My concern would be that, once you start demanding enough actual movement to get the (quite sophisticated) mechanisms we have for tracking and localizing our body in space(It's actually pretty impressive. Unless you have a lesion study all about you, you should find things like 'bring the tips of your left and right index finger together, behind your back, with your eyes closed' quite trivial, assuming your joints are up to it, all based on unconscious processing of various sensory input) any fudging of the correlation between what you can feel your body doing and what you can see your avatar doing onscreen is going to go flying deep into nausea territory faster than an undergrad who has just discovered existentialism...
Doing a pure 1-1 correlation between onscreen and 'real' movement is a technical challenge; but if you start having to deliberately fudge game-specific mechanics because the controller doesn't even pretend to support them, it isn't going to be pretty. Explaining to your inner ear why, say, 'running' and 'turning' work just as expected; but 'pop-out-and-fire-from-behind-cover-because-this-is-gears-of-war' is just mapped to a button, rather than displacing your torso and tilting your head, is going to be puke city.
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
For instance, if you are on a system where kernel mode setting Isn't Quite There Yet, it is fairly likely that 'pretty' won't even be possible, just because of the amount of flailing between the BIOS and early boot mucking around in some legacy VGA mode, and then a bunch of flickering when things eventually get handed to X. It's not so much that anything terribly useful is directly made possible by being able to turn on the fancy a few seconds earlier; but signs of togetherness in the graphics drivers are generally a good thing.
....who thinks slander is a strange thing to ban legally? As a skeptic it seems both epistemically and pragmatically difficult to work with such laws, and I feel we should try and create unlegislated social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead.
The theory is based largely on the...unimpressive... history of 'social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead'. Unless you really suck at character assassination, you should be able to get a juicy lie into circulation enormously faster, further, and more durably than any mundane and tedious truth.
(Now, of course, some slander/libel/sedition/etc. laws are pretty specifically aimed at "Don't say mean things about People More Important Than You, especially if they are true, and those are a sordid lot; but the idea that lying about somebody in a way calculated to damage them is treated as a flavor of damage is because that has generally proven to be true)
I guess it really Depends on your definition of "Prompt" either legally or culturally. In some cultures payment of invoices after 30-120 days is considered normal business practice.
Based on the bios, I'd say that this isn't a cultural misunderstanding(unless 'self-satisfied marketing flacks who refer to themselves as "creatives"' are a 'culture' now).
You have no sympathy for a large company trying to bully a woman out of 50,000 units of money -- over a claim about them not paying 150 units of money. In other words - if you said that I withheld a dollar from you, it would then be fair to claim that I caused $333 of damage to you? Really?
If what she said is true then she has nothing to worry about. However she'll have to be able to prove it's true.
Civil claims are ruinously expensive no matter what(even best case, a jurisdiction with robust speech protections and an anti-SLAPP statute with teeth, she'd need somebody to take the case on contingency, and have a sufficiently flexible schedule that 'Oh, just getting embroiled in an ongoing court case' won't, say, get her fired). Also, you might be thinking of American libel law. Over on her Britannic Majesty's side of the pond, the state of libel law is notoriously ghastly.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
Sure, the JVM itself always got a reasonable amount of love, and the historically-comical nature of Windows security took some of the heat off browser plugins; but has the 'well, if we just add a sandbox, we can take something that works fairly well for instruction-set and OS abstraction of trusted workloads and adapt it to the 'run any old shit the internet throws at you' use case ever been anything but a bad idea waiting to bite?
It's also an odd set of choices. The senator, going by his interest group endorsements and voting record, is pretty much a stock Missisippi conservative. Apparently a trifle too fond of earmarks to be a real hit with team Tea Party; but solid numbers on pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax. The choice of him and the president(Obama's reputation for liberalism is only deserved in certain areas; but boy is it ever persistent...) just seems rather dissonant.
As an expression of general distaste, you'd expect them to hit the president and, say, the majority and minority leaders, or the Appropriations Commitee. As an expression of a specific ideology, you'd expect targets that are all opposed to it...
The interesting thing(in the context of the transformation of christian thinking on Usury) is the difference that developed between the catholics and the protestants:
Because so much of catholic religious and philosophical thought owed a debt to Aristotelian natural law theory that verged on being a second mortgage, they spent much more time grappling with(and tended to structure their solutions to dodge around) the notion that it was 'contrary to nature for money to fructify', with assorted other arguments(duty to charity, god's postlapsarian condemnation to live 'by the sweat of your brows' seen as a condemnation of unearned income, and others) playing a secondary role.
Partially because their strong 'sola scriptura' bent kept them off the Aristotle a bit(protestant moralists generally didn't mind approvingly quoting catholic condemnations of usury; but the role of christianized Aristotelianism was overall much, much smaller), and partly because they developed later, and much more in the context of an urbanized or semi-urbanized population with mercantile activity, protestant thinking on the subject frequently went directly for the 'duty of charity' angle, and voceferiously attacked 'consumption credit', extended to the poor; as a violation of that duty; but was largely untroubled by capital markets and instruments that dealt in business investment.
The social, pragmatic, reasoning and effect were actually quite similar in both cases(as you note). Even to this day, payday loans, check-cashing joints, and the like are considered pretty sleazy by all but the most doctrinare free-marketeers, and neither the catholic nor protestant positions endorsed the extension of consumption credit.
The difference is that, betweent their natural law enthusiasm and their long history of arguments against usury, the catholic position had to be much more creative about logic-chopping their way to the conclusion, while the reformation allowed the protestant position to mostly ignore the accumulated precedent, rather than having to produce a body of circumvention and subtle amendment.
As a historical note, christianity used to have nearly identical rules concerning usury; and the deep suspicion of interest-bearing loans is a least as old as Aristotle(who was Not A Fan).
As time went on, though, a number of... increasingly creative... legalisms were hacked together to allow contractual arrangements that were loans at interest in everything but name. In the case of christianity, the charade was so transparent, and the amount of obviously-loan-backed economic activity so significant, by the early modern period, if not earlier, that almost everyone bowed to the inevitable and "usury" stopped meaning 'charging interest' and started meaning 'charging lots and lots of interest'(and even 'lots and lots' has proven to be pretty flexible).
Islam has not (yet) reached the 'eh, fuck it, sure we charge interest' stage; but let's just say that they are doing some downright jesuitical work at the 'So, what sophistry can we spin to make interest not look like interest?' stage. The range of products dubbed 'islamic finance' won't say 'interest'; but it will look like a duck and quack like one.
Let's put it this way: The late Mr. Jobs, not himself exactly a Stallmanesque exemplar of the principles of software freedom, described the measures needed to get Blu-Ray support as 'a bag of hurt' for a reason(that probably wasn't even entirely about selling more movies on iTunes)...
That probably depends more on what people are shooting and editing with on the one end, and what people are decoding and viewing with on the other.
Thanks to the magic of lossy compression, you can get pretty much any resolution you want at any data rate you want(just ask Youtube about their 1080p...). If memory serves, BD-ROM 'HD' video tops out at just under 50mb/s, and is generally considered endurable, and many broadcast and cable channels squeeze considerably harder than that. If we naively assume that pushing 4 times the pixels takes around 4 times the bandwidth, we are still only talking a 200mb/s stream, with considerable room to move downward if you find the notion of people buying $20k displays to watch stop-motion legovision amusing...
The bigger problem is likely to be that camera gear, and hardware for transmitting, storing, and editing the uncompressed video are excitingly expensive and not terribly well justified by the market, with the cheaper(but much more distributed) problem of a whole lot of fixed-function decoders that top out on 1080p material.
The weird thing is that the Mali-400 MP on the RK3066 shows up in devices all over the place on the benchmark list. The one you link to is #71; but the same GPU also hangs out in a big cluster down at #248-251(even weirder, just above that cluster of "Up to 1.6 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Mali-400 MP (quad core, 250 MHz)" are some higher-scoring "1 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 ARM Mali 400 MP (single core)" devices. And (unlike CPUs for some workloads, GPUs are generally alleged to parallelize well)).
It is a bit surprising to see Nvidia not outgunning the 'sure it's dreadful; but at least it sips power!' players, even with a mains-powered STB that is pretty much limited only by thermal headroom; but either something is severely dubious with futuremark, or there are some subtle ways to fuck up the implementation of exactly the same hardware.
You can force Win7 to load an unsigned driver; but(at least if things are working as designed) an unsigned driver with access to anything in the 'Protected Media Path' will, indeed, cause the system to report that the PMP is compromised if anything asks. Most software doesn't care, Blu-ray playback is probably the exception.
I don't know if it has come to this; but some additional cat-and-mousing could also be done by the playback client. Some game and program DRM systems used to have the 'feature' of preventing the application from running if they detected a SCSI CD-ROM drive in the system, since virtually no consumer systems had such hardware; but most ISO-mounter virtual CD devices were implemented as SCSI devices. It wouldn't be hard to imagine similarly paranoid probing of the video device for any signs of being a fake(a process that might be a great deal easier because real GPUs have capabilities that are hard to emulate in software, like very, very, very fast execution of certain workloads).
It isn't clear that MS has anything coherent in the 'stop ipads and cellphones and stuff from eating our casual customers' column; but all they'd have to do to move Win8 from 'Windows Vista's Revenge' to 'worthy, if not groundbreaking, series of incremental improvements to various aspects of Windows 7' would be to flip the switch and have non-touch devices default to 'desktop' and touch devices default to 'the UI formerly known as Metro'.
Pretty much everything is still present in Win8; but they seem content to just stick their fingers in their ears and ignore the problem, even as OEMs have started shipping ghastly craplets designed to vaguely resemble a start menu. I just don't get it.
I don't know if it will run well; but running 'better' than a single-core CPU built on an older design and running at less than half the clock speed, with half the RAM, should be essentially automatic.
Given that all these little things have hardware decoders, I suspect that actual video decode(for mutually supported codecs) will be close enough to be irrelevant(unless a terribly slow storage bus is messing with things somewhere); but XBMC interface/overlay/widgets will probably appreciate the extra room...
It's also worth noting, just for the sake of balance, that '73d in benchmarks' is a close to meaningless figure, equivalent to declaring that a given computer with, say, an i5 CPU is "not even in the top hundred" because you can buy hundreds of distinct SKUs that have i7 CPUs.
On the benchmark page you can see that major swaths of the benchmark list are near duplicates.
The top 20-odd spots are "quad-core Krait 300 Adreno 320", with the bulk of the next 50 being "dual-core Krait 300 Adreno 320".
The oddballs are "2 GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2580 PowerVR SGX544MP2", Samsung's "Up to 1.7 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 Mali-T604" and one or two other minor variants.
It's actually pretty surprising how much variation their is(in at least one case a dual Krait benchmarked ahead of several quad Kraits, allegedly at the same clock speed, and the ASUS transformer with a slower Tegra3 benches ahead of the OUYA with a higher clocked and otherwise identical SoC); but there Just. Aren't. That. Many. SoCs at the high end of the market.
There are definitely faster chips(especially on the CPU side, Nvidia went a bit light on the CPU side on the theory, unsurprising for them, that GPU is what counts); but only a handful, just used in 70-odd devices.
This fact doesn't make the Tegra3 any faster in an absolute sense; but there aren't even enough SoCs on the market for something to meaningfully be '73d'
People tend to forget that without the 'patent cost' we'd have no research. Drug companies need those massive profit margins in order to fund future research for present and future illnesses. Especially since the government drug research is at an all time low.
With patent costs, poor people with AIDs can't afford antiretrovirals. Result? The patentholder doesn't sell anything to them, and they die(and AIDs, given its transmission mechanism, has a funny habit of starting its work on mid/late teens and young adults, exactly the sort of human capital who might help their locations be less totally fucked in the future, if they aren't busy dying)...
Without patent costs? Patentholder still gets nothing; but health outcomes are substantially improved. Worst case, humanitarian win. Best case, future customers.
The tricky bit, of course, is that a rational, self-interested, patentholder(while they have no incentive to let people who could never pay die, since they couldn't have been customers anyway) does have an incentive to use whatever market-segmentation and price discrimination mechanisms are available to charge wealthier customers absolutely as much as they possibly can.
(It's analogous to universities that offer academic scholarships: It is mutually beneficial for the school and the poor-but-bright-and-motivated if talented students can afford to go to college; but it creates an incentive to set a 'Official Price: $50k+/yr. If you can't pay that, precisely as much as you can pay' rather than a lower equilibrium price, that would occur in absence of price discrimination mechanisms.)
I agree that VMWare will run you nontrivial money; but the 'overhead' argument leaves me more skeptical these days.
I don't deny that there is some, but now that hardware-assistance for virtualization is effectively obligatory in modern hardware, it isn't huge. Compared to the convenience features that you don't get with OS-level segregation(trivial snapshot/rollback, and migration from host to host being the big ones, it's just hard to get worked up about.
Certainly, if I were looking at a much bigger, much more homogenous, workload, I'd be much more worried about what I'm eating on VM overhead, and whether the virtualization software provider has really earned that slice of the per-machine cost; but for small/medium and fairly heterogenous loads, the number of CPU cycles that are sacrificed to make my life easier and more convenient just doesn't seem that serious.
My understanding is that the primary risk isn't from eating them(though I'd certainly be careful during prep, and if some horrid little cyst is just fine after being boiled I definitely didn't advise it); but the fact that they serve as a natural reservoir for the parasites and more or less continually shed them into the environment.
It always amazes me that people worry so much about moving one or two genes around in plants in a thought out and carefully controlled manner yet they hardly worry about the introduction of whole functional genomes (i.e. invasive species) into ecosystems. Given the clear and deleterious impacts of introduced species (as opposed to those for GMOs which are debatable at best) you would think there would be large organizations of anti-introduced genome activists.
Why would you expect activists on an issue where there is virtually no counterpressure?
Accidental introductions still happen, reasonably frequently, and individual 'wildcat' introductions (usually of something that somebody thinks will be tasty and/or amusing to hunt/fish) do happen as well; but essentially nobody in anything resembling an authoritative role will even suggest a deliberate introduction in anything but the most cautious terms(and usually then only in an effort to control a prior introduction that got out of hand).
The sheer difficulty of the task, and the near-impossibility of eradicating established populations, works against the effort; but there is no activism because being against introduced species is already policy(and downright uncontroversial policy, at that).
GMOs, by contrast, have much more... effective... friends and allies, which provides their opponents with some incentive to try to push back.
Regardless of how good or bad their cause is, people rarely get worked up about things that are already going the way they want.
It is a pity that they carry some pretty unpleasant parasites. Generally not lethal; but classic Journal-of-Tropical-Medicine-ghastly-worms-are-burrowing-through-my-internal-organs stuff.
Arguably, the problem isn't so much that 'nobody wears watches anymore'(though cellphones certainly haven't done them any favors); but nobody wears watches in the market range amenable to technology companies.
You've got your $2 digitals, unexciting but pretty solid at telling time for ages on a teeny little battery, fairly durable, and cheap enough that nobody cries if 'fairly' turns out not to be durable enough. Unless your 'smart watch' plan involves almost no money and almost no power, it'd better do something really cool if it is going to sway people away from these; because these things are cheaper and longer-running than anything 'smart' is going to be.
Then you've got the watches-as-jewelry segment, which spans a wide variety of tastes and price points; but jewelry-style luxury markets are more or less the opposite of what tech companies are good at. It will be a lot easier to sneak in here on price and care-and-feeding; but interest in 'this watch looks exactly like the other 10 million we paid foxconn to stamp out; because that's how economies of scale work, m'kay?' may be a problem.
If you had a 'smart watch' concept that was compelling enough to get the cheap seats to pay more and recharge more, or the jewelry section to embrace a disposable widget instead of some ostensibly 'timeless' fashion item, you'd have something that people would wear watches for, if necessary. That, though, is the tricky bit.
In operation since shortly after WWII wrapped up, and now Pearson steps in and the price spikes... Allow me a moment to collect myself after such an earth-shattering surprise. Does anybody know what moment of insanity and/or oversight in foundational structure allowed Pearson to get in on the action in the first place?
Why does this even need a warning? If you're too stupid not to understand to either A) not ingest these, or B) not give them to someone not old enough to know better, then by all means, swallow them all, then go get an MRI.
I find the overreaction(compared to less esoteric flavors of consumer-unsafety) rather strange; but the mechanism of harm is not wildly intuitive.
If you ingest one, the consequences are essentially nil. The coatings(generally either nickel or some epoxy or polymer) are reasonably inert and not particularly dangerous, and even the magnets themselves(while not considered biocompatible) are not a serious oral toxicity concern.
If you ingest two or more, with a time lag between ingestions, they can potentially snap together and trap intestinal tissue between them. No blood flow, the tissue dies, and you get necrosis, potential rupture, and other wacky fun.
That's exactly the sort of hazard scenario that isn't wildly obvious; but is also much more avoidable if you know about it. 1. Don't swallow them. 2. If you fail at 1, don't play with them for a few days, maybe a week just to be on the safe side. Easy.
Slashdot Mirror
My concern would be that, once you start demanding enough actual movement to get the (quite sophisticated) mechanisms we have for tracking and localizing our body in space(It's actually pretty impressive. Unless you have a lesion study all about you, you should find things like 'bring the tips of your left and right index finger together, behind your back, with your eyes closed' quite trivial, assuming your joints are up to it, all based on unconscious processing of various sensory input) any fudging of the correlation between what you can feel your body doing and what you can see your avatar doing onscreen is going to go flying deep into nausea territory faster than an undergrad who has just discovered existentialism...
Doing a pure 1-1 correlation between onscreen and 'real' movement is a technical challenge; but if you start having to deliberately fudge game-specific mechanics because the controller doesn't even pretend to support them, it isn't going to be pretty. Explaining to your inner ear why, say, 'running' and 'turning' work just as expected; but 'pop-out-and-fire-from-behind-cover-because-this-is-gears-of-war' is just mapped to a button, rather than displacing your torso and tilting your head, is going to be puke city.
It just needs to be fast IMHO.
Anyone else agree?
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
For instance, if you are on a system where kernel mode setting Isn't Quite There Yet, it is fairly likely that 'pretty' won't even be possible, just because of the amount of flailing between the BIOS and early boot mucking around in some legacy VGA mode, and then a bunch of flickering when things eventually get handed to X. It's not so much that anything terribly useful is directly made possible by being able to turn on the fancy a few seconds earlier; but signs of togetherness in the graphics drivers are generally a good thing.
....who thinks slander is a strange thing to ban legally? As a skeptic it seems both epistemically and pragmatically difficult to work with such laws, and I feel we should try and create unlegislated social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead.
The theory is based largely on the...unimpressive... history of 'social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead'. Unless you really suck at character assassination, you should be able to get a juicy lie into circulation enormously faster, further, and more durably than any mundane and tedious truth.
(Now, of course, some slander/libel/sedition/etc. laws are pretty specifically aimed at "Don't say mean things about People More Important Than You, especially if they are true, and those are a sordid lot; but the idea that lying about somebody in a way calculated to damage them is treated as a flavor of damage is because that has generally proven to be true)
I guess it really Depends on your definition of "Prompt" either legally or culturally. In some cultures payment of invoices after 30-120 days is considered normal business practice.
Based on the bios, I'd say that this isn't a cultural misunderstanding(unless 'self-satisfied marketing flacks who refer to themselves as "creatives"' are a 'culture' now).
You have no sympathy for a large company trying to bully a woman out of 50,000 units of money -- over a claim about them not paying 150 units of money. In other words - if you said that I withheld a dollar from you, it would then be fair to claim that I caused $333 of damage to you? Really?
It isn't a "large company". It's this guy, personally.
I don't know how large his company is; but behind every corporate veil, there is some asshole making the decisions.
If what she said is true then she has nothing to worry about. However she'll have to be able to prove it's true.
Civil claims are ruinously expensive no matter what(even best case, a jurisdiction with robust speech protections and an anti-SLAPP statute with teeth, she'd need somebody to take the case on contingency, and have a sufficiently flexible schedule that 'Oh, just getting embroiled in an ongoing court case' won't, say, get her fired). Also, you might be thinking of American libel law. Over on her Britannic Majesty's side of the pond, the state of libel law is notoriously ghastly.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
Sure, the JVM itself always got a reasonable amount of love, and the historically-comical nature of Windows security took some of the heat off browser plugins; but has the 'well, if we just add a sandbox, we can take something that works fairly well for instruction-set and OS abstraction of trusted workloads and adapt it to the 'run any old shit the internet throws at you' use case ever been anything but a bad idea waiting to bite?
It's also an odd set of choices. The senator, going by his interest group endorsements and voting record, is pretty much a stock Missisippi conservative. Apparently a trifle too fond of earmarks to be a real hit with team Tea Party; but solid numbers on pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax. The choice of him and the president(Obama's reputation for liberalism is only deserved in certain areas; but boy is it ever persistent...) just seems rather dissonant.
As an expression of general distaste, you'd expect them to hit the president and, say, the majority and minority leaders, or the Appropriations Commitee. As an expression of a specific ideology, you'd expect targets that are all opposed to it...
The interesting thing(in the context of the transformation of christian thinking on Usury) is the difference that developed between the catholics and the protestants:
Because so much of catholic religious and philosophical thought owed a debt to Aristotelian natural law theory that verged on being a second mortgage, they spent much more time grappling with(and tended to structure their solutions to dodge around) the notion that it was 'contrary to nature for money to fructify', with assorted other arguments(duty to charity, god's postlapsarian condemnation to live 'by the sweat of your brows' seen as a condemnation of unearned income, and others) playing a secondary role.
Partially because their strong 'sola scriptura' bent kept them off the Aristotle a bit(protestant moralists generally didn't mind approvingly quoting catholic condemnations of usury; but the role of christianized Aristotelianism was overall much, much smaller), and partly because they developed later, and much more in the context of an urbanized or semi-urbanized population with mercantile activity, protestant thinking on the subject frequently went directly for the 'duty of charity' angle, and voceferiously attacked 'consumption credit', extended to the poor; as a violation of that duty; but was largely untroubled by capital markets and instruments that dealt in business investment.
The social, pragmatic, reasoning and effect were actually quite similar in both cases(as you note). Even to this day, payday loans, check-cashing joints, and the like are considered pretty sleazy by all but the most doctrinare free-marketeers, and neither the catholic nor protestant positions endorsed the extension of consumption credit.
The difference is that, betweent their natural law enthusiasm and their long history of arguments against usury, the catholic position had to be much more creative about logic-chopping their way to the conclusion, while the reformation allowed the protestant position to mostly ignore the accumulated precedent, rather than having to produce a body of circumvention and subtle amendment.
As a historical note, christianity used to have nearly identical rules concerning usury; and the deep suspicion of interest-bearing loans is a least as old as Aristotle(who was Not A Fan).
As time went on, though, a number of... increasingly creative... legalisms were hacked together to allow contractual arrangements that were loans at interest in everything but name. In the case of christianity, the charade was so transparent, and the amount of obviously-loan-backed economic activity so significant, by the early modern period, if not earlier, that almost everyone bowed to the inevitable and "usury" stopped meaning 'charging interest' and started meaning 'charging lots and lots of interest'(and even 'lots and lots' has proven to be pretty flexible).
Islam has not (yet) reached the 'eh, fuck it, sure we charge interest' stage; but let's just say that they are doing some downright jesuitical work at the 'So, what sophistry can we spin to make interest not look like interest?' stage. The range of products dubbed 'islamic finance' won't say 'interest'; but it will look like a duck and quack like one.
Let's put it this way: The late Mr. Jobs, not himself exactly a Stallmanesque exemplar of the principles of software freedom, described the measures needed to get Blu-Ray support as 'a bag of hurt' for a reason(that probably wasn't even entirely about selling more movies on iTunes)...
That probably depends more on what people are shooting and editing with on the one end, and what people are decoding and viewing with on the other.
Thanks to the magic of lossy compression, you can get pretty much any resolution you want at any data rate you want(just ask Youtube about their 1080p...). If memory serves, BD-ROM 'HD' video tops out at just under 50mb/s, and is generally considered endurable, and many broadcast and cable channels squeeze considerably harder than that. If we naively assume that pushing 4 times the pixels takes around 4 times the bandwidth, we are still only talking a 200mb/s stream, with considerable room to move downward if you find the notion of people buying $20k displays to watch stop-motion legovision amusing...
The bigger problem is likely to be that camera gear, and hardware for transmitting, storing, and editing the uncompressed video are excitingly expensive and not terribly well justified by the market, with the cheaper(but much more distributed) problem of a whole lot of fixed-function decoders that top out on 1080p material.
The weird thing is that the Mali-400 MP on the RK3066 shows up in devices all over the place on the benchmark list. The one you link to is #71; but the same GPU also hangs out in a big cluster down at #248-251(even weirder, just above that cluster of "Up to 1.6 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Mali-400 MP (quad core, 250 MHz)" are some higher-scoring "1 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 ARM Mali 400 MP (single core)" devices. And (unlike CPUs for some workloads, GPUs are generally alleged to parallelize well)).
It is a bit surprising to see Nvidia not outgunning the 'sure it's dreadful; but at least it sips power!' players, even with a mains-powered STB that is pretty much limited only by thermal headroom; but either something is severely dubious with futuremark, or there are some subtle ways to fuck up the implementation of exactly the same hardware.
You can force Win7 to load an unsigned driver; but(at least if things are working as designed) an unsigned driver with access to anything in the 'Protected Media Path' will, indeed, cause the system to report that the PMP is compromised if anything asks. Most software doesn't care, Blu-ray playback is probably the exception.
I don't know if it has come to this; but some additional cat-and-mousing could also be done by the playback client. Some game and program DRM systems used to have the 'feature' of preventing the application from running if they detected a SCSI CD-ROM drive in the system, since virtually no consumer systems had such hardware; but most ISO-mounter virtual CD devices were implemented as SCSI devices. It wouldn't be hard to imagine similarly paranoid probing of the video device for any signs of being a fake(a process that might be a great deal easier because real GPUs have capabilities that are hard to emulate in software, like very, very, very fast execution of certain workloads).
It isn't clear that MS has anything coherent in the 'stop ipads and cellphones and stuff from eating our casual customers' column; but all they'd have to do to move Win8 from 'Windows Vista's Revenge' to 'worthy, if not groundbreaking, series of incremental improvements to various aspects of Windows 7' would be to flip the switch and have non-touch devices default to 'desktop' and touch devices default to 'the UI formerly known as Metro'.
Pretty much everything is still present in Win8; but they seem content to just stick their fingers in their ears and ignore the problem, even as OEMs have started shipping ghastly craplets designed to vaguely resemble a start menu. I just don't get it.
I don't know if it will run well; but running 'better' than a single-core CPU built on an older design and running at less than half the clock speed, with half the RAM, should be essentially automatic.
Given that all these little things have hardware decoders, I suspect that actual video decode(for mutually supported codecs) will be close enough to be irrelevant(unless a terribly slow storage bus is messing with things somewhere); but XBMC interface/overlay/widgets will probably appreciate the extra room...
It's also worth noting, just for the sake of balance, that '73d in benchmarks' is a close to meaningless figure, equivalent to declaring that a given computer with, say, an i5 CPU is "not even in the top hundred" because you can buy hundreds of distinct SKUs that have i7 CPUs.
On the benchmark page you can see that major swaths of the benchmark list are near duplicates.
The top 20-odd spots are "quad-core Krait 300 Adreno 320", with the bulk of the next 50 being "dual-core Krait 300 Adreno 320".
The oddballs are "2 GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2580 PowerVR SGX544MP2", Samsung's "Up to 1.7 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 Mali-T604" and one or two other minor variants.
It's actually pretty surprising how much variation their is(in at least one case a dual Krait benchmarked ahead of several quad Kraits, allegedly at the same clock speed, and the ASUS transformer with a slower Tegra3 benches ahead of the OUYA with a higher clocked and otherwise identical SoC); but there Just. Aren't. That. Many. SoCs at the high end of the market.
There are definitely faster chips(especially on the CPU side, Nvidia went a bit light on the CPU side on the theory, unsurprising for them, that GPU is what counts); but only a handful, just used in 70-odd devices.
This fact doesn't make the Tegra3 any faster in an absolute sense; but there aren't even enough SoCs on the market for something to meaningfully be '73d'
People tend to forget that without the 'patent cost' we'd have no research. Drug companies need those massive profit margins in order to fund future research for present and future illnesses. Especially since the government drug research is at an all time low.
Remember price discrimination/market segmentation:
With patent costs, poor people with AIDs can't afford antiretrovirals. Result? The patentholder doesn't sell anything to them, and they die(and AIDs, given its transmission mechanism, has a funny habit of starting its work on mid/late teens and young adults, exactly the sort of human capital who might help their locations be less totally fucked in the future, if they aren't busy dying)...
Without patent costs? Patentholder still gets nothing; but health outcomes are substantially improved. Worst case, humanitarian win. Best case, future customers.
The tricky bit, of course, is that a rational, self-interested, patentholder(while they have no incentive to let people who could never pay die, since they couldn't have been customers anyway) does have an incentive to use whatever market-segmentation and price discrimination mechanisms are available to charge wealthier customers absolutely as much as they possibly can.
(It's analogous to universities that offer academic scholarships: It is mutually beneficial for the school and the poor-but-bright-and-motivated if talented students can afford to go to college; but it creates an incentive to set a 'Official Price: $50k+/yr. If you can't pay that, precisely as much as you can pay' rather than a lower equilibrium price, that would occur in absence of price discrimination mechanisms.)
I agree that VMWare will run you nontrivial money; but the 'overhead' argument leaves me more skeptical these days.
I don't deny that there is some, but now that hardware-assistance for virtualization is effectively obligatory in modern hardware, it isn't huge. Compared to the convenience features that you don't get with OS-level segregation(trivial snapshot/rollback, and migration from host to host being the big ones, it's just hard to get worked up about.
Certainly, if I were looking at a much bigger, much more homogenous, workload, I'd be much more worried about what I'm eating on VM overhead, and whether the virtualization software provider has really earned that slice of the per-machine cost; but for small/medium and fairly heterogenous loads, the number of CPU cycles that are sacrificed to make my life easier and more convenient just doesn't seem that serious.
My understanding is that the primary risk isn't from eating them(though I'd certainly be careful during prep, and if some horrid little cyst is just fine after being boiled I definitely didn't advise it); but the fact that they serve as a natural reservoir for the parasites and more or less continually shed them into the environment.
It always amazes me that people worry so much about moving one or two genes around in plants in a thought out and carefully controlled manner yet they hardly worry about the introduction of whole functional genomes (i.e. invasive species) into ecosystems. Given the clear and deleterious impacts of introduced species (as opposed to those for GMOs which are debatable at best) you would think there would be large organizations of anti-introduced genome activists.
Why would you expect activists on an issue where there is virtually no counterpressure?
Accidental introductions still happen, reasonably frequently, and individual 'wildcat' introductions (usually of something that somebody thinks will be tasty and/or amusing to hunt/fish) do happen as well; but essentially nobody in anything resembling an authoritative role will even suggest a deliberate introduction in anything but the most cautious terms(and usually then only in an effort to control a prior introduction that got out of hand).
The sheer difficulty of the task, and the near-impossibility of eradicating established populations, works against the effort; but there is no activism because being against introduced species is already policy(and downright uncontroversial policy, at that).
GMOs, by contrast, have much more... effective... friends and allies, which provides their opponents with some incentive to try to push back.
Regardless of how good or bad their cause is, people rarely get worked up about things that are already going the way they want.
It is a pity that they carry some pretty unpleasant parasites. Generally not lethal; but classic Journal-of-Tropical-Medicine-ghastly-worms-are-burrowing-through-my-internal-organs stuff.
Arguably, the problem isn't so much that 'nobody wears watches anymore'(though cellphones certainly haven't done them any favors); but nobody wears watches in the market range amenable to technology companies.
You've got your $2 digitals, unexciting but pretty solid at telling time for ages on a teeny little battery, fairly durable, and cheap enough that nobody cries if 'fairly' turns out not to be durable enough. Unless your 'smart watch' plan involves almost no money and almost no power, it'd better do something really cool if it is going to sway people away from these; because these things are cheaper and longer-running than anything 'smart' is going to be.
Then you've got the watches-as-jewelry segment, which spans a wide variety of tastes and price points; but jewelry-style luxury markets are more or less the opposite of what tech companies are good at. It will be a lot easier to sneak in here on price and care-and-feeding; but interest in 'this watch looks exactly like the other 10 million we paid foxconn to stamp out; because that's how economies of scale work, m'kay?' may be a problem.
If you had a 'smart watch' concept that was compelling enough to get the cheap seats to pay more and recharge more, or the jewelry section to embrace a disposable widget instead of some ostensibly 'timeless' fashion item, you'd have something that people would wear watches for, if necessary. That, though, is the tricky bit.
In operation since shortly after WWII wrapped up, and now Pearson steps in and the price spikes... Allow me a moment to collect myself after such an earth-shattering surprise. Does anybody know what moment of insanity and/or oversight in foundational structure allowed Pearson to get in on the action in the first place?
Why does this even need a warning? If you're too stupid not to understand to either A) not ingest these, or B) not give them to someone not old enough to know better, then by all means, swallow them all, then go get an MRI.
I find the overreaction(compared to less esoteric flavors of consumer-unsafety) rather strange; but the mechanism of harm is not wildly intuitive.
If you ingest one, the consequences are essentially nil. The coatings(generally either nickel or some epoxy or polymer) are reasonably inert and not particularly dangerous, and even the magnets themselves(while not considered biocompatible) are not a serious oral toxicity concern.
If you ingest two or more, with a time lag between ingestions, they can potentially snap together and trap intestinal tissue between them. No blood flow, the tissue dies, and you get necrosis, potential rupture, and other wacky fun.
That's exactly the sort of hazard scenario that isn't wildly obvious; but is also much more avoidable if you know about it. 1. Don't swallow them. 2. If you fail at 1, don't play with them for a few days, maybe a week just to be on the safe side. Easy.