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Comment Re:40 and done (Score 0) 710

Please make sure not to apply for a job where I work OK? We have enough people working the bare minimum as it is. I try to keep them off my team but it's a never ending battle ...

I enjoy working with people who have a desire to do good work and like what they do enough to work more than 40 hours if that's what's called for, when that's what's called for. People who walk out the door when there is still work to be done because jobs are "a dime a dozen" are not people I want to work with.

I also enjoy working with people who prioritize work appropriately and have lives out of work. And those people typically are reasonable and realize that sometimes more than 40 is part of the job, just as the rest of us are reasonable and realize that working excessive hours on a continual basis is not cool either.

But people who only want to do the minimum necessary just to get paid? They can stay away. Far away.

Comment Re:I just dont get it (Score 3, Insightful) 646

The moment you begin a sentence with "Liberals" or "Conservatives" is the moment I stop reading. If you can't think on a higher plane than that kind of pointless labelling, then your comments are not interesting and will be ignored.

And yes, I literally stopped reading at the first word of your sentence (OK actually I read "Liberals are always", so I guess I read three).

Comment Re:Seems reasonable... (Score 1) 260

I think you missed the point.

The point is that people "vote with their dollars and their feet" is not a good argument in this case.

People "vote with their dollars and their feet" means that people make their choices known through actions other than voting on the issue. But the person you replied to is pointing that "voting with dollars and feet" does not legitimize the contested activity, just like "voting with your feet" that having to pay for garbage removal is too onerous and demonstrating that by dumping your trash inappropriately does not legitimize that activity.

In other words, just because people prefer an alternative and would take that alternative when nothing else prevents them from doing so, does not legitimize that alternative.

As for the debate at hand, I think I fall on the side of the cab companies; but I think that these new services have definitely put them on notice. We have the technology to make them irrelevant, so they'd better improve or die. Regulations may prevent cab alternatives from operating now but that can and will change ...

Comment Re:Speed is dead, long live low power (Score 3, Insightful) 57

Agreed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: significant performance increases in the x86 world are a thing of the past.

There simply isn't enough money in the market chasing higher performance to make the development cost of faster chips worth the investment.

This is actually an opportunity for AMD. I expect it costs AMD less to catch up to Intel than it costs Intel to push to faster speeds, and since Intel isn't being paid anymore to get faster, AMD can, like the slow and steady tortoise, gradually catch up to Intel. I believe it will take a couple more years, but if AMD survives that long, I believe that it will have achieved near performance parity with Intel by then.

And then neither company's offerings will get much faster, forever thereafter, until there is some new kind of 'killer app' that demands increased CPU speeds that people are willing to pay for (could happen anytime; but the way things are going, with everyone moving to mobile phones and pads, I think we're in for a relatively long haul of form factor and power usage dominating the marketable characteristics of CPUs).

I believe Intel will continue to hold a power advantage over AMD for a long time though, but AMD will gradually narrow that gap as well.

The thing is, AMD will be fighting Intel for a stagnating/shrinking CPU market, and more than likely AMD won't increase its margins significantly during this process, it will just reduce Intel's margins. Not really good news for either company, but worse for Intel.

Comment Re:Still using Sandforce? (Score 1) 113

Ah, so that's what he meant. Yeah I've had two Intel 520s in my work computer for a couple of years now, no problems. But you're right, the crucial difference is Intel vs. OCZ.

You can count me among those who wouldn't touch anything by OCZ with a 10 foot pole. Not even with Toshiba backing them.

Comment There are too many pseudo-science stories (Score 4, Insightful) 293

There are too many pseudo-science stories on Slashdot these days. Are you listening, editors? It's like reading Scientific American (which was almost as bad as Omni last time I read it).

Here we have a whole huge paragraph full of fantasized bullshit whose only supporting documents are a speculative paper submitted to arXiv, and a brief regurgitation thereof on some arXiv blog.

Please stop wasting my time. I want to read NEWS for Nerds (where "news" means "as factually verifiable as possible") and stuff that MATTERS (and pseudo science speculation does not matter to me).

Thank you.

Comment Re:This is the problem with Linux Security (Score 4, Insightful) 127

Taking off-topic potshots against FOSS in response to a misinformed post which incorrectly describes the date of the bug report in response to a post which inaccurately maligns the attitude of kernel developers towards security bugs?

For fuck's sake, we're three levels deep in FUD here. Someone throw me a rope so I can pull myself out of this quagmire of bullshit.

Comment It's a great idea (Score 2) 82

I have to wonder why the idea of adaptive vsync wasn't thought of earlier or implemented into display standards earlier. It just seems like such an obvious idea once you've heard of it. Surely someone else in the graphics/display industry must have had the idea before NVidia?

I can't think of any downsides to having this technology; it's pure upside as far as I can tell. Although, I guess I could imagine that there could be some technical downsides, depending upon how displays are typically implemented. For an LCD, I can imagine that knowing the frequency ahead of time allows the LCD panel to perhaps "pipeline" some of its operation, allowing faster grey-to-grey transitions. For example, if the display knows that the next frame is going to come at exactly X milliseconds in the future, then perhaps it could start transitioning all pixels to grey at time X - N, where N is the average time it takes for pixels to transition to grey, and then when the frame is received, it could then transition all pixels from grey to the next frame pixel colors faster. With adaptive vsync, the display would not be able to do this; it would have to start the transition from frame M pixel values to frame M + 1 pixel values only as soon as frame M + 1 becomes available.

Not being able to play grey-to-grey optimization games is I guess a possible downside of adaptive vsync; but I suspect it's a pretty small downside. Aside from gamers who want to see "the next frame" with the smallest latency possible, I don't know that anyone is really going to care much about that potential downside.

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