Hibernate to RAM is infinitely faster than having to copy all that data anywhere, and the power requirements of keeping RAM refreshed are ridiculously low. My desktop in suspend (S3) draws 1W more than fully powered off. Powers up in maybe 4 seconds (as fast as the HDD can spin-up, really).
An SD slot would not only provide for a lot of capacity (way more than what you get on a CDROM), but also a means to stop writing, and a means to swap out bad flash or reload it in another computer.
The cost of the hardware needed to support an SD card slot (fully, in hardware-only, before POST) would be more than the cost of a lot of ($40) low-end motherboards.
Directly wiring a Flash chip to the memory space is MUCH cheaper, and what's more, the most basic socket for the Flash/CMOS has all the same advantages of an SD card slot... ie. It's not the inability to swap chips that stops people from doing more experimentation with their motherboard's firmware.
You can't prove a negative, only a positive. The onus is on you to prove that there is at least one ARM system out there that is competitive with x86.
Who the hell cares about it doing lots of nifty multimedia anyway? This thing is enabling people to have computers in third world countries. Fitness for purpose.
Part of the "purpose" for the OLPC is to enable things like a software spectrum analyzer, VoIP, video, audio, and many other types of multimedia. Your only argument seems to be that you don't think the OLPC should be able to do the things that it does.
If that was the design, even the lowest-end ARM chip would be vastly overkill, and it could instead easily be a $15 digital organizer, calculator and text reader. Of course it wouldn't be a "computer" by any stretch of the imagination.
And if you're really fussed about playing back multimedia, there are plenty of ARM-based CPUs around that have hardware video and/or 3D accelerators in them.
That's a complete non-sequitur, trying to excuse the ARM's poor performance by including other hardware to pick up the slack. As soon as you include hardware acceleration, the CPU is almost entirely out of the picture, only being used to move the bits across the bus. An 8080 could "decode" 1080 h.264 video with the help of a hardware accelerator.
You are happy using last year's sound card and video card on your cutting-edge motherboard?
Video is the only thing you have a point on, and then, still maybe not if you're using Linux. The rest doesn't improve often at all...
If you got a good NIC (eg. Intel) when it went to gigabit, don't expect to need (or want) another one for close to a decade. Wifi is updated a bit more often, but only every few years, and still you can safely skip a version or two. A 48K 24-bit 5.1 soundcard from 10 years ago is still just as good as it ever was. And frankly, soundcards are nearing obsolescence, as all many really need is the $5 built-in S/PDIF digital output. USB hasn't improved for years, since v2 was introduced, and built-in USB2 is as good as anything, if not better than add-in cards. Firewire has had some speed improvements in the past 10+ years since introduction, but practically any device you get with Firewire is going to be limited to 1X speed anyhow, so there's little benefit in an upgrade.
According to the GPL, they will have to release the source code and the tool set. That means a Linux updater, and a custom firmware fairly quickly.
Well, you're half right.
They need to release any modifications they made to the GPL'd free software, but they most certainly don't have to release an "updater" or anything of the sort. In fact they can easily pull a Tivo and use a signature to prevent you from upgrading the firmware at all.
If you were to compare general/integer computation between even an old ARM9 and the Geode, an ARM9 will beat it clock-for-clock.
By all means, point me to some benchmarks. Your claims fly in the face of every bit of embedded work I've ever done.
In fact a couple years ago I figured that drastically underclocking a PIII to the point that it used ~200mA like many ARM chips would result in a chip that could easily outperform anything available out there. It's just not practical for embedded systems because of the price of a PIII, and the rather complex supporting hardware for such desktop CPUs, as compared with ($5) ARMs. Yes, even in the most power-frugal situations, price is an even more major concern.
Floating point? We're not in the dark ages any more in the embedded community. For starters: WE DON'T NEED IT. Emulation suffices pretty damn well for every day usage. It's not like Excel requires 8GFLOPS to recalculate 1,000 cells. These machines aren't for games either (and hell, you can do games without an FPU anyway - we managed for decades perfectly well).
Emulating floating point with integers is painfully slow. Of course Excel would be okay with an emulated FPU, but the kinds of multimedia being done on the OLPC are very float-intensive. Try playing a few videos on your ARM test systems and see just how fast of a CPU you need... Hint, it'll require a number of clock cycles, far in excess of a Geode.
If you still really, really must waste a big bunch of silicon area to hardware floating point, then there's plenty of solutions out there for ARM which are 1-2 MACs per clock. That'll match the Geode easily. Oh, and also vector stuff should you want that.
I haven't had the opportunity to work with ARMs having an FPU, but everything I've heard (second hand) says they are extremely basic, and very very slow.
And finally, one of the OLPC developers publicly said that they investigated numerous architectures, and the speed of floating point calculations was precisely the reason they settled on x86 and the Geode.
ARM or SHx are both much more power efficient, work with linux (and get more done per clock cycle)
NO, YES, and NO respectively.
ARM and SH are both very low power, but that is entirely at the expense of performance. A good trade-off for embedded systems that don't need much processing power, but certainly not for multimedia applications. As soon as you start trying to do floating point calculations, watch your ARM/SH CPU grind to a halt. They certainly do less per clock than even older x86 CPUs, and are a long way behind fairly modern x86 CPUs like the Geode. That goes double for Intel's clock-inflated XScale CPUs, pushing 1GHz.
With IE being part of the operating system, and commercial software companies being required by law to provide free security updates, I imagine Microsoft was opening themselves up to all sorts of legal liability.
Before locking IE7 up with WGA, they could avoid fixing huge security holes in older versions of the browser, telling everyone to upgrade to the latest version, or shut-up and live with it. With WGA routinely denying legitimate users, and apparently no method provided for users to have problems with WGA resolved, this could really have forced Microsoft to continue relasing patches for IE6 for several more years.
Micrsoft seems to be intentionally trying to avoid such legal problems for the rest of their security updates, by allowing automatic updates to be downloaded, even if WGA checks fail and you aren't even allowed to use the windowsupdate website directly.
DRM... Does using it shift legal liability onto companies that were previously able to avoid indemnity, and were previously otherwise just raking-in free money with each copy sold?
The Zune supports low complexity AAC, so you'll get quality no better than MP3, and it won't play most existing AAC audio files.
I quickly googled Creative, and their players support AAC, too.
Creative Zen Micro does not support AAC. Creative Zen Stone does not support AAC. Creative Zen Stone Plus does not support AAC. Creative Zen VPlus does not support AAC. Creative Zen Vision W does not support AAC. Creative Zen Nano Plus does not support AAC. Creative MuVo V100 does not support AAC.
All support WMA.
Sony is another important manufacturer of MP3 players, and it supports AAC, too (even on non-MP3-player products such as the PSP). All the manufacturers I could think of support AAC.
Sony 1&2GB Walkman does not support AAC. It does support WMA Sony Video Walkman supports only low complexity AAC. Also WMA. Sony CD Walkmen do not support AAC. Sony CD Alarm Clocks do not support AAC. Sony CD Boom Boxes do not support AAC. Sony SACD players do not support AAC. Sony DVD players do not support AAC. Sony BluRay players do not support AAC.
All above support MP3 and most play ATRAC as well.
All the manufacturers I could think of
You suffer from a lack of memory...
Sandisk Archos Panasonic Samsung etc.
I'll save you the trouble... ALL support MP3 and WMA. Only a few high-end models will handle AAC-LC audio files, and that's mainly because they want to support MPEG-4, and AAC-LC comes with it. Several video players only handle WMV (no MPEG-4) and so, still not even AAC-LC on many video players.
I can't tell whether you're uninformed or simply lying to make a point?
I was really thinking that about you... You aren't even good at making it up.
Oh, and if you have QuickTime installed on Windows (as many people do), it supports AAC, too.
The fact that you can find software for a PC that supports AAC is incredibly unspectacular. It's extremely easy to install a program that supports just about any audio format you like, even woefully obsolete and neglected ones.
Is there really a shortage of willing volunteer transcribers? I seem to remember Project Gutenberg getting far more volunteers than they could use, without even asking...
And speaking for myself, I'm sure I could transcribe a couple full sentences more quickly than I could two arbitrary words, so I'd call this a terrible use of the available volunteer resources as well.
HD-DVD and Blueray aren't about high definition video (my 2 year old Oppo DVD player does that just fine, apart from the fact no one will sell me a movie in DivX format),
You can put high def video on a CD too... Just as you can put a 11megapixel JPEG on a floppy disk.
What people like to completely ignore is that lossy codecs will happily use whatever data rate you give them... It'll just look like crap if it's not enough. And even if you have enough space that you don't notice artifacts, doesn't mean it can't get much, much better if you let it use more space.
I have a particular movie that when reencoded with Xvid at a reasonable bit rate, loses 90% of the stars in the space scenes... You might not actively notice that on a casual viewing, but it really changes the movie, and it's painfully obvious side-by-side.
There is no reason that standard 2 hour movies can't be distributed on a double-layer DVD using a modern compression format -- which are supported in just about every $99 DVD player I see at Circuit City.
Divx isn't a modern compression format anymore. h.264 and WMV are much better, and they are in-fact the codecs used by HD-DVD and BluRay... Yet they still need as much space as is available on the disc to make good-looking HD video. You literally CAN put HD on a dual-layer DVD, just as you CAN upscale your DVDs to HD resolution, but there's little point in it.
I do have a problem with the fact that not a single journalist sees fit to note in their articles that the media companies public rationale for the switch is specious.
Have you considered they might simply understand a little more about the issue than you?
Pretty much all currently sold MP3 players play AAC.
Completely wrong. Apart from the iPod, a very small number of MP3 players play AAC. WMA seems to be the most popular secondary format there.
My 20-bucks chinese DVD player plays AAC. Windows does. Macs do.
My DVD player certainly doesn't play AAC. Windows does not include an AAC codec, though, like everything else, of course you can install one after the fact. Macs obviously do because Quicktime is AAC-based now, and Apple has been the main force behind AAC.
I can tell which of two identical phones are ringing in different parts of a room. And the frequency ranges are questions of degree.
If they are at a different distance from you, you may be able to determine that from amplitude, but that only works in perfect conditions. Generally, short-range.
And what's more, "different parts of a room" makes the comparison invalid... With Phased Arrays, of course you can have two transmitters on the same frequency, especially if they're in very different directions. Once you have several in the same general direction, you lose the ability to discern them, dependent on the frequency, of course.
But you continue to believe in magic technology that defies natural laws. I won't interrupt your fantasy again.
Hmm... So... Did you actively plagiarize your comment from B5_geek and my own comments from THIS THREAD, 2 days ago, or was it entirely subconscious?
This is especially true for AMD, whose numbers seem to be based around the clock speed an equivalent Intel chip might have run at many years ago when they invented the convention,
AMD's numbers are consistent... You can be pretty sure a 4000+ will be 2X as fast as a 2000+. What system could possibly be better? There is no inherent natural metric for computing power, so you have to start with an arbitrary number somewhere, and AMD's PR number is as good a starting point as any.
Intel's new "random model numbers" naming doesn't seem much better.
In fact I'd say (and DID say) it's infinitely worse, since the model numbers they choose are ENTIRELY arbitrary. If people start using model numbers as a relative performance metric, they are left wide-open to manipulation (model-number inflation) when Intel wants to increase sales.
Even some kind of very basic number relating to cores/speed like the 4x2200 for a 4 core, 2.2Ghz chip would be better than the current mess in my opinion though.
"No, what it'll do is bring-back the MHz myth, in full-force.
Gee, Intel has this 4Ghz CPU, and AMD has this 3GHz CPU for a bit less, and VIA has this 2.5GHz CPU for half the price...
Buy VIA CPU... Go home and spend the next two years wondering why the hell your computer is ridiculously slow, and pondering the meaning of MHz myth." --Evilviper, slashdot.org, September 29, 2007
Only VIA (and ARM/MIPS/etc. suppliers) want to keep the MHz myth going.
As for AAC, it's part of MPEG-4, so yeah. Unlike all the wannabe successors to MP3, this is the official one, and it will stick around.
Funny, because MP3 was unofficial itself...
MP2 was the standard codec, used with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, and MP3 was basically a rejected off-shoot only good for low quality, low bitrate audio, with extremely high processing requirements.
I think you've got a rather unrealistic view of the way the world works.
Unless you can see only one object in a room that's colored red, this should be easy to understand.
You can distinguish between multiple objects that are close together, because visible light is at an EXTREMELY high frequency... far, far higher than anything we use for radio communications.
Try it with sound... Have two speakers playing the same frequency sound (eg. a sine wave) right next to each other. Have each play an occasional blip (eg. slow morse code), and just try to distinguish which blip came from which speaker. Try that with a few hundred speakers, and let me know how your magic infinite bandwidth technology works out...
Phased arrays can distinguish between different transmitters even at frequencies used for radio networks now
There's lots of things you can do in ideal circumstances.
With a small number of transmitters, that might work, but for every transmitter, the noise level goes up, and there's nothing any kind of antenna can do about it.
There's nothing "magic" about the higher frequencies that makes them unique for use by phased arrays.
Indeed there is. Higher frequencies are much more directional, that will cut down on adjacent interference from nearby transmitters on the same frequencies. With lower frequencies, multipath interference becomes a major problem.
It's just a matter of improving the arrays and the parallel signal processing required to use them for this application.
You can keep improving signal processing all you want. It will only slightly improve the situation. It's going to be an extremely long time before it's good enough to pick one-part signal out of 999-parts noise from adjacent transmitters. And by the time that happens, you can bet bandwidth requirements will have risen significantly, again.
It's mainly people that are ignorant of communications theory that leads to such baseless sensationalized claim.
When are phased array digital radio networks going to be cheap, fast and reliable enough that "spectrum" is no longer a bottleneck?
About the same time that cars require no energy input to work...
Directivity (ie. phased array) is good, and can improve speed and spectrum utilization, but it's just one more technology that improves communications. It's not a game changer in the slightest.
The only real possibility of deregulation is in extremely high frequencies, where high directivity and line-of-sight propagation will prevent it from interfering with others on the same frequency (think: optical). Once you get down to frequencies that are popular, and in common use today, no magic any antenna can do will prevent it from propagating normally, and causing noise for (physically) adjacent users of the same frequency.
ARM processors have always produced much *higher* bang per MHz than their competitors, right back to when it was launched and an 8 MHz ARM could absolutely cream a 33MHz Intel processor.
I have no doubt that was true, many years ago, when it was competing against 486s. At least as long as you didn't try to do any floating point operations...
It's certainly not true today, with Intel's XScale chips pushing 1GHz without improving performance much over it's predecessors, floating point calculations being much more widespread, and x86 CPUs having significantly improved performance-per-clock.
When will people get a fucking clue that the MP4 files that iTunes sells are not an Apple proprietary format?
No, but the M4P files which make up 99.99% of iTMS sure are... and despite your screaming, he didn't specifically mention the file format, and I would assume he actually meant the DRM.
It's the codec developed to replace MP3.
As opposed to EVERY OTHER AUDIO CODEC THAT'S COME OUT SINCE MP3... They were all designed to be heavily marketed for a few months, carve out a tiny niche, and then completely disappear from the scene. But not AAC, no.
AAC is going to stick around and replace MP3 because it's almost as high quality as Musepack at 128kbps, a datarate Musepack's psychoacoustic model wasn't ever optimized for... Great codec that AAC... So much better than TwinVQ/VQF, which failed miserably, and essentially got wholly incorporated into the (massive) AAC standard.
And reportedly Amazon's terms of service don't allow re-downloading of transfer of ownership.
Who needs Amazon's permission to transfer ownership. There's no DRM so they can't technologically stop you from transferring files, and first-sale doctrine should override their contract terms.
As for re-downloading, who cares? The record store never let me "re-download" scratched CDs. It's a pretty well-understood problem. Without DRM, there's no issue.
No, Windows 2000 was only for big corporate users. Few home users saw that until XP (2003?), and who upgrades immediately?
That was LONG, LONG after MP3 had become an extremely popular, must-have item (7+ years I'd say). Long after Napster, long after Gnutella, etc. Winamp was installed on every computer. The lack of MP3 support in Windows didn't hurt MP3 one bit, nor the popularity of Windows.
That's like a billion years in internet time.
In that case MP3 is 2 billion years old, and Microsoft missed more than half of it. It didn't send Windows down the tubes.
And, of course, you're ignoring every other example I gave...
Slashdot Mirror
What? Why?
Hibernate to RAM is infinitely faster than having to copy all that data anywhere, and the power requirements of keeping RAM refreshed are ridiculously low. My desktop in suspend (S3) draws 1W more than fully powered off. Powers up in maybe 4 seconds (as fast as the HDD can spin-up, really).
The cost of the hardware needed to support an SD card slot (fully, in hardware-only, before POST) would be more than the cost of a lot of ($40) low-end motherboards.
Directly wiring a Flash chip to the memory space is MUCH cheaper, and what's more, the most basic socket for the Flash/CMOS has all the same advantages of an SD card slot... ie. It's not the inability to swap chips that stops people from doing more experimentation with their motherboard's firmware.
You can't prove a negative, only a positive. The onus is on you to prove that there is at least one ARM system out there that is competitive with x86.
Part of the "purpose" for the OLPC is to enable things like a software spectrum analyzer, VoIP, video, audio, and many other types of multimedia. Your only argument seems to be that you don't think the OLPC should be able to do the things that it does.
If that was the design, even the lowest-end ARM chip would be vastly overkill, and it could instead easily be a $15 digital organizer, calculator and text reader. Of course it wouldn't be a "computer" by any stretch of the imagination.
That's a complete non-sequitur, trying to excuse the ARM's poor performance by including other hardware to pick up the slack. As soon as you include hardware acceleration, the CPU is almost entirely out of the picture, only being used to move the bits across the bus. An 8080 could "decode" 1080 h.264 video with the help of a hardware accelerator.
Video is the only thing you have a point on, and then, still maybe not if you're using Linux. The rest doesn't improve often at all...
If you got a good NIC (eg. Intel) when it went to gigabit, don't expect to need (or want) another one for close to a decade.
Wifi is updated a bit more often, but only every few years, and still you can safely skip a version or two.
A 48K 24-bit 5.1 soundcard from 10 years ago is still just as good as it ever was. And frankly, soundcards are nearing obsolescence, as all many really need is the $5 built-in S/PDIF digital output.
USB hasn't improved for years, since v2 was introduced, and built-in USB2 is as good as anything, if not better than add-in cards.
Firewire has had some speed improvements in the past 10+ years since introduction, but practically any device you get with Firewire is going to be limited to 1X speed anyhow, so there's little benefit in an upgrade.
Well, you're half right.
They need to release any modifications they made to the GPL'd free software, but they most certainly don't have to release an "updater" or anything of the sort. In fact they can easily pull a Tivo and use a signature to prevent you from upgrading the firmware at all.
By all means, point me to some benchmarks. Your claims fly in the face of every bit of embedded work I've ever done.
In fact a couple years ago I figured that drastically underclocking a PIII to the point that it used ~200mA like many ARM chips would result in a chip that could easily outperform anything available out there. It's just not practical for embedded systems because of the price of a PIII, and the rather complex supporting hardware for such desktop CPUs, as compared with ($5) ARMs. Yes, even in the most power-frugal situations, price is an even more major concern.
Emulating floating point with integers is painfully slow. Of course Excel would be okay with an emulated FPU, but the kinds of multimedia being done on the OLPC are very float-intensive. Try playing a few videos on your ARM test systems and see just how fast of a CPU you need... Hint, it'll require a number of clock cycles, far in excess of a Geode.
I haven't had the opportunity to work with ARMs having an FPU, but everything I've heard (second hand) says they are extremely basic, and very very slow.
And finally, one of the OLPC developers publicly said that they investigated numerous architectures, and the speed of floating point calculations was precisely the reason they settled on x86 and the Geode.
I bet he's smarter than most
NO, YES, and NO respectively.
ARM and SH are both very low power, but that is entirely at the expense of performance. A good trade-off for embedded systems that don't need much processing power, but certainly not for multimedia applications. As soon as you start trying to do floating point calculations, watch your ARM/SH CPU grind to a halt. They certainly do less per clock than even older x86 CPUs, and are a long way behind fairly modern x86 CPUs like the Geode. That goes double for Intel's clock-inflated XScale CPUs, pushing 1GHz.
With IE being part of the operating system, and commercial software companies being required by law to provide free security updates, I imagine Microsoft was opening themselves up to all sorts of legal liability.
Before locking IE7 up with WGA, they could avoid fixing huge security holes in older versions of the browser, telling everyone to upgrade to the latest version, or shut-up and live with it. With WGA routinely denying legitimate users, and apparently no method provided for users to have problems with WGA resolved, this could really have forced Microsoft to continue relasing patches for IE6 for several more years.
Micrsoft seems to be intentionally trying to avoid such legal problems for the rest of their security updates, by allowing automatic updates to be downloaded, even if WGA checks fail and you aren't even allowed to use the windowsupdate website directly.
DRM... Does using it shift legal liability onto companies that were previously able to avoid indemnity, and were previously otherwise just raking-in free money with each copy sold?
The Zune supports low complexity AAC, so you'll get quality no better than MP3, and it won't play most existing AAC audio files.
Creative Zen Micro does not support AAC.
Creative Zen Stone does not support AAC.
Creative Zen Stone Plus does not support AAC.
Creative Zen VPlus does not support AAC.
Creative Zen Vision W does not support AAC.
Creative Zen Nano Plus does not support AAC.
Creative MuVo V100 does not support AAC.
All support WMA.
Sony 1&2GB Walkman does not support AAC. It does support WMA
Sony Video Walkman supports only low complexity AAC. Also WMA.
Sony CD Walkmen do not support AAC.
Sony CD Alarm Clocks do not support AAC.
Sony CD Boom Boxes do not support AAC.
Sony SACD players do not support AAC.
Sony DVD players do not support AAC.
Sony BluRay players do not support AAC.
All above support MP3 and most play ATRAC as well.
You suffer from a lack of memory...
Sandisk
Archos
Panasonic
Samsung
etc.
I'll save you the trouble... ALL support MP3 and WMA. Only a few high-end models will handle AAC-LC audio files, and that's mainly because they want to support MPEG-4, and AAC-LC comes with it. Several video players only handle WMV (no MPEG-4) and so, still not even AAC-LC on many video players.
I was really thinking that about you... You aren't even good at making it up.
The fact that you can find software for a PC that supports AAC is incredibly unspectacular. It's extremely easy to install a program that supports just about any audio format you like, even woefully obsolete and neglected ones.
I can't see any reason for this.
Is there really a shortage of willing volunteer transcribers? I seem to remember Project Gutenberg getting far more volunteers than they could use, without even asking...
And speaking for myself, I'm sure I could transcribe a couple full sentences more quickly than I could two arbitrary words, so I'd call this a terrible use of the available volunteer resources as well.
You can put high def video on a CD too... Just as you can put a 11megapixel JPEG on a floppy disk.
What people like to completely ignore is that lossy codecs will happily use whatever data rate you give them... It'll just look like crap if it's not enough. And even if you have enough space that you don't notice artifacts, doesn't mean it can't get much, much better if you let it use more space.
I have a particular movie that when reencoded with Xvid at a reasonable bit rate, loses 90% of the stars in the space scenes... You might not actively notice that on a casual viewing, but it really changes the movie, and it's painfully obvious side-by-side.
Divx isn't a modern compression format anymore. h.264 and WMV are much better, and they are in-fact the codecs used by HD-DVD and BluRay... Yet they still need as much space as is available on the disc to make good-looking HD video. You literally CAN put HD on a dual-layer DVD, just as you CAN upscale your DVDs to HD resolution, but there's little point in it.
Have you considered they might simply understand a little more about the issue than you?
Completely wrong. Apart from the iPod, a very small number of MP3 players play AAC. WMA seems to be the most popular secondary format there.
My DVD player certainly doesn't play AAC. Windows does not include an AAC codec, though, like everything else, of course you can install one after the fact. Macs obviously do because Quicktime is AAC-based now, and Apple has been the main force behind AAC.
If they are at a different distance from you, you may be able to determine that from amplitude, but that only works in perfect conditions. Generally, short-range.
And what's more, "different parts of a room" makes the comparison invalid... With Phased Arrays, of course you can have two transmitters on the same frequency, especially if they're in very different directions. Once you have several in the same general direction, you lose the ability to discern them, dependent on the frequency, of course.
But you continue to believe in magic technology that defies natural laws. I won't interrupt your fantasy again.
Did he order Vanguard TV3 to explode on the launch pad, too?
AMD's numbers are consistent... You can be pretty sure a 4000+ will be 2X as fast as a 2000+. What system could possibly be better? There is no inherent natural metric for computing power, so you have to start with an arbitrary number somewhere, and AMD's PR number is as good a starting point as any.
In fact I'd say (and DID say) it's infinitely worse, since the model numbers they choose are ENTIRELY arbitrary. If people start using model numbers as a relative performance metric, they are left wide-open to manipulation (model-number inflation) when Intel wants to increase sales.
"No, what it'll do is bring-back the MHz myth, in full-force.
Gee, Intel has this 4Ghz CPU, and AMD has this 3GHz CPU for a bit less, and VIA has this 2.5GHz CPU for half the price...
Buy VIA CPU... Go home and spend the next two years wondering why the hell your computer is ridiculously slow, and pondering the meaning of MHz myth."
--Evilviper, slashdot.org, September 29, 2007
Only VIA (and ARM/MIPS/etc. suppliers) want to keep the MHz myth going.
Funny, because MP3 was unofficial itself...
MP2 was the standard codec, used with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, and MP3 was basically a rejected off-shoot only good for low quality, low bitrate audio, with extremely high processing requirements.
I think you've got a rather unrealistic view of the way the world works.
You can distinguish between multiple objects that are close together, because visible light is at an EXTREMELY high frequency... far, far higher than anything we use for radio communications.
Try it with sound... Have two speakers playing the same frequency sound (eg. a sine wave) right next to each other. Have each play an occasional blip (eg. slow morse code), and just try to distinguish which blip came from which speaker. Try that with a few hundred speakers, and let me know how your magic infinite bandwidth technology works out...
There's lots of things you can do in ideal circumstances.
With a small number of transmitters, that might work, but for every transmitter, the noise level goes up, and there's nothing any kind of antenna can do about it.
Indeed there is. Higher frequencies are much more directional, that will cut down on adjacent interference from nearby transmitters on the same frequencies. With lower frequencies, multipath interference becomes a major problem.
You can keep improving signal processing all you want. It will only slightly improve the situation. It's going to be an extremely long time before it's good enough to pick one-part signal out of 999-parts noise from adjacent transmitters. And by the time that happens, you can bet bandwidth requirements will have risen significantly, again.
It's mainly people that are ignorant of communications theory that leads to such baseless sensationalized claim.
About the same time that cars require no energy input to work...
Directivity (ie. phased array) is good, and can improve speed and spectrum utilization, but it's just one more technology that improves communications. It's not a game changer in the slightest.
The only real possibility of deregulation is in extremely high frequencies, where high directivity and line-of-sight propagation will prevent it from interfering with others on the same frequency (think: optical). Once you get down to frequencies that are popular, and in common use today, no magic any antenna can do will prevent it from propagating normally, and causing noise for (physically) adjacent users of the same frequency.
No one has even remotely suggested taking spectrum away from schools that are using it.
Try not to slander Verizon... Sprint is the company involved.
All things you'd know, had you (or the moderators) RTFA.
I have no doubt that was true, many years ago, when it was competing against 486s. At least as long as you didn't try to do any floating point operations...
It's certainly not true today, with Intel's XScale chips pushing 1GHz without improving performance much over it's predecessors, floating point calculations being much more widespread, and x86 CPUs having significantly improved performance-per-clock.
No, but the M4P files which make up 99.99% of iTMS sure are... and despite your screaming, he didn't specifically mention the file format, and I would assume he actually meant the DRM.
As opposed to EVERY OTHER AUDIO CODEC THAT'S COME OUT SINCE MP3... They were all designed to be heavily marketed for a few months, carve out a tiny niche, and then completely disappear from the scene. But not AAC, no.
AAC is going to stick around and replace MP3 because it's almost as high quality as Musepack at 128kbps, a datarate Musepack's psychoacoustic model wasn't ever optimized for... Great codec that AAC... So much better than TwinVQ/VQF, which failed miserably, and essentially got wholly incorporated into the (massive) AAC standard.
Who needs Amazon's permission to transfer ownership. There's no DRM so they can't technologically stop you from transferring files, and first-sale doctrine should override their contract terms.
As for re-downloading, who cares? The record store never let me "re-download" scratched CDs. It's a pretty well-understood problem. Without DRM, there's no issue.
eMusic isn't mainstream in the slightest. If there's an artist you've ever heard of on eMusic, they have 2 tracks via some compilation CD...
If you're lucky, they'll have one album from the group from back when they were unsigned nobodies with some tiny label.
Amazon, meanwhile, has all the groups you've heard of, and probably all their albums available for $0.89 each.
No, Windows 2000 was only for big corporate users. Few home users saw that until XP (2003?), and who upgrades immediately?
That was LONG, LONG after MP3 had become an extremely popular, must-have item (7+ years I'd say). Long after Napster, long after Gnutella, etc. Winamp was installed on every computer. The lack of MP3 support in Windows didn't hurt MP3 one bit, nor the popularity of Windows.
In that case MP3 is 2 billion years old, and Microsoft missed more than half of it. It didn't send Windows down the tubes.
And, of course, you're ignoring every other example I gave...