Re:I think IBM will cause more trouble than AMD
on
Crossroads for Intel
·
· Score: 1
What a dumb, narrow-minded comment!
Intel's and AMD's processors are not valuable just from the performance perspective. What makes them valuable is the huge infrastructure around the x86 architecture: chipsets, mobo makers, support circuits (like CPU power supplies), SOFTWARE, all together.
To dethrone the x86 platform with a Power5 one, IBM would have to win over everybody, not just the nerd drooling over CPU specs.
You truly don't seem to understand the semiconductor industry and what makes it to be like what it is.
Think it in different terms. It's not the median value that matters, but the standard deviation. The smaller the stdev is, the more mediocre the group is.
Again, you're missing the point. If you didn't knew the 747 weight, all you could do is to try to frame a figure for it based on correlations.
For instance, I am certain that at the airport you saw a 747 refueled. Well the fuel truck is something to compare to. If it looks that "OK, the plane seems like 10 X 2 X 2 the size of the truck, but I know that the body is just a hollow aluminum tube, so let's say the plane weight is like 50% of 40 trucks. A truck must weight like 10t, so you end up with 200t for the 747. Not bad for someone who doesn't have a better clue!
...(as opposed to reasonable estimates based on something you learned 10-20 years ago). You're thinking about remembering things, the quiz is about estimating. Like, without looking at the British Isles map, how tall is the whole thing? 500-800 miles, something like that (I'm still not looking at the map). So the Edinburgh/Cardiff distance would be quite smaller than that, give it 200 miles. How close is that?
Again, the quiz is about finding answers about things you never knew (Harold II? I don't recall any king of england with that name... So it must be one of the ones before 1066 - I know that something happened in 1066 and I really hope that the US school teaches children about world history so you would know that too - and I remember that england didn't have kings too much before William, so Harold must have been made king somewhere between 950 and 1066).
A share before the IPO is not the same as a ordinary share (after the IPO); that's why the pre-IPO shares are called restricted stock. Whoever holds restricted stock must stick to a tenuous procedure to have it approved by the company (Google in this case) as an ordinary stock. This happened in my company back in 2001 when it became public.
It seems that many confuse the shares with stock options. In fact I think that all Google employees have only stock options. Until they're exercised, SO's are just a promise from the company to the employee. There are standard conditions in which a SO agreement can be finished, so Google has the upper hand in this as well.
OK, sorry, I probably overreacted, but, again, I ask you the question: have you walked recently into a phone store? If yes, which service provider?
The 1100 feature set makes me believe it's still just a crappy new generation phone. Not only because the extra things a normal phone doesn't need, but also because just being new it probably has a more ruthless channel compression, meaning a worse voice quality, and a latest generation one-chip RX/TX which means bad reception range.
I am really pissed off by the fact that old cell phones (3-4 years old) run circles around the newer phones in terms of phone function. To add any new feature (Distribution lists and concatenated text (SMS) messaging/Date and time screensavers/Built-in alarm and reminders/Stopwatch and countdown timer/Full-size animated screensavers/
Two built-in games)), they had somehow to sacrifice quality of the main functions. My experience is limited to the Nokia phones over a span of about 4 years, but everything I read makesme believe the same thing happens to all cellphone makers.
Hmmm, you're wrong. I own a 3588i and it comes with games, lots'a tones and it looks shiny, but... takes quite long to turn on, the voice quality is worse and the receiver sensitivity is worse than the 2-year old 3585 I also own.
The 3588 is supposed to be an improved 3585, but to me it's amazing that the newer 3588 is actually performing much worse than the old thing at the very basic function it's supposed to do: act as a phone.
Serban
The newer one cuts off the call (signal faded?) when there are still very good receiving conditions and the voice is cracking when receiving on a land phone a call from the 3588.
It seems that nothing beats the phone quality of a 2-4 years old cellphone, regardless of the make (motorola, samsung, nokia etc)
You're retard or what? When was the last time when you shopped for a cell phone?
You can't buy a simple phone anymore. Even the simplest one has too many shitty features in it (downloadable tones, graphics, games etc), while the quality of the phone itself reaches record lows.
If I could get a battery for my 4-year old cell phone I'd ditch in a second the shiny and crappy 2-months old one.
You're wrong on two accounts: first, you don't know what you know and second that what you know is very good knowledge:-)
The fact is WP5.1 was an amazing word-processor, capable of dealing, with very limited resources and in a very precise way, with very large and complex documents. Something that MSWord was never (and still isn't) capable of.
To use WP5.1, you actually had to learn a little bit of typesetting, something that is derided these days, in the name of cuteness and visual glitter.
Therefore, you don't yet know how fortunate you were to actually learn something from your bruising with WP5.1 !
However, you should take a look at Dell's notebook line. 7-8 years ago, when every big-name notebook maker was R&D-ing their own product line, Dell was a quite shiny star.
These days, when everyone just slaps their logo on something made by the likes of Quanta in Taiwan, (even the ass-tight japanese companies started a couple of years ago doing it), Dell still manages to require at least a better quality from their sub-contractors. Can you really compare an Inspiron with a Presario? HP was sh*t in the notebook world and managed to bring Compaq down to the same level.
Don't be silly. I like vi, but if you have access to vim, it would be really stupid to enable the "vi compatability mode" just to enjoy the classic vi feel.
It seems that there is an Alan Lomax's "Music of the World" series recently published. I have two albums (the France and Romania ones) and drooling uncontrollably when reading about what's available in the series (based on the inner cover listing).
Thanks for the link. It seems to me that this guy Ballard tries to make a case out of nothing.
His claim that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake is phony and runs against the current data regarding historical geography changes (the statement that he found an old shoreline and freshwater shells is suspect at best).
I was startled by the subject because I'm from a town on Black Sea's shore and have an interest in how the region evolved geographically in geological times.
If you're talking about the hypothesized flood through the Dardanelles that may have created the Black Sea
Do you have a link about this? My impression was that the Black Sea was just a remnant of the Thetys Sea which disappeared when the continental masses around were pushed up.
I'd like to read more about the alternate scenario.
ALL of the PLLs use a so called VCO, which is an oscillator capable of providing continuous frequency. The PLL is just a negative feedback loop in the spectrum domain so the VCO output frequency (or a submultiple of it) and phase dutifully follow some reference signal (e.g. the FSB one).
Now, the most common implementation of a VCO in CMOS is, guess what, a ring oscillator. You're in the wrong. </nitpick>
The patent has a very nice idea behind it, but I doubt that the Pentium-like CPUs/chipsets use it. It is relevant to systems where the controller/CPU drive the I/O interface clock; this idea would allow the controller to run at its highest allowable clock speed and still meet the critical-path timing constraints (providing that the delay of the ring oscillator matches the critical-path delay, of course).
This is just a crappy P&R feed for this guy's "new and revolutionary" process.
As a matter of fact, yes, the cell itself can explode, if you try really hard and heat it a lot (much more than 140F). Modern cells in a reasonable ambient temperature will not ignite even when shorted (I was really disappointed when I tried that with Sony and Molicell elements, no fireworks for me).
However, all consumer battery packs have substantial electronics in between the cells themselves and the pack terminals. All of them have mosfet switches that turn off when they detect a shortcircuit (or merely an overcurrent) or if the charger goes crazy and tries to overcharge the cells or if the cells' temperature exceeds a certain value - typical 55*C for charging and 60*C for discharging.
They also have a one-time fuse "detonated" by a separate chip that senses when the cells are about to go. From this p.o.v. there are two or 3 levels of redundant protection in every LiIon/LiPoly pack sold.
The chargers also are specially designed for each kind of battery pack. They are I/V limited chargers, with the I dictated by the current rating of the cell (a 4000mAh pack is charged with 3 to 5A) and the V determined by the cell configuration: one cell (like in cellphones) needs 4.2V, three-cells (the 10.8V packs) need 3*4.2V and so on.
There are also extensive (fanatic actually) reliability tests done when qualifying the packs. Paper clip shorting, ESD zapping, puncturing, submersing, everything is tried. There is a rigorous TUV standard for these tests - look for the TUV logo on your pack and you'll know it passed the test.
I believe that you can explode a LiIon cell only if you throw it directly in the fire. But an equally bad BOOM! happens if you throw in the fire a pressurized aluminium can and nobody goes crazy when handling a RAID cockroach spray.
It's simply full of inaccuracies. The piezo transformer is not a new idea. You take a piece of piezo-electric material, excite it in AC (thus making it vibrate) and, with electrodes placed properly on the same piece of material, you get back electric signal from the vibration.
This stuff is already used in low-to-high voltage converters (e.g. the inverter in the laptop panel - its job is to produce high AC voltage for driving the backplane CCFL). However there are tremendous shortcomings when comparing to the mature magnetic energy conversion: 1) LOWER efficiency - if you can get 84% you've got a lucky day. Magnetic-based conversion can easily achieve 90-95%. 2) to work properly, these things must be driven at resonance, i.e. the AC input signal must match the resonating frequency of the piezo-transformer. This is much more difficult (think dynamic frequency tuning) than driving the wide bandwidth magnetic transformer. 3) derived from 2), the driving signal must be sinus (the energy confined in a narrow spectrum). This is very difficult. A magnetic transformer is usually driven in switching-mode - certainly all AC-adaptors (off-line AC/DC converters) for laptops are. 4) the input/output voltage ratio is fixed by the piezotransformer geometry. A ratio higher than 1:10 was very unusual back in 2001 when I designed back-light inverters with them. In contrast, the magnetic transformer is very versatile and, when controlling the insulation between the primary and secondary(ies), you can easily achieve factors of 100s. 5) present piezo materials have much lower power density ratings than the better magnetic cores. This means that for the same 80W AC-adaptor you'll need a much bulkier piezo-transformer than a magnetic transformer to transfer that power.
Did you see any of these major setbacks mentioned in the article? What a piece of crap!
B.t.w. it makes no sense to integrate the AC adaptor in the laptop as it limits its portability. When you're on batteries and you can't use the AC outlet, you don't want to carry with you the extra weight of an useless AC adaptor, do you?
His bull-headedness got his crew stuck and some killed
You're certainly right about Shackleton being an a**hole putting his crew in harm's way. However, in the grueling two next years after the catastrophe happened he did not lose any crew member. That's a feat in itself!
Germany went from the most crippled economy of the 20th century to the dominant military power in the world in 15 years
Hey spartacus, is this the degree of knowledge you get in your crappy school system? Your lack of History understanding is only too typical for a 30 years old (and under) american.
FYI, at the turn of the 20th century, Germany was one of the most industrialized countries in the whole wide world. It's economic recovery after losing the WWI didn't happen in a vacuum, bonehead!
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What a dumb, narrow-minded comment!
Intel's and AMD's processors are not valuable just from the performance perspective. What makes them valuable is the huge infrastructure around the x86 architecture: chipsets, mobo makers, support circuits (like CPU power supplies), SOFTWARE, all together.
To dethrone the x86 platform with a Power5 one, IBM would have to win over everybody, not just the nerd drooling over CPU specs.
You truly don't seem to understand the semiconductor industry and what makes it to be like what it is.
Serban
Large stdev == GOOD.
Serban
Serban
For instance, I am certain that at the airport you saw a 747 refueled. Well the fuel truck is something to compare to. If it looks that "OK, the plane seems like 10 X 2 X 2 the size of the truck, but I know that the body is just a hollow aluminum tube, so let's say the plane weight is like 50% of 40 trucks. A truck must weight like 10t, so you end up with 200t for the 747. Not bad for someone who doesn't have a better clue!
Again, the quiz is about finding answers about things you never knew (Harold II? I don't recall any king of england with that name... So it must be one of the ones before 1066 - I know that something happened in 1066 and I really hope that the US school teaches children about world history so you would know that too - and I remember that england didn't have kings too much before William, so Harold must have been made king somewhere between 950 and 1066).
Serban
Don't bother... it's obvious that the guy's both retard AND mean.
It seems that many confuse the shares with stock options. In fact I think that all Google employees have only stock options. Until they're exercised, SO's are just a promise from the company to the employee. There are standard conditions in which a SO agreement can be finished, so Google has the upper hand in this as well.
Serban
The 1100 feature set makes me believe it's still just a crappy new generation phone. Not only because the extra things a normal phone doesn't need, but also because just being new it probably has a more ruthless channel compression, meaning a worse voice quality, and a latest generation one-chip RX/TX which means bad reception range.
I am really pissed off by the fact that old cell phones (3-4 years old) run circles around the newer phones in terms of phone function. To add any new feature (Distribution lists and concatenated text (SMS) messaging/Date and time screensavers/Built-in alarm and reminders/Stopwatch and countdown timer/Full-size animated screensavers/ Two built-in games)), they had somehow to sacrifice quality of the main functions. My experience is limited to the Nokia phones over a span of about 4 years, but everything I read makesme believe the same thing happens to all cellphone makers.
Serban
The 3588 is supposed to be an improved 3585, but to me it's amazing that the newer 3588 is actually performing much worse than the old thing at the very basic function it's supposed to do: act as a phone.
Serban The newer one cuts off the call (signal faded?) when there are still very good receiving conditions and the voice is cracking when receiving on a land phone a call from the 3588.
It seems that nothing beats the phone quality of a 2-4 years old cellphone, regardless of the make (motorola, samsung, nokia etc)
You can't buy a simple phone anymore. Even the simplest one has too many shitty features in it (downloadable tones, graphics, games etc), while the quality of the phone itself reaches record lows.
If I could get a battery for my 4-year old cell phone I'd ditch in a second the shiny and crappy 2-months old one.
Serban
You're right. The guy actually meant to say "...This piece of code is so slippery, it's devious,".
Serban
The fact is WP5.1 was an amazing word-processor, capable of dealing, with very limited resources and in a very precise way, with very large and complex documents. Something that MSWord was never (and still isn't) capable of.
To use WP5.1, you actually had to learn a little bit of typesetting, something that is derided these days, in the name of cuteness and visual glitter.
Therefore, you don't yet know how fortunate you were to actually learn something from your bruising with WP5.1 !
Serban
What is HP's Business-Grade line? Since they sacked CPQ's Armada fine series of laptops, I lost track of what means a good HP notebook.
However, you should take a look at Dell's notebook line. 7-8 years ago, when every big-name notebook maker was R&D-ing their own product line, Dell was a quite shiny star.
These days, when everyone just slaps their logo on something made by the likes of Quanta in Taiwan, (even the ass-tight japanese companies started a couple of years ago doing it), Dell still manages to require at least a better quality from their sub-contractors. Can you really compare an Inspiron with a Presario? HP was sh*t in the notebook world and managed to bring Compaq down to the same level.
Don't be silly. I like vi, but if you have access to vim, it would be really stupid to enable the "vi compatability mode" just to enjoy the classic vi feel.
Serban
Who is the idiot who modded this as "flamebait"? The post was at least informative! Serban
It seems that there is an Alan Lomax's "Music of the World" series recently published. I have two albums (the France and Romania ones) and drooling uncontrollably when reading about what's available in the series (based on the inner cover listing).
Serban
His claim that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake is phony and runs against the current data regarding historical geography changes (the statement that he found an old shoreline and freshwater shells is suspect at best).
I was startled by the subject because I'm from a town on Black Sea's shore and have an interest in how the region evolved geographically in geological times.
Do you have a link about this? My impression was that the Black Sea was just a remnant of the Thetys Sea which disappeared when the continental masses around were pushed up.
I'd like to read more about the alternate scenario.
Thanks.
ALL of the PLLs use a so called VCO, which is an oscillator capable of providing continuous frequency. The PLL is just a negative feedback loop in the spectrum domain so the VCO output frequency (or a submultiple of it) and phase dutifully follow some reference signal (e.g. the FSB one).
Now, the most common implementation of a VCO in CMOS is, guess what, a ring oscillator. You're in the wrong.
</nitpick>
The patent has a very nice idea behind it, but I doubt that the Pentium-like CPUs/chipsets use it. It is relevant to systems where the controller/CPU drive the I/O interface clock; this idea would allow the controller to run at its highest allowable clock speed and still meet the critical-path timing constraints (providing that the delay of the ring oscillator matches the critical-path delay, of course).
Serban
Serban
Excuse me, just being curious, but are you as dense as you seem?
This is just a crappy P&R feed for this guy's "new and revolutionary" process.
As a matter of fact, yes, the cell itself can explode, if you try really hard and heat it a lot (much more than 140F). Modern cells in a reasonable ambient temperature will not ignite even when shorted (I was really disappointed when I tried that with Sony and Molicell elements, no fireworks for me).
However, all consumer battery packs have substantial electronics in between the cells themselves and the pack terminals. All of them have mosfet switches that turn off when they detect a shortcircuit (or merely an overcurrent) or if the charger goes crazy and tries to overcharge the cells or if the cells' temperature exceeds a certain value - typical 55*C for charging and 60*C for discharging.
They also have a one-time fuse "detonated" by a separate chip that senses when the cells are about to go. From this p.o.v. there are two or 3 levels of redundant protection in every LiIon/LiPoly pack sold.
The chargers also are specially designed for each kind of battery pack. They are I/V limited chargers, with the I dictated by the current rating of the cell (a 4000mAh pack is charged with 3 to 5A) and the V determined by the cell configuration: one cell (like in cellphones) needs 4.2V, three-cells (the 10.8V packs) need 3*4.2V and so on.
There are also extensive (fanatic actually) reliability tests done when qualifying the packs. Paper clip shorting, ESD zapping, puncturing, submersing, everything is tried. There is a rigorous TUV standard for these tests - look for the TUV logo on your pack and you'll know it passed the test.
I believe that you can explode a LiIon cell only if you throw it directly in the fire. But an equally bad BOOM! happens if you throw in the fire a pressurized aluminium can and nobody goes crazy when handling a RAID cockroach spray.
Serban
It's simply full of inaccuracies. The piezo transformer is not a new idea. You take a piece of piezo-electric material, excite it in AC (thus making it vibrate) and, with electrodes placed properly on the same piece of material, you get back electric signal from the vibration.
This stuff is already used in low-to-high voltage converters (e.g. the inverter in the laptop panel - its job is to produce high AC voltage for driving the backplane CCFL). However there are tremendous shortcomings when comparing to the mature magnetic energy conversion:
1) LOWER efficiency - if you can get 84% you've got a lucky day. Magnetic-based conversion can easily achieve 90-95%.
2) to work properly, these things must be driven at resonance, i.e. the AC input signal must match the resonating frequency of the piezo-transformer. This is much more difficult (think dynamic frequency tuning) than driving the wide bandwidth magnetic transformer.
3) derived from 2), the driving signal must be sinus (the energy confined in a narrow spectrum). This is very difficult. A magnetic transformer is usually driven in switching-mode - certainly all AC-adaptors (off-line AC/DC converters) for laptops are.
4) the input/output voltage ratio is fixed by the piezotransformer geometry. A ratio higher than 1:10 was very unusual back in 2001 when I designed back-light inverters with them. In contrast, the magnetic transformer is very versatile and, when controlling the insulation between the primary and secondary(ies), you can easily achieve factors of 100s.
5) present piezo materials have much lower power density ratings than the better magnetic cores. This means that for the same 80W AC-adaptor you'll need a much bulkier piezo-transformer than a magnetic transformer to transfer that power.
Did you see any of these major setbacks mentioned in the article? What a piece of crap!
B.t.w. it makes no sense to integrate the AC adaptor in the laptop as it limits its portability. When you're on batteries and you can't use the AC outlet, you don't want to carry with you the extra weight of an useless AC adaptor, do you?
Serban
You're certainly right about Shackleton being an a**hole putting his crew in harm's way. However, in the grueling two next years after the catastrophe happened he did not lose any crew member. That's a feat in itself!
Serban
Germany went from the most crippled economy of the 20th century to the dominant military power in the world in 15 years
Hey spartacus, is this the degree of knowledge you get in your crappy school system? Your lack of History understanding is only too typical for a 30 years old (and under) american.
FYI, at the turn of the 20th century, Germany was one of the most industrialized countries in the whole wide world. It's economic recovery after losing the WWI didn't happen in a vacuum, bonehead!
Serban