Sony wouldn't be competing with "Linux games" in a "Linux gaming market". Sony would be competing with bootable CD/DVD/BD games that run on PS3, just like Sony games. The gamer wouldn't know it's a "Linux game", it would just be a game. That would be cheaper than the Sony games, because it doesn't include the Sony license (among other efficiencies).
Of course that scenario depends on the RSX working. So I don't know why you're talking about "RSX lock-out", which my post to which you replied postulated as working, the basis for competing with Sony-licensed games. Perfect circle, useless argument.
BTW, Sony has sponsored Linux on PS3 itself, not just feeding us a line about it working.
The RSX is a part unique to the PS3 designed jointly by Sony and nVidia.
What makes you think it lacks the security the rest of the PS3 has? What makes you think exposing RSX functions in a driver would expose holes in the Hypervisor, other than the access to the RSX that the driver exposes by design?
That sounds pretty good. Will it sync a phone plugged into a (Linux) PC across the Internet/LAN to the server?
Do you know which Debian/Ubuntu packages contain the syncML plugin for Evolution, and which contain the syncML server? Or where on the Net to find tarfiles/etc?
How about a driver for Linux on the PlayStation 3, which would let the PS3 RSX chip actually work for Linux apps?
Right now PS3 Linux runs all display processing on the PPC core on the Cell, which needs to do a lot of other processing to keep the complex Cell going. Meanwhile there's an RSX chip that runs at 1.8TeraFLOPS, dwarfing even the Cell's 0.2TFLOPS. But Sony's Hypervisor virtualization layer that runs Linux hides the RSX from Linux. However, the RSX is exposed in some API, otherwise PS3 Linux wouldn't display on the HDMI port out of the PS3, and sound probably wouldn't work (probably also running on the RSX somehow).
Sony doesn't want the RSX exposed to Linux apps, because then Linux apps could compete with Sony-licensed games (without paying Sony the royalty that even subsidizes over 25% of the PS3 purchase price). But can't nVidia release a driver, or some kind of specs, that expose a 2D API for running X desktops? Sony's money all comes from 3D games.
So far I've never plugged any HW into my Ubuntu PCs without finding at least a proprietary driver that delivers at least the main functions, except an X3d "3DWorld" VGA/glasses system that seems totally orphaned. But I don't use other exotic HW, or even push the limits of the OS with gaming.
What I do lack is sync "drivers" for Evolution. I want to sync across the LAN with apps on Windows. And most important, I want to sync with my SonyEricsson K750 phone. I want to sync my calendars, contacts, and media files, including phone SMS'es as Evolution memos and Evolution email (from a single folder) as some kind of phone text item. I also want to import my old Palm Pilot calendar, contects and memos into Evolution (or the K750, then sync that with Evolution).
Usually OS connections to devices develops slower than app connections, because OS development is slower and has so many other focuses. Evolution seems pretty badly interconnected to other apps, especially on other OS'es, especially on mobile devices.
Or am I just missing a treasure trove? FWIW, the "MultiSync" project is pretty dead, and never worked as easily as a driver (for either the OS or for Evolution).
You've worked in SW QA for ~10 years... since 1997. That's 3 years after Netscape's "public beta" struck a crippling blow to SW QA, especially in the release cycle, but also in opening SW development to any halfass who put "HTML programmer" on their resume. Since then, SW quality has been anything but "assured", except that it's dependably lower quality than when development had some discipline.
Different SW houses do indeed do it differently. From each other, and from when quality was more reliable, and - more to the point - predictable. The scenario you described abuses the meaning of Alpha/Beta/Release, the same way marketers have abused version numbering into largely arbitrary numbers (sometimes not even sequential, as Solaris) to create an appearance of improvement that's not directly correlated to the actual production process.
What do I know about the subject? I released my first software in 1977. I released my first software in the "Internet" (DARPANet) in 1981. I've produced SW for supercomputers, mainframes, PCs, DSPs, embedded controllers, mobile phones/PDAs, in multiple countries, in Silicon Valley, in NYC, in a few dozen languages, from 8 to 128 bits. I've made a living as exclusive a Beta tester, and Alpha/Beta/Release tested hundreds of SW packages, including private Betas of Photoshop, RealAudio/Video, and many others spawned in the current post-Netscape version naming chaos. I've worked for Apple Computer, several governments (foreign and domestic), dozens of Fortune 500 corps. I've started up SW companies and wound them down. I've taught hundreds of programmers, from adolescents to college/grad to retraining COBOL programmers. I've made $millions for myself, hundreds of $millions for my direct customers. I've invented several applications and businesses. I've managed up to dozens of developers/etc simultaneously.
In other words, I know more about SW development and its processes than you probably ever will. In fact, I know more about obsolete SW development than you know about the current "state of the art". And I know people like you, who fill the industry with incompetence, largely out of conceit to reinvent the wheel without spokes. So don't give me any crap about your resume. If you want to debate testing names and discipline, try to say something that at least sounds professional. Try to say something indicating you're worth debating, which doesn't include either insults which you're totally unqualified to deliver, or nonsense like "only exception is Microsoft".
For example, just because Beta SW is defined by testing by people outside the dev team, doesn't mean developers don't test it (people in the SW business should know that the converse is not necessarily true, a logical fallacy). But again, if you want to debate, give me some kind of reason. Instead of proving just why the SW QA business is so shabby, because it's got loudmouth newcomers who can't learn from the lessons we learned from in the past.
I said introduced. All the examples you cited are the nth versions of those products. Released after a series of failures, including the launch, that all disappointed moderately high expectations. We're talking about the "Mobile 6-Based 'Wing'", which is an introduction of a new product, even though it's based on the 6th version of an MS platform.
You want to talk about fact and FUD, start with debating the actual point I made, not some strawman you (and Microsoft's marketing department) would prefer to talk about.
When I worked at Apple (1993-4), we used Alpha: dev team testing; Beta: testing outside dev team, whether Apple or Apple customers; Golden Master: Finally released to users, testing considered complete. The "Gamma" term was sometimes used informally, to refer to release candidates culminating in the Golden Master that shipped.
It sounds like that system is the same as yours, though yours formalized using "Gamma", and made the "dev team" boundary into anyone at Apple vs anyone outside Apple.
I think the inside/outside Apple boundary is arbitrary in terms of the quality of the code, and more importantly the control of the project. It does relate to marketing, and to the priority on control of rumors and "buzz" since Jobs came back.
FWIW (a lot), that way of controlling projects doesn't work, mainly because plenty of bugs can be fixed only with features. Gating releases on who's testing it does work.
You're saying some thing circular. You are testing Betas. Alpha is the word we use for the very different category of SW that is being tested by only people in the design/implementation team/s.
Instead, those terms are being used wrong to describe a degree of quality, in terms of project progress, which makes the project (and its products) less manageable, less predictable by its consumers.
How many companies can compete by introducing so many products that are so disappointing for so long? Is there even a single MS product (outside the Xbox) released in the past 10 years that hasn't been disappointing? Where do these expectations of good quality come from? And how come consistently low quality doesn't lower them?
The expectation - delivery = disappointment formula is reversed for Microsoft success. That is the surest measure of a monopoly's PR power.
"Alpha" testing is testing by people who participated in the design and/or implementation. Any testing by people not in those teams is, by definition, "Beta" testing.
Alpha/Beta/Release is not a measure of quality or maturity. It just tells who is testing, and their relationship to the software.
TrollMods want another Cold War faceoff in Europe. I guess Slashdot's scriptkiddie contingent, born after 1990's end of that half-century nightmare, thinks it's all a videogame.
How about "US threatens Putin with Missile Bases in Europe"?
Bush is an insane tyrant, a rogue regime that's turned everything it's touched into new danger. He dropped the ABM Treaty that Nixon had signed with the Soviets which kept the Cold War from spiraling out of control. Because Star Wars "missile defense" was the main Bush "defense" agenda: create as many missile threats as possible to "market" Star Wars to a terrorized American public.
Just as Bush didn't let the Qaeda's Afghanistan base of attacks stop him from invading Iraq instead, the foreign policy his cronies wanted despite the real world, Bush is roaring right ahead with Star Wars. He's goading Russia into a new nuke race because it's good for him, right according to their original plans that he never abandons. Just like Cheney tried to provoke an armageddon with China over Taiwan. Hell, even Bush Sr's plans for NASA to deliver Star Wars are now in full swing, with the old Star Wars hand Griffin running the show, and a new National Space Policy of militarizing space by NASA for the Pentagon and CIA.
These insane tyrants must be stopped. IMPEACH THEM NOW. Today. Before it's too late.
Are these new mics low-power enough with good response to make 1g Bluetooth earbuds run for days on a charge, but pick up just voice from over by the ear?
But Republicans do have a survivalist-nerd contingency to worry about alienating who don't like their politicians bought off by "Hollywood". Until they draft a presidential candidate like Reagan or Fred Thompson from Hollywood.
I guess that's the same point you're making: Republicans will believe their politicians are reducing government's size and intrusion into people's lives, even while they're multiplying it and breaking every boundary to invasion.
The Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress scored only 21 bribees and $54,000 total, averaging just under $2600. Minority Republicans got more, $62,900 for their 28 bribees, though they got lower on average: just under $22,500.
Why does the minority Republican contingent get so many more bribees one third more, and more total take?
How efficient is the transduction of electromagnetic energy into a diamond convertible into the electron spins that can "charge" nuclear spins? How efficient is the discharge? And how much energy can be stored in these spins, multiplied by 1.1% of the C atoms in a synthetic 1mm^2 diamond?
If we could use NASA's new really-remote control drone tech to make really big reflectors on the Moon, pointing at these high-concentration solar cells, we could beam a vast amount of energy down for use on the Earth. 1.3KW:m^2 falls steadily on the Moon, except for dark phases which could be balanced by another reflector on the Moon's other side.
100m^2 on a single m^2 panel at 40% efficiency would be 52KW, or 10 average US homes. Lunar surface area is about 3.8E7Km^2, so the entire current US energy generation could be fed by 2.39 millionths of a percent of the lunar surface, on about 70*70Km reflectors on a half-million Km^2 of Lunar surface.
Of course, by the time we'd scale up, we could have Lunar (or L-point, etc) orbital reflectors consuming no lunar surface, pointing at only 70-100Km of Lunar based cells. By which time the efficiency could be higher, and optical materials that can receive more than 100x full insolation, then distribute it to stacked cells, could be available.
I wish each announcement of a cell also reported its consumption part of its energy budget.
We're finally getting really efficient solar cells. And they'll just keep coming, with oil costing not just $60-75+ a barrel, but upsetting the never-stable geopolitics that now can kill hundreds of thousands of people in months, weeks or days.
So it's even more important to know how much energy these new cells consume during their lifetime: production, distribution/deployment, transmission inefficiency, maintenance, recycling. Because if we're so desperate for "efficient" cells that we massively depend on them, but their overall lifecycle isn't really efficient, then we'll be burning energy and pumping pollution even worse than before.
Hey, TrollMods, your boy Ted Stevens is headed for the Cunningham Suite in the slammer. And your new star, Fred "Frogman" Thompson, has his own "strong convictions". McCain himself was kneedeep in the same S&L swindles - how long before your boy finishes his long career in public service making license plates, finally a productive Republican?
[a teraflop is] a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.
Over a decade and a half ago, in 1990, I programmed parallel AT&T DSP32C boards (multiple DSPs per ISA board in an 80386 host). Up to 5 25GFLOPS chips on a 125GFLOPS board, up to 8 boards in a 1TFLOPS host PC. That PC, nearly double the "decade ago", had over 1TFLOPS (including its FPGA glue) in about 3 square feet.
And it actually ran applications (commercial image processing) in the field. This Intel chip might be smaller than 3'^2, but it still needs to run in the same size PC, and it doesn't run any commercial apps. Even 17 years later, on twice the cores we had in 1990.
Sure, the past 17 years hasn't seen our parallelism innovations become common (though finally digital cameras are catching up to our 16Mpxl, but not at 40bit color). Because the same problem we didn't solve in general, parallel programming semantics and debugging that reuse existing codebase and techniques, is still hard. But if we'd discarded the uniprocessor codebase then, or just ignored it as we built a new, parallel codebase, we'd have 17 years of code now that would be "legacy" which didn't largely lock us, and our thinking, out of simple multiprocessing development.
So I hope that Intel's multicore development is really just a platform for developing parallel coding systems. I'd love to see all that Intel money and brains put behind "executable UML", or some other flow "language", by inventing "lossless" lexical/graphical interconverters and expression standards. But they'll probably spend it all on marketing and emulating an 80386 to run Windows. Because that's the part of our 1990 platform that can be reinvented and resold as "brand new", just like it was back then, without taking much of a risk.
I use a SonyEricsson K750 phone as my music player - it's a Flash walkman, with 1GB MemoryStick, Bluetooth and USB connection to my Ubuntu (GNOME) PC.
How do I sync not just the K750's music/image/video folders (which appear as USB drives), but also its calendar, contacts and email with desktop Evolution?
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I don't think you're reading my post properly.
Sony wouldn't be competing with "Linux games" in a "Linux gaming market". Sony would be competing with bootable CD/DVD/BD games that run on PS3, just like Sony games. The gamer wouldn't know it's a "Linux game", it would just be a game. That would be cheaper than the Sony games, because it doesn't include the Sony license (among other efficiencies).
Of course that scenario depends on the RSX working. So I don't know why you're talking about "RSX lock-out", which my post to which you replied postulated as working, the basis for competing with Sony-licensed games. Perfect circle, useless argument.
BTW, Sony has sponsored Linux on PS3 itself, not just feeding us a line about it working.
The RSX is a part unique to the PS3 designed jointly by Sony and nVidia.
What makes you think it lacks the security the rest of the PS3 has? What makes you think exposing RSX functions in a driver would expose holes in the Hypervisor, other than the access to the RSX that the driver exposes by design?
That sounds pretty good. Will it sync a phone plugged into a (Linux) PC across the Internet/LAN to the server?
Do you know which Debian/Ubuntu packages contain the syncML plugin for Evolution, and which contain the syncML server? Or where on the Net to find tarfiles/etc?
How about a driver for Linux on the PlayStation 3, which would let the PS3 RSX chip actually work for Linux apps?
Right now PS3 Linux runs all display processing on the PPC core on the Cell, which needs to do a lot of other processing to keep the complex Cell going. Meanwhile there's an RSX chip that runs at 1.8TeraFLOPS, dwarfing even the Cell's 0.2TFLOPS. But Sony's Hypervisor virtualization layer that runs Linux hides the RSX from Linux. However, the RSX is exposed in some API, otherwise PS3 Linux wouldn't display on the HDMI port out of the PS3, and sound probably wouldn't work (probably also running on the RSX somehow).
Sony doesn't want the RSX exposed to Linux apps, because then Linux apps could compete with Sony-licensed games (without paying Sony the royalty that even subsidizes over 25% of the PS3 purchase price). But can't nVidia release a driver, or some kind of specs, that expose a 2D API for running X desktops? Sony's money all comes from 3D games.
Or maybe someone else has a way.
So far I've never plugged any HW into my Ubuntu PCs without finding at least a proprietary driver that delivers at least the main functions, except an X3d "3DWorld" VGA/glasses system that seems totally orphaned. But I don't use other exotic HW, or even push the limits of the OS with gaming.
What I do lack is sync "drivers" for Evolution. I want to sync across the LAN with apps on Windows. And most important, I want to sync with my SonyEricsson K750 phone. I want to sync my calendars, contacts, and media files, including phone SMS'es as Evolution memos and Evolution email (from a single folder) as some kind of phone text item. I also want to import my old Palm Pilot calendar, contects and memos into Evolution (or the K750, then sync that with Evolution).
Usually OS connections to devices develops slower than app connections, because OS development is slower and has so many other focuses. Evolution seems pretty badly interconnected to other apps, especially on other OS'es, especially on mobile devices.
Or am I just missing a treasure trove? FWIW, the "MultiSync" project is pretty dead, and never worked as easily as a driver (for either the OS or for Evolution).
You've worked in SW QA for ~10 years... since 1997. That's 3 years after Netscape's "public beta" struck a crippling blow to SW QA, especially in the release cycle, but also in opening SW development to any halfass who put "HTML programmer" on their resume. Since then, SW quality has been anything but "assured", except that it's dependably lower quality than when development had some discipline.
Different SW houses do indeed do it differently. From each other, and from when quality was more reliable, and - more to the point - predictable. The scenario you described abuses the meaning of Alpha/Beta/Release, the same way marketers have abused version numbering into largely arbitrary numbers (sometimes not even sequential, as Solaris) to create an appearance of improvement that's not directly correlated to the actual production process.
What do I know about the subject? I released my first software in 1977. I released my first software in the "Internet" (DARPANet) in 1981. I've produced SW for supercomputers, mainframes, PCs, DSPs, embedded controllers, mobile phones/PDAs, in multiple countries, in Silicon Valley, in NYC, in a few dozen languages, from 8 to 128 bits. I've made a living as exclusive a Beta tester, and Alpha/Beta/Release tested hundreds of SW packages, including private Betas of Photoshop, RealAudio/Video, and many others spawned in the current post-Netscape version naming chaos. I've worked for Apple Computer, several governments (foreign and domestic), dozens of Fortune 500 corps. I've started up SW companies and wound them down. I've taught hundreds of programmers, from adolescents to college/grad to retraining COBOL programmers. I've made $millions for myself, hundreds of $millions for my direct customers. I've invented several applications and businesses. I've managed up to dozens of developers/etc simultaneously.
In other words, I know more about SW development and its processes than you probably ever will. In fact, I know more about obsolete SW development than you know about the current "state of the art". And I know people like you, who fill the industry with incompetence, largely out of conceit to reinvent the wheel without spokes. So don't give me any crap about your resume. If you want to debate testing names and discipline, try to say something that at least sounds professional. Try to say something indicating you're worth debating, which doesn't include either insults which you're totally unqualified to deliver, or nonsense like "only exception is Microsoft".
For example, just because Beta SW is defined by testing by people outside the dev team, doesn't mean developers don't test it (people in the SW business should know that the converse is not necessarily true, a logical fallacy). But again, if you want to debate, give me some kind of reason. Instead of proving just why the SW QA business is so shabby, because it's got loudmouth newcomers who can't learn from the lessons we learned from in the past.
I said introduced. All the examples you cited are the nth versions of those products. Released after a series of failures, including the launch, that all disappointed moderately high expectations. We're talking about the "Mobile 6-Based 'Wing'", which is an introduction of a new product, even though it's based on the 6th version of an MS platform.
You want to talk about fact and FUD, start with debating the actual point I made, not some strawman you (and Microsoft's marketing department) would prefer to talk about.
When did you use those definitions at Apple?
When I worked at Apple (1993-4), we used Alpha: dev team testing; Beta: testing outside dev team, whether Apple or Apple customers; Golden Master: Finally released to users, testing considered complete. The "Gamma" term was sometimes used informally, to refer to release candidates culminating in the Golden Master that shipped.
It sounds like that system is the same as yours, though yours formalized using "Gamma", and made the "dev team" boundary into anyone at Apple vs anyone outside Apple.
I think the inside/outside Apple boundary is arbitrary in terms of the quality of the code, and more importantly the control of the project. It does relate to marketing, and to the priority on control of rumors and "buzz" since Jobs came back.
Can you give me an example project?
FWIW (a lot), that way of controlling projects doesn't work, mainly because plenty of bugs can be fixed only with features. Gating releases on who's testing it does work.
You're saying some thing circular. You are testing Betas. Alpha is the word we use for the very different category of SW that is being tested by only people in the design/implementation team/s.
Instead, those terms are being used wrong to describe a degree of quality, in terms of project progress, which makes the project (and its products) less manageable, less predictable by its consumers.
How many companies can compete by introducing so many products that are so disappointing for so long? Is there even a single MS product (outside the Xbox) released in the past 10 years that hasn't been disappointing? Where do these expectations of good quality come from? And how come consistently low quality doesn't lower them?
The expectation - delivery = disappointment formula is reversed for Microsoft success. That is the surest measure of a monopoly's PR power.
"Alpha" testing is testing by people who participated in the design and/or implementation. Any testing by people not in those teams is, by definition, "Beta" testing.
Alpha/Beta/Release is not a measure of quality or maturity. It just tells who is testing, and their relationship to the software.
Which Republicans will TrollMod me just because I say that Bush is destroying America, and stupid people still approve of him?
Moderation 0
50% Troll
30% Underrated
20% Insightful
TrollMods want another Cold War faceoff in Europe. I guess Slashdot's scriptkiddie contingent, born after 1990's end of that half-century nightmare, thinks it's all a videogame.
How about "US threatens Putin with Missile Bases in Europe"?
Bush is an insane tyrant, a rogue regime that's turned everything it's touched into new danger. He dropped the ABM Treaty that Nixon had signed with the Soviets which kept the Cold War from spiraling out of control. Because Star Wars "missile defense" was the main Bush "defense" agenda: create as many missile threats as possible to "market" Star Wars to a terrorized American public.
Just as Bush didn't let the Qaeda's Afghanistan base of attacks stop him from invading Iraq instead, the foreign policy his cronies wanted despite the real world, Bush is roaring right ahead with Star Wars. He's goading Russia into a new nuke race because it's good for him, right according to their original plans that he never abandons. Just like Cheney tried to provoke an armageddon with China over Taiwan. Hell, even Bush Sr's plans for NASA to deliver Star Wars are now in full swing, with the old Star Wars hand Griffin running the show, and a new National Space Policy of militarizing space by NASA for the Pentagon and CIA.
These insane tyrants must be stopped. IMPEACH THEM NOW. Today. Before it's too late.
Notebooks? Whatever.
Are these new mics low-power enough with good response to make 1g Bluetooth earbuds run for days on a charge, but pick up just voice from over by the ear?
But Republicans do have a survivalist-nerd contingency to worry about alienating who don't like their politicians bought off by "Hollywood". Until they draft a presidential candidate like Reagan or Fred Thompson from Hollywood.
I guess that's the same point you're making: Republicans will believe their politicians are reducing government's size and intrusion into people's lives, even while they're multiplying it and breaking every boundary to invasion.
The Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress scored only 21 bribees and $54,000 total, averaging just under $2600.
Minority Republicans got more, $62,900 for their 28 bribees, though they got lower on average: just under $22,500.
Why does the minority Republican contingent get so many more bribees one third more, and more total take?
How efficient is the transduction of electromagnetic energy into a diamond convertible into the electron spins that can "charge" nuclear spins? How efficient is the discharge? And how much energy can be stored in these spins, multiplied by 1.1% of the C atoms in a synthetic 1mm^2 diamond?
If we could use NASA's new really-remote control drone tech to make really big reflectors on the Moon, pointing at these high-concentration solar cells, we could beam a vast amount of energy down for use on the Earth. 1.3KW:m^2 falls steadily on the Moon, except for dark phases which could be balanced by another reflector on the Moon's other side.
100m^2 on a single m^2 panel at 40% efficiency would be 52KW, or 10 average US homes. Lunar surface area is about 3.8E7Km^2, so the entire current US energy generation could be fed by 2.39 millionths of a percent of the lunar surface, on about 70*70Km reflectors on a half-million Km^2 of Lunar surface.
Of course, by the time we'd scale up, we could have Lunar (or L-point, etc) orbital reflectors consuming no lunar surface, pointing at only 70-100Km of Lunar based cells. By which time the efficiency could be higher, and optical materials that can receive more than 100x full insolation, then distribute it to stacked cells, could be available.
I wish each announcement of a cell also reported its consumption part of its energy budget.
We're finally getting really efficient solar cells. And they'll just keep coming, with oil costing not just $60-75+ a barrel, but upsetting the never-stable geopolitics that now can kill hundreds of thousands of people in months, weeks or days.
So it's even more important to know how much energy these new cells consume during their lifetime: production, distribution/deployment, transmission inefficiency, maintenance, recycling. Because if we're so desperate for "efficient" cells that we massively depend on them, but their overall lifecycle isn't really efficient, then we'll be burning energy and pumping pollution even worse than before.
Moderation +3
60% Insightful
20% Troll
10% Flamebait
Hey, TrollMods, your boy Ted Stevens is headed for the Cunningham Suite in the slammer. And your new star, Fred "Frogman" Thompson, has his own "strong convictions". McCain himself was kneedeep in the same S&L swindles - how long before your boy finishes his long career in public service making license plates, finally a productive Republican?
Over a decade and a half ago, in 1990, I programmed parallel AT&T DSP32C boards (multiple DSPs per ISA board in an 80386 host). Up to 5 25GFLOPS chips on a 125GFLOPS board, up to 8 boards in a 1TFLOPS host PC. That PC, nearly double the "decade ago", had over 1TFLOPS (including its FPGA glue) in about 3 square feet.
And it actually ran applications (commercial image processing) in the field. This Intel chip might be smaller than 3'^2, but it still needs to run in the same size PC, and it doesn't run any commercial apps. Even 17 years later, on twice the cores we had in 1990.
Sure, the past 17 years hasn't seen our parallelism innovations become common (though finally digital cameras are catching up to our 16Mpxl, but not at 40bit color). Because the same problem we didn't solve in general, parallel programming semantics and debugging that reuse existing codebase and techniques, is still hard. But if we'd discarded the uniprocessor codebase then, or just ignored it as we built a new, parallel codebase, we'd have 17 years of code now that would be "legacy" which didn't largely lock us, and our thinking, out of simple multiprocessing development.
So I hope that Intel's multicore development is really just a platform for developing parallel coding systems. I'd love to see all that Intel money and brains put behind "executable UML", or some other flow "language", by inventing "lossless" lexical/graphical interconverters and expression standards. But they'll probably spend it all on marketing and emulating an 80386 to run Windows. Because that's the part of our 1990 platform that can be reinvented and resold as "brand new", just like it was back then, without taking much of a risk.
Just make sure the evil bit is unset on your "hacking tools", and they'll be hunky-dory.
I use a SonyEricsson K750 phone as my music player - it's a Flash walkman, with 1GB MemoryStick, Bluetooth and USB connection to my Ubuntu (GNOME) PC.
How do I sync not just the K750's music/image/video folders (which appear as USB drives), but also its calendar, contacts and email with desktop Evolution?