Posts by Sgt. Pinback

The World (still) Needs AMD

Like Bruce said, we owe a lot to AMD. An Intel without AMD is a very scary scenario from a consumer value standpoint, but everyone (surely) knows this already. ARM is a fortunate counterpoint to the duopoly.

AMD doesn't need to compete with Intel, it's been good since the early 2000's at delivering measurable value purely by differentiating. Nintendo learned that early on with the Gamecube (using, then, ATi), MS and Sony have since figured it out. AMD need to market that message to the rest of the world to be successful.

My biggest complaint of AMD is similar to the first commentard's. I can't buy the AMD solution that I want!

(although I suspect it's more a case of shite motherboard makers lacking imagination in my case - I want small form factor AM3+ for steroidal linux virtualisation)

As for whether or not their processors are good for the average consumer, I think the reflex is to compare them to the older approach of making a PC where the thing is large, noisy and has to have a discreet video card and mechanical disk - that is not what new consumer PC deployments look like. They want small, they want quiet, they want 3D and they want it to playback their pirated TV and movie files without skipping or distorting. This is AMDs exact strength with their APU line of processors, there's no technical reason they can't profit on those use cases.

And I like AMD's new C-level guys. Having Papermaster (Apple's doomed antenna-gate patsy) and Read (who doesn't like an ex-IBMer?) driving the direction of the company sounds like a really good start. Any time I read an interview with either man they just reek good sense. Hopefully this important computing company survives well past the post-PC era.

*in full disclosure: there is not a single AMD processor active in my house at the moment (I'm ignoring my Geode powered firewall). I'm not a fanboy. I just respect that they seem to make some really good shit - Sony/Nintendo/MS seem to agree

what is the meaning of cloud?

I think your definitions suck young man.

The word cloud has and does mean exactly nothing while trying to describe everything. It has come to replace the terms internet, hosted, virtualised, cluster, web service, blah blah blah farking blah. "Cloud computing" as a term is the closest I've heard to any of these tossed about cloudy pseudonyms that even begins to describe something remotely specific. Vendors abuse the term enormously and customers pay the price.

And to say someone doesn't have a private "cloud" for one reason or another is bollocks because the term means literally nothing specific at all. I can have a private freaking cloud running on my laptop, google has a cloud (seemingly) without virtualisation, I can have a single server with many virtual machines all managed and orchestrated by something like chef/ansible/puppet and call it a cloud as legitimately as someone like Microsoft does. Businesses across the world have had clouds for decades, they just used to call it a network.

I doubt I'm the only guy in the industry to be sick to death of the misuse of this word. Your article has just enforced the stupidity just a little bit more, well done.

(we are all dumber for having read your article, I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul)

this author really hates JJ

fair enough then, personally I think he'll do ok directing Star Wars episode 70 million or whatever it's called

but

Pinning hate of JJ on Cloverfield is a bit harsh though I reckon. That was Matt Reeves and Drew Goddard's baby. JJ fronted the money and encouraged Matt to play with visual effects from what I've heard, Drew wrote it. I sense (not like force sense, regular sense) a fair amount of ignorance surrounding the work discussed by The Reg author. I enjoyed reading how obviously he hates JJ though. Maybe JJ stole his girlfriend or bacon sarnie once?

(personally I thought Cloverfield was really excellent, on par with Chronicle for positive modern scifi cinema surprises)

and

Whatever anyone thinks of JJ's directing chops EVERYONE HAS TO AGREE that, at his worst, he will be a measurable shit-tonne better than Georgie Lucas directing/writing. Freaking Michael Bay would probably be better.

Lucas came up with a great franchise but he was unusually bad at bringing the story* to screen. So many really dumb writing moments and bad direction. I mean, surely, universally, everyone vomits in their mouth just a little bit any time Anakin and Padme have a scene together where they speak! uurrk, word vomit

(http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=150 sums up Anakin/Padme moments pretty well)

By default Star Wars always looks amazing, it's surely a given for this new one too. The music is also automatically killer. The music is as iconic as the Star Wars universe.

And if Ben Burtt is involved in sound effects like he has in the last 6 movies you can expect this new Star Wars to bring great aural personality to the creatures, vehicles and weapons as he always does.

Plus, the script of any Star Wars movie is usually ludicrously bad and the direction (I'm looking at you episodes 1 through 3) is at best cheesy. To say JJ will screw the job anymore than George would've is a very, very big stretch. It could be so much worse than this, fans are already extremely lucky.

And Disney. I don't know what they're capable of after swallowing so many other companies but I do know that they have a fuck load of very talented artists. ILM had quite a lot but ILM + Disney + Marvel is a very interesting conglomerate to have beavering away at any creative job. The film will visually be spectacular no matter how hammy the story.

Point is, Star Wars was always about the team making it, not the director. It won't be any different with Ep7. Doubly so because Disney now own all the previously used teams! I'm reserving judgement until I see it, it really doesn't matter so much who's directing it.

*Visual effects and sound were always Star Wars' strong point. Remember that in the early days of the Star Wars releases they pioneered new sound technology (THX) because current cinema audio tech just didn't do the films justice. George was an excellent business man and team builder but he was very lucky that Star Wars was received so well, because so many parts of it were (and still are) so very, very bad.

nice collection but a bit on the boring side

Props to the HP printer that still runs, I've got one of those.900 series printers and it's still rock solid. Like those old Laserjet4s or whatever they used to make.

Anyone here own a FingerWorks iGesture keyboard? Mine's still getting used everyday, got it around 2002. I can't imagine a working life without this keyboard. Analog text cursor ftw!

Or own any H3D Glasses from back in the first days of 3D accelerated games? Used to play a lot of quake 2 in 3D with those specs back in the day (when I thought it was somehow cool) on my Pure3D (that's right Voodoo 1 chip but with 50% extra VRAM! oh yeah)

And then there's the collection of minidisc players that just never break. I still use the amazing powered condenser mic for speech in tf2 and online gaming. Fantastic little mic, it's like having Steve Austin ears when you listen to it through earphones - picks up the sound the little gears make inside the minidisc unit ffs. sensiteeeve.

come on reg commentards, I want to hear more about the crazy UNIQUE tech we own

(Alternative modern tech is getting pretty rad as well. My mate coded me up a webapp for my Pi that takes automated time lapse photography then renders the frames into a movie. I was amazed at how quick he got it up and running using BootStrap and the Pi.

And I just bought my second nokia n9 off ebay but this time it's basically brand new with a valid warranty and is the 64GB thing - going from sixteen gig to sixty four fucking gig is going to be ridiculous. Love those n9s, miraculous little product from before Nokia chewed the cyanide pill.)