This feels like we're cleaning the crap out of the air:-) But I already see a way to boost sales: Avoid having to wear tin-foil hats, clean the mind-control signals out of the air before they even reach you!
Wow, if people read the criminal indictment there's one, possibly even two murder-for-hires in the wings linked to (allegedly posted by / conversation with) this guy.
I don't think the NSA has to break actual keys brute-force, but with information leakage it has been shown that data can be sussed-out of an encrypted stream (particularly an interactive one). Given sufficient leakage of known quantities, keys can be broken in much less time.
As we've seen just recently, even something as innocuous as HTTP compression over a SSL link can result in serious information leakage by anyone monitoring the size of the payloads.
Encryption streams, in general, require additional random data to be inserted into the stream and for the salt to be continuously modified (i.e. feedback) to remain strong. If one does neither of those things than the information leakage increases to the point where the keys can be broken without spending years of cpu cycles.
I don't think you actually bothered to read and understand what I wrote. Try again. This time read my responses (or at least the first two) a bit more carefully.
I'm not in the least saying that transactional hardware support is bad. I am saying that programming to Intel's transactional interface FIRST, as your primary programming model, particularly for consumer applications, can lead to very undesirable results on hardware that doesn't support it.
Intel tends to implement first-run features with very weird restrictions and other goo that only leads to trouble down the line. Their HVM stuff being a really good case in point (AMD's is much, much cleaner, too bad AMD dropped off the performance curve a few years ago). There are plenty of other examples as well. There are very severe limitations to what Intel's (now TWO) transactional models can handle. Programming specifically to those interfaces is akin to the people who would hand-code assembly years ago for a 15% improvement over C and think it was good (hint: all that code was thrown out the window soon after).
Right now only very short locked code sections can operate reasonably under Intel's current transactional model. It just so happens that the most prevalent use of spin locks in modern architectures is with short locked code sections. Longer locked code sections do not typically use spin locks. So a reasonable first approximation of any implementation of Intel's model is going to be as a way to boost spin locks.
In a well written SMP application or kernel there are not actually very many places where conflicts create performance issues. In either Linux or DragonFly I can only think of two places: (1) Concurrent file descriptor access from a threaded program, and (2) Concurrent VM faults from a threaded program to the same memory location(s) (same underlying VM objects and same underlying page table page). And that's pretty much it. For applications it will depend on the application of course, I'm not completely dismissing it. I LIKE the concept. I DON'T LIKE the severe limitations imposed by Intel's model. It's that simple.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of SMP code on modern systems (and, frankly, I was doing SMP code with paired 8-bit CPUs over 28 years ago), so if you think you are somehow stating something in regards to my knowledge base, I would humbly suggest that you take your opinions and shove them down a toilet somewhere because you clearly have no clue whatsoever as to what I've been doing the last 20 years.
Well, for video games (or anything you sell to the consumer), you clearly do not want to rely on Intel's transactional extensions because doing so could significantly reduce or destroy performance on any customer systems that don't have them.
Basically the way the basic (the prefixed) transactional extension works is to avoid dirtying the cache line(s) associated with the spin lock or unlock operations, with the assumption that the operations which are run within the locked section are less likely to conflict than the spin lock itself.
Since spin locks are often used incorrectly and are often coarse-grained (or even global), this can yield significant improvements in performance.
However, it also HIDES the fact that the application was badly written. If you write an application which depends on the new extensions the result will be extremely poor performance on any cpu which does not support the extensions.
So as far as game design goes, the transaction stuff is worse than worthless. The transactional stuff is best used for turn-key (server-side) code where the hardware environment is under your control.
It's almost an oxymoron if you are talking about a single-socket Intel cpu. You don't actually need the transactional extensions to make things go fast. It's only when you get to multi-socket where the cache management bandwidth (which is what the transactional extensions are able to avoid) becomes a big deal.
If the purpose is to test code performance then it is better to test without transaction support anyway since transaction support is not a replacement for proper algorithmic design. Or to put it another way... if you code SPECIFICALLY for one of the two intel transactional models that means you will probably wind up with very sloppy code (such as using global spinlocks more than you need to and assuming that the underlying transaction just won't conflict as much). The code might run fine on an Intel cpu but its performance value will not be portable.
And besides... 'your company' ? Use a Xeon then, right? It's not as though it costs all that much more.
General rule of thumb is that 2x hyperthreads is approximately equal to 1.5 real cores. Nobody is lying, Intel makes the thread/core distinction very clearly. The reason is primarily due to pipeline and memory stalls creating space which can be filled by the other thread.
Keep in mind that a modern superscale cpu can have something like 160? (number not exact) instructions in-flight at any given moment, depending on how good the branch prediction is. Instruction execution is not really a matter of clock cycles so much as it is a matter of waiting for memory and execution unit resources. Even instruction-instruction dependencies can often be absorbed by the out-of-order execution engine.
Hence why all my Android and iOS devices run a VPN (using the OpenVPN app which works great on both). Of course, the network at the VPN end-point isn't necessarily more secure, but it will be far more secure than all the networks in-between.
The real question here is... will Google at LEAST update all the phones and pads under their own control? Motorola and Nexus updates, please!
I will never buy a hybrid drive from seagate or anyone else. It's a huge waste of effort and money which only adds additional more uncertainty to the failure cases that already exist. 8GB of flash on a hybrid drive at best improves boot times by a second or two (literally, just that), and there's no point 'caching' application binaries when you can trivially stuff 16G+ of ram in a modern machine.
My windows box boots from a normal HDD just fine. If anyone is unhappy with their boot times it's probably because their machines are loaded with tons of crapware.
Laptops don't need HDDs at all. Just go with a SSD. There is absolutely no need to store your life's work on your laptop when a myrid of wireless/internet/automatic backup solutions are available.
Workstations and servers will want discrete SSDs in addition to HDDs. We stuff 128-256GB SSDs on our servers, use ~30G for boot+root, and the remaining 200GB to help cache the filesystems on the HDDs. Works great. The last thing you want are idiotic multi-failure-mode hybrid drives on an important machine.
I am not particularly married to WD or Seagate, but the last few years Seagate's line-up has been such a horrid mish-mash of half-baked features that I've pretty much been sticking to WD.
Not really, no. You will save money going with 2.5" HDDs instead of 3.5" HDDs, however. SSDs still eat less power when idle, but HDDs don't eat a whole lot of power when idle either.
Otherwise it depends on the kind of machine it is. If it's a desktop or workstation, then cpu's with integrated graphics (AMD APUs or Intel xxx5 chips typically) use far less power than systems with discrete gpus or graphics cards. Later generation chips eat less power when idle. Intel pretty much wins on that front if you want a powerful but low-power workstation. Haswell mobos and a good PSU will draw under 20W without having to go to sleep. Costs some money, though.
And I think a lot of you are confused by that. Samsung is just selling hardware. Apple is selling hardware AND creating an ongoing income stream from its ecosystem. Apple focuses on and accomplishes far higher customer retention numbers to sustain a longer purchasing cycle by consumers as the market matures. And it shows in the margins and the premium that Apple is STILL able to command for its products (despite what the emotionally-driven people on slashdot think).
From a business perspective, Apple is beating the holy crap out of its rivals and as the market matures pure hardware makers such as Samsung are being forced into more defensive positions. It's obvious just looking at the relative margin numbers.
Statistics can be very misleading, particularly the idiotic 'global market share' statistics the media seems to love to quote. The simple fact of the matter is that Apple is not diving head-first into lower economic zones. It's dipping its feet in from the higher zones but from Apple's perspective there's just no point trying to run after customers who don't won't provide any meaningful ongoing income to either Apple or Apple Developers. This also supports Apple's premium pricing model because, to be frank, the consumers of its products tend to be the same consumers who spend significant amounts of money just on telco. In the U.S. and other economically mature zones, Apple's premium is barely 1 month's phone bill. Not enough of a reason for those people to switch to a cheaper device.
China is certainly different in this regard, but Apple's business model is still generating enormous revenue and profits so to say that they are somehow 'losing' in China is losing sight of the bigger picture. Apple will tune its model but they will always sell at a premium to other devices. There's no reason for them not to.
Actually Samsung doesn't. You are quoting a widely disseminated piece that itself quoted incorrect statistics and had a misleading title. The original was corrected but the media tends to only propagate the more sensationalist titles and articles.
Part of the problem in today's world is being able to distinguish truth from fiction. Even when using valid data, it is always possible to quote a particular statistic out of context to make it appear that the data supports a story when, in fact, it doesn't.
In this particular situation the roles are actually reversed. Samsung has become more defensive, willing to chop margins to try to gain footholds in markets, and Apple pretty much beats the shit out of all of its competitors when it comes to margins and real profit.
Next time I'll just raise my little finger and then the angry comments will *really* start to fly:-)
In anycase, my brother worked for Apple for a number of years and it can be quite a high-stress environment. Probably the highest-stress environment of any company, anywhere. But ex-Apple employees often take away a good chunk of change plus lots of great ongoing contacts which works naturally well when moving onto to another job that might then do (more) business with Apple in the future. The Apple ecosystem extends far beyond the consumer!
I think the digital-zoom capability argument falls on its face though. I've looked at the sample images. The camera is clearly designed to oversample. The entire technology is based around oversampling. The instant you start zooming digitally you lose that oversampling and the technology falls on its face.
The phone is designed to store smaller pictures, there's no point storing 40MP files. I guess a lot of people missed the point... photoshop isn't going to be able to do jack with a full 40MP file from this phone, you might as well let the phone process it down to a smaller format.
The actual sensor is not all that great. It's VERY noisy, even in good light, and the phone software is clearly doing a ton of noise-reduction post-processing. Oversampling works for some things, like the nyquist frequency limit, but it won't reduce noise appreciably compared to the same sensor designed with fewer, bigger pixels and a focus on noise reduction. Nokia's marketing is intentionally overstating the technology.
The phone clearly produces better pictures than other phones. It doesn't hold a candle to even a low-end DSLR, however. If you want to take good pictures you don't do it with a phone, not even this one.
I wouldn't put it past Verizon to do that but one of my colo's peers primarily with Cogent and Cogent blows up internet connectivity from that colo all the time, an issue I just don't have in my other colo. Honestly I don't think Cogent has the moral authority to be able to assert anything.
Depending on the level of compression a full HD (1080p) stream requires between 400KBytes/sec and ~2 MBytes/sec of bandwidth. That is, approximately 4MBits-20MBits.
Needless to say, even 100MBit ethernet has no problem with a couple of those, let alone existing 1-gigabit ethernets.
At 2160p (which is what people call 4K, for 3840x2160), perhaps ~1 MByte/sec to ~5 MBytes/sec depending on the level of compression and the complexity of the video. That is, somewhere north of 50 MBits on the top end. Despite having four times the pixels you don't actually need four times the bandwidth for a high quality stream. Standard Gigabit ethernet is still plenty good enough for a dozen and a half 4K streams.
If it doesn't have 5 GHz wifi connectivity it's worthless. 2.4 GHz connectivity interferes with bluetooth (read: music streaming over bluetooth), regardless of what fancy protocols they say they might be running to reduce interference. I have yet to find a 2.4 GHz wifi device that doesn't cause gaps in music playback over bluetooth.
Because, really, there was never a 'Facebook' phone in the first place. It was just an annoying app launcher that should never have been bundled with a phone. This also demonstrates the sheer power that the default app launcher has to make or break perfectly fine hardware. Even though the customer can easily replace the launcher, bundling a phone with a messed up launcher basically destroys sales of the phone.
Vendors try to lock people into these sorts of things all the time, it just usually isn't quite so blatant and most people don't even realize that it is happening. Buy a Motorola phone and you get some minor but interesting stuff that is generic but locked into the platform (can't be downloaded and run on other android phones). Same with all vendors, but they have to tread carefully or risk alienating their entire user base. The FB stuff was so in-your-face that even a 5-year-old could turn away from the foul stench.
That is totally absurd reasoning. Everyone in the society is responsible for contributing to the upkeep and maintenance of societal structures. You know, like roads and parks and low-cost food and all the stuff you use every day and obviously don't think you have to pay for.
Because our modern society functions with each individual specializing (e.g. I'm a programmer, I don't build bridges or farm crops)... because of that we need monetary and tax structures for each individual to be able to fairly contribute to the society as a whole.
If you are proposing that we revert to a tribal structure where essentially nobody specializes in anything and people contribute to societal structures more directly, then not having taxes will work just fine. Of course, we won't have TVs or cell phones, cheap food, or vacations either! By all means, travel to some deep jungle somewhere and have at it! I'll stay here thank you very much!
Whether you buy and sell stuff with cash or your barter makes no difference.
Stick to your roots guys, this isn't a stock forum and 99% of the people here clearly don't know one blessed thing about investing, how companies work, or even what these big numbers actually mean.
Actually its worse then that, but I'm being politic.
Huge mistake if you believe that. The value of the dollar is not just in its practical utility, but also and primarily because it is backed by stabilizing factors which Bitcoin does not have. Namely, dollars can be expanded to balance against the economy and contracted through taxes (taxes alone are a huge stabilizing factor and control on the velocity of money in the supply chain). That isn't to say that mismanagement doesn't occur, only that it is recoverable when it does (pretty much proven in the 80's). Huge mismanagement is another story, but mostly non-sequitur to the discussion. In addition to that, disputes (including debt defaults) are resolved in dollars by the courts if you are a US citizen, it isn't something you can choose or not choose to adhere to.
The sheer volume of transactions done in dollars adds short-term stability by virtue of trade contracts and the simple fact that retailers cannot necessarily immediately pass on costs to consumers.
Bitcoin has none of this. It's value is completely unmanaged and unsupported except by trading. It is highly deflationary which from time immemorial has only resulted in one thing: economic instability, then hording followed by a complete collapse as a currency.
Anyone who thinks that increased use in commerce will somehow magically stabilize it is in for a huge disappointment. Bitcoin will fail utterly under those circumstances due to the extreme deflation it would cause.
But it will fail anyway simply due to its lack of ANY stabilizing factor. People seem to think that inflation is the ultimate destroyer of money. That has never been true. Debt without recourse is the ultimate destroyer of money.
Slashdot Mirror
This feels like we're cleaning the crap out of the air :-) But I already see a way to boost sales: Avoid having to wear tin-foil hats, clean the mind-control signals out of the air before they even reach you!
-Matt
Wow, if people read the criminal indictment there's one, possibly even two murder-for-hires in the wings linked to (allegedly posted by / conversation with) this guy.
-Matt
GCC tends to overoptimize things to the point where the optimizations become self-defeating.
-Matt
I wouldn't call them desperate but I think they are seriously underestimated the intelligence level of their customers.
-Matt
I don't think the NSA has to break actual keys brute-force, but with information leakage it has been shown that data can be sussed-out of an encrypted stream (particularly an interactive one). Given sufficient leakage of known quantities, keys can be broken in much less time.
As we've seen just recently, even something as innocuous as HTTP compression over a SSL link can result in serious information leakage by anyone monitoring the size of the payloads.
Encryption streams, in general, require additional random data to be inserted into the stream and for the salt to be continuously modified (i.e. feedback) to remain strong. If one does neither of those things than the information leakage increases to the point where the keys can be broken without spending years of cpu cycles.
-Matt
I don't think you actually bothered to read and understand what I wrote. Try again. This time read my responses (or at least the first two) a bit more carefully.
I'm not in the least saying that transactional hardware support is bad. I am saying that programming to Intel's transactional interface FIRST, as your primary programming model, particularly for consumer applications, can lead to very undesirable results on hardware that doesn't support it.
Intel tends to implement first-run features with very weird restrictions and other goo that only leads to trouble down the line. Their HVM stuff being a really good case in point (AMD's is much, much cleaner, too bad AMD dropped off the performance curve a few years ago). There are plenty of other examples as well. There are very severe limitations to what Intel's (now TWO) transactional models can handle. Programming specifically to those interfaces is akin to the people who would hand-code assembly years ago for a 15% improvement over C and think it was good (hint: all that code was thrown out the window soon after).
Right now only very short locked code sections can operate reasonably under Intel's current transactional model. It just so happens that the most prevalent use of spin locks in modern architectures is with short locked code sections. Longer locked code sections do not typically use spin locks. So a reasonable first approximation of any implementation of Intel's model is going to be as a way to boost spin locks.
In a well written SMP application or kernel there are not actually very many places where conflicts create performance issues. In either Linux or DragonFly I can only think of two places: (1) Concurrent file descriptor access from a threaded program, and (2) Concurrent VM faults from a threaded program to the same memory location(s) (same underlying VM objects and same underlying page table page). And that's pretty much it. For applications it will depend on the application of course, I'm not completely dismissing it. I LIKE the concept. I DON'T LIKE the severe limitations imposed by Intel's model. It's that simple.
-Matt
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of SMP code on modern systems (and, frankly, I was doing SMP code with paired 8-bit CPUs over 28 years ago), so if you think you are somehow stating something in regards to my knowledge base, I would humbly suggest that you take your opinions and shove them down a toilet somewhere because you clearly have no clue whatsoever as to what I've been doing the last 20 years.
-Matt
Well, for video games (or anything you sell to the consumer), you clearly do not want to rely on Intel's transactional extensions because doing so could significantly reduce or destroy performance on any customer systems that don't have them.
Basically the way the basic (the prefixed) transactional extension works is to avoid dirtying the cache line(s) associated with the spin lock or unlock operations, with the assumption that the operations which are run within the locked section are less likely to conflict than the spin lock itself.
Since spin locks are often used incorrectly and are often coarse-grained (or even global), this can yield significant improvements in performance.
However, it also HIDES the fact that the application was badly written. If you write an application which depends on the new extensions the result will be extremely poor performance on any cpu which does not support the extensions.
So as far as game design goes, the transaction stuff is worse than worthless. The transactional stuff is best used for turn-key (server-side) code where the hardware environment is under your control.
-Matt
It's almost an oxymoron if you are talking about a single-socket Intel cpu. You don't actually need the transactional extensions to make things go fast. It's only when you get to multi-socket where the cache management bandwidth (which is what the transactional extensions are able to avoid) becomes a big deal.
If the purpose is to test code performance then it is better to test without transaction support anyway since transaction support is not a replacement for proper algorithmic design. Or to put it another way... if you code SPECIFICALLY for one of the two intel transactional models that means you will probably wind up with very sloppy code (such as using global spinlocks more than you need to and assuming that the underlying transaction just won't conflict as much). The code might run fine on an Intel cpu but its performance value will not be portable.
And besides... 'your company' ? Use a Xeon then, right? It's not as though it costs all that much more.
-Matt
General rule of thumb is that 2x hyperthreads is approximately equal to 1.5 real cores. Nobody is lying, Intel makes the thread/core distinction very clearly. The reason is primarily due to pipeline and memory stalls creating space which can be filled by the other thread.
Keep in mind that a modern superscale cpu can have something like 160? (number not exact) instructions in-flight at any given moment, depending on how good the branch prediction is. Instruction execution is not really a matter of clock cycles so much as it is a matter of waiting for memory and execution unit resources. Even instruction-instruction dependencies can often be absorbed by the out-of-order execution engine.
-Matt
Hence why all my Android and iOS devices run a VPN (using the OpenVPN app which works great on both). Of course, the network at the VPN end-point isn't necessarily more secure, but it will be far more secure than all the networks in-between.
The real question here is... will Google at LEAST update all the phones and pads under their own control? Motorola and Nexus updates, please!
-Matt
I will never buy a hybrid drive from seagate or anyone else. It's a huge waste of effort and money which only adds additional more uncertainty to the failure cases that already exist. 8GB of flash on a hybrid drive at best improves boot times by a second or two (literally, just that), and there's no point 'caching' application binaries when you can trivially stuff 16G+ of ram in a modern machine.
My windows box boots from a normal HDD just fine. If anyone is unhappy with their boot times it's probably because their machines are loaded with tons of crapware.
Laptops don't need HDDs at all. Just go with a SSD. There is absolutely no need to store your life's work on your laptop when a myrid of wireless/internet/automatic backup solutions are available.
Workstations and servers will want discrete SSDs in addition to HDDs. We stuff 128-256GB SSDs on our servers, use ~30G for boot+root, and the remaining 200GB to help cache the filesystems on the HDDs. Works great. The last thing you want are idiotic multi-failure-mode hybrid drives on an important machine.
I am not particularly married to WD or Seagate, but the last few years Seagate's line-up has been such a horrid mish-mash of half-baked features that I've pretty much been sticking to WD.
-Matt
Not really, no. You will save money going with 2.5" HDDs instead of 3.5" HDDs, however. SSDs still eat less power when idle, but HDDs don't eat a whole lot of power when idle either.
Otherwise it depends on the kind of machine it is. If it's a desktop or workstation, then cpu's with integrated graphics (AMD APUs or Intel xxx5 chips typically) use far less power than systems with discrete gpus or graphics cards. Later generation chips eat less power when idle. Intel pretty much wins on that front if you want a powerful but low-power workstation. Haswell mobos and a good PSU will draw under 20W without having to go to sleep. Costs some money, though.
-Matt
And I think a lot of you are confused by that. Samsung is just selling hardware. Apple is selling hardware AND creating an ongoing income stream from its ecosystem. Apple focuses on and accomplishes far higher customer retention numbers to sustain a longer purchasing cycle by consumers as the market matures. And it shows in the margins and the premium that Apple is STILL able to command for its products (despite what the emotionally-driven people on slashdot think).
From a business perspective, Apple is beating the holy crap out of its rivals and as the market matures pure hardware makers such as Samsung are being forced into more defensive positions. It's obvious just looking at the relative margin numbers.
Statistics can be very misleading, particularly the idiotic 'global market share' statistics the media seems to love to quote. The simple fact of the matter is that Apple is not diving head-first into lower economic zones. It's dipping its feet in from the higher zones but from Apple's perspective there's just no point trying to run after customers who don't won't provide any meaningful ongoing income to either Apple or Apple Developers. This also supports Apple's premium pricing model because, to be frank, the consumers of its products tend to be the same consumers who spend significant amounts of money just on telco. In the U.S. and other economically mature zones, Apple's premium is barely 1 month's phone bill. Not enough of a reason for those people to switch to a cheaper device.
China is certainly different in this regard, but Apple's business model is still generating enormous revenue and profits so to say that they are somehow 'losing' in China is losing sight of the bigger picture. Apple will tune its model but they will always sell at a premium to other devices. There's no reason for them not to.
-Matt
Actually Samsung doesn't. You are quoting a widely disseminated piece that itself quoted incorrect statistics and had a misleading title. The original was corrected but the media tends to only propagate the more sensationalist titles and articles.
Part of the problem in today's world is being able to distinguish truth from fiction. Even when using valid data, it is always possible to quote a particular statistic out of context to make it appear that the data supports a story when, in fact, it doesn't.
In this particular situation the roles are actually reversed. Samsung has become more defensive, willing to chop margins to try to gain footholds in markets, and Apple pretty much beats the shit out of all of its competitors when it comes to margins and real profit.
-Matt
Next time I'll just raise my little finger and then the angry comments will *really* start to fly :-)
In anycase, my brother worked for Apple for a number of years and it can be quite a high-stress environment. Probably the highest-stress environment of any company, anywhere. But ex-Apple employees often take away a good chunk of change plus lots of great ongoing contacts which works naturally well when moving onto to another job that might then do (more) business with Apple in the future. The Apple ecosystem extends far beyond the consumer!
-Matt
Should be nice taking a break from Apple's high-stress environment. IX, maybe do a few apps on the side... there ya go!
-Matt
I think the digital-zoom capability argument falls on its face though. I've looked at the sample images. The camera is clearly designed to oversample. The entire technology is based around oversampling. The instant you start zooming digitally you lose that oversampling and the technology falls on its face.
The phone is designed to store smaller pictures, there's no point storing 40MP files. I guess a lot of people missed the point... photoshop isn't going to be able to do jack with a full 40MP file from this phone, you might as well let the phone process it down to a smaller format.
The actual sensor is not all that great. It's VERY noisy, even in good light, and the phone software is clearly doing a ton of noise-reduction post-processing. Oversampling works for some things, like the nyquist frequency limit, but it won't reduce noise appreciably compared to the same sensor designed with fewer, bigger pixels and a focus on noise reduction. Nokia's marketing is intentionally overstating the technology.
The phone clearly produces better pictures than other phones. It doesn't hold a candle to even a low-end DSLR, however. If you want to take good pictures you don't do it with a phone, not even this one.
-Matt
I wouldn't put it past Verizon to do that but one of my colo's peers primarily with Cogent and Cogent blows up internet connectivity from that colo all the time, an issue I just don't have in my other colo. Honestly I don't think Cogent has the moral authority to be able to assert anything.
-Matt
Depending on the level of compression a full HD (1080p) stream requires between 400KBytes/sec and ~2 MBytes/sec of bandwidth. That is, approximately 4MBits-20MBits.
Needless to say, even 100MBit ethernet has no problem with a couple of those, let alone existing 1-gigabit ethernets.
At 2160p (which is what people call 4K, for 3840x2160), perhaps ~1 MByte/sec to ~5 MBytes/sec depending on the level of compression and the complexity of the video. That is, somewhere north of 50 MBits on the top end. Despite having four times the pixels you don't actually need four times the bandwidth for a high quality stream. Standard Gigabit ethernet is still plenty good enough for a dozen and a half 4K streams.
-Matt
If it doesn't have 5 GHz wifi connectivity it's worthless. 2.4 GHz connectivity interferes with bluetooth (read: music streaming over bluetooth), regardless of what fancy protocols they say they might be running to reduce interference. I have yet to find a 2.4 GHz wifi device that doesn't cause gaps in music playback over bluetooth.
-Matt
Because, really, there was never a 'Facebook' phone in the first place. It was just an annoying app launcher that should never have been bundled with a phone. This also demonstrates the sheer power that the default app launcher has to make or break perfectly fine hardware. Even though the customer can easily replace the launcher, bundling a phone with a messed up launcher basically destroys sales of the phone.
Vendors try to lock people into these sorts of things all the time, it just usually isn't quite so blatant and most people don't even realize that it is happening. Buy a Motorola phone and you get some minor but interesting stuff that is generic but locked into the platform (can't be downloaded and run on other android phones). Same with all vendors, but they have to tread carefully or risk alienating their entire user base. The FB stuff was so in-your-face that even a 5-year-old could turn away from the foul stench.
-Matt
That is totally absurd reasoning. Everyone in the society is responsible for contributing to the upkeep and maintenance of societal structures. You know, like roads and parks and low-cost food and all the stuff you use every day and obviously don't think you have to pay for.
Because our modern society functions with each individual specializing (e.g. I'm a programmer, I don't build bridges or farm crops)... because of that we need monetary and tax structures for each individual to be able to fairly contribute to the society as a whole.
If you are proposing that we revert to a tribal structure where essentially nobody specializes in anything and people contribute to societal structures more directly, then not having taxes will work just fine. Of course, we won't have TVs or cell phones, cheap food, or vacations either! By all means, travel to some deep jungle somewhere and have at it! I'll stay here thank you very much!
Whether you buy and sell stuff with cash or your barter makes no difference.
-Matt
Stick to your roots guys, this isn't a stock forum and 99% of the people here clearly don't know one blessed thing about investing, how companies work, or even what these big numbers actually mean.
Actually its worse then that, but I'm being politic.
-Matt
Huge mistake if you believe that. The value of the dollar is not just in its practical utility, but also and primarily because it is backed by stabilizing factors which Bitcoin does not have. Namely, dollars can be expanded to balance against the economy and contracted through taxes (taxes alone are a huge stabilizing factor and control on the velocity of money in the supply chain). That isn't to say that mismanagement doesn't occur, only that it is recoverable when it does (pretty much proven in the 80's). Huge mismanagement is another story, but mostly non-sequitur to the discussion. In addition to that, disputes (including debt defaults) are resolved in dollars by the courts if you are a US citizen, it isn't something you can choose or not choose to adhere to.
The sheer volume of transactions done in dollars adds short-term stability by virtue of trade contracts and the simple fact that retailers cannot necessarily immediately pass on costs to consumers.
Bitcoin has none of this. It's value is completely unmanaged and unsupported except by trading. It is highly deflationary which from time immemorial has only resulted in one thing: economic instability, then hording followed by a complete collapse as a currency.
Anyone who thinks that increased use in commerce will somehow magically stabilize it is in for a huge disappointment. Bitcoin will fail utterly under those circumstances due to the extreme deflation it would cause.
But it will fail anyway simply due to its lack of ANY stabilizing factor. People seem to think that inflation is the ultimate destroyer of money. That has never been true. Debt without recourse is the ultimate destroyer of money.
-Matt