I've built two machines in the last year. A gaming rig for myself, with the now-discontinued Phenom II x6 1100T, and my wife with the 3870 APU. I carried over the video card I had used to previously upgrade the machine before that into my box, and didn't put one in hers. The only game we really play anymore is The Old Republic. We both play at 1920x1080. She gets ~30fps at low-mid settings, and I get 50-60 with everything maxed, including antialiasing. She noticed, with them sitting side-by-side, that mine looked better. But not enough better that she wanted to spend $150 on a new video card on it.
The person above that said it, said it right. Machines are just good enough these days. The video card I moved over was a 5770, which is now a few generations old.
I really hope we're all wrong here, and AMD is still around. Both of these machines have 16 GB RAM, and enough power to do what we need, and both were built for a few hundreds bucks each. Hers is quieter, mine is beefier. Both suited our needs. But I can't help but worry that if we allow AMD to die that the day of the cheap desktop is done. It'll be tablets for everyone. And I'd find it pretty hard to play The Old Republic on an iPad (though an app to send out my companions while I'm not at my desk would be nice...).
If you need ECC, you're a bit of the minority. And sadly, that's not something AMD can really afford to go after right now:(
He's not forcing it. Going to the FCC and trying to make them do it governmentally would be anti-libertarian. Calling for a protest is precisely what a libertarian should be doing. Asking the market to help decide a financial decision. After all, the only reason the news stations hold the debates is to sell ads. He just has to convince them that including him will sell more ads than it will cost them.
In that case, you're not the target market for the 8150. You're the target market for the APUs. Which provide the lower power profile you're looking for with rock solid 3d and GPGPU performance, at a lower total power envelope.
Quit complaining because you bought the wrong product.
Those things are ridiculously expensive to design and build. Smaller processes, linear optimizations, it's not cheap. And they just flat out don't have the capital. So what they were trying to do was focus on the bulk market to build back up some of that capital. The problem is that they didn't get the contracts from the big name manufacturers to provide them in bulk, and most of the people that buy at home will pat 75% more for that 10% boost in framerate and go intel. I buy AMD for a couple reasons. 1) I like the products. Overall they fit my need at a price point I like. 2) I like the company. I know a couple folks that work (or maybe worked soon enough) there. 3) I like competition. It keeps Intel's chips cheaper. I think that when AMD falls, the intel chips will go up in price, and then we'll be stuck with ARMs in our gaming rigs withing 5-10 years.
I just wish that more people bought their products for their machines, because we need them around.
Money is different from wealth, once you have enough to be able to relax. I truly feel sorry for you, if you actually believe money is everything. Maybe you just don't know any better.
Without the massive containment chambers, and the reactor vessels for light water reactors that can only be made by one company on earth, you can cut down build time a lot. You can build a fully functioning nuclear reactor in less than 18 months, as the US gov't did back in the 70's. If you use a passively safe, low pressure design like the LFTR, then you can build them much faster than 15 years.
Estimates put it at $2/watt total cost. Plus it can burn the "waste" from other nuclear plants, reducing cost elsewhere. Can solar plants help empty out those stores?
There was a functioning LFTR (thorium) reactor that the United States government ran for 4 years, before mothballing it in favor of the fast breeder (uranium) reactors for political reasons. The design exists already, and is proven to work. Needs a little modernization. Much of the reason that they will not research or fund much research into thorium is that it is super plentiful, and could cover all our needs, and wouldn't have to be coming from any specific politician's area. By blocking this, politicians from Texas can say they are protecting the oil industry jobs, politicians from the east coast can say they are protecting the coal jobs, and politicians everywhere can tout how they are protecting us from big, bad RADIATION (OOOOOOH, SCAAARY). Funny thing is this: the thorium reactor is passively safe. Loses power? All the fuel drops into a storage tank, all by its lonesome. There isn't an excessive amount of hydrogen to released outside containment to blow up the buildings and scare journalists. It burns over 99% of the fuel that is put in, producing less than a kilogram of waste per year for a gigawatt reactor, and most of that "waste" is Plutonium 238, which NASA is begging for, for their nuclear batteries for deep space probes.
In short, no one plans to build new nuclear reactors in the US because they will WORK. India and China are both building them right now. And we're going to lose the energy race, because of narrow minded individuals that refuse to research things because they are afraid of NUK-U-LAR. So when all the cool advancements in radiotherapy and innovation caused by the glut of power over in China, then we can be the next iteration of western Europe looking off our West Coast, going "Damn, I wish I had invested more in that..."
The A8-3850 plays The Old Republic at medium settings at 1920x1080 at around 40-50 fps, with 8GB RAM. The whole buildout cost a couple hundred bucks, using the on-processor video card. I'd hardly call that "downhill". Uses tiny amounts of power compared to what you get out of it. No stutter doing just about anything. Now, granted, I can't play Skyrim at max settings, but it provides solid performance at a good price.
I'm actually quite glad that they quit fighting for the "OMG WE HAVE THE BEST $1000 PROCESSOR" slot and started making really solid mid-range gear. Since that's what I buy. And what most people buy.
Not without cost, but a 256 MB server is only 1.5c/hr. You could spin you a standard 2 db, 2 webhead, behind a load balancer development environment to play with for just 7.5c/hr. (Don't do it with the RHEL builds, they have flat licensing fees). You can play with any of the API language bindings, or directly in curl. Our API docs are freely available to anyone, and we use a RESTful API. I wish I had seen this before, but I don't check this email often. If you're actually interested, feel free to email me at the listed email address. Make sure to put something useful in the title, so I don't discount you as spam, and I'd be more than happy to help you get started. I'm one of the stronger folks with the APIs since they interest me personally, not just professionally. Or you can check out the docs: http://docs.rackspace.com/api/ Or both.
Learning software and continually advancing software will one day mean that people will work to advance society by choice instead of need. More being mechanized means cheaper things. At some point, there will be a tipping point, and it'll be cheap enough that we can go back to single income households again! Maybe one day, I'll be a stay at home dad, lol, and people will actually be able to afford to retire!
If you have a bad enough data center that they aren't testing their generators and switches, and don't have multiple interconnects, you have problems. Granted, there are larger issues, like a truck crashing into the generator / electric company interconnect which cannot be foreseen, but the hallmark of a good company is one that learns from that mistake.
That's what A/C was saying. With Rackspace, you do get root to your environment, and the ability to image a gold master once you've got it set up the way you want. This lets you scale sideways pretty quickly, if you need extra copies of it suddenly. Or you can take an image, spin a copy, and to an upgrade to make sure it works right. That way you're only paying for the dev / staging environments when you're using them. Things like that, which are hard to do with hardware.
Disclaimer: I work in the Rackspace Cloud Department.
Hard to get to "above 60,000 feet" without passing through "under 60,000 feet". I'd imagine the bigger focus is the launch and landing for the FAA. They can then leave LEO to NASA for regulation. (For the record, I'm pretty anti-regulation overall, but I thought I might clarify).
Rackspace (my employer) does sell private cloud services. You could maintain the keys to that. But you pay enterprise prices, because it's an enterprise solution. If you want commodity prices, on the commodity product, you get the commodity server. Can a tech look into your stuff? Sure, if you give him the password, or aren't monitoring it for password changes, or are paying them for management on the server. But access is tracked, as are changes, etc. So, it's about as safe as paying someone to manage your servers in house. After all, a piece of paper with your employee to stop him from selling to your competitor isn't good enough either, if a paper with a service provider isn't.
Multiple IPs in multiple networks is standard fare in Linux. Very common. Believe it or not, not all of us are constrained by the limitations of Windows.
I work on this stuff on a daily basis as part of my job, but that is one part that Just Works (tm)
Alternatively, you could pick up one of the official MCSA/MCSE books. These do an alright job of covering it. Maybe it's just because I'm a linux admin, but I learned more from installing samba than I ever did from windows books.
Yay taxes! This is what happens when you try to tax commercial interests more than residential ones. When someone figures out how to make things more efficient and you cross into the expensive business taxation.
A good (reversed for slashdot) example would be to tax all multicore processors at an extra $150 each. There would have been a continued push into netburst to maximize single core performance, instead of splitting to multiple as they have in all devices... even phones. We would be further behind in innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
I've built two machines in the last year. A gaming rig for myself, with the now-discontinued Phenom II x6 1100T, and my wife with the 3870 APU. I carried over the video card I had used to previously upgrade the machine before that into my box, and didn't put one in hers. The only game we really play anymore is The Old Republic. We both play at 1920x1080. She gets ~30fps at low-mid settings, and I get 50-60 with everything maxed, including antialiasing. She noticed, with them sitting side-by-side, that mine looked better. But not enough better that she wanted to spend $150 on a new video card on it.
:(
The person above that said it, said it right. Machines are just good enough these days. The video card I moved over was a 5770, which is now a few generations old.
I really hope we're all wrong here, and AMD is still around. Both of these machines have 16 GB RAM, and enough power to do what we need, and both were built for a few hundreds bucks each. Hers is quieter, mine is beefier. Both suited our needs. But I can't help but worry that if we allow AMD to die that the day of the cheap desktop is done. It'll be tablets for everyone. And I'd find it pretty hard to play The Old Republic on an iPad (though an app to send out my companions while I'm not at my desk would be nice...).
If you need ECC, you're a bit of the minority. And sadly, that's not something AMD can really afford to go after right now
He's not forcing it. Going to the FCC and trying to make them do it governmentally would be anti-libertarian. Calling for a protest is precisely what a libertarian should be doing. Asking the market to help decide a financial decision. After all, the only reason the news stations hold the debates is to sell ads. He just has to convince them that including him will sell more ads than it will cost them.
In that case, you're not the target market for the 8150. You're the target market for the APUs. Which provide the lower power profile you're looking for with rock solid 3d and GPGPU performance, at a lower total power envelope.
Quit complaining because you bought the wrong product.
Those things are ridiculously expensive to design and build. Smaller processes, linear optimizations, it's not cheap. And they just flat out don't have the capital. So what they were trying to do was focus on the bulk market to build back up some of that capital. The problem is that they didn't get the contracts from the big name manufacturers to provide them in bulk, and most of the people that buy at home will pat 75% more for that 10% boost in framerate and go intel. I buy AMD for a couple reasons. 1) I like the products. Overall they fit my need at a price point I like. 2) I like the company. I know a couple folks that work (or maybe worked soon enough) there. 3) I like competition. It keeps Intel's chips cheaper. I think that when AMD falls, the intel chips will go up in price, and then we'll be stuck with ARMs in our gaming rigs withing 5-10 years.
I just wish that more people bought their products for their machines, because we need them around.
Money is different from wealth, once you have enough to be able to relax. I truly feel sorry for you, if you actually believe money is everything. Maybe you just don't know any better.
The sun is too small to go supernova. Lrn2science.
Maybe they could work on deploying some more towers in high usage areas with that 49% profit?
Without the massive containment chambers, and the reactor vessels for light water reactors that can only be made by one company on earth, you can cut down build time a lot. You can build a fully functioning nuclear reactor in less than 18 months, as the US gov't did back in the 70's. If you use a passively safe, low pressure design like the LFTR, then you can build them much faster than 15 years.
Estimates put it at $2/watt total cost. Plus it can burn the "waste" from other nuclear plants, reducing cost elsewhere. Can solar plants help empty out those stores?
There was a functioning LFTR (thorium) reactor that the United States government ran for 4 years, before mothballing it in favor of the fast breeder (uranium) reactors for political reasons. The design exists already, and is proven to work. Needs a little modernization. Much of the reason that they will not research or fund much research into thorium is that it is super plentiful, and could cover all our needs, and wouldn't have to be coming from any specific politician's area. By blocking this, politicians from Texas can say they are protecting the oil industry jobs, politicians from the east coast can say they are protecting the coal jobs, and politicians everywhere can tout how they are protecting us from big, bad RADIATION (OOOOOOH, SCAAARY). Funny thing is this: the thorium reactor is passively safe. Loses power? All the fuel drops into a storage tank, all by its lonesome. There isn't an excessive amount of hydrogen to released outside containment to blow up the buildings and scare journalists. It burns over 99% of the fuel that is put in, producing less than a kilogram of waste per year for a gigawatt reactor, and most of that "waste" is Plutonium 238, which NASA is begging for, for their nuclear batteries for deep space probes.
In short, no one plans to build new nuclear reactors in the US because they will WORK. India and China are both building them right now. And we're going to lose the energy race, because of narrow minded individuals that refuse to research things because they are afraid of NUK-U-LAR. So when all the cool advancements in radiotherapy and innovation caused by the glut of power over in China, then we can be the next iteration of western Europe looking off our West Coast, going "Damn, I wish I had invested more in that..."
Well, to be fair, Intel doesn't have to write drivers that work at over 15 fps...
The A8-3850 plays The Old Republic at medium settings at 1920x1080 at around 40-50 fps, with 8GB RAM. The whole buildout cost a couple hundred bucks, using the on-processor video card. I'd hardly call that "downhill". Uses tiny amounts of power compared to what you get out of it. No stutter doing just about anything. Now, granted, I can't play Skyrim at max settings, but it provides solid performance at a good price.
I'm actually quite glad that they quit fighting for the "OMG WE HAVE THE BEST $1000 PROCESSOR" slot and started making really solid mid-range gear. Since that's what I buy. And what most people buy.
Obviously people value saving the half hour of drive time more than the $2.50 extra on groceries. Damn them!
Not without cost, but a 256 MB server is only 1.5c/hr. You could spin you a standard 2 db, 2 webhead, behind a load balancer development environment to play with for just 7.5c/hr. (Don't do it with the RHEL builds, they have flat licensing fees). You can play with any of the API language bindings, or directly in curl. Our API docs are freely available to anyone, and we use a RESTful API. I wish I had seen this before, but I don't check this email often. If you're actually interested, feel free to email me at the listed email address. Make sure to put something useful in the title, so I don't discount you as spam, and I'd be more than happy to help you get started. I'm one of the stronger folks with the APIs since they interest me personally, not just professionally. Or you can check out the docs: http://docs.rackspace.com/api/ Or both.
Learning software and continually advancing software will one day mean that people will work to advance society by choice instead of need. More being mechanized means cheaper things. At some point, there will be a tipping point, and it'll be cheap enough that we can go back to single income households again! Maybe one day, I'll be a stay at home dad, lol, and people will actually be able to afford to retire!
If you have a bad enough data center that they aren't testing their generators and switches, and don't have multiple interconnects, you have problems. Granted, there are larger issues, like a truck crashing into the generator / electric company interconnect which cannot be foreseen, but the hallmark of a good company is one that learns from that mistake.
That's what A/C was saying. With Rackspace, you do get root to your environment, and the ability to image a gold master once you've got it set up the way you want. This lets you scale sideways pretty quickly, if you need extra copies of it suddenly. Or you can take an image, spin a copy, and to an upgrade to make sure it works right. That way you're only paying for the dev / staging environments when you're using them. Things like that, which are hard to do with hardware.
Disclaimer: I work in the Rackspace Cloud Department.
Fiber only needs power at each end. There should be at least one long haul fiber to another city in any respectable data center.
I was wondering how long it would take them to figure out they could treat us like the states.
Refurbished means it already broke once. I wouldn't want a refurbished space suit, either. "Most of my items have almost no blood left on them."
Hard to get to "above 60,000 feet" without passing through "under 60,000 feet". I'd imagine the bigger focus is the launch and landing for the FAA. They can then leave LEO to NASA for regulation. (For the record, I'm pretty anti-regulation overall, but I thought I might clarify).
Rackspace (my employer) does sell private cloud services. You could maintain the keys to that. But you pay enterprise prices, because it's an enterprise solution. If you want commodity prices, on the commodity product, you get the commodity server. Can a tech look into your stuff? Sure, if you give him the password, or aren't monitoring it for password changes, or are paying them for management on the server. But access is tracked, as are changes, etc. So, it's about as safe as paying someone to manage your servers in house. After all, a piece of paper with your employee to stop him from selling to your competitor isn't good enough either, if a paper with a service provider isn't.
Multiple IPs in multiple networks is standard fare in Linux. Very common. Believe it or not, not all of us are constrained by the limitations of Windows.
I work on this stuff on a daily basis as part of my job, but that is one part that Just Works (tm)
Nothing quite like setting up samba to understand windows auth. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml
Alternatively, you could pick up one of the official MCSA/MCSE books. These do an alright job of covering it. Maybe it's just because I'm a linux admin, but I learned more from installing samba than I ever did from windows books.
Yay taxes! This is what happens when you try to tax commercial interests more than residential ones. When someone figures out how to make things more efficient and you cross into the expensive business taxation.
A good (reversed for slashdot) example would be to tax all multicore processors at an extra $150 each. There would have been a continued push into netburst to maximize single core performance, instead of splitting to multiple as they have in all devices... even phones. We would be further behind in innovation.