I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that a shockingly large number of people confuse nomenclature with knowledge. Because of that, a fairly fiddly technical discussion over how best to handle astronomical nomenclature hit the popular press as "zOMG pointy-headed scientists don't even know if Pluto is a planet!!!!!"
Naming is not a trivial thing, good nomenclature makes the world a much easier place, crap nomenclature makes it a mess wholly without reason; but either way it seduces people into forgetting that names are simply constructs, assigned for our convenience to bundles of real things. Sometimes, you have to revise the constructs to make the nomenclature better, simpler, more expressive, whatever; but that is very different from changing the bundle of real things and attributes.
Hardware backlog unloading seems like the most plausible cause.
Having already been manufactured and shipped, virtually any amount of money made on these things(either in direct sale prices or in plan attaches) is better than the alternative of just scrapping them. Since they were designed to be 'better-than-feature-phones' they should be able to curb-stomp your basic shit feature phone if sold at roughly similar prices, and with roughly similar plans. They are better than feature phones, just not as good as the real smartphones they were pitted against.
I think that the basic problem is that Google's desires(and thus expenditures) do not line up with those of the freelance linux-on-the-desktop community.
Google (correctly) perceives that, because their area of strength lies in their essentially opaque search, advertising, and operations expertise, much of which is OSS based but purely in house, exposed only by web APIs, that they have no particular competitive advantage in desktop and mobile, unlike MS(desktop) or Apple(mobile, high-end consumer desktop).
This is why their efforts in these areas are either OSS, and basically designed to bolster use of their core services(ie. Chrome is not intended to make money, it is intended to light a fire under the ass of every subpar JS/HTML5 implementation out there, therefore, they have nothing to gain by making it closed source. Similarly, Android is designed to kill off the dumbphones that make using the internet on the go too painful, and thus bolster Google's mobile/location ad business and keep Apple from being in a position to cut off Google's air supply on the mobile side. If it gets good enough, they may use their control of the Market and some of the core apps to try to extract some cash; but it is basically just a loss leader, hence again the openness).
Things like Earth and Sketchup are oddballs, aquisitions offered as freeware, but continuing the aquired company's sale of a premium version, presumably in the spirit of cost recovery.
In general, though, Google's only real interest in the desktop and mobile spaces is not OSS or freedom per se; but in increasing the number of people using web applications and service, where google has great strength, and in attempting to weaken MS and Apple to prevent them from achieving a position strong enough to use against them. They(probably correctly) don't seem to view linux-on-the-arbitrary-desktop/laptop as a solution to this problem, especially catering to the needs of other than casual gamers.
Because of their size, and the not truly horrible(merely rather uncertain on a per-unique-model basis) of linux graphics, Google can safely consider the problem solved. If they say "1 million units" there are plenty of vendors who will say "would you like source with that, sir?". Also, because openness on the desktop and mobile is simple a means to Google's ends, if they get the source under NDA and have to ship a blob, that doesn't conflict with their goals to any great degree. They'd prefer full OSS, just for cost reasons; but they have no real need to fight heroically for it, since they are large enough to get engineering cooperation from makers of binary blobs.
I agree that the problem is not fully solved for the individual wishing to run linux on his desktop/laptop; but I don't think Google cares. Their announced intention, with both ChromeOS and Android, is OSS; but shipped by partners with hardware. If you want to have a go at building it yourself, have fun; but only the stuff shipped by partners, on hardware, with engineering/integration done for you, is Google's problem.
Given the number of stories where people either come to work and shoot up the place after being laid off, or even murder-suicide their own families and then themselves due to economic stresses, I'm not at all sure that it is rationality saving them.
Obviously, the rational thing is to fatalistically suck it up and try to move on, and I'd fully expect most people to do so; but an irrationality incidence of less than 1 in 1000 adds up to more than a few very dangerious people on a population level...
What I don't understand, with these "Corporation that doesn't give a fuck and has more politicians in its pocket than you ever will fucks over some more luckless saps" stories is why there isn't more extralegal violence associated with them.
Obviously, subjecting large corporations to serious penalties under law would be unamerican, and we generally avoid it; but America is crawling with angry and well armed people, many without too much to lose, and spree-killing is something we start practicing in high school.
Why isn't there an enraged ex-fisherman with an AR-15 lurking outside the window of every BP C-level whose name is publicly known? People get killed all the time over petty shit, why not the big stuff?
Any CPU debug mode worthy of the name should be able to violate OS security six ways from Sunday, and silently at that, without any difficulty. By the same token, though, any CPU debug mode worthy of shipping in commercial silicon really ough to be possible for the firmware and/or kernel to lock for the duration of operation. If userspace can kick it off, a brave and exciting new world of AMD-specific malware is about to begin...
I strongly suspect that Google either considers the matter of Linux drivers largely solved(ie. Intel anything except that GMA 500 crap will work fine, just not very fast in any OS, NVIDIA spits on OSS; but mostly knows how to make the trains run on time within their binary blob world, AMD/ATI has made substantial commitments to improved openness and to their closed source stuff not sucking) or something to be solved with much larger piles of money, quietly "We have every expectation of shipping 1-2 million ChromeOS devices a quarter. It is our comittment to our customers, and a requirement of our product design, that the graphical experience be both rich and rock-solid..." *raises eyebrows significantly at meeting room full of competing vendors*.
While I would certainly like to see them buy the Nouveau guys some beer or something, I suspect that, for the purposes of an entity like Google, graphics is either a solved problem, or an area where they don't need to go with penny-ante public announcements.
(In addition, of course, this current competition is sponsored by a guy who just works for Google. Obviously it is unlikely that Google is going to sack him for it, but their only support for the competition is by the indirect means of paying the guy's salary for work he does for them, leaving him with the cash to offer a prize. This isn't a Google competition.)
I suspect that MS knows that they don't have a leg to stand on against the present activity(all the copyrighted code/DRM protected stuff/patented wizbangs are in the firmware, and writing a driver that just receives the data the firmware generates is the sort of thing that even the DMCA explicitly protects). I assume that their frankly nasty bluster so far has been about two things 1. management of the fears of Joe User: Joe hears "hackers hack Kinect", Joe assumes that his Kinect is now watching his children on behalf of Romanian cybercriminals. MS doesn't want that, so they talk big about how secure and law-enforcement-cooperating they are. 2. Overton window shifting: If you want a specific, and novel, legal result, you generally have to prepare the groundwork for it by modifying the discourse. You do this by the crude; but often successful, expedient of repeating your currently-false-but-desired-to-be-true worldview in public, a lot. If "unapproved use = tampering = evil" has been repeated a few thousand times by the time that DMCA 2: Son of DMCA comes before congress, it will be much more likely to make it in.
Now, if somebody does something directly competitive with PrimeSense, on a commercial scale, you may well see the claims start flying that any working Kinect driver must be implementing 127 patented algorithms and is otherwise all kinds of illegal; but that probably isn't worth the cost of process servers for the current scruffy band of international hackers...
As a pure webcam, to be used alongside existing machine vision software, it is a significant letdown(640x480 for $150? I feel like its 1995 all over again!). The more-or-less realtime rangefinding, though, is head and shoulders above all but the most sophisticated work in hobbyist robots and things.
The only real downer is the 12 watt power draw and need for a USB 2.0 master. The USB 2.0 master requirement is way less limiting than it used to be(the shivaplug board on my desk qualifies, as well as being more than fast enough to serve as a robot brain, and is still less than a quarter the size of the FIRST controller we used back in high school robotics...); but 12 watts is 12 watts. Static applications and larger robots only need apply.
It isn't at all clear(and I know of no direct support for the notion) that MS used Winmodems as a tactical move; but having a single player holding the lion's share of the market certainly does make the process of moving function out of the hardware and into the driver easier and more attractive.
If there are a dozen small players, all sparring with their own oddball architectures and OSes and whatnot, being able to say "It speaks AT commands over an RS-232 bus. Figure it out for your own damn freak of an OS." is pretty attractive.
If Windows is the overwhelming player, you just slap a windows driver in the box, save BOM money on every unit, and go home happy.
Now, given that the pressure on BOM costs is just the nature of the hardware market, and that MS has actually lagged behind and prevented the driverization of certain functions(ie. Linux has several filesystems designed to do all the housekeeping necessary to run directly on raw NAND flash. Windows works fine with abstracted flash products(SD cards, xd cards behind a reader, etc.); but has no such support), and that they have, more recently, presumably to avoid lousy vendor drivers making them look bad, been shoving vendors toward standards(some of them actually standard, as in the case of webcams not being "vista certified" if they weren't UVC compliant, some being pet 'standards' like the NDIS-over-USB that most cheapo DSL modems optionally speak) it seems unlikely that MS is using driverization as a serious competitive strategy.
It certainly doesn't hurt them, as the incumbent, that there exists a lot of hardware that is just a brick without a very complex driver, and the incumbent is the one you can't not write a driver for; but MS doesn't seem to have pressed that advantage particularly hard, with the exception of the notorious emails about trying to break ACPI.
Driverization has certainly made life worse for OSS purists in cases where hardware is extremely complex or requires patented techniques to do its work; but even the fairly hostile players generally have a closed-source driver available these days. Also, given that hardware costs way more than software, and moves more slowly(especially among low-budget players), the OSS community has actually made some attempts at driverization of its own: GNU Radio and the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, some of the work around Asterix, and certain HAM experimentation most notably...
I don't know what Primesense's agreement with MS says; but your post certainly does suggest that a decent OSS driver for the Kinect peripheral could certainly make the Primesense folks very, very sad pandas.
Every unit attached to an xbox is basically free money, for basically any nonzero fee, since no gamer would shell out 40 times what a kinect costs, and MS will be able to move those suckers in serious quantity; but if they start displacing units such as the one you bought, each such displacement will erase the profit from hundreds of gaming units...
Question is, was this just the tradeoff they knew they were going to face, and they decided that the volume was worth it, will there be some sort of legal crackdown attempt, or do they have a differentiated product waiting in the wings(much superior cameras, GigE instead of USB, for easy long distance/multiple unit wiring, etc.)?
I'd be curious to know exactly how limited the hardware could be while still implementing the cube solving algorithm. Clock speeds are just a matter of patience, half the speed just means waiting twice as long; but there has to be an amount of RAM below which the algorithm Just Can't Be Done.
As for the hardware side, I imagine that the guys who do really serious high speed CNC machinery could probably achieve better-than-human speeds, though the device would probably cost 100k and require the cube to be continuously sprayed with a coolant/lubricant fluid to avoid thermal or mechanical damage...
Another interesting(and potentially cheaper; but with an exciting element of danger!) possibility would be if you allowed yourself to glue a suitably powerful magnet to each surface subcube of the cube, so you could then manipulate it without physical contact, other than one support point, by surrounding it with an array of electromagnets...
The security staff really let an opportunity slip past them here.
"I'm terribly sorry madam; but surely the real Home Office Minister Baroness Neville-Jones would be properly familiar with aircraft security procedure. Come with me, please."
*Whispers*"We caught a terrorist impersonating the Home Office Minister! What'we do now?"
*Whisper*"Just throw a bag over her head and hand her over to the Yanks, those bloody-minded bastards love that sort of thing."
There is another possible consideration: the producer of the technology.
Primesense created, presumably holds patents on, and did the reference design for, the "Kinect" camera/IR projector range mapping stuff. MS didn't buy them, they just bought/licenced enough of their stuff to produce Kinect hardware.
It is quite possible that Primesense also sells one or more much expensive motion capture solutions/SDKs/whatever based on the same technology; but agreed to give MS a sweet deal, in $/unit terms, because of the number of units expected to sell.
If the Kinect becomes generally useful, with independently produced drivers, anybody will be able to buy an instance of PrimeSense's fancy tech for $150 at any gamestop.
Consider an example from the old days: the first "Airport" cards were actually just rebadged Lucent gear; but with the pins deliberately switched around so that they would be incompatible with a PCMCIA slot. The Lucent branded equivalents were more expensive; but worked with normal PCMCIA slots. Obviously Lucent wasn't taking a loss on the "airport" cards; but they were having it both ways: sell a bunch of units to well-heeled consumers via Apple; but don't cannibalize the deep-pocketed connected enterprise market, thanks to deliberate incompatibility. There could be something similar going on here.
I hope that this "Nevercookie" addresses the issues raised by "Evercookie" in a systematic way, rather than just defeating Evercookie point-by-point.
Evercookie's creator explicitly noted that his work was a simple proof of concept, cooked up fairly quickly, as a way of raising the issue of covert persistent data storage on the web. He further noted that people who actually do evil for a living are probably at least as creative as he is, and have a whole lot more time to work on the problem. Simply defeating Evercookie, as released, will probably save you from a few of whatever the analytics world's equivalent of a script-kiddie is; but will do next to nothing against the issues that Evercookie was designed merely to demonstrate...
I don't think that they have much choice about "Ion 2" pretty much sucking.
With the prior generation of atoms, the usual pairing was Atom + fairly antiquated Intel chipset with GMA950 and a fairly high TDP. For just a little extra, you could pair the Atom with Nvidia's chipset instead, which had as good or better TDP and much better integrated graphics. Intel wasn't happy; but the end result was good.
With the newer generation, Intel brought most of the chipset functions onboard, and played hardball with licensing, so that "Ion 2" ended up consisting of, in essence, Nvidia's lowest-end discrete GPU added on to the system via the few PCIe lanes available. Unlike Ion, which was a genuine improvement in basically all respects other than OSS linux support, Ion2 meant higher TDP, more board space, and higher BOM.
Intel bears much of the blame for it; but Ion 2 is largely a dog, particularly when compared to the "CULV" options, which will get you a real(albeit low end) Core2 or i3 processor and a similar low end GPU for not much more than the Atom...
They are definitely releasing Tegra-branded ARM SoCs that include their own GPU tech as one of the functional blocks. If that is what you mean by "hybrid", then yes.
To the best of my knowledge, though, neither Nvidia, with their ARM SoCs, nor Intel with their on-package GMAs, nor AMD with their upcoming on-die ATI tech are creating what you might call a full "hybrid"(ie. a CPU whose instruction set also includes GPU-esque instructions, like MMX or SSE on steroids). At present, they are all just more heavily integrating, for economic and latency reasons, a discrete "CPU" block and a discrete "GPU" block.
Yeah, I'd assume that it is somewhere around the time that integrated circuits hit the street. 3 billion discretes, especially with what transistors used to cost, seems a touch unlikely; but it cannot have been long after the integrated stuff became available.
With a 244 watt TDP, I suspect that they need every inch of the front of the card, and are constrained only by PCIe form-factor concerns from using more of the back, just to keep the thing from burning out without a fan that sounds like a legion of the damned every time you boot the thing. The entire front of the card is a combination of heatsink(and not your extruded aluminum jobby, a phase-change vapor chamber unit) and a shroud to direct air flow.
If you want to see the board, back off a few price/performance tiers, and you'll get a 90% bare PCB with a dinky little slug of aluminum or copper on the main chip.
In an absolute, architectural sense, essentially never. A screamingly fast vector processor isn't going to do much for all your x86 code, and never mind all the little housekeeping chores that the CPU does(most of the modern ones include the system RAM controller(s), do a lot of peripheral wrangling, may be the root of the PCIe bus, and so forth).
In a "designing your next gaming build" sense, they largely already have. Unless you are a money-is-no-object-e-penis-must-get-longer type gamer, you can generally get better bang for your buck by going with a cheaper CPU and spending the savings on a nicer graphics card. It depends on the game, and there are situations where a truly epic(2x or 3x of the top of the line GPU ganged together with SLI or crossfire) graphics system will be CPU bound without the best CPU available; but Joe Gamer is, most of the time, better off with a third tier CPU and a second tier GPU, or a 2nd tier CPU and a 1st tier GPU.
In smaller systems(where board footprint really counts) or in cheap systems(where package costs and board size really count) the integration of CPU and GPU into a single package proceed apace, with AMD rolling low-end ATI tech into certain of their newer parts, and Intel trying to make their GMA stuff suck less. The only real wild card is Nvidia: Unlike Intel or AMD, they have no x86 cores to speak of, on the other hand, their GPU-computing initiatives are arguably the most advanced, in terms of tool and driver maturity. The question is, will they eventually produce an Nvidia equivalent to AMD and Intel's CPU/GPU combo packages(perhaps by buying VIA, who has adequate-but-deeply-unexciting x86 assets; but utter shit GPUs), or will they persist purely as a maker of high end gaming GPUs and GPU-based compute cards?
Unless the heriditary line of the "PC" as we know it is wholly extinguished, there will always be an x86 CPU floating around somewhere in the block diagram(and, in other types of systems, likely an ARM CPU); but it is already the case that, for many applications, the CPU has gotten fast enough to hit diminishing returns for many applications, and the GPU(or just the embedded h.264 decoder) is where the action is.
I don't think that the situation is nearly as clear cut as your example.
Something like Gmail is clearly a "cloud" service. It offers email through either web, pop3, or IMAP interfaces with essentially complete abstraction of what goes on underneath.
Amazon, for its part, offers VMs, of various sizes, with essentially complete abstraction of what is underneath, accessible by means of one or more nearly frictionless programmatic ordering methods(as opposed to calling your account rep or filling out a PO or something). It is certainly a very different level of granularity, and there are definitions of "cloud computing" that could meaningfully exclude it; but there are other, equally meaningful and potentially useful, definitions that could include it.
This GTX580 is a 3 billion transistor chip(not counting the RAM on the same card, just the GPU die itself). Does anybody know what year the number of transistors on the entire planet reached the number on this die?
I don't think that, with the fairly classical "cloud" guys like Amazon, who offer essentially Virtual Private Server products; but with automated provisioning, the argument has ever been about much more than flexibility. The more abstracted "cloud" people(gmail, google docs, etc.) can make the management complexity argument, since they offer highly abstract services with all the gory details hidden; but Amazon basically just tosses you a Linux VM and leaves you to deal with it from there. The only attraction is that, unlike classic VPS, you don't have to talk to a sales rep, just an API.
Given that with Amazon, all their EC2 stuff is either uber-commodity linux VMs or available for local hosting via the Eucalyptus project(their storage mechanism, etc.) it is possible to adopt a hybrid "base load/burst load" strategy, similar to how the electrical utilities do it. If your operation has a more or less steady base load, you run it on cheap boxes of your own. If you have a load spike, you use the expensive; but quick to spin up, EC2 instances. Since modern virtualization overhead is low, and virtualization is extremely convenient anyway, you don't lose to much, you don't pay Amazon a flexibility fee for things you don't need to be flexible; but you can swiftly pay for additional capacity that works just like your local capacity, and then stop paying when you no longer need it.
If you need long-term, stable levels of service, you'd be insane to buy it from a burst-service company, just as very heavy cell users would be nuts to buy a contractless per-minute plan. Either do it in house or hire a hosting company to do it for you, on a stable basis.
The notion that there is an entity called "true cloud computing" is largely nonsense. "Cloud Computing" is just a buzzword, which covers a continuum of things: At one extreme you have essentially classical virtual private server offerings; but with an API instead of a sales rep for provisioning. At the other extreme you have fully abstracted services like "email" with absolute opacity about what goes on under the hood.
Trying to define "cloud computing" is rather like trying to come up with a good definition of "species". We know a great deal about the actual objects we are talking about; but the definition is a matter of convenience, rather than some platonic essence to be discovered.
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I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that a shockingly large number of people confuse nomenclature with knowledge. Because of that, a fairly fiddly technical discussion over how best to handle astronomical nomenclature hit the popular press as "zOMG pointy-headed scientists don't even know if Pluto is a planet!!!!!"
Naming is not a trivial thing, good nomenclature makes the world a much easier place, crap nomenclature makes it a mess wholly without reason; but either way it seduces people into forgetting that names are simply constructs, assigned for our convenience to bundles of real things. Sometimes, you have to revise the constructs to make the nomenclature better, simpler, more expressive, whatever; but that is very different from changing the bundle of real things and attributes.
Hardware backlog unloading seems like the most plausible cause.
Having already been manufactured and shipped, virtually any amount of money made on these things(either in direct sale prices or in plan attaches) is better than the alternative of just scrapping them. Since they were designed to be 'better-than-feature-phones' they should be able to curb-stomp your basic shit feature phone if sold at roughly similar prices, and with roughly similar plans. They are better than feature phones, just not as good as the real smartphones they were pitted against.
I think that the basic problem is that Google's desires(and thus expenditures) do not line up with those of the freelance linux-on-the-desktop community.
Google (correctly) perceives that, because their area of strength lies in their essentially opaque search, advertising, and operations expertise, much of which is OSS based but purely in house, exposed only by web APIs, that they have no particular competitive advantage in desktop and mobile, unlike MS(desktop) or Apple(mobile, high-end consumer desktop).
This is why their efforts in these areas are either OSS, and basically designed to bolster use of their core services(ie. Chrome is not intended to make money, it is intended to light a fire under the ass of every subpar JS/HTML5 implementation out there, therefore, they have nothing to gain by making it closed source. Similarly, Android is designed to kill off the dumbphones that make using the internet on the go too painful, and thus bolster Google's mobile/location ad business and keep Apple from being in a position to cut off Google's air supply on the mobile side. If it gets good enough, they may use their control of the Market and some of the core apps to try to extract some cash; but it is basically just a loss leader, hence again the openness).
Things like Earth and Sketchup are oddballs, aquisitions offered as freeware, but continuing the aquired company's sale of a premium version, presumably in the spirit of cost recovery.
In general, though, Google's only real interest in the desktop and mobile spaces is not OSS or freedom per se; but in increasing the number of people using web applications and service, where google has great strength, and in attempting to weaken MS and Apple to prevent them from achieving a position strong enough to use against them. They(probably correctly) don't seem to view linux-on-the-arbitrary-desktop/laptop as a solution to this problem, especially catering to the needs of other than casual gamers.
Because of their size, and the not truly horrible(merely rather uncertain on a per-unique-model basis) of linux graphics, Google can safely consider the problem solved. If they say "1 million units" there are plenty of vendors who will say "would you like source with that, sir?". Also, because openness on the desktop and mobile is simple a means to Google's ends, if they get the source under NDA and have to ship a blob, that doesn't conflict with their goals to any great degree. They'd prefer full OSS, just for cost reasons; but they have no real need to fight heroically for it, since they are large enough to get engineering cooperation from makers of binary blobs.
I agree that the problem is not fully solved for the individual wishing to run linux on his desktop/laptop; but I don't think Google cares. Their announced intention, with both ChromeOS and Android, is OSS; but shipped by partners with hardware. If you want to have a go at building it yourself, have fun; but only the stuff shipped by partners, on hardware, with engineering/integration done for you, is Google's problem.
Given the number of stories where people either come to work and shoot up the place after being laid off, or even murder-suicide their own families and then themselves due to economic stresses, I'm not at all sure that it is rationality saving them.
Obviously, the rational thing is to fatalistically suck it up and try to move on, and I'd fully expect most people to do so; but an irrationality incidence of less than 1 in 1000 adds up to more than a few very dangerious people on a population level...
If they had written to the correct registers they could have put the well into debug mode and sorted all this out...
What I don't understand, with these "Corporation that doesn't give a fuck and has more politicians in its pocket than you ever will fucks over some more luckless saps" stories is why there isn't more extralegal violence associated with them.
Obviously, subjecting large corporations to serious penalties under law would be unamerican, and we generally avoid it; but America is crawling with angry and well armed people, many without too much to lose, and spree-killing is something we start practicing in high school.
Why isn't there an enraged ex-fisherman with an AR-15 lurking outside the window of every BP C-level whose name is publicly known? People get killed all the time over petty shit, why not the big stuff?
Any CPU debug mode worthy of the name should be able to violate OS security six ways from Sunday, and silently at that, without any difficulty. By the same token, though, any CPU debug mode worthy of shipping in commercial silicon really ough to be possible for the firmware and/or kernel to lock for the duration of operation. If userspace can kick it off, a brave and exciting new world of AMD-specific malware is about to begin...
I strongly suspect that Google either considers the matter of Linux drivers largely solved(ie. Intel anything except that GMA 500 crap will work fine, just not very fast in any OS, NVIDIA spits on OSS; but mostly knows how to make the trains run on time within their binary blob world, AMD/ATI has made substantial commitments to improved openness and to their closed source stuff not sucking) or something to be solved with much larger piles of money, quietly "We have every expectation of shipping 1-2 million ChromeOS devices a quarter. It is our comittment to our customers, and a requirement of our product design, that the graphical experience be both rich and rock-solid..." *raises eyebrows significantly at meeting room full of competing vendors*.
While I would certainly like to see them buy the Nouveau guys some beer or something, I suspect that, for the purposes of an entity like Google, graphics is either a solved problem, or an area where they don't need to go with penny-ante public announcements.
(In addition, of course, this current competition is sponsored by a guy who just works for Google. Obviously it is unlikely that Google is going to sack him for it, but their only support for the competition is by the indirect means of paying the guy's salary for work he does for them, leaving him with the cash to offer a prize. This isn't a Google competition.)
I suspect that MS knows that they don't have a leg to stand on against the present activity(all the copyrighted code/DRM protected stuff/patented wizbangs are in the firmware, and writing a driver that just receives the data the firmware generates is the sort of thing that even the DMCA explicitly protects). I assume that their frankly nasty bluster so far has been about two things 1. management of the fears of Joe User: Joe hears "hackers hack Kinect", Joe assumes that his Kinect is now watching his children on behalf of Romanian cybercriminals. MS doesn't want that, so they talk big about how secure and law-enforcement-cooperating they are. 2. Overton window shifting: If you want a specific, and novel, legal result, you generally have to prepare the groundwork for it by modifying the discourse. You do this by the crude; but often successful, expedient of repeating your currently-false-but-desired-to-be-true worldview in public, a lot. If "unapproved use = tampering = evil" has been repeated a few thousand times by the time that DMCA 2: Son of DMCA comes before congress, it will be much more likely to make it in.
Now, if somebody does something directly competitive with PrimeSense, on a commercial scale, you may well see the claims start flying that any working Kinect driver must be implementing 127 patented algorithms and is otherwise all kinds of illegal; but that probably isn't worth the cost of process servers for the current scruffy band of international hackers...
As a pure webcam, to be used alongside existing machine vision software, it is a significant letdown(640x480 for $150? I feel like its 1995 all over again!). The more-or-less realtime rangefinding, though, is head and shoulders above all but the most sophisticated work in hobbyist robots and things.
The only real downer is the 12 watt power draw and need for a USB 2.0 master. The USB 2.0 master requirement is way less limiting than it used to be(the shivaplug board on my desk qualifies, as well as being more than fast enough to serve as a robot brain, and is still less than a quarter the size of the FIRST controller we used back in high school robotics...); but 12 watts is 12 watts. Static applications and larger robots only need apply.
It isn't at all clear(and I know of no direct support for the notion) that MS used Winmodems as a tactical move; but having a single player holding the lion's share of the market certainly does make the process of moving function out of the hardware and into the driver easier and more attractive.
If there are a dozen small players, all sparring with their own oddball architectures and OSes and whatnot, being able to say "It speaks AT commands over an RS-232 bus. Figure it out for your own damn freak of an OS." is pretty attractive.
If Windows is the overwhelming player, you just slap a windows driver in the box, save BOM money on every unit, and go home happy.
Now, given that the pressure on BOM costs is just the nature of the hardware market, and that MS has actually lagged behind and prevented the driverization of certain functions(ie. Linux has several filesystems designed to do all the housekeeping necessary to run directly on raw NAND flash. Windows works fine with abstracted flash products(SD cards, xd cards behind a reader, etc.); but has no such support), and that they have, more recently, presumably to avoid lousy vendor drivers making them look bad, been shoving vendors toward standards(some of them actually standard, as in the case of webcams not being "vista certified" if they weren't UVC compliant, some being pet 'standards' like the NDIS-over-USB that most cheapo DSL modems optionally speak) it seems unlikely that MS is using driverization as a serious competitive strategy.
It certainly doesn't hurt them, as the incumbent, that there exists a lot of hardware that is just a brick without a very complex driver, and the incumbent is the one you can't not write a driver for; but MS doesn't seem to have pressed that advantage particularly hard, with the exception of the notorious emails about trying to break ACPI.
Driverization has certainly made life worse for OSS purists in cases where hardware is extremely complex or requires patented techniques to do its work; but even the fairly hostile players generally have a closed-source driver available these days. Also, given that hardware costs way more than software, and moves more slowly(especially among low-budget players), the OSS community has actually made some attempts at driverization of its own: GNU Radio and the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, some of the work around Asterix, and certain HAM experimentation most notably...
I don't know what Primesense's agreement with MS says; but your post certainly does suggest that a decent OSS driver for the Kinect peripheral could certainly make the Primesense folks very, very sad pandas.
Every unit attached to an xbox is basically free money, for basically any nonzero fee, since no gamer would shell out 40 times what a kinect costs, and MS will be able to move those suckers in serious quantity; but if they start displacing units such as the one you bought, each such displacement will erase the profit from hundreds of gaming units...
Question is, was this just the tradeoff they knew they were going to face, and they decided that the volume was worth it, will there be some sort of legal crackdown attempt, or do they have a differentiated product waiting in the wings(much superior cameras, GigE instead of USB, for easy long distance/multiple unit wiring, etc.)?
I'd be curious to know exactly how limited the hardware could be while still implementing the cube solving algorithm. Clock speeds are just a matter of patience, half the speed just means waiting twice as long; but there has to be an amount of RAM below which the algorithm Just Can't Be Done.
As for the hardware side, I imagine that the guys who do really serious high speed CNC machinery could probably achieve better-than-human speeds, though the device would probably cost 100k and require the cube to be continuously sprayed with a coolant/lubricant fluid to avoid thermal or mechanical damage...
Another interesting(and potentially cheaper; but with an exciting element of danger!) possibility would be if you allowed yourself to glue a suitably powerful magnet to each surface subcube of the cube, so you could then manipulate it without physical contact, other than one support point, by surrounding it with an array of electromagnets...
The security staff really let an opportunity slip past them here.
"I'm terribly sorry madam; but surely the real Home Office Minister Baroness Neville-Jones would be properly familiar with aircraft security procedure. Come with me, please."
*Whispers*"We caught a terrorist impersonating the Home Office Minister! What'we do now?" *Whisper*"Just throw a bag over her head and hand her over to the Yanks, those bloody-minded bastards love that sort of thing."
There is another possible consideration: the producer of the technology.
Primesense created, presumably holds patents on, and did the reference design for, the "Kinect" camera/IR projector range mapping stuff. MS didn't buy them, they just bought/licenced enough of their stuff to produce Kinect hardware.
It is quite possible that Primesense also sells one or more much expensive motion capture solutions/SDKs/whatever based on the same technology; but agreed to give MS a sweet deal, in $/unit terms, because of the number of units expected to sell.
If the Kinect becomes generally useful, with independently produced drivers, anybody will be able to buy an instance of PrimeSense's fancy tech for $150 at any gamestop.
Consider an example from the old days: the first "Airport" cards were actually just rebadged Lucent gear; but with the pins deliberately switched around so that they would be incompatible with a PCMCIA slot. The Lucent branded equivalents were more expensive; but worked with normal PCMCIA slots. Obviously Lucent wasn't taking a loss on the "airport" cards; but they were having it both ways: sell a bunch of units to well-heeled consumers via Apple; but don't cannibalize the deep-pocketed connected enterprise market, thanks to deliberate incompatibility. There could be something similar going on here.
I hope that this "Nevercookie" addresses the issues raised by "Evercookie" in a systematic way, rather than just defeating Evercookie point-by-point.
Evercookie's creator explicitly noted that his work was a simple proof of concept, cooked up fairly quickly, as a way of raising the issue of covert persistent data storage on the web. He further noted that people who actually do evil for a living are probably at least as creative as he is, and have a whole lot more time to work on the problem. Simply defeating Evercookie, as released, will probably save you from a few of whatever the analytics world's equivalent of a script-kiddie is; but will do next to nothing against the issues that Evercookie was designed merely to demonstrate...
I don't think that they have much choice about "Ion 2" pretty much sucking.
With the prior generation of atoms, the usual pairing was Atom + fairly antiquated Intel chipset with GMA950 and a fairly high TDP. For just a little extra, you could pair the Atom with Nvidia's chipset instead, which had as good or better TDP and much better integrated graphics. Intel wasn't happy; but the end result was good.
With the newer generation, Intel brought most of the chipset functions onboard, and played hardball with licensing, so that "Ion 2" ended up consisting of, in essence, Nvidia's lowest-end discrete GPU added on to the system via the few PCIe lanes available. Unlike Ion, which was a genuine improvement in basically all respects other than OSS linux support, Ion2 meant higher TDP, more board space, and higher BOM.
Intel bears much of the blame for it; but Ion 2 is largely a dog, particularly when compared to the "CULV" options, which will get you a real(albeit low end) Core2 or i3 processor and a similar low end GPU for not much more than the Atom...
They are definitely releasing Tegra-branded ARM SoCs that include their own GPU tech as one of the functional blocks. If that is what you mean by "hybrid", then yes.
To the best of my knowledge, though, neither Nvidia, with their ARM SoCs, nor Intel with their on-package GMAs, nor AMD with their upcoming on-die ATI tech are creating what you might call a full "hybrid"(ie. a CPU whose instruction set also includes GPU-esque instructions, like MMX or SSE on steroids). At present, they are all just more heavily integrating, for economic and latency reasons, a discrete "CPU" block and a discrete "GPU" block.
Yeah, I'd assume that it is somewhere around the time that integrated circuits hit the street. 3 billion discretes, especially with what transistors used to cost, seems a touch unlikely; but it cannot have been long after the integrated stuff became available.
With a 244 watt TDP, I suspect that they need every inch of the front of the card, and are constrained only by PCIe form-factor concerns from using more of the back, just to keep the thing from burning out without a fan that sounds like a legion of the damned every time you boot the thing. The entire front of the card is a combination of heatsink(and not your extruded aluminum jobby, a phase-change vapor chamber unit) and a shroud to direct air flow.
If you want to see the board, back off a few price/performance tiers, and you'll get a 90% bare PCB with a dinky little slug of aluminum or copper on the main chip.
In an absolute, architectural sense, essentially never. A screamingly fast vector processor isn't going to do much for all your x86 code, and never mind all the little housekeeping chores that the CPU does(most of the modern ones include the system RAM controller(s), do a lot of peripheral wrangling, may be the root of the PCIe bus, and so forth).
In a "designing your next gaming build" sense, they largely already have. Unless you are a money-is-no-object-e-penis-must-get-longer type gamer, you can generally get better bang for your buck by going with a cheaper CPU and spending the savings on a nicer graphics card. It depends on the game, and there are situations where a truly epic(2x or 3x of the top of the line GPU ganged together with SLI or crossfire) graphics system will be CPU bound without the best CPU available; but Joe Gamer is, most of the time, better off with a third tier CPU and a second tier GPU, or a 2nd tier CPU and a 1st tier GPU.
In smaller systems(where board footprint really counts) or in cheap systems(where package costs and board size really count) the integration of CPU and GPU into a single package proceed apace, with AMD rolling low-end ATI tech into certain of their newer parts, and Intel trying to make their GMA stuff suck less. The only real wild card is Nvidia: Unlike Intel or AMD, they have no x86 cores to speak of, on the other hand, their GPU-computing initiatives are arguably the most advanced, in terms of tool and driver maturity. The question is, will they eventually produce an Nvidia equivalent to AMD and Intel's CPU/GPU combo packages(perhaps by buying VIA, who has adequate-but-deeply-unexciting x86 assets; but utter shit GPUs), or will they persist purely as a maker of high end gaming GPUs and GPU-based compute cards?
Unless the heriditary line of the "PC" as we know it is wholly extinguished, there will always be an x86 CPU floating around somewhere in the block diagram(and, in other types of systems, likely an ARM CPU); but it is already the case that, for many applications, the CPU has gotten fast enough to hit diminishing returns for many applications, and the GPU(or just the embedded h.264 decoder) is where the action is.
I don't think that the situation is nearly as clear cut as your example.
Something like Gmail is clearly a "cloud" service. It offers email through either web, pop3, or IMAP interfaces with essentially complete abstraction of what goes on underneath.
Amazon, for its part, offers VMs, of various sizes, with essentially complete abstraction of what is underneath, accessible by means of one or more nearly frictionless programmatic ordering methods(as opposed to calling your account rep or filling out a PO or something). It is certainly a very different level of granularity, and there are definitions of "cloud computing" that could meaningfully exclude it; but there are other, equally meaningful and potentially useful, definitions that could include it.
This GTX580 is a 3 billion transistor chip(not counting the RAM on the same card, just the GPU die itself). Does anybody know what year the number of transistors on the entire planet reached the number on this die?
I don't think that, with the fairly classical "cloud" guys like Amazon, who offer essentially Virtual Private Server products; but with automated provisioning, the argument has ever been about much more than flexibility. The more abstracted "cloud" people(gmail, google docs, etc.) can make the management complexity argument, since they offer highly abstract services with all the gory details hidden; but Amazon basically just tosses you a Linux VM and leaves you to deal with it from there. The only attraction is that, unlike classic VPS, you don't have to talk to a sales rep, just an API.
Given that with Amazon, all their EC2 stuff is either uber-commodity linux VMs or available for local hosting via the Eucalyptus project(their storage mechanism, etc.) it is possible to adopt a hybrid "base load/burst load" strategy, similar to how the electrical utilities do it. If your operation has a more or less steady base load, you run it on cheap boxes of your own. If you have a load spike, you use the expensive; but quick to spin up, EC2 instances. Since modern virtualization overhead is low, and virtualization is extremely convenient anyway, you don't lose to much, you don't pay Amazon a flexibility fee for things you don't need to be flexible; but you can swiftly pay for additional capacity that works just like your local capacity, and then stop paying when you no longer need it.
If you need long-term, stable levels of service, you'd be insane to buy it from a burst-service company, just as very heavy cell users would be nuts to buy a contractless per-minute plan. Either do it in house or hire a hosting company to do it for you, on a stable basis.
The notion that there is an entity called "true cloud computing" is largely nonsense. "Cloud Computing" is just a buzzword, which covers a continuum of things: At one extreme you have essentially classical virtual private server offerings; but with an API instead of a sales rep for provisioning. At the other extreme you have fully abstracted services like "email" with absolute opacity about what goes on under the hood.
Trying to define "cloud computing" is rather like trying to come up with a good definition of "species". We know a great deal about the actual objects we are talking about; but the definition is a matter of convenience, rather than some platonic essence to be discovered.