Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week.

For the vast majority of home users this is still the best advice.

Ageism in tech is very real, and even if you're not seeing it yet, you will in another 10 years. By that time it will be too late. Get on the management track while you can.

Nvidia is just pissing on everyone. Who is going to buy their chips ? Not AMD users (duh), and when Larrabee ships they will face stiff competition from Intel. And they don't have a future generation game console. How does a hardware company think it can act like this and survive ?

Hyperthreading shows you eight fake cores which map to four real cores. I benchmarked it extensively. Computationally intensive routines with a small memory footprint can gain up to 20%. Bandwidth or memory intensive routines can lose up to 50%. In the extreme case, 8 threads on virtual cores can be half the speed of 4 threads on 4 real cores on a Core i7. Keep in mind, this is on a crazy application that generates lots of data.

If your algorithm is designed to break up the problem to exploit the cache then hyperthreading is a bigger mess. The data for thread 1 and thread 2 (out of 8) might be complementary, but the operating system will run those threads different actual cores, because all it sees is the virtual cores. This can be very inefficient if you need the whole cache.

Perhaps worst of all, you are stuck always running 8 threads. 2-6 threads may not be distributed evenly across the real cores, leading to inconsistent performance. Therefore, you may lose performance by attempting to scale the problem further than it is efficient to do so. With real cores, I can decide (based on problem size) the correct number of core to use.

In conclusion, hyperthreading has its uses, but operating systems are oblivious to it and that's a major problem with more than one core.

Atom cpus are not especially profitable. They're cheap. Intel is handing them off to TSMC and probably hoping like hell that the market still craves high performance. Unless more software is parallelized, things are going to be bad!

Note: I parallelized my software and the Core i7 is awesome. Superlinear speedup is easy to achieve with a dedicated L2 cache. The Phenom II would also give great performance. So I would bet that Atom and other underpowered cpus are a fad. They will not look very good next to a mobile Core i7 that is 20x faster when all cores are used.

Tell her to fuck off. Seriously, is this a joke ? Why would you let her go through your binder ? Do you just do anything someone says to be nice ? Go to her office and demand your notes back. Don't leave until she gives them to you. Take it up with the head department. Ask them what kind of fucking crock "school" they have. Is it a degree mill where you pay for a piece of paper ? You can get those with mail order you know. What a fucking joke.

I disagree. AMD is in an ok position, not great obviously, but their platform is competitive. The Core i7 is a better processor than the Phenom II, but I don't expect its price to come down any time soon. Intel will milk the high margins for as long as they can and sell old Core 2 quads to consumers for at least this year.

Given the choice between a Core 2 Quad and a Phenom II, you should pick the Phenom. No question about it. The Core 2 quad has a split cache so multithreaded performance is crap. The cores have to transfer data through the slow memory interface, which limits parallel speedup in a lot of cases. This wasn't really an issue when Intel released the processor, but in the near future it will be a serious issue because the parallel software is coming.

"Black Holes Lead Galaxy Growth" - this is great news for our economy.

These are the same guys who arrogantly rejected digital cellphones for a long time because it would interfere with their market share grasp of analog cellphones.

Better than $ will get ya thru times of no drugs.

There's the grocery shopping, baking pies, thawing out the turkey, reaching your arm inside its cavities to pull out the neck bone and giblets, boiling up the cranberry sauce, making the stuffing, peeling all the potatoes to cook and mash, trying to figure out how to make gravy from the drippings, carving the damn turkey after it's roasted, not to mention hauling out all the wedding china and "good" wineglasses (which can't go in the dishwasher of course), ironing that mile-long tablecloth, poihsing the silver, dirtying up every pot and pan in the house. Not to mention relatives who come and stay for the entire weekend and have to be fed and entertained. Whew! I'm glad to have my family gather together, but I give thanks when it's all over!