I'm not surprised it caught on. The screen has to be in constant motion in one direction for the effect to occur which makes it an interesting novelty but little else.
It's not for the author's benefit, it's for Lulu's. They make more money for every checkbox that people enable when publishing their vanity books. It would be tough to find many books on the service that people would actually want to read let alone copy.
Solaris wills till run most SunOS apps that weren't too tightly integrated.
So you mean apps that *are* tightly integrated might not work? How is this any different from the situation with Windows where the kind of apps that may have issues are generally system tools. Think things like virus checkers, drive defraggers / repartition / cloners etc. The situation is no different on Unix systems. I expect if you ran some random network tool from 10 years ago on Solaris 10 you would experience all sorts of issues brought about by changes to security, location of files, bug fixes etc.
Besides which, even if you had software so ancient it wasn't supported by Windows, you could still virtualize it. It doesn't even need Windows to be underneath since the likes of VirtualBox more or less cut the host OS out of the equation.
I think you would be hard pushed to find any OS which tried to maintain the level of backwards binary compatibility as Windows has traditionally provided. Sure some things break from release to release, but generally the majority works extremely well. Given the hideous complexity of Windows this is nothing short of a minor miracle.
X11 isn't a bottleneck by itself since at its heart its a very basic API. But therein lies the issue. For it to be any use it must run a raft of extensions (for 3D, multiple displays, fonts etc.), and then layers of widgets and libraries on top, and a window manager too. Then on top of that you have the "desktop", GNOME or KDE which might run a pile of periphery processes to handle messaging, virtual file systems, automount, screen saver and other tasks. And everything is at the mercy of gcc for its generated code size / speed, and the kernel for timeslicing and prioritisation.
It means it is wrong to blame X11 since there is plenty to go around. However, it wouldn't hurt to imagine a world without X11 running *under* the desktop and what possibilities it might open in terms of performance or development cost if it weren't. X11 could run over the desktop as it does on other operating systems.
Would it be better if X11 died? I don't know. But it would be interesting to find out.
Assuming the summary isn't completely wrong, this is an excellent idea. In the UK we are under severe threat of a draconian three-strikes law.
In the long term, such laws are probably a good thing. They'll just advance the state of the art in p2p so that crypto, packet shaping, anonymous routing etc. becomes the default. Of course it won't prevent the RIAA sniffing traffic and attempting to make inferences but it will be much harder for them to prove their case.
I wonder if even Intel's heart is in USB any more. USB 3 sounds considerably more complex than previous versions, not just for the chipsets but in terms of the cost of cabling etc. I wonder if the tech is going to see serious adoption. Intel are already talking up Light Peak which has a potential for insane transfer rates. I expect USB will be around for a long time yet, but I wonder if USB 3 will have time to become established before something much better appears.
I remember the good old days where you barely even see what you were doing on a Gameboy / Gameboy Color / Game Boy Advance because the screen was so atrocious that it only worked in direct sunlight. I expect backlighting and other advances come at a cost to battery life.
The data is essentially delivered by cell phone. They are using AT&T's international roaming service for the international Kindle, and that costs a lot.
Then offer users the choice of tethered purchases that cost the same or wireless purchases that cost 40% more. The excuses Amazon are coming out with are complete bollocks.
In some respect this bullshit is a good thing since it may open some people's eyes to the benefits of an open format ereader, one that allows you to switch retailers at will rather than be at the whim of one retailer forever.
Vista's perceived sluggishness is probably attributable to inefficient coding practice rather than the raw speed of the underlying OS. For example, people complain about the time it takes to copy files over the network with Vista which should have little to do with the CPU.
You might not care about potentially 17% CPU power savings. I expect large enterprises who run 10,000 PCs including data centers would be very interested.
As for Windows 7 being an improved OS, yes it is. It is a substantial improvement over XP and Vista in a variety of ways such as security, virtualization support, performance on multi-core processors, support for 64-bit processors, desktop usability etc. Perhaps none of them matter to you or don't matter enough to switch but that's besides the point.
If someone plagiarized Shakespeare, then of course it's going to contain matches because someone is copying his style and turn of phrase. Isn't that the point of this software? I don't see how finding matches allows anyone to say one way or another that the unknown work was authored by the same person. It could well be an imitator, which I'm sure Shakespeare had plenty of during his time and thereafter.
If the sales of the PC version tanked it would also give them a good reason to drop the PC platform all together which is understandable from a business point of view.
It's not understandable if it tanked through their own hamfisted restrictions. PC gamers like dedicated servers. It means clans have somewhere fixed to play, they can make mods, they can moderate who gets on, they can run game matching front ends etc. More importantly, it means the players can run servers beyond a game's commercial life.
It doesn't stop Infinity Ward running their own official servers, or offering some form of single sign-on, or medals / points / rewards, or even selling DLC, or even preventing piracy. They could provide their own server as a value add, and I'm sure the service would be popular. But I see no technical reason for taking away a feature that many people want, especially since the code already exists.
Yes the camera's that are built into laptops are usally pretty piss poor quality, but theres nothing stopping someone taking a USB video camera in as well. It wouldn't surprise me if there are a few tiny ones that record with good footage, and connected to a laptop, would have plenty of recording space unlike a cellphone which most won't have the room/power to store movie length footage
You can get HD video recorders the size of a pack of cigarettes which record to 16Gb flash cards. It would be plenty powerful enough to record a movie. You'd have to be insane to want to use a laptop, not least because you'd cast a glow over half the auditorium while fiddling around to set it up. Hardly conspicuous or necessary given that the picture quality wouldn't be any better.
So Michael Dell, the CEO of the company that is the largest dealer of PCs to businesses and individuals, suggests you opt for the extra grand in order to 'love your PC again.' You don't say. I would be shocked if anyone was willing to fork over more than $900 for an entire computer these days. How am I to differentiate this from any salesman saying, "Buy the most expensive one for the best experience."
Nehalem covers a range of processors from 2 all the way through to 8 cores. And I doubt Michael Dell would be directing people to NewEgg for their purchases. Nor do full retail prices apply when purchasing an OS or Office Suite. Nor would most people even need Windows 7 Pro, and even if they did they are probably eligible to upgrade for much less than full price.
Sure Michael Dell's hyperbole is over the top, but so are your calculations. Chances are you could buy the whole system including office suite for the price you suggest. Less probably if you went for a entry level offering such as an i3/i5 when they start appearing in strength.
1) Acer machines are what they are which is solid affordable machines. I've never had an issue with an Acer laptop except of my own doing.
2) Stereoscopic 3D is a novelty, especially on a laptop. I can see the attraction in a high spec system but not in a laptop where 3D is generally underpowered to start with.
3) Windows 7 is Vista done right. It works, it works extremely well in fact and I see no reason to be upset about it.
it is prohibited for the driver to detect the launch of 3DMark Vantage executable and to alter, replace or override any quality parameters or parts of the benchmark workload based on the detection.
And was it actually doing this? What I mean is that if the visuals were identical with the hack as without, what difference does it make? I don't know if this is the case since the article is down, but if they were then I don't see Intel doing the wrong thing. I can see the justification for integrated graphics processors taking advantage of the CPU, if the application performance of CPU+GPU exceeds that of just GPU. Perhaps some games are single threaded, and if there is an extra core lying around, why not take advantage of it?
Certain FEATURES touted as a + for Windoze eg OLE never made it into Unix since their design required the OS to be broken by design and the developers declined to do it.
Erk, there is nothing inherently wrong with OLE, ActiveX or anything else in COM. At the end of the day they're just a means to embed or utilise one program from another. And yes GNOME/KDE have their equivalents. The problem has nothing to do with the OS but in the way IE promoted ActiveX, including automatic installation and the broken assumptions underlying its trust model such as the safe for scripting flag. Basically IE let you instantiate any control installed in your system so long as it was tagged safe for scripting. Even inadvertant bugs in the automation interface of a control could be exploited in drive by attacks.
Other browsers such as Mozilla, Opera etc have their own plugin solutions which are conceptually little different from ActiveX controls. Netscape/Mozilla has various used NPAPI combined with LiveConnect/XPConnect for scripting. The big difference historically was it was more of a pain in the ass to install a plugin than a control so the consequence of an exploit was minimized. It still doesn't prevent exploits happening though as the recent vulnerabilities in Flash Player 10 demonstrate.
Again you're conflating the runtime, with technology sitting on the language. For example EHCache is a well known caching solution for Java, one which can even do distributed caching. But fundamentally there is nothing stopping something equivalent appearing on.NET with similar performance. Perhaps it already has. I agree that Java offers a wealth of choice for potential software and hardware solutions and for that reason alone I wonder why anyone would want to use.NET on the backend. But the runtime itself has little to do with it.
I was involved in a project that used C and the NSAPI to deliver realtime quotes to various back end financial services via XML http. This was a business critical application that provided hundreds of thousands of quotes per second to virtually all retail services of a very large financial corporation. It was pure C running on Solaris with a master process handling streaming quotes and a ton of slave processes all sharing memory and cached data to maximize request throughput. It was still considered too slow. Last I heard they were moving to a dedicated hardware solution with a thin wrapper to convert the response to XML. Which brings me to my original point - the fact it was implemented in C was less relevant than many other factors.
Easily. Every so often (e.g. after 2 days, or 5 hours of play) it asks you to resync your disk to confirm you still own it. The first sync would copy the disc (encrypted to just that PSP of course), the subsequent syncs would just test key sectors to ensure you still own it. People who give their game away can't resync so the game is disabled until they do sync again.
If the UMD device were built into a charging dock, the chances are you'd be returning it to the dock anyway where a resync could be done automatically if the game were still in the drive.
Game rentals are coming to the device soon, so the firmware would even have the concept time limited games.
I know it's unfashionable to say this... if company A & B both wrote a trading platform, to the same requirements and with the same underlying software you can bet your boots that one would still be much faster than the either. The point being that the implementation language isn't as important as how the system was designed, architected and implemented. People are proclaiming that Linux is faster than.NET when its more accurate to say MilleniumIT is faster than TradElect, or so they say.
Why this should be is not at all clear, but.NET is probably not the root cause. Chances are in fact that any Linux/Solaris solution would be mostly coded in Java anyway which suffers similar runtime overheads. The hardware it runs on, the network topology, how messages are passed around, dedicated switches, the database, the scalability or lack thereof in the code and countless other factors are far more significant than the underlying language.
One clear advantage of going the Linux / Unix route is that licencing is a lot cheaper and there are probably a lot more hardware options to consider too.
The two things are not mutually exclusive. Sony wouldn't have been so fast to drop the price if the slim wasn't the culmination of several years of aggressive cost saving measures. Besides, the slim garnered massive positive press coverage that just a price drop alone wouldn't have gained.
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I'm not surprised it caught on. The screen has to be in constant motion in one direction for the effect to occur which makes it an interesting novelty but little else.
It's not for the author's benefit, it's for Lulu's. They make more money for every checkbox that people enable when publishing their vanity books. It would be tough to find many books on the service that people would actually want to read let alone copy.
I want to know if Guitar Hero is playable using a wand attached to the forehead.
So you mean apps that *are* tightly integrated might not work? How is this any different from the situation with Windows where the kind of apps that may have issues are generally system tools. Think things like virus checkers, drive defraggers / repartition / cloners etc. The situation is no different on Unix systems. I expect if you ran some random network tool from 10 years ago on Solaris 10 you would experience all sorts of issues brought about by changes to security, location of files, bug fixes etc.
Besides which, even if you had software so ancient it wasn't supported by Windows, you could still virtualize it. It doesn't even need Windows to be underneath since the likes of VirtualBox more or less cut the host OS out of the equation.
I think you would be hard pushed to find any OS which tried to maintain the level of backwards binary compatibility as Windows has traditionally provided. Sure some things break from release to release, but generally the majority works extremely well. Given the hideous complexity of Windows this is nothing short of a minor miracle.
It means it is wrong to blame X11 since there is plenty to go around. However, it wouldn't hurt to imagine a world without X11 running *under* the desktop and what possibilities it might open in terms of performance or development cost if it weren't. X11 could run over the desktop as it does on other operating systems.
Would it be better if X11 died? I don't know. But it would be interesting to find out.
In the long term, such laws are probably a good thing. They'll just advance the state of the art in p2p so that crypto, packet shaping, anonymous routing etc. becomes the default. Of course it won't prevent the RIAA sniffing traffic and attempting to make inferences but it will be much harder for them to prove their case.
I wonder if even Intel's heart is in USB any more. USB 3 sounds considerably more complex than previous versions, not just for the chipsets but in terms of the cost of cabling etc. I wonder if the tech is going to see serious adoption. Intel are already talking up Light Peak which has a potential for insane transfer rates. I expect USB will be around for a long time yet, but I wonder if USB 3 will have time to become established before something much better appears.
I remember the good old days where you barely even see what you were doing on a Gameboy / Gameboy Color / Game Boy Advance because the screen was so atrocious that it only worked in direct sunlight. I expect backlighting and other advances come at a cost to battery life.
In this day and age, a 512Mb file is not really big. A typical .iso or movie rip exceeds that amount.
Then offer users the choice of tethered purchases that cost the same or wireless purchases that cost 40% more. The excuses Amazon are coming out with are complete bollocks.
In some respect this bullshit is a good thing since it may open some people's eyes to the benefits of an open format ereader, one that allows you to switch retailers at will rather than be at the whim of one retailer forever.
Vista's perceived sluggishness is probably attributable to inefficient coding practice rather than the raw speed of the underlying OS. For example, people complain about the time it takes to copy files over the network with Vista which should have little to do with the CPU.
As for Windows 7 being an improved OS, yes it is. It is a substantial improvement over XP and Vista in a variety of ways such as security, virtualization support, performance on multi-core processors, support for 64-bit processors, desktop usability etc. Perhaps none of them matter to you or don't matter enough to switch but that's besides the point.
If someone plagiarized Shakespeare, then of course it's going to contain matches because someone is copying his style and turn of phrase. Isn't that the point of this software? I don't see how finding matches allows anyone to say one way or another that the unknown work was authored by the same person. It could well be an imitator, which I'm sure Shakespeare had plenty of during his time and thereafter.
It's not understandable if it tanked through their own hamfisted restrictions. PC gamers like dedicated servers. It means clans have somewhere fixed to play, they can make mods, they can moderate who gets on, they can run game matching front ends etc. More importantly, it means the players can run servers beyond a game's commercial life.
It doesn't stop Infinity Ward running their own official servers, or offering some form of single sign-on, or medals / points / rewards, or even selling DLC, or even preventing piracy. They could provide their own server as a value add, and I'm sure the service would be popular. But I see no technical reason for taking away a feature that many people want, especially since the code already exists.
You can get HD video recorders the size of a pack of cigarettes which record to 16Gb flash cards. It would be plenty powerful enough to record a movie. You'd have to be insane to want to use a laptop, not least because you'd cast a glow over half the auditorium while fiddling around to set it up. Hardly conspicuous or necessary given that the picture quality wouldn't be any better.
Nehalem covers a range of processors from 2 all the way through to 8 cores. And I doubt Michael Dell would be directing people to NewEgg for their purchases. Nor do full retail prices apply when purchasing an OS or Office Suite. Nor would most people even need Windows 7 Pro, and even if they did they are probably eligible to upgrade for much less than full price.
Sure Michael Dell's hyperbole is over the top, but so are your calculations. Chances are you could buy the whole system including office suite for the price you suggest. Less probably if you went for a entry level offering such as an i3/i5 when they start appearing in strength.
1) Acer machines are what they are which is solid affordable machines. I've never had an issue with an Acer laptop except of my own doing. 2) Stereoscopic 3D is a novelty, especially on a laptop. I can see the attraction in a high spec system but not in a laptop where 3D is generally underpowered to start with. 3) Windows 7 is Vista done right. It works, it works extremely well in fact and I see no reason to be upset about it.
And was it actually doing this? What I mean is that if the visuals were identical with the hack as without, what difference does it make? I don't know if this is the case since the article is down, but if they were then I don't see Intel doing the wrong thing. I can see the justification for integrated graphics processors taking advantage of the CPU, if the application performance of CPU+GPU exceeds that of just GPU. Perhaps some games are single threaded, and if there is an extra core lying around, why not take advantage of it?
Erk, there is nothing inherently wrong with OLE, ActiveX or anything else in COM. At the end of the day they're just a means to embed or utilise one program from another. And yes GNOME/KDE have their equivalents. The problem has nothing to do with the OS but in the way IE promoted ActiveX, including automatic installation and the broken assumptions underlying its trust model such as the safe for scripting flag. Basically IE let you instantiate any control installed in your system so long as it was tagged safe for scripting. Even inadvertant bugs in the automation interface of a control could be exploited in drive by attacks.
Other browsers such as Mozilla, Opera etc have their own plugin solutions which are conceptually little different from ActiveX controls. Netscape/Mozilla has various used NPAPI combined with LiveConnect/XPConnect for scripting. The big difference historically was it was more of a pain in the ass to install a plugin than a control so the consequence of an exploit was minimized. It still doesn't prevent exploits happening though as the recent vulnerabilities in Flash Player 10 demonstrate.
Again you're conflating the runtime, with technology sitting on the language. For example EHCache is a well known caching solution for Java, one which can even do distributed caching. But fundamentally there is nothing stopping something equivalent appearing on .NET with similar performance. Perhaps it already has. I agree that Java offers a wealth of choice for potential software and hardware solutions and for that reason alone I wonder why anyone would want to use .NET on the backend. But the runtime itself has little to do with it.
I was involved in a project that used C and the NSAPI to deliver realtime quotes to various back end financial services via XML http. This was a business critical application that provided hundreds of thousands of quotes per second to virtually all retail services of a very large financial corporation. It was pure C running on Solaris with a master process handling streaming quotes and a ton of slave processes all sharing memory and cached data to maximize request throughput. It was still considered too slow. Last I heard they were moving to a dedicated hardware solution with a thin wrapper to convert the response to XML. Which brings me to my original point - the fact it was implemented in C was less relevant than many other factors.
If the UMD device were built into a charging dock, the chances are you'd be returning it to the dock anyway where a resync could be done automatically if the game were still in the drive.
Game rentals are coming to the device soon, so the firmware would even have the concept time limited games.
Why this should be is not at all clear, but .NET is probably not the root cause. Chances are in fact that any Linux/Solaris solution would be mostly coded in Java anyway which suffers similar runtime overheads. The hardware it runs on, the network topology, how messages are passed around, dedicated switches, the database, the scalability or lack thereof in the code and countless other factors are far more significant than the underlying language.
One clear advantage of going the Linux / Unix route is that licencing is a lot cheaper and there are probably a lot more hardware options to consider too.
The two things are not mutually exclusive. Sony wouldn't have been so fast to drop the price if the slim wasn't the culmination of several years of aggressive cost saving measures. Besides, the slim garnered massive positive press coverage that just a price drop alone wouldn't have gained.