The Synaptics touchpad can detect multitouch. The standard Synaptics drivers come with an application called Pressure Graph - you can open it by right-clicking on the Synaptics icon in the system tray. Cool! I'll have to boot into windows and try that out. Sounds like it really is a software thing.
Unless I'm being dense, none of the things you mention require multi-touch. They're just single-touch gesture detection routines. Looking at the author's website reveals that the only multi-touch support is two-finger or three-finger taps, and that this is not supported on all models.
It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y) Well... every laptop model I've used does support these, at least with the Linux drivers, whereas the Windows drivers vary a lot. Tap and drag is also supported on every model I've used.
The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
pressing one finger onto the touchpad
*simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...
Simon. That may indeed exceed the capabilities of Synaptics touchpads. Though I'm not honestly sure. I wouldn't be surprised to see the capabilities of Synaptics pads improved rapidly if the iPhone interface becomes a hit.
The Synaptics touchpads used on practically all notebook computers already support multi-touch features. These just have to be appropriately configured with software.
For example, using the Xorg drivers and GTK configuration applet gsynaptics, you can set up a touchpad to do different actions based on double-tapping, triple-tapping, scrolling via linear and circular dragging, etc.
So if Apple figures out how to make an intuitive user interface out of touchpad motions, that's pretty cool, and other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly!
... when you enslave yourself to a closed-source operating system, not just on the computer but on the phone.
Every time I hear about 64-bit something not working on Windows, I have to laugh a bit. Basically every open-source package has worked flawlessly on 64-bit systems since around 2002, with some of the code released *before* the Opteron/Athlon 64 actually came out. All the open-source drivers work too.
The way I see it, if you want progress and portability in computer systems, forking over lots of money to buy proprietary hardware and software isn't a good way to get it.
Yeah, I think the underclocking approach they've used is completely valid. If two processors are built on the same core revision and the same CMOS process, then clock differences are just a matter of changing the multiplier.
I thought this was an excellent review. Probably the most useful CPU benchmark review I've ever read, actually. Very thorough, very wide range of benchmarks, very useful commentary on different factors that might be affecting the results on the different benchmarks, and not loaded up with ads (*cough* TomsHardware *cough*).
One thing I found very interesting was the considerable advantage AMD had in the 64-bit benchmarks, especially Cinebench and POV-RAY, and the Linux-based Folding@Home. It seems that the AMD's really shine in 64-bit performance. For those of us, who run 64-bit Linux, where *all* of our open-source software is natively 64-bit, AMD64 gives a pretty great performance boost. Yet another point in favor of open-source:-)
I'm no fan of over-regulation, but I was glad to see this one pass. Lot's of people are completely unaware that caller ID even can be spoofed. If they got a call that appeared to be from someone at their bank, they'd give their account number to get some issue straightened out.
Aside from prank phone calls, the only use for Caller ID spoofing is fraud, which is definitely a government issue.
And the way to fix this is... to lull people into a false sense of security by convincing them that the government can effectively curb these abuses???
I think laws that supposedly provide security by making something illegal, without an effective mechanism for enforcement, are dangerous and waste well-meaning people's time. For example, take the crazy post-9/11 prohibitions on bringing various things on airplanes. Well... I can get my shampoo bottle in my carry-on through security 9 times out of 10, but then occasionally they catch it and I have to throw it out. It's obviously not protecting anyone from terrorists carrying liquids since (a) they usually don't catch them, and (b) there's no punishment for trying to carry on such items and getting caught, so there's no deterrent and no way to track people who repeatedly experiment with security. Basically, the whole thing just makes my mom worry less about terrorism, and needlessly hassles a lot of travelers.
We saw it with the IDE's. When Microsoft had to compete with Borland {Borland Pascal; Borland C/C++} it came up with the 'Visual' IDE. Visual C, Visual Fortran. It was a good IDE, and it won against Borland. After that... it languished. Now... now that we're seeing the Eclipse IDE and SUN's IDE... suddenly Microsoft floors the accelerator again. Kind of like Intel vs. AMD, eh?
x86 made only incremental gains from the 486 to the Pentium IV. Suddenly, wham! AMD comes out with the 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 and they kick the crap out of Intel on price, performance, and power consumption for a year or so.
Now we've seen a ferocious flurry of innovation from Intel, which has suddenly been pouring money into R&D and taking advantage of its superior manufacturing processes. We've got Intel vs. AMD to thank for quad-core, low-power, hardware virtualization... and best of all, $59 dual-core 64-bit processors from Newegg:-)
Now AMD is falling behind fairly rapidly, and we can expect Intel to slack off its R&D correspondingly. But in a year or five, AMD or someone else (VIA? IBM? MIPS?) will be back with something new and send Intel scrambling again.
GP is full of shit. A $200,000 house must be in rural Iowa or somewhere. You're lucky to get a bare-Earth quarter acre for $400,000 in many places. My parents have a beautiful, almost luxurious, house in a prominent midwestern college town... 5 bedrooms, 3/4 acre, hot tub, sauna, skylights everywhere, bidets, finished basements, etc. Apparently it's worth about $300k. It was apparently the talk of the town when it was built in the 80s (not by my family). I'm guessing most of the homes in our neighborhood are worth $200k-$300k or so.
Well, practically all processors are easier to virtualize than x86:-) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_v irtualization_requirement) MIPS, ARM, PPC, SPARC all "just work" with virtualization, since all their privileged instructions operate in the non-braindead way.
Of course, if you use virtualization to do cross-OS development or to run Windows apps, then obviously you're kind of stuck with x86:-(
Dam I really think it would be better if we didn't have a "two party system" in the x86 field. A third (or fourth) vendor would be nice. But given the high barrier to entry, its not going to happen anytime soon. Heck, it doesn't even have to be x86. I don't use anything but open-source software, so I don't really care one bit about the underlying architecture, as long as it performs well. If somebody builds a well-performing, price-competitive mobo/processor combo that I can drop into my current box, and supports USB/SATA/PCI/2D graphics, I'll use it.
ARM, MIPS64, PowerPC, SPARC, whatever works... I imagine there's a large community of open-source users who would similarly jump ship from x86 if there were an alternative that were competitive on price/performance and flexibility.
Yeah, I'm wondering what exactly is the argument for not breaking it...
Is it the expense of making a new one? Do they think the data will be of limited utility? Or are they just worried that the public is going to be freaked out by the catastrophic failure modes that carbon fiber sometimes exhibits? (read this article for a bit of information on carbon fiber bike failure)
The failure properties of most structural metals are very, very, very well understood. Not so much for carbon fiber. Engineers really like to know that what they're building isn't going to snap in half at a stress riser... especially when it's an airplane wing!!!
In any case, I'm sure that the widespread use of carbon fiber in aircraft will lead to a wealth of technical data and open up new uses for this cool material.
On the other hand, when I want a cheap and versatile embedded system, I just get a wireless router! I bought a discontinued model of NETGEAR wireless router with 32 MiB of SDRAM, 16 MiB of flash, USB 2.0, and a 200 MHz MIPS processor for about $30. Lots of fun to play around with!!
(a) How much will it cost? If it's cheap, I want one!!! (b) This is darn similar to the recently announced Yoggie Pico, which is only $40--though the Pico doesn't have USB host capability or ethernet (but could probably be hacked to provide such:-))
Eh... I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna get sued over taking copies of my DVDs along on vacation on my laptop:-) Is the chain smoker thing a reference to Cancer Man in the X-Files?
And do it! For instance, improve a feature of a game that you like. Or implement a missing feature that you've been hankering after. I think this is a great way to get started, because it gives you the satisfaction of reward.
For example, I like to use the free software Theora video codec to rip DVDs under Linux. It used to support SIMD-acceleration, making it encode movies about twice as fast... but only on 32-bit x86. Well, I had just gotten a new AMD64 box, and wanted it to rip movies faster. So I checked out the Theora code, refreshed my knowledge of assembly language, and within a couple days I had a working MMX/SSE-accelerated encoder. It was a very satisfying feeling!! And that code went into the mainline Theora release a couple months later (1.0alpha6).
um, you know apple is selling leopard for ANY pc in october right? so, your point will be quite moot in a few months
(ps, i'm not an apple fanboi either, i prefer my os free:) I think you're sadly misinformed. That would be great news, and we'd have heard a LOT more about it. But it's not true at all. Where the heck did you hear it?
Yeah, that laptop is uncannily similar... yours has Firewire and S-Video ports, otherwise identical it seems. I wouldn't run Vista except that it came with the computer and I was too lazy to install XP. As I've said above, I only use it for one specific app.
I know the idea that you own something that has the potentional to do more idologically is annoying but if you think about it in terms I bought what I wanted at the time and the fact it has more potentional then what I got is just an added extra.
I agree! Don't get me wrong: IBM's strategy makes pretty good sense in terms of lowering costs for everyone involved. But my hacker soul is driven to rage by the thought of not being able to use my hardware fully.:-)
The ATI X1100 can run some games, but I doubt that it will run Aero at all.
Is this a Dell Inspiron 1501? I got one a few weeks ago, Turion 64 X2 TL-60 with 1gb RAM, Radeon Xpress 1100. Runs Vista with Aero fine. Except Aero drives me crazy, so I turned it off right away. And I run Ubuntu 90% of the time anyway:-)
RAM is cheap, so if you're going to go and buy Vista, it would be silly not to buy some extra RAM at the same time.
RAM is not that cheap. It'd cost me $100 to upgrade from 1 GiB to 2 GiB on my desktop. Why should I? Ubuntu runs just great with 1gb, or even 512mb for that matter. XP is also fine with 1gb.
I just don't see many people upgrading to Vista other than when they buy new computers. It's expensive to buy the software and expensive to buy RAM upgrades.
They want to remain in control of the platform, if people use mac or linux as their main os and use Windows to run one of those not-yet-supported programs the power of Microsoft wil start to degrade...
That's how I use Windows these days, to run one and exactly one app. I use QEMU to run virtualized XP so that I can use Altera Quartus II to design, debug, and program FPGAs. It's one of those highly specialized, complicated programs, and they offer a free-as-in-beer Windows version, but the Linux version costs $$$. I can't stand to run Windows natively, since I go crazy with the lack of a high-powered command-line and no apt-get. Windows sure is a crappy development environment unless you shell out for Visual Studio, and even then I prefer what Linux offers.
If they begin to offer a free-as-in-beer Linux version, I'll jump ship in the blink of an eye, and banish XP from my computer entirely. Altera's main competitor, Xilinx, already offers a free-as-in-beer version of their design software.
Microsoft should be afraid, very very afraid. Linux distros like Ubuntu already offer a full-featured, secure, and stable suite of programs for basic productivity, database work, internet access, multimedia, and development. The number of Windows-only apps is fading fast.
Hey, I use Quartus II 7.1 as well, with an FPGA board. The the only program that prevents me from living in Ubuntu full-time. I have had no problems with the USB Blaster under XP, either running native or virtualized under QEMU, on a Linux host. I can't recommend QEMU enough!
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iGuess iPhone isJust iNother cool product squandered by being totally locked in to one vendor.
Oh wait, it's actually locked in to *two* vendors. Yikes!
It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y) Well... every laptop model I've used does support these, at least with the Linux drivers, whereas the Windows drivers vary a lot. Tap and drag is also supported on every model I've used. The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
- pressing one finger onto the touchpad
- *simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...Simon. That may indeed exceed the capabilities of Synaptics touchpads. Though I'm not honestly sure. I wouldn't be surprised to see the capabilities of Synaptics pads improved rapidly if the iPhone interface becomes a hit.
The Synaptics touchpads used on practically all notebook computers already support multi-touch features. These just have to be appropriately configured with software.
For example, using the Xorg drivers and GTK configuration applet gsynaptics, you can set up a touchpad to do different actions based on double-tapping, triple-tapping, scrolling via linear and circular dragging, etc.
So if Apple figures out how to make an intuitive user interface out of touchpad motions, that's pretty cool, and other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly!
... when you enslave yourself to a closed-source operating system, not just on the computer but on the phone.
Every time I hear about 64-bit something not working on Windows, I have to laugh a bit. Basically every open-source package has worked flawlessly on 64-bit systems since around 2002, with some of the code released *before* the Opteron/Athlon 64 actually came out. All the open-source drivers work too.
The way I see it, if you want progress and portability in computer systems, forking over lots of money to buy proprietary hardware and software isn't a good way to get it.
Yeah, I think the underclocking approach they've used is completely valid. If two processors are built on the same core revision and the same CMOS process, then clock differences are just a matter of changing the multiplier.
:-)
I thought this was an excellent review. Probably the most useful CPU benchmark review I've ever read, actually. Very thorough, very wide range of benchmarks, very useful commentary on different factors that might be affecting the results on the different benchmarks, and not loaded up with ads (*cough* TomsHardware *cough*).
One thing I found very interesting was the considerable advantage AMD had in the 64-bit benchmarks, especially Cinebench and POV-RAY, and the Linux-based Folding@Home. It seems that the AMD's really shine in 64-bit performance. For those of us, who run 64-bit Linux, where *all* of our open-source software is natively 64-bit, AMD64 gives a pretty great performance boost. Yet another point in favor of open-source
I'm no fan of over-regulation, but I was glad to see this one pass. Lot's of people are completely unaware that caller ID even can be spoofed. If they got a call that appeared to be from someone at their bank, they'd give their account number to get some issue straightened out.
And the way to fix this is... to lull people into a false sense of security by convincing them that the government can effectively curb these abuses???Aside from prank phone calls, the only use for Caller ID spoofing is fraud, which is definitely a government issue.
I think laws that supposedly provide security by making something illegal, without an effective mechanism for enforcement, are dangerous and waste well-meaning people's time. For example, take the crazy post-9/11 prohibitions on bringing various things on airplanes. Well... I can get my shampoo bottle in my carry-on through security 9 times out of 10, but then occasionally they catch it and I have to throw it out. It's obviously not protecting anyone from terrorists carrying liquids since (a) they usually don't catch them, and (b) there's no punishment for trying to carry on such items and getting caught, so there's no deterrent and no way to track people who repeatedly experiment with security. Basically, the whole thing just makes my mom worry less about terrorism, and needlessly hassles a lot of travelers.
x86 made only incremental gains from the 486 to the Pentium IV. Suddenly, wham! AMD comes out with the 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 and they kick the crap out of Intel on price, performance, and power consumption for a year or so.
Now we've seen a ferocious flurry of innovation from Intel, which has suddenly been pouring money into R&D and taking advantage of its superior manufacturing processes. We've got Intel vs. AMD to thank for quad-core, low-power, hardware virtualization... and best of all, $59 dual-core 64-bit processors from Newegg
Now AMD is falling behind fairly rapidly, and we can expect Intel to slack off its R&D correspondingly. But in a year or five, AMD or someone else (VIA? IBM? MIPS?) will be back with something new and send Intel scrambling again.
And what's wrong with Iowa, by the way?
Well, practically all processors are easier to virtualize than x86 :-) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_v irtualization_requirement) MIPS, ARM, PPC, SPARC all "just work" with virtualization, since all their privileged instructions operate in the non-braindead way.
:-(
Of course, if you use virtualization to do cross-OS development or to run Windows apps, then obviously you're kind of stuck with x86
ARM, MIPS64, PowerPC, SPARC, whatever works... I imagine there's a large community of open-source users who would similarly jump ship from x86 if there were an alternative that were competitive on price/performance and flexibility.
Yeah, I'm wondering what exactly is the argument for not breaking it...
Is it the expense of making a new one?
Do they think the data will be of limited utility?
Or are they just worried that the public is going to be freaked out by the catastrophic failure modes that carbon fiber sometimes exhibits? (read this article for a bit of information on carbon fiber bike failure)
The failure properties of most structural metals are very, very, very well understood. Not so much for carbon fiber. Engineers really like to know that what they're building isn't going to snap in half at a stress riser... especially when it's an airplane wing!!!
In any case, I'm sure that the widespread use of carbon fiber in aircraft will lead to a wealth of technical data and open up new uses for this cool material.
My bad, I've no idea where I got that price from.
On the other hand, when I want a cheap and versatile embedded system, I just get a wireless router! I bought a discontinued model of NETGEAR wireless router with 32 MiB of SDRAM, 16 MiB of flash, USB 2.0, and a 200 MHz MIPS processor for about $30. Lots of fun to play around with!!
(a) How much will it cost? If it's cheap, I want one!!! :-))
(b) This is darn similar to the recently announced Yoggie Pico, which is only $40--though the Pico doesn't have USB host capability or ethernet (but could probably be hacked to provide such
Eh... I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna get sued over taking copies of my DVDs along on vacation on my laptop :-) Is the chain smoker thing a reference to Cancer Man in the X-Files?
And do it! For instance, improve a feature of a game that you like. Or implement a missing feature that you've been hankering after. I think this is a great way to get started, because it gives you the satisfaction of reward.
For example, I like to use the free software Theora video codec to rip DVDs under Linux. It used to support SIMD-acceleration, making it encode movies about twice as fast... but only on 32-bit x86. Well, I had just gotten a new AMD64 box, and wanted it to rip movies faster. So I checked out the Theora code, refreshed my knowledge of assembly language, and within a couple days I had a working MMX/SSE-accelerated encoder. It was a very satisfying feeling!! And that code went into the mainline Theora release a couple months later (1.0alpha6).
so, your point will be quite moot in a few months
(ps, i'm not an apple fanboi either, i prefer my os free:) I think you're sadly misinformed. That would be great news, and we'd have heard a LOT more about it. But it's not true at all. Where the heck did you hear it?
Prostitutes demand sex!!!
Moving along...
Yeah, that laptop is uncannily similar... yours has Firewire and S-Video ports, otherwise identical it seems. I wouldn't run Vista except that it came with the computer and I was too lazy to install XP. As I've said above, I only use it for one specific app.
Oh yeah? Well in MY surreal parallel universe, all dogs are green!!!
I agree! Don't get me wrong: IBM's strategy makes pretty good sense in terms of lowering costs for everyone involved. But my hacker soul is driven to rage by the thought of not being able to use my hardware fully.
Is this a Dell Inspiron 1501? I got one a few weeks ago, Turion 64 X2 TL-60 with 1gb RAM, Radeon Xpress 1100. Runs Vista with Aero fine. Except Aero drives me crazy, so I turned it off right away. And I run Ubuntu 90% of the time anyway
RAM is not that cheap. It'd cost me $100 to upgrade from 1 GiB to 2 GiB on my desktop. Why should I? Ubuntu runs just great with 1gb, or even 512mb for that matter. XP is also fine with 1gb.
I just don't see many people upgrading to Vista other than when they buy new computers. It's expensive to buy the software and expensive to buy RAM upgrades.
That's how I use Windows these days, to run one and exactly one app. I use QEMU to run virtualized XP so that I can use Altera Quartus II to design, debug, and program FPGAs. It's one of those highly specialized, complicated programs, and they offer a free-as-in-beer Windows version, but the Linux version costs $$$. I can't stand to run Windows natively, since I go crazy with the lack of a high-powered command-line and no apt-get. Windows sure is a crappy development environment unless you shell out for Visual Studio, and even then I prefer what Linux offers.
If they begin to offer a free-as-in-beer Linux version, I'll jump ship in the blink of an eye, and banish XP from my computer entirely. Altera's main competitor, Xilinx, already offers a free-as-in-beer version of their design software.
Microsoft should be afraid, very very afraid. Linux distros like Ubuntu already offer a full-featured, secure, and stable suite of programs for basic productivity, database work, internet access, multimedia, and development. The number of Windows-only apps is fading fast.
Hey, I use Quartus II 7.1 as well, with an FPGA board. The the only program that prevents me from living in Ubuntu full-time. I have had no problems with the USB Blaster under XP, either running native or virtualized under QEMU, on a Linux host. I can't recommend QEMU enough!