'' At 50:1 for an x86 PB I'd put $30-$40 on one and that way I could afford one to buy one straightaway. I don't think those odds are realistic. ''
Where are my moderator points when I need them? 50:1 odds for an x86 PB are ridiculous. If those odds were offered by a reputable betting shop where I could be confident that they can carry the losses, I would bet £1000 immediately. Chances for an x86 PowerBook are at least 1:5 or better.
>> There's no maybe about it - legalising free music downloads universally would kill organised music. A weaker measure wouldn't, but universal decriminalisation would kill the infrastructure that makes music 'happen'.
I wouldn't think so. First, live concerts would not be affected very much at all. Second, I could imagine some serious sponsorship. For example, Apple Computer would probably start sponsoring good and/or popular musicians and give away their works for free on any iPod that you buy. And the next Britney Spears record would have "brought to you by xxxxxx Cola" written on it, and it would be true.
'' 32-bit datapaths will always be faster than 64-bit datapaths! If you aren't addressing more than 4GB of RAM and don't need 64-bit arithmetic, then a 32-bit processor can definitely be faster than a 64-bit.
Then there is cache footprints. 32-bit code will pack more tightly into caches resulting in higher performance. ''
How many addressable integer registers and MMX registers does an x86 chip in 32 bit mode have? How many addressable integer registers and MMX registers does an x86 chip in 64 bit mode have?
Answers: 8 and 16.
x86 chips in 64 bit mode run quite a bit faster for reasons that have nothing to do with 64 bitness at all. The instruction set has been changed to give access to twice as many registers, and that gives 15 to 20 percent more speed.
'' For desktops, regular dual CPU's will be a lot cheaper and just as effective for a long time to come.
Or am I missing something here?''
Ask Apple. They don't build any dual CPU machines anymore, just dual-core (there is one exception, and that is dual CPU + dual core = quad core).
If you can fit two CPUs into one chip, that is definitely cheaper than building two separate chips. There is faster communication from chip to chip (direct L2 cache to L2 cache is faster than going through the bus), L2 cache can be shared (so if one app is busy doing intensive calculations without much memory access, another one can have twice the L2 cache). Disadvantage can be that there is only one path between CPUs and memory.
'' It is one step above young Earth creationists, who seek "geological evidence" to "support" their preconceived interpretation of the Genesis chronology. ''
Isn't that a really stupid attitude? I mean it is just about conceivable that god created the earth 6000 years ago and hid dinosaur bones that look as if they are 200 million years old, to test the faith of people or for whatever reason. But why would god have created the earth 6000 years ago, and then hidden dinosaur bones that look as if they are 200 million years old, but can be identified as fakes that are only 6000 years old on closer inspection? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
'' They still don't understand, bringing the costs down would solve a lot of their problems. If I can get an album (record, tape, cd, or whatever) for $5, why bother pirating it? But, looking at a $20 price tag, that may encourage me to pirate. At $5 each, I'd consider actually going to the store and buying music ''
Here in England, you can buy illegal copies of most new DVDs in appalling quality for about five pound, when the top-quality original DVD sells for say £14.95. It proves that there is a market for DVDs in lower-than-normal quality at lower-than-normal price. It should be easy for the movie industry to get rid of those pirates by just selling the same DVDs at lower quality and lower price.
Usually, I have a choice of buying a DVD at a higher price or a video at a significantly lower price. I know the video has lower quality, but many people buy them because they are cheaper. However, many people would be willing to buy low-price DVDs with artificially reduced quality (from a store instead of market stall).
'' I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?''
If p is a prime, then the distance to the next smaller prime is on the average about ln (p). Cases where the gap to the next smaller prime is more than (ln (p))^2 seem to be exceedingly rare. So yes, there are gazillions of primes between this one and the next smaller one.
There may be no Mersenne primes between this one and the previously largest known, because Mersenne primes are indeed very rare.
'' How much money is Apple making from iPODs, iTunes, and such? How much are they making from the computer hardware? And what are the projections for the next 5 years? ''
The answers: 1. Tons. 2. Tons. 3. iPod will grow quicker for a while, but when it gets closer to saturation, Macs will take over again.
'' Our marketdroids produced a site at one point that would not work with anything other than IE. When told of this they said they didn't care. As it happens the geeks here had more influence with the CEO, and so this attitude was readjusted toute suite ''
Very strange. I had heard of cases where it was the other way round, web designers who didn't want to cater for "idiots who spend much too much money on overpriced hardware", and the marketing people didn't mind at all to sell to people who spend much too much money on overpriced hardware.
>> Anyone have any answers as to what breaks on the page in safari?
Probably a hard-coded check for browsers that the webpage has been tested with: Either Netscape 7 or Firefox on the Macintosh, that's what the error message on www.gap.com says (note that it does _not_ say "We don't support safari", that would mean they would recognise Safari).
About the most stupid webpage that I found complained that I didn't have Flash installed. I do have Flash installed. Then they directed me to a webpage where I could download Flash for Windows. Believe me, Flash for Windows wouldn't do me any good whatsoever, because I am one hundred percent sure it doesn't run on a Macintosh.
Did I mention that 90 percent of these problems are caused by sheer stupidity? If the web designer isn't stupid, then there is no need to _support_ any modern browser, just write decent HTML.
'' I mean, really, how can they rip X amount of CDs in 2-5 days? ''
If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I would just buy the ten cheapest Dells that I could find, and a dozen spare CD drives, just in case. One Dell for each customer. Feed them CDs as fast as you can, walking from one machine to the next.
'' Apple will probably not take any legal action because Apple is partly owned by microsoft.. ''
I'd really like to know where you got that information from. This seems to be like one of these viruses or bacteria that can stay in the ground frozen for ten years and spring up again and can't be killed. So please tell us: Where did you read this and when, or where did you hear it?
>> And before you go on the "why would a computer novice have FOUR computers?" rant, I offer you this: It's 1990, a man gets a computer. It's 1994, the man's computer stops working, he puts it in the closet, he gets another computer. It's 2000, his second computer stops working, he puts it and the first out in the garage and gets a new one. I'm sure you can guess where the fourth computer came from unless you are actually as stupid as your comment would lead me to believe.
More likely, it is 2002, a man gets a computer. It's 2003, the man's computer stops working...
'' Why didn't John Seigenthaler edit his own page with correct information? Instead of sueing wikipedia he could have just added the "correct" information himself. Isn't that the point of wikipedia? What don't I understand here? ''
Of all the people in the world, John Seigenthaler is the one person who should never, ever be allowed to edit a page about John Seigenthaler, for very good reasons. See recent theregister articles about exceptions to that rule.
Wikipedia now has an article about "Moral Responsibility". The problem is, Wikipedia still has no moral responsibility and doesn't intend to have it, as evidenced by this discussion here.
'' Is/was the rest of the shop Windows-based? Did you stop to think that just MAYBE the former boss had a reason to not want to add yet another platform to the mix? And now that you've implemented the new platform, who supports it when you leave? Because you sound exactly like the type that would have fully documented everything. ''
So what do you know? You don't know anything about the company, anything about the IT situation in that company, nothing about the poster and his boss and their qualifications, you know shit, but you think you know better, right?
'' THis is always there - you'd think $250 Million would buy a company a good set of electronic surveilance systems to identify outliers which just seem odd ('why is our guy selling this 610,000 yuan stock at 1yuan?!' says the comp in a split second). But there will *always* be human error. ''
It seems that Japan is much more vulnerable to this. A US broker making exactly the same mistake would have sold 5000 shares for 1 dollar instead of 1 share for 5000 dollar - much cheaper mistake at $25 million only. In reality, in most US trades the number of shares is higher than the share price, so the risk is even lower.
'' What I hate even more (yes, Microsoft I'm talking to YOU) is that "OK" and "Cancel" are not synonymous with "Yes" and "No".
Do you wish to abort this operation?
OK Cancel ''
MacOS X Human Interface Guidelines state that there should be a "Cancel" button, which should always be in the same position in all dialogs. Clicking "Cancel" means that the action which caused the dialog or alert to appear will not be performed. There is no "Cancel" button if there is no operation that can be canceled - for example, a notification that the paper in the printer has jammed cannot be canceled.
With these guidelines, a question "Do you wish to abort this operation" is completely useless. It should be "Do you wish to perform this operation?" and "Cancel" will not perform it.
>> My own relationship barely survived, and that was only because I cut back to 80 hours a week, even though people were bitching at me for the laziness.
There is a nice study by Eysenck who found out that people working 57 hours per week are less productive than people working 48 hours per week. Not "productive per hour worked", but productive. Less work produced in 57 hours than in 48 hours.
I'd say that you were working for a company run by sadistic idiots.
>> Theoretically everything should work just fine, but it shows that software developers just didn't imagine the scenario.
Mixing processors with different capabilities is probably a bigger problem. Application asks OS: "Do you support SSE3"? OS says: Yes. OS switches to a different processor that doesn't support SSE3. Application uses SSE3 instructions and crashes.
"" There were a few cases on this where video rental places wanted to keep pristine their originals, and rent out the backup copies. Even if done on a one-to-one basis, this isn't legal, because when the physical possession of the original CD is transferred, any archival backups (in any form) must either be transferred with the CD or destroyed. ""
So they could have done it legally if they gave every rental customer both one original type with "DONT TOUCH IT" written on it and a copy of that tape?
>> The problem with your defense is, the RIAA will need to show -- by a preponderance of the evidence, more likely than not -- that the infringement occured at your IP address. At that point, when you say, "it wasn't me, it was somebody stealing my bandwidth," the burden then shifts to YOU to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
If it is so easy for the RIAA to find out which IP address an infringement occured at, then it would be quite stupid to use your own IP address for that action, and it would be much more likely that someone did some hack to use your IP address.
It's like a car openly being used in a bank robbery; it is quite unlikely that the legitimate owner of the car is the bank robber.
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'' At 50:1 for an x86 PB I'd put $30-$40 on one and that way I could afford one to buy one straightaway. I don't think those odds are realistic. ''
Where are my moderator points when I need them? 50:1 odds for an x86 PB are ridiculous. If those odds were offered by a reputable betting shop where I could be confident that they can carry the losses, I would bet £1000 immediately. Chances for an x86 PowerBook are at least 1:5 or better.
''Nothing can come good from offering an ultra thin laptop.
The thinner it is, the more suspectible it is to braking. ''
Absolutely. I always slow down very gently when I have one in my car. It is so susceptible to braking, I suspect it would break if I brake too hard.
>> There's no maybe about it - legalising free music downloads universally would kill organised music. A weaker measure wouldn't, but universal decriminalisation would kill the infrastructure that makes music 'happen'.
I wouldn't think so. First, live concerts would not be affected very much at all. Second, I could imagine some serious sponsorship. For example, Apple Computer would probably start sponsoring good and/or popular musicians and give away their works for free on any iPod that you buy. And the next Britney Spears record would have "brought to you by xxxxxx Cola" written on it, and it would be true.
>> You're forgetting that Australia is a nation that was founded by criminals.
Hmmmh, I thought Australia was founded by the then British government...
'' 32-bit datapaths will always be faster than 64-bit datapaths! If you aren't addressing more than 4GB of RAM and don't need 64-bit arithmetic, then a 32-bit processor can definitely be faster than a 64-bit.
Then there is cache footprints. 32-bit code will pack more tightly into caches resulting in higher performance. ''
How many addressable integer registers and MMX registers does an x86 chip in 32 bit mode have?
How many addressable integer registers and MMX registers does an x86 chip in 64 bit mode have?
Answers: 8 and 16.
x86 chips in 64 bit mode run quite a bit faster for reasons that have nothing to do with 64 bitness at all. The instruction set has been changed to give access to twice as many registers, and that gives 15 to 20 percent more speed.
'' For desktops, regular dual CPU's will be a lot cheaper and just as effective for a long time to come.
Or am I missing something here?''
Ask Apple. They don't build any dual CPU machines anymore, just dual-core (there is one exception, and that is dual CPU + dual core = quad core).
If you can fit two CPUs into one chip, that is definitely cheaper than building two separate chips. There is faster communication from chip to chip (direct L2 cache to L2 cache is faster than going through the bus), L2 cache can be shared (so if one app is busy doing intensive calculations without much memory access, another one can have twice the L2 cache). Disadvantage can be that there is only one path between CPUs and memory.
'' Don't try to use logic and omnipotent gods in the same sentence, its to easy to logically disprove an omnipotent god.... ''
Actually, it is impossible to logically disprove an omnipotent god.
'' It is one step above young Earth creationists, who seek "geological evidence" to "support" their preconceived interpretation of the Genesis chronology. ''
Isn't that a really stupid attitude? I mean it is just about conceivable that god created the earth 6000 years ago and hid dinosaur bones that look as if they are 200 million years old, to test the faith of people or for whatever reason. But why would god have created the earth 6000 years ago, and then hidden dinosaur bones that look as if they are 200 million years old, but can be identified as fakes that are only 6000 years old on closer inspection? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
'' They still don't understand, bringing the costs down would solve a lot of their problems. If I can get an album (record, tape, cd, or whatever) for $5, why bother pirating it? But, looking at a $20 price tag, that may encourage me to pirate. At $5 each, I'd consider actually going to the store and buying music ''
Here in England, you can buy illegal copies of most new DVDs in appalling quality for about five pound, when the top-quality original DVD sells for say £14.95. It proves that there is a market for DVDs in lower-than-normal quality at lower-than-normal price. It should be easy for the movie industry to get rid of those pirates by just selling the same DVDs at lower quality and lower price.
Usually, I have a choice of buying a DVD at a higher price or a video at a significantly lower price. I know the video has lower quality, but many people buy them because they are cheaper. However, many people would be willing to buy low-price DVDs with artificially reduced quality (from a store instead of market stall).
'' I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?''
If p is a prime, then the distance to the next smaller prime is on the average about ln (p). Cases where the gap to the next smaller prime is more than (ln (p))^2 seem to be exceedingly rare. So yes, there are gazillions of primes between this one and the next smaller one.
There may be no Mersenne primes between this one and the previously largest known, because Mersenne primes are indeed very rare.
'' How much money is Apple making from iPODs, iTunes, and such? How much are they making from the computer hardware? And what are the projections for the next 5 years? ''
The answers: 1. Tons. 2. Tons. 3. iPod will grow quicker for a while, but when it gets closer to saturation, Macs will take over again.
'' Our marketdroids produced a site at one point that would not work with anything other than IE. When told of this they said they didn't care. As it happens the geeks here had more influence with the CEO, and so this attitude was readjusted toute suite ''
Very strange. I had heard of cases where it was the other way round, web designers who didn't want to cater for "idiots who spend much too much money on overpriced hardware", and the marketing people didn't mind at all to sell to people who spend much too much money on overpriced hardware.
>> Anyone have any answers as to what breaks on the page in safari?
Probably a hard-coded check for browsers that the webpage has been tested with: Either Netscape 7 or Firefox on the Macintosh, that's what the error message on www.gap.com says (note that it does _not_ say "We don't support safari", that would mean they would recognise Safari).
About the most stupid webpage that I found complained that I didn't have Flash installed. I do have Flash installed. Then they directed me to a webpage where I could download Flash for Windows. Believe me, Flash for Windows wouldn't do me any good whatsoever, because I am one hundred percent sure it doesn't run on a Macintosh.
Did I mention that 90 percent of these problems are caused by sheer stupidity? If the web designer isn't stupid, then there is no need to _support_ any modern browser, just write decent HTML.
'' I mean, really, how can they rip X amount of CDs in 2-5 days? ''
If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I would just buy the ten cheapest Dells that I could find, and a dozen spare CD drives, just in case. One Dell for each customer. Feed them CDs as fast as you can, walking from one machine to the next.
'' Apple will probably not take any legal action because Apple is partly owned by microsoft.. ''
I'd really like to know where you got that information from. This seems to be like one of these viruses or bacteria that can stay in the ground frozen for ten years and spring up again and can't be killed. So please tell us: Where did you read this and when, or where did you hear it?
>> And before you go on the "why would a computer novice have FOUR computers?" rant, I offer you this: It's 1990, a man gets a computer. It's 1994, the man's computer stops working, he puts it in the closet, he gets another computer. It's 2000, his second computer stops working, he puts it and the first out in the garage and gets a new one. I'm sure you can guess where the fourth computer came from unless you are actually as stupid as your comment would lead me to believe.
More likely, it is 2002, a man gets a computer. It's 2003, the man's computer stops working...
'' Why didn't John Seigenthaler edit his own page with correct information? Instead of sueing wikipedia he could have just added the "correct" information himself. Isn't that the point of wikipedia? What don't I understand here? ''
Of all the people in the world, John Seigenthaler is the one person who should never, ever be allowed to edit a page about John Seigenthaler, for very good reasons. See recent theregister articles about exceptions to that rule.
Wikipedia now has an article about "Moral Responsibility". The problem is, Wikipedia still has no moral responsibility and doesn't intend to have it, as evidenced by this discussion here.
'' Is/was the rest of the shop Windows-based? Did you stop to think that just MAYBE the former boss had a reason to not want to add yet another platform to the mix? And now that you've implemented the new platform, who supports it when you leave? Because you sound exactly like the type that would have fully documented everything. ''
So what do you know? You don't know anything about the company, anything about the IT situation in that company, nothing about the poster and his boss and their qualifications, you know shit, but you think you know better, right?
'' THis is always there - you'd think $250 Million would buy a company a good set of electronic surveilance systems to identify outliers which just seem odd ('why is our guy selling this 610,000 yuan stock at 1yuan?!' says the comp in a split second). But there will *always* be human error. ''
It seems that Japan is much more vulnerable to this. A US broker making exactly the same mistake would have sold 5000 shares for 1 dollar instead of 1 share for 5000 dollar - much cheaper mistake at $25 million only. In reality, in most US trades the number of shares is higher than the share price, so the risk is even lower.
'' What I hate even more (yes, Microsoft I'm talking to YOU) is that "OK" and "Cancel" are not synonymous with "Yes" and "No".
Do you wish to abort this operation?
OK Cancel ''
MacOS X Human Interface Guidelines state that there should be a "Cancel" button, which should always be in the same position in all dialogs. Clicking "Cancel" means that the action which caused the dialog or alert to appear will not be performed. There is no "Cancel" button if there is no operation that can be canceled - for example, a notification that the paper in the printer has jammed cannot be canceled.
With these guidelines, a question "Do you wish to abort this operation" is completely useless. It should be "Do you wish to perform this operation?" and "Cancel" will not perform it.
>> My own relationship barely survived, and that was only because I cut back to 80 hours a week, even though people were bitching at me for the laziness.
There is a nice study by Eysenck who found out that people working 57 hours per week are less productive than people working 48 hours per week. Not "productive per hour worked", but productive. Less work produced in 57 hours than in 48 hours.
I'd say that you were working for a company run by sadistic idiots.
>> Theoretically everything should work just fine, but it shows that software developers just didn't imagine the scenario.
Mixing processors with different capabilities is probably a bigger problem. Application asks OS: "Do you support SSE3"? OS says: Yes. OS switches to a different processor that doesn't support SSE3. Application uses SSE3 instructions and crashes.
"" There were a few cases on this where video rental places wanted to keep pristine their originals, and rent out the backup copies. Even if done on a one-to-one basis, this isn't legal, because when the physical possession of the original CD is transferred, any archival backups (in any form) must either be transferred with the CD or destroyed. ""
So they could have done it legally if they gave every rental customer both one original type with "DONT TOUCH IT" written on it and a copy of that tape?
>> The problem with your defense is, the RIAA will need to show -- by a preponderance of the evidence, more likely than not -- that the infringement occured at your IP address. At that point, when you say, "it wasn't me, it was somebody stealing my bandwidth," the burden then shifts to YOU to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
If it is so easy for the RIAA to find out which IP address an infringement occured at, then it would be quite stupid to use your own IP address for that action, and it would be much more likely that someone did some hack to use your IP address.
It's like a car openly being used in a bank robbery; it is quite unlikely that the legitimate owner of the car is the bank robber.