First, this is just an announcement that 64bit support will be included in a stable branch, and secondly.. how many people truly benefit from 64bit?
Not to be negative, but I'm yet to see any benchmarks showing a marked improvement (for general PC usage) from going 32bit to 64bit. All it really does is let you use more RAM (REALLY not useful for the average desktop user at this time) and perform 64 bit calculations natively (really only useful for scientific applications, certainly useless for desktop users 99.99% of the time).
On the downside, binaries become larger (64bit addresses instead of 32bit) and old binaries may have to be emulated (if using a 64bit-only CPU).
Still, I guess it'll excite some desktop users, wanting the "full functionality" from their brand new 64bit dual-core system. Personally, I only went to a x86-64 chip recently because it was the best price/performance chip I could find - 64bit processing had and continues to have no positive influence on my computing experience.
P.S. Sorry to be so negative, but I'm sick of hearing all this phwoar! stuff about 64bit, when it really isn't that exciting. Guess I haven't had my morning coffee yet..
I still remember playing Conan: The Cimmerian (some variant of it anyway) on the PC about 15 years ago. It was an RPG style game, you were (naturally) Conan and you basically walked around killing things, gaining levels / items and all the usual RPG stuff. Probably the first RPG I ever played and I've loved them ever since:)
I really like Java the way it is now - One single download of the OFFICIAL JRE and you can run pretty much anything that any website can throw at you, run a multitude of Java-based programs and you never really have to worry about having the right libraries etc. cause it's all _just there_ (with the exception of some applications which do require free java libraries.. most of the good applications manage to bundle everything in one neat package though).
Open Source Java would be nice because you'd never really have to worry about Sun turning around and charging on a subscription or per-seat basis for the JRE or JDK, although I don't think thats ever going to be in their interests anyway.
Having offshoots of Java which are almost JRE compatible but just have a little extra here and a little extra there is probably just going to confuse everything a lot. With any luck OSS developers will realize this and simply contribute to mainstream Java, but I guess time will tell what actually happens.
does the concept of a pull-string operated laptop seem a little insulting?
Also, what real use can you glean from a PC these days, without a network connection? 90% of the use I get out of my PC is from the broadband connection giving me access to wikipedia, google, various developer networks, digg & slashdot.
So does anyone out there have a non-connected PC hooked up performing some life-changing work, or are they just useless when disconnected from the wwworld?
None of it would exist at all if the END USER stopped buying viagra every time they get an offer in their inbox..
However, I would applaud a spamming company that slowly removed non-responsive email addresses from their spam lists and tailored their spam only to those few users who respond
You've been working around the clock for the last 2 weeks to pull together countless pieces of information, facts, statistics for a major presentation. Your overhead slides are stored in a YouOS Powerpoint-esque program, all beautifully laid out with well laboured-over text accompanying all the pretty images - You feel really good about this major presentation, everything is in play and it's going to go off with out a hitch...
Too Many Users Online...
You know, Windows has given me BSODs, Linux has sent me insane with broken/missing drivers, *BSD has nerfed my partitions (admittedly my own fault) but NEVER have I been told I cannot log in because there are too many users online.
I'm sure this wont be an issue when this goes mainstream.. well, I hope not, but the possibility of valuable, sometimes crucial work being inaccessible is just not acceptable to me.
Ohh, and also YouOS will have unlimited access to my private, sensitive information
heh, I had always wondered why you would pay for cable and then receive advertising anyway..
I guess there is always the possibility that more advertising will be introduced into internet-broadcast TV shows. However, because the company providing the online episode has cut out the middle-man (the broadcaster), there is a lot less incentive to bombard the viewer with additional advertising - having a watermark during the entire episode should be more than enough to convince viewers that they NEED product xyz. The fact that the makers of product xyz gave them a free episode should also act as ample incentive to purchase the right product (xyz) next time you're at the store, as well.
Maybe I'm just naive, maybe I just want free, legitimate TV episodes with less direct advertising, but I will be VERY happy if someone like coca-cola ever takes up this idea and runs with it:)
Finally, someone in the broadcasting business is catching on.. There ARE a lot of people viewing video online, they WILL continue, and if you can figure out a legitimate advertising and revenue model, you can capitalise on online video content in a big way.
Ever since watching "PiracyIsGood.mov", a recording of a presentation given at (I assume) a University campus, I have been very keen to have either a broadcasting company or even the advertising department of a major company latch on to the concepts presented in this movie, and release a TV series in online form with watermark advertising (as outlined in the video).
The basic concept is.. Coke/Walmart/GM or whoever currently pays thousands of dollars for a 5-10 second advert during a TV episode, which a lot of viewers simply ignore. With this new method, the company would purchase an entire series of episodes, place their watermark in the corner of the video and distribute it online. It would be impossible to remove the (admittedly fairly unobtrusive) water from the video, and certainly not worth the effort, so the company would have, perhaps, 24 episodes, 22 mins each = 528 minutes of you watching a video with their advertising in the corner.
You win (free episodes), they win (this could work out cheaper than paying for 30 seconds of advertising during the airing of these 24 episodes, plus you get 528 minutes of advertising, not 12, and it's unobstrusive so no-one is going to get frustrated at your annoying gimmick advert), and the only people who lose are the broadcasting company who was too stupid to capitalise on this idea in the first place.
Maybe this is all too idealistic, and I'm sure there are other things that need to come into consideration, but I am VERY keen to see this happen sometime. Season 5 of Futurama with a coca-cola symbol in the corner works for me.. In fact, I'll drink a bottle of coke each time I watch an episode:)
Makes me wonder really, how can they be at all sure of themselves and the decline of P2P when piracy is still so rampant? Most of the big Bittorrent tracker sites are still going, I believe, and non-distributed P2P programs are popping up quicker than RIAA can get rid of them.
Really, they wont win until people don't _want_ to pirate stuff, and thats probably never going to happen. Their shoddy content protection / DRM schemes are probably going to make more people pirate stuff, not less..
Just speculation, but I think they're just trying to sound like they have it all under control to restore a little faith in themselves.
It's fairly hefty on the physics details, but it does go into some interesting details about not only how humans, or at least sentient spacecraft capable of reproducing themselves need to be sent out by the human race pronto, if we want to have any chance of becomming immortal. I haven't read the book in a long time now, so I'm a little light on details but I can see how Hawking could be on the same wavelength (branching out to preserve the human race)
I think a merger between these two can only work out well.. It means that I can probably expect much cooler desktop solutions (especially high-end/gamer solutions) from ATI/AMD, and if nothing else it pushes Intel and NVidia to be a little more competitive as the two rivals ramp up and combine their relative technologies to provide cheaper, more powerful hardware solutions.
Of course, this does all revolve around that evil marketing hype word, Synergy..
Given Vista's demand on systems, is there even any point in trying to run it emulated on modern-day hardware? It seems to me like the overhead presented by emulation would bring vista to a grinding halt..
Well thats the answer to the better-than-native performance then. It simply creates a hole in the space-time continuum, off-loads all processing work to the infinite monkies with infinite abacuses, and reports 0.0 cpu load to the benchmark program.
I was always under the impression that pilots were trained pretty much entirely for these once-in-a-lifetime events, such as mid-air collision and having one jet fail. I guess they are only going to be useful for take-off and landing now?
Maybe they're trying to phase out pilots all together? Sure would put an end to the whole pension-deficit issue that airlines are facing (well, once all the current pilots die of old age).
Microsoft is finally waking up and seeing that they actually have to change their ways and act like they're part of the community and not just dictating the software and services they provide down upon everyone. Acting more like google and apple might actually draw in the more open-source oriented developers, who have prefered these other companies in the past because they get given a little and can contribute a little in return.
I think Sun has the best model set up, with Java and Netbeans etc, but Microsoft should really be trying to compete with this so they have more products to offer the end user, instead of alienating people and pushing them towards opensource.
Anyway, good to see Microsoft starting to adapt to the way Software development is starting to work now.. they're only a few years late:)
Seeing as the ATI board doesn't have a built-in ethernet controller (which honestly seems a little crappy, I thought these things became standard on-board features a year or two ago), and the motherboard only has a limited number of PCI / PCI-X expansion slots (very limited, if you go for an SLI setup, as I'm sure many will).. where is the room for expansion with other devices such as Soundcards, PCMCIA slots (yes, these ARE handy on desktop PCs in my opinion), WiFi cards, TV-Tuners etc?
It seems to me that you're really limited to just 1-2 additional cards, and not having an in-built ethernet controller really limits flexibility..
I'm also not 100% sure about having only 1 PATA connector, although this is probably a good thing these days..
The difference in power consumption just between different motherboards is quite amazing - I have never really paid much attention to the actual motherboard I use in the past, but I guess it is starting to get quite important to over-all system performance these days.
Isn't it getting to the point now where us lucky ones in the first world are throwing away enough old-but-still-working hardware that people in the third world CAN have a PC that works just fine with the right setup and just isn't the latest and greatest quad-core offering from Intel?
I guess it makes a lot of sense from Microsofts point of view.. instead of letting them have cheap home PCs and "free" Windows software (aka piracy), make them pay outlanding sums of money over the long-term without realizing it, while offering the usual sub-standard software and being able to fall back on "ooh, it must be network problems, cause our centralized Office products are perfect!" excuses as required.
Whatever happened to all these $100 PCs bundled with Linux? They can't be much more expensive than a thin-client PC + broadband connection required to deliver the new Microsoft centralised services at any decent speed?
I hope M$ has thought this one through - if they start actually forcing those who cannot afford it to pay for M$ products, those who cannot afford it will quickly migrate to something they can afford, eg. Linux. Perhaps once the end-user moves, corporations will feel more secure about moving and before you know it, M$ isn't turning a profit in either of their two truly profitable offerings any more (Windows and Office)
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First, this is just an announcement that 64bit support will be included in a stable branch, and secondly.. how many people truly benefit from 64bit?
Not to be negative, but I'm yet to see any benchmarks showing a marked improvement (for general PC usage) from going 32bit to 64bit. All it really does is let you use more RAM (REALLY not useful for the average desktop user at this time) and perform 64 bit calculations natively (really only useful for scientific applications, certainly useless for desktop users 99.99% of the time).
On the downside, binaries become larger (64bit addresses instead of 32bit) and old binaries may have to be emulated (if using a 64bit-only CPU).
Still, I guess it'll excite some desktop users, wanting the "full functionality" from their brand new 64bit dual-core system. Personally, I only went to a x86-64 chip recently because it was the best price/performance chip I could find - 64bit processing had and continues to have no positive influence on my computing experience.
P.S. Sorry to be so negative, but I'm sick of hearing all this phwoar! stuff about 64bit, when it really isn't that exciting. Guess I haven't had my morning coffee yet..
I still remember playing Conan: The Cimmerian (some variant of it anyway) on the PC about 15 years ago. It was an RPG style game, you were (naturally) Conan and you basically walked around killing things, gaining levels / items and all the usual RPG stuff. Probably the first RPG I ever played and I've loved them ever since :)
I really like Java the way it is now - One single download of the OFFICIAL JRE and you can run pretty much anything that any website can throw at you, run a multitude of Java-based programs and you never really have to worry about having the right libraries etc. cause it's all _just there_ (with the exception of some applications which do require free java libraries.. most of the good applications manage to bundle everything in one neat package though).
Open Source Java would be nice because you'd never really have to worry about Sun turning around and charging on a subscription or per-seat basis for the JRE or JDK, although I don't think thats ever going to be in their interests anyway.
Having offshoots of Java which are almost JRE compatible but just have a little extra here and a little extra there is probably just going to confuse everything a lot. With any luck OSS developers will realize this and simply contribute to mainstream Java, but I guess time will tell what actually happens.
does the concept of a pull-string operated laptop seem a little insulting?
Also, what real use can you glean from a PC these days, without a network connection? 90% of the use I get out of my PC is from the broadband connection giving me access to wikipedia, google, various developer networks, digg & slashdot.
So does anyone out there have a non-connected PC hooked up performing some life-changing work, or are they just useless when disconnected from the wwworld?
None of it would exist at all if the END USER stopped buying viagra every time they get an offer in their inbox..
However, I would applaud a spamming company that slowly removed non-responsive email addresses from their spam lists and tailored their spam only to those few users who respond
You've been working around the clock for the last 2 weeks to pull together countless pieces of information, facts, statistics for a major presentation. Your overhead slides are stored in a YouOS Powerpoint-esque program, all beautifully laid out with well laboured-over text accompanying all the pretty images - You feel really good about this major presentation, everything is in play and it's going to go off with out a hitch...
...
Too Many Users Online
You know, Windows has given me BSODs, Linux has sent me insane with broken/missing drivers, *BSD has nerfed my partitions (admittedly my own fault) but NEVER have I been told I cannot log in because there are too many users online.
I'm sure this wont be an issue when this goes mainstream.. well, I hope not, but the possibility of valuable, sometimes crucial work being inaccessible is just not acceptable to me.
Ohh, and also YouOS will have unlimited access to my private, sensitive information
heh, I had always wondered why you would pay for cable and then receive advertising anyway..
:)
I guess there is always the possibility that more advertising will be introduced into internet-broadcast TV shows. However, because the company providing the online episode has cut out the middle-man (the broadcaster), there is a lot less incentive to bombard the viewer with additional advertising - having a watermark during the entire episode should be more than enough to convince viewers that they NEED product xyz. The fact that the makers of product xyz gave them a free episode should also act as ample incentive to purchase the right product (xyz) next time you're at the store, as well.
Maybe I'm just naive, maybe I just want free, legitimate TV episodes with less direct advertising, but I will be VERY happy if someone like coca-cola ever takes up this idea and runs with it
No, I don't. However, at least they have the politeness to core dump only in the mens room.
Finally, someone in the broadcasting business is catching on.. There ARE a lot of people viewing video online, they WILL continue, and if you can figure out a legitimate advertising and revenue model, you can capitalise on online video content in a big way.
:)
Ever since watching "PiracyIsGood.mov", a recording of a presentation given at (I assume) a University campus, I have been very keen to have either a broadcasting company or even the advertising department of a major company latch on to the concepts presented in this movie, and release a TV series in online form with watermark advertising (as outlined in the video).
The basic concept is.. Coke/Walmart/GM or whoever currently pays thousands of dollars for a 5-10 second advert during a TV episode, which a lot of viewers simply ignore. With this new method, the company would purchase an entire series of episodes, place their watermark in the corner of the video and distribute it online. It would be impossible to remove the (admittedly fairly unobtrusive) water from the video, and certainly not worth the effort, so the company would have, perhaps, 24 episodes, 22 mins each = 528 minutes of you watching a video with their advertising in the corner.
You win (free episodes), they win (this could work out cheaper than paying for 30 seconds of advertising during the airing of these 24 episodes, plus you get 528 minutes of advertising, not 12, and it's unobstrusive so no-one is going to get frustrated at your annoying gimmick advert), and the only people who lose are the broadcasting company who was too stupid to capitalise on this idea in the first place.
Maybe this is all too idealistic, and I'm sure there are other things that need to come into consideration, but I am VERY keen to see this happen sometime. Season 5 of Futurama with a coca-cola symbol in the corner works for me.. In fact, I'll drink a bottle of coke each time I watch an episode
P.S. you can get the video at http://ausgamers.com/files/details/html/17504
welcome our new android lecturer overlords?
Seriously, something like this must destroy students concentration.. It certainly seems to take away the human side of teaching.
Couldn't they just demonstrate to him how nice their torture policy really is?
:)
A couple of electrodes expertly placed will have him singing praise for the CIA in his blogs in no time
I'm sure it is, but I hate it when people don't specify :(
2x to 40x speedup? 2% to 40%? 2 to 40 seconds?
Standardised units are your friend.
lol..
Makes me wonder really, how can they be at all sure of themselves and the decline of P2P when piracy is still so rampant? Most of the big Bittorrent tracker sites are still going, I believe, and non-distributed P2P programs are popping up quicker than RIAA can get rid of them.
Really, they wont win until people don't _want_ to pirate stuff, and thats probably never going to happen. Their shoddy content protection / DRM schemes are probably going to make more people pirate stuff, not less..
Just speculation, but I think they're just trying to sound like they have it all under control to restore a little faith in themselves.
I don't suppose anyone has read this book?
It's fairly hefty on the physics details, but it does go into some interesting details about not only how humans, or at least sentient spacecraft capable of reproducing themselves need to be sent out by the human race pronto, if we want to have any chance of becomming immortal. I haven't read the book in a long time now, so I'm a little light on details but I can see how Hawking could be on the same wavelength (branching out to preserve the human race)
First Microsoft embraces Open source, now the RIAA feels comfortable with P2P networks, and thinks that they have the issue under control..
The axis of evil is definitely plotting something big..
Does anyone else get nervous when Microsoft starts saying they want to embrace open source?
I think a merger between these two can only work out well.. It means that I can probably expect much cooler desktop solutions (especially high-end/gamer solutions) from ATI/AMD, and if nothing else it pushes Intel and NVidia to be a little more competitive as the two rivals ramp up and combine their relative technologies to provide cheaper, more powerful hardware solutions.
Of course, this does all revolve around that evil marketing hype word, Synergy..
Given Vista's demand on systems, is there even any point in trying to run it emulated on modern-day hardware? It seems to me like the overhead presented by emulation would bring vista to a grinding halt..
Well thats the answer to the better-than-native performance then. It simply creates a hole in the space-time continuum, off-loads all processing work to the infinite monkies with infinite abacuses, and reports 0.0 cpu load to the benchmark program.
Obvious really.
Soon they'll have nothing left to do at all..
I was always under the impression that pilots were trained pretty much entirely for these once-in-a-lifetime events, such as mid-air collision and having one jet fail. I guess they are only going to be useful for take-off and landing now?
Maybe they're trying to phase out pilots all together? Sure would put an end to the whole pension-deficit issue that airlines are facing (well, once all the current pilots die of old age).
Microsoft is finally waking up and seeing that they actually have to change their ways and act like they're part of the community and not just dictating the software and services they provide down upon everyone. Acting more like google and apple might actually draw in the more open-source oriented developers, who have prefered these other companies in the past because they get given a little and can contribute a little in return.
:)
I think Sun has the best model set up, with Java and Netbeans etc, but Microsoft should really be trying to compete with this so they have more products to offer the end user, instead of alienating people and pushing them towards opensource.
Anyway, good to see Microsoft starting to adapt to the way Software development is starting to work now.. they're only a few years late
Seeing as the ATI board doesn't have a built-in ethernet controller (which honestly seems a little crappy, I thought these things became standard on-board features a year or two ago), and the motherboard only has a limited number of PCI / PCI-X expansion slots (very limited, if you go for an SLI setup, as I'm sure many will).. where is the room for expansion with other devices such as Soundcards, PCMCIA slots (yes, these ARE handy on desktop PCs in my opinion), WiFi cards, TV-Tuners etc?
It seems to me that you're really limited to just 1-2 additional cards, and not having an in-built ethernet controller really limits flexibility..
I'm also not 100% sure about having only 1 PATA connector, although this is probably a good thing these days..
The difference in power consumption just between different motherboards is quite amazing - I have never really paid much attention to the actual motherboard I use in the past, but I guess it is starting to get quite important to over-all system performance these days.
And just as they started their massive energy-saving campaign, it turns out we don't need it after all.. .. At least in 20 years time.. or 50..
Isn't it getting to the point now where us lucky ones in the first world are throwing away enough old-but-still-working hardware that people in the third world CAN have a PC that works just fine with the right setup and just isn't the latest and greatest quad-core offering from Intel?
I guess it makes a lot of sense from Microsofts point of view.. instead of letting them have cheap home PCs and "free" Windows software (aka piracy), make them pay outlanding sums of money over the long-term without realizing it, while offering the usual sub-standard software and being able to fall back on "ooh, it must be network problems, cause our centralized Office products are perfect!" excuses as required.
Whatever happened to all these $100 PCs bundled with Linux? They can't be much more expensive than a thin-client PC + broadband connection required to deliver the new Microsoft centralised services at any decent speed?
I hope M$ has thought this one through - if they start actually forcing those who cannot afford it to pay for M$ products, those who cannot afford it will quickly migrate to something they can afford, eg. Linux. Perhaps once the end-user moves, corporations will feel more secure about moving and before you know it, M$ isn't turning a profit in either of their two truly profitable offerings any more (Windows and Office)