Couldn't the buyer just keep AMD as a separate, but wholly owned, company? Or would just owning a majority of the stock be enough to trigger this clause? If so, it's exceedingly bizarre; I've never heard of anything like that before. Intel's attempt to exercise such a trigger would also cause potential antitrust issues.
The idea that Windows keyboard shortcuts are correct and Mac OS ones are wrong is just moronic. Neither is wrong or right - they're just different. Note that Mac OS keystrokes came first.
Windows represents about 90% of the desktop market. This means that Windows is a de facto standard and that any competitors either have to get in line, or users experienced with Windows will perceive them as clumsy and hard to use. Doesn't matter if this is fair in some Platonic sense, nor does it matter if they came first. You can't expect people to change what is wired into their long-term muscle memory.
For all the "original intent" types, it should be noted that the framers of the Constitution explicitly gives the federal government the power "to establish post offices and post roads." What does that have to do with the Internet? In the late 18th century when the Constitution was written, snail mail was the most advanced means of communication. The framers believed that the federal government should take a pro-active role in ensuring that everyone in the country had access to this communication infrastructure. There is no reason why the same underlying principle should not apply to telegraphs in the 19th century, phones in the 20th, or Internet access today. Clearly the intent of the framers was not to advocate one single method of communication, but to specify that the government of a free society should take the lead in providing state-of-the-art communication technology to the greatest extent possible.
The advent of exclusive content on Netflix will be a major incentive for hackers to try to break their DRM. Until now, no one has really cared about it because anyone who wants the content in a freely usable format can get it easier by ripping the relevant DVD/Blu-Ray, or in the case of TV shows by using a hacked Tivo to capture the transport stream. Because of that, no one thought it was worth hacking Netflix DRM when all they would get is lower quality versions of what they could already get elsewhere. Things have now changed. I bet the first workable hack comes out less than a month after the first exclusive episode airs.
as for TFA Newegg, Tiger, and Amazon are my three favorite places to shop anymore, never have a bit of hassle, never have a problem. Every time i've tried dealing with local shops I've found piss poor selection, clueless help, and insane prices. With Newegg you can tell pretty easily if something is junky just by the amount of negatives, just look at the rating on some of the Seagate drives for an example. Personally i'd rather shop there than deal with retail hassles, thanks Newegg!
I do a lot of my shopping at Newegg, but I'm also fortunate to have a Fry's in the area; they have a great selection and are often (though not always) competitive on pricing with Newegg.
There's also a local Micro Center - haven't shopped there yet, but I probably will when I build my next box. $179 for a Intel 2500k is hard to beat.
I've got a feeling that tape reliability numbers are massively exaggerated in marketing materials. For example, I once had a tape getting repeatedly loaded, read a little bit, and then unloaded overnight because of a software bug. It was destroyed. Think grooves etched into the plastic casing, and the tape worn to the point of transparency. That got me thinking, and I looked up the numbers.
Nearly *all* reliability numbers for electronics are massively exaggerated in marketing materials. That said, my experience is that hard drives are much more reliable than any tape-based system. Think about it this way: did you have more mechanical failures with your old VCRs than you do with hard drives today?
We may yet see high-end Intel discrete graphics cards in the future.
Knights Corner sounds like it is basically a high-end GPU without the actual graphics output. This lets Intel position it as a professional product for HPC and supercomputing, and squeeze out as much profit as possible from the early models. Then, once the R&D cost has been amortized and the fab technology is advanced further, they can add a HDMI output, dedicated RAM, and glue logic, and write appropriate drivers to make it a full-fledged graphics card. Of course this may lack some features of the professional Knights Corner (ECC support?) so it won't cannibalize the high-end market. But it has the potential to be much more power-efficient than AMD and nVidia enthusiast products.
Well, for starters, civilian users have been affected by Duqu, so of course the antivirus researchers should go after it.
Secondly, your basic premise ("prevent the total destruction of Israel") is fundamentally flawed. Rulers far worse than Ahmadinejad (and Ali Khamenei, the real ruler of Iran) have had nuclear weapons in the past. Stalin and Mao were about as evil as it gets, but they still didn't blow up the world. You might say that the Iranians are different because they're fanatics. And I suppose that Mao, who starved millions to death in the "Great Leap Forward," was a pragmatic realist? The truth is that nuclear weapons don't start war; they keep the peace. People who crave martyrdom that badly usually get their wish fairly early on; they don't become leaders of nations.
Israel isn't worried about being blown up. They're worried that if they have to face another regional power of equal might, they might not be able to bully their neighbors quite so much any more.
Anyone that complains about personal info / privacy concerns and uses hotmail, yahoo, gmail, facebook, twitt-head-er, etc. etc. has NO leg to stand on.
Oh, please. With Facebook, anyone with half a clue knows going in that you shouldn't post anything you don't want seen in public. Same goes for Twitter.
Phone calls are very different. You have an expectation of privacy when calling someone. Laws going back decades prohibit wiretapping without a warrant.
I don't see why there would be any GPL issues. The patent license fees were already paid by the hardware manufacturer, and all the GPL software is doing is sending it a bitstream. What happens to the bitstream after that has nothing to do with the software license.
It would be absurd if there were hardware features of the chipset that could not be used due to being deliberately disabled. For the Raspberry Pi to be workable in a HTPC or media streamer setup, it must support at least VC-1 and MPEG-2 bitstream decoding in addition to H.264. Although they are less intensive to handle in software, I doubt the Raspberry Pi's weak (by modern standards) ARM CPU can handle 1080p23.976 decoding of these formats via software alone.
I like document prep tools like TeX infinitely more than WYSIWYG tools like MSWord.
Fair enough, but do realize that this puts you in a relatively small minority.
I can focus on content while TeX handles the formatting, and I end up with a nicely done PDF.
Separation of content and presentation is a high-level abstract concept. Many users won't be able to understand it at all.
How hard is it to learn LaTeX, anyway? Even non-programmers could learn the basics over a weekend if they put their minds to it.
No, they couldn't. Many of them simply do not have the necessary aptitude to do so no matter how hard they try. (And many others who could learn, given sufficient time and effort, won't want to bother since a WSYIWYG tool works fine for them.)
MS Office is far from perfect, but right now it's still the best office suite in the industry. The fact that its file format is a de facto standard is a large part of that, but not the whole thing. OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is notably slower, less user-friendly, and not particularly compatible with MS Office documents.
Since the formats for both OOXML and the older binary documents are publicly available from Microsoft, the open-source community should be able to do better. Unfortunately, open-source priorities are often deeply screwed up, and vitally important projects are left to stagnate.
Microsoft is no longer a start-up. They can't reasonably expect to get massive exponential growth. What they can do is to pay out modest dividends year after year while increasing capital value a little over the rate of inflation (which, currently, is virtually nil). Shareholders are unreasonable to expect anything else from a company as long-standing and mature as Microsoft. You should buy Microsoft stock if you want a safe investment, not one that gives a 10%+ annual return.
The announced price is low enough that I don't really care how much the raw chip costs; for hobbyists, you're very unlikely to find a better deal.
What concerns me more is the "proprietary" aspect. How many of the chip's features will be accessible by hobbyist developers? Will we be receiving full public documentation on how it works?
The real question is whether the underlying APIs will be open to the public, or if you'll have to sign some sort of Broadcom NDA to actually use the features the hardware already contains. Also, I'm interested to know if HDMI 1.3 bitstreaming (TrueHD and DTS-HD) is incorporated. These shouldn't require any licenses since the data isn't being decoded, just packetized and sent over a cable.
*If* the APIs are open, this could be a great XBMC platform with full support for all the Blu-ray codecs.
Ion 2 coupled with a low powered Atom plays anything video using pretty much zero CPU, and it even bitstreams Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA to the receiver, on Linux and Windows.
No, it doesn't. Ion 2 can send 7.1 channel LPCM, but cannot bitstream the HDMI 1.3 audio formats. You can decode TrueHD using ffdshow, but outside of proprietary Blu-ray software there is currently no way to decode DTS-HD MA on a PC at full fidelity. (ffdshow only supports the lossy core stream)
However, any AMD Brazos board should do bitstreaming with no problem.
Every time this issue is discussed, someone claims that Firefox should not be blamed for the faults of Firefox add-ons and extensions and plug-ins. However, they are the reason people use Firefox. Firefox developers need to take responsibility; an unstable add-on should not be allowed to cause Firefox to be unstable.
The reason why Firefox plugins are more functional than those of other browsers is that they have more access and more ability to modify the browsing experience. But this also means that a malformed plugin has a greater ability to crash the browser. It's an unavoidable trade-off.
Knock the chip off your shoulder. I wasn't attacking you, just adding my own experiences to the mix.
Given that you referenced the use of multiple add-ons, how can you be certain that the problems are being caused by Firefox's own code rather than these add-ons? (I use Adblock Plus, which is the main reason I stick with Firefox, as well as DOM Inspector and Menu Editor. But that's it. I've never used any of the add-ons mentioned above.)
I've heard quite a bit of talk about Firefox memory leaks and instability, but I haven't experienced any of this myself. I use Firefox as my regular browser both at work (on XP SP3) and at home (on Win7 SP1) and it has been stable on both. I've got an Athlon X2 245 with 4GB of RAM in my home PC, which makes it a low to mid range system. My work laptop is even less impressive. Memory usage usually hovers around 400MB after extensive use. At home, I often have Firefox running for several weeks consecutively, hibernating instead of shutting down when I walk away. This has worked fine for me so far.
Many of the reports say the problems happen with a lot of tabs open. I don't use tabs, instead preferring separate windows and the OS's native task management. Perhaps this is why I'm not seeing the problem?
More recent versions of Firefox have GPU acceleration. We know that graphics drivers are very often poorly written and unstable, especially for those who stay on the bleeding edge. Does Firefox crash more often if hardware acceleration is enabled? (I've used HW acceleration ever since they allowed the use of the GDI font rendering style with it. I can't stand that subpixel-positioned crap.)
I'd be interested if the crash reports have verified their systems are stable under other loads. Do they pass memtest? Does a 24-hour load with Prime95 or another stress tester run without errors?
How many add-ons are the crash affected users running? Which ones?
That said, I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in Firefox, as there are in any other large and complex software package. All I can say is that I haven't run into any showstoppers. Now if they'd just stop screwing around with the UI...
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Compilers aren't rocket science.
Indeed not. They are far more complicated than that.
vPro doesn't exist for the evulz, it exists because it is a network management feature that IT professionals wanted.
Couldn't the buyer just keep AMD as a separate, but wholly owned, company? Or would just owning a majority of the stock be enough to trigger this clause? If so, it's exceedingly bizarre; I've never heard of anything like that before. Intel's attempt to exercise such a trigger would also cause potential antitrust issues.
The idea that Windows keyboard shortcuts are correct and Mac OS ones are wrong is just moronic. Neither is wrong or right - they're just different. Note that Mac OS keystrokes came first.
Windows represents about 90% of the desktop market. This means that Windows is a de facto standard and that any competitors either have to get in line, or users experienced with Windows will perceive them as clumsy and hard to use. Doesn't matter if this is fair in some Platonic sense, nor does it matter if they came first. You can't expect people to change what is wired into their long-term muscle memory.
For all the "original intent" types, it should be noted that the framers of the Constitution explicitly gives the federal government the power "to establish post offices and post roads." What does that have to do with the Internet? In the late 18th century when the Constitution was written, snail mail was the most advanced means of communication. The framers believed that the federal government should take a pro-active role in ensuring that everyone in the country had access to this communication infrastructure. There is no reason why the same underlying principle should not apply to telegraphs in the 19th century, phones in the 20th, or Internet access today. Clearly the intent of the framers was not to advocate one single method of communication, but to specify that the government of a free society should take the lead in providing state-of-the-art communication technology to the greatest extent possible.
The advent of exclusive content on Netflix will be a major incentive for hackers to try to break their DRM. Until now, no one has really cared about it because anyone who wants the content in a freely usable format can get it easier by ripping the relevant DVD/Blu-Ray, or in the case of TV shows by using a hacked Tivo to capture the transport stream. Because of that, no one thought it was worth hacking Netflix DRM when all they would get is lower quality versions of what they could already get elsewhere. Things have now changed. I bet the first workable hack comes out less than a month after the first exclusive episode airs.
I live in North Georgia.
as for TFA Newegg, Tiger, and Amazon are my three favorite places to shop anymore, never have a bit of hassle, never have a problem. Every time i've tried dealing with local shops I've found piss poor selection, clueless help, and insane prices. With Newegg you can tell pretty easily if something is junky just by the amount of negatives, just look at the rating on some of the Seagate drives for an example. Personally i'd rather shop there than deal with retail hassles, thanks Newegg!
I do a lot of my shopping at Newegg, but I'm also fortunate to have a Fry's in the area; they have a great selection and are often (though not always) competitive on pricing with Newegg.
There's also a local Micro Center - haven't shopped there yet, but I probably will when I build my next box. $179 for a Intel 2500k is hard to beat.
I've got a feeling that tape reliability numbers are massively exaggerated in marketing materials. For example, I once had a tape getting repeatedly loaded, read a little bit, and then unloaded overnight because of a software bug. It was destroyed. Think grooves etched into the plastic casing, and the tape worn to the point of transparency. That got me thinking, and I looked up the numbers.
Nearly *all* reliability numbers for electronics are massively exaggerated in marketing materials. That said, my experience is that hard drives are much more reliable than any tape-based system. Think about it this way: did you have more mechanical failures with your old VCRs than you do with hard drives today?
We may yet see high-end Intel discrete graphics cards in the future.
Knights Corner sounds like it is basically a high-end GPU without the actual graphics output. This lets Intel position it as a professional product for HPC and supercomputing, and squeeze out as much profit as possible from the early models. Then, once the R&D cost has been amortized and the fab technology is advanced further, they can add a HDMI output, dedicated RAM, and glue logic, and write appropriate drivers to make it a full-fledged graphics card. Of course this may lack some features of the professional Knights Corner (ECC support?) so it won't cannibalize the high-end market. But it has the potential to be much more power-efficient than AMD and nVidia enthusiast products.
Well, for starters, civilian users have been affected by Duqu, so of course the antivirus researchers should go after it.
Secondly, your basic premise ("prevent the total destruction of Israel") is fundamentally flawed. Rulers far worse than Ahmadinejad (and Ali Khamenei, the real ruler of Iran) have had nuclear weapons in the past. Stalin and Mao were about as evil as it gets, but they still didn't blow up the world. You might say that the Iranians are different because they're fanatics. And I suppose that Mao, who starved millions to death in the "Great Leap Forward," was a pragmatic realist? The truth is that nuclear weapons don't start war; they keep the peace. People who crave martyrdom that badly usually get their wish fairly early on; they don't become leaders of nations.
Israel isn't worried about being blown up. They're worried that if they have to face another regional power of equal might, they might not be able to bully their neighbors quite so much any more.
Anyone that complains about personal info / privacy concerns and uses hotmail, yahoo, gmail, facebook, twitt-head-er, etc. etc. has NO leg to stand on.
Oh, please. With Facebook, anyone with half a clue knows going in that you shouldn't post anything you don't want seen in public. Same goes for Twitter.
Phone calls are very different. You have an expectation of privacy when calling someone. Laws going back decades prohibit wiretapping without a warrant.
Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?
I don't see why there would be any GPL issues. The patent license fees were already paid by the hardware manufacturer, and all the GPL software is doing is sending it a bitstream. What happens to the bitstream after that has nothing to do with the software license.
It would be absurd if there were hardware features of the chipset that could not be used due to being deliberately disabled. For the Raspberry Pi to be workable in a HTPC or media streamer setup, it must support at least VC-1 and MPEG-2 bitstream decoding in addition to H.264. Although they are less intensive to handle in software, I doubt the Raspberry Pi's weak (by modern standards) ARM CPU can handle 1080p23.976 decoding of these formats via software alone.
I like document prep tools like TeX infinitely more than WYSIWYG tools like MSWord.
Fair enough, but do realize that this puts you in a relatively small minority.
I can focus on content while TeX handles the formatting, and I end up with a nicely done PDF.
Separation of content and presentation is a high-level abstract concept. Many users won't be able to understand it at all.
How hard is it to learn LaTeX, anyway? Even non-programmers could learn the basics over a weekend if they put their minds to it.
No, they couldn't. Many of them simply do not have the necessary aptitude to do so no matter how hard they try. (And many others who could learn, given sufficient time and effort, won't want to bother since a WSYIWYG tool works fine for them.)
MS Office is far from perfect, but right now it's still the best office suite in the industry. The fact that its file format is a de facto standard is a large part of that, but not the whole thing. OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is notably slower, less user-friendly, and not particularly compatible with MS Office documents.
Since the formats for both OOXML and the older binary documents are publicly available from Microsoft, the open-source community should be able to do better. Unfortunately, open-source priorities are often deeply screwed up, and vitally important projects are left to stagnate.
Microsoft is no longer a start-up. They can't reasonably expect to get massive exponential growth. What they can do is to pay out modest dividends year after year while increasing capital value a little over the rate of inflation (which, currently, is virtually nil). Shareholders are unreasonable to expect anything else from a company as long-standing and mature as Microsoft. You should buy Microsoft stock if you want a safe investment, not one that gives a 10%+ annual return.
Well, it can run Linux, so I suppose you could use it as an ultra-cheap nettop for someone who just does web browsing and email.
It could make a good XBMC platform assuming they open up the APIs for HD video stream decoding.
It could also be useful for embedded system applications for which an Arduino or similar device is not powerful enough.
The announced price is low enough that I don't really care how much the raw chip costs; for hobbyists, you're very unlikely to find a better deal.
What concerns me more is the "proprietary" aspect. How many of the chip's features will be accessible by hobbyist developers? Will we be receiving full public documentation on how it works?
The real question is whether the underlying APIs will be open to the public, or if you'll have to sign some sort of Broadcom NDA to actually use the features the hardware already contains. Also, I'm interested to know if HDMI 1.3 bitstreaming (TrueHD and DTS-HD) is incorporated. These shouldn't require any licenses since the data isn't being decoded, just packetized and sent over a cable.
*If* the APIs are open, this could be a great XBMC platform with full support for all the Blu-ray codecs.
Ion 2 coupled with a low powered Atom plays anything video using pretty much zero CPU, and it even bitstreams Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA to the receiver, on Linux and Windows.
No, it doesn't. Ion 2 can send 7.1 channel LPCM, but cannot bitstream the HDMI 1.3 audio formats. You can decode TrueHD using ffdshow, but outside of proprietary Blu-ray software there is currently no way to decode DTS-HD MA on a PC at full fidelity. (ffdshow only supports the lossy core stream)
However, any AMD Brazos board should do bitstreaming with no problem.
Every time this issue is discussed, someone claims that Firefox should not be blamed for the faults of Firefox add-ons and extensions and plug-ins. However, they are the reason people use Firefox. Firefox developers need to take responsibility; an unstable add-on should not be allowed to cause Firefox to be unstable.
The reason why Firefox plugins are more functional than those of other browsers is that they have more access and more ability to modify the browsing experience. But this also means that a malformed plugin has a greater ability to crash the browser. It's an unavoidable trade-off.
Yet it happens. Adobe Flash under Firefox seems to be able to kill my Linux system.
How is a Flash vulnerability Mozilla's fault? We all know that Flash is full of holes; blame Adobe since they're the ones who own the damn thing.
Knock the chip off your shoulder. I wasn't attacking you, just adding my own experiences to the mix.
Given that you referenced the use of multiple add-ons, how can you be certain that the problems are being caused by Firefox's own code rather than these add-ons? (I use Adblock Plus, which is the main reason I stick with Firefox, as well as DOM Inspector and Menu Editor. But that's it. I've never used any of the add-ons mentioned above.)
I've heard quite a bit of talk about Firefox memory leaks and instability, but I haven't experienced any of this myself. I use Firefox as my regular browser both at work (on XP SP3) and at home (on Win7 SP1) and it has been stable on both. I've got an Athlon X2 245 with 4GB of RAM in my home PC, which makes it a low to mid range system. My work laptop is even less impressive. Memory usage usually hovers around 400MB after extensive use. At home, I often have Firefox running for several weeks consecutively, hibernating instead of shutting down when I walk away. This has worked fine for me so far.
Many of the reports say the problems happen with a lot of tabs open. I don't use tabs, instead preferring separate windows and the OS's native task management. Perhaps this is why I'm not seeing the problem?
More recent versions of Firefox have GPU acceleration. We know that graphics drivers are very often poorly written and unstable, especially for those who stay on the bleeding edge. Does Firefox crash more often if hardware acceleration is enabled? (I've used HW acceleration ever since they allowed the use of the GDI font rendering style with it. I can't stand that subpixel-positioned crap.)
I'd be interested if the crash reports have verified their systems are stable under other loads. Do they pass memtest? Does a 24-hour load with Prime95 or another stress tester run without errors?
How many add-ons are the crash affected users running? Which ones?
That said, I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in Firefox, as there are in any other large and complex software package. All I can say is that I haven't run into any showstoppers. Now if they'd just stop screwing around with the UI...