Windows Phone is actually a perfectly OK operating system (after many tries - we're up to WP8 after all). What it lacks is apps, and it's never going to get them because developers don't want to have to support three platforms. If they had their way they wouldn't even have to support two, but most accept that as a necessary evil to limit the monopoly power of the platform owners.
Microsoft also gets a big demerit for the way they handled Windows Phone 7. They put a big (unsuccessful) marketing push behind it, and then they announced WP8. They also announced that the WP7 and WP8 apps were incompatible, and that the WP7 phones would never get WP8. They missed the opportunity to show some class - so few WP7 phones had been sold that Microsoft should have simply given a free WP8 phone to everybody who had bought one, thus dodging the accusation of abandoning people who had just bought new Microsoft phones.
Microsoft's best plan for Windows Phone would have been to ignore the consumer market and go all-in on enterprise computing. If they had done that - offered from day one a full implementation of Office, VPN support, domain login, and all the other stuff that the big corporate types wanted, and put a strong emphasis on security - they could have established themselves as a real alternative for some users. instead, they chose to take on iOS and Android head-on, which was guaranteed to lose.
The problem with that theory is that IBM wins the case by proving that SCO has no intellectual property, leaving nothing to take. I don't think SCO has any remaining real assets to speak of. IBM could claim ownership of the SCO trademark but that surely has negative value by now.
A CFL that is left on continuously and that has proper ventilation actually does last as long as they claim it will - in my experience, often longer. The claimed life expectancy of most CFLs ranges from 7,000 to 10,000 hours; that's in the vicinity of one year of continuous use (8,760 hours unless it's a leap year). You will also get close to the claimed lifetime if the bulb is turned on and off infrequently; a bulb that is turned on once per day for two hours probably will last ten years.
Two things shorten the lifetime of CFLs in typical home use. One, they get turned on and off many times per day, which is not good for any type of fluorescent lighting. (It also shortens the life of incandescent bulbs but less dramatically.) Two, they are often installed in fixtures with poor ventilation; the result is that the electronics overheat and burn out.
LED bulbs solve one of the two problems; turning them on and off frequently doesn't bother them at all. Overheating of the electronics is still an issue. Overheating of the LEDs is also an issue, which is why LED bulbs have big heat sinks. They also have even longer claimed life expectancies, usually 25,000 hours (about 3 years continuous) or more, and that rating reflects when the bulb will fade to 70% of original output rather than when it will fail completely.
These light bulbs offer far more than on-off control, so enabling the light switch wouldn't do the same thing. They are multi-color bulbs using three colors of LED (RGB) so you can change the intensity and the color of light you get. The Philips Hue system is the most direct competitor; it uses a standalone bridge that you connect with a cable to your router, rather than a WiFi-enabled bulb like the LIFX system does.
Smart light bulbs are a mixed bag for energy savings. On the one hand, the ease of controlling them means that lights are less likely to be left on in situations where they are not needed. On the other hand, a conventional bulb turned off at the wall or fixture switch consumes zero watts of power, but a smart bulb has to use some power to be able to respond to commands. The LIFX kickstarter clams that it's a very small amount, but their claim that "a AA battery would keep a LIFX smartbulb in standby mode for approximately 1-2 years" probably is just the amount of power that the controller itself uses and ignores power supply efficiency. The master bulb is more power hungry, requiring 2-3 watts. Currently they seem to be selling only what the Kickstarter called master bulbs; every bulb has a WiFi chip as well as mesh networking. But now they claim that the standby power is less than 1 watt.
RGB bulbs are also less energy efficient than phosphor coated white LED bulbs at present. LIFX says their bulb uses 15W and is the equivalent of a 60W incandescent. (They don't give output in lumens, so I can't evaluate how equivalent it is.) The current state of the art for phosphor-coated bulbs is 9-10W for a 60W equivalent bulb.
If you use Bluetooth for playback you lose the benefit of FLAC. Bluetooth audio is compressed, and the compression usually sounds worse than MP3 does at the bit rates that people mostly use these days. (The standard compression for Bluetooth music is SBC; others can optionally be implemented but both ends of the link must have support.)
The fact that there are more SSH servers on Windows than on Linux is an illustration of the advantages of free software.
Nearly every Linux distribution comes with OpenSSH. (On some distros it is not part of the default install but is available from the software repositories.) It is also included with Mac OS X and the various flavors of BSD Unix. OpenSSH is free both as in speech and as in beer, fully featured, and well debugged and highly reliable. Nobody is going to enter the field of doing SSH software for Linux unless they have something to offer that OpenSSH lacks - additional features, higher performance, and/or commercial support.
The picture is different on Windows. Some of the Windows SSH servers listed on Wikipedia are available for free non-commercial use, but none are truly free software. The only way to get a free software implementation of an SSH server on Windows is to install Cygwin, which includes OpenSSH. People keep reinventing the SSH wheel because there is no solid free option.
Until PowerShell came into the picture, an SSH server for Windows was also far less useful than its Linux counterpart because there were too many useful things that you could not do from the command line. SSH can also be about X Windows forwarding on Unix and Linux, but that doesn't work on Windows. Windows has its own solutions for desktop forwarding, and some of them work well; just saying that it's not a reason to install an SSH server.
Mostly true if you're in the US; not much of the good Australian beer is being sent over here. Certainly not true if you live in Australia, as there is some excellent beer to be had. Craft brewing has taken hold in most developed nations now.
I'd vote for Fosters being the PBR of Australia rather than the Bud. To my taste, Budweiser is unique among mass market American beers in that it tastes actively bad; perhaps I don't like the flavor note from the beechwood chips. The others are just flavorless and uninteresting.
They're not quite that limited. The one with the smallest build area, the Up! Mini, can make objects up to 4.7" in each dimension. The largest one, the Solidoodle 2, can do 6" cubed, and the Cube 3D falls in the middle at 5.5" cubed.
You're right, however; at the present time 3D printing doesn't make sense for objects that you can easily buy. It DOES have a place for prototyping new designs, or for creating replacement parts for old things that are no longer being made. If you need knows for something new you just buy knobs, but if you need a replacement knob for a 40 year old device and you want it to match the shape of the other knobs you may need a 3D printer.
Is the volume lower in the summer? Some people might prefer to schedule surgery then because it's less disruptive to their work life. Teachers are the obvious example, but even for others it might be easier to fit surgery into a time when things at the office slow down.
When you look at gasoline engines, you have to consider things like the torque curve and throttle lag. More power is available at some engine speeds than at others, and power doesn't become instantly available when you stomp on the accelerator. Electric motors, on the other hand, have a flat torque curve (just about all the power is available from 0 RPM upward) and no lag worth mentioning. (The control software is another matter.) One reason that driving a Tesla is so mind-blowing is that it can throw you into your seat from a standing start in a way that no gasoline car can match, at least not without serious clutch abuse.
When you are cruising at a steady highway speed in a Prius, all or nearly all the power is coming from the gasoline engine. When you hit the accelerator to speed up you get a quick burst from the electric motor and then the gas engine ramps up, so you speed up more quickly than a gasoline engine with its modest horsepower can. And you save fuel because quick throttle bursts on a gasoline engine are very inefficient.
Theoretical computer science is very math heavy. Stuff like studying what is computable and what is not, the order of computation of algorithms, proving whether programs are correct, and so forth. These things are what being a computer science academic is about, and that's why most CS degrees are math-heavy.
The work that the majority of software developers do in the real world does not use much math. (As other commenters have pointed out, there are exceptions; aside from scientific programming, such fields as data mining and financial analysis require math.) There are a few schools that offer computer engineering degrees (rather than computer science) that focus on preparing you for real-world work. Community colleges and continuing education programs also offer many classes focused on the practical aspects of software.
For years the medical profession has been telling people to cut back on salt because salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is bad for people; therefore lowering blood pressure by reducing salt intake should reduce the death rate from hypertension. There is only one problem - a recent study strongly suggests that it's not true; reducing salt intake to the levels advocated by the anti-salt activists appears to increase mortality. Reducing high blood pressure with drugs does appear to decrease mortality, so don't stop taking your high blood pressure meds.
Wheat can self-pollinate, but that doesn't mean that every bit of wheat out there is self-pollinated. In the wild, some of your wheat will cross-pollinate with other plants; if there are GMO wheat plants nearby it will cross-pollinate with those. As a result, we are finding patented GMO DNA in organic wheat that never had any direct connection with Monsanto; the farmers retained seed that had cross-pollinated with GMO wheat in neighboring farms.
My high school had a computer room with an IBM 1620 (later replaced with an IBM 1130) that you programmed with punch cards. I found it in 10th grade and didn't have room for my schedule for a computer class until 12th grade so I picked it up myself; by the time I reached 12th grade I was well beyond what the class had to offer so I didn't take it. A bit later I got time on the local university's time sharing system: PDP-10 and Model 35 Teletypes.
NYC is a special case because the density of taxis and taxi use is high enough that street hailing actually works pretty well. Until you need a taxi outside the major business or rich residential areas; then you need to call one. (Or if you're rich, your building's doorman calls one for you.) I haven't tried it, but hailing a cab on the street probably doesn't work well north of 100th St.
Here in Boston and surrounding towns, hailing a taxi on the street mostly fails unless you're in one of the places where times of high demand can be predicted (Landsdowne St at closing time, sports and concert venues when an event ends). Either you walk to one of the well populated taxi stands that exist in busy areas (big hotels, or busy tourist areas like Quincy Market or Harvard Square) or you call one. I suspect the story is much the same in most American cities.
The cab companies don't need to skim from the dispatchers. They're already taking an enormous cut from the drivers. It's inherent to any place that uses a system of taxi medallions that are kept artificially scarce; all the bargaining power belongs to the medallion owners and they take most of the profits, leaving the drivers just barely enough to scrape by. Taxis should be licensed by states (yes, I said STATES, not cities and towns) so that they can be required to meet safety and honesty standards, but it should be a modest annual fee and the licenses should be issued to all takers.
Why states rather than cities? In NYC it doesn't matter as much because the city is so huge, but in other places (greater Boston for example, where I live) licensing by city causes some major system inefficiencies. Cabs aren't allowed to pick up passengers except in the city or town where they are licensed, even though fares often take them to other cities and towns. A Cambridge cab that takes a passenger to the airport in Boston has to return empty; ditto a Boston cab that takes a passenger from the airport to Cambridge. Shifting to statewide taxi licensing would eliminate that inefficiency, saving time, money, and fossil fuel consumption.
As for NYC standardizing on a vehicle with no hybrid option, that's just stupid. Urban cabs are an ideal use case for hybrids, because nearly all of their driving is on congested city streets in stop-and-go traffic. Hybrids typically deliver DOUBLE the gas mileage of non-hybrids in a taxi. Taxis will also be an excellent use for full electric vehicles once cars with sufficient range and battery lifetime are available.
The Intel chips also have a big edge at audio and video encoding. But that is likely in part because of their market dominance.
Why, you ask? Encoding applications contain critical tight loops, and how well a processor performs the specific sequence of instructions can make a huge difference in speed. Those inner loops are even sometimes done as hand-tuned assembler code, one of the few places that assembler is still relevant other than embedded systems programming. Because Intel's CPUs hold most of the market, those loops are optimized to work well on them; performance on AMD systems isn't an important consideration. Inner rendering loops in games are another place where carefully tuned code gets used, and again Intel's processors are likely to get more attention.
Another factor is that the best optimizing compiler currently available for x86 code is produced by Intel. Naturally, their efforts only go into making the resulting code work better on Intel processors. Some results have suggested that their compiler deliberately produces code sequences that are especially bad for AMD's designs.
A fairer comparison with the i3 would be a higher performance AMD part, one that has the same TDP in the real world rather than on spec sheets. I suspect the i3 will still be faster but the gap will be smaller.
The $1500 4K TV that has been written about here on Slashdot is almost cheap enough. And you're right; as people move up to higher resolution monitors they're going to need more GPU horsepower as well. The masses still won't be buying at $650 but it's a step in the right direction.
They had both a three-core Phemon and a three-core A6 APU. Neither is a current design though it may still be possible to buy them.
AMD currently sell six-core processors, which are really 8-core designs with one core pair turned off. Their current designs use pairs of CPU cores with some shared resources so the number of cores will always be an even number; I don't think it's likely that they will ever release a part that disabled only one of the two cores in a pair.
Intel doesn't currently disable cores in their CPUs to create lower-grade chips. They do speed grading however, and they may do cache disabling - if they do it would be because some of the cache fails testing. They did more of that sort of thing in the past; your FPU-less 486SX was likely to be a 486DX die with a defective FPU.
AMD does disable CPU cores. That's where the 3-core Phenoms came from, and where the 6-core FX comes from now. I believe the 4 core FX is normally a separate design but some may be 8-core die with half the chip turned off; the end user gets the same performance either way.
As others have already pointed out, this kind of thing has been standard business practice in graphics for many years. The down-spec chips may have out-and-out defective portions, or they may fail to meet their power and heat specifications if everything is turned on. Or they may be perfectly good chips that AMD or NVidia sells as lower-end chips because they don't have enough demand for the expensive ones.
How is a Blu-Ray drive outdated? Streaming has its uses but local content still delivers the highest video quality and will for some time to come; Netflix isn't ready to stream 30GB every time somebody watches a movie.
There will surely be an update to the Blu-Ray standard for 4K content. Most likely it will be based on the already existing BDXL 100GB standard and the upcoming h.265 codec, and both the PS4 and the Xbox One will quietly include drives that can read BDXL and later get a software upgrade. They won't have hardware decode for h.265 but both consoles will have enough CPU power to do without.
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Windows Phone is actually a perfectly OK operating system (after many tries - we're up to WP8 after all). What it lacks is apps, and it's never going to get them because developers don't want to have to support three platforms. If they had their way they wouldn't even have to support two, but most accept that as a necessary evil to limit the monopoly power of the platform owners.
Microsoft also gets a big demerit for the way they handled Windows Phone 7. They put a big (unsuccessful) marketing push behind it, and then they announced WP8. They also announced that the WP7 and WP8 apps were incompatible, and that the WP7 phones would never get WP8. They missed the opportunity to show some class - so few WP7 phones had been sold that Microsoft should have simply given a free WP8 phone to everybody who had bought one, thus dodging the accusation of abandoning people who had just bought new Microsoft phones.
Microsoft's best plan for Windows Phone would have been to ignore the consumer market and go all-in on enterprise computing. If they had done that - offered from day one a full implementation of Office, VPN support, domain login, and all the other stuff that the big corporate types wanted, and put a strong emphasis on security - they could have established themselves as a real alternative for some users. instead, they chose to take on iOS and Android head-on, which was guaranteed to lose.
The problem with that theory is that IBM wins the case by proving that SCO has no intellectual property, leaving nothing to take. I don't think SCO has any remaining real assets to speak of. IBM could claim ownership of the SCO trademark but that surely has negative value by now.
A CFL that is left on continuously and that has proper ventilation actually does last as long as they claim it will - in my experience, often longer. The claimed life expectancy of most CFLs ranges from 7,000 to 10,000 hours; that's in the vicinity of one year of continuous use (8,760 hours unless it's a leap year). You will also get close to the claimed lifetime if the bulb is turned on and off infrequently; a bulb that is turned on once per day for two hours probably will last ten years.
Two things shorten the lifetime of CFLs in typical home use. One, they get turned on and off many times per day, which is not good for any type of fluorescent lighting. (It also shortens the life of incandescent bulbs but less dramatically.) Two, they are often installed in fixtures with poor ventilation; the result is that the electronics overheat and burn out.
LED bulbs solve one of the two problems; turning them on and off frequently doesn't bother them at all. Overheating of the electronics is still an issue. Overheating of the LEDs is also an issue, which is why LED bulbs have big heat sinks. They also have even longer claimed life expectancies, usually 25,000 hours (about 3 years continuous) or more, and that rating reflects when the bulb will fade to 70% of original output rather than when it will fail completely.
These light bulbs offer far more than on-off control, so enabling the light switch wouldn't do the same thing. They are multi-color bulbs using three colors of LED (RGB) so you can change the intensity and the color of light you get. The Philips Hue system is the most direct competitor; it uses a standalone bridge that you connect with a cable to your router, rather than a WiFi-enabled bulb like the LIFX system does.
Smart light bulbs are a mixed bag for energy savings. On the one hand, the ease of controlling them means that lights are less likely to be left on in situations where they are not needed. On the other hand, a conventional bulb turned off at the wall or fixture switch consumes zero watts of power, but a smart bulb has to use some power to be able to respond to commands. The LIFX kickstarter clams that it's a very small amount, but their claim that "a AA battery would keep a LIFX smartbulb in standby mode for approximately 1-2 years" probably is just the amount of power that the controller itself uses and ignores power supply efficiency. The master bulb is more power hungry, requiring 2-3 watts. Currently they seem to be selling only what the Kickstarter called master bulbs; every bulb has a WiFi chip as well as mesh networking. But now they claim that the standby power is less than 1 watt.
RGB bulbs are also less energy efficient than phosphor coated white LED bulbs at present. LIFX says their bulb uses 15W and is the equivalent of a 60W incandescent. (They don't give output in lumens, so I can't evaluate how equivalent it is.) The current state of the art for phosphor-coated bulbs is 9-10W for a 60W equivalent bulb.
If you use Bluetooth for playback you lose the benefit of FLAC. Bluetooth audio is compressed, and the compression usually sounds worse than MP3 does at the bit rates that people mostly use these days. (The standard compression for Bluetooth music is SBC; others can optionally be implemented but both ends of the link must have support.)
A radio station that plays only music where no payola is available? Not likely.
The fact that there are more SSH servers on Windows than on Linux is an illustration of the advantages of free software.
Nearly every Linux distribution comes with OpenSSH. (On some distros it is not part of the default install but is available from the software repositories.) It is also included with Mac OS X and the various flavors of BSD Unix. OpenSSH is free both as in speech and as in beer, fully featured, and well debugged and highly reliable. Nobody is going to enter the field of doing SSH software for Linux unless they have something to offer that OpenSSH lacks - additional features, higher performance, and/or commercial support.
The picture is different on Windows. Some of the Windows SSH servers listed on Wikipedia are available for free non-commercial use, but none are truly free software. The only way to get a free software implementation of an SSH server on Windows is to install Cygwin, which includes OpenSSH. People keep reinventing the SSH wheel because there is no solid free option.
Until PowerShell came into the picture, an SSH server for Windows was also far less useful than its Linux counterpart because there were too many useful things that you could not do from the command line. SSH can also be about X Windows forwarding on Unix and Linux, but that doesn't work on Windows. Windows has its own solutions for desktop forwarding, and some of them work well; just saying that it's not a reason to install an SSH server.
The Transformer Book Trio is actually two computers - an Atom-based tablet that runs Android plus a i7-equipped keyboard/CPU that runs Windows 8. This article http://www.zdnet.com/asus-doubles-down-with-the-transformer-book-trio-7000016269/ states it a bit more clearly.
Mostly true if you're in the US; not much of the good Australian beer is being sent over here. Certainly not true if you live in Australia, as there is some excellent beer to be had. Craft brewing has taken hold in most developed nations now.
I'd vote for Fosters being the PBR of Australia rather than the Bud. To my taste, Budweiser is unique among mass market American beers in that it tastes actively bad; perhaps I don't like the flavor note from the beechwood chips. The others are just flavorless and uninteresting.
They're not quite that limited. The one with the smallest build area, the Up! Mini, can make objects up to 4.7" in each dimension. The largest one, the Solidoodle 2, can do 6" cubed, and the Cube 3D falls in the middle at 5.5" cubed.
You're right, however; at the present time 3D printing doesn't make sense for objects that you can easily buy. It DOES have a place for prototyping new designs, or for creating replacement parts for old things that are no longer being made. If you need knows for something new you just buy knobs, but if you need a replacement knob for a 40 year old device and you want it to match the shape of the other knobs you may need a 3D printer.
Is the volume lower in the summer? Some people might prefer to schedule surgery then because it's less disruptive to their work life. Teachers are the obvious example, but even for others it might be easier to fit surgery into a time when things at the office slow down.
Horsepower are not all created equal.
When you look at gasoline engines, you have to consider things like the torque curve and throttle lag. More power is available at some engine speeds than at others, and power doesn't become instantly available when you stomp on the accelerator. Electric motors, on the other hand, have a flat torque curve (just about all the power is available from 0 RPM upward) and no lag worth mentioning. (The control software is another matter.) One reason that driving a Tesla is so mind-blowing is that it can throw you into your seat from a standing start in a way that no gasoline car can match, at least not without serious clutch abuse.
When you are cruising at a steady highway speed in a Prius, all or nearly all the power is coming from the gasoline engine. When you hit the accelerator to speed up you get a quick burst from the electric motor and then the gas engine ramps up, so you speed up more quickly than a gasoline engine with its modest horsepower can. And you save fuel because quick throttle bursts on a gasoline engine are very inefficient.
Theoretical computer science is very math heavy. Stuff like studying what is computable and what is not, the order of computation of algorithms, proving whether programs are correct, and so forth. These things are what being a computer science academic is about, and that's why most CS degrees are math-heavy.
The work that the majority of software developers do in the real world does not use much math. (As other commenters have pointed out, there are exceptions; aside from scientific programming, such fields as data mining and financial analysis require math.) There are a few schools that offer computer engineering degrees (rather than computer science) that focus on preparing you for real-world work. Community colleges and continuing education programs also offer many classes focused on the practical aspects of software.
Let's not forget "don't eat salt".
For years the medical profession has been telling people to cut back on salt because salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is bad for people; therefore lowering blood pressure by reducing salt intake should reduce the death rate from hypertension. There is only one problem - a recent study strongly suggests that it's not true; reducing salt intake to the levels advocated by the anti-salt activists appears to increase mortality. Reducing high blood pressure with drugs does appear to decrease mortality, so don't stop taking your high blood pressure meds.
Wheat can self-pollinate, but that doesn't mean that every bit of wheat out there is self-pollinated. In the wild, some of your wheat will cross-pollinate with other plants; if there are GMO wheat plants nearby it will cross-pollinate with those. As a result, we are finding patented GMO DNA in organic wheat that never had any direct connection with Monsanto; the farmers retained seed that had cross-pollinated with GMO wheat in neighboring farms.
My high school had a computer room with an IBM 1620 (later replaced with an IBM 1130) that you programmed with punch cards. I found it in 10th grade and didn't have room for my schedule for a computer class until 12th grade so I picked it up myself; by the time I reached 12th grade I was well beyond what the class had to offer so I didn't take it. A bit later I got time on the local university's time sharing system: PDP-10 and Model 35 Teletypes.
NYC is a special case because the density of taxis and taxi use is high enough that street hailing actually works pretty well. Until you need a taxi outside the major business or rich residential areas; then you need to call one. (Or if you're rich, your building's doorman calls one for you.) I haven't tried it, but hailing a cab on the street probably doesn't work well north of 100th St.
Here in Boston and surrounding towns, hailing a taxi on the street mostly fails unless you're in one of the places where times of high demand can be predicted (Landsdowne St at closing time, sports and concert venues when an event ends). Either you walk to one of the well populated taxi stands that exist in busy areas (big hotels, or busy tourist areas like Quincy Market or Harvard Square) or you call one. I suspect the story is much the same in most American cities.
The cab companies don't need to skim from the dispatchers. They're already taking an enormous cut from the drivers. It's inherent to any place that uses a system of taxi medallions that are kept artificially scarce; all the bargaining power belongs to the medallion owners and they take most of the profits, leaving the drivers just barely enough to scrape by. Taxis should be licensed by states (yes, I said STATES, not cities and towns) so that they can be required to meet safety and honesty standards, but it should be a modest annual fee and the licenses should be issued to all takers.
Why states rather than cities? In NYC it doesn't matter as much because the city is so huge, but in other places (greater Boston for example, where I live) licensing by city causes some major system inefficiencies. Cabs aren't allowed to pick up passengers except in the city or town where they are licensed, even though fares often take them to other cities and towns. A Cambridge cab that takes a passenger to the airport in Boston has to return empty; ditto a Boston cab that takes a passenger from the airport to Cambridge. Shifting to statewide taxi licensing would eliminate that inefficiency, saving time, money, and fossil fuel consumption.
As for NYC standardizing on a vehicle with no hybrid option, that's just stupid. Urban cabs are an ideal use case for hybrids, because nearly all of their driving is on congested city streets in stop-and-go traffic. Hybrids typically deliver DOUBLE the gas mileage of non-hybrids in a taxi. Taxis will also be an excellent use for full electric vehicles once cars with sufficient range and battery lifetime are available.
The Intel chips also have a big edge at audio and video encoding. But that is likely in part because of their market dominance.
Why, you ask? Encoding applications contain critical tight loops, and how well a processor performs the specific sequence of instructions can make a huge difference in speed. Those inner loops are even sometimes done as hand-tuned assembler code, one of the few places that assembler is still relevant other than embedded systems programming. Because Intel's CPUs hold most of the market, those loops are optimized to work well on them; performance on AMD systems isn't an important consideration. Inner rendering loops in games are another place where carefully tuned code gets used, and again Intel's processors are likely to get more attention.
Another factor is that the best optimizing compiler currently available for x86 code is produced by Intel. Naturally, their efforts only go into making the resulting code work better on Intel processors. Some results have suggested that their compiler deliberately produces code sequences that are especially bad for AMD's designs.
A fairer comparison with the i3 would be a higher performance AMD part, one that has the same TDP in the real world rather than on spec sheets. I suspect the i3 will still be faster but the gap will be smaller.
The $1500 4K TV that has been written about here on Slashdot is almost cheap enough. And you're right; as people move up to higher resolution monitors they're going to need more GPU horsepower as well. The masses still won't be buying at $650 but it's a step in the right direction.
They had both a three-core Phemon and a three-core A6 APU. Neither is a current design though it may still be possible to buy them. AMD currently sell six-core processors, which are really 8-core designs with one core pair turned off. Their current designs use pairs of CPU cores with some shared resources so the number of cores will always be an even number; I don't think it's likely that they will ever release a part that disabled only one of the two cores in a pair.
Intel doesn't currently disable cores in their CPUs to create lower-grade chips. They do speed grading however, and they may do cache disabling - if they do it would be because some of the cache fails testing. They did more of that sort of thing in the past; your FPU-less 486SX was likely to be a 486DX die with a defective FPU. AMD does disable CPU cores. That's where the 3-core Phenoms came from, and where the 6-core FX comes from now. I believe the 4 core FX is normally a separate design but some may be 8-core die with half the chip turned off; the end user gets the same performance either way. As others have already pointed out, this kind of thing has been standard business practice in graphics for many years. The down-spec chips may have out-and-out defective portions, or they may fail to meet their power and heat specifications if everything is turned on. Or they may be perfectly good chips that AMD or NVidia sells as lower-end chips because they don't have enough demand for the expensive ones.
It's not earthshaking news but it's an announcement that a significant number of Slashdot readers will be interested in. Looks worthy to me.
How is a Blu-Ray drive outdated? Streaming has its uses but local content still delivers the highest video quality and will for some time to come; Netflix isn't ready to stream 30GB every time somebody watches a movie.
There will surely be an update to the Blu-Ray standard for 4K content. Most likely it will be based on the already existing BDXL 100GB standard and the upcoming h.265 codec, and both the PS4 and the Xbox One will quietly include drives that can read BDXL and later get a software upgrade. They won't have hardware decode for h.265 but both consoles will have enough CPU power to do without.