I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.
The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in/sys, but sadly, most are not.
Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?
That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.
A government that makes a common sense. Time to move to Swiss
No, a government that doesn't want to be on the bad side of the people that voted for them. This could well be one of the truest to-date examples of the popular quotes about democracy:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Even Cringley points out at the first of his article that originally TCP was written for a VASTLY different and weaker network than we have now, so instead of trying to make the networks go back to a mid 1980s design, wouldn't it be smarter just to update TCP to take advantage of new tech advances?
There's nothing about a "weaker" network that necessitates a protocol redesign. TCP has had problems with congestion handling from day one, that have necessitated a million and one hacks and workarounds, because it stupidly conflates packet loss with congestion... Some links will have packet loss without any congestion, and others (like these with huge buffers) will have congestion without (immediate) packet loss. It was a bad design decision.
What's worse is that IP was designed correctly to begin with. The original design has ICMP control messages (eg. source-quench) to signal congestion, much like many other networking protocols. The real problem was that the specifics were vague, and there was no exact standard on how much to slow down, how it affects higher level protocols, etc., so it became a prisoner's dilemma, and highly unfair, and was deprecated.
Of course, this problem could occur with TCP's congestion control just as easily if any particular implementations reduced the rate of exponential backoff, so there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the original congestion control design, just the lack of consistent implementation.
Controlling congestion by dropping packets is like controlling freeway traffic by randomly pushing cars off the road with a bulldozer.
What are you talking about? The Desktop version of Opera is the ultimate example of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into a program, RATHER than making decent design choices... How many completely different models do they have for tabs and windows these days? None of which works in an easy, smooth, and sane manner...
I always liked KDE Konqueror browser, but never thought that it would supplant Firefox - albeit by a different name.
Just because Chrome used one component from Konq doesn't make them remotely similar. KHTML overtook Gecko. Konq did NOT overtake Firefox.
Honestly, the differences between most browsers is the front-end, after all. They all render standard HTML/CSS just fine... but Opera giving you 20 different ways to use tabs, Firefox making the UI buttons drag-n-drop, etc., is what really makes a difference to users.
Personally, I'll pay $1,000 to anyone who hacks CSS support and (working!) JS into links2... I miss the old, lightning fast browsers, with awesome keyboard support, now replaced by dog slow resource-hogs that do NOTHING any better...
Which is not to say that they're lying, but just that they're certainly biased
Yes, they obviously might be a little biased. However, dismissing a report because of the source, without actually trying to refute anything they've said, is incredibly lazy and dishonest, and just makes you look biased.
One of the really neat things about it is that integrating a "UPS" can be just as simple as adding an appropriate lead acid battery in parallel with the load and calling it a day.
That's a great strategy for small and unimportant loads. For critical servers, not having the wiring to do routine battery tests is a complete non-starter.
And just because it's "neat" doesn't mean it's considerably more efficient. Switching power supplies have gotten extremely efficient. Total up the losses in the most efficient PSU and UPS you can find, and tell me how much we're hoping to gain even if DC was 100% efficient, and how much it's going to cost to get there. The numbers aren't appealing.
the 230 VAC , which has a peak to peak voltage of 325 volts, just a stones throw from 380 VDC.
I have a much better idea... let's just run datacenters at 230VAC. 90%+ efficient PSUs these days means you're throwing away standard components to save a couple percentage points on efficiency... not a good trade off.
The DC datacenter idea is a holdover from the days of 60% efficient PSUs, which is long past.
There's nothing wrong with CRF, it will do what you want, as long as you understand you're giving up a little bit of quality/size to use it. The same is true of multi-threaded encoding. I expect the overwhelming majority of people are perfectly fine with both trade-offs in exchange for the convenience they provide. Only when storage space or bandwidth is very tight do the amounts we're talking about really matter.
What's more, the most basic video encoding tips can make a far, far larger difference in quality/size... cropping video to dimensions which are multiples of 16, eliminating edge noise, cropping off black bars, etc.
If you really want a solid basis in audio/video codec fundamentals, I suggest the MPEG-1 article on Wikipedia.
They've been talking about "paperless offices" for decades now, and it hasn't happened yet.
They've been talking about it for decades, but it was obvious that there was no way for it to happen back then...
These days, though, Smart Phones provide the last missing piece of the puzzle. Tiny e-Reader in your pocket at all times. Pull it out and look up the info you need, open your e-mail, launch a VNC session, whatever. Now we have a plausible endgame to eliminate 99% of print-outs found in offices, as soon as smartphone penetration increases a bit... And with pretty good $100 Android smart phones out there, it could happen pretty quickly now.
My last printer (color laser) died months ago, and I haven't felt the need to get a replacement. There's only the extremely rare form that needs to be mailed. Sure, printers will always be around, as you say, but they're clearly going the way of the FAX machine. Maybe the walmart Kodak photo kiosks will be replaced with HP printer kiosks for these rare occasionally needs for paper copies, in the near future.
Inkjet printers are completely unsuited to being powered-up once every 6 months, and laser printers are bottoming out at $100, so aren't getting cheap enough to finally put them out of their misery, either. A $100 laser printer is an amazing deal compared to the costs a decade ago, $150 for a CLP-325W color laser even moreso, but consider the cost of the investment for printing two pages, every couple months, and it doesn't really make sense.
That's horribly incorrect. I liked the sound of hybrid drives as well when I saw the price... The 500GB laptop hard drives with 4GB Flash for $150, should be awesome... But I, not being an idiot, did some research, and sure enough, the reviews say it's not remotely comparable to a real SSD.
It's faster than a drive without such a cache, and it might be a good option for a laptop, but even there I'd say a 32GB SD card would be cheaper, and will work wonders on FreeBSD with ZFS configured for L2ARC...
I have no particular interest in what anyone buys, but the comparison to real SSDs is a massively dishonest.
- Swype automatically adds words to dictionary, only have to tap them in once.
Clearly you've never tried it... It gets more and more confused the more words get added to it, and it often throws in a wrong dictionary word instead of the arbitrary commands you want to enter. And you'd be amazed how useless swype is where filesystem paths are involved.
It takes less than half the screen in portrait mode
SSH in portrait mode is entirely useless, end of story. 80x24 is the magic number, not 12x40.
You shouldn't be using phones for real work except in an emergency. And in those situations touchscreen with Swype is fine.
I'm so glad you're here to tell me what I SHOULDN'T be using my phone for. And here I was getting real work done, I had no idea I was breaking the law, or doing something immoral, or whatever. Clearly all the time I've saved myself and others with my ability to quickly login to the servers at work to fix problems and look up info has been a horrible mistake...
I wonder, do you also know the minimum size laptop I can use to get work done? I mean, my EEE Netbook is pretty small, is that supposed to be reserved for emergencies also? Hey, if some random idiot on slashdot says so, I guess I've gotta carry a 10lbs desktop replacement with me at all times, on the off chance I'd like to quickly look-up some info, or fix a server while I'm out of the house, since it's apparently wrong to do with a phone, and, I presume, other small devices as well...
Why would ANYONE want to ssh from a phone unless they have no choice?
Because it's extremely convenient, to have a thin client in your pocket at all times. In a meeting, and it would help to know something about a server? Quick and easy. Ditto for needing to VNC/RDP to your main system to look-up some things on them... Even a minimal amount of typing is a nightmare if you've got to use an on-screen keyboard.
With a qwerty keyboard, SSH on via a phone only minimally painful. Even when sitting at home, and needing to do some installations or configuration on my DVR or such, I just pull out the phone. Sure, I've even got a netbook, which I'll fire-up if I've got serious work to do, but a little thing that fits in one hand, and floats in the air (don't need a table, not taking up my lap, etc.) and can be dropped in a pocket at a moment's notice is extremely convenient and very useful.
ConnectBot on SSH is pretty flexible and capable, on-par with Putty for xterm emulation. I can get >80x24 on my phone in a readable font, which is the magic number where you can do everything, rather than only a subset of programs work properly.
...on a related note: Samsung Transform Ultra phones have the most unbelievably and intolerably glitchy touch-screens. The kind of thing you've gotta talk yourself out of throwing through the nearest window. Plenty of accounts of this online, and yet Samsung support claims complete ignorance, and though a software fix seems quite easy, there's still nothing out there. With only one mode of input available, and that being unreliable and borderline useless, it doesn't matter how cheap it is, they'd have to pay ME to use it!
If you can telecommute to work, so can someone else in another country who will do your job for cheaper.
This is quite true. When the office in China calls me at 3am to fix their server/network issues, I often wonder how many local Chinese employees I'm taking the place of... And it's not just this job... I've heard anecdotes from plenty oof otherd, whose experiences resemble my own, of being brought in to (very quickly) fix up things my inexpensive Indian counterparts couldn't figure out after weeks of work. I don't know wh
Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail.
Swype fails horribly when you need to type non-dictionary words. Touchscreens also lack arrow keys, necessary for navigating text boxes and more. And in portrait mode, Swype takes up the ENTIRE screen, making it completely useless. The lack of keyboards is precisely why people believe smartphones and tablets are consumption-only devices, when, in fact, they can do a hell of a lot when proper input menthods are available.
I also challenge you to prove that swype or any on-screen keyboard is faster, as I know I'll blow by anyone, typing with my thumbs.
And yes, on-screen keyboards fail miserably when you try to use your phone for real work, like SSH or VNC/RDP connections.
A static quantizer will waste space, as it doesn't really correspond with quality. And there are still a few optimizations in x264 which require two-pass encoding and don't work with crf mode.
AFAIK the Pentium (brand) hadn't been dead for very long before they brought it back- the point at which you're suggesting this logic would have been applied in the repositioning.
Intel went about 2 years without any pentium branded products before reintroducing it. And to make it worse, that 2 year gap was after the brand had taken a serious beating with years of Pentium-4 CPUs being greatly inferior to AMD offerings.
No offence, but this comes across as an over-thought post-rationalisation of Intel's rather badly-thought out choice. I doubt they applied that logic, and I doubt that the people Intel marketing had in mind when choosing names
Actually, it's quite the opposite. There's no question Pentium was a damaged brand. YOU are the one who wants to paint it as an idiotic move with no thought put into it.
Even if you are correct, then they still happen to have dummied their way into a mostly-correct decision, keeping the brand alive. Unlike you, I don't claim to know the rationale behind it, and I'd be the last person to try to rationalize or justify anything Intel does (I pretty well exclusively buy AMD gear, myself).
I was a big hold-out as well... Only had a smart phone for a year, and now I don't want to go without one ever again.
The things you hear people arguing about are bikesheds, absolutely unimportant details.
Having a cell phone, first, has a couple killer apps. Getting a call just as you start your trip that plans have changed... Getting a call while shopping that so-and-so remembered something they want you to pick up. Following-up with someone who gave you bad directions, or an incorrect name, or whatever. Mine usage boils down to being reachable in the event of work emergencies... On-call rotation, before pagers and cell phones, was a horrible thing, almost prison-like, in that you absolutely had to stay close to your land-line phone at all times.
Having a smart phone has far more benefits. The biggest being location-based data. You can be in the middle of a long trip, and have a tire blow out, and not have to depend on a complete idiot cashier to direct you to the nearest tire shop... you go from being a stranger in a new area, to an instant expert on any area you are in. Schedules changed and left you with nothing to do for a couple hours? You can immediately find the nearest shopping mall, nearest movie theatre, etc. Less of a break? You can check and reply to your e-mail, read the latest news headlines, pay some bills, etc.
The rise of the smartphone is going to be the final nail in the coffin of office printers... Your photos are on your phone, your coupons are on your phone, your e-mail is on your phone, your order number is on your phone, anything you might want to print out you can trivially send to your nice portable phone which you are going to be carrying around with you, anyhow.
In a way, I got in early... I was using PDAs from the early days, more than a decade before smartphones came along. My big take-away from all that experience? Never buy a device without a physical keyboard attached... It sounds small, yet it makes a HUGE, HUGE difference. On my Android phone with a slide-out keyboard, I can launch a VPN connection to the office, SSH into my workstation, and do most of the things I could sitting in the office... This utterly dumbfounded all my techie co-workers, early adopters of iPhones and often carrying around two smartphones, neither of which allows them a tolerable thin-client experience, cutting them off from much of the information they'd like to have, and missing much of the utility of a portable computing device. An on-screen keyboard just can't do the job, using too much screen real-estate, and making input (non-dictionary commands in particular) too slow and cumbersome to be useful.
And to break a few prejudices, I answer my cell phone only a tiny fraction of the time, have MORE PRIVACY as I can walk away from my desk when in the office, and don't EVER talk on my phone in busy public spots like elevators, restaurants, etc., as I'm always able to walk away if I do find it necessary to make a call.
1) IT issues are user-facing, and have immediate effects. ie. When your computer is down for a day or two as IT is recovering data from a failed hard drive and/or transferring backups to your new system, you're not thinking about how awesome they are for being able to do that effectively, or how cost-effective it is that they don't go over-board with overzealous backup solutions for all desktop PCs. No, all you know are that something IT is responsible for failed, and you can't do your work for a day or two because of it. This is very different from any other department.
2) Budgetary reasons very, very often force IT to NOT implement the level of redundant systems they know are necessary to provide a really reliable network, or implement the best solutions, or implement the features everyone wants. Additionally, budget reasons again often result in low quality people in IT, at least in lower-level positions, requiring lots of pain and shouting to get through to the guys who know better, and can help.
3) IT is also in the unenviable position of being the cops... nobody likes the cops. This ranges from refusing to install (or perhaps cutting off) whatever you want to use to get around whatever oppressive policy management has in-place, to looking at the code you've quickly cobbled together at the behest of whatever managers and saying "Hell no, that's not getting deployed to our production servers."
IT is a thankless job, and yet is by far the most profitable department in any company I've ever worked in. IT is the group that puts together and maintains all the systems that greatly reduces the number of people needed to accomplish a given job, and is usually the only group who cares and is responsible for keeping the production servers running, completely despite the crap code you've shovelwared out the door to meet your deadline and look like a hero, as everything completely falls apart behind the scenes...
The solutions to problems 1-3 generally require more communication with IT, far earlier in the process (designing a solution, choosing a program, etc), or communication with policy makers in the company to ensure that they know how their decisions may impact you, and find out if they are willing to accept the consequences of their own policies... eg. if management wants to ban something that will help you do your job, and is willing to accept that results will be slower and you will bill more hours for less work, then there's probably no quick fix for the problem in sight, and trying to get IT to help you, or at least allow you, to do an end-run around dysfunctional company policies is going to end badly and only frustrate you further, through no fault of IT's.
It makes sense that yesterday's high-end brand is today's low-end. If you've been buying "Pentiums" in the past couple years, they've been old, out of date chips, so the old brand is tarnished, replaced by something newer and shinier, but still holding on, as warehouses of P4s and Pentium-Ds are still selling well, but only at fire-sale prices.
That they're using the P brand only for servers, yeah, that's pretty damn stupid... I can't argue with that. Those buying servers will be looking at specs, and are interested in exact model numbers, to hell with vague marketing names...
In the end you wind up with a more complex, more bug prone (because of said complexity) kernel, that takes an order of magnitude more development time for far less results
A thousand bugs that will have no adverse effects is infinitely more desirable than a handful of bugs that will bring down the system. This is precisely why there is separation between kernel space and user space. I can't see how you can be so dense as to not understand the benefit of extending this privledge separation into the kernel itself.
I keep throwing out examples, and you keep repeating non-sequitors and ignoring my answers, and several examples of microkernels working very well in real life, and for decades, no less. I'm going to write you off now as dense or a troll, and I really don't care which...
Not only is it quite legal, I (and many others) swear by WD's "Green" hard drives. They're at least as fast as my previous 7200RPM hard drive, and run damn near silent, and very, very cool, even without any attmept to cool them. Unlike Seagate drives, WD HDDs also support acoustic noise management, dropping the already damn quite drives down another few decibles.
They're not just perfect for DVRs, either. If your primary drive is an SSD, you likelydon't need crazy seek time on your secondary bulk storage, and low power, longevity, and nearly no noise is a great feature.
So change all your linux machines to run on a straight microkernel, you will have a similar sample size to what you have now, and tell me how your results go
Go read a few accounts of OpenVMS admins...
The proof is in the puddinng so to speak, microkernels do not magically fix everything, if hardware is left in an unrecoverable state microkernels still fail to fix the issues.
No, microkernels do not magically fix everything. They scientifically fix the most important issues.
And there's no reason hardware would be left in an unrecoverable state. Most hardware can be entirely powered-off without power-cycling the entire machine. And all the work needed to figure out how to gracefully recover has already been done in Linux, FreeBSD, etc., as it's required for S3/Suspend to work.
Going to microkernels is not some magical panacea that will fix all reliability issues.
No, it's a very non-magical thing, which is both actually and theoretically able to make a kernel that is 100% reliable. The reality won't be perfect, but in practice, it comes very, very close.
As an active individual I have no desire to adjust my life around a television schedule, nor pay $50+ a month for a cable service that I rarely use. Cutting that expense to $8 a month makes much more sense
You do realize you can put up an antenna, don't you? $0 a month.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.
The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in /sys, but sadly, most are not.
Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?
That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.
No, a government that doesn't want to be on the bad side of the people that voted for them. This could well be one of the truest to-date examples of the popular quotes about democracy:
There's nothing about a "weaker" network that necessitates a protocol redesign. TCP has had problems with congestion handling from day one, that have necessitated a million and one hacks and workarounds, because it stupidly conflates packet loss with congestion... Some links will have packet loss without any congestion, and others (like these with huge buffers) will have congestion without (immediate) packet loss. It was a bad design decision.
What's worse is that IP was designed correctly to begin with. The original design has ICMP control messages (eg. source-quench) to signal congestion, much like many other networking protocols. The real problem was that the specifics were vague, and there was no exact standard on how much to slow down, how it affects higher level protocols, etc., so it became a prisoner's dilemma, and highly unfair, and was deprecated.
Of course, this problem could occur with TCP's congestion control just as easily if any particular implementations reduced the rate of exponential backoff, so there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the original congestion control design, just the lack of consistent implementation.
Controlling congestion by dropping packets is like controlling freeway traffic by randomly pushing cars off the road with a bulldozer.
What are you talking about? The Desktop version of Opera is the ultimate example of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into a program, RATHER than making decent design choices... How many completely different models do they have for tabs and windows these days? None of which works in an easy, smooth, and sane manner...
Just because Chrome used one component from Konq doesn't make them remotely similar. KHTML overtook Gecko. Konq did NOT overtake Firefox.
Honestly, the differences between most browsers is the front-end, after all. They all render standard HTML/CSS just fine... but Opera giving you 20 different ways to use tabs, Firefox making the UI buttons drag-n-drop, etc., is what really makes a difference to users.
Personally, I'll pay $1,000 to anyone who hacks CSS support and (working!) JS into links2... I miss the old, lightning fast browsers, with awesome keyboard support, now replaced by dog slow resource-hogs that do NOTHING any better...
Yes, they obviously might be a little biased. However, dismissing a report because of the source, without actually trying to refute anything they've said, is incredibly lazy and dishonest, and just makes you look biased.
That's a great strategy for small and unimportant loads. For critical servers, not having the wiring to do routine battery tests is a complete non-starter.
And just because it's "neat" doesn't mean it's considerably more efficient. Switching power supplies have gotten extremely efficient. Total up the losses in the most efficient PSU and UPS you can find, and tell me how much we're hoping to gain even if DC was 100% efficient, and how much it's going to cost to get there. The numbers aren't appealing.
I have a much better idea... let's just run datacenters at 230VAC. 90%+ efficient PSUs these days means you're throwing away standard components to save a couple percentage points on efficiency... not a good trade off.
The DC datacenter idea is a holdover from the days of 60% efficient PSUs, which is long past.
BTW, APC agrees with me:
http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/NRAN-76TTJY_R2_EN.pdf
There's nothing wrong with CRF, it will do what you want, as long as you understand you're giving up a little bit of quality/size to use it. The same is true of multi-threaded encoding. I expect the overwhelming majority of people are perfectly fine with both trade-offs in exchange for the convenience they provide. Only when storage space or bandwidth is very tight do the amounts we're talking about really matter.
What's more, the most basic video encoding tips can make a far, far larger difference in quality/size... cropping video to dimensions which are multiples of 16, eliminating edge noise, cropping off black bars, etc.
If you really want a solid basis in audio/video codec fundamentals, I suggest the MPEG-1 article on Wikipedia.
They've been talking about it for decades, but it was obvious that there was no way for it to happen back then...
These days, though, Smart Phones provide the last missing piece of the puzzle. Tiny e-Reader in your pocket at all times. Pull it out and look up the info you need, open your e-mail, launch a VNC session, whatever. Now we have a plausible endgame to eliminate 99% of print-outs found in offices, as soon as smartphone penetration increases a bit... And with pretty good $100 Android smart phones out there, it could happen pretty quickly now.
My last printer (color laser) died months ago, and I haven't felt the need to get a replacement. There's only the extremely rare form that needs to be mailed. Sure, printers will always be around, as you say, but they're clearly going the way of the FAX machine. Maybe the walmart Kodak photo kiosks will be replaced with HP printer kiosks for these rare occasionally needs for paper copies, in the near future.
Inkjet printers are completely unsuited to being powered-up once every 6 months, and laser printers are bottoming out at $100, so aren't getting cheap enough to finally put them out of their misery, either. A $100 laser printer is an amazing deal compared to the costs a decade ago, $150 for a CLP-325W color laser even moreso, but consider the cost of the investment for printing two pages, every couple months, and it doesn't really make sense.
That's horribly incorrect. I liked the sound of hybrid drives as well when I saw the price... The 500GB laptop hard drives with 4GB Flash for $150, should be awesome... But I, not being an idiot, did some research, and sure enough, the reviews say it's not remotely comparable to a real SSD.
eg. http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_review
It's faster than a drive without such a cache, and it might be a good option for a laptop, but even there I'd say a 32GB SD card would be cheaper, and will work wonders on FreeBSD with ZFS configured for L2ARC...
I have no particular interest in what anyone buys, but the comparison to real SSDs is a massively dishonest.
Clearly you've never tried it... It gets more and more confused the more words get added to it, and it often throws in a wrong dictionary word instead of the arbitrary commands you want to enter. And you'd be amazed how useless swype is where filesystem paths are involved.
SSH in portrait mode is entirely useless, end of story. 80x24 is the magic number, not 12x40.
I'm so glad you're here to tell me what I SHOULDN'T be using my phone for. And here I was getting real work done, I had no idea I was breaking the law, or doing something immoral, or whatever. Clearly all the time I've saved myself and others with my ability to quickly login to the servers at work to fix problems and look up info has been a horrible mistake...
I wonder, do you also know the minimum size laptop I can use to get work done? I mean, my EEE Netbook is pretty small, is that supposed to be reserved for emergencies also? Hey, if some random idiot on slashdot says so, I guess I've gotta carry a 10lbs desktop replacement with me at all times, on the off chance I'd like to quickly look-up some info, or fix a server while I'm out of the house, since it's apparently wrong to do with a phone, and, I presume, other small devices as well...
I'm not suggesting everyone use a fixed bitrate, just hoping to clear up a couple misconceptions.
Because it's extremely convenient, to have a thin client in your pocket at all times. In a meeting, and it would help to know something about a server? Quick and easy. Ditto for needing to VNC/RDP to your main system to look-up some things on them... Even a minimal amount of typing is a nightmare if you've got to use an on-screen keyboard.
With a qwerty keyboard, SSH on via a phone only minimally painful. Even when sitting at home, and needing to do some installations or configuration on my DVR or such, I just pull out the phone. Sure, I've even got a netbook, which I'll fire-up if I've got serious work to do, but a little thing that fits in one hand, and floats in the air (don't need a table, not taking up my lap, etc.) and can be dropped in a pocket at a moment's notice is extremely convenient and very useful.
ConnectBot on SSH is pretty flexible and capable, on-par with Putty for xterm emulation. I can get >80x24 on my phone in a readable font, which is the magic number where you can do everything, rather than only a subset of programs work properly.
I do. Therefore it most certainly can be done.
...on a related note: Samsung Transform Ultra phones have the most unbelievably and intolerably glitchy touch-screens. The kind of thing you've gotta talk yourself out of throwing through the nearest window. Plenty of accounts of this online, and yet Samsung support claims complete ignorance, and though a software fix seems quite easy, there's still nothing out there. With only one mode of input available, and that being unreliable and borderline useless, it doesn't matter how cheap it is, they'd have to pay ME to use it!
This is quite true. When the office in China calls me at 3am to fix their server/network issues, I often wonder how many local Chinese employees I'm taking the place of... And it's not just this job... I've heard anecdotes from plenty oof otherd, whose experiences resemble my own, of being brought in to (very quickly) fix up things my inexpensive Indian counterparts couldn't figure out after weeks of work. I don't know wh
Swype fails horribly when you need to type non-dictionary words. Touchscreens also lack arrow keys, necessary for navigating text boxes and more. And in portrait mode, Swype takes up the ENTIRE screen, making it completely useless. The lack of keyboards is precisely why people believe smartphones and tablets are consumption-only devices, when, in fact, they can do a hell of a lot when proper input menthods are available.
I also challenge you to prove that swype or any on-screen keyboard is faster, as I know I'll blow by anyone, typing with my thumbs.
And yes, on-screen keyboards fail miserably when you try to use your phone for real work, like SSH or VNC/RDP connections.
A static quantizer will waste space, as it doesn't really correspond with quality. And there are still a few optimizations in x264 which require two-pass encoding and don't work with crf mode.
Intel went about 2 years without any pentium branded products before reintroducing it. And to make it worse, that 2 year gap was after the brand had taken a serious beating with years of Pentium-4 CPUs being greatly inferior to AMD offerings.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. There's no question Pentium was a damaged brand. YOU are the one who wants to paint it as an idiotic move with no thought put into it.
Even if you are correct, then they still happen to have dummied their way into a mostly-correct decision, keeping the brand alive. Unlike you, I don't claim to know the rationale behind it, and I'd be the last person to try to rationalize or justify anything Intel does (I pretty well exclusively buy AMD gear, myself).
I was a big hold-out as well... Only had a smart phone for a year, and now I don't want to go without one ever again.
The things you hear people arguing about are bikesheds, absolutely unimportant details.
Having a cell phone, first, has a couple killer apps. Getting a call just as you start your trip that plans have changed... Getting a call while shopping that so-and-so remembered something they want you to pick up. Following-up with someone who gave you bad directions, or an incorrect name, or whatever. Mine usage boils down to being reachable in the event of work emergencies... On-call rotation, before pagers and cell phones, was a horrible thing, almost prison-like, in that you absolutely had to stay close to your land-line phone at all times.
Having a smart phone has far more benefits. The biggest being location-based data. You can be in the middle of a long trip, and have a tire blow out, and not have to depend on a complete idiot cashier to direct you to the nearest tire shop... you go from being a stranger in a new area, to an instant expert on any area you are in. Schedules changed and left you with nothing to do for a couple hours? You can immediately find the nearest shopping mall, nearest movie theatre, etc. Less of a break? You can check and reply to your e-mail, read the latest news headlines, pay some bills, etc.
The rise of the smartphone is going to be the final nail in the coffin of office printers... Your photos are on your phone, your coupons are on your phone, your e-mail is on your phone, your order number is on your phone, anything you might want to print out you can trivially send to your nice portable phone which you are going to be carrying around with you, anyhow.
In a way, I got in early... I was using PDAs from the early days, more than a decade before smartphones came along. My big take-away from all that experience? Never buy a device without a physical keyboard attached... It sounds small, yet it makes a HUGE, HUGE difference. On my Android phone with a slide-out keyboard, I can launch a VPN connection to the office, SSH into my workstation, and do most of the things I could sitting in the office... This utterly dumbfounded all my techie co-workers, early adopters of iPhones and often carrying around two smartphones, neither of which allows them a tolerable thin-client experience, cutting them off from much of the information they'd like to have, and missing much of the utility of a portable computing device. An on-screen keyboard just can't do the job, using too much screen real-estate, and making input (non-dictionary commands in particular) too slow and cumbersome to be useful.
And to break a few prejudices, I answer my cell phone only a tiny fraction of the time, have MORE PRIVACY as I can walk away from my desk when in the office, and don't EVER talk on my phone in busy public spots like elevators, restaurants, etc., as I'm always able to walk away if I do find it necessary to make a call.
Three reasons people hate IT:
1) IT issues are user-facing, and have immediate effects. ie. When your computer is down for a day or two as IT is recovering data from a failed hard drive and/or transferring backups to your new system, you're not thinking about how awesome they are for being able to do that effectively, or how cost-effective it is that they don't go over-board with overzealous backup solutions for all desktop PCs. No, all you know are that something IT is responsible for failed, and you can't do your work for a day or two because of it. This is very different from any other department.
2) Budgetary reasons very, very often force IT to NOT implement the level of redundant systems they know are necessary to provide a really reliable network, or implement the best solutions, or implement the features everyone wants. Additionally, budget reasons again often result in low quality people in IT, at least in lower-level positions, requiring lots of pain and shouting to get through to the guys who know better, and can help.
3) IT is also in the unenviable position of being the cops... nobody likes the cops. This ranges from refusing to install (or perhaps cutting off) whatever you want to use to get around whatever oppressive policy management has in-place, to looking at the code you've quickly cobbled together at the behest of whatever managers and saying "Hell no, that's not getting deployed to our production servers."
IT is a thankless job, and yet is by far the most profitable department in any company I've ever worked in. IT is the group that puts together and maintains all the systems that greatly reduces the number of people needed to accomplish a given job, and is usually the only group who cares and is responsible for keeping the production servers running, completely despite the crap code you've shovelwared out the door to meet your deadline and look like a hero, as everything completely falls apart behind the scenes...
The solutions to problems 1-3 generally require more communication with IT, far earlier in the process (designing a solution, choosing a program, etc), or communication with policy makers in the company to ensure that they know how their decisions may impact you, and find out if they are willing to accept the consequences of their own policies... eg. if management wants to ban something that will help you do your job, and is willing to accept that results will be slower and you will bill more hours for less work, then there's probably no quick fix for the problem in sight, and trying to get IT to help you, or at least allow you, to do an end-run around dysfunctional company policies is going to end badly and only frustrate you further, through no fault of IT's.
It makes sense that yesterday's high-end brand is today's low-end. If you've been buying "Pentiums" in the past couple years, they've been old, out of date chips, so the old brand is tarnished, replaced by something newer and shinier, but still holding on, as warehouses of P4s and Pentium-Ds are still selling well, but only at fire-sale prices.
That they're using the P brand only for servers, yeah, that's pretty damn stupid... I can't argue with that. Those buying servers will be looking at specs, and are interested in exact model numbers, to hell with vague marketing names...
A thousand bugs that will have no adverse effects is infinitely more desirable than a handful of bugs that will bring down the system. This is precisely why there is separation between kernel space and user space. I can't see how you can be so dense as to not understand the benefit of extending this privledge separation into the kernel itself.
I keep throwing out examples, and you keep repeating non-sequitors and ignoring my answers, and several examples of microkernels working very well in real life, and for decades, no less. I'm going to write you off now as dense or a troll, and I really don't care which...
Not only is it quite legal, I (and many others) swear by WD's "Green" hard drives. They're at least as fast as my previous 7200RPM hard drive, and run damn near silent, and very, very cool, even without any attmept to cool them. Unlike Seagate drives, WD HDDs also support acoustic noise management, dropping the already damn quite drives down another few decibles.
They're not just perfect for DVRs, either. If your primary drive is an SSD, you likelydon't need crazy seek time on your secondary bulk storage, and low power, longevity, and nearly no noise is a great feature.
Go read a few accounts of OpenVMS admins...
No, microkernels do not magically fix everything. They scientifically fix the most important issues.
And there's no reason hardware would be left in an unrecoverable state. Most hardware can be entirely powered-off without power-cycling the entire machine. And all the work needed to figure out how to gracefully recover has already been done in Linux, FreeBSD, etc., as it's required for S3/Suspend to work.
No, it's a very non-magical thing, which is both actually and theoretically able to make a kernel that is 100% reliable. The reality won't be perfect, but in practice, it comes very, very close.
You do realize you can put up an antenna, don't you? $0 a month.