"Condrake" would have been easy to pronounce. Unfortunately, it has the word "Con" in it, which doesn't sound like a good thing to buy.
Why didn't they use something completely new like "Foxglove"? It's herbal and has earthy, pagan overtones like Mandrake. It's also got some interesting connotations about being a comfortable covering for Firefox.
I *like* Foxglove. Somebody should start a Foxglove Linux project. I can immediately picture the logo, the website, and a half dozen decent marketing campaigns. You could talk about it being "foxy", make a pun on the Dr. Seuss classic "Fox in Socks", make "fox guarding the henhouse" references, say it "fits like a glove", run a "Poison your PC" campaign, or (my personal favorite) call it "digital digitalis". It's a *damn* fine name for a Linux distro.
I'm primarily suggesting that we're taking an extreme view of this situation, and there is another extreme view on the opposite side. Both views are probably *too* extreme.
As George Carlin said, somewhere between "Famous Potatoes" and "Live Free or Die", the truth lies... and it's probably a *little* closer to "Famous Potatoes".
I don't see how a vendor can influence a Wiki any more easily than it can influence the market. It strikes me that you would have to fundamentally alter the way Wikipedia works for any such influence to make even a slight difference.
Of course, I might be overlooking something. How do you suggest the vendor might influence Wikipedia? What could a similar site do to prevent such influence?
How do you think they determined that? I'll bet they asked him. "Did you write this whole thing in four months?" "Why yes, yes I did." End of story in most organisations.
And in many large companies, there's also a sort of nervous laughter while pointedly looking the other way about certain employees. We *know* what they're doing probably isn't strictly speaking legal or ethical, but we studiously avoid knowing too much about it because that would obligate us to *do* something about it (and potentially expose us to implication). When you're pretty sure your colleague is stealing from competitors to give your company a stronger market advantage, doing the Right Thing is probably detrimental to your career, so you pretend to have more doubt than you really do.
Assume the project starts up and hires some fly-by-night guy to design and build this system. He promises he can do it in four months for X amount of money.
This guy tries like hell to build the project, but gets stymied by some stuff. So he downloads PearPC and tries to figure out what he's doing wrong.
Eventually, he figures out that what he did wrong was promise something that nobody could deliver, so he panics and starts mucking around in PearPC to conceal its origin.
When the deadline hits, he sends them his "obfuscated" version of PearPC and collects his check. He runs off into the night hoping nobody ever finds out.
Meanwhile, the completely innocent company puts this project up for sale. The open source community raises hell. The company goes "OMG! WTF?" and yanks it off the market.
After some examination, the company decides that the only possible way to recover from this (according to their lawyers) is to GPL the project. Since it qualifies as a work made for hire, they own all the rights to the non-PearPC code, so they can license *that* however they like.
Just playing devil's advocate. Maybe the big bad company isn't the villain here; maybe it's just one crappy little ass-hat developer.
Remember all the old "smell-o-vision" jokes? Insert your favorite one here.
The thing that scares me is how any new technology is used *badly* for the first three to five years. Force feedback was around for a good long time before anyone did anything sensible with it, and even stereo sound was heinously abused in the early days. I can just imagine the hideous misfeatures that will pop up with this.
And for the conspiracy theorists among us, Drs. Chaffee and Light in the UK supposedly had some limited success controlling the human brain with radio waves in the 30s. If either of those are cited in the patent application, we might want to steer clear of any game using this technology...
I was actually just *about* to mention that, because it seems to be targeting the same audience: they targeted the mid-teen market 25 years ago, and now they're targeting the over-40 market. So if you were 16 in 1981, you'd be 40 today... and exactly the kind of person they're targeting.
I miss my IntelliVision. Particularly the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game where arrows bounced off walls like some weird form of billiards, which is unfortunately one of the few games NOT recently re-released on the PS2 collection.
I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to stand by the companies that have been good to me. If people feel abused and mistreated by a company, the company's offering does badly -- hence the Dreamcast problem. The Dreamcast was a great system, but there were a lot of promises that never materialised, and Sega had a pretty solid reputation for screwing things up. (This is not necessarily why the console failed, but it's certainly why *I* didn't buy a Dreamcast.)
Sony and Nintendo have been very good to a lot of gamers for a very long time, Nintendo longer than Sony; I don't think they're going to "lose" anytime soon. Microsoft is starting to gather a pretty solid following, too; I know an awful lot of people who swear by their XBox more often than they swear at it.
So IMO, nobody's going to lose a whole lot. There will be some shuffling around among the undecided and the new gamers, but in the end all three consoles will have a solid audience. Nintendo is probably the closest thing we'll have to a "loser", primarily because they've targeted the family market, but there are more than enough concerned families out there to keep them in business.
Me, I've got all three consoles, and I'm already squirreling away money to knock back a triple-threat preorder once we get ship dates on the next-gen consoles. Screw console monogamy.;)
> Photoshop CS runs just fine on > my Windows XP SP2 box
Those who actually paid attention to the WHOLE list know that PhotoShop CS only fails to start under XP SP2 on 64-bit processors, and that Virtual PC simply runs XP SP2 virtual machines more *slowly* than XP SP1 virtual machines.
You know, if you want to do more than knee-jerk over the name in the left hand column.
Whenever you place your faith in a large software package that you don't personally understand down to its deepest levels, you're betting that someone will always be available to maintain it.
Sometimes you lose.
While the open source community is full of people working on various projects, there are several large and complex projects that NOBODY works with anymore, but that other people still want to use. Freedom or no freedom, sometimes your support drops out from under you, and you're left stranded in the middle of nowhere with a problem nobody wants to solve.
It's no different than having a commercial product drop off the support list. You have the same recourse: do it yourself, or switch products. And that's where I get really annoyed and offended by the open source crowd, because if I choose to fix the product I have, the same community that abandoned me when I needed them is right there saying "it's GPL, you have to give it back to us". There's a whole lot of "DIY" shouted in my direction when I need help, and a whole lot of "gimme" when *other* people need help. Or even when they *don't* need help, just because I have something new and they want it, even if it's completely worthless to them.
We like to pretend that the open source community is full of developers, but the fact is it's primarily composed of scavengers who hang around developers and feed on our scraps.
So when BM (huhuhuh, I said BM... oh, sorry) wants to take their product away, I sympathise. I look at what they're doing, and I think they didn't ask a whole hell of a lot: don't reverse engineer their work, and don't support someone who does. That's a very small thing to ask, even if you *do* normally have the right to do it. And the community failed them on this request, so I think they're completely justified in taking their ball and going home.
And I can't help thinking that when you're a developer, the open source community wants your balls, so you can be like them. I don't really care for that idea, but I find it very amusing to say it that way.
My company has a standard clause in our independent contractor agreement that allows us to specify whether ancillary projects will be undertaken by the client, who will then pay for the development and own the rights, or by my company... which then does the development "off the clock" and owns all rights. (The definition of an ancillary project is complex, but it's essentially anything that isn't part of the core functionality and can still work reliably without that core.)
The concept here is that if we come across something that would be better shared than hoarded, we can share it -- either by sticking it in a box and selling it, or by taking it open source. We draw the line based on whether we think people will buy it. (Hey, we're a business. Piss off.)
The upshot, however, is that our ancillary projects tend not to be very useful to anyone. Not only do we not think people will buy most of them, we don't think people will USE most of them. So the vast majority of the time, we look at something like our skinning and template engine, and we say "even if you *did* need this, you could write it yourself in less time than it would take to find the project". (Literally, it's about twenty lines. Not interesting at all.) We may at some point release something along the lines of Bob Stout's SNIPPETS, but that's about all we're likely to do.
In the end, our ability to release open source projects is hampered by the narrow focus of our tools. They have such limited functionality and flexibility, they're just not going to be applicable to most people's needs. Even when we took our web site's back end and branded it "Alatar CMS" for release as an open source project, we had to admit it's just plain not ready for general use. At some point, we're still going to clean it up and release it, but we're just not ready to invest time in that yet.
> it seems like you may almost have > some bias against people with certs.
A bit. A bit. Just a bit.
Seriously, it's not the certification I have trouble with; it's the sort of person who waves it around. I think a certification is the sort of thing you pull out when you need it, not something you stick at the end of your name for brownie points.
Unfortunately, that's what you have to do for a lot of employers, and there's no way for the applicant to know I'm actually put off by certifications... so I'm forgiving of it on a resume. It's the people who start every other sentence with "well I'm a CCNA, and..." that bother me.
> The clock speed or name of the > processor just shouldn't matter.
The name, no, that shouldn't matter. Neither should the price. We're talking about performance differences, plain and simple; who made the processor and how much it cost are two things that have nothing to do with that.
> Do you really think that your logic > would factor into someone's buying > decisions?
No, I think it would factor into the question of which processor is comparable to another processor for purposes of benchmarking. Benchmarks are supposed to compare alternatives which are fundamentally *similar*, so they're on an even playing field.
> The fact that you didn't go with the > FX processor because it was "too fast" > betrays your bias.
Excuse me, but you're highly mistaken if you think I wrote that benchmark. I'm simply observing that you clearly don't know how you select the alternatives used in a benchmark, and that I would have made the same decision the reviewer did.
Bias? Irrelevant. I've explained exactly why the 4000+ was, in my opinion, the right processor to use. Do you honestly think "it's cheaper" holds any water at all as a contraindicator? Bias, schmias, the 4000+ *should* show roughly equivalent numbers to the 3.73 -- and what do you know, it did; except in the one area where AMD processors are *known* to excel. That's a valid benchmark.
Leasing equipment is a losing proposition, in my experience. It's never worth what you save up front; like most "loan shark" style propositions, the savings seem obvious, but most of the costs are hidden. If it was cheaper to lease, computer dealers wouldn't be encouraging it.
> Why are many cities so interested in > providing free/cheap WiFi access?
I think it's more that voters and lobbyists of various stripes have some idea that the government needs to be MORE in their business than it already is.
I for one don't want all my internet traffic traveling across a single chokepoint owned by the government, no matter how local the government is. And I *trust* my government a lot more than most/. posters seem to.
> If you reply, do so only to what > I explicitly wrote.
Somewhat off topic... does this work? I have that problem a lot. Is it really that easy to fix?
A secondary question comes up. Let's say that I register cantarafamily.org and use it to make fun of your family photos. You come to me and say "take that down". If I say to you that I will not take it down, but that I will *sell* it to you for whatever price, am I cybersquatting?
My impression of cybersquatting is that it needs to have the express goal of being sold. When you go to a domain and see a big spammy page that says "this domain is for sale", that's cybersquatting. Putting up an inflammatory site and demanding money to remove it is blackmail... not cybersquatting.
I suppose it comes down to contact. If I call you with a proposal and say "pay me", that's one thing. If you come to me with requests and I say "pay me", that's a whole different thing.
I just picked this up yesterday on the advice of a fellow game developer, and the most amusing thing about Katamari Damacy is not just the way it takes VERY simplistic gameplay and makes it horrifically addictive, but the weirdo Japanese mentality behind all the messages. I'll certainly grab the sequel when it shows up.
there are many sides to every story you 24104 105 xxxx x7161 19 05915 76095 61
Granted, the "many s" is just a guess, but it's *probably* right. I haven't looked too hard for a pattern in the digits, but if you have it memorised, I'll bet there is one.
Bits of security remaining: about 16. Think about changing it... unless, of course, you already have. (*I* certainly wouldn't post a password I was still using, but I might post a little "bait" just for fun.)
> it's almost a machine fit for nasa > that would cost around 3000$ to buy
Benchmarks aren't about making you feel good about your system. They're about making you feel inadequate so you'll buy a new one. And they WANT you to spend $3000 on a machine fit for NASA.
It's a good policy, anyway. A $1000 machine lasts about a year; a $1500 machine lasts about two years; a $3000 machine lasts about *five*. My P3-500 was about $3000, and still going strong. You pay for what you get.
How about we take an Intel CPU at 3.73 GHz and compare it to an AMD CPU advertised to perform around that same clock speed? That gives us the 3800+, the 4000+, and the FX-55. Traditionally, AMD's estimation has been 5 to 10 percent high in terms of what Intel processors they can match (across the board, as opposed to gaming where the estimates are about right), so we can assume:
- The 3800+ performs at 3.42-3.61 GHz which is too low.
- The 4000+ should perform at about 3.6-3.8 GHz, which is about right.
- The FX-55 is undoubtedly faster than the 4000+, owing to its 2.6 GHz actual clock speed compared to the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz. This is a 1/12 increase, so we can expect the FX-55 to perform at 3.9-4.2 GHz... which is significantly higher than the 3.73 we're targeting.
So the FX-55 is too fast, the 3800+ is too slow, and the 4000+ is about right. An argument might be advanced for the FX-53, but I think those have been discontinued.
Where exactly is the problem? I mean, if you RTFA, they say outright that if all you care about is gaming the AMD outperforms the Intel by around 10%, which gives us that 4000+ they advertise... but if you need to do other things, the Intel outperforms the AMD slightly. Which is roughly what you should expect, given the Intel and AMD core competencies. If the 4000+ specs out in the dead center of the range I estimated, it should come out at 3.7 -- which is just over 99% of the Intel clock speed, and should result in less than a 1% margin of loss. This is about what we see in the results.
In other words, nobody paid me squat, and my own experience with processor comparisons predicts pretty much the exact results we saw. So any claim of "bias" seems ill-considered.
However, I would already have mentioned Lime Coke in the proper context after becoming a customer. As the commercial continues to play, I am progressively less likely to recommend Lime Coke, and more likely to bitch about that damnable commercial.
Repetitive marketing isn't the only way, either. There's a car insurance company in the Pacific northwest called Vern Fonk, and there's an insurance adjuster who works there named Rob Thielke. Rob Thielke makes some of the most twisted and demented commercials on the planet. They don't play often, but when they do, people *talk* about them.
I think you just slightly misunderstood it. It *was* the commercial that convinced me to try Lime Coke. I saw the commercial, and promptly forgot about it. It took a few times for me to get it stuck in my head enough that I remembered to look for it at the store. So yes, repetitive marketing works.
But once I'd already seen it, tried the product, and settled on being a regular customer... the commercial keeps on playing. It also plays a lot more often now. It took me almost a week to see it the four or five times that I *needed* to see it, but now I see it two or three times a day.
Eventually, the commercial hits a "rebound" point and makes me want to actively avoid the company's products because they remind me of the commercial. The Lime Coke commercial is, actually, a bad example -- it happens to be one of the best commercials I've seen in a long time, so it will take it a long time to hit the rebound point. I probably should have chosen a different commercial, because a *bad* commercial gets annoying a lot faster.;)
The question here is, where do we *really* hit the trailing edge of the bell curve? There comes a time when your marketing message begins to annoy people, because it's being handed to people who either do not want your product, or are already using it. At some point, the risk to your public image outweighs the potential benefit of a few new customers. Marketers seem to think they can milk the message a *lot* longer than I see it working in practice.
> Remember that Seinfeld episode > where George gets that Mennen > commercial jingle stuck in his head?
No, but I remember Ellen Degeneres having a similar element in her stand-up set a few years ago, and I remember the Orwellian backlash against Beatrice when "we're Beatrice" started showing up at the end of damn near every commercial on television around the late eighties or early nineties.
Ubiquity *scares* people. Not only do they not like it, they will actually take up arms against you for it. Microsoft is a great example of that. Also notice how a lot of people switched away from Red Hat when it became almost synonymous with Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
...what a stupid name.
;)
"Condrake" would have been easy to pronounce. Unfortunately, it has the word "Con" in it, which doesn't sound like a good thing to buy.
Why didn't they use something completely new like "Foxglove"? It's herbal and has earthy, pagan overtones like Mandrake. It's also got some interesting connotations about being a comfortable covering for Firefox.
I *like* Foxglove. Somebody should start a Foxglove Linux project. I can immediately picture the logo, the website, and a half dozen decent marketing campaigns. You could talk about it being "foxy", make a pun on the Dr. Seuss classic "Fox in Socks", make "fox guarding the henhouse" references, say it "fits like a glove", run a "Poison your PC" campaign, or (my personal favorite) call it "digital digitalis". It's a *damn* fine name for a Linux distro.
Too bad nobody ever listens to me.
I'm primarily suggesting that we're taking an extreme view of this situation, and there is another extreme view on the opposite side. Both views are probably *too* extreme.
As George Carlin said, somewhere between "Famous Potatoes" and "Live Free or Die", the truth lies... and it's probably a *little* closer to "Famous Potatoes".
I don't see how a vendor can influence a Wiki any more easily than it can influence the market. It strikes me that you would have to fundamentally alter the way Wikipedia works for any such influence to make even a slight difference.
Of course, I might be overlooking something. How do you suggest the vendor might influence Wikipedia? What could a similar site do to prevent such influence?
How do you think they determined that? I'll bet they asked him. "Did you write this whole thing in four months?" "Why yes, yes I did." End of story in most organisations.
And in many large companies, there's also a sort of nervous laughter while pointedly looking the other way about certain employees. We *know* what they're doing probably isn't strictly speaking legal or ethical, but we studiously avoid knowing too much about it because that would obligate us to *do* something about it (and potentially expose us to implication). When you're pretty sure your colleague is stealing from competitors to give your company a stronger market advantage, doing the Right Thing is probably detrimental to your career, so you pretend to have more doubt than you really do.
Assume the project starts up and hires some fly-by-night guy to design and build this system. He promises he can do it in four months for X amount of money.
This guy tries like hell to build the project, but gets stymied by some stuff. So he downloads PearPC and tries to figure out what he's doing wrong.
Eventually, he figures out that what he did wrong was promise something that nobody could deliver, so he panics and starts mucking around in PearPC to conceal its origin.
When the deadline hits, he sends them his "obfuscated" version of PearPC and collects his check. He runs off into the night hoping nobody ever finds out.
Meanwhile, the completely innocent company puts this project up for sale. The open source community raises hell. The company goes "OMG! WTF?" and yanks it off the market.
After some examination, the company decides that the only possible way to recover from this (according to their lawyers) is to GPL the project. Since it qualifies as a work made for hire, they own all the rights to the non-PearPC code, so they can license *that* however they like.
Just playing devil's advocate. Maybe the big bad company isn't the villain here; maybe it's just one crappy little ass-hat developer.
Remember all the old "smell-o-vision" jokes? Insert your favorite one here.
The thing that scares me is how any new technology is used *badly* for the first three to five years. Force feedback was around for a good long time before anyone did anything sensible with it, and even stereo sound was heinously abused in the early days. I can just imagine the hideous misfeatures that will pop up with this.
And for the conspiracy theorists among us, Drs. Chaffee and Light in the UK supposedly had some limited success controlling the human brain with radio waves in the 30s. If either of those are cited in the patent application, we might want to steer clear of any game using this technology...
I was actually just *about* to mention that, because it seems to be targeting the same audience: they targeted the mid-teen market 25 years ago, and now they're targeting the over-40 market. So if you were 16 in 1981, you'd be 40 today... and exactly the kind of person they're targeting.
I miss my IntelliVision. Particularly the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game where arrows bounced off walls like some weird form of billiards, which is unfortunately one of the few games NOT recently re-released on the PS2 collection.
I apologise for not writing ALL of the details, but PhotoShop CS fails to start:
- Under Windows XP
- Using SP2
- On a 64-bit processor
- With NX support
- When DEP is enabled
- And no exception exists for the program
In other words, the error *exists*, but doesn't affect everyone. It's also not exactly an architectural problem in Windows.
I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to stand by the companies that have been good to me. If people feel abused and mistreated by a company, the company's offering does badly -- hence the Dreamcast problem. The Dreamcast was a great system, but there were a lot of promises that never materialised, and Sega had a pretty solid reputation for screwing things up. (This is not necessarily why the console failed, but it's certainly why *I* didn't buy a Dreamcast.)
;)
Sony and Nintendo have been very good to a lot of gamers for a very long time, Nintendo longer than Sony; I don't think they're going to "lose" anytime soon. Microsoft is starting to gather a pretty solid following, too; I know an awful lot of people who swear by their XBox more often than they swear at it.
So IMO, nobody's going to lose a whole lot. There will be some shuffling around among the undecided and the new gamers, but in the end all three consoles will have a solid audience. Nintendo is probably the closest thing we'll have to a "loser", primarily because they've targeted the family market, but there are more than enough concerned families out there to keep them in business.
Me, I've got all three consoles, and I'm already squirreling away money to knock back a triple-threat preorder once we get ship dates on the next-gen consoles. Screw console monogamy.
> Photoshop CS runs just fine on
> my Windows XP SP2 box
Those who actually paid attention to the WHOLE list know that PhotoShop CS only fails to start under XP SP2 on 64-bit processors, and that Virtual PC simply runs XP SP2 virtual machines more *slowly* than XP SP1 virtual machines.
You know, if you want to do more than knee-jerk over the name in the left hand column.
Whenever you place your faith in a large software package that you don't personally understand down to its deepest levels, you're betting that someone will always be available to maintain it.
Sometimes you lose.
While the open source community is full of people working on various projects, there are several large and complex projects that NOBODY works with anymore, but that other people still want to use. Freedom or no freedom, sometimes your support drops out from under you, and you're left stranded in the middle of nowhere with a problem nobody wants to solve.
It's no different than having a commercial product drop off the support list. You have the same recourse: do it yourself, or switch products. And that's where I get really annoyed and offended by the open source crowd, because if I choose to fix the product I have, the same community that abandoned me when I needed them is right there saying "it's GPL, you have to give it back to us". There's a whole lot of "DIY" shouted in my direction when I need help, and a whole lot of "gimme" when *other* people need help. Or even when they *don't* need help, just because I have something new and they want it, even if it's completely worthless to them.
We like to pretend that the open source community is full of developers, but the fact is it's primarily composed of scavengers who hang around developers and feed on our scraps.
So when BM (huhuhuh, I said BM... oh, sorry) wants to take their product away, I sympathise. I look at what they're doing, and I think they didn't ask a whole hell of a lot: don't reverse engineer their work, and don't support someone who does. That's a very small thing to ask, even if you *do* normally have the right to do it. And the community failed them on this request, so I think they're completely justified in taking their ball and going home.
And I can't help thinking that when you're a developer, the open source community wants your balls, so you can be like them. I don't really care for that idea, but I find it very amusing to say it that way.
My company has a standard clause in our independent contractor agreement that allows us to specify whether ancillary projects will be undertaken by the client, who will then pay for the development and own the rights, or by my company... which then does the development "off the clock" and owns all rights. (The definition of an ancillary project is complex, but it's essentially anything that isn't part of the core functionality and can still work reliably without that core.)
The concept here is that if we come across something that would be better shared than hoarded, we can share it -- either by sticking it in a box and selling it, or by taking it open source. We draw the line based on whether we think people will buy it. (Hey, we're a business. Piss off.)
The upshot, however, is that our ancillary projects tend not to be very useful to anyone. Not only do we not think people will buy most of them, we don't think people will USE most of them. So the vast majority of the time, we look at something like our skinning and template engine, and we say "even if you *did* need this, you could write it yourself in less time than it would take to find the project". (Literally, it's about twenty lines. Not interesting at all.) We may at some point release something along the lines of Bob Stout's SNIPPETS, but that's about all we're likely to do.
In the end, our ability to release open source projects is hampered by the narrow focus of our tools. They have such limited functionality and flexibility, they're just not going to be applicable to most people's needs. Even when we took our web site's back end and branded it "Alatar CMS" for release as an open source project, we had to admit it's just plain not ready for general use. At some point, we're still going to clean it up and release it, but we're just not ready to invest time in that yet.
> it seems like you may almost have
> some bias against people with certs.
A bit. A bit. Just a bit.
Seriously, it's not the certification I have trouble with; it's the sort of person who waves it around. I think a certification is the sort of thing you pull out when you need it, not something you stick at the end of your name for brownie points.
Unfortunately, that's what you have to do for a lot of employers, and there's no way for the applicant to know I'm actually put off by certifications... so I'm forgiving of it on a resume. It's the people who start every other sentence with "well I'm a CCNA, and..." that bother me.
> The clock speed or name of the
> processor just shouldn't matter.
The name, no, that shouldn't matter. Neither should the price. We're talking about performance differences, plain and simple; who made the processor and how much it cost are two things that have nothing to do with that.
> Do you really think that your logic
> would factor into someone's buying
> decisions?
No, I think it would factor into the question of which processor is comparable to another processor for purposes of benchmarking. Benchmarks are supposed to compare alternatives which are fundamentally *similar*, so they're on an even playing field.
> The fact that you didn't go with the
> FX processor because it was "too fast"
> betrays your bias.
Excuse me, but you're highly mistaken if you think I wrote that benchmark. I'm simply observing that you clearly don't know how you select the alternatives used in a benchmark, and that I would have made the same decision the reviewer did.
Bias? Irrelevant. I've explained exactly why the 4000+ was, in my opinion, the right processor to use. Do you honestly think "it's cheaper" holds any water at all as a contraindicator? Bias, schmias, the 4000+ *should* show roughly equivalent numbers to the 3.73 -- and what do you know, it did; except in the one area where AMD processors are *known* to excel. That's a valid benchmark.
Leasing equipment is a losing proposition, in my experience. It's never worth what you save up front; like most "loan shark" style propositions, the savings seem obvious, but most of the costs are hidden. If it was cheaper to lease, computer dealers wouldn't be encouraging it.
> Why are many cities so interested in
/. posters seem to.
> providing free/cheap WiFi access?
I think it's more that voters and lobbyists of various stripes have some idea that the government needs to be MORE in their business than it already is.
I for one don't want all my internet traffic traveling across a single chokepoint owned by the government, no matter how local the government is. And I *trust* my government a lot more than most
> If you reply, do so only to what
> I explicitly wrote.
Somewhat off topic... does this work? I have that problem a lot. Is it really that easy to fix?
A secondary question comes up. Let's say that I register cantarafamily.org and use it to make fun of your family photos. You come to me and say "take that down". If I say to you that I will not take it down, but that I will *sell* it to you for whatever price, am I cybersquatting?
My impression of cybersquatting is that it needs to have the express goal of being sold. When you go to a domain and see a big spammy page that says "this domain is for sale", that's cybersquatting. Putting up an inflammatory site and demanding money to remove it is blackmail... not cybersquatting.
I suppose it comes down to contact. If I call you with a proposal and say "pay me", that's one thing. If you come to me with requests and I say "pay me", that's a whole different thing.
A "bald-faced effort to get even"? Wasn't that pretty much the problem in the first place?
> WTF. The first game was 20 bucks.
;)
Well, as any smart provider of addictive substances knows, you *always* discount the first dose.
I just picked this up yesterday on the advice of a fellow game developer, and the most amusing thing about Katamari Damacy is not just the way it takes VERY simplistic gameplay and makes it horrifically addictive, but the weirdo Japanese mentality behind all the messages. I'll certainly grab the sequel when it shows up.
Interlaced text and numerals:
there are many sides to every story you
24104 105 xxxx x7161 19 05915 76095 61
Granted, the "many s" is just a guess, but it's *probably* right. I haven't looked too hard for a pattern in the digits, but if you have it memorised, I'll bet there is one.
Bits of security remaining: about 16. Think about changing it... unless, of course, you already have. (*I* certainly wouldn't post a password I was still using, but I might post a little "bait" just for fun.)
> it's almost a machine fit for nasa
> that would cost around 3000$ to buy
Benchmarks aren't about making you feel good about your system. They're about making you feel inadequate so you'll buy a new one. And they WANT you to spend $3000 on a machine fit for NASA.
It's a good policy, anyway. A $1000 machine lasts about a year; a $1500 machine lasts about two years; a $3000 machine lasts about *five*. My P3-500 was about $3000, and still going strong. You pay for what you get.
How about we take an Intel CPU at 3.73 GHz and compare it to an AMD CPU advertised to perform around that same clock speed? That gives us the 3800+, the 4000+, and the FX-55. Traditionally, AMD's estimation has been 5 to 10 percent high in terms of what Intel processors they can match (across the board, as opposed to gaming where the estimates are about right), so we can assume:
- The 3800+ performs at 3.42-3.61 GHz which is too low.
- The 4000+ should perform at about 3.6-3.8 GHz, which is about right.
- The FX-55 is undoubtedly faster than the 4000+, owing to its 2.6 GHz actual clock speed compared to the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz. This is a 1/12 increase, so we can expect the FX-55 to perform at 3.9-4.2 GHz... which is significantly higher than the 3.73 we're targeting.
So the FX-55 is too fast, the 3800+ is too slow, and the 4000+ is about right. An argument might be advanced for the FX-53, but I think those have been discontinued.
Where exactly is the problem? I mean, if you RTFA, they say outright that if all you care about is gaming the AMD outperforms the Intel by around 10%, which gives us that 4000+ they advertise... but if you need to do other things, the Intel outperforms the AMD slightly. Which is roughly what you should expect, given the Intel and AMD core competencies. If the 4000+ specs out in the dead center of the range I estimated, it should come out at 3.7 -- which is just over 99% of the Intel clock speed, and should result in less than a 1% margin of loss. This is about what we see in the results.
In other words, nobody paid me squat, and my own experience with processor comparisons predicts pretty much the exact results we saw. So any claim of "bias" seems ill-considered.
However, I would already have mentioned Lime Coke in the proper context after becoming a customer. As the commercial continues to play, I am progressively less likely to recommend Lime Coke, and more likely to bitch about that damnable commercial.
Repetitive marketing isn't the only way, either. There's a car insurance company in the Pacific northwest called Vern Fonk, and there's an insurance adjuster who works there named Rob Thielke. Rob Thielke makes some of the most twisted and demented commercials on the planet. They don't play often, but when they do, people *talk* about them.
> You just disproved your own point.
;)
I think you just slightly misunderstood it. It *was* the commercial that convinced me to try Lime Coke. I saw the commercial, and promptly forgot about it. It took a few times for me to get it stuck in my head enough that I remembered to look for it at the store. So yes, repetitive marketing works.
But once I'd already seen it, tried the product, and settled on being a regular customer... the commercial keeps on playing. It also plays a lot more often now. It took me almost a week to see it the four or five times that I *needed* to see it, but now I see it two or three times a day.
Eventually, the commercial hits a "rebound" point and makes me want to actively avoid the company's products because they remind me of the commercial. The Lime Coke commercial is, actually, a bad example -- it happens to be one of the best commercials I've seen in a long time, so it will take it a long time to hit the rebound point. I probably should have chosen a different commercial, because a *bad* commercial gets annoying a lot faster.
The question here is, where do we *really* hit the trailing edge of the bell curve? There comes a time when your marketing message begins to annoy people, because it's being handed to people who either do not want your product, or are already using it. At some point, the risk to your public image outweighs the potential benefit of a few new customers. Marketers seem to think they can milk the message a *lot* longer than I see it working in practice.
> Remember that Seinfeld episode
> where George gets that Mennen
> commercial jingle stuck in his head?
No, but I remember Ellen Degeneres having a similar element in her stand-up set a few years ago, and I remember the Orwellian backlash against Beatrice when "we're Beatrice" started showing up at the end of damn near every commercial on television around the late eighties or early nineties.
Ubiquity *scares* people. Not only do they not like it, they will actually take up arms against you for it. Microsoft is a great example of that. Also notice how a lot of people switched away from Red Hat when it became almost synonymous with Linux.