Intel seems to be a full generation behind ARM in making efficient chips, but has used the 2 generation head start their fab has on everyone to cover that game, and then some now.
The story I got from my friends who work there (circa 1 year ago) is that they are scared to death that the tablet/phone markets escaped them. Desktop replacements have slowed, and they missed the boat on phones/tablets. They suck at being lean and mean, so they have almost always just outgrown their screw-ups. Chips like this make it clear that they really have made strides to close the gaps where they could.
It still stands that they have to push out an entrenched ARM competitor, and they appear to be trying to do so by targetting the 2 in 1 side rather than tablets directly.
Well, not quite, but the lower limit definition need to ratchet up every year. We are consuming ever more data each year, so shouldn't we expect the minimum acceptable "broadband" definition to adjust accordingly?
A few years down the road the right to be able to travel might end up as a defended right. Reasonable accommodations have to be made for disabled people, and I think it would be reasonable to require airlines to provide accommodations, at no cost, for tall people. A couple inches of knee space should be regulated. The current race to the bottom has gone more than far enough.
It is hard to build your brand image when a bunch of lying greedy a-holes are your main contacts to the public. Dealers are going to take a ~10-15% cut as well, which makes an already expensive alternative that much worse. For a new brand to jump directly to the dealer model is a huge hurdle.
The real question is when the other brands are going to make the plunge as well. If Tesla manages to get their model to stick well enough in a bunch of states you can bet that at some point an automaker that is already on the ropes (*cough* Chrysler *cough*) might get desperate enough to try and bypass their dealers to gain a cost edge that might make the difference between survival and not.
I can't disagree with anything you said. The Leaf is a good little second or third car. I use mine as my daily commuter, usually 15-40 miles a day, and we use it for most of our driving on weekends. It easily gets used for >50% of the miles in the house. But the range just doesn't cut it for about 10% of the trips. It is actually rather fun to drive, but only once you get good at ignoring all the whirly gigs warning you about how much energy you are wasting and the completely bogus range estimator.
If they can get the real range up to 150 or 200 miles it will be vastly easier to own a car like the Leaf as your only car. Only a couple percent of trips would be out of that range for almost anybody, and then renting using things like a Zip car makes good sense for the few long trips you take per year.
Tesla has a great car, and has suffered some bugs from being their first full fledged car. $70-90k just makes it an absurd proposition for most folks. I got my used leaf for $15k, which will pay for itself in about 40k miles compared to driving my truck, so it was a no-brainer.
I am hopeful that within a few years we will have a longer range Leaf, and a cheaper Tesla to provide 2 good options in the $35k ballpark. Just as important, it would be nice to see the charging infrastructure get figured out, too many companies with too many hair-brained plans are a real turnoff to trying to do a road trip (AeroVironment chargers for example require a monthly plan, or to call to access them every time, wtf?).
"The secret here is that the No-Fly list is a farce."
It is worse than a farce, as it has become a weapon to illegally coerce cooperation among certain ethnic and religious groups. Turn state's evidence, or you might end up on the list and not be able to ever visit your family member's again. How can we as a "freedom loving American's" tolerate any citizen being strong-armed like this?! Being inaccurate at times would be forgiven by most (especially if there was a plausible challenge and review path), but to be used as it is just plain awful and illegal.
The erosion of our liberties and freedoms under the Patriot Act have been beyond shameful. We backed that up with blunders like GITMO. I am not sure where it ends, but it has played out as if the playbook was right from an Orwell novel.
It would also be nice if we put more effort into being a likeable country rather than spending so much time, effort, money, and political capital keeping our enemies at bay and out allies paid off. If we would stop meddling in everyone else's affairs we might not have so many people and groups trying to attack us in the first place. It would take decades, as we have meddled for quite a while in quite a lot of places. But long term, it would be nice to have the moral high ground again.
I quite likely have, but I am not so crass as to go around asking random strangers in the gym what their orientation is.
I was just curious. I don't have any good way to find out what my usage is, and I'm guessing it is a lot lower than 150 GB/mo. We do a few hours of Hulu/Netflix a week and a bit of gaming. I have a 2 year old that mostly consumes my non-working waking hours.
Yes, rapacious capitalism tends mostly to believe in whatever lines their pockets at the moment.
Your mention of ethanol is a great example. Ethanol on the whole is a big loser both in therms of wasting food, wasting tax dollars subsidizing it, not reducing carbon emissions, and greatly using up public will with a massive sideshow. Monsanto loves it, as do lots of industrial farmers (there are no family farmers left of consequence, just in campaign ads).
If our government was not already captured by the current lot, we could use laws to adjust incentives to get these rapacious capitalists to cause less harm by letting them fight over dollars in solar rather than oil. Sadly, changing the status quo scares the hell out of the current set of rapacious capitalists, so they spend part of their massive profit to manipulate the system to keep their cash cow protected. We as voters have been gerrymandered into being mostly irrelevant, so we cannot do much anymore. Weak minded kumbaya green folks are their own worst enemies, expecting that hugs and good will toward mankind will magically solve the problem (and they SUCK at math).
I'll stick to my opinion that this self driving thing will mostly be a fad. For ~10-20% of the population who really can't drive (elderly, vision impaired, etc) it makes some good sense, then maybe another 10% who have long commutes that rise to the level of being a burden. The other 70-800% simply won't see it as a worthwhile capability in the next couple decades.
My suspicion is that the real utility will be in automating 18 wheeler traffic and with improving public transportation. General utility just does not compute for this curmudgeon.
Besides, I can't wait to see what the EULA looks like for one of these things.
The best defense against employees stabbing you in the back as they leave, is to not ever stab them in the back. Employees who were treated well and treated as human beings are much less likely to be jerks towards the company after they leave.
A disgruntled employee is not going to be dissuaded from screwing you simply by the fact that they have to hand a phone in.
I've had a couple companies treat me evilly, and to this day I look extra hard for alternatives when they are a prospective vendor, and I make FULL use of their support guys when they manage to get in-house. Bugs I would normally just report and work around get turned into monthly tracked items that require corrective action and root cause reports. I don't cross the line, but I share as much of my insight as I can without actually crossing the line. Companies that have treated me well generally get the benefit of my doubt.
How much stuff have you bought due to ads? Zero here. I usually get ads for places I just shopped at, which is really closing the barn door after the cows have left, and often results in me thinking twice about going there again.
I'm convinced that ad based funding is a bubble waiting to pop. I would be very interested to see the analytics supporting the notion that people were clicking enough ads (or influenced by the ads) in Flappy Birds to support the 50k/day payout the author was getting (and that was just his cut).
I pay for Hulu, and I wish there was a slightly higher cost ad free option.
I'd also be open to paying $20/month for a completely ad free internet where the ISP's and content providers figured out some miraculous revenue sharing agreement (good luck with that).
My problem with the current pay-wall route is that too many places have just a few articles I want to read occasionally, nut they want to do yearly subscriptions, which is a no-go for the amount of stuff I want.
As a result I do ad-block, and also avoid a lot of sites. Mandatory video ads almost always makes me leave. I almost never watch anything on youtube anymore.
I'm a fairly savvy guy, but my background is in RF&Microwave engineering, not computer science or IT. I should be low hanging fruit for Linux. I don't do a lot of programming, but have done some assembly, C, Matlab, Vee (shudder), etc.
So why don't I run Linux?
Every couple years I try. Most recently I put a Linux Mint installation on a virtual machine and gave it another pass. No go. Getting the monitor resolution right took a bunch of googling, tracking down some arcane text file to edit, restart, finally get to select the right resolution. Halfway through I remembered I had to do the same BS when I put Ubuntu onto a partition a couple years before (still there, couldn't easily figure out how to get the boot-loader going on the new machine, so it just sits there on my second drive). It's the fricking 21st century, it should just work!
The more you dig in, the more you are confronted with vast wasteland of fragmented BS.
I also tried a pre-canned distro called CAE Linux a little while back. I hit a road block trying to run some of the tools when I found that only about 3/4 of the needed pieces have english localizations, and I don't speak French. The other problem was that a lot of the naming within the main toolset was cutsey crap that was not intuitive, so it made a hard learning curve worse. Linux is rife with such dumbass naming conventions (WTF does "Grep" have to do with searching?!). I was hoping to keep the company from pouring money into a grossly overpriced thermal simulator. Sadly for an engineering group it was clear that Linux and those tools were just not adequately usable.
So unless you are installing Linux for a home user to surf the web and little else, I just don't see the current philosophy of Linux ever getting broad penetration on the desktop. There is a thin veneer of polish for Office and web, but anywhere off the beaten path, even a little, requires a deep dive into jargon hell.
It sure seems like such selectable ethics concerns are kind of jumping the gun. Regulatory behavior is going to clamp down on such options faster than you can utter "Engage!". Personally I would want my autonomous car to be designed with the most basic "don't get in a crash" goal only, as I suspect regulators will as well.
Far more important is the idea that we will have at least an order of magnitude or two increase in the amount of code running a car. If Toyota had trouble with the darn throttle (replacing the function of a cable with a few sensors and a bunch of code), how can we trust that car companies will be able to manage a code base this big without frequent catastrophe? Adding extra complexity to tweak the "ethics" of the car just sounds like guilding the lilly, which increases the opportunities for bugs to creep in.
Yes, the average federal worker makes double the average salary across the US. However, most federal employees have to have a college degree, which makes a comparison between a Federal employee and a Walmart employee pretty meaningless. My guess is you already know this and are likely either a mindless Fox watching drone, or a paid shill.
When skills are normalized, federal workers make substantially less (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/01-30-FedPay.pdf). The very top of the federal pay scale is under 150k (and the DC area is very pricey to live in), compare that to silicon valley or Wall Street.
NASA has been starved down to a rotting skeleton, as it is an easy punching bag for the right.
In all seriousness, at my office the office director just yesterday made the comment that most of our programmers are EE majors, as he tends to find they make much better low level programmers than CS grads. We make test and measurement equipment, and our office does a lot of the firmware and measurement "personalities". Our equipment measures things that most CS majors wouldn't even understand in the first place, so this makes some sense.
The result is we have a lot of gray haired engineers, a kilt wearer, but only a few with suspenders.
"Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it..."
My friends don't need to know about my wrist's daily life. Adding sensors for heart rate, glucose level, and so on would make me even less inclined to want my wrist to be ratting me out constantly to Facebook.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I see all this wearable tech crap as a passing fad at best, and more likely just a load of baseless hype.
Write me an app that lets me spend more time with my kid, or get to a campground more often and we can talk. More gadgets to clutter my already hectic life just has no appeal to me.
It is getting really hard not to be cynical about our whole governance.
The conspiracy nutjobs have been made to look as fools not for making outlandish claims, but not making outlandish enough claims to match the audacity of these agencies.
I worked for one of the 3 letter acronym agencies for a short stint, and it struck me how you had a large group of folks paid to be underhanded and devious, and this crept into the collective psyche. So dealing with other departments to share resources was a cat and mouse game itself. Professional liars just don't know how to turn it off after a while.
Our government leaders can't figure out how to pay to fix roads and bridges, yet can't figure out how not to build tanks that nobody wants.
The election system is just so badly corrupted by the rich and powerful that I see no real path to get leaders in place that are not already owned by masters other than the electorate.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel seems to be a full generation behind ARM in making efficient chips, but has used the 2 generation head start their fab has on everyone to cover that game, and then some now.
The story I got from my friends who work there (circa 1 year ago) is that they are scared to death that the tablet/phone markets escaped them. Desktop replacements have slowed, and they missed the boat on phones/tablets. They suck at being lean and mean, so they have almost always just outgrown their screw-ups. Chips like this make it clear that they really have made strides to close the gaps where they could.
It still stands that they have to push out an entrenched ARM competitor, and they appear to be trying to do so by targetting the 2 in 1 side rather than tablets directly.
Is there even an app for that?
Still not interested. That is all.
Well, not quite, but the lower limit definition need to ratchet up every year. We are consuming ever more data each year, so shouldn't we expect the minimum acceptable "broadband" definition to adjust accordingly?
Oh well, still jaded after all these years...
A few years down the road the right to be able to travel might end up as a defended right. Reasonable accommodations have to be made for disabled people, and I think it would be reasonable to require airlines to provide accommodations, at no cost, for tall people. A couple inches of knee space should be regulated. The current race to the bottom has gone more than far enough.
Complainers will mysteriously end up on the no-fly list is my bet.
It is hard to build your brand image when a bunch of lying greedy a-holes are your main contacts to the public. Dealers are going to take a ~10-15% cut as well, which makes an already expensive alternative that much worse. For a new brand to jump directly to the dealer model is a huge hurdle.
The real question is when the other brands are going to make the plunge as well. If Tesla manages to get their model to stick well enough in a bunch of states you can bet that at some point an automaker that is already on the ropes (*cough* Chrysler *cough*) might get desperate enough to try and bypass their dealers to gain a cost edge that might make the difference between survival and not.
I can't disagree with anything you said. The Leaf is a good little second or third car. I use mine as my daily commuter, usually 15-40 miles a day, and we use it for most of our driving on weekends. It easily gets used for >50% of the miles in the house. But the range just doesn't cut it for about 10% of the trips. It is actually rather fun to drive, but only once you get good at ignoring all the whirly gigs warning you about how much energy you are wasting and the completely bogus range estimator.
If they can get the real range up to 150 or 200 miles it will be vastly easier to own a car like the Leaf as your only car. Only a couple percent of trips would be out of that range for almost anybody, and then renting using things like a Zip car makes good sense for the few long trips you take per year.
Tesla has a great car, and has suffered some bugs from being their first full fledged car. $70-90k just makes it an absurd proposition for most folks. I got my used leaf for $15k, which will pay for itself in about 40k miles compared to driving my truck, so it was a no-brainer.
I am hopeful that within a few years we will have a longer range Leaf, and a cheaper Tesla to provide 2 good options in the $35k ballpark. Just as important, it would be nice to see the charging infrastructure get figured out, too many companies with too many hair-brained plans are a real turnoff to trying to do a road trip (AeroVironment chargers for example require a monthly plan, or to call to access them every time, wtf?).
What are these "accountability" and "rule of law" things you speak of?
"The secret here is that the No-Fly list is a farce."
It is worse than a farce, as it has become a weapon to illegally coerce cooperation among certain ethnic and religious groups. Turn state's evidence, or you might end up on the list and not be able to ever visit your family member's again. How can we as a "freedom loving American's" tolerate any citizen being strong-armed like this?! Being inaccurate at times would be forgiven by most (especially if there was a plausible challenge and review path), but to be used as it is just plain awful and illegal.
The erosion of our liberties and freedoms under the Patriot Act have been beyond shameful. We backed that up with blunders like GITMO. I am not sure where it ends, but it has played out as if the playbook was right from an Orwell novel.
It would also be nice if we put more effort into being a likeable country rather than spending so much time, effort, money, and political capital keeping our enemies at bay and out allies paid off. If we would stop meddling in everyone else's affairs we might not have so many people and groups trying to attack us in the first place. It would take decades, as we have meddled for quite a while in quite a lot of places. But long term, it would be nice to have the moral high ground again.
I quite likely have, but I am not so crass as to go around asking random strangers in the gym what their orientation is.
I was just curious. I don't have any good way to find out what my usage is, and I'm guessing it is a lot lower than 150 GB/mo. We do a few hours of Hulu/Netflix a week and a bit of gaming. I have a 2 year old that mostly consumes my non-working waking hours.
Out of pure curiosity, what are you doing that gets you up to >150 GB per month?
Yes, rapacious capitalism tends mostly to believe in whatever lines their pockets at the moment.
Your mention of ethanol is a great example. Ethanol on the whole is a big loser both in therms of wasting food, wasting tax dollars subsidizing it, not reducing carbon emissions, and greatly using up public will with a massive sideshow. Monsanto loves it, as do lots of industrial farmers (there are no family farmers left of consequence, just in campaign ads).
If our government was not already captured by the current lot, we could use laws to adjust incentives to get these rapacious capitalists to cause less harm by letting them fight over dollars in solar rather than oil. Sadly, changing the status quo scares the hell out of the current set of rapacious capitalists, so they spend part of their massive profit to manipulate the system to keep their cash cow protected. We as voters have been gerrymandered into being mostly irrelevant, so we cannot do much anymore. Weak minded kumbaya green folks are their own worst enemies, expecting that hugs and good will toward mankind will magically solve the problem (and they SUCK at math).
I'll stick to my opinion that this self driving thing will mostly be a fad. For ~10-20% of the population who really can't drive (elderly, vision impaired, etc) it makes some good sense, then maybe another 10% who have long commutes that rise to the level of being a burden. The other 70-800% simply won't see it as a worthwhile capability in the next couple decades.
My suspicion is that the real utility will be in automating 18 wheeler traffic and with improving public transportation. General utility just does not compute for this curmudgeon.
Besides, I can't wait to see what the EULA looks like for one of these things.
Nuff said.
The best defense against employees stabbing you in the back as they leave, is to not ever stab them in the back. Employees who were treated well and treated as human beings are much less likely to be jerks towards the company after they leave.
A disgruntled employee is not going to be dissuaded from screwing you simply by the fact that they have to hand a phone in.
I've had a couple companies treat me evilly, and to this day I look extra hard for alternatives when they are a prospective vendor, and I make FULL use of their support guys when they manage to get in-house. Bugs I would normally just report and work around get turned into monthly tracked items that require corrective action and root cause reports. I don't cross the line, but I share as much of my insight as I can without actually crossing the line. Companies that have treated me well generally get the benefit of my doubt.
How much stuff have you bought due to ads? Zero here. I usually get ads for places I just shopped at, which is really closing the barn door after the cows have left, and often results in me thinking twice about going there again.
I'm convinced that ad based funding is a bubble waiting to pop. I would be very interested to see the analytics supporting the notion that people were clicking enough ads (or influenced by the ads) in Flappy Birds to support the 50k/day payout the author was getting (and that was just his cut).
I pay for Hulu, and I wish there was a slightly higher cost ad free option.
I'd also be open to paying $20/month for a completely ad free internet where the ISP's and content providers figured out some miraculous revenue sharing agreement (good luck with that).
My problem with the current pay-wall route is that too many places have just a few articles I want to read occasionally, nut they want to do yearly subscriptions, which is a no-go for the amount of stuff I want.
As a result I do ad-block, and also avoid a lot of sites. Mandatory video ads almost always makes me leave. I almost never watch anything on youtube anymore.
I'm a fairly savvy guy, but my background is in RF&Microwave engineering, not computer science or IT. I should be low hanging fruit for Linux. I don't do a lot of programming, but have done some assembly, C, Matlab, Vee (shudder), etc.
So why don't I run Linux?
Every couple years I try. Most recently I put a Linux Mint installation on a virtual machine and gave it another pass. No go. Getting the monitor resolution right took a bunch of googling, tracking down some arcane text file to edit, restart, finally get to select the right resolution. Halfway through I remembered I had to do the same BS when I put Ubuntu onto a partition a couple years before (still there, couldn't easily figure out how to get the boot-loader going on the new machine, so it just sits there on my second drive). It's the fricking 21st century, it should just work!
The more you dig in, the more you are confronted with vast wasteland of fragmented BS.
I also tried a pre-canned distro called CAE Linux a little while back. I hit a road block trying to run some of the tools when I found that only about 3/4 of the needed pieces have english localizations, and I don't speak French. The other problem was that a lot of the naming within the main toolset was cutsey crap that was not intuitive, so it made a hard learning curve worse. Linux is rife with such dumbass naming conventions (WTF does "Grep" have to do with searching?!). I was hoping to keep the company from pouring money into a grossly overpriced thermal simulator. Sadly for an engineering group it was clear that Linux and those tools were just not adequately usable.
So unless you are installing Linux for a home user to surf the web and little else, I just don't see the current philosophy of Linux ever getting broad penetration on the desktop. There is a thin veneer of polish for Office and web, but anywhere off the beaten path, even a little, requires a deep dive into jargon hell.
As it always has, and likely always will be.
It sure seems like such selectable ethics concerns are kind of jumping the gun. Regulatory behavior is going to clamp down on such options faster than you can utter "Engage!". Personally I would want my autonomous car to be designed with the most basic "don't get in a crash" goal only, as I suspect regulators will as well.
Far more important is the idea that we will have at least an order of magnitude or two increase in the amount of code running a car. If Toyota had trouble with the darn throttle (replacing the function of a cable with a few sensors and a bunch of code), how can we trust that car companies will be able to manage a code base this big without frequent catastrophe? Adding extra complexity to tweak the "ethics" of the car just sounds like guilding the lilly, which increases the opportunities for bugs to creep in.
Wow you are ignorant.
Yes, the average federal worker makes double the average salary across the US. However, most federal employees have to have a college degree, which makes a comparison between a Federal employee and a Walmart employee pretty meaningless. My guess is you already know this and are likely either a mindless Fox watching drone, or a paid shill.
When skills are normalized, federal workers make substantially less (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/01-30-FedPay.pdf). The very top of the federal pay scale is under 150k (and the DC area is very pricey to live in), compare that to silicon valley or Wall Street.
NASA has been starved down to a rotting skeleton, as it is an easy punching bag for the right.
In all seriousness, at my office the office director just yesterday made the comment that most of our programmers are EE majors, as he tends to find they make much better low level programmers than CS grads. We make test and measurement equipment, and our office does a lot of the firmware and measurement "personalities". Our equipment measures things that most CS majors wouldn't even understand in the first place, so this makes some sense.
The result is we have a lot of gray haired engineers, a kilt wearer, but only a few with suspenders.
"Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it..."
My friends don't need to know about my wrist's daily life. Adding sensors for heart rate, glucose level, and so on would make me even less inclined to want my wrist to be ratting me out constantly to Facebook.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I see all this wearable tech crap as a passing fad at best, and more likely just a load of baseless hype.
Write me an app that lets me spend more time with my kid, or get to a campground more often and we can talk. More gadgets to clutter my already hectic life just has no appeal to me.
It is getting really hard not to be cynical about our whole governance.
The conspiracy nutjobs have been made to look as fools not for making outlandish claims, but not making outlandish enough claims to match the audacity of these agencies.
I worked for one of the 3 letter acronym agencies for a short stint, and it struck me how you had a large group of folks paid to be underhanded and devious, and this crept into the collective psyche. So dealing with other departments to share resources was a cat and mouse game itself. Professional liars just don't know how to turn it off after a while.
Our government leaders can't figure out how to pay to fix roads and bridges, yet can't figure out how not to build tanks that nobody wants.
The election system is just so badly corrupted by the rich and powerful that I see no real path to get leaders in place that are not already owned by masters other than the electorate.
How's the weather in Canada these days?