While there are some text editors and such, a big issue has been about QuickOffice and when it will be made available for true document editing(right now we have viewing). There are a number of apps out there for WebOS, perhaps not in the hundreds of thousands, but WebOS has enough apps for most people, and only those who are more concerned with how many apps there are, rather than "is there enough for my needs?" will really find the App Catalog too small.
Now, in reality there are two programs that give you access to an application catalog(store), the first comes out of the box, and has free and paid applications. There is a second called Preware that will act like a second app catalog for homebrew applications. This was touched on in the article without being named. Preware gives you access to tons of patches and tweaks, and in general will supplement the official app catalog well enough for most people. Since there are not a TON of apps overall, we don't have 2000 different fart apps and garbage like that, where the numbers are padded with duplicate pieces of garbage. If you then clean up the app catalogs/stores between platforms, and then look for the USEFUL apps, you won't be too disappointed with what is available for WebOS, but there ARE some things missing that would force some people to skip the platform right now. This is where getting more publicity will help fill in the gaps since it isn't TOO difficult to port an app from iOS to WebOS.
The real key is that if you are looking to see if WebOS will meet your needs, ask the community at www.precentral.net in the forums.
Now, some of what was missing from the article...
Without downloading apps, WebOS is designed to sync your phone against either a Gmail or Yahoo account over the air, no need for cables to sync to a computer as long as you have cellular or WiFi data working. Facebook and other social networking are also included right out of the package, and your "friends list" will be merged with your contacts in your address book so it is all neatly connected together. In general, the level of integration between your different communications methods is very good, so you go to your address book, and you can e-mail, call, send a SMS/MMS message to the person. The only downside out of the box is that some chat features for social networking are not set out of the box. There are patches to take care of this though.
WebOS is currently split in three main groups, and there is a fair bit of compatibility going up in versions.
The original Palm branded phones are generally on WebOS 1.4.5, with the Palm Pre 2 running 2.0.1. There was an upgrade that was only made available to users of O2 in Europe for WebOS 2.1 on the Palm Pre Plus, and the developer community has come up with a way to legally allow users to hack this new version on to their own Palm Pre and Pre Plus phones. So even though 2.0 or 2.1 is not officially available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus for most people, it CAN be done if you can handle a bit of tinkering.
Then you have the HP Veer, tiny as it may be, it is running WebOS 2.2. Note that apps for 1.x will run on 2.x for the most part. The Touchpad comes with WebOS 3.0 which will generally run apps from WebOS 1.x and 2.x.
When the Pre 3 comes out(whatever the name may end up being by the time it does), it will come with either WebOS 2.2, 2.3, or 3.0, at this point there is speculation all over the place. The Pre 3, if it comes out SOON, will be fast enough to grab some attention and probably generate more app development. The real key is how long HP is going to wait, or why they have not released it yet. 1.4GHz with 512MB of RAM with a 3.6 inch screen plus slide-out keyboard SHOULD be enough to get some users if Verizon and AT&T don't hide it and intentionally kill sales. We shall see what happens.
And that would justify the hike in the streaming costs, and Netflix could have done a profit sharing thing where Netflix gives a percentage of net income as a straight percentage, rather than a straight dollar amount up front. Break the streaming down by studio, then pay 10 percent of net profits, split up by percentage and that goes to the studios. So if Fox content is 10 percent, then Fox would get 10 percent of the 10 percent. The studios would then want Netflix to do well, and that would mean keeping rates low.
If Netflix actually offered a good selection for streaming, then the need for DVDs would not be necessary. As it stands right now, if you want to watch a TV series and get ALL episodes from a given season, you MUST get it on DVD because individual episodes are missing from the streaming selection.
Picture someone like my father who might want to watch MASH....then find out that episode 3 on disc 1 isn't available for streaming, then episode 8 from the second disc was missing from streaming, episode 11 and 12 are missing too from streaming. If you really cared enough, that would be really annoying, so going to DVD would be required for watching every episode.
Then the movie collection....it may seem like there is a lot there, but there have been many situations where I looked and couldn't find the movie I was looking for, either on DVD or streaming. This is the problem that Netflix has, they have a lot of stuff overall, but there are many things they don't have, and the streaming selection is very limited....as in, less than a quarter of the movies offered on DVD are available for streaming.
People die all the time, in ALL countries, not just third world countries. If you want to save people who are starving, how about starting in your own country with communities that are poor? The USA has many regions, including rural upstate New York, and areas of the deep south as well as others where things are not much better than what you see in third world countries, yet too many people are more worried about the people in other countries than people in THIS country who are in the same situation.
I am not saying that nothing should be done to stop the wars that cause starvation in third world countries, but when the conversation is about "global food supplies" and overpopulation of the planet, then is it a good idea to encourage population growth in places that can't even grow enough food to feed their current population? The USA has resources to trade for food that we don't produce here. Japan has resources that they trade for things they don't produce, so why should the third world, which has been getting aid for many decades and which has no resources to export get a free handout.
I'd rather not see people in the USA starve because people insist on giving food to third world countries that can't support their own populations and don't put in the effort needed to grow more food.
I know I'll get down rated for this, but with the concerns of global food supplies not being enough, and the growing global population, should we REALLY be trying to save people from starvation who will never be able to provide for themselves? Starvation is the thing that keeps societies from growing faster than the increase in food production, so why encourage third world countries to continue to increase their populations when they can't feed themselves?
There is a basic concept, if you have a resource, trade it for a resource you do not have, and that includes money. If there is an entire nation that has no resources to trade and they are not capable of growing their own food, then the population will starve, the population will go down, and things balance out. Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help? The world as a whole does not need money pits, and the world as a whole does not need a "food pit" that will never be able to trade resources for food.
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole. If you want to adopt people and bring them into your own country, then fine, bring them in, and make them productive.
One thing to consider is that as a person gets older, there is a tendency to think before you do things, and when it comes to code, thinking about the problem and how best to code it DOES make for better overall code than the younger programmers who jump into coding without thinking ahead. It may also be the education that has changed, where the "old school" approach of trying to do the most with the least amount of code.
Back when memory was at a premium, if you looked at the code and saw five different sections that were very similar being used, you would make a new function to handle all five instances. The code would be smaller, take less memory, and there was less you had to debug. The mindset of people who learned to code when resources are at a minimum is very different from these days where using an extra 500MB for libraries with 15 versions of very similar code are pulled in.
When it comes to the search engine, it may be very difficult to code it to comply with the court order and also allow for the mention of said paper. The whole cache system for example may not be coded to "exclude from cache these specific pages", so it is either to filter out ALL those Belgian papers completely, or end up not in compliance with the court order.
Search tends to be an "inclusive" thing where you have to be very selective to exclude content....how do you exclude the content of papers while letting the top layer show up and be 100 percent certain that the AUTOMATED system doesn't accidentally put some content into the search? It isn't Google screwing with these idiots, it is the idiots not understanding what they were asking for. Google is not some manual system where every item that shows up has been added by a person.
You mean multi-threading. HyperThreading is an Intel term for running two threads at a time on one core and "tricking" the OS into thinking there are twice as many cores as there really are. It does help performance in heavily threaded applications, but if you compare eight real cores to four cores that look like eight, and you improve performance so those eight real cores are competitive per-clock with Intel cores, there's a big advantage.
$320 for an 8-core processor that I think starts at 3.8GHz(not the 3.2GHz mentioned in this article), and that's sounding pretty good.
Quad-core makes a huge difference when you are busy and doing many things at the same time. Yes, the i5 has a better core design, so is faster in most tasks, and that is why AMD has been hurting, except at the lower end of the market. Intel graphics are horrible, so for your average consumer that will never add a video card to their machine, a $500 AMD based machine will tend to be a bit better than a $500 Intel machine for "total experience". As you go up from there, AMD starts looking worse since you get systems with an Intel processor and an AMD or NVIDIA video card that clearly give Intel the edge.
That is why Bulldozer is so important, because if AMD can get 25% better performance per clock with the same number of cores compared to earlier chips and can do it for less money, that will really help extend the price range for where AMD is competitive. There have been other reports that Bulldozer is able to beat the i7-2500 in overall performance. Even if extra cores are required, if the overall benchmarks give AMD the lead at the same price point, that really will help make for a competitive environment.
When it comes to processor power draw, you also have to compare how the companies measure these things. AMD rates chips on max power draw, not sustained power draw. So a 125W AMD chip may only be drawing 50W, but it can go up to 125W. In this case, we are looking at an eight-core processor, so if you think it will draw the same amount of power as a four-core processor, that's not realistic. We shall see what the real numbers look like when the chips are officially launched.
On a high-speed connection, web browsing renders pages faster on a faster processor, you have e-mail, plus a word processor, Quickbooks, all running at the same time comfortably. Just because you do very little with your machine doesn't mean that others use their computers like an overgrown tablet and only do one thing at the same time.
If you read the other responses, you would see that there is a lot of really questionable stuff here that makes the leaked information worthless. There was a known issue in the pre-release Bulldozer cores that crippled performance, which is a big part of why the release was delayed. Now, you clearly have no knowledge of CPU design if you think that clock speed alone is an indicator of performance. Intel has been beating AMD at the same clock speed for a while now due to differences in design, not clock speed. A 2.2GHz Athlon 64 was around as fast as a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 in real-world situations, and many clueless people just couldn't wrap their heads around that idea.
The big question will be what sort of performance improvements the Bulldozer core design has brought to the table compared to previous generations. Since 4-core versions will be available, that would help eliminate core count differences and would set things up for a straight drop-in CPU replacement for benchmarking. Still, if you don't think that a 3GHz processor today is faster than a 3GHz processor from six years ago, you really need to try doing a real-world comparison.
I would love to just go streaming and never bother with ordering on DVD, except the streaming catalog is so small compared to the DVD offering, no one in their right mind would do it. If you want to watch a TV series on streaming, one or two episodes per DVD are missing on the streaming offerings! I am serious, try to stream an entire season, and you miss an episode here and there, one episode or more per DVD. This forces those who go with Netflix to catch up on a TV show to go the DVD route.
Netflix management must know the weaknesses in what is offered, and is just killing off the company rather than see it collapse by doing something so stupid, no sane person would even suggest it.
While there is clearly a market for "premium" items that cost a LOT, the non-Apple world can get a decent laptop for the $500 range. Yes, that may not have the aluminum case, but it also is a fully functional laptop that has full support for Flash, and ALL normal Windows based applications will run on it. There are also new platforms that are just starting to show up, like the AMD A4 and A6 based that are also starting to show up in very thin laptops that get acceptable graphics performance that will accelerate Firefox or IE 9, plus other applications that are starting to use the graphics power to improve performance.
The competition isn't all about what Apple puts out, it is what you see in the market in general, and with the economy still in the toilet, people are less inclined to spend money on products of questionable value to them.
You are wrong there, and you have to go into the reason why the economy is having so many problems that ALLOW restricting trade from other countries to cause problems. The USA is suffering from a massive lack of manufacturing right now, and it forces companies to go to other countries for manufacturing. Yes, some of this is caused by the price of labor, which robotics could solve, but a lot of it is a trend that says, "Look for the cheapest source of labor in the world, without looking for better ways to do things". The very concept of "work smarter, not harder" has faded when it SHOULD be the mantra of management.
So, rather than aiming to keep manufacturing here in the USA and using robotics to solve the problem of domestic workers demanding too much in pay, they go to China. Now, we have no factory workers(who do make money so pay income taxes), and we have more factories shut down due to the recession, with no companies interested in buying those factories and putting people to work. If we had a lot of electronics manufacturing factories HERE, then restricting trade with China wouldn't really cause ANY problems. The fact is, I don't think Apple would even consider making any products themselves these days, it is all farmed out to Foxconn, where the working conditions are so bad, people would rather kill themselves than go to work.
Now, you want depression, try being out of work for six or more months because there are no jobs and without having family that you can live with because you can't bring in enough money to live on your own. You want stupidity, look at the 2001-2003 period where tech companies were going out of business left and right and the government did NOTHING, yet when a Wall Street company that makes no products has problems, they suddenly got government help to stay alive. Technology has been seen as the direction the entire world is going in, and the US Government has shown the least interest in really boosting that sector...unless you look at energy development companies getting government grants.
Wasn't there a lawsuit trying to ban imports of Apple devices from China over something similar? Remember, Apple doesn't make their products here in the USA, so HP(which bought Palm), could easily come up with a similar thing to block the importing of the iPhone into the USA. People don't remember, but Palm was the company that dominated the PDA market, and there are many patents surrounding their true innovations. All HP would have to do would be to point out how all the smartphones on the market have PDA features which IT currently holds the patent on. So, all those apps would be sending money back to HP if they wanted to push the issue.
If someone were to start launching rockets into the USA from Mexico, don't you expect that the USA would act rather quickly to go after the attackers? Yes, Israel has done some things that deserve condemnation, but at the same time, MOST of the incidents WERE incited by violent actions. Basically, how many times do you poke a bear with a stick before the bear rips your arms off or just kills you for it?
Instead of this backward approach to government security being firewalls and this and that, lay out a different network, complete with its own fiber and connections. Think of it like re-creating the old Arpanet, where the public does NOT have access, and the only connections come from places with real reasons to be connected. The places with real need for security would not have ANY connections to the normal Internet, no gateways, no dial-up, NOTHING that others could use to access it remotely. The CIA, FBI, and a core military connection might be connected on this new network, but if you want REAL security, don't let ANYONE even try knocking on the door.
At no time should an employee even have access from home, unless the person has such a requirement for that access that dedicated fiber links to the home for that very reason is considered valid, and with that access, the home should have 24x7 security to make sure the location itself is not compromised. Even then, you would have dedicated machines at the location for one network or the other, with no connections between the two, no wireless on the machine(s) that are on the secured network.
Lock it down, don't give the "keys" to anyone, and anyone that does have home access to such a secured network should have the connected machine monitored 24x7. Why be stupid and risk security via VPN when there is a chance the VPN itself may be compromised? Why take the risk?
And the moment the rest of the world decides NOT to go to China for manufacturing, their economy will CRASH harder than what we saw here in the USA a few years back. Trade embargo on China, and three months later, China shuts down, because China NEEDS other countries to provide work for people...without that, you have lots of unemployed people who will be upset that the government just won't support them, because it won't be able to.
When any web page that has Flash apps on it requires an App because the devices don't have Flash on them, the numbers are flawed, even if accurate. If you take every web page that has a Flash application on it, including Speedtest.net, you could argue that each of these web pages are considered an app on devices that DO support Flash, since you can make a link to those pages to run the Flash version.
So, how many thousands of Flash apps are there on web pages out there? Can we now add them to the total number of apps available on other platforms?
When you need to jailbreak a device because the company that makes the product doesn't "approve" of a lot of software out there, that is a clear sign of the company standing for being closed and against freedom. I am not talking about clearly negative software that is harmful to users, I am talking about Apple saying "we don't ALLOW this because we don't like it".
Apple is following the lead of the Chinese government, where a company or individual can get their applications banned from the Apple App Store because of personal dislike by a company employee. This is the problem with Apple, and the more people allow that sort of behavior, the worse Apple will get. I expect that if Facebook got into a war with Apple, that Apple would update the OS to disallow all Facebook apps and even access to the Facebook web page on iDevices.
If Apple ever comes out with OS 11, then I may take another look at it, but in general, the UI feels...gooey, and doesn't feel all that fast. I am not talking about the speed of the machines as much as just the feel of the UI itself. It may be intentional, but I always feel that Apple put too much effort into cute little UI elements which make the experience feel slow. Of course, I also like to see progress, and feel that Apple UI design is stagnant which is NOT a good thing.
People had a difficult time going from the UI of Windows XP to Vista, and even without any technical issues, there would have been complaints due to how long XP was around. On the Mac side, I suspect that Apple may not be able to update the UI at this point because MOST Apple fanatics just can't handle change at this point. 10 years is far too long for an OS to stick around without major improvements, which is why Windows 7 has done so well, due to the UI improvements in addition to many improvements that came with Vista but were not noticed by the general public.
Really, we are all exact duplicates of each other? When you are faced with shortages of equipment or supplies, the intelligent people will take the knowledge out there and use it to address shortages, but to say that all humans have the same genes is as ignorant as you can possibly get. There is a HUGE variation in the human species, and yes, there are some people who are so intelligent it can seem scary to those who are considered intelligent by most people, but there are also those who are criminally stupid and shouldn't be allowed to live.
Now, being able to create your own intranet is not the same as being able to create your own internet. The Internet by definition is a network of networks, and unless they are trying to create an alternative network that spans the globe, at most it would just be a WAN that covers a given region due to not having a solid infrastructure currently in place. I give the people credit for being able to make the stuff themselves, but at the same time, if others have actually invented the equipment, then this is just another do it yourself project, and isn't quite the same as INVENTING anything. If you read how to do something on the Internet, that doesn't mean that if you build it yourself, that you invented it.
The big issue when it comes to OS design is the API, and if it can possibly be an improvement over what is currently out there. Think about it, it's all about making an API for programmers to code for that will be better in some way, shape, or form compared to what else is out there. For phones, you see Android, WebOS, iOS, and the list goes on. Some use Linux under the API, so what API would be better? How many attempts will there be to slap a new API on top of Linux, call it a new OS, and then watch as no one bothers to code for it?
Mozilla doesn't need to make a new OS with what is already out there. Then again, we don't need other operating systems that are based on web technologies, since by nature, the majority of the API code is the source of whatever limitations there will be. A better OS would be something that is designed to be VERY VERY low profile with very little overhead, and then make sure the design always stays lean and mean. If something is going to be optional, then make sure the OS does not get weighed down by forcing that item to be active. Now, most people don't think about it, but Linux is really a kernel with the GNU setup on top of it to provide those basic OS features. Now, take a Linux kernel, and replace the GNU stuff with something that is GUI based and REALLY REALLY tight, without the bloat that comes from standardized libraries that have 20 functions that do the same thing. Re-invent the wheel with all the modern stuff put in there, but without all the bloat and legacy stuff that comes from needing to make things compatible. New OS means you need new code anyway, so why not start off REALLY clean?
And that is why Mozilla won't do it, because the amount of effort needed to make a really NEW OS that does away with all that legacy garbage that slows everything down is very high.
Everyone wants faster and faster speeds, yet they also expect unlimited monthly bandwidth, and THAT is what is causing the cellular providers to start putting monthly bandwidth caps on their networks. The solution SHOULD be fairly simple in theory, don't give people the maximum speed that the equipment and communication protocol allows, and go to a tiered approach. Unlimited data at 2 megabit, but then go to a 5GB cap for 4 megabit OR there would be a higher price for the 4 megabit speed. If people want a 7 megabit connection and still want unlimited data, then they should pay more for it.
Cable and DSL providers have offered tiered data plans for a while, where if you want faster connection speeds, you need to pay more per month, so really, it is the fault of the cellular providers for increasing speeds for users without going to this sort of tiered approach. Most of my data usage comes from WiFi, but when I am on the road, I would rather have unlimited 2G speeds than a 2GB/month cap at 3G or 4G speeds.
The reasoning behind this sort of setup is fairly straight forward, where there IS a limited amount of bandwidth going to all nodes on the network, so in order to keep any node from getting saturated/overloaded, you have to make sure that people do not use too much data at any one time. People will complain if an area "seems slow" at normal 3G speeds compared to other areas, so in order to provide a consistent experience across the entire network, people should be kept to a reasonable speed that will not overload the network at any given node. So, expect that 2mbps would be the standard speed for EVERYONE, and those who want faster should pay extra, or accept that they have a limited amount that they can download each month.
The problem is that cellular providers have never done the work to set up this sort of thing, so it is "everyone gets the fastest speeds", and now they are placing limits on people. If you can run out of bandwidth in one hour of continual use at 4G speeds, I'd much rather get unlimited at 2GB speeds and avoid paying more on my already high bill.
Sending something into space isn't the biggest problem, it is keeping it intact and getting it back in one piece that is where the biggest challenge is.
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While there are some text editors and such, a big issue has been about QuickOffice and when it will be made available for true document editing(right now we have viewing). There are a number of apps out there for WebOS, perhaps not in the hundreds of thousands, but WebOS has enough apps for most people, and only those who are more concerned with how many apps there are, rather than "is there enough for my needs?" will really find the App Catalog too small.
Now, in reality there are two programs that give you access to an application catalog(store), the first comes out of the box, and has free and paid applications. There is a second called Preware that will act like a second app catalog for homebrew applications. This was touched on in the article without being named. Preware gives you access to tons of patches and tweaks, and in general will supplement the official app catalog well enough for most people. Since there are not a TON of apps overall, we don't have 2000 different fart apps and garbage like that, where the numbers are padded with duplicate pieces of garbage. If you then clean up the app catalogs/stores between platforms, and then look for the USEFUL apps, you won't be too disappointed with what is available for WebOS, but there ARE some things missing that would force some people to skip the platform right now. This is where getting more publicity will help fill in the gaps since it isn't TOO difficult to port an app from iOS to WebOS.
The real key is that if you are looking to see if WebOS will meet your needs, ask the community at www.precentral.net in the forums.
Now, some of what was missing from the article...
Without downloading apps, WebOS is designed to sync your phone against either a Gmail or Yahoo account over the air, no need for cables to sync to a computer as long as you have cellular or WiFi data working. Facebook and other social networking are also included right out of the package, and your "friends list" will be merged with your contacts in your address book so it is all neatly connected together. In general, the level of integration between your different communications methods is very good, so you go to your address book, and you can e-mail, call, send a SMS/MMS message to the person. The only downside out of the box is that some chat features for social networking are not set out of the box. There are patches to take care of this though.
WebOS is currently split in three main groups, and there is a fair bit of compatibility going up in versions.
The original Palm branded phones are generally on WebOS 1.4.5, with the Palm Pre 2 running 2.0.1. There was an upgrade that was only made available to users of O2 in Europe for WebOS 2.1 on the Palm Pre Plus, and the developer community has come up with a way to legally allow users to hack this new version on to their own Palm Pre and Pre Plus phones. So even though 2.0 or 2.1 is not officially available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus for most people, it CAN be done if you can handle a bit of tinkering.
Then you have the HP Veer, tiny as it may be, it is running WebOS 2.2. Note that apps for 1.x will run on 2.x for the most part. The Touchpad comes with WebOS 3.0 which will generally run apps from WebOS 1.x and 2.x.
When the Pre 3 comes out(whatever the name may end up being by the time it does), it will come with either WebOS 2.2, 2.3, or 3.0, at this point there is speculation all over the place. The Pre 3, if it comes out SOON, will be fast enough to grab some attention and probably generate more app development. The real key is how long HP is going to wait, or why they have not released it yet. 1.4GHz with 512MB of RAM with a 3.6 inch screen plus slide-out keyboard SHOULD be enough to get some users if Verizon and AT&T don't hide it and intentionally kill sales. We shall see what happens.
And that would justify the hike in the streaming costs, and Netflix could have done a profit sharing thing where Netflix gives a percentage of net income as a straight percentage, rather than a straight dollar amount up front. Break the streaming down by studio, then pay 10 percent of net profits, split up by percentage and that goes to the studios. So if Fox content is 10 percent, then Fox would get 10 percent of the 10 percent. The studios would then want Netflix to do well, and that would mean keeping rates low.
If Netflix actually offered a good selection for streaming, then the need for DVDs would not be necessary. As it stands right now, if you want to watch a TV series and get ALL episodes from a given season, you MUST get it on DVD because individual episodes are missing from the streaming selection.
Picture someone like my father who might want to watch MASH....then find out that episode 3 on disc 1 isn't available for streaming, then episode 8 from the second disc was missing from streaming, episode 11 and 12 are missing too from streaming. If you really cared enough, that would be really annoying, so going to DVD would be required for watching every episode.
Then the movie collection....it may seem like there is a lot there, but there have been many situations where I looked and couldn't find the movie I was looking for, either on DVD or streaming. This is the problem that Netflix has, they have a lot of stuff overall, but there are many things they don't have, and the streaming selection is very limited....as in, less than a quarter of the movies offered on DVD are available for streaming.
People die all the time, in ALL countries, not just third world countries. If you want to save people who are starving, how about starting in your own country with communities that are poor? The USA has many regions, including rural upstate New York, and areas of the deep south as well as others where things are not much better than what you see in third world countries, yet too many people are more worried about the people in other countries than people in THIS country who are in the same situation.
I am not saying that nothing should be done to stop the wars that cause starvation in third world countries, but when the conversation is about "global food supplies" and overpopulation of the planet, then is it a good idea to encourage population growth in places that can't even grow enough food to feed their current population? The USA has resources to trade for food that we don't produce here. Japan has resources that they trade for things they don't produce, so why should the third world, which has been getting aid for many decades and which has no resources to export get a free handout.
I'd rather not see people in the USA starve because people insist on giving food to third world countries that can't support their own populations and don't put in the effort needed to grow more food.
I know I'll get down rated for this, but with the concerns of global food supplies not being enough, and the growing global population, should we REALLY be trying to save people from starvation who will never be able to provide for themselves? Starvation is the thing that keeps societies from growing faster than the increase in food production, so why encourage third world countries to continue to increase their populations when they can't feed themselves?
There is a basic concept, if you have a resource, trade it for a resource you do not have, and that includes money. If there is an entire nation that has no resources to trade and they are not capable of growing their own food, then the population will starve, the population will go down, and things balance out. Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help? The world as a whole does not need money pits, and the world as a whole does not need a "food pit" that will never be able to trade resources for food.
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole. If you want to adopt people and bring them into your own country, then fine, bring them in, and make them productive.
One thing to consider is that as a person gets older, there is a tendency to think before you do things, and when it comes to code, thinking about the problem and how best to code it DOES make for better overall code than the younger programmers who jump into coding without thinking ahead. It may also be the education that has changed, where the "old school" approach of trying to do the most with the least amount of code.
Back when memory was at a premium, if you looked at the code and saw five different sections that were very similar being used, you would make a new function to handle all five instances. The code would be smaller, take less memory, and there was less you had to debug. The mindset of people who learned to code when resources are at a minimum is very different from these days where using an extra 500MB for libraries with 15 versions of very similar code are pulled in.
When it comes to the search engine, it may be very difficult to code it to comply with the court order and also allow for the mention of said paper. The whole cache system for example may not be coded to "exclude from cache these specific pages", so it is either to filter out ALL those Belgian papers completely, or end up not in compliance with the court order.
Search tends to be an "inclusive" thing where you have to be very selective to exclude content....how do you exclude the content of papers while letting the top layer show up and be 100 percent certain that the AUTOMATED system doesn't accidentally put some content into the search? It isn't Google screwing with these idiots, it is the idiots not understanding what they were asking for. Google is not some manual system where every item that shows up has been added by a person.
You mean multi-threading. HyperThreading is an Intel term for running two threads at a time on one core and "tricking" the OS into thinking there are twice as many cores as there really are. It does help performance in heavily threaded applications, but if you compare eight real cores to four cores that look like eight, and you improve performance so those eight real cores are competitive per-clock with Intel cores, there's a big advantage.
$320 for an 8-core processor that I think starts at 3.8GHz(not the 3.2GHz mentioned in this article), and that's sounding pretty good.
Quad-core makes a huge difference when you are busy and doing many things at the same time. Yes, the i5 has a better core design, so is faster in most tasks, and that is why AMD has been hurting, except at the lower end of the market. Intel graphics are horrible, so for your average consumer that will never add a video card to their machine, a $500 AMD based machine will tend to be a bit better than a $500 Intel machine for "total experience". As you go up from there, AMD starts looking worse since you get systems with an Intel processor and an AMD or NVIDIA video card that clearly give Intel the edge.
That is why Bulldozer is so important, because if AMD can get 25% better performance per clock with the same number of cores compared to earlier chips and can do it for less money, that will really help extend the price range for where AMD is competitive. There have been other reports that Bulldozer is able to beat the i7-2500 in overall performance. Even if extra cores are required, if the overall benchmarks give AMD the lead at the same price point, that really will help make for a competitive environment.
When it comes to processor power draw, you also have to compare how the companies measure these things. AMD rates chips on max power draw, not sustained power draw. So a 125W AMD chip may only be drawing 50W, but it can go up to 125W. In this case, we are looking at an eight-core processor, so if you think it will draw the same amount of power as a four-core processor, that's not realistic. We shall see what the real numbers look like when the chips are officially launched.
On a high-speed connection, web browsing renders pages faster on a faster processor, you have e-mail, plus a word processor, Quickbooks, all running at the same time comfortably. Just because you do very little with your machine doesn't mean that others use their computers like an overgrown tablet and only do one thing at the same time.
If you read the other responses, you would see that there is a lot of really questionable stuff here that makes the leaked information worthless. There was a known issue in the pre-release Bulldozer cores that crippled performance, which is a big part of why the release was delayed. Now, you clearly have no knowledge of CPU design if you think that clock speed alone is an indicator of performance. Intel has been beating AMD at the same clock speed for a while now due to differences in design, not clock speed. A 2.2GHz Athlon 64 was around as fast as a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 in real-world situations, and many clueless people just couldn't wrap their heads around that idea.
The big question will be what sort of performance improvements the Bulldozer core design has brought to the table compared to previous generations. Since 4-core versions will be available, that would help eliminate core count differences and would set things up for a straight drop-in CPU replacement for benchmarking. Still, if you don't think that a 3GHz processor today is faster than a 3GHz processor from six years ago, you really need to try doing a real-world comparison.
I would love to just go streaming and never bother with ordering on DVD, except the streaming catalog is so small compared to the DVD offering, no one in their right mind would do it. If you want to watch a TV series on streaming, one or two episodes per DVD are missing on the streaming offerings! I am serious, try to stream an entire season, and you miss an episode here and there, one episode or more per DVD. This forces those who go with Netflix to catch up on a TV show to go the DVD route.
Netflix management must know the weaknesses in what is offered, and is just killing off the company rather than see it collapse by doing something so stupid, no sane person would even suggest it.
While there is clearly a market for "premium" items that cost a LOT, the non-Apple world can get a decent laptop for the $500 range. Yes, that may not have the aluminum case, but it also is a fully functional laptop that has full support for Flash, and ALL normal Windows based applications will run on it. There are also new platforms that are just starting to show up, like the AMD A4 and A6 based that are also starting to show up in very thin laptops that get acceptable graphics performance that will accelerate Firefox or IE 9, plus other applications that are starting to use the graphics power to improve performance.
The competition isn't all about what Apple puts out, it is what you see in the market in general, and with the economy still in the toilet, people are less inclined to spend money on products of questionable value to them.
You are wrong there, and you have to go into the reason why the economy is having so many problems that ALLOW restricting trade from other countries to cause problems. The USA is suffering from a massive lack of manufacturing right now, and it forces companies to go to other countries for manufacturing. Yes, some of this is caused by the price of labor, which robotics could solve, but a lot of it is a trend that says, "Look for the cheapest source of labor in the world, without looking for better ways to do things". The very concept of "work smarter, not harder" has faded when it SHOULD be the mantra of management.
So, rather than aiming to keep manufacturing here in the USA and using robotics to solve the problem of domestic workers demanding too much in pay, they go to China. Now, we have no factory workers(who do make money so pay income taxes), and we have more factories shut down due to the recession, with no companies interested in buying those factories and putting people to work. If we had a lot of electronics manufacturing factories HERE, then restricting trade with China wouldn't really cause ANY problems. The fact is, I don't think Apple would even consider making any products themselves these days, it is all farmed out to Foxconn, where the working conditions are so bad, people would rather kill themselves than go to work.
Now, you want depression, try being out of work for six or more months because there are no jobs and without having family that you can live with because you can't bring in enough money to live on your own. You want stupidity, look at the 2001-2003 period where tech companies were going out of business left and right and the government did NOTHING, yet when a Wall Street company that makes no products has problems, they suddenly got government help to stay alive. Technology has been seen as the direction the entire world is going in, and the US Government has shown the least interest in really boosting that sector...unless you look at energy development companies getting government grants.
Wasn't there a lawsuit trying to ban imports of Apple devices from China over something similar? Remember, Apple doesn't make their products here in the USA, so HP(which bought Palm), could easily come up with a similar thing to block the importing of the iPhone into the USA. People don't remember, but Palm was the company that dominated the PDA market, and there are many patents surrounding their true innovations. All HP would have to do would be to point out how all the smartphones on the market have PDA features which IT currently holds the patent on. So, all those apps would be sending money back to HP if they wanted to push the issue.
If someone were to start launching rockets into the USA from Mexico, don't you expect that the USA would act rather quickly to go after the attackers? Yes, Israel has done some things that deserve condemnation, but at the same time, MOST of the incidents WERE incited by violent actions. Basically, how many times do you poke a bear with a stick before the bear rips your arms off or just kills you for it?
Instead of this backward approach to government security being firewalls and this and that, lay out a different network, complete with its own fiber and connections. Think of it like re-creating the old Arpanet, where the public does NOT have access, and the only connections come from places with real reasons to be connected. The places with real need for security would not have ANY connections to the normal Internet, no gateways, no dial-up, NOTHING that others could use to access it remotely. The CIA, FBI, and a core military connection might be connected on this new network, but if you want REAL security, don't let ANYONE even try knocking on the door.
At no time should an employee even have access from home, unless the person has such a requirement for that access that dedicated fiber links to the home for that very reason is considered valid, and with that access, the home should have 24x7 security to make sure the location itself is not compromised. Even then, you would have dedicated machines at the location for one network or the other, with no connections between the two, no wireless on the machine(s) that are on the secured network.
Lock it down, don't give the "keys" to anyone, and anyone that does have home access to such a secured network should have the connected machine monitored 24x7. Why be stupid and risk security via VPN when there is a chance the VPN itself may be compromised? Why take the risk?
And the moment the rest of the world decides NOT to go to China for manufacturing, their economy will CRASH harder than what we saw here in the USA a few years back. Trade embargo on China, and three months later, China shuts down, because China NEEDS other countries to provide work for people...without that, you have lots of unemployed people who will be upset that the government just won't support them, because it won't be able to.
When any web page that has Flash apps on it requires an App because the devices don't have Flash on them, the numbers are flawed, even if accurate. If you take every web page that has a Flash application on it, including Speedtest.net, you could argue that each of these web pages are considered an app on devices that DO support Flash, since you can make a link to those pages to run the Flash version.
So, how many thousands of Flash apps are there on web pages out there? Can we now add them to the total number of apps available on other platforms?
When you need to jailbreak a device because the company that makes the product doesn't "approve" of a lot of software out there, that is a clear sign of the company standing for being closed and against freedom. I am not talking about clearly negative software that is harmful to users, I am talking about Apple saying "we don't ALLOW this because we don't like it".
Apple is following the lead of the Chinese government, where a company or individual can get their applications banned from the Apple App Store because of personal dislike by a company employee. This is the problem with Apple, and the more people allow that sort of behavior, the worse Apple will get. I expect that if Facebook got into a war with Apple, that Apple would update the OS to disallow all Facebook apps and even access to the Facebook web page on iDevices.
If Apple ever comes out with OS 11, then I may take another look at it, but in general, the UI feels...gooey, and doesn't feel all that fast. I am not talking about the speed of the machines as much as just the feel of the UI itself. It may be intentional, but I always feel that Apple put too much effort into cute little UI elements which make the experience feel slow. Of course, I also like to see progress, and feel that Apple UI design is stagnant which is NOT a good thing.
People had a difficult time going from the UI of Windows XP to Vista, and even without any technical issues, there would have been complaints due to how long XP was around. On the Mac side, I suspect that Apple may not be able to update the UI at this point because MOST Apple fanatics just can't handle change at this point. 10 years is far too long for an OS to stick around without major improvements, which is why Windows 7 has done so well, due to the UI improvements in addition to many improvements that came with Vista but were not noticed by the general public.
Really, we are all exact duplicates of each other? When you are faced with shortages of equipment or supplies, the intelligent people will take the knowledge out there and use it to address shortages, but to say that all humans have the same genes is as ignorant as you can possibly get. There is a HUGE variation in the human species, and yes, there are some people who are so intelligent it can seem scary to those who are considered intelligent by most people, but there are also those who are criminally stupid and shouldn't be allowed to live.
Now, being able to create your own intranet is not the same as being able to create your own internet. The Internet by definition is a network of networks, and unless they are trying to create an alternative network that spans the globe, at most it would just be a WAN that covers a given region due to not having a solid infrastructure currently in place. I give the people credit for being able to make the stuff themselves, but at the same time, if others have actually invented the equipment, then this is just another do it yourself project, and isn't quite the same as INVENTING anything. If you read how to do something on the Internet, that doesn't mean that if you build it yourself, that you invented it.
The big issue when it comes to OS design is the API, and if it can possibly be an improvement over what is currently out there. Think about it, it's all about making an API for programmers to code for that will be better in some way, shape, or form compared to what else is out there. For phones, you see Android, WebOS, iOS, and the list goes on. Some use Linux under the API, so what API would be better? How many attempts will there be to slap a new API on top of Linux, call it a new OS, and then watch as no one bothers to code for it?
Mozilla doesn't need to make a new OS with what is already out there. Then again, we don't need other operating systems that are based on web technologies, since by nature, the majority of the API code is the source of whatever limitations there will be. A better OS would be something that is designed to be VERY VERY low profile with very little overhead, and then make sure the design always stays lean and mean. If something is going to be optional, then make sure the OS does not get weighed down by forcing that item to be active. Now, most people don't think about it, but Linux is really a kernel with the GNU setup on top of it to provide those basic OS features. Now, take a Linux kernel, and replace the GNU stuff with something that is GUI based and REALLY REALLY tight, without the bloat that comes from standardized libraries that have 20 functions that do the same thing. Re-invent the wheel with all the modern stuff put in there, but without all the bloat and legacy stuff that comes from needing to make things compatible. New OS means you need new code anyway, so why not start off REALLY clean?
And that is why Mozilla won't do it, because the amount of effort needed to make a really NEW OS that does away with all that legacy garbage that slows everything down is very high.
Everyone wants faster and faster speeds, yet they also expect unlimited monthly bandwidth, and THAT is what is causing the cellular providers to start putting monthly bandwidth caps on their networks. The solution SHOULD be fairly simple in theory, don't give people the maximum speed that the equipment and communication protocol allows, and go to a tiered approach. Unlimited data at 2 megabit, but then go to a 5GB cap for 4 megabit OR there would be a higher price for the 4 megabit speed. If people want a 7 megabit connection and still want unlimited data, then they should pay more for it.
Cable and DSL providers have offered tiered data plans for a while, where if you want faster connection speeds, you need to pay more per month, so really, it is the fault of the cellular providers for increasing speeds for users without going to this sort of tiered approach. Most of my data usage comes from WiFi, but when I am on the road, I would rather have unlimited 2G speeds than a 2GB/month cap at 3G or 4G speeds.
The reasoning behind this sort of setup is fairly straight forward, where there IS a limited amount of bandwidth going to all nodes on the network, so in order to keep any node from getting saturated/overloaded, you have to make sure that people do not use too much data at any one time. People will complain if an area "seems slow" at normal 3G speeds compared to other areas, so in order to provide a consistent experience across the entire network, people should be kept to a reasonable speed that will not overload the network at any given node. So, expect that 2mbps would be the standard speed for EVERYONE, and those who want faster should pay extra, or accept that they have a limited amount that they can download each month.
The problem is that cellular providers have never done the work to set up this sort of thing, so it is "everyone gets the fastest speeds", and now they are placing limits on people. If you can run out of bandwidth in one hour of continual use at 4G speeds, I'd much rather get unlimited at 2GB speeds and avoid paying more on my already high bill.
Sending something into space isn't the biggest problem, it is keeping it intact and getting it back in one piece that is where the biggest challenge is.