Also, the Vista prefetch thing is amazing. The more I use Vista the more I've gotten used to it; everything opens instantaneously now (it preloads your frequently used programs like Firefox into RAM, ready to be run). When even the most basic computers seem to come with 3GB of RAM, there's no point in just letting it sit around.
There's still plenty reason to blame monopoly. Check out this thread on the AT forums, user VinDSL comes up with some interesting facts + sources about these supposed "Higher return rates" with Linux. Apparently it's all FUD marketing from MS:
Some netbook retailers are slamming Linux for boosting their product-return rates. Here's why you should take their protests with a grain of salt.
Lately, quite a few netbook makers and resellers are saying that buyers return Linux machines far more often than identical models running Windows XP. Last year, for example, the director of U.S. sales for MSI told Laptop Magazine that customers return Linux netbooks four times as often as Windows netbooks.
As Computerworld.com contributor Eric Lai pointed out, however, such claims can be misleading.
According to Lai, MSI's numbers weren't based on the company's actual netbook return rates.
In fact, at the time, MSI wasn't even shipping a Linux-powered netbook model.
GM is not going into bankruptcy. There are far too many democrat-voting UAW workers for Obama to ignore. Much better to keep the company afloat and the guys employed to get their votes in 2012.
You're right, there is no need to put lipstick on the pig.
In ordinary political, this analogy is easy to discern. But right now, I can't tell which is which. Are you saying Unix is the lipstick? Because we all know FreeBSD is good stuff. But...Apple is known for their pretty UI...is that the lipstick? Making Unix the pig? I run Unix you insensitive clod!
I didn't read the hothardware article. Did they specify at which resolutions which card wins? Did they test with the newest 185 Nvidia drivers? They're moderately slower than the 182's.
Anandtech, my personal favorite reviewer (none of that 1 paragraph/page + 100 page article nonsense *cough tomshardware cough*) tells a different story.
In case you don't feel like clicking-- 4890 takes the cake hands down on 24" and sub 24" displays (1920x1200 resolution and lower). At 2560x1200, it's a tossup.
It has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with revenue from cable company contracts. The problem the "content providers" had was that via Boxee and other set-top pcs, people could forgo cable all-together and that would be a huge chunk of lost revenue. Hulu is popular but the ad revenue from Hulu is nothing compared to the money the cable companies pay "content providers".
* I quote "content providers" because Hulu liked to use that phrase when Boxee was shut out. The fact of the matter is that Hulu is co-owned by two of these "content providers" so in essence, Hulu *IS* the "content provider"
Not for long. Last year something like 40% of their advertisements were public service announcements. Only you can prevent forest fires, tell your friends to slow down while driving, etc.
Basically, Hulu is not profitable yet. Probably won't be for some time, until advertisers catch on. I hope that's the only problem.
1). Someone posts a bunch of gibberish on April Fools 2). Someone with mod points mods "insightful" or "interesting", causing other users to think it's legit and needs to be decrypted 3). Everyone else spends an hour trying to figure out what it says. Parent laughs. 4). ??? 5). Profit!
IBM taking over Sun might breathe new life into OOo and improve the development processes (remove political barriers to accepting certain much-needed-patches.
Aside from the "Preview" delay, I welcome the changes. I almost didn't bother replying, btw. I seriously think there is a silent majority that likes the changes.
The only thing I don't like is having to click "more" 5x to get all the comments. What if I just want ALL of them?
Metamoderation won't fix this. Take the ID debates, for example. The Creationists will metamod the Evo's mod's as bad, and vice versa. If enough people metamod a certain way, the result will be the same as we have with them mod'ing poorly.
Is it fun? If not, people will figure it out soon enough. I don't have a problem with it. Most of the time I just want new content (commercial quality) to play around in (mods are fun yes but professional art has its value in my book).
I read a good portion of the article as well as the comments in the link, and I'm inclined to believe this is a special interests article written in light of some of Obama's campaign comments about the need to upgrade/repair our power infrastructure. (Btw-- as usual, the problem with the grid is legislative, if this part is fixed then the carriers wouldn't have any problems paying for infrastructure repairs, not to mention upgrades. Fix the legislative problem and the whole situation will basically solve itself-- but of course Congress doesn't want that, they'd rather us be dependent on them aka when it hits the fan, the only option at that point will be massive government infrastructure spending.)
I'm not saying it's not a problem, I just think the timing with all this is quite funny. Why have we not heard of this in such a doomsday way before now? CMEs have been occurring all the while that we've had our power grid up and happily running. We just need to update our infrastructure to be able to shut down on a moments notice (apparently it takes about 15 minutes currently to shut it down to protect the equipment). Canada had some problems with a CME recently (last 10 years), but they were fixed in 9 hours, a far cry from the doomsday "years!!" that some of the comments after the article claim. Besides, I didn't see anything to suggest this solar polar switch will be any worse than the last 10 we've had. In the mean time, we could send up a better satellite to monitor this stuff.
Honestly I just want more proof--
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
Really? I mean, really? That's some fine reporting right there...yes sir..plasma balls spewing forth which wipe out our power grid...our modern way of life is seeding our own destruction!!! Sheesh.
True, very true. There are fewer signs of actual logic and reason in Sacramento than there are in Washington. Common sense has ceased to exist in either location in detectable quantities.
That's because the smog and pollutants from cars and our coal power plants and wasteful style of life are blocking all the portions of the EM spectra normally associated with common sense! Don't you see! This is all the more reason to tax these vehicles!!!
Why can't they just move to bittorrent? I'm gathering all my clan's favorite CTF maps and will be starting a torrent of them and publicizing it so people don't have to go register at file-sends-you-lots-of-spam-to-buy-their-service-planet.
I will be sad to see FileFront go, they were my favorite. The least nonsense, just click a button and get a usually-anywhere-from-1.3-5megabytes/second-fast download.
I didn't read the featured article, but whenever I see "X program/system mimics brain" I always try to pipe in with my 2 cents.
Any system that considers a brain as nothing but a series of perceptron-based connections is going to fall short of the neurology of the actual brain it is trying to mimic. Ask any neurologist and they will tell you that there many other dimensions at play in the human brain. For instance, the whole system itself is sitting in a chemical bath which can change at any moment with the right mixture of hormones or other chemical changes. These changes in chemistry affect the firing and working of the neurons, axons, and synapses. Combine this with the control of external factors such as DNA, RNA, and epigenitics and things start getting exponentially complex.
I don't mean to down-play the progress we're making in this field. I just hate it when I see the "Computer system with X-sized neural network must equal a brain with X-number of neurons" mentality.
It's for marketing purposes, to draw in R&D cash.
Side note: what happens when you a company obtains a monopoly with someone with an inquisitive mind at the top? Thing someone the size of Bell. If it's privately (not shareholder) owned, then there are no monetary/profit obligations to anybody but yourself. If Microsoft were not publicly traded, and Steve or Bill more motivated, and sufficiently inquisitive, less busy pouring their time into managing the business...given their unlimited funds they'd probably think to themselves "sky's the limit, what can I do to _really_ shake things up?" Hiring thousands of AI CS researchers would be one, to run after a completely unprofitable for the next 15 years assignment, just for fun, just because you're inquisitive and want to know if it can be done.
Think of all the human-capital intensive jobs that would create. Just tossing that out there to show that a monopoly CAN be good for a society. Whether or not it would happen, who knows-- last one that did [Bell] (and I'm not defending them in any way it was before my time) got split up-- they funded the guys that invented the transistor, made huge stability improvements to the helicopter, etc. When you have a guaranteed stable source of revenue and few enough people with enough self-control and inquisitiveness (to not take all the money for themselves), you can get some very interesting inventions that you never would have found otherwise...
A smarter way of getting robots to do our bidding is not to hard wire laws that force robots not to harm humans(though it should still be done for the sake of redundant safety) but rather to instill the desire to be good to people.
For example, rather then writing in a rule stating that the robot must clean the dishes, instead give it an orgasmic sense of satisfaction from cleaning.
Side note: It's not, on the surface, orgasmic, but this is what a lot of Christians believe (or, should) about God-- that he is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. It's easy to see how this works in a lot of the cases-- Proverbs for example is full of obvious truths that we don't like to apply to our lives ("love of money is root of all kinds of evil"..."better enough and a quiet house than wealth and a house full of strife" etc.). Starting from these we can move on to some of the hotter topics like why the Bible says you should be married a). before having sex (with your wife) and b). to one woman. These are things (particularly a) that society scoffs at, but were given to us for a reason.
The Bible is a guidebook for how to be most satisfied. Until we think of it this way, we're missing the point. Most (all?) of the times we sin are when we have convinced ourselves that our way is better and that God doesn't really have what's best for us in mind.
That's not to say this life doesn't have pain, and some people experience tons of it, but in the long run none of what we give up matters if all we have to give up is some fleeting, ultimately unsatisfying comfort in this life (say, lots of sex with lots of different hot women-- there are consequences to this, namely that you miss out on the ability to have an emotionally meaningful relationship when you give yourself over to this. Sure somebody will reply telling me I'm wrong, but there are plenty of men if you look for them who have gone this route and who wouldn't recommend it, nay would beg you to choose otherwise) for an eternity of joy in the next.
We have a capacity for infinite satisfaction (does not our desire for it prove that we were meant for that? You couldn't be thirsty if there no such thing as water), and that's what I'm pursuing in being a Christian. This world is temporary, we die, pass on and can't take any of the stuff, money, women we've accumulated with us. We were wired to desire and be satisfied with more; and it's right in front of us, all we have to do is accept what God says about our fallen human condition and need for a savior, and believe that he provided that in Christ, which is a free gift to us if we are willing to receive it. When you boil it down is it really that bad? Simply admitting that there is one Greater, and submitting your life to his will for you (which, first and foremost, is that you believe in Christ). But he won't force it on you.
My Firefox thread is using 16 threads at the moment.
Could you clarify this for us? I thought it was common knowledge Firefox did not use multiple threads, and the code would be such a nightmare to try to thread that the developers just get angry at the mention of it (hence hardly anybody uses the gecko engine for the base of a new browser. Or something like that. I'm grossly oversimplifying what I've read from those supposedly in the know on/.) rather than try to deal with the problem.
It's funny you say that, I did that all with my overclocked Sempron socket 754 (it had hypertransport) single-core CPU at a measly 2.3Ghz. I had 1.5GB of RAM and it was all I needed to do what you're saying and more. Torrents, lots of Firefox tabs, 8 PDFs open, instant messaging, listening to music, burning a (data) DVD, watching a movie on my second monitor, copying gobs of data to an external harddrive for backups, writing a paper in Office, reading two others, etc etc.
All this was going on with my single core CPU running with cool&quiet downclocked to 1Ghz loaded at 25%.
So it was taking 250Mhz to handle all that stuff at once in Windows XP. Moving to Vista, it was a lot slower I'll give you that, but now I've got a dual core 3.4Ghz Core 2 series chip and if it weren't for gaming there would be _no point_ in upgrading. I _rarely_ burn video-dvds and when I do it only takes a minute per minute of video. Setting it up to burn+shutdown and then going to bed was never a problem in the first place, either.
The fact of the matter is, and especially since Windows 7 is supposedly much more efficient than Vista, nobody needs a quad core CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the Vista prefetch thing is amazing. The more I use Vista the more I've gotten used to it; everything opens instantaneously now (it preloads your frequently used programs like Firefox into RAM, ready to be run). When even the most basic computers seem to come with 3GB of RAM, there's no point in just letting it sit around.
There's still plenty reason to blame monopoly. Check out this thread on the AT forums, user VinDSL comes up with some interesting facts + sources about these supposed "Higher return rates" with Linux. Apparently it's all FUD marketing from MS:
Some netbook retailers are slamming Linux for boosting their product-return rates. Here's why you should take their protests with a grain of salt.
Lately, quite a few netbook makers and resellers are saying that buyers return Linux machines far more often than identical models running Windows XP. Last year, for example, the director of U.S. sales for MSI told Laptop Magazine that customers return Linux netbooks four times as often as Windows netbooks.
As Computerworld.com contributor Eric Lai pointed out, however, such claims can be misleading.
According to Lai, MSI's numbers weren't based on the company's actual netbook return rates.
In fact, at the time, MSI wasn't even shipping a Linux-powered netbook model.
Source.
See what the 4th edition does to you? First Gary, now this. Be warned!!
GM is not going into bankruptcy. There are far too many democrat-voting UAW workers for Obama to ignore. Much better to keep the company afloat and the guys employed to get their votes in 2012.
You're right, there is no need to put lipstick on the pig.
In ordinary political, this analogy is easy to discern. But right now, I can't tell which is which. Are you saying Unix is the lipstick? Because we all know FreeBSD is good stuff. But...Apple is known for their pretty UI...is that the lipstick? Making Unix the pig? I run Unix you insensitive clod!
I didn't read the hothardware article. Did they specify at which resolutions which card wins? Did they test with the newest 185 Nvidia drivers? They're moderately slower than the 182's.
Anandtech, my personal favorite reviewer (none of that 1 paragraph/page + 100 page article nonsense *cough tomshardware cough*) tells a different story.
In case you don't feel like clicking-- 4890 takes the cake hands down on 24" and sub 24" displays (1920x1200 resolution and lower). At 2560x1200, it's a tossup.
Considering you can buy the 4890 right now and the GTX275 won't be available for 2 more weeks, I think it's pretty clear which card to get.
It has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with revenue from cable company contracts. The problem the "content providers" had was that via Boxee and other set-top pcs, people could forgo cable all-together and that would be a huge chunk of lost revenue. Hulu is popular but the ad revenue from Hulu is nothing compared to the money the cable companies pay "content providers".
* I quote "content providers" because Hulu liked to use that phrase when Boxee was shut out. The fact of the matter is that Hulu is co-owned by two of these "content providers" so in essence, Hulu *IS* the "content provider"
Not for long. Last year something like 40% of their advertisements were public service announcements. Only you can prevent forest fires, tell your friends to slow down while driving, etc.
Basically, Hulu is not profitable yet. Probably won't be for some time, until advertisers catch on. I hope that's the only problem.
Click.
1). Someone posts a bunch of gibberish on April Fools
2). Someone with mod points mods "insightful" or "interesting", causing other users to think it's legit and needs to be decrypted
3). Everyone else spends an hour trying to figure out what it says. Parent laughs.
4). ???
5). Profit!
IBM taking over Sun might breathe new life into OOo and improve the development processes (remove political barriers to accepting certain much-needed-patches.
It's a win/win!
Wouldn't that be a lin/win box?
Aside from the "Preview" delay, I welcome the changes. I almost didn't bother replying, btw. I seriously think there is a silent majority that likes the changes.
The only thing I don't like is having to click "more" 5x to get all the comments. What if I just want ALL of them?
Metamoderation won't fix this. Take the ID debates, for example. The Creationists will metamod the Evo's mod's as bad, and vice versa. If enough people metamod a certain way, the result will be the same as we have with them mod'ing poorly.
I've seen this go both ways, btw.
I don't have control over this part of the firewall, neither at work nor at the uni.
I think it's the Doom 3 engine + poor modeling, not the uncanny valley. Some of those models have the same freaking ghostly Doom 3 skin.
Sorry if this isn't based on the Doom 3 engine, it just looks like it to me and makes sense if it's in development by id software.
Is it fun? If not, people will figure it out soon enough. I don't have a problem with it. Most of the time I just want new content (commercial quality) to play around in (mods are fun yes but professional art has its value in my book).
TFS was TL;DR.
Stellar explanation sir, capital!
I read a good portion of the article as well as the comments in the link, and I'm inclined to believe this is a special interests article written in light of some of Obama's campaign comments about the need to upgrade/repair our power infrastructure. (Btw-- as usual, the problem with the grid is legislative, if this part is fixed then the carriers wouldn't have any problems paying for infrastructure repairs, not to mention upgrades. Fix the legislative problem and the whole situation will basically solve itself-- but of course Congress doesn't want that, they'd rather us be dependent on them aka when it hits the fan, the only option at that point will be massive government infrastructure spending.)
I'm not saying it's not a problem, I just think the timing with all this is quite funny. Why have we not heard of this in such a doomsday way before now? CMEs have been occurring all the while that we've had our power grid up and happily running. We just need to update our infrastructure to be able to shut down on a moments notice (apparently it takes about 15 minutes currently to shut it down to protect the equipment). Canada had some problems with a CME recently (last 10 years), but they were fixed in 9 hours, a far cry from the doomsday "years!!" that some of the comments after the article claim. Besides, I didn't see anything to suggest this solar polar switch will be any worse than the last 10 we've had. In the mean time, we could send up a better satellite to monitor this stuff.
Honestly I just want more proof--
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
Really? I mean, really? That's some fine reporting right there...yes sir..plasma balls spewing forth which wipe out our power grid...our modern way of life is seeding our own destruction!!! Sheesh.
True, very true. There are fewer signs of actual logic and reason in Sacramento than there are in Washington. Common sense has ceased to exist in either location in detectable quantities.
That's because the smog and pollutants from cars and our coal power plants and wasteful style of life are blocking all the portions of the EM spectra normally associated with common sense! Don't you see! This is all the more reason to tax these vehicles!!!
Why can't they just move to bittorrent? I'm gathering all my clan's favorite CTF maps and will be starting a torrent of them and publicizing it so people don't have to go register at file-sends-you-lots-of-spam-to-buy-their-service-planet.
I will be sad to see FileFront go, they were my favorite. The least nonsense, just click a button and get a usually-anywhere-from-1.3-5megabytes/second-fast download.
I didn't read the featured article, but whenever I see "X program/system mimics brain" I always try to pipe in with my 2 cents.
Any system that considers a brain as nothing but a series of perceptron-based connections is going to fall short of the neurology of the actual brain it is trying to mimic. Ask any neurologist and they will tell you that there many other dimensions at play in the human brain. For instance, the whole system itself is sitting in a chemical bath which can change at any moment with the right mixture of hormones or other chemical changes. These changes in chemistry affect the firing and working of the neurons, axons, and synapses. Combine this with the control of external factors such as DNA, RNA, and epigenitics and things start getting exponentially complex.
I don't mean to down-play the progress we're making in this field. I just hate it when I see the "Computer system with X-sized neural network must equal a brain with X-number of neurons" mentality.
It's for marketing purposes, to draw in R&D cash.
Side note: what happens when you a company obtains a monopoly with someone with an inquisitive mind at the top? Thing someone the size of Bell. If it's privately (not shareholder) owned, then there are no monetary/profit obligations to anybody but yourself. If Microsoft were not publicly traded, and Steve or Bill more motivated, and sufficiently inquisitive, less busy pouring their time into managing the business...given their unlimited funds they'd probably think to themselves "sky's the limit, what can I do to _really_ shake things up?" Hiring thousands of AI CS researchers would be one, to run after a completely unprofitable for the next 15 years assignment, just for fun, just because you're inquisitive and want to know if it can be done.
Think of all the human-capital intensive jobs that would create. Just tossing that out there to show that a monopoly CAN be good for a society. Whether or not it would happen, who knows-- last one that did [Bell] (and I'm not defending them in any way it was before my time) got split up-- they funded the guys that invented the transistor, made huge stability improvements to the helicopter, etc. When you have a guaranteed stable source of revenue and few enough people with enough self-control and inquisitiveness (to not take all the money for themselves), you can get some very interesting inventions that you never would have found otherwise...
A smarter way of getting robots to do our bidding is not to hard wire laws that force robots not to harm humans(though it should still be done for the sake of redundant safety) but rather to instill the desire to be good to people.
For example, rather then writing in a rule stating that the robot must clean the dishes, instead give it an orgasmic sense of satisfaction from cleaning.
Side note: It's not, on the surface, orgasmic, but this is what a lot of Christians believe (or, should) about God-- that he is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. It's easy to see how this works in a lot of the cases-- Proverbs for example is full of obvious truths that we don't like to apply to our lives ("love of money is root of all kinds of evil"..."better enough and a quiet house than wealth and a house full of strife" etc.). Starting from these we can move on to some of the hotter topics like why the Bible says you should be married a). before having sex (with your wife) and b). to one woman. These are things (particularly a) that society scoffs at, but were given to us for a reason.
The Bible is a guidebook for how to be most satisfied. Until we think of it this way, we're missing the point. Most (all?) of the times we sin are when we have convinced ourselves that our way is better and that God doesn't really have what's best for us in mind.
That's not to say this life doesn't have pain, and some people experience tons of it, but in the long run none of what we give up matters if all we have to give up is some fleeting, ultimately unsatisfying comfort in this life (say, lots of sex with lots of different hot women-- there are consequences to this, namely that you miss out on the ability to have an emotionally meaningful relationship when you give yourself over to this. Sure somebody will reply telling me I'm wrong, but there are plenty of men if you look for them who have gone this route and who wouldn't recommend it, nay would beg you to choose otherwise) for an eternity of joy in the next.
We have a capacity for infinite satisfaction (does not our desire for it prove that we were meant for that? You couldn't be thirsty if there no such thing as water), and that's what I'm pursuing in being a Christian. This world is temporary, we die, pass on and can't take any of the stuff, money, women we've accumulated with us. We were wired to desire and be satisfied with more; and it's right in front of us, all we have to do is accept what God says about our fallen human condition and need for a savior, and believe that he provided that in Christ, which is a free gift to us if we are willing to receive it. When you boil it down is it really that bad? Simply admitting that there is one Greater, and submitting your life to his will for you (which, first and foremost, is that you believe in Christ). But he won't force it on you.
My Firefox thread is using 16 threads at the moment.
Could you clarify this for us? I thought it was common knowledge Firefox did not use multiple threads, and the code would be such a nightmare to try to thread that the developers just get angry at the mention of it (hence hardly anybody uses the gecko engine for the base of a new browser. Or something like that. I'm grossly oversimplifying what I've read from those supposedly in the know on /.) rather than try to deal with the problem.
How do you know it's running 16 threads?
It's funny you say that, I did that all with my overclocked Sempron socket 754 (it had hypertransport) single-core CPU at a measly 2.3Ghz. I had 1.5GB of RAM and it was all I needed to do what you're saying and more. Torrents, lots of Firefox tabs, 8 PDFs open, instant messaging, listening to music, burning a (data) DVD, watching a movie on my second monitor, copying gobs of data to an external harddrive for backups, writing a paper in Office, reading two others, etc etc.
All this was going on with my single core CPU running with cool&quiet downclocked to 1Ghz loaded at 25%.
So it was taking 250Mhz to handle all that stuff at once in Windows XP. Moving to Vista, it was a lot slower I'll give you that, but now I've got a dual core 3.4Ghz Core 2 series chip and if it weren't for gaming there would be _no point_ in upgrading. I _rarely_ burn video-dvds and when I do it only takes a minute per minute of video. Setting it up to burn+shutdown and then going to bed was never a problem in the first place, either.
The fact of the matter is, and especially since Windows 7 is supposedly much more efficient than Vista, nobody needs a quad core CPU.