Most people are used to the idea that all software is proprietary. It takes extra work to educate people on the mere existence of open alternatives. To many people it seems like bashing the proprietary, because the idea of open software goes against their preconceptions. The same goes for music, for example. I've had people blame me for illegal activities when burning Linux install CDs, and even CDs of my own music, because clearly copying music and software is wrong.
Rather than kicking a puppy, it's like kicking your grandfather. He can't remember who you are, but he's kind of upset by it.
I sort of agree -- it is like kicking an old person/dog that used to be really mean to you back in the day. But now we are supposed to ignore all that just because they are old?
Now that she downloaded it, what's keeping her from buying the DVDs right now? She's "more than willing to buy it", right?
IMHO, hauling pieces of plastic around the globe is a terrible waste of energy and environment, since we already have better methods of content delivery. I could pay for a download with guaranteed speed and quality, as opposed to the lottery of finding a decent torrent. Naturally, the price must be considerably lower than a DVD since there are a lot fewer physical expenses.
Nokia had their series of tablets (770, N800, N810) which eventually became the N900 phone. However, the phoneless tablets were not much bigger, and I think this tells something about their idea of a tablet. I have found my N800 a very nice reader, it is much nicer to hold than a book (even a paperback) when lying down and reading. I cannot imagine holding something much bigger for extended periods.
I recently got an N900, and it feels surprisingly small given its much improved specs, but after all, it is a phone and sized like one. I think I'll keep the N800 for some time mainly as a reader, but I really wouldn't mind if the phone were slightly bigger for better readability.
Please hand in you Linux geek card on your way out;)
Seriously though, it is not a fair comparison. The N900 is thicker, but then it also has a QWERTY keyboard underneath. It also has a regular Linux distro with root, X11, Gtk, Qt, Glibc etc. so you can do anything you could on a desktop distro. AFAIK, it is the only such phone that is widely available, and the closest alternative would be something like the OpenMoko models, which are not easy to find, and not nearly as powerful hardware.
There is even a passively cooled 5770 from Gigabyte. I'm running one practically fanless, with only a single slow fan in the entire system, and the GPU stays around 64 C while crunching Bitcoins for days at a time. Fan placement is somewhat critical, in that a randomly oriented case fan is not enough, but in an otherwise fanless system this is nice and quiet.
Moore's law is not so bad compared to the bigger picture of running out of resources. An economy that assumes exponential growth will be thrown into turmoil, and millions^Wbillions will lose their jobs.
This Thursday, a building at my local university was evacuated because somebody had heard a gun-loading sound, but nothing happened and no gun was found. Not that you could get an authentic loading sound as a ringtone, or a remotely similar sound from anything else like printers and copy machines. Perhaps a detector could have prevented this overkill operation that involved canceling a lot of lectures and a lot of police work.
IBM PC was an x86 machine running DOS. When you buy "PC" software today, it will not run on an IBM PC, because it is written for Windows. Why is it so hard to call it "Windows" software?
As the GP said, personal computers are everywhere, and they run many different architectures and operating systems, so we need to be more specific.
I have a number of applications where I want a low powered "desktop" form factor. That probably means Mini-ITX or something like that. The canonical example? A home file server. It's not in use 90% of the time, and I'd like my power bill to go down and the heat load to go down. A chip with a super low power standby mode would be nice.
teknohog@kasj ~ $ uname -a Linux kasj 2.6.35.11 #5 Mon Feb 7 08:11:45 EET 2011 armv5tel Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l) Buffalo LS-XHL Series GNU/Linux
IMHO, the only sensible use for these monster GPUs is parallel computing (OpenCL etc). For many problems they are the best bang per buck, as well as per power consumption. It seems that the HD5000 series maintains the lead in this sense; for example the HD6990 has fewer stream units than the HD5970, and the extra texture units are not generally used in computing.
If you want to use ATI's Eyefinity mode (which I don't use), you just add a $25 adapter, so that you can plug the third screen into the ATI card... however, doing this removes the ability to maximize windows on any given screen (because all 3 of them are literally considered one), and I use that 10x more than I would triple-screen gaming. (also, both ATI's/nVidia's triple-screen gaming modes give you stretched images on the side screens, unless you position the monitors in a perfectly straight line... which, most of the time, I think nobody is actually willing to do)
In my experience, Atom processors do not play high resolution very well. But even if it did, having a version that uses the GPU would be a significant improvement. It would free the CPU to do potentially something else. Including downclocking, which could improve energy efficiency significantly.
Good point, but the power consumption of a Radeon is not exactly zero, even at idle. If you need to add a discrete GPU to shave off a few CPU watts, I believe the overall consumption increases.
On my PDA (Nokia N810), I used to decompress audio using a software lib. When I switched to a lib that uses the internal DSP, my battery life increase 300%.
Another good point. Unfortunately, this AMD announcement does not do much help in the mobile space.
There is also the general point that hardware acceleration is lagging behind new codec development. Software is much more flexible, even when "hardware" means new drivers/firmware for a general-purpose DSP. In this day and age it would be much more interesting to see codecs written in OpenCL, for example.
Mplayer-uau (basically mplayer with full multithreading) plays 1080p H.264 on an Atom D510 without any hardware decoding. I have given up with GPU video decoding on Linux, since software works so well even on fanless processors.
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Most people are used to the idea that all software is proprietary. It takes extra work to educate people on the mere existence of open alternatives. To many people it seems like bashing the proprietary, because the idea of open software goes against their preconceptions. The same goes for music, for example. I've had people blame me for illegal activities when burning Linux install CDs, and even CDs of my own music, because clearly copying music and software is wrong.
Rather than kicking a puppy, it's like kicking your grandfather. He can't remember who you are, but he's kind of upset by it.
I sort of agree -- it is like kicking an old person/dog that used to be really mean to you back in the day. But now we are supposed to ignore all that just because they are old?
Now that she downloaded it, what's keeping her from buying the DVDs right now? She's "more than willing to buy it", right?
IMHO, hauling pieces of plastic around the globe is a terrible waste of energy and environment, since we already have better methods of content delivery. I could pay for a download with guaranteed speed and quality, as opposed to the lottery of finding a decent torrent. Naturally, the price must be considerably lower than a DVD since there are a lot fewer physical expenses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_trombone
"SNOW crash" sounds good to me.
Nokia had their series of tablets (770, N800, N810) which eventually became the N900 phone. However, the phoneless tablets were not much bigger, and I think this tells something about their idea of a tablet. I have found my N800 a very nice reader, it is much nicer to hold than a book (even a paperback) when lying down and reading. I cannot imagine holding something much bigger for extended periods.
I recently got an N900, and it feels surprisingly small given its much improved specs, but after all, it is a phone and sized like one. I think I'll keep the N800 for some time mainly as a reader, but I really wouldn't mind if the phone were slightly bigger for better readability.
Good jokes are always insightful at heart, and only superficially funny.
Please hand in you Linux geek card on your way out ;)
Seriously though, it is not a fair comparison. The N900 is thicker, but then it also has a QWERTY keyboard underneath. It also has a regular Linux distro with root, X11, Gtk, Qt, Glibc etc. so you can do anything you could on a desktop distro. AFAIK, it is the only such phone that is widely available, and the closest alternative would be something like the OpenMoko models, which are not easy to find, and not nearly as powerful hardware.
Or photos of pussies with CAT o5 tails. Actually, twisted-pair cable would make at least a Cat o' eight tails.
Does this also unroll your loops?
Wait, are you seriously asking Slashdotters for advice on dating?
There is even a passively cooled 5770 from Gigabyte. I'm running one practically fanless, with only a single slow fan in the entire system, and the GPU stays around 64 C while crunching Bitcoins for days at a time. Fan placement is somewhat critical, in that a randomly oriented case fan is not enough, but in an otherwise fanless system this is nice and quiet.
Moore's law is not so bad compared to the bigger picture of running out of resources. An economy that assumes exponential growth will be thrown into turmoil, and millions^Wbillions will lose their jobs.
This Thursday, a building at my local university was evacuated because somebody had heard a gun-loading sound, but nothing happened and no gun was found. Not that you could get an authentic loading sound as a ringtone, or a remotely similar sound from anything else like printers and copy machines. Perhaps a detector could have prevented this overkill operation that involved canceling a lot of lectures and a lot of police work.
Moreover, most of this local computer storage is also in the form of spinning disks, albeit in closed containers.
"there isn't really any such thing as a ministry of funny walks!".
No, but there is the Ministry of Silly Walks.
IBM PC was an x86 machine running DOS. When you buy "PC" software today, it will not run on an IBM PC, because it is written for Windows. Why is it so hard to call it "Windows" software?
As the GP said, personal computers are everywhere, and they run many different architectures and operating systems, so we need to be more specific.
I have a number of applications where I want a low powered "desktop" form factor. That probably means Mini-ITX or something like that. The canonical example? A home file server. It's not in use 90% of the time, and I'd like my power bill to go down and the heat load to go down. A chip with a super low power standby mode would be nice.
You can just honestly say that you don't know how to fix Windows since you don't use it. No reason to patronize them on their OS choices.
IMHO, the only sensible use for these monster GPUs is parallel computing (OpenCL etc). For many problems they are the best bang per buck, as well as per power consumption. It seems that the HD5000 series maintains the lead in this sense; for example the HD6990 has fewer stream units than the HD5970, and the extra texture units are not generally used in computing.
If you want to use ATI's Eyefinity mode (which I don't use), you just add a $25 adapter, so that you can plug the third screen into the ATI card... however, doing this removes the ability to maximize windows on any given screen (because all 3 of them are literally considered one), and I use that 10x more than I would triple-screen gaming. (also, both ATI's/nVidia's triple-screen gaming modes give you stretched images on the side screens, unless you position the monitors in a perfectly straight line... which, most of the time, I think nobody is actually willing to do)
In my experience, Atom processors do not play high resolution very well. But even if it did, having a version that uses the GPU would be a significant improvement. It would free the CPU to do potentially something else. Including downclocking, which could improve energy efficiency significantly.
Good point, but the power consumption of a Radeon is not exactly zero, even at idle. If you need to add a discrete GPU to shave off a few CPU watts, I believe the overall consumption increases.
On my PDA (Nokia N810), I used to decompress audio using a software lib. When I switched to a lib that uses the internal DSP, my battery life increase 300%.
Another good point. Unfortunately, this AMD announcement does not do much help in the mobile space.
There is also the general point that hardware acceleration is lagging behind new codec development. Software is much more flexible, even when "hardware" means new drivers/firmware for a general-purpose DSP. In this day and age it would be much more interesting to see codecs written in OpenCL, for example.
http://talkingincircles.net/2008/05/19/how-to-make-windows-xp-look-and-act-like-fluxbox/
Mplayer-uau (basically mplayer with full multithreading) plays 1080p H.264 on an Atom D510 without any hardware decoding. I have given up with GPU video decoding on Linux, since software works so well even on fanless processors.
There are good reasons for a single-button mouse. The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking,
Are you saying that non-technical users don't know left from right? I hope none of these non-technical users ever get a driving license.