I think kilobyte = 1024 bytes was probably an optimisation back when a megabyte was huge. I mean, a kilobyte being 2.4% larger than the SI definition isn't much, but 1TB is 10% larger (1024GiB vs 931GiB) and it's only getting worse as sizes grow.
From what I hear, employees have the privilege of working 80-hour weeks because they can be easily replaced. Actually, employees have the "privilege" of working 80-hour weeks because they like their job so much that the employers can get away with it. Where I work some people voluntarily work later than the end of their shift, unpaid. Shocking, isn't it?
Though by the time you're in a senior position your salary pretty much includes overtime pay.
Actually, last time I checked modern 64-bit cpus could actually only address 2^40 bytes of Ram, because you couldn't physically attach that much ram to them. 2^39 starting at 0 and 2^39 at the other end of the 64-bit spectrum.
Essentially the upper half IS reserved for the OS (which is much more than 2^48, it's 2^63), but it will be a long while before it's a problem, because at the moment there's a big no-man's-land between the valid program and OS memory addresses.
My workstation is a core 2 quad, and a full debug build of our project takes 20 minutes, despite using a parallel compiler. On a single core it takes about an hour. You don't want to know how long the optimised build takes on one core.
So there are plenty of workstation uses for a quad core, but I agree that at the moment it's overkill for a home desktop.
Ati budget cards seem to have a history of bad or too high overclocked ram. I had an ATI X800GTO that caused the same problems you describe but in Windows. Dropping the gfx ram speed by 10-20MHz cleared up the issues, but that was obviously unacceptable. I couldn't get a reply from ati, so in the end I borrowed a ATI X1900XTX from a mate, and am now replacing it with an nVidia 8800GTS. I now run linux (Ubuntu Feisty x86-64), so I could do with a card that has fewer issues.
Though installing the ati driver through Ubuntu Feisty's "Restricted Drivers Manager" didn't cause any of the problems that installing ati's own driver did when I ran Fedora Core 6 a few months ago. It actually made it so I couldn't load X. Under Feisty even hardware acceleration worked without me touching anything.
I used to be able to freeze the university's linux password change system by trying to change my password to another specific one that I'm not going to tell you because I use it elsewhere. It didn't have any special characters in it, just a cap, a digit, and a bunch of lowercase letters. I guess it hashed to 0 or something.
I run Ubuntu x86-64, and wine wasn't installed by default because the one in the repository is x86 only. I just added wine's own repository and installed it from there. Sounds like I'm in exactly the situation Dell is considering, and I don't see it as a problem.
You forgot to mention that they're also less fuel efficient than cars from 50 years ago. Well, maybe not American muscle cars, but the British Mini is 7-48 years old (it was being made for over 40 years!), won numerous rallies and the original got 40mpg (that's British miles and gallons btw, but it's still more than 33 American mpg).
Admittedly the original did have a top speed of 70mph, but the second version (with a huge 1 litre engine!) did 90mph and 30mpg (25mpg US).
As usual it depends on the website's own internet connection as well as your own. If they can't support more than 1Mbps per person then you won't be able to get anything from their site any faster than that. The "backbone" has plenty of speed and capacity, it's the ends that cause the slowdown.
On the other hand a tracert will show that most of your latency is from your ISPs network, where your traffic bounces between up to 10 machines before making onto the net proper.
It's been shown that you can shape the main body of your creature however you want, only the mouth, feet, hands, etc. are pre-made pieces, and you can place them wherever you like. And there's 30+ of each to choose from, not to mention the whole automatic animation and texturing system.
If you don't believe me just go look on youtube for the videos from the various E3 and GDC demos.
I seem to remember pandora requires a zip code to verify you're American. If you live abroad just put in 000000 and you're set! At least you could, I don't know if they still accept it, but they did when I signed up.
As they say, "C programs are only as stable as the person who wrote them".
It is pretty much the best choice for anything though, as it can quite literally do anything, and quickly too (assuming you know what you're doing). I won't consider VB6 mature until someone writes an OS kernel in it. After all, that is the ultimate test of any programming language.
For Windows it's either. Most programs are one instance per window, for some the same instance controls them all, and trying to start a new instance just gets the old one to open a new window. Either way, it's the same for the user so it doesn't really matter.
Microsoft Word is one of the "multiple windows controlled by one instance" programs, as is Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 is apparently both (!?) in that pressing ctrl-N opens a new window under the same instance, and running the program a second time does actually start a second instance.
Yeah, I understand all that, but the ability to simulate a generic brain would give you the ability to simulate any arbitrary brain, assuming you could find a way to scan it's structure. Though the process would likely involve causing brain death to prevent changes to the brain while you were scanning...
As for the "mental storage" - simulating a brain doesn't mean much about mental storage. Knowing and simulating an Intel chip in a program doesn't mean you can crack open an already produced Intel chip unit and hack few more cores in it. Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc. So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?
I think you'd be surprised, try hooking it up and you might find windows still supports it. I have a parallel port Epson LX80 (I think) at home that even Windows XP x64 edition supports.
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I don't work at EA.
I don't have a US drivers license either, but I'm British ^_^
I think kilobyte = 1024 bytes was probably an optimisation back when a megabyte was huge. I mean, a kilobyte being 2.4% larger than the SI definition isn't much, but 1TB is 10% larger (1024GiB vs 931GiB) and it's only getting worse as sizes grow.
Though by the time you're in a senior position your salary pretty much includes overtime pay.
Actually, last time I checked modern 64-bit cpus could actually only address 2^40 bytes of Ram, because you couldn't physically attach that much ram to them. 2^39 starting at 0 and 2^39 at the other end of the 64-bit spectrum.
Essentially the upper half IS reserved for the OS (which is much more than 2^48, it's 2^63), but it will be a long while before it's a problem, because at the moment there's a big no-man's-land between the valid program and OS memory addresses.
Why's that a reply to me? I didn't mention power/heat.
You're obviously working on something bigger than me then.
My workstation is a core 2 quad, and a full debug build of our project takes 20 minutes, despite using a parallel compiler. On a single core it takes about an hour. You don't want to know how long the optimised build takes on one core.
So there are plenty of workstation uses for a quad core, but I agree that at the moment it's overkill for a home desktop.
Ati budget cards seem to have a history of bad or too high overclocked ram. I had an ATI X800GTO that caused the same problems you describe but in Windows. Dropping the gfx ram speed by 10-20MHz cleared up the issues, but that was obviously unacceptable. I couldn't get a reply from ati, so in the end I borrowed a ATI X1900XTX from a mate, and am now replacing it with an nVidia 8800GTS. I now run linux (Ubuntu Feisty x86-64), so I could do with a card that has fewer issues.
Though installing the ati driver through Ubuntu Feisty's "Restricted Drivers Manager" didn't cause any of the problems that installing ati's own driver did when I ran Fedora Core 6 a few months ago. It actually made it so I couldn't load X. Under Feisty even hardware acceleration worked without me touching anything.
I used to be able to freeze the university's linux password change system by trying to change my password to another specific one that I'm not going to tell you because I use it elsewhere. It didn't have any special characters in it, just a cap, a digit, and a bunch of lowercase letters. I guess it hashed to 0 or something.
I run Ubuntu x86-64, and wine wasn't installed by default because the one in the repository is x86 only. I just added wine's own repository and installed it from there. Sounds like I'm in exactly the situation Dell is considering, and I don't see it as a problem.
You forgot to mention that they're also less fuel efficient than cars from 50 years ago. Well, maybe not American muscle cars, but the British Mini is 7-48 years old (it was being made for over 40 years!), won numerous rallies and the original got 40mpg (that's British miles and gallons btw, but it's still more than 33 American mpg).
Admittedly the original did have a top speed of 70mph, but the second version (with a huge 1 litre engine!) did 90mph and 30mpg (25mpg US).
It's more that the game forces you to slowly improve your own creature, in a sort of cross between creationism and evolution :)
As usual it depends on the website's own internet connection as well as your own. If they can't support more than 1Mbps per person then you won't be able to get anything from their site any faster than that. The "backbone" has plenty of speed and capacity, it's the ends that cause the slowdown.
On the other hand a tracert will show that most of your latency is from your ISPs network, where your traffic bounces between up to 10 machines before making onto the net proper.
It's been shown that you can shape the main body of your creature however you want, only the mouth, feet, hands, etc. are pre-made pieces, and you can place them wherever you like. And there's 30+ of each to choose from, not to mention the whole automatic animation and texturing system.
If you don't believe me just go look on youtube for the videos from the various E3 and GDC demos.
I seem to remember pandora requires a zip code to verify you're American. If you live abroad just put in 000000 and you're set! At least you could, I don't know if they still accept it, but they did when I signed up.
Or more importantly for the slashdot crowd, it's 5-10 powerful pcs (depending on psu efficiency)
As they say, "C programs are only as stable as the person who wrote them".
It is pretty much the best choice for anything though, as it can quite literally do anything, and quickly too (assuming you know what you're doing). I won't consider VB6 mature until someone writes an OS kernel in it. After all, that is the ultimate test of any programming language.
For Windows it's either. Most programs are one instance per window, for some the same instance controls them all, and trying to start a new instance just gets the old one to open a new window. Either way, it's the same for the user so it doesn't really matter.
Microsoft Word is one of the "multiple windows controlled by one instance" programs, as is Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 is apparently both (!?) in that pressing ctrl-N opens a new window under the same instance, and running the program a second time does actually start a second instance.
Yeah, I understand all that, but the ability to simulate a generic brain would give you the ability to simulate any arbitrary brain, assuming you could find a way to scan it's structure. Though the process would likely involve causing brain death to prevent changes to the brain while you were scanning...
Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc. So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/skynews/20070427/tuk-war
Also a lot of people are uncomfortable with telling people to use the gimp because of the name.
I think you'd be surprised, try hooking it up and you might find windows still supports it. I have a parallel port Epson LX80 (I think) at home that even Windows XP x64 edition supports.