Nvidia's Tegra2 looks promising. It's dual core and SOC, so you get Nvidia from top to bottom (including GPU, and we know how good Nvidia is at that). Intel is king of the CPU, but Nvidia seems to do everything else better. So long as their CPU performance rivals the Atom, I think Tegra2 will be a better chip overall. It is stuck with DDR2, which will make it slightly more expensive, but it has everything else nailed.
That's ridiculous. The margins for hardware are so tight, that if you can be the first one to sell at $100 and still turn a profit, you'll have the entire low budget market to yourself until a competitor catches up. There is a huge incentive to release good low-budget hardware.
The problem is it's hard to release low budget hardware that customers will find acceptable. There is a point where most people are willing to spend an extra $100 for a significant power jump. The area where netbooks would be most effective, more expensive smart-phones are sold at a subsidized rate. That's why the netbook market is creeping back up toward the notebook market, there is effectively a more expensive product at the same price point, which is tough to beat.
All we're getting is another Ultra-Mobile market, but this time with less customized hardware and more sane prices. It's a good thing.
What I'm interested in is what happens after this next generation, which will be capable of flawless 1080P playback.
Look to the nVidia Tegra 2 first, you'll see hardware using it coming out later this year. Dual core, full 1080P decode and encode. It's SOC so it should drive the prices for hardware down even further.
There were a number of studies/comparison that showed that it's low peak power was far outweighed by the poor performance of the chip - it may have idled at 1 watt and peaked at 4 watts, but it spent all its time at 4 watts. More powerful CPU's with similar idle power usage but higher peak power usage tended to use less power over all, because they could actually spend most of their time at the idle power state. I.E. they may have had twice the peak power usage, but they sat in the low power idle state four or five times as long, negating the power loss during high activity.
Obviously it depends on what you are doing on the netbook (or similar device), but for the things it was intended to do the Atom was just not a very good chip. The best thing it had going for it was that it did not need a heatsink.
And yeah, the chipset dwarfed any power savings the processor gave, and for a long time the two were stuck together effectively making the Atom bottom barrel.
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."? Computers years ago already passed the good-enough mark for normal usage. The only thing that still drives processors are transcoding and games really. Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine.
It's funny, because that's almost verbatim what people said when the Pentium, with all 200 of its megahertz glory, was released. They said only gamers and media editors would care.
Today my cell phone has three times that much power, and the top of the line phones have five. My bottom of the line, 2 year old laptop has a processor with two cores that are each 10-20 times as powerful as that processor that was "enough for everybody", and I could go out and buy a laptop now that is four or five times as powerful as the one I have if I wanted to.
What you don't realize is that most people never cared what the processor was. The point where it's "enough for everybody" is always here, but it shifts with each new advancement. New advancements are made which require greater processing ability. People care about how smoothly things run, when software has moved to the point where it no longer runs smoothly on the hardware they have, people upgrade.
The only reason there is any kind of a slowdown right now, is because we are still working out how to most effectively use multiple processors. That will take time, there is a significant software base that does not do this well, and when that changes you will see the boom resume as enthusiastically as ever. More than likely someone will make a breakthrough in the OS arena, and that will be that.
"Moore's Law" was never a law, it was an estimation. It has also been adjusted several times. Last but not least, every time someone declares it dead, they wind up with egg on their face.
How is it, every time they add more privacy options, more of my personal information that was restricted access gets exposed to more people ?
Yeah but, see, you didn't have those options before, so obviously they can only assume you wanted the minimum amount of privacy your previous settings allowed for, so all the new options should be enabled!
Exactly, and gas costs so much that I don't know many people who don't double check that they have the right one.
What's disgusting about gas stations is that they list their prices as something like $2.99 99/100. They won't even spare you that penny! ALL of them do this, it's crazy. Just to squeeze a few cents out of every fill-up.
News flash: All retailers keep your credit card information in some way. If you buy something, chances are they have it.
Clearly, if it so important to them that I keep my credit card information on their site, then it stands to reason that they intend to misuse it in some way.
That's not sound reasoning you are using, it's paranoia.
Perhaps I was being enrolled in a club that would charge me $50 a month to have priority access to future purchase opportunities.
That's called "bait and switch", and they can get hit with serious fraud charges for doing it. The last minute $6 "fee" is as close as they can get to bait and switch without being illegal. However, they must tell you the actual charges before you buy, or you can sue the pants off of them.
A little common sense goes a long way. The tickets were one price, Ticketmaster's fee was additional. The total for the tickets is still the total for the tickets, they didn't lie about that. The total you'll pay to buy from Ticketmaster, however, is the ticket total plus the fee. Is it unethical? Hell yes it is. Does that mean they'll be doing something illegal with your credit card? No, it doesn't. If they do, you'll get the privilege of ripping them a new one, as credit card companies don't like fraud, and they act immediately to remedy the situation.
I've got another question for you though, do you pay with a credit card at brick and mortar stores? If so, you are far more likely to have your credit card number and identity stolen. The vast majority of such thefts occur outside the internet.
Food for thought.
Oh and I think you are perfectly justified in not doing business with Ticketmaster, but not because they are going to start charging your card for absurd things. That's just stupid. Even asshole companies don't get to the size of Ticketmaster by committing fraud on all their customers. Think it through a little bit.
The former was not disingenuous, it's just a perfect example of the widespread use of malicious interface design. The article writer likely has no control over who the WWW Conference chooses to publish their materials, and if they did you know they wouldn't use a company that has such malicious interfaces.
For what it's worth, the full text feature of ACM.org is not in any way malicious towards a subscriber who regularly uses the service to read published papers. All it would take is a "(subscription required)" note next to the PDF and it would no longer be a trap.
It's really borderline, with regards to the types of interfaces the OP is talking about.
You don't care about raw temperature transfer, you care about energy usage to either cool or heat
Is it cheaper to cool? Or is it cheaper to heat?
Can you save money and energy by containing the cool area and allowing the hot aisle to heat the rest of the room? Or is too much heat your problem, and you'd be cooling the whole space anyway, so cool the whole datacenter and contain the heat?
Honestly, I think the best solution for almost all situations would be to contain both hot and cold aisles. Chances are you're always going to need at least a little AC no matter where your datacenter is (I may be one of the few exceptions), so it doesn't make sense to let the hot aisle run rampant and only contain the cold aisle. As far as the cold aisle goes, that's always going to need cooling, so you'll definitely want to contain it.
If you're putting in a new containment system, why not duct it twice? Then if you need to warm the common areas you can just vent a little from your hot aisle to regulate the temperature, without letting it run wild. It would be more expensive to set up, but not by a lot if you plan for it from the beginning, and it will give you maximum efficiency.
If you contain the hot air you must cool a much larger area, which is very inefficient and makes anybody who must work in the server room less comfortable when compared to allowing waste heat to warm the main areas. More comfortable, less energy wasted cooling the cold aisle, and less energy wasted venting the hot aisle.
A vinyl partition is plenty of separation, and if you want to upgrade, use two vinyl partitions separated by an air gap. That's the same basic setup that the ski resort in Dubai uses, except they use two roofs instead of two vinyl partitions, of course. Air is a fantastic insulator when it is not allowed to mix.
Temperature lost through seepage from solid objects is going to be minimal, at best, unless they are made of large sections of aluminum or copper. Frankly, I've never seen a server room with large panels of aluminum or copper, so I don't see that being an issue.
News shows and documentaries are just as copyrighted as movies, why is downloading them acceptable if movies are not?
Either way, the argument doesn't work, and it's still a dick move. It should completely stop now, because it should be abundantly clear that torrenting over Tor only serves to wast the network's bandwidth.
I'm not against Flash. I'm against it on devices that must be reliable and are built with limited processor and electrical power.
I dunno, 1ghz+ dual core processors, like the new Tegra 2 based phones coming out soon, don't seem all that limited to me. The new processors use less battery power than the old too, as they are complete SOC setups. Flash is wasteful, but it isn't that processor heavy.
Frankly, I hope Apple and Adobe both lose. It would be much better if the HTML5 standard included a true open standard, instead of the snake oil that is H.264. Don't get me wrong, fantastic technology, but calling it open is a joke. It's proprietary, restrictively licensed, and if you want to use it you owe royalties. Exactly what about that is "open" by any definition? It's just a normal industry standard, calling it "open" is just marketing bullshit. HTML5 should have a stipulation against non-free standards for the officially supported video formats. If browsers want to include h.264 support, that's fine, but they should also support something like Ogg Theora by default in the standard. Google's VP8 is almost certainly going to be free and open, so that would be a good choice as well.
Either way, H.264 support should not be part of the HTML5 standard, it should be separate. It will effectively hamstring free open-source browser standards compliance if it is included. That could be another reason Jobs is pushing it so hard - he can afford the costs, but some of his competitors may not.
Besides, Jobs is even more deceptive and disingenuous, because Flash actually uses H.264 already.
Make my phone. Make my phone's OS. Don't tell me what I can and can't have on it.
That's what Google is trying to do, though they miscalculated with Verizon and have had a setback. I definitely agree with you, I'll never own an iPhone for the very reasons you state. We'll see how Google pulls out of their recent failure.
You do realize that 98% of web users have Flash, right? Going through all the trouble of an HTML only version of his site only adds 2% to his potential viewership, and it's much harder to make it look nice. He didn't exclude all that many customers by using Flash, or he would not have used it.
Where is the return on investment? HTML5 isn't even an option yet, what do you propose? Remember, if he has to spend more money to get his site looking the way he wants without Flash than the added 2% of potential users could generate, it's not worth the effort.
There really aren't a whole lot of cases where that kind of effort would be justified, when his site works fine right now and hits 98% of his customer base.
I just want to point out, that the only quality video standard that is actually open is Ogg Theora. Google's VP8 will probably be open as well, but we don't know that yet.
H.264, which is the "open standard" that Jobs is pushing, is a proprietary format created by the ITU-T and the MPEG (same guys who did the proprietary DVD standard) groups. It requires strict licensing terms and royalties (which are not made public, btw). I really don't understand why so many people let them get away with calling it "open" when it is about as closed as you can get. Even the Flash standard, while proprietary, is completely open and freely licensed. I certainly wouldn't call Flash "open", but it is much more open than H.264 is.
That's why this is complete hypocrisy. Jobs says "open standards" and lists H.264 as one of them. It's a complete lie. There is nothing about H.264 that makes it more open than Flash. Not one thing. There are actually quite a few that make it less open.
I didn't realize how much the Sense UI added until I downloaded the Android emulator - it really is a pretty big difference. Nothing really structural, just lots of nice little things that other people have to patch together with various apps (mail apps, wireless switch widgets, etc).
Do you have any experience using Android at all? Of course you'll be able to turn it off!
If not in an official setting (though I find it unlikely that there would not be one), then someone will write an app to do it. Just like everything else.
Verizon has contractual obligations and a considerable advertising investment in the Motorola Droid. *Every* service provider makes such deals, there's nothing nefarious going on other than standard business practices.
That's not the reason the Nexus was pulled, the phone was in their lineup to be released until the HTC Incredible came out, which is the new top dog in Android smartphones. It's better in every way, and apparently an HTC contract was easier and faster to set up than a Google contract. So one week the Nexus was scheduled to be released, the next it was pulled in favor of the Incredible.
Google, frankly, just took too long and missed their shot. I think they overestimated how long the Nexus would be at the top. It certainly has nothing to do with Motorola (the Verizon Incredible adds take a direct shot at the Motorola Droid adds, mimicking that red eye and everything).
Besides, Verizon sucks, why would you want to sign up with them anyway?
Because they're better than everybody else? Seriously, half of my friends use Verizon, and Verizon doesn't sell service in my area. Their network and plans are that good. Though, my roommate is a little miffed that they sent her a new Incredible even though she can't activate it here. She had to send it to her parents so they could activate it for her, and they'll be sending it back. Other than that everything I've heard is positive. AT&T offers service here, and I do hear a lot of negative comments about them. There is no official Sprint coverage, but the local carriers are all Sprint partners (my Hero is a Sprint Hero).
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Nvidia's Tegra2 looks promising. It's dual core and SOC, so you get Nvidia from top to bottom (including GPU, and we know how good Nvidia is at that). Intel is king of the CPU, but Nvidia seems to do everything else better. So long as their CPU performance rivals the Atom, I think Tegra2 will be a better chip overall. It is stuck with DDR2, which will make it slightly more expensive, but it has everything else nailed.
That's ridiculous. The margins for hardware are so tight, that if you can be the first one to sell at $100 and still turn a profit, you'll have the entire low budget market to yourself until a competitor catches up. There is a huge incentive to release good low-budget hardware.
The problem is it's hard to release low budget hardware that customers will find acceptable. There is a point where most people are willing to spend an extra $100 for a significant power jump. The area where netbooks would be most effective, more expensive smart-phones are sold at a subsidized rate. That's why the netbook market is creeping back up toward the notebook market, there is effectively a more expensive product at the same price point, which is tough to beat.
All we're getting is another Ultra-Mobile market, but this time with less customized hardware and more sane prices. It's a good thing.
What I'm interested in is what happens after this next generation, which will be capable of flawless 1080P playback.
Look to the nVidia Tegra 2 first, you'll see hardware using it coming out later this year. Dual core, full 1080P decode and encode. It's SOC so it should drive the prices for hardware down even further.
There were a number of studies/comparison that showed that it's low peak power was far outweighed by the poor performance of the chip - it may have idled at 1 watt and peaked at 4 watts, but it spent all its time at 4 watts. More powerful CPU's with similar idle power usage but higher peak power usage tended to use less power over all, because they could actually spend most of their time at the idle power state. I.E. they may have had twice the peak power usage, but they sat in the low power idle state four or five times as long, negating the power loss during high activity.
Obviously it depends on what you are doing on the netbook (or similar device), but for the things it was intended to do the Atom was just not a very good chip. The best thing it had going for it was that it did not need a heatsink.
And yeah, the chipset dwarfed any power savings the processor gave, and for a long time the two were stuck together effectively making the Atom bottom barrel.
I thought all mopeds were dual powered?
Isn't that what "MoPed" means? ;)
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."? Computers years ago already passed the good-enough mark for normal usage. The only thing that still drives processors are transcoding and games really. Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine.
It's funny, because that's almost verbatim what people said when the Pentium, with all 200 of its megahertz glory, was released. They said only gamers and media editors would care.
Today my cell phone has three times that much power, and the top of the line phones have five. My bottom of the line, 2 year old laptop has a processor with two cores that are each 10-20 times as powerful as that processor that was "enough for everybody", and I could go out and buy a laptop now that is four or five times as powerful as the one I have if I wanted to.
What you don't realize is that most people never cared what the processor was. The point where it's "enough for everybody" is always here, but it shifts with each new advancement. New advancements are made which require greater processing ability. People care about how smoothly things run, when software has moved to the point where it no longer runs smoothly on the hardware they have, people upgrade.
The only reason there is any kind of a slowdown right now, is because we are still working out how to most effectively use multiple processors. That will take time, there is a significant software base that does not do this well, and when that changes you will see the boom resume as enthusiastically as ever. More than likely someone will make a breakthrough in the OS arena, and that will be that.
"Moore's Law" was never a law, it was an estimation. It has also been adjusted several times. Last but not least, every time someone declares it dead, they wind up with egg on their face.
How is it, every time they add more privacy options, more of my personal information that was restricted access gets exposed to more people ?
Yeah but, see, you didn't have those options before, so obviously they can only assume you wanted the minimum amount of privacy your previous settings allowed for, so all the new options should be enabled!
It makes perfect sense.
Right?
I really think Notes trumps SAP in the user-unfriendliness department.
Even my bosses, when they were hiring me, were chuckling in that "funny but sad" sort of way when asking if I'd used Notes before.
I was recently hired by IBM, and man, what a PAIN!
I actually thought Notes was dead, then I learned I must do everything through it.
Exactly, and gas costs so much that I don't know many people who don't double check that they have the right one.
What's disgusting about gas stations is that they list their prices as something like $2.99 99/100. They won't even spare you that penny! ALL of them do this, it's crazy. Just to squeeze a few cents out of every fill-up.
News flash: All retailers keep your credit card information in some way. If you buy something, chances are they have it.
Clearly, if it so important to them that I keep my credit card information on their site, then it stands to reason that they intend to misuse it in some way.
That's not sound reasoning you are using, it's paranoia.
Perhaps I was being enrolled in a club that would charge me $50 a month to have priority access to future purchase opportunities.
That's called "bait and switch", and they can get hit with serious fraud charges for doing it. The last minute $6 "fee" is as close as they can get to bait and switch without being illegal. However, they must tell you the actual charges before you buy, or you can sue the pants off of them.
A little common sense goes a long way. The tickets were one price, Ticketmaster's fee was additional. The total for the tickets is still the total for the tickets, they didn't lie about that. The total you'll pay to buy from Ticketmaster, however, is the ticket total plus the fee. Is it unethical? Hell yes it is. Does that mean they'll be doing something illegal with your credit card? No, it doesn't. If they do, you'll get the privilege of ripping them a new one, as credit card companies don't like fraud, and they act immediately to remedy the situation.
I've got another question for you though, do you pay with a credit card at brick and mortar stores? If so, you are far more likely to have your credit card number and identity stolen. The vast majority of such thefts occur outside the internet.
Food for thought.
Oh and I think you are perfectly justified in not doing business with Ticketmaster, but not because they are going to start charging your card for absurd things. That's just stupid. Even asshole companies don't get to the size of Ticketmaster by committing fraud on all their customers. Think it through a little bit.
This at least is genuine.
The former was not disingenuous, it's just a perfect example of the widespread use of malicious interface design. The article writer likely has no control over who the WWW Conference chooses to publish their materials, and if they did you know they wouldn't use a company that has such malicious interfaces.
For what it's worth, the full text feature of ACM.org is not in any way malicious towards a subscriber who regularly uses the service to read published papers. All it would take is a "(subscription required)" note next to the PDF and it would no longer be a trap.
It's really borderline, with regards to the types of interfaces the OP is talking about.
You don't care about raw temperature transfer, you care about energy usage to either cool or heat
Is it cheaper to cool? Or is it cheaper to heat?
Can you save money and energy by containing the cool area and allowing the hot aisle to heat the rest of the room? Or is too much heat your problem, and you'd be cooling the whole space anyway, so cool the whole datacenter and contain the heat?
Honestly, I think the best solution for almost all situations would be to contain both hot and cold aisles. Chances are you're always going to need at least a little AC no matter where your datacenter is (I may be one of the few exceptions), so it doesn't make sense to let the hot aisle run rampant and only contain the cold aisle. As far as the cold aisle goes, that's always going to need cooling, so you'll definitely want to contain it.
If you're putting in a new containment system, why not duct it twice? Then if you need to warm the common areas you can just vent a little from your hot aisle to regulate the temperature, without letting it run wild. It would be more expensive to set up, but not by a lot if you plan for it from the beginning, and it will give you maximum efficiency.
The cake is a lieeee!!
I suggest containing the cold air.
If you contain the hot air you must cool a much larger area, which is very inefficient and makes anybody who must work in the server room less comfortable when compared to allowing waste heat to warm the main areas. More comfortable, less energy wasted cooling the cold aisle, and less energy wasted venting the hot aisle.
A vinyl partition is plenty of separation, and if you want to upgrade, use two vinyl partitions separated by an air gap. That's the same basic setup that the ski resort in Dubai uses, except they use two roofs instead of two vinyl partitions, of course. Air is a fantastic insulator when it is not allowed to mix.
Temperature lost through seepage from solid objects is going to be minimal, at best, unless they are made of large sections of aluminum or copper. Frankly, I've never seen a server room with large panels of aluminum or copper, so I don't see that being an issue.
See why there is a debate?
News shows and documentaries are just as copyrighted as movies, why is downloading them acceptable if movies are not?
Either way, the argument doesn't work, and it's still a dick move. It should completely stop now, because it should be abundantly clear that torrenting over Tor only serves to wast the network's bandwidth.
With Android, you can pretty much guarantee that you'll be able to turn it off. If not via an official widget, then someone will write an app for it.
I have flash on my HTC, and while I can't disable it, I can certainly uninstall it if I wanted to.
I'm not against Flash. I'm against it on devices that must be reliable and are built with limited processor and electrical power.
I dunno, 1ghz+ dual core processors, like the new Tegra 2 based phones coming out soon, don't seem all that limited to me. The new processors use less battery power than the old too, as they are complete SOC setups. Flash is wasteful, but it isn't that processor heavy.
Frankly, I hope Apple and Adobe both lose. It would be much better if the HTML5 standard included a true open standard, instead of the snake oil that is H.264. Don't get me wrong, fantastic technology, but calling it open is a joke. It's proprietary, restrictively licensed, and if you want to use it you owe royalties. Exactly what about that is "open" by any definition? It's just a normal industry standard, calling it "open" is just marketing bullshit. HTML5 should have a stipulation against non-free standards for the officially supported video formats. If browsers want to include h.264 support, that's fine, but they should also support something like Ogg Theora by default in the standard. Google's VP8 is almost certainly going to be free and open, so that would be a good choice as well.
Either way, H.264 support should not be part of the HTML5 standard, it should be separate. It will effectively hamstring free open-source browser standards compliance if it is included. That could be another reason Jobs is pushing it so hard - he can afford the costs, but some of his competitors may not.
Besides, Jobs is even more deceptive and disingenuous, because Flash actually uses H.264 already.
Make my phone. Make my phone's OS. Don't tell me what I can and can't have on it.
That's what Google is trying to do, though they miscalculated with Verizon and have had a setback. I definitely agree with you, I'll never own an iPhone for the very reasons you state. We'll see how Google pulls out of their recent failure.
You do realize that 98% of web users have Flash, right? Going through all the trouble of an HTML only version of his site only adds 2% to his potential viewership, and it's much harder to make it look nice. He didn't exclude all that many customers by using Flash, or he would not have used it.
Where is the return on investment? HTML5 isn't even an option yet, what do you propose? Remember, if he has to spend more money to get his site looking the way he wants without Flash than the added 2% of potential users could generate, it's not worth the effort.
There really aren't a whole lot of cases where that kind of effort would be justified, when his site works fine right now and hits 98% of his customer base.
Which he has absolutely no right to do.
I just want to point out, that the only quality video standard that is actually open is Ogg Theora. Google's VP8 will probably be open as well, but we don't know that yet.
H.264, which is the "open standard" that Jobs is pushing, is a proprietary format created by the ITU-T and the MPEG (same guys who did the proprietary DVD standard) groups. It requires strict licensing terms and royalties (which are not made public, btw). I really don't understand why so many people let them get away with calling it "open" when it is about as closed as you can get. Even the Flash standard, while proprietary, is completely open and freely licensed. I certainly wouldn't call Flash "open", but it is much more open than H.264 is.
That's why this is complete hypocrisy. Jobs says "open standards" and lists H.264 as one of them. It's a complete lie. There is nothing about H.264 that makes it more open than Flash. Not one thing. There are actually quite a few that make it less open.
I didn't realize how much the Sense UI added until I downloaded the Android emulator - it really is a pretty big difference. Nothing really structural, just lots of nice little things that other people have to patch together with various apps (mail apps, wireless switch widgets, etc).
Sense is nice. ^^
Do you have any experience using Android at all? Of course you'll be able to turn it off!
If not in an official setting (though I find it unlikely that there would not be one), then someone will write an app to do it. Just like everything else.
Seriously, what's the problem?
Use the web much?
Verizon has contractual obligations and a considerable advertising investment in the Motorola Droid. *Every* service provider makes such deals, there's nothing nefarious going on other than standard business practices.
That's not the reason the Nexus was pulled, the phone was in their lineup to be released until the HTC Incredible came out, which is the new top dog in Android smartphones. It's better in every way, and apparently an HTC contract was easier and faster to set up than a Google contract. So one week the Nexus was scheduled to be released, the next it was pulled in favor of the Incredible.
Google, frankly, just took too long and missed their shot. I think they overestimated how long the Nexus would be at the top. It certainly has nothing to do with Motorola (the Verizon Incredible adds take a direct shot at the Motorola Droid adds, mimicking that red eye and everything).
Besides, Verizon sucks, why would you want to sign up with them anyway?
Because they're better than everybody else? Seriously, half of my friends use Verizon, and Verizon doesn't sell service in my area. Their network and plans are that good. Though, my roommate is a little miffed that they sent her a new Incredible even though she can't activate it here. She had to send it to her parents so they could activate it for her, and they'll be sending it back. Other than that everything I've heard is positive. AT&T offers service here, and I do hear a lot of negative comments about them. There is no official Sprint coverage, but the local carriers are all Sprint partners (my Hero is a Sprint Hero).