...which is also erroneous, not as bad as comparing with PowerPC. Any comparison with P4 clock speeds needs to be thrown out the window immediately, since P4 clock speed is cheating to be inflated.
True. p3 and p4 are different architectures, and initially the p4 did not have the same "oomph" per cycle as the p3 (and hench, the p3 1ghz was faster than 1.4ghz p4 in certain benchmarks). However, I wouldn't call it "cheating". The p4 simply has more pipeline stages thus allowing it to operate at a higher clock rate (and there are reasons you would want to do this beyond marketing). Also, subtle advances in the p4 architecture (better branch prediction, higher cache sizes) have made the p4 more powerful per clock than it's initial incarnations.... so while comparing a 2.5ghz p4 to a 1.0ghz p3 is not exactly apples-to-apples, it's probably close enough for approximation.
What I'm saying is that either a) the G4 is reaching the end of it's lifecycle or b) Motorola sucks. I'm leaning towards b). Either way, Apple has a problem on their hands. They need to up the cpu speeds and especially the bus speeds (as another post intelligently pointed out).
Apple is in somewhat of a tight spot in terms of the cpu. While on the wintel side you have four competing companies making x86 chips, Apple is reliant solely on Motorola for it's G4's. (sidenote: IBM was a source for G3's, but Motorola was unwilling to license the technology for the G4. Is this still the case?)
Also, the average cpu speed for apple is growing at a fairly small rate. In 2 years, x86 cpu speeds are around 2.5 times faster (from 1ghz to 2.5 ghz). On the apple side, the top G4 speed in the past 2 years has gone from 766mhz to 1ghz. Apple's only resort to scale up processing power has been to release multiprocessor configurations.
I see a tough road for Apple. If they stick with Motorola, they are subject to Motorola's utter inability to perform. They could jump to the x86 or Itanium, but they would face a migration nightmare (the osx migration was tough enough). Either option doesn't look good.
User Friendlyness is in direct inverse porportion to Efficiency.
Rubbish. You're confusing "User Friendly" with various user interface issues. And while it is occasionally true that a user-friendly interface can slow down a process, the intention should be the opposite.
User Friendliness, properly executed, increases efficiency by leveraging the user's intuition in order to get a task done. For example: I could certainly copy a file from one folder to another using the command line, but intuition tells me that dragging the visual representation of that file from one (visual representation of a) folder to another will have the same effect. Since I can move a mouse faster than I can type, I think I'll go with the more user-friendly option and get the job done quicker.
Using my own tools I can fix my car. But if I take it to the mechanic, and pay him to fix it, it will take much longer. I have to wait for him to get around to it. He is getting paid by the hour, so he is in little to no rush to get it done.
Not only is this apples-to-oranges, it's just plain wrong. My mechanic can rebuild my transmission in far less time than I'll be able to. But since your point is so glaringly off-topic, I'll leave it alone.
Key combos are often faster, and much more efficient than a mouse
Yes they are, which is why most interface designers will tell you that key-combos can make for a user-friendlier system.
While you are probably correct in your assumption that this device is doing it's own decode and just using the gba for i/o (otherwise, why does it have it's own headphone jack?), I don't see why this has to be the case.
The GBA has a 200mhz ARM cpu. That should be fast enough, right? I'm not very familiar with the flavors of the ARM archetecture -- is the 200mhz ARM processor a vastly different model from the 200mhz ARM processor that's in an ipaq? And ipaqs can handle mp3's no problem.
Waitasec... didn't Slashdot just violate NPR's linking policy by linking to their linking policy?
The other irony is, if everyone filled out those damn requests to link to NPR's site, NPR would be so deluged with such requests that they would quickly abandon the policy.
Of course, then you would have to further explain the notion of parody, and then further explain that it is a device often used in the criticism of an idea or concept, and further explain that such criticism of government is in fact legal in the United States. As opposed to China, where criticism of government is often followed by a tank smooshing you.
You think that the editor for the Beijing Evening News has the guts to sign off on that story?
To call what Nintendo is doing a "plan" is getting a little loose with the language. Essentially they are saying "We'll make the modem, but you third parties will need to create your own network and subscription model. Oh, and we don't think this online gaming thing is going to be very popular.". When you consider that there is hardly *any* third party support, how is Nintendo going to make this a success by pushing the responsibility onto the third-parities! Of course, perhaps Nintendo the wisest of the three companies -- how many failed peripherals did Nintendo introduce before finally getting the hint?
As far as EA, I'd say that it does indeed sound like negotiation. Microsoft will probably be more willing to cave-in simply to shut them up.
It's not like I have any love for Microsoft, but EA is practically the Microsoft in the video games Arena. I would not be surprised in the least if EA were simplying playing the "MS is a Bully" card merely as leverage for more favorable terms. The conspiracy theorist in me makes me think that this has more to do with Microsoft's chummy relationship with Sega (EA's software rival).
Microsoft is Evil, but not stupid... they don't have the market share to start bullying developers and, in fact, they've been exceedingly friendly (in that crack-dealer-to-first-time-user sense) to anyone even remotely interested in developing for the XBox. If you're an Indy developer, just try getting a dev kit for a PS2 or a Gamecube. It will not happen. It makes no sense to then turn around and alienate developers with a hard-ass stance for the online network.
Pretend you're an EA marketing droid, what sounds better:
"We won't sign a deal with Microsoft if they sign a deal with Sega"
"We won't sign a deal with Microsoft until they cut their royalty fees in half."
Here's a picture of the notices sent out by verisign.
A while back, some companies were getting in trouble by sending businesses "invoices" for office supplies when they were in fact nothing more than a cheap attempt to get office managers to accidentally sign off on them. I'm pretty sure that you don't see this as much anymore because the offending companies got the smackdown from the government. These "renewal notices" seem to fall under the same guise.
Sure, it didn't add alot to the overall cost, but it seems like a waste of real estate. You get three firewire ports over 2 usb ports. Plus one of the firewire ports is in the front, where I think usb would make more sense.
I mean, this thing is probably going to be in a server room, so I can't really see it hooked up to an ipod or a camcorder, and firewire doesn't extend long enough to make it to someones office before you need a repeater.
The only real application I see is IP over firewire which isn't a bad idea at all. You get 4x performance over 100mb ethernet and the hubs are alot cheaper than gigabit so you it's a nice compromise.
Still, beyond IP, what would a practicle application be?
I really love it when newspeople mention how the economic downturn is over, yet in the same breath mention that company abc is laying off thousands of worker.
With 15,000 being layed off, it seems the matter of this merger being a "good thing" depends entirely on who you ask.
There are several perople that are rallying against digital projection. Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg to name a few. These are people who have a vast amount of experience in this field. Ebert, for one, has been the most vocal about his distaste for digital projection: claiming that it yields muted colors and compression artifacts.
No doubt it's better than DVD quality, but there definitely some compression going on. To match the quality of 35mm print, you need something like a 5 megapixel camera. For 1/1.85 aspect ratio projection you're talking about a 3,000 x 1600 pixel image. Is the resolution on DLP that good? On the DLP website I couldn't get any hard numbers for what the resolution will be for digital projection (there's alot of info there, so be my guest). Even with DVD compression levels you're gonna have to put this thing on a 100gig hard drive, and the compression is quite noticable to film buffs (admittedly, I can only tell with poorely encoded dvd's).
Besides, there are alot of things that influence the quality of the cinema experience. Hardly any theatres use the correct brightness for their projectors. Furthermore, the jump to 50mm or 75mm film would have an astounding leap in quality. You could double the framerate, but you'd also double the number of film canisters (I worked at a theater during high school, those suckers can get pretty big and heavy).
My dad's got one of those cheapy altimeter/compass combos that sticks to your dashboard. $20, so I extrapolated. I can't account for it's accuracy, but it's an altimeter just the same. (and the man hardly ever leaves phoenix, which begs the question of why he got an altimeter in the first place.
And I see thermometer/barometers all the time that people put on their porch wall. In fact, I have one boxed away somewhere, and I'm sure I would have remembered paying a bundle (maybe someone gave it to me?? i dunno)
Some things money can't buy.
on
Touchscreen Watch
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Cost of witnessing some dumbass spend $650 dollars to combine all of these devices that will hardly ever be used just because the product's website features scantily clad women?
Priceless.
I guess if you're gonna spend $650 dollars on a watch that can tell the temperature, you wont mind if it's a rectal thermometer, huh?
It would be cheaper, but probably not as valuable. My interactions with professors and other students taught me things that you just can't learn in a book. Plus, I used my elective credits to fill out areas that I was quite interested in but and wanted to learn more: astronomy, political science, and cinema. I reckon that the only class that I took that I didn't want to take was statistics, but even in that instance I wound up learning some valuable things.
Don't get me wrong. The point of my argument is not to say that a college education is all-important. Far from it. Hell, most of my education occured in the trenches so to speak. All I am saying is that you will ultimately become unsatisfied if you pursue a line of work only to make money. Even if you do make money.
Think about it. This audit claims that Logicon vastly inflated claims of savings, and also inflated the number of licenses the state would need. I can't think of ONE salesperson or company that wouldn't do the same thing. It's common for companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to give kickbacks to their busniess partners when they broker a deal. Hence, the business partner is going to try to make the deal as big as possible.
Logicon probably gave a crazy, high-ball figure with the expectaction that the state would counter with a lower number. When the state instead countered with "Okay, that sounds great", what would you expect Logicon to do (besides snicker)?
Once again, PHP is a language and ASP is a framework. The ASP you mention in the sloppycode article is implemented in VBScript. Never did I say that VBScript is faster than PHP. I'm only saying that you can use faster languages and still have it be an ASP. And yeah, PHP is slow.
Slashdot Mirror
True. p3 and p4 are different architectures, and initially the p4 did not have the same "oomph" per cycle as the p3 (and hench, the p3 1ghz was faster than 1.4ghz p4 in certain benchmarks). However, I wouldn't call it "cheating". The p4 simply has more pipeline stages thus allowing it to operate at a higher clock rate (and there are reasons you would want to do this beyond marketing). Also, subtle advances in the p4 architecture (better branch prediction, higher cache sizes) have made the p4 more powerful per clock than it's initial incarnations.... so while comparing a 2.5ghz p4 to a 1.0ghz p3 is not exactly apples-to-apples, it's probably close enough for approximation.
Are you seriously claiming that a 2.5 GHz x86 processor (Intel, AMD or whatever) is exactly 2.5 times "faster" than a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 chip?
Um, no. I'm re-reading my post to try to fathom where you came up to with that. Let me restate.
Fastest x86 cpu 2 yrs ago: 1ghz
Fastest x86 today: 2.5ghz
Speed gain: 250 percent
Fastest g4 2 years ago: 766mhz
Fastest g4 today: 1ghz
Speed gain: 30 percent
What I'm saying is that either a) the G4 is reaching the end of it's lifecycle or b) Motorola sucks. I'm leaning towards b). Either way, Apple has a problem on their hands. They need to up the cpu speeds and especially the bus speeds (as another post intelligently pointed out).
Apple is in somewhat of a tight spot in terms of the cpu. While on the wintel side you have four competing companies making x86 chips, Apple is reliant solely on Motorola for it's G4's. (sidenote: IBM was a source for G3's, but Motorola was unwilling to license the technology for the G4. Is this still the case?)
Also, the average cpu speed for apple is growing at a fairly small rate. In 2 years, x86 cpu speeds are around 2.5 times faster (from 1ghz to 2.5 ghz). On the apple side, the top G4 speed in the past 2 years has gone from 766mhz to 1ghz. Apple's only resort to scale up processing power has been to release multiprocessor configurations.
I see a tough road for Apple. If they stick with Motorola, they are subject to Motorola's utter inability to perform. They could jump to the x86 or Itanium, but they would face a migration nightmare (the osx migration was tough enough). Either option doesn't look good.
I read the IMac rumor on CNet, too. I'm curious as to what publications *will* be allowed to attend.
Masturbation doesn't count, pal.
User Friendlyness is in direct inverse porportion to Efficiency.
Rubbish. You're confusing "User Friendly" with various user interface issues. And while it is occasionally true that a user-friendly interface can slow down a process, the intention should be the opposite.
User Friendliness, properly executed, increases efficiency by leveraging the user's intuition in order to get a task done. For example: I could certainly copy a file from one folder to another using the command line, but intuition tells me that dragging the visual representation of that file from one (visual representation of a) folder to another will have the same effect. Since I can move a mouse faster than I can type, I think I'll go with the more user-friendly option and get the job done quicker.
Using my own tools I can fix my car. But if I take it to the mechanic, and pay him to fix it, it will take much longer. I have to wait for him to get around to it. He is getting paid by the hour, so he is in little to no rush to get it done.
Not only is this apples-to-oranges, it's just plain wrong. My mechanic can rebuild my transmission in far less time than I'll be able to. But since your point is so glaringly off-topic, I'll leave it alone.
Key combos are often faster, and much more efficient than a mouse
Yes they are, which is why most interface designers will tell you that key-combos can make for a user-friendlier system.
While you are probably correct in your assumption that this device is doing it's own decode and just using the gba for i/o (otherwise, why does it have it's own headphone jack?), I don't see why this has to be the case.
The GBA has a 200mhz ARM cpu. That should be fast enough, right? I'm not very familiar with the flavors of the ARM archetecture -- is the 200mhz ARM processor a vastly different model from the 200mhz ARM processor that's in an ipaq? And ipaqs can handle mp3's no problem.
Waitasec... didn't Slashdot just violate NPR's linking policy by linking to their linking policy?
The other irony is, if everyone filled out those damn requests to link to NPR's site, NPR would be so deluged with such requests that they would quickly abandon the policy.
Of course, then you would have to further explain the notion of parody, and then further explain that it is a device often used in the criticism of an idea or concept, and further explain that such criticism of government is in fact legal in the United States. As opposed to China, where criticism of government is often followed by a tank smooshing you.
You think that the editor for the Beijing Evening News has the guts to sign off on that story?
To call what Nintendo is doing a "plan" is getting a little loose with the language. Essentially they are saying "We'll make the modem, but you third parties will need to create your own network and subscription model. Oh, and we don't think this online gaming thing is going to be very popular.". When you consider that there is hardly *any* third party support, how is Nintendo going to make this a success by pushing the responsibility onto the third-parities! Of course, perhaps Nintendo the wisest of the three companies -- how many failed peripherals did Nintendo introduce before finally getting the hint?
As far as EA, I'd say that it does indeed sound like negotiation. Microsoft will probably be more willing to cave-in simply to shut them up.
Microsoft is Evil, but not stupid... they don't have the market share to start bullying developers and, in fact, they've been exceedingly friendly (in that crack-dealer-to-first-time-user sense) to anyone even remotely interested in developing for the XBox. If you're an Indy developer, just try getting a dev kit for a PS2 or a Gamecube. It will not happen. It makes no sense to then turn around and alienate developers with a hard-ass stance for the online network.
Pretend you're an EA marketing droid, what sounds better:
Pardon the whoring, but Go Daddy has posted a copy of the notice that Verisign sent out. It does seem fairly shady.
Here's a picture of the notices sent out by verisign.
A while back, some companies were getting in trouble by sending businesses "invoices" for office supplies when they were in fact nothing more than a cheap attempt to get office managers to accidentally sign off on them. I'm pretty sure that you don't see this as much anymore because the offending companies got the smackdown from the government. These "renewal notices" seem to fall under the same guise.
Sure, it didn't add alot to the overall cost, but it seems like a waste of real estate. You get three firewire ports over 2 usb ports. Plus one of the firewire ports is in the front, where I think usb would make more sense.
I mean, this thing is probably going to be in a server room, so I can't really see it hooked up to an ipod or a camcorder, and firewire doesn't extend long enough to make it to someones office before you need a repeater.
The only real application I see is IP over firewire which isn't a bad idea at all. You get 4x performance over 100mb ethernet and the hubs are alot cheaper than gigabit so you it's a nice compromise.
Still, beyond IP, what would a practicle application be?
I wasn't able to find any info from the hothardware or matrox sites. Any rumors as to when this is coming out, and how much it's going to cost?
I really love it when newspeople mention how the economic downturn is over, yet in the same breath mention that company abc is laying off thousands of worker.
With 15,000 being layed off, it seems the matter of this merger being a "good thing" depends entirely on who you ask.
There are several perople that are rallying against digital projection. Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg to name a few. These are people who have a vast amount of experience in this field. Ebert, for one, has been the most vocal about his distaste for digital projection: claiming that it yields muted colors and compression artifacts.
No doubt it's better than DVD quality, but there definitely some compression going on. To match the quality of 35mm print, you need something like a 5 megapixel camera. For 1/1.85 aspect ratio projection you're talking about a 3,000 x 1600 pixel image. Is the resolution on DLP that good? On the DLP website I couldn't get any hard numbers for what the resolution will be for digital projection (there's alot of info there, so be my guest). Even with DVD compression levels you're gonna have to put this thing on a 100gig hard drive, and the compression is quite noticable to film buffs (admittedly, I can only tell with poorely encoded dvd's).
Besides, there are alot of things that influence the quality of the cinema experience. Hardly any theatres use the correct brightness for their projectors. Furthermore, the jump to 50mm or 75mm film would have an astounding leap in quality. You could double the framerate, but you'd also double the number of film canisters (I worked at a theater during high school, those suckers can get pretty big and heavy).
My dad's got one of those cheapy altimeter/compass combos that sticks to your dashboard. $20, so I extrapolated. I can't account for it's accuracy, but it's an altimeter just the same. (and the man hardly ever leaves phoenix, which begs the question of why he got an altimeter in the first place.
And I see thermometer/barometers all the time that people put on their porch wall. In fact, I have one boxed away somewhere, and I'm sure I would have remembered paying a bundle (maybe someone gave it to me?? i dunno)
Decent wristwatch: $60
Decent compass: $10
Decent Barometer: $5
Decent Altimeter: $5
Decent thermometer: $3.50 (Walgreens)
Cost of witnessing some dumbass spend $650 dollars to combine all of these devices that will hardly ever be used just because the product's website features scantily clad women?
Priceless.
I guess if you're gonna spend $650 dollars on a watch that can tell the temperature, you wont mind if it's a rectal thermometer, huh?
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these *whack* ouch!! Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!!!
It would be cheaper, but probably not as valuable. My interactions with professors and other students taught me things that you just can't learn in a book. Plus, I used my elective credits to fill out areas that I was quite interested in but and wanted to learn more: astronomy, political science, and cinema. I reckon that the only class that I took that I didn't want to take was statistics, but even in that instance I wound up learning some valuable things.
Don't get me wrong. The point of my argument is not to say that a college education is all-important. Far from it. Hell, most of my education occured in the trenches so to speak. All I am saying is that you will ultimately become unsatisfied if you pursue a line of work only to make money. Even if you do make money.
I pursued my degree in computer science because I wanted to learn. If you went into this field for other reasons... well, maybe you shouldn't have.
This guy sounds like a sadist. Hopefully he grafted a ctrl-alt-delete key on the joysticks.
Oh, and the next guy to even THINK about mentioning a beowulf cluster of these things should die a slow, painful death.
Think about it. This audit claims that Logicon vastly inflated claims of savings, and also inflated the number of licenses the state would need. I can't think of ONE salesperson or company that wouldn't do the same thing. It's common for companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to give kickbacks to their busniess partners when they broker a deal. Hence, the business partner is going to try to make the deal as big as possible.
Logicon probably gave a crazy, high-ball figure with the expectaction that the state would counter with a lower number. When the state instead countered with "Okay, that sounds great", what would you expect Logicon to do (besides snicker)?
Once again, PHP is a language and ASP is a framework. The ASP you mention in the sloppycode article is implemented in VBScript. Never did I say that VBScript is faster than PHP. I'm only saying that you can use faster languages and still have it be an ASP. And yeah, PHP is slow.