HD isn't about the consumer. It's about profiteering on the backs of the consumer.
HD represents the interests of the media companies.
HD represents the interests of the electronics companies - albeit to a lesser extent.
But it does not represent the interests of the consumer. It was specifically designed to leave the consumer out in the cold:
What the hell are you even talking about? I hope that your post was intended as satire, but it certainly doesn't come off as such - except for your blatant misinformation.
It comes with draconian DRM schemes. You need a special, expensive cable to hook it up.
ATSC doesn't contain any DRM at all, unless you count the broadcast flag (which isn't widely used and is ignored by many tuners).
DVI/HDMI cables are $8-$15, if you buy them online. Component cables are even cheaper.
You can't record HD tv shows and movies.
Ever heard of the HD TiVo, Media Center, The Dish VIP622, or any of the many cable company HD-DVRs? Comcast doesn't even offer an HD box that's not a DVR.
You can't afford an HD set without talking to a banker or maxing out your credit card.
LCD HDTVs are under $400.
With the exception of the resolution, 20 years ago a tv with a vcr was more enjoyable and offered more features than will be present in even the highest end HD systems. And it cost less in terms of real dollars.
Now I know you're just screwing with us.
Here's a hint: satire only works when it actually looks like satire.
Considering that there are quite a few other changes to the Windows shutdown procedure, I suspect that the shutdown team worked on quite a bit more than just a menu. Is development slow? Absolutely. But that's the way it is in a huge project - planning, testing, and other overhead are just par for the course, particularly when you have 20 years of legacy software that needs to work.
Before you crap on Vista, you should actually use it. I run RC2 on a daily basis (on a 1.5GHz P4 system, no less). It's not the OS that you think it is.
Unfortunately, in XP you have to choose "Turn Off Computer" to bring up the dialog box that has the option to merely put it to sleep.
Or close the lid. Or press the sleep button that's on 99% of notebooks.
I have my power button set to hibernate (suspend-to-disk) and the lid set to suspend-to-memory. If I'm shutting down for under a day, I use suspend - if I'm not going to be using it for a few days, I suspend to disk.
Vista supports both in the new "sleep" mode, which writes the memory to disk and then goes into S3 suspend.
They should make the 'sleep' option do both hibernate and sleep. Always write the RAM to disk, but still leave the RAM powered just in case the user comes back after a few minutes. If sleeping for > 5 minutes (or some other configurable amount of time), turn off power to RAM and hibernate. I think Apple calls this "safe sleep." Best of both worlds.
Apparently, you've never used Vista on a laptop, because that is exactly what it does. XP can do something similar, too (set a hibernate time greater than your sleep time - you'll notice that the laptop wakes and hibernates at your set time).
The 360 is the first console where you can replace a game soundtrack with your own music. It's the first console that comes with wireless controllers - controllers which can power on and off the system, no less. It's the first console that plays music over the network or off of a USB key or iPod - out of the box. It's the first console where you can download demos, trailers, TV, movies, and quite a bit more - right out of the box, without having to pay.
Microsoft got the 360s software very, very right. Sony's going to need more than Blu-Ray and Cell to combat that.
I love how everyone has jumped on you for postulating that - maybe, just maybe - Apple hardware isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Between heat problems, "mooing", dead logic boards, bad batteries, and all of the other problems that Apple's hardware has had, it's abundantly clear that Apple's hardware isn't really any different from the rest of the PC industry.
I will never switch to an OS that only runs on one brand of hardware. If Apple's two laptop models don't impress me, I'm screwed. There are literally thousands of different PC notebooks - from the generic ChemBook I'm typing this on (which has dedicated graphics, is small, and has decent battery life yet still cost less than $900) to the various tablets and even Lenovo's products. If you want a TrackPoint, you can get it. Rounded front case? Yes. Integrated SD reader? No problem. Fingerprint reader? Yes.
The replies to your comment assume that, just because they like a MacBook, everyone should.
What if I want a $400 notebook? HP sells one that has 512M of DDR, GeForce 6150 graphics, a 1.8GHz Sempron, 40GB 5200rpm HDD, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive. The bottom-end MacBook is nearly 3x as expensive!
What if I want an ultralight notebook? Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Sony already have lightweight notebooks, but Apple's smallest notebook is over 5lbs.
Apple fans seem to think that two sizes should fit everyone. I want a platform that allows me choice in hardware and choice in manufacturers. Apple doesn't offer that.
After reading the article, I can't quite tell why the hell this is on Slashdot. It's just someone's rants on a stupid blog - why the hell is that newsworthy at all? It's not even really a comparison of Mac OS and Windows at all, it's just a rant about how much better OS X is.
The blogger is so stupid that he somehow thinks it's appropriate to bundle operating system sales and hardware sales on the same chart, to make it look like Macs are more popular than they actually are. You can't turn a 2.5% market share into a 5% market share just by giving Microsoft 50% of the PC market! The numbers HAVE NO MEANING if you do that.
Actually, the dig was at Windows XP SP2 in particular - not just Windows generally.
If these bots have control over 'the most secure Windows yet', then that is worthy of note.
Not when you consider that XP SP2 is, by far, the most used desktop OS in the world. Of course it makes up the largest percentage of the attacks!
Here's a hint: you don't need root access to launch this kind of attack. If you can send mail, you can send spam.
Re:A Perfect Example Of Why Microsoft Is Failing
on
Final Fantasy XII Review
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Gamers are waiting in the rain for PS3s because Sony launched with too few consoles. And your argument about how Sony is making consoles more accessible seems particularly ironic considering that the PS3 is $200 more expensive than the 360.
The Cube was the most affordable systm of the last generation. And, for most of its life, the XBOX was the same price as the PS2 - and it included a hard drive and NIC.
The PS2 was one of the most expensive consoles ever when it launched. It was (and is) hard to develop for.
Is the PS3 an excellent product? Absolutely. But so is the 360. The XBOX had a unified online expeience and downloadable games 2 years ago. The level of functionality that the 360 had a year ago is in many ways superior to what the PS3 has now.
Sony hopes to impress us with the PS3. But the 360 is here, now, in quantity, and for $100 less than the cheap PS3. Is the PS3 a solid product and an excellent value? Yes. But Sony is selling to the wrong market. $500 is just too damned expensive. All Microsoft needs now is a $200 core system.
They don't support it, fine. That's their prerogative. But there's a difference between breaking and banning. This is denial of a paid service when the customer was likely adhering to their end of the contract.
Blizzard Entertainment reserves the right to terminate this Agreement without notice, if, in Blizzard Entertainment's sole and absolute discretion, you fail to comply with any terms contained in these Terms of Use or the World of Warcraft EULA.
Along with:
Blizzard Entertainment may, in its sole and absolute discretion, take whatever action it deems necessary to preserve the integrity of World of Warcraft.
Basically, Blizzard can terminate your account at any time, without notice, at its "sole and absolute discression" if you violate the TOS. What's considered a violation? Anything that affects the "integrity of World of Warcraft" - in other words, whatever Blizzard says is a violation.
sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof
Wrong, wrong, wrongedy wrong! There's always going to be another bug. The process of debugging itself adds more bugs. This is basic software engineering - you simply cannot assume that the software will be flawless.
Can Firefox be made very, very secure? Yes. Is it already reasonably secure? Yes. Will it ever be 100% secure, never needing a single security patch? Not a chance.
IE7 on Vista may not be the most secure browser out there, but the design choices that Microsoft made (running IE as a user with virtually no permissions and forcing most file/registry operations to go through a broker) will mean that it will be very hard to exploit in a meaningful fashion.
Open source does not eliminate security vulnerabilities. It has been shown time and time again that the "many eyes" theory doesn't work as well as we think it does. Most programmers aren't looking for vulnerabilities. Most users/corporations don't have the time to audit code for vulnerabilities. That's why OpenSSH and the Kernel have had multiple root exploits, why I'm now running Thunderbird 1.5.0.8, and why PHP and Apache are about as secure as Swiss cheese.
It is entirely premature to assume that open-source software is secure by nature. Only time can tell whether code is really secure, and so far it appears that the open-source world can be just as prone to insecurity as the closed-source world is.
I'm sure someone with superior technical knowledge on this subject will correct me before long, but I believe it's because they were able to essentially include much of the original PS hardware on a single chip in the PS2. It's not quite at the point where they can emulate the PS2 the same way.
Actually, that's exactly what Sony did with the PS3 - the PS3 motherboard contains the same EE+GS chip that powers the slim PS2.
Come on! If you're in an urban or suburban area in the US, you can almost always get broadband from either the cable company or the phone company (or both). Not to mention all of the wireless ISPs. Hell, my grandfather (now 90) has neither sewage nor water service, lives 10 miles down an unpaved road, and at least 15 miles from the nearest community of any size. Guess what? They have cable internet service through Adelphia. And they qualify for DSL from Verizon as well.
The fact is, not everyone wants broadband.
As for "25 MBps" connections, guess what - I'm on a university network with a 100MBps connection and multiple OC-3 links. Unless I'm pulling from Akamai (local mirror) or another university (Abiline), I can't tell the difference between the service I have here and the 6Mbps Comcast at home. Guess what? The Comcast connection has better latency, too - around 40ms to Google.
Verizon is pulling fiber into millions of homes and cable companies are upgrading their infastructure to support massive amounts of bandwidth (look at Comcast's CRAN, for example). Where, exactly, is the problem here? Since when did it matter if South Korea or France has a higher percentage of broadband subscribers? There are a multitude of factors that contribute to that (population density, generally unmetered local service, etc.). Let's worry about the problems that are really problems - like why we have so much heart disease or so many murders (even though the rate is at an all-time low).
There are perfectly good alternatives which are OSS & Free.
No, there aren't. What good is an open-source voting system unless you can verify that the hardware is running the software that it's supposed to be running. And, before you say, "use digital signatures", consider this: what verifies the signature? What compiler generated the code that verifies the signature? How do we know that the machine hasn't been tampered with? How do we know that the software doesn't have a security flaw?
Many of these questions can be answered, but not in a way that is transparent to everyone. Hand-counted paper ballots are cheap, simple, and verifiable. Best of all, hand-counted paper ballots have important properties that make fraud hard:
Committing massive fraud requires a lot of effort. Creating 10,000 forged ballots requires a considerable amount of effort, which means that you're probably going to need to have a lot of people in on the fraud. That means that your chances of getting caught are much higher.
Stuffing the box is difficult. How do you submit ballots without anyone noticing, particularly when the ballot box is kept in sight of many individuals at all times. Moreover, you have to get rid of ballots in the (locked) box somehow, or the counts aren't going to match up.
Changing the count is very difficult. Too many people watching. Someone is going to notice.
Destroying ballots is difficult. How do you steal the box without getting caught? What do you do with it? Police are good at investigating theft and vandalism.
The best feature of IE7 is that it makes it easier to use Firefox. No, really. With IE7 installed, when you enter a URL into a Windows Explorer windows (as I frequently did as a mattter of habit when I was using IE6), it launches the default browser (Firefox in my case). With IE6, it just turns the Explorer window into an IE window - convenient, but a pain in the neck when you realize that you've been using IE.
I can understand some of the other projects, but the Wiimote? It's not available in Japan, either. Moreover, the Wii launches in the US (Nov 19th) before it launches in Japan (Dec 2nd).
No hardware random number generators;/dev/random in Linux, BSD, et. al. is an Abomination Before God, mostly because there is no real hardware generator backing it, and so none of your interrupt processing gets done in bounded time because it "harvests entropy" during interrupt processing and other critical tasks
Via's C7 x86 CPU line has hardware-RNGs in it.
If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:
No one is arguing that the i386 architecture is complete or even particularly good. If I were writing assembly code, I'd want to be writing it for a CISC CPU with a nice instruction set (M68000, anyone?). If I'm writing a modern OS, there are a bunch of features that the x86 just doesn't have or has implemented through hacks.
But arguing that the Core 2 Duo is a "hopped up 386" is just wrong. It may implement the same basic instruction set (albeit with a LOT of extensions), but internally it's a completely different design.
By analogy, one could argue that a Toyota Prius is just a "hopped up Model-A". The Prius is a very different machine, with many additional features, but when you get down to it, it still has the same basic features.
The fact is, x86 is still around because we have years of x86 code to run and years of research into x86 compilers. Conroe/Woodcrest is the fastest CPU in the world for a broad range of tasks - when you ship millions per year, you can afford to invest billions of dollars.
Would we have better performance today if we had switched to a RISC architecture (e.g. PowerPC)? Perhaps. But we might also have better performance if we had switched to a VLIW architecture, or to something like Itanium. Assuming that any one model is ideal ignores the complexity of the underlying problem.
Simple floating point power of the SIMD units is easy enough to benchmark.
Core Duo has one SIMD unit. Cell has 10 (7 SPE and 3 AltiVec). You can Google for this stuff fairly easily. It's even the same benchmarks.
In 5 years the Core Duo will be just as fast; and everyone will have bought a new PC (or two) to get it. Sony has to put this chip out now, so that it will still be relevant in the MIDDLE of the console lifecycle.
Core Duo has two SIMD units (one per core). Of course the SIMD performance of Cell is excellent. If you want to decode a bunch of H.264 streams, encode MP3s, or process certain types of scientific data, Cell is a great CPU. If, on the other hand, you do something that doesn't require a bunch of matrix operations - that is, most things you do on a CPU today - you're going to want something with more cache, a better branch predictor, better memory prefetch, out-of-order execution, and all of the other modern features that make CPUs fast at running procedural code.
If you want to compare numbers that don't mean anything, Cell is going to be crushed by any modern GPU. But the fact is, bullshit synthetic benchmarks don't indicate how fast a CPU really is.
Many-core CPUs have been tried before (e.g. Sun's UltraSparc T1, which has 8 cores and 4 threads/core). It looks great on paper, but the reality is that 90% of the time it just can't get out of its own damn way - at best, it's a bit faster than a dual-core Opteron system. Throw a Woodcrest Xeon at it and it's not going to stand much of a chance.
I Agree. I just want a simple phone with decent standby time and excellent reception. I don't need a camera or an MP3 player or a web browser. I just want a phone... seriously.
Nokia 3595. $15 on Craigslist, unlocked, great standby time & great reception.
I never get people who complain about how phones are overly complicated "these days". Guess what? There are MILLIONS of used GSM phones out there in the world. There are nearly 20,000 on eBay right now. If you want a decent, simple phone, go on eBay and buy one!
when you see it hooked up to a 60" Bravia LCD playing both games and Blu-Ray movies at 1080p, you start to get it
I'll "get" that it looks exactly like watching an HD-DVD on a 60" Bravia LCD. Which looks surprisingly like watching a regular DVD on a no-brand 60" LCD, as long as you're not standing 2 feet from the screen.
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is nice, but there just isn't enough content. Practically every movie ever made is on DVD, and they cost $8-$15 if you are willing to shop around. I already have a substantial DVD collection. So, tell me, why should I blow $600 for a Blu-Ray player?
I have a $500 LCD HDTV. It's got an LG Philips panel, 1366x768 (720p) native resolution, and component, DVI/HDCP, and VGA inputs. DVDs look great on it coming from my $40 Wal-Mart special "Progressive Scan" DVD player. TV looks crappy, but that's because the cable sucks here.
So, again, why should I spend more than my TV for a Blu-Ray player? I could drop $600 on a PS3 and not blink. I'm sure it's a damn fine system. But the question is, why is it $200 better than an XBOX 360, which has (right now) a bigger library of games, nicer controllers (come on, the SIXAXIS is just a warmed-over DualShock), and will connect to my Media Center PC so that I can watch recorded TV over the network.
Where's the $200 of value? Blu-Ray? Nope. I'm not paying $25 for a moive. I'm not going to blow $200 on a system for a format that may not even succeed. When Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players are $40, then we can start talking.
Sony keeps trying to convince us that we want to spend $600 on their PS3. Many people probably will - hell, a lot of people threw down $1000 for a standalone Blu-Ray player. But $600 can buy a lot - a 360 core and 6 games (if all you want to do is play games), a PS2 and a whole mess of games, a new TV, a year of digital cable. Sony is competing for our entertainment dollars, and they're going to have to do a better job convincing us that the PS3 is where to spend them.
Is the PS3 overpriced? No. There's a lot of value in that system. But there's also a lot of value in a Lexus. Sony's trying to sell a Lexus to a Corolla market.
Slashdot Mirror
$129 has a lot to do with that.
What the hell are you even talking about? I hope that your post was intended as satire, but it certainly doesn't come off as such - except for your blatant misinformation.
ATSC doesn't contain any DRM at all, unless you count the broadcast flag (which isn't widely used and is ignored by many tuners).
DVI/HDMI cables are $8-$15, if you buy them online. Component cables are even cheaper.
Considering that there are quite a few other changes to the Windows shutdown procedure, I suspect that the shutdown team worked on quite a bit more than just a menu. Is development slow? Absolutely. But that's the way it is in a huge project - planning, testing, and other overhead are just par for the course, particularly when you have 20 years of legacy software that needs to work.
Before you crap on Vista, you should actually use it. I run RC2 on a daily basis (on a 1.5GHz P4 system, no less). It's not the OS that you think it is.
Or close the lid. Or press the sleep button that's on 99% of notebooks.
I have my power button set to hibernate (suspend-to-disk) and the lid set to suspend-to-memory. If I'm shutting down for under a day, I use suspend - if I'm not going to be using it for a few days, I suspend to disk.
Vista supports both in the new "sleep" mode, which writes the memory to disk and then goes into S3 suspend.
Apparently, you've never used Vista on a laptop, because that is exactly what it does. XP can do something similar, too (set a hibernate time greater than your sleep time - you'll notice that the laptop wakes and hibernates at your set time).
The 360 is the first console where you can replace a game soundtrack with your own music. It's the first console that comes with wireless controllers - controllers which can power on and off the system, no less. It's the first console that plays music over the network or off of a USB key or iPod - out of the box. It's the first console where you can download demos, trailers, TV, movies, and quite a bit more - right out of the box, without having to pay.
Microsoft got the 360s software very, very right. Sony's going to need more than Blu-Ray and Cell to combat that.
I love how everyone has jumped on you for postulating that - maybe, just maybe - Apple hardware isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Between heat problems, "mooing", dead logic boards, bad batteries, and all of the other problems that Apple's hardware has had, it's abundantly clear that Apple's hardware isn't really any different from the rest of the PC industry.
I will never switch to an OS that only runs on one brand of hardware. If Apple's two laptop models don't impress me, I'm screwed. There are literally thousands of different PC notebooks - from the generic ChemBook I'm typing this on (which has dedicated graphics, is small, and has decent battery life yet still cost less than $900) to the various tablets and even Lenovo's products. If you want a TrackPoint, you can get it. Rounded front case? Yes. Integrated SD reader? No problem. Fingerprint reader? Yes.
The replies to your comment assume that, just because they like a MacBook, everyone should.
What if I want a $400 notebook? HP sells one that has 512M of DDR, GeForce 6150 graphics, a 1.8GHz Sempron, 40GB 5200rpm HDD, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive. The bottom-end MacBook is nearly 3x as expensive!
What if I want an ultralight notebook? Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Sony already have lightweight notebooks, but Apple's smallest notebook is over 5lbs.
Apple fans seem to think that two sizes should fit everyone. I want a platform that allows me choice in hardware and choice in manufacturers. Apple doesn't offer that.
You forgot the part where people are locked into iPod/iTunes/iTMS because of DRM-encumbered tracks which are only Apple compatible.
After reading the article, I can't quite tell why the hell this is on Slashdot. It's just someone's rants on a stupid blog - why the hell is that newsworthy at all? It's not even really a comparison of Mac OS and Windows at all, it's just a rant about how much better OS X is.
The blogger is so stupid that he somehow thinks it's appropriate to bundle operating system sales and hardware sales on the same chart, to make it look like Macs are more popular than they actually are. You can't turn a 2.5% market share into a 5% market share just by giving Microsoft 50% of the PC market! The numbers HAVE NO MEANING if you do that.
Not when you consider that XP SP2 is, by far, the most used desktop OS in the world. Of course it makes up the largest percentage of the attacks!
Here's a hint: you don't need root access to launch this kind of attack. If you can send mail, you can send spam.
Gamers are waiting in the rain for PS3s because Sony launched with too few consoles. And your argument about how Sony is making consoles more accessible seems particularly ironic considering that the PS3 is $200 more expensive than the 360.
The Cube was the most affordable systm of the last generation. And, for most of its life, the XBOX was the same price as the PS2 - and it included a hard drive and NIC.
The PS2 was one of the most expensive consoles ever when it launched. It was (and is) hard to develop for.
Is the PS3 an excellent product? Absolutely. But so is the 360. The XBOX had a unified online expeience and downloadable games 2 years ago. The level of functionality that the 360 had a year ago is in many ways superior to what the PS3 has now.
Sony hopes to impress us with the PS3. But the 360 is here, now, in quantity, and for $100 less than the cheap PS3. Is the PS3 a solid product and an excellent value? Yes. But Sony is selling to the wrong market. $500 is just too damned expensive. All Microsoft needs now is a $200 core system.
Incorrect. Newer Pentium-4 CPUs support both ODCM and P-State transitions, just like the Pentium M, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo.
I'm running Vista (RC2) on a P4 1.5GHz (Willamette) system with 768M of PC2100 DDR and a GeForce 6200. Fast? No. But it's really not that bad.
With Aero disabled, it's every bit as fast as XP, if not a bit better.
You should read the Terms of Use:
Along with:
Basically, Blizzard can terminate your account at any time, without notice, at its "sole and absolute discression" if you violate the TOS. What's considered a violation? Anything that affects the "integrity of World of Warcraft" - in other words, whatever Blizzard says is a violation.
Wrong, wrong, wrongedy wrong! There's always going to be another bug. The process of debugging itself adds more bugs. This is basic software engineering - you simply cannot assume that the software will be flawless.
Can Firefox be made very, very secure? Yes. Is it already reasonably secure? Yes. Will it ever be 100% secure, never needing a single security patch? Not a chance.
IE7 on Vista may not be the most secure browser out there, but the design choices that Microsoft made (running IE as a user with virtually no permissions and forcing most file/registry operations to go through a broker) will mean that it will be very hard to exploit in a meaningful fashion.
Open source does not eliminate security vulnerabilities. It has been shown time and time again that the "many eyes" theory doesn't work as well as we think it does. Most programmers aren't looking for vulnerabilities. Most users/corporations don't have the time to audit code for vulnerabilities. That's why OpenSSH and the Kernel have had multiple root exploits, why I'm now running Thunderbird 1.5.0.8, and why PHP and Apache are about as secure as Swiss cheese.
It is entirely premature to assume that open-source software is secure by nature. Only time can tell whether code is really secure, and so far it appears that the open-source world can be just as prone to insecurity as the closed-source world is.
Actually, that's exactly what Sony did with the PS3 - the PS3 motherboard contains the same EE+GS chip that powers the slim PS2.
You can see it on the left side of this photo.
Come on! If you're in an urban or suburban area in the US, you can almost always get broadband from either the cable company or the phone company (or both). Not to mention all of the wireless ISPs. Hell, my grandfather (now 90) has neither sewage nor water service, lives 10 miles down an unpaved road, and at least 15 miles from the nearest community of any size. Guess what? They have cable internet service through Adelphia. And they qualify for DSL from Verizon as well.
The fact is, not everyone wants broadband.
As for "25 MBps" connections, guess what - I'm on a university network with a 100MBps connection and multiple OC-3 links. Unless I'm pulling from Akamai (local mirror) or another university (Abiline), I can't tell the difference between the service I have here and the 6Mbps Comcast at home. Guess what? The Comcast connection has better latency, too - around 40ms to Google.
Verizon is pulling fiber into millions of homes and cable companies are upgrading their infastructure to support massive amounts of bandwidth (look at Comcast's CRAN, for example). Where, exactly, is the problem here? Since when did it matter if South Korea or France has a higher percentage of broadband subscribers? There are a multitude of factors that contribute to that (population density, generally unmetered local service, etc.). Let's worry about the problems that are really problems - like why we have so much heart disease or so many murders (even though the rate is at an all-time low).
No, there aren't. What good is an open-source voting system unless you can verify that the hardware is running the software that it's supposed to be running. And, before you say, "use digital signatures", consider this: what verifies the signature? What compiler generated the code that verifies the signature? How do we know that the machine hasn't been tampered with? How do we know that the software doesn't have a security flaw?
Many of these questions can be answered, but not in a way that is transparent to everyone. Hand-counted paper ballots are cheap, simple, and verifiable. Best of all, hand-counted paper ballots have important properties that make fraud hard:
The best feature of IE7 is that it makes it easier to use Firefox. No, really. With IE7 installed, when you enter a URL into a Windows Explorer windows (as I frequently did as a mattter of habit when I was using IE6), it launches the default browser (Firefox in my case). With IE6, it just turns the Explorer window into an IE window - convenient, but a pain in the neck when you realize that you've been using IE.
I can understand some of the other projects, but the Wiimote? It's not available in Japan, either. Moreover, the Wii launches in the US (Nov 19th) before it launches in Japan (Dec 2nd).
Apparently, the future is now just 14 days away!
Ironically, there actually is a product called AMD Fusion.
CPU and graphics on a single die. That's what you get when you buy ATI.
No hardware random number generators; /dev/random in Linux, BSD, et. al. is an Abomination Before God, mostly because there is no real hardware generator backing it, and so none of your interrupt processing gets done in bounded time because it "harvests entropy" during interrupt processing and other critical tasks
Via's C7 x86 CPU line has hardware-RNGs in it.
If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:
No one is arguing that the i386 architecture is complete or even particularly good. If I were writing assembly code, I'd want to be writing it for a CISC CPU with a nice instruction set (M68000, anyone?). If I'm writing a modern OS, there are a bunch of features that the x86 just doesn't have or has implemented through hacks.
But arguing that the Core 2 Duo is a "hopped up 386" is just wrong. It may implement the same basic instruction set (albeit with a LOT of extensions), but internally it's a completely different design.
By analogy, one could argue that a Toyota Prius is just a "hopped up Model-A". The Prius is a very different machine, with many additional features, but when you get down to it, it still has the same basic features.
The fact is, x86 is still around because we have years of x86 code to run and years of research into x86 compilers. Conroe/Woodcrest is the fastest CPU in the world for a broad range of tasks - when you ship millions per year, you can afford to invest billions of dollars.
Would we have better performance today if we had switched to a RISC architecture (e.g. PowerPC)? Perhaps. But we might also have better performance if we had switched to a VLIW architecture, or to something like Itanium. Assuming that any one model is ideal ignores the complexity of the underlying problem.
Simple floating point power of the SIMD units is easy enough to benchmark.
Core Duo has one SIMD unit. Cell has 10 (7 SPE and 3 AltiVec). You can
Google for this stuff fairly easily. It's even the same benchmarks.
In 5 years the Core Duo will be just as fast; and everyone will have bought a
new PC (or two) to get it. Sony has to put this chip out now, so that it will
still be relevant in the MIDDLE of the console lifecycle.
Core Duo has two SIMD units (one per core). Of course the SIMD performance of Cell is excellent. If you want to decode a bunch of H.264 streams, encode MP3s, or process certain types of scientific data, Cell is a great CPU. If, on the other hand, you do something that doesn't require a bunch of matrix operations - that is, most things you do on a CPU today - you're going to want something with more cache, a better branch predictor, better memory prefetch, out-of-order execution, and all of the other modern features that make CPUs fast at running procedural code.
If you want to compare numbers that don't mean anything, Cell is going to be crushed by any modern GPU. But the fact is, bullshit synthetic benchmarks don't indicate how fast a CPU really is.
Many-core CPUs have been tried before (e.g. Sun's UltraSparc T1, which has 8 cores and 4 threads/core). It looks great on paper, but the reality is that 90% of the time it just can't get out of its own damn way - at best, it's a bit faster than a dual-core Opteron system. Throw a Woodcrest Xeon at it and it's not going to stand much of a chance.
I Agree. I just want a simple phone with decent standby time and excellent reception. I don't need a camera or an MP3 player or a web browser. I just want a phone... seriously.
Nokia 3595. $15 on Craigslist, unlocked, great standby time & great reception.
I never get people who complain about how phones are overly complicated "these days". Guess what? There are MILLIONS of used GSM phones out there in the world. There are nearly 20,000 on eBay right now. If you want a decent, simple phone, go on eBay and buy one!
I'll "get" that it looks exactly like watching an HD-DVD on a 60" Bravia LCD. Which looks surprisingly like watching a regular DVD on a no-brand 60" LCD, as long as you're not standing 2 feet from the screen.
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is nice, but there just isn't enough content. Practically every movie ever made is on DVD, and they cost $8-$15 if you are willing to shop around. I already have a substantial DVD collection. So, tell me, why should I blow $600 for a Blu-Ray player?
I have a $500 LCD HDTV. It's got an LG Philips panel, 1366x768 (720p) native resolution, and component, DVI/HDCP, and VGA inputs. DVDs look great on it coming from my $40 Wal-Mart special "Progressive Scan" DVD player. TV looks crappy, but that's because the cable sucks here.
So, again, why should I spend more than my TV for a Blu-Ray player? I could drop $600 on a PS3 and not blink. I'm sure it's a damn fine system. But the question is, why is it $200 better than an XBOX 360, which has (right now) a bigger library of games, nicer controllers (come on, the SIXAXIS is just a warmed-over DualShock), and will connect to my Media Center PC so that I can watch recorded TV over the network.
Where's the $200 of value? Blu-Ray? Nope. I'm not paying $25 for a moive. I'm not going to blow $200 on a system for a format that may not even succeed. When Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players are $40, then we can start talking.
Sony keeps trying to convince us that we want to spend $600 on their PS3. Many people probably will - hell, a lot of people threw down $1000 for a standalone Blu-Ray player. But $600 can buy a lot - a 360 core and 6 games (if all you want to do is play games), a PS2 and a whole mess of games, a new TV, a year of digital cable. Sony is competing for our entertainment dollars, and they're going to have to do a better job convincing us that the PS3 is where to spend them.
Is the PS3 overpriced? No. There's a lot of value in that system. But there's also a lot of value in a Lexus. Sony's trying to sell a Lexus to a Corolla market.