I've never been able to find any benchmarks of the Tegra chip. The only three things that are commonly known is that it's from Nvidia, that it's an updated PortalPlayer chip (the chips in older iPods), and that it can play HD video through its video out.
People seem to just see the name Nvidia and think it's got a GeForce 9800GT or something.
and big color OLED display
Smaller and lower resolution than an iPhone.
why would they equipped it with such features to only play MP3s or to slide album covers in 3D ?
The number one reason for those features is to sound superior to the iPhone. Nvidia? OLED? Must be better!
It seems to me that as soon as someone comes out with a smartphone / mp3 player that is not so "controlled" and lets users install what they want, it will eventually rule the market. I thought someone would have done that by now.
Nobody cares beyond a handful of geeks, and even they still buy the iPhone.
Agreed. And even if they were as bad as Apple, it's still ludicrous and clear bias to refer to Apple's store as "open", and to spin it that Microsoft not following suit is somehow a bad thing.
Not sure why this post is tagged msastroturf.
A controlled store is infinitely more open than no store at all.
I'm currently using a netbook as my primary computer, following hardware failure.
And are you so thoroughly satisfied with your netbook as your primary computer that you have no desire for a faster, more powerful computer (ignoring your issue with lack of RAM)?
They are *plenty* powerful for the majority of computer use.
I wish people would comprehend the implications of this. It's also the same problem with "Linux is suitable for the majority of what people do at home".
Yes, majority. A car that can only run 60 miles on a tank of gas covers the majority of what people do with their cars. But a cat that only runs 60 miles on a tank of gas would be unacceptable because, while a majority of people's driving sessions consist of less than 30 mile trips from home, they still need the occasional trip to a friend's or relative's place in the next town or two over, and the even rarer, but still critical, road trip out of state or wherever.
With netbooks, the majority of what people do, a netbook can do acceptably with regards to performance. But sometimes people want to check out an HD YouTube clip (even HQ clips have performance issues on the current Atom N270/GMA950 netbooks), or process those vacation photos/videos, etc.
Take, for example, something that almost everyone uses: iTunes. iTunes will run just fine on a netbook, will play music just fine, and probably play SD videos just fine, but when they decide they'd like to rent an HD movie or TV show, they will find out the performance just isn't there.
Yes, most people, most of the time, will be just fine with a netbook. Unfortunately (well, fortunately, actually), people sometimes do want to do more than a netbook can handle.
I suspect someone's going to chime in that HD doesn't make any sense on an 800x600 screen, which isn't strictly true (1280x720 will look better on that screen than 640x480), is a side issue when the topic is performance (a few posts up someone mentions using an external display, keyboard and mouse with their netbook) and just further illustrates another problem with netbooks. It's definitely *not* a feature that the screen is so small that HD content has more detail than the screen can display.
For one, this will add even more vulnerabilities to browsers which seem to already have loads of them.
While replacing one of the biggest ones: Flash.
WebGL won't be a plugin, it will b part of the browser. That means Firefox won't be vulnerable because of an Adobe bug, but because of a Mozilla bug, and Mozilla can fix the bug themselves.
Also, with more diversity, bugs will be less likely to be exploited, and when they are they will have a smaller path of destruction.
And for another the web should be accessible for -everyone- from the low-end netbook to a Core i7, and even older systems should be able to browse web.
This is no different than Flash is now, except that WebGL has the potential to be significantly more efficient. WebGL isn't going to replace HTML, it's going to augment it, similar to how Flash does today. Sites that want to be accessible to more users will avoid reliance on resource demanding WebGL elements, or avoid it altogether, just like sites avoid resource demanding Flash objects.
On the other hand, those sites that want to take advantage of it, and for those users with more modern machines (really, WebGL isn't going to require advanced GPUs and high-end Core2Duos unless you start putting game level 3D and AI into it, simple 3D rendering will work just fine on older hardware--better, in fact, that 3D Flash does now), we'll be able to have a more rich web experience.
I absolutely detest the notion that the web should not embrace new technologies just because some people have crap computers. I agree that most web sites should be designed to be accessible across a broad range of computers (either by limiting advanced features, or providing alternate pages), but if a site wants to specialize with features that tax even modern systems (like YouTube did not too long ago), then as long as they are not essential sites (like banks, utilities, government, news media, etc), then they should be encouraged.
Already many sites are unusable without a recent version of Flash, we don't need extra hardware as requirements to view sites.
There you go. So how is this worse?
how many of us have encountered sites built entirely in Flash? Or have a requirement of Flash for simple things like navigation? While some things obviously need Flash (such as Homestar Runner because they are Flash cartoons) others use Flash for no real reason.
Which has what to do with WebGL?
But adding a high-end graphics card to a computer just to view the web? Thats just a bit ridiculous.
Not as ridiculous as assuming WebGL will mean that you have to have a high-end GPU and CPU just to view the web.
While I'm sure there are some great uses for this, it also sounds like a way to serve even more resource-hungry adverts than they can with Flash. Furthermore, if this became widespread in situations not really requiring it, a decent graphics card could essentially become a requirement for web surfing.
I don't see how this is any different than the current situation with Flash.
Flash is resource hungry, and plays annoying ads in both 2d and 3d, with sound. So the situation is presently worse. Even if WebGL includes audio (or perhaps in the future there will be WebAL, etc.), the situation is presently worse given how problematic Flash is.
Having seen some of the things Apple (and others, but it's really Apple that's pushing it at this point) is doing with HTML5, everything that can be done to replace Flash is a good thing. Even if it means the same annoying types of ads as now, at least they'll have less of a performance hit, and they won't be tied to a single program that is constantly plagued with security issues, has performance issues, crashes so often that Apple and Google sequester plug-ins/windows/tabs because of it, and whose updater is annoying and tries to push additional toolbars which no one wants.
Just as Flash served to kill off pretty much all the various and annoying plug-ins you had to download to make full use of the web, and replaced them all with a single plug-in to rule them all, HTML5, with things like canvas, the video tag, and WebGL, is looking to do the same to Flash--replace it with something better.
Only an idiot would claim that servers being compromised because admins choose to send passwords over the internet in plain text proves anything about how secure the software running on those servers is.
Unless it's a Windows web server. In that case, Administrator incompetence always proves how insecure Windows/IIS are.
The term often applies to groups of computer systems that have had malicious software installed by worms, Trojan horses or other malicious software.
"Often" is a very different word than "always", "solely" or "only".
It's clear that how the botnet came about is not critical to the definition. The clue is right there in the name that it's referring to a network of bots.
The key detail here is that it's a number of computers under surreptitious remote control.
And you like the one that fits your fiscal agenda. So I'm not the only one who selects their definitions, am I? You. Are. An. Astroturfer.
With people like you making Linux users look like raving madmen, I'm pretty sure all the MS astroturfers have been granted the day off.
Some folks feel that building to be accessible the novice is a worthy goal, even if it means compromising the power of the tool. Some folks feel that building a powerful tool is a worthy goal, even if it means that there is a learning curve that challenges the novice. Both of them are right. Some folks can't do both of these things, and some folks can't do either of these things. Some of those folks will hide their incompetencies behind these worthy goals, and murky the discussion as a consequence.
Ah yes, the venerable Chewbacca Defense.
Still, at the end of the day, it's wrong to fund corporate entities that make their money keeping the problem solving mechanisms that you use to run your life secret from you.
It's wrong to pay for products that work best for you?
That said, there is something to be said for doing things "correctly" even if the UI isn't as easy as it could be. In this regard GIMP handily trumps "dumbed down" competitors.
Um... The GIMP, a full-featured image editor, can handily beat competitors which slimmed-down feature sets?
New tagline: The GIMP, it's better than MS Paint.
Actually, I don't even think that's true. When it comes to the actual set of common features, I'll wager MS Paint is much easier to use.
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed. Not so much with MSO.
Not really. Most end users can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. Hell, most programmers can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. It's easy to fix a small bug (like word count can't handle more than 65535 words, or paragraph indentation is inconsistent, etc.), but something fundamental like fixing an issue with the interpretation of a file format like is being discussed here isn't generally going to be fixed by a patch from some casual user, even a highly technically proficient one who is a skilled developer.
This is pretty much the same situation MS Office is in. It's not like MS themselves can't fix bugs in Office.
You're using the old definition of Stable. Stable v1.1beta is so much better. Please upgrade; we're no longer accepting bug reports against Stable 1.0, which was a developer-only release. You should have known this from the.0 -- we told you ages ago that 1.0 means broken, I mean, developer.
"It's your fault, user" for thinking Stable 1.0 might mean it actually works, and not that it's a "broken, developer-only release", but that Stable 1.1 *beta* is actually the stable version. Well, obviously...
That's exactly my point. With cooperative multitasking, if you know everything that's going on, it can be more efficient than preemptive multitasking. Just like manually managing your threads can be more efficient than something like GCD.
At the most fundamental level, cooperative is more efficient (if well programmed), just as manually managing threads (if well programmed) is more efficient.
It's that "if well programmed" that's the killer. If your environment is completely known, *and* you are skilled, you have the potential to do a better job by hand. But in the real world, were your software is going to run on all sorts of computers with all sorts of different software and processing capabilities, you can't fine tune your program, so letting the system handle it works better.
Looking at it differently, with cooperative multitasking or manually controlling threads, *if* you have complete knowledge of the system *and* you are sufficiently skilled, you can approach 100% efficiency. With cooperative multitasking, or thread management similar to GCD, you might reach only 90% efficiency. But if you have to build a cooperative multitasking or manually manages threads in a program, that is going to run on all sorts of computers, you may only manage perhaps an overall average 70% efficiency.
And the fact that you can get that 90% efficiency with much less effort than you have to put in to get maybe around 70% (or whatever) efficiency, the benefits here are obvious.
The queue implementation also looks like it imposes a lot of overhead, so it is not very useful for parallelizing short-running "blocks" of code.
Actually, it's extremely good at parallelizing short-running blocks of code.
Unless your program is going to run on a very specific and unchanging computer configuration with all other tasks known and well-defined, GCD will pretty much *always* do a better job and handling and prioritizing threads.
Any performance lost in overhead is regained many times over in threads not bogging down the system. It's a bit similar to comparing cooperative and preemptive multi-tasking. With preemptive, there is system overhead in it having to manage all the various processes, but cooperative is so inefficient that the overhead is miniscule compared to the gains in the vast majority of scenarios.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but this sports hell fast GPU
I've never been able to find any benchmarks of the Tegra chip. The only three things that are commonly known is that it's from Nvidia, that it's an updated PortalPlayer chip (the chips in older iPods), and that it can play HD video through its video out.
People seem to just see the name Nvidia and think it's got a GeForce 9800GT or something.
and big color OLED display
Smaller and lower resolution than an iPhone.
why would they equipped it with such features to only play MP3s or to slide album covers in 3D ?
The number one reason for those features is to sound superior to the iPhone. Nvidia? OLED? Must be better!
but rather a modern Windows Mobile phone - they can do pretty much everything nowadays.
But how many of those things can they do well?
It seems to me that as soon as someone comes out with a smartphone / mp3 player that is not so "controlled" and lets users install what they want, it will eventually rule the market. I thought someone would have done that by now.
Nobody cares beyond a handful of geeks, and even they still buy the iPhone.
Agreed. And even if they were as bad as Apple, it's still ludicrous and clear bias to refer to Apple's store as "open", and to spin it that Microsoft not following suit is somehow a bad thing.
Not sure why this post is tagged msastroturf.
A controlled store is infinitely more open than no store at all.
No, you didn't put it in because it undermines your argument.
If you're going to call the iPhone a "general purpose device", then you can't really exempt the Xbox 360.
Upgrading your OS is just asking for trouble IMO.
Only when "your OS" is Windows. I've found most other OSs upgrade just fine.
It's the registry and the way programs toss libraries all over the place that really make it difficult for MS to have a reliable update mechanism.
Good going MS! Add a few hours to that and they might beat the time it took for a few people I know to upgrade Ubuntu!
Be honest now, it wasn't "a few people you know", it was *you*, right? And it wasn't Ubuntu, it was Gentoo, yes?
It's ok, you can tell the truth. Admitting one's mistakes is the first step towards recovery.
I'm currently using a netbook as my primary computer, following hardware failure.
And are you so thoroughly satisfied with your netbook as your primary computer that you have no desire for a faster, more powerful computer (ignoring your issue with lack of RAM)?
They are *plenty* powerful for the majority of computer use.
I wish people would comprehend the implications of this. It's also the same problem with "Linux is suitable for the majority of what people do at home".
Yes, majority. A car that can only run 60 miles on a tank of gas covers the majority of what people do with their cars. But a cat that only runs 60 miles on a tank of gas would be unacceptable because, while a majority of people's driving sessions consist of less than 30 mile trips from home, they still need the occasional trip to a friend's or relative's place in the next town or two over, and the even rarer, but still critical, road trip out of state or wherever.
With netbooks, the majority of what people do, a netbook can do acceptably with regards to performance. But sometimes people want to check out an HD YouTube clip (even HQ clips have performance issues on the current Atom N270/GMA950 netbooks), or process those vacation photos/videos, etc.
Take, for example, something that almost everyone uses: iTunes. iTunes will run just fine on a netbook, will play music just fine, and probably play SD videos just fine, but when they decide they'd like to rent an HD movie or TV show, they will find out the performance just isn't there.
Yes, most people, most of the time, will be just fine with a netbook. Unfortunately (well, fortunately, actually), people sometimes do want to do more than a netbook can handle.
I suspect someone's going to chime in that HD doesn't make any sense on an 800x600 screen, which isn't strictly true (1280x720 will look better on that screen than 640x480), is a side issue when the topic is performance (a few posts up someone mentions using an external display, keyboard and mouse with their netbook) and just further illustrates another problem with netbooks. It's definitely *not* a feature that the screen is so small that HD content has more detail than the screen can display.
You can just not bother to install Flash, or use FlashBlock
I'm sure there will be a Firefox extension to disable this, if not an actual browser preference.
For one, this will add even more vulnerabilities to browsers which seem to already have loads of them.
While replacing one of the biggest ones: Flash.
WebGL won't be a plugin, it will b part of the browser. That means Firefox won't be vulnerable because of an Adobe bug, but because of a Mozilla bug, and Mozilla can fix the bug themselves.
Also, with more diversity, bugs will be less likely to be exploited, and when they are they will have a smaller path of destruction.
And for another the web should be accessible for -everyone- from the low-end netbook to a Core i7, and even older systems should be able to browse web.
This is no different than Flash is now, except that WebGL has the potential to be significantly more efficient. WebGL isn't going to replace HTML, it's going to augment it, similar to how Flash does today. Sites that want to be accessible to more users will avoid reliance on resource demanding WebGL elements, or avoid it altogether, just like sites avoid resource demanding Flash objects.
On the other hand, those sites that want to take advantage of it, and for those users with more modern machines (really, WebGL isn't going to require advanced GPUs and high-end Core2Duos unless you start putting game level 3D and AI into it, simple 3D rendering will work just fine on older hardware--better, in fact, that 3D Flash does now), we'll be able to have a more rich web experience.
I absolutely detest the notion that the web should not embrace new technologies just because some people have crap computers. I agree that most web sites should be designed to be accessible across a broad range of computers (either by limiting advanced features, or providing alternate pages), but if a site wants to specialize with features that tax even modern systems (like YouTube did not too long ago), then as long as they are not essential sites (like banks, utilities, government, news media, etc), then they should be encouraged.
Already many sites are unusable without a recent version of Flash, we don't need extra hardware as requirements to view sites.
There you go. So how is this worse?
how many of us have encountered sites built entirely in Flash? Or have a requirement of Flash for simple things like navigation? While some things obviously need Flash (such as Homestar Runner because they are Flash cartoons) others use Flash for no real reason.
Which has what to do with WebGL?
But adding a high-end graphics card to a computer just to view the web? Thats just a bit ridiculous.
Not as ridiculous as assuming WebGL will mean that you have to have a high-end GPU and CPU just to view the web.
While I'm sure there are some great uses for this, it also sounds like a way to serve even more resource-hungry adverts than they can with Flash. Furthermore, if this became widespread in situations not really requiring it, a decent graphics card could essentially become a requirement for web surfing.
I don't see how this is any different than the current situation with Flash.
Flash is resource hungry, and plays annoying ads in both 2d and 3d, with sound. So the situation is presently worse. Even if WebGL includes audio (or perhaps in the future there will be WebAL, etc.), the situation is presently worse given how problematic Flash is.
Having seen some of the things Apple (and others, but it's really Apple that's pushing it at this point) is doing with HTML5, everything that can be done to replace Flash is a good thing. Even if it means the same annoying types of ads as now, at least they'll have less of a performance hit, and they won't be tied to a single program that is constantly plagued with security issues, has performance issues, crashes so often that Apple and Google sequester plug-ins/windows/tabs because of it, and whose updater is annoying and tries to push additional toolbars which no one wants.
Just as Flash served to kill off pretty much all the various and annoying plug-ins you had to download to make full use of the web, and replaced them all with a single plug-in to rule them all, HTML5, with things like canvas, the video tag, and WebGL, is looking to do the same to Flash--replace it with something better.
Sometimes the media rewords things for a story, and the original meaning is inadvertently lost in the translation.
The actual statistic is that Microsoft engineers are responsible for most crashes.
I guess we will watch Jurassic Park 4 live. :)
But only for dinosaurs that are not extinct, and naturally reproduce by cloning.
Great work scientists! You've cloned an already self-cloning plant! Maybe next you can work on creating flying birds...
They're quite liberal with definitions in Tasmania. If there's more than a year age gap then technically your sister isn't a relative.
And if there's less than 9 months gap, then technically she's your clone[*].
[*] I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. There are no fraternal twins in Tasmania.
Only an idiot would claim that servers being compromised because admins choose to send passwords over the internet in plain text proves anything about how secure the software running on those servers is.
Unless it's a Windows web server. In that case, Administrator incompetence always proves how insecure Windows/IIS are.
Instead I propose the following definition:
botnet: an automated and self propagating network of compromised machines.
It's pretty clear the definition you're really trying to propose is:
"botnet: a network of infected or compromised non-Linux machines."
Just callin' it like I want to see it.
Fixed your sig for you.
Ok. I went back and read the definitions.
I like this one:
The term often applies to groups of computer systems that have had malicious software installed by worms, Trojan horses or other malicious software.
"Often" is a very different word than "always", "solely" or "only".
It's clear that how the botnet came about is not critical to the definition. The clue is right there in the name that it's referring to a network of bots.
The key detail here is that it's a number of computers under surreptitious remote control.
And you like the one that fits your fiscal agenda. So I'm not the only one who selects their definitions, am I? You. Are. An. Astroturfer.
With people like you making Linux users look like raving madmen, I'm pretty sure all the MS astroturfers have been granted the day off.
Some folks feel that building to be accessible the novice is a worthy goal, even if it means compromising the power of the tool. Some folks feel that building a powerful tool is a worthy goal, even if it means that there is a learning curve that challenges the novice. Both of them are right. Some folks can't do both of these things, and some folks can't do either of these things. Some of those folks will hide their incompetencies behind these worthy goals, and murky the discussion as a consequence.
Ah yes, the venerable Chewbacca Defense.
Still, at the end of the day, it's wrong to fund corporate entities that make their money keeping the problem solving mechanisms that you use to run your life secret from you.
It's wrong to pay for products that work best for you?
That said, there is something to be said for doing things "correctly"
even if the UI isn't as easy as it could be. In this regard GIMP
handily trumps "dumbed down" competitors.
Um... The GIMP, a full-featured image editor, can handily beat competitors which slimmed-down feature sets?
New tagline: The GIMP, it's better than MS Paint.
Actually, I don't even think that's true. When it comes to the actual set of common features, I'll wager MS Paint is much easier to use.
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed. Not so much with MSO.
Not really. Most end users can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. Hell, most programmers can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. It's easy to fix a small bug (like word count can't handle more than 65535 words, or paragraph indentation is inconsistent, etc.), but something fundamental like fixing an issue with the interpretation of a file format like is being discussed here isn't generally going to be fixed by a patch from some casual user, even a highly technically proficient one who is a skilled developer.
This is pretty much the same situation MS Office is in. It's not like MS themselves can't fix bugs in Office.
You're using the old definition of Stable. Stable v1.1beta is so much better. Please upgrade; we're no longer accepting bug reports against Stable 1.0, which was a developer-only release. You should have known this from the .0 -- we told you ages ago that 1.0 means broken, I mean, developer.
"It's your fault, user" for thinking Stable 1.0 might mean it actually works, and not that it's a "broken, developer-only release", but that Stable 1.1 *beta* is actually the stable version. Well, obviously...
That's exactly my point. With cooperative multitasking, if you know everything that's going on, it can be more efficient than preemptive multitasking. Just like manually managing your threads can be more efficient than something like GCD.
At the most fundamental level, cooperative is more efficient (if well programmed), just as manually managing threads (if well programmed) is more efficient.
It's that "if well programmed" that's the killer. If your environment is completely known, *and* you are skilled, you have the potential to do a better job by hand. But in the real world, were your software is going to run on all sorts of computers with all sorts of different software and processing capabilities, you can't fine tune your program, so letting the system handle it works better.
Looking at it differently, with cooperative multitasking or manually controlling threads, *if* you have complete knowledge of the system *and* you are sufficiently skilled, you can approach 100% efficiency. With cooperative multitasking, or thread management similar to GCD, you might reach only 90% efficiency. But if you have to build a cooperative multitasking or manually manages threads in a program, that is going to run on all sorts of computers, you may only manage perhaps an overall average 70% efficiency.
And the fact that you can get that 90% efficiency with much less effort than you have to put in to get maybe around 70% (or whatever) efficiency, the benefits here are obvious.
The queue implementation also looks like it imposes a lot of overhead, so it is not very useful for parallelizing short-running "blocks" of code.
Actually, it's extremely good at parallelizing short-running blocks of code.
Unless your program is going to run on a very specific and unchanging computer configuration with all other tasks known and well-defined, GCD will pretty much *always* do a better job and handling and prioritizing threads.
Any performance lost in overhead is regained many times over in threads not bogging down the system. It's a bit similar to comparing cooperative and preemptive multi-tasking. With preemptive, there is system overhead in it having to manage all the various processes, but cooperative is so inefficient that the overhead is miniscule compared to the gains in the vast majority of scenarios.
I guess the next best thing would be a library that handles the thread pooling and figures out how to manage things.
That's what it is. It's called libdispatch.