Original poster: "Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that."
This article gives some insight into why Intel is doing this. Basically, ARM has been making noises for some time about getting into the server market. Intel is very concerned about this, because ARM is used to lower margins and willing to license their designs widely, and could easily undercut Intel on price. They see the writing on the wall. Sure, they would like to keep ECC and other server-type goodies as premium features, but that's no longer a realistic option. Either they have to offer something cheaper, or customers who want low-cost, high-reliability server hardware will jump ship as soon as they can. This is the market niche the Atom S1200 is designed to fill. Intel gets to tout its advantage of backwards compatibility while being able to dramatically undercut other server-grade hardware on price. With this, ARM is going to have a much harder time convincing data centers to switch.
By the way, if all you care about is ECC, you don't have to buy an expensive CPU from Intel to get that (though you do need a C-series chipset rather than the consumer-grade stuff). Many of Intel's Ivy Bridge Pentium and Core i3 processors now support ECC, though this has not been widely publicized. For example, this i3-3220 is only $119.99 at Newegg and according to Intel's official site it supports ECC.
Given that the press shots for the part show a damn lot of teeny BGA balls on the bottom, I'd hope that it isn't an end user part...
Existing Intel Atom chips are also BGA-soldered, but you can purchase motherboards with the chip already included for DIY systems. The same is true of AMD's E-series. The question is whether any of Intel's customers will want to supply S1200-series boards to end users, or if they prefer to reserve them for charging out the nose in prebuilt systems.
Well, OK, but I'm not going to be buying 1000 units and I don't plan on laying out and soldering my own board either. How much will it cost to get a S1200 motherboard+chip combo in a standard form factor? Or is this going to be OEM-only?
But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors.
Or, alternatively, manufacturers and retailers need to stop trying to pass off tunerless TV sets as monitors.
A wide aspect ratio is great for HDTV and feature films. But when you're trying to get work done on the desktop, 4:3 is still superior to the alternatives. Actually, for web browsing and word processing, a 16:9 monitor turned 90 degrees might work fairly well – but this is poorly supported with existing operating systems and it would break Windows ClearType, which is needed to get halfway decent looking text on today's low-DPI displays.
This LG monitor isn't that terrible – it has a resolution of 2560x1080, which means you aren't losing any more vertical space than you would with a standard 1080p monitor. But 1080 vertical lines is about the minimum that is even somewhat acceptable. What frightens me is the prospect that we're going to wind up with 1792x768 or some such abomination becoming the standard on laptops. For some reason, vendors really seem to love those short-screen 768p displays, even though they don't match HDTV resolutions or any other known standard.
I don't see how this helps average Windows users in any way. Most people who have a choice will be staying with Windows 7, and even those who are stuck with Windows 8 for whatever reason can still run VLC just fine on the Desktop. (Like all other x86 software it won't run on WinRT, but WinRT is dead on arrival.) Metro needs to be killed quickly, and it's baffling as to why an open source project would try to prop it up.
If VLC wants to fund a Kickstarter, putting more resources into Blu-Ray menu support would be a much better choice. This is one thing that open-source software still can't do, and is one of the remaining barriers to a truly competitive open-source media player.
JavaScript is a horrid language. Nonetheless, it's the only widely supported language for client-side browser code, so we're stuck with it there.
But why on Earth would anyone even consider running this abomination on a server, when there are many other, better languages designed specifically for server-side code?
It used to be that all of the popular desktop operating systems – Windows, Linux, and even MacOS – offered a good degree of customizability. Except on Linux you didn't have to delve into the depths of configuration files, but you could change things if you wanted to. This was because the interfaces were designed by programmers who understood the need for flexibility.
The rise of self-proclaimed UI designers and UI experts has changed all that. Now the trend across the board is to pitch the user interface to the lowest common denominator, and when power users complain, not only to ignore their complaints but to actively insult them. We see this with the removal of the Start menu on Windows 8 and the shoving of "Metro" down everyone's throat, and we see this with Mark Shuttleworth's blithe dismissal of Unity critics as "depressed hipsters."
The truth is that people who don't care much about computers and use them mostly as content-consumption devices are already flocking to tablets and smartphones. On these devices, a simplistic UI is fine – but the corollary is that the desktop market will be more dominated by content creators and power users, who aren't satisfied with the limitations of portable devices. So offering customizability and giving power users what we want on the desktop is more important, not less. Anyone who tries to go after both the tablet and desktop market with a lowest-common-denominator strategy is likely going to lose both.
I could be wrong, but I suspect implementing the OSX APIs in Linux might actually be easier than trying to implement Win32. Partly this is because OSX is already a *nix-based system, so you don't have to do as many weird hacks with directory mapping and so forth. But mostly I think it may be simpler because Apple has relatively clean APIs and relentlessly deprecates legacy stuff. When you implement Win32, you have to implement literally thousands (if not millions) of hacks and special cases going back to the 1980s. This is not without justification as a design goal – backward compatibility is one of the reasons why Windows has had such staying power in business – but it's difficult for even Microsoft to get the whole edifice running smoothly, much less third parties with no access to internal design documents and source code. In contrast, when Apple switched from Carbon to Cocoa, they were pretty aggressive about deprecating the old framework.
If you have OSX already, why are you messing around with linux?
Presumably at least a part of the target audience for this project is people who don't have OSX, but would like the option to run OSX programs on a free operating system.
Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
The thing is, this could actually have been a good wedge issue for the Republicans if they had run with it instead of backing off. It tends to be younger people who care the most about copyright reform, and the young are a strong Democratic voting bloc. Advocacy of copyright reform on the Republican side could have forced the Democratic Party to risk either alienating its younger supporters or losing the support of the big-money boys in Hollywood. But apparently the Republicans aren't willing to piss in the cheerios of any rich people, even the ones who don't vote for them anyway.
I think most of us realized long ago that when politicians claim to be "pro-business" they are referring not to some abstract ideal of free markets, but rather to being in favor of the incumbent players getting richer and more powerful. But just in case anyone on Slashdot hadn't figured this out yet, hopefully after this event they will have.
You mean low cost, not cheap. Android phones can do everything an iPhone or Windows Phone does, at a lower cost. So it is not cheap, it is a more valuable option for the customer.
Most Android phones don't offer as polished or clean an experience as iOS. Samsung's phones are an exception, which is why Apple has been trying to cripple them via lawsuits – but the good phones like the Galaxy Note II are as or more expensive than an iPhone. The majority are crammed full of un-removable carrier crapware. The Nexus 4 at least does offer a clean experience at a lower (un-subsidized) price than the competition.
I know that's how the law is written currently, but it seems to me that the law hasn't kept up with the times. The rule should be that if you have any kind of substantial market share (more than 25% or so) you can't engage in these kind of anti-competitive activities.
Sure, given football's current popularity, no one is going to be writing its epitaph any time soon. But in the long run, I think that the conclusive proof that modern tackle football causes brain damage is going to be a decisive factor and will either cause the game to change beyond recognition or be ejected from the pantheon of American sports.
There is precedent for this. Professional boxing used to be an extremely popular sport. Today it is little more than a tawdry sideshow, and one of the reasons for its decline in popularity is that everyone knows how terrible a toll it takes on the participants. Few children want to be professional boxers when they grow up, because even kids know that boxers get serious brain damage and/or die young.
The new knowledge of football's dangers will not affect current NFL players, who are invested in their careers, nor will it affect most current players in high school or college, who have already placed a great deal of time, effort, and self-image into the sport. But football is going to have a pipeline problem in the next generation. Middle-class parents will increasingly ban their sons from playing tackle football in high school. Indeed, many high schools may shut down their football programs entirely due to lawsuits or the fear thereof. It's going to be difficult to justify exposing underage kids to activity that is known to cause brain injury even if all the rules are followed. Where is the next generation of NFL players going to come from? Sure, they might be able to get enough people from poorer communities (or those with really diehard fans) to keep the game going, but the inevitable result is that football will move from the core of American life to the margins unless the game is substantially altered.
Does the Windows version of iTunes still install about half a dozen auxiliary programs and background processes? The last time I tried it, things were so bad that I basically consider this program to be malware. No, I don't want Bonjour, QuickTime, Safari, or any of that crap... I just want to be able to put files on my iDevice, and unfortunately since it won't show up as an external HDD like just about everything else out there, iTunes is the only way. It's getting to the point where you pretty much need a quarantined PC just for iDevice "syncing" (a stupid term, I don't want to sync anything, I just want to move files manually).
So the companies that pay OUR pensions rob us, why should we let the GOVERNMENT workers keep theirs?
This line of reasoning results in a race to the bottom and ends up with everyone except the top 1% wallowing in the gutter. You should be asking why corporations are allowed to steal from their workers, not why governments have to keep promises to theirs.
Nintendo's target market is young, and casual gamers.
The Wii was also very popular with older gamers as well – some of whom were people who grew up with Nintendo franchises like Mario and Zelda, and some of whom had no video game experience at all but enjoyed simple activities like Wii Fit.
Take a look at this Wikipedia article on video game sales figures: the best-selling Wii games are far outselling the top Xbox 360 and PS3 titles.
The truth is that FPSes and MMORPGs are actually a relatively niche interest, but since they appeal to the coveted teenage/young-adult male demographic, they get a lot more press than they deserve.
I guess one could argue that you don't want a bunch of ports on your system, but most people can't afford to buy all the consoles and will choose whichever they can expect to get most of the games they want to play. This will, once again, turn into "and then there's the Nintendo port" that's a radically different game, since at that point it's cheaper to start fresh than adapt. And a lot of studios won't even bother, I suspect, leaving yet another Nintendo generation filled with shovelware and crap kid games that are dirt cheap to make because they're so bad.
Nintendo's games are actually much more popular than the FPS/MMORPG crap on other consoles and the PC. Not being able to port this garbage is probably a net plus – Nintendo is going for a completely different (and larger) demographic. There is more to life than young men in the 14-25 age bracket.
If the allegedly underpowered hardware of the Wii U offends you, congratulations – you're not the target audience.
This is assuming they don't go broke before the 5 years is up. Warranties are usually void in the case of bankruptcy proceedings.
Anandtech seems to like what they've seen of the OCZ Vector so far, but keep in mind that it hasn't been time-tested and that it is basically OCZ's Hail Mary pass: it's succeed or go bankrupt.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing OCZ go away. They've been at the bleeding edge too long and have done more than any other company to hurt the reputation of SSDs. Maybe WD or Seagate will buy them for their Indilinx division so they can put out reasonably credible (and hopefully better-tested) SSD offerings.
I maintain that you CAN'T really program morality into a machine (it's hard enough to program it into a human). And I also doubt that engineers will ever really be able to overcome the numerous technical issues involved with driverless cars. But above these two problems, far and away above *all* problems with driverless cars is the real reason I think we'll never see anything more than driver *assisting* cars on the road: legal liability.
What you're overlooking is that there are some very big companies who want to introduce driverless cars, and those companies are powerful enough to change tort law if they need to – especially as this is uncharted legal waters.
That's probably not how things should be run in what is supposed to be a democratic republic, but the fact is that if big corporations want the law to be a certain way, and there aren't other big corporations or major grassroots movements who oppose it, then that's the way the law is going to be. And small-time trial lawyers who handle car wrecks for a living aren't going to outcompete Google and Volkswagen at the statehouse or Congress.
The real trick is going to be extending that to lolcat GIFs (probably impossible unless the source image has tons of resolution) and making sure the page layout doesn't get buggered up (merely extremely difficult).
GIFs and PNGs should probably be pixel-doubled in each direction, because using a scaling algorithm could cause trouble with low-resolution icons and stuff like pixel art. For JPEGs, a good upscaling algorithm like bicubic would probably be fine.
Page layout shouldn't be an issue. When you're running on a 2880x1800 "retina" display, the page thinks the layout is 1440x900 (and will get those numbers if it queries via JavaScript); the only major difference is that text is more clearly rendered because it gets 4x the number of pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
Original poster: "Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that."
This article gives some insight into why Intel is doing this. Basically, ARM has been making noises for some time about getting into the server market. Intel is very concerned about this, because ARM is used to lower margins and willing to license their designs widely, and could easily undercut Intel on price. They see the writing on the wall. Sure, they would like to keep ECC and other server-type goodies as premium features, but that's no longer a realistic option. Either they have to offer something cheaper, or customers who want low-cost, high-reliability server hardware will jump ship as soon as they can. This is the market niche the Atom S1200 is designed to fill. Intel gets to tout its advantage of backwards compatibility while being able to dramatically undercut other server-grade hardware on price. With this, ARM is going to have a much harder time convincing data centers to switch.
By the way, if all you care about is ECC, you don't have to buy an expensive CPU from Intel to get that (though you do need a C-series chipset rather than the consumer-grade stuff). Many of Intel's Ivy Bridge Pentium and Core i3 processors now support ECC, though this has not been widely publicized. For example, this i3-3220 is only $119.99 at Newegg and according to Intel's official site it supports ECC.
Given that the press shots for the part show a damn lot of teeny BGA balls on the bottom, I'd hope that it isn't an end user part...
Existing Intel Atom chips are also BGA-soldered, but you can purchase motherboards with the chip already included for DIY systems. The same is true of AMD's E-series. The question is whether any of Intel's customers will want to supply S1200-series boards to end users, or if they prefer to reserve them for charging out the nose in prebuilt systems.
Well, OK, but I'm not going to be buying 1000 units and I don't plan on laying out and soldering my own board either. How much will it cost to get a S1200 motherboard+chip combo in a standard form factor? Or is this going to be OEM-only?
But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors.
Or, alternatively, manufacturers and retailers need to stop trying to pass off tunerless TV sets as monitors.
A wide aspect ratio is great for HDTV and feature films. But when you're trying to get work done on the desktop, 4:3 is still superior to the alternatives. Actually, for web browsing and word processing, a 16:9 monitor turned 90 degrees might work fairly well – but this is poorly supported with existing operating systems and it would break Windows ClearType, which is needed to get halfway decent looking text on today's low-DPI displays.
This LG monitor isn't that terrible – it has a resolution of 2560x1080, which means you aren't losing any more vertical space than you would with a standard 1080p monitor. But 1080 vertical lines is about the minimum that is even somewhat acceptable. What frightens me is the prospect that we're going to wind up with 1792x768 or some such abomination becoming the standard on laptops. For some reason, vendors really seem to love those short-screen 768p displays, even though they don't match HDTV resolutions or any other known standard.
I don't see how this helps average Windows users in any way. Most people who have a choice will be staying with Windows 7, and even those who are stuck with Windows 8 for whatever reason can still run VLC just fine on the Desktop. (Like all other x86 software it won't run on WinRT, but WinRT is dead on arrival.) Metro needs to be killed quickly, and it's baffling as to why an open source project would try to prop it up.
If VLC wants to fund a Kickstarter, putting more resources into Blu-Ray menu support would be a much better choice. This is one thing that open-source software still can't do, and is one of the remaining barriers to a truly competitive open-source media player.
JavaScript is a horrid language. Nonetheless, it's the only widely supported language for client-side browser code, so we're stuck with it there.
But why on Earth would anyone even consider running this abomination on a server, when there are many other, better languages designed specifically for server-side code?
It used to be that all of the popular desktop operating systems – Windows, Linux, and even MacOS – offered a good degree of customizability. Except on Linux you didn't have to delve into the depths of configuration files, but you could change things if you wanted to. This was because the interfaces were designed by programmers who understood the need for flexibility.
The rise of self-proclaimed UI designers and UI experts has changed all that. Now the trend across the board is to pitch the user interface to the lowest common denominator, and when power users complain, not only to ignore their complaints but to actively insult them. We see this with the removal of the Start menu on Windows 8 and the shoving of "Metro" down everyone's throat, and we see this with Mark Shuttleworth's blithe dismissal of Unity critics as "depressed hipsters."
The truth is that people who don't care much about computers and use them mostly as content-consumption devices are already flocking to tablets and smartphones. On these devices, a simplistic UI is fine – but the corollary is that the desktop market will be more dominated by content creators and power users, who aren't satisfied with the limitations of portable devices. So offering customizability and giving power users what we want on the desktop is more important, not less. Anyone who tries to go after both the tablet and desktop market with a lowest-common-denominator strategy is likely going to lose both.
I could be wrong, but I suspect implementing the OSX APIs in Linux might actually be easier than trying to implement Win32. Partly this is because OSX is already a *nix-based system, so you don't have to do as many weird hacks with directory mapping and so forth. But mostly I think it may be simpler because Apple has relatively clean APIs and relentlessly deprecates legacy stuff. When you implement Win32, you have to implement literally thousands (if not millions) of hacks and special cases going back to the 1980s. This is not without justification as a design goal – backward compatibility is one of the reasons why Windows has had such staying power in business – but it's difficult for even Microsoft to get the whole edifice running smoothly, much less third parties with no access to internal design documents and source code. In contrast, when Apple switched from Carbon to Cocoa, they were pretty aggressive about deprecating the old framework.
If you have OSX already, why are you messing around with linux?
Presumably at least a part of the target audience for this project is people who don't have OSX, but would like the option to run OSX programs on a free operating system.
what OS X application is worth running on Linux?
Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
The thing is, this could actually have been a good wedge issue for the Republicans if they had run with it instead of backing off. It tends to be younger people who care the most about copyright reform, and the young are a strong Democratic voting bloc. Advocacy of copyright reform on the Republican side could have forced the Democratic Party to risk either alienating its younger supporters or losing the support of the big-money boys in Hollywood. But apparently the Republicans aren't willing to piss in the cheerios of any rich people, even the ones who don't vote for them anyway.
I think most of us realized long ago that when politicians claim to be "pro-business" they are referring not to some abstract ideal of free markets, but rather to being in favor of the incumbent players getting richer and more powerful. But just in case anyone on Slashdot hadn't figured this out yet, hopefully after this event they will have.
Why hasn't Firefox been developed for jailbroken iDevices?
You mean low cost, not cheap. Android phones can do everything an iPhone or Windows Phone does, at a lower cost. So it is not cheap, it is a more valuable option for the customer.
Most Android phones don't offer as polished or clean an experience as iOS. Samsung's phones are an exception, which is why Apple has been trying to cripple them via lawsuits – but the good phones like the Galaxy Note II are as or more expensive than an iPhone. The majority are crammed full of un-removable carrier crapware. The Nexus 4 at least does offer a clean experience at a lower (un-subsidized) price than the competition.
I know that's how the law is written currently, but it seems to me that the law hasn't kept up with the times. The rule should be that if you have any kind of substantial market share (more than 25% or so) you can't engage in these kind of anti-competitive activities.
Sure, given football's current popularity, no one is going to be writing its epitaph any time soon. But in the long run, I think that the conclusive proof that modern tackle football causes brain damage is going to be a decisive factor and will either cause the game to change beyond recognition or be ejected from the pantheon of American sports.
There is precedent for this. Professional boxing used to be an extremely popular sport. Today it is little more than a tawdry sideshow, and one of the reasons for its decline in popularity is that everyone knows how terrible a toll it takes on the participants. Few children want to be professional boxers when they grow up, because even kids know that boxers get serious brain damage and/or die young.
The new knowledge of football's dangers will not affect current NFL players, who are invested in their careers, nor will it affect most current players in high school or college, who have already placed a great deal of time, effort, and self-image into the sport. But football is going to have a pipeline problem in the next generation. Middle-class parents will increasingly ban their sons from playing tackle football in high school. Indeed, many high schools may shut down their football programs entirely due to lawsuits or the fear thereof. It's going to be difficult to justify exposing underage kids to activity that is known to cause brain injury even if all the rules are followed. Where is the next generation of NFL players going to come from? Sure, they might be able to get enough people from poorer communities (or those with really diehard fans) to keep the game going, but the inevitable result is that football will move from the core of American life to the margins unless the game is substantially altered.
If a 50,000+ seat organization says "give us the old price or we're switching to Linux", then I bet they will get the old price.
Does the Windows version of iTunes still install about half a dozen auxiliary programs and background processes? The last time I tried it, things were so bad that I basically consider this program to be malware. No, I don't want Bonjour, QuickTime, Safari, or any of that crap... I just want to be able to put files on my iDevice, and unfortunately since it won't show up as an external HDD like just about everything else out there, iTunes is the only way. It's getting to the point where you pretty much need a quarantined PC just for iDevice "syncing" (a stupid term, I don't want to sync anything, I just want to move files manually).
So the companies that pay OUR pensions rob us, why should we let the GOVERNMENT workers keep theirs?
This line of reasoning results in a race to the bottom and ends up with everyone except the top 1% wallowing in the gutter. You should be asking why corporations are allowed to steal from their workers, not why governments have to keep promises to theirs.
Nintendo's target market is young, and casual gamers.
The Wii was also very popular with older gamers as well – some of whom were people who grew up with Nintendo franchises like Mario and Zelda, and some of whom had no video game experience at all but enjoyed simple activities like Wii Fit.
Take a look at this Wikipedia article on video game sales figures: the best-selling Wii games are far outselling the top Xbox 360 and PS3 titles.
The truth is that FPSes and MMORPGs are actually a relatively niche interest, but since they appeal to the coveted teenage/young-adult male demographic, they get a lot more press than they deserve.
I guess one could argue that you don't want a bunch of ports on your system, but most people can't afford to buy all the consoles and will choose whichever they can expect to get most of the games they want to play. This will, once again, turn into "and then there's the Nintendo port" that's a radically different game, since at that point it's cheaper to start fresh than adapt. And a lot of studios won't even bother, I suspect, leaving yet another Nintendo generation filled with shovelware and crap kid games that are dirt cheap to make because they're so bad.
Nintendo's games are actually much more popular than the FPS/MMORPG crap on other consoles and the PC. Not being able to port this garbage is probably a net plus – Nintendo is going for a completely different (and larger) demographic. There is more to life than young men in the 14-25 age bracket.
If the allegedly underpowered hardware of the Wii U offends you, congratulations – you're not the target audience.
This is assuming they don't go broke before the 5 years is up. Warranties are usually void in the case of bankruptcy proceedings.
Anandtech seems to like what they've seen of the OCZ Vector so far, but keep in mind that it hasn't been time-tested and that it is basically OCZ's Hail Mary pass: it's succeed or go bankrupt.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing OCZ go away. They've been at the bleeding edge too long and have done more than any other company to hurt the reputation of SSDs. Maybe WD or Seagate will buy them for their Indilinx division so they can put out reasonably credible (and hopefully better-tested) SSD offerings.
I maintain that you CAN'T really program morality into a machine (it's hard enough to program it into a human). And I also doubt that engineers will ever really be able to overcome the numerous technical issues involved with driverless cars. But above these two problems, far and away above *all* problems with driverless cars is the real reason I think we'll never see anything more than driver *assisting* cars on the road: legal liability.
What you're overlooking is that there are some very big companies who want to introduce driverless cars, and those companies are powerful enough to change tort law if they need to – especially as this is uncharted legal waters.
That's probably not how things should be run in what is supposed to be a democratic republic, but the fact is that if big corporations want the law to be a certain way, and there aren't other big corporations or major grassroots movements who oppose it, then that's the way the law is going to be. And small-time trial lawyers who handle car wrecks for a living aren't going to outcompete Google and Volkswagen at the statehouse or Congress.
The real trick is going to be extending that to lolcat GIFs (probably impossible unless the source image has tons of resolution) and making sure the page layout doesn't get buggered up (merely extremely difficult).
GIFs and PNGs should probably be pixel-doubled in each direction, because using a scaling algorithm could cause trouble with low-resolution icons and stuff like pixel art. For JPEGs, a good upscaling algorithm like bicubic would probably be fine.
Page layout shouldn't be an issue. When you're running on a 2880x1800 "retina" display, the page thinks the layout is 1440x900 (and will get those numbers if it queries via JavaScript); the only major difference is that text is more clearly rendered because it gets 4x the number of pixels.
So how exactly do you remove Internet Explorer, then?
Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off
There's a checkbox for IE in there (at least on Windows 7).