The Playbook packs a (atypically, for a RIM device) capable OMAP4430 and 1GB of RAM. I don't know if anybody has Linux running on one; but it's pretty much identical in spec to the Pandaboard, for which reports on Linux performance are not at all hard to find(though many are for the 1.2GHz 'ES' version, which should skew things a touch).
Unthrilling by the standards of linux running on one of Intel's little toys(probably with actual GPU support, no less!); but easily within the realm of endurable.
A water tank has no guns either. Does that make it "not a tank?"
As it happens, we call tanks 'tanks' because the brits called their tanks 'tanks' in order to convey the impression(pre-release) that they were not tanks...
Plus, unless your jurisdiction's laws regarding covert videotaping are atypically robust, the fact that the perv-cam is hidden in a fake fire alarm may violate more rules than the fact that you installed it above the bed in that apartment you rent out!
Just run the Flash you trust and need for normal functionality. Done and done.
The mere presence of Flash on the system allows it to be craftily run in more areas than you might expect(as with the 'flash exploit embedded in an Office document' story seen here just recently, along with PDFs in Acrobat and a bunch of other abominations). Even if you can find the correct toggles to shut that off, Flash's updater can't really be trusted not to merrily reinstall things whenever the next update comes out; but running a version of Flash that isn't the newest is just asking for trouble...
If it were only confined to a browser(and a browser that didn't trust it in the slightest), it wouldn't be so bad.
I don't know how much demand there would be for this; but there would seem to be a middle-ground option that would solve the problem:
If you don't know exactly what hardware the OS will be booting on; but do know that it won't change, you can probe once, save the results, and use them to charge blindly forward on all future boots.
You would still need the added complexity of the probing and modularity capabilities, and the added size of all the possible drivers, so the savings would only really be in boot time; but you could do it.
What I don't know is whether there would be enough hardware falling in this area to get support(either OSS that isn't bit-rotting or commercial that has enough customers to be reasonably priced per-unit). The PC/server markets can't assume static hardware(even laptop, and some tablet, users sometimes plug in USB devices if nothing else, and are probably even more likely to do mean things like putting the OS to sleep and then changing the hardware out from under it) and the really serious embedded people are not going to like the additional size and complexity.
The S29GL032N on the main system board is a 4 megabyte Spansion flash chip. Not luxurious; but well within the realm of a router-sized embedded linux(though it neither implies nor excludes a bunch of embedded OS options).
As for speed, Linux can be made to be quite snappy; but it wouldn't surprise me if enough of the lag is in starting up network-related stuff, along with whatever server program the device uses to allow the client to connect to it, that you wouldn't be able to readily distinguish between Linux, Vxworks, BSD or WinCE on speed alone: sure, an embedded OS booting from solid-state storage on known hardware should move like lighting; but then it has to bring up an external USB device, do the WPA dance, send a DHCP request and receive a reply, and then start up whatever server program the firmware guys threw together for the client to connect to. And then we don't actually know how often the client side of things actually polls the IP where it thinks the device is supposed to be, or whether the device sends out some sort of broadcast when it comes up, or what. Too many variables to even say how fast the OS comes up.
What baffles me is that the author of TFA is apparently geek enough to take a screwdriver to a $150 toy; but is making dumb guesses about OS type based on boot time even though he found a populated serial header, with RX and TX labelled, no less... C'mon, man, you can be pretty sure that the thing is 3.3v(based on the flash IC and lack of visible level converters, might be 5v or 5v-tolerant, highly unlikely to be RS-232), the pins are labelled for you, and it'll probably boot-spew something at you, why are you guessing based on boot time?
Parts of the rover, like motors and gears are supposed to be modular, yet they don't really look like that to me, maybe I'm just misreading the images.
To me, it looks like "Made in China" - medium cost build. There's some build quality, it's not made from the cheapest material available, but it's not for daily use. Well, it's supposed to be a toy..
I suspect that it's a matter of Brookstone's style. They do a lot of relatively pricey and dubiously useful novelty gadgets(the sort of thing you end up with if you do your technology shopping from the 'Skymall' catalog...) That's the sort of business with enough churn in the product catalog that you'd bankrupt yourself doing a lot of fully-custom parts, so you'll see moderately mod-friendly levels of modularity, lots of space between parts unless mechanically necessary, connectors rather than ribbon cables or soldered components, and so on; but it also isn't one that allows you to specialize around a few core products that you relentlessly refine over several product generations for maximum elegance in mass production and service.
Their price tags, and target market, likely keep them from going with the very nastiest build quality(the product manual, while no doubt uninformative, was probably in readable English, as well); but I wouldn't expect to find either beautifully refined elegance or impressive-but-deeply-DIY-unfriendly extreme miniaturization and integration in their stuff.
Not to mention all those (not always linux based; but generally dangerously overqualified in one way or another) network connected devices with cameras and microphones that people lovingly carry around and carefully keep charged and in working order totally voluntarily...
What I find sort of alarming is that excessive scribbling causes the firmware to fail, rather than to fall back to some sort of sane failsafe state.
It sounds like Samsung managed to make things brittle enough to be the first to fail under real-world conditions; but, no matter how much storage you provide, somebody could always demand more. You'd hope that the firmware would either behave sensibly as the storage fills up(and stop accepting requests for more) or at least fail sensibly and wipe or truncate the storage area and come right back up, ready for recovery...
I realize that implementing embedded flash objects in Office documents was probably something that mostly happened because Microsoft wanted OLE to make embedding arbitrary stuff in arbitrary stuff happen(unlike Adobe's sick fetish for inserting horrible things into PDFs, which is their own damn fault); but do Flash embeds in Office documents actually occur, in the wild, as something people would actually do and distribute, for anything other than malicious purposes? I honestly can't remember ever having seen a single one, ever.
It's probably worth, if nothing else, considering it as a matter of good practice.
The submitter is under no obligation to provide multiple localizations(which can be an arduous and nontrivial task, combining the thrill of tech writing with the skills of a translator); but building an application such that somebody providing a localization for it involves major surgery is pretty...retro.
Obviously, you haven't been watching Fox News. They have assured me that it was the evil government, and not base greed and the free market, that caused the crash.
Didn't you hear? It was Bill Clinton's army of crafty welfare negroes who somehow managed to sucker the brightest lights on Wall Street, despite having minimal prior experience with anything other than check-cashing joins and sleazy rent-to-own financing schemes... Makes perfect sense!
Given that the dumb fuckers who get caught passing a few thousand in bad checks tend to do more time than the smart fuckers who get caught passing a few billion in bad securities tend to do more time, I'd say that the quants are on to something...
(Can you imagine what would happen to sentencing guidelines if we decided 'fuck this shit' and started punishing large scale fraud with the same sorts of time-per-thousand-dollars-stolen that we do for blue-collar economic crimes?)
That's the especially baffling thing: theoretically, "XPS" is supposed to come in with the price premium over "Inspiron" that you would expect, but a bit cheaper than "Optiplex"; but Dell's enthusiasm for constantly-changing-but-sometimes-quite-large deals/discount codes/temporary sales/different prices between home and 'small business' stores/etc. actually meant that you could get a given 'XPS' for less than the closest equivalent 'Inspiron' depending on the phase of the moon.
I'm far from certain that they'll succeed as some sort of bold new flavor of console(as you say, the console incumbents are gearing up for a fresh spin, and PC gaming is pretty cheap, at least for undemanding titles, when you consider that you probably own a PC already); but I'm in for one on the hope that they'll be a version of those little Android 'stick PCs' or "mini PCs' that might actually remain stable long enough to get some firmware that isn't total shit.
I've played around with a few of the ebay special ones(which are cheaper, 50-80 dollars) and they are much more convenient than a PC to have sitting by the TV; but the firmware is pretty dreadful and there is such a mass of cryptically branded models flying around that the Cyanogenmod-and-similar brigade isn't too much help. Paying a little bit more to get a somewhat more powerful, and quite possibly better supported(1st and 3rd party) implementation of the idea is pretty attractive.
I doubt that it'll replace my PC for actual gaming duties; but media frontend and similar duties are handled in a different room entirely, so there is enough space to share.
Actually Dell's Enterprise level support is fairly good. Fortunately I haven't had much experience with consumer level support.
For somewhat mysterious reasons, they semi-bifurcated their consumer line into "Inspiron" and "XPS". There is a lot of overlap in specs(most models on one side of the fence are just a plastics kit away from a model on the other, though 'XPS' usually has more of the optional upgrades pre-added); but the "XPS" line also comes with nicer support, reasonably close to the support on enterprise desktop/laptop stuff, with just a few more dumb questions ahead of time because they aren't sure you are an actual tech.
I'm certainly not a lawyer, your lawyer, or his lawyer; but I'm pretty sure that 'having a feature that might facilitate some third party breaking the terms of use that they may or may not have agreed to' isn't actually a crime(unless you are being sued by the MPAA/RIAA, in which case basically anything that transmits or stores information that might conceivably be copyrighted is a conspiracy with the worst of pirates and pedo-terrorists).
Nothing that says they can't bury you in procedure until you suffocate; but the 'request' is bullshit and they ought to be ashamed of it. Is it ever a good thing for a file format to have only a single program capable of decoding it?
It seems a safe assumption that Google is following the numbers(you don't exactly turn a profit on online advertising margins without doing so).
The question is which numbers are they following?
Do owners of the 'zOMG Criminal records lookup!!!' websites pay more for "black" adsense terms? Do they pay for plausible sounding names and Google has discovered that click-through rates are better when their pair those websites with the "black" names? What is the cause?
It seems... unlikely... that Google is leaving good money on the table in order to bring subtle racism to ad placement. Major corporations usually reserve the 'this could be terrible PR if it gets out' stuff for schemes that are actually profitable. The question is, what aspect of the market(ad-sellers? audience attitudes? The racial makeup of Google's market share vs. other search engines?) are their algorithms picking up on?
ChromeOS does a reasonable amount of client-side caching at this point(you obviously aren't getting on the internet without a connection; but you won't be noticeably more screwed than the guy with a copy of Office and no internet connection).
Also, unless the environments I've seen are very atypical, network connectivity issues(WAN or LAN side) tend to disrupt schools and businesses pretty significantly because of how much of the workflow involves poking at the internet in some way, even if it's a totally bespoke application that looks and acts nothing like a browser...
The heartening result is that Harvard takes cheating seriously. They suspended about 60 students over it and a bunch of others are on probation -- probably because they couldn't prove those students cheated.
You call that 'serious'?
Harvard admits somewhere in the range of 5-6 percent of those who apply. Even if we assume that the bottom 75% or so of the applicant pool are just deluded optimists, Harvard could replace its entire class two or three times over with people who would love to have been admitted. If they were remotely serious, they could have banhammered everyone involved in cheating and called it a day. Instead they are being 'temporarily asked to leave'. That's crazy lenient given how trivial it would be to replace them, and how meaningful a degree from Harvard is supposed to be.
Anyone want to place some bets on how long four people in a tiny, bunkerlike hamster habitube surrounded by dust and hard vacuum would last before they really started head downhill psychologically?
Speaking of making money by selling snake oil to China... An, um, friend wants to know if there is a ludicrous backstory that works as well on Chinese customers as the old "Oh, this is a traditional Chinese remedy, rebalances your Qi with the wisdom of the orient" one does on Americans...
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The Playbook packs a (atypically, for a RIM device) capable OMAP4430 and 1GB of RAM. I don't know if anybody has Linux running on one; but it's pretty much identical in spec to the Pandaboard, for which reports on Linux performance are not at all hard to find(though many are for the 1.2GHz 'ES' version, which should skew things a touch).
Unthrilling by the standards of linux running on one of Intel's little toys(probably with actual GPU support, no less!); but easily within the realm of endurable.
In an ideal world, I could live a life without Java, but I love my Android phone...
Stop, stop, you are making Larry Ellison's lawyers cry.
Wait, actually, that's probably a feature. Carry on.
A water tank has no guns either. Does that make it "not a tank?"
As it happens, we call tanks 'tanks' because the brits called their tanks 'tanks' in order to convey the impression(pre-release) that they were not tanks...
Plus, unless your jurisdiction's laws regarding covert videotaping are atypically robust, the fact that the perv-cam is hidden in a fake fire alarm may violate more rules than the fact that you installed it above the bed in that apartment you rent out!
Just run the Flash you trust and need for normal functionality. Done and done.
The mere presence of Flash on the system allows it to be craftily run in more areas than you might expect(as with the 'flash exploit embedded in an Office document' story seen here just recently, along with PDFs in Acrobat and a bunch of other abominations). Even if you can find the correct toggles to shut that off, Flash's updater can't really be trusted not to merrily reinstall things whenever the next update comes out; but running a version of Flash that isn't the newest is just asking for trouble...
If it were only confined to a browser(and a browser that didn't trust it in the slightest), it wouldn't be so bad.
I don't know how much demand there would be for this; but there would seem to be a middle-ground option that would solve the problem:
If you don't know exactly what hardware the OS will be booting on; but do know that it won't change, you can probe once, save the results, and use them to charge blindly forward on all future boots.
You would still need the added complexity of the probing and modularity capabilities, and the added size of all the possible drivers, so the savings would only really be in boot time; but you could do it.
What I don't know is whether there would be enough hardware falling in this area to get support(either OSS that isn't bit-rotting or commercial that has enough customers to be reasonably priced per-unit). The PC/server markets can't assume static hardware(even laptop, and some tablet, users sometimes plug in USB devices if nothing else, and are probably even more likely to do mean things like putting the OS to sleep and then changing the hardware out from under it) and the really serious embedded people are not going to like the additional size and complexity.
The S29GL032N on the main system board is a 4 megabyte Spansion flash chip. Not luxurious; but well within the realm of a router-sized embedded linux(though it neither implies nor excludes a bunch of embedded OS options).
As for speed, Linux can be made to be quite snappy; but it wouldn't surprise me if enough of the lag is in starting up network-related stuff, along with whatever server program the device uses to allow the client to connect to it, that you wouldn't be able to readily distinguish between Linux, Vxworks, BSD or WinCE on speed alone: sure, an embedded OS booting from solid-state storage on known hardware should move like lighting; but then it has to bring up an external USB device, do the WPA dance, send a DHCP request and receive a reply, and then start up whatever server program the firmware guys threw together for the client to connect to. And then we don't actually know how often the client side of things actually polls the IP where it thinks the device is supposed to be, or whether the device sends out some sort of broadcast when it comes up, or what. Too many variables to even say how fast the OS comes up.
What baffles me is that the author of TFA is apparently geek enough to take a screwdriver to a $150 toy; but is making dumb guesses about OS type based on boot time even though he found a populated serial header, with RX and TX labelled, no less... C'mon, man, you can be pretty sure that the thing is 3.3v(based on the flash IC and lack of visible level converters, might be 5v or 5v-tolerant, highly unlikely to be RS-232), the pins are labelled for you, and it'll probably boot-spew something at you, why are you guessing based on boot time?
Parts of the rover, like motors and gears are supposed to be modular, yet they don't really look like that to me, maybe I'm just misreading the images.
To me, it looks like "Made in China" - medium cost build. There's some build quality, it's not made from the cheapest material available, but it's not for daily use. Well, it's supposed to be a toy..
I suspect that it's a matter of Brookstone's style. They do a lot of relatively pricey and dubiously useful novelty gadgets(the sort of thing you end up with if you do your technology shopping from the 'Skymall' catalog...) That's the sort of business with enough churn in the product catalog that you'd bankrupt yourself doing a lot of fully-custom parts, so you'll see moderately mod-friendly levels of modularity, lots of space between parts unless mechanically necessary, connectors rather than ribbon cables or soldered components, and so on; but it also isn't one that allows you to specialize around a few core products that you relentlessly refine over several product generations for maximum elegance in mass production and service.
Their price tags, and target market, likely keep them from going with the very nastiest build quality(the product manual, while no doubt uninformative, was probably in readable English, as well); but I wouldn't expect to find either beautifully refined elegance or impressive-but-deeply-DIY-unfriendly extreme miniaturization and integration in their stuff.
Not to mention all those (not always linux based; but generally dangerously overqualified in one way or another) network connected devices with cameras and microphones that people lovingly carry around and carefully keep charged and in working order totally voluntarily...
What I find sort of alarming is that excessive scribbling causes the firmware to fail, rather than to fall back to some sort of sane failsafe state.
It sounds like Samsung managed to make things brittle enough to be the first to fail under real-world conditions; but, no matter how much storage you provide, somebody could always demand more. You'd hope that the firmware would either behave sensibly as the storage fills up(and stop accepting requests for more) or at least fail sensibly and wipe or truncate the storage area and come right back up, ready for recovery...
I realize that implementing embedded flash objects in Office documents was probably something that mostly happened because Microsoft wanted OLE to make embedding arbitrary stuff in arbitrary stuff happen(unlike Adobe's sick fetish for inserting horrible things into PDFs, which is their own damn fault); but do Flash embeds in Office documents actually occur, in the wild, as something people would actually do and distribute, for anything other than malicious purposes? I honestly can't remember ever having seen a single one, ever.
It's probably worth, if nothing else, considering it as a matter of good practice.
The submitter is under no obligation to provide multiple localizations(which can be an arduous and nontrivial task, combining the thrill of tech writing with the skills of a translator); but building an application such that somebody providing a localization for it involves major surgery is pretty...retro.
Not that it will; but let that be a lesson to you.
Obviously, you haven't been watching Fox News. They have assured me that it was the evil government, and not base greed and the free market, that caused the crash.
Didn't you hear? It was Bill Clinton's army of crafty welfare negroes who somehow managed to sucker the brightest lights on Wall Street, despite having minimal prior experience with anything other than check-cashing joins and sleazy rent-to-own financing schemes... Makes perfect sense!
Given that the dumb fuckers who get caught passing a few thousand in bad checks tend to do more time than the smart fuckers who get caught passing a few billion in bad securities tend to do more time, I'd say that the quants are on to something...
(Can you imagine what would happen to sentencing guidelines if we decided 'fuck this shit' and started punishing large scale fraud with the same sorts of time-per-thousand-dollars-stolen that we do for blue-collar economic crimes?)
That's the especially baffling thing: theoretically, "XPS" is supposed to come in with the price premium over "Inspiron" that you would expect, but a bit cheaper than "Optiplex"; but Dell's enthusiasm for constantly-changing-but-sometimes-quite-large deals/discount codes/temporary sales/different prices between home and 'small business' stores/etc. actually meant that you could get a given 'XPS' for less than the closest equivalent 'Inspiron' depending on the phase of the moon.
I'm far from certain that they'll succeed as some sort of bold new flavor of console(as you say, the console incumbents are gearing up for a fresh spin, and PC gaming is pretty cheap, at least for undemanding titles, when you consider that you probably own a PC already); but I'm in for one on the hope that they'll be a version of those little Android 'stick PCs' or "mini PCs' that might actually remain stable long enough to get some firmware that isn't total shit.
I've played around with a few of the ebay special ones(which are cheaper, 50-80 dollars) and they are much more convenient than a PC to have sitting by the TV; but the firmware is pretty dreadful and there is such a mass of cryptically branded models flying around that the Cyanogenmod-and-similar brigade isn't too much help. Paying a little bit more to get a somewhat more powerful, and quite possibly better supported(1st and 3rd party) implementation of the idea is pretty attractive.
I doubt that it'll replace my PC for actual gaming duties; but media frontend and similar duties are handled in a different room entirely, so there is enough space to share.
Actually Dell's Enterprise level support is fairly good. Fortunately I haven't had much experience with consumer level support.
For somewhat mysterious reasons, they semi-bifurcated their consumer line into "Inspiron" and "XPS". There is a lot of overlap in specs(most models on one side of the fence are just a plastics kit away from a model on the other, though 'XPS' usually has more of the optional upgrades pre-added); but the "XPS" line also comes with nicer support, reasonably close to the support on enterprise desktop/laptop stuff, with just a few more dumb questions ahead of time because they aren't sure you are an actual tech.
"Inspiron" support is rather less exciting.
I'm certainly not a lawyer, your lawyer, or his lawyer; but I'm pretty sure that 'having a feature that might facilitate some third party breaking the terms of use that they may or may not have agreed to' isn't actually a crime(unless you are being sued by the MPAA/RIAA, in which case basically anything that transmits or stores information that might conceivably be copyrighted is a conspiracy with the worst of pirates and pedo-terrorists).
Nothing that says they can't bury you in procedure until you suffocate; but the 'request' is bullshit and they ought to be ashamed of it. Is it ever a good thing for a file format to have only a single program capable of decoding it?
It seems a safe assumption that Google is following the numbers(you don't exactly turn a profit on online advertising margins without doing so).
The question is which numbers are they following?
Do owners of the 'zOMG Criminal records lookup!!!' websites pay more for "black" adsense terms? Do they pay for plausible sounding names and Google has discovered that click-through rates are better when their pair those websites with the "black" names? What is the cause?
It seems... unlikely... that Google is leaving good money on the table in order to bring subtle racism to ad placement. Major corporations usually reserve the 'this could be terrible PR if it gets out' stuff for schemes that are actually profitable. The question is, what aspect of the market(ad-sellers? audience attitudes? The racial makeup of Google's market share vs. other search engines?) are their algorithms picking up on?
ChromeOS does a reasonable amount of client-side caching at this point(you obviously aren't getting on the internet without a connection; but you won't be noticeably more screwed than the guy with a copy of Office and no internet connection).
Also, unless the environments I've seen are very atypical, network connectivity issues(WAN or LAN side) tend to disrupt schools and businesses pretty significantly because of how much of the workflow involves poking at the internet in some way, even if it's a totally bespoke application that looks and acts nothing like a browser...
Also, once you buy a laptop, you get to keep it until it dies or is lost. Your job may well not last as long.
The heartening result is that Harvard takes cheating seriously. They suspended about 60 students over it and a bunch of others are on probation -- probably because they couldn't prove those students cheated.
You call that 'serious'?
Harvard admits somewhere in the range of 5-6 percent of those who apply. Even if we assume that the bottom 75% or so of the applicant pool are just deluded optimists, Harvard could replace its entire class two or three times over with people who would love to have been admitted. If they were remotely serious, they could have banhammered everyone involved in cheating and called it a day. Instead they are being 'temporarily asked to leave'. That's crazy lenient given how trivial it would be to replace them, and how meaningful a degree from Harvard is supposed to be.
Anyone want to place some bets on how long four people in a tiny, bunkerlike hamster habitube surrounded by dust and hard vacuum would last before they really started head downhill psychologically?
Speaking of making money by selling snake oil to China... An, um, friend wants to know if there is a ludicrous backstory that works as well on Chinese customers as the old "Oh, this is a traditional Chinese remedy, rebalances your Qi with the wisdom of the orient" one does on Americans...