It probably would have been fine if they hadn't chosen to use proprietary parts for most of it. USB, etc. That said, it's still a pretty good device, and superior to almost all but the very latest phones. (Excluding size of course)
I agree with most of what you said. I feel like adding to it.
Depends on the database. If using them for cache, it's not a bad idea, if your budget can take replacing them every year or two.
With one particular brand, I looked up the flash cells (which drive makers provide little or any documentation on). After roughly 2 years of use, if written to at just an average of 22 MB/sec, assuming the wear leveling is perfect*, and they fail after the ave failure according the manufacturer of the flash. A hard drive can usually sustain more than that, and with hard drives, it's usually power cycles, and a little (running time), that cause failure, not # of writes. That could only be a few months, if you are writing at close to a lot of drives claim for sustained writes.
For a small, mostly static database, with a tiny percentage of writes, they will probably boost performance a lot. (Depending on how much was cached to RAM already.)
SSDs are a lot more dependant on use cases for when they will fail than HDDs are. The ones in the first case, possibly as little as 2-4 months, the second case, near infinite (on that count). It's very good to make sure that people understand both the pros and cons. For the most part, where you'd get the most benefit: using SSDs as cache is very bad on the SSDs, but good for performance. For static storage, it doesn't matter too much.
Everyone I know, including left-handed and ambidextrous people, use their mouse with the right hand. They use controllers as laid out. If anything, a stylus should be even more easy to use left handed.
The article makes no mention of how the controls are laid out, so that's it's difficult for left-handed people. All it says is that there's no left handed mode. If the person actually described a problem, I'd have some sympathy, but as it is, the article lays out absolutely no reason for even a complaint.
I haven't played the game, nor purchased it, but I have a big problem with their statistics: They basically took the unique IPs and divided by the number of sales. That might have been somewhat accurate in the 1980s.
It's utter rubbish. People often have laptops. Today, my laptop will have at least 2 IPs. There are days that I've had 5 different ones, from different locations. (Actually probably more than that, considering that the university likes to subnet by building, which probably means that there are another 2 IPs. (possibly per day, unless their DHCP assigns the same one))
So if I'd purchased the game, and played it on my laptop at various times throughout the day, over a week, I could very easily account for 10 IPs alone. The same methodology applied to Steam, could easily lead to Steam being well over 50% pirated.
No, it wasn't PC/2. It was PS/2, which stood for Personal System/2. The PS/2 mouse/keyboard connectors were introduced on it. What did the PS in PS/2 stand for in your version of reality?
If you are going to be an ass while also being wrong, can you wait for me to haul my PS/2 out and drop it on you? It's only a model 80.
I agree, they aren't the same thing. Actually, patent encumbered is worse than proprietary in a lot of ways.
If I clean room reverse engineer the protocol/specification for something proprietary, I can talk to it/play it/build a replacement part/whatever. I can then sell it if I wish.
For patents, I do the exact same thing, and sell it, I could get sued, and lose the case.
The point was that Windows itself is not a strength. Win32 (and prior interfaces), that's Windows 'Killer Application', compatibility with prior apps.
I'm probably one of the few anymore who has used mainline Windows (NT) on non-x86 processors, when it ran on alpha. (I pity the poor Itanic users.) The OS itself was fine, but aside from a very few programs, none were native. Digital had fx!32, which worked for some, and didn't work for other pieces of software. (Some it worked, on but was so SLOW, others it was faster than native x86s of the time.) However, Windows and the few native programs were nothing to write home about. Windows advantage is it's applications, without them, it's at best mediocre. (That said, it's true for most OSes.)
You'll notice that Apple, having had so many iphone apps, has realized this and is trying to push that program advantage heavily. "There's an app for that", "X applications and counting" sort of lines. It's the same thing. They recognize that their device isn't really that special, but because of position, they got a lot of applications. If they can hold onto them, and Android doesn't blaze by them, iPhone compatibility may become the win32 of the smartphone market. Where someone may have a phone that's massively more capable, has a better OS/GUI, etc, but lacks the app base of Apple.
That said, app compatibility doesn't seem to apply everywhere, for example, look at consoles. It was 'killer' for the PS2, but after everyone realized that PS1s were $20 used (if that), they kept the consoles or bought a 'new' one. The same (not yet as drastic) drop in price for PS2s and Xboxes is happening, so people who want to play their old games, will just keep them (or play them on emulators, which is what the xbox 360 does).
That is the big problem with them. Hopefully, Apple's entry will drive the price down, and the Wacom pen tablet that all of those have will decrease in price. (From what I've heard one of the reasons why tablet PCs were so expensive was to not kill their (really expensive) Cintiq market) Some others had a 'real' touchscreen also built in, specifically IBMs just before being sold to Lenovo, and Lenovo after that.
Which somewhat explains the cost. The rest being that it's niche, and one of those applications is medical... which is the only place outside art, I've seen Cintiqs... and that was at admissions. That alone says they are spending way too much on some portions of technology.
The lowest, I recall seeing tablets, which were comparable in hardware specs to the then equivalent of a $400-500 laptop, was $1000. Actually, they were more like netbooks, in terms of CPU and such, now that I think about it, again, helping the case for them being very expensive.
Look up Qtopia, granted it was designed for a stylus/higher accuracy than iphone touchscreen has, so it's not perfect for capacitive touch screens/fat fingering things. Also satisfies your criteria for easily portable, being based upon Qt.
Another GUI + underlying Linux OS: WebOS (without the easily portable apps thing)
You are confusing a GUI with the OS, in both cases, the OS is Linux, the GUI is what's drastically different.
Actually, Windows based tablets are actually making headway. For one example, look at a lot of medical use doctors offices/hospitals/clinics, many of them have tablets. For another, look at many classrooms, where if the professor uses any computer, it is quite likely a tablet.
It just isn't making the splashy headlines, but it's been slowly and steadily growing. Could the ipad do some of the above? Probably. Is it likely to be given the chance to? I doubt it. Many of the applications used for the medical uses, especially from what I've seen, are both custom and subject to HIPAA. I seriously doubt anyone will actually try to replicate it on the ipad, due to being essentially held hostage to apple's approval for any new versions. That doesn't even address the mess that would be the ipad in regards to HIPAA, due to Apple's control.
I've been watching this for a while, and as far as I can tell, discrete graphics cards will still be significantly faster for most things. The reason being memory bandwidth. Sure cache is faster, for smaller datasets. Unfortunately, let's assume you have 10MB of cache, your average screen size will take at half of that (call it 5MB for a 32 bit 1440x900 image), and that's not counting the cpu's cache usage if it's shared. So you can't cache many textures, geometry or similar, after which it drops off to the figures below:
DDR3-1066 8533 MB/s (x2 or x3) up to ~ 25 GB/s (~8600 GT) DDR3-1333 10667 MB/s up to 32 GB/s (~8600 GT)
Both well below the 103 GB/s of an 8800 Ultra
Compare that with a few current generation end cards: Geforce 220-25GB/sec Geforce 260-111GB/sec Geforce 280-141GB/sec Geforce 480-177GB/sec
There will be some advantages to having it on die, but for anything requiring lots of memory bandwidth, a discrete card is likely to absolutely trounce Fusion, especially when you consider that the memory bandwidth for the DDR chips quoted above, is shared with the processor. (Considering I was thinking of all current CPUs, AMD's are only dual channel, or x2, not the x3 as above, but that may change, and probably should if they introduce a new socket which they probably need to, simply to support the graphics outputs.) That's a lot of the reason Integrated graphics using main memory have always been behind anything with it's own memory. Even the really cheap Nvidia cards (Don't remember which they were, but they were about the time PCI express came out) that were advertised as 64MB (of system memory) had at least 16MB. That was for two reasons: Latency PCI express has a lot of bandwidth, but local memory is faster, and framebuffer.
Fusion strikes me as AMD repeating Nvidia's experiment, probably with the result of beating the heck out of current integrated chips, but being at best comparable to 'midrange' (x6____) graphics cards. If it has that performance, and has good drivers: it will be a resounding success for them. It won't cannibalize the highly profitable high end, but will make good gaming even cheaper on AMD. Every AMD Fusion based computer would be capable of good enough gaming, or 3D work. Bonus to them if when not in use for graphics the GPU part also speeds up the CPU with a separate dedicated card. (I think that's another intention, but not the primary focus, but like everyone I'll have to wait and see.)
I've been doing something in python, and I have to ask someone who thinks it's 'pretty' why there appears to be no for loops with floats (or hell, ints). You can write your own, as I have, but that's far from pretty, compared to almost any other language.
Though, I don't think anyone would describe perl as pretty.
Then there's the problem of things like 17 miles of 'construction with no work being done, unless the people in the cop cars were all the workers on break... (Nevada, in the that case, but Arizona, when traveling through it seemed fond of Construction zone ending, then ~200 foot ahead, another construction zone, and multiple times I saw a cop there.)
I agree in principle with the idea of being careful about construction zones, but I'm kind of cynical about how the laws are, and the increased fines are abused by certain states. (Mostly those in the center and southwest of the US, but I haven't traveled by car much to the east for a while.) If there was work actually being done, fine.
(Also, say what you will about California, in my experience, when CalTrans had a job, it got done in a short and reasonable amount of time.)
Well, compare netbook price to a year ago, you'll find it's gone up, drastically. The EEEs which were ~$200 (or less, someone in my family purchased a 900 for $160), are now, at a minimum $300. It's no wonder sales have declined, with such an increase in price.
Amazing how that little detail seems to be left out of most people looking at it. Even people with business degrees should be able to recognize that.
If it crashes your Mac, it's not Flash's fault. Any Operating System should handle misbehaving applications. Sure, Flash may not be good, but blaming an OS' failing on an Application is ignorant. The Application should under almost any circumstance, not touch the file system directly, as you suggest happened to you. Any application that does should be required to run under a privileged account. Also, your assertion that flash is the only thing that can crash it, is highly unlikely, as any other application could do whatever flash did, and would likely cause your Operating System into a similar failure.
What you describe is a minor failure of Adobe's software, and a MAJOR failure of Apple's software. Either that, or it's a hardware failure... an Apple hardware failure.
The HP release when they bought Compaq was clear that they'd support Alpha.
Hell, a month or two before they canceled them, there was a big "We'll support alpha" video with the CEO of the time. Guess what? You shouldn't trust what corporations say.
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It probably would have been fine if they hadn't chosen to use proprietary parts for most of it. USB, etc. That said, it's still a pretty good device, and superior to almost all but the very latest phones. (Excluding size of course)
I agree with most of what you said. I feel like adding to it.
Depends on the database. If using them for cache, it's not a bad idea, if your budget can take replacing them every year or two.
With one particular brand, I looked up the flash cells (which drive makers provide little or any documentation on). After roughly 2 years of use, if written to at just an average of 22 MB/sec, assuming the wear leveling is perfect*, and they fail after the ave failure according the manufacturer of the flash. A hard drive can usually sustain more than that, and with hard drives, it's usually power cycles, and a little (running time), that cause failure, not # of writes. That could only be a few months, if you are writing at close to a lot of drives claim for sustained writes.
For a small, mostly static database, with a tiny percentage of writes, they will probably boost performance a lot. (Depending on how much was cached to RAM already.)
SSDs are a lot more dependant on use cases for when they will fail than HDDs are. The ones in the first case, possibly as little as 2-4 months, the second case, near infinite (on that count). It's very good to make sure that people understand both the pros and cons. For the most part, where you'd get the most benefit: using SSDs as cache is very bad on the SSDs, but good for performance. For static storage, it doesn't matter too much.
You could use Fluorinert and avoid having to deal with purity, but that would still far exceed the cost given the one time I got a price on it...
Apparently, it's sold more widely now, so at $40 per 5 mL, to fill the 770,000 gallons... $23,318,136,600
(Probably cheaper in bulk) I wonder about Google going to this someday.
Everyone I know, including left-handed and ambidextrous people, use their mouse with the right hand. They use controllers as laid out. If anything, a stylus should be even more easy to use left handed.
The article makes no mention of how the controls are laid out, so that's it's difficult for left-handed people. All it says is that there's no left handed mode. If the person actually described a problem, I'd have some sympathy, but as it is, the article lays out absolutely no reason for even a complaint.
Don't forget food and guns. The US exports a lot of those.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
I haven't played the game, nor purchased it, but I have a big problem with their statistics: They basically took the unique IPs and divided by the number of sales. That might have been somewhat accurate in the 1980s.
It's utter rubbish. People often have laptops. Today, my laptop will have at least 2 IPs. There are days that I've had 5 different ones, from different locations. (Actually probably more than that, considering that the university likes to subnet by building, which probably means that there are another 2 IPs. (possibly per day, unless their DHCP assigns the same one))
So if I'd purchased the game, and played it on my laptop at various times throughout the day, over a week, I could very easily account for 10 IPs alone. The same methodology applied to Steam, could easily lead to Steam being well over 50% pirated.
No, it wasn't PC/2. It was PS/2, which stood for Personal System/2. The PS/2 mouse/keyboard connectors were introduced on it. What did the PS in PS/2 stand for in your version of reality?
If you are going to be an ass while also being wrong, can you wait for me to haul my PS/2 out and drop it on you? It's only a model 80.
Nope, the screwed up the Plot for Doom. How they could mess that up is beyond my understanding.
Allow me to lay it out:
1) You are a marine on Mars.
2) Hell breaks loose.
You'll notice that they failed on #2. Oh dear, people might be offended by hell in our horribly violent game.
While they may have had diagnostics on a HD partition, the GUI on all Compaq's I'd seen was in the bios.
I agree, they aren't the same thing. Actually, patent encumbered is worse than proprietary in a lot of ways.
If I clean room reverse engineer the protocol/specification for something proprietary, I can talk to it/play it/build a replacement part/whatever. I can then sell it if I wish.
For patents, I do the exact same thing, and sell it, I could get sued, and lose the case.
Somehow I don't think nvidia ion(2) is going to be 'bog standard'.
I'll be surprised if they can do that on an an intel (only) board, which will likely be 'bog standard'.
Dell Computers, HP Computers, ipads, iphones, Gateways, all made by Foxconn and friends.
Apple doesn't really make anything.
Funny how you mention file systems. Windows handles how many of those again? 4? (vfat, ntfs, iso9660, udf)
Not that I disagree about Apple making Microsoft look not as bad, nor that it takes a lot.
The point was that Windows itself is not a strength. Win32 (and prior interfaces), that's Windows 'Killer Application', compatibility with prior apps.
I'm probably one of the few anymore who has used mainline Windows (NT) on non-x86 processors, when it ran on alpha. (I pity the poor Itanic users.) The OS itself was fine, but aside from a very few programs, none were native. Digital had fx!32, which worked for some, and didn't work for other pieces of software. (Some it worked, on but was so SLOW, others it was faster than native x86s of the time.) However, Windows and the few native programs were nothing to write home about. Windows advantage is it's applications, without them, it's at best mediocre. (That said, it's true for most OSes.)
You'll notice that Apple, having had so many iphone apps, has realized this and is trying to push that program advantage heavily. "There's an app for that", "X applications and counting" sort of lines. It's the same thing. They recognize that their device isn't really that special, but because of position, they got a lot of applications. If they can hold onto them, and Android doesn't blaze by them, iPhone compatibility may become the win32 of the smartphone market. Where someone may have a phone that's massively more capable, has a better OS/GUI, etc, but lacks the app base of Apple.
That said, app compatibility doesn't seem to apply everywhere, for example, look at consoles. It was 'killer' for the PS2, but after everyone realized that PS1s were $20 used (if that), they kept the consoles or bought a 'new' one. The same (not yet as drastic) drop in price for PS2s and Xboxes is happening, so people who want to play their old games, will just keep them (or play them on emulators, which is what the xbox 360 does).
That is the big problem with them. Hopefully, Apple's entry will drive the price down, and the Wacom pen tablet that all of those have will decrease in price. (From what I've heard one of the reasons why tablet PCs were so expensive was to not kill their (really expensive) Cintiq market) Some others had a 'real' touchscreen also built in, specifically IBMs just before being sold to Lenovo, and Lenovo after that.
Which somewhat explains the cost. The rest being that it's niche, and one of those applications is medical... which is the only place outside art, I've seen Cintiqs... and that was at admissions. That alone says they are spending way too much on some portions of technology.
The lowest, I recall seeing tablets, which were comparable in hardware specs to the then equivalent of a $400-500 laptop, was $1000. Actually, they were more like netbooks, in terms of CPU and such, now that I think about it, again, helping the case for them being very expensive.
Look up Qtopia, granted it was designed for a stylus/higher accuracy than iphone touchscreen has, so it's not perfect for capacitive touch screens/fat fingering things. Also satisfies your criteria for easily portable, being based upon Qt.
Another GUI + underlying Linux OS: WebOS (without the easily portable apps thing)
You are confusing a GUI with the OS, in both cases, the OS is Linux, the GUI is what's drastically different.
Actually, Windows based tablets are actually making headway. For one example, look at a lot of medical use doctors offices/hospitals/clinics, many of them have tablets. For another, look at many classrooms, where if the professor uses any computer, it is quite likely a tablet.
It just isn't making the splashy headlines, but it's been slowly and steadily growing. Could the ipad do some of the above? Probably. Is it likely to be given the chance to? I doubt it. Many of the applications used for the medical uses, especially from what I've seen, are both custom and subject to HIPAA. I seriously doubt anyone will actually try to replicate it on the ipad, due to being essentially held hostage to apple's approval for any new versions. That doesn't even address the mess that would be the ipad in regards to HIPAA, due to Apple's control.
I've been watching this for a while, and as far as I can tell, discrete graphics cards will still be significantly faster for most things. The reason being memory bandwidth. Sure cache is faster, for smaller datasets. Unfortunately, let's assume you have 10MB of cache, your average screen size will take at half of that (call it 5MB for a 32 bit 1440x900 image), and that's not counting the cpu's cache usage if it's shared. So you can't cache many textures, geometry or similar, after which it drops off to the figures below:
DDR3-1066 8533 MB/s (x2 or x3) up to ~ 25 GB/s (~8600 GT)
DDR3-1333 10667 MB/s up to 32 GB/s (~8600 GT)
Both well below the 103 GB/s of an 8800 Ultra
Compare that with a few current generation end cards:
Geforce 220-25GB/sec
Geforce 260-111GB/sec
Geforce 280-141GB/sec
Geforce 480-177GB/sec
There will be some advantages to having it on die, but for anything requiring lots of memory bandwidth, a discrete card is likely to absolutely trounce Fusion, especially when you consider that the memory bandwidth for the DDR chips quoted above, is shared with the processor. (Considering I was thinking of all current CPUs, AMD's are only dual channel, or x2, not the x3 as above, but that may change, and probably should if they introduce a new socket which they probably need to, simply to support the graphics outputs.) That's a lot of the reason Integrated graphics using main memory have always been behind anything with it's own memory. Even the really cheap Nvidia cards (Don't remember which they were, but they were about the time PCI express came out) that were advertised as 64MB (of system memory) had at least 16MB. That was for two reasons: Latency PCI express has a lot of bandwidth, but local memory is faster, and framebuffer.
Fusion strikes me as AMD repeating Nvidia's experiment, probably with the result of beating the heck out of current integrated chips, but being at best comparable to 'midrange' (x6____) graphics cards. If it has that performance, and has good drivers: it will be a resounding success for them. It won't cannibalize the highly profitable high end, but will make good gaming even cheaper on AMD. Every AMD Fusion based computer would be capable of good enough gaming, or 3D work. Bonus to them if when not in use for graphics the GPU part also speeds up the CPU with a separate dedicated card. (I think that's another intention, but not the primary focus, but like everyone I'll have to wait and see.)
I've been doing something in python, and I have to ask someone who thinks it's 'pretty' why there appears to be no for loops with floats (or hell, ints). You can write your own, as I have, but that's far from pretty, compared to almost any other language.
Though, I don't think anyone would describe perl as pretty.
Superglue is too fast now?
Then there's the problem of things like 17 miles of 'construction with no work being done, unless the people in the cop cars were all the workers on break... (Nevada, in the that case, but Arizona, when traveling through it seemed fond of Construction zone ending, then ~200 foot ahead, another construction zone, and multiple times I saw a cop there.)
I agree in principle with the idea of being careful about construction zones, but I'm kind of cynical about how the laws are, and the increased fines are abused by certain states. (Mostly those in the center and southwest of the US, but I haven't traveled by car much to the east for a while.) If there was work actually being done, fine.
(Also, say what you will about California, in my experience, when CalTrans had a job, it got done in a short and reasonable amount of time.)
Fastest baseball game ever, that wasn't called due to weather.
Well, compare netbook price to a year ago, you'll find it's gone up, drastically. The EEEs which were ~$200 (or less, someone in my family purchased a 900 for $160), are now, at a minimum $300. It's no wonder sales have declined, with such an increase in price.
Amazing how that little detail seems to be left out of most people looking at it. Even people with business degrees should be able to recognize that.
If it crashes your Mac, it's not Flash's fault. Any Operating System should handle misbehaving applications. Sure, Flash may not be good, but blaming an OS' failing on an Application is ignorant. The Application should under almost any circumstance, not touch the file system directly, as you suggest happened to you. Any application that does should be required to run under a privileged account. Also, your assertion that flash is the only thing that can crash it, is highly unlikely, as any other application could do whatever flash did, and would likely cause your Operating System into a similar failure.
What you describe is a minor failure of Adobe's software, and a MAJOR failure of Apple's software. Either that, or it's a hardware failure... an Apple hardware failure.
The HP release when they bought Compaq was clear that they'd support Alpha.
Hell, a month or two before they canceled them, there was a big "We'll support alpha" video with the CEO of the time. Guess what? You shouldn't trust what corporations say.