dammit.
Slashdot Mirror
Now they finally seem to have woken up and, by god, they are really moving now, aren't they. $9bn in 45nm fabs? A wafer of 80-core chips already? Speaking as a one-time AMD Fanboi, I have to say - the daddy is back.
(Let the flaming commence)
I believe you are talking about this.
There's more to the Prime edition than meets the eye.
However, try staying in that routine for a few years and then go back to on-site support. I guarantee you'll be more susceptible than ever. Constant moderate exposure doesn't make you completely immune to anything (you still get sick), but it does improve your immunity to almost everything. The body adapts to its environment.
Okay, just to clear this up: the average toilet seat is, believe it or not, one of the most sterile and least bacteria-ridden places you will find anywhere in your household. It is usually a barren plastic surface with little purchase for bacteria or moisture, it is cleaned and disinfected more than most surfaces, and the only real chance it has of catching anything that bacteria feed on is if someone ends up smearing crap on it - I'm really hope that's not the norm. In addition, what is unfortunately likely to end up on the seat is urine, which is totally sterile and would kill rather than feed most bacteria. Anyone who ever cleans their house will have a pretty sterile seat, and there is not much chance that anything you do pick up on the back of your legs is going to be transferred directly to your face by your hand.
Just about the opposite of all the points above can be said about your keyboard and mouse. It should come as absolutely no surprise that these things are riddled with bacteria...
As is your skin. All of it. You are fucking covered in the little guys, and it's rarely a problem. If you're the sort of person who's likely to get sick from a mouse that hasn't been disinfected, your life is too sterile for you to survive easily in the wild. Self-cleaning mice and mobility-scooters for the morbidly obese - they amount to the same thing: people's poor lifestyles causing them to be unfit to survive normally. I understand why people need these things, but if they'd exercised moderation in all things from the start, they wouldn't be in this situation.
Now, playing HL2 at a resolution of 1680x1050 with HDR, AF, all the fancies turned on, it played fine but with a (barely) noticeable judder when things got really busy.
So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.
It occurred to me that when you're at a decent resolution AA really doesn't matter - the individual pixels are so difficult for your eye to distinguish that diagonal lines look diagonal, whether anti-aliased or not.
So basically, AA is an almost useless feature when you've got a good enough resolution. I can't find a game that will slow my card down - Doom3, Oblivion, you name it - and this card was less than £150. There's going to have to be a serious upping of the ante in games detail if anyone expects me to consider one of these £200+ cards to be of any worth.
Seriously, they've fscked up every single aspect of the publicity, popularity and launch of the PS3 through trying to make this system do everything. They even said as much. And then they leave out the rumble.
Fucksakes.
More serious note though: has this policy been influenced at all by that SCO guff? I wonder...
Local Government doesn't count (they're not sapient).
Be excited. Oh yes. I just wish I could be arsed with consoles...
Bagsy "dick.mobi" /coat
This is turning into a bit of a "Summary Judgment throwing contest". I understand why IBM would request them (because SCO doesn't have anything), but then SCO threw some back at the counterclaims, as if to say "Yeah? Well, take that! And you smell!". It's like chimps throwing poo...
There aren't enough "Redundant" modpoints in the world to shut you all up. Just stop yelling Dupe, would you? I think it was pretty obvious from second one.
Munix?
Oh joy. The goatse fans will be happy.
Ye-eeeess, but they weren't designed, were they? We're talking about the process of design, and what makes a design beautiful. You didn't really understand anything I said after the first sentence, did you?
However, you're talking apples & oranges here, although you've raised an interesting point. What wer're talking about is the act of creation, whereas you're talking about the creator (I use "creation" here loosely).
The idea as I understand it is that a well-trained scientist/engineer/mathematician/whatever has a good sense of what works well and what doesn't. He develops a sort of "instinct" for what is a successful and elegant implementation, and what is a botch job that just meets the needs of the job. Usually it is the former that turns out to be the most robust, the easiest to use or maintain, the furthest-reaching in its unanticipated capabilities. The latter will tend to fail under slight changes in function or environment. (Sorry, I'm trying to generalise here).
So, an expert in their field learns to be attracted to solutions that are elegant and practical. They learn to instinctively find beautiful those implementations which will work best. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the parent poster said, and those who spend a lot of time looking at solutions in their particular field will find beauty in function.
Therefore, the aphorism holds quite true. If someone hacks together a product, site, program that looks shoddy to him but apparently meets the specification, they instinctively know that it isn't great and will, in future, cause problems. The quote, I suspect, is meant to encourage those who work in such capacities to have more concern for the "aesthetics" of their product - by which it means "does it look good to you?".
To go back to Hawking, I think he'd agree: if an equation explaining some aspect of the universe looks ugly as hell, it's probably not quite right. This is a source of ongoing debate (is it likely that the universe is based on simple truths, or are we just making particularly good sense of chaos? Can we ever find a Grand Unifying Theory that works?). He no doubt does not see himself as an attractive guy, but that's not the issue - his work is.
When you talk about finding beauty in creatures, these are not our creations and so your comparison is not really relevant. To an entomologist, cockroaches are beautiful because they work so well - not because it's pretty. For years the famous E=mc^2, although a meaningless mess to many, was seen as so beautiful and elegant because, for such a simple equation, it allowed one to extrapolate so much understanding about the way the universe works.
The principle isn't infallible, but it is a very useful insight nonetheless for experts in their fields.
Fair enough, but why the quotation marks? Is that meant to be a dig at Brah's "supposed" claim to have created it? Be fair, the guy created something that revolutionised the internet as a medium for media. I don't think he deserves that kind of attitude for not doing as great a job at implementing the service as he did with the software.
Assuming the questions were posed in a "Y/N" fashion, what this study tells anyone with a statistical background is that there is no fucking consensus whatsoever. These guys have no idea - pick any question about 2020 and pose it to one of these guys. They're almost exactly as likely to say "yes" as "no".
It's interesting that this study was done, and it makes an interesting read, but it produced almost exactly no significant results.
So before the "is this the best they can do" crapflood gets out of hand: No, it isn't.
However, I am having a fucking nightmare trying to get any DVDs to play on it (one of the reasons I wanted it silent). The Intel P965 chipset includes ICH8, which should be brilliant but has some serious problems with drive support when compared with its older sibling the ICH7.
It doesn't have P-ATA IDE support as standard, but sort of "cobbles together" a couple of the 8 SATA ports into a PATA should you set it in the BIOS.
This allowed me to install OS etc using my PATA DVD-RW, but I couldn't play any direct DVD media from the drive no matter what app I used. Having read about the PATA issue I bit the bullet and bought a SATA DVD-RW, but this had no impact whatsoever.
Also note that overclocking on the P965 can be very unstable when you go much above stock. This is, I suspect, not so much due to the chipset itself, but due to the irritating "intelligent overclocking" features it introduces (CIA or somesuch) which always seems to get unstable at far lower speeds than when you adjust manually.
I'm hoping & praying that all the above issues will be sorted out with chipset-driver & BIOS updates, but nothing's been forthcoming since shortly after their release. Dammit.
(IANAEconomist)
This will make no difference. I give it no more than a year before Sony sneaks DRM software onto your analog computer via your LP's autoplay...