Or maybe put a 9v battery in it, in case the power suddenly goes out?
There's plenty of ways to tackle the issue. How do you tackle silent data corruption? I've experienced it first hand running a linux distro off an SDHC card. It's easier to deal with power failure.
Plenty of kids and neighborhoods are all the worse because of negligent/never_there fathers. No one grew up harmed because someone wasn't a good water polo player.
But millions may have been harmed without his great words.
I wonder if people can ever get it into their heads that an SSD is about speed, not about capacity. Then again, since every single netbook these days comes with a 360gb slow ass HD instead of small but fast SSD, I think I might be fighting a loosing battle. Seems the average customer can only judge something if the number is bigger.
We should list 4KiB read/write speeds on the box!
I just tossed together a DIY laptop for someone that required a desktop-replacement laptop that is easy to move/carry. What did I choose?.... 500GB 7200RPM 32MB HDD. Why?... their old laptop had an 80GB drive completely full. 100+ GB SSDs are prohibitively expensive.
The sad thing is, all our data is getting bigger. Pictures used to be about 1MB. Now it's not uncommon for them to be 6+ MB. OS's used to be about 2GB. Now they're at least 12GB. We easily need 6x the storage that we used to.
This solution provides a cost-effective way to have both performance and storage *right now*.
Did you look at those benchmarks? It doesn't give much more performance over a regular laptop drive. Not even enough to best a desktop drive, like a WD Black.
For small file read/writes, SSDs are still magnitudes faster. (20-50x faster than this drive?)
At best, you could say this drive has built-in readyboost.
What makes this special is not just that it has a cache. Every HDD out there has a cache. This puppy has a "cache" 100x what current drives have.
I think it's silly. The NAND will wear out really quick, and there doesn't seem to be much of a performance boost over a fast WD Black. Actually, there's no performance boost - but it is a smaller form factor that fits in laptops.
I remember a few years back a (Japanese?) company paired 1-2GB of cache with a 5400RPM HDD. They completely maxed out SATA1's transfer speeds - faster than the fastest WD Black released today. (The 2TB one)
If we had HDDs with 2GB of cache rather than 32-64MB, our drives would be a lot quicker. Quite possibly comparable to SSDs in sequential read/write, and a bit higher than our current HDDs in IOPS. I'd take one simply because it wouldn't wear out like NAND does.
How many commercially successful devices have been launched that were aimed at developers first, users second. Unless you find favour with the 99% of users that are mere "users", it's going to be very hard to sell enough to keep the bottom line black.
Beats me - but this device isn't intended to be "commercially successful" in the way you refer.
About 25% of the people pre-ordering are developers. There could potentially be hundreds to thousands of homebrew projects within the first year - some very high quality.
The reward for us developers, is other developers creating their own dream apps.
Face it, average Joe would rather use $600 on a dedicated gaming console that fits in his pocket, a few games, and a case of beer. The Pandora doesn't have that appeal, and is doomed to failure no matter how good it may be for developers.
You clearly don't understand what "for developers first" means. Your mindset is absolutely correct for a device being sold primarily to users.
This is not such a device. It is a dream machine - a handheld console that has everything the gp32x community wants. It was designed for that community. The team needs about 12k sales to break even. (which should be doable - there's quite a lot of interest) Once they hit that, it's officially a success.;)
Anything beyond that is just groovy - but if it's users rather than developers, they won't be contributing awesome homebrew, will they?
Seriously, gaming is one area that OSS does not seem to do well in.
You clearly weren't around for the GP2X. Developers flock to these devices. For every high quality x86 linux FOSS game, there's about 20 on these handhelds. For quality and quantity, it even has the homebrew communities for the NDS and PSP (combined) beat.
Plus, there's the emulators.
And all the non-gaming stuff you can use it for.
to $200 (for the unit and all accessories).
But how much will you spend on games? $130 is a small difference if it saves me having to buy a netbook, too. I can take notes on this thing anywhere, browse the web, practice drawing, do pen testing (as an example - I don't actually do that)... Anything that you could do on a netbook you could also do on a Pandora, but with the benefit of having gaming controls and a 14-16 hour battery life. It fits in your pocket, so it's always with you.
As I said, I just fail to see the appeal.
Okay, that's fine. You're clearly not their market. You'd be better off with a netbook and NDS.
Pandora batteries cost half as much. Mine was $19.99 shipped, 4250mah.
These batteries get 14-16 hours in real-world tests with WiFi off - so it's not like a netbook where "14 hours" actually only gives 6 if you're running the CPU 100%. This is an actual 14-16 hours. I assume those batteries you linked do indeed give the PSP 10 hours of actual play time?... if you don't mind paying twice as much, each.
Does it run hackable linux, with off-the-shelf compatibility with your favourite tools?
Uh, yes again.
That would be a "No". Thanks for the link though.
Let me make this clear - the Pandora will almost be suitable as a desktop replacement. (form factor ignored) At launch it'll run software like OpenOffice, Firefox, Chromium, etc. - you could load it up with pen testing tools, use VNC/SSH... basically, you've got a fully featured desktop environment preinstalled on it, ready for linux apps to be loaded.
If you want enough of them, its value shoots up far above other handhelds.
Yes & right now there is a $200 difference. No where near enough value for the cost compared to a cracked PSP Slim if all you want to do with it is play games.
If all you want to do is play $50 commercial games, buy a PSP or NDS or some other big-name console and play it. This is a device for developers first, users second. Not the other way around.
They're using a "PowerVR SGX530" in there, and IIRC the PowerVR chips don't usually have FOSS drivers, so you might be SOL on that software front.
While true, they are currently using the best SGX530 driver released to date. It's available to you, in case you want to roll your own distro or go with Ubuntu or Gentoo instead. The newest one handles OGL ES 1.1/2.0, and works with X11 with a < 2% performance penalty. (Windowed Quake3!... if you so desire)
All the hardware has either FOSS drivers or publicly available binary blobs.
The Droid Incredible [phonescoop.com] appears to be more powerful while weighing half as much and fitting in a pocket comfortably. Just add a game controller...
...which doesn't fit in your pocket? Pointless.
Also, who wants a 5 hour battery life? The Pandora has closer to 16 hours. (with WiFi off)
You also have to consider that a heavier OS or memory bandwidth constriction might mean more impressive specs are weaker when it comes to actual performance. This quote demonstrates well:
For example, let’s take a look at the iPhone 3GS. It’s commonly rumored to contain a PowerVR SGX 535, which is capable of processing 28 million triangles per second (Mt/s). There’s a driver file on the phone that contains “SGX535” in the filename, but that shouldn’t be taken as proof as to what it actually contains. In fact, GLBenchmark.com shows the iPhone 3GS putting out approximately 7 Mt/s in its graphics benchmarks. This initially led me to believe that the iPhone 3GS actually contained a PowerVR SGX 520 @ 200 MHz (which incidentally can output 7 Mt/s) or alternatively a PowerVR SGX 530 @ 100 MHz because the SGX 530 has 2 rendering pipelines instead of the 1 in the SGX 520...
But indeed, it's confirmed elsewhere to be an SGX535. So how then can the Pandora (with an underclocked SGX 530) beat it in OpenGL benchmarks? Lower OS overhead, and lower memory bandwidth constriction. Something that should be about 30% the speed actually runs slightly faster.
So although it "seems underwhelming" to you, you are not one of the giddy developers excited about the Pandora, and you certainly shouldn't be modded insightful, because you don't understand the hardware, controls, or OS at all.
My PSP does that & plays all my old PSX games. I got it for $100 used.
But can your PSP play N64 games? Can it browse the web, or use 3G sticks? Nope?
Will it have tons of homebrew games? (you might think so, but gp32x's community pumps out way more homebrew stuff than the PSP community does. Source: The devs coming over from the PSP community)
Does your PSP have awesome controls, a great screen, a 14 hour battery life? Nope?
Does it run hackable linux, with off-the-shelf compatibility with your favourite tools? Nope?
There's many features that make a Pandora desirable. If you want enough of them, its value shoots up far above other handhelds.
2 years ago these specs would have been exciting, but with smartphones already pushing over 1ghz and 512mb ram, I don't see the appeal.
It's not the CPU speed. It's the controls, and the developers behind the project.
And even if other devices have faster internals, most have such high overhead OS's that you hardly get any power. The emulator devs are excited, because just about everything in the OS can shut off when you start a game, if it isn't needed.
but my laptop does that and has a nice big screen too.
Your laptop has dual-analog sticks, and R1/L1 buttons? Didn't think so.
it seems like it will be so radically obsolete in a short period of time.
Only if you define obsolescence by CPU speed rather than controls and form factor.
There's no other clamshell handhelds with such great controls. The Pandora is like a 4x4 Jeep, and what you've got is a new yet very fast car. Great for city driving, but you don't want to hit any potholes or go offroading with it.
I guess you could say that the pandora is like the ultimate portable console, but only if you don't want to play any newer games.
It's not really that bad. If you look at x86, there's a dozen available bootloaders, multiple kinds of BIOS's - even things like EFI...
It's just that ARM CPUs remain relevant longer than x86 designs, because their target market isn't the bleeding edge. A simple but older ARM CPU can be sold cheaper - perhaps even for a few dollars - and might have enough processing power to do fine in a DVD player or other embedded device. Standardized boot loaders weren't important for this market, but now with ARM-based netbooks flooding eBay, and every phone in existence being powered by ARM, they're starting to be.
Keep in mind that while current ARM fragmentation may not equal user freedom, ARM is providing freedom to the companies that fab processors, and for developers there's the potential to port just about anything to ARM instruction sets.
Three companies basically have x86 locked down, and nobody else can join the market. It's quite standardized for the user, but from a certain perspective there is no freedom here.
Nobody knows how to write parsers anymore. I've never seen a recent university CS curriculum that covers parsing with respect to different parser constructs for different languages. Sure, the students learn to load up the chosen XML parsing library and pull in XML, and they learn to take text from stdin, but there's seldom any emphasis on what to do with more screwy formats. Maybe, just maybe, they might get exposed to different languages through a compilers class, but generally not how to process different languages outside of lex/yacc. This bothers me greatly.
Warning: Long rambling post follows. To summarize, I haven't found any courses that covered anything close to parsing, except maybe invoking XML parsing libraries and stuff.
Before I took any programming courses, I figured out how to create an XML parser in javascript. I had a dream of making a game, which needed server-side storage, but I never got around to finishing it. Quite an experiment, though.
After that I went on to help decode Outpost 2's compiled map format. (maps were DLL files - oh the design choices of old games!) I wrote an editor for it in Jamascript (a mirror of Javascript - see Clickteam), and wrote my own tile renderer with smooth scrolling. It worked quite well, except in XP SP2. Lack of further interest from the community caused that project to die, but got me interested in compiled languages - with a compiled language, I'd be in control of whether it worked on an OS or not.
So I decided I needed to learn a compiled language, but since I didn't like C, I started by porting my XML parser to Java, and added writing capabilities. I used it for some projects where I didn't need to deal with DOM nodes and stuff; I just needed to spit out data as XML <key>value</key> pairs, which it did just fine. Although the parser was simple(200 lines, max?), and couldn't read complex XML, it could generate valid simple XML, which any other parser could read. Oh, and it failed gracefully if the file was too advanced. (that was my biggest accomplishment, and required rethinking how I had designed it)
Then I changed it to pre-pend itself to other files as a sort of metadata. That way I could attach info like the number of frames, size of frames, etc. to a tileset PNG. You can see where I was going with this... I wanted to make a game. But somehow I got bored and stopped working on it again.
All this working with Java led me to a few inevitable conclusions. I just plain don't like some of Java's syntax verbosity. Some of the choices make the code stretch on and on and on, when readability could be enhanced by doing the opposite. I wrote a code pre-processor, to enable (among other things) keywords like public: and private: - also var, so that I could easily deal with statements like this:
public ArrayList<SomeObject> myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>(); -> var myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();
It just felt cleaner to me - perhaps because of my javascript roots. I had a dream of creating an entire IDE, with background colours (changing based on scope, public/private, etc.), but I never actually got around to writing that... in the end I went back to other IDEs which lacked my features, but had stuff like code completion. (quite handy)
Now I'm working on many other projects - but I must say, I haven't encountered a course yet that covered any of this stuff. I'm probably looking at the wrong college courses, or maybe there's just not enough jobs that demand it? I had no trouble finding, Ruby, Python, Java, C#, and C++ courses, but none cover this stuff. I just had to tinker to learn it.
You may have a point there. Modern onboard is ridiculously fast, too. The top of the line IGPs are between a 6600GT and 7600GT in performance. It's high enough to play somewhat new games on low settings with a smooth framerate.
This has the potential to almost completely knock out the child market - where games wouldn't play smooth enough, so the child begs his or her parents for a new videocard.;)
But since those children are actually moving to consoles, what have we really lost? There's still several million PC gamers on services like Steam, and we all buy new hardware every few years... the market may shrink, but it'll still be there.
I've been wondering for a while if the right approach for the whole codec mess is to wait until MPEG-1 is truly free and clear, and adopt that. You may laugh, but try encoding something in MPEG-1 with ffmpeg, using large (> 100) GOP sizes, and high numbers of B-frames (16+.)* On a normal high performance computer in 2010, the speed of compression is too low to be practical, but the results are excellent, even at relatively low bitrates. 4-6Mbps is more than enough for high quality 720p24, in most cases.
x264 (I don't know about other H.264 encoders) delivers great results for 480p in the 512kbit-1mbit range. (depending on content - cartoons look near perfect at 512kbit, or lower) Most movies will get DVD quality from roughly 768kbit. A 2mbit stream should easily manage 720p at close to perfect perceivable quality.
To top it all off, 512kbit x264 with all settings tweaked to roughly the max encodes at over 30fps on a modern quad-core.
bandwidth is improving
Not as fast as the number of people that want to watch Youtube.
Kinda sad to see them go. They've always provided good warranty support.
eVGA is pretty much killing off all the competition by being totally awesome.
They encourage overclocking, their warranties aren't voided by cooling mods, and their prices are competitive (or often better than) XFX and BFG's. For some reason, eVGA cards usually overclock better, too.
eVGA wants their customers to use their hardware, hard. They encourage folding, among other things. Their rank proves it.
I like the company. My last card was either going to be an eVGA GTS 250 ($140 at the time), BFG GTS 250 ($135 after MIR), or Asus GTS 250($90 after MIR). I went for the Asus one, which was actually a mistake. The GDDR3 overheated at stock speeds, and had to be underclocked 40%... until I modded the cooling ($15), and then I could overclock by nearly 20%. This pales in comparison to my last eVGA card (a 7900GS), which attained 70% overclocks on the core and memory.
They should have went with a more power efficient (and faster) core 2 duo.
Core 2 Duo? That could've gone with a faster and more power efficient Atom. P4's are just that bad.
I'm a bit surprised they didn't strike a deal AMD, or a big eTailer. It's good PR. I've seen Athlon II X2 CPUs going for $35. Toss in a $45 board, $15 of RAM, a cheap PSU and case... an old HDD... presto, you just built a sub-60w computer, for maybe $150, and it's at least 4x faster than a P4.
Slashdot Mirror
But what good is cache if it isn't persistent?
Buy a UPS! ;)
And slap a huge warning sticker on the HDD!
Or maybe put a 9v battery in it, in case the power suddenly goes out?
There's plenty of ways to tackle the issue. How do you tackle silent data corruption? I've experienced it first hand running a linux distro off an SDHC card. It's easier to deal with power failure.
A little bit of down time boosts productivity!
Antitrust suits aren't started with mere weeks of research. They've probably been preparing for months.
Plenty of kids and neighborhoods are all the worse because of negligent/never_there fathers. No one grew up harmed because someone wasn't a good water polo player.
But millions may have been harmed without his great words.
Did you think of that?
I wonder if people can ever get it into their heads that an SSD is about speed, not about capacity. Then again, since every single netbook these days comes with a 360gb slow ass HD instead of small but fast SSD, I think I might be fighting a loosing battle. Seems the average customer can only judge something if the number is bigger.
We should list 4KiB read/write speeds on the box!
I just tossed together a DIY laptop for someone that required a desktop-replacement laptop that is easy to move/carry. What did I choose?.... 500GB 7200RPM 32MB HDD. Why?... their old laptop had an 80GB drive completely full. 100+ GB SSDs are prohibitively expensive.
The sad thing is, all our data is getting bigger. Pictures used to be about 1MB. Now it's not uncommon for them to be 6+ MB. OS's used to be about 2GB. Now they're at least 12GB. We easily need 6x the storage that we used to.
This solution provides a cost-effective way to have both performance and storage *right now*.
Did you look at those benchmarks? It doesn't give much more performance over a regular laptop drive. Not even enough to best a desktop drive, like a WD Black.
For small file read/writes, SSDs are still magnitudes faster. (20-50x faster than this drive?)
At best, you could say this drive has built-in readyboost.
From what I've seen on the NCIX forums, heavy use seems to kill the Indilinx ones in about 15-20 months. A lot of people have had to RMA them...
What makes this special is not just that it has a cache. Every HDD out there has a cache. This puppy has a "cache" 100x what current drives have.
I think it's silly. The NAND will wear out really quick, and there doesn't seem to be much of a performance boost over a fast WD Black. Actually, there's no performance boost - but it is a smaller form factor that fits in laptops.
I remember a few years back a (Japanese?) company paired 1-2GB of cache with a 5400RPM HDD. They completely maxed out SATA1's transfer speeds - faster than the fastest WD Black released today. (The 2TB one)
If we had HDDs with 2GB of cache rather than 32-64MB, our drives would be a lot quicker. Quite possibly comparable to SSDs in sequential read/write, and a bit higher than our current HDDs in IOPS. I'd take one simply because it wouldn't wear out like NAND does.
How many commercially successful devices have been launched that were aimed at developers first, users second. Unless you find favour with the 99% of users that are mere "users", it's going to be very hard to sell enough to keep the bottom line black.
Beats me - but this device isn't intended to be "commercially successful" in the way you refer.
About 25% of the people pre-ordering are developers. There could potentially be hundreds to thousands of homebrew projects within the first year - some very high quality.
The reward for us developers, is other developers creating their own dream apps.
Face it, average Joe would rather use $600 on a dedicated gaming console that fits in his pocket, a few games, and a case of beer. The Pandora doesn't have that appeal, and is doomed to failure no matter how good it may be for developers.
You clearly don't understand what "for developers first" means. Your mindset is absolutely correct for a device being sold primarily to users.
This is not such a device. It is a dream machine - a handheld console that has everything the gp32x community wants. It was designed for that community. The team needs about 12k sales to break even. (which should be doable - there's quite a lot of interest) Once they hit that, it's officially a success. ;)
Anything beyond that is just groovy - but if it's users rather than developers, they won't be contributing awesome homebrew, will they?
You should be able to for the second batch, now that they've shipped something.
That was a very effective way of ending our banter! :D
Seriously, gaming is one area that OSS does not seem to do well in.
You clearly weren't around for the GP2X. Developers flock to these devices. For every high quality x86 linux FOSS game, there's about 20 on these handhelds. For quality and quantity, it even has the homebrew communities for the NDS and PSP (combined) beat.
Plus, there's the emulators.
And all the non-gaming stuff you can use it for.
to $200 (for the unit and all accessories).
But how much will you spend on games? $130 is a small difference if it saves me having to buy a netbook, too. I can take notes on this thing anywhere, browse the web, practice drawing, do pen testing (as an example - I don't actually do that)... Anything that you could do on a netbook you could also do on a Pandora, but with the benefit of having gaming controls and a 14-16 hour battery life. It fits in your pocket, so it's always with you.
As I said, I just fail to see the appeal.
Okay, that's fine. You're clearly not their market. You'd be better off with a netbook and NDS.
But can your PSP play N64 games?
Uh, yes? I'm sure it's slow, but there you go.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/daedalus-n64/ [sourceforge.net]
...
This doesn't even deserve a response. I'm talking about a playable framerate. Not 5fps.
Yes again, PSP have been able to get online via WiFi from day one.
Browsing the web wouldn't be fun with such a horribly low resolution.
or use 3G sticks
Don't you already own a cell phone?
How is this a response? Most cellphones can't tether, so how does that help?
Does your PSP have awesome controls
I don't think they are too bad.
Then you've never tried a Pandora.
a great screen
4.3" is the same size as the Pandora, albeit @ 1/2 rez.
PSP screens used to have HORRIBLE ghosting, and an awful colour gamut. It's still bad, and the resolution is low, but it is better than before.
You can't argue this one. The Pandora's screen is far superior to the PSP's, in every way. (including power consumption, excluding price)
No, but it does have a 10 hour battery life. And the batteries are cheap.
http://www.circuitcentral.com.au/sony-psp-high-capacity-battery-3650mah-aftermarket.html [circuitcentral.com.au]
Pandora batteries cost half as much. Mine was $19.99 shipped, 4250mah.
These batteries get 14-16 hours in real-world tests with WiFi off - so it's not like a netbook where "14 hours" actually only gives 6 if you're running the CPU 100%. This is an actual 14-16 hours. I assume those batteries you linked do indeed give the PSP 10 hours of actual play time?... if you don't mind paying twice as much, each.
Does it run hackable linux, with off-the-shelf compatibility with your favourite tools?
Uh, yes again.
That would be a "No". Thanks for the link though.
Let me make this clear - the Pandora will almost be suitable as a desktop replacement. (form factor ignored) At launch it'll run software like OpenOffice, Firefox, Chromium, etc. - you could load it up with pen testing tools, use VNC/SSH... basically, you've got a fully featured desktop environment preinstalled on it, ready for linux apps to be loaded.
If you want enough of them, its value shoots up far above other handhelds.
Yes & right now there is a $200 difference. No where near enough value for the cost compared to a cracked PSP Slim if all you want to do with it is play games.
If all you want to do is play $50 commercial games, buy a PSP or NDS or some other big-name console and play it. This is a device for developers first, users second. Not the other way around.
I think you've just proven you're a user.
They're using a "PowerVR SGX530" in there, and IIRC the PowerVR chips don't usually have FOSS drivers, so you might be SOL on that software front.
While true, they are currently using the best SGX530 driver released to date. It's available to you, in case you want to roll your own distro or go with Ubuntu or Gentoo instead. The newest one handles OGL ES 1.1/2.0, and works with X11 with a < 2% performance penalty. (Windowed Quake3!... if you so desire)
All the hardware has either FOSS drivers or publicly available binary blobs.
The Droid Incredible [phonescoop.com] appears to be more powerful while weighing half as much and fitting in a pocket comfortably. Just add a game controller...
...which doesn't fit in your pocket? Pointless.
Also, who wants a 5 hour battery life? The Pandora has closer to 16 hours. (with WiFi off)
You also have to consider that a heavier OS or memory bandwidth constriction might mean more impressive specs are weaker when it comes to actual performance. This quote demonstrates well:
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=17125
For example, let’s take a look at the iPhone 3GS. It’s commonly rumored to contain a PowerVR SGX 535, which is capable of processing 28 million triangles per second (Mt/s). There’s a driver file on the phone that contains “SGX535” in the filename, but that shouldn’t be taken as proof as to what it actually contains. In fact, GLBenchmark.com shows the iPhone 3GS putting out approximately 7 Mt/s in its graphics benchmarks. This initially led me to believe that the iPhone 3GS actually contained a PowerVR SGX 520 @ 200 MHz (which incidentally can output 7 Mt/s) or alternatively a PowerVR SGX 530 @ 100 MHz because the SGX 530 has 2 rendering pipelines instead of the 1 in the SGX 520...
But indeed, it's confirmed elsewhere to be an SGX535. So how then can the Pandora (with an underclocked SGX 530) beat it in OpenGL benchmarks? Lower OS overhead, and lower memory bandwidth constriction. Something that should be about 30% the speed actually runs slightly faster.
So although it "seems underwhelming" to you, you are not one of the giddy developers excited about the Pandora, and you certainly shouldn't be modded insightful, because you don't understand the hardware, controls, or OS at all.
My PSP does that & plays all my old PSX games. I got it for $100 used.
But can your PSP play N64 games? Can it browse the web, or use 3G sticks? Nope?
Will it have tons of homebrew games? (you might think so, but gp32x's community pumps out way more homebrew stuff than the PSP community does. Source: The devs coming over from the PSP community)
Does your PSP have awesome controls, a great screen, a 14 hour battery life? Nope?
Does it run hackable linux, with off-the-shelf compatibility with your favourite tools? Nope?
There's many features that make a Pandora desirable. If you want enough of them, its value shoots up far above other handhelds.
2 years ago these specs would have been exciting, but with smartphones already pushing over 1ghz and 512mb ram, I don't see the appeal.
It's not the CPU speed. It's the controls, and the developers behind the project.
And even if other devices have faster internals, most have such high overhead OS's that you hardly get any power. The emulator devs are excited, because just about everything in the OS can shut off when you start a game, if it isn't needed.
but my laptop does that and has a nice big screen too.
Your laptop has dual-analog sticks, and R1/L1 buttons? Didn't think so.
it seems like it will be so radically obsolete in a short period of time.
Only if you define obsolescence by CPU speed rather than controls and form factor.
There's no other clamshell handhelds with such great controls. The Pandora is like a 4x4 Jeep, and what you've got is a new yet very fast car. Great for city driving, but you don't want to hit any potholes or go offroading with it.
I guess you could say that the pandora is like the ultimate portable console, but only if you don't want to play any newer games.
See above.
Very good points. Before something like this can be implemented, the entire system has to be computer controlled, and implemented flawlessly.
I wouldn't want a computer controlling my engine unless it was also driving my car, and everyone else's car. There's too many unpredictable factors.
And like I said, the entire system has to be implemented flawlessly, and fail gracefully when hardware dies.
It's not really that bad. If you look at x86, there's a dozen available bootloaders, multiple kinds of BIOS's - even things like EFI...
It's just that ARM CPUs remain relevant longer than x86 designs, because their target market isn't the bleeding edge. A simple but older ARM CPU can be sold cheaper - perhaps even for a few dollars - and might have enough processing power to do fine in a DVD player or other embedded device. Standardized boot loaders weren't important for this market, but now with ARM-based netbooks flooding eBay, and every phone in existence being powered by ARM, they're starting to be.
Keep in mind that while current ARM fragmentation may not equal user freedom, ARM is providing freedom to the companies that fab processors, and for developers there's the potential to port just about anything to ARM instruction sets.
Three companies basically have x86 locked down, and nobody else can join the market. It's quite standardized for the user, but from a certain perspective there is no freedom here.
Yes, but Scroogle has recently been shut down by Google, so this is their alternative.
They weren't "shut down" - the creators were too lazy to redirect their queries to another page.
Big difference.
After the beatdown they got for crying wolf in that last slashdot article, I'm surprised someone didn't know that.
Nobody knows how to write parsers anymore. I've never seen a recent university CS curriculum that covers parsing with respect to different parser constructs for different languages. Sure, the students learn to load up the chosen XML parsing library and pull in XML, and they learn to take text from stdin, but there's seldom any emphasis on what to do with more screwy formats. Maybe, just maybe, they might get exposed to different languages through a compilers class, but generally not how to process different languages outside of lex/yacc. This bothers me greatly.
Warning: Long rambling post follows. To summarize, I haven't found any courses that covered anything close to parsing, except maybe invoking XML parsing libraries and stuff.
Before I took any programming courses, I figured out how to create an XML parser in javascript. I had a dream of making a game, which needed server-side storage, but I never got around to finishing it. Quite an experiment, though.
After that I went on to help decode Outpost 2's compiled map format. (maps were DLL files - oh the design choices of old games!) I wrote an editor for it in Jamascript (a mirror of Javascript - see Clickteam), and wrote my own tile renderer with smooth scrolling. It worked quite well, except in XP SP2. Lack of further interest from the community caused that project to die, but got me interested in compiled languages - with a compiled language, I'd be in control of whether it worked on an OS or not.
So I decided I needed to learn a compiled language, but since I didn't like C, I started by porting my XML parser to Java, and added writing capabilities. I used it for some projects where I didn't need to deal with DOM nodes and stuff; I just needed to spit out data as XML <key>value</key> pairs, which it did just fine. Although the parser was simple(200 lines, max?), and couldn't read complex XML, it could generate valid simple XML, which any other parser could read. Oh, and it failed gracefully if the file was too advanced. (that was my biggest accomplishment, and required rethinking how I had designed it)
Then I changed it to pre-pend itself to other files as a sort of metadata. That way I could attach info like the number of frames, size of frames, etc. to a tileset PNG. You can see where I was going with this... I wanted to make a game. But somehow I got bored and stopped working on it again.
All this working with Java led me to a few inevitable conclusions. I just plain don't like some of Java's syntax verbosity. Some of the choices make the code stretch on and on and on, when readability could be enhanced by doing the opposite. I wrote a code pre-processor, to enable (among other things) keywords like public: and private: - also var, so that I could easily deal with statements like this:
public ArrayList<SomeObject> myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();
->
var myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();
It just felt cleaner to me - perhaps because of my javascript roots. I had a dream of creating an entire IDE, with background colours (changing based on scope, public/private, etc.), but I never actually got around to writing that... in the end I went back to other IDEs which lacked my features, but had stuff like code completion. (quite handy)
Now I'm working on many other projects - but I must say, I haven't encountered a course yet that covered any of this stuff. I'm probably looking at the wrong college courses, or maybe there's just not enough jobs that demand it? I had no trouble finding, Ruby, Python, Java, C#, and C++ courses, but none cover this stuff. I just had to tinker to learn it.
You may have a point there. Modern onboard is ridiculously fast, too. The top of the line IGPs are between a 6600GT and 7600GT in performance. It's high enough to play somewhat new games on low settings with a smooth framerate.
This has the potential to almost completely knock out the child market - where games wouldn't play smooth enough, so the child begs his or her parents for a new videocard. ;)
But since those children are actually moving to consoles, what have we really lost? There's still several million PC gamers on services like Steam, and we all buy new hardware every few years... the market may shrink, but it'll still be there.
I've been wondering for a while if the right approach for the whole codec mess is to wait until MPEG-1 is truly free and clear, and adopt that. You may laugh, but try encoding something in MPEG-1 with ffmpeg, using large (> 100) GOP sizes, and high numbers of B-frames (16+.)* On a normal high performance computer in 2010, the speed of compression is too low to be practical, but the results are excellent, even at relatively low bitrates. 4-6Mbps is more than enough for high quality 720p24, in most cases.
x264 (I don't know about other H.264 encoders) delivers great results for 480p in the 512kbit-1mbit range. (depending on content - cartoons look near perfect at 512kbit, or lower) Most movies will get DVD quality from roughly 768kbit. A 2mbit stream should easily manage 720p at close to perfect perceivable quality.
To top it all off, 512kbit x264 with all settings tweaked to roughly the max encodes at over 30fps on a modern quad-core.
bandwidth is improving
Not as fast as the number of people that want to watch Youtube.
Kinda sad to see them go. They've always provided good warranty support.
eVGA is pretty much killing off all the competition by being totally awesome.
They encourage overclocking, their warranties aren't voided by cooling mods, and their prices are competitive (or often better than) XFX and BFG's. For some reason, eVGA cards usually overclock better, too.
eVGA wants their customers to use their hardware, hard. They encourage folding, among other things. Their rank proves it.
I like the company. My last card was either going to be an eVGA GTS 250 ($140 at the time), BFG GTS 250 ($135 after MIR), or Asus GTS 250($90 after MIR). I went for the Asus one, which was actually a mistake. The GDDR3 overheated at stock speeds, and had to be underclocked 40%... until I modded the cooling ($15), and then I could overclock by nearly 20%. This pales in comparison to my last eVGA card (a 7900GS), which attained 70% overclocks on the core and memory.
They should have went with a more power efficient (and faster) core 2 duo.
Core 2 Duo? That could've gone with a faster and more power efficient Atom. P4's are just that bad.
I'm a bit surprised they didn't strike a deal AMD, or a big eTailer. It's good PR. I've seen Athlon II X2 CPUs going for $35. Toss in a $45 board, $15 of RAM, a cheap PSU and case... an old HDD... presto, you just built a sub-60w computer, for maybe $150, and it's at least 4x faster than a P4.