Hell ask the local PC shops, there are usually guys like me around that refurb systems for the poor folks and we are always looking for spare parts. I tend to focus on the working poor, they are the ones that slip through the cracks the most in my area but I'm sure there is somebody similar in his area, ask the local freecycle or any of the mom&pop shops, they'll know.
I'll get hate for saying this, but its the FOSSies at the top that will ruin it, Valve or not. By "FOSSie" I mean those that hold GPL as inviolate and will hate Valve for daring to bring their DRM platform to Linux. We saw this right here when many of the old guard devs were posting things like "Well as long as they don't put it in the repo" because God forbid things should be easy for a non GPL package!
You see right now Linux is split in 2, on one side you have the pragmatists that just wants the damned thing to work for as many as possible, then you have the FOSSies that don't give a shit if its the most fiddly obtuse mess on the planet as long as GPL is held above all. I have a feeling that Valve is gonna find out like so many before that the FOSSies hold positions in the higher levels of your system internals and there is gonna be a LOT of "Ooops, broke your shit Valve...well if you'd just open your source code why that shit wouldn't happen".
This is why the ONLY time Linux has gained any ground is when Google just took the system internals away from the devs and took everything in house, where they could force some order and direction. If Valve thinks those devs that hold GPL like the ten commandments are gonna play nice with their DRM platform? Shiiit, they might as well ask for abortion clinics at the RNC, it would probably go over as well.
Final verdict? Win 8 bombs, OEMs continue selling Win 7, Gabe quietly lets the Linux version rot after he has to do a couple of major rebuilds thanks to the FOSSie faction trying to force him to Open Source his code, and that will be the end of that. There is A REASON why you don't get proprietary software on Linux, its not because you can't make it run, its because the FOSSie faction will make damned sure it won't run for long, so why bother? Until the faction that worships GPL isn't in command you can give it up Chuck.
Exactly, you don't need to anything about the person saddling up to your register, just what products are most likely to sell together at the checkout. Hell stores have been doing this for years, putting little things like batteries that people often forget by the register so they see them and go "Oh I need batteries for my remote" and it increases sales. For an appstore this approach is PERFECT as they can simply look at what apps sell together and offer bundle deals. Do people that buy Plants VS Zombies also buy Angry Birds? Well offer those in a bundle!
As a retailer I can tell you there is a TON of things you can learn without needing to know a damned thing about the actual person, for example I always suggest if someone wants a new video card that they have me buy them a power supply...why? Do I KNOW they have a weak power supply? Nope but I know that OEMs typically shortchange on the power supply and since graphics cards pull more power than an IGP I nearly always have to change one when I add the other so voila! I got that proved again to me on Saturday, when I opened up a customers computer to put in a new graphics card and sure enough...they had a 165w PSU in a quad core system, I swear to God a lousy 165w in an Athlon quad! But since I already knew this was likely and had told the customer so he had me order a nice 500w PSU and all was good.
So they don't really need to invade anybody's privacy, simply look at the data from the checkout and spot the patterns, that will give them more than enough to increase sales without needing to be creepy like FB. What you are describing is the FB way and I agree, its creepy. But even then if you are on a page looking at X and most people who buy X also buy Y-Z the smart thing would be to show links to Y-Z, again don't need to know if you are interested or not, just putting like products together, no different than you do in a real B&M store.
While I'm sure he's not happy about Ballmer trying to turn Windows into an ersatz Apple, I mean who DIDN'T know that Windows 8 would suck big hairy balls for gaming? Its a tweeting, twitting, FB shitting "social media hub" that has a billion damned things constantly running in the background popping "information" aka bullshit in the background sucking CPU cycles and GPU resources...and you say it ain't good for gaming? Really? Well no shit, you took Win 7 and tied a fucking boat anchor to it trying to make it into a damned smartphone, what the fuck did you expect?
Hopefully Ballmer's fat ass won't be in the big chair for Win 9, his ass is getting old and its obvious to everyone, including the financial district, that he just ain't got what it takes...fuck make ME the head of MSFT, I'd turn that company around in 3 years, maybe less! The problem is they have become too far removed from their customers, they are looking at what the other guy does and just aping instead of saying "Will that WORK for our customers? Well what do they want instead?" and giving them that.
Windows could be the juggernaut it was in the 90s if it wasn't so damned full of PHBs and layers between them and the customers...News Flash MSFT...ASK US WHAT WE WANT and we'll be more than happy to tell you it AIN'T APPLE because if we want Apple we wouldn't be buying from you!...Morons, total fucking morons running that company.
Wrong, sorry, don't know where you get your info from but the BD/PD design uses SHARED integers (2 per module VS 3 a piece for Thuban) while they touch on this here and please note the benches on previous pages that have the FX 8 nearly tied with the X6 even though it has 20% more cores, if you want a more in depth explanation of the BD modular layout go to Tom's hardware who lays out the whole thing.
But I'm sorry but both the integer and floating point are shared with BD and I don't know where you got your info from but neither integer or floating point is shared with Thuban, and FYI but pretty much every chip since the P3 has had a floating point so unless you've been running embedded ARM (the only chip made without a FP unit) I'm sorry but you're just badly misinformed.
It is actually quite simple when you think about it. By forcing ever larger amount of people and money into a market with a limited number of stocks then actual investment and market value, that is truly valuing a company based upon its earnings, its plans for the future, and its growth potential is simply thrown out the window for gross speculation. I mean what else COULD possibly happen, when you have ever larger amounts chasing a limited number of stocks BUT rampant speculation?
And what so many refuse to accept or understand is rampant speculation is a cancer, its throwing a tanker full of gasoline on a fire. No longer will a company plan for the future, because this is NOT what causes your stock to rise under rampant speculation, only short term gains should be pursued because the market is so volatile. A perfect example of how speculation rewards destructive behavior is what happened to Circuit City, where the CEO did a massive "slash and burn" firing all of their best salesmen and selling their best properties. In an investment market those that buy stocks would have said "Wait a minute...how do you plan to stay in business by cutting off your nose to spite your face?" and the stock would have tanked, but in a speculator's market they ONLY looked at the fact that costs were down compared to last quarter and profits up so the stock bounced, the CEOs cashed out, the stock tanked, and the company went under.
But this is why those 5% have blown such a huge bubble, because of insider information if you are one of the 5%? You'll make out like a bandit and have enough warning to cash out in plenty of time. remember thanks to computers we now have nanosecond trading, which of course Joe Average can't do but those with the money to pay to be hooked directly into the exchanges CAN, so even without insider information they will get enough advantage through computerized trading to stay ahead of the wrecking ball. But since companies are no longer valued by their plans, earnings, and future potential but instead by what you can flip the stock for just like in the housing market you have stocks that aren't worth a tenth of what they are selling for being flipped for ever higher profits.This is why the bubble will burst, its just a ponzi scheme.
Actually getting out of the Euro would probably be a smart thing, as they will frankly NEVER be able to pay back the loans and most likely the people will revolt over the measures being imposed on them in return for the loans.
Whether you agree or disagree with the direction Greece is headed you simply can't force the people to accept what essentially was a crooked deal between the large banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs (Why am I not surprised that GS was involved? I swear they are Wolfram & Hart, and I wouldn't be shocked if their board was demons in Gucci suits) and the former government.
But I think we are disagreeing not because of differing opinion, but misunderstanding. You see there is NO privacy implications when you process the raw data, because frankly i have to know absolutely NOTHING about you to do it, in fact it could be the first time to my store and you've never bought a thing!
You see the data correlation would NOT come from individual users at all, but strictly from correlating which merchandise sells together. Its like selling charcoal with BBQs, I don't have to KNOW whether you like charcoal, hell for all I know you might prefer woodchips, all I have to KNOW is that when I sell this product MOST people also buy charcoal, therefor I should offer charcoal to you if you want to buy a BBQ.
So anybody that would consider this a privacy problem simply wouldn't understand how it works, as i don't need to know if you are black or white, male or female, young or old, all I need to know is what products sell together most often so I can offer bundles. Its no different than how I offer a new wireless keyboard and mouse with new systems that I sell. do I KNOW you don't have a keyboard and mouse? Nope, hell you may have a much nicer one than me, but from my experience selling towers i have seen that MOST people who buy a tower ask about a keyboard and mouse, so by throwing those in its a nice value add for the customer and increases my sales.
So again if they were to do it like Amazon and tiger I don't see how there would be any privacy problems. neither place knows anything about me other than my address and what my previous purchases were, but by looking at what most people bought at the same time they can get a good idea of what products should be offered while knowing very little or even nothing. I mean if I were buying a Blu ray burner, should they offer me diapers, or blank Blu ray discs? Obviously the later and I bet if you looked at the raw data more than 90% that buy a burner buy the discs too, so its simply looking at what products are most often bought together and bundling them, no need to know anything at all about the person buying anything.
To me the sad part is it isn't even based in reality, its the "Anybody but M$!" bullshit, like Microsoft controlled X86 or something, like there wasn't Linux and BSD and OSX and everyone else also running on X86.
But in the end RSF99 we've all seen the writing on the wall, ARM simply doesn't scale. I mean can you imagine how much power you'd have to blow just to bring ARM up to a fricking Netburst P4? Or the Phenom I? I HAVE one of the first gen Brazos E350 netbooks and frankly the performance is good enough I got rid of my full size dual core notebooks because I just didn't need it anymore. 5 hours on a 6 cell playing 720P? the ability to run 1080P over HDMI? Even plays L4D and Portal 2?
Let's face it, people just aren't gonna go back to having Pentium II levels of performance out of their mobile devices, there are just too many things they want to do with them. People WANT their videos, and chat, and music, and games, and ALL that shit needs a high IPC that ARM just isn't able to deliver, I mean do you have ANY idea how much Nvidia is spending or ARM R&D? And yet they are having to just pile on the cores because they've found the simple fact is ARM just doesn't scale well.
Its a GREAT embedded chip, where you don't need performance of even a P3, nobody does it better, with the right chips to take the heavy lifting it'll even do 1080P like the Pi, but its simply easier for Intel and AMD to pare down the crazy IPC they already have than for ARM to scale to their levels.
Trilogy of terror 2 is from 1996, the one I saw was in the mid to late 70s, so unless i have the ability to see the future it simply can't be that movie. The dead of night had the SAME story, only difference is I believe the child is named Timmy in that one, but as you can see here its the same story, complete with mother called son back from grave. In fact i think the picture on the box is the kid as he is starting to change, although from what I remember with each flash of lightning he becomes more and more demonic until he reaches the mother, truly fucking scary.
Straw man. I'm sure that your average street person has it better than people did in the middle ages, that don't make them kings. I'm sure that by now you have heard the phrase "1%" although I would argue a better term would be 5%, since it is the top 5% that control over 80% of the wealth in this country and most of that wealth grows ever larger by each generation, just by the fact that with that much wealth one can simply rig the game to insure you never lose.
And THIS, this right here, is why the rights of the commoner is taken away, because to insure that the top 5% never lose one has to twist more and more laws to gain them advantages. Our MSM is owned by a handful, therefor even when the lies are obvious, such as the faked documents leading up to Iraq, such as the obvious "Assange is a monster, don't look at those papers!" Wikileaks "scandal", they fall in line and do their master's bidding.
I have said it before and I'll say it again, if Watergate would have happened today Woodword and Bernstein would have gotten a rendition ride and Nixon would have been treated as a victim, with the entire media and both sides of the aisle lining up to cover for him. The system has become rotten to the core, free market fairy tales won't make the peasants believe in the lie that is the American dream anymore, not when their jobs are shipped to China while the 5% live like Gods among men, so the laws are getting nastier to keep the peasants in line. Watch the video, she lays it out step by step with historical precedent to back it up and she is VERY conservative in her views and frankly more optimistic than I think one should be.
And if you would like to know what the tipping point will be, the final match that will end the idea of a free America, here you go and please not the graphs starting at 3.30 or so. The government has been forcing more and more people into the pockets of their "friends" the top 5% on Wall Street that they have blown a MASSIVE bubble, so massive that when it blows you'll pretty much wipe out every cent every retiree and working person has ever saved, as well as make the government unable to pay its obligations to the poor, elderly, and disabled. Notice that the bubble in 29 only had 125% of GDP, and it took until 1953 to climb back out of, even the massive spending of WWII couldn't bring us back to pre 1929 levels. This bubble is 430% and rising so when it blows you'll be talking about the REST OF THE CENTURY for the government to dig out, but frankly I don't think the USA will survive this bubble, I truly think there will be a revolution.
See? It is THIS, this right here, that pisses me off when the fanbois get pissed when i point out the new AMD chips aren't good for a general purpose. Here you have a specific task that the Bulldozer chip is EXCELLENT at, you've thought it out and found a chip that is well suited to the task at hand, bravo. this is why I still build AM3+ units because for the kind of tasks my users have, HTPCs, basic web tasks, even gaming, the AM3+ chips are GREAT at these tasks but the BD doesn't work nearly as well.
My entire point is that its just not a general purpose CPU, its too specialized for that, but if you have a task, such as Linux VMs, which of course will be patched MUCH quicker than Windows? Then it makes GREAT sense and you'll save a ton, just as my customers save a ton by sticking with AM3+. Even I went with AMD for my family, because the Thuban X6 for me and the oldest and the Deneb quad are GREAT for gaming and multitasking.
So bravo, and enjoy your Piledriver X8 which will make the perfect chip for the task.
Watch the end of America which applies to ALL of the west, because they are all pretty much following the same game plan, suppress rights, use cops as thugs, the stuff we are seeing now is what they saw in Italy and Germany in the early 30s, its how you take a modern society, like Germany and Italy before their "dear leaders" came to power that was an open society, and slowly but surely make it into a closed society.
Thanks, and you were close,I think its actually "Dead Of Night" which I believe the original trilogy of terror was based on, I'm trying to track both it and the original trilogy down to see which it is, since I saw this thing in like 78 or so on cable. If you ever get a chance to see it though that scene where the lightning shows the kid's "true" face? pants wetting scary!
I never understood all the "you sexist pig!" crap, I mean so what if guys like booth babes or hot babes in commercials? Its like when I pointed out the whole "booth babe" stink to my GF, know what she said? "Give us girls some guys that look like John Carter and you can ogle all you want honey, BTW did you see his abs? OMG he looked good in that little loincloth thingie!"
So just be fair about it, gals like to ogle too so give them a little eye candy and everyone will be happy. But you're right that only a blind guy would suggest that having someone seriously hot deliver the message makes no difference, as it does.
Notice how I got marked down for what even one of their former engineers says is true? Oh well, truth is truth. I do have a question though...why are you choosing the 8350 over the X6? Do you have a specific workload that can use 8 integer cores that doesn't have much if any use for floating point?
Because you look at the benches and the BEST the X8s do is 6-8% over the Thuban X6, and that is with workloads practically tailored for the chip. In most everyday tasks they are within a couple of points of each other....only the X6 is $110 and the 8350 is $180.
BTW you should probably also know that the core scheduling problems in Windows have been marked as "will not fix" and they even pulled the patches for Win 7, the ONLY way to get around this problems is Windows 8 as they replaced the scheduler in Win 8 with one which understands how the BD cores work (which is as you said, more like hyperthreading than true cores, which means that X8 is really an X4 with hyperthreading) so if you don't want to switch to Win 8 right away you'll be tying a boat anchor to your system.
Don't get me wrong, the X8 does have a place, for example its real good with running DBs or if you're doing a bunch of GPU heavy work like renders it can keep the GPU fed just fine, I just don't see any real selling point for the X8 at its current price, not with it so close to the X6 on performance. If it were me I'd pick up a cheap X6 and wait for excavator to see if things improve.
Although that right there should show AMD has some serious trouble with the BD design, since they are sticking with AM3+ for one more chip even though AM3+ is a dual channel design. You KNOW that has to be a serious bottleneck but you can just hear the engineers going "Look the best we're gonna get out of this chip isn't gonna beat the i5, if we try to force them to buy a new board too it just won't fly" as why else would they be sticking with a dual channel design and PGA when its obvious that LGA and quad channel is the way to go?
Well it could be worse, it could be one of the "fill in the blank" clickbaits like "Will (insert product) be the death of (insert something with crazed fanbase like FOSS, Apple)?" as God knows I've seen enough of THOSE with the release of Win 8.
This? this is....well its just sad, that's what it is. I'd have been asking if they'd like me to contact a therapist for them if I'd have been at the event as this is just a sad "look at me!" cry for attention. The fact that it made the front page is pretty damned pathetic though, I thought the firehose was supposed to end bullshit like this?
Actually what you are describing happened 3 CEOs ago and as you can read from that link by an ex AMD chip man you can see that the engineers they got now? Not really what is needed. All the Cyrix guys? GONE. All the Athlon64 guys? GONE. All the K8-10 guys? GONE. One of the first things that happened when the CEO musical chairs started was a slash and burn of the engineering dept which is why they are in the shape they are in now, Bulldozer was done using computer layouts which add 20% to power usage while losing 20% performance.
so anybody who wants to know why AMD went downhill so quick and why Bulldozer was such a disaster, please read the link, its an eye opener. personally I hope they can turn things around but after a slash and burn THAT bad its gonna be damned hard to recover, especially when Intel is so far ahead already. Hell since one of the previous CEOs killed Thuban they don't even have a single slot on Tom's hardware build list for cheap PCs, and haven't had a single slot in over a year. They don't even have good deals on the low end anymore as the Pentiums based on Sandy curbstomp them, its just NOT a good time for AMD.
Except in this case its easy enough to prove, intel has many fabs running at half capacity just so they don't end up with warehouses full of chips and the big "back to school" drive that both Intel and AMD were counting on proved to be a giant bust.
In a way both Intel and AMD are victims of their own success, they built such insane monster chips that frankly nobody NEEDS any more power and the few that buy power just for the sake of saying that have it just isn't enough to keep the market going. Hell my oldest is on his fourth year of college with his AMD dual core laptop and is quite happy with it, just as we're happy with our 2 Phenom X6s and the quad for the youngest on our desktops, plays all the latest games with cycles to spare so why buy another?
So it isn't like AMD is laying people off while posting record profits here, their numbers suck, the new half core design is a bust, people just aren't buying new systems until their old ones die, and the third world is skipping desktops and laptops and going straight to smartphones...its just not a great time for Intel or AMD.
Those were good chips but IIRC you had to REALLY watch the temps as they didn't have thermal monitoring and you could cook them if you weren't careful. We used to have a dead chip bucket at the old shop I worked at and it was nearly all Athlon chips where they went nuts with the OCing and cooked. Not to mention there were quite a few less than honest shops in my area that would crank the clocks and sell them as a faster system then BAM! cooked box.
As far as raw performance jump I'd have to say the ones I saw with the most consistent OCs was the Pentium Ds, those netburst dual cores could really crank up as far as clocks as long as you used a decent air cooling, I just recently had a customer finally let his Pentium D go to a relative so he could get a Phenom II X6, he had that thing running for years with a 1GHz OC and no troubles. Tough little chips those were.
The problem is AMD's new "half core" design is a complete flop and is often just BARELY better than X6, and that is when you put X6 against the new X8, if you put them equal, X6 VS X6, then Phenom II wins.
That is why I'm still building pretty much AMD exclusively, because in socket AM3+ frankly the bang for the buck is STILL there and better than Intel. I've been getting Athlon triples for $60, quads for $70, Phenom quads for $90 and Thuban X6s for $110. These chips are frankly more powerful than your average user will ever need but when you figure in the cost of boards you can build a damned nice AMD system for less than $450 and still make a decent profit, the only thing you are building from Intel at that price is a Pentium dual core.
That isn't to say there isn't ANY markets where AMD's new chips can't be a good deal, the netbooks with the E450 are nice, and when you can find them the C60 netbooks make great "pocket PCs" and the Llano quad laptops are great multimedia portables. And hopefully that former Apple/Athlon64 designer they hired will come up with a killer new chip, its just that Bulldozer/Piledriver just don't cut it. Its too hot, too power hungry, and costs too much to manufacture so they have to put it against the i5 which curbstomps. But since the previous CEO killed Thuban which was getting damned near 100% yields they have no choice but try to push the turkey that is "half cores" while hoping to stay afloat until they can come up with something better.
Like you I hope they manage to pull it off, and as long as I can get such great deals on Am3+ I'll keep selling 'em, but ATM there just isn't any positives when it comes to the BD/PD design, there just isn't.
Interesting? Really? For vaporware? Nvidia is up to 5 cores NOW trying to give people the performance they want and the batteries are dying quicker than ever. Lets face it folks ARM has hit a wall, to get IPC to scale up to even Atom and Hondo is blowing power budgets left and right. Sure ARM will always have a place in embedded, where you frankly don't need even the performance of what we had 25 years ago, but the "future" is more of what we have now, ever heavier multimedia, ever heavier loads, ever more IPC. And in these areas ARM just don't scale while still saving power over X86.
And that's the problem in a nutshell, as people desire more and more power its frankly easier for Intel to scale down than for ARM to scale up.
Actually the "future" will be the past, several chips designed for different tasks that can be switched on the fly. AMD was smart to buy Seamicro as they can now tie Opteron chips via hypertransport into these servers. Imagine a system that uses low power ARM cores for the day to day stuff where it doesn't need the incredible IPC of X86 but when its needed it can instantly kick on however many high performance X86 cores it needs, and then switch them off when the work is completed?
But I hate to break the news to ya faragon but ARM chips frankly aren't saving any juice over low power Intel at this point, as people demand more and more performance. This is why the ARM holdings group have been talking about "dark silicon" as to feed the ARM chips with everything on will kill a battery in 20 minutes, no different than X86. While ARM had an advantage for awhile it simply can't scale, which is why Nvidia is up to 5 cores now with even more in the pipe and feeding all those cores sucks just as bad as modern X86, no real advantage anymore.
What interface? Nobody seen "strange days" around here? The future will simply bypass all the bullshit and send the simulation directly into your brain. Talk about an easy way to keep the masses passive! They could live in the worst rat hole and be happy as clams, as long as they could plug in at the end of the day.
"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain" and THAT will be the future, only it won't be brought by some enslaving machines, it'll be brought by megacorps who'll make a fricking killing. We are now just starting to figure this stuff out, glasses that let the blind see, sounds broadcast to the brain, but you can bet your last dollar they WILL figure out how to just send the signals directly to your brain, then no "interface" needed. Plug in, tune out.
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Hell ask the local PC shops, there are usually guys like me around that refurb systems for the poor folks and we are always looking for spare parts. I tend to focus on the working poor, they are the ones that slip through the cracks the most in my area but I'm sure there is somebody similar in his area, ask the local freecycle or any of the mom&pop shops, they'll know.
If you're counting routers, servers and the like? Then your statement is true but I don't see many GAME sales coming from those sectors.
I'll get hate for saying this, but its the FOSSies at the top that will ruin it, Valve or not. By "FOSSie" I mean those that hold GPL as inviolate and will hate Valve for daring to bring their DRM platform to Linux. We saw this right here when many of the old guard devs were posting things like "Well as long as they don't put it in the repo" because God forbid things should be easy for a non GPL package!
You see right now Linux is split in 2, on one side you have the pragmatists that just wants the damned thing to work for as many as possible, then you have the FOSSies that don't give a shit if its the most fiddly obtuse mess on the planet as long as GPL is held above all. I have a feeling that Valve is gonna find out like so many before that the FOSSies hold positions in the higher levels of your system internals and there is gonna be a LOT of "Ooops, broke your shit Valve...well if you'd just open your source code why that shit wouldn't happen".
This is why the ONLY time Linux has gained any ground is when Google just took the system internals away from the devs and took everything in house, where they could force some order and direction. If Valve thinks those devs that hold GPL like the ten commandments are gonna play nice with their DRM platform? Shiiit, they might as well ask for abortion clinics at the RNC, it would probably go over as well.
Final verdict? Win 8 bombs, OEMs continue selling Win 7, Gabe quietly lets the Linux version rot after he has to do a couple of major rebuilds thanks to the FOSSie faction trying to force him to Open Source his code, and that will be the end of that. There is A REASON why you don't get proprietary software on Linux, its not because you can't make it run, its because the FOSSie faction will make damned sure it won't run for long, so why bother? Until the faction that worships GPL isn't in command you can give it up Chuck.
Exactly, you don't need to anything about the person saddling up to your register, just what products are most likely to sell together at the checkout. Hell stores have been doing this for years, putting little things like batteries that people often forget by the register so they see them and go "Oh I need batteries for my remote" and it increases sales. For an appstore this approach is PERFECT as they can simply look at what apps sell together and offer bundle deals. Do people that buy Plants VS Zombies also buy Angry Birds? Well offer those in a bundle!
As a retailer I can tell you there is a TON of things you can learn without needing to know a damned thing about the actual person, for example I always suggest if someone wants a new video card that they have me buy them a power supply...why? Do I KNOW they have a weak power supply? Nope but I know that OEMs typically shortchange on the power supply and since graphics cards pull more power than an IGP I nearly always have to change one when I add the other so voila! I got that proved again to me on Saturday, when I opened up a customers computer to put in a new graphics card and sure enough...they had a 165w PSU in a quad core system, I swear to God a lousy 165w in an Athlon quad! But since I already knew this was likely and had told the customer so he had me order a nice 500w PSU and all was good.
So they don't really need to invade anybody's privacy, simply look at the data from the checkout and spot the patterns, that will give them more than enough to increase sales without needing to be creepy like FB. What you are describing is the FB way and I agree, its creepy. But even then if you are on a page looking at X and most people who buy X also buy Y-Z the smart thing would be to show links to Y-Z, again don't need to know if you are interested or not, just putting like products together, no different than you do in a real B&M store.
While I'm sure he's not happy about Ballmer trying to turn Windows into an ersatz Apple, I mean who DIDN'T know that Windows 8 would suck big hairy balls for gaming? Its a tweeting, twitting, FB shitting "social media hub" that has a billion damned things constantly running in the background popping "information" aka bullshit in the background sucking CPU cycles and GPU resources...and you say it ain't good for gaming? Really? Well no shit, you took Win 7 and tied a fucking boat anchor to it trying to make it into a damned smartphone, what the fuck did you expect?
Hopefully Ballmer's fat ass won't be in the big chair for Win 9, his ass is getting old and its obvious to everyone, including the financial district, that he just ain't got what it takes...fuck make ME the head of MSFT, I'd turn that company around in 3 years, maybe less! The problem is they have become too far removed from their customers, they are looking at what the other guy does and just aping instead of saying "Will that WORK for our customers? Well what do they want instead?" and giving them that.
Windows could be the juggernaut it was in the 90s if it wasn't so damned full of PHBs and layers between them and the customers...News Flash MSFT...ASK US WHAT WE WANT and we'll be more than happy to tell you it AIN'T APPLE because if we want Apple we wouldn't be buying from you!...Morons, total fucking morons running that company.
Wrong, sorry, don't know where you get your info from but the BD/PD design uses SHARED integers (2 per module VS 3 a piece for Thuban) while they touch on this here and please note the benches on previous pages that have the FX 8 nearly tied with the X6 even though it has 20% more cores, if you want a more in depth explanation of the BD modular layout go to Tom's hardware who lays out the whole thing.
But I'm sorry but both the integer and floating point are shared with BD and I don't know where you got your info from but neither integer or floating point is shared with Thuban, and FYI but pretty much every chip since the P3 has had a floating point so unless you've been running embedded ARM (the only chip made without a FP unit) I'm sorry but you're just badly misinformed.
It is actually quite simple when you think about it. By forcing ever larger amount of people and money into a market with a limited number of stocks then actual investment and market value, that is truly valuing a company based upon its earnings, its plans for the future, and its growth potential is simply thrown out the window for gross speculation. I mean what else COULD possibly happen, when you have ever larger amounts chasing a limited number of stocks BUT rampant speculation?
And what so many refuse to accept or understand is rampant speculation is a cancer, its throwing a tanker full of gasoline on a fire. No longer will a company plan for the future, because this is NOT what causes your stock to rise under rampant speculation, only short term gains should be pursued because the market is so volatile. A perfect example of how speculation rewards destructive behavior is what happened to Circuit City, where the CEO did a massive "slash and burn" firing all of their best salesmen and selling their best properties. In an investment market those that buy stocks would have said "Wait a minute...how do you plan to stay in business by cutting off your nose to spite your face?" and the stock would have tanked, but in a speculator's market they ONLY looked at the fact that costs were down compared to last quarter and profits up so the stock bounced, the CEOs cashed out, the stock tanked, and the company went under.
But this is why those 5% have blown such a huge bubble, because of insider information if you are one of the 5%? You'll make out like a bandit and have enough warning to cash out in plenty of time. remember thanks to computers we now have nanosecond trading, which of course Joe Average can't do but those with the money to pay to be hooked directly into the exchanges CAN, so even without insider information they will get enough advantage through computerized trading to stay ahead of the wrecking ball. But since companies are no longer valued by their plans, earnings, and future potential but instead by what you can flip the stock for just like in the housing market you have stocks that aren't worth a tenth of what they are selling for being flipped for ever higher profits.This is why the bubble will burst, its just a ponzi scheme.
Actually getting out of the Euro would probably be a smart thing, as they will frankly NEVER be able to pay back the loans and most likely the people will revolt over the measures being imposed on them in return for the loans.
Whether you agree or disagree with the direction Greece is headed you simply can't force the people to accept what essentially was a crooked deal between the large banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs (Why am I not surprised that GS was involved? I swear they are Wolfram & Hart, and I wouldn't be shocked if their board was demons in Gucci suits) and the former government.
But I think we are disagreeing not because of differing opinion, but misunderstanding. You see there is NO privacy implications when you process the raw data, because frankly i have to know absolutely NOTHING about you to do it, in fact it could be the first time to my store and you've never bought a thing!
You see the data correlation would NOT come from individual users at all, but strictly from correlating which merchandise sells together. Its like selling charcoal with BBQs, I don't have to KNOW whether you like charcoal, hell for all I know you might prefer woodchips, all I have to KNOW is that when I sell this product MOST people also buy charcoal, therefor I should offer charcoal to you if you want to buy a BBQ.
So anybody that would consider this a privacy problem simply wouldn't understand how it works, as i don't need to know if you are black or white, male or female, young or old, all I need to know is what products sell together most often so I can offer bundles. Its no different than how I offer a new wireless keyboard and mouse with new systems that I sell. do I KNOW you don't have a keyboard and mouse? Nope, hell you may have a much nicer one than me, but from my experience selling towers i have seen that MOST people who buy a tower ask about a keyboard and mouse, so by throwing those in its a nice value add for the customer and increases my sales.
So again if they were to do it like Amazon and tiger I don't see how there would be any privacy problems. neither place knows anything about me other than my address and what my previous purchases were, but by looking at what most people bought at the same time they can get a good idea of what products should be offered while knowing very little or even nothing. I mean if I were buying a Blu ray burner, should they offer me diapers, or blank Blu ray discs? Obviously the later and I bet if you looked at the raw data more than 90% that buy a burner buy the discs too, so its simply looking at what products are most often bought together and bundling them, no need to know anything at all about the person buying anything.
To me the sad part is it isn't even based in reality, its the "Anybody but M$!" bullshit, like Microsoft controlled X86 or something, like there wasn't Linux and BSD and OSX and everyone else also running on X86.
But in the end RSF99 we've all seen the writing on the wall, ARM simply doesn't scale. I mean can you imagine how much power you'd have to blow just to bring ARM up to a fricking Netburst P4? Or the Phenom I? I HAVE one of the first gen Brazos E350 netbooks and frankly the performance is good enough I got rid of my full size dual core notebooks because I just didn't need it anymore. 5 hours on a 6 cell playing 720P? the ability to run 1080P over HDMI? Even plays L4D and Portal 2?
Let's face it, people just aren't gonna go back to having Pentium II levels of performance out of their mobile devices, there are just too many things they want to do with them. People WANT their videos, and chat, and music, and games, and ALL that shit needs a high IPC that ARM just isn't able to deliver, I mean do you have ANY idea how much Nvidia is spending or ARM R&D? And yet they are having to just pile on the cores because they've found the simple fact is ARM just doesn't scale well.
Its a GREAT embedded chip, where you don't need performance of even a P3, nobody does it better, with the right chips to take the heavy lifting it'll even do 1080P like the Pi, but its simply easier for Intel and AMD to pare down the crazy IPC they already have than for ARM to scale to their levels.
Trilogy of terror 2 is from 1996, the one I saw was in the mid to late 70s, so unless i have the ability to see the future it simply can't be that movie. The dead of night had the SAME story, only difference is I believe the child is named Timmy in that one, but as you can see here its the same story, complete with mother called son back from grave. In fact i think the picture on the box is the kid as he is starting to change, although from what I remember with each flash of lightning he becomes more and more demonic until he reaches the mother, truly fucking scary.
Straw man. I'm sure that your average street person has it better than people did in the middle ages, that don't make them kings. I'm sure that by now you have heard the phrase "1%" although I would argue a better term would be 5%, since it is the top 5% that control over 80% of the wealth in this country and most of that wealth grows ever larger by each generation, just by the fact that with that much wealth one can simply rig the game to insure you never lose.
And THIS, this right here, is why the rights of the commoner is taken away, because to insure that the top 5% never lose one has to twist more and more laws to gain them advantages. Our MSM is owned by a handful, therefor even when the lies are obvious, such as the faked documents leading up to Iraq, such as the obvious "Assange is a monster, don't look at those papers!" Wikileaks "scandal", they fall in line and do their master's bidding.
I have said it before and I'll say it again, if Watergate would have happened today Woodword and Bernstein would have gotten a rendition ride and Nixon would have been treated as a victim, with the entire media and both sides of the aisle lining up to cover for him. The system has become rotten to the core, free market fairy tales won't make the peasants believe in the lie that is the American dream anymore, not when their jobs are shipped to China while the 5% live like Gods among men, so the laws are getting nastier to keep the peasants in line. Watch the video, she lays it out step by step with historical precedent to back it up and she is VERY conservative in her views and frankly more optimistic than I think one should be.
And if you would like to know what the tipping point will be, the final match that will end the idea of a free America, here you go and please not the graphs starting at 3.30 or so. The government has been forcing more and more people into the pockets of their "friends" the top 5% on Wall Street that they have blown a MASSIVE bubble, so massive that when it blows you'll pretty much wipe out every cent every retiree and working person has ever saved, as well as make the government unable to pay its obligations to the poor, elderly, and disabled. Notice that the bubble in 29 only had 125% of GDP, and it took until 1953 to climb back out of, even the massive spending of WWII couldn't bring us back to pre 1929 levels. This bubble is 430% and rising so when it blows you'll be talking about the REST OF THE CENTURY for the government to dig out, but frankly I don't think the USA will survive this bubble, I truly think there will be a revolution.
See? It is THIS, this right here, that pisses me off when the fanbois get pissed when i point out the new AMD chips aren't good for a general purpose. Here you have a specific task that the Bulldozer chip is EXCELLENT at, you've thought it out and found a chip that is well suited to the task at hand, bravo. this is why I still build AM3+ units because for the kind of tasks my users have, HTPCs, basic web tasks, even gaming, the AM3+ chips are GREAT at these tasks but the BD doesn't work nearly as well.
My entire point is that its just not a general purpose CPU, its too specialized for that, but if you have a task, such as Linux VMs, which of course will be patched MUCH quicker than Windows? Then it makes GREAT sense and you'll save a ton, just as my customers save a ton by sticking with AM3+. Even I went with AMD for my family, because the Thuban X6 for me and the oldest and the Deneb quad are GREAT for gaming and multitasking.
So bravo, and enjoy your Piledriver X8 which will make the perfect chip for the task.
Watch the end of America which applies to ALL of the west, because they are all pretty much following the same game plan, suppress rights, use cops as thugs, the stuff we are seeing now is what they saw in Italy and Germany in the early 30s, its how you take a modern society, like Germany and Italy before their "dear leaders" came to power that was an open society, and slowly but surely make it into a closed society.
Thanks, and you were close,I think its actually "Dead Of Night" which I believe the original trilogy of terror was based on, I'm trying to track both it and the original trilogy down to see which it is, since I saw this thing in like 78 or so on cable. If you ever get a chance to see it though that scene where the lightning shows the kid's "true" face? pants wetting scary!
I never understood all the "you sexist pig!" crap, I mean so what if guys like booth babes or hot babes in commercials? Its like when I pointed out the whole "booth babe" stink to my GF, know what she said? "Give us girls some guys that look like John Carter and you can ogle all you want honey, BTW did you see his abs? OMG he looked good in that little loincloth thingie!"
So just be fair about it, gals like to ogle too so give them a little eye candy and everyone will be happy. But you're right that only a blind guy would suggest that having someone seriously hot deliver the message makes no difference, as it does.
Notice how I got marked down for what even one of their former engineers says is true? Oh well, truth is truth. I do have a question though...why are you choosing the 8350 over the X6? Do you have a specific workload that can use 8 integer cores that doesn't have much if any use for floating point?
Because you look at the benches and the BEST the X8s do is 6-8% over the Thuban X6, and that is with workloads practically tailored for the chip. In most everyday tasks they are within a couple of points of each other....only the X6 is $110 and the 8350 is $180.
BTW you should probably also know that the core scheduling problems in Windows have been marked as "will not fix" and they even pulled the patches for Win 7, the ONLY way to get around this problems is Windows 8 as they replaced the scheduler in Win 8 with one which understands how the BD cores work (which is as you said, more like hyperthreading than true cores, which means that X8 is really an X4 with hyperthreading) so if you don't want to switch to Win 8 right away you'll be tying a boat anchor to your system.
Don't get me wrong, the X8 does have a place, for example its real good with running DBs or if you're doing a bunch of GPU heavy work like renders it can keep the GPU fed just fine, I just don't see any real selling point for the X8 at its current price, not with it so close to the X6 on performance. If it were me I'd pick up a cheap X6 and wait for excavator to see if things improve.
Although that right there should show AMD has some serious trouble with the BD design, since they are sticking with AM3+ for one more chip even though AM3+ is a dual channel design. You KNOW that has to be a serious bottleneck but you can just hear the engineers going "Look the best we're gonna get out of this chip isn't gonna beat the i5, if we try to force them to buy a new board too it just won't fly" as why else would they be sticking with a dual channel design and PGA when its obvious that LGA and quad channel is the way to go?
Well it could be worse, it could be one of the "fill in the blank" clickbaits like "Will (insert product) be the death of (insert something with crazed fanbase like FOSS, Apple)?" as God knows I've seen enough of THOSE with the release of Win 8.
This? this is....well its just sad, that's what it is. I'd have been asking if they'd like me to contact a therapist for them if I'd have been at the event as this is just a sad "look at me!" cry for attention. The fact that it made the front page is pretty damned pathetic though, I thought the firehose was supposed to end bullshit like this?
Actually what you are describing happened 3 CEOs ago and as you can read from that link by an ex AMD chip man you can see that the engineers they got now? Not really what is needed. All the Cyrix guys? GONE. All the Athlon64 guys? GONE. All the K8-10 guys? GONE. One of the first things that happened when the CEO musical chairs started was a slash and burn of the engineering dept which is why they are in the shape they are in now, Bulldozer was done using computer layouts which add 20% to power usage while losing 20% performance.
so anybody who wants to know why AMD went downhill so quick and why Bulldozer was such a disaster, please read the link, its an eye opener. personally I hope they can turn things around but after a slash and burn THAT bad its gonna be damned hard to recover, especially when Intel is so far ahead already. Hell since one of the previous CEOs killed Thuban they don't even have a single slot on Tom's hardware build list for cheap PCs, and haven't had a single slot in over a year. They don't even have good deals on the low end anymore as the Pentiums based on Sandy curbstomp them, its just NOT a good time for AMD.
Except in this case its easy enough to prove, intel has many fabs running at half capacity just so they don't end up with warehouses full of chips and the big "back to school" drive that both Intel and AMD were counting on proved to be a giant bust.
In a way both Intel and AMD are victims of their own success, they built such insane monster chips that frankly nobody NEEDS any more power and the few that buy power just for the sake of saying that have it just isn't enough to keep the market going. Hell my oldest is on his fourth year of college with his AMD dual core laptop and is quite happy with it, just as we're happy with our 2 Phenom X6s and the quad for the youngest on our desktops, plays all the latest games with cycles to spare so why buy another?
So it isn't like AMD is laying people off while posting record profits here, their numbers suck, the new half core design is a bust, people just aren't buying new systems until their old ones die, and the third world is skipping desktops and laptops and going straight to smartphones...its just not a great time for Intel or AMD.
Those were good chips but IIRC you had to REALLY watch the temps as they didn't have thermal monitoring and you could cook them if you weren't careful. We used to have a dead chip bucket at the old shop I worked at and it was nearly all Athlon chips where they went nuts with the OCing and cooked. Not to mention there were quite a few less than honest shops in my area that would crank the clocks and sell them as a faster system then BAM! cooked box.
As far as raw performance jump I'd have to say the ones I saw with the most consistent OCs was the Pentium Ds, those netburst dual cores could really crank up as far as clocks as long as you used a decent air cooling, I just recently had a customer finally let his Pentium D go to a relative so he could get a Phenom II X6, he had that thing running for years with a 1GHz OC and no troubles. Tough little chips those were.
The problem is AMD's new "half core" design is a complete flop and is often just BARELY better than X6, and that is when you put X6 against the new X8, if you put them equal, X6 VS X6, then Phenom II wins.
That is why I'm still building pretty much AMD exclusively, because in socket AM3+ frankly the bang for the buck is STILL there and better than Intel. I've been getting Athlon triples for $60, quads for $70, Phenom quads for $90 and Thuban X6s for $110. These chips are frankly more powerful than your average user will ever need but when you figure in the cost of boards you can build a damned nice AMD system for less than $450 and still make a decent profit, the only thing you are building from Intel at that price is a Pentium dual core.
That isn't to say there isn't ANY markets where AMD's new chips can't be a good deal, the netbooks with the E450 are nice, and when you can find them the C60 netbooks make great "pocket PCs" and the Llano quad laptops are great multimedia portables. And hopefully that former Apple/Athlon64 designer they hired will come up with a killer new chip, its just that Bulldozer/Piledriver just don't cut it. Its too hot, too power hungry, and costs too much to manufacture so they have to put it against the i5 which curbstomps. But since the previous CEO killed Thuban which was getting damned near 100% yields they have no choice but try to push the turkey that is "half cores" while hoping to stay afloat until they can come up with something better.
Like you I hope they manage to pull it off, and as long as I can get such great deals on Am3+ I'll keep selling 'em, but ATM there just isn't any positives when it comes to the BD/PD design, there just isn't.
Interesting? Really? For vaporware? Nvidia is up to 5 cores NOW trying to give people the performance they want and the batteries are dying quicker than ever. Lets face it folks ARM has hit a wall, to get IPC to scale up to even Atom and Hondo is blowing power budgets left and right. Sure ARM will always have a place in embedded, where you frankly don't need even the performance of what we had 25 years ago, but the "future" is more of what we have now, ever heavier multimedia, ever heavier loads, ever more IPC. And in these areas ARM just don't scale while still saving power over X86.
And that's the problem in a nutshell, as people desire more and more power its frankly easier for Intel to scale down than for ARM to scale up.
Actually the "future" will be the past, several chips designed for different tasks that can be switched on the fly. AMD was smart to buy Seamicro as they can now tie Opteron chips via hypertransport into these servers. Imagine a system that uses low power ARM cores for the day to day stuff where it doesn't need the incredible IPC of X86 but when its needed it can instantly kick on however many high performance X86 cores it needs, and then switch them off when the work is completed?
But I hate to break the news to ya faragon but ARM chips frankly aren't saving any juice over low power Intel at this point, as people demand more and more performance. This is why the ARM holdings group have been talking about "dark silicon" as to feed the ARM chips with everything on will kill a battery in 20 minutes, no different than X86. While ARM had an advantage for awhile it simply can't scale, which is why Nvidia is up to 5 cores now with even more in the pipe and feeding all those cores sucks just as bad as modern X86, no real advantage anymore.
What interface? Nobody seen "strange days" around here? The future will simply bypass all the bullshit and send the simulation directly into your brain. Talk about an easy way to keep the masses passive! They could live in the worst rat hole and be happy as clams, as long as they could plug in at the end of the day.
"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain" and THAT will be the future, only it won't be brought by some enslaving machines, it'll be brought by megacorps who'll make a fricking killing. We are now just starting to figure this stuff out, glasses that let the blind see, sounds broadcast to the brain, but you can bet your last dollar they WILL figure out how to just send the signals directly to your brain, then no "interface" needed. Plug in, tune out.