You already have them. The white people left the cities and formed their own little planets, complete with nearly-total white schools. By default, the cities became nearly all black and, since the money and employment ran away, poor.

I'm not sure which surprises me more, that User Friendly is still updated after all these years, or that someone is making a goat.cx reference when the internet has moved on to bigger and greater shock sites.

Sorry but you are having some selective memory. AMD actually was only a performance leader for a very brief period of time, that being the P4 days. That was also not because of anything great they did, but rather because the P4 ended up being a bad design because it did not scale as Intel thought it would. Outside of that they were competitive during the P3 days, but behind other than that.

They also had serious problems outside of any business practices from Intel. The three big ones that really screwed them today:

1) Their disastrous chipset situation. When the Athlons came out, their chipsets were garbage. The AMD made chipsets lacked any advanced features. The VIA chipsets were full featured, but poorly implemented. I bought an Athlon, excited at the performance upgrade I'd get from my P2 and drawn in by the price. I spent two weeks fighting and fighting to make it work, before finally finding out that GeForce graphics card were just incompatible with the boards because of VIA's out-of-spec AGP implementation. I sent it all back, got a P3 on an Intel chipset, and it all worked from the word go. Experiences like that really put many people and vendors off of AMD (combined with things like lacking a thermal halt on the chip so if a heatsink fell off the chip would bur out).

2) Their utter lack of innovation/resting on laurels. AMD took FOREVER to get out any kind of real new architecture, that being the Bulldozer, and it was poor when it happened. For too long they kept rehashing their same CPU architecture, while Intel kept moving theirs forward. This became particularly acute when the Sandy Bridge came out, which was a really good architecture improvement. Having nothing new and just trying to glom more cores on the server products was not a winning strategy long term.

3) Ignoring the software side of things. One of the things that makes Intel chips perform so well is their excellent compiler. It generates faster code than any other compiler, in every single test I've ever seen. That matters in the real world since people aren't going to waste time hand-optimizing assembly. Only recently did AMD get a compiler out (I haven't seen benchmarks on how good it is), for most of their life they just relied on other compilers and whined that the Intel compiler was mean to their chips. That has been a problem, particularly in research settings where people need high performance but are not primarily programmers and need something good at automatic code optimization.

AMD has done a lot to screw themselves over long periods and it has built up to a situation now where they are struggling in a big way. If you think Intel is all to blame you've your head in the sand.

What is your proposal, people should purchase AMD chips as a charity?

Nobody other than Intel zealots wants to see AMD go away. However if AMD's products are not competitive for what they want, why should they buy them? Trying to argue charity buying is a non-starter and a very bad strategy.

AMD has been really screwing up on their processors as of late. Their performance is not that good in most things and their performance per watt is even worse. So for a great many tasks, they are not a great choice. Their "APU" concept is an interesting one, but one who's time seems to be up as Intel's integrated graphics have been very good lately and getting better with each generation so "a CPU with good graphics" is likely to just be what we think of as a CPU.

If AMD wants more sales they have to make a product that is compelling in some way. As it stands, it isn't compelling in that many markets.

Look up "Shadowplay" by nVidia. That is their software that uses the "nvenc" feature of their new GPUs. It has near zero CPU and GPU load, just load on the disk. All encoding is done by a special dedicated encoder on the chip. It's a fast encoder too, it can do 2560x1600@60fps.

The downside is it is not as good looking per bit as some of the software encoders (particularly X264) so if the target is something low bitrate you may wish to capture high bitrate and then reencode to a lower bitrate with other software later.

Bandicam also claims to support the hardware encoders of all the platform (Intel calls their QuickSync, AMD calls there's AMD APP).

do we call assholes "researchers"? This guy is nothing but a grandstanding asshole. You dont make comments like that and you dont do the FUD slinging that he does after getting denied.

Researchers do real work and publish their findings for peer review, not act like a street cred seeking HAx0r trolling for Lulz.

That sounds like "Cosmos" is cancelled then.

Too bad, as it was the best thing on TV.

To your point (sorry!) There is no "fault". Girls tend not to care about STEM subjects. It's that simple. STEM requires endless hours studying alone, about subjects that would bore an anvil to tears. We literally drug our children to hold still and have the stuff poured into them. It isn't for everyone; that's why so many antisocial types gravitate towards it. You either like it, or you don't.

Teachers don't "fail" - students fail. And "failure" is not the right word. You can't force interest into a human child like some personality-altering enema. A teacher can instill the basics of how to be a human being, like history, and arithmetic, and reading. The rest comes from the child and the matrix the child lives in. You can't manufacture Alan Turings, and God help us if you could - the world does NOT need to be composed of semi-autistic math prodigies. We need the other types as well.

Let the DAMNED children become what they want to become. Here's a poser: has any one of these STEM-pushers asked the kids what they think about their "failure" to become good corporate tech fodder?

The whole "privatize schools into moneymaking ventures to raise test scores and thus provide cheaper, better labor for corporations" IS the experiment. But finding failure in the experimental results will not be tolerated. The schools will be turned into corporate labor factories, and we've no mechanism to stop them.

What are we losing? Imagination. The overworked, no-time-for-play lab mice have no damned imaginations. They will not be able to grow their minds that way. That requires free time, and freedom to wander around and do nothing but dream. That is no longer tolerated. Damaged mice. And eventually, a damaged culture, a passive, corporatized citizenry that can't even perceive what it has lost.

And oh yeah: this is being done because employers want more job applicants and thus will be able, over time. to turn STEM jobs into a paper hat minimum wage paradise - for them. They are sick at the idea of all that money flowing out of their platinum parachute accounts and into the pockets of mere laborers. It has to stop!

Perhaps girls aren't as interested in STEM subjects as boys, because their intrinsic culture, the floating "girlness" passed on from mother to daughter and from playmate to playmate, veers towards social interaction and the softer subjects. STEM is inherently a loner's paradise.

Reengineering people is not a good idea. Girls will find their own way into whatever they wish to do. You can't force them to like what you like, no matter how many Starfleet academies you lock them into.

I think strange, convulsive, politics could be a major component of this. Argentina in particular could have been on par with Western Europe if it wasn't for the poltiical insanity from the 1950s onward.

When they build tunnels for trains now, don't they use those giant boring machines that excavacte the tunnel and line it with concrete now? The machines I think are giant not because of the digging itself but because they're usually boring a tunnel big enough to run a parallel set of subway-sized cars through. Add in cathedral-sized chambers for regular stops and its easy to see why its so expensive.

What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train capable of just carrying parcels? The trains could run on rubber wheels following the tunnel. The cars could be flatbeds that carry miniature containers which could be inserted and removed via basically elevator shafts that grabbed them from above, eliminating the need for significant excavations for stations.

Powering it would be another issue, but maybe they could be powered by battery packs swapped at container insertion points or some kind of induction power cable pulled through the tunnel.

I just read a history of the Mississippi before the Civil War and I seem to remember something about large bones being discovered in giant burial mounds found near the flood plain.

I think they also mentioned that before the Corps of Engineers "tamed" the Mississippi (ie, turned it into an navagation canal) the regular flooding and natural erosion of the wild river would periodically expose giant bones, although those I believe were attributed to dinosaurs.

Wow, that is impressive. I doubt I'll ever see that much write intensive flash in one place. We added a flash tier to a seed install (dumb customer only bought a single 15k tier and wondered why performance sucked) and I can never get over how fucking outrageously expensive the flash tier costs. I think it was pushing $100k.

I'd wager that mid range flash like the Samsung 850 Pros are getting cheap enough that double parity, double hot spares and replacing disks regularly due to burnout is probably cheaper for nearly the same performance than buying write intensive flash for all but the most intensive applications.

It's too bad that inexpensive SAN controllers rely on such cheap processors and NICs. I think it's getting to the point where fairly dumb controllers and bulk prosumer ssds will outperform tiering controllers.