Nowadays almost all chips perform way better (or way way better) than they need to for the application at hand. If an Atom chip and an ARM chip consume the same amount of power and are both performing well enough, it doesn't matter if the ARM chip gives you more cycles per watt — it just means that the ARM chip has more cycles to waste.
ARM chips dominate cell phones for the same reason x86 chips dominate PCs: they grabbed a dominant market share early on. It says nothing about the superiority of one versus the other.
I think you misunderstand what "standby time" means. It definitely does not mean the screen is off but the rest of the system is active — you don't save that much power just by switching off the backlight! It appears to be equivalent to Windows Hybrid Sleep, which also supports 1-second resumes. I don't use it myself, because Windows 7 can resume from plain hibernate mode (which uses no power at all) in 5 seconds, and draining the battery, even by such small amounts, is not worth saving 4 seconds.
The comparison that really matters is, of course, how long you can use the thing without recharging. My netbook goes for 6 hours, this one claims 8. Possibly a 25% difference, though that doesn't allow for the usual manufacturer hype.
Incidentally, my netbook is also a Toshiba, and it looks like this ARM netbook uses the same double-sized battery pack.
I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life...
This advantage seems to have gone away, more or less. ARM chips use less power because they're RISC, which means fewer transistors. And guess what? Intel's low-power Atom is also RISC (the complex x86 instruction set is emulated using "micro-ops") and seems to do OK with power consumption. My own Atom-based Netbook can make a battery last all day.
Anybody who's tried to find Skype for an Android phone could clear that up. There used be an official Skype client for Android, but it's been withdrawn "in order to improve the mobile experience". Translation: if you want Skype on any mobile platform other than iPhone, you have to switch to Verizon. Hard to enforce if there's an Android SDK.
Not being a big fan of TV sitcoms, I had to google that. Sheldon Cooper is extremely geeky, right? So yeah, my comments are probably pretty Cooperesue, but it's hard to see how they could be more so than 90% of Slashdot comments.
Anybody who thinks that the World Cup (or any other sports event) has anything to do with "useful" needs to get out more. I'm not even a sports fan, and even I know that people who follow sports do so for entertainment, excitement, and camaraderie. In that context, a tweet that says "GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL #POR Portugal I LOVE MY COUNTRY, I LOVE MY TEAM ♥ OMG, OMG OMG PORTUGAAAAAAAAAL" is as "useful" as anything else that comes out of game.
If you want to assess the relevance of twittering to engineers, look at tweets that have something to do with engineering. Of which there are quite a few.
I don't see Shoutcast fading anywhere any time soon. There are 30,000 Shoutcast servers, serving half a million listeners during peak hours.
I mostly use Shoutcast to listen to public radio. I don't see these guys going to a lot of trouble to move away from Shoutcast just so people can use VLC. Even if they did, the main alternatives for them seem to be protocols from RealMedia and Microsoft, both of which have business models just as obnoxious as AOL's.
There are open source alternatives, of course. But the big users of the above protocols seem to want turnkey solutions, not something with a lot of expensive hacker overhead. So until somebody starts a business supporting OS media servers with the same level of support as AOL, RealMedia, and MS, we're stuck with proprietary protocols.
In the 1800s there were 400+ medical schools in the united states. By the early twentieth century there were less than eighty.
You're referring to the big medical education reforms that occurred in the early part of the 20th century. Most of those pre-reform "medical schools" did little more than help their students cram for state medical exams. What put them out of business was not some arbitrary AMA quota, but the fact that getting actual clinical experience became a mandatory part of medical education.
In any case, the "shortage" your conspiracy theory posits (sounds like something Glen Beck would talk about) would have been well in place by 1950. And in 1950, medical care was still relatively cheap. It's only since then that prices have gone through the roof.
Finally, you're assuming that greedy doctors account for most of medical costs. Wrong. It's mostly drug costs, device costs, hospital costs (and I think you'll find that few hospital employees make a lot of money), etc.
I can't get insurance, and I need a hearing aid. I needed to get examined by an MD, who also dealt with the wax buildup in my ears. Cost: $200. Next I have to see an audiologist and get a hearing test, which will cost another $100-200. Finally the hearing aid itself will cost at least $1500. Sorry, no greed here, just an excess of expensive technology.
I confess to not having read TFA all the way to the end (where this tidbit appears). But though the senate may be part of the legislature, that's still not "what the legislature wants" (or "what california wants" as it says in the headline), especially when only 25 out of 40 senators were present for the vote.
I guess you were asleep when they showed that "how a bill becomes law" video. The California state legislature hasn't even voted on this, and I doubt that it ever will. Like it says in TFA, this is a proposal by a one particular member, and will never be more than that unless he gets a lot of other assemblymen and state senators to back it.
Not all that offtopic. We're talking about the moral weirdness of capital punishment, and this is an important data point.
It's interesting that so many people sentenced to death in Utah opted for the firing squad. Why choose it? My guess is that they like the melodrama. And that's big irony behind capital punishment: in seeking our revenge against the most brutal killers, we're actually giving a nasty bunch of a losers a heroic end.
Who's saying there should not be laws? TFA is saying that laws don't solve anything, which is quite a bit different.
I was going to use a house as an analogy, but since this is Slashdot, I'll make it a car. If everybody goes around leaving keys in the ignition, lots of cars are going to be stolen. Now, when crime rises, people demand tougher laws, but tougher laws aren't always the solution, and wouldn't be in this case. Pointing that out is not the same as saying that it's OK to steal from careless people.
We Americans seem to be particularly blind to the limitations of punitive laws. That's why we have a bigger percentage of our population behind bars than any other country. (The USSR and South Africa used to be ahead of us, but they've been through some changes...) Most of these convicts have some connection with the "War on Drugs", our 40 year effort to stamp out drug usage once and for all. The main result of which has been to make various drug lords rich (we're talking an 87 billion dollar industry), make a lot of innocent people dead, and create maybe a marginal reduction in illicit drug use.
Whenever I point this out, somebody accuses me of advocating legalization of drug use, just as you accuse TFA of advocating legalized data theft. False dichotomy, dude. The choice is never as simple as tough laws or no laws at all.
"Plenty of offline applications?" Try almost all of them. People tend to associate Java with web applets, but that's never been more than a tiny percentage of Java applications. There are too many platforms that are better suited.
Wrong use case. It's important to know about your friends' kids' bowel habits in real time. That's why thoughtful parents use Twitter. Blogs should be reserved for more analytical communications.
First you give a long list of add-on responsibilities you got because the company doesn't have any money. Then you ask us how to get more money. The question answers itself, really.
Yes, it's not fair. Yes, it would be stupid of them not to do their best to hang onto you, now that so much is dependent on you. So what? Tech companies, especially tech companies in trouble, are not known for their fairness or smarts. No matter how you go about asking, there can be only one answer: "the money's just not there."
Not that it matters. This company is clearly circling the drain.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, the marketing alliance between Verizon and Skype is not exactly secret.
Nowadays almost all chips perform way better (or way way better) than they need to for the application at hand. If an Atom chip and an ARM chip consume the same amount of power and are both performing well enough, it doesn't matter if the ARM chip gives you more cycles per watt — it just means that the ARM chip has more cycles to waste.
ARM chips dominate cell phones for the same reason x86 chips dominate PCs: they grabbed a dominant market share early on. It says nothing about the superiority of one versus the other.
I think you misunderstand what "standby time" means. It definitely does not mean the screen is off but the rest of the system is active — you don't save that much power just by switching off the backlight! It appears to be equivalent to Windows Hybrid Sleep, which also supports 1-second resumes. I don't use it myself, because Windows 7 can resume from plain hibernate mode (which uses no power at all) in 5 seconds, and draining the battery, even by such small amounts, is not worth saving 4 seconds.
The comparison that really matters is, of course, how long you can use the thing without recharging. My netbook goes for 6 hours, this one claims 8. Possibly a 25% difference, though that doesn't allow for the usual manufacturer hype.
Incidentally, my netbook is also a Toshiba, and it looks like this ARM netbook uses the same double-sized battery pack.
I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life...
This advantage seems to have gone away, more or less. ARM chips use less power because they're RISC, which means fewer transistors. And guess what? Intel's low-power Atom is also RISC (the complex x86 instruction set is emulated using "micro-ops") and seems to do OK with power consumption. My own Atom-based Netbook can make a battery last all day.
Anybody who's tried to find Skype for an Android phone could clear that up. There used be an official Skype client for Android, but it's been withdrawn "in order to improve the mobile experience". Translation: if you want Skype on any mobile platform other than iPhone, you have to switch to Verizon. Hard to enforce if there's an Android SDK.
I suspect those listeners are not distributed evenly between servers.
Well yeah. But that still doesn't explain why they continue to pursue that RHS long after the judge has made it clear they're not going to get it.
Not being a big fan of TV sitcoms, I had to google that. Sheldon Cooper is extremely geeky, right? So yeah, my comments are probably pretty Cooperesue, but it's hard to see how they could be more so than 90% of Slashdot comments.
Anybody who thinks that the World Cup (or any other sports event) has anything to do with "useful" needs to get out more. I'm not even a sports fan, and even I know that people who follow sports do so for entertainment, excitement, and camaraderie. In that context, a tweet that says "GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL #POR Portugal I LOVE MY COUNTRY, I LOVE MY TEAM ♥ OMG, OMG OMG PORTUGAAAAAAAAAL" is as "useful" as anything else that comes out of game.
If you want to assess the relevance of twittering to engineers, look at tweets that have something to do with engineering. Of which there are quite a few.
I don't see Shoutcast fading anywhere any time soon. There are 30,000 Shoutcast servers, serving half a million listeners during peak hours.
I mostly use Shoutcast to listen to public radio. I don't see these guys going to a lot of trouble to move away from Shoutcast just so people can use VLC. Even if they did, the main alternatives for them seem to be protocols from RealMedia and Microsoft, both of which have business models just as obnoxious as AOL's.
There are open source alternatives, of course. But the big users of the above protocols seem to want turnkey solutions, not something with a lot of expensive hacker overhead. So until somebody starts a business supporting OS media servers with the same level of support as AOL, RealMedia, and MS, we're stuck with proprietary protocols.
In the 1800s there were 400+ medical schools in the united states. By the early twentieth century there were less than eighty.
You're referring to the big medical education reforms that occurred in the early part of the 20th century. Most of those pre-reform "medical schools" did little more than help their students cram for state medical exams. What put them out of business was not some arbitrary AMA quota, but the fact that getting actual clinical experience became a mandatory part of medical education.
In any case, the "shortage" your conspiracy theory posits (sounds like something Glen Beck would talk about) would have been well in place by 1950. And in 1950, medical care was still relatively cheap. It's only since then that prices have gone through the roof.
Finally, you're assuming that greedy doctors account for most of medical costs. Wrong. It's mostly drug costs, device costs, hospital costs (and I think you'll find that few hospital employees make a lot of money), etc.
I can't get insurance, and I need a hearing aid. I needed to get examined by an MD, who also dealt with the wax buildup in my ears. Cost: $200. Next I have to see an audiologist and get a hearing test, which will cost another $100-200. Finally the hearing aid itself will cost at least $1500. Sorry, no greed here, just an excess of expensive technology.
I confess to not having read TFA all the way to the end (where this tidbit appears). But though the senate may be part of the legislature, that's still not "what the legislature wants" (or "what california wants" as it says in the headline), especially when only 25 out of 40 senators were present for the vote.
My point being that dying by firing squad seems to have some kind of appeal.
the California state legislature wants
I guess you were asleep when they showed that "how a bill becomes law" video. The California state legislature hasn't even voted on this, and I doubt that it ever will. Like it says in TFA, this is a proposal by a one particular member, and will never be more than that unless he gets a lot of other assemblymen and state senators to back it.
Pay attention. We're talking about a form of execution chosen by the person to be executed.
Right, because back before the internet, nobody knew whose signature was on a public document.
Not all that offtopic. We're talking about the moral weirdness of capital punishment, and this is an important data point.
It's interesting that so many people sentenced to death in Utah opted for the firing squad. Why choose it? My guess is that they like the melodrama. And that's big irony behind capital punishment: in seeking our revenge against the most brutal killers, we're actually giving a nasty bunch of a losers a heroic end.
Who's saying there should not be laws? TFA is saying that laws don't solve anything, which is quite a bit different.
I was going to use a house as an analogy, but since this is Slashdot, I'll make it a car. If everybody goes around leaving keys in the ignition, lots of cars are going to be stolen. Now, when crime rises, people demand tougher laws, but tougher laws aren't always the solution, and wouldn't be in this case. Pointing that out is not the same as saying that it's OK to steal from careless people.
We Americans seem to be particularly blind to the limitations of punitive laws. That's why we have a bigger percentage of our population behind bars than any other country. (The USSR and South Africa used to be ahead of us, but they've been through some changes...) Most of these convicts have some connection with the "War on Drugs", our 40 year effort to stamp out drug usage once and for all. The main result of which has been to make various drug lords rich (we're talking an 87 billion dollar industry), make a lot of innocent people dead, and create maybe a marginal reduction in illicit drug use.
Whenever I point this out, somebody accuses me of advocating legalization of drug use, just as you accuse TFA of advocating legalized data theft. False dichotomy, dude. The choice is never as simple as tough laws or no laws at all.
"Plenty of offline applications?" Try almost all of them. People tend to associate Java with web applets, but that's never been more than a tiny percentage of Java applications. There are too many platforms that are better suited.
Wrong use case. It's important to know about your friends' kids' bowel habits in real time. That's why thoughtful parents use Twitter. Blogs should be reserved for more analytical communications.
First you give a long list of add-on responsibilities you got because the company doesn't have any money. Then you ask us how to get more money. The question answers itself, really.
Yes, it's not fair. Yes, it would be stupid of them not to do their best to hang onto you, now that so much is dependent on you. So what? Tech companies, especially tech companies in trouble, are not known for their fairness or smarts. No matter how you go about asking, there can be only one answer: "the money's just not there."
Not that it matters. This company is clearly circling the drain.
He entered the comment in code mode.
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2300
No. This. Is. How. Such. A. Per. Son. Types.
Both of them.
Bored now.