A sues B B countersues A A and B settle A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
Is there a reason this still makes the news every time?
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money. Sometimes the price might be too high, of course. But there's always a price.
I am at a total loss for understanding when a firm releases a new power effecient graphics card that draws 19 watts of energy continuously when doing absolutely nothing at all. Something is fundementally wrong with the industry here not just AMD.
That's actually not bad at all. The problem is that a transistor that's turned "off" is no longer off. As semiconductor manufacturing processes get smaller, transistors become worse and worse at being insulators when off, both through the gate (which, in an ideal MOSFET transistor, never conducts current) and through the junction (in an ideal transistor, it conducts when on, and insulates perfectly when off).
These days, about 50% or more of a chip's power is lost to leakage - these transistors that are burning power just through their existence. It's a huge problem that has several workarounds, but no solid solution. So far, the best thing you can do is turn part (or all) of the chip off; if you're not doing video decoding, turn off the video decoder (ie literally cut power to that area of the chip). If you're not doing 3D, turn off those areas of the chip. Of course, you turn off power using what? More transistors! So there's still leakage, it's just much less.
Finally, keep in mind that "idle" != "doing absolutely nothing at all". The graphics card is still in regular communication with both the CPU (giving it commands and data) and video RAM (holding the working data, and everything that's visible on your screen), and sending data to your monitor for it to display. Pixels on a display aren't a set-it-and-forget-it thing; they get continually refreshed. So on a 1440x900 60 Hz screen, the video card is sending about 78 million pixels to the display every second. So not only is it doing something, but the power to various parts of the chip (PCIe interface, memory interface, video output, and anything in between) can't be powered down, meaning there's a leakage penalty too.
Not to mention, they're heat-resistant, but they don't really have a heat problem, because they don't have any leakage! Plus, they can't be manufactured at any great scale with e-beam lithography, break down in about an hour even at their current slow speed, and are quite a bit larger than existing transistors. They've got some work to do before these get interesting, and I think there's a lot of other potential future technologies that are far ahead of them in development.
I agree. My university did this a number of years ago; if you had a bot, worm, virus, or any other malware infection that was detected via the network, they'd quarantine your machine so all web pages were redirected to an info page telling you what to do. Windows Update and a few other select sites were excepted, so users could remove the infection, etc. When your computer was cured, you could call in and have your access restored in a few minutes.
Of course, antivirus software was given away for free, there was a 24-hour helpdesk to assist with this process, and also walk-in and drop-off support if you needed more assistance. It was definitely a class above most ISP support.
I too used a plastic sandwich bag this week for a medical miracle; I was hiking and developed a blister on my heel, but through the use of a plastic sandwich bag as cushioning and slippery material so that my heel wouldn't rub, I was able to continue with less pain, and without worsening the blister.
I know, impressive.
Maybe this means that plastic baggies will soon be needing FDA approval, or maybe a prescription.
Running a fast core at low speed saves a good amount of power, but running a core designed for that low speed is even lower power. The transistors in the third core are physically different, mostly to reduce the leakage power, which is wasted power from transistors that can't be turned off all the way. Designers have to make a tradeoff between speed and power in their transistors. A fast transistor lets electrons through quickly when the transistor turns on, but is bad at keeping electrons from passing through when off. A slow transistor is the reverse; it is a good insulator when the transistor is off, but it is also a (not quite as) good insulator when the transistor is on! This is just a design that attempts to get the best of both worlds, though with a cost (die area) penalty, plus a latency penalty to switch between them.
You're also assuming the fan is still perfectly mounted (which it might not have been in the first place), and that sort of thing.
For one of my past jobs (computer repair), I saw a desktop that had a machining problem with the heatsink. It had 4 legs that were supposed to poke through holes in the CPU card, but one of the legs had a large burr of metal on it that didn't fit through the hole. The end result? In the ~2 years that this computer had been running, the heatsink had NEVER touched the CPU. No wonder it stopped booting! I had very little trouble convincing the manufacturer that even though it was well past the 1-year warranty, that this was a manufacturing/QC issue that should be covered, so the user got their machine fixed for free.
They're knowingly releasing hardware that can't survive 'full throttle', and it's bullshit.
Would you prefer hardware that has much greater margins built in that can handle running Furmark? That's entirely possible to do.
OK, now when you buy a video card, you see one from manufacturer X for $250, and one from manufacturer Y for $270. The GPU, clock speeds, and benchmarks are the same. Which do you buy? I'd bet that for the vast majority of consumers, it's probably going to be the cheaper one. Oops, they just voted against being able to run Furmark.
There's no user-visible reason to buy a card that can handle Furmark when a different card is cheaper. That program is a degenerate case that real games just won't hit. Not to mention, how many people actually try it. One in a thousand? And I'm being generous here too - more likely, you'd have to give up cash AND performance to get a card to run Furmark. Now try and convince me that you're going to pay more for a less-performant card, just so you can run some software once or twice - and it will have no effect on the games you typically use it for, which will work just fine on both.
That said, the hardware I'm familiar with all has protection mechanisms built in to keep the card from doing any permanent damage - both with software and hardware. First steps will usually include things like reducing the clock speed or voltage. The ultimate step is typically turning off GPU power. To the user, this will look like a crash. It probably just means that with the rapid increase in power dissipation (and a partially blocked fan and a dust-insulated heatsink), the fan wasn't able to keep the GPU cool. So the hardware does the smartest thing it can, which is try to ensure that you don't have to buy a new video card. Without that protection, a semiconductor can easily go into thermal runaway; the hotter a part gets, the more power it dissipates, and the hotter it gets. This cycle ends abruptly when a fuse in your power supply blows or the chip in question literally melts.
And as one final note, when I did computer repair, I'd often see people complaining about "the latest OS upgrade killed my RAM/HD/CPU/awesome hair!" Do I really think that the OS upgrade had anything to do with it? Probably not. Maybe it involved a little bit greater stress or stressed different parts of the system differently, or maybe they just happened to coincide. If the hardware died (and I mean won't-boot-dead, this article seems to be more about crashing, which is completely different), then it was probably already marginal, and would've had to be replaced soon anyway.
They didn't invent those things, and I'm not saying they did. However, they DID invent the previous generation phone, which provides a baseline that they have to beat. This is especially true since they really only have one model of iPhone at a time. Other phone manufacturers have so many models that you don't have to beat the specs of every previous phone, or even of any particular phone, because nobody is making that comparison.
And if you measure your phone's battery life in days, you either don't have a smartphone, or you have one that you really don't need.
If that were literally true, every Nokia user would be carrying around an auto-aiming parabolic antenna 6 feet in diameter and a few hundred pounds of batteries to power the amplifiers for it.
I get what he's trying to communicate - that he believes that choices between aesthetics and performance will be decided in favor of performance. But only within certain constraints. Like a certain sized device, with a certain amount of talk and standby time, in a particular shape, with particular durability requirements, some maximum cost of parts and engineering, etc...
Apple's not really any different, they just have additional constraints; eg longer battery life and smaller size than the previous generation, while boosting the screen resolution and the size of the camera lens and sensor.
And it's certainly not news. Apple has done this for many, many, many years, and people have complained about it for just as long. I certainly don't see why it's worthy of slashdot status. If you want a free discussion forum, hold it in a place where it's not the uniform policy to delete off-topic posts liberally. If you want a place where you can get (or give) an answer about a technical problem with your Apple product without having to dig through lots of chaff, visit the Apple discussions site.
Apple has always stated that their forums are for users to help each other; primarily this means one person posts "I'm having this issue" and another user posts "here's how to fix it." Their ToS specifically prohibits discussion of speculation, rumor, Apple policy or procedure, polls or petitions, and non-technical topics. They suggest that all posts should be either a technical support question, technical support answer, or constructive feedback about product features, and that "I'm sorry for the rant, but..." is a hallmark phrase of a disallowed post.
I guess as long as this routine event makes the front page of/., there's a few other news items that should be submitted:
"Law of gravity applies to iPhone when released four feet above cement"
"Old faithful erupts, despite history of consistently erupting"
"Slashdot approves story mentioning iPhone 4 for front page"
Don't get me wrong - I think a car like that is a great idea, and a very large percentage of consumers can get by using it. I'd consider a plug-in hybrid for myself, except for a few problems. First, I live in an apartment, so I'm unable to charge a car at home - there's no electrical near my car. And second, I almost always bicycle when I'm going a short distance (15 miles or less one way, give or take). So I would rarely be able to get as much of an advantage with a plug-in as the average Joe who is often taking short trips to and from work or the grocery store.
My only problem is with claiming that it's getting 1 L/100 km; depending on the individual, it could very easily get anywhere between 0 L and 4.7 L/100 km. It's more accurate to say that it requires no gasoline for the first 40 miles (covering xx% of all trips), and then gets 4.7 L/100 km thereafter. Let individuals figure out how those specifications fit their driving habits, rather than try to lump it into one convenient (and disingenuous) fuel economy number.
You conveniently left off the last half of that sentence: "On August 11, 2009, GM released their estimated EPA city fuel economy rating for the Volt of 230 mpg-US (1.0 L/100 km; 280 mpg-imp) of gasoline plus 25 kWh/100 mi (160 km) of electricity."
So no, the Volt isn't going 100 km on 1 liter of gas any more than an electric car is going 100 km on 0 liters of gas. Its actual fuel economy off gasoline only is almost 5 times worse, if you take a look at the sentence before the one you quoted:
"The Volt's range-extending gasoline engine is expected to get approximately 50 mpg-US (4.7 L/100 km; 60 mpg-imp) on the city cycle of the EPA's test while operating in this Charge Sustaining (CS) mode."
That's still nothing to sneeze at, of course. And the average person will probably get 230 mpg or in that range, since trips greater than 40 miles are not terribly common for most people. But you can't claim that it's really getting that high of fuel economy, because you're leaving off the majority of its fuel.
This is wrong; the Prius uses only toothed gears as well. The previous generation used a chain drive in addition to gears, but the current generation uses just gears.
The Prius "CVT" is very unlike any other CVT, so people often differentiate it by calling it an eCVT (for electric), since there are no friction components.
I doubt recouping their investment has anything to do with it; they're not going to be able to sell it to many people, and probably not for a very high price either. They also may have to worry about support costs; they'd probably have been better off canceling it a week before shipping and saving that week's worth of engineering time.
However, this little experiment (or parts of it, anyway) may end up in future generations of Intel CPUs. They want to get it into researchers' hands now so that they can find out what's good about it, and what can be improved. Researchers can develop new algorithms to split up the work from a program so that it can be run on these many cores. Without significant advances in that area, there are many workloads (including most of the ones in the consumer space) that will never benefit from anything other than a small number of screaming fast cores. With a little help from researchers now, they can have a much better product a few years down the road.
I think in the long run, a high-performance general purpose computer will have to have two different processors; one has a small number of cores, but can do out-of-order superscalar execution, has tons of cache, a great branch predictor, high clock speed, etc. All the things that make single-thread execution fly. The other has a large (VERY large) number of very simple cores that aren't particularly fast for any one thread, but can run so many of them in parallel (or quickly switching between them) that they can finish far more work in the same amount of time. If there's a big pile of work to be done, they can handle it; perfect for video, for example.
Wait a minute - most of us already have that. The fast, complex processor is obvious. The parallel one is your GPU. The golden age of the GPU is just beginning; as more developers figure out good ways to take advantage of it, we should see some very interesting advances in both hardware and software.
This is why, when you write a new compiler, you compile it twice. First, you run it through the older version of the compiler to get the one with the new features. Then, you recompile the same code again with the new compiler, and you get the same program, but it takes advantage of any new features in the new compiler, putting them into the newly compiled binary. Further compilations, of course, just produce the same result.
How the F can they sell this phone in northern climates? I live in WI and in Feb I will frequently go outside on a nice day to take a conf call and get some fresh air. A nice day being, at least, in the upper 20's.
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So leave the phone in your pants pocket, where it's probably much warmer, and will not be subject to condensation when you bring it back inside. Or put it in there before you go inside. Use a headset if you need to call somebody outside. Quite frankly, I find it uncomfortable to use a phone outside in such temperatures, as that generally means taking off a glove as well.
I think in most cases, people will not trigger the sensors - if you're using it, you're holding it sandwiched between your face and your hand, and the chips are producing heat. Walk inside, and it's not totally frigid, though I might avoid doing it just to be nice to my phone - it is, after all, a piece of sensitive electronics, not a dog's chew toy. If you're not using it, it's probably securely stowed in a coat pocket or purse, where the temperature and humidity change will be much more gradual, and not subject to condensation.
I worked for a company that made embedded systems for telecommunications; they typically had to be more tolerant of temperature variation than most consumer products (say -5C to 65C, roughly). As part of our qualification, we'd try to push the limits to see just how hot and cold we could get our product before it would fail to know just how much margin we had (we always tested with at least 5C of margin). Pushing the high temperature range, it was pretty easy to get many ICs to their maximum junction temperature due to power dissipation (and also because we weren't allowed to have fans on our products, as such mechanical components are liable to fail). However, in the low range, I'm not aware of anything ever going wrong before we hit -40C, which was our arbitrary testing limit. But most of the chips we used were only guaranteed to work down to 0C; we just had to take on all the risk that the product might fail below that temperature.
You can bet Apple's buying standard commercial temperature range parts (many parts aren't even available with larger temperature ranges), and they don't want to take the risk if the parts don't work beyond their specified temperatures.
I'll defend them a bit - they say in their paper that they exclude computers that were purchased as either refurbished or used.
But that's where my defense of their methodology ends. They say the total sample size was 30,000, and they analyzed 9 brands that had over 1,000 units each. IMHO, that's still a pretty small sample size. The margin of error on at least some of those numbers would be around ±3%; that would be enough for the "top 6" manufacturers to be roughly indistinguishable. Keeping that in mind, I'd say there are two groups of manufacturers, reliability-wise: Asus, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, and Dell are more reliable, and Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and HP are less reliable - but only by a couple percent.
Also, I'd object similarly to their comparison of netbooks against the larger notebook market; they say in their paper that netbook market share was 10% of all laptops until Q4 last year, so I have to assume that their 1-year data is probably similar, meaning 10% of their 30,000 samples are netbooks. That means a margin of error around ±2%. However, the difference between netbooks and "premium laptops" in reliability at 1 year is only 1.6%.
Finally, I almost missed this, but all their 3-year reliability numbers for all laptops are "projections" from their 2-year data (their 3-year reliability numbers for netbooks are projected from just 1 year). So take any error they had at 2 years, multiply it by 3/2, and you're off even further - I suppose that means the margin of error on some of these numbers is probably closer to 4.5%.
All in all, I'd say their paper is a little light on numbers. There are a whopping 11 actual data points that they base all of their data on in the paper - the other 13 data points are projections (all but 1 is a projection from data that is not quoted in the paper). Add to that my general sense of distrust in anybody that sells an extended warranty, and, well, you get the idea.
I think the main problem most slashdotters will have is that the government will be able to tell when you're watching a porn video versus just looking at pictures, due to the extra power draw during video decoding.
Luckily, my brain does not subtract my right ear from the left.
I mean, who cares whether it's possible to modify the audio stream to make the noise noticeable? The point is to have lots of music in a small space. Personally, I can hear compression artifacts in 128k MP3 in some music. Typically, I use 160k or better AAC, which is pretty solidly in the realm of I-can't-hear-the-difference.
It's not a die shrink - the GT 240 supports DirectX 10.1, while the GTS 250 only supports 10.0. Not to mention the GT 240 can also do GDDR 5. And the GT240 is about half the power. And despite the GT240 having a 25% slower graphics clock, 27% slower processor clock, AND 25% fewer cores, it manages about 25% less performance. If it were the same chip, those effects should roughly stack so it'd be about.75*.75=.5625 or 44% less performance. Looks to me like it's something new and different, and not just a re-brand.
Now where's the -1 Wrong mod when you need one? Or at least a -0 Wrong mod - you can keep the points and the visibility, but there oughtta be a tag for those cases where a +5 comment just ain't right.
In general, I agree. The point of going to college is not to learn what's in the book - it's to learn how to think. Lots of people are trained to code, and to code well. The really good ones know how to think beyond their code. It doesn't matter if you learn how to think in your Master's program, during a Bachelor's, in a 2-year school, or on your own. However, none of those are necessarily evidence that the person knows how to think, which is why there's an interview before you can get a job. The Master's degree is a good way to show that you at least have a high likelihood of being able to think. If you don't have any schooling at all, your resume/cover letter had better indicate very clearly how you learned to go beyond the knowledge in the books, or it'll quickly go to the shredder.
And that is what a degree is good for - it'll get you to the interview a little more easily. Beyond that, you have to show that you got the degree for good reason, not just that you have the piece of paper. If you did well in school, that's not a problem - but it's often not the case. One person I know told me that he rejects about 95% of the people he interviews. The average degree level of those candidates is probably a Master's degree. So the degree alone grants you more opportunities, but beyond that, you have to prove your skills.
I'm in hardware, not software, but there are certain things that I expect a hardware engineer to know; like how a transistor works, or how to build a logic gate out of them. I'd also expect them to be able to learn new things in the middle of an interview, based on knowledge of these basic concepts. Writing code in a hardware description language looks a lot like any other code, but without the proper training (wherever it comes from), you can end up writing something that would be great software, but makes for very very bad hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
Is there a reason this still makes the news every time?
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money. Sometimes the price might be too high, of course. But there's always a price.
I am at a total loss for understanding when a firm releases a new power effecient graphics card that draws 19 watts of energy continuously when doing absolutely nothing at all. Something is fundementally wrong with the industry here not just AMD.
That's actually not bad at all. The problem is that a transistor that's turned "off" is no longer off. As semiconductor manufacturing processes get smaller, transistors become worse and worse at being insulators when off, both through the gate (which, in an ideal MOSFET transistor, never conducts current) and through the junction (in an ideal transistor, it conducts when on, and insulates perfectly when off).
These days, about 50% or more of a chip's power is lost to leakage - these transistors that are burning power just through their existence. It's a huge problem that has several workarounds, but no solid solution. So far, the best thing you can do is turn part (or all) of the chip off; if you're not doing video decoding, turn off the video decoder (ie literally cut power to that area of the chip). If you're not doing 3D, turn off those areas of the chip. Of course, you turn off power using what? More transistors! So there's still leakage, it's just much less.
Finally, keep in mind that "idle" != "doing absolutely nothing at all". The graphics card is still in regular communication with both the CPU (giving it commands and data) and video RAM (holding the working data, and everything that's visible on your screen), and sending data to your monitor for it to display. Pixels on a display aren't a set-it-and-forget-it thing; they get continually refreshed. So on a 1440x900 60 Hz screen, the video card is sending about 78 million pixels to the display every second. So not only is it doing something, but the power to various parts of the chip (PCIe interface, memory interface, video output, and anything in between) can't be powered down, meaning there's a leakage penalty too.
Not to mention, they're heat-resistant, but they don't really have a heat problem, because they don't have any leakage! Plus, they can't be manufactured at any great scale with e-beam lithography, break down in about an hour even at their current slow speed, and are quite a bit larger than existing transistors. They've got some work to do before these get interesting, and I think there's a lot of other potential future technologies that are far ahead of them in development.
I agree. My university did this a number of years ago; if you had a bot, worm, virus, or any other malware infection that was detected via the network, they'd quarantine your machine so all web pages were redirected to an info page telling you what to do. Windows Update and a few other select sites were excepted, so users could remove the infection, etc. When your computer was cured, you could call in and have your access restored in a few minutes.
Of course, antivirus software was given away for free, there was a 24-hour helpdesk to assist with this process, and also walk-in and drop-off support if you needed more assistance. It was definitely a class above most ISP support.
I too used a plastic sandwich bag this week for a medical miracle; I was hiking and developed a blister on my heel, but through the use of a plastic sandwich bag as cushioning and slippery material so that my heel wouldn't rub, I was able to continue with less pain, and without worsening the blister.
I know, impressive.
Maybe this means that plastic baggies will soon be needing FDA approval, or maybe a prescription.
Running a fast core at low speed saves a good amount of power, but running a core designed for that low speed is even lower power. The transistors in the third core are physically different, mostly to reduce the leakage power, which is wasted power from transistors that can't be turned off all the way. Designers have to make a tradeoff between speed and power in their transistors. A fast transistor lets electrons through quickly when the transistor turns on, but is bad at keeping electrons from passing through when off. A slow transistor is the reverse; it is a good insulator when the transistor is off, but it is also a (not quite as) good insulator when the transistor is on! This is just a design that attempts to get the best of both worlds, though with a cost (die area) penalty, plus a latency penalty to switch between them.
Still better than RyanAir; they charge you a $10 fee to process the service charge for you.
You're also assuming the fan is still perfectly mounted (which it might not have been in the first place), and that sort of thing.
For one of my past jobs (computer repair), I saw a desktop that had a machining problem with the heatsink. It had 4 legs that were supposed to poke through holes in the CPU card, but one of the legs had a large burr of metal on it that didn't fit through the hole. The end result? In the ~2 years that this computer had been running, the heatsink had NEVER touched the CPU. No wonder it stopped booting! I had very little trouble convincing the manufacturer that even though it was well past the 1-year warranty, that this was a manufacturing/QC issue that should be covered, so the user got their machine fixed for free.
They're knowingly releasing hardware that can't survive 'full throttle', and it's bullshit.
Would you prefer hardware that has much greater margins built in that can handle running Furmark? That's entirely possible to do.
OK, now when you buy a video card, you see one from manufacturer X for $250, and one from manufacturer Y for $270. The GPU, clock speeds, and benchmarks are the same. Which do you buy? I'd bet that for the vast majority of consumers, it's probably going to be the cheaper one. Oops, they just voted against being able to run Furmark.
There's no user-visible reason to buy a card that can handle Furmark when a different card is cheaper. That program is a degenerate case that real games just won't hit. Not to mention, how many people actually try it. One in a thousand? And I'm being generous here too - more likely, you'd have to give up cash AND performance to get a card to run Furmark. Now try and convince me that you're going to pay more for a less-performant card, just so you can run some software once or twice - and it will have no effect on the games you typically use it for, which will work just fine on both.
That said, the hardware I'm familiar with all has protection mechanisms built in to keep the card from doing any permanent damage - both with software and hardware. First steps will usually include things like reducing the clock speed or voltage. The ultimate step is typically turning off GPU power. To the user, this will look like a crash. It probably just means that with the rapid increase in power dissipation (and a partially blocked fan and a dust-insulated heatsink), the fan wasn't able to keep the GPU cool. So the hardware does the smartest thing it can, which is try to ensure that you don't have to buy a new video card. Without that protection, a semiconductor can easily go into thermal runaway; the hotter a part gets, the more power it dissipates, and the hotter it gets. This cycle ends abruptly when a fuse in your power supply blows or the chip in question literally melts.
And as one final note, when I did computer repair, I'd often see people complaining about "the latest OS upgrade killed my RAM/HD/CPU/awesome hair!" Do I really think that the OS upgrade had anything to do with it? Probably not. Maybe it involved a little bit greater stress or stressed different parts of the system differently, or maybe they just happened to coincide. If the hardware died (and I mean won't-boot-dead, this article seems to be more about crashing, which is completely different), then it was probably already marginal, and would've had to be replaced soon anyway.
They didn't invent those things, and I'm not saying they did. However, they DID invent the previous generation phone, which provides a baseline that they have to beat. This is especially true since they really only have one model of iPhone at a time. Other phone manufacturers have so many models that you don't have to beat the specs of every previous phone, or even of any particular phone, because nobody is making that comparison.
And if you measure your phone's battery life in days, you either don't have a smartphone, or you have one that you really don't need.
If that were literally true, every Nokia user would be carrying around an auto-aiming parabolic antenna 6 feet in diameter and a few hundred pounds of batteries to power the amplifiers for it.
I get what he's trying to communicate - that he believes that choices between aesthetics and performance will be decided in favor of performance. But only within certain constraints. Like a certain sized device, with a certain amount of talk and standby time, in a particular shape, with particular durability requirements, some maximum cost of parts and engineering, etc...
Apple's not really any different, they just have additional constraints; eg longer battery life and smaller size than the previous generation, while boosting the screen resolution and the size of the camera lens and sensor.
Luckily, I tend to not make millions of calls myself, so the absolute number doesn't really make a difference for me - how about you?
And it's certainly not news. Apple has done this for many, many, many years, and people have complained about it for just as long. I certainly don't see why it's worthy of slashdot status. If you want a free discussion forum, hold it in a place where it's not the uniform policy to delete off-topic posts liberally. If you want a place where you can get (or give) an answer about a technical problem with your Apple product without having to dig through lots of chaff, visit the Apple discussions site.
Apple has always stated that their forums are for users to help each other; primarily this means one person posts "I'm having this issue" and another user posts "here's how to fix it." Their ToS specifically prohibits discussion of speculation, rumor, Apple policy or procedure, polls or petitions, and non-technical topics. They suggest that all posts should be either a technical support question, technical support answer, or constructive feedback about product features, and that "I'm sorry for the rant, but..." is a hallmark phrase of a disallowed post.
I guess as long as this routine event makes the front page of /., there's a few other news items that should be submitted:
"Law of gravity applies to iPhone when released four feet above cement"
"Old faithful erupts, despite history of consistently erupting"
"Slashdot approves story mentioning iPhone 4 for front page"
I hadn't noticed this problem... until I clicked on this post to read it. Irony, thy name is /.
Mods, send me those -1 Offtopics, if you don't mind.
Don't get me wrong - I think a car like that is a great idea, and a very large percentage of consumers can get by using it. I'd consider a plug-in hybrid for myself, except for a few problems. First, I live in an apartment, so I'm unable to charge a car at home - there's no electrical near my car. And second, I almost always bicycle when I'm going a short distance (15 miles or less one way, give or take). So I would rarely be able to get as much of an advantage with a plug-in as the average Joe who is often taking short trips to and from work or the grocery store.
My only problem is with claiming that it's getting 1 L/100 km; depending on the individual, it could very easily get anywhere between 0 L and 4.7 L/100 km. It's more accurate to say that it requires no gasoline for the first 40 miles (covering xx% of all trips), and then gets 4.7 L/100 km thereafter. Let individuals figure out how those specifications fit their driving habits, rather than try to lump it into one convenient (and disingenuous) fuel economy number.
You conveniently left off the last half of that sentence:
"On August 11, 2009, GM released their estimated EPA city fuel economy rating for the Volt of 230 mpg-US (1.0 L/100 km; 280 mpg-imp) of gasoline plus 25 kWh/100 mi (160 km) of electricity."
So no, the Volt isn't going 100 km on 1 liter of gas any more than an electric car is going 100 km on 0 liters of gas. Its actual fuel economy off gasoline only is almost 5 times worse, if you take a look at the sentence before the one you quoted:
"The Volt's range-extending gasoline engine is expected to get approximately 50 mpg-US (4.7 L/100 km; 60 mpg-imp) on the city cycle of the EPA's test while operating in this Charge Sustaining (CS) mode."
That's still nothing to sneeze at, of course. And the average person will probably get 230 mpg or in that range, since trips greater than 40 miles are not terribly common for most people. But you can't claim that it's really getting that high of fuel economy, because you're leaving off the majority of its fuel.
This is wrong; the Prius uses only toothed gears as well. The previous generation used a chain drive in addition to gears, but the current generation uses just gears.
The Prius "CVT" is very unlike any other CVT, so people often differentiate it by calling it an eCVT (for electric), since there are no friction components.
I doubt recouping their investment has anything to do with it; they're not going to be able to sell it to many people, and probably not for a very high price either. They also may have to worry about support costs; they'd probably have been better off canceling it a week before shipping and saving that week's worth of engineering time.
However, this little experiment (or parts of it, anyway) may end up in future generations of Intel CPUs. They want to get it into researchers' hands now so that they can find out what's good about it, and what can be improved. Researchers can develop new algorithms to split up the work from a program so that it can be run on these many cores. Without significant advances in that area, there are many workloads (including most of the ones in the consumer space) that will never benefit from anything other than a small number of screaming fast cores. With a little help from researchers now, they can have a much better product a few years down the road.
I think in the long run, a high-performance general purpose computer will have to have two different processors; one has a small number of cores, but can do out-of-order superscalar execution, has tons of cache, a great branch predictor, high clock speed, etc. All the things that make single-thread execution fly. The other has a large (VERY large) number of very simple cores that aren't particularly fast for any one thread, but can run so many of them in parallel (or quickly switching between them) that they can finish far more work in the same amount of time. If there's a big pile of work to be done, they can handle it; perfect for video, for example.
Wait a minute - most of us already have that. The fast, complex processor is obvious. The parallel one is your GPU. The golden age of the GPU is just beginning; as more developers figure out good ways to take advantage of it, we should see some very interesting advances in both hardware and software.
This is why, when you write a new compiler, you compile it twice. First, you run it through the older version of the compiler to get the one with the new features. Then, you recompile the same code again with the new compiler, and you get the same program, but it takes advantage of any new features in the new compiler, putting them into the newly compiled binary. Further compilations, of course, just produce the same result.
How the F can they sell this phone in northern climates? I live in WI and in Feb I will frequently go outside on a nice day to take a conf call and get some fresh air. A nice day being, at least, in the upper 20's.
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So leave the phone in your pants pocket, where it's probably much warmer, and will not be subject to condensation when you bring it back inside. Or put it in there before you go inside. Use a headset if you need to call somebody outside. Quite frankly, I find it uncomfortable to use a phone outside in such temperatures, as that generally means taking off a glove as well.
I think in most cases, people will not trigger the sensors - if you're using it, you're holding it sandwiched between your face and your hand, and the chips are producing heat. Walk inside, and it's not totally frigid, though I might avoid doing it just to be nice to my phone - it is, after all, a piece of sensitive electronics, not a dog's chew toy. If you're not using it, it's probably securely stowed in a coat pocket or purse, where the temperature and humidity change will be much more gradual, and not subject to condensation.
I worked for a company that made embedded systems for telecommunications; they typically had to be more tolerant of temperature variation than most consumer products (say -5C to 65C, roughly). As part of our qualification, we'd try to push the limits to see just how hot and cold we could get our product before it would fail to know just how much margin we had (we always tested with at least 5C of margin). Pushing the high temperature range, it was pretty easy to get many ICs to their maximum junction temperature due to power dissipation (and also because we weren't allowed to have fans on our products, as such mechanical components are liable to fail). However, in the low range, I'm not aware of anything ever going wrong before we hit -40C, which was our arbitrary testing limit. But most of the chips we used were only guaranteed to work down to 0C; we just had to take on all the risk that the product might fail below that temperature.
You can bet Apple's buying standard commercial temperature range parts (many parts aren't even available with larger temperature ranges), and they don't want to take the risk if the parts don't work beyond their specified temperatures.
I'll defend them a bit - they say in their paper that they exclude computers that were purchased as either refurbished or used.
But that's where my defense of their methodology ends. They say the total sample size was 30,000, and they analyzed 9 brands that had over 1,000 units each. IMHO, that's still a pretty small sample size. The margin of error on at least some of those numbers would be around ±3%; that would be enough for the "top 6" manufacturers to be roughly indistinguishable. Keeping that in mind, I'd say there are two groups of manufacturers, reliability-wise: Asus, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, and Dell are more reliable, and Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and HP are less reliable - but only by a couple percent.
Also, I'd object similarly to their comparison of netbooks against the larger notebook market; they say in their paper that netbook market share was 10% of all laptops until Q4 last year, so I have to assume that their 1-year data is probably similar, meaning 10% of their 30,000 samples are netbooks. That means a margin of error around ±2%. However, the difference between netbooks and "premium laptops" in reliability at 1 year is only 1.6%.
Finally, I almost missed this, but all their 3-year reliability numbers for all laptops are "projections" from their 2-year data (their 3-year reliability numbers for netbooks are projected from just 1 year). So take any error they had at 2 years, multiply it by 3/2, and you're off even further - I suppose that means the margin of error on some of these numbers is probably closer to 4.5%.
All in all, I'd say their paper is a little light on numbers. There are a whopping 11 actual data points that they base all of their data on in the paper - the other 13 data points are projections (all but 1 is a projection from data that is not quoted in the paper). Add to that my general sense of distrust in anybody that sells an extended warranty, and, well, you get the idea.
I think the main problem most slashdotters will have is that the government will be able to tell when you're watching a porn video versus just looking at pictures, due to the extra power draw during video decoding.
Luckily, my brain does not subtract my right ear from the left.
I mean, who cares whether it's possible to modify the audio stream to make the noise noticeable? The point is to have lots of music in a small space. Personally, I can hear compression artifacts in 128k MP3 in some music. Typically, I use 160k or better AAC, which is pretty solidly in the realm of I-can't-hear-the-difference.
It's not a die shrink - the GT 240 supports DirectX 10.1, while the GTS 250 only supports 10.0. Not to mention the GT 240 can also do GDDR 5. And the GT240 is about half the power. And despite the GT240 having a 25% slower graphics clock, 27% slower processor clock, AND 25% fewer cores, it manages about 25% less performance. If it were the same chip, those effects should roughly stack so it'd be about .75*.75=.5625 or 44% less performance. Looks to me like it's something new and different, and not just a re-brand.
Now where's the -1 Wrong mod when you need one? Or at least a -0 Wrong mod - you can keep the points and the visibility, but there oughtta be a tag for those cases where a +5 comment just ain't right.
In general, I agree. The point of going to college is not to learn what's in the book - it's to learn how to think. Lots of people are trained to code, and to code well. The really good ones know how to think beyond their code. It doesn't matter if you learn how to think in your Master's program, during a Bachelor's, in a 2-year school, or on your own. However, none of those are necessarily evidence that the person knows how to think, which is why there's an interview before you can get a job. The Master's degree is a good way to show that you at least have a high likelihood of being able to think. If you don't have any schooling at all, your resume/cover letter had better indicate very clearly how you learned to go beyond the knowledge in the books, or it'll quickly go to the shredder.
And that is what a degree is good for - it'll get you to the interview a little more easily. Beyond that, you have to show that you got the degree for good reason, not just that you have the piece of paper. If you did well in school, that's not a problem - but it's often not the case. One person I know told me that he rejects about 95% of the people he interviews. The average degree level of those candidates is probably a Master's degree. So the degree alone grants you more opportunities, but beyond that, you have to prove your skills.
I'm in hardware, not software, but there are certain things that I expect a hardware engineer to know; like how a transistor works, or how to build a logic gate out of them. I'd also expect them to be able to learn new things in the middle of an interview, based on knowledge of these basic concepts. Writing code in a hardware description language looks a lot like any other code, but without the proper training (wherever it comes from), you can end up writing something that would be great software, but makes for very very bad hardware.