Here is a review of one of the phones based on the 1.6Ghz atoms, with some benchmarks and battery life testing. A bit of googling around for that model will yield more of the same.
I'm not really interested in getting into a flamewar about a device category I don't even own an example of; but all the benchmarks I've read indicate that the 1.6Ghz single-core atom is basically equivalent to a dual 1.5Ghz ARM. Not bleeding edge(their GPU, especially, is an older part); but neither substantially slower nor substantially hotter than the silicon in other phones in the price range.
x86 linux binaries shouldn't be any big deal. It'll be interesting to see if anybody manages to get anything running remotely adequately under WINE, which is something that would have been wholly impractical on ARM; but might be possible on this thing. (If memory serves, these very-low-power atoms are deviant in some way that makes at least older Windows kernels freak out; but are x86 compatible from the perspective of programs that don't try anything seriously retro, like attempting to talk to the parallel port at the memory address where God and the IBM PC intended it to be...)
Intel has previously released a 1.6Ghz chip that is at least somewhat similar(possibly worse, I don't know how much improvement there has been between that one and this 2Ghz model). It didn't feature in any phones of particular interest, a few mid-ish range ones on non-US carriers; but benchmarks suggested that it was pretty much even, in performance and battery life, to ARM phones in the dual 1.5Ghz processor range...
It does seem that the 'smartphone' category has been pegged at "Well, one working day of use is all the battery life people care about, so if you find yourself above that, make the phone slimmer, the screen bigger, or add a uselessly overpowered cellular modem..." territory; but Intel does seem to have things down to less risible power levels.
This certainly isn't the first-gen Atom combined with a 20-watt 945G...
Apparently Chrome can be downloaded, which is a damn good thing because the default Android browser is pretty unimpressive(ie. the 'play' store won't flag it as incompatible with the device); but the Chrome built for Android apparently has some ARM-based optimizations or assumptions that make it less than it might be on x86, TFA isn't specific about what they are.
It's a trifle odd, though, given that Google certainly spends a fair amount of time polishing Chrome for x86 on Windows, OSX, Linux, and their own 'ChromeOS', and Intel has the same access to the Chromium source code as everybody else(if their engineers see something that could be improved), as well as giant fucking buckets of cash with which to induce Google to work a bit faster on making the Android version of Chrome really scream on x86(not that Google would have any obvious interest in Android working worse on any platform; but a little sweetener could probably get you moved up the priority list a bit)... You'd think that Chrome would have been a major target.
"The way to get manufacturing back here in my opinion, is to make a products store front cost true to what the real cost is. Ie sum of parts + labour + the cost of dealing with the waste."
I suppose we could also take the cynical approach of attempting to lower the cost of shipping vile industrial pollutants to some country that can't do much about it...
'Fault' might not be the right term. 'Incompatibility' might be better. Some people do not 'mix' well in short-term situations(unless actually impaired enough for a diagnosis of 'mild autism-spectrum-disorder/nonverbal learning disability not otherwise classified/damned-if-we-know-we're-just-the-DSM', they can usually learn to fake it enough for politeness' sake; but faking it is draining not pleasurable); but they might feel much more at home in a more cohesive environment where they get time to develop rapport with coworkers or customers over time.
Obviously, if somebody simply can't usefully interact with others, they are going to have vocational issues period; but people who can easily and spontaneously interact with a steady cast of strangers, and actually feel better for having done so, are definitely a subset of the socially functional in general.
(anecdote semi-related to the point: it may also depend on the system under which the techs are allocated. My office has a printer-tech contract and I usually never even see the printer techs, much less get a chance to talk to them or not. Each printer has a unique code(identifying its model, room number, street address, and our customer info) and a phone number. Any member of the staff can call the number and punch in the code if their printer is out of toner. We get a report on service calls every quarter for billing/tracking purposes; but the only person who sees the same tech more than once, at most, is probably the receptionist who buzzes in visitors... We aren't hostile and impersonal per se; but under the allocation system used, it'd be nontrivial for a tech to exchange more than a 'good afternoon' with somebody who happened to be in the hallway at the same time.)
It doesn't help entities that are likely to be targets of directed attacks(either high value institutional targets, who ideally aren't using PSK and are rotating passwords properly, or people with psycho and/or prankster neighbors); but the easiest way to keep people out of your network, for most of us, might actually to be to give them some of what they want.
APs with multiple radios, or chipsets capable of handling multiple SSIDs with distinct security and routing rules, are increasingly common and cheap. If you broadcast an open SSID(all traffic originating from there QoS tagged as lower priority than traffic from your internal network, naturally) that dumps anybody who connects straight to the internet, no connection to the internal network or router configuration interfaces(through Tor if you are really worried about somebody's warez and/or kiddie porn pointing back to you), that removes the bulk of most people's interest in cracking your network itself...
Wait: an article about some guys who reverse engineered a (very common) broadcom wireless chipset to add monitor mode to a linux kernel driver(complete with source and instructions on how to brick your own phone) is 'spam'?
What is slashdot for, if not trolling and arguing about linux drivers?
It's a pity, actually. There are plenty of ways to say that the robot (through a combination of physical design and active sensor systems) is designed to be safe enough to share an environment with humans, rather than being caged off with warning signs on the swing zones and big red buttons that you have to press before performing maintenance without sounding so overtly fawning about it.
1.(the shorter term): So long as robots are capable of only some things, you'll get more jobs for US workers by keeping the factory onshore, partially robotic and partially staffed, than you will by having it leave entirely. Also, the presence of parts of the supply chain tends to have synergistic effects for other parts, especially when quick turnaround is needed, so even if you have an entirely automated factory, you have a better chance that WidgetCorp will keep their engineering office across the street so they can pop in and make revisions quickly, rather than opening up across the street from their factory elsewhere.
2.(longer term, albeit not necessarily that long, depending on who you are): Yup, robots can do much of what humans can do, often for less than the humans could live a non-miserable existence on. The scope of robotic('robotic' in the broad sense that includes both big industrial arms and pure software agents capable of data-processing tasks of various sorts) capability shows no signs of decreasing. Whether this means that humans are becoming obsolete, or humans are on the verge of getting some well-earned time off is up to us. And, frankly, I'm not inclined to optimism on this one...
The annoying thing is going to be the part of the future where we all have a dozen slightly different revisions(each with its own ideosyncratic and slightly broken firmware, either cheap, lazy, and barely localized from the OEM, or brutally skinned and DRMed from whoever handed it out as a marketing pitch, maybe some will be supported by cyanogenmod 2017 if we are lucky) of the $35 tablet gathering dust in our sock drawer; but don't have any way to combine them into one $350-equivalent tablet.
I remember hitting that point with computers. When I was a wee lad knee-high to a grasshopper, having access to A Computer was pretty serious business. Then, through a combination of getting older and computers getting cheaper, I could suddenly get all the computers I could dumpster dive!!! And then reality bit me in the ass: Even in the pre-virtualization environment, I couldn't actually do very much with more than a few computers, and the degree to which two computers could be turned into one better computer was pretty limited. I built a beowulf cluster, just because, but that really just drove home the fact that I didn't use much software that needed fairly-loosely-networked compute nodes. It was a sad day.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able "
Absolutely. We haven't innovated one damned thing since then.
Oh keeper of the most smug tablet of moral superiority, thank you for your wisdom, ensuring we do not stray.
Never takes you long to show up.
Don't forget to justify Muslim outrage because of the crusades while you're at it.
Maybe I was unclear, and maybe you weren't paying attention; but my point would be precisely the opposite of somebody who would go cuddle with them about how traumatic the crusades were, oh noes...
My point here is "Yeah, China would appear to be ripping off the best designs available, which means US stealth tech and some amount of ruskie reliability; I would remind everyone frothing at the vile espionage of the Red Chinaman that espionage is something everybody does, so shut up for once." Where somebody to come whining about 'crusaders', it'd be "And the groups who swept across north africa and up into the iberian peninsula were different how exactly? Or the ones that didn't make it past Mr. Martel while pushing into eastern Europe? Everybody is launching pointless wars of aggression today, neither side will have a toehold worth a damn within a century or two, and none of this affects you 1000 years later except in some onanistic nationalist fantasy. Shut up."
Such is the nature of espionage, though. Both sides do it, and react in "outrage" when they catch it happening.
That's the part that I find so annoying. If people want to be boy scouts, knock it off with the cloak and dagger and go earn a merit badge or something. If people want to be all cloak and dagger, quit regurgitating your deeply unconvincing lies about what you aren't doing.
With(unfortunately for their shareholders) one crucial difference.
Somehow, I don't know how they did it, AOL took a formerly-high-flying and now rotten from the inside company and somehow conned Time Warner to a merger of almost equals, with AOL on top. Damn. Now, of course, their business consists largely of confused old people who can't figure out how to cancel; but that was their moment.
Yahoo, by contrast, turned to a rather generous buyout bid and has been slipping fairly steadily in value since....
Right, because technology from 70 YEARS ago is so meaningful today.
Funny you should mention that... Built in 1955, after we snagged a few smaller presses from Germany and the commies got a 30,000 ton press. Continues to operate to the present day, providing precision pressed aerospace components to much of the US aircraft production industry...
How well do the 'fastness' metrics used to rank computers in e-peen order capture some of the messier variables of assorted cache speeds and sizes, latencies and throughputs of network interconnects, dubiously general; but very high speed for certain purposes GPU or fpga elements vs. generic CPUs, and so on?
Obviously, the people building these things to get work done have an incentive to make them actually useful; but is the benchmark itself much of a test of dreadful interconnect design or other serious issues, or could you just buy your way to a shiny spot at the top by shoving together enough gigE connected 1Us?
Given that we yoinked aiframes, designs, machine tools, and scientists(see 'Project Paperclip') pretty much wholesale from the parts of germany we got to first, we probably shouldn't head for the moral high ground just yet...
Yeah, we all knew that RIM was on the outs; but getting cut from the running for 'stodgy corporate issued device' by the somewhat-less-than-vibrant players over at yahoo? Ice burn, man, Ice Burn.
If you have the knack for it, whenever you encounter and IVR is to repeatedly scream a phrase at it, something like 'agent'. Good systems recognize the word and put you through to a human post haste. Shit systems, which are the predominant type, have something like a 30 or 60 second timeout before requiring human help.
Some systems may actually be responding to the vocal stress cues. In an effort to pretend to care, while minimzing the number of actual humans needed, some designs will prioritize the ones that sound increasingly angry so as to get them dealth with and out of the way. I find that it generally isn't difficult to convincingly emulate boiling rage, and(depending on whether the phone drone knows he is being dumped into a rage call or not) immediately switching to polite-and-businesslike when the human comes on usually works pretty well.
TFA(to the best of my layman's understanding) suggests that this one is a stainless steel pipe with an Americum source behind a beryllium window.
If some dumbass cuts it open, or decides to look down the tube for an extended period, things will get bad; but as long as it is mechanically undisturbed it won't be a huge deal.
The Goiania incident was particularly nasty because the source was opened and Caesium chloride(started out as a dust, also readily water-soluble, for extra pollution potential...) went all over the place. Had nobody opened the source, exposure would have been trivial. Incidents like that are(part of) the reason why the graphic designers behind the nuclear trefoil attempted to come up with something that was overtly threatening looking, even to somebody who might not speak English or even be literate in their local language.
If the finder does not contact law enforcement, then I feel this issue is best left up to natural selection. First to nominate for a Darwin award.
Depending on exactly how the source is encapulated, it may well not work out so neatly. If mechanically damaged, Americium-241 could come out to play and get all over the place, including friends, family, and general passers-by who hardly did anything to deserve an award...
This thing isn't exactly an unalterable inventory item that just happens to do 1d6 radiation damage every hour it remains in a character's inventory.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a review of one of the phones based on the 1.6Ghz atoms, with some benchmarks and battery life testing. A bit of googling around for that model will yield more of the same.
I'm not really interested in getting into a flamewar about a device category I don't even own an example of; but all the benchmarks I've read indicate that the 1.6Ghz single-core atom is basically equivalent to a dual 1.5Ghz ARM. Not bleeding edge(their GPU, especially, is an older part); but neither substantially slower nor substantially hotter than the silicon in other phones in the price range.
x86 linux binaries shouldn't be any big deal. It'll be interesting to see if anybody manages to get anything running remotely adequately under WINE, which is something that would have been wholly impractical on ARM; but might be possible on this thing. (If memory serves, these very-low-power atoms are deviant in some way that makes at least older Windows kernels freak out; but are x86 compatible from the perspective of programs that don't try anything seriously retro, like attempting to talk to the parallel port at the memory address where God and the IBM PC intended it to be...)
Intel has previously released a 1.6Ghz chip that is at least somewhat similar(possibly worse, I don't know how much improvement there has been between that one and this 2Ghz model). It didn't feature in any phones of particular interest, a few mid-ish range ones on non-US carriers; but benchmarks suggested that it was pretty much even, in performance and battery life, to ARM phones in the dual 1.5Ghz processor range...
It does seem that the 'smartphone' category has been pegged at "Well, one working day of use is all the battery life people care about, so if you find yourself above that, make the phone slimmer, the screen bigger, or add a uselessly overpowered cellular modem..." territory; but Intel does seem to have things down to less risible power levels.
This certainly isn't the first-gen Atom combined with a 20-watt 945G...
Apparently Chrome can be downloaded, which is a damn good thing because the default Android browser is pretty unimpressive(ie. the 'play' store won't flag it as incompatible with the device); but the Chrome built for Android apparently has some ARM-based optimizations or assumptions that make it less than it might be on x86, TFA isn't specific about what they are.
It's a trifle odd, though, given that Google certainly spends a fair amount of time polishing Chrome for x86 on Windows, OSX, Linux, and their own 'ChromeOS', and Intel has the same access to the Chromium source code as everybody else(if their engineers see something that could be improved), as well as giant fucking buckets of cash with which to induce Google to work a bit faster on making the Android version of Chrome really scream on x86(not that Google would have any obvious interest in Android working worse on any platform; but a little sweetener could probably get you moved up the priority list a bit)... You'd think that Chrome would have been a major target.
"The way to get manufacturing back here in my opinion, is to make a products store front cost true to what the real cost is. Ie sum of parts + labour + the cost of dealing with the waste."
I suppose we could also take the cynical approach of attempting to lower the cost of shipping vile industrial pollutants to some country that can't do much about it...
'Fault' might not be the right term. 'Incompatibility' might be better. Some people do not 'mix' well in short-term situations(unless actually impaired enough for a diagnosis of 'mild autism-spectrum-disorder/nonverbal learning disability not otherwise classified/damned-if-we-know-we're-just-the-DSM', they can usually learn to fake it enough for politeness' sake; but faking it is draining not pleasurable); but they might feel much more at home in a more cohesive environment where they get time to develop rapport with coworkers or customers over time.
Obviously, if somebody simply can't usefully interact with others, they are going to have vocational issues period; but people who can easily and spontaneously interact with a steady cast of strangers, and actually feel better for having done so, are definitely a subset of the socially functional in general.
(anecdote semi-related to the point: it may also depend on the system under which the techs are allocated. My office has a printer-tech contract and I usually never even see the printer techs, much less get a chance to talk to them or not. Each printer has a unique code(identifying its model, room number, street address, and our customer info) and a phone number. Any member of the staff can call the number and punch in the code if their printer is out of toner. We get a report on service calls every quarter for billing/tracking purposes; but the only person who sees the same tech more than once, at most, is probably the receptionist who buzzes in visitors... We aren't hostile and impersonal per se; but under the allocation system used, it'd be nontrivial for a tech to exchange more than a 'good afternoon' with somebody who happened to be in the hallway at the same time.)
It doesn't help entities that are likely to be targets of directed attacks(either high value institutional targets, who ideally aren't using PSK and are rotating passwords properly, or people with psycho and/or prankster neighbors); but the easiest way to keep people out of your network, for most of us, might actually to be to give them some of what they want.
APs with multiple radios, or chipsets capable of handling multiple SSIDs with distinct security and routing rules, are increasingly common and cheap. If you broadcast an open SSID(all traffic originating from there QoS tagged as lower priority than traffic from your internal network, naturally) that dumps anybody who connects straight to the internet, no connection to the internal network or router configuration interfaces(through Tor if you are really worried about somebody's warez and/or kiddie porn pointing back to you), that removes the bulk of most people's interest in cracking your network itself...
"As you know, ah, you write software to go with the hardware you have---not the hardware you might want or wish to have at a later time."
This article is plain spam.
Wait: an article about some guys who reverse engineered a (very common) broadcom wireless chipset to add monitor mode to a linux kernel driver(complete with source and instructions on how to brick your own phone) is 'spam'?
What is slashdot for, if not trolling and arguing about linux drivers?
It's rather worrying actually. It's like being reassured that there is ABSOLUTELY no poison in the coffee.
Damn right, if there is absolutely no poison in there they probably have you drinking decaf!
The robot, Baxter, is completely safe
It's a pity, actually. There are plenty of ways to say that the robot (through a combination of physical design and active sensor systems) is designed to be safe enough to share an environment with humans, rather than being caged off with warning signs on the swing zones and big red buttons that you have to press before performing maintenance without sounding so overtly fawning about it.
I suspect that there are two basic answers:
1.(the shorter term): So long as robots are capable of only some things, you'll get more jobs for US workers by keeping the factory onshore, partially robotic and partially staffed, than you will by having it leave entirely. Also, the presence of parts of the supply chain tends to have synergistic effects for other parts, especially when quick turnaround is needed, so even if you have an entirely automated factory, you have a better chance that WidgetCorp will keep their engineering office across the street so they can pop in and make revisions quickly, rather than opening up across the street from their factory elsewhere.
2.(longer term, albeit not necessarily that long, depending on who you are): Yup, robots can do much of what humans can do, often for less than the humans could live a non-miserable existence on. The scope of robotic('robotic' in the broad sense that includes both big industrial arms and pure software agents capable of data-processing tasks of various sorts) capability shows no signs of decreasing. Whether this means that humans are becoming obsolete, or humans are on the verge of getting some well-earned time off is up to us. And, frankly, I'm not inclined to optimism on this one...
The annoying thing is going to be the part of the future where we all have a dozen slightly different revisions(each with its own ideosyncratic and slightly broken firmware, either cheap, lazy, and barely localized from the OEM, or brutally skinned and DRMed from whoever handed it out as a marketing pitch, maybe some will be supported by cyanogenmod 2017 if we are lucky) of the $35 tablet gathering dust in our sock drawer; but don't have any way to combine them into one $350-equivalent tablet.
I remember hitting that point with computers. When I was a wee lad knee-high to a grasshopper, having access to A Computer was pretty serious business. Then, through a combination of getting older and computers getting cheaper, I could suddenly get all the computers I could dumpster dive!!! And then reality bit me in the ass: Even in the pre-virtualization environment, I couldn't actually do very much with more than a few computers, and the degree to which two computers could be turned into one better computer was pretty limited. I built a beowulf cluster, just because, but that really just drove home the fact that I didn't use much software that needed fairly-loosely-networked compute nodes. It was a sad day.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able "
Absolutely. We haven't innovated one damned thing since then.
Oh keeper of the most smug tablet of moral superiority, thank you for your wisdom, ensuring we do not stray.
Never takes you long to show up.
Don't forget to justify Muslim outrage because of the crusades while you're at it.
Maybe I was unclear, and maybe you weren't paying attention; but my point would be precisely the opposite of somebody who would go cuddle with them about how traumatic the crusades were, oh noes...
My point here is "Yeah, China would appear to be ripping off the best designs available, which means US stealth tech and some amount of ruskie reliability; I would remind everyone frothing at the vile espionage of the Red Chinaman that espionage is something everybody does, so shut up for once." Where somebody to come whining about 'crusaders', it'd be "And the groups who swept across north africa and up into the iberian peninsula were different how exactly? Or the ones that didn't make it past Mr. Martel while pushing into eastern Europe? Everybody is launching pointless wars of aggression today, neither side will have a toehold worth a damn within a century or two, and none of this affects you 1000 years later except in some onanistic nationalist fantasy. Shut up."
Such is the nature of espionage, though. Both sides do it, and react in "outrage" when they catch it happening.
That's the part that I find so annoying. If people want to be boy scouts, knock it off with the cloak and dagger and go earn a merit badge or something. If people want to be all cloak and dagger, quit regurgitating your deeply unconvincing lies about what you aren't doing.
With(unfortunately for their shareholders) one crucial difference.
Somehow, I don't know how they did it, AOL took a formerly-high-flying and now rotten from the inside company and somehow conned Time Warner to a merger of almost equals, with AOL on top. Damn. Now, of course, their business consists largely of confused old people who can't figure out how to cancel; but that was their moment.
Yahoo, by contrast, turned to a rather generous buyout bid and has been slipping fairly steadily in value since....
Right, because technology from 70 YEARS ago is so meaningful today.
Funny you should mention that... Built in 1955, after we snagged a few smaller presses from Germany and the commies got a 30,000 ton press. Continues to operate to the present day, providing precision pressed aerospace components to much of the US aircraft production industry...
How well do the 'fastness' metrics used to rank computers in e-peen order capture some of the messier variables of assorted cache speeds and sizes, latencies and throughputs of network interconnects, dubiously general; but very high speed for certain purposes GPU or fpga elements vs. generic CPUs, and so on?
Obviously, the people building these things to get work done have an incentive to make them actually useful; but is the benchmark itself much of a test of dreadful interconnect design or other serious issues, or could you just buy your way to a shiny spot at the top by shoving together enough gigE connected 1Us?
Given that we yoinked aiframes, designs, machine tools, and scientists(see 'Project Paperclip') pretty much wholesale from the parts of germany we got to first, we probably shouldn't head for the moral high ground just yet...
Oww, that has to hurt.
Yeah, we all knew that RIM was on the outs; but getting cut from the running for 'stodgy corporate issued device' by the somewhat-less-than-vibrant players over at yahoo? Ice burn, man, Ice Burn.
Good Morning, Sir, would you mind confirming your slashdot UID for me before I can respond to your post?
If you have the knack for it, whenever you encounter and IVR is to repeatedly scream a phrase at it, something like 'agent'. Good systems recognize the word and put you through to a human post haste. Shit systems, which are the predominant type, have something like a 30 or 60 second timeout before requiring human help.
Some systems may actually be responding to the vocal stress cues. In an effort to pretend to care, while minimzing the number of actual humans needed, some designs will prioritize the ones that sound increasingly angry so as to get them dealth with and out of the way. I find that it generally isn't difficult to convincingly emulate boiling rage, and(depending on whether the phone drone knows he is being dumped into a rage call or not) immediately switching to polite-and-businesslike when the human comes on usually works pretty well.
TFA(to the best of my layman's understanding) suggests that this one is a stainless steel pipe with an Americum source behind a beryllium window.
If some dumbass cuts it open, or decides to look down the tube for an extended period, things will get bad; but as long as it is mechanically undisturbed it won't be a huge deal.
The Goiania incident was particularly nasty because the source was opened and Caesium chloride(started out as a dust, also readily water-soluble, for extra pollution potential...) went all over the place. Had nobody opened the source, exposure would have been trivial. Incidents like that are(part of) the reason why the graphic designers behind the nuclear trefoil attempted to come up with something that was overtly threatening looking, even to somebody who might not speak English or even be literate in their local language.
If the finder does not contact law enforcement, then I feel this issue is best left up to natural selection. First to nominate for a Darwin award.
Depending on exactly how the source is encapulated, it may well not work out so neatly. If mechanically damaged, Americium-241 could come out to play and get all over the place, including friends, family, and general passers-by who hardly did anything to deserve an award...
This thing isn't exactly an unalterable inventory item that just happens to do 1d6 radiation damage every hour it remains in a character's inventory.