No. You'll be fine. This entire topic is alarmist and misconstrued. The people who are screwed are the ones who tried to go under the radar and buy games in Thailand or Russia for the sole purpose of using them elsewhere.
I've heard this before every time somebody mentions Storm and the asymptotically increasing spam bandwidth consumption. These are the real crises the internet is going to have to deal with in the very near future. The garbled mix-and-match of security, anonymity, and authentication methods currently available all fight with one another, and in the end are slowly losing the war against malware. The problem increasing consumer internet connectivity is almost negligible considering what small percentage of traffic it causes.
I don't like how the article doesn't state any projected costs. 30nm is on the bleeding edge of process sizes and I'd be surprised if they don't take pretty severe hit to their chip yield as a result. We'll see.
Agreed. I always love to sit and snicker when I see piles and piles of hype surrounding a console game. The game developers do a wonderful job of making the game look like it'll be more complex than it actually is, or ever can be on a console platform. The end result is a dumbed-down version of the same game we've been playing for years but with marginally improved graphics. See also every Halo game ever.
The only sad part about the joke is that there's no punchline: the mediocre (read: crap) product gets released to booming applause and eaten up by Xbox-playing frat boys who don't know any better. Rinse and repeat.
And every PC gamer looks on wondering where the click-and-drag inventory system went.
Why waste time worrying about which countries have the best useless tech gadgets when the US is so far behind in more important areas: internet connectivity and infrastructure?
4. Getting as expensive as a good computer but with so many restrictions
I would go a step further. I think it's safe to say that PC's are actually less expensive if built intelligently from scratch. I tried this on newegg a little while ago and built a perfectly decent computer for about $700, and that included the monitor. I could list the specs if you'd like, but refrain for the sake of brevity
Compare this to a $400+ X-box 360 (if you have the audacity to expect a decent hard drive), as well the requisite HDTV (that was a severe clincher), throw in controllers and a Live subscription, and you're looking in the ballpark of $1000. PC's being looked at as elitist money-machines has long since been a bit of market fraud eaten up by people afraid to build their own system.
Yes, my newegg sanity-box doesn't have an 8-core cell processor, but considering how under-leveraged the PS3 hardware really is, I can't see why that would matter in the least. PC Gaming companies just have to realize that they still have an audience and can leverage greater degrees of complexity in their designs in order spur innovation.
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
on
eBay The Vote
·
· Score: 1
The funny thing is that the most insidious vote-buying in the country isn't politicians (or other citizens) buying citizens' votes, it's corporations buying politicians' votes. If they outlawed THAT, then we might start making some progress.
Not entirely...politicians buying votes with promises of tax breaks should count a little bit.
What's more intimidating to me is the tilting of the spam:real-message ratio COMBINED the general increase in internet traffic as more people and businesses come online. The bandwidth numbers are, frankly, staggering (sorry, can't find any good links to stats). Now, consider the economic ramifications of the amount of traffic caused by spam servers and botnets flooding the lines AND the amount of money (in commercially available products and human resources) companies and ISP's have to dedicate to stop spam from reaching users AND the lost productivity when the aforementioned measures fail AND the lower efficiency of malware-infested PC's in the botnets. This little advertising practice creates an unacceptable drain on our economy.
That's just freaky, SO DID I. I grabbed it from underdogs a couple weeks ago and played it via Cedega in 'nix, so my OS problems were a little less challenging. I have always been told it's a great game but never got around to playing it during its prime (Half-Life, guilty as charged). Now I can see what all the fuss is about. The game was creepy, atmospheric, and difficult (which I appreciate immensely, more than the dumbed-down console ports that saturate the market today). I'd still say Deus Ex is better, if anything else but because of the writing and character development that SS2 very much lacked. But this ranks in my top 5 of all time, I'd say. Apparently I'm not alone with this sentiment.
Depending on how stable all related drivers and devices are by the time Gutsy rolls out, this may very well be the worst thing that could happen to Ubuntu since that bad Xorg update last year.
Ubuntu is cherished by new-to-linux users as being zero-configuration and extremely hardware-compatible. Now they are introducing features which may fail to work with certain hardware. Why on earth would they do this?!
The article makes a short note on metastability, but wouldn't this be more appropriately applied to a register array of flip-flops, which are much more susceptible to falling into a metastable state, instead of a ram? If he's using the SRAM (he never clarifies), he's counting on the charge of a single capacitor being randomly dispersed in order to enforce randomness, not the properties of the transistors at all. Using flip-flop circuits by violating their setup/hold times seems like it'd be more effective. It has probably already been explored. The article says so itself. So what's novel here?
Indeed. Simulating and optimizing for process faults is often accomplished as a form of Monte Carlo testing, where a stochastic sweep is done over various possible process faults to determine the likelihood that transistor parameters like gain or threshold voltage come out as expected. This is often done at the analog design level as a necessary simulation step.
I couldn't find much on the web about this besides a patent from 1994.
Our government was, even back then, much less likely to make an example of a striking workforce. The Chinese government has proven that it is fully willing to use violence against a peaceful protest. In this day and age, workers shouldn't be forced to lay down their lives in order to achieve basic human rights. I'm afraid I just don't have enough faith in China's patience to say "leave it to them to solve the problem."
The answer to helping these people advance is not to stop buying their products, which puts them right back where they were - with nothing. The answer is to continue to buy their products, which empowers them and gives them options.
Unfortunately I won't be able to believe this until I see a more concerted effort on the part of the Chinese labor communities to fight for better living and working conditions. The way things became better for workers in the US was when the prospect of strikes cajoled management into finally acknowledging workers rights. Buying their products just puts more and more money into the ever-growing Chinese plutocracy, and encourages them to maintain the status quo. International pressure would be far more effective.
According to the article, the company's revenue has been growing 50% every year for 10 years. Has the working environment improved proportionally?
But is this really useful? To use a GPL core would mean that all the rest of the chip design would have to be released too. Very few hardware builders will be prepared to release their silicon source code because that is often the only way they have of preventing mass knock-offs etc.
/
Indeed, it is rather daring to distribute chip design schematics openly. Sun is banking on the fact that their design is inherently novel compared to competitors. As for future knockoffs, it just forces the designers to continue to innovate.
I wager the future of public internet access will be a combined effort of private and public initiatives. Take for example the town of Brookline, MA, which recently implemented the nations first border-to-border wireless internet access system. It was an initiative based in the town, organized by the local government, but implemented by a private firm (Strix Systems I believe) to get a professional infrastructure in place.
Although it's a pay service for most homes, public hotspots exist in parks, recreational areas, and some public housing.
In short, with this bill I think we can at least look forward to more systems like this cropping up, which blur the line between municipal implementation and private enterprise. In the end, it means more choice for the consumer and more pervasive internet access for the people themselves.
Lenovo makes no claim as to what OS goes on this PC. Since MS has promised China Windows XP deals as cheap as $5 I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the end up running.
The reason the OLPC project has taken so much heat about their price increase is that those few extra dollars are much more significant is some parts of the world.
The specs honestly aren't that bad considering for their target audience, all that the computer needs to do (most of the time) is play media, create and edit documents, and browse the web.
The more major names that get behind this realization, the better off for the world at large. Average Joe computer user doesn't need a PCIe x16 graphics card. He just doesn't.
flash-based hard drive ($199 for 4GB, $299 for 8GB)
weight:.89 kilograms, just around 2 pounds
Ports:
four USB 2.0
VGA output
10/100 Ethernet
56K phone modem
Battery:
4-cell, estimated 3 hours life
The lack of an optical drive and the low nonvolatile storage space is a bummer, but flash hard drives are faster and stabler. And as the article states, you can always hook up an external.
There is wisdom to this indeed. Most college Computer Science programs didn't start migrating to teaching primarily Java until they saw that the high-school advanced placement program for computer science chose to do so.
There does tend to be a trickle-up effect from primary education to higher education. Whether the effect extends from higher education to industry and enterprise remains to be seen.
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users.
Keep in mind, the Chinese government also wants to control its own economy. Being dependent on an outside source of software and putting their infrastructure in the hands of a western company are both unappealing. This was the original impetus for Red Flag Linux itself. It's honestly surprising to me that things have taken this course.
When you create your own distro, you can put whatever you want in it. Microsoft won out in the short run because of their insane price-slashing ($10 per seat for Windows and Office?!) and behind-the-curtain source code collaboration. Will it hold out in the long run?
In the enterprise world, it's not uncommon for companies to not use Outlook but still rely on an Exchange infrastructure. Thunderbird as a standalone mail client is fine, but if it wants to compete it's going to have to integrate much better with robust calendar and resource scheduling programs. Lightning or Sunbird betas aren't going to cut it.
When UT2004 came out, it was $40 and it disappeared from the shelves like free candy. After selling out, it came back as $50. Perhaps distributors can learn a lesson from this, as PC game sales of non-overhyped games continue to dwindle.
The discussions regarding GPL and open-source drivers are irrelevant to the point Dell (and ATI+Linux users over the years) have been trying to make. There's more to making drivers work in linux than opening up the source code.
The more a piece of software makes use of a certain OS's API and specific device control structure, the harder it is to make it portable. Everything to do with how the software interacts with the operating system, and optimizations made therein, have to be re-written, and linux has a very very different device node structure than windows! There is a great deal of effort required to make the same functionality, and the same performance. Nvidia has historically shown more dilligence on this front. The fact that a so many it-won't-work cases exist for the ATI drivers implies they've cut a lot of corners. Yet they continue to release updates. I wonder how many people at ATI are actively working on this...
ATI has had proprietary linux drivers for quite some time now, and as somebody who's used them for about 4 years, I can say they've come a long was in terms of performance. However, dropping support for fairly recent cards is rather troubling, and nothing Dell can say would make a difference there (no market for cards that aren't being sold). And still no AIGLX. Outside pressure might help with that one...
There's a veritable graveyard of dead gaming franchises and companies, but I'm going to vote for my most dearly departed...
MicroProse was an amazing company, devoted to making some ground-breaking combat flight sims as well as genuinely fun games (worms! x-com!). They were bought out by Hasbro, who immediately took them out of the flight sim market. The announcement about the buyout was made on December 7, 1998, a day which will live in infamy.
They also had a brief hold on the MechWarrior series, which after the third sequel fell into a state of consolitis after being sold to Microsoft. Not dead, but dead to me I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
No. You'll be fine. This entire topic is alarmist and misconstrued. The people who are screwed are the ones who tried to go under the radar and buy games in Thailand or Russia for the sole purpose of using them elsewhere.
I've heard this before every time somebody mentions Storm and the asymptotically increasing spam bandwidth consumption. These are the real crises the internet is going to have to deal with in the very near future. The garbled mix-and-match of security, anonymity, and authentication methods currently available all fight with one another, and in the end are slowly losing the war against malware. The problem increasing consumer internet connectivity is almost negligible considering what small percentage of traffic it causes.
I don't like how the article doesn't state any projected costs. 30nm is on the bleeding edge of process sizes and I'd be surprised if they don't take pretty severe hit to their chip yield as a result. We'll see.
Agreed. I always love to sit and snicker when I see piles and piles of hype surrounding a console game. The game developers do a wonderful job of making the game look like it'll be more complex than it actually is, or ever can be on a console platform. The end result is a dumbed-down version of the same game we've been playing for years but with marginally improved graphics. See also every Halo game ever.
The only sad part about the joke is that there's no punchline: the mediocre (read: crap) product gets released to booming applause and eaten up by Xbox-playing frat boys who don't know any better. Rinse and repeat.
And every PC gamer looks on wondering where the click-and-drag inventory system went.
Why waste time worrying about which countries have the best useless tech gadgets when the US is so far behind in more important areas: internet connectivity and infrastructure?
4. Getting as expensive as a good computer but with so many restrictions
I would go a step further. I think it's safe to say that PC's are actually less expensive if built intelligently from scratch. I tried this on newegg a little while ago and built a perfectly decent computer for about $700, and that included the monitor. I could list the specs if you'd like, but refrain for the sake of brevity
Compare this to a $400+ X-box 360 (if you have the audacity to expect a decent hard drive), as well the requisite HDTV (that was a severe clincher), throw in controllers and a Live subscription, and you're looking in the ballpark of $1000. PC's being looked at as elitist money-machines has long since been a bit of market fraud eaten up by people afraid to build their own system.
Yes, my newegg sanity-box doesn't have an 8-core cell processor, but considering how under-leveraged the PS3 hardware really is, I can't see why that would matter in the least. PC Gaming companies just have to realize that they still have an audience and can leverage greater degrees of complexity in their designs in order spur innovation.
The funny thing is that the most insidious vote-buying in the country isn't politicians (or other citizens) buying citizens' votes, it's corporations buying politicians' votes. If they outlawed THAT, then we might start making some progress.
Not entirely...politicians buying votes with promises of tax breaks should count a little bit.
What's more intimidating to me is the tilting of the spam:real-message ratio COMBINED the general increase in internet traffic as more people and businesses come online. The bandwidth numbers are, frankly, staggering (sorry, can't find any good links to stats). Now, consider the economic ramifications of the amount of traffic caused by spam servers and botnets flooding the lines AND the amount of money (in commercially available products and human resources) companies and ISP's have to dedicate to stop spam from reaching users AND the lost productivity when the aforementioned measures fail AND the lower efficiency of malware-infested PC's in the botnets. This little advertising practice creates an unacceptable drain on our economy.
That's just freaky, SO DID I. I grabbed it from underdogs a couple weeks ago and played it via Cedega in 'nix, so my OS problems were a little less challenging. I have always been told it's a great game but never got around to playing it during its prime (Half-Life, guilty as charged). Now I can see what all the fuss is about. The game was creepy, atmospheric, and difficult (which I appreciate immensely, more than the dumbed-down console ports that saturate the market today).
I'd still say Deus Ex is better, if anything else but because of the writing and character development that SS2 very much lacked. But this ranks in my top 5 of all time, I'd say. Apparently I'm not alone with this sentiment.
Depending on how stable all related drivers and devices are by the time Gutsy rolls out, this may very well be the worst thing that could happen to Ubuntu since that bad Xorg update last year.
Ubuntu is cherished by new-to-linux users as being zero-configuration and extremely hardware-compatible. Now they are introducing features which may fail to work with certain hardware. Why on earth would they do this?!
The article makes a short note on metastability, but wouldn't this be more appropriately applied to a register array of flip-flops, which are much more susceptible to falling into a metastable state, instead of a ram? If he's using the SRAM (he never clarifies), he's counting on the charge of a single capacitor being randomly dispersed in order to enforce randomness, not the properties of the transistors at all. Using flip-flop circuits by violating their setup/hold times seems like it'd be more effective. It has probably already been explored. The article says so itself. So what's novel here?
Indeed. Simulating and optimizing for process faults is often accomplished as a form of Monte Carlo testing, where a stochastic sweep is done over various possible process faults to determine the likelihood that transistor parameters like gain or threshold voltage come out as expected. This is often done at the analog design level as a necessary simulation step.
I couldn't find much on the web about this besides a patent from 1994.
Our government was, even back then, much less likely to make an example of a striking workforce. The Chinese government has proven that it is fully willing to use violence against a peaceful protest. In this day and age, workers shouldn't be forced to lay down their lives in order to achieve basic human rights. I'm afraid I just don't have enough faith in China's patience to say "leave it to them to solve the problem."
The answer to helping these people advance is not to stop buying their products, which puts them right back where they were - with nothing. The answer is to continue to buy their products, which empowers them and gives them options.
Unfortunately I won't be able to believe this until I see a more concerted effort on the part of the Chinese labor communities to fight for better living and working conditions. The way things became better for workers in the US was when the prospect of strikes cajoled management into finally acknowledging workers rights. Buying their products just puts more and more money into the ever-growing Chinese plutocracy, and encourages them to maintain the status quo. International pressure would be far more effective.
According to the article, the company's revenue has been growing 50% every year for 10 years. Has the working environment improved proportionally?
But is this really useful? To use a GPL core would mean that all the rest of the chip design would have to be released too. Very few hardware builders will be prepared to release their silicon source code because that is often the only way they have of preventing mass knock-offs etc.
/ Indeed, it is rather daring to distribute chip design schematics openly. Sun is banking on the fact that their design is inherently novel compared to competitors. As for future knockoffs, it just forces the designers to continue to innovate.
I wager the future of public internet access will be a combined effort of private and public initiatives. Take for example the town of Brookline, MA, which recently implemented the nations first border-to-border wireless internet access system. It was an initiative based in the town, organized by the local government, but implemented by a private firm (Strix Systems I believe) to get a professional infrastructure in place. Although it's a pay service for most homes, public hotspots exist in parks, recreational areas, and some public housing. In short, with this bill I think we can at least look forward to more systems like this cropping up, which blur the line between municipal implementation and private enterprise. In the end, it means more choice for the consumer and more pervasive internet access for the people themselves.
Lenovo makes no claim as to what OS goes on this PC. Since MS has promised China Windows XP deals as cheap as $5 I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the end up running.
The reason the OLPC project has taken so much heat about their price increase is that those few extra dollars are much more significant is some parts of the world.
The specs honestly aren't that bad considering for their target audience, all that the computer needs to do (most of the time) is play media, create and edit documents, and browse the web.
The more major names that get behind this realization, the better off for the world at large. Average Joe computer user doesn't need a PCIe x16 graphics card. He just doesn't.
900MHz Intel Dothan based Pentium M CPU
.89 kilograms, just around 2 pounds
512MB of DDR2 memory
802.11g wireless capability
flash-based hard drive ($199 for 4GB, $299 for 8GB)
weight:
Ports:
four USB 2.0
VGA output
10/100 Ethernet
56K phone modem
Battery:
4-cell, estimated 3 hours life
The lack of an optical drive and the low nonvolatile storage space is a bummer, but flash hard drives are faster and stabler. And as the article states, you can always hook up an external.
There is wisdom to this indeed. Most college Computer Science programs didn't start migrating to teaching primarily Java until they saw that the high-school advanced placement program for computer science chose to do so.
There does tend to be a trickle-up effect from primary education to higher education. Whether the effect extends from higher education to industry and enterprise remains to be seen.
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users.
Keep in mind, the Chinese government also wants to control its own economy. Being dependent on an outside source of software and putting their infrastructure in the hands of a western company are both unappealing. This was the original impetus for Red Flag Linux itself. It's honestly surprising to me that things have taken this course.
When you create your own distro, you can put whatever you want in it. Microsoft won out in the short run because of their insane price-slashing ($10 per seat for Windows and Office?!) and behind-the-curtain source code collaboration. Will it hold out in the long run?
In the enterprise world, it's not uncommon for companies to not use Outlook but still rely on an Exchange infrastructure. Thunderbird as a standalone mail client is fine, but if it wants to compete it's going to have to integrate much better with robust calendar and resource scheduling programs. Lightning or Sunbird betas aren't going to cut it.
When UT2004 came out, it was $40 and it disappeared from the shelves like free candy. After selling out, it came back as $50. Perhaps distributors can learn a lesson from this, as PC game sales of non-overhyped games continue to dwindle.
The discussions regarding GPL and open-source drivers are irrelevant to the point Dell (and ATI+Linux users over the years) have been trying to make. There's more to making drivers work in linux than opening up the source code.
The more a piece of software makes use of a certain OS's API and specific device control structure, the harder it is to make it portable. Everything to do with how the software interacts with the operating system, and optimizations made therein, have to be re-written, and linux has a very very different device node structure than windows! There is a great deal of effort required to make the same functionality, and the same performance. Nvidia has historically shown more dilligence on this front. The fact that a so many it-won't-work cases exist for the ATI drivers implies they've cut a lot of corners. Yet they continue to release updates. I wonder how many people at ATI are actively working on this...
ATI has had proprietary linux drivers for quite some time now, and as somebody who's used them for about 4 years, I can say they've come a long was in terms of performance. However, dropping support for fairly recent cards is rather troubling, and nothing Dell can say would make a difference there (no market for cards that aren't being sold). And still no AIGLX. Outside pressure might help with that one...
There's a veritable graveyard of dead gaming franchises and companies, but I'm going to vote for my most dearly departed...
MicroProse was an amazing company, devoted to making some ground-breaking combat flight sims as well as genuinely fun games (worms! x-com!). They were bought out by Hasbro, who immediately took them out of the flight sim market. The announcement about the buyout was made on December 7, 1998, a day which will live in infamy.
They also had a brief hold on the MechWarrior series, which after the third sequel fell into a state of consolitis after being sold to Microsoft. Not dead, but dead to me I suppose.