The MR2 came out the same time as the Fiero, with design beginning in the 70s. And unlike GM management, they actually wanted to build a good sports car instead of a sporty commuter that handled like crap. They did very well on the SCCA tracks in the mid 80s.
For a short while the Supra was interesting, then Toyota decided the Americans weren't worthy of a RWD coupe any more and started rebadging Celicas as Supras for us instead.
You have it backwards. The Celica Supra was a reworked Celica for the first two generations, and then it diverged. The last model was lighter and more powrful than a contemporary 300ZX..
in the past
"basically every car Toyota has ever sold in the US in the history of time" Yes, in the past.
Was there really that much demand for an ugly vehicle with AWD after Pontiac killed the Aztek?
The Aztek wasn't an SUV, more a minivan in SUV guise (basically, an early crossover). It had an AWD system just to give it more traction in bad weather. The FJ is actually a hard-core 4x4 designed with extensive off-road testing. We have generally accepted ugliness in such cars, and it can in fact be seen as good looking for the purpose. Take the Jeep, Land Rover, Scout and HMMWV for example.
In any case, none of the above were at all boring, which was my point. Sadly, the FJ is the only non-boring car Totoya has out now. If you're looking for a sports coupe or sedan, you're out of luck.
A Tesla wouldn't be good for my high-speed long-distance runs, where I only stop long enough to fuel. However, for a nice leisurely road trip, it might not be bad to linger for an hour at my stops.
OS X was taken 64-bit from the sky down. First certain performance-intensive libraries like math, then others, then Finder, then BSD, then Mach. It allowed for a more gradual approach that didn't break tons of applications require 64-bit hardware from the beginning.
For iOS it's much easier. They can just install a completely 32- or 64-bit version based hardware. There are fewer than 10 32-bit major hardware variations out there, and all will be out of support in about four years. By that time, the "Apple TV" product will be using the then-old 64-bit A7 processor while the latest iPhone (or even MacBook) gets the A10.
But a big reason that I don't think anybody has mentioned is that with ARM64 cryptography functions in the SIMD unit now handle AES and SHA. That right there should give a huge speed boost to anything encryption related, which Apple is building more and more into the system.
32-it ARM already has more registers (16) than 64-bit x86 (14). This is far less of a "break the bottleneck" scenario than when x86 went from a paltry 6 to 14.
OS X and iOS are much the same. Likely they already have an ARM OS X running (they had x86 running years before the switch). In a few years expect Apple to design a more powerful 4+ core A series chip, and for the latest MacBook Air to be running it, advertised battery life "all day long."
It will translate x86 applications to ARM and cache the translated executable. XCode will have another checkbox for ARM to produce fat binaries native on both platforms. They're using OpenGL on both, so that should translate between the PowerVR and NVidia GPUs.
Objective-C uses automatic reference counting. For most cases, the compiler inserts all the the needed object releases for you. Garbage collection used to exist in Objective-C but was deprecated.
Garbage collection uses CPU and memory resources to run, not good in a handheld. On a server I've seen garbage collection taking up 50% of the CPU when memory was scarce.
You just made me think of a big reason. Apple just finished supporting 32-bit Darwin and Core libraries in its shipping desktop OS, but is still supporting them for mobile. All future mobile products will be 64-bit, and Apple's iOS hardware support tends to last about three years.
So, 3-4 years from now Apple gets to be 64-bit across the board, no more 32-bit legacy in any supported product.
The main benefit of this move to the latest ARM CPU design is ironically much the same as the advantage brought by x86_64 - more registers are now available and some floating point operations are more efficient.
The extra registers won't mean that much of a difference as x86. This would be going from 16 to 31 (unless Apple decided to do something different), which you are right probably won't mean much since that probably isn't the performance choke point. But x86 went from 6 to 14, and I remember one game got a 20% speed improvement just recompiling to use the extra registers. Still notice current ARM 32 has more registers than x86-64.
If anyone is well positioned for apps to run on both operating systems it's... Microsoft. They have one kernel running on phones and tablets and laptops.
iOS is OS X, same kernel, same core libraries, just a few things swapped in and out, a different UI, and different apps. For example, both iOS and OS X apps would use the Core Image framework to manipulate images or video. The same applies for animations, text, audio, etc. There are obvious differences of course, OS X doesn't need the code dealing with phone calls, and iOS doesn't need RAID storage management.
They also haven't arbitrarily delineated PCs and Tablets like OSX has.
That's a big reason why Microsoft tablets have always failed in the market.
When OSX attempts to bridge the gulf between OSX and iOS it's going to run into the exact same challenge that Microsoft has in Windows 8.
It will be interesting to see what happens if they try. Right now it looks like streamlining -- reducing the differences between platforms to allow easy code reuse between iOS and OS X applications. Eventually a developer may be able to build one package that will run on either platform, with appropriate user interfaces exposed for each.
All they have to do is make a fingerprint mandatory for an essential service. If they require it for drivers licenses and public transportation passes, they have over 99% of the population covered.
It would depend on the implementation, and I'd like to see how Apple is doing it.
If it is on the chip in a crypto module as they way, a well designed one would only have a few functions. One would be to store (when you teach the system your print). Another would be authenticate (send fingerprint data to see if it matches anything stored). It would be pretty stupid (or required by a three-letter-agency) to include a function to read the fingerprint data. If that function isn't built into the chip hardware, it's not going to happen without some very expensive equipment.
I listened to my Walkman all the time, purchased 1983. I played games, did schoolwork and programmed on my Atari 800, purchased 1984. Then I got an Olivetti M10 notebook (same as a TRS-80 Model 100) in 1985. I spent countless hours on dialup BBSs. I wasn't rich, actually fairly poor. All of these were bought with summer job money.
Unfortunately, email for the masses outside of a walled garden wouldn't be popular for years. FidoNet was in its infancy at this time.
In the conditions of your contract you gave up a specified amount of privacy (your time/location information at toll booths) in exchange for the consideration of the convenience the service provides. They have now taken more privacy than you willingly gave up, providing more value for themselves than the contract gave them, and have provided no further consideration to you.
Classic example of "Give government a tool, and it will be abused."
You keep trotting out this "more nimple players" that are cooler thing. I don't see them. Samsung? Big, slow, selling cheaply built phones with various half-baked features haphazardly thrown in. They've been in such a race to copy Apple that their stores at one point were an Apple Store copy down to accidentally including Apple logos. HTC? About the same for the phones. Google/Moto is now just starting to do something interesting, but we'll have to see where that goes.
Cooler? I don't see the big lines at their stores on release day. I don't see the young crowd camping out for days in front of a Samsung store.
You are right that (aside from the scanner) there was no big hardware wow thing that wasn't basically an increase in specs and quality. But this is Apple's "S" year, which is normally just a bump in specs. The big test as to whether Apple has lost it will be next year with an iPhone 6. That has to produce something overall innovative or Apple has shown it can't do it without Jobs.
One, low-level classified material may be sent by courier (expensive) or using USPS Certified or Registered mail. FedEx is allowed only for urgent overnight and requires special permission.
One time market leader in smartphones? On a volume basis, now #2 worldwide, and that's against much cheaper (and even free) phones sold. On a profit basis, by far #1.
Main product has been eclipsed by more nimble competitors? Apple releases once per year. Given the fast pace of phone technology, in that time it is likely one of their many competitors will release something better in various ways. Apple just release again, eclipsing them. The leapfrog game will continue.
Has a large cash hoard but nothing to invest in? Apple has been buying a lot of companies in order to bolster its chip design, mapping, search, voice control and other products and technologies. The fingerprint reader on the iPhone 5S comes from the $356,000,000 buy of AuthenTec last year. This doesn't count the billions invested in manufacturing. Apple just keeps making money faster than they can spend it.
Develops overly conservative derivative products to protect its existing business and margins? You say protect, I say leverage. It all works together very well in the ecosystem. Remember though that Apple is known to take a hit on margins just to make a better product.
Was once seen as hip and cool but now ridiculed as "my father's" device? Yeah, right.
I should have been more specific, their nuclear weapons program goes back to the 80s. However, I'm only talking the active program. I'm sure Kim had dreams of nukes back in the 60s too.
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The MR2 came out the same time as the Fiero, with design beginning in the 70s. And unlike GM management, they actually wanted to build a good sports car instead of a sporty commuter that handled like crap. They did very well on the SCCA tracks in the mid 80s.
You have it backwards. The Celica Supra was a reworked Celica for the first two generations, and then it diverged. The last model was lighter and more powrful than a contemporary 300ZX..
"basically every car Toyota has ever sold in the US in the history of time" Yes, in the past.
The Aztek wasn't an SUV, more a minivan in SUV guise (basically, an early crossover). It had an AWD system just to give it more traction in bad weather. The FJ is actually a hard-core 4x4 designed with extensive off-road testing. We have generally accepted ugliness in such cars, and it can in fact be seen as good looking for the purpose. Take the Jeep, Land Rover, Scout and HMMWV for example.
In any case, none of the above were at all boring, which was my point. Sadly, the FJ is the only non-boring car Totoya has out now. If you're looking for a sports coupe or sedan, you're out of luck.
MR2, Supra in the past. FJ Cruiser in the present.
If you don't restrict to the US, the 2000 GT too.
And in the process made the thing practically impossible to roll over.
A Tesla wouldn't be good for my high-speed long-distance runs, where I only stop long enough to fuel. However, for a nice leisurely road trip, it might not be bad to linger for an hour at my stops.
OS X was taken 64-bit from the sky down. First certain performance-intensive libraries like math, then others, then Finder, then BSD, then Mach. It allowed for a more gradual approach that didn't break tons of applications require 64-bit hardware from the beginning.
For iOS it's much easier. They can just install a completely 32- or 64-bit version based hardware. There are fewer than 10 32-bit major hardware variations out there, and all will be out of support in about four years. By that time, the "Apple TV" product will be using the then-old 64-bit A7 processor while the latest iPhone (or even MacBook) gets the A10.
But a big reason that I don't think anybody has mentioned is that with ARM64 cryptography functions in the SIMD unit now handle AES and SHA. That right there should give a huge speed boost to anything encryption related, which Apple is building more and more into the system.
32-it ARM already has more registers (16) than 64-bit x86 (14). This is far less of a "break the bottleneck" scenario than when x86 went from a paltry 6 to 14.
OS X and iOS are much the same. Likely they already have an ARM OS X running (they had x86 running years before the switch). In a few years expect Apple to design a more powerful 4+ core A series chip, and for the latest MacBook Air to be running it, advertised battery life "all day long."
It will translate x86 applications to ARM and cache the translated executable. XCode will have another checkbox for ARM to produce fat binaries native on both platforms. They're using OpenGL on both, so that should translate between the PowerVR and NVidia GPUs.
Objective-C uses automatic reference counting. For most cases, the compiler inserts all the the needed object releases for you. Garbage collection used to exist in Objective-C but was deprecated.
Garbage collection uses CPU and memory resources to run, not good in a handheld. On a server I've seen garbage collection taking up 50% of the CPU when memory was scarce.
Apple designs their own chips.
You just made me think of a big reason. Apple just finished supporting 32-bit Darwin and Core libraries in its shipping desktop OS, but is still supporting them for mobile. All future mobile products will be 64-bit, and Apple's iOS hardware support tends to last about three years.
So, 3-4 years from now Apple gets to be 64-bit across the board, no more 32-bit legacy in any supported product.
The extra registers won't mean that much of a difference as x86. This would be going from 16 to 31 (unless Apple decided to do something different), which you are right probably won't mean much since that probably isn't the performance choke point. But x86 went from 6 to 14, and I remember one game got a 20% speed improvement just recompiling to use the extra registers. Still notice current ARM 32 has more registers than x86-64.
Try to download an iOS 7 app on your older iOS, it'll offer to give you an older version.
iOS is OS X, same kernel, same core libraries, just a few things swapped in and out, a different UI, and different apps. For example, both iOS and OS X apps would use the Core Image framework to manipulate images or video. The same applies for animations, text, audio, etc. There are obvious differences of course, OS X doesn't need the code dealing with phone calls, and iOS doesn't need RAID storage management.
That's a big reason why Microsoft tablets have always failed in the market.
It will be interesting to see what happens if they try. Right now it looks like streamlining -- reducing the differences between platforms to allow easy code reuse between iOS and OS X applications. Eventually a developer may be able to build one package that will run on either platform, with appropriate user interfaces exposed for each.
At least the French admitted they wanted GSM encryption weak so they could break it.
All they have to do is make a fingerprint mandatory for an essential service. If they require it for drivers licenses and public transportation passes, they have over 99% of the population covered.
You're assuming the mapping algorithm produces a 1:1 hash. Possibly the numerical map of the fingerprint (the "hash") includes some fuzziness.
It would depend on the implementation, and I'd like to see how Apple is doing it.
If it is on the chip in a crypto module as they way, a well designed one would only have a few functions. One would be to store (when you teach the system your print). Another would be authenticate (send fingerprint data to see if it matches anything stored). It would be pretty stupid (or required by a three-letter-agency) to include a function to read the fingerprint data. If that function isn't built into the chip hardware, it's not going to happen without some very expensive equipment.
No, it's something AuthenTec came up with, which made that company worth $390 million to Apple.
As a kid in 1986:
I listened to my Walkman all the time, purchased 1983. I played games, did schoolwork and programmed on my Atari 800, purchased 1984. Then I got an Olivetti M10 notebook (same as a TRS-80 Model 100) in 1985. I spent countless hours on dialup BBSs. I wasn't rich, actually fairly poor. All of these were bought with summer job money.
Unfortunately, email for the masses outside of a walled garden wouldn't be popular for years. FidoNet was in its infancy at this time.
In the conditions of your contract you gave up a specified amount of privacy (your time/location information at toll booths) in exchange for the consideration of the convenience the service provides. They have now taken more privacy than you willingly gave up, providing more value for themselves than the contract gave them, and have provided no further consideration to you.
Classic example of "Give government a tool, and it will be abused."
A grant of immunity from prosecution solves all his Fifth Amendment worries.
You keep trotting out this "more nimple players" that are cooler thing. I don't see them. Samsung? Big, slow, selling cheaply built phones with various half-baked features haphazardly thrown in. They've been in such a race to copy Apple that their stores at one point were an Apple Store copy down to accidentally including Apple logos. HTC? About the same for the phones. Google/Moto is now just starting to do something interesting, but we'll have to see where that goes.
Cooler? I don't see the big lines at their stores on release day. I don't see the young crowd camping out for days in front of a Samsung store.
You are right that (aside from the scanner) there was no big hardware wow thing that wasn't basically an increase in specs and quality. But this is Apple's "S" year, which is normally just a bump in specs. The big test as to whether Apple has lost it will be next year with an iPhone 6. That has to produce something overall innovative or Apple has shown it can't do it without Jobs.
One, low-level classified material may be sent by courier (expensive) or using USPS Certified or Registered mail. FedEx is allowed only for urgent overnight and requires special permission.
One time market leader in smartphones?
On a volume basis, now #2 worldwide, and that's against much cheaper (and even free) phones sold. On a profit basis, by far #1.
Main product has been eclipsed by more nimble competitors?
Apple releases once per year. Given the fast pace of phone technology, in that time it is likely one of their many competitors will release something better in various ways. Apple just release again, eclipsing them. The leapfrog game will continue.
Has a large cash hoard but nothing to invest in?
Apple has been buying a lot of companies in order to bolster its chip design, mapping, search, voice control and other products and technologies. The fingerprint reader on the iPhone 5S comes from the $356,000,000 buy of AuthenTec last year. This doesn't count the billions invested in manufacturing. Apple just keeps making money faster than they can spend it.
Develops overly conservative derivative products to protect its existing business and margins?
You say protect, I say leverage. It all works together very well in the ecosystem. Remember though that Apple is known to take a hit on margins just to make a better product.
Was once seen as hip and cool but now ridiculed as "my father's" device?
Yeah, right.
I should have been more specific, their nuclear weapons program goes back to the 80s. However, I'm only talking the active program. I'm sure Kim had dreams of nukes back in the 60s too.