Remember, these are leaked return figures from Best Buy: given how hellish the experience of returning a product there can be, another third may have just shoved the thing in a sock drawer and eaten the loss.
CPU upgrades are mostly doable (approximately as much as in a hypothetical desktop computer where you can't do a motherboard swap); but GPU upgrades seem to be game over. Yeah, MxM 'exists'; but very few laptops use it, there is virtually no secondary market in MxM cards (much less GPU vendors or their OEMs putting new MxM cards, with new GPUs, on the market as individual parts, it's almost all working-pulls from dead hardware), and, while the module is the same size and shape at all times, the require cooling certainly isn't...
This is excellent. At my company we are not allowed to have phones with cameras, so now I am juggling my private smartphone and a kick-ass Nokia 101 which I take to my desk.
If I could build a smartphone with a decent touchscreen, no camera, and dual sim capabilities I'd be really happy.
I've always been somewhat surprised by how (relatively) few vendors of fancy smartphones don't have a "My employer is paranoid, I'll give you $100 extra to leave out the phone module during assembly." build-to-order option.
Doesn't solve anybody's problem if they still want their phone to take pictures outside of work; but if you just don't care about your phone's camera, it'd at least let you choose from a much longer list of contemporary gear.
That's certainly the impression that only gets deeper every time I interact with somebody who can afford more lawyers than I can. Plus, Mandatory Binding Arbitration with the arbiter of their choice, in the venue of their choice, according to a contract that they reserve the right to amend at any time if it wasn't bad enough originally!
"We are going to achieve a consensus ad idem concerning this medical coverage policy, by one method or another. Now, would you like to do this the easy way, or are you going to make me do it the hard way?"
Also, given the generally negative effects of both poverty and ill-health on things like school attendance and performance, there is a fairly strong incentive to make these mechanisms accessible even to adults who are probably permanently screwed at this point. Even if it's too late to do much more than write them off, they are the ones we need to work with if we want to head off the next generation of probably permanently screwed people before it's too late.
"[T]he content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible."
They really are setting the bar high in Kentucky.
What I want to know is who they had to waterboard to get insurance companies to provide information about their policies written at a 6th-grade level...
Mine alternates between issuing cryptic tomes (with pictures of happy, smiling, healthy people on the front, naturally) that alternate between dense medical-billing-and-coding jargon and EULA-like 'eh, you'll discover what we don't cover after you've had the procedure' disclaimers.
As much as I enjoy making fun of the developing world, why should we permit vital, allegedly mutually-consensual, contracts to be couched in language that a substantial portion of the people who 'agree' to them aren't capable of understanding? Without mutual understanding, much less mutual consent, centuries of contract law are reduced to a mockery.
Can you think of any rights or prerogatives that you currently possess that the feds would need to get your signature in some super-secret-crafty-scheme in order to remove?
Is there a single hardware related company that doesn't have a speculative-office-of-silicon-photonics group hanging around somewhere? Why highlight Oracle?
Again, that's something that a I find somewhat surprising. By politician standards, Obama's (or at least some suitably-empowered flunky's) level of expertise is high. And this is sort of a Big Project for him, politically. I would have expected careful selection of contractors, and contractors placed on notice that Hell Hath No Fury like the customer if they fuck this one up.
The thing that's interesting about the 'blame the developers' position is that, in the run-up to the election, it was generally demonstrated that Obama's tech (management) chops were head-and-shoulders above his opponent's. (Obama's election-information-system-thing was called 'Narwhal', Romney's 'Orca'. Arstechnica has some good coverage of the two; but you can google around for other info. In short, though, 'Narwhal' was considered agile, cloud-architecture-oriented, etc, etc, etc, modern buzzwords, and brutally outperformed the competition.)
Given that healthcare reform is Sort of A Big Thing (even if the result he got is basically Romneycare, as it exists in MA from before Romney's conversion to the idea that it threatens the fundamental underpinnings of America), I would have expected that an IT project in support of it would have been running in skunkworks mode from pretty much the moment of the election, if not before, and that absolutely every effort would have been made to assure success.
Just for the sake of perspective, 'big government' didn't "just put a man on the moon", it was an iterative process going all the way back to the experience of the Nazi war criminals we hastily whitewashed, up through a variety of incremental improvements and test designs (along with various accidents, some fatal), until we get to the Apollo missions that everyone actually remembers (and some of those had Issues as well).
Apollo 1 didn't, exactly go so hot(well, it actually went pretty hot indeed), and at least 5 others were killed in jet-based training.
Gemini 8 almost went rather badly, Apollo 12 was struck by lighting, Apollo 13's multiple issues are well known, Apollo 15 had parachute problems.
An assortment of workers and techs have also snuffed it in ground based accidents while working on space launch hardware.
This is not to say that the healthcare.gov rolllout was a success (it wasn't); but website launch failures are pretty boring as failure goes, everyone from small-business intranets up to major web companies seems to fuck them up on occasion. The bigger question will be time-to-fix. To use TFA's own analogy, you could have written "Why can't big government launch a rocket?" when Apollo 1 rather embarassingly caught fire on the ground, reducing the entire crew to charred corpses, because it had been filled with pure oxygen and improperly passivated. As we now know, they can, just not on the first try.
Even 1024x768 is 786432 pixels. 8bpp, 30FPS is 22.5MB/s, 16bpp obiously twice that. I suppose, on consideration, that 50MB/s (purely of framebuffer transferring) would probably be an acceptable load for a nominally 133MB/s basic-desktop PCI bus. A shared, graphics only, one would be better; but at that level of fiddling, you might as well just dump the 2d features on the 3d board (why, hello there, exactly what in fact happened, we were just talking about you...)
Interesting. I'm surprised that they managed to pull that off over a PCI bus. Especially before people got serious about security-through-randomization of the address space layout, it's always been conceptually fairly simple for anything with memory access to dump stuff into the framebuffer (they seem to have bitrotted; but there used to be some amusing examples designed for use against classic macs over firewire, since that was both external and had DMA, dumping flying toasters directly on top of your victim's desktop, silently grabbing frames out of their framebuffer, that sort of thing); but PCI is shared, and just not all that fast (compared to the demands of uncompressed video output of any nontrivial resolution and bit depth.
Out of curiosity, did the PowerVR cards manage to behave well in that regard, or could you induce situations where firing up the 3d cratered throughput on any IDE/ethernet/whatever peripherals on the same PCI bus, or where frames dropped all over the place because your IDE controller decided that something needed to Get Written NOW, and grabbed mastery of the bus at the wrong moment?
If your car, or friends, include components of the same quality as x86 ACPI implementations, I would strongly recommend getting rid of them. Yesterday.
I'm not interested in defending Nvidia (if they want to pull stunts like Optimus, it's their job to make them work, nobody said life was fair.); but 'Optimus' is woven throughout the system like an inoperable late-stage cancer for a reason: detecting arbitrary 3d acceleration load and (theoretically) transparently grabbing the work from the Intel GPU, handing it off to the Nvidia GPU, and using the now-lobotomized Intel part purely as a place to dump the finished frames for display (this arrangement, where the Intel integrated graphics part can remain permanently connected to all video outputs, and any video switching silicon can be eliminated from the board cost, replaces the first generation of 'switchable' graphics, where display outputs were physically switched between the two GPUs, apparently OEMs didn't like that one very much) isn't exactly a trivial problem.
That doesn't excuse a defective solution to a nontrivial problem; but until GPU load gets the couple of decades of civilizing and refinement that CPU load monitoring has received, it's going to be hacky at best.
Get Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4 on a 4k screen and your opinion will rapidly change. They can barely even make 40 fps !
Hence my weasel-wording of 'few to none'. Though, if somebody thinks that a $550 GPU is excessive, they probably aren't buying 4k screens, yet. People who use the term 'just to play another CoD game' with that tone of disdain probably aren't Crysis or Battlefield 4 poster children, either.
There were actually good games to play on the PC. But $550 for a pixel pumper just to play another CoD game. Not worth it.
Few to none of them need a $550 GPU, even on 1920x1080 and higher; but the PC is where all the good games are, aside from a few XBOX/Playstation title still in exclusivity periods, and anything Nintendo, if that's your thing.
I can't think of a platform-jealousy incident as a PC gamer since, what, Escape Velocity and Marathon?
I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver..Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.
As much as I find 'Catalyst Control Center' to be totally fucking useless, and would be pleased by a 'just the damn driver, the OS already has interfaces for changing monitor resolution and whatnot' edition, isn't using relevant vendor APIs for your application, rather than rolling your own or using real antiques, sort of what you are encouraged to do?
Its existence is obnoxious; but it would hardly be the better for depending on an older.NET version, or QT, or some braindead AMD custom nonsense, would it?
Apparently, those were associated with a different program... How many different programs are there? That's a state secret, citizen! Are 'violations that even our internal affairs flunkies can't pretend away automatically re-classified as part of PROJECT BAD-EGG, which is the only program with any history of violations? Gosh no! Could we just classify each distinct login by every single analyst as a 'program' in order to say that we have a 100% record on shutting down programs with violations associated? Well, it's a big namespace, so why not?
Are there even any datacenters, power plants, or other such facilities that don't use a closed-loop (full of suitably domesticated, additive-laced, and probably unpleasant enough to be illegal to discharge in quantity, between the metal ions and the assorted biocides, coolant fluid) and then a big, durable, heat exchanger that couples the internal loop to the hostile-but-cheap cold water from the outside world?
This doesn't change the general "Oh, you want to put that on a boat... Just go back over my price list and double all the numbers you see..." rule; but I'd be more surprised to hear about somebody playing fast-and-dangerous with an open-loop cooling system, directly exposed to the environment, than by Google attempting to put a rack of servers almost anywhere in or near Earth's gravity well...
Really, (to the degree that Apple ever consents to anybody who isn't them having the keys to the kingdom), a device configuration profile is intended to be the keys to the kingdom. It's the closest thing to binding an iPhone to AD that Apple shows any signs of supporting, and should really be treated in a similar way (ie. the fact that binding a computer to an AD domain essentially owns it in every imaginable way, vs. the domain admin, is a feature. However, if your ISP's setup instructions told you "Now, add your computer to the ISP.com directory." you would, and should, run away screaming.)
(Incidentally, that list is why every 'iOS MDM solution' is almost exactly the same, right down to the names of various options and config fields, except with a slightly more or less lousy web interface: all of them can twiddle any item on that list, for devices slaved to them; but none of them can touch anything else. Apple has been slowly adding power and granularity, under pressure from institutional iOS deployments; but device profiles are intended as a management tool, albeit one that never really puts full control in the hands of the IT office, since you don't get away from Apple.)
What honestly does surprise me a bit is that Apple doesn't automatically blacklist/nuke from the app store, and generally unleash hell upon, any outfit that tries to deploy these things as though they were 'apps', to institutionally unaffiliated end users. Any management tool worth its salt is, by design, a crazy dangerous attack toolkit if the manager isn't somebody you want to be managing your device. That's not really a flaw, just a fact. It isn't a surprise that Apple's management interface, while obnoxiously limited in certain ways, is no different; but it is something of a surprise that they aren't cracking down harder on random sleazy outfits attempting to push config profiles onto devices where they really have no business exercising that kind of control.
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Remember, these are leaked return figures from Best Buy: given how hellish the experience of returning a product there can be, another third may have just shoved the thing in a sock drawer and eaten the loss.
CPU upgrades are mostly doable (approximately as much as in a hypothetical desktop computer where you can't do a motherboard swap); but GPU upgrades seem to be game over. Yeah, MxM 'exists'; but very few laptops use it, there is virtually no secondary market in MxM cards (much less GPU vendors or their OEMs putting new MxM cards, with new GPUs, on the market as individual parts, it's almost all working-pulls from dead hardware), and, while the module is the same size and shape at all times, the require cooling certainly isn't...
This is excellent. At my company we are not allowed to have phones with cameras, so now I am juggling my private smartphone and a kick-ass Nokia 101 which I take to my desk.
If I could build a smartphone with a decent touchscreen, no camera, and dual sim capabilities I'd be really happy.
I've always been somewhat surprised by how (relatively) few vendors of fancy smartphones don't have a "My employer is paranoid, I'll give you $100 extra to leave out the phone module during assembly." build-to-order option.
Doesn't solve anybody's problem if they still want their phone to take pictures outside of work; but if you just don't care about your phone's camera, it'd at least let you choose from a much longer list of contemporary gear.
With some talented exceptions, people who write lists of forbidden objects for a living often exhibit dangerously limited imagination.
That's certainly the impression that only gets deeper every time I interact with somebody who can afford more lawyers than I can. Plus, Mandatory Binding Arbitration with the arbiter of their choice, in the venue of their choice, according to a contract that they reserve the right to amend at any time if it wasn't bad enough originally!
"We are going to achieve a consensus ad idem concerning this medical coverage policy, by one method or another. Now, would you like to do this the easy way, or are you going to make me do it the hard way?"
Also, given the generally negative effects of both poverty and ill-health on things like school attendance and performance, there is a fairly strong incentive to make these mechanisms accessible even to adults who are probably permanently screwed at this point. Even if it's too late to do much more than write them off, they are the ones we need to work with if we want to head off the next generation of probably permanently screwed people before it's too late.
"[T]he content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible." They really are setting the bar high in Kentucky.
What I want to know is who they had to waterboard to get insurance companies to provide information about their policies written at a 6th-grade level...
Mine alternates between issuing cryptic tomes (with pictures of happy, smiling, healthy people on the front, naturally) that alternate between dense medical-billing-and-coding jargon and EULA-like 'eh, you'll discover what we don't cover after you've had the procedure' disclaimers.
As much as I enjoy making fun of the developing world, why should we permit vital, allegedly mutually-consensual, contracts to be couched in language that a substantial portion of the people who 'agree' to them aren't capable of understanding? Without mutual understanding, much less mutual consent, centuries of contract law are reduced to a mockery.
Can you think of any rights or prerogatives that you currently possess that the feds would need to get your signature in some super-secret-crafty-scheme in order to remove?
Haven't we been using explosives to clear the landing one of tall brush, inconvenient locals, and anything else for at least decades now?
Nothing says 'we come in peace' quite like blasting the site flat before touchdown!
Is there a single hardware related company that doesn't have a speculative-office-of-silicon-photonics group hanging around somewhere? Why highlight Oracle?
Again, that's something that a I find somewhat surprising. By politician standards, Obama's (or at least some suitably-empowered flunky's) level of expertise is high. And this is sort of a Big Project for him, politically. I would have expected careful selection of contractors, and contractors placed on notice that Hell Hath No Fury like the customer if they fuck this one up.
The thing that's interesting about the 'blame the developers' position is that, in the run-up to the election, it was generally demonstrated that Obama's tech (management) chops were head-and-shoulders above his opponent's. (Obama's election-information-system-thing was called 'Narwhal', Romney's 'Orca'. Arstechnica has some good coverage of the two; but you can google around for other info. In short, though, 'Narwhal' was considered agile, cloud-architecture-oriented, etc, etc, etc, modern buzzwords, and brutally outperformed the competition.)
Given that healthcare reform is Sort of A Big Thing (even if the result he got is basically Romneycare, as it exists in MA from before Romney's conversion to the idea that it threatens the fundamental underpinnings of America), I would have expected that an IT project in support of it would have been running in skunkworks mode from pretty much the moment of the election, if not before, and that absolutely every effort would have been made to assure success.
Just for the sake of perspective, 'big government' didn't "just put a man on the moon", it was an iterative process going all the way back to the experience of the Nazi war criminals we hastily whitewashed, up through a variety of incremental improvements and test designs (along with various accidents, some fatal), until we get to the Apollo missions that everyone actually remembers (and some of those had Issues as well).
Apollo 1 didn't, exactly go so hot(well, it actually went pretty hot indeed), and at least 5 others were killed in jet-based training.
Gemini 8 almost went rather badly, Apollo 12 was struck by lighting, Apollo 13's multiple issues are well known, Apollo 15 had parachute problems.
An assortment of workers and techs have also snuffed it in ground based accidents while working on space launch hardware.
This is not to say that the healthcare.gov rolllout was a success (it wasn't); but website launch failures are pretty boring as failure goes, everyone from small-business intranets up to major web companies seems to fuck them up on occasion. The bigger question will be time-to-fix. To use TFA's own analogy, you could have written "Why can't big government launch a rocket?" when Apollo 1 rather embarassingly caught fire on the ground, reducing the entire crew to charred corpses, because it had been filled with pure oxygen and improperly passivated. As we now know, they can, just not on the first try.
Even 1024x768 is 786432 pixels. 8bpp, 30FPS is 22.5MB/s, 16bpp obiously twice that. I suppose, on consideration, that 50MB/s (purely of framebuffer transferring) would probably be an acceptable load for a nominally 133MB/s basic-desktop PCI bus. A shared, graphics only, one would be better; but at that level of fiddling, you might as well just dump the 2d features on the 3d board (why, hello there, exactly what in fact happened, we were just talking about you...)
Interesting. I'm surprised that they managed to pull that off over a PCI bus. Especially before people got serious about security-through-randomization of the address space layout, it's always been conceptually fairly simple for anything with memory access to dump stuff into the framebuffer (they seem to have bitrotted; but there used to be some amusing examples designed for use against classic macs over firewire, since that was both external and had DMA, dumping flying toasters directly on top of your victim's desktop, silently grabbing frames out of their framebuffer, that sort of thing); but PCI is shared, and just not all that fast (compared to the demands of uncompressed video output of any nontrivial resolution and bit depth.
Out of curiosity, did the PowerVR cards manage to behave well in that regard, or could you induce situations where firing up the 3d cratered throughput on any IDE/ethernet/whatever peripherals on the same PCI bus, or where frames dropped all over the place because your IDE controller decided that something needed to Get Written NOW, and grabbed mastery of the bus at the wrong moment?
If your car, or friends, include components of the same quality as x86 ACPI implementations, I would strongly recommend getting rid of them. Yesterday.
I'm not interested in defending Nvidia (if they want to pull stunts like Optimus, it's their job to make them work, nobody said life was fair.); but 'Optimus' is woven throughout the system like an inoperable late-stage cancer for a reason: detecting arbitrary 3d acceleration load and (theoretically) transparently grabbing the work from the Intel GPU, handing it off to the Nvidia GPU, and using the now-lobotomized Intel part purely as a place to dump the finished frames for display (this arrangement, where the Intel integrated graphics part can remain permanently connected to all video outputs, and any video switching silicon can be eliminated from the board cost, replaces the first generation of 'switchable' graphics, where display outputs were physically switched between the two GPUs, apparently OEMs didn't like that one very much) isn't exactly a trivial problem.
That doesn't excuse a defective solution to a nontrivial problem; but until GPU load gets the couple of decades of civilizing and refinement that CPU load monitoring has received, it's going to be hacky at best.
Get Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4 on a 4k screen and your opinion will rapidly change. They can barely even make 40 fps !
Hence my weasel-wording of 'few to none'. Though, if somebody thinks that a $550 GPU is excessive, they probably aren't buying 4k screens, yet. People who use the term 'just to play another CoD game' with that tone of disdain probably aren't Crysis or Battlefield 4 poster children, either.
There were actually good games to play on the PC. But $550 for a pixel pumper just to play another CoD game. Not worth it.
Few to none of them need a $550 GPU, even on 1920x1080 and higher; but the PC is where all the good games are, aside from a few XBOX/Playstation title still in exclusivity periods, and anything Nintendo, if that's your thing.
I can't think of a platform-jealousy incident as a PC gamer since, what, Escape Velocity and Marathon?
I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver. .Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.
As much as I find 'Catalyst Control Center' to be totally fucking useless, and would be pleased by a 'just the damn driver, the OS already has interfaces for changing monitor resolution and whatnot' edition, isn't using relevant vendor APIs for your application, rather than rolling your own or using real antiques, sort of what you are encouraged to do?
.NET version, or QT, or some braindead AMD custom nonsense, would it?
Its existence is obnoxious; but it would hardly be the better for depending on an older
Apparently, those were associated with a different program... How many different programs are there? That's a state secret, citizen! Are 'violations that even our internal affairs flunkies can't pretend away automatically re-classified as part of PROJECT BAD-EGG, which is the only program with any history of violations? Gosh no! Could we just classify each distinct login by every single analyst as a 'program' in order to say that we have a 100% record on shutting down programs with violations associated? Well, it's a big namespace, so why not?
Somebody who knows how to lose things, good and hard, when the occasion calls for it can be a very valuable henchman....
Are there even any datacenters, power plants, or other such facilities that don't use a closed-loop (full of suitably domesticated, additive-laced, and probably unpleasant enough to be illegal to discharge in quantity, between the metal ions and the assorted biocides, coolant fluid) and then a big, durable, heat exchanger that couples the internal loop to the hostile-but-cheap cold water from the outside world?
This doesn't change the general "Oh, you want to put that on a boat... Just go back over my price list and double all the numbers you see..." rule; but I'd be more surprised to hear about somebody playing fast-and-dangerous with an open-loop cooling system, directly exposed to the environment, than by Google attempting to put a rack of servers almost anywhere in or near Earth's gravity well...
Really, (to the degree that Apple ever consents to anybody who isn't them having the keys to the kingdom), a device configuration profile is intended to be the keys to the kingdom. It's the closest thing to binding an iPhone to AD that Apple shows any signs of supporting, and should really be treated in a similar way (ie. the fact that binding a computer to an AD domain essentially owns it in every imaginable way, vs. the domain admin, is a feature. However, if your ISP's setup instructions told you "Now, add your computer to the ISP.com directory." you would, and should, run away screaming.)
(Incidentally, that list is why every 'iOS MDM solution' is almost exactly the same, right down to the names of various options and config fields, except with a slightly more or less lousy web interface: all of them can twiddle any item on that list, for devices slaved to them; but none of them can touch anything else. Apple has been slowly adding power and granularity, under pressure from institutional iOS deployments; but device profiles are intended as a management tool, albeit one that never really puts full control in the hands of the IT office, since you don't get away from Apple.)
What honestly does surprise me a bit is that Apple doesn't automatically blacklist/nuke from the app store, and generally unleash hell upon, any outfit that tries to deploy these things as though they were 'apps', to institutionally unaffiliated end users. Any management tool worth its salt is, by design, a crazy dangerous attack toolkit if the manager isn't somebody you want to be managing your device. That's not really a flaw, just a fact. It isn't a surprise that Apple's management interface, while obnoxiously limited in certain ways, is no different; but it is something of a surprise that they aren't cracking down harder on random sleazy outfits attempting to push config profiles onto devices where they really have no business exercising that kind of control.