The original Crazy Taxi was also ported to Gamecube, so if you can find a copy, it's playable on the Wii as well.

I highly doubt anyone is comparing parts with such a large difference in TDP. When shopping for a processor, the first thing you determine is what performance level you need, and then you look at what you can get to meet that performance level. Do this with AMD and Intel processors will not give such a large TDP gap.

But even with that said, it is perfectly possible for a 115W TDP part to use less power than a 65W TDP part, for a given task. As an extreme example, take a 65W part from five years ago and a 115W part from today, and set them to perform the same video encoding job. The likely result is that the modern 115W part will be done in a fraction of the time, thereby spending most of its time in an idle state and using much less power than the 65W part. The same situation does occur when comparing modern processors - Intel has a large IPC advantage, so their processors will do more work per watt, all else being equal.

I wouldn't say they only recently started using 32nm - they released the first 32nm processors at the start of the year, and 8 months is still a long time in the processor world. The entire Core i3 series is 32nm, along with all of the dual-core i5s and the hex-core i7s. That basically only leaves the quad-core i5s and i7s, and a few value Pentium processors that aren't really relevant to this discussion anyway.

Even ignoring the process advantage, Intel also has a large IPC advantage, so their processors are going to do more work per watt. The only way AMD has remained competitive is by offering more cores than Intel at the same price point, which can only result in higher power consumption. This is also why you can't just compare TDP values to compare power consumption - for the same amount of work, the Intel processor is going to be idle longer than the AMD processor, and use less power as a result.

Have you factored in power consumption? AMD's chips are still built on a larger process, so they use significantly more power than Intel processors at a given performance level. Depending on the purchase price, cost of electricity in your area, and how much the computer is used, it may be cheaper to invest in a bit more expensive processor to save on the electricity bill.

Here in Denmark there are very very few stop signs - I've probably seen two or three in the six years I've lived here. This functions just as effectively as a stop sign, since everybody understands what a yield means, and knows to stop if someone is coming. And everything flows much more smoothly since you normally don't need to stop at every intersection.

Another thing to consider is roundabouts. They are very effective at slowing traffic, since it's impossible to run a roundabout if it's got a fence or hill in the middle. They are also quite effective for intersections that would otherwise be 4-way stops or traffic lights.

An interesting sidenote to this discussion is the Camilla Broe case (the Wikipedia article is poorly written but gives a good overview). In her case it was a drug-related crime, but the circumstances were similar to this one - there was no real question of her guilt, just the fact that the penalties for the crime are much harsher in the US than they are in Denmark. It ended up being a pretty embarassing case, since the Americans ended up dropping the charges on statute of limitations grounds, so the whole affair was completely needless.

One thing I'd love to see is a price/performance analysis that includes the cost of running the system, so I could compare the purchase price to the total price after running 4 hours a day for a year, for example. AMD has always been good at offering similar performance to Intel at any given price point they release to, but lately their products have been much less efficient than Intel's, as they require more cores to achieve similar performance and are built on a larger process.

The government isn't telling a parent that the parent can't buy their kid a happy meal with a toy in it. The government is telling McDonald's and other corporations that they are no longer allowed to use toys as bait to get children to eat unhealthy food. Nobody is restricting the personal freedoms of the parent to provide the toy themself.

My experience is that very few electronics corporations give a rat's ass about consumer protection laws. I believe Sony also claims to sell their consoles here with a 1-year warantee, despite the fact that the legal minimum is 2 years.

Yes, it probably only affects newer cards.

The newer cards have so many execution units, that the cards aren't actually able to run all of them full-out at the same time - it would take too much power and produce too much heat. The logic behind this is that for most applications, total performance is bottlenecked somewhere, so every part of the chip is never going to be active at the same time. Apparently something in their driver update has either changed this or (more likely) broken the logic to throttle back the card if it is running too hard.

Maybe Superman flies while carrying a man?

I am not disputing any facts. If the title had said "Former Tour de France Champion", there would be no problem. But he is no longer a Tour de France Champion, as he has been stripped of that title.

I haven't read his books, but I live in Denmark so Lomborg gets quite a bit of press here, especially under the climate change conference in December. In interviews he's always come across as a pragmatist more than a skeptic.

He has two main arguments:

1) Think about the return on investment.

Let's say we can cool the earth one degree by spending a trillion dollars. Is it worth the investment? What do we really get out of it? How many other problems could have been fixed with that money?

2) The current approach to fighting climate change is wrong.

UN treaties and money aren't going to stop the developing world from using fossil fuels. The only surefire way to get off of coal is to develop something that is cheaper. Instead of giving money to developing countries to bribe them not to pollute, we should invest the money in new technology, so that in 10, 20, 30 years we can say "here, this is cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute".

I think both of his points are important to consider, though I don't agree with him completely. There are risks to his solution - what if our investments don't bear fruit, and coal is still the cheapest energy source in 30 years? What if climate change causes political destabilization so we don't have enough time to get finished?

I don't think anybody has a perfect solution, but I do think that Lomborg contributes positively to the debate.

The title is inaccurate, as Landis is not a Tour de France champion. What an athlete is stripped of a title, it means you shouldn't be using that title to describe the athlete any more. Logical, no?

I was finishing undergrad at around the time Microsoft first tried the waters with tablet PCs. I think they failed mostly because they were a niche market, so they were underpowered and expensive. The people who had one were actually quite happy using them for note-taking though.

One area where tablets could be brilliant for math and engineering students is in inputting math equations, since it's clumsy to generate large equations with a keyboard and mouse. I don't know what the status of commercial offerings is now, but if anybody is interested in looking into this, we open-sourced our fourth-year design project to make a math recognizer. Get it here.

The goal was to recognize the major symbols use in math equations and recognize their placement in relation to each other, so we could typeset and send the equation to a computer algebra system. I feel we actually did a pretty good job with the time and resources we had available.

Since it was for Microsoft tablets we did it in C#. But anyone looking into iPad development can probably get something out of the algorithms we used for 2D placement recognition, at least.

As it is now the program is at about the point where it is good enough to be useful but not perfect by any means. We needed about 10-20 times more samples for training the symbol recognizer, so it will misrecognize many of them. We could also use better post-processing for ignoring stray strokes and resolving overlapping symbols. The 2D placement algorithm is actually really good though and will correctly parse most equations as long as you're a bit careful.