NIMBYs are generally a pain in the ass.... they're just selfish pricks.
Be careful not to paint with too broad a brush. Corporations are only too happy to erect the most god-awful eyesores if it saves them a few cents. See ATT Uverse complaints about refrigerator-sized boxes springing-up in people's front yards. See natural gas wells in residential areas springing up all over Colorado. See cell towers that take minimal effort to disguise as trees, but wasn't considered until NIMBYs complained. Etc.
There's a line somewhere, but I have no more problem with NIMBYs than I do with corporations saving a buck by blocking out the sun, and similar...
Solar is eons away from being a power source for cars anyone could actually use.
Not at all. What's the #1 complaint about electric cars we currently have? RANGE. Now your car doesn't have enough surface area to be powered entirely by solar, but if it could extend your range by 10%, or maybe tip the scales so you don't have to plug-in at the office (or the beach, the park, the store, etc) to make it home, it would be a huge plus. How about just float-charging batteries, or providing sufficient power than infrequently used vehicles don't need to be plugged-in?
A tablet is very good at web browsing, email, apps etc but a phone (...) mostly sucks at those things due to its restrictive form factor.
I couldn't disagree more. The web is HTML, which is a mark-up language, which can be displayed any way you like. I can squeeze it onto a 2-line LCD watch and not lose anything.
E-mail is slightly more restrictive, in that you have to support about 80 column wide plain text, but no big loss if you wrap it, as long as you can rotate the phone and see what it's supposed to look like...
I go through hundreds of emails each day on my phone, even when I have a desktop 10' away, and a laptop in arm's reach, because they've done such a great job making the interface work well on a small screen. There are a few features missing, but they'd be missing from a tablet as well.
Ditto for web browsing... I am occasionally frustrated by the limitations of the mobile web browsers on offer, or the active elements that don't work without a mouse, but again, you get those same limitations from a tablet, end of story.
I will admit that one of the things that made me love my phone was finding a top-notch RSS reader app, which gave me a consistent and perfect interface, and eliminated 90% of my day-to-day web browsing... Something I still haven't found for any desktop OS.
Anyhow, I have one other secret that's much more universal... I figured it out after cursing my first PDA a decade ago. ALWAYS get a physical keyboard. My second PDA (a Psion 5mx) had a pretty good keyboard I could touch type on. These days sliders are a far, far cry from my amazing Psion, but it makes my phone more than tolerable to use. The penultimate example is ConnectBot, The SSH client + terminal emulator. Slightly quirky and FCs some times, but as near to xterm & putty as I've seen on a phone. I use it to do real work, and I wouldn't give it up for anything... but slide-in that keyboard, and the on-screen keyboard covers 95% of the screen, to the point of uselessness. Plus, typing on an on-screen keyboard is just a nightmare to begin with, inaccurate as hell, a nightmare in the corner case it just doesn't want to behave, makes text input in web pages impossible in some cases, etc.
So far, I haven't seen a tablet with a slide-out keyboard. The transformer isn't good-enough; what happens when you're using the tablet bit and suddenly REALLY need a keyboard for some arrow up/down, or other input? Not convenient at all. Advantage, Phone.
In addition, I've tried tablets, and there's one major issue you wouldn't think about until you've been using it for a while.. Those thumb motions so natural on a small phone screen, suddenly become laborious full-arm movements, and as quick as I move, that turns into a lot of work, and ruins the interface.
Similarly, there's a world of difference between a hand-held phone, that your hand can comfortably wrap around, and a tablet too big to do the same. Suddenly it goes from this ultra-portable, no thought needed, to basically a laptop, where you need to think about the logistics of where you can set it that it'll be at eye level, and on the move you need both hands free to do the most basic things. All defiencies smart phones don't have. The only tablet that might boast these GREAT phone-like features is Dell's 5" tablet.
In addition, seamlessly transitioning from wifi to cell, back to wifi, without carrying around a bunch of other devices is a major feature, not a liability. The only reason I could see you not liking it is because you aren't smart enough to use Boost or Virgin Mobile, which is only $35/mo.
The home screen of my iPhone ends up looking like a NASCAR competitor, rather than actually having information that might be useful to me like whether or not the weather will be decent tomorrow or if my friend has gotten back to me about dinner tonight.
That's an iPhone defficiency which Android certainly does not suffer from... They're called "Widgets" and they work quite well. I've got 3 home screens full of them. Music, news, traffic, appointments, weather, latest text messages, emails, etc.
1. No it doesn't, as I keep saying. 2. In this case, you don't want a desktop and are completely off the topic. 3. Mobile software works for mobile devices. Once you give people a computer interface, they're going to want to do real work on it, and being unable to do so won't be acceptable as it is now when people have a mobile phone + tablet + computer. 4. Youtube works on phones because of proprietary applications that interface directly with it, blessed by Google. If google decides they don't like your desktop idea, you won't get your youtube. 5. YES IT IS FAIR because you're suggesting a NEW ARM CPU will be performance-competitive with said old/used P4 CPU. You certainly can't claim anything ARM will be REMOTELY competitive with a NEW Intel/AMD CPU. This is GP's original point, and I can't understand how you can be so incredibly dense as to not be able to understand the concept, time after time...
By jove! I think you are right and the XX million people who all bought iPhones were all too stupid to realise that they were being duped.
While he may be overstating it, he is still correct. You'd be very hard pressed to compare an iPhone and an old PDA side-by-side and list anything fundamentally different or NEW in that the iPhone has and the decade-old PDA does not.
Multitouch? Okay, fine, but I'd be perfectly happy with my droid if I had to use the old zoom buttons (android versions < 2.x).
Apple did little integration tweaks to streamline the interface. They didn't do anything fundamentally new or different.
And I have no idea what you're talking about wrt Dr Warburg's cancer research. PH balance has notging to do with it. "the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar." -- Dr. Otto H. Warburg in Lecture
Mining news stories will only tell you what people already knew... Osama Bin Laden? If you asked any experts in the past decade where he was, the answer was always "Pakistan". Everyone assumed he was in the tribal areas, and were wrong. In hindsight, it's easy to say they were within X km, but that information also ceases to be useful in hindsight...
Anyhow, this story isn't a complete waste. It segues nicely into a different story from PRI a couple months ago, which DOES make predictions. It is based on weather, and specifically predicts how many politically unstable countries are likely to experience "violence" (an uprising) in a given year:
I think you overestimate the performance requirements of the general population.
This goes back to what the GP said... If you're okay with poor performance, why not buy an old P4 system for $40 (or keep the one you have)? If ARM is perpetually behind x86, what is the advantage to ARM?
Low CPU power consumption is a joke in a desktop system, because all the other power-hungry components will mask any savings. It's possible to get impressively low-power x86 CPUs, like a Athlon x4 2.5GHz that maxes out at 45watts (idles in the single-digits).
ARM obviously won't run pre-existing desktop software, and anybody that's run a Linux desktop on non-x86 boxes will tell you that it's a decided downgrade, as numerous porting issues crop-up. The lack of Flash would of course be an issue, and no, normal/average people won't go without their YouTube, gnash isn't even remotely close, and HTML5 is a long ways off.
I'm still waiting to hear the advantage. Price is higher, power consumption difference is negligable, performance is considerably lower, etc.
I'm pointing out not only is it a newer and higher performing micro-arch, it's _ALSO_ a clock speed increase. The A15 will blow the A9 out of the water.
Fair enough, but those are marketing numbers, I'm not inclined to believe them for a second. When 3rd parties have their hands on them, we can talk. And as I keep saying, CPU is only part of the equation. If they don't have very fast buses and memory, and better GPUs like desktop systems (driving up power consumption for sure) they will still perform quite poorly.
OF course.... the days of shiny new nav units are numbered, as Smart phones such as Android/iPhone, are obsoleting dedicated nav devices by having apps that perform the function.
And they are often FREE, advertising supported, and always looking for new revenue sources, so watch-out!
Missing something there with adding micro- & picocells. You need to run a landline to them. That's gonna cost a pretty penny
A business DSL line is only slightly more expensive than home DSL... And if we've established that only 10 people will be using that particular pico-cell site at a time, then DSL bandwidth should be sufficient, even with encryption on-top of it. If regulations aren't a problem, it could be dirt-cheap (relatively) to put up thousands of pico-cells in no time.
1. The P4 uses something like 5-10 times as much power for the task.
The power consumption of an idle P4 is just noise. The rest of the system (fast northbridge, GPU, etc.) consume VASTLY more power, so 5-10 times as much power is likely to be well under a 1% difference in total.
But everyone else is using a web browser and Microsoft Office - as long as the user interface remained the same, a switch to ARM wouldn't even be noticed.
WRONG! Your phone and tablets don't feel slow because the software was custom written to be extremely fast. Your web browser is actually extremely CPU-hungry, you just don't notice because you've got a system that's vastly faster than a phone... Have you ever tried running Firefox 3.x on a 1GHz Duron, with PC-133 memory? That was my primary workstation until recently, and it was MASSIVELY slow. Firefox took FOREVER to open a page, while something feature-bare like links-gui or Dillo was damn near instant.
And BTW, Firefox is a lightweight in comparison to Flash. One visit to Youtube and after being unable to play more than a couple frames of a video and your ultra-efficient ARM Desktop system will feel like the 33MHz 486 it really is...
How much power does the 1.7 Ghz P4 system require vs the Kal-El Quad Core ARM at 1.0 Ghz?
Actually, and old P4 will idle down to pretty damn low power. But that really doesn't matter... the CPU will be only a tiny fraction of the overall power consumption.
I recently bought an Athon x4 with a TDP of 45W. At idle, it's using next to no power... Yet this super-efficient sytem draws 65 watts at idle. Meanwhile, the ancient P4 I'm typing on right now, is idling at under 40 watts. WHY, you ask? Because as memory bandwidth increases, Northbridges draw vastly more power. The memory itself feels nice and cool, but the northbridge needs its own fan... Putting an ARM CPU in a desktop motherboard would NOT allow it to avoid these problems. Sure, you could go with nice slow buses (ala phones, tablets, pdas, etc.) but then you'll have a horribly performing device.
And did I mention video cards? No big deal when you're single-tasking on a tablet, maybe with a game using a tiny subset of OpenGL commands, but go to a desktop, and you won't even be able to support the native resolutions of an LCD monitor (I haven't seen a phone that outputs even 1080 on their HDMI, yet). So now your nice sub-watt CPU is drawing 60 watts for fast memory bus, and a graphics chip idling.
The Cortex-A15 will be available in up to octo-core configurations at 2.5Ghz, using a fraction of the power of a P4 (vs the 1.0Ghz benchmark you provide).
MHz myth in full force... Don't we still kick people off of/. for stupid mistakes like this? In short, that 2.5GHz could well be slower than the 1GHz CPU. Things like pipeline length, bus and memory speeds, and MIPS per MHz are important.
Even cheap and useless gimmicky junk like the Qi don't compare (where's the video? where's the optical drive? Where's the expansion?)
You can make up arbitrary hardware requirements for "most people" but that doesn't exactly explain why Apple is selling tens of millions of iPads to ecstatic customers with a fraction of the "power" of a P4.
Come on, this is PAINFULLY obvious...
The iPad doesn't run Mac OS, RHEL, or Windows. It runs code that was optimized to hell and back to be small and fast. I've got my old Psion 5MX with a 26MHz ARM CPU that is more responsive than an iPad, but that doesn't mean that ancient 26MHz ARM CPU is on-par, performance wise.
Also notable is the affect of solid state. I tried an Archos 70 with a 256GB laptop hard drive in it... It was immediately PAINFUL to use. The fact that tablets / smart phones come with solid-state storage helps to mask a lot of the poor performance, so the lack of IO lag makes it FEEL like a lot faster.
People have accepted crippled (fast) software on tablets. Turn it into a desktop, however, and they'll be feeling the limitations very quickly, and get very upset. And if you take away the limitations (eg. install Linux on it) you'll find yourself feeling the painful performance limitations very quickly.
With wireless, ISPs are functionally limited by their available licensed spectrum within each market area. Currently there is more thirst for cellular data than there is available spectrum, so in most cellsites in any moderately populated area, you are going to be fighting for bandwidth with everyone who is streaming HD NetFlix.
The exact same thing was true when broadband was new. DSL / Cable was slow and expensive, and high-traffic users were cosing ISPs serious money. What's changed is that bandwidth costs to your ISP went through the floor, and they didn't pass much of that savings on to you, so they've got bigger margins, and we're far enough along they don't need to worry about recouping their investment right away.
There's no reason wireless can't go the same way...
Sure, right now there aren't nearly enough towers, and putting up new ones is damn expensive... The build-out continues, and prices are still high. But once things settle down, and maybe picocells are hanging off of every street light and telephone pole, your cell phone can get all the bandwidth it wants in ultra-low power mode, because there's only 10 people in range, with all that available spectrum shared between just the 10 of you... Works pretty much the same as regular wifi that way.
Of course, you're a fool if you expect unlimited cell-phone bandwidth to be the case right now. And more than that, the latency isn't anywhere close to wired, so I'd rather pay the $30/month for much faster Cable/DSL available at home.
There's nothing more significant about owning a "mobile phone" than having a walkie-talkie and a scientifig calculator... Internet access on dumb phones is so crippled that it doesn't matter.
What's going to be interesting is when a large number of kids have SMART phones, ie. full web access, networked applications, etc. Then you very nearly have a full computer in your hands, and information always at your fingertips. But the dumb phones parents are likely to give their children don't have this effect at all... they pretty much just make phone calls, and run trivial and useless toy apps.
There is nothing of greater threat to national security than a HOMELESS hacker.
A friend of mine was homeless. The only homeless guy I knew who wore $1,000+ suits and drove a Mercedes. He was traveling so much he just decided not to pay for a place he'd barely ever use.
A few years ago I couldn't imagine going without a permanent residence, but the rise of smartphones, netbooks, tablets, flat-screen TVs, Hulu/Netfix, etc., has seen me reconsidering that position quite a bit, lately. These days, when I'm traveling, even if I'm going to be away for weeks, I pack clothes, toiletries, and my cellphone charger (and headphones)... Nothing else.
I only wish the built-in speakers were better. Two great-sounding, front-facing speakers on my phone would be awesome. If Archos can manage that in their small, dirt cheap "tablets", why can't Moto/HTC/Samsung?
With technology continuing to make everything smaller and more mobile, I'm thinking living in a van (in a nice area) might actually be a reasonable option. And if you thought it was bad how people would go camping in their RVs and just take their whole life with them, just wait...
. Sure you can make money if you're smart/lucky/know the right people/have the right fiber connection/have the best and brightest market manipulation master
The stock market is only gambling if you play it that way... trying to guess which stocks are going to go up, which will go down, and when. Just about all the amatures play it this way, and then they lose 75% of their retirement savings...
In fact the statistics are that 80% of mutual funds (the huge companies with multimillion dollar hotshot traders) perform below the INDEX. Basically, you've got a 20% chance of earning a bit more money by making all the right trades, and gambling with your money (or letting someone else do it).
The alternative is quite simple... Buy the index! Index funds (index ETFs) have extremely low overhead, and perform great. You also don't get stuck paying taxes on phantom gains (even if you lost money). You don't want or need to know any insider information, you're actually betting that other traders are doing a good job of reacting to such things (efficient market theory) and you benefit.
What's more (imho) is that you A) only pay 15% tax on your gains, rather than the 30% or more you'd pay on interest earned in (bank) deposit accounts (double taxation). And B) With 401ks and the like, you're doing this with pre-tax income, lowering your tax burder/tax bracket in the process, and are likely to be in a very low tax bracket when you eventually withdraw that money in retirment.
You only think man pages are unacceptable because you've never seen a decent man page. Try ANY man pages from FreeBSD / OpenBSD. They're available via the web interface. Compare to some of the god-awful GNU man pages...
There are a lot of things that go into making a system that's mission-critical, and the CPU is a small part of the equation (and usually is the least troublesome).
That's not really true. The lack of high-end features in x86 CPUs was the weak link in getting reliable servers for some time. And when those features started being added, they appeared in servers almost immediately. Even now Xeons lag significantly behind proprietary CPUs, and Intel is just once again on a marketing push to claim every incremental improvement suddenly makes them ultra-reliable.
Also, the main place all these features need to be is in the chipsets, which Intel also manufactures.
And I'm surprised: I figured Facebook would be either more bureaucratic (like MS) or kinda dickishly autocratic (like Zuckerberg is rumoured to be).
I've seen what happens when a startup gets big, and I don't have good things to say about it.
Lack of bureaucracy is often code for the lunatics taking over and running the asylum... Think, no standards, no processes, no training for new hires (and there are, of course, lots of them) and just nobody in-charge or enforcing, anything. That kind of havock is great for the sociopaths, but makes it very hard for the adults to manage to keep everything holding together with toothpicks and bubblegum, particularly when every new guy makes the same damn stupid mistakes, because they're so "empowered" and management is hands-off and won't enforce the most basic standards.
I've seen both sides of the coin, and while both are terrible at their extreme, I'd rather err on the side of a little too-much management and standards.
Of course this is an extreme generalization. There is the perfect balance in there, somewhere, and facebook is swimming in enough money that they certainly COULD have gotten things right, but I'm inclined to believe it's a lot more like the out-of-control overgrown startups I've seen than anyone would like to admit...
Your claim it is supposed to do something related to profits simply is not supported by the facts.
What do you think that "exclusive Right" is for? So you can keep the Irish from having a copy? The exclusivity is specifically for allowing "authors and inventors" a chance to monetize their creations, before it falls into the public domain.
That's specifically how copyright is meant to "promote" "Science and useful Arts".
I think cable ties are a great way to reduce the chaos in a pile of spaghetti-style cables.
Some people dislike them, but I think they are just not accustomed to using them.
Consider these poor confused souls may simply be people who came along AFTER you zip tied all the network cables together, and had to deal with that horrible mess.
Some type of tie is useful, but zip ties are TERRIBLE. They have a small surface area, so they dig-in very tightly and cut into the cables. Similiarly, they're so tightly on there that cutting them off is quite difficult, and can EASILY result in collateral damage of cutting INTO a cable.
For the same reasons, your bundles of zip-tied cables have NO GIVE at all. This is very rarely desirable. Proper cable management should make it easy to manage the mess, not turn a bundle of cables into an immovable structural element, tantamount to a strutural column that just happens to be made of CAT-6.
Now, needing a little slack on one cable may now involve ripping up innumerable floor or ceiling tiles, cutting ALL the zip ties, then pulling a little slack, and tying it all up again. What a nightmare. The cure is worse than the disease. It's this kind of poorly thought-out cable management that results in an additional run of new cables being slightly less hassle than using a pair in the existing zip-tied bundle of doom...
How do you think your zip ties perform on fiber-optic bundles?
What not to do.
The ideal cable ties are soft, have a much wider footprint than zip ties, are impossible to over-tighten, and are easily reusable. Velcro works, but they're more expensive, and more importantly, I find them extremely unweildy, as they constantly stick together when and in ways you don't want them to.
"rapstraps" are a pretty good design.
Beaded cable ties deserve honorable mention as well, as being extremely common, dirt cheap, and vastly better than zip ties.
At that price, it's a great deal. Start a kickstart install of CentOS5.x, and deliver it to customers who need a bunch of office desktops, terminals, etc. These days, you can spend a lot of money to get super-efficient components, and still end up drawing more power, and making much more noise (above PC idles at under 40watts, and is impressively damn-near silent).
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful not to paint with too broad a brush. Corporations are only too happy to erect the most god-awful eyesores if it saves them a few cents. See ATT Uverse complaints about refrigerator-sized boxes springing-up in people's front yards. See natural gas wells in residential areas springing up all over Colorado. See cell towers that take minimal effort to disguise as trees, but wasn't considered until NIMBYs complained. Etc.
There's a line somewhere, but I have no more problem with NIMBYs than I do with corporations saving a buck by blocking out the sun, and similar...
Not at all. What's the #1 complaint about electric cars we currently have? RANGE. Now your car doesn't have enough surface area to be powered entirely by solar, but if it could extend your range by 10%, or maybe tip the scales so you don't have to plug-in at the office (or the beach, the park, the store, etc) to make it home, it would be a huge plus. How about just float-charging batteries, or providing sufficient power than infrequently used vehicles don't need to be plugged-in?
I couldn't disagree more. The web is HTML, which is a mark-up language, which can be displayed any way you like. I can squeeze it onto a 2-line LCD watch and not lose anything.
E-mail is slightly more restrictive, in that you have to support about 80 column wide plain text, but no big loss if you wrap it, as long as you can rotate the phone and see what it's supposed to look like...
I go through hundreds of emails each day on my phone, even when I have a desktop 10' away, and a laptop in arm's reach, because they've done such a great job making the interface work well on a small screen. There are a few features missing, but they'd be missing from a tablet as well.
Ditto for web browsing... I am occasionally frustrated by the limitations of the mobile web browsers on offer, or the active elements that don't work without a mouse, but again, you get those same limitations from a tablet, end of story.
I will admit that one of the things that made me love my phone was finding a top-notch RSS reader app, which gave me a consistent and perfect interface, and eliminated 90% of my day-to-day web browsing... Something I still haven't found for any desktop OS.
Anyhow, I have one other secret that's much more universal... I figured it out after cursing my first PDA a decade ago. ALWAYS get a physical keyboard. My second PDA (a Psion 5mx) had a pretty good keyboard I could touch type on. These days sliders are a far, far cry from my amazing Psion, but it makes my phone more than tolerable to use. The penultimate example is ConnectBot, The SSH client + terminal emulator. Slightly quirky and FCs some times, but as near to xterm & putty as I've seen on a phone. I use it to do real work, and I wouldn't give it up for anything... but slide-in that keyboard, and the on-screen keyboard covers 95% of the screen, to the point of uselessness. Plus, typing on an on-screen keyboard is just a nightmare to begin with, inaccurate as hell, a nightmare in the corner case it just doesn't want to behave, makes text input in web pages impossible in some cases, etc.
So far, I haven't seen a tablet with a slide-out keyboard. The transformer isn't good-enough; what happens when you're using the tablet bit and suddenly REALLY need a keyboard for some arrow up/down, or other input? Not convenient at all. Advantage, Phone.
In addition, I've tried tablets, and there's one major issue you wouldn't think about until you've been using it for a while.. Those thumb motions so natural on a small phone screen, suddenly become laborious full-arm movements, and as quick as I move, that turns into a lot of work, and ruins the interface.
Similarly, there's a world of difference between a hand-held phone, that your hand can comfortably wrap around, and a tablet too big to do the same. Suddenly it goes from this ultra-portable, no thought needed, to basically a laptop, where you need to think about the logistics of where you can set it that it'll be at eye level, and on the move you need both hands free to do the most basic things. All defiencies smart phones don't have. The only tablet that might boast these GREAT phone-like features is Dell's 5" tablet.
In addition, seamlessly transitioning from wifi to cell, back to wifi, without carrying around a bunch of other devices is a major feature, not a liability. The only reason I could see you not liking it is because you aren't smart enough to use Boost or Virgin Mobile, which is only $35/mo.
That's an iPhone defficiency which Android certainly does not suffer from... They're called "Widgets" and they work quite well. I've got 3 home screens full of them. Music, news, traffic, appointments, weather, latest text messages, emails, etc.
1. No it doesn't, as I keep saying.
2. In this case, you don't want a desktop and are completely off the topic.
3. Mobile software works for mobile devices. Once you give people a computer interface, they're going to want to do real work on it, and being unable to do so won't be acceptable as it is now when people have a mobile phone + tablet + computer.
4. Youtube works on phones because of proprietary applications that interface directly with it, blessed by Google. If google decides they don't like your desktop idea, you won't get your youtube.
5. YES IT IS FAIR because you're suggesting a NEW ARM CPU will be performance-competitive with said old/used P4 CPU. You certainly can't claim anything ARM will be REMOTELY competitive with a NEW Intel/AMD CPU. This is GP's original point, and I can't understand how you can be so incredibly dense as to not be able to understand the concept, time after time...
While he may be overstating it, he is still correct. You'd be very hard pressed to compare an iPhone and an old PDA side-by-side and list anything fundamentally different or NEW in that the iPhone has and the decade-old PDA does not.
Multitouch? Okay, fine, but I'd be perfectly happy with my droid if I had to use the old zoom buttons (android versions < 2.x).
Apple did little integration tweaks to streamline the interface. They didn't do anything fundamentally new or different.
No, he's not a reputiible surgeon, he had his license to practice medicine taken away because his insane treatments were killing people.
See the following link for some real facts:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/08/a_fungus_among_us_in_oncology.php
And I have no idea what you're talking about wrt Dr Warburg's cancer research. PH balance has notging to do with it. "the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar." -- Dr. Otto H. Warburg in Lecture
See PRI story below... But first:
Mining news stories will only tell you what people already knew... Osama Bin Laden? If you asked any experts in the past decade where he was, the answer was always "Pakistan". Everyone assumed he was in the tribal areas, and were wrong. In hindsight, it's easy to say they were within X km, but that information also ceases to be useful in hindsight...
Anyhow, this story isn't a complete waste. It segues nicely into a different story from PRI a couple months ago, which DOES make predictions. It is based on weather, and specifically predicts how many politically unstable countries are likely to experience "violence" (an uprising) in a given year:
http://www.pri.org/stories/science/environment/global-violence-linked-to-severe-weather5064.html
This goes back to what the GP said... If you're okay with poor performance, why not buy an old P4 system for $40 (or keep the one you have)? If ARM is perpetually behind x86, what is the advantage to ARM?
Low CPU power consumption is a joke in a desktop system, because all the other power-hungry components will mask any savings. It's possible to get impressively low-power x86 CPUs, like a Athlon x4 2.5GHz that maxes out at 45watts (idles in the single-digits).
ARM obviously won't run pre-existing desktop software, and anybody that's run a Linux desktop on non-x86 boxes will tell you that it's a decided downgrade, as numerous porting issues crop-up. The lack of Flash would of course be an issue, and no, normal/average people won't go without their YouTube, gnash isn't even remotely close, and HTML5 is a long ways off.
I'm still waiting to hear the advantage. Price is higher, power consumption difference is negligable, performance is considerably lower, etc.
Fair enough, but those are marketing numbers, I'm not inclined to believe them for a second. When 3rd parties have their hands on them, we can talk. And as I keep saying, CPU is only part of the equation. If they don't have very fast buses and memory, and better GPUs like desktop systems (driving up power consumption for sure) they will still perform quite poorly.
And they are often FREE, advertising supported, and always looking for new revenue sources, so watch-out!
A business DSL line is only slightly more expensive than home DSL... And if we've established that only 10 people will be using that particular pico-cell site at a time, then DSL bandwidth should be sufficient, even with encryption on-top of it. If regulations aren't a problem, it could be dirt-cheap (relatively) to put up thousands of pico-cells in no time.
The power consumption of an idle P4 is just noise. The rest of the system (fast northbridge, GPU, etc.) consume VASTLY more power, so 5-10 times as much power is likely to be well under a 1% difference in total.
WRONG! Your phone and tablets don't feel slow because the software was custom written to be extremely fast. Your web browser is actually extremely CPU-hungry, you just don't notice because you've got a system that's vastly faster than a phone... Have you ever tried running Firefox 3.x on a 1GHz Duron, with PC-133 memory? That was my primary workstation until recently, and it was MASSIVELY slow. Firefox took FOREVER to open a page, while something feature-bare like links-gui or Dillo was damn near instant.
And BTW, Firefox is a lightweight in comparison to Flash. One visit to Youtube and after being unable to play more than a couple frames of a video and your ultra-efficient ARM Desktop system will feel like the 33MHz 486 it really is...
Actually, and old P4 will idle down to pretty damn low power. But that really doesn't matter... the CPU will be only a tiny fraction of the overall power consumption.
I recently bought an Athon x4 with a TDP of 45W. At idle, it's using next to no power... Yet this super-efficient sytem draws 65 watts at idle. Meanwhile, the ancient P4 I'm typing on right now, is idling at under 40 watts. WHY, you ask? Because as memory bandwidth increases, Northbridges draw vastly more power. The memory itself feels nice and cool, but the northbridge needs its own fan... Putting an ARM CPU in a desktop motherboard would NOT allow it to avoid these problems. Sure, you could go with nice slow buses (ala phones, tablets, pdas, etc.) but then you'll have a horribly performing device.
And did I mention video cards? No big deal when you're single-tasking on a tablet, maybe with a game using a tiny subset of OpenGL commands, but go to a desktop, and you won't even be able to support the native resolutions of an LCD monitor (I haven't seen a phone that outputs even 1080 on their HDMI, yet). So now your nice sub-watt CPU is drawing 60 watts for fast memory bus, and a graphics chip idling.
MHz myth in full force... Don't we still kick people off of /. for stupid mistakes like this? In short, that 2.5GHz could well be slower than the 1GHz CPU. Things like pipeline length, bus and memory speeds, and MIPS per MHz are important.
Additionally, he mentioned the SLOWEST P4 he could find... They're basically giving away much faster P4s these days. Hell, you can buy a complete 2.4GHz P4 system for under $40: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS
Even cheap and useless gimmicky junk like the Qi don't compare (where's the video? where's the optical drive? Where's the expansion?)
Come on, this is PAINFULLY obvious...
The iPad doesn't run Mac OS, RHEL, or Windows. It runs code that was optimized to hell and back to be small and fast. I've got my old Psion 5MX with a 26MHz ARM CPU that is more responsive than an iPad, but that doesn't mean that ancient 26MHz ARM CPU is on-par, performance wise.
Also notable is the affect of solid state. I tried an Archos 70 with a 256GB laptop hard drive in it... It was immediately PAINFUL to use. The fact that tablets / smart phones come with solid-state storage helps to mask a lot of the poor performance, so the lack of IO lag makes it FEEL like a lot faster.
People have accepted crippled (fast) software on tablets. Turn it into a desktop, however, and they'll be feeling the limitations very quickly, and get very upset. And if you take away the limitations (eg. install Linux on it) you'll find yourself feeling the painful performance limitations very quickly.
The exact same thing was true when broadband was new. DSL / Cable was slow and expensive, and high-traffic users were cosing ISPs serious money. What's changed is that bandwidth costs to your ISP went through the floor, and they didn't pass much of that savings on to you, so they've got bigger margins, and we're far enough along they don't need to worry about recouping their investment right away.
There's no reason wireless can't go the same way...
Sure, right now there aren't nearly enough towers, and putting up new ones is damn expensive... The build-out continues, and prices are still high. But once things settle down, and maybe picocells are hanging off of every street light and telephone pole, your cell phone can get all the bandwidth it wants in ultra-low power mode, because there's only 10 people in range, with all that available spectrum shared between just the 10 of you... Works pretty much the same as regular wifi that way.
Of course, you're a fool if you expect unlimited cell-phone bandwidth to be the case right now. And more than that, the latency isn't anywhere close to wired, so I'd rather pay the $30/month for much faster Cable/DSL available at home.
There's nothing more significant about owning a "mobile phone" than having a walkie-talkie and a scientifig calculator... Internet access on dumb phones is so crippled that it doesn't matter.
What's going to be interesting is when a large number of kids have SMART phones, ie. full web access, networked applications, etc. Then you very nearly have a full computer in your hands, and information always at your fingertips. But the dumb phones parents are likely to give their children don't have this effect at all... they pretty much just make phone calls, and run trivial and useless toy apps.
A friend of mine was homeless. The only homeless guy I knew who wore $1,000+ suits and drove a Mercedes. He was traveling so much he just decided not to pay for a place he'd barely ever use.
A few years ago I couldn't imagine going without a permanent residence, but the rise of smartphones, netbooks, tablets, flat-screen TVs, Hulu/Netfix, etc., has seen me reconsidering that position quite a bit, lately. These days, when I'm traveling, even if I'm going to be away for weeks, I pack clothes, toiletries, and my cellphone charger (and headphones)... Nothing else.
I only wish the built-in speakers were better. Two great-sounding, front-facing speakers on my phone would be awesome. If Archos can manage that in their small, dirt cheap "tablets", why can't Moto/HTC/Samsung?
With technology continuing to make everything smaller and more mobile, I'm thinking living in a van (in a nice area) might actually be a reasonable option. And if you thought it was bad how people would go camping in their RVs and just take their whole life with them, just wait...
The stock market is only gambling if you play it that way... trying to guess which stocks are going to go up, which will go down, and when. Just about all the amatures play it this way, and then they lose 75% of their retirement savings...
In fact the statistics are that 80% of mutual funds (the huge companies with multimillion dollar hotshot traders) perform below the INDEX. Basically, you've got a 20% chance of earning a bit more money by making all the right trades, and gambling with your money (or letting someone else do it).
The alternative is quite simple... Buy the index! Index funds (index ETFs) have extremely low overhead, and perform great. You also don't get stuck paying taxes on phantom gains (even if you lost money). You don't want or need to know any insider information, you're actually betting that other traders are doing a good job of reacting to such things (efficient market theory) and you benefit.
What's more (imho) is that you A) only pay 15% tax on your gains, rather than the 30% or more you'd pay on interest earned in (bank) deposit accounts (double taxation). And B) With 401ks and the like, you're doing this with pre-tax income, lowering your tax burder/tax bracket in the process, and are likely to be in a very low tax bracket when you eventually withdraw that money in retirment.
Of course, you'd be AN IDIOT to listen to financial advice from a random /.er. However, this happens to be basically the same advice Warren Buffet routinely gives, and he might just know what he's talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idr6c8NHuWs&feature=youtube_gdata_player
You only think man pages are unacceptable because you've never seen a decent man page. Try ANY man pages from FreeBSD / OpenBSD. They're available via the web interface. Compare to some of the god-awful GNU man pages...
That's not really true. The lack of high-end features in x86 CPUs was the weak link in getting reliable servers for some time. And when those features started being added, they appeared in servers almost immediately. Even now Xeons lag significantly behind proprietary CPUs, and Intel is just once again on a marketing push to claim every incremental improvement suddenly makes them ultra-reliable.
Also, the main place all these features need to be is in the chipsets, which Intel also manufactures.
I've seen what happens when a startup gets big, and I don't have good things to say about it.
Lack of bureaucracy is often code for the lunatics taking over and running the asylum... Think, no standards, no processes, no training for new hires (and there are, of course, lots of them) and just nobody in-charge or enforcing, anything. That kind of havock is great for the sociopaths, but makes it very hard for the adults to manage to keep everything holding together with toothpicks and bubblegum, particularly when every new guy makes the same damn stupid mistakes, because they're so "empowered" and management is hands-off and won't enforce the most basic standards.
I've seen both sides of the coin, and while both are terrible at their extreme, I'd rather err on the side of a little too-much management and standards.
Of course this is an extreme generalization. There is the perfect balance in there, somewhere, and facebook is swimming in enough money that they certainly COULD have gotten things right, but I'm inclined to believe it's a lot more like the out-of-control overgrown startups I've seen than anyone would like to admit...
What do you think that "exclusive Right" is for? So you can keep the Irish from having a copy? The exclusivity is specifically for allowing "authors and inventors" a chance to monetize their creations, before it falls into the public domain.
That's specifically how copyright is meant to "promote" "Science and useful Arts".
Consider these poor confused souls may simply be people who came along AFTER you zip tied all the network cables together, and had to deal with that horrible mess.
Some type of tie is useful, but zip ties are TERRIBLE. They have a small surface area, so they dig-in very tightly and cut into the cables. Similiarly, they're so tightly on there that cutting them off is quite difficult, and can EASILY result in collateral damage of cutting INTO a cable.
For the same reasons, your bundles of zip-tied cables have NO GIVE at all. This is very rarely desirable. Proper cable management should make it easy to manage the mess, not turn a bundle of cables into an immovable structural element, tantamount to a strutural column that just happens to be made of CAT-6.
Now, needing a little slack on one cable may now involve ripping up innumerable floor or ceiling tiles, cutting ALL the zip ties, then pulling a little slack, and tying it all up again. What a nightmare. The cure is worse than the disease. It's this kind of poorly thought-out cable management that results in an additional run of new cables being slightly less hassle than using a pair in the existing zip-tied bundle of doom...
How do you think your zip ties perform on fiber-optic bundles?
What not to do.
The ideal cable ties are soft, have a much wider footprint than zip ties, are impossible to over-tighten, and are easily reusable. Velcro works, but they're more expensive, and more importantly, I find them extremely unweildy, as they constantly stick together when and in ways you don't want them to.
"rapstraps" are a pretty good design.
Beaded cable ties deserve honorable mention as well, as being extremely common, dirt cheap, and vastly better than zip ties.
I do. Or rather, I did...
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS
At that price, it's a great deal. Start a kickstart install of CentOS5.x, and deliver it to customers who need a bunch of office desktops, terminals, etc. These days, you can spend a lot of money to get super-efficient components, and still end up drawing more power, and making much more noise (above PC idles at under 40watts, and is impressively damn-near silent).