Technology is easy, that's why it can evolve so fast.
No, it's not. It's just that we're so good at it that it looks easy.
Producing a modern, competitive CPU requires a $2 billion factory which will be outdated in under 10 years.
Building the A380 involves sourcing parts from thousands of suppliers, integrating systems from different manufacturers, and thousands of hours of safety and durability tests.
We have gotten used to the idea that integrated circuits will double in density every 18 months. This does not happen because shrinking integrated circuits is easy. It has taken breakthrough after breakthrough to make the T61 I'm typing this on possible, in many different fields around the world.
Of course, technology is also an area where you can achieve a lot by just being intelligent.
Not so much anymore. There's a reason that you can't get an engineering job without a college degree - it's not just a matter of being intelligent, it's a matter of having the field-specific knowledge to put your intelligence to work.
Exactly. I arrive at the airport (Denver) an hour before my flight, and unless something goes wrong I'm almost always at the gate around 40 minutes before my flight.
Pack light. Print your boarding pass before you go. Take off your jacket and put it in your backpack as soon as you get into the airport. Cross the bridge to the (underutilized) security checkpoint. Put your change, phone, belt, and any anything in your pockets (except your wallet/ID/boarding pass) INSIDE your bag, while you are waiting in line for security. Wait for the person to mark your boarding pass. Head for the shortest line. Pull your shoes off and your laptop out before you get to the table. Use TWO bins, one for your notebook (has to be scanned separately) and one for your shoes and any other miscellaneous effects. Put your bag on the belt by itself. Walk through the metal detector. Grab your bag, put your notebook back in it, and throw on your shoes. Clear the security area quickly, then pull out your phone/change/other effects. Take the elevator to the train (unless you're flying Frontier). Take the train to your concourse and walk to your gate. Have your boarding pass handy. Get on the plane. Find a seat (or your seat, if you're not flying Southwest) quickly. Put your bag under the seat in front of you, if it fits. Sit down.
One more tip: if you can, wear shorts and a T-shirt. And sandals with socks. It sounds crazy, but planes are CRAMPED and HOT. Loose fitting, breathable clothing goes a long way.
Uh, I have a T61, and you're wrong on most counts.
No line-in for audio. This is a big problem for doing audio recordings
Almost no notebook has this; the ThinkPad has a mic-level input which is arguably more useful for doing recording.
No enough ports (only 3 USB, no firewire)
Most ThinkPads don't have FireWire, my T61 being a notable exception. Few people use this interface for anything but video production, which you're not going to want to do on a machine with a 64GB SSD anyway. Get a MacBook Pro.
Widescreen. Ugh. Repeat after me, laptops are for documents, not for movies. "Widescreen" ju3D performance sust means "missing the top and bottom of the display" - it should be renamed "shortscreen".
Funny, I watch movies on my laptop all the time. Perhaps you should consider that there is more than one use for a notebook. Oh, and widescreen is great for document review too - you can see two pages at the same time on the 1440x900 screen that my T61 (and the x300) has.
Lid catches: IBM used to have two, carefully balanced; Lenovo reduced this to one as a deliberate measure, but it is now harder to open with a single hand.
How can you open two spring latches with one hand? And, FYI, the latch on the T61 "clicks" open after you slide it, so you only need one hand.
Side-mounted ports for ethernet - so the cable gets in the way on the desk.
It's on the back on the x300, but I have one word for you anyway: dock.
- Windows keys (used to be absent) - making the Ctrl and Alt keys too small.
These keys are extremely handy. CTRL and ALT are just the right sizes, though FN is in the wrong place.
Thinkpads are generally quite Linux friendly (see thinkwiki.org), but still, can't we have the nice Intel i810 cards on the high-end models, instead of crippling them with useless ATI cards?
The i810 is horribly out of date - I can't believe you called it "nice", considering that it had TERRIBLE 2D, video, and 3D performance and poor VGA output quality. You can buy a ThinkPad today with NVIDIA (Quadro NVS 140m) or Intel (GMA x3100) graphics, both of which are far better than the i810.
How about some things that the older models LACKED: Intel Gigabit Ethernet, WWAN, Sudden Motion Sensor, Touchpad (many, including myself, prefer it), LCD protection (magnesium cage), ThinkLight.
EDGE is fine by me on the iPhone. T-Mobile in the US doesn't offer UMTS yet, and when they do it's going to be on the AWS band which almost no 3G phones actually support (and which the iPhone wouldn't support anyway, even if it had 3G).
I'm also on a college campus which is blanketed by WiFi, which is faster and has better latency than UMTS/HSDPA anyway.
The iPhone is absolutely an excellent device, with few exceptions. Now, I jailbroke/unlocked mine the first day out of the box, so I'm not getting the "normal experience". But as a hardware device it's excellent, and the software isn't half bad either.
As for the MBA, I have to agree with Woz. It looks like a very nice machine, but at the end of the day it's hard to ignore the fact that the Lenovo X300 is similar in size and weight yet packs: - 3 USB ports - Intel Gigabit Ethernet (with AMT which is actually really cool) - WWAN (Verizon, if you want it) - DVD burner - Removable battery - Kensington lock
It's hard to believe that the MBA doesn't have a Kensington lock, especially considering how small and easy to steal it is. It's policy where I work (and many other places) that notebooks have to be locked whenever you're not physically present, which would mean that I would have to take the MBA (or lock it up) whenever I went to get a drink of water.
WiFi is decent, but Gigabit Ethernet is dramatically faster for things like file copies; moreover, it's the only option in many places like hotel rooms. With the MBA it's another stupid dongle to remember.
I don't know what the charge time is on the X300, but my T61 charges from dead in around an hour. The MacBook my friend has takes more like 2-3 hours, which is a big deal if you only have 45 minutes of power while you wait for your flight.
Basically, the X300 is the ultimate road warrior notebook. It's got everything you need built in.
Of course, if you don't get an "A" ticket, you can kiss your chance for a window seat goodbye.
Anyone can get an "A" ticket; you don't even have to pay extra. Just check in 24 hours (exactly) before your flight online. You usually get a pretty low number, too.
Me? I'm more of a "Coach-jerk". I check in everything I can. I board quickly, usually with an "A" ticket. I go for the window seat, my laptop goes on the floor in front of me, my jacket goes into the seat next to me. I pull my hat down, lean back, and start reading.
Seat 11E on Southwest 737-700 and 737-300 airplanes has a built-in space to the right. Seat 12F has tons of legroom, because there is no seat 11F. Seats 11A, 11B, and 11C have about 10 extra inches of legroom. Often people overlook these seats for some reason; I cannot contemplate why anyone flying alone would turn down a seat with extra room.
They call it an exit row. I call it "first class".
You should avoid the forward lavatory on Southwest, if you're a guy and he aft lavatory is open. The forward lavatory has the "Southwest 737 Forward Lavatory Seat Bug" - the toilet seat will not stay up because the curvature of the aircraft prevents it from tilting past straight up.
But when we get off, that's where everybody does the stupid - they all rush off the plane so that they can stand for 20 minutes at the baggage claim.
Did you ever stop to think that some people may have connecting flights? Ever flown through LAS or MDW on Southwest? Ever get delayed and have to run to make a tight connection?
Usually, I get the seat next to me empty, though if anybody asks, I'm nice about moving my jacket. Coach is so much nicer when you have a nice, empty seat next to you to park your crap!
Ahh, so you're that guy. I guess I don't really care. 80% of Southwest flights I'm on are 100% full, no seats free. Comfortable? Not exactly. Cost effective? Absolutely. You can't have $59 tickets from Denver to Oakland if you don't fill the planes.
No modern notebook sits for "two weeks in standby mode". There's not enough juice in the battery to keep the DRAM refreshed. I have a friend with a T61 and the 9-cell battery, and it's dead (from full) in around 5-6 days of suspend, which is actually quite long for a notebook. His notebook has 1 1GB DIMM; with 2 DIMMs expect about half that life.
Some notebooks have "hybrid suspend"; this saves the memory to the disk and shuts down. That's probably what you're seeing.
I'm glad that Slashdot is trying to spin this as another "Vista Sucks" piece. It's not.
Vista's biggest problem, from day 1, has been buggy, shitty drivers. NVIDIA's drivers were horrible at release. So were Intel's.
Go read these emails. They are expressing dismay at two major things:
Microsoft didn't push manufacturers enough to release Vista capable drivers.
Microsoft caved to Intel on hardware requirements.
The first problem puzzles me. Many of the emails seem to reflect my confusion about this - WHY weren't drivers ready when Vista had been feature-complete for over a year? Manufacturers seemed to get used to the idea that Microsoft wasn't going to ship, which after 5 years of delays, I guess isn't so unreasonable.
The second problem is typical MS. They do this with WinMo devices, many of which still ship with a TI OMAP 850 (200MHz ARM - it was slow when it was released 4 years ago) and 64MB of memory (~30-40MB of which is used as a filesystem cache to avoid killing the flash memory). That's why I now carry an iPhone.
The OMAP 850 is a multimedia-focused chip with graphics acceleration built in. The only surprise is that the reviewer called it "slow" based on the mere fact that it's a 200MHz chip.
The OMAP 850 is slow. There are 4-year-old phones which had an OMAP 850. Can't we do better than that?
Sure about that? Because I've met my fair share of Atheists that are as aggressive in trying to convert people as any Christian would be. Hell, most of the hard-core atheists are more obnoxious then the hard-core Christians. Either way, they both share one common trait: Both are utterly sure beyond any reasonable doubt that THEY have the RIGHT answer.
You haven't met the right people, then. Even some of the most outspoken atheists - like Richard Dawkins - admit the possibility that they are wrong. What Dawkins does say, and what I agree with, is that it's more likely that there is no God.
No, the workstation drivers emphasize precision over speed. The cards are exactly the same, except that there are laser-burned fuses on the workstation cards so you can't use "gaming" cards with the workstation drivers.
Interestingly enough, at least on the NV side the drivers are the same too. They just enable/disable specific options (and optimizations) based on whether or not the card is a Quadro.
USB mini-B is found on most newer Motorola phones, HTC phones, and BlackBerrys. It's also on my digital camera, my Nokia 770 tablet, and my Creative Zen media player.
Unfortunately, some idiot at the USB-IF decided that we needed ANOTHER connector. Now there are micro-B connectors, which are used on the newest Motorola phones and on the Nokia N810. Shame on whoever thought that up.
Here's a hint to manufacturers of digital cameras, MP3 players, phones, portable hard drives, and most other USB devices: PUT A MINI B PORT ON YOUR DEVICE. I'm not buying your device if it doesn't have one, because I'm not going to bring 5 proprietary cables with me. I have like 8 mini-USB cables and numerous chargers. I have cables/chargers at my office, in multiple places at home, in the car, in my backpack, and spares in my luggage. Chances are that wherever I am I will be able to find one.
Good idea but the iPhone is a RADIO TRANSMITTER that uses a frequency that must be licenses. A software error could disable nearby cell phones. A computer or a game console is different.
God, this is such shit. GSM phones don't magically disable nearby handests because someone loaded "bad" software. Hell, the OS doesn't even have ANYTHING to do with interfacing with the GSM network - it's all handled by the baseband firmware, which is what actually responsible for communicating on the network.
Apple is giving us another giant helping of bullshit and you are eating it up. Here's a question? If it's not possible to allow any application to run on the phone safely, how do Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry manage to do it?
Honestly, you only need 24 to 32 FPS as that is pretty much where your eyes are at
Honestly, you don't play FPS games if you say that.
Film has such a crappy frame rate (24fps) that most movies avoid fast camera pans. TV runs at 60 fields (480i60, 1080i60) or 60 frames (480p60, 720p60) per second, not 30 frames per second.
30fps is acceptable for a game like WoW where you have hardware cursor and you aren't using a cursor-controlled viewpoint. It's not as smooth, but it's playable.
30fps isn't acceptable for a FPS, RTS without hardware cursor, or really any game where your mouse rate depends on your framerate. Precise mouse movement (which is essential in many games) depends on having a consistently high number of updates per second.
It lets you enter WPA-PSK keys before booting? Not all of us can control the wireless infrastructure.
Firewire requires 12V; battery on this is only 7.4V.
Whether or not you were involved with the design of this thing, you're wrong. 6-pin ("DV-sized", as the original poster indicated) FireWire ports are unpowered. Many, many PC notebooks have these ports. They won't power a drive, but you can hook up a camcorder or externally-powered (e.g. large) drive.
I'm sure you're very impressed with the design. Perhaps you have a right to be. But we're not impressed. Maybe these things will sell like hotcakes. Maybe they won't. But if they do, you'll have the other side of Apple to thank for it.
There's a lot to be said about being able to understand another person's perspective and requirements. On a geek site, an engineering achievement such as an incredibly small laptop that (for instance) required Intel to produce a new, smaller chip design is worthy of respect rather than puerile comments about shiny toys. Reducing height by 25% and weight by 40% is a tough design goal. But if you can't understand the user, or appreciate the engineering - just get on with other things.
I can't understand why it lacks simple connectors like an Ethernet port or more than one USB port.
Perhaps Apple should stop telling us what we "don't need" and provide something that we doneed.
As for the "new, smaller chip design", no, it's not new - but Apple wants you to think it is. It's the same LV Core 2 that's been sold for over a year, using the same soldered-to-board BGA design. Smaller PC notebooks (like the ultraportable Sony and Toshiba models) use the same CPU, or, in some cases, the even-lower-power ULV variant.
The OQO is "incredibly small". The MacBook Air is not. Similarly sized and sometimes lighter PC notebooks have been on the market for years. Go look at the Toshiba Portege series from 10 years ago, or the PictureBook. Even my 5-year-old Compaq Armada M300 was similar in size, and I got it for $300 on eBay. It had a removable battery, integrated Ethernet, and 2 USB ports too. And a PC Card slot.
When you drop the optical drive and use a smaller (1.8") HDD, it's easy to make a small notebook.
It's not about us "understanding your perspective". It's about us calling bullshit on the Apple hype. The MacBook Air has some serious problems. One USB port in this day and age is simply absurd. No WWAN on an ultraportable notebook is absurd. A non-removable battery is absurd. These are not features, and they aren't necessary to build a small notebook. They are design decisions Apple made because they thought they knew better than their users. The sad part is, their fanboys will buy it hook, line and sinker.
Uh, I have 4 computers that I use regularly, so my Lenovo T61 is certainly not my "primary computer". But it has the same capabilities as a real system, unlike the MacBook Air.
There are so many reasons to have a notebook that is a fully-featured computer, and only one not to: 2lbs. That's the difference between my T61 and the MacBook Air. There are smaller, lighter full-featured notebooks too. Notebooks with replacable batteries. Notebooks with Ethernet ports. Notebooks with optical drives.
Apple went too far. I can understand leaving out the optical drive - it's probably the biggest part of the notebook. But one USB port? No FireWire? No Ethernet? No replacable battery? These are standard notebook features.
You don't miss a replacable battery until two years down the line when your battery quits working and you have to send the whole machine to Apple to have it replaced for $200 (rather than spending $60 on eBay for a new battery).
You don't miss having an Ethernet port until you want to transfer some DVD images from a desktop - what takes 2 hours on 802.11g (1MiB/s) takes 3 minutes over GigE (40 MiB/s).
You don't miss having multiple USB ports until you want to plug in a USB drive while you're using a EVDO or HSDPA card. Hope you remembered to bring your USB hub.
You don't miss having a microphone port until you realize that your USB headset takes up your only USB port. Oops. Hope you brought that USB hub.
You don't miss having a full-sized display connector until you want to show something on a larger monitor. Hope you remembered to bring your mini-DVI to DVI adapter. And your DVI to VGA adapter.
You don't miss the optical drive until someone asks you to watch their training video on DVD. Or a new movie. Or install MATLAB. Or Mathematica. Hope you brought your external optical drive. And a USB hub, since it uses your only USB port.
So, I guess it comes down to this: you can bring a 5lb notebook and be ready for pretty much anything. Why would you give up all of that capability for 2lbs?
Your metaphor on multi-issue CPUs is interesting, but not necessarily valid.
Instruction scheduling is the biggest fundamental problem facing CPUs today. Even the best pipelined design issues only one instruction per clock, per pipeline (excluding things like macro-op fusion which combine multiple logical instructions into a single internal instruction). So we add more pipelines. But more pipelines can only get us so far - it becomes increasingly more difficult to figure out (schedule) which instructions can be executed on which pipeline at what time.
There are several potential solutions. One is to use a VLIW architecture where the compiler schedules instructions and packs them into bundles which can be executed in parallel. The problem with VLIW is that many scheduling decisions can only occur at runtime. VLIW is also highly dependent on having excellent compilers. All of these problems (among others) plagued Intel's advanced VLIW (they called it "EPIC") architecture, Itanium.
Another solution is virtual cores, or HyperThreading. HTT uses instructions from another thread (assuming that one is available) to fill pipeline slots that would otherwise be unused. The problem with HTT is that you still need a substantial amount of decoding logic for the other thread, not to mention a more advanced register system (although modern CPUs already have a very advanced register system, particularly on register-starved architectures like x86) and other associated logic. In addition, if you want to get benefits from pipeline stalls (e.g like on the P4), you need even more logic. This means that HTT isn't particularly beneficial unless you have code that results in a large number of data dependencies or branch mispredicts, or if pipeline stalls are particularly expensive.
Multicore CPUs have come about for one simple reason: we can't figure out what to do with all of the transistors we have. CPUs have become increasingly complex, yet the fabrication technology keeps marching forward, outpacing the design resources that are available. This has manifested itself in two main ways.
First, designers started adding larger and larger caches to CPUs (caches are easy to design but take up lots of transistors). But after a point, adding more cache doesn't help. The more cache you have, the slower it operates. So designers added a multi-level cache hierarchy. But this too only goes so far - as you add more cache levels, the performance delta between memory and cache decreases, because there's only a finite level of reference locality in code (data structures like linked lists don't help this). You may be able to get a single function in cache, but it's unlikely that you're going to get the whole data set used by a complex program. The net result is that beyond a certain point, adding more cache doesn't do much.
What do you do when you can't add more cache? You could add more functional units, but then you're constrained by your front-end logic again, which is a far more difficult problem to solve. You could add more front-end logic, which is what HyperThreading does. But that only helps if your functional units are sitting idle a substantial percentage of the time (as they did on the P4).
So you look at adding both functional units and more front-end logic. You'll decode many instruction streams and try to schedule them on many pipelines. This is what modern GPUs do, and for them, it works quite well. But most general-purpose code is loaded with data dependencies and branches, which makes it very difficult to schedule more than a very few (say, 4) instructions at a time, regardless of how many pipelines you have. So, now, effectively, you have one thread that is predominantly using 4 pipelines, and one that is predominantly using the other 4.
Wait, though. If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines, and one is mostly using the other, we can split the pipelines into two groups. Each will take one thread. This way, our register and cache systems are simpler (because
I'm in CS at the University of Colorado, and while our program as a whole is more like software engineering than CS (which is why it's in the engineering department), that happens to be exactly what I want.
For "higher-level" courses (data structures, algorithms), I've programmed in C, C++, Java, Python, and C#. But I've also taken a digital-logic course where I "programmed" in Verilog. I've taken a (required) course where I programmed in M68000 assembly. I wrote a compiler in another required course that had to emit x86 assembly. I've coded for various RISC architectures, too.
Is learning about the entire hardware-software stack CS? No, probably not. But it's valuable in and of itself, and it's something that I'm interested in.
Now, if you're teaching pure "CS", the language is really irrelevant. CS is about the theory, which is something that you can implement in practically any language. But that's not the kind of program I'm looking for. It's not the kind of program that most students are looking for.
I love how Ubuntu is given 'credit' for codec buddy. Who wrote codec buddy? Bastien Nocera who works for Red Hat and Thomas Vander Stichele who works for Fluendo (you know, the guys who want your soul so you can play mp3's)
Red Hat pays someone's salary to write codec buddy and yet 'ubuntu' comes out the better. Sounds like NetworkManager all over again. Red Hat pays to write the code the fanboys think ubuntu is the greatest thing ever....
I don't care who wrote the code, I care that it's part of the distro.
Fedora 8 won't install in graphical mode on my system, and the text mode installer results in a different install than the graphical installer (you have to go turn on things like GDM, NetworkManager, and the graphical boot screen).
Ubuntu has officially-packaged binary NV drivers. And, yes, I prefer aptitude to yum.
We're all friends here. I prefer to use Ubuntu. Some people prefer Fedora, which is another fine distro. CentOS is a great choice for business use where long-term support is a big priority.
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That's crap. Windows Server 2008 is an excellent server OS, and WS2003 isn't half bad either.
No, it's not. It's just that we're so good at it that it looks easy.
Producing a modern, competitive CPU requires a $2 billion factory which will be outdated in under 10 years.
Building the A380 involves sourcing parts from thousands of suppliers, integrating systems from different manufacturers, and thousands of hours of safety and durability tests.
We have gotten used to the idea that integrated circuits will double in density every 18 months. This does not happen because shrinking integrated circuits is easy. It has taken breakthrough after breakthrough to make the T61 I'm typing this on possible, in many different fields around the world.
Not so much anymore. There's a reason that you can't get an engineering job without a college degree - it's not just a matter of being intelligent, it's a matter of having the field-specific knowledge to put your intelligence to work.
Exactly. I arrive at the airport (Denver) an hour before my flight, and unless something goes wrong I'm almost always at the gate around 40 minutes before my flight.
Pack light. Print your boarding pass before you go. Take off your jacket and put it in your backpack as soon as you get into the airport. Cross the bridge to the (underutilized) security checkpoint. Put your change, phone, belt, and any anything in your pockets (except your wallet/ID/boarding pass) INSIDE your bag, while you are waiting in line for security. Wait for the person to mark your boarding pass. Head for the shortest line. Pull your shoes off and your laptop out before you get to the table. Use TWO bins, one for your notebook (has to be scanned separately) and one for your shoes and any other miscellaneous effects. Put your bag on the belt by itself. Walk through the metal detector. Grab your bag, put your notebook back in it, and throw on your shoes. Clear the security area quickly, then pull out your phone/change/other effects. Take the elevator to the train (unless you're flying Frontier). Take the train to your concourse and walk to your gate. Have your boarding pass handy. Get on the plane. Find a seat (or your seat, if you're not flying Southwest) quickly. Put your bag under the seat in front of you, if it fits. Sit down.
One more tip: if you can, wear shorts and a T-shirt. And sandals with socks. It sounds crazy, but planes are CRAMPED and HOT. Loose fitting, breathable clothing goes a long way.
Almost no notebook has this; the ThinkPad has a mic-level input which is arguably more useful for doing recording.
Most ThinkPads don't have FireWire, my T61 being a notable exception. Few people use this interface for anything but video production, which you're not going to want to do on a machine with a 64GB SSD anyway. Get a MacBook Pro.
Funny, I watch movies on my laptop all the time. Perhaps you should consider that there is more than one use for a notebook. Oh, and widescreen is great for document review too - you can see two pages at the same time on the 1440x900 screen that my T61 (and the x300) has.
How can you open two spring latches with one hand? And, FYI, the latch on the T61 "clicks" open after you slide it, so you only need one hand.
It's on the back on the x300, but I have one word for you anyway: dock.
These keys are extremely handy. CTRL and ALT are just the right sizes, though FN is in the wrong place.
The i810 is horribly out of date - I can't believe you called it "nice", considering that it had TERRIBLE 2D, video, and 3D performance and poor VGA output quality. You can buy a ThinkPad today with NVIDIA (Quadro NVS 140m) or Intel (GMA x3100) graphics, both of which are far better than the i810.
How about some things that the older models LACKED: Intel Gigabit Ethernet, WWAN, Sudden Motion Sensor, Touchpad (many, including myself, prefer it), LCD protection (magnesium cage), ThinkLight.
EDGE is fine by me on the iPhone. T-Mobile in the US doesn't offer UMTS yet, and when they do it's going to be on the AWS band which almost no 3G phones actually support (and which the iPhone wouldn't support anyway, even if it had 3G).
I'm also on a college campus which is blanketed by WiFi, which is faster and has better latency than UMTS/HSDPA anyway.
The iPhone is absolutely an excellent device, with few exceptions. Now, I jailbroke/unlocked mine the first day out of the box, so I'm not getting the "normal experience". But as a hardware device it's excellent, and the software isn't half bad either.
As for the MBA, I have to agree with Woz. It looks like a very nice machine, but at the end of the day it's hard to ignore the fact that the Lenovo X300 is similar in size and weight yet packs:
- 3 USB ports
- Intel Gigabit Ethernet (with AMT which is actually really cool)
- WWAN (Verizon, if you want it)
- DVD burner
- Removable battery
- Kensington lock
It's hard to believe that the MBA doesn't have a Kensington lock, especially considering how small and easy to steal it is. It's policy where I work (and many other places) that notebooks have to be locked whenever you're not physically present, which would mean that I would have to take the MBA (or lock it up) whenever I went to get a drink of water.
WiFi is decent, but Gigabit Ethernet is dramatically faster for things like file copies; moreover, it's the only option in many places like hotel rooms. With the MBA it's another stupid dongle to remember.
I don't know what the charge time is on the X300, but my T61 charges from dead in around an hour. The MacBook my friend has takes more like 2-3 hours, which is a big deal if you only have 45 minutes of power while you wait for your flight.
Basically, the X300 is the ultimate road warrior notebook. It's got everything you need built in.
Anyone can get an "A" ticket; you don't even have to pay extra. Just check in 24 hours (exactly) before your flight online. You usually get a pretty low number, too.
Seat 11E on Southwest 737-700 and 737-300 airplanes has a built-in space to the right. Seat 12F has tons of legroom, because there is no seat 11F. Seats 11A, 11B, and 11C have about 10 extra inches of legroom. Often people overlook these seats for some reason; I cannot contemplate why anyone flying alone would turn down a seat with extra room.
They call it an exit row. I call it "first class".
You should avoid the forward lavatory on Southwest, if you're a guy and he aft lavatory is open. The forward lavatory has the "Southwest 737 Forward Lavatory Seat Bug" - the toilet seat will not stay up because the curvature of the aircraft prevents it from tilting past straight up.
Did you ever stop to think that some people may have connecting flights? Ever flown through LAS or MDW on Southwest? Ever get delayed and have to run to make a tight connection?
Ahh, so you're that guy. I guess I don't really care. 80% of Southwest flights I'm on are 100% full, no seats free. Comfortable? Not exactly. Cost effective? Absolutely. You can't have $59 tickets from Denver to Oakland if you don't fill the planes.
No modern notebook sits for "two weeks in standby mode". There's not enough juice in the battery to keep the DRAM refreshed. I have a friend with a T61 and the 9-cell battery, and it's dead (from full) in around 5-6 days of suspend, which is actually quite long for a notebook. His notebook has 1 1GB DIMM; with 2 DIMMs expect about half that life.
Some notebooks have "hybrid suspend"; this saves the memory to the disk and shuts down. That's probably what you're seeing.
Vista's biggest problem, from day 1, has been buggy, shitty drivers. NVIDIA's drivers were horrible at release. So were Intel's.
Go read these emails. They are expressing dismay at two major things:
The first problem puzzles me. Many of the emails seem to reflect my confusion about this - WHY weren't drivers ready when Vista had been feature-complete for over a year? Manufacturers seemed to get used to the idea that Microsoft wasn't going to ship, which after 5 years of delays, I guess isn't so unreasonable.
The second problem is typical MS. They do this with WinMo devices, many of which still ship with a TI OMAP 850 (200MHz ARM - it was slow when it was released 4 years ago) and 64MB of memory (~30-40MB of which is used as a filesystem cache to avoid killing the flash memory). That's why I now carry an iPhone.
The OMAP 850 is slow. There are 4-year-old phones which had an OMAP 850. Can't we do better than that?
You haven't met the right people, then. Even some of the most outspoken atheists - like Richard Dawkins - admit the possibility that they are wrong. What Dawkins does say, and what I agree with, is that it's more likely that there is no God.
No, the workstation drivers emphasize precision over speed. The cards are exactly the same, except that there are laser-burned fuses on the workstation cards so you can't use "gaming" cards with the workstation drivers.
Interestingly enough, at least on the NV side the drivers are the same too. They just enable/disable specific options (and optimizations) based on whether or not the card is a Quadro.
They are, and always have been. Credibility and bias are absolutely essential in debate.
Debate is about more than just formal logical arguments, you know.
USB mini-B is found on most newer Motorola phones, HTC phones, and BlackBerrys. It's also on my digital camera, my Nokia 770 tablet, and my Creative Zen media player.
Unfortunately, some idiot at the USB-IF decided that we needed ANOTHER connector. Now there are micro-B connectors, which are used on the newest Motorola phones and on the Nokia N810. Shame on whoever thought that up.
Here's a hint to manufacturers of digital cameras, MP3 players, phones, portable hard drives, and most other USB devices: PUT A MINI B PORT ON YOUR DEVICE. I'm not buying your device if it doesn't have one, because I'm not going to bring 5 proprietary cables with me. I have like 8 mini-USB cables and numerous chargers. I have cables/chargers at my office, in multiple places at home, in the car, in my backpack, and spares in my luggage. Chances are that wherever I am I will be able to find one.
God, this is such shit. GSM phones don't magically disable nearby handests because someone loaded "bad" software. Hell, the OS doesn't even have ANYTHING to do with interfacing with the GSM network - it's all handled by the baseband firmware, which is what actually responsible for communicating on the network.
Apple is giving us another giant helping of bullshit and you are eating it up. Here's a question? If it's not possible to allow any application to run on the phone safely, how do Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry manage to do it?
Honestly, you don't play FPS games if you say that.
Film has such a crappy frame rate (24fps) that most movies avoid fast camera pans.
TV runs at 60 fields (480i60, 1080i60) or 60 frames (480p60, 720p60) per second, not 30 frames per second.
30fps is acceptable for a game like WoW where you have hardware cursor and you aren't using a cursor-controlled viewpoint. It's not as smooth, but it's playable.
30fps isn't acceptable for a FPS, RTS without hardware cursor, or really any game where your mouse rate depends on your framerate. Precise mouse movement (which is essential in many games) depends on having a consistently high number of updates per second.
Many commercial PCs, including those from Gateway, use EFI.
Is this a fact, or your pulled-out-of-your-ass opinion? Repeating something doesn't make it true.
I happen to prefer both Linux and Windows to Mac OS X.
It lets you enter WPA-PSK keys before booting? Not all of us can control the wireless infrastructure.
Whether or not you were involved with the design of this thing, you're wrong. 6-pin ("DV-sized", as the original poster indicated) FireWire ports are unpowered. Many, many PC notebooks have these ports. They won't power a drive, but you can hook up a camcorder or externally-powered (e.g. large) drive.
I'm sure you're very impressed with the design. Perhaps you have a right to be. But we're not impressed. Maybe these things will sell like hotcakes. Maybe they won't. But if they do, you'll have the other side of Apple to thank for it.
I can't understand why it lacks simple connectors like an Ethernet port or more than one USB port.
Perhaps Apple should stop telling us what we "don't need" and provide something that we doneed.
As for the "new, smaller chip design", no, it's not new - but Apple wants you to think it is. It's the same LV Core 2 that's been sold for over a year, using the same soldered-to-board BGA design. Smaller PC notebooks (like the ultraportable Sony and Toshiba models) use the same CPU, or, in some cases, the even-lower-power ULV variant.
The OQO is "incredibly small". The MacBook Air is not. Similarly sized and sometimes lighter PC notebooks have been on the market for years. Go look at the Toshiba Portege series from 10 years ago, or the PictureBook. Even my 5-year-old Compaq Armada M300 was similar in size, and I got it for $300 on eBay. It had a removable battery, integrated Ethernet, and 2 USB ports too. And a PC Card slot.
When you drop the optical drive and use a smaller (1.8") HDD, it's easy to make a small notebook.
It's not about us "understanding your perspective". It's about us calling bullshit on the Apple hype. The MacBook Air has some serious problems. One USB port in this day and age is simply absurd. No WWAN on an ultraportable notebook is absurd. A non-removable battery is absurd. These are not features, and they aren't necessary to build a small notebook. They are design decisions Apple made because they thought they knew better than their users. The sad part is, their fanboys will buy it hook, line and sinker.
Uh, I have 4 computers that I use regularly, so my Lenovo T61 is certainly not my "primary computer". But it has the same capabilities as a real system, unlike the MacBook Air.
There are so many reasons to have a notebook that is a fully-featured computer, and only one not to: 2lbs. That's the difference between my T61 and the MacBook Air. There are smaller, lighter full-featured notebooks too. Notebooks with replacable batteries. Notebooks with Ethernet ports. Notebooks with optical drives.
Apple went too far. I can understand leaving out the optical drive - it's probably the biggest part of the notebook. But one USB port? No FireWire? No Ethernet? No replacable battery? These are standard notebook features.
You don't miss a replacable battery until two years down the line when your battery quits working and you have to send the whole machine to Apple to have it replaced for $200 (rather than spending $60 on eBay for a new battery).
You don't miss having an Ethernet port until you want to transfer some DVD images from a desktop - what takes 2 hours on 802.11g (1MiB/s) takes 3 minutes over GigE (40 MiB/s).
You don't miss having multiple USB ports until you want to plug in a USB drive while you're using a EVDO or HSDPA card. Hope you remembered to bring your USB hub.
You don't miss having a microphone port until you realize that your USB headset takes up your only USB port. Oops. Hope you brought that USB hub.
You don't miss having a full-sized display connector until you want to show something on a larger monitor. Hope you remembered to bring your mini-DVI to DVI adapter. And your DVI to VGA adapter.
You don't miss the optical drive until someone asks you to watch their training video on DVD. Or a new movie. Or install MATLAB. Or Mathematica. Hope you brought your external optical drive. And a USB hub, since it uses your only USB port.
So, I guess it comes down to this: you can bring a 5lb notebook and be ready for pretty much anything. Why would you give up all of that capability for 2lbs?
Your metaphor on multi-issue CPUs is interesting, but not necessarily valid.
Instruction scheduling is the biggest fundamental problem facing CPUs today. Even the best pipelined design issues only one instruction per clock, per pipeline (excluding things like macro-op fusion which combine multiple logical instructions into a single internal instruction). So we add more pipelines. But more pipelines can only get us so far - it becomes increasingly more difficult to figure out (schedule) which instructions can be executed on which pipeline at what time.
There are several potential solutions. One is to use a VLIW architecture where the compiler schedules instructions and packs them into bundles which can be executed in parallel. The problem with VLIW is that many scheduling decisions can only occur at runtime. VLIW is also highly dependent on having excellent compilers. All of these problems (among others) plagued Intel's advanced VLIW (they called it "EPIC") architecture, Itanium.
Another solution is virtual cores, or HyperThreading. HTT uses instructions from another thread (assuming that one is available) to fill pipeline slots that would otherwise be unused. The problem with HTT is that you still need a substantial amount of decoding logic for the other thread, not to mention a more advanced register system (although modern CPUs already have a very advanced register system, particularly on register-starved architectures like x86) and other associated logic. In addition, if you want to get benefits from pipeline stalls (e.g like on the P4), you need even more logic. This means that HTT isn't particularly beneficial unless you have code that results in a large number of data dependencies or branch mispredicts, or if pipeline stalls are particularly expensive.
Multicore CPUs have come about for one simple reason: we can't figure out what to do with all of the transistors we have. CPUs have become increasingly complex, yet the fabrication technology keeps marching forward, outpacing the design resources that are available. This has manifested itself in two main ways.
First, designers started adding larger and larger caches to CPUs (caches are easy to design but take up lots of transistors). But after a point, adding more cache doesn't help. The more cache you have, the slower it operates. So designers added a multi-level cache hierarchy. But this too only goes so far - as you add more cache levels, the performance delta between memory and cache decreases, because there's only a finite level of reference locality in code (data structures like linked lists don't help this). You may be able to get a single function in cache, but it's unlikely that you're going to get the whole data set used by a complex program. The net result is that beyond a certain point, adding more cache doesn't do much.
What do you do when you can't add more cache? You could add more functional units, but then you're constrained by your front-end logic again, which is a far more difficult problem to solve. You could add more front-end logic, which is what HyperThreading does. But that only helps if your functional units are sitting idle a substantial percentage of the time (as they did on the P4).
So you look at adding both functional units and more front-end logic. You'll decode many instruction streams and try to schedule them on many pipelines. This is what modern GPUs do, and for them, it works quite well. But most general-purpose code is loaded with data dependencies and branches, which makes it very difficult to schedule more than a very few (say, 4) instructions at a time, regardless of how many pipelines you have. So, now, effectively, you have one thread that is predominantly using 4 pipelines, and one that is predominantly using the other 4.
Wait, though. If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines, and one is mostly using the other, we can split the pipelines into two groups. Each will take one thread. This way, our register and cache systems are simpler (because
They say the display is LED backlit, so there's probably no color wheel. Bright R/G/B LEDs are commonly available and can switch plenty fast.
I'm in CS at the University of Colorado, and while our program as a whole is more like software engineering than CS (which is why it's in the engineering department), that happens to be exactly what I want.
For "higher-level" courses (data structures, algorithms), I've programmed in C, C++, Java, Python, and C#. But I've also taken a digital-logic course where I "programmed" in Verilog. I've taken a (required) course where I programmed in M68000 assembly. I wrote a compiler in another required course that had to emit x86 assembly. I've coded for various RISC architectures, too.
Is learning about the entire hardware-software stack CS? No, probably not. But it's valuable in and of itself, and it's something that I'm interested in.
Now, if you're teaching pure "CS", the language is really irrelevant. CS is about the theory, which is something that you can implement in practically any language. But that's not the kind of program I'm looking for. It's not the kind of program that most students are looking for.
I don't care who wrote the code, I care that it's part of the distro.
Fedora 8 won't install in graphical mode on my system, and the text mode installer results in a different install than the graphical installer (you have to go turn on things like GDM, NetworkManager, and the graphical boot screen).
Ubuntu has officially-packaged binary NV drivers. And, yes, I prefer aptitude to yum.
We're all friends here. I prefer to use Ubuntu. Some people prefer Fedora, which is another fine distro. CentOS is a great choice for business use where long-term support is a big priority.
As long as you don't use Gentoo...
I was expecting the same thing.
If it's any consolation, look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8W2AxXfbvM