Indeed. If something grows 30-fold in 3 years, it's growing at an average rate of about 211% per year, because (1+2.11)^3 = 30.
Apparently the author doesn't understand the difference between linear and exponential growth or the terminology used to describe them. I think that percent-per-year growth is almost always a confusing way to describe growth when the percentage is more than 10-20%. That's because people assume x% growth in one year corresponds to 2x% growth in two years. Which is pretty close to the mark for a small growth rates (say 5%), but way off for larger growth rates. It's easily seen in the Taylor expansion of the exponential function, e^x = 1 + x + (x^2)/2 + (x^3)/6 +..., which is nearly linear for values of x1 but highly nonlinear for larger values.
But when the place in Maine or Hampshire or Vermont opens-up, I'll be first in line.
Too hot? Have you been to Western North Carolina?
It's a mountainous, heavily-forested region. Snow in the winter, sometimes heavy snow. The Carolina coast can really roast in the summer, but it stays pretty cool in the mountains. I was born in North Carolina but mostly grew up in Michigan, and prefer cold to warm areas. Western Carolina is certainly warmer than mid-Michigan, but it has a rather pleasant climate in my opinion.
... is not data. The singular of anecdote is also not data.
Basically, one guy used one computer with flash on a few times, and with flash off a few times. What web sites was he looking at? How many did he have open at once? Why couldn't he just use an ad blocker rather than kill Flash altogether?
I think Adobe Flash sucks as much as the next FLOSS fanboy, but this is just an insubstantial anecdote. Couldn't the author at least run PowerTOP or some Mac equivalent, and try to figure out how much the processor is waking up with/without flash, how much disk is being used, etc?
Microsoft encouraged companies to build in-house web apps on top of IE6, using its many poorly-documented proprietary features. Many of those features were so poorly documented and maintained by MS that they won't even work with newer versions of IE!
Obviously, this was a poor decision on the part of a lot of IT departments and corporate web app developers, but I do think Microsoft deserves a good part of the blame for encouraging such departures from web standards.
(Writing this from Chrome, while I wrangle a recalcitrant IE6 web app in another window... )
The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.
Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.
In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.
Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.
You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.
You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.
Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)
Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.
According to the wikipedia article, it can be tripped in a non-volatile fashion, meaning that power-cycling won't fix it. But it can also be reset electronically if an appropriate electronic interface is provided.
Does that remind you of anything? As far as I can tell, it's just marketing-speak for one bit (literally) of embedded flash memory.
While I can imagine some interesting and useful applications for flash embedded in CMOS logic, this seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse by lockdown-happy vendors. It's annoying enough to brick a computer by flashing the wrong BIOS, or to brick a router by flashing the wrong firmware, but at least in those cases the flash memory is on a separate chip. Either the chip is socketed (removable), or there are usually test points or a JTAG interface, allowing the flash to be rewritten to a correct state.
But with tiny amounts of flash deeply embedded into CMOS logic, there's no way to alter or even to find the non-volatile memory. Yech...
Whoops... I did know that. Thanks for the correction!
LG is Korean too. Panasonic, Sharp, and Sanyo are Japanese. Sony Ericsson is a Japanese-Swedish joint venture. HTC is Taiwanese. Any other major Asian phone manufacturers that I'm missing?
Agreed on the ugliness. There's a reason that phones that look like this always suck:
What's the point of making it slide out at all??? When you're using it, it's bigger, uglier, and more awkward than a regular non-sliding Slate phone. When you're fumbling for it in your pocket, it's roughly squarish, so you never know which way is up. Humans like non-square aspect ratios (photos, display screens, book pages) for a reason... what a dumb design.
Also, what does this phone do that the way-less-hyped messaging phones from Japanese makers like Samsung can't do?
I don't see Microsoft making a decent phone anytime soon because it keeps trying to emulate BlackBerry, the iPhone, Android and WebOS and failing at all of them. Microsoft will never get the reliability of BlackBerry OS, Microsoft can never reach the cult-like status of Apple, it can't just decide not to include a major feature like Flash, Multitasking, copy/paste, etc. until a future software update and expect people to buy it, Microsoft can never reach the level of appeal of the Google cloud services nor the openness of a Linux-based OS, and Microsoft will try, but fail to reach the level of ease of use of WebOS just like they tried to copy OS X and failed.
Precisely. There's no reason for anyone to want a phone OS built on the Microsoft philosophy. Their phone OSes have been bloated, buggy, with unexciting UIs, and with a tendency to be rolled out before they were really ready. In the mobile OS market, Microsoft has no head-start or brand recognition like they've had in the PC market for decades. Sure, there have been Windows Mobile phones for yeaaaaars, mostly aimed at the business market, but none of them have been exciting enough for business users to want to use at home or tell their kids about.
I have a 2-year-old Motorola Q smartphone which runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. This phone is practically a microcosm of what's wrong with Microsoft's mobile offerings. It looks great on the outside, like a thinner, more angular, "edgier" Blackberry. The QWERTY keyboard, which stubbornly refuses to wear out, is better than any I have ever used on a phone. I get people asking me about it all the time, and this is a piece of hardware that's been out for 4 years.
The internal specs aren't bad for its age, either: CDMA/EV-DO, Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3 megapixel camera, 312 MHz XScale (ARM) processor, MiniSD card slot, very bright QVGA screen, good sound quality. So far, so good, right?
The problem is the OS: it's static and half-open and half-locked-down and Microsoft-centric in every imaginable way. Almost everything you could want to do is possible, but almost everything is also a huge pain in the ass. Some examples:
The mail client can do IMAP and POP mail, but the interface is infuriatingly quirky (can't sync the Drafts folder... why???) and lacking in options and keyboard shortcuts (for example, you can quickly switch accounts, but not folders). It can also do Exchange Mail, slightly better. For no good reason, the Exchange configuration is handled via a completely different mechanism than regular mail accounts... and a very unintuitive one at that. You can only have one Exchange account, and it's always named "Outlook Express"... why??
The mobile browser is outdated. It can't do any JavaScript, Flash, etc. It keeps a history list, but is dog-slow to navigate it with even a few hundred entries. There's no reliable way to download links, rather than open them immediately, which is totally maddening. There are no consistent forward-and-back shortcuts. It's impossible to have more than one instance running at a time, and there are no tabs, so you can't really multi-task on the web.
Unlike the iPhone, Windows Mobile phones have a normal-ish filesystem which you can navigate with a file manager, in order to copy and manipulate files. You can copy files to and from an SD card easily. Unfortunately, it borrows nearly all the bad features of Windows on the Desktop: weird deep hierarchies with impenetrable UUIDs for directory names. All the important files which you might want to back up (mail, text messages, contacts) are stored in weird opaque formats and the files are permanently locked so you can't copy them... unless you use some custom ActiveSync software. Why couldn't they make it so I couldn't back up my text messages with a simple copy command?
Parts of the OS are totally "bolted-on", like the Bluetooth support. Bluetooth works well, but the
Hey, nice! I'm really glad to see that feature included in HTML5.
Now I can't wait until Costco's photo printing website supports it or zip file upload... they have incredibly good and fast and cheap photo printing, but with a sucky website that only works properly with Internet Explorer. >:-(
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Who cares about "drop-dead gorgeous"? Can someone show me a site using Flash for its major content, that isn't totally f@#($ing God-awful?
Major uses of Flash today, as I see them:
Ads: Flash adds tend to be annoying and distracting, but I block them with AdBlock, so I don't really care.
Splash screens: I hate these, as do just about everyone else. Apparently even Adobe's own Flash guidelines recommend against them.
Games: Some of them are pretty clever, some are lame. This is about the most legit use of Flash that I can think of.
"Artsy" sites: I hate movie/music/photography/art sites that rely on Flash. They tend to use Flash to cram textual content into a tiny column. Usability is all wrong. AJAX could do a much better job.
Replacing HTML deficiencies:
Video: Flash does this well, where it's supported, but HTML5 will do it with less overhead and better native codec integration, once fully supported by sites and browsers.
Multi-file upload: As far as I know, Flash and Java applets are the only satisfactory ways to do this currently, and they are often buggy. HTML should support some standard mechanism for this. Photo sharing and printing websites are major users of these. I wish all of them supported zip file uploads as a stop-gap measure...
Anything else? As soon as HTML5 is well-supported, I can't see any good use of Flash besides games, and even there I imagine that HTML5 will make inroads.
other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Try the 80s too. You date yourself by glazing over this time period and giving an anecdote from 2001.
Is this supposed to be a criticism of me? I was too young and my family didn't own a computer until 1992.
Sun *was* the defacto desktop and server platform for affordable UNIX for a very very long time, when Linux was just a glimmer in Linus' eye, and while the project was gaining any sort of enterprise stability and seriousness... which was a period of more than 15 years. Not something to be just written off as a blip in history.
I gotta disagree with the 15 year timespan. Linux 0.01 came out in 1991, and my medium-sized company was using it for serious work by 2001.
Budding hacker me was playing with it by 1995, and running it exclusively for all my browsing, homework, etc. by 2000.
Sun actually had really good software that did things that Linux can still only dream of.
Like what? (Serious question.)
I remember in 2001-2002, Solaris was better at multitasking, and CDE was marginally better than GNOME as a GUI (but they both sucked and GNOME actually got better).
Of course I worked a lot with their High End stuff... and it sounds like you worked with their low end stuff. Having a big difference in usefulness of the software to the hardware.
I don't know the server side of things much, but I know that Sun does have some very fault-tolerant and massively parallel server hardware.
But in terms of bread-and-butter workstations? Inertia and slightly more reliable hardware (at a big price premium) were the only things keeping developers on Solaris by 2001, as far as I could tell.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
I agree with this assessment, other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Here's my historical perspective...
In 2001-2002, I worked at a small company making speech synthesis software. Our products had been developed on Sun workstations, and most of us developers used them still. They were very reliable once set up correctly, and they had nice, big, clear CRT monitors, nice optical mice, nice keyboards with extra programmable function keys, and fast SCSI hard drives. They ran the CDE GUI desktop, which was ugly and clunky, but worked out-of-the-box. We relied on the proprietary XWave software for audio waveform analysis, but otherwise used GNU tools almost exclusively.
Developers, especially the young-uns like myself, were rapidly acquiring enthusiasm for Linux. I was 19 and had been using Linux for years and got a lot of my older coworkers enthused, although I liked Solaris too.
Solaris still had a few key advantages:
Audio "just worked." Getting OSS audio (/dev/dsp) to work under Linux was a chipset-dependent pain in the ass and it the device I/O semantics differed from Solaris.
GUI desktop: Solaris's CDE desktop sucked, but GNOME was pretty awful in those days too.
Linux was building up a lot of advantages though, and fast:
Any old programmer could slap it on any old Windows box lying around. Solaris hardware was expensive as hell, and no one knew how to upgrade it besides our one in-house guru. There was no plug-and-play... even replacing a Sun keyboard could have incomprehensibly weird side effects. Linux was bending over backwards to get plug-and-play support for all kinds of hardware.
Package management. Debian had APT already, which rocked. You could just apt-get GCC/GDB/Emacs/CVS/MySQL and be up and running. Under Solaris, we had to rebuild everything from source on new/reinstalled systems. An annoying bottleneck, and Sun was slow to recognize and embrace this software distribution model. The community-run Sunfreeware.com was in an embryonic stage at that point.
Way faster compile times. x86 processors (P3? P4?) were killing Sparc. I remember that Solaris was very reliable for multitasking, whereas Linux at that time would bog down when you ran too many CPU- or I/O-intensive tasks at once. But if you were running one big compile and needed to finish it ASAP, x86 was superior.
Basically, Linux was fixing its deficiencies (audio, reliability, GUI) a lot faster than Sun was fixing theirs. Performance comparison was exacerbated by Sun's hardware: it was expensive and hard to upgrade, so we resisted upgrading it, so it started to seem slower and slower and even less appealing.
Sun had built its business on reliable hardware coupled with a highly-regarded, reliable UNIX OS that only had to support a small range of hardware (not unlike Apple's Mac model). They seem to have been completely blindsided by Linux's ability to support an incredible range of commodity hardware, and they seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that their proprietary development tools sucked, and everyone wanted to use GNU tools.
So much ignorance in this post I'm not sure where to start...
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
Have you compared the R&D budgets of the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries recently?
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Hard drives employing perpendicular recording and granular magnetic media have astonishingly low costs per bit, and are quite a robust design.
Here's what holds them back: To make magnetic bits smaller and smaller without killing the signal-to-noise ratio, you have to make individual magnetic grains smaller. They get more and more thermally unstable, and you don't want bits flipping randomly. The way to fix this is to make the media more and more anisotropic, which means it takes a larger and larger magnetic field to write them. But there are no suitable materials that can produce fields bigger than about 2.45 T. (A slightly outdated but excellent summary of this issue by Seagate: pdf)
All that sounds intimidating, but there are very serious challenges facing further miniaturization of Flash memory as well. The bigger R&D budget helps, of course, but HDDs have a big head start and some cost and structural advantages.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
What... Intel? Samsung? Micron? SanDisk? They already are!
As for the magnetic storage companies, others have already pointed out that magnetic and flash drives are extremely different designs and there is very little low-level overlap. I have personally worked in both industries.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
Um... what? More like "new awesome floppies will be released in 10 TB size."
Magnetic drives are still waaaay ahead of flash drives in terms of cost-per-GB. You can get a 1 TB drive for $70... that's about 7/GB, still 20× cheaper than flash which typically runs $1.50-$2/GB in bulk.
Also, optimal controller and filesystem design for Flash hasn't really been worked out like it has been for magnetic drives. The "big boys" are working on these issues though, as are lots of smart OS hackers.
It's waaay premature to announce the demise of magnetic drives. They're still very cost-effective for 2.5" and 3.5" form factors.
Frankly, I'd *like* a hackable car... something that I can tinker with and mod and adjust.
Can anyone tell based on the photos in the article what model it is? Looks like a Japanese sedan of some kind... not sure exactly what. Does anyone recognize the dashboard display?
Like most other alternative online payment methods (*cough* Paypal *cough*), this one is a terrible deal for consumers.
In the US, especially after the Credit CARD Act of 2009, you get a huge array of benefits for using a credit card:
Strong, federally-mandated protection against fraud and bait-and-switch (in most cases, the card issuer and merchant duke it out over chargebacks, and the consumer owes nothing).
Limits on interest rates and fees
Most decent cards these days offer cash back/rewards... I get about 2% back overall via judicious mix of 3 cards.
Anyone with less-than-awful credit can get a credit card with no annual fee and pay it off monthly, thus incurring no interest or fees ever. Just use it as more convenient cash, rather than as credit. You have to get a credit check for Verizon cell phone contracts in the US too, so the bar for a credit card is not too different from that for Verizon's payment system.
With Verizon's payment system, you get none of these as far as I can tell. Credit cards have gotten too competitive, and thus unprofitable for issuers, and so they've invented newer and sketchier payment options designed to lure gullible and disadvantaged consumers. Shameful.
I see these "Free Public WiFi" ESSIDs all over the place in public areas, such as airports. They never work. They're usually ad-hoc networks.
I assumed for a while that they're symptoms/carriers of some kind of malware, but didn't really worry about it since I don't use Windows.
I just read this article which has a slightly crazy but just-maybe-plausible theory to explain them. They think that it's a weird, propagating out-of-control Windows XP feature, which makes every network to which an XP computer connects propagate its name as an ad-hoc network. And then when somebody else tries to connect because of the enticing name, they keep the ESSID alive for another minute since it's an ad-hoc network, and this continues ad infinitum. So the whole thing is nothing but a long-lasting "echo" of a forgotten network that keeps alive in heavily trafficked public areas. The whole idea seems nuts. Dumber than dumb. Dumber than Microsoft even.
But I haven't heard of any better explanation for the "Free Public Wifi" phenomenon. Anyone else???
The best phone cameras (iPhone, Droid) are pretty good, but not nearly as good as a good compact camera, and nowhere near a DSLR.
The best phone GPS's are very accurate, but have nowhere near the battery life, sensitivity, and ruggedness of a Garmin Legend unit designed for hiking.
The best phone keyboards are quite usable, but not as good as a tiny netbook, and nowhere near a larger netbook.
The best phone screens are large and clear, but not nearly as good as a portable DVD player, and nowhere near a notebook.
The best phone processors (ARM Cortex A8) are pretty darn close to a netbook, but nowhere near as powerful as a higher-end notebook or desktop.
The best phone media players (iPhone) are... okay, a decent phone actually is just as good, if not better than, a dedicated MP3 player in this case.
When you have a good signal, a 3G connection can give pretty high throughput, but not as good as midrange DSL or cable connection, and nowhere near as good as most universities' or corporate offices' bandwidth.... And everyone seems to like it that way. The smartphone seems to have become the jack-of-all-trades device, highly integrated and packing tons of features. The best ones are good at lots of things, but they're not really "the best possible device" for any one task. Smartphones are good for talking and sending messages and browsing the web and figuring out where you are and taking photos and playing music, but there are dedicated devices that do any thing better. This probably explains why there's no phone that's just amazing for gaming. It would compromise all the other functions to a degree that would render it attractive only to a niche market.
I don't understand why it won't work with Firefox 3.5.7 though:-( I am running Ubuntu and have the free (if patent-infringing) x264 codec installed. I can play H.264 videos fine in Totem or Xine or VLC... why can't FF use this codec?
It is because of the classic dillema that keeps users on Craigslist (despite it being a steamping pile of crap), and keeps people on eBay (despite them charging a fortune). People searching need a critical mass of people selling, and people selling need a critical mass of people searching. It is a self-renforcing monopoloy that is a tough nut to crack.
Craigslist has always been unpopular in small markets, that is where Kijiji got its foothold.
This makes no sense at all. Why would Craigslist benefit from the network effect, but not Kijiji?
Example: We have a huge, active Craigslist in DC. By contrast, Kijiji has practically nothing. On the other hand, my hometown of Lansing, Michigan has a small and anemic Craigslist. Not many postings in the for sale section, for instance. The Kijiji site for Lansing is also very sparse.
So I don't get it... I can't actually find a specific small-town environment in which Kijiji actually has an advantage. Can anyone suggest a specific one? I also don't know of any marketing or technical reason why Kijiji would have gotten a foothold where Craigslist hasn't...
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Indeed. If something grows 30-fold in 3 years, it's growing at an average rate of about 211% per year, because (1+2.11)^3 = 30.
Apparently the author doesn't understand the difference between linear and exponential growth or the terminology used to describe them. I think that percent-per-year growth is almost always a confusing way to describe growth when the percentage is more than 10-20%. That's because people assume x% growth in one year corresponds to 2x% growth in two years. Which is pretty close to the mark for a small growth rates (say 5%), but way off for larger growth rates. It's easily seen in the Taylor expansion of the exponential function, e^x = 1 + x + (x^2)/2 + (x^3)/6 + ..., which is nearly linear for values of x1 but highly nonlinear for larger values.
Too hot.
But when the place in Maine or Hampshire or Vermont opens-up, I'll be first in line.
Too hot? Have you been to Western North Carolina?
It's a mountainous, heavily-forested region. Snow in the winter, sometimes heavy snow. The Carolina coast can really roast in the summer, but it stays pretty cool in the mountains. I was born in North Carolina but mostly grew up in Michigan, and prefer cold to warm areas. Western Carolina is certainly warmer than mid-Michigan, but it has a rather pleasant climate in my opinion.
... is not data. The singular of anecdote is also not data.
Basically, one guy used one computer with flash on a few times, and with flash off a few times. What web sites was he looking at? How many did he have open at once? Why couldn't he just use an ad blocker rather than kill Flash altogether?
I think Adobe Flash sucks as much as the next FLOSS fanboy, but this is just an insubstantial anecdote. Couldn't the author at least run PowerTOP or some Mac equivalent, and try to figure out how much the processor is waking up with/without flash, how much disk is being used, etc?
Microsoft encouraged companies to build in-house web apps on top of IE6, using its many poorly-documented proprietary features. Many of those features were so poorly documented and maintained by MS that they won't even work with newer versions of IE!
Obviously, this was a poor decision on the part of a lot of IT departments and corporate web app developers, but I do think Microsoft deserves a good part of the blame for encouraging such departures from web standards.
(Writing this from Chrome, while I wrangle a recalcitrant IE6 web app in another window... )
... on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out what this wondrous new device is called.
Will it be the iPad Mini? The iPod Maxi? The iTouch Macro Pad? Or what???
The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.
Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.
In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.
Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.
You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.
You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.
Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)
Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.
According to the wikipedia article, it can be tripped in a non-volatile fashion, meaning that power-cycling won't fix it. But it can also be reset electronically if an appropriate electronic interface is provided.
Does that remind you of anything? As far as I can tell, it's just marketing-speak for one bit (literally) of embedded flash memory.
While I can imagine some interesting and useful applications for flash embedded in CMOS logic, this seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse by lockdown-happy vendors. It's annoying enough to brick a computer by flashing the wrong BIOS, or to brick a router by flashing the wrong firmware, but at least in those cases the flash memory is on a separate chip. Either the chip is socketed (removable), or there are usually test points or a JTAG interface, allowing the flash to be rewritten to a correct state.
But with tiny amounts of flash deeply embedded into CMOS logic, there's no way to alter or even to find the non-volatile memory. Yech...
Whoops... I did know that. Thanks for the correction!
LG is Korean too. Panasonic, Sharp, and Sanyo are Japanese. Sony Ericsson is a Japanese-Swedish joint venture. HTC is Taiwanese. Any other major Asian phone manufacturers that I'm missing?
Agreed on the ugliness. There's a reason that phones that look like this always suck:
What's the point of making it slide out at all??? When you're using it, it's bigger, uglier, and more awkward than a regular non-sliding Slate phone. When you're fumbling for it in your pocket, it's roughly squarish, so you never know which way is up. Humans like non-square aspect ratios (photos, display screens, book pages) for a reason... what a dumb design.
Also, what does this phone do that the way-less-hyped messaging phones from Japanese makers like Samsung can't do?
I don't see Microsoft making a decent phone anytime soon because it keeps trying to emulate BlackBerry, the iPhone, Android and WebOS and failing at all of them. Microsoft will never get the reliability of BlackBerry OS, Microsoft can never reach the cult-like status of Apple, it can't just decide not to include a major feature like Flash, Multitasking, copy/paste, etc. until a future software update and expect people to buy it, Microsoft can never reach the level of appeal of the Google cloud services nor the openness of a Linux-based OS, and Microsoft will try, but fail to reach the level of ease of use of WebOS just like they tried to copy OS X and failed.
Precisely. There's no reason for anyone to want a phone OS built on the Microsoft philosophy. Their phone OSes have been bloated, buggy, with unexciting UIs, and with a tendency to be rolled out before they were really ready. In the mobile OS market, Microsoft has no head-start or brand recognition like they've had in the PC market for decades. Sure, there have been Windows Mobile phones for yeaaaaars, mostly aimed at the business market, but none of them have been exciting enough for business users to want to use at home or tell their kids about.
I have a 2-year-old Motorola Q smartphone which runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. This phone is practically a microcosm of what's wrong with Microsoft's mobile offerings. It looks great on the outside, like a thinner, more angular, "edgier" Blackberry. The QWERTY keyboard, which stubbornly refuses to wear out, is better than any I have ever used on a phone. I get people asking me about it all the time, and this is a piece of hardware that's been out for 4 years.
The internal specs aren't bad for its age, either: CDMA/EV-DO, Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3 megapixel camera, 312 MHz XScale (ARM) processor, MiniSD card slot, very bright QVGA screen, good sound quality. So far, so good, right?
The problem is the OS: it's static and half-open and half-locked-down and Microsoft-centric in every imaginable way. Almost everything you could want to do is possible, but almost everything is also a huge pain in the ass. Some examples:
Hey, nice! I'm really glad to see that feature included in HTML5.
Now I can't wait until Costco's photo printing website supports it or zip file upload... they have incredibly good and fast and cheap photo printing, but with a sucky website that only works properly with Internet Explorer. >:-(
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Who cares about "drop-dead gorgeous"? Can someone show me a site using Flash for its major content, that isn't totally f@#($ing God-awful?
Major uses of Flash today, as I see them:
Anything else? As soon as HTML5 is well-supported, I can't see any good use of Flash besides games, and even there I imagine that HTML5 will make inroads.
other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Try the 80s too. You date yourself by glazing over this time period and giving an anecdote from 2001.
Is this supposed to be a criticism of me? I was too young and my family didn't own a computer until 1992.
Sun *was* the defacto desktop and server platform for affordable UNIX for a very very long time, when Linux was just a glimmer in Linus' eye, and while the project was gaining any sort of enterprise stability and seriousness... which was a period of more than 15 years. Not something to be just written off as a blip in history.
I gotta disagree with the 15 year timespan. Linux 0.01 came out in 1991, and my medium-sized company was using it for serious work by 2001.
Budding hacker me was playing with it by 1995, and running it exclusively for all my browsing, homework, etc. by 2000.
This just in: "Vendor lock-in makes it harder to switch to a competitor's products!"
Wow!!!! Story at 10!!!
Sun actually had really good software that did things that Linux can still only dream of.
Like what? (Serious question.)
I remember in 2001-2002, Solaris was better at multitasking, and CDE was marginally better than GNOME as a GUI (but they both sucked and GNOME actually got better).
Of course I worked a lot with their High End stuff... and it sounds like you worked with their low end stuff. Having a big difference in usefulness of the software to the hardware.
I don't know the server side of things much, but I know that Sun does have some very fault-tolerant and massively parallel server hardware.
But in terms of bread-and-butter workstations? Inertia and slightly more reliable hardware (at a big price premium) were the only things keeping developers on Solaris by 2001, as far as I could tell.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
I agree with this assessment, other than Sun hardware being cheap... perhaps it was a bargain compared to other commercial Unix vendors back in the 90s, but by the time it became plausible to choose between Linux-on-x86 and Solaris-on-Sun, Sun was really way more expensive.
Here's my historical perspective...
In 2001-2002, I worked at a small company making speech synthesis software. Our products had been developed on Sun workstations, and most of us developers used them still. They were very reliable once set up correctly, and they had nice, big, clear CRT monitors, nice optical mice, nice keyboards with extra programmable function keys, and fast SCSI hard drives. They ran the CDE GUI desktop, which was ugly and clunky, but worked out-of-the-box. We relied on the proprietary XWave software for audio waveform analysis, but otherwise used GNU tools almost exclusively.
Developers, especially the young-uns like myself, were rapidly acquiring enthusiasm for Linux. I was 19 and had been using Linux for years and got a lot of my older coworkers enthused, although I liked Solaris too.
Solaris still had a few key advantages:
Linux was building up a lot of advantages though, and fast:
Basically, Linux was fixing its deficiencies (audio, reliability, GUI) a lot faster than Sun was fixing theirs. Performance comparison was exacerbated by Sun's hardware: it was expensive and hard to upgrade, so we resisted upgrading it, so it started to seem slower and slower and even less appealing.
Sun had built its business on reliable hardware coupled with a highly-regarded, reliable UNIX OS that only had to support a small range of hardware (not unlike Apple's Mac model). They seem to have been completely blindsided by Linux's ability to support an incredible range of commodity hardware, and they seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that their proprietary development tools sucked, and everyone wanted to use GNU tools.
Thank you! Good to know :)
Maybe the footnote is just some cover-your-ass legal BS, with the photos tacitly intended to identify the vehicle?
So much ignorance in this post I'm not sure where to start...
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
Have you compared the R&D budgets of the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries recently?
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Hard drives employing perpendicular recording and granular magnetic media have astonishingly low costs per bit, and are quite a robust design.
Here's what holds them back: To make magnetic bits smaller and smaller without killing the signal-to-noise ratio, you have to make individual magnetic grains smaller. They get more and more thermally unstable, and you don't want bits flipping randomly. The way to fix this is to make the media more and more anisotropic, which means it takes a larger and larger magnetic field to write them. But there are no suitable materials that can produce fields bigger than about 2.45 T. (A slightly outdated but excellent summary of this issue by Seagate: pdf)
All that sounds intimidating, but there are very serious challenges facing further miniaturization of Flash memory as well. The bigger R&D budget helps, of course, but HDDs have a big head start and some cost and structural advantages.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
What... Intel? Samsung? Micron? SanDisk? They already are!
As for the magnetic storage companies, others have already pointed out that magnetic and flash drives are extremely different designs and there is very little low-level overlap. I have personally worked in both industries.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
Um... what? More like "new awesome floppies will be released in 10 TB size."
Magnetic drives are still waaaay ahead of flash drives in terms of cost-per-GB. You can get a 1 TB drive for $70... that's about 7/GB, still 20× cheaper than flash which typically runs $1.50-$2/GB in bulk.
Also, optimal controller and filesystem design for Flash hasn't really been worked out like it has been for magnetic drives. The "big boys" are working on these issues though, as are lots of smart OS hackers.
It's waaay premature to announce the demise of magnetic drives. They're still very cost-effective for 2.5" and 3.5" form factors.
Hmmm... any more details on this?
Frankly, I'd *like* a hackable car... something that I can tinker with and mod and adjust.
Can anyone tell based on the photos in the article what model it is? Looks like a Japanese sedan of some kind... not sure exactly what. Does anyone recognize the dashboard display?
Like most other alternative online payment methods (*cough* Paypal *cough*), this one is a terrible deal for consumers.
In the US, especially after the Credit CARD Act of 2009, you get a huge array of benefits for using a credit card:
Anyone with less-than-awful credit can get a credit card with no annual fee and pay it off monthly, thus incurring no interest or fees ever. Just use it as more convenient cash, rather than as credit. You have to get a credit check for Verizon cell phone contracts in the US too, so the bar for a credit card is not too different from that for Verizon's payment system.
With Verizon's payment system, you get none of these as far as I can tell. Credit cards have gotten too competitive, and thus unprofitable for issuers, and so they've invented newer and sketchier payment options designed to lure gullible and disadvantaged consumers. Shameful.
I see these "Free Public WiFi" ESSIDs all over the place in public areas, such as airports. They never work. They're usually ad-hoc networks.
I assumed for a while that they're symptoms/carriers of some kind of malware, but didn't really worry about it since I don't use Windows.
I just read this article which has a slightly crazy but just-maybe-plausible theory to explain them. They think that it's a weird, propagating out-of-control Windows XP feature, which makes every network to which an XP computer connects propagate its name as an ad-hoc network. And then when somebody else tries to connect because of the enticing name, they keep the ESSID alive for another minute since it's an ad-hoc network, and this continues ad infinitum. So the whole thing is nothing but a long-lasting "echo" of a forgotten network that keeps alive in heavily trafficked public areas. The whole idea seems nuts. Dumber than dumb. Dumber than Microsoft even.
But I haven't heard of any better explanation for the "Free Public Wifi" phenomenon. Anyone else???
The best phone cameras (iPhone, Droid) are pretty good, but not nearly as good as a good compact camera, and nowhere near a DSLR.
The best phone GPS's are very accurate, but have nowhere near the battery life, sensitivity, and ruggedness of a Garmin Legend unit designed for hiking.
The best phone keyboards are quite usable, but not as good as a tiny netbook, and nowhere near a larger netbook.
The best phone screens are large and clear, but not nearly as good as a portable DVD player, and nowhere near a notebook.
The best phone processors (ARM Cortex A8) are pretty darn close to a netbook, but nowhere near as powerful as a higher-end notebook or desktop.
The best phone media players (iPhone) are... okay, a decent phone actually is just as good, if not better than, a dedicated MP3 player in this case.
When you have a good signal, a 3G connection can give pretty high throughput, but not as good as midrange DSL or cable connection, and nowhere near as good as most universities' or corporate offices' bandwidth. ... And everyone seems to like it that way. The smartphone seems to have become the jack-of-all-trades device, highly integrated and packing tons of features. The best ones are good at lots of things, but they're not really "the best possible device" for any one task. Smartphones are good for talking and sending messages and browsing the web and figuring out where you are and taking photos and playing music, but there are dedicated devices that do any thing better. This probably explains why there's no phone that's just amazing for gaming. It would compromise all the other functions to a degree that would render it attractive only to a niche market.
Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.
Good to know! I don't see this anywhere in the FF 3.6 release notes.
I don't understand why it won't work with Firefox 3.5.7 though :-( I am running Ubuntu and have the free (if patent-infringing) x264 codec installed. I can play H.264 videos fine in Totem or Xine or VLC... why can't FF use this codec?
This makes no sense at all. Why would Craigslist benefit from the network effect, but not Kijiji?
Example: We have a huge, active Craigslist in DC. By contrast, Kijiji has practically nothing. On the other hand, my hometown of Lansing, Michigan has a small and anemic Craigslist. Not many postings in the for sale section, for instance. The Kijiji site for Lansing is also very sparse.
So I don't get it... I can't actually find a specific small-town environment in which Kijiji actually has an advantage. Can anyone suggest a specific one? I also don't know of any marketing or technical reason why Kijiji would have gotten a foothold where Craigslist hasn't...