The costs associated with getting a product into retail channels are nothing to sneeze at. Also the costs associated with advertising these products is not cheap either. Cable companies don't have to put their products into retail channels and can advertise pretty much "for free" on their own service (not really for free since whatever time they use to advertise could have been used to make advertising revenue, except in those cases where they air their ads in the time slots that otherwise weren't bought).
But I agree with your fundamental point that it's the subsidy that they can give to their customers in the monthly fee area and hardware that is most significant.
Those boxes work much more like a digital VCR than a true DVR as far as I know, although I have to admit I have never used one and can only go on others' observations here.
Also you are providing evidence for at least some of my points - believe me there is no way that cable companies could push such *very expensive* technology as dual-tuner HD pvrs without the deep pockets that they have to absorb the losses that must be associated with that product. There is just no way that $10/month can support the development of, production of, and distribution of that product.
TiVo can provide technical innovation. Cable companies are generally not known for their ability to innovate technology or to produce compelling products such as set top boxes like TiVo with new and advanced features. They tend to "follow leads" as is obvious now with the crop of second-rate DVRs that they are releasing.
We'll see how this plays out. Either the technical superiority of TiVo will win out or the lower-cost, lower-quality options that the cable companies can offer will win out. Actually it's likely that both will win and retain some part of the market, the question is, how large a part for each respectively?
Believe me, no one at TiVo is under any delusions that we don't have to work *very hard* to stay ahead of the pack and retain technical superiority.
I feel that especially on this topic, I have to remind everyone that I speak for myself and not TiVo.
Believe me, it can be very disheartening to work for an innovator in a marketplace where large established companies have such control over the distribution channels.
Cable companies and satellite companies already have a "lock" to a large extent on their customers and for them to sell an additional service such as a DVR requires so much less capital investment in marketing, and let's face it, making a good product, than it takes for a company like TiVo.
And those companies already have much deeper pockets than a small company like TiVo with which to absorb the losses associated with pushing this rather expensive technology out to users.
It's kind of funny to me that people will pay $80 cable bills without a whimper but will cry foul at the concept of paying $13 a month to TiVo to make the cable service so much more worthwhile.
Cable DVRs suck. Most people would be much happier with a TiVo and would find the extra expense to be justified. I know I'm biased but I honestly believe that.
My comments are my own and I do not speak for my employer.
Manhattan has huge densities compared to those figures. 66,940 people per square mile according to this site:
http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/popInfo.php?locIn de x=1101
Looking around that site, Queens County has a pop density of 20,408.
Bronx County = 31,709.
Kings County (Brooklyn) = 34,916.
Richmond County (Staten Island) = 7,587.
So I'd say that a rough estimate of the population density of just the five boroughs of New York City is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 people per square mile.
Roadrunner cable modem service in NYC is $50 month for either 3 Mbit or 6 Mbit download, I'm not sure which it is (seems mostly irrelevent as you're unlikely to pull more than about 2 Mbit over the internet at large anyway).
I have no idea why U.S. broadband is so expensive. I wish it weren't.
I hate to have to ask this but SOMEONE PLEASE MOD MY POST UP! I didn't understand the "no karma bonus" and "no subscriber bonus" checkboxes and they had the opposite effect of what I intended. I wanted to give my post some extra bonuses because I am trying to help this person and I wanted my comments to be seen, and unfortunately all I succeeded in doing was giving my post a score of "1". Thanks!
I like Magic The Gathering Online. It's an online multiplayer version of the Magic The Gathering card game. This is a strategic card game that is alot of fun to play. The interface to the game is very simple, and you wouldn't need a keyboard to play it *at all*, all you need to be able to do is point and click, and right-click, and possibly click-and-drag. However without the ability to type you wouldn't be able to say "good luck" and "good game" to your opponenets, which wouldn't interfere with your gameplay but other players who don't know your circumstances may unfortunately come to the conclusion that you are an unfriendly person. If you do have the ability to type just a little bit, even if slowly, that would help immensely with the social aspect of the game.
It's not a traditional "video game" in the sense that it's not an action-based game, but you get to play against real people, meaning that the challenge level is always pretty high, and it really can be a very fun game to play. And like I mentioned there can be social aspects to it as well which are nice. I've met some nice people from all over the world on there.
I would recommend starting out with "league" play, which is a relatively cheap way to learn how to play and to get alot of playing time on a pretty even playing field.
Oh yeah there is a free preview available too, which allows you to play only with a limited set of card decks against other people who are playing the preview, but it will help you to know whether or not you can handle the interface to the game, and whether or not you enjoy it.
So clearly you read comments such as the O.P.'s with a biased viewpoint, you have just admitted it.
He said that they "refuse to learn", not that they are too lazy to learn. There is a difference.
Just like someone who DOESN'T speak BAE isn't "too lazy" to learn how to speak it, they just "refuse to". Of course using the term "refusing to" does imply that they make a conscious effort and I think that's wrong; I don't think that people who speak BAE make some kind of conscious choice, the way they speak is a natural consequence of their surroundings as they were brought up and learned to speak whatever language was around them.
But I do think that there is a collective sense of an exclusive group that comes along with speaking a minority language (and I'm using "minority" here in the numerative sense, not in the racial sense, so don't get too worked up here) that contributes *immensely* to the preservation of this dialect of English for those who are in that group.
I really think it's unfortunate that people such as yourself choose to label other people as racist right away. It doesn't add anything to the discussion and it's inflammatory. It's not useful to not be able to discuss points of views such as the O.P.'s without playing the "racist" card right off the bat.
I honestly think by the way that you jumped to that conclusion so quickly that you *want* to believe that people are racist, because it probably fits in with some kind of self-justification that you want to have.
Seriously, if you base your conclusions about people that you have never even met based on one bad experience that *you* have had with a completely unrelated set of people, I think that you should really re-examine your motives.
Not trying to be overly critical here, just trying to get you to think about this.
His post never used, or implied, the word "lazy". You have chosen to read it that way. He simply pointed out the fallacy of the previous poster's assertion that BAE has grammar constructs which are required because "proper" English is lacking it. In fact proper English does have the constructs required, and the addition of the new constructs in BAE are simply redundancies.
Most likely these redundancies are intentional, either subconsciously or consciously, on the part of the people speaking this way, probably because it's just another way to identify with a particular group. I personally dislike BAE because I think it's simply a way for some people to try to be exclusionary (i.e. create a group within which they identify and others who do not talk/act/dress/etc like them do not), and I don't like that.
On the other hand, those people probably want to belong to such a group because there has been so much exclusion practiced against them historically. Which I hate equally, if not more.
By the way, calling someone else racist without them actually saying anything racist is really rude and uncalled for.
Perforce is not a locking version control system; there is a step that you have to take before you can edit a file, 'p4 edit foo.cpp', that makes the file editable. Perforce checks out all files as read-only and p4 edit makes it writeable. But multiple developers can p4 edit the same file at the same time. I really have no idea what the point of p4 edit is except that it allows Perforce to know who all is editing a file and it can warn you if you p4 edit a file that someone else has opened. But it's just a warning, there is nothing preventing two people from p4 editing the same file at the same time.
I use perforce at work and subversion at home. I prefer subversion, I just like the "feel" of it better, but Perforce definitely has better branch merge support. I can't compare the speed between the two very well, the size and scope of the projects at work are not really comparable with the piddly projects that I use subversion for at home.
Note that the cost is $1 per CPU hour. This means that if your application uses 1,000 CPUs, it will cost you $1,000 per hour. Since the target applications are large problems that are not easy to solve without huge CPU resources, the cost for most applications will be quite a lot.
And yet, it will probably be very cost effective for certain applications, where the cost of building and maintaining your own computing grid would be prohibitive.
Somehow the thought of the world moving back towards "mainframe" style computing with truly "central processors" and everyone with a terminal in their home is comforting in a nostalgic sort of way.
I'm not kidding. I remember reading some really well-written theorizations on what the second Matrix movie would be about before it was released, and the theorized plots that I read on the 'net were a MILLION times better than the Matrix 2 & 3 that followed. I really think that the Matrix guys could have benefitted tremendously from reading some of what was theorized, there were all kinds of interesting twists in what I read on the 'net (even on Slashdot if I recall correctly) that were so much better than the movies turned out to be.
They should do the same for X-Files. Just hint that there will be a sequel movie, and then scan the fan sites for the best plots offered as guessed as to what is going to happen. It would be a great way to amass alot of good ideas. I know there is alot of crap out there but some people really do write some pretty good stuff, that could at least be used as a basis for some ideas. I'm serious.
Heh, I never realized the humor in it until you pointed it out. I tend to either become bored with or totally addicted to games. I have destroyed three copies of Jedi Acadamy (bought it three times!) to stop an addiction in progress. I have destroyed multiple MTGOL accounts. Back in the day I fried my Fallout 2 disc in the microwave to stop myself from playing it. I hit my Quake 2 disc with a hammer. You could say that I have a problem:)
This Slashdot article prompted me to put my WOW game and account up on eBay. Wonder what it'll go for. So far one bidder at $9.99...
I cancelled my account after the first month. It's a fine game but I find MMORPG's with their whack-a-mole style fighting to be really boring.
I much prefer real-time shooters. I used to be very good at Jedi Academy online but I had to make myself quit because I played too much. I can't get that "addicted" feeling with MMORPG's, they're just not compelling enough to me.
I'm very confused by the specs that I read on the AMD site. It says that these chips have a 14 bit address bus. Doesn't that mean that they only support 16K bytes? Does that even make any sense?
Or does the memory interface require two cycles to transmit the address, giving a 28 bit address bus, for a total of 256 MB?
I ask this because I have a similar setup, with my PC in a closet next to my computer desk and long USB, firewire, and video cables running from the closet to my desktop. The only problem that I have is that modern ATX motherboards will not turn on just because the power is turned on. So when I flip my surge protector on, the computer doesn't come on. I have to open the closet and manually press the computer's power button. Although there is one way around this. I never let the operating system shut the computer down. I always use "reboot" instead of "shut down" and when the grub boot menu comes up, I flick the surge protector off. Then when I turn it back on, the motherboard thinks that it is recovering from a power outage situation and comes on.
It's a pain having to always do a reboot and wait for grub to come up though rather than shutting down. And my wife sometimes doesn't remember to do it.
Any hints for making turning on a computer in such a situation more hassle-free?
By the way, my closet gets damn hot with my Athlon XP 1800+ system and my Linux firewall in there. But 2.5 years on and I haven't had any component failures.
So basically, the amount of energy it takes to perform calculations is tiny? If processor A performs 2 billion arithmetic operations per second, and it is able to perform each operation just as efficiently as processor B which only performs 1 billion operations per second, the I would expect processor A to use twice as much energy performing its calculations as processor B.
But what you're saying is that the amount of energy being wasted as heat for both processors A and B is 99%, so the extra power used by processor A in its calculations won't be noticeable compared to processor B (assuming that the only extra power used by processor B is that used to perform calculations).
486s comsumed what, 10 - 20 watts? And they performed something like 1/100 or fewer as many arithmetic operations per second as today's processors? So they used 1/5 the power but performed 1/100 the amount of useful work. I guess that today's processors actually convert more of their input power to useful work (calculations) than processors of the past did.
I'm pretty sure that I read in a previous Anandtech article a couple of weeks ago that they are using a new means of measuring CPU power usage - they measure the total wattage consumed by the entire PC and somehow extract the CPU power usage from that. I could be wrong though, I'm not sure exactly how they are obtaining their CPU power usage figures.
I do not believe that the total wattage consumed by the processor would equal the total wattage produced by the processor as waste heat. The processor does more than just convert electricity to heat. It uses some of the energy provided to it to redirect electrons around its circuits. That energy is not lost as waste heat.
Maybe the amount of energy that a processor uses to do useful work versus the amount that it loses as waste heat is negligeable, I don't know. But I seriously doubt that these processors are dissipating 86 - 210 watts of waste heat. It just doesn't seem like it would be possible to build heat sinks and fans capable of dissipating that heat without serious impact on noise and form factor.
That's some pretty tired anti-AMD FUD there. Can't you come up with any fresh FUD? FUD that's been out of date for 3+ years is just not worth even spouting.
This very thorough article also includes a comparison of power usage of the various processors during idle and busy states. The numbers look HUGE - the 90 nm Athlon 64 3500+ does the best at 86 watts at idle, with the Intel P4 560 (3.6 Ghz) doing the worst at 124 watts. While under a workload, the range is 114 watts to 210 watts.
At first I couldn't believe my eyes - how can heat sinks keep up with these figures? But then I realized that only some of that wattage is being converted to waste heat - some of it is actually doing the useful work of the processor.
Just curious - does anyone have any idea what the likely waste heat dissipation, in watts, would be for these processors, given the total power consumption figures in the article?
Hey man, I'm a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party and I am going to vote for the Libertarian in every election that I can. I don't care if you think it's a wasted vote. You can come up with all of the illogical half-truths that you want to to try to justify your opinion that others should only vote the way you want them to, I don't care, I'm still going to vote Libertarian. I happen to believe that the founders of our country wanted us to vote for who WE wanted to win, not who we think EVERYONE ELSE wants to win.
Slashdot Mirror
The costs associated with getting a product into retail channels are nothing to sneeze at. Also the costs associated with advertising these products is not cheap either. Cable companies don't have to put their products into retail channels and can advertise pretty much "for free" on their own service (not really for free since whatever time they use to advertise could have been used to make advertising revenue, except in those cases where they air their ads in the time slots that otherwise weren't bought).
But I agree with your fundamental point that it's the subsidy that they can give to their customers in the monthly fee area and hardware that is most significant.
Those boxes work much more like a digital VCR than a true DVR as far as I know, although I have to admit I have never used one and can only go on others' observations here.
Also you are providing evidence for at least some of my points - believe me there is no way that cable companies could push such *very expensive* technology as dual-tuner HD pvrs without the deep pockets that they have to absorb the losses that must be associated with that product. There is just no way that $10/month can support the development of, production of, and distribution of that product.
No offense taken.
TiVo can provide technical innovation. Cable companies are generally not known for their ability to innovate technology or to produce compelling products such as set top boxes like TiVo with new and advanced features. They tend to "follow leads" as is obvious now with the crop of second-rate DVRs that they are releasing.
We'll see how this plays out. Either the technical superiority of TiVo will win out or the lower-cost, lower-quality options that the cable companies can offer will win out. Actually it's likely that both will win and retain some part of the market, the question is, how large a part for each respectively?
Believe me, no one at TiVo is under any delusions that we don't have to work *very hard* to stay ahead of the pack and retain technical superiority.
I feel that especially on this topic, I have to remind everyone that I speak for myself and not TiVo.
I work for TiVo.
Believe me, it can be very disheartening to work for an innovator in a marketplace where large established companies have such control over the distribution channels.
Cable companies and satellite companies already have a "lock" to a large extent on their customers and for them to sell an additional service such as a DVR requires so much less capital investment in marketing, and let's face it, making a good product, than it takes for a company like TiVo.
And those companies already have much deeper pockets than a small company like TiVo with which to absorb the losses associated with pushing this rather expensive technology out to users.
It's kind of funny to me that people will pay $80 cable bills without a whimper but will cry foul at the concept of paying $13 a month to TiVo to make the cable service so much more worthwhile.
Cable DVRs suck. Most people would be much happier with a TiVo and would find the extra expense to be justified. I know I'm biased but I honestly believe that.
My comments are my own and I do not speak for my employer.
Manhattan has huge densities compared to those figures. 66,940 people per square mile according to this site:
n de x=1101
http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/popInfo.php?locI
Looking around that site, Queens County has a pop density of 20,408.
Bronx County = 31,709.
Kings County (Brooklyn) = 34,916.
Richmond County (Staten Island) = 7,587.
So I'd say that a rough estimate of the population density of just the five boroughs of New York City is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 people per square mile.
Roadrunner cable modem service in NYC is $50 month for either 3 Mbit or 6 Mbit download, I'm not sure which it is (seems mostly irrelevent as you're unlikely to pull more than about 2 Mbit over the internet at large anyway).
I have no idea why U.S. broadband is so expensive. I wish it weren't.
http://mtgoinstall.wizards.com/installers/mtgodl2. exe
I hate to have to ask this but SOMEONE PLEASE MOD MY POST UP! I didn't understand the "no karma bonus" and "no subscriber bonus" checkboxes and they had the opposite effect of what I intended. I wanted to give my post some extra bonuses because I am trying to help this person and I wanted my comments to be seen, and unfortunately all I succeeded in doing was giving my post a score of "1". Thanks!
I like Magic The Gathering Online. It's an online multiplayer version of the Magic The Gathering card game. This is a strategic card game that is alot of fun to play. The interface to the game is very simple, and you wouldn't need a keyboard to play it *at all*, all you need to be able to do is point and click, and right-click, and possibly click-and-drag. However without the ability to type you wouldn't be able to say "good luck" and "good game" to your opponenets, which wouldn't interfere with your gameplay but other players who don't know your circumstances may unfortunately come to the conclusion that you are an unfriendly person. If you do have the ability to type just a little bit, even if slowly, that would help immensely with the social aspect of the game.
l 2. exe
It's not a traditional "video game" in the sense that it's not an action-based game, but you get to play against real people, meaning that the challenge level is always pretty high, and it really can be a very fun game to play. And like I mentioned there can be social aspects to it as well which are nice. I've met some nice people from all over the world on there.
I would recommend starting out with "league" play, which is a relatively cheap way to learn how to play and to get alot of playing time on a pretty even playing field.
Oh yeah there is a free preview available too, which allows you to play only with a limited set of card decks against other people who are playing the preview, but it will help you to know whether or not you can handle the interface to the game, and whether or not you enjoy it.
You can download MTGOL at:
http://mtgoinstall.wizards.com/installers/mtgod
So clearly you read comments such as the O.P.'s with a biased viewpoint, you have just admitted it.
He said that they "refuse to learn", not that they are too lazy to learn. There is a difference.
Just like someone who DOESN'T speak BAE isn't "too lazy" to learn how to speak it, they just "refuse to". Of course using the term "refusing to" does imply that they make a conscious effort and I think that's wrong; I don't think that people who speak BAE make some kind of conscious choice, the way they speak is a natural consequence of their surroundings as they were brought up and learned to speak whatever language was around them.
But I do think that there is a collective sense of an exclusive group that comes along with speaking a minority language (and I'm using "minority" here in the numerative sense, not in the racial sense, so don't get too worked up here) that contributes *immensely* to the preservation of this dialect of English for those who are in that group.
I really think it's unfortunate that people such as yourself choose to label other people as racist right away. It doesn't add anything to the discussion and it's inflammatory. It's not useful to not be able to discuss points of views such as the O.P.'s without playing the "racist" card right off the bat.
I honestly think by the way that you jumped to that conclusion so quickly that you *want* to believe that people are racist, because it probably fits in with some kind of self-justification that you want to have.
Seriously, if you base your conclusions about people that you have never even met based on one bad experience that *you* have had with a completely unrelated set of people, I think that you should really re-examine your motives.
Not trying to be overly critical here, just trying to get you to think about this.
So are you saying that there is or isn't a difference between "I be hating" and "I am hating"?
His post never used, or implied, the word "lazy". You have chosen to read it that way. He simply pointed out the fallacy of the previous poster's assertion that BAE has grammar constructs which are required because "proper" English is lacking it. In fact proper English does have the constructs required, and the addition of the new constructs in BAE are simply redundancies.
Most likely these redundancies are intentional, either subconsciously or consciously, on the part of the people speaking this way, probably because it's just another way to identify with a particular group. I personally dislike BAE because I think it's simply a way for some people to try to be exclusionary (i.e. create a group within which they identify and others who do not talk/act/dress/etc like them do not), and I don't like that.
On the other hand, those people probably want to belong to such a group because there has been so much exclusion practiced against them historically. Which I hate equally, if not more.
By the way, calling someone else racist without them actually saying anything racist is really rude and uncalled for.
Perforce is not a locking version control system; there is a step that you have to take before you can edit a file, 'p4 edit foo.cpp', that makes the file editable. Perforce checks out all files as read-only and p4 edit makes it writeable. But multiple developers can p4 edit the same file at the same time. I really have no idea what the point of p4 edit is except that it allows Perforce to know who all is editing a file and it can warn you if you p4 edit a file that someone else has opened. But it's just a warning, there is nothing preventing two people from p4 editing the same file at the same time.
I use perforce at work and subversion at home. I prefer subversion, I just like the "feel" of it better, but Perforce definitely has better branch merge support. I can't compare the speed between the two very well, the size and scope of the projects at work are not really comparable with the piddly projects that I use subversion for at home.
If you had RTFA yourself, you would have known the answer to your questtion.
And yet, it will probably be very cost effective for certain applications, where the cost of building and maintaining your own computing grid would be prohibitive.
Somehow the thought of the world moving back towards "mainframe" style computing with truly "central processors" and everyone with a terminal in their home is comforting in a nostalgic sort of way.
I'm not kidding. I remember reading some really well-written theorizations on what the second Matrix movie would be about before it was released, and the theorized plots that I read on the 'net were a MILLION times better than the Matrix 2 & 3 that followed. I really think that the Matrix guys could have benefitted tremendously from reading some of what was theorized, there were all kinds of interesting twists in what I read on the 'net (even on Slashdot if I recall correctly) that were so much better than the movies turned out to be.
They should do the same for X-Files. Just hint that there will be a sequel movie, and then scan the fan sites for the best plots offered as guessed as to what is going to happen. It would be a great way to amass alot of good ideas. I know there is alot of crap out there but some people really do write some pretty good stuff, that could at least be used as a basis for some ideas. I'm serious.
Heh, I never realized the humor in it until you pointed it out. I tend to either become bored with or totally addicted to games. I have destroyed three copies of Jedi Acadamy (bought it three times!) to stop an addiction in progress. I have destroyed multiple MTGOL accounts. Back in the day I fried my Fallout 2 disc in the microwave to stop myself from playing it. I hit my Quake 2 disc with a hammer. You could say that I have a problem :)
...
This Slashdot article prompted me to put my WOW game and account up on eBay. Wonder what it'll go for. So far one bidder at $9.99
I cancelled my account after the first month. It's a fine game but I find MMORPG's with their whack-a-mole style fighting to be really boring.
I much prefer real-time shooters. I used to be very good at Jedi Academy online but I had to make myself quit because I played too much. I can't get that "addicted" feeling with MMORPG's, they're just not compelling enough to me.
I was a bit confused by what he said at first too, but I realized that he was talking about the TiVo UI when he was saying that it was good.
BTW I work for TiVo so I am biased.
I'm very confused by the specs that I read on the AMD site. It says that these chips have a 14 bit address bus. Doesn't that mean that they only support 16K bytes? Does that even make any sense?
Or does the memory interface require two cycles to transmit the address, giving a 28 bit address bus, for a total of 256 MB?
How do you turn it on?
I ask this because I have a similar setup, with my PC in a closet next to my computer desk and long USB, firewire, and video cables running from the closet to my desktop. The only problem that I have is that modern ATX motherboards will not turn on just because the power is turned on. So when I flip my surge protector on, the computer doesn't come on. I have to open the closet and manually press the computer's power button. Although there is one way around this. I never let the operating system shut the computer down. I always use "reboot" instead of "shut down" and when the grub boot menu comes up, I flick the surge protector off. Then when I turn it back on, the motherboard thinks that it is recovering from a power outage situation and comes on.
It's a pain having to always do a reboot and wait for grub to come up though rather than shutting down. And my wife sometimes doesn't remember to do it.
Any hints for making turning on a computer in such a situation more hassle-free?
By the way, my closet gets damn hot with my Athlon XP 1800+ system and my Linux firewall in there. But 2.5 years on and I haven't had any component failures.
So basically, the amount of energy it takes to perform calculations is tiny? If processor A performs 2 billion arithmetic operations per second, and it is able to perform each operation just as efficiently as processor B which only performs 1 billion operations per second, the I would expect processor A to use twice as much energy performing its calculations as processor B.
But what you're saying is that the amount of energy being wasted as heat for both processors A and B is 99%, so the extra power used by processor A in its calculations won't be noticeable compared to processor B (assuming that the only extra power used by processor B is that used to perform calculations).
486s comsumed what, 10 - 20 watts? And they performed something like 1/100 or fewer as many arithmetic operations per second as today's processors? So they used 1/5 the power but performed 1/100 the amount of useful work. I guess that today's processors actually convert more of their input power to useful work (calculations) than processors of the past did.
I'm pretty sure that I read in a previous Anandtech article a couple of weeks ago that they are using a new means of measuring CPU power usage - they measure the total wattage consumed by the entire PC and somehow extract the CPU power usage from that. I could be wrong though, I'm not sure exactly how they are obtaining their CPU power usage figures.
I do not believe that the total wattage consumed by the processor would equal the total wattage produced by the processor as waste heat. The processor does more than just convert electricity to heat. It uses some of the energy provided to it to redirect electrons around its circuits. That energy is not lost as waste heat.
Maybe the amount of energy that a processor uses to do useful work versus the amount that it loses as waste heat is negligeable, I don't know. But I seriously doubt that these processors are dissipating 86 - 210 watts of waste heat. It just doesn't seem like it would be possible to build heat sinks and fans capable of dissipating that heat without serious impact on noise and form factor.
That's some pretty tired anti-AMD FUD there. Can't you come up with any fresh FUD? FUD that's been out of date for 3+ years is just not worth even spouting.
This very thorough article also includes a comparison of power usage of the various processors during idle and busy states. The numbers look HUGE - the 90 nm Athlon 64 3500+ does the best at 86 watts at idle, with the Intel P4 560 (3.6 Ghz) doing the worst at 124 watts. While under a workload, the range is 114 watts to 210 watts.
At first I couldn't believe my eyes - how can heat sinks keep up with these figures? But then I realized that only some of that wattage is being converted to waste heat - some of it is actually doing the useful work of the processor.
Just curious - does anyone have any idea what the likely waste heat dissipation, in watts, would be for these processors, given the total power consumption figures in the article?
Hey man, I'm a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party and I am going to vote for the Libertarian in every election that I can. I don't care if you think it's a wasted vote. You can come up with all of the illogical half-truths that you want to to try to justify your opinion that others should only vote the way you want them to, I don't care, I'm still going to vote Libertarian. I happen to believe that the founders of our country wanted us to vote for who WE wanted to win, not who we think EVERYONE ELSE wants to win.